In recent months (especially since people found out I’m expecting another baby), I’ve been asked a particular question by several different people. It seems possible that others have wondered the same thing, too, so I thought I’d post the answer here. The answer is, “No.”

Hee.

Okay, seriously, the question. A couple of friends have asked whether, given the amount of time required by Wonderboy’s various medical issues and Early Intervention, we are going to have to think about putting the girls in school. How can we go on juggling PT, OT, speech/hearing therapy, bunches of doctor appointments and keep writing books and keep homeschooling the girls?

It’s a fair question, coming from friends who love us dearly but don’t live nearby. If you hang out with us in person a lot, then you probably already see why “Heavens no!” is the answer to the question. It’s a question that springs from the perfectly understandable assumption that homeschooling takes a lot of time. Which is to say, it’s an assumption born of educational experiences which involve establishing long, set periods of time each day for the study of seven to ten different subjects. If you’re supposing that we must sit the girls down at the table every day and teach math, teach writing, teach history, teach science, etc etc etc—at three different grade levels—then I can absolutely see why such an arrangement would seem difficult under our current circumstances.

But homeschooling doesn’t have to be anything like that. It can be; I have many homeschooling friends who do make use of traditional school methods and schedules at home. But for us (and for many thousands of other families), homeschooling is something entirely different from school. It isn’t a section of our day devoted to learning by traditional methods (or more accurately, teaching by traditional methods)—it’s a lifestyle, it’s a way of learning as you live and living as you learn. It’s discussing Shostakovich over breakfast and solving complicated math problems in your head for fun on the way to the grocery store. It’s snuggling up with your 4-year-old several times a day, a few minutes here and there, to listen to her read a Bob Book. It’s being 8 years old and falling so in love with Liberty’s Kids on PBS that you spend six whole months writing letters to your mother in the character of a Revolutionary War-era British girl living in Philadelphia, fully expecting your mother to keep up her side of the correspondence. It’s reading a book of Greek myths until it quite literally falls apart, and deciding (at the determined age of six) that you need to learn to read Ancient Greek. It means giving your mother no peace (determined 6-year-old that you are) until she manages to track down a child’s Greek primer for you.

It means that when you discover your little brother is hard of hearing and—talk about surprises!—spent the first ten months of his life unable to hear much of the chatter going on around him, you immediately dive into the study of sign language. Your mother ditches the family German lessons because the little brother kind of needs to learn English first. Sign language becomes a family passion. By the time you’re ten, you have completed a college-level ASL intro course online and are hungry for more.

Learning permeates the day, every day. There are no summer breaks because there is nothing to break FROM—who ever stops learning? It would be like taking a vacation from eating.

Neighbors often say to me, “I could never homeschool because it takes so much time.” I joke that I couldn’t send my kids to school because that takes so much time. You have to get everybody up at the crack of dawn and rush around getting dressed and packing lunches and stuffing backpacks. You have school clothes and play clothes, twice the laundry. You have to figure out when to fit in doctor and dentist appointments. You have to schedule time for parent/teacher conferences, school fundraisers, checking reading logs, helping with homework, volunteering in the classroom, and on and on. And if you have several kids, you have to juggle those things for all of them. I know this is true because I have lots and lots of friends with kids in school, and these are the challenges they discuss. Being an involved, committed school parent takes a great investment of time.

The school kids around here probably spend more time on homework than my kids do on table work in the course of a day. When you’re learning one on one, it can happen more quickly. There isn’t any reason to have extra work for practice at home, because you already are home and your parents know whether you understand a concept or not. If you’re having trouble multiplying fractions, your mom can suggest you triple a cookie recipe. It’s amazing how quickly you master a skill when you get to eat it afterward.

We have loads of reasons for homeschooling, definite and serious and passionate reasons. But if I were to set all of them aside and address the question purely as a practical, time-management matter, I’d say we’d be nuts to give up the freedom and flexibility this lifestyle affords us. The appointment-juggling would become more complicated if I had school and bus schedules constraining us. Plus I’d be sending Wonderboy’s greatest therapeutic aides (and the joys of his life) away for the bulk of the day. His sisters are deeply, eagerly involved in his various therapies. His first speech/hearing therapist considered Jane her right-hand man in Wonderboy’s sessions. He has made huge strides recently, and I am convinced this is due in large part to the delightful motivation and modeling he receives all day long from his sisters.

Like I said, I get where the question is coming from. If homeschooling required six hours of concentrated instruction time five days a week, we’d be in trouble. But a lifestyle of learning is a whole different kettle of fish. Wonderboy has brought an awful lot of learning to this house. We learn because of him, for him, from him. I affectionately refer to him as our Unit Study on the Brain. Rose calls him her Favorite Thing in the Whole World Which I Love Even More than Horses and Dolphins and Both my Hermit Crabs Put Together.

So. If you’ve wondered whether this will all get too complicated at some point and we’ll have to lay our ideologies aside and put the kids in school just as a matter of survival—now you know. We have an immensely good thing going here. But I really appreciate the concern, honestly, and I’d rather people did ask the question. It gives me an excuse to gush about how much fun I have all day long with my fabulous children.

I just looked out the window and saw Beanie blithely pedaling her two-wheeler around the cul de sac. Since she didn’t know HOW to ride a two-wheeler fifteen minutes ago, you can imagine I found this a rather astonishing sight. Scott’s brilliant method has worked its magic again. He wrote a piece about this on his own blog a couple of weeks ago, the day he took Beanie’s pedals OFF her bike (step one of His Brilliant Method), which piece I shall now repost here in order to share his brilliance with as many people as possible. He would perhaps argue that the really brilliant person is whoever invented this particular method of teaching a kid to ride a bike, but I will counter with the assertion that it takes an inspired mind to think of Googling “teach your kid to ride a bike.” Which is what he did, which is how he discovered the Brilliant Method, which is what led to Bean’s amazingly speed achievement today. I therefore present:

So some of you may remember that a while back I said that The Rose had actually forgotten how to ride her bike over the winter, thus disproving the old adage. She hopped on it this spring, went two feet, wobbled, almost fell off and decided she no longer knew how to ride a bike.

She spent all spring and summer sadly watching her big sister do amazing feats on two wheels but wouldn’t give it another go herself, even though her two best friends also spent those seasons riding like madwomen.

And then one day, a few weeks back, out of the blue, she asked if she could ride her bike. I said sure, of course. So I brought it out, helped her on with her helmet and she climbed on. She was shaky for the first few seconds and then it was like she hadn’t stopped for eleven months. Off she went, getting better by the minute—an amazing thing to witness. And for the next week she rode every chance she got, from early in the morning to late in the evening, until she was far better than she’d been last year.

Kids are weird.

The Bean didn’t want to be left out, so I brought out her bike as well. I’d taken the pedals off and lowered the seat so she could learn to ride the way Max and The Rose had. Our neighbors had noticed this, and The Rose’s sudden amazing prowess, and asked what the deal was. Max filled them in in incredible detail.

Intrigued, they took the training wheels and pedals off their seven-year-old’s bike and lowered her seat as well. And within a few days she was riding like a pro.

Our neighbors have since thanked us about a half-dozen times, as have a few other friends we’ve passed this Learning to Ride a Bike tip on to. In the interest of furthering joy for mankind, and in case any of youse has a kid who wants to learn how to ride a bike, I therefore present what I firmly believe is The Easiest Way to Learn How to Ride a Bike.

First of all, as mentioned, you take off not just the training wheels—vile things which only serve to ingrain bad habits which later have to be unlearned—but also the pedals themselves, and lower the seat way down; the seat should be low enough that when sitting her feet are flat on the ground, with her knees bent, as though sitting in a chair.

Okay. Now she just rides around. And that’s how she learns how to ride the bike in a matter of days, all by herself.

See, normally, when you’re learning how to ride a bike, you’re trying to learn how to steer, pedal, brake and balance all at the same time. They’re all vital, obviously, but the hardest and most important of these, of course, is learning to balance. By taking away the pedaling and braking part, you’re able to focus on just the balancing and steering. And, really, the steering’s pretty basic, especially if you don’t have to worry about the pedaling and braking part.

It’s best to do this on a basically flat area with maybe just the tiniest hint of a slope—but just a tiny one. The kid will initially sort of duckwalk the bike around, taking little babysteps. Soon—generally sooner than you can believe—she’ll realize that’s a little bit boring and that by taking bigger and longer strides, she can glide a little bit further each time. From there it’s just a little while longer before she’s got both feet off the ground at the same time, balancing perfectly.

Theoretically you could do this by just lowering the seat and not removing the pedals, but the kid’ll keep banging her legs into the pedals as she walks, so it’s way more comfortable to take ‘em off. And you want to make this as easy for the kid as possible, because that way she does all the work. Which isn’t only good for you—not that I ever discount an excuse for laziness—but because it works better.

And there you go. After maybe a few days or a few weeks, depending upon the kid (our neighbor’s kid asked for them back after about two hours; they put her off for a few days but finally gave in and, yeah, she was ready for ‘em), the kid’ll be begging to take it to the next stage, at which point you put the pedals back on. It’ll take a few minutes for her to get used to the pedaling and braking thing but not too long. Not too long at all. You’ll be amazed. After a week of practice—or, as always, maybe less—you’ll want to raise her seat back up to where it should normally be.

I spent hours and hours trying to teach Max how to ride a bike the standard way and after about a dozen hours she was convinced she was one of those rare humans who was simply fated to never ride a bicycle. Then we tried this technique. I’d guess I had to invest a total of an hour, including time spent removing and replacing the pedals, before she was completely proficient. Same thing went for The Rose (both times combined).

And the joy it’s brought…I mean, just riding a bike’s pretty groovy thang in and of itself. But mastering this vital childhood step all by yourself? The Rose glowed for weeks. She felt like she’d kicked Godzilla’s ass. And that, my friends, is beyond cool.

I have just polished off—with considerable help from children doing their finest ravenous-baby-bird impersonations—the remnants of the cherry cobbler I baked for teatime last week. We will pause here while people who know me well digest this news. Yes. I BAKED. From scratch. Well, the cherries were canned but I did actually have to crack an egg. And measure things. And—are you ready for this?—”cut in butter.” Oh sure, most of you out there probably cut butter into a flour mixture as easily as breathing, but SOME of us find these things a lot more complicated than, say, writing novels or using HTML code. To be fair, I must disclose that Jane did most of the actual cutting-in. But I put the cobbler in the oven and took it out when it was done. Not burned. Not still gooey in places. Really truly perfectly done. Also, I whipped cream. (Gasps arise from my friends.)

Anyway, I have decided that cherry cobbler is the world’s most perfect food. (Well, right after dark-chocolate-and-marzipan bars. And my mom’s fried okra.) The cherries, not too tart, not too sweet, bursting with antioxidants, so the can assures me. The biscuity cobbler topping, only slightly sweet, with a lovely cake-like texture. And then of course the whipped cream, which, now that I think about it, really might be God’s most awesome invention. And so foolproof that even I can’t mess it up.

I have informed my children that we’re going to be eating lots and lots of cobbler from now on. They appear to be amenable to this plan. I will now share the recipe so you know what to serve for dessert next time you have me over.

Fruit Cobbler for the Incompetent Cook

Ingredients:

1 can cherry pie filling (or blueberry, apple, whatever)
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon (optional–I didn’t use it)
3 tablespoons margarine or butter
1 beaten egg
3 tablespoons milk

Preheat oven to 400. Dump pie filling in an ungreased 8×8 baking dish and stick in oven to warm up while you mix the topping. (Cookbook will prattle on about how to make fruit filling from scratch, but you know your limits.)

In bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking powder, and if desired, cinnamon. Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Do not panic if you have no idea what that means. Google can offer a ready explanation. Or ask your oldest child, who seems to have an innate knack for these things. Better yet, let her do it. You can still claim credit with your friends because after all, YOU made her.

In another bowl, combine egg and milk. Add to flour mixture, stirring just to moisten.

Take baking dish out of oven. Drop topping into 6 mounds atop filling. Do not forget that the baking dish is HOT. When you do forget, drop spoon into filling and rush to sink to put burned hand under cold water. Allow oldest child to gingerly fish spoon out of filling and resume dropping mounds of topping into dish (which child will not forget is hot, because 1) you are yowling at sink and 2) she has more than half a brain). Assure younger children that your burn is not serious. Resolve to yowl under your breath next time, so as not to alarm small children.

Turn off cold water, dry burned hand, stifling scream when towel touches burned part, and resume impersonation of capable, domestically skilled mother. Start to pick up baking dish and thank children for alerting you with frantic shrieks that you are about to touch hot dish once again. Pick up potholders, which are lying on counter right next to hot baking dish and which were custom-made for you on a potholder loom in colors so garish it is surprising that you failed to notice them when you reached for the scalding-hot dish in the first place. USING POTHOLDERS, place dish in oven. Bake at 400 degrees for 20-25 minutes or until toothpick inserted in topping comes out clean. Possibly entrust this task to your oldest child, as you are sure to burn yourself again if you attempt it.

Serve warm with freshly made whipped cream, which (thank heavens) even you cannot mess up.

To celebrate, eat three servings. But save enough for tomorrow’s breakfast.

A tiny postscript to my Halloween post: early this morning, painfully early, as I was stumbling around trying to get the garbage out and just blearily noticing I was wearing two different socks, Beanie hit me a question.

“Mommy, what do you think I should be for Halloween NEXT year?”

And so it begins. Again.

I get so many emails asking about what books & materials we use for math, science, history, and so forth that I decided to add some “favorites” lists to the sidebar. Hard not to get carried away, though—the “Favorite Fiction & Poetry” list alone could be a mile long! I’ll have to stick to a dozen or so gems at a time, and change it up now and then. So far we’ve concocted our lists of math, science, and lit favorites…other areas to come. The kids are thoroughly enjoying compiling their share of the lists. Scroll down and check them out!

***

On another note. The dragon mask I was panicking about on Saturday: thank goodness for Google. Found this link, just what the doctor ordered. Unbeknownst to me, Jane had spent the morning crafting this fabulous tail, so here’s what we came up with. Beanie was pleased, and that’s what counts.

But we still haven’t tackled the pumpkin.

Forget Scrooge, forget the Grinch—what I really need is an iconic literary character to represent the curmudgeon I become in late October every year. What’s the matter with me? I’m only thirty-six! My own deliriously blissful Halloweens are not so terribly far behind me. How vividly I still recall the triumph of the perfect costume, the inimitable joy of that sackful of candy! The deep satisfaction of foisting the annual pile of lollipops (bleh) on my sisters in exchange for real treasure: Special Dark bars, Sweetarts, Twizzlers…

So it’s not that I’m unsympathetic to the thrill of Halloween. I guess I just haven’t successfully made the transition to the mom’s role in this particular celebration and all that that entails.

Yes, now that I think about it, it comes down to two major shortcomings in my motherhood qualifications:

1) I don’t sew.

2) I don’t shop.

You can see how this might pose a challenge to the whole costume-assembly process.

I do have some interest in learning to sew; I even treated myself to a sewing machine nine years ago upon receiving my first advance for a novel. To date, I have used it to make: some beanbags (cute if clumsy), one and a half cloth dolls (actually quite charming—the finished one, at least; the other one’s head lolls freakishly on its insufficiently stuffed neck, and its legs are different sizes); and two baby blankets (one for a friend, and since it was my first effort in the flannel blanket field, I have worried ever since that it has slowly unraveled with each wash because I failed to properly, um, what do you call it where you zigzag stitch along the raw edge of the fabric to keep it from unraveling in the wash).

Obviously, Halloween costumes are still a bit beyond my reach.

As for the shopping thing, well, I just hate it. I have no better excuse than that. The driving, the parking, the aisle after aisle of decision-making, the fretting over price, the waiting in lines, the package-lugging—I hate every single stressful, expensive minute of it. And yes, online shopping is a breeze, but you can’t easily buy bits-and-pieces of costume ingredients over the internet; and my inner curmudgeon has a prejudice against buying ready-made costumes outright. Inheriting them from neighbors, fine. But actually paying for them? Bah!

My kids start planning their costumes in July, a display of forethought which the chronic procrastinator in me finds intensely irritating. Frenzied last-minute effort has served me well my entire life—at least, it has for the trivial things like grad school papers and income taxes. But those things are tic tac toe compared to the 3-D timed chess tournament that is the dreaded Halloween costume.

So here it is the morning of the neighborhood Fall Festival, the high point of which, naturally, is the costume parade. And I still have to concoct a dragon mask for Beanie and locate appropriately fringy Native American pants for Jane to wear under the authentic red polyester beaded tunic her beloved piano teacher loaned her. (And thanks a million, Wendi, for rescuing me from the terrors of having to provide the TOP half of her costume!) Meanwhile, the ever-practical Rose rummaged through my closet and assembled a Wendy (the Peter Pan heroine, not the piano teacher) costume that 1) looks nothing like anything Wendy would actually wear and 2) pleases her immensely. So whew. One satisfying if unrecognizable costume down, two half-costumes to go.

So of course, procrastinator/curmudgeon that I am, I quite sensibly chose to begin the frantic morning by sitting down and writing a grumpy post about how the panic clock is ticking down the minutes to impending costume doom.

And don’t even get me started on the whole pumpkin-carving thing. We still have tomorrow, right?

August was not a month for blogging; not for me, at least. And here we are well into September, and I’m looking around feeling dazed, wondering how our summer slipped by without a chronicle. I suppose we were too busy doing to do much reflecting. Or perhaps it is simply that sunscreen-slick hands can’t stay on the keyboard.

But this past week seems to have tipped us into fall. The pool is closed; the wooded trails around our neighborhood are cool and inviting; the kids are wanting to paint and ride bikes, things they haven’t bothered about since spring. And I’m wanting slow down and capture the moments that whisked past me these past few months.

Wonderboy had his surgery in early August and has made a good recovery. At last he can sit again, though he still seems uncomfortable in the car if the ride is more than a few minutes. He continues to explode with new signs: I lost count at fifty, and he adds new ones every day. When Scott was away this past weekend, the boy stalked the house signing “Want Daddy” until I thought his thumb was going to bore a hole in his forehead. I have to keep his thumbnail cut short or else he scratches himself something awful.

Beanie has announced that she hates her curly hair. She has the most gorgeous head of golden sausage-curls, really unbelievable hair of the sort that makes people happy just to see it. I expected it would torment her as a teenager but I certainly never imagined her hair woes would begin at age four. “I don’t WANT to be a curly girl!” she wails. This is the only gloomy note in her sun-drenched disposition. When she is not pining for straight hair, she bounces around singing, constantly singing. Sometimes the songs are her own made-up ramblings, surprisingly lyrical. Other times she amuses me with the Beatles or folk songs.

The other day she was stuck in a loop of “The Old Gray Mare.” After about forty repetitions, she turned to me and said, “What’s ain’t?”

I explained. She experimented with the synonym: “The old gray mare just isn’t what she used to be, isn’t what she used to be…nope, ain’t sounds better.”

Ain’t that the truth.

Salad bar, that is.

I figure I can’t be the only busy mom whose children eat a more healthy diet than she does. I’m always cutting up fruit for them, or telling them to eat some carrots or a banana, but when I’m the one in need of a snack, well, I really really like cookies.

The kids are always singing the fruit-and-veggie song from Signing Time (“Any way you slice it, or dice it, or peel it, it’s gotta add up to five a day”) and this has made me sheepishly aware of how often I fall short of the mark. I know, it’s pathetic, and I ought to be embarrassed to post it here. But like I said, I’m operating under the assumption that I’m not the only one. Please don’t disillusion me. I know you’re out there somewhere, Cookie-Loving Mother Who Hates Chopping Vegetables.

Anyway, I had this brilliant idea (she says modestly). One nice big salad a day can take care of all five servings (and then some) in a fell swoop. (Don’t worry, that’s not the brilliant idea—that’s pedestrian statement of the obvious.) Why don’t I eat more salads, I wondered?

Two reasons.

1) Laziness.
2) Boredom.

Regarding the latter reason, I realized that I always enjoy salads in restaurants (on the rare occasions on which we dine in one) because they include such yummy tidbits. Pine nuts, sunflower seeds, almonds, mandarin oranges, dried cranberries, real bleu cheese. Well, duh, nothing’s stopping me from doing this at home. Just hadn’t occurred to me before.

So I picked up a few of these items and began sprinkling them on spinach salads at home. Yum. Seriously. I’ll eat a giant bowlful of raw spinach just for the sake of a few mandarin oranges. For about a week after I had the Fancy Salads Are Yummy insight, I ate a really delicious and large spinach salad every day. In my convert’s zeal, I gleefully chopped red bell pepper and mushrooms and carrots and other veggies for these princely salads, these superheroes of salads, these I’ll-see-your-five-a-day-and-raise-it salads.

And then Reason #1 reared its very ugly head. All that chopping. All those little bags and containers to take out and put away. All that digging around in the pantry for the precious baggie of dried cherries I found on sale. Too much fuss! Too much assembly required! Cookies come pre-assembled, whispered the voice of sloth in my head. And no mess to clean up afterward…

Which is when the brilliant idea occurred. Maybe it will only seem brilliant to you if you are as culinarily lazy as I am. Maybe it will only further convince you that I am the most pathetic fool ever to set foot in a kitchen. There are those who would agree with you. You know who you are.

Anyway. What I did was to put all my salad fixings in a plastic bin. Boom, one-stop shopping. It’s right there at eye level on the fridge shelf, where I can’t avoid seeing it. Big bag of prewashed spinach sitting on top. In the bin are all the little baggies and plastic containers that I was finding it such a burden to collect from various points in the pantry and refrigerator. Pine nuts, sunflower seeds, almonds, mandarin oranges, dried cranberries, real bleu cheese…mmm, just cutting-and-pasting this list from above makes me hungry. (They don’t all make it into every salad, of course, just a random selection. Otherwise there’d be no room for the veggies, which are, of course, the whole point.)

Also in the bin: sliced mushrooms, diced bell peppers, chopped carrots. OK, so it’s not a perfect system: I still have to prep the veggies. But (another duh moment) I’m doing it once or twice a week, at night after the kids are in bed. Then in the middle of my busy day, I can scoop a handful of diced peppers out of a baggie and throw it on my beeyootiful salad. I know, lots of people have thought of this before me. I don’t claim to be innovative. Except possibly in the matter of sticking it all in a bin together so all I have to do is pull the bin out of the fridge and mix-and-match until I’ve got a bowlful.

I am so delighted at the success of my new system that I think I’ll go celebrate with some cookies.

I don’t have time to write much in the way of a blog entry today, so I’m just going to post a list.

Things on My Nightstand (Which Is Technically Not a Nightstand, But Rather a Barstool Standing Beside the Bed):

• A lamp
• A baby monitor
• A small bottle of contact lens rewetting drops (mine)
• A small bottle of Burt’s Bees Milk & Honey lotion (not mine)
• A yellow plastic frog
• A copy of Mossflower by Brian Jacques
• A copy of Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Unset
• Several thousand dollars in Monopoly money

Hmm. Writing this list has given me a flashback. Ninth grade English class. Assignment: write a description of your bedroom. We had to read our descriptions aloud and I remember being puzzled when my classmates laughed at several points during my reading. Not in a mean way, just in an amused way; but I hadn’t intended to be funny and so it confused me that they thought it was. Looking back on it, recalling what I can of my description, I can see now why they laughed. There was something about the yellow walls glowing like sunlight above the grass-green carpet, the "fourteen crumpled pieces of paper from failed attempts at writing a poem" (I remember that phrase exactly because it jumps into my head whenever I toss a crumpled paper toward a trash can and miss), and a bit about melted crayons in the overhead light fixture because my bedroom had formerly belonged to my younger sisters who had bunk beds.

Funny how the only parts I remember twenty-plus years later are the parts people found odd enough to laugh at. Just as the interesting (to me) parts of my nightstand list are the frog and the Monopoly money. (I’m still wondering how they got there, and whether they were part of a single game/event or were brought to this place separately, perhaps by different children. I could ask, but there’s more ‘scope for imagination’ in not knowing for sure.)

So much for my just writing a list.