Soup’s on!

African peanut soup. Tunisian chickpea soup. Thai beef noodle. Miso. Minestrone. Gaspacho. And over 40 more soups.

Where are all these soups? In a cookbook that I’ve been pulling together the past few weeks while lying on the couch with my laptop (because when lying down, I don’t have the chest pains). I’ve gleaned tasty-sounding recipes from cookbooks I own, written up family recipes that no one previously recorded, asked friends for their favorite recipes, and surfed the ’Net. There’s no end to delicious-sounding recipes, and it’s hard to stop collecting them.

But why soups in the heat of summer? Because in September, when I begin homeschooling Alexandra and Larissa, I’ll be teaching a course in cooking, and specifically, cooking soup. These recipes will be in the instruction book for the cooking class.

“Teaching” them how to cook soups is really an exaggeration. Alexandra and Larissa are already good cooks and know far more than the basics of cooking. I’ve trained up all three kids since toddlerhood, a time when children want to imitate everything their parents do. It’s actually a test of patience to allow a toddler to “help” in the kitchen, yet when kids watch and help, they learn, and when they practice, they get better at a task. By early elementary school, all three of my children could bake a batch of cookies without me in the kitchen. (They weren’t quite as good at cleaning up, though.) Still, I was delighted to come home from work to the smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.

Although baking cookies was the first thing all the kids learned, mainly because of marathon baking sessions at Christmastime, they also learned to cook main meals. Jacob bakes a great pizza. Larissa makes delicious quiche. And Alexandra can bake a savory chicken with mashed potatoes. All of them can read a recipe and follow it.

So in the fall, I won’t really be teaching cooking at all. I’ll simply hand all three their own soup cookbook, and then assign them the soup of the day, probably twice a week. And I’ll have them bake the occasional loaf of fresh bread to go with the soup. They’ll get the satisfaction of cooking dinner; I’ll have a reprieve from cooking!

I am curious how they’ll react to some of the more exotic soups, such as Mulligatawny, which has raw apples as a garnish, or Moroccan chickpea soup, which includes tahini as an ingredient. Larissa requested that I not cook any of the new soups in advance to test the recipes; she wants the results to be a surprise, a novelty. So as much as I’ve wanted to try my hand at cooking the bean sprout soup or the Vietnamese fisherman’s soup, I’ve refrained.

I got my idea for the cookbook here. Although I won’t be including photos, I think it’s an excellent way to bind the book.

Since I’ve already gotten carried away in collecting recipes, we’ll be starting the soup cooking class a little early this summer – with the cold soups.

Oh, and the final exam? They’ll each have to cook a soup of their own, one that they make up using ingredients on hand – a little of this, a little of that. Isn’t that what soup cooking is all about?

Home stretch

Jacob went to work with George today to help power wash a house that George will be painting next week. Homeschooling allows that flexibility. Not only is Jacob learning a life skill, he’s earning money and helping Dad. Schooling is set aside for the day.

We’re in the home stretch, but not quite done yet. Health, Global History, Biology, and Geometry all have set topics that I need to cover, and each subject still has one to two weeks of material left. I’m a pusher, and I won’t let up on these subjects until he’s done with the curriculum I set out to cover – a curriculum that runs parallel to the public school where he started the year.

English, Bible Study, Music, and Spanish are more flexible. Jacob has read more for literature and covered more vocabulary words than his contemporaries in public school. He’s done studying the book of Luke. His piano recital is tonight. And Spanish – it’s up to Nita how much he covers, but he’s still running parallel to his sister Alexandra, who started the year in the same Spanish I class in high school. The high school teacher spends so much time in the daily class criticizing the students and yelling at them that Jacob has covered the same amount of material in his twice-weekly classes taught by another homeschooling mom. Poor Alexandra, an excellent student who grasps foreign languages easily, could have covered far more material than she did because the teacher held the class back to accommodate the slowest learners. The teacher decided to cater to them, not to the median of the class, and certainly not to the bright students. Alexandra was definitely frustrated.

Since Jacob is out of the house today, I’m enjoying a day alone, as much as I can while still sick with lupus. Over the weekend, I had a scary attack: such severe pain in my chest/heart area that I was writhing in pain, tears streaming down my face, and all this while we had guests in the house. I asked them to pray for me as I lay on the couch moaning and terrified. Eventually the pain subsided, but I continued to lie on the couch, probably making the guests a touch uncomfortable with my frailty. That episode motivated George to call the elders of the church to pray for me, as stated in James 5:14-15:

Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven.

The pastor and one of the elders came that evening. They sat and talked a while, then prayed over me and anointed me with oil. Six years ago when I had my first and only other bout of lupus, I was healed four days after the elders’ prayer.

Now I await healing. The pastor, however, said it will still be a while before I’m well.

Keeping a Nature Journal

How could I possibly homeschool without the Internet? Fellow homeschoolers across the country and the globe are such a precious resource!

Take nature journaling, for example. I’d never heard of nature journaling, but while searching the Internet for sources about supplementing my homeschooing with literature, as I’d been doing with Jacob’s history course, I stumbled on an article by Catherine Levison. In her article, Catherine mentions a book called Keeping a Nature Journal. Hmm. It sounded interesting, so I looked it up. Then I bought it.

Larissa, my youngest, loves to draw and is interested in pursuing a career that involves drawing and plants. She’s my gardening helper – weeding, mulching, planning new gardens. Nature journaling sounded like something she might like to do for a course next year.

When the book arrived, Larissa immediately spotted it by my bed. “May I look at it?” she asked.

Just a flip through a few pages, and she was hooked.

“Could you buy me a blank book so I can start a nature journal?” Larissa asked.

Forget about coursework and schedule, requirements and electives. She wanted to start this now, not next fall.

What a feeling of satisfaction when you hit on something that appeals to your child that much.

Thank you, fellow homeschoolers, for sharing!

Ambien

Mom’s episode was apparently a side effect of Ambien, her sleeping pill for the last ten years. All the blood tests found nothing abnormal in her blood, and not a trace of alcohol.

This discovery, which we siblings had suspected, triggered a rash of emails to one another, including a link to a list of rather scary side effects people have suffered from Ambien.

My sister took Mom to another doctor appointment later in the week, and Mom signed papers allowing my sister and me access to her medical records. This was a great relief as many elderly staunchly refuse to give up anything – access to records, rights to make medical decisions for them, power of attorney. It’s simply not an easy time for either my parents or us grown kids.

Mom changed sleeping medication, which apparently isn’t as effective. But my personal feeling is that any medication designed to knock you out cannot be good for you, certainly not in the long run. A drug dependency like this worries me. Most of the world’s population doesn’t have access to sleeping pills, so why should we North Americans drug ourselves just because we can? I struggle with this. I take no medication regularly and would have to be absolutely convinced that I couldn’t live without a particular medicine. As far as I’m concerned, a medicine for your thyroid or for high blood pressure would be necessary; a sleeping pill is not. But then again, I don’t have trouble sleeping…

However, I am struggling with my lupus. I felt better the day I came to my parents, and two days after that when I took my dad to the dermatologist so that my mother didn’t have to drive. (We weren’t yet sure of the test results then.) I was getting better, better, and then – crash! – I crawled into bed and didn’t get out for a day. That was last Friday. Now I’m up only a little bit, then have to lie down, nauseated by the exertion of merely sitting up. My joints ache, and even large doses of Bufferin or Advil don’t make a dent in the pain. I thought I’d be well; instead, I’m right back where I started in late April.

The company nurse called to let me know how many weeks of short-term disability payments I have left, how long my job would remain open for me before someone else was hired to fill it, and informed me about long-term disability – something I don’t want to think about. She suggested that since I’m no better off now than I was initially I see a rheumatologist.

I think it’s time I began to pray harder for healing.

But through all this, I continue to homeschool Jacob…

Foreboding

It took an unusually long time for my mom to answer the door. As I stood on the front porch, I could finally see her shuffling toward the front door like an old woman. That wasn’t her normal gait. When she swung the door open, Mom didn’t greet me.

“No one is here. No one,” she said and wandered away.

I peeked around the corner into the living room and sitting in his usual spot on the easy chair was my 88-year-old dad. He was the only other person who lives in my parents’ home.

“Who isn’t here?” I asked.

But I’d been warned. My sister had called me this morning, and despite my husband’s explanations that because of my lupus I was sleeping in, she insisted on speaking to me, telling me that our mother wasn’t making sense, was going on about blowing up the inflatable mattress for our brother Peter and his wife Tamara who live in Toronto but were supposedly visiting. On a weekday without telling us? Not likely. My sister was at work, so she asked that I drive to our parents’ house and check whether Mom really was as bad off as she sounded on the phone. My sister would wait for my call at work and make a doctor’s appointment, if I thought it necessary.

“Peter and Tamara aren’t here. Or little Danya and Mark. They were here last night, but they went to sleep at U-U’s house,” said Mom. U-U was my middle brother’s nickname. They had never slept at his house before…

I scanned the living room for stray toys or any sign that my brother’s family had indeed been there, then walked over to my hard-of-hearing father.

“Dad!” I shouted. “Were Peter and Tamara here last night?”

“No, I didn’t see them,” he said. “Mama said that I slept through it.”

Dad is notorious for nodding off, but I doubt that even he could sleep through the energetic visit of a 16-month-old toddler and a four-year-old.

“You look tired, Mom,” I said, hoping she’d give me some clue as to her state of health. Her eyes were mere slits. And on this chilly morning, she was wearing a sleeveless shirt and a vest turned inside out.

“I am. I had a party here yesterday. Yura and Maria came. And Peter and Tamara with their kids. And Irene Rak – she’s such a nice person. It was such a nice party. No pomp and circumstance. Very nice…”

My mom doesn’t throw parties, except for the family – and then she talks about it for weeks in advance. Mom had never met my sister-in-law Irene, who lives in Ukraine. But there was an even bigger problem with her story.

“Mom, Yura died last week,” I said. My mother had been the one to notify me of his death.

“I meant Volodia,” Mom corrected herself, naming Yura’s father who had died in World War II!

I picked up the phone and dialed my sister.

Was it a stroke? An overdose of sleeping pills, which she sometimes takes in the middle of the night? Sleeping pills and alcohol? We needed to find out. We’d been through something similar with our mom over a decade ago when she began to lull herself to sleep with large doses of alcohol because of insomnia, which had been a side effect of her blood pressure medication. She swore to us that she would never, ever drink again after she switched medication. Was she secretly hitting the bottle again? I didn’t smell it on her breath.

While I waited for my sister to come, I tried to get Mom to sit. She stumbled as she walked around the kitchen, putting away a knife and fork in the refrigerator. I wanted to make myself some coffee, but Mom took the steaming cup for herself. I was afraid that she’d spill it, so I put it on the coffee table in the living room for her.

“Sit, Mom, and have some coffee. I’ll bring the sugar.” She sprinkled a spoonful of sugar on the carpet as she completely missed the cup.

Although something was drastically amiss, Dad just kept pecking away at his laptop, checking the latest news as he always does, seemingly oblivious to Mom’s bizarre behavior. He didn’t hear what she said because he hardly hears even when you speak loudly and right at him. He was living in his own world; my mother was fantasizing hers. And I felt completely helpless in this bizarre situation.

I was so thankful when my sister arrived. I expected my mother to protest being taken to the doctor, but she followed my sister like an obedient puppy, stumbling on her way out, walking to the wrong car, but coming along.

My father can hardly walk, and when he does it’s only with a walker, so my mother, who is 11 years younger than Dad, serves him like a maid. I talked with my dad for a while, telling him that I’d be back with lunch for him since Mom would be gone for several hours – to the doctor, for blood work, and for a CAT scan.

I came home and found Jacob working on Health, even though I hadn’t had time to write out his assignments for the day. At least something was going right. He was looking at the course outline and figuring out his own assignment. I was impressed.

“Someday, it might be you going to take care of me,” I said an hour later as I headed out again with a sandwich for my dad. “Keep working on your schoolwork and I’ll catch you later!”

My sister returned with Mom just as I was serving Dad lunch. The blood was drawn and tests ordered. Now we have to wait. But by evening, Mom was sounding like Mom again. And she was making sense.

But what was it?

On medical leave

I get nothing done while on medical leave.

I get up late and check Jacob’s schedule. He’s been working while I sleep.

I review his vocabulary with him.

I lie down and read a book for next year’s curriculum.

I go over Jacob’s Health assignment. We review together for his test. I log in to check my email on my work account. I don’t want to see the backlog of writing that my coworkers must now do for me. I log out.

I lie down, my heart aching in my chest.

I read some Biology and explain phenotypes and genotypes while lying on the couch.

I keep reading my book. My hands are cold. The sky is cloudy and temperatures are way, way below the normal for May. I am discouraged. My lupus is no better than when I first went out on medical leave.

I get up and go over the Global History and write the schedule for the next week.

I lie down. I check personal email from my laptop while reclined.

I get up and look at my garden. I pull up a dandelion. I feel the chest pains again.

I lie down. The house needs cleaning. The garden needs work. This quarter’s grades haven’t yet been sent in to the school district.

I get nothing down while on medical leave.

Triggered memories

I read an excellent book review by the Thinking Mother in this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling.

Although I haven’t read Ships Without a Shore, based on the review, I certainly share the author’s viewpoint. Years ago I wrote numerous articles for the Montessori school newsletter about some of those topics...

Montessori preschool – what a long time ago!

One girl in Jacob’s class was an only child. Her parents both worked full-time for a large corporation so they could afford their large, sterile-looking MacMansion where they could have housed a dozen kids. That little girl, who spent mornings at Montessori preschool and afternoons in daycare, prayed that her mother would lose her job. She just wanted to be with her mother. The child cared nothing for the large house.

The greatest gift parents can give their children is their time. Instead, many parents believe that signing up kids for softball, piano lessons, and sending them off on sleepovers is what’s best for them. The parents end up as chauffeurs; the kids end up frazzled and rushed. Where is the one-on-one time? The teaching moments?

I enjoy spending time with a friend chatting over a cup of coffee. In the same way, I love spending time with my children, talking, cooking together, gardening, or just hanging around the living room. When the kids were preschool age, they were far more eager to spend time with me than they are now as teens. But, surprisingly, because of the time that my husband and I spent with them back in their younger years, the relationship we have today is still remarkably close.

It wasn’t always easy to make the time to be with the children. We were an odd family, I suppose. Because my husband was an immigrant and I had more earning power, we decided that he would stay home with the kids and I would work. Oh, it hurt when the kids cried at night for Daddy, not Mommy, because Dad was at home to kiss their boo-boos. But I consoled myself thinking that most Dads are never that close with their kids. Their closeness remains to this day, and sometimes they still choose to confide in Dad instead of Mom. Yes, it still hurts, but I’m still glad that the children are that close to Dad. I never was close to my own dad.

As the kids got older, we juggled our time so we could both work. Both of us were self-employed – George as a general contractor, I as a writer. George took on daytime projects and I stayed with the children. Then in the late afternoon, we would switch: George would take the cranky, worn-out kids and spend the evenings with them, tucking them in as I wrote training documents in my home office.

My fondest memories are from those days of juggling when the children were about 2, 4, and 6. I did all kinds of things that I enjoy with the kids, things that I would never have allowed myself the luxury of doing if not “for the children’s sake.” Finding caterpillars and raising them into Monarch butterflies. Wading in the creek at a nearby park and climbing the shoulder-high waterfall. Hiking in the neighborhood park. Netting tadpoles. Roasting hot dogs over a bonfire in the backyard woods. Catching fireflies in the park.

Today, my older two would rather spend time with their friends than go to the park to catch tadpoles. But 12-year-old Larissa still prefers those quiet one-on-one times with Mom. For now.

What I check out of the library

“That’s an incredibly depressing set,” said the librarian when I was checking out items at the public library yesterday. “Well, maybe Gandhi…” she added, motioning to the DVD I had in the pile.

I suppose she was right.

I took out Gandhi to supplement my son’s history lessons.

Hiroshima by John Hersey is a compilation of six first-hand accounts of people who survived the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The reportage follows six people right before, during, and directly after the bombing. Yes, the details are gruesome, but the book puts a human face on the statistics that we read. I read this book two months ago, now I’m giving it to Jacob to follow along with a book-on-tape of this book. This is also part of Jacob’s history curriculum.

Sold by Patricia McCormick is about a Nepali girl who is sold by her stepfather into prostitution in India. Although it’s a novel, it’s based on interviews with real women who were sold into the sex slave. I’m going to pre-read this book to see whether I want to include it in my Heartache curriculum.

A Child Called “It” by Dave Pelzer in an autobiographical account of extreme child abuse. Some of the ways that Dave’s mother conjured up to torture him were beyond anything I’ve ever heard. His alcoholic mother ostracized him from the rest of the family, then tormented him with not only beatings, but starvation, poisoning, and worse.

I had stopped in the library right before my doctor’s appointment. I finally decided to take medical leave from work due to my recurrence of lupus, and I needed him to fill out the paperwork. But the wait to see the doctor was long, and meanwhile I read the first 40 pages of A Child Called “It.” I read the rest of the book before suppertime. It will definitely be on my Heartache curriculum, and I’m going back to the library today to get the sequel, as well as two books that Dave Pelzer’s brother wrote. Apparently after David was rescued by social services from the severe abuse, the mother turned her wrath on the next older son. He, too, wrote about his experiences.

Why am I drawn to these “depressing” books, I often wonder. Is it a morbid curiosity? Why?

By knowing what is happening in other people’s lives can we truly appreciate what we have and perhaps extend a hand to help others in need. Dave’s life would have been different if someone had been kind to him even during his school days, but his classmates mocked him due to his sloppy appearance and stench (his mother refused him a change of clothing or baths) and added more pain to his tormented life. By being educated about the injustices of the world, we can also be more compassionate towards the victims. And ultimately, compassion is what I hope to instill in my children as well as an awareness of the horrors that they don’t experience firsthand.

I grew up in a sheltered, loving home with no exposure to abuse. I thought all families were basically like ours, except that my parents came from a foreign country so we spoke Ukrainian at home. I was in my twenties when I first read about wife beatings and child abuse. I was horrified. Later, after a friend of mine was married and living in another city, she opened up to me and said that her father was an abuser. Her sister would run barefoot through the snow to a neighbor’s house to get away from him. I visited this girl as I was growing up, spent time in her home, and I never suspected… It’s all around us, but the victims usually remain silent.

In my house, I want the victims to be heard.