My Charmed Life in the Sea of Pink

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

O Edamame!

This past weekend we went out to the local hibachi grill restaurant with our friends to celebrate a birthday and have a farewell dinner. Yng Yng's parents have been visiting from Malaysia for the past several months, and they returned home this week. The are very beautiful people, and it was so nice to visit with them several times over the course of their visit. So here we were at the Shogun restaurant. We were all seated around the hibachi grill. Analese and Anita were seated way across from us, and they were in their own little world. We were all enjoying an edamame appetizer. Yng Yng took a few pods over to Anita and Analese. Imagine my surprise when Analese kept coming back for more! She came back multiple times asking for more of the "beans." I was so pleased that she seemed to be so enjoying a green vegetable. She seems to be a bit anti-green veggie lately. Fast forward to Monday when we were grocery shopping. I found a bag of frozen edamame that you steam in the bag in the microwave. I threw it right into my cart, intending to serve it to Analese before she forgot about her great edamame experience in the restaurant. Fast forward to dinner tonight. I decided to serve the edamame as a side dish. I got Analese's plate all ready for her, and I filled half of her plate with edamame pods. I gave her a bowl for discarding the empty pods. She was so excited to have the edamame on her plate, and she was excited about the bowl. She got right to work squeezing the beans out of the pod. However, instead of squeezing the beans into her mouth (which is how one typically eats edamame), she was squeezing them into the bowl. I reminded her that the bowl was for the purpose of discarding the empty pods. "Oh no, mommy. I want to do it this way." OK. Whatevah. Anyway, she was having so much fun (she even SAID that she was having fun) squeezing the beans out of the pods. She ended up with a good sized serving of shelled edamame. So I suggested that she eat them. "I don't want them, mommy." WHAT??? I guess if I had been paying attention to her at the restaurant, then I may have realized that she was not actually eating the edamame, she was just shelling them for grins and giggles. Of course, little Anita was probably actually eating hers, because she is just healthy that way. So, back to tonight's dinner. I said, "Analese, you have to eat SOME of that edamame." "OK mommy, I will eat 2." Me: "No, how about 10." So I counted out 10 of the beans, and removed the other beans. About 45 minutes later, those 10 beans had made it into her tummy. She did not balk at eating them. She was just separating them into smaller piles and doing simple addition. "Look Mommy! 2+3=5! 6+2=8!"

Wordless Wednesday

Goofing around with the iPhone camera.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Thank you!

I really appreciate all of the thought provoking comments you all left on the ranty homeschooling post of mine. I love blogging with all of you open-minded, diverse and super-duper intelligent women. If there were only more of you all in the world:)

Monday, August 23, 2010

Ranty Random

Today I came across this interesting article about homeschoolers in Texas. The article was mostly positive, although it was a bit light on actual information. I should not have read the comments following the article, but I unfortunately got sucked in...What struck me was how many people have very strong negative opinions about homeschooling. Some of these opinions are so strong that they believe homeschooling should be criminalized. Of course, many of these people do not even have kids, so I'm not sure they are qualified to argue this point at all. Maybe it is a Texas thing, but the general perception of homeschoolers seems to be religious right fringe lunatic zealots. Sigh.....I am used to being a bit of a misfit, and I am admittedly hard to categorize. Religious right? Let's take the right part first. I tend to swing a bit left of center politically, so right is out. Religious? Yes, I am religious....or maybe spiritual is a better term, although I do believe the two go hand in hand. I am not a lunatic, however. In fact, I would even say that I am not necessarily homeschooling for religious reasons, although I do give Biblical instruction. I would be doing that even if my kids were enrolled in public school, because I believe that religious instruction should be instilled at home first and foremost. I like to believe that I am a hip and progressive homeschooler. Maybe I am a hip wannabe, but I do try to be progressive, and I am certainly doing college preparatory homeschooling.....Well, right now I am doing Kindergarten level homeschooling, but if I stay in the game for the long haul, we are definitely doing college preparatory, advanced schoolwork. I am a firm believer in higher education, and my children will be highly encouraged to pursue advanced degrees of their choosing. My homeschool heroes both received advanced professional degrees and are some of the most well adjusted and well socialized people that I know. I am aware that there are probably many examples out there of homeschooling done poorly. And if someone knows someone who is not doing a good job homeschooling, then that colors his/her future opinions about homeschooling. Homeschooling is absolutely not for everyone. There are so many factors involved, and it is a huge commitment. I love teaching. My degrees are in science, but teaching is really more my passion. I was fortunate to be able to do some clinical teaching when I worked at the University hospital. I am not knocking the public schools. I am a product of public education, and it certainly worked for me and my husband. I'm sure I would have done well with private or home education also. The point is, there are many educational choices, and we all just want to feel warm and fuzzy about the choice we make for our children. Perhaps if we feel at peace with our decisions, then we will not bash other people's decisions. PEACE! The world would be a better place.....Now for the #1 reason I am homeschooling......Drum roll please.......Hubby gets 12 weeks of vacation a year, and we take vacations all random times of the year. I really don't want to be attached to the school calendar just yet. We will take it one year at a time. I'm certain that I will homeschool the girls through early elementary. I hope to go beyond that. But we will really feel the benefit in October of 2011, when Analese's peers are sitting in Kindergarten and we are going to Disney WOO HOO! I homeschool on a year round schedule to be able to accommodate those random vacations.

I know that was a "ranty" post for me. It was a brewin' all day, so thank you for reading or skimming though. Now on to the lighter randoms. My girls were both snotty nosed today, and Mariele even had a low grade fever when she woke from her afternoon nap. They are supposed to start their fall classes at The Little gym tomorrow morning, so I hope they are well and don't have watery snot dripping from their little snouts.

Some cute pics from the weekend.

A funny story about scissors. Lee was absolutely appalled when he found out that I was allowing Analese to cut with a pair of sharp tipped sewing scissors when she was doing her school work. We tried using the plastic safety scissors.....but they just don't cut! Yeah, they are pretty safe. Analese is doing a lot of "precision" cutting, and she really was preferring the sewing scissors. She was always fully supervised, by the way. Anyway, Lee brought her home a pair of metal safety scissors the other day.

She was proud of her new scissors, especially because her Daddy gave them to her. She took them over to the couch along with her straw thermos. After a few minutes, we wondered why she was being so quiet. Lee went over to check on her and found her with the scotch tape dispenser trying to tape up the almost severed straw from her thermos.

She immediately started crying. She totally did not mean to do it. I think she was just goofing around and was very surprised that the scissors actually cut through the straw! I contacted the Thermos company and ordered replacement straws and all is well, but that poor child sniveled for about an hour over that severed straw! Oh, it is hard to be four sometimes.