Our Adventures!

Well, last week we went to Bird City and had a wonderful time there, well until Sunday morning when Conner came down with the stomach flu bug. We stayed for the morning meeting and then took Conner, a bucket, lots of clorox wipes and headed home. We made it after only about 4 or 5 stops for sickness (and this mama doesn't do well with the whole vomiting thing!) and he slept it off, felt fine by Monday morning. So far, no one else is sick...

They are doing fine with school, making good progress. The goal is 3% a week on the curriculum. So far we have not had any trouble keeping up with that. We have started blocking by week, so an example of our week would be:
Monday: 5 math lessons and 1 history
Tuesday: 5 reading lessons and 1 history
Wednesday: 3 science lessons and 2 history
Thursday: 7 language arts lessons (includes grammar, composition and vocabulary)
Friday: 2 art, 1 music (for Keenan) and 2-3 Spanish (for Conner and that number depends on how many he fit in other days of the week).

Sometimes the kids don't block the same thing on the same day so that my attention can be one kid while the other does something more independent.

And now, just to be fair....a narrative essay by Conner. This one has been about 3 weeks in the writing as Conner absolutely does not like to be rushed!

My First Companion

As Dan Greenberg said, “Cats are dangerous companions for writers because cat watching is a near perfect method of writing avoidance”. I have been cat watching my whole life. This is the story of Forrest Gump, my first companion, and the many interesting things we did together. And yes, in case you were wondering, cat watching is a real distraction, from all kinds of important things. But it is such a fun activity.

Some children have an older brother or sister meet them when they come home from the hospital, but Forest Gump was waiting for me when I came home from the hospital. You may be wondering who Forest Gump is. Well, he was a Siamese cat that my parents got when they first got married. I suppose you wonder how he got the name Forest Gump. My parents got this cat about the same time they saw the movie Forest Gump. Our cat had lots of enthusiasm about everything he did but he was still petty slow about some things, like learning not to jump on the toilet seat when it was open and trying to get out from under the table when all the chairs were pushed in, since he was cross-eyed you see. When Forest was about 4 years old, everything in his world changed because my mom and dad brought home a baby.

A big brother might be disappointed to have a baby that couldn’t do anything come home from the hospital but Forest Gump and I loved to watch each other from the very beginning. My first day home I had to be under these ultraviolet lights for jaundice, or something wrong with my blood. The lights came in a little suitcase thing and my eyes had to be covered up with little glasses because the bright light would hurt my eyes. Forest was very curious and kept jumping up on the stand where I was laying in the lights but mom and dad were worried he would hurt his eyes so they had to keep chasing him away. Some cats are scared of noises but Forest was never scared about my crying. If I ever started crying, mom told me that he would come right in to check on me. One time my dad was gone for work for a few days and my mom was really tired and she didn’t hear me crying. Not to worry though, Forest was looking out for me! He jumped on my mom’s bed and kept pushing on her head until she woke up! As soon as I started moving around, Forest was always there, just a few steps behind me.

What a strange sight that must have been! A little boy and his cat sized shadow, traipsing around like they were two brothers who could not be separated. What was common between playtime and quiet time? My constant companion Forrest Gump. Whatever I did when I was playing he was always right there but unfortunately many of the things I did, he couldn’t really participate in. Well, except for messing up my Lincoln Log Houses, knocking my wooden trains off the track and mixing up piles of Legos. One time though, we had a toy we both agreed was the best, a cardboard box. You probably wonder why a cat and a 3 year old had so much fun with a box. This was a special box. For starters it was huge and my dad helped me make a 3 sided square hole for a door and another for a window. As soon as I left my little box house, Forrest would go inside and then poke his nose out the window to spy on all of us. We had the greatest time with me putting a string through the window so he could attack it. We shared quiet time too. Whenever I sat down on the couch to look at picture books, the next thing I knew, Forrest would be sitting next to me with his chin on my leg. It was almost as if he were reading along. I am sure I read a few stories out loud to him too, since cats are such great listeners!

The next stage in life was when I had to leave Forrest to go to school. We still stayed best friends though and he would sit on the fence and watch for my bus to come home, kind of like Lassie. When I raced up the hill his scratchy “meow” would greet me every day. He often wondered around the neighborhood during the day but somehow he always knew what time to be watching for me because every day, there he was, balanced on the top rail of the wooden fence around our small back yard. He loved that perch, like a hawk on an old oak branch, he could watch everything that went on in the park across the street and in our own back yard. He loved to sit there and watch my brother and I dig trenches and build construction sites in the back yard. He was probably the most patient cat that ever lived. Sometimes little boys can be pretty ornery. They get crazy ideas that there is just no explanation for. One day my brother and I thought it would be a good idea to use the orange hairspray my mom had gotten for crazy hair day at school and spray paint Forrest Gump. I am not sure what we were pretending but we were in Make Believe World. Even though Forrest got a bath out of the whole deal, he didn’t seem to have any hard feelings towards us, since he still waited for us after school, from his spot on the fence, and greeted us with a smile and “hello” in his own language. He had been there every day of my life, I just never thought of life without Forrest Gump.

The thing is, no matter how much we love them, animals get older. Somehow, I guess I didn’t understand what it meant when he started dragging his legs in the winter and couldn’t jump on things as well. My mom said things about arthritis but I didn’t have any idea what that meant. He seemed to sleep more but we could still get him to chase a string or a ball sometimes. Then he started to get ear infections all the time and didn’t feel well enough to even sit on the fence and wait for us, but when we were sitting on the couch or playing games on the floor he was always right there. Then one day when I was happily sitting at my desk at school, my mom and dad came to the door of my classroom. By the looks on their faces, I knew that it was bad news. They asked me to come with them and my brother Keenan to the car, but didn’t tell me why. Once we were in the car, they explained that we had to go to the vet’s office. Mom had taken Forrest into the vet that day for another ear infection but his ear had started to bleed. The vet couldn’t get it to stop and the only treatment was a really serious surgery that would make him deaf. Mom and dad explained that it didn’t make sense to put him through the surgery when he was almost 14 years old and he probably wouldn’t be happy if he were deaf, if he did live through the surgery. Besides that, the surgery cost way more money that we had right then. I still didn’t understand where they were going with this but then they explained that the best way to take care of an animal who was this sick would be to give him medicine to make him sleep forever. I felt sad and mad and a little sick to my stomach to think about that.

Forrest had been my best friend since I was born and to think of life without him didn’t make much sense. Who would I talk to? Who would meet me after school? Who would listen to me when I was mad or sad? Who would listen to my crazy ideas that other people laughed at? But what mom and dad said did make sense. Forrest couldn’t live with a bleeding ear and I couldn’t imagine him not being able to hear. He loved to sit on the fence but that wouldn’t be safe if he could not hear dogs or other dangerous animals coming close. He would have to be locked inside all the time and that wouldn’t make him happy. Besides, the surgery would be very dangerous and painful for him. I realized I would have to say goodbye to Forrest forever. Mom and dad took us into the room where the vet was with Forrest and they explained that they would put a needle in his leg and put some medicine in and he would just go to sleep. Mom and dad wanted us to say goodbye and then go out and let the vet take care of them. But I said “No way!” I wouldn’t let Forrest go through that alone. So we stayed in the room and hugged and kissed him while he left us. Then we cried all the way home. When we got home I just stood outside the door, by his spot on the fence, and remembered. I don’t know how long I stood there, but I couldn’t seem to move away.

After 10 years of cat watching, suddenly I found myself without any distractions. I guess I should have become the best writer around but somehow things didn’t turn out that way. It seems that easily distracted people can always find something to be distracted by. It probably wasn’t my cat that was distracting me, but something inside my own head, or maybe my little brother! It has been 3 years now and while I still miss Forrest, now I have 3 other distractions to my learning, Dexter and Ginger, our new kittens, and Keenan, my younger brother. It seems like as good of excuse as any to quote Dan Greenberg and say, “Cats are dangerous companions for writers because cat watching is a near perfect method of writing avoidance.”