Mighty, Mighty Titus Turns Three!

Ode to Titus

You may be small in stature but you are powerful in spirit.  

Your strength lies not only in your muscles but also in your mind.

Your smile could light up a city and your laughter fuel a country.

You are my number one helper and daily chore companion.

You're calculating and compassionate, a friend to family and stranger.

May the Lord always turn his face toward you and bless you all the days of your life.

He started his third year so big!

And then he just kept growing!

First time petting sting ray.

Pizza with friends a favorite treat.

Chillin' with Roofus.

Titus the magnificent!

Hunting for Dinosaur bones.

Born to play baseball (or model).

Communing with nature.

Exuding joy!

Fort building connoisseur (especially for kitty).

Addicted to water.

Always around to help with any job.

The wild side.

Just one of the guys.

Ready to take on anything.

Leading his brothers to new heights.

Sliding into the new year.

The new three year old on the block. Large and in charge!

Happy Birthday Titus!  We love you more than you can ever imagine!

Amberlicious Month Three

I forgot how quickly they grow.  She's already doing 360s and rolling to her side on her play mat.

She's starting to grab toys and play with them.  As a result, she's reminding me to braid my long hair more.

Her personality is coming out more, with dimpled smiles and squeaks.  She clearly recognizes her daddy and looks like an elf princess perched in his arms surveying her domain.  

She went on her fist bike ride this month.  No worries, we figured out years ago how to put a car seat safely in the bike trailer.  She's as safe there as in the car.  We only went a little over a mile, because mommy couldn't tow her much farther. She seemed to like it so we'll try a longer ride this weekend.

Jared initiated a neat scavenger for her and us over the weekend.  We walked around following his map from place to place.  He handed out a new clue as we reached each special spot.  It's awesome to be able to encourage those spontaneous moments of creativity.

Titus likes to share his iPad and his discoveries with his little sister.  I wish I had a picture of his special discovery the other day but I will do my best to describe what happened.  We were at a park with a big wooden playground.  Chris and I were sitting on a bench talking and I was feeding Amber.  We see Titus walking over to us with something pinched between his forefinger and thumb.  The object in question is making a high-pitched squeak.  It's clearly not a mouse but we are in denial of what it is until he gets closer. 

It was a bat.  Poor thing had been injured and must have crawled between two of the playground logs to hide.  It just wasn't expecting the "Mighty! Mighty! Titus!" to come along.  Unfortunately, it was too injured to take it to a wildlife rehab center.  Chris took pity on it and gently took it over to a quiet area under a bush to pass quietly.  The kids followed him like the pied piper but courteously left when he said it needed to go to sleep.

Amber is going to have quite a life.  She has three awesome brothers with very different strengths to share.  She's sort of like Dorthy in the "Wizard of Oz".  Titus is her fearless lion.  Jared her intelligent and imaginative scarecrow.  Lance her loving, sensitive and caring tinman.  However, I don't think Sarge would fit very well in her bike basket.

*Note:  She does have more than one outfit but apparently purple is her most photogenic color.

Tigers and Bears! Oh, my!

"I go cow-cow?" asks the two year old emphatically.  "Cow-Cow" is his word for Cub Scouts.  Cub Scouts is a favorite activity in our house and my two-year old is no exception.  When Chris can't bring him, boy do I have a bummed little boy to cheer up. In fact, my normal ham (has to be in every photo) is not in the photo below because he was already in the car waiting to go!  So here's my "Join Cub Scouts" pitch.

Last year a friend convinced my husband and I that Lance should start Cub Scouts.  She motivated me with the phrase "It's a guy thing, something you don't have to be involved in."  As a homeschool mom, that was all the motivation I needed, my plate was already full with activities for the boys.  Joking aside, it has been a great experience for the boys and I encourage anyone to join.

Lance is now a "Bear" and Jared is a "Tiger".  The motto of their pack is "We do stuff!" and they most certainly do.   The den and pack meetings are a lot of fun. They work through their requirements for new coveted belt loops, their next badge, do skits, crafts or go on field trips; like this trip to the police station.

The pack does an additional event each month, usually overnight camping, but they also have other fun weekend events on non-camping months.  Two of the boys' favorites are rock climbing and zip-lining/ropes course.

 

The homeschooling mom in me likes all the stuff they learn.  They learn physical science and carpentry skills by preparing their vehicles for the "Space Derby" and "Pinewood Derby" each year.  These, like the other weekend events, are always open to the whole family which allows no excuse to not join in the fun.

And if that wasn't enough, they also learn life skills with the annual "Popcorn Sales" fundraiser.   I was amazed at the learning opportunities afforded this year by selling popcorn door-to-door.  The boys really jumped into it.   They worked on their sales pitch and refined their manners. They also learned the importance for finishing the job by delivering all the popcorn weeks later (harder in some ways than selling it). They finished each sale saying "Thank you for supporting our pack. See you next year!".  I'm especially proud to say my boys sold the most popcorn of any family in the pack, because they did it all on their own. Chris and I only chaperoned.  Their motivation was of course the foam dart guns on the prize table, but, hey, whatever it takes, right?  Grandpa Bob bought Titus one for Christmas to level the playing field.

I know most families are overbooked with activities but I must say it might be worth dropping something else and trying this out.  The great "They" say there is nothing more impressive on a resume (not even Ivy League credentials) than being an "Eagle Scout".  I'll be curious is my boys make it some day.

Note:  For those mom's like me who are sewing adverse; never fear!  The Scouts no longer have achievement patches, only "belt loops" and "pins" (no sewing required, yay!).  And for the few patches on the uniform, I use this awesome stuff called "BadgeMagic", which is conveniently available right next to the patches, so you'll never have to pick-up a needle :-)

Their ideas...

When the new year started, I knew we needed to start school again, but frankly I hadn't made a plan for the week.  So when I announced last Tuesday morning that we needed to start school, I was pleased when Jared asked "Can I do my Rocket Phonics?".  We have not opened that book/curricula in over six months.  I was excited, that he was excited about doing something; so we kicked right in.  That led to starting up all their core curriculum again, most of which we hadn't touched since Amber was born.  It turned out to be a nice and easy way to start out the new year.  Thankfully, they weren't done sharing their ideas of how our school days should go.

Jared also voiced a real interest in the idea of writing in a journal.  He had seen an episode of "Clifford The Big Red Dog" about journal writing.  They also enjoy doing the "Draw-Write-Now" assignments and I decided to combine the two and for this I found the perfect composition notebooks.  These notebooks have room to draw on the top of each page and wide lines to write down below.  They are devouring these journal books.  I'm really enjoying all their creative ideas.  I limit them to an hour first thing in the morning, but if I let them, I think they'd spend hours everyday drawing and writing in them.  I am careful not to correct anything they write in these journals, the journals should be a way to express themselves freely and to practice what they learn in language arts.  Over time, I hope to see an advancement in their spelling, sentence structure, and vocabulary.

Lance "reignited" a keen interest in volcanoes after borrowing a video from the library.  He looked up Mt. St. Helen on Google Earth and watched videos from links found there.  Then he made models of exploding volcanoes, complete with doomed villages, in the sand box.

Titus, not to be left out, has been our creative/craft idea king.  The other day, he rummaged his way to the back of the craft cupboard and came out with old marshmallows.  I brought out the toothpicks and we started making letters. The letters then morphed into constellations.  When his brother completed the assignment they were working on they made their own creations.

Love Parachute - note the heart at the bottom

Jet Plane

Today, Titus started drumming on an empty container in the kitchen.  This reminded me about the containers I'd been saving to do a "Tom-Tom Craft" with the boys.  

I decided to I follow their lead on changing things up and updated our schedule.  First change was to get back to scheduling in Excel (yay!).  The second was to literally turn things around.  I transposed my spreadsheet so that the dates were now the columns and subjects the rows.  This allows me to print out a schedule similar to the one I was handwriting.  It also allows the flexibility to add/change/move around subjects easily.  I am now posting their schedules on the entertainment center (so they can't forget/miss them) and color coding them with things they can do on their own vs. things where they need my help.  The idea is that hopefully they can be more productive during the day when I'm occupied with Amber.  We'll see how it works in the weeks ahead.

We're going to do what I call our "Core Curricula" Monday to Wednesday and incorporate History on Thursdays and Fridays.  History is too reading intensive to do the same day with their reading and language arts curricula.  

Here's what our new schedule looks like:

BIBLE (M-S):  We are back to doing our CLE Bible curricula everyday.  I have struggled with how to approach this subject more than any other subject in our house.  I have felt pressured to do more to make my children incredible scholars and other lofty goals.  Most of my plans haven't made it past Tuesday of the new week, with us ending up doing no Bible work at all the rest of the week.  Reality set in this year and what is really necessary is for them to know and love the bible.  With CLE, they learn about the bible and its easy for me to teach and most importantly they like it so much they ask to do it.  This is exactly what I needed and its been sitting on my shelf all along.

LANGUAGE ARTS:

• Journal Writing (M-S)
• CLE Language Arts Grade 1 (Jared only)
• Easy Grammar - Grade 3 Student Book and Daily Grams (Lance only)
• All About Spelling Level 2 (Lance Only)
• Pentime - Cursive Practice (Lance Only)

READING:  In addition to continuing to read and narrate the "Christian Liberty Nature Readers" we have started our CLE Reading and "Rocket Phonics" curricula again.  I absolutely adore the readers in both curricula and the boys do also.  In addition, we always have a couple read-aloud books going and the boys have their own books to read.

MATH:  We have returned to our summer schedule of Calculadder (M-F) and CLE Math (M-W).

PIANO (M-S), CC REVIEW (M-F), HISTORY (R-F), SCIENCE:  No changes here from previous post.

Some days I feel like we change our schedule more than our clothes around here, but that's part of the reason I homeschool.  I love having the flexibility to continual improve on the whats, hows and whys of teaching my children.  My desire above all things is to ignite a life long love of learning.

Just because she's cute!

Safari

Early last week, I came downstairs to find Lance looking up the word "Safari" in our 1828 Noah Webster dictionary.  He said couldn't find it and sure enough it wasn't in that dictionary. We decided to find out how old the word was and it turns out it didn't become part of the English language until the 1890s. The work has Swahili/Arabic origins and means "journey".  Looking back on the last few weeks, I found it very aprepo. 

Jared's last SVT was December 21.  Though we managed to avoid the ER by the skin of our teeth, it was the proverbial last straw for me.  My body broke down. I got a cold the next day and it lasted over two weeks.  The entire situation took a toll on my spirit as well.  Having your son endure three life-threatening events in four-month period can wear a person down. 

I've mentioned before that I have control issues - I'm a fixer by nature.  Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do to fix Jared and the doctors said there's nothing they can really do either at this point. It's hard for a fixer to accept that all they can do is Trust in the Lord and I'm no exception.  As a result, I have frequently felt abandoned by God despite the abundant blessings He has given us; like our four beautiful children.  

Over the last two years my hope/faith had been growing a little, maybe trusting in the Lord was enough. Jared seemed to be thriving. His activity levels were high.  He had fun this past summer swimming and playing with his brothers.  I started to hope again that one of these days I would go to the cardiologist and find out my prayers had been answered and Jared was miraculously healed. These episodes have made it more difficult but I will always keep praying for a miracle. 

Today, I saw Chris pull Jared down into his lap and hug him so tight Jared was laughing and complaining. I could see the tears in Chris' eyes.  When Jared left the room he said: "Sometimes I wonder if this is the last time." I nodded and said I know.  Knowing I'm not alone on this journey is both a blessing and a source of pain.  It's hard to see such pain in the eyes of someone you.  We both put on a good show of strength, but it is still just a show.  

A friend gave me a little ray of hope last Sunday.  I told her I was switching Jared back to his old liquid vitamins.  I said when I went to re-order them the other day, I had the sudden thought maybe I shouldn't keep Jared on them.  I explained I had switched the boys to new liquid vitamins early this summer because they had ionized minerals that help to detox the body and improve focus.  I was pleased with the vitamins and they seemed to be helping.  The thought that made me stop giving them to Jared was "what if they were doing their job too well and decreasing the effectiveness of Jared's medications?"  My friend said she thinks those moments are the Holy Spirit talking to us.  I'd never thought of random ideas that way, but it is comforting knowing that God is still talking to me. I just need to listen and trust more. 

Jared has definitely been more spacey this week as a result (mental confusion is also a side effect of one of his drugs.)  But if the SVTs don't return, I can cope with his spaceiness with patience and grace. I'm hoping to move forward with our journey again this week.  Our lives must go on as normal as possible for Jared and the sake of our three other children.  Chris and I have always said "We don't want our children to survive, we want them to thrive!".  To do that we must get back to enjoying every part of the journey, wherever it leads.

2011 Year End

Ah, the phrase "Year-End" makes me sort-of-sentimental and sort-of relieved that it doesn't mean spending the holidays in a cube closing the books and preparing for auditors :-)

As promised here is our 2011 Year-End Highlights!

Here are my beautiful children on Christmas Eve.  I left Chris and I out of the photo because we are not so beautiful from lack of sleep and I don't have time to touch us up in Photoshop :-) 

This year lance officially started his love of baseball. In the spring dad helped coach. In fall Chris was the head coach of his team. Chris really enjoyed coaching. Currently Lance's favorite position is catcher, but I adore this shot he took of him pitching. For his birthday, Chris, Grandpa Harv, Jared and Matthew went to a real RedSox game at Disney's Wide World of Sports, if that gives you an idea of the severity of baseball fever in our house. When he wasn't playing baseball, he was running in the "Smile Mile" or swimming with a team of friends all summer long. All this work culminated in August when he successfully competed in his first Triathlon. In short, Lance likes sports and he's very athletic.

Jared is my beautiful thespian.

He loves to talk to people.  He frequently sings for people at the park and enjoys playing his piano.  Jared celebrated his birthday at the Fountains Resort again this year with friends and family.  After his birthday, he started up karate again and it has gone very well and he is now a purple belt with black stripe. 

Jared's cardiac conditions are part of the reason we studied anatomy in detail this summer.  We wanted to finally explain to him what his conditions were.  We had no idea how important that would be in the fall when one of his conditions started acting up again, after being inactive for two years.  He had three SVTs this fall/winter and has progressively become braver with each occurrence.  I think it helps that he intellectually understands what's going on.  Unfortunately, because of his conditions Jared found out he is not allowed to play baseball or any contact sport.  It helped that he was the bat boy on Lance's team in the fall but he was disappointed at the news.  But rather than focus on the negative we thought of alternatives and one I came up with was riflrey.  Grandpa Bob is an expert marksman and was happy to help start this focus.  He not only gave him a BB gun for Christmas but took the time to explain to him this really is a sport he can compete in at in the Olympics. If this doesn't work out I think he'll make a great sports announcer some day.

Then there is Titus.  His name and personality lend itself to so many nicknames and theme songs; "We are the Titus, the mighty, mighty Titus" is still the favorite.  He wants to be in on EVERYTHING his big brothers are doing, physical or age barriers be darned.  He's been talking like a five year old since the beginning of the year and I wish I'd kept a list of some of his incredible statements. He jumped into the pool fearlessly all summer long and became a pretty good swimmer.  He ran the nursery at CC and wooed all the teachers at church, one even called him a "genius" (Hee Hee).  Chris suggested a blurry picture, since he's always moving but I chose these instead.

Super Hero Titus or Disappearing Titus

I did not pose him he did this himself :-)

Titus in charge on his "Wee HOO"!

The biggest event of the year was the arrival of little Amber Elizabeth.  I'm not sure little is the best way to describe her. Our chunky monkey weighed in at 11 lbs. 12 oz. at her two month checkup and 23 inches.  Each child seems to grow up quicker than the previous. She is so alert and interested in the world around her, and what a world it is.

That wraps up the year.  Safe tiddings to you and yours!  May the New Year be filled with God's blessing upon your families.

Love the Otto Clan! 

Next Right Thing

I have kept a journal since I was a young girl. As a child, it was my way of venting.  After I married Chris, I got rid of all those old journals. I decided my journal should be a way to record everything good in our lives. I've done a decent job of keeping a journal over
the last 15 years - until January of 2010. The last two years have been rough on many levels.  I've had a hard time seeing the sun through the clouds and my journal reflects that by having very few entries.  It fills me with guilt all the wonderful moments with my boys I never recorded and have already forgotten. We can't change the past and as our pastor says: "all we can do the next right thing". 

This last week hasn't been any easier, new challenges pop up and life is still tough. But if I keep waiting for life to improve, I'm going to keep missing the rays of sunshine that make rainbows in the clouds.  From now on, I'm going to do things differently.

I'm going to use my nice new hot pink iPhone to capture those special moments so I'll have them to write down later. My blog is going to change from a homeschooling resource, to a journal of my family's adventures through life. And I can post lots of pictures. Yay! "They" say a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes no words can do justice to what happens in the lives of my boys. 

I want to change how we live life in order to increase the chances of having more happy moments to record. I will change homeschooling to being just one part of our life, not it's main focus.  To do this, I plan to continue our gravitation towards a more Charlotte Mason approach to homeschooling.  I am going to plan more field trips and have the boys experience what they have learned. 

I want to bring FUN back into our daily lives and enjoy the simple moments to play when the moment strikes us.  I've done more of this lately and I already see a difference in the boys. Finally, I plan to remove the burdens we have inflicted on our lives.

My next entry starts this journey and I will include a little catch-up on the highlights of 2011. Stay tuned!

Back in the Saddle Again....

I've been spending as little time as possible on my computer lately, partly because its been bugging my eyes and partly because I simply don't have the time.  We are starting our third week of nearly full-time school again.  I say nearly because there are a few things we still need to add back but all in good time.

THE BUCKING BRONCO

The biggest challenge we have to getting things done is not Amber but my very active two year old Titus.  He's the cutest thing in the world (which is how he became a terrorist), extremely smart (he knows all his letters and their sounds) but he doesn't do tricks (only counts when playing hide-n-seek) and he has the attention span of a gnat.  Here's how me trying to integrate him into our day and honor his requests of "I do work too!" goes:

The scene is him on my lap with the alphabet in front of him (consonants in red, vowels in blue) a picture of a cat and three blank spaces after.

"Titus point to the letter that makes the /k/ sound"

    Titus points to "c" and we start to spell the word.

"Nicely done, now which letter makes the /a/ sound"

    Titus points to "m" and starts spinning it around.

"Not /m/, /a/, its a blue letter."

    "Not blue, I like red"

"Okay, point to /t/ then"

   Titus then starts twisting multiple letters.

"Titus point to the letter that makes the /t/ sound"
I repeated this a few times till he gave me a sly smile and said...

   "How 'bout "p"?"
Game over he wins.

He knows very well which letter is "t" but lost interest in the game that quickly and that's how all our teaching lessons go.  Then because he's "done" in his mind, his brothers should be too and free to play with him, thus the challenge of my days.  The worst part is I really feel for him.  He's only two.   He should just be playing his days away.  I envy the homeschool mom's that have the option to put their littlest in preschool, it seems like such a win-win plan.  However, for us preschool is a petri dish and we can't mess with that.  I'm hoping to find some way to create a mini-preschool at my house with my friends daughter.  We are trying to find someone to play with them a few hours a week while we teach the older ones.

LOW TECH SOLUTION

I wasn't going to let my eyes stop us from starting school the other week, so I went low-tech.  I took a 5x8 index card drew some lines and called it a schedule.  Strangely the new system is working better than any other system we've used the past.  Here's how the last week and the current week looks:

To the untrained eye (which is anyone other than me and the boys :-) ) it looks like a bunch of gibberish but here's what it means to our days.  I have this on the front of a three ring binder for the boys to view anytime during the day, certain things they can do on their own and other things require my help.  That said it means we do NOT do these things in order we do then as the opportunity arrives during the day.  Inside the binder are all the worksheets/supplies they need to complete the work for the week.  They can work ahead if they want (hasn't happened yet) but if they do not complete their work during the week they will have to do it over the weekend (that motivates them to do it during the week).

BIBLE:  For right now its just me reading bible stories from the "Jesse Tree" book and them making their new links for the "Thankful Garland".  Next week we will go back to reading "Matthew" with narration and discussion.  On the weekends Chris does the CLE Bible curricula with them.

CHORES:  This isn't a subject but my children claim they just cannot remember on their own, to vacuum their rugs and brush their teeth each morning.  The "LF" you see I added this to stop the discussions over who is vacuuming which rugs, which days since they switch each day (Oyeevey!)

PIANO:  Is practice four days a week and lessons on Thursday, details of which is all determined by their wonderful piano teacher.

CC REVIEW:  Involves reviewing the first 12 weeks of Classical Conversation Memory work, three weeks each day.  Most days it means watching three weeks of the videos I created, but some days it involves me quizzing them.  I'm happy to say that based on the quiz days my videos have really done their job.

DRILLS:  These are our "Calculadder"(CL) and "Alphabetter"(AB) drills.  Between the two it only takes 6 minutes a day.  I am extremely pleased with the "Calculadder", I can see the boys truly gaining mastery in math and staying fresh with their math skills till we start-up their full curricula again.

HISTORY:  This is where we spend most of our day.  Its not just history but also reading, science, penmanship and art.  I have decided to go really deep with our history this year instead of going wide.  I want the boys to truly understand history from a providential standpoint, how it all relates and the details of the people and the events.  In addition to various living books, I'm using all the tools mentioned in my previous posts (Post 1 and Post 2) to teach the boys history and recently one more I found from Brandy called "Adventure Tales of America" (ATA).

I use the "Mighty Works of God" (MW) as our backbone curricula and then work off it with the others. For instance with the Pilgrims we started with MW reading and worksheets.  At the same time we were also reading "Squanto: Friend of the Indians".  Then we went over the same period in the ATA and "The Light and the Glory" (LG), doing worksheets out their Activity Books, while reading "The First Book of Indians".  In addition I have them draw two related pictures and corresponding penmanship from the "Draw Write Now" Series each week.

In the evenings they watch the "Drive Thru History" DVDs (I can't say enough good about these) and other supplemental DVDs I have found at the library.  My latest cool find was a DVD called "Lost at Sea: The Search for Longitude".  After watching it this weekend I have decided that Harrison is the inventor the boys will be using for their Inventor Speech at CC in week 15.

SCIENCE:  I asked Chris to take the lead in this subject.  They have started the Mr. Q Chemistry curricula and I can't say enough good.  It is easy, thorough and fun.  In addition, we will start reading from the "World of Chemistry" book this week and plan on using a number of the awesome resources Brandy recently posted on her "Half-a-Hundred Acre Woods" blog.  Dad and boys are having fun.  Here's the boys and their first experiment the "Rubber Egg".

READING:  This we are still keeping light and have not started up their full Language Arts curricula yet.  I figure they are doing so much reading on their own and with history, we can wait a little bit to get back into curricula.  For now I am simply having them read from the "Christian Liberty Press Science Readers" and narrate back to me what they have read.  For Lance, I did have him start-up his Easy Grammar Daily Grams and Student Book but just one page a day for now.  I'm also trying to get him to practice typing and cursive but its been off and on.

Finally, we are also working on an adaptation of file folder game called "Passport to America" with some living history books.  I've been searching the library for books about each of the landmarks.  We are slowly reading our way through.  When we are done I'm going to use the game as a final quiz, having them match everything up and tell me what they know.

Here's a quick list of what we've read so far:

• "Sky Boys:  How they built the Empire State Building" by Deborah Hopkinson
• "The Hover Dam" by Jeffrey Zuehlke
• "Lakes" by Geoffrey H. Nash
• "What is Mt. Rushmore" by Laine Falk
• "Story of the Lincoln Memorial" by Tom Dunningham
• "You Wouldn't Want to be a Worker on the Statue of Liberty" by John Malam
• "You Wouldn't Want to Work on the Brooklyn Bridge" by Thomas Ratliff
• "A Capital for the Nation" by Stan Hoig
• "The Story of the Liberty Bell" by Natalie Miller

We try to do some craft and art projects during the week but most days we choose to go play at the park instead, the weather is just too wonderful this time of year to resist!  In fact some days we even take our reading to the park.