Being Weird

"But homeschooled kids are just weird!" 

(sigh)

No, we've never heard that before! 

(aahhh... the smell of sarcasm)

As we're sort of starting to wrap up our year-long project-blog of providing just a little window into "our homeschool mystery," I'm considering topics that I haven't yet hit on. I know our tag cloud is fairly long, but I wanted the kids to see some of what they have accomplished in one year, and I also wanted readers interested in certain topics to be able to find them. The tags increase in size as we return to those subjects, and I see that "socialization" is nice and big! If you click on the socialization tag, you will see all the times we have referenced the socialization process when writing about our homeschool journey. I enjoy reading them all back to back since I like stories about times with our friends.

So I find that even if I'm able to convince the doubters that homeschooled kids are, in fact, plenty socialized, I still get the, "but they're weird" response. So I officially give up! That's right, for those of you that know me, miracle of miracles, I'm not going to argue this one! I do believe that homeschoolers eat, sleep, and breathe just like everyone else in this world, but I will accept the "weird" title. If being weird means that we make our own paths and don't follow the crowd, then I'll take it! There's no coincidence that I'm timing this blog post with Halloween, a holiday that I've always enjoyed. To me, there's something so fun about dressing up and being silly and weird for a night. It's the only night of the year that we "get to try on something new" for a change, and it's accepted by most of society. I think it would be nice if we could embrace that philosophy the rest of the year.

I have three favorite blog articles on the subject of homeschoolers "being weird." The first is "The Weird Homeschool Girl Goes to School" by Tammy Takahashi where she points out the irony that if schooled kids are so accepting of people who are different, then how come they don't help the weird kid at school?
Here's a link: http://www.justenoughblog.com/?p=1468

I also like her article, "School Pot Calling Homeschool Kettle Black -- Acceptance is not taught in school" which has one of my favorite quotes, "School is not better simply because you went to school." As someone who also went to school, can I please be spared of one more person telling me, "Look, I went to school, and I turned out fine." Yes, I get it -- it's possible. I'm only trying to present that homeschooling is also a viable option for turning out "fine."
Here's a link: http://www.justenoughblog.com/?p=1735

The last article is from the blog, Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers, and the post, "Why Are Homeschoolers So Weird and Unsocialized?" attempts to define what it means to be "weird," followed by one of  my favorite poems by Robert Frost. I also encourage you to read the comments after the post so you can get an idea of the kinds of things people say to homeschoolers all the time. Do parents of schooled kids endure this much hostility towards their decision to send their kids to school?
Here is the link: http://www.weirdunsocializedhomeschoolers.com/2008/08/why-are-homeschoolers-so-weird-and.html 

Return of the Tadpoles

Along time ago, about three or more months, I went kayaking with my family at Watson Lake. While we were there, Patrick and I caught six tadpoles. While we were catching tadpoles, I spotted a tadpole that had actually started growing legs. It was even bigger than the frog that we saw earlier. Patrick nearly caught it, but the tadpole escaped too quickly. We put the others in an old water bottle we found in the car so we could take them home. When we arrived at home base, we left them in their water bottle on the porch. We had decided not to move the tadpoles into something bigger until Patrick and I got home from Eagleridge the next day. Now you are to hear the more recent story of the "tadpoles."

The day after we went to Eagleridge, we spent our day studying tadpoles. We learned what they like to eat, how long it takes for them to turn into frogs, and other helpful things about tadpoles. We also tried to figure out what type of frog would come out of our tadpoles, but we couldn't find our type of tadpole. That's when we found out they were not tadpoles at all. Our dad had suggested they were this from the beginning, but we didn't believe him. After a little research we found the truth. These animals live in large groups. We saw some real tadpoles swimming around with them which was why we thought they were all tadpoles, but they weren't. We had caught a group of minnows!

Just this week we went to Flagstaff to see some fall color. We wanted to go to Hart Prairie, but it was closed so we just drove around in the mud pretending we had four-wheel drive. :) We had decided to bring the minnows with us so we could drop them off in one of Flagstaff's lakes. We wanted to put them in something similar to their environment. When we were done driving through the aspens, we started driving to Lake Mary. We turned of onto this dirt road thinking it led to Lake Mary. We drove on this street that wasn't even on the map for an hour to only get about two miles. During our nice drive, we thought we had passed Lake Mary and were on our way to Mormon Lake. Then we thought we had passed Mormon Lake when we got out of the dirt. We saw this horse while we were going one way off the forked road, but he kept telling us to go the other direction. In the end he was right.

We ended up at Lake Mary where we deposited our minnows. We weren't even sure if they were alive, but we didn't fret over it. We arrived home late on a school (Eagleridge) night. That was okay though because we learned a lot from this trip. This is one of the ways a homeschooler learns. By experiencing! I also learned never to catch my pets again.

The Mystery of the MIM

Yesterday we went to the new Musical Instrument Museum (MIM for short) with our homeschool group. Before we went into the museum, while we were standing in the courtyard, we learned from the tour guide that the entire building was made from sandstone shipped from India. She also told us that it took six years to collect all the instruments that are in the museum. I found it very interesting how they used different classes of instruments to organize our presentation, how each part of the world has all different types of instruments, and how they acquired the biggest stringed instrument in the world for this museum.

For the first part of the tour, there was a small demonstration on the different categories of musical instruments. These categories are: Aerophones, Membranophones, Electrophones, Idiophones, Corpophones, and Chordophones. The museum classifies these instruments in these categories to better understand how they are played. The best Example of these classes is the Theremin. It Makes sound by sending an electronic signal to an ampliffier when it's magnetic fields are disturbed. So, the Theremin is an electrophone.

Another thing that made the museum interesting was all the different types of instruments they had. It seemed like there were at least two instruments from every country in the world. That's more than 390 instruments from around the world. Other wise know as enough instruments to give a musician a headache trying to remember them all. Along with these instruments they also had some historic ones on display including one of the light up drums from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Peace Piano, Eric Clapton's guitar "Brownie", and a couple of amplifiers that Dick Dale blew up. Who knew a broken amp could be considered historic.

My favorite instrument in the museum is the Octobass. It is a 12 foot tall three stringed Double bass that is so deep that it can barely be heard by human ears. Only three were ever made, and there is only one person in the western hemisphere who can play one. After we got home, Omar Domkus (the parent who set up the tour and he is also a bass player) sent us a YouTube video of someone playing the same Octobass. It sounded like a dying whale.

Another thing I noticed about the tour was the fact that the tour guide seemed to think we didn't know much about instruments. During our second run through the museum, (the tour guide seemed to be rushing us through the exhibits) the tour guide met up with my dad and I while we were looking at the electric guitars. She told us about how on the web-site they had a whole curriculum on how electric guitars and amps work. My dad then explained how we had just finished building one (picture of the guitar we built is below), and he told her that I work the sound board at our church. The look on her face was priceless.

This concludes the mystery of the MIM: Idiophones don't mean the maker was an idiot, broken amps can be historic, and the tour was most likely made for public school groups.

Happy Emergency Nurses Day!

We like to celebrate holidays here at Our Homeschool Mystery so today we are celebrating Emergency Nurses Day! Cheers to all the great Emergency Nurses out there! I feel so lucky to be one of them! Every working day is a new and different adventure with people from all walks of life... patients with delayed care, intoxicants, language, cultural, and educational barriers... we see everybody!

We see patients BEFORE a diagnosis is made, and we are the ones that deal with patients and families in their time of anxiety from the "not knowing."

We shift gears on cue... never knowing what is going to walk through the doors next!

We have FUN! We play charades in triage when the patient does not know what meds he takes... "Little blue pill... sounds like... starts with... 2 syllables... rhymes with..."

We're crafty... ever see our "stinky feet" combat creations?

We also love patient makeovers... "We had to cut all your clothes off of you, but we're sending you home in these donated clothes... the hot pink biker shorts are a new look for you, sir."

We're resourceful... "Oh looky, I found the one last vein for an IV that you DIDN'T already use for your heroin!"

We're the cheerleaders... "You're a natural with those crutches -- it's like you've had a broken leg your whole life!"

I have to think that many of these emergency nursing skills are a lot like being a homeschooling mom... adaptable, strong, fun, crafty, resourceful, and encouraging. But most of all, we just CARE about our patients, much like we CARE about our kids, and that's why we do it, and it all seems easy for that reason.  :)