Rambling, ponderous, convoluted rabbit trails

 

Summer School

I know that’s a picture you guys have seen before, I haven’t had a chance to pick up my camera in the last day or two so I’m cheating with an old shot.  The girls were asked to choose four items outside to draw and try to identify.  These were her choices.  

Homeschooling is fun year round.  Ya know, except when it isn’t.  Heh.  But winter finds me scrambling to find some things to fill the time, things that get their cabin fevered brains working.  Things that have to be done inside where it isn’t 30 degrees and windy as all heck out.  We read A LOT in the winter.  We watch movies.  We play games.  The girls like to have friends over.  I like to have friends over.  

We’re in that mode right now.  Searching for indoor things to do that keep us motivated and not going stir crazy as we spin our wheels inside.

This week we are doing the typical things but we’re also learning some interesting things as well, if not necessarily labeled fun.  Frances will be tickled to learn that Katy is learning about past and present participles.  Woot!!  Actual grammar being taught.  Whoda thunk it?  :)  Katy is also learning about the Civil War and slavery as well.  She stops me regularly during our reading to ponder how the whole issue of slavery and the Civil War could’ve been avoided.  She’s a thinker, that one.  

Emily and Elizabeth are learning about vikings, the discovery of Greenland by Eric the Red.  They are also learning the continents and oceans with this CD we bought, Geography Songs.  Sure, the songs can be a tad dorky and sometimes just odd but they certainly work.  

They aren’t as brilliant as their daddy was with geography though.  Well, I shouldn’t say that, they haven’t been asked to do what he did.  When he was a kid, I’m not sure what age this started, he was able to put together a puzzle of the US states blindfolded just by feeling the shapes of the pieces.  Granted he is, and apparently always has been, a map person.  A person who has no trouble with directions.  A person who hates my GPS because he always knows better than Sue does.  That’s her name, Sue.  Yes, the GPS.  She has a British accent, too.  :)  I love Sue.

Sue, in pink because she's pretty

Sorry, will return to my raptures of Sue later…

When we moved here Steven knew almost instinctively how to get around in this massive spaghetti bowl of a city.  He would drive us downtown ONCE and know exactly where he was going the next trip into the city.  ”It’s ever increasing circles, babe.  It’s easy!”  

Um, no sir.  It is not.  I give you exhibit A:

This is not a map people. This is chaos on paper

 The only part of DC I know how to drive around in I found because I got lost.  I was driving home from Katy’s orthodontist the first time I went without Steven.  I was feeling all confident and cocky, perhaps my first mistake.  I got back in the van, paid the parking attendant and headed back out.  Somehow, though I still to this day have no idea how, I ended up downtown.  The way home is no where NEAR the city.  Leave it to me.

I drive around a few minutes and start to fret a little because I could not figure out where I was or how to get out.  I called Steven at work thinking that, as he has done before (more than once actually) he could help me out of this mess.  Trouble was he wasn’t there at his desk.  

Now, a good two years from the incident I’ve become rather used to the fact that he is rarely, if ever, at his desk in a given day.  Then, I had no idea.  He had always been available to bail me out when I needed him.  And, quite frankly, I’ve needed that directional bailout more than once.  

I hung up the phone, slung the ear piece and the phone into the passenger seat and tried not to panic.  I’m a crier and it was all I could do to hold it together and not freak out the girls.  

“Breathe Christy.  You can do this.”

“Um, I’m sorry, have we met?  I am directionally challenged!  I only knew which direction was which in Mississippi because if you went too far south you were in the ocean.”

I often have these conversations with myself.  

What?

I realize that some of you are right now googling the price of straight jackets and mental hospital stays.  It’s ok.  I know I’m nutty.

So, I pulled over on the side of the road.  Not into a parking spot because those creatures are almost extinct in this concrete jungle.  I tried to get my bearings, as best I could.  I look around and try to find something I recognize.  Then I see it.

How could you miss that???

 

 

The Washington Monument.

It’s huge, it’s pointy, it’s easily visible from most of the parts of the city I know.  I am fairly certain at this point that I can ind my way home from the Washington Monument.

Ok, perhaps fairly certain is a smidge beyond what I felt.  But I was feeling a little less terrified.  I knew that at some point in one of our jaunts downtown we’d driven by there and found our way out to 395.  I just wasn’t quite sure how I was going to recreate this feat.

Turns out, long story short (as if I could tell anything short) that I did find my way out.  I’m not sure how long I drove around in that on section where you have to take a zillion lefts and a sudden right before I got it right, but I did.  We made it home and I was beyond thrilled with myself.  

I felt courageous.  I felt strong.  I am woman, hear me roar!

Or at least here me squeal with delight when I found myself back on the right road.

Finding my way out of the city that day has served me well since then.  I’ve maneuvered my way out of there many a time by looking for the tall pointy object that guides me home.  Washington Monument, how I love thee.

Ok, I know this post didn’t start out like this.  Not by any stretch of the imagination.  I think I started out discussing school and rambled down this rabbit trail somewhere along the way.  But, unfortunately for you dear reader, that’s how my mind works.  Rambling, ponderous, convoluted rabbit trails.

It’s almost like one of those mazes made from hedges.

Welcome to my brain...

A labryrinth of sorts.  Yes, that’s what I call it. 

I’m not crazy.

I’m convoluted.

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