Strewsday Tuesday - 11/22/11

I took a little break from this for the past two Tuesdays, didn't I.  Not that it was intentional; Strewsday Tuesday just sort of swam out of focus for a bit there!

Anyway, some fun strewing has been going on around here lately:

• Becky climbed a tree and gently brought down a bird's nest she says she's been eyeing for a while.  We don't know what kind of bird though, but that is the second bird's nest she's now collected.  So I guess nature strewed that one!
• I've been on a housekeeping kick which inspired me to go to the bookcase in the dining room and pull out this charmer.  Becky discovered the paper dolls in the back of the book and we've had several charming hours where I've read from the book while she's played with the dolls.  The one caveat to this book is the dated characterization of Lucinda the maid.  "Cinda" is right out of a minstrel show.  I don't get why America thought this stereotype was so amusing.  I think Margaret Mitchell must have used Cinda as her model for Prissy.  I keep waiting for Cinda to burst out with "I don't know nothin' about birthin' babies!"  The very interesting thing is that we noticed these books were published in 1912, so that's pretty much 100 years ago.  We've had fun noticing what they call different things, for instance there is a piece of furniture in the kitchen called the kitchen dresser.  Nobody has a kitchen dresser anymore.
• Becky found this old book that Hannah left behind and it inspired her to clean her room!  Yep!  All on her own one day she spent several hours working away on her room, incorporating many of the ideas in this book.
• Becky continues to play on the piano a lot; practicing Christmas songs and making up little melodies.
• Rick has been reading a biography of Einstein (he just finished one on Steve Jobs; he's on a biography kick) and he's been talking a lot about it with Sean.  Sean has been interested in physics for a couple months now, but he got really into trying to understand Einstein's Theory of Relativity and he gets it!  I don't get it.  My 12 yo has to explain things to me and then I only see it dimly, but he gets all excited about it.  He's been reading The Cartoon Guide to Physics, off and on as a result.  Rick, kind of joking around, said to Sean, "hey maybe you'll grow up to be a theoretical physicist one day."  Sean kind of beamed about that, but then thought about and decided no, he still wants to be some kind of artist instead.
• Our 4H club we were starting up has fallen apart due to circumstances beyond our control, so we've gone independent but at the last minute we were able to join in a project at our former 4H group.  It is a project based on projectiles.  The kids (mostly boys) made slingshots and met on Sunday afternoon to shoot them.  They also got to shoot arrows.  The next project is building their own catapults.
• Josh went on a weekend retreat (getting home just in time for 4H).  He made some resolutions to change certain poor habits, got home and immediately broke them; this is all due to his computer addiction.  I firmly believe he is addicted.  He will play on the computer and deprive himself of sleep, food, and neglect, to his own shame, his duties.  He gets disgusted with himself and wants to do better but then immediately loses control again.  I think that he would be much more social if he wasn't so trapped.  I think he lost his good friend due to the computer.  I am chagrinned at all the advice I took now on letting kids self-regulate.  I feel like we've reached the point where we are doing an intervention to try to help him get ahold of his problem.  The kid really is struggling to control himself.  Bah!  He has asked us to be more strict with him.  He was without computer for the weekend retreat but I believe he must have spent 10 hours yesterday on it. He was supposed to be doing his Precalc but he didn't even finish a lesson.  I would go down and check on him occasionally, asking him what he was doing.  He is very deceptive with me about it and then he's terribly ashamed that he's been deceptive. I'm not even mad at him because I can see he's not able to control himself.  So......as soon as Rick has time, he's absolutely got to put a timer on that machine.  In the meantime, Josh will do his precalc on my computer (the program is online so what happens is Josh gets on to watch the videos, gets tempted to look up other stuff on the computer and before you know it, hours have passed and he's not done what he set out to do.    All this is good though because he's learning about himself and we are coming up with a plan to deal with the problem.   But it's a tough nut to crack and I wish I had never let it fester so long. . . .