Yesterday was a partial solar eclipse.

We have done the pinprick in paper before, which worked out amazingly well, but I thought we’d amp up the intensity: find an astronomer and get them to let us play with their telescopes!  How hard can that be?

You’d be surprised how easy that was 🙂

So, over at my education-blog, BreakingOrbits, there is an Events page.  That page has a ton of links to Free things going on in the Bay Area.  Lo and behold, the City College of San Francisco was having a free event where you could play with the Astronomy department’s telescope!

No kidding!

So, off we went!

(I love homeschooling)

I love colleges.  I love colleges in the way 6 year old little girls love Princess Castles.  I love the design, I love the architecture, I love the over-the-top hugeness they put into the walkways.  (You should have seen my melting face when Ben took me to see Dartmouth.  Holy cow was that amazing.)  These stairs were huge, and I made the kids walk all the way up just so I could get a picture of them on the steps in front of the giant pillars and dome, and the gigantic words that say, “The Truth Shall Make You Free.”  I love colleges.  They are definitely where I belong.  I would love to go back and teach Literature classes there after the kids are all off on their own.

 

 

 

Thank you kids for letting Mom take this awesome picture 🙂

 

 

Okay, so here was where it was happening!  We walked all through the Science Hall, which was actually pretty neat to see.  They had a seismograph machine in the wall that was working, and that was amazingly awesome (and I got to explain what it was to some random guy walking by, because he said he never understood what it did! Awesome day for him!).  There were displays in the hallways, and one had whale vertebra, whale baleens, shells and microscopic pictures of marine amoeba.  I also got to bug a study hall asking if any of those fine gentlemen were the Astronomers we were looking for.  They waved their hand and said, “These are not the Astronomers you are looking for.”  They were pretty convincing, so we kept walking…and we finally found them!  They were outside, which made a lot more sense.

This guy was hanging out with some mylar, and you could look through the mylar and see the eclipse.

 

 

The kids all stood in line to wait their turn to look through the telescope.

 

This is Evan in the gray sweatshirt, and he was in charge of the telescope.  He was a very pleasant fellow, and we talked with him for a bit.  He was explaining how today was particularly interesting, because there was a gigantic sunspot that you could see today; so that made the eclipse a little more exciting!

 

When we were done, I figured we’d walk around and see what else the college had to offer.  Nova wanted to see the Art dept., so we headed over there.  We found the art gallery, which was fun for me.  I worked in a gallery at a college for a few years, and it was one of my favorite jobs.  So I loved being able to take the kids here and show them around.

 

We took a seat and I showed the kids the students’ paintings.  Had them tell me which ones were still lifes, which ones were portraits, etc.  Alice got really into it and found the “HORSIE!!!!!!”

I was trying to explain why Helvetica was so important, but I lost them on that topic.  Which is totally fair. However, if you are interested in typography, the documentary, “Helvetica,” is actually very interesting.

 

We were done walking around the college, and we had a little time to kill…so we went to the beach.  The kids know what to do 🙂

Okay, so I was at a stoplight when I saw this guy in the wild, writing.  May I just say that he found a fantastic place to write.  Noisy, busy, but no one is bothering you.   My hat off to you, fellow writer.

Life is good 🙂

Our home is usually very healthy. Sometimes a small cold here and there, but nothing overwhelming.

The past few weeks we each have taken turns running fevers and developing head colds.  Fortunately, it really isn’t that bad. It’s just a cold, it isn’t projectile vomiting or staying up all night with humidifiers, Vicks and on-call nursing staff.  It’s a cold…it’s just the neverending cold.  So I’m home from church with some of the girls, making homemade pizzas for lunch and using the free time to sanitize the house.

There is nothing like repetative tasks like scrubbing toilets that gets your mind wandering on weird things.

Like Frozen.

(perhaps the neverending movie?)

 

Remember a few days after Frozen came out, all of a sudden everyone was snarky about Elsa’s parents?  “They were actually horrible parents because they locked their poor daughter in a room, and she was incapable of living without them!  For shame.”

That has always bothered me, but I never understood why.  Well, now I have the time to figure it out!

 

First off, the desecrating of heroes has always bothered me.  They are heroes, but they are also human (for the most part..depending on your story).  I have a huge problem with how comfortable people are with hating others; it just drives me crazy.  I have listened to rants about why Abraham Lincoln was, actually, the “worst President evar.”  To which I say, “Wasn’t that over 150 years ago…so who cares??”  Mother Theresa was actually some monster in India.  Thomas Jefferson was a Theist, Winston Churchill was racist, Gandhi was evil, and Martin Luther was a leprechaun (citation needed).

There are good people in the world.  These good people are each individuals fighting their own fight, traveling their own travels, enjoying their own joys.  These people see the good in others and look to do good for others.

 

 

Okay, so this is totally a 1990s motivational poster kind of feel…but it’s true!  Good people will make you feel good.  Ben is a good person, and he makes me feel great.  My kids are good people, and they make me feel happy.  I am a good person, and I look to make them all feel loved and happy.  I mean, that is kinda the whole point of this life thing….there were 10 Commandments in the Old Testament.  What was Jesus’ New Commandment?

 

No, that’s not it.

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

(John 13:34-35 ESV)

 

 

 

 

The new commandment is to love.  When we demonize people, including heroes, it isn’t loving.  It’s judging.  It is saying, “oh sure, they might have done this one good thing, but that doesn’t make them a good person.”  One: yes it does.  Two: it doesn’t make you a good person tearing them down.  So knock it off.

Being loving means we care about each other.  We are concerned about each other.  We delight in our successes and we are bummed out when things don’t work the way we thought they would.

 

Even though the parents in Frozen were fictional, the backlash against them was very real.  It was real, and it stung, and I finally figured out why it bothered me.  Here is why:

 

They were special needs parents.  They didn’t have schools or doctors to help them learn how to support their daughter.  No one had ever seen powers like Elsa’s before, and they were doing the best they could with the complete lack of resources they had available.  They gave her tips on how to control her emotions.  They gave her love and support throughout her childhood.  They left the castle in her care when they did leave and assured her that she could do it.  They didn’t have a cure for it.  They didn’t have a support group to help them.  They didn’t have any idea of where it came from or what it meant for their child’s future: and they still kept positive and loving, to the end.

Those are good parents.

Just like every other parent with a special needs child, they struggled on their own.  They could see how hard life was going to be for their daughter, and it tore them up inside…but they found solutions and strength for their child.  They knew how different Elsa felt, and they made sure to love her unconditionally.

When you see a family with a special needs child, you are seeing 5 minutes of their day.  You aren’t spending the countless hours of taking care of their children, the hours/years of research trying to find better ways to help them, the endless nights telling yourself it will be okay.  Because you know it will be okay.  When you are the parent of a special needs child, no one else on earth loves that child more than you do…and you will fight to the death to do everything possible for them.

The backlash against Elsa’s parents always bothered me because they were parents of a special needs child.  If anything, watching Frozen should have made us think, “My goodness, those parents had it rough.  They did it all on their own!  I wonder if there are any parents of children with special needs around me who I could help.”

 

We should not be tearing parents down.  We should learn from this, and lift each other up.

 

 

Being a parent doesn’t mean you find all the answers.  I doubt it means you find most of the answers!

But it means you do it together.  That is love.

We picked up a bug a few weeks ago, and it isn’t entirely going away as quickly or as quietly as I would have liked.

First kid#3 , #5, #1 and #4 had a little fever.  It went away within a few days, so I thought that was it.  But then kid#3 and kid#5 got it back with a vengance for a few days. Then we woke up feeling a little off…and the next day I had a fever, and I’m still feeling run down.  #3 finally got it yesterday, plus he has completely lost his voice, which is hilarious for me since I have lost my voice every single time I even get the tiniest sore throat throughout my entire life.

So, we’re  all recovering slowly.  Fortunately we don’t have the flu or anything…just a cold hard enough to knock us off our feet.

 

The thing about colds, or just feeling under the weather for any reason, is that you can get cranky.

Hey, you got a fever there.

Just ask Ben. I may, or may not, have been unreasonably cranky on Sunday night.

Thankfully, Monday morning came around and I at least felt a little bit better and apologized profusely for it, and he was fine.  Granted, it was his turn that afternoon to run the cranky mill, so I got to give him the same grace he gave me.  You have to take care of each other through cold season.

But with kids, they don’t have the experience to know they are cranky when they are sick.  They just know they aren’t feeling well, and they think the world is falling apart because you put their orange cup in the dishwasher and they have to wait for it to finish washing in order to get it back, and they wanted water in that orange cup.

Really, these things matter when kids are sick.  You can’t anticipate everything that is going to bug them, and I don’t condone catering to their every whim…but everyone needs some grace when they’re sick.  Especially kids.

 

So, kid#1 was just feeling a little crabby this morning while we were reading Jane Eyre, which is kind of understandable because chapter 4 is like, a million pages long.  It is interesting to me, but the kids are zoning out halfway through.  By the end of the chapter, I noticed that kid#1 is starting to retreat a little…which is what I do when I don’t feel well.

 

 

Retreat!

What I did once I saw this was I told her to go take a break. Get some water and some lunch.  Meanwhile, I got all some ingredients out.

All of us girls put on our aprons (the boys took a break with Minecraft) and we got to work on making meatballs!  This got us working together, talking and making something that we could enjoy later.  She felt significantly better after we connected, and we’re back to normal.

You don’t need to do something really big in order to connect with your kids, and it doesn’t take much to make it matter.  It doesn’t have to be a big deal like taking them to Disneyland.  All these little times are going to be the ones they remember the most.  They are going to say, “Remember that afternoon when we made pineapple meatballs?  Those were great!”

–>  Recipe! <–

Cold season is coming up.  Have a few of these little tricks under your belt for when you need them 🙂

Here are some ideas off the top of my head:

• Make chicken homemade noodle soup together
• Make drop biscuits and eat with pumpkin butter
• Make sugar cookies
• Make a giant pot of tea with their choice of tea
• Make pudding together
• Bake a loaf of banana bread
• If you really want to be crazy, share a can of sardines and sweet potato crackers with them…that’ll spice up the day 😉

For the record, kid#1 and kid#2 finished the can for me…it was that awesome.