Over-extended-dom

I think I've been much better about not over-extending myself recently. But things are piling up a little now. Running has been put on hold. I've been able to squeeze rink maintenance in, but nothing else.

Tomorrow the giant wholesale dried fruit & nut order needs to be sorted and delivered. I spent all evening tonight working on the labels and accounting for that.

The next day Noah, Erin and I leave for Cranbrook to do a weekend gig with the Symphony of the Kootenays. Five hours of driving each way, with two overnights. Hopefully we'll get back late Sunday evening. It's mostly baroque stuff (Messiah, Purcell, more Handel) so should be manageable for Noah who has excellent baroque instincts and can sight-read extremely well with those instincts assisting him (otherwise ... not so much). I'm actually playing violin rather than viola. I hope I can play more or less in tune; it has been years since I've performed on violin!

The younger girls will be staying home with Chuck and enjoying Christmas by the Lake.

Next week is a mess of lessons, group class, choir rehearsals of various sorts, a trip to Calgary, a frantic trip back home in time for an Annual General Meeting of the VFA Society and a long complicated board meeting the next day.

Somewhere in the midst of it all I'm supposed to be conjuring up some sort of holiday season, including gifts for everyone. Virtually nothing has been started.

Hmmm.

Fiona and Sophie just arrived in from skating announcing they'd invented gods as a result of playing some twisted game of Simon Says.

Sophie's god is Chaezploz, the god of beverages.

Fiona's god is Applodox, the god of paradoxes.

My kids are weird.

Neologism of the day:

Tireturd. n. A concretion of sand, dirt, salt and slush, sprayed up from the roadway while driving only to freeze into a disgusting icy brown chunk in the wheelwell of your vehicle. Prone to dropping off in carports and garages. Best kicked off if possible in roadside parking spaces rather than at home.

The gazinta bar

Ah, the family lexicon. Ours is bizarre and extensive, including such neologisms as "threehead," "agilitous," "wobbits" and "clape." We come by it honestly. My dad referred to the white residue left on one's toothbrush as "spinge." We carry that one forward in homage.

For the most part we remember where the words came from and we're all careful to keep these words within the privacy of our weird family conversation at home. But occasionally a word becomes so much a part of our lives that one or another of us is no longer aware that it's not universally understood. Such was the case with the gazinta bar.

Fiona knows that there are two ways to think about division. You can think of it according to the fractionalization model: you are splitting a larger number into so many equal smaller pieces. Or you can think of it according to the measurement model: you are figuring out how many pieces of a particular size fit into the larger number. Twenty divided by four is a quarter of twenty (i.e. 5) or else it is the fact that five fours fit into twenty.

And when it comes to long division, we use the measurement model. We draw this symbol: it's a right parenthesis with a horizontal bar attached to the top of it, extending to the right. It's a gazinta bar, because we use it when we're figuring out how many times 9 gazinta 28.9. I coined the word back when Erin was working in Singapore 4B I think. I thought it was pretty clever. It was a reminder of which conceptual model of division we needed to use when doing larger problems or those involving remainders or decimals.

Except that I realized today, after months of working with Fiona on various forms of division, that I had never explained to her the derivation of the word, nor that it was a family neologism. She was just matter-of-fact calling it a gazinta bar, as easily as she might have called it a widget or a scuzzlewhit. When I explained that our liaison teacher wouldn't have a clue what we were talking about if we used the term, and in fact that no one in the world outside our family would have any idea, she started laughing her head off. We googled it to be sure. Indeed, no relevent hits. This term is ours and ours alone.

Except that now we've both gone and blogged about it. So now all of you know.

Calgary miscellany

Calgary pool. Fiona is finally getting it. She's swimming more than a couple of strokes. Monthly aliquots of cheerful persistence have finally paid off. She can almost make the length of the small hotel pool. Her goal for this trip is to do the whole length.

Sophie figured out treading water and is trying to work herself up to two minutes. Her first try was 30 seconds. By the end of tonight's session she had done two minutes! That should give her under-vigilant mother time to notice she needs rescuing if she ever gets into trouble in the water.

Noah opted to stay in the room and take a shower. He was in sorry need of a haircut and we hadn't got around to it before leaving home. So I brought the trimmer and scissors along and we cut his hair while he stood in the motel tub. I think it's normally only fugitives who cut their hair in motel bathrooms. Perhaps we can find him a stick-on beard and some peroxide to complete his disguise.

Today during the drive to Calgary we were trying to recall which weird words we use on a regular basis are ones we actually invented. We could only think of two, but I am sure there are more.

Buttsloosh - noun
(Etymology: a garbled mispronunciation of "boot slush," the grotty salty sandy stuff that ends up on the floor of the minivan in winter time) ... toilet water backsplash, or the messy results of a "backfiring powerflush"

Wobbits - noun
The state of giddy weakness that occurs when one laughs too hard. Often leads to falling off chairs, or the inability to pick oneself up after a hilariously embarrassing physical misadventure. "I was trying to tell him to stay back, but I had really bad wobbits and so I couldn't talk or point or anything."

Fiona's Bourrée

Fiona has been on a bit musical plateau with violin this fall. We were without lessons from mid-August until the second week of October and that got things off to a slow start. When we got back she easily polished up the first Seitz Concerto movement from Book 4 and while she was given permission to get started on the next one several times, she just didn't seem enthused about moving ahead.

I do worry about the musical and intellectual demands of a 5-year-old working at this level, so I would never want to "assign" new repertoire to her. I've always waited until she's really feeling ready for a new challenge before helping her move ahead. And she seemed happy just to percolate away at her current repertoire level. Instead this fall she's been working hard at learning orchestra music and honing her sight-reading skills -- and of course she's been busy diving into piano lessons, reading novels and starting new challenging stuff in math. She finally launched into the next piece a couple of weeks ago and learned most of it, but then sort of set it aside as she prepared for this weekend's recital.

She was going to perform the Bach Bourrée at the end of Book 3. A week ago she told me quite cheerfully that she was a little worried about playing it badly. Since she was playing fine, I told her that and did my best to reassure her, telling her she'd have lots of rehearsal time and would probably feel less worried after she'd had a chance to play with the accompanist. The first rehearsal went pretty well, so I figured she'd feel better. The only difficulty she'd had was with remembering the final repeat before the 'da capo.' The final rehearsal she had some of the same difficulties. The piece has four separate repeats, plus a final 'da capo' of the first two sections, this time without repeats. And it's five minutes long. It's quite normal for the repeats to be a bit of a problem. She seemed little "tryish"¹ but otherwise fine.

Most of the time she's outgoing, a delighted and enthusiastic performer with very high standards for herself but a resilient roll-with-the-punches kind of attitude. Maybe she was overtired from piano recital the night before. Maybe her perfectionism is looming closer to the surface as she gets older and more intellectually sophisticated. Maybe whatever violin aimlessness she's had this fall was at the root of it. But when it came time to stand up and perform, she was sure she was going to forget repeats and somehow that wasn't acceptable. Her chin started quivering about 8 bars in and by the time she began the repeat of the first section she was starting to cry. I scooped her up and out of the performance space. She hugged me and asked "do I have to play?" Well of course not! I hugged her back plenty.

Later she said she was a little disappointed that she had not played. She would have loved to have played something "without nasty repeats." (If only we'd known how she'd been feeling about this -- there were plenty of other things she could have played!) But it was okay. She knew she'd made the right choice at the time. There will be plenty of other recitals, and she's already looking forward to them.

So the video above is of her rehearsal, not her aborted performance. You can see where her "repeat worries" were already looming. But I think you can still get a sense of how she's playing these days. I'm sure that when she's ready her "zoom" will return.

¹ tryish adj. trī-ish
The state of being highly focused on an outcome and susceptible to potential frustration.

Absent from school

We're an unschooling family. We don't normally do much in the way of structured schooling. When Sophie expressed an interest in L'Art de Lire French early in the summer I forgot all about it. She asked again. "Oh," I responded, feeling guilty, "were you expecting me to buy it for you -- like sometime nowishly¹?" Well, yes, she said. So I ordered it.

And though I'd forgotten all about it, it turned up in the mail. Right during one of the busy music school weeks. Fine. I figured we'd get to it some day. After all, like most curricular resources we own it would be more for inspiration and dabbling, not diligent study.

Sophie didn't get that memo. She tore into it. There's a teacher's manual that I suspect lays the whole curriculum out and guides the parent in introducing the language. I haven't yet peeked inside the cover. But that hasn't stopped Sophie from working blindly through the student workbook with ongoing enthusiasm. Last evening when I got home from rehearsal she asked me a question about conjugating irregular verbs and I realized she'd actually been working at it pretty darn effectively. She's making good progress.

Today I was gone all day again. Work, lessons with the older kids, chamber music rehearsals. I got home at 7 pm and Sophie was again working on French. She'd been stumped for a while, working only with the student book. But eventually she'd dug around and found an old French-English dictionary and done a bit of gap-filling by herself. "It's okay," she said, when I apologized again for not having spent a moment with her over the past couple of weeks on it. "Dictionaries are fun. I can do it myself."

It's only very rarely that I'm called upon to be a teacher to my homeschooled children. You'd think I could find at least a few minutes to sit down and look at the French program and then offer her a little guidance. Unfortunately I seem to be accumulating a string of unexcused absences from school. Fortunately Sophie doesn't seem to be suffering too badly.

1. nowishly [nou-ish-lee] adverb
at the present moment, more or less, though with some wiggle-room to allow for inertia, procrastination or disorganization, or all three.

Learning to swim

When I grew up we spent summers in a warm lake at the cottage owned by my grandparents. We also had a few months of swim lessons at the local Y around age 8 or 10. My kids have been a little more disadvantaged at the learn-to-swim thing. Our lake is glacier-fed, meaning it's freezing cold 10 months of the year and very cold for the other two. Locally there are no swimming lessons, and there's no pool. There's a remote possibility that swim lessons might be offered in Nelson at a time that we're travelling there anyway, but it hasn't happened the past few years.

Still, the kids have learned to swim. Mostly in hotel pools, with occasional refresher courses in the hot springs pools an hour north of us. Somehow a couple of hours of swimming a handful of times a year has made swimmers out of most of them. (Fiona is close, but not quite there yet.)

It's probably just as well that my kids are "immersion learners" who prefer to let things lie fallow for a time and then delve deeply into learning, making great strides in short periods of time. I remember the fall Noah turned 7, staying at a motel with the kids while Chuck attended a CME conference. In the course of a single day Noah went from being a barely-swimmer who could dog-paddle a few strokes so long as he didn't get his face wet, to confidently diving head-first into the deep and of the pool and challenging himself to swim down and touch bottom. We were all raisins that day. I think we spent more than 8 hours in the water.

These days Sophie is our most passionate swimmer. The monthly trips to Calgary have given her plenty of opportunity to hone her fishy skills. Alas her immense mop of fine blond hair does not like the water at all. She pays for her trips to the pool with 20 minutes of shampooing and conditioning afterwards to get the barbieness¹ out. I think I must look for one of those specialty shampoos for swimmers.

¹barbieness - [bahr bee nes] noun
The noxious texture of squeaky plastic Barbie-doll hair.

barbieish - [barh bee ish] adj.
Pink and girly, as marketed specifically to young girls.

Set game

I'm not actually much of a family game player myself. I make an effort, and sometimes I enjoy the conversation and the kid-watching, but it's a rare family game that I enjoy for the game itself. Set is the exception. It's a visual-spatial pattern-recognition game that taps into mathematical intuitiveness. There's no strategy. It's difficult to explain what constitutes a Set to people who are language-based learners. Often the people who are Set whizzes are people who can't for the life of them explain in words what a set is.

(My succinct but oblique verbal explanation: Every card has four attributes. A set is a group of three cards about which it cannot be said that there are precisely two cards with some particular attribute. You can check it out at the game's website.)

Anyway, tonight Fiona wanted to play a big family game in the worst way. No one else really wanted to play. As she's been 'cryish'¹ lately, I offered to play a game with her. I was delighted when she chose Set. Then I remembered that she's only five and she probably wouldn't understand what defines a set. Oh well, we gave it a whirl anyway.

When Sophie was 6 she gradually got the knack of Set by playing with the purple cards only. That was one less attribute to fuss about, and the patterns became more apparent. With Fiona I tried a different tactic. Once I found a set amongst twelve face-up cards, I'd pull two out of three of the set out and show them to Fiona. Then I'd challenge her to find the third member of that set. She did amazingly well. Before long she was eagerly seeking to find her own sets, and managed to successfully identify a couple.

¹cryish [krahy-ish] adj. Of a fragile emotional state characterized by episodes of sobbing initiated by trivial triggers, particularly when due to as-yet-undeclared developmental reorganization of psyche or intellect.