So last week, Zoe came here and stayed a couple of days. When she went home, she took Becca. Then Becca came home for a few days, until Zoe came back here and stayed a couple of days, then Becca went to her house for a couple of days and now they’re back here. They hate being apart. They bicker a little bit sometimes, but rarely have arguments. Their personalities go together well. They make me laugh because they’re both sort of bossy but in completely different ways. Zoe likes to be in command of coming up with new things to do, or making up the rules of whatever game they invent. Rebecca is usually okay with that, but she’s a boulder of immobility if she doesn’t like something. Becca likes to micromanage. Like if they’re playing games on the computer, she wants everything done a certain way. Zoe is very patient with Becca’s controlling ways, and usually very gentle when she says she’s had enough already. They’re constantly doing something. Although I don’t put restrictions on how much they can watch tv or play video games, they actually do very little of either. They’ll often start or end their day with screen time, but in the middle, it’s just a few minutes here and there. Mostly, they’re inventing elaborate pretend play stories. One week it’s fairies, then archaeologists (did they have to use my favorite spoon for their “dig?!”), now it seems they’ve spun off that into Egypt. Whatever the current incarnation, they call it The Game, and each one usually lasts at least a whole day, but often evolves and changes over a period of days or weeks. When they’re apart, they’ll talk about it on the phone and pick up where they left off when they’re together again.

I’m going to try to talk them into letting me post some photos of them on my blog later. I didn’t actually ask permission to talk about them like this (I usually clear things with Becca), but I will ask them to pose for some sister-friend shots later. Right now they’re still sleeping, at noon, because they stayed up SOOOO late last night, playing the Egypt game.

What we’ve been doing lately: swimming. Well, Rebecca the Fish swims As Much As Possible, and I sit in the shade watching her, glaring at the neighbors, and reading. What else we’ve been doing is reading a lot, playing World of Warcraft, and writing letters. And waiting for Zoe to come home! Rebecca’s Very Very Best Friend, Zoe, has been in Arizona visiting her grandparents, for A WHOLE ENTIRE MONTH and the terrible lonely drama has been… a terrible lonely drama. She’s coming home in a few days, although Becca probably won’t see her until early next week.

I finished The Foundling, and while it wasn’t my favorite of the “kid” books I’ve been reading lately, I did like it and have requested Book 2 from the library. I started The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. I’m only a little into it, but so far I like it a lot and it’s just a lovely lovely book, with beautiful illustrations. It’s just an unusual book. Rebecca and I finished Akiko and the Journey to Toog by Mark Crilley and loved it as much as all the Akiko books. This has been one of our favorites series of books. Now we’ve started reading the Gregor series by Suzanne Collins. I’ve read the first three books, but I guess I’ll stop now, read those to Becca, and continue on together.

There was a discussion on a local homeschooling list that had me shaking my head. The topic was what sort of responsibilities your kids have around the house, and whether or not they get an allowance. There were some differences based on age, but most people said their kids were responsible for their own stuff (clean their room, their own messes in the rest of the house, personal hygiene) and most had at least some chores. Some people give their kids an allowance, some don’t. A few people, though, I swear, when I was reading their posts, it reminded me of nothing so much as dog training. These parents say their kids get money for doing chores, for doing school work, have money taken away for bad behavior, and for not doing chores. Why not just get a clicker and train your kids with that? I also thought, gosh, that seems like a lot of work to me. For me, I mean, keeping track of all the ways kids can earn/lose money? Pfft, no thanks.

Personally, I don’t think money should be tied to chores. No one pays ME for chores! You’re part of a family, you have to help out, that seems simple. If I don’t clean the toilet one week, nothing bad happens. If I don’t clean the toilet for a bunch of weeks, all sorts of things might happen. My family might start to notice and complain, or I might be embarrassed because it’s so gross. And, ultimately, it will be a lot tougher to clean because I let it go. These are consequences of a simple chore going undone. If Ed suddenly told me I had to pay him $5 because I didn’t clean the toilet, wtf? If Becca doesn’t do something that is her responsibility, one of the consequences might be that I get pissed off because I’ve had to step over her pile of crap in the living room repeatedly. Another might be something gets stepped on and broken because she left it in the middle of the floor all day. If she doesn’t clean her room, she’ll get frustrated because she can’t find anything, or she might be embarrassed when her friends see it looking like a pig sty. I don’t know, I just think that level of micromanaging kids actually prevents them from learning responsibility, rather than the opposite. They learn they’ll get in trouble for not following your rules, but do they learn the real consequence of their actions?

For our family it works better if Rebecca just agrees to help out with chores on an “as needed” basis. She’s responsible for her own messes and then she helps me when I ask. She also decided a few weeks ago that she would start doing some of the dishes. I never asked her to wash the dishes, although she helps me put them away frequently. One day when I was out and she was home with Ed, I came home to find she’d washed the dishes in the sink (we live in the dark ages and do not have a dishwasher, btw). Since then, she does a bunch of dishes almost every day, usually in the afternoon, so she does a sink full of breakfast and lunch dishes, everything except big messy pans. I don’t complain at all if she doesn’t do them, but I sure do show my appreciation when she does! Probably she’d love it if I gave her a buck every time, heh, but I love that money is not her motivation. For now, she doesn’t get a regular allowance. I was forever forgetting to give it to her, I almost never have money in my wallet, and she forgets to ask. By the time anyone remembers, we have no idea how many weeks she DIDN’T get allowance. For now, our system is pretty informal. She asks for things she wants and I either get it or I don’t. I’d estimate that I spend $20-ish a month on things she wants. Sometimes she wants a thing that costs that much, in which case that’s probably all she’ll get for a while. Other times she might want a pack of Pokemon cards or something else small. I usually give her a few bucks to spend at the $1 area when we go to Target. Occasionally she wants something big that I don’t really want to buy for her, so she’ll ask me if she can earn some money. Then I will give her some of my chores to do and I’ll pay her for them. *shrug* It works, for us, for now.

I fully understand that what works for my family might not for others, and that the number of kids you have, and the particular circumstances of your life might also make a difference. It was just the micromanagement that struck me as sort of crazy.

“I had a good day but I got really mad at one point. Some kids were being mean to Goldy. One of the kids chased him so I did the one thing I could. I took him inside and I did the dishes.”

Now. These things are both true, some kids were chasing Not-our-cat-Goldy and Rebecca brought him inside to escape them. And she did do the dishes, but the events were unrelated. I like how she made them related, though, she did it deliberately. She said she liked the way it made a little twist at the end. It reminded me of William Carlos Williams, a simple but unexpected twist in something everyday.

Oh yes, I’m the crazy lady comparing her 9 year-old’s journal entry to William Carlos Williams, heh. I think I wouldn’t have except she read it to me aloud and then asked me if I liked what she did at the end, and proceeded to tell me why she wrote it that way even though in real life, the cat and the dishes didn’t happen at the same time.

I’ve written about how she learned to read without being “taught.” It was “late” by school standards, but it was easy and fluid and now she reads as well or better than other kids her age. What’s funny to me is that she still says she can’t read. She admits she can “read a little,” but for some reason she thinks a person “can’t read” if they don’t know every word they see. I’ve told her that even an old lady bookworm like me doesn’t know every word I see, but she’s clinging to her notion. Maybe she’s afraid that if she “can read,” I won’t read books to her anymore? I don’t know, it doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that she’s doing what she wants; she reads for information and for fun.

For a long time, she nearly refused to write. She hated it fiercely and avoided it as much as possible. Lately, she writes more, especially since she got interested in keeping a journal. Like her path to reading, her path to writing is SO interesting. She still loathes lower case letters and vehemently rejects using them. I’m not sure what it’s about, something about having trouble making the more curvy lines of lowercase letters look the way she wants is my guess. I suspect it’s going to change soon, as her interest in writing increases, she’ll find lowercase letters faster. I’ve never given her punctuation lessons, but other than a few quirks, she’s using punctuation correctly. I noticed recently that she seems to be using apostrophes correctly, using them for contractions and possession appropriately. She’s unsure about commas. For a while she would insert them randomly, but she doesn’t do that anymore. One of her current quirks is to put a long dash at the end of each line, like she were splitting up a word or something. I’m not sure where she got the idea to do it, she told me she “just likes to” when I asked.

I can’t wait to see where she goes with writing in the next few months. She’s interested in having a pen pal and that will definitely challenge her. Last night she was writing thank you notes and it was so cute. I liked how if she wasn’t sure how to spell a word, she looked in her mind to think where she’d seen it before and either spelled it out of her head or went to look for the source to copy the word. It wasn’t very efficient, but she was determined to only ask for my help in spelling as a last resort. It was sort of typical of her in general, fiercely independent, highly perfectionist and extremely sensitive to any real or perceived criticism.

Happy birthday to my beautiful daughter!

Four days until her birthday. The pile of gifts in the living room is making her a little insane(r).