mathmom's blog

So Eleanor is in a youth orchestra.  It is not the highest, most professional orchestra.  Nor is it the 4th grade orchestra---it's a friendly, non-competitive, musical, not overly serious place to make music and friends. They were handing out music at the beginning of last semester, and for one of the pieces the key signature had a few flats.  "Does anyone know what key this is in?" asked the conductor.  A few people looked at the flats, tried to work out the tonic and dominant, and made a few guesses.  Eleanor, who has not been trained in music theory (probably I should do something about that =) raised her hand.  "E minor."  Wow!  Everyone was super impressed.  How'd she figure it out, they wanted to know. Turns out the title of the piece was "Organ Fugue in E minor."  It pays to have your eyes open!

So while I was out getting a new tire on the van, Luke was at home and he watched some internet videos. He mostly likes Smarter Every Day and Veritasium and Minute Physics, so I am not too worried. But today he said he had seen something really disturbing. "Oh no," I thought, "pornography? Violence? Religion? Politics?" So I asked him. It turns out the disturbing video was about the Banach Tarski paradox, where you disassemble one sphere to make two identical spheres. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox   )   I think I'll keep him.

The other day we had pulled into the gym parking lot.  As Luke was hand-closing the sliding passenger door to our van (because the motor is worn out) he called out "Mom!  Come see!  This is important!" Usually Luke knows the difference between important and unimportant, so I went over to see what he was talking about.  I'm sure I expected some sort of lizard or snake on the ground, but this was actually really important.   What Luke had noticed was a nail or something embedded in the side corner of the tire.  I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have noticed since I'm not on the passenger side of the car very often.  I probably would have driven half way to Durham before the tire blew out and there was a fiery wreck... Well, maybe not a wreck, but a lot of inconvenience. I sent the kids into their gym lesson and  texted Michael.  He was already on his way to pick up the kids, since I had to be in Durham, and he suggested that I start taking of...

Apparently, Luke does not trust me.  He wanted me to wake him up at 1 this morning to watch the Perseid meteor shower, but as he was telling me to "make sure to wake me up," he realized that he has his own alarm clock.  He set it and was ready to go.  I asked the girls if they wanted to be woken up and they declined. He may have had reason to not believe that I would wake him up.  We have tried to wake Luke up in the middle of the night for other astronomical events but he is notoriously difficult to wake up.  I recall shaking and yelling, only to have him roll over and groan.  Last night I was prepared to go into his room to turn off his alarm when he didn't wake up this morning, but it turned out not to be a problem---he was bright eyed and bushy tailed after only about 30 seconds of alarm. (Note: the alarm woke me up without any trouble, even from the other room.) We went out to the darker end of the street and lay down in the damp grass.  We s...

So far today we have: eaten breakfast cleaned off some of the rocks from the lawn made baguette read caught tadpoles, learned about their habitat and made a fishbowl for them done block printing practiced, done some writing,  watched a Star Trek TNG episode  All with surprisingly little arguing and surprisingly little mess. Wow! If every day went like this I might actually enjoy summer "break" a little more... Update: the day ceased to go so smoothly immediately after I wrote this.  I should have known! =)

A few years ago we went to the pool with a friend of Amanda's and her mom and little brother.  The brother was 3 years old and swam like a fish.  Luke was about 3 years old and swam like a... well, he didn't swim so much as walk around the shallow end and fall over, needing to be rescued.  I asked how she taught her son to swim. "Well, every day we go to the pool for a couple of hours in the morning, and then a few more hours in the afternoon for swim team."  Right.  That was obviously not the path Luke would take to swimming well.  They obviously really loved going to the pool.  I did it as a chore out of a sense of obligation to my kids and came home as soon as I felt my duties were discharged. Then the other mom noted that Amanda enjoyed reading a lot, and wanted to figure out how to help her daughter love reading.  "I've even tried getting a magazine or two so she can see me reading, too."  I told her that we just read all the time....

In order to strive to declutter I have been going through boxes in the attic.  One of the boxes I found was my school work from high school.  I think I threw out (or have on floppy disk somewhere) my work from college.  I don't know where my elementary work is, although I'd love to see my story notebook.  But my high school stuff was pretty amusing.  One of the pieces of writing I found was a description of my room in 10th grade.  I wrote it in the form of a detective report, and the assignment was to do some sort of descriptive writing.  I was handing lots of things over to Eleanor to read, so I gave her this one. And now I'm not sure it was a good idea.  I was not a neat child.  I have improved, thanks to maturity, guilt, and having 3 small people around who make even bigger messes than I could.  But in high school... Eleanor's response was to tell me, "Now I never have to clean my room again!  You were messier than I am!" I...