What Comes of Not Knowing About Jackets

Today Tehva showed us why we need to go back to America, if only for a little while. Today we discovered that Tehva does not know how to put on a jacket.

The girl can read like a demon, swim with the fishes, and walk barefoot for miles, even on 120 degree plus plus plus days. But she cannot get a jacket on without the sleeves of her sweater riding up to her armpits.

Tian was startled at this revelation. “Mom! What is wrong with Tehva? Why doesn’t she know how to put on a jacket?”

Duh, live in the Middle East much?

She can't put on a jacket, but she knows her stuff
when it comes to mummifying chickens

Every summer for the past four years we have gone to the USA, and each summer, the kids are released upon American society. Short of the fiery religious debates in which Tian has engaged her Sunday school teacher, and the Hitler-esque manner in which Tehva has bullied and bossed the neighborhood kids there, they have generally done well.

She's fine...just fine...keep saying it...

Okay, so Silas’s continuing inability to tie shoelaces? And Tian’s inability to speak to an authority figure without pointing out every single error in logic or technique? Both are probably related to the homeschooling and the mamsy-pamsy way in which I deal with them on a daily basis. And who needs to wear closed-toed shoes in the desert anyhow? But generally I feel that they will effortlessly merge back into mainstream America without a hiccup when we return to ‘Merica. Or at least I hope.

Each year I have left the USA to return to Oman thinking that my kids are fine…that they will be fine upon the imminent return, because when you are ex-patting it, this is always somewhere within your thoughts. It sometimes even surfaces to dominate your thoughts for short spurts. But in the day-to-day of living and learning here, it is also easy to bury this thought, especially as the time away becomes more prolonged.

Yes, and he is also fine despite appearances

Life here moves quickly (thus no blog post in, like, a million years) and we are left with little time for reflection on such questions as, “Will my kid be a freak when we go back home?” Additionally, the answer is "Yes for a little while" and so no one wants to discuss it much.

The generally harmless peer group--or at least two of them

In spite of the freak factor, it has been a relief to let the grip of the home society melt away. For four years, I have not had to worry about my kids’ clothing or style choices, the contents of their lunch boxes, their test scores in relation to their classmates’ test scores or anyone else's, their peers (I know them all too well), their safety within an institutional setting, or the quality of the material that is theoretically making its way into their little heads. I have not had to worry about supplementing activities or boosting instructional time. And I have certainly not have had to worry about the implications of Silas not knowing how to tie his shoes, or Tian angering the wrong instructor.

I highly recommend it, y’all.

But in other ways, this squirming away from the grip of American society has left me, actually all of us, on the outs. I no longer know what is cool and what is not. I have no idea anymore about what my children should be able to do according to the Standards or the Common Core. I don’t know what has come of the FDA’s strangle hold on school lunch programs. I don’t know whether Tian’s constant use of the word, “Mank” to 

Totally mank. Totally.

describe unpleasantries is totally weird or totally in in the USA.

In the four years here, they have gone from being children who fit a certain mold—the one dictated by society and by me so that they would be more apt to conform to society’s wishes—to being something of culture-less individuals. And while there are certainly rules that must be followed in Oman (What do you mean I can’t wear my favorite sleeveless top now that I have boobs?) as everywhere else, in many ways we have been beyond the reach of those rules.

But that is all coming to an end. The countdown has begun.

The Return

I am back.

Every now and then a blog needs a year off and so I indulged myself and took the time to indulge myself. But now with life in Muscat beginning to churn again after a long summer away, I NEED to write. Or at least I tell myself that I need to write, since I am being pressured from left and right to pen something.

What I want to create is a top ten list of all of the things that have changed over the last year. I like top ten lists for the very obvious call out to David Letterman, but I also like them for the neatness and structure that they impart. As a writer I know where I can stop writing. As a reader you know exactly how long you have to out up with my blog.

However, I can’t think of ten changes to share. I only can think of eight. And really they are not top…they just are changes. So here are eight changes, in no particular order, that have occurred here in the last year or so since I blogged.

     1.) Puberty

          That’s it. Just puberty.

     2.) Sailing

The sailboat that sat in our driveway for nearly two years? If you visited us at any point between 2010 and 2012, you remember that boat. It was the one you practically had to climb over to enter our house. Last year we donated it to a sailing club here in exchange for the occasional sail session on it, and replaced it in our drive with a table which we have covered with skulls. Muscat has contributed to the look of the skulls by covering them with dust. It gives the driveway a very white trash sort of feel. Homey.  

     3.) Chickenpox

The Varicella fairy visited us during October. In classic American style, instead of treating the Varicella, we spent a lot of our time trying to figure out who was to blame. And with each speculation as to the responsible party, another eruption of pox occurred until Silas was covered in spots (this is what we do in Muscat when we have chicken pox...we go out for Indian food, which is probably why the virus has gone around town twice already since August).

In the end we eliminated most of Muscat and narrowed the suspected Varicella transmitters down to two individuals. Suspect 1 was a friend who had had shingles many moons before, but was the most obvious suspect because she had had Varicella and was foolish enough to admit it. Suspect 2 was some random British child encountered at a birthday party two weeks before the breakout. I blame the British.

    4.) The Black and White Cat

Harry the Cat has never gotten a mention on the blog and so I mention him now. We found him under the new expressway, probably having been thrown from a vehicle, and took him in as a favor to a friend, who promised to take him off our hands within a few days. Did I mention that this friend is British?

Harry looks like a Jersey cow. He complains loudly, drinks from the toilet, and has inspired Silas to write an epic which intertwines all of the pets in Muscat. Visit it at www.sisstoryblog.blogspot.com

    5.) A Contract! A Real Contract!

For one month this summer, I taught real students at a real school for one whole month, and was contracted to do it! Having been out of the game in an institutional sense for three years, it was validating to work in a concrete box again. And that sense of validation made me question my sanity. Trying not to think too hard and moving along…

    6.) Reading

Tehva reads. Finally. 

Poser.

Each morning she reports on the number of chapters she conquered in the previous 24 hours. This morning it was 57 chapters. I was not aware that we had 57 chapters in easy chapter books available in our house and so, while it is exciting that she is finally reading, it is questionable as to exactly what she is reading. This may be contributing to her growing penchant for racy material, whether it is in an online or paper medium.

    7.) Muscat International Airport

The construction site, just minutes from our house.

After gaining and losing a number of friends who were associated with the new airport’s construction but ran screaming from the country in frustration over how the construction was proceeding, it is comforting to see that the airport is coming along. To celebrate, Muscat Municipality has been closing lanes and roads throughout the area to enlarge them, reroute them, redecorate them, or sometimes to just erect little wooden men who have orange flags taped to their hands next to them.

If you are smart you can infer why I have included this in the list—getting anywhere on this side of town anymore involves some major road wrangling, which leads to the next change...

  

    8.) Socialization Opportunities

Many a moon ago when I started homeschooling, I was followed by the specter of potential unsocialization. No one was worried about my children academically, physically, or nutritionally, but I was questioned constantly about socialization. “What do your children do for socialization? How are you teaching them to relate to other people? How will they learn to play with others if they don’t go to school?”

And so, folding to peer pressure, we spend a good amount of time in the afternoons carting the children to socialization opportunities and our week is shaped by rugby, Girl Guides, violin and piano lessons, homeschool co-op classes, tennis and swimming lessons, pottery class, playdates, the Family Hash, and kid-only mountain walks.

In spite of all of that socialization, they remain who they have always been.

It is an expensive lesson, both in time and resources. Ah well.

So that is as things stand now. If I am as consistent as before with keeping up with this, you just might get to read a new blog post again in the next year. If you are lucky.

I Think I Just Drooled on Myself

Aside from the fact that Oman is seriously lacking on the affordable English-medium school front, and I am doing a little something about that, this post has very little to do with Oman. For those of you who troll the blog in order to live vicariously through me, sorry, this one is a bit of a downer. I promise the next blog will deal with the new housemaid or the return of the Big Car, or something equally expatty.

No, this blog is about The School and the six children I pack into it every day.

That's right, my little school has grown again to six warm bodies, with two tweeny girls in to replace the two boys who left at the end of last year for greener pastures. Our school, which last year was pure insanity punctuated by small stretches of intense concentration, has become a place of surface calm. However, with the introduction of more girls, it is now also a sounding place for anxieties great ("My mom is so down today") and small ("I think my armpits stink. Do you have any deodorant I can borrow?")

Silas, who never enjoyed being part of the masculinity movement last year, has asked twice recently when we are going to get more boys. "Honestly, Silas? You didn't even like having boys here last year. They were too loud for you, remember?" And then he remembers and drifts off to bemoan the fact that he has to spend several hours every day bending to someone else's will, with that someone being me.

Ya' know, I just want to put this on the table right here...girls are a whole different ball of wax from boys. Perhaps my late realization of this fact is one of the reasons that the international schools here have been loathe to give me any consideration at all in their hiring over our two years here.

But boys...boys go for long stretches without noticing anything aside from their impulses--whether that is to jump on the nearest boy or spray water on the cat sauntering by. And then they will buckle down for fifteen to twenty minutes of glorious and intense concentration, pounding through an hour's worth or work in record time. They roll all over the floor, fiddle with tidbits, clap loudly, fart, scream, and generally raise the dead, but they get their stuff done without much more than loud noises.

Then there are girls. Girls want to discuss everything, intensely negotiating several facets of the assignment before anything has even begun. Then they will sometimes commence their work by commenting on their general inability to do what is in front of them. They comment on how stupid they are, or act the cheerleader, telling one another to be confident in their abilities. They hem and haw and chit and chat. Finally, in the end, they get on with it and finish their work very competently, usually with a flourish and an extra spritz of deodorant, just for good measure.

In my ongoing endeavor to console myself that this is all good, I have been cruising other home schoolers' blogs as well as teachers' blogs for the answer to the never-answerable query: Is this girl thing normal? And the thing is, I don't find much commentary on this phenomenon. I do find lots of talk about teaching boys but I don't find much on the girl thing.

Strangely enough, this negotiatory behavior seems normal for my five girls--it's beginning to feel like a compulsion, this rearranging their thinking and developing their communication abilities while they chatter amongst themselves. And their chatter is somewhat exhausting, full of language that suggests they are both doubting their abilities and supporting and encouraging one another--like a manic school day each and every day without the option for medication.

I am intrigued by these girly girls as I am not sure I ever was one. At any rate, by the end of each day I am fairly exhausted by the split-personality mood they set and, thus, I think I just drooled on myself. Don't worry, happens all the time.

The Expat Box

Anything you want you can find in Muscat, except for fresh cranberries on the eve of Thanksgiving. Generally, though, if you have the riyals to pay for it, you can buy it. I have even run across canned corned beef hash several times, which should jar you into the realization that my previous statement is absolutely true, for the law of item acquisition overseas is, "If one can readily find corned beef hash in stores rather than on the black market, then one is in a place where ANYTHING can be had."

A second guideline of living overseas is "Find the box". That is, when you meet another expat you immediately converse upon a finite number of topics in order to discover which box that person fits into. Nationality is the most obvious first box one seeks out, followed quickly by how long one has been here, and previous overseas experience (always seek out common passport stamps). If the personality checks out thus far, the next box to explore is occupation.

Muscat houses an astonishing variety of jobs filled by an astounding array of personalities from countries all over the world. I have met communications people, international school teachers, botanists, biologists, tour guides, and engineers. Hand any of these individuals the homeschool bomb, though, and they balk. "Ooooh, homeschooling are you? (no, this was not Yoda that I met recently, although being British set him not too far from the mark--and he has big ears, this Brit) That must be amazingly difficult!"

From an older, childless British woman: "Ah yes, homeschooling. I didn't realize that anyone here was doing that. And what are you doing for your children's socialization?"

From an Indian mother of five whose youngest is 7 and oldest is 32(!) "Yes, I have heard that homeschooling causes immense stress for the person who is acting as the instructor. Is that so? Do you find this to be the case?"

And the best one was from an American man: "Well I have heard that your children are really doing well with the homeschooling and are literate, but that your son is a little bit lazy. It sounds like you are doing a great job! He will probably grow up to be a politician!"

Once we have run through the boxing exercise, I usually find that the conversation ends after I have revealed that I am homeschooling, and subsequent conversations revolve around that topic in a polite, removed sort of way. The homeschool box is a tough one to be in as everyone believes they know what it looks like on the inside yet no one has actually explored it. Nor do they much care to.

Lately, the box looks...well, you be the judge. Having recently taken on a colleague's child, who is also a No Child Left Behind refugee, our little school has grown to four instead of the three that I had started with.

The biggest change is that Silas no longer spends his mornings under the table. Eleven weeks into the school year, the genius finally comprehended that, once he has finished his material for the day, he is done whether it takes him an hour or ten hours. Now he views the underside of the table as a waste of his time and chooses instead to study. When he does go into hiding, it is in places that are far more sophisticated than a table. The roof offers corners and compressors to hide behind, there are five bathrooms to choose from, our furniture sits at odd angles to deaden the echos (and consequently offer rich hiding opportunities), and his bedroom has its own nooks and crannies.

Tian has become an academic workhorse. She most recently penned a five paragraph essay on the plausibility of Marco Polo's writings in his book, A Description of the World. Today she and Silas were spontaneously evolving lines to poems about dragon eggs, and correcting one another as they recited snatches of a speech by Abraham Lincoln. She has mastered long division, read extensively on the center of the earth, and is constructing a clay map of Eurasia. She is the homeschooled child I always want to make fun of. While she and Silas follow the same curriculum, Tian follows it with so much more finesse and abandon. She is something of a dweeb.

As for Tehva, we have shipped her off to a morning preschool program at the university. She was simply becoming too much of a distraction with her non-stop frittering and random abuse of her brother and sister. Once we took on the fourth child for daily schooling, Tehva's screeching rants drove poor Catherine to distraction and set her rocking, fingers jammed in her ears, in order to calm herself. An eight by twelve room is not big enough to hold Tehva and a special needs child and a boy who cannot figure out the concept of a to-do list and a hopeless over achiever and the homeschool mother whom everyone assumes is one beer short of a six pack for even considering schooling her own children in the first place.

A reread tells me why no one asks about much beyond the fact that I homeschool. TMI.

Really?

Homeschooling always has sounded like a sweet option for education, especially after reading blog after blog online, published by mother after enthusiastic mother heralding the sheer joy they find in their experience. "It is the most holy, intimate experience..." gushes one. "There is nothing you could do that would bring you closer to your children," squeals another. And my personal favorite is, "Every moment is a joy."

Really? Every moment?

We started school on Monday out of boredom. The day before, Tian had ridden more than ten miles on her bike, circling my parents' neighborhood at least five times, admittedly losing count after the fourth lap. Silas had taken whining to a new spine-tingling level of perfection. And Tehva kept indiscriminately punching people, which meant that she was bored.

So I dug out the textbooks, trade books, and curriculum I had meticulously packed in the preceding weeks. I extracted a tiny cache of supplies and lesson plans I had prepared during the early summer and set up shop (or school) in my parents' dining room. Tian did a happy dance, and Silas shrieked with excitement. "All right," I thought. "This is going to rock!"

On Monday we started and the day went like a dream. The experience was truly everything those blogging, home school mommies had promised--close, joyous, (I wouldn't call it intimate), wonderful--it was the perfect teacher and the students finished the day energized by the experience.

Then came Tuesday. Within an hour Silas was under the table, crying, and I was reduced to pulling out all the tricks I had saved up after fifteen years of teaching other people's children. They worked miraculously on my own children but left me shaken and cursing those silly home school mommies. We were not enjoying every minute. Not even every other minute.

This morning (Thursday) school started and then ended just as quickly due to concentration issues from Silas, who leaked tears from the corners of his big, lashy eyes. A break, some outside time, and then an impromptu art lesson all served to bring him back onto the straight and narrow. However, during his language lesson the first sentence he penned was, "I hate homeschooling." (At least he used a pronoun, which was the assignment!)

My more seasoned and experienced friends who have home schooled say that tears on day 2, and every other day, sounds just about right. Whew.

Tian, meanwhile, has been wallowing in the experience like a pig in warm, stinky mud. Subscribing to the unit method of study, she has made herself a medieval loom out of a cardboard box and, throughout the day, when she has a spare moment or while being read to, she weaves. She also has planned a medieval feast, memorized a minstrel song, and is quite likely planning a jousting tournament on the sly. All the while she is also excelling in her studies, jumping through any hoop thrown before her.

Tehva still indiscriminately punches us and then runs away laughing. Nothing much has changed in her dysfunctional world, except now she can tell us what letter "punch" starts with, and she can read the words "me" and "am".

In spite of Silas's disagreements with the course of his education, we are going to continue on this path for the next year. Thus we are pulling out all the stops and doing whatever educational nonsense strikes our fancy. Or my fancy. Or my and Tian's fancy. No matter what we do, Tehva will haul off and smack us and Silas will cry.

Next post I will attach videos and photos of what we have done this week! We are big home school goobers, even though we are not really enjoying EVERY moment.