It's Been a While

 Long time no blog, but I'm going to make an effort at catching up!

Big stuff:

Me and Pa after the second shot

1. After a year of being very tightly locked down to protect Mumpy and Pa from Covid, all of us except Choclo and Oob have received their second shot of the Pfizer vaccine.  We will all be immune on St. Patrick's Day, which I see as a gift from our beloved St. Patrick!

 2. Late last year, it looked like Mumpy and I both almost definitely had breast cancer.  In January, we learned that Mumpy did not, and I might not have breast cancer.   In February, I had a biopsy surgery that was way more involved than I thought it would be, but I now know that I do not have breast cancer either! 

I learned that I didn't have cancer the same week that I learned that we would be able to get the Covid vaccine, and I was amazed at how much energy and brain space that freed up!  I've been catching up on all the things, and that finally includes this blog.

3.  We've had two birthdays which I will get to in their own separate posts.

4.  We've had plenty of ups and downs with other health related problems, but we seem to be settling down to an even keel now (please God!).

5.  I have done a ton of home schooling!

6. It's Lent, and I have Gospel Desserts!

The Virus Post

I haven't been blogging about this, partly because things have been busy, and partly because... I'm tired of hearing and thinking about it.  But this blog is also a record of our family life, and it's made some dramatic (mostly nice) changes for us.

Everyone is home!  There are ten of us home pretty much all the time!  I'm loving having everyone around: isolation with the 9 people you are closest to is not so bad for me!

A lot of our life is going on as usual: Klenda is home, but she's painting a lot of the time, Zorg and Leena are doing their college work online.Choclo, Oob, and Leena are still getting home schooled.  Mxyl is doing freelance work from home.

And some things are different: the Emperor is home!  He's working on all sorts of small projects.

My mom is doing great, and my dad is doing much better, and the weather has been beautiful.

We're using the extra time to do fun family stuff and also working on a fair number of projects: garden rejuvenation, back basement sorting, and so forth.

On the down side, we are keeping ourselves pretty strictly quarantined.  Most of us would probably weather an infection pretty easily, but my dad is about as high risk as you can get: 82, recovering from pneumonia, Parkinson's, bone marrow cancer (with a suppressed immune system), the residual problems of having had prostate cancer, and now a touch of congestive heart failure.

Trying to make sure that he isn't exposed has been somewhat stressful.  I'm actually less worried since they've shut everything down, but we are only having a minimal number of us out to do essential shopping, and we are all maniacs with hand sanitizer when we are out.

But we've been going on lots of walks and spending lots of time outside, so it doesn't feel too constraining so far.

Coming Up for Air

Masking up to visit Pa.

Well, it's been pretty crazy.

My poor dad was in and out of the hospital since a week before Christmas with what ended up as pnuemonia.

He's out now, but in rehab gaining strength until he can reliably walk again.

But, before that, while my mom was helping him in the hospital, she got knocked flat by the flu.  In his hospital room.

Generally, you don't want someone with pneumonia exposed to the flu.
Anyway, we all (10 of us) had to get tested.

The score was 4 to 6.  Mumpy and Pa were sick with type A, and two of us were carrying type B (but never got sick). Ten rounds of Tamiflu later, I'm here to say: GET YOUR FLU SHOT!

The 8 of us who had the shot were fine, and the other two scared me. A lot!

Anyway, between hospitals, ERs, Rehab, quarantines, and doctor visits, it's been pretty crazy, but I think we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

And just in time!  Zorg and Leena start college this week!

The Laptop is Fixed!

For which I can thank the redoubtable Bill! So now I can blog All the Things!

The washing machine is fixed, thanks to Mumpy, Zorg, and Mxyl.

Choclo has a pair of sharp new glasses!

 My Aunt and Uncle visited and we all went to the Botanical gardens (another post)!

We've been watching the Mandalorian, and Klenda continues to amaze.

We actually finished our Awesome Geography around the world trip (more posts coming)!!

We are into Advent, all of which I missed blogging about as my laptop was slowing to a standstill.  I'll just post a link to our Advent stuff.



And today is the feast of St.Nicholas!

Catching Up

I'm going to do a series of  posts catching up on the last six weeks, but here's the short and (mostly) drama free version:

 My Dad, who has had Parkinson's for nearly 30 years, got diagnosed with bone marrow cancer (MDS).  This sounds terrible, but is actually fantastic news. 

It turns out that much of the decline he's had over the past year is actually from not having enough blood cells, not really the Parkinson's, AND they can do many things to get his bone marrow producing cells again, AND the actual cancer is very slow and unlikely to be life limiting in his case.  After a certain amount of anguish before we understood all this, we are very, very happy and relieved!

Also, my Dad is retiring at the end of this month, shortly before his 81st birthday!

I've been doing a lot of driving back and forth to NJ, and my sister is still there now, helping out while his bone marrow gets up and running again.

Oh yes, and there was Christmas!  Christmas here, decorating the parish, Christmas in NJ, terrorizing my mother with dinosaurs and traumatizing my sister with llamas, and Christmas back in Maryland with family, friends, and weird frogs.  We really needed all 12 days this year!

And today we are packing up Christmas at the parish and at home, and starting to think about what this new semester will look like.  I've been working on new ways to organize schedules now that we have so many older kids going in so many directions.

Back From My Summer Blog Vacation

I'm back!

And no one died and I wasn't really sick, and there weren't any major life crises!

I hadn't actually intended to take a giant blog vacation, I was just busy and tired, and then busy relaxing so I wouldn't feel tired.

And now I don't feel tired, and I have a huge backlog of photos and fun things to write about.  My hope is to do a bunch of posts and schedule them, so there should be a post a day for a while.

We went on vacation, Scout camp happened, a big birthday happened, we sorted every book in the house, I'm gearing up for a brand new science class, and a Geography class, and we got a new pet!

So, more tomorrow!

All Sorts

I haven't been doing too much blogging lately, but that's because we've been busy doing all sorts of stuff.

 We've been feeding (and watering) the wild birds.  It's been pretty cold, so we are getting lots of the usual sparrows, juncos (snow birds), cardinals, and chickadees, but also downy woodpeckers, cedar wax wings, purple finches, goldfinches, and an unruly mob of starlings.

I love this picture because it looks like the sparrow is talking to the bird sculpture we use to hold the deicer in place!

We helped out at our parish's new "Service Saturday," helping the Missionaries of Charity at their food kitchen  in the city.

 We've been making valentine holders.

Now we just need to make the valentines!



The Emperor took a trip last weekend to visit his childhood best friend in North Carolina.

We've been on a reading binge (more on that in another post).

And we got all the kitchen cabinets cleaned!

Probably not the most exciting blog post ever!

But we haven't gotten the dreaded flu, the older Zoomlians are settling into their college classes, I've been healthy and back to running, and I feel like I'm getting everything back to normal.

God is good!

Back and Catching Up

So, yes, I'm finally back and I'm finally well!  It just really took a few months to recover.  My advice: don't get bitten by a tick!

I have lots of photos and things to blog from the summer, and I am gearing up for the new school year (actually, my Anatomy and Physiology class starts today!), so I'll have lots to blog about.

In the mean time, here are a few pictures from the summer:

Guest Blog by Mxyl: Reminiscing

Sometimes it's good to get back to the roots, however small they may seem.  Seeing what you've done can help to inspire you to go further, and it can also remind you why you're doing what you're doing in the first place.  Going through the past can result in a much better perspective, as it contains both mistakes to avoid repeating and once-buried ideas that can inspire greater ones.  To quote a considerably unlikely source, "building the future and keeping the past alive are one in the same thing." 

The Prime Minister is recovering well, slowly but surely (as the previous post shows), and during her recovery, she decided to look and read through a few print-outs of our blog in its earliest years with a few Zoomlians.  Reading together can be a very close time for families, so I decided to try and capture the moment as best I could.

 Here she is reading with Oob--when the Prime Minister started the blog, Oob was just a few months old!  He was very interested in seeing the stories from when he was that age.  It's very strange for me to see him looking back on what had happened a decade ago, especially since it's a time I can recall fairly easily, whereas he may be hearing about some of his early life for the first time. 

Going back and hearing about the past isn't just about retaining memories.  Reading, recording and documenting life can also help share it with others--even my taking these pictures can help give a taste of life from someone else's perspective, be it the Prime Minister's or Leena's in this photo.  Much like how reading even fictional books (as a certain high school English teacher I know can attest to) can give you a glimpse into how other people view the world, reading the Prime Minister's posts from several years after the actual stories can help give us--especially as Zoomlians--a look into how the Prime Minister viewed the events of the past decade, rather than just going by our views alone.  As an amateur filmmaker, I believe this even ties in to what I want my works to do--the characters, worlds and stories in film can help spread different perspectives to others, allowing them to ask questions that may not have occurred to them, and perhaps leaving them thinking about the world slightly differently. 

Even if things are going slowly, we're still going strong.  Hope to be back soon! 

Back in Glorious Technicolor!

We're back in the blogging game, thank you Bill!  Many posts coming up!

Still Here!

And I have a huge backlog of posts to write!

It's been that kind of crazy end-of-school-year-birthday-bonanaza-anniversary-family celebration that only May can bring.

Here's what's been happening:
It rained.  A lot.

And then it rained more. 

We've broken all sorts of records for consecutive days of rain!

 And then it hailed!

But all the rain had been fantastic for the garden- so much so that I see I have been underwatering for the past 12 years.

The front garden has turned into the glorious English cottage style garden I have dreamed of ever since I first read Jane Austen!

That's probably because we've had English weather: cool and rainy with some fog and extra drizzle.

The flowers think it's perfect!

Other stuff: we've wrapped up all the classes and I will be blogging them to finish the history, science, and religion series.

I had a birthday and we had an anniversary and I made a very fun visit to my folks (in which Mumpy had a birthday) and we are getting ready for another birthday- all of which I will get to on the blog!

AND!

Klenda got her driver's license!!

Congratulations!!!!

Both her driving class teacher and her testing inspector commented that she was a good safe driver!


 Hooray, Klenda!





Only 15 days until Zorg is eligible to try for his learner's permit...

Because You Can't Get Enough!

Mxyl needed to construct a website for a class, and he decided to make a companion site to this blog.  It's always interesting to see your kid's view of their home schooling adventure!

He accidentally made it more spectacular than the blog, but that's OK, it's also very funny, so give it a look.

The Zoom Times

I've posted a permanent link in the top left sidebar.   In fact, I switched around the Zoomlian blogroll to include all their websites, so you can easily access all the Zoomlian fun!

I Shall Return

Really soon now!  I have a shiny new laptop which I bought before I realized that my freezer was in the process of dying.  It is new (well, refurbished and about half the price of new), and it turned out to be much shinier than we had expected: it has a touch screen!

No, I did not realize that when I bought it.

Hey, maybe the new freezer will turn out to have a touch screen, too!

Unfortunately, that brings up the image of me accidentally swiping the freezer and deleting all the ice cream...

At any rate, Bill has the laptop, and he is transferring files, setting up a firewall, making sure it has a word processing program, and otherwise idiot proofing it.

Actually, Bill also has most of the contents of my freezer in his freezer.  Hey, look, he's literally saving my bacon!  Thanks Bill!

Poll Results!

Nine people voted.  The top answer was "It makes my head explode!" with 6 votes, followed by "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" with 5 votes, and then "It's too busy and hard to read" with 4 votes.

 "Keep it forever," and "the height of style and elegance" trailed with 2 and 1 votes respectively.

I'm sure that those last 3 voters will be sad to hear that Choclo and Oob have lost interest in finished enjoying the robots and spaceships, and we now return you to our regularly scheduled blog design.

For the rest of you: Come baaaack!!!!

Blog Redesign Comments

I thought I'd just share a sampling of comments.  It seems that how much you appreciated the redesign is directly correlated to age.

Oob: Wow!  That's really cool!

Choclo: Hmmm.  Very nice.

Zorg: Looks like pajamas.

Klenda (in the nicest way possible): No taste AT ALL.

My sister (an actual artist): Um... It's...visually arresting. (Me: Really?) As in, "Watch out for the fashion police."

1000

 This is my 1,000th post!

 It's hard to believe I've been blogging for five years!

Back then, the Zoomlians looked like this:

Choclo was 2, and Oob was only 2 months!

Too much cuteness!!!

 Now they're a bit bigger... but, honestly, still kind of like that.

I went back and reread my earliest posts.

I had nearly forgotten how we started out as Zoom Times:

Why Zoom Times? The first reason is that the more kids I have, the faster the time goes and since I just had my 6th baby, we are really zooming along! The second reason is that this is a blog primarily about our homeschooling adventures which is , in turn, primarily about my crazy kids.

Usually kids ask parents the big question: where did I come from? My kids didn't ask me, they told me where they came from. They come from the planet Zoom. Never heard of it? It's in the galaxy of Oom along with a number of other inhabited planets with names like Boom, Doom, Foom...you get the idea. When they arrived on our planet, the oxygen in the atmosphere caused them to develop legs. Although they were each hundreds of years old when they arrived, the legs took some getting used to, so they were raised by swamp monsters, then mermaids, and then they came to us.

Yes, my kids did write their own origin story!

I was also interested to see that my homeschool philosophy has remained quite stable:

 I think a big part of how you home school has to do with why you home school. We home school in order to allow each child to become the person God created them to be. We are interest led with an emphasis on fun. We do have certain musts: math and learning to read and write, but we are very flexible in terms of how and when they get it. We also tend to be really immersed in what we are interested in. Our high tides tend to be a week a month or a day dedicated to a particular topic (often a requested topic). We subscribe to a tidal homeschooling philosophy, with times of high and low tides.

That's still us!  Thanks for visiting Zoom!

Update

We had the portfolio review last Thursday and we had a great time!

The only down side is that I keep remembering things I forgot to say... 

Days later, I am still coming up with, "I totally forgot to mention the gingerbread houses!" and, "Oh yeah, three of the kids are taking piano lessons!" and ,"Ooooh!  All of those scout badges!"

Anyway, I love making a big deal out of the review, and it's important to me to really reflect on what we did and what we'd like to do... but by Friday I was in definite need of some R and R.

Blog Keeping

I've been on a real reorganization rampage (try saying that 5 times fast).  First the basement, then the home school room, then a massive toy cull, followed by a book cull, followed by a reorganization of the living room.

And now the blog!

I went through and pruned all the dead links and added some new ones. I dropped the (unschooling) Sandra Dodd link because while I agree with her about many things,  I found that some of the things she was advocating (particularly regarding tests), while amusing, were not what I wanted to advocate!

I found the gem of a blog,  Journey into Unschooling!  I've been following it a few months and never fail to find it a source of amusement and inspiration.  She also does brilliantly clear tutorials for many of the fun and funky things she does. 

I've also added Toad Haven under home school links.  It's kind of a blog and kind of a fount of the useful, amazing, amusing, and thoughtful.  These people ooze real life education, and I mean that in the best possible way!! 

There are also some new favorite sites, particularly Johnnie's Math Page, a 7-12 portal, and the Physics Game page.

Enjoy!

But We're Feeling Muuuch Better Now

I am doing fine now, things just got a little crazy there for a while.

Some of it was crazy in a good way: we went to the March Through Time (pictures coming), I finally filed the Giant Stack of Homeschool Papers (turned out I hadn't filed anything since ...Halloween, actually!), I accomplished the Ultimate Housekeeping Trifecta (getting the homeschool room, Lego/exercise room, and guest room cleaned at the same time!), we got the garden going for the year (another post), and made many visits to the Arboretum and local playgrounds.

Some of it was crazy in a bad way: the cooktop cracking (again!) and the bizarre annual stress of figuring out how to keep the co-op going for another year without just giving up on the older kids (bizarre because I think I don't actually need to get stressed out about this every year, but I really do).

And there was a whole lot of just life crazy: figuring out how to get the organizing and cleaning stuff done while still setting up the garden before the weeds took hold yet spending as much time as possible outside while the weather is nice. And homeschooling the kids.

At any rate, the end is in sight! I only have 4 more co-ops and 3 more CCD classes!

Lot O Life

I have a lot going on right now and I just don't have the emotional energy to blog. I will be able to blog about most of it within a week or so, but, til then, just pray for me, please!