Having my own homegrown techie available to help me with my site and blog is really convenient, but it has its hazards. She can do things that I can’t do, and I can’t undo.
Case in point: Dd17 was going through one of my childhood photo albums when she suddenly decided my blog needs a photo of me….hence the new addition to the upper right corner of this blog.
“Mom,” she says, “You still have bangs, and you still make that face sometimes!”
Yep, some things never change 🙂
I used to have a poster just like this one on my wall, because when I was a teen, my favorite movie star was Humphrey Bogart. The fact that he died the year before I was born made no difference to me. I grew up watching his films on television and thought he was the best actor ever.
Since then, I’ve widened my knowledge of films and the people who appear(ed) in them, but I still enjoy his work. This past week, my husband and I watched two of his films with dd17 in hopes of teaching her how to recognize and appreciate good movies. (Note: we tried this with our older two with mixed results. Hopefully, three’s the charm!)
First up, “Casablanca.” This very famous movie was made during World War II and includes a wonderful cast beyond Bogart, including Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Raines, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre. Romantically bittersweet, it has a theme of personal sacrifice. It’s a terrific film and well-worth watching with your teens.
Next is “Sabrina,” a Billy Wilder film about a chauffeur’s daughter who finds romance in the wealthy family that employs her father. Many believe that Bogart was miscast in this film, and I admit that he often seems uncomfortable. The climax of the film is quite unbelievable. And yet somehow it works.
By the way, “Sabrina” is a showcase for Audrey Hepburn, and a great introduction to her work if you don’t know much about her. My daughter already knew who she was, having seen her recently in “Roman Holiday” (another great movie about personal sacrifice) and “Charade.”
While “Casablanca” would be of interest to both sexes, “Sabrina” is more of a chick flick, although I’m sure someone as poised as Audrey Hepburn would have come up with a more elegant way of describing it. 😉
This past weekend we celebrated our son’s 16th birthday. While all of our children’s birthdays are special, his are a yearly reminder of God’s goodness in caring for him when he was a critically ill newborn. Back when he lay in his isolette with tubes taped to him and monitor leads stuck on him, we didn’t know that he would become the healthy, strong and happy young man he is today. So we celebrate!
I wish we could have known back then that he would be ok. I also wish we could have known that having a baby with disabilities is not the trauma it looks like at first.
It was 16 years ago yesterday that a doctor we’d never seen before interrupted our celebratory hospital dinner (champagne, steak, éclairs) to bluntly tell us that our son had suddenly begun having trouble breathing, his heart wasn’t working right, he would have to be transferred to a larger hospital, and oh, by the way, we think he might have Down syndrome.
Great bedside manner, that guy. It was like being hit by a ton of bricks. At first, we chose to deal with the health issues rather than the spare chromosome and what it meant, because the health issues were more pressing. But once our son began to stabilize, we had to face the fact that he was quite different from his siblings in some important and unchangeable ways.
Like most parents with a special needs child, we discovered that there’s a grief process you go through when you have a child with disabilities. You have to accept that he won’t be president, won’t be a scholar, and in the case of Down syndrome, won’t get to raise a child of his own someday.
But once you learn to stop focusing on the things he won’t do, you can begin to celebrate the things he does. You learn about them as they happen. He brings joy to your family, he works hard to master every little step of development, he teaches his siblings about love and sacrifice, and he’s used by God to strengthen your faith. I hope I don’t come across as a goody-two-shoes when I say that he is actually a great blessing. I wish we could have known that when we got his diagnosis, but at least we know it now.
He’s a lot of fun as well as an occasional source of frustration. That makes him just like his siblings. Yes, I worry about his future, especially when I read terrible things like this. But I also worry about our older children: our daughter living alone in a large city, our son traveling all over the country on business (and out of the country on mission trips), and our younger daughter, who is just reaching the age where she must make some important decisions about her future. Parenting has exponentially increased my prayer life!
And that’s a good thing. God uses parenting to grow us and to make us into the people he wants us to become. The tools he uses for this are our children, who happen to be a blessing in their own right.
That’s just one reason why their birthdays are so special. In the case of our youngest, we also celebrate the fact that he’s made it through so many challenges and is still here with us. For that, we are grateful!
Today dd17 and I worked together on the Tax Project found in Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers.
It’s a weird feeling, teaching my child out of a book that I wrote. But I wrote it eight years ago, and that’s long enough that I sometimes forget the author’s identity for a second 🙂
We sometimes get questions from people asking how old a teen should be to do Life Prep. We respond that it depends on the teen, their goals and which project in the book is being considered.
For instance, a 14-year-old boy will find the Car Project (link goes to free download of this project) a lot more interesting than the Credit Card project, just because most boys of that age are eagerly looking forward to having their own cars.
In the case of the Tax Project, we tell people to wait until their teen has a job that generates a paycheck. There’s nothing like receiving a check for less than you earned (because of taxes, Medicare, and Social Security) to get your attention. It’s amazing how that event can arouse a teen’s curiosity about taxes (primarily why they’re so high!)
Since dd17 has been earning paychecks since last summer, this was a great time to do the Tax Project. Add the fact that it’s time to determine if she needs to file a tax return for 2008, and she was more than eager to do the project. There’s nothing like a receptive student, is there?
It all went well, and only took a few hours. However, I learned that one part of the Tax Project has changed since I wrote it. In the book, I referred to a little pie chart inside the IRS’ 1040 booklet that showed exactly where our tax dollars go. That pie chart is gone, and I could not find it on the IRS web site.
However, I did find a simplified version of it in an IRS Power Point pdf (see page 5). It may be simplified, but it’s as depressing as ever. Dd and I had a good discussion about that, too. We homeschoolers are so fortunate to have the time to teach our teens about these things before they leave home.
One of the things homeschooled kids miss out on is being criticized by teachers for their personal beliefs.
I don’t think it’s bad to miss out on such experiences, but it does get me thinking about how to prepare (or whether it’s possible to prepare) our college-bound homeschooled offspring for that kind of situation, which is becoming increasingly common.
Not that it never happened in the past, of course. I recall being graded down in Biology 100 back at the good old U of I for refusing to accept the theory of evolution as a valid one. And as recently as last fall, my teenage daughter took some flak from her community college professor (in a graphic arts class, no less) for commenting that she liked Sarah Palin.
But it appears that the teachers are becoming more vehement and profane:
Jonathan Lopez, who is working on his associate of arts degree at Los Angeles City College, quoted a dictionary definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman and cited several Bible verses during a public speaking class in late November, his suit says. His professor, John Matteson, interrupted, called Lopez a “fascist bastard” and refused to let him finish his address, according to the suit.
Nice, huh? We don’t have to worry about Jonathan, who has since sued the college district with the help of the Alliance Defense Fund. But what about our kids? John Matteson isn’t the only idiot professor out there. Can we prepare our kids for this kind of attack, and if so, how?
I think we should warn them that this happens, and discuss ways they can deal with it. In the case of my daughter, we discussed the inappropriateness of her teacher’s remarks (which I won’t go into here), especially since her dad and I were paying $400 for graphic design instruction, not misguided knee-jerk political philosophy. We also talked about what she wished she would have said, and what she’ll do when (not if) it happens again. We talked about knowing what you believe and why you believe it. And I told her I was proud of her for politely standing up for herself when verbally attacked by an authority figure.
Did I leave anything out? What else can we do?
