Category Archive

Miss Attitude

One of the stated reasons that I choose to home educate my children is so that they will be free to follow their dreams so it seems odd in retrospect that I have been shooting down a dream. I only meant to be realistic but it seems that the universe might be trying to tell me something.

My daughter, like nearly every other little girl, wants to be a movie star or a model. I have always told her that it will never happen. She lives in Missouri, not Hollywood. Her daddy is not Billy Ray Cyrus. She is upper-lower class to lower-middle class with no friends in high places. She is pretty, but not drop dead gorgeous.

And I am not, not, not one of those moms. I cringe when I see little girls all dressed up with more make-up on than I own being dragged to ridiculous pageants. I admit that I judge those mothers harshly. I believe they are trying to live their own dream through their little girls.

But it just keeps coming up.

She was asked to help a university student with a research project. They came to our house with television cameras and interviewed her in her room surrounded by her things. She was only four. I asked why they wanted her when they had kids of their own they could have used. Because she would do a better job on camera, I was told. She’s bubbly. Out-going. Not shy.

Then Lexie was asked to model for the Springfield Ballet. She had an hours long photo shoot. She was in several of their advertising campaigns and brochures. She did a fantastic job. They approached us.

Then she was asked to model for the Discovery Center. She had an impromptu photo shoot in the science lab there. I never saw the flier or ad that came of it, but again, they approached us.

And now, tomorrow, Lexie is going to go shoot a commercial. I deliver her at 3:00 looking nice but natural. She will be on KY3. I got the phone call this afternoon. I don’t have any idea why she’s being asked to do this. I’m still shaking my head.

Meanwhile, I’m afraid I’ve been a bad mommy. I’m afraid I denied her a chance to follow her dream by telling her it was stupid and unrealistic. But her dream didn’t give up.

I feel like maybe I should have been dragging myself to ridiculous pageants all these years instead of insisting on science and history and reading. I feel like I should have sent her off to be on Kid Nation when she begged me to. I feel like I should have taken her to that audition in Branson to work in a show all summer even though I didn’t want her to work all summer long. I feel like I should have taken her when the Oscar Mayer Wiener people were in town looking for the star of their next commercial. And so on…

Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe I can say, “All right. We’ll do this thing.” But I don’t know where to start. Where does one sign up to be in a ridiculous pageant?

My apologies to the author of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

If you give a kid an African Violet, she’s going to need to repot it.

So you buy a cheap clay flowerpot and tell her she can paint it. You get out the acrylic paints and brushes and she paints the flowerpot. The flowerpot is left to dry and the paints don’t get put away.

That night you stay up too late and since your son is gone visiting Grandma this week, you sleep til noon the next day.

When you get up you find that the kid has emptied eighteen tubes of acrylic paint onto a serving platter since her pallet wasn’t big enough for all of them.

She has painted a wedding gift for her aunt on which she used exactly four of the eighteen colors.

She has also painted a picture on 20# bond printer paper that she wants to enter in the fair. It’s a good picture but she can’t enter it because it isn’t on a canvas. It’s on printer paper. You try to remember where you put the canvases you bought last summer for the fair but realize you have to buy more paint now and groan because those little tubes of acrylics are so expensive. So are the canvases but you bought a dozen of them last year expecting lots of do-overs and she only ended up using two of them.

She has ruined a total of four kitchen towels and her clothes. If there is anything that takes acrylic paint out of cloth you don’t know what it is.

But you don’t complain about any of it. You don’t want to squelch her creativity. And anyway, it’s your fault for sleeping late when you should have been supervising.

So, if you give a kid an African Violet, you’re going to need new paint, new towels, and new clothes. And you’re going to realize that it is time to start stressing about fair entries for this year.

And the violet still hasn’t been repotted.

This afternoon I was in the kitchen washing dishes while my daughter was watching Animal Planet.

She came in, as she often does, talking and waving her arms around, telling me all about the mating and reproduction methods of anglerfish. It went something like this:

“The female is ten times bigger than the male and when they mate, the male bites into the female and sucks blood from the female. Each day she absorbs more of him and eventually gets pregnant. Then after she has the babies he is just a lump and he stays there forever. And they stay that way for life. For life, Mom! Then he dies but he’s still there on her back for all eternity and she has to go get a new one.”

“Now, how would you like that, Mom?”

I am somewhat disturbed that my daughter seems to have some idea that reproduction is supposed to be enjoyable for the parties involved.

I just Googled anglerfish and found her account to be mostly true. From Wikipedia:

Some anglerfishes of the superfamily Ceratiidae employ an unusual mating method. Since individuals are presumably locally rare and encounters doubly so, finding a mate is problematic. When scientists first started capturing ceratioid anglerfish, they noticed that all of the specimens were females. These individuals were a few inches in size and almost all of them had what appeared to be parasites attached to them. It turned out that these “parasites” were the remains of male ceratioids.

I originally sent this email to our local homeschool group on 12/14/06.

Go ahead and laugh at me now because you will be as soon as you read this. Add to your list of famous last words, “I wonder what that tastes like?”

Several few months ago we were given a very large cactus. Our neighbor was moving to Florida and couldn’t move it. It spent the summer and fall outside. When it got too cold out I brought it inside. Well, the dog was chasing the cat and knocked the thing over. It shot out this milky fluid all over the place when it hit the floor. And I say, “I wonder what that tastes like?”

Turns out it tasted bad, very bad. It was downright painful, burning like fire, swelling up my mouth and throat. Nothing helped. Not water, not milk, not mouthwash. Then I got dizzy and developed a migraine-like headache. I was sick for 24 hours.

Upon googling I discovered that it is not a cactus at all but a succulent of the Euphorbia family. It is highly toxic. Some euphorbias are used to make poison arrows. I have to get rid of it. We have six cats, one dog, and two small children. This thing is only suitable for a home without pets or small children.

It is a lovely plant and I really think it’s too beautiful to simply put out in the garbage. It is in the laundry room under a fluorescent light until I can find a home it. I had to rescue it after my husband evicted it into the bitter cold and I hid it in there. He’s bound to find it and evict it again. So if you have no pets and your kids are older please take it.

What does this have to do with homeschooling? Not much. Sorry about that. But homeschoolers do have a natural curiosity that could cause a story like this to be told.