car nap

Here's how Turkish kids on a road trip take a nap...no kidding...this isn't the only time we've seen it...just the best picture we could get.

Road trippin

Sometimes we take a road trip. This is what it looks like when we do. Most of us wear pants, shorts, or some kind of clothing on our bottom half. Cort likes to camouflage himself into his carseat so we won't notice how many oreos and twizzlers he's going through. This was a 5 hour drive to Adana so I wanted to have an audio book. There was ONE audio book for kids at the library. It's a Neil Gaiman book, so I picked it up because I thought Bill would like it, then I read the back and put it right back down. Hello, freaky. But when I realize that it's the only kids audio book in the whole place...I get it and I'm the first person on the card to check it out.
So, Coraline was fun to listen to and slightly disturbing but did the trick because the bigs were silent for 95% of the trip. When you stop at the gas station in Turkey they bring you out a fancy little glass cup of chai (tea) with a darling, tiny spoon. Then they might offer to take a picture of your family who's all desperately running around because they've been stuck sitting still for 3 hours. Because everyone wants to have their picture taken when they're feeling like that.

Gross!

Castle

There's so much history in Turkey. Whenever we take a trip we can't decide what to see. Sometimes you're just driving on the highway and you can see a beautiful stone ampitheater from the road with houses built up around it and no signs anywhere- it's just a 2,000 year old site that no one took the time to chart.
There's a lot of incredible things we come across on these journeys. Iwant to stop and take pictures every 3 minutes as we drive. Look at those wonderful mountains, the blue sky, the clouds. How can the highway be this uneven and patched? Look at those slumdog millionaire kids beating eachother up in the park...isn't that beautiful? Look at that brick wall built out in the middle of nowhere and clearly building has stopped and someone has spray painted the turkish word 'for sale' on it. Who would buy it? What was it going to be? Why would anyone build something out there? Look at that truck that's overloaded to double it's size...any small wind will topple that thing over. Look at those men driving, all three of them squished together on the front seat so that the sheep has room in the backseat.
Look at that shepherd talking on his cell phone. It goes on and on like this for me....
The kids only notice when I say "Look! Cows!" because they are too busy reading or listening to the auido book. Sloane says things like "Cows? Where? Are they Turkish? I'm going to shoot them!" (I have no idea where this comes from...the bigs don't say anything like this).

Club Med

Then we went to the beach next to the amazing castle...there's another castle in the middle of the water on a castle-sized island and you can take a boat out to explore it. When we arrived we were fully clothed. Within 30 minutes the bigs were swimming and the littles were covered in sand...only partially wet.

phat lip

Poor little Cort. This was taken just after his forehead/nose/mouth scrape had healed up. I was standing right next to him, he tripped and fell on the floor. I reached down to pluck him up and NO KIDDING there was a spot of blood on the floor- that fast! He wasn't climbing or balancing or doing anything exciting...just walking, just fell on the floor and his lip was THIS big all of a sudden. These pictures were taken after icing and going to the library for storytime. (and before he scratched up his cheek falling off of a picnic table later that day.)

April

Summer school

So, I've been thinking about school some now. Billie had a birthday recently and we (I) have a little cycle I go through as a homeschooler. Here's how it goes: Billie has a birthday, always seems to happen right around March and suddenly I have to think of her in terms of a 'bigger kid'. Then I panic which goes something like this "SIX! Six? A six year old is like a BIG kid...like one of those kids I see in the street or at the playground, with cool clothes and they know about things and they know how to do stuff and everything. Billie is going to be six??! Now I really have to do some school-y stuff. I'm going to get serious. We're going to start writing every day...yeah. And I'll organize a schedule to make sure we do science at least twice a week and not just catching tadpole science. Yeah, that's it...I'm going to get serious." Step two is ordering an insane amount of books and supplies. Then I'm ready to get down to business...for real this time.
Then it's April and I'm making myself crazy trying to make sure we do 'real' school. I usually stick to my schedule for a couple weeks during this month. Then it's May and school kids are getting ready to wrap up their year of learning. Now it's time to give my kid the standardized test to make sure they are meeting the random standards of American kids their age. There is not one question about Ancient Egypt and nothing about Latin. Then I look over the test and I realized both kids have passed that 'grade level' by FAR. Then I think over my two weeks of quizzing them on 'adverbs' 'prefixs', making sure that they know what a molecule is, can they identify a ventricle and what is 7x9?
That's usually when I breathe a sigh of relief and think...that's not what learning is about. We need to be outside more, climbing trees, learning how to share, being honest, dancing, reading, reading, reading good literature. We need to be learning how to cook, writing letters, using manners at the dinner table, playing chess, talking, taking walks, going on vacation, take a good book up in a tree for an hour, roller skating, playing soccer, counting the money in piggy banks, writing poems, putting on our own plays, making birdhouses...
So, that's what we're doing this summer.
It's far from ideal and not exactly what people think of when they think of 'school' but it's fun and I'm stickin to it...until next March.