Grinding the gears

We've kept our noses to the grindstone and have been schooling like nobody's business.  There has been some resistance, but in general, the boys have been co-operating pretty nicely with the at-home school work.  Now, if I could just get that same compliance with everything else, life would be grand!  Hee Hee!

We're on our second semester, and we've started attending a homeschool co-op on Tuesdays.  There are quite a few kids of all ages at this co-op, so hopefully the boys will make some new pals.  They seem to be enjoying it thus far.

They are both taking sport stacking, which if you don't know what that is, here's a youtube video of some kids that are really good at it.  I haven't seen the boys actually doing the stacking, yet, but judging from the sounds coming from their classroom, it sounds like an active and energetic time in there!

They are also both in a class called Games, funnily enough, because they bring games from home to play with the other kids in the class.  So far, Super Mario Memory has been the favorite.

Then we break for lunch, and during our first week, our friend Lilly interviewed us as Family of the Week for the Co-op Newsletter.  Eddie was also interviewed by another girl for the Boy of the Week feature.

After lunch, both boys take fencing.  I'm one of the assistants in that class, so I got pictures of them last week.  Fencing is hard work!

Eddie to the left, Andrew to the right

The fourth session of the day is when they split up.  Andrew is taking a class called The Amazing Human Body, and Eddie is taking a Drawing class.

It appears they've been discussing the digestive system in Andrew's class, which is awesome, because we've been learning about the digestive system in our health book.

Here's the paper he brought home from co-op this week.

Eddie is learning about perspective in drawing class:

He drew his name in 3D in his gigantic drawing pad.

The other outside activities the kids have been doing these past few weeks are theatre class for Andrew and golf lessons for Ed.

Andrew's theatre class put on a puppet show of The Lorax by Dr. Seuss.  They did a wonderful job and I really enjoyed the set decorations.

Eddie is doing well in golf and has moved up to the intermediate level class after just six weeks.  Here he is on his first day:

 

While it makes for a busy week with the driving here and there, I think we're all getting a lot out of all of the activities.

We also took a field trip to the James A. Garfield House in Mentor.  That's a really interesting place, if any of you local people have never been there.  It's a National Park Service site, so they have a Junior Ranger Program, which the kids worked on while we were there.

Here are a couple of the activities the boys did:

 

And here are some photos of the day:

Memory Work:

Except for a few new science terms and new French and Latin vocabulary words, we haven't added anything to memory work for a while.

Language Arts:

We just read the last chapter in Paragraph Town and the boys have been learning what it means to write a good paragraph.  I had them attempt to write a well organized paragraph, with a topic sentence about any subject of their choosing, and here's what I got:

I actually thought these were not bad paragraphs from the two kids who hate writing more than anything.  Obviously, I need to buy some lined paper.  That might help with the handwriting.  Possibly.  I won't hold my breath.

We worked on some more 4 part analysis of sentences:

And we did some more worksheets about language mechanics:

Remind me why I introduced this kid to e. e. cummings.

 


We've done a few spelling units, and continued to plug away at the cursive handwriting book.

 

For reading, I've had them read several non fiction books about varying subjects.  I have them all listed in my 2012-2013 Reading post.  We are on the last disc of Jefferson's Sons and I have another audiobook lined up for when we've finished.  Should be any day now.  The boys also read James and The Giant Peach for book club.  I had read it to them about 3 years ago, but they enjoyed reading it themselves this time around.

Math:

The Measurement book has been fun lately. 

Apparently, this one wasn't so fun.  Check out the name at the top.

This activity was great.  Below are the pictures they drew "to scale" for this worksheet.  I wish I could have included the ones that took more than one sheet.

Math U See has become a little more interesting lately, too:

 

 

Finding the area of a trapezoid, learning expanded notation, starting division with remainders, and reviewing a bunch of stuff!  Check out Andrew's commentary on the top of the last page.

History:

There is so much to cover in Story of the World, that it's impossible to get it all done in the standard 36 weeks of school, unless you do nothing but history.  That's why we always work on it into the summer.  But, since becoming so behind, I've been really working on getting in as many history lessons as we can.  We've powered through several chapters in the last month.  We're now at the tail end of the 1800's and the beginning of the 1900's.  We are reading a couple of chapter books that are set in some of the places we've learned about- The Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark and Nory Ryan's Song by Patricia Reilly.

 


 

When we learned about the Young Bulgarians, we did a little project making Martenitsas. You can read about the Bulgarian tradition of Martenitsas in this video.

Science:

We've read chapters 6-9 in our RS4K Physics book.  We have read a few more chapters in the Basher Physics book, as well as several sections about electricity and waves in the Usborne Science Encyclopedia.

We did Experiment 6 in the Lab Book, which worked very well:

We learned how electrons will travel from the surface of one object and create a charge in another object.

We've had some snafus with experiments 7 & 8, so I need to see if we can do them at another time by switching out some of the materials that weren't working.


French and Latin:

In French, Chapter 6 was a review chapter, so I gave them a test on what we've covered so far this year.  Neither of them were able to conjugate être, so since the test, we've been taking more time on verbs.  We started Chapter 7, which is all about regular -er verbs.

 

In Latin, we learned about -are verb endings in the present tense.  We are moving through the book and the boys are retaining more and more of the vocabulary.

The story of Echo and Narcissus was in the book, and here's Andrew's version of the story:

Logic:

We're doing deduction activities from our Connections book.

 

And yes, Eddie is now going by the alias Maverick.

Health:

We finally made our lobe helmets.  This was a messy, but enjoyable, project.

We finished up the nervous system and moved on to the digestive system.  Here's the version of the digestive system that we labeled:

Yes, we had a lot of goofy boy laughing while writing the word anus.

Then we learned about the body's pH level and how we should try to maintain a slightly alkaline body to be in good health.  We bought pH test strips that you swipe through your urine stream (big fun!), and we discovered that Mom is the only alkaline resident of the household (big surprise, there!).  So, we looked at the chart in our health book and found the foods we had been eating recently to see where they fell on the chart.  Then, the boys each wrote a list of foods of which they could eat more to try to elevate their pH levels.

 

P.E. we definitely have covered at co-op with fencing and sport stacking.

Art:

Since we're not doing the Willoughby Arts Center anymore, I've done a couple of art projects with them here at home, both of which I found on Pinterest, of course.

These were done by painting over a cardstock cut out, then removing it.  Watercolors can get under the cardstock pretty easily when you use a lot of water.

To do this project, you make a design with school glue on paper, then pour salt over the glue.  Then, you touch watercolors gently onto the salt and watch the color spread.  Eddie used black paint on his salt, which turned a kind of gray.  We do have these hanging up in the school room, but they sluff off a lot of salt, so beware!

Music:

We have done no music since the Willoughby Center.  I'm putting this here to remind myself that I wanted to start them back up on the recorder.  Need to add that to the lesson plans!

Juice and Smoothie Recipes

For my BFF, who shall remain nameless, because she's not fond of internet exposure:

I present a link to my Juicing and Smoothie Board on Pinterest

http://pinterest.com/lynnique/juicing-and-smoothies/

Enjoy!

Miso Soup

I can tell this is going to be my new lunch obsession.  I used a brown rice miso in water and added rice vermicelli, this mushroom spice blend, green onions, and bean sprouts.  Warm and delicious.

A New Concoction

I needed to come up with something to do with the leftover chicken from our chicken noodle soup, and also with a half a head of cabbage.  I wanted it to be fairly low-cal at the same time.  So, I made a salad of the chicken, grated cabbage, celery, yellow pepper, radishes, red onion, cilantro, and carrots.  I made a dressing of raw honey, raw apple cider vinegar, and flax oil.  Then I dumped it on a bed of baby spinach.  A tasty and healthy lunch, if I do say so myself.

Sharing is good!

My sister Danielle made this yummy dish of carrots, celery, red & yellow peppers, green onions, chick peas in a peanut satay sauce.  Served over brown rice.  So delicious.  I'm so delighted to have someone else cook a meal for me!

Thinking about cancer today

Warning:  Graphic photos of my scar - don't look if you don't want to be grossed out.


It's coming up on 4 months since I went to the hospital with excruciating abdominal pain and ended up with emergency surgery and the diagnosis of ovarian cancer.  It's been an emotional roller coaster ever since.

 After some scans in the ER, the attending gynecologist told me that I had a large cyst on my ovary and that it had caused a torsion, which was causing the intense pain.  He told me it was probably not cancer, but that they were going to have a gynecologic oncologist on hand, just on the off chance that it was cancer.  If the cyst  was malignant, they would most likely remove my other ovary, fallopian tubes, and possibly the uterus.  I agreed (in my fog of pain and dilaudid) that this was okay with me.  I just wanted the pain to be gone.  At that point I would have agreed to have my whole torso cut off.

The next thing I remember is waking up in the recovery room surrounded by my husband, my mother, my sister, my best friend, and possibly others.  The first question out of my mouth- "Was it cancer?"  Someone, I think it was my mom, said, "Yes."  I vaguely remember the surgeon coming over and telling me all the things they removed- both ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, cervix, appendix, omentum, and several lymph nodes.  They also found an umbilical hernia and fixed that while they were in there.  The incision went from the bottom of my sternum all the way down to my pubic bone.  I was told that I had a very large tumor on my left ovary and some spread to the right ovary.  They took out all the other things because ovarian cancer usually spreads to these areas.  The surgeon told me and my family that it was an aggressive type of cancer and that I would need chemotherapy, which would start in about 5 weeks.

The surgery was on a Sunday night.  By Wednesday evening, I was ready to get out of the hospital and get home to my own bed and real food.  Friends and family visiting, bringing food, bringing flowers, bringing books and other gifts and lots and lots of cards were what got me through those first few weeks.  I can never thank them enough.

Part of my cancer posse with their teal ribbon shirts.

I can never thank my sisters and mom enough for taking care of me and taking care of my children and my house when I couldn't do it.  If not for them, this whole period of my life would have been much, much worse.

Not everything went smoothly, though.   The first night home I threw up.  Probably from eating too much real food after eating almost nothing at the hospital.  Possibly from the horrible Vicodin, which I didn't take anymore.  I stuck to Advil after that, which if you take a look at the incision, you can see that Advil was not quite enough, so I was pretty uncomfortable.

Here's a self portrait, looking pathetic, propped up in the recliner chair we made Michael drag back into my room.

We had some fighting and arguing about what to do.  I didn't want to try to get my pathology report while I was still just trying to get out of bed and move around a little each day.  I wanted to heal enough, so that if the pathology report was really bad news, I wouldn't burst my staples out with crying.  Some people wanted to get the pathology report ASAP so that we could start researching what to do.  Everything hinges on that pathology report.  Ovarian cancer is a pretty generic term.  There are several different types and different levels of each type of ovarian cancer.  The treatments  and prognosis can vary widely depending on the type and aggressiveness of the cancer.

Well, here's what I was trying to heal up before finding out the bad news:

Before getting staples out- about 1 week after surgery

After staples out- about 4 weeks after surgery, keloids starting to form.

About 2 weeks after my surgery, I went for a check up to have the staples removed.  I was actually healing up quite nicely, and was feeling rather well, under the circumstances.  At that appointment, the nurse practitioner was able to print off the preliminary pathology report, which had been performed by the hospital's general pathologist.  It was not the final report, because the samples were being sent to the main Cleveland Clinic campus to be reviewed by a gynecologic oncology pathologist.

The news from the pathology report was pretty good.  Not nearly as bad as the surgeon had led us to believe.  The tumor had been enormous- 17 cm X 15 cm X 9 cm and classified as serous adenocarcinoma.  Not great, but not the worst kind, either. The best part was that it wasn't a fast growing kind.  It was actually a low grade tumor, which meant that it wasn't very aggressive after all.  We could all finally breathe a little sigh of relief.  That report also showed that it hadn't spread anywhere except to the right ovary, which was also a relief. The lymph nodes being clear was the biggest relief of all.

Things were starting to look up- until a week later when I went to see the surgeon/oncologist that performed my surgery.  To say that we had a clash of personalities would be an understatement.  I left that office feeling violated and abused and hopeless and angry and discouraged and disgusted and a whole bunch of other emotions which I can't even remember.  In his dismissive and arrogant way, he discussed "the protocol"  with me.  Well, you can't actually call it a discussion- more like Nellie and I asking questions and he rudely ignoring them while saying a bunch of bull shit and trying to get us out of there as quickly as possible so he could go to lunch.   Anyway, "the protocol" (a word he repeated at least 20 times in our 15 minute visit) was to consist of my getting doses of carboplatin and taxol intravenously every 3 weeks for a total of 6 sessions.  After that, I would go for periodic check ups to have my CA 125 (a marker in the blood that can indicate cancer) level checked to make sure it was in the normal range.  He hadn't read my pathology report in full. He actually sat there glancing through it for the first 3 minutes of our meeting.  He was just telling me what they "DO" in these situations and assuming I would just accept that because he said so.

At first, I felt bad, but then I just got angry and thought, "You need to know with whom you're dealing, Dr.  Macho!"

Weee-lllll, after much anguish and torment, and calling and talking to one of the nurse practitioners, I decided to change over to another gyno oncologist in the practice.  When Dr. Macho found out about it, he actually called me at home.  He wanted to know why I was switching, and I told him exactly why.  He already knew some of what I said, because I had talked to the nurse about it.  So, I'm assuming he was forced to call me, but I must say that he did apologize for making me uncomfortable, and told me that if it were his wife in my situation, he would want her to feel at ease with her choice of doctor.  I have to say that although I still think we would never get along in a million years, I respected him for apologizing to me.

He then went on to tell me that he had received the final pathology report and the tumor board had just discussed it that morning.  Based on what he had seen in surgery, he was very surprised to find out that it was a low grade tumor.  He told me that it was both good and bad.  The good news was that it could take a very long time for the tumor to grow back. The bad news was that chemo was not very effective on these types of tumors.  So I asked if they still recommended chemo, then.  He said that yes they did still recommend it because there was like a 30% benefit to doing it.  Not wanting to get into a long conversation with him, I let it go and figured I'd ask the other oncologist about it.

Meanwhile, my mom, my sisters, my husband, my best friend and I had all been reading everything we could get our hands on about ovarian cancer.  The Gathering Place library was a good resource.  The Gathering Place is super awesome all around.  I felt pretty confident that I knew as much as I could possibly know before meeting with the second oncologist.  And, before meeting with him, I had pretty much decided that I was not going to do chemo.  I couldn't find any article or book which said that chemo was an effective method of treating low grade carcinomas.  It appears that they just do chemo because there is no better treatment, so they throw something at the cancer to make it seem like they are doing something about it. I told my family that I was thinking about not doing the chemo.  Everyone said it was my decision, but most of them thought I should probably go along with what the doctor said.

So, the next week, I met with the second gynecologic oncologist (whom I'd met briefly on rounds during my hospital stay).  Although still somewhat on the arrogant surgeony side, he was MUCH easier to talk with and did not send my jerk-o-meter into overdrive.  I asked him many, many questions.  So did Nellie.  He answered every one, although you could tell that he thought we were a little over the top with the questions. He still didn't act dismissive of us, though, which was great.  He was thorough in his answers and I felt reassured that I had made the right choice to switch doctors.

However, after talking with him, I was once again back to being very frightened.  It seems my final pathology report wasn't quite as rosy as the first had been.  Not only had the cancer spread to the right ovary, it had spread to the left fallopian tube and they found cells in the peritoneal washings.  So, instead of being stage 1C as we originally thought, I was actually at a Stage 2.  Also, the way he described the kind of cancer cells I had was very graphic and creepy.  I imagined them looking something like this:

Scary, no?

I confirmed with him that there were no other treatments beside chemo, nor were there any current trial studies for which I was eligible.  I asked him about the 30% benefit that Dr. Macho had mentioned.  He said that 30% of women in my situation who had the chemo did not experience a recurrence in 5 years.  So, that means 70% do have a recurrence in 5 years.  Ooooo-kay.   Hmmmm.  I asked if there were stats on the women with my diagnosis who choose not to do chemo.  He said there weren't enough cases for those stats.  So, basically, it could be exactly the same as those who do have the chemo.  No one knows.  I was very lucky to have my tumor discovered at stage 2.  Most often, this type of cancer is not discovered until it has spread all over and is then pretty much impossible to beat.

Learning that there were more cancerous areas than I'd originally thought terrified me.  Instead of telling him that I didn't want to do chemo, I let them show me all around the chemo section and I spoke with the chemo nurse, and set up an appointment for my first chemo session. I kind of decided on the spot that I should probably do the chemo, just in case.  Maybe those crazy, ugly cells would be afraid of the poisonous toxins. I know I was.

So, I came home and told everyone that I was doing the chemo after all.  Except, that night, I couldn't sleep at all.  The nagging thoughts about all the other stuff I had read prior to my visit with Onco-Gyn #2 came flooding back. So, I got back on the computer and read some more stuff.  It confirmed my prior position that chemo was probably not the best choice for me.  I mean, really.  Why would I put my body through the physical torture of chemo when I was barely healed from a major, traumatic surgery, when there is only a 30% chance that it would give me 5 years cancer free?  So, I changed my mind back again, then dealt with the agony of telling everyone again that I wasn't going to do the chemo after all.  By this time, a couple more people had read the stuff I read, and agreed that it didn't really make sense to do the chemo, even though that's what the doctors wanted me to do.

I'm really not one who likes to rock the boat, so I was experiencing great trepidation about calling the doctor back and canceling the chemo.  I mean, I'd already gone rogue and demanded a new doctor.  I didn't want to be that pain in the ass person who always has to do things her own way.

"Can't somebody else do this for me?  I don't want to have to call that place again . . ."

About 3 days before I was supposed to go in, I  finally got up the courage to call and tell them I wasn't going to do the chemo after all.  When I called, I spoke with the chemo nurse, and when I told her I changed my mind, she said in a nonchalant voice, "Well, that makes sense since you have a low grade tumor."  WHAT?!?!?  That's not what I expected to hear.  She told me she'd tell the doctor and let me know what he said.  She called me back a few minutes later, and he was like, "Okay, no prob.  Make an appointment for 3 months from now, and we'll check how you're doing."  SERIOUSLY?
That was it.  I hadn't needed to be so worried about calling them.  Even they knew that chemo was a ridiculous and pointless attempt at treatment for this type of tumor.

Even though I'm still scared to death about the cancer, and I'm facing my first check up after declining chemo, I'm also 100% sure that I made the right decision.  If I'd gone the chemo route, I'd be sitting here with no hair on a 22°F day, feeling sick and miserable.  Instead, I chose a different route.  I chose to do other things about which I may blog when it's not so cold and my fingers aren't so freezing.  But mainly, I resolved to try to live as healthily as possible for however long I have to do so.

It had better be a long time, because there are SO many books we haven't read, yet!

I feel good, people tell me I look good.  I'm just living my life day to day and trying to keep the negative thoughts at bay. Looking forward to April, when I have 2 weekend getaways and celebrate my 44th birthday.  And hopefully, the weather will be much improved.

New Year, Old School

The holidays were busy as usual, and we didn't quite fit in as much school as I'd hoped, but that is to be expected for this time of year.  I have a few weeks of old lesson plans to finish up before I spend a chunk of time figuring out what to do when, for the rest of the year.  We have some changes to our schedule coming up, and I need to revamp how we will fit in all of our lessons.  Andrew will be taking Theatre at the Solon Center for the Arts.  Eddie will be learning how to golf at the Golf Dome in Chagrin Falls.  And to top it all off, we joined a homeschool Co-op which we will begin attending in February.  I'm excited about meeting some new homeschoolers, and Eddie is excited about hanging around with some of the kids he met at the Fine Arts class.  Andrew will learn to love it, I hope.   He would be an excellent hermit.

So, the kids finished up their classes at the Willoughby Fine Arts center, and we were treated to a Performance Night.  When we first arrived, there was a table in the lobby, where all of there visual arts creations were stacked for us to look through and take home.  Some of Eddie's artwork had gone missing, so he didn't have a big stack.

 

Here's Andrew's portrait of Clancy the Dog.

They worked on comic books, so here is one of Andrew's pages.

The older kids did India ink drawings with quills.

Then, we proceeded to the auditorium, where we got to witness drum circle, modern dance and acting out of scenes.  They were all pretty cute.  Here are some pictures from the performances:

I really need to get a real camera instead of using my phone!

Holiday Week:

We took a break from regular school work for a little bit to do some fun holiday stuff.  Scheduling conflicts seemed to interfere somewhat, so this holiday week wasn't quite as idyllic as last year's, but I think they enjoyed it anyway.

They did some holiday themed math pages, puzzles, stories, etc.  And we read several holiday books, which you can see in my 2012-2013 reading post. 

I let the spelling, punctuation and capitalization go, because I just didn't have the energy, and this was supposed to be fun.  But, I've told these kids they are going to have to stay "after school" for remedial handwriting and language arts, since they can't seem to remember the basic things we covered a gazillion times.

*

*

*notice our family word for ornaments (ornabobs) made it onto both of these pages!

We did a couple of Christmas craft projects, like making these paper trees, and these ice cream cone trees:

Memory Work:

Still reviewing poems, foreign language and science vocabulary, Newton's Law of Motion, and grammar lists.  The boys have begun learning Oh Captain, My Captain by Walt Whitman.  This poem was in both our history book and our poetry book, so it was fated that we learn it.  I so wish they were old enough to watch Dead Poets' Society with me!

Language Arts:

We finished the Grammar Town book.  We reviewed phrases and clauses, and learned about independent and dependent clauses and sentence types.  We started analyzing the sentences in Practice Town and will continue with that book for the rest of the year.

We did a couple more lessons in spelling- with ie words and words that end in y.

Andrew read I Survived: Hurricane Katrina and Ed read The Story of Doctor Dolittle, and they both did book reports on these books.  We are on disc 5 of Jefferson's Sons and still enjoying it.

Math:

We are now done with Lesson 12 in MUS.  We did a couple of Measurement worksheets and talked about adding and subtracting with negative numbers a little.

History:

We did two more chapters in Story of the World, and learned about The Triple Alliance in Paraguay, The Dominion of Canada, the many changes of government in France, and the Second Reich in Prussia.  Lots of stuff happening in the world in the late 1800s!

Science:

We read Chapter 5 in RS4K Physics, Chapter 6 in Basher Physics, and several pages in our Usborne Science Encyclopedia- all relating to chemical and nuclear energy.

We did experiment 5 in the lab book, which was really cool!  We made a battery out of cells.  The cells were pennies, paper towels dipped in salt water, and aluminum foil.  We connected each end to a volt meter to measure the output of our battery, then we added cells to see if more voltage was produced.  The boys plotted their outcomes on a graph.  

French and Latin:

In French, we finished Lesson 5 and learned about conjugating -er verbs.

In Latin, we are learning more about the different verb endings indicating the subject, thus eliminating the need for subject pronouns.

The story of Pandora was also in their Latin books, so I had them illustrate the story.  Here is Andrew's version of what came out of Pandora's box:

And Eddie's:

That about sums it up.  Except for dance at Willoughby, Health and PE kind of fell by the wayside this time around.  I plan to get back on track with it when I start the new section of lesson plans.