Team Gray!

Our dryer has been squeaking lately. I looked it up and found out it was a belt issue, and thought I could wait a minute before getting it fixed.

Today that was that minute’s time.

And the dryer almost blew it by not squeaking. That was my fault, running the dryer before the repairman got here. And the I couldn’t get the dumb thing to start squeaking for anything!

But the first thing the repairman told me was that a Frigidaire dryer wouldn’t have a belt issue. It could be any number of things, but he couldn’t tell for sure until her heard the squeak.

So he waited.

And discovered that our ducts were clogged. Our dryer wasn’t venting properly, and that could be contributing to the mysterious squeak.

Eventually, the squeak returned, and the repairman knew that it was a bad ball bearing. Mind you, this dryer has been run just about every day since we got it back in 2007. We have a lot of laundry.

So the guy fixed the ball bearing and told me how to clean the ducts. As I stood on the ladder in the basement unscrewing brackets which held up the ducts, I first thought, it’s a good thing I’m working out so much… Then I thought, I can’t imagine my mother ever doing this…climbing and standing on a ladder, fumbling with screwdrivers and flashlights and lanterns, getting so dust all over her pants, face and glasses.

So I found out where the dryer duct runs, how and when to clean it, and now our dryer doesn’t overheat, and it so much more efficient.

I didn’t around to working out today, but I know something accounts for the sore back, arms and hands…

Drill: any strict, methodical, repetitive, or mechanical training, instruction, or exercise

discipline: behavior in accord with rules of conduct; behavior and order maintained by training and control

habit: an acquired behavior pattern regularly followed until it has become almost involuntary

These words go through my head everyday. I am convinced that our homeschool–nee, family success lies in these three interrelated concepts.

We started the drill sometime last school year, probably in the Spring or Summer, as we were wrapping up our math for the year, I thought I needed a new approach to help the children learn their fact families and perfect their fact practice tests.

My husband downloaded Math Bingo, a game that reinforced addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts. I remembered a game we used to play called Sumsense.

That’s two elements of the drill. The third is the piano. I have three children who have fact sheets and study Suzuki piano, so we rotate stations first thing in the morning.

I tell the children to do their drill, and they know when they’re to do which station. Since we’ve been doing the drill, I have seen such improvement in each child’s piano performance and math scores.

I am reminded that Charlotte Mason was a strong advocate of establishing good habits.

I have noticed that my daughter who would practice piano whether I told her to or not is also the most consistent with her math facts. She is solid in math, even though she describes herself as ‘not a math person.’ It could be that she is the oldest of the three, and has had more time to learn her facts. It could also be argued that she has been studying piano longest.

But I have seen improvement in all the children, and the younger children are scoring higher at their level than their older sister did at their age.

All of this is enough incentive to continue the drill, even though sometimes I worry that nobody initiates it themselves, and am I stealing their joy of learning? Or does it really justify the time it takes?

And then I must have faith that establishing routines and habits will serve the children in the long run, whether they play the piano, or compute math sums, run a household, write computer programs, or whatever.

My favorite stories growing up were Anansi the Spider Man and The Snow Queen.

And probably for the same reason. The pictures in these books were mesmerizing. I tried to copy both styles, to varying effect.

The Snow Queen illustrations were like the puppet Christmas specials, like Rudolph and Santa Claus is Coming to Town. But since they were still pictures, rather than animations, the illustrations looked like dolls.

I posed my Sunshine Family and Happy Family dolls into different story scenarios and photographed them. I tried to make slides and photos, but I didn’t have the skills. It just looked like shadowed, slightly blurry, boring photos–nothing like the magic I saw in my golden press Snow Queen story.

I had a little better luck with the Anansi story, probably because I didn’t give up. I tried to do a scroll interpretation of the story when I was younger, 2nd or 3rd grade or so. This was where I copied the pictures and stories onto a roll of paper and stretched the story between two dowels in a cardboard box. The story scrolled through my makeshift screen like a primitive film strip.

Later, probably 8th grade or so, I had another go at copying the Anansi story. This time, I copied the backgrounds as nearly as I could with markers on art paper, and then shot slides using dolls and African figurines as the main characters. My parents helped by borrowing a light box from the University so I could shoot my pictures in proper lighting.

My father and I narrated the story on tape and played a little jazz in the background.

I turned this project in as an English assignment; I forget which, but the experience was more valuable than the finished project.

I have since moved on to having my children act out our favorite stories on videotape. Maybe practice will improve those efforts?