Cotton Gins, Charles Dickens, and Cleaning Up Faster than Barney

This is a cotton gin:

Interestingly, you cannot find a real cotton gin within 50 square miles of Tampa, Florida.  I tried every pioneer village from here to Dade City and no one has one.  One such facility even told me that they had cotton . . . just no cotton gin.

Good gravy, what are they going to do with their cotton???

It appears that I need to travel to Georgia to actually fulfill this educational goal.

We have “upped the ante” with this half of the school year.  In the fall, I heeded traditional homeschooling wisdom and gave Casey a few light months to settle into homeschooling.  The overachiever in me felt that maybe we were not doing enough, but I resisted the urge to add anything else to the daily schedule.  For the spring, however, we have added a typing course, a more intensive science curriculum from Sonlight, and we are going to write more and read more difficult books.

We started A Tale of Two Cities two weeks ago and are plodding through it, one or two chapters a day.  The book is set during the French Revolution so it coincided with our history studies (thankfully, our history activity book did not require us to make a guillotine out of toilet paper rolls and razor blades). The language is extremely difficult — lots of long, nearly unmanageable words for a 9 year old, like “transmutation” and “equidistant.”  It is almost completely over his head, but it’s almost completely over my head as well (what on earth is “transmutation”?), so we stop quite a bit and I explain passages to him or remind him which country we are in and which two people look very much like each other (because that becomes very important later).  I’ve always read Casey books that were too difficult for him, but even so, this one is pushing it.  If we make it all the way through, we’ll be making a visit to Planet Smoothie for a victory frozen yogurt.

In other household news, I managed to get the kids to clean up our completely wrecked first floor this afternoon by inventing a new game.  I wrote small, discrete jobs on slips of paper (e.g., “pick up all the dirty clothes and take them upstairs to the laundry room,” “take any toy with wheels on it upstairs to its proper bin in the playroom,” “pick up all LEGOs and take them to the LEGO table in the playroom,” “pick up all shoes and put them in the shoe basket”).  There were fourteen separate small tasks to perform.  I folded all the slips of paper and put them in a basket.

The rules of the game were that each child would pull a job out of the basket, race to complete the job, and then come back for a new job.  The child with the most jobs completed once all the slips were gone would earn $3 in extra commission.  The problem with picking up and putting away in our house is that Mace doesn’t really help unless you are standing over him and harping at him and then Casey is resentful that he’s having to do most of the work and slows down to super slo-mo speed.  It is typically an all-afternoon endeavor just to get clothes, shoes, and toys picked up and put away.

Today, it took 15 minutes.  And when the game was over, each of the children had completed the same number of tasks, so I gave both of them a $3 commission bonus.

That’s right . . . today I’m Super Mom.  Let me know if I can fix your kids for you.  But give me a minute before you call, I need to go tidy up the playroom.  There’s a huge pile of toys, LEGOS, and laundry in the middle of the floor up there.