A request...

To whoever was praying for me a half hour ago: Bless you, bless you. And can you set a reminder for yourself to pray for me at 6pm every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday from now until...well, until they come out with an approved oral med (my neurologist hopes it'll be out in 2010 - it's currently in trials and doing very well so far!)?

I picked the hip. I figured it this way: The thighs are worst, closely followed by the hips (which makes me feel even worse when my baby has to get her immunizations). So I'm doing a hard-easy-hard-easy pattern. So I did thighs first, then arms and it was time for my next hard spot. Believe it or not, yes, the stomach is considered easy. They say it's because the stomach doesn't have lots of nerves there so that makes sense to me. Apparently, your hip and thighs have LOTS of nerves. But, sweet Prayer Warrior, Big Bertha went easy on me tonight and I thank you from the bottom of my....errr....hip. ;) She hurt me but not as bad as some of the lower dose shots. I did get my headache faster tonight but maybe I'll get lucky and it'll go away faster too. The original dose was 8.8 mcgs, then I went to 22mcgs and Big Bertha was 44mcgs. Hopefully the side effects are as tolerable as the last two dosages.

In UNSCHOOLING news...
Matthew, quietly making his lunch, announces, "Mom, 10 times 3 is 30!" "Yep," I said, in unschooling fashion, not immediately quizzing him on other problems he can solve. He continued, "Because 10 plus 10 plus 10 is 30!" "Yep," I answered again.

Just now, I asked him what made him think of that this afternoon. Was he counting something? "No, just sometimes my mind starts thinking about numbers and I think about them...and then my mind thinks about something else".

I was recently talking to a friend who wanted to know how to answer strangers when they asked about what kind of schooling they do at home. My answers are different depending on who we're talking to. If it's a grocery store check-out lady, I just say that "we homeschool". If it's a neighbor or friend, I might go into the concept of unschooling or 'child-led interests' or 'relaxed homeschooling' or 'delight-driven learning' (most of these are roughly the same concept). I told her that the first question people invariably ask is, "But what if they don't want to learn xxx subject?" Usually that subject is math. I'd say nine out of ten times, it's math (and the other 10% is science). My answer is usually, "How can they *not* learn math? It's everywhere. It's in cooking, in drawing maps, in spending their money on items at the store, in helping Hubby build something for the yard, in calculating square footage for painting a room with Mom. You can't escape math just because you don't like to sit in a stuffy classroom with some old man (all my math teachers were old men who couldn't relate to me) spouting theorems at you and forcing you to recite the times tables. And sometimes, math just pops into your head and you think about it for a while and then, you think about something else.