martinzoo

Yesterday, after spending a LONG time at the doctor’s office, we learned of another reason for us to keep up with our nutritional diligence. I took GB to the doctor to learn what we could about his fainting spells. I was able to pinpoint a few triggers for each of his episodes. Each time he has been awakened much earlier than a typical day.

Being homeschoolers, we are not held into the typical school day or waking time. And since GB has a tough time falling asleep at night, and usually sleeps as late as 9:30-10:00, getting up before 6:00 is traumatizing to his system.  In the last few months he has fainted at two swim meets that occurred really early in the morning.

Ever since he’s been tiny I’ve recognized that when he is late eating his meals his mood suffers dramatically. After eating, he gets right back to normal. Since this was also typical for my husband, it was easy to spot in GB. We just tried to make sure we had usual eating times. The swim meets messed with his eating schedule also.

Each time he had a fainting episode he responded well and quickly to sweets. The first time it happened there was a doctor nearby who helped us and got him a piece of candy pretty quickly. The second time it happened, I rushed off to the snack bar and got him a soda.

Afterward, his behavior could only be described as strange. He was weirdly disconnected in his speech and thoughts. But a few hours later this would disappear.

My husband’s family has a very strong history of diabetes, so I worried that these were signs of diabetes. So I made an appointment to see his p-doc. But after doing a bit of research myself, I figured that it was more likely that he was hypoglycemic. And that is what the doctor concluded also.

I’m not sure how this has affected him in the past. I hope that I didn’t wait too long to bring him. His doctor said that he felt it was happening mainly in the morning because at that time of day he’d been without food or drink for at least 12 hours and was experiencing a sugar low. His suggestion was to have a complex carbohydrate snack before bed, such as peanut butter crackers.

There are members of my family who were concerned that GB was having these problems because of his vegetarian choices. But his doctor was very reassuring and said that GB’s blood work looked great. He did ask GB to take a supplemental vitamin so that he would make sure he had enough iron and B-12.

I was worried that if hypoglycemia was the diagnosis that GB would have to go through scary tests. But he didn’t. And I was worried that I had done something to bring these occasions on. But I guess I didn’t. And I was worried that we would have to carry one of those cases around to check his sugar occasionally. But, thankfully, we don’t. And I was worried that we would have to make major changes at home. But a vitamin and a snack are changes that we can handle.

I guess I was a worrywart.

Now we just have to wait, watch, and hope that it won’t happen again. If it does, back he goes.

Here are some links that I looked at to learn about hypoglycemia.

Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford

Hypoglycemia in Children

KidsHealth.org

A few weeks ago a few of the moms in my homeschooling group decided to put together a little co-op. And it’s been pretty fun so far. I’ve never done anything like this before and I feel a bit of pressure to make sure that it remains a learning activity and not just a glorified play date with lots of kids.

Yesterday everybody spontaneously came to our house. We were going to go to another mom’s house and do a biography of a famous person. But we decided that since the weather was going to be mild, we should try and get the kids outdoors for a change. The plan was to cut through the woods near our house and enter Pocahontas State Park, via the horse trails, and have a nature walk. And then we would come back to our house and do a little project. I hadn’t planned on doing the nature walk ahead of time, so I didn’t feel like I totally had a handle on the co-op process. But I think the kids had fun. I’m not sure they really learned anything…… but maybe.

We armed the kids with a ‘winter nature walk’ worksheet, which was kind of like a scavenger hunt. And they all seemed to enjoy looking for the various items. It helped them to focus on the nature, and not the playing.

The mosses and the lichen really popped in a visual way since there was so little color anywhere else. I thought this patch was particularly beautiful.

Here is GB contemplating his list of things to find. The only things he couldn’t find were the bird and the feather. Surprisingly, we saw no birds. They were there. I could hear them. But when we were looking for them, they weren’t apparent.

This tree stump was fascinating to study up close.

When we came back, we made these little mold terrariums. It didn’t quite go along with the nature hike, but it was a nice project to do on short notice. And I did have almost all the supplies handy. Luckily for us, unlucky for them, one of the mom’s had recently had a refrigerator malfunction. So she had plenty of washed out jars to bring along. So for the next few weeks we will watch mold grow on bread, oranges, broccoli, cheese, orange peel, and a vanilla wafer. It should be interesting.

I also pulled out our microscopes and we looked at the stuff we brought back. Some of the lichen was particularly interesting up close. I love our microscopes.

Vacation is basically over. Red has gone back home, and our college kids will return to school soon. But while they are still here we decided to make this be a transition week, with only a bit of learning and scheduling for each day. GB was sad to see Zeke go home with Red. But I’m sure he’ll be back. And perhaps we’ll make a little trip to Harrisonburg to visit Aquagirl, Red and Zeke.

GB and I had a breakfast discussion today.

Now that it is a new year, we would like to have a different focus to our homeschool. We’d like to move away from our packaged curriculum and delve into a more interest based learning environment. I don’t want this to give GB and excuse to be lazy. We will still have ’school hours’ and ‘learning times’ to our day. And I still want him to be learning in a thoughtful pattern of sorts.

Like, we agree that spelling should still be a weekly part of our agenda. So I’m going to pull the spelling lists from our packaged curriculum and offer them up at the start of the week for GB to learn. When he is ready, I will test him. Currently, he is enjoying writing short stories. My dh is alarmed at the content of these stories, since they revolve around horror and war stories with lots of death and destruction. But since the stories provide me with lots of opportunities, through editing, to discuss many different language arts applications, I’m all for this latest story writing quest; regardless of the content.

For science, we decided (over breakfast) to focus more on Benjamin Franklin and all his experiments and philosophies. GB was not really into all the life sciences that we were studying in his packaged curriculum, so I’m hoping this will rekindle his passion for science. And hopefully, his interest will come around to the life sciences at some point. Right now I just want to keep him interested.

He’s really excited by our history unit that we are going to begin. We’re kind of stepping backwards. The last few years have focused on the exploration of the world and colonial and revolutionary history of America. But now he wants to learn about the medieval time period, which could take us quite a while. I bought Kris Bordessa’s book, Great Medieval Project You Can Build Yourself. And we will begin that next week. I’ve also been researching some web sites to go along with the unit. I know this will be something he’ll enjoy learning about.

For math, I want to make this enjoyable somehow, also. I bought the book, Family Math, and I’m hoping that he enjoys learning in this very hands-on way. I’ve also been reading on the Homeschooling Creatively site about the Life of Fred math books. And this sounds very interesting for him. This subject is going to have to be handled delicately since he hasn’t ever developed an affinity for it.

We also decided to add a personal fitness course into our weekly agenda. He swims every week, which is good. But I want him to understand WHY physical fitness is important for your health.

So that is our focus for the upcoming months. GB is excited that he got so much say in what we will be doing. And I like the fact that he is excited. I hope this experiment works and that I won’t regret deviating from our curriculum. The curriculum was an easy way for me to pace our schooling. And it was an easy way for me to document what we had covered.

Wish us luck!

Aquagirl’s boyfriend, Red, has been visiting us for the past week. I love him. He already feels like part of the family. He fits in quite nicely and I hope she keeps him around.

So, since it IS Christmas time, I got him a present too. I got it from the same place that I got Jabem’s fuzebox. It’s called a drawdio. It’s a kit that you put together. You have to solder a bunch of little pieces and parts together and then attach it to a pencil. Then you can draw lines on paper and actually play music on the paper. Or, you can attach it to your kitchen faucet and play music with the running water. It’s kind of hard to describe, but you can watch these videos and then you’ll understand.

It’s addictively fun. And even GB, who swears he hates music, was intrigued by it. The first thing GB tried to play was the theme from ‘Jaws’….LOL! I’d highly recommend it for your older teens who like to put stuff together. You know how hard it is to find stuff that they truly find captivatingly interesting.

The soldering process makes it too hard for the younger set to give this project a try, unless a parent is really helping a lot…. or perhaps an older sibling. And the pieces and parts really are super-tiny. But it was a perfect present for the older kids to play with. And we all had fun playing with it when it was put together.