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Life Without a Field Guide
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Category:
Humor
Publisher: Lill Hawkins
ISBN-10: 9781310809880
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 128
Copyright: January 26, 2016
Price: FREE! (eBook)
Living and learning in Maine, mostly humorously.
You don't have to be a homeschooler, a parent or from Maine to see the funny side of Life Without a Field Guide.
Being secular homeschoolers in a small town in Maine isn't easy. Drifts of doom. Frost heaves from Hades. Maine isn't for the fainthearted, but it can be hilarious, almost hysterical at times.
Luckily, Lill, Geekdaddy, Son, and Daughter are usually able to overcome almost anything - even lovesick porcupines and hunters that shoot at anything with four legs, including lawn furniture - without losing their senses of humor.
Did Lill really see a Kiwi near the "Caution, Blind Chicken!" sign?
Does Daughter have Dramatic Fever or is it a case of the Instamatic Flu? Why is Son wearing a lobster tail on his neck and seeing ninjas at the deli counter? Does the Marriage Bed of Satan have a memory foam mattress and is death by arachnophobia insecticide?
Will Geekdaddy manage to survive being decaffeinated? What if his purple union boxers - the ones that say "look for the union label" on the front - fade to pink in the washer? Why did a psychiatrist mistake him for a patient at the mental health institution where he works, simply because he was talking to his tomato plant and wearing three sets of glasses?
The Life Without a Field Guide Series answers these questions and many more.
Excerpt
Life Without a Field Guide
Other homeschooling parents make me feel like such a slacker. Like Ava and her husband, Carl. She’s a translator. He’s a biologist who specializes in diseases of plants. This year, they're educating their three kids in France via field trips to the Louvre and strolls along the Champs-Elysees. She’s translating books from Arabic to French and he's fighting grape blight or blot or rot or something.
They're both so intelligent that they have to drink three glasses of wine and take a Benadryl to talk to ordinary people like me. On Thanksgiving this year, while we ate our turkey and cranberry sauce, they digested their dinde rotie and sauce de myrtille. Then I assume they hit the Beaujolais before they composed a "what our kids are doing in homeschool" blog post. Sandwiched in between photos of French street scenes with tiny figures that might have been them or might have been almost anyone, including pigeons, were lists of what their kids were up to. I swear they only do it to make unschoolers like me feel inadequate.
My kids are very artistic but they've never shown any interest in art history or anyone else's art. Their kids are making a copy of Empress Theodora and her retinue, a mosaic that appears on the south wall of the apse at San Vitale. Life-sized. In their hotel room. With pieces, they manufacture themselves by breaking bottles, ashtrays, ceramic soap dishes and cough lozenges. (The picture of it is kind of dark, but I believe I can just make out the Smith Brothers logo on one of the red robes.)
My kids go to the library and get books about Pokémon, the latest fantasy novel, Barbie, and fairies. Their children write books like "Deforestation and its Impact on Biodiversity, Habitat Loss, Trade and Endangered Species." With footnotes in Latin. I'm only up to page 568, but I can tell you, we won't be getting any mahogany furniture anytime soon.
We visit museums and spend more time arguing about whether the blinds are made out of aluminum or plastic than we do looking at the exhibits. Their kids are docents at three museums and a private collection of Faberge Eggs. Imperial Eggs. The eight missing ones.
We have a Black Lab and three cats. They have a Giant Gambian Pouched Rat, a Komodo Dragon, several hedgehogs and a platypus. Laying eggs. It's their science fair project at the homeschooler's science fair. We don't attend ours, ever since the unfortunate incident with the manure vs. chemical fertilizer experiment. (I still say they should have given us extra credit for demonstrating the explosive property of those chemicals).
We play Mario Tennis. They play polo with real ponies and several members of royalty. We spend hours wading in tide pools but never remember to bring our marine biology book, so all we can identify are crabs and those brown wiggly things with all the legs. Sandworms? Clamworms? Well, they're ugly as sin and can give you a painful pinch, we know that. They often do research for the Cousteau Society. In a shark cage. With the door open.
Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a little here, but honestly, this is what it feels like sometimes, when I read all the blog posts about museums toured, concerts attended, instruments mastered, classics read, projects completed, esoteric knowledge acquired and businesses in operation. Doesn't anyone else just hang out with each other most of the time? Visit with friends? Read for pleasure? Make things just for the heck of it, not because they're projects or educational? Consider Jeopardy or the History Channel or PBS specials highly informative? Doesn't anyone take a walk without a field guide?
We do get a lot of non-fiction out of the library every week and my kids are both very creative, but we're pikers compared to what seems to be the norm in the homeschooling blogosphere. I have this recurring nightmare that my kids are going to turn 18 and sue me for not making them learn more. Oh wait, didn't I just read that a ten-year-old homeschooler did that? And represented himself? In a Class Action Suit? And won? Serves you right, Ava and Carl.
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