Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

Today, while in the midst of doing his math problems - calculating the area and perimeter of rectangles - my oldest child corrected me and made me laugh. I usually knit while the kids are doing their math, they have so many questions and need help learning not to frustrate themselves. It also give me a good excuse to knit.

In between screens at mathscore.com, I asked my daughter to turn on the oven to 450 because I'd like to give them hot dogs and french fries for lunch. It's a special lunch for us - a having friends over or celebrating something kind of lunch. Today the snow is just so glorious (we can afford to say that while we are immobilized) that it seemed a celebration lunch kind of day. Besides, calculating area makes sense now.

Buddy lifted his head from his math and said "Wait, why don't I get to know what we are having? Why does she get to know all about it?"

I thought about the many answers to this question for about a nanosecond and wound up saying "It's a vast conspiracy." (Someone please nominate me for Mother of the Year.)

"You mean 'vast right wing conspiracy,' Mommy!"

That made me laugh. Math was over. No, I'm not anti-Hillary, or even anti-Clinton. But I needed to explain. We headed to youtube to find this video:




This, in turn led to a history discussion (does it count as history when it was so recent?). We talked about the two party political system, political dynasties like the Bush and Clinton families and the role of the media in shaping policies. We also talked about personal responsibility and how "uncool" it is to have both a wife and a girlfriend.

This is yet another reason why I love homeschooling. We had the time to get deep into a topic, could strike while the iron was hot and give them as much information as they wanted. They also get to understand one of their mother's favorite expressions and have hot dogs for lunch with no worries about the incredible snow.

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