Bully Reading and Ruffle Bumps
/I used to think that bullying was not a concern of mine. My image of a bully was one of a big guy on the blacktop during recess, picking on the little guy with glasses. Since there was no blacktop recess in the lives of my children, I didn't worry too much about bullying. I was so wrong.
In the last two months, I've learned quite a bit about bullying. I've learned that the more likely vehicle in my children's lives is not a basketball thrown at them, but a cell phone heavily armed with foul language and pointed mean messages. I've learned that the bully isn't necessarily a big grade school boy, but may be a teenaged girl. Not that boys are immune; they are bullies, too, and bullying is just as likely to happen at soccer practice in a pleasant suburban neighborhood with private school and homeschool boys as on the public school blacktop. Oh yes, we are learning about bullies in lots of venues and from several angles.
Most of all, I've learned that homeschooling doesn't matter one whit when it comes to bullying. To say this surprised me is an understatement. The things I'm learning! Homeschooled kids are bullied and homeschooled kids are bullies. All of a sudden, it's very much my business.
So, I'm reading Dear Bully: Seventy Authors Tell Their Stories. It's an anthology of essays written by accomplished authors, mostly authors for teens. Every perspective is represented here: the bully, the bullied, the bystander. So far, it's an interesting read, but not something I'd hand to tweens and definitely something that I'd read with teens.
In the knitting department, I planned to knit for hours as I waited for soccer games on Sunday and finish this scarf at last. But I got stuck on picking up the wrapped stitches (can you see them there?). I have some different directions and I'm hoping to conquer them tonight and then just cruise to the end. Once the wrapped ones are all picked up, I have to knit front, back, and front again in all two hundred stitches, to give me a three hundred stitch ruffle. That's a very long stretch of ruffly happy. I'm very eager to get there.
{Good news: I think the comments are working again. Yay!}
