Watch the video and find peace at last. They had me until the kid started driving. Ken also sent me a link to the Free Range Kids blog, run by a deep thinking parent who is apparently trying to find a way, like many of us, to balance the need to help kids stay safe and alive with the need for them to take steps toward independence (ie, some risks) in order to grow as people and solve their own problems and not be always nagging us about getting their precious Pokemon cards from the store for them or to please sew them something for their secret sister exchange. No. They need to do stuff on their own sometimes.
Some dangerous things I let my kids do recently;
1) Climb every tree in the park together, without me nearby to micromanage their footholds and feel panic at the unparalleled heights attained. They are going for a record, logging an experiment (tree species and climability) and enjoying childhood’s greatest pleasure in one swoop. Who am I to interfere? Can I require helmets? Strap a cellphone to their shins?
2) Act nuts at the skate park. They want to do ollies, ride half pipes. Other things that seem foolhardy. They have not built up the basic skills to even ride smoothly over a bump in the sidewalk. Oh well, off the the skatepark we went. This time helmets were part of the program….even though all of the big boy skaters had none. Anoif asked if she could walk next time to the skatepark without me. That requires even more trust in the universe and skaterboys. Apparently, it is unhip to have one’s mother in attendance while improving one’s balance on a rolling plank of wood in the presence of other like-minded revelers.
(The first baby blanket ever in the works. I’m so proud! The baby is due in June to my cousin. That plant in a bag is a recycled material plant seedling, a green bean -I shared the how to link on earth day, the windowbox leaves are tiny little salads of our future, and the egg carton sprouts are marigolds.)
The message from the universe this week which is coming in loud and strong: all good things come with time. You gotta wait. Wait until the moment is right. Ugh. Actually, I’ve been getting this message for weeks. I’ve got seedling all over the place that want to go in to the ground but instead must linger in the home, perilously close to cats who want to nibble them, small children who seem to be prone to knocking things over and me who wants to squirt them to death with a bottle of water. Poor things are probably longing for some sun and bugs and birds to torment them. Local lore states that all gardens be started no earlier than mother’s day if you hope to see results. But this year I plan to expand the garden beyond our simple box we made a few years back and have been hoarding items and making lists of things I want to plant and it seems to be taking so long to get to mother’s day, a day when the family takes me to a plant store and helps me plant whatever I buy.
Then there’s the knitting. I am slowly plodding my way through this baby blanket and so excited to see that I can actually make a whole item with different colors in it! Thanks Kelly at Chicks with Stixs for talking me into it. But my baby cousin won’t be here until June and I’ll have to wait until August to see him.
Other things I’m waiting on: beach days, vacation, seeing my extended family, kayaking. I’m breathing deeply and exuding uncharacteristic Buddha calm. What is the universe making you wait for?
On Monday we were conducting a simple experiment withtin cans which demonstrated Bernoulli’s law. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Basically, you blow air between the cans and the air pressure lowers and instead of the cans going apart as you’d figure, they come closer together. Anything hands-on and my kids are all for it, so I take advantage of that by drumming this stuff up sometimes.
Anyway, later that night I got a rare glimpse in to my son’s head. I had stolen hit on the idea of videotaping some of these events as a way to lend them some importance and so they are available for review, hopefully making them easier to understand/recall. At one point, I handed Mail the camera so that I could try blowing between the cans. I noticed while watching it later that night that this is when things started to get interesting. Up until then there is a mom sounding enthused about air pressure and a son and daughter playing along. After then, all hell breaks loose…
As some of you know, I lost my stepfather this year to cancer. I also lost my grandmother 8 years ago to cancer on the day my son was born. For that reason, the past 3 years I’ve been doing the Chicago Walk and Roll 5 mile walk in their honor. It has been empowering every single time. The first year our team was Jane and I , the second year it was Ken and I. Everyone is so busy in May it is nearly impossible to get folks to walk with you along the beautiful lakefront of downtown Chicago for a morning. But this year I have my mom coming! I’m so excited! She’s flying in for a whole week and she’s training everyday. We decided this would be another way to say goodbye John. We’re doing some stuff to maybe contribute in some tiny way to make it easier on the next guy who gets what he had.
If you are around Chicago and want to join our team, please sign up and walk with us. Nothing would make my mom happier than a healthy group of friends joining in with us. They also have all sorts of music and free stuff down there for the walkers, skaters, bikers who attend. Visit the team page here.
(Remember when we used to do stuff together? Before you got all big-headed?)
Dear Homeschooling,
You’ve been good to us. So accommodating and thought provoking and full of surprises. Remember the fire ants in the kitchen? Or the water wheel we made that one time? Ooh, ooh, how about when we hatched praying mantis babies, or when we sketched stuff at the museum with the kids? That was cool. You’ve really allowed us to see how the kids tick, and I’m grateful for that, I really am. But still, there are times when you are a bit of a weight to haul around on my shoulders every day. Please, don’t take offense. I love you. You are more than just an educational choice to me and mine. I’ve said it before, you are a lifestyle. But really, technically, a “life” is a life and “you” are just a way to explain to the world that our lives don’t often include a chunk of time in a cinderblock building. That is an important job, Homeschooling, but lately you’ve been stepping out of bounds a little bit. I think this has a lot to do with how popular you’ve become lately. Everyone wants to hang out with you now because you are so cool, I get that. But don’t get too big for your britches and start demanding I keep up with your agenda. I mean, have you learned nothing from your friend Green lately? For years, a small dedicated portion of the population was focused on improving the world by living green and then their dream came true- all corporations people finally got the message that it is way profitable cool to be green. Well, then the old greeners sure didn’t get any special pat on the back or apologies for getting called weirdos all those times, did they? They just got called extreme greens (okay, I made that up) and now they have to start chaining themselves to trees to get any attention whatsoever since all of the office buildings in town have turned recycling from an alternative hip martyrish thing to do to a standard procedure. My point here is, when all the world loves you, don’t forget your old friends. It ain’t fair to expect them to take the heat for you and your fickle ways. Do you think you will be popular forever? You do? My you have a swollen head my friend. Educational theories are as thick as televised debates in this land and as soon as some new sociologist with 20 to 30 years of teaching experience slaps together a newer, sleeker methodology to capture the public’s eye, you are done for. Then where will you be? Nowhere without us.
As for homeschooling, Homeschooling, I don’t mean that we’re going to stop or anything. As long as we can continue to…
(Some earth I recently sprawled on to appreciate earth more.)
This year I’ve been getting much braver about botany. I am on a one woman mission to increase foliage and especially food producing foliage in and near my house. I am not against feeding and supporting the species who would like to keep my foliage free of other species who would gobble down my foliage either. Doing some reasearch on that. Did you know marigolds discourage root rot when surrounding other plants? Huh.
Anyway, when it comes to recognizing “earth day” I can’t pick some namby pamby activity that has no connection with anything that interests me. This year it has to be plant related. I mean, I know earth day is always pretty much plant related or else we’d call it moon day . What I meant was, in the past we’ve picked up trash and planted flowers and sometimes cut down buckthorn from forest preserves. But this year I want more dirt involved. That is why I proudly support newspaper planting pots. Got the idea from an earth day thing I went to this past weekend. It is great for any group or kid thing. All you need is some newspaper, a bunch of seeds and some dirt, then you can send them home with a plant in the making. Best of all , use the newspaper bags to wrap the whole thing up in to make a greenhouse. So, consider it a recycling project as well as a gardening job.
You know what’s weird? When your family is seperated in to 3 different time zones for a few days. Then you decide, yeah, we humans obviously are weird. In addition to creating extra time zones, we also have such complex lives that we have to turn off the fight or flight type instinct that would occur to us in a simpler world when one of our children was seperated from us. In a simpler world, my 12 year old would be prepapring for adulthood also, albeit, probably not on a jet plane or a tour bus, but still. I’d have to suspend some of the fear brain and trust in the universe. Even if that trust was just a thin veil between me and the universe which allowed me to get some sleep; a veil that is often pierced at midnight.
Like last night when my daughter called me at midnight for example. I had convinvced myself she forgot to call because she was having so much fun with her friends. Deluded, trustful fool, the universe must have been snickering. Partly true. She was having fun she assured me, but also she was sitting in a ditch on a bus on some rural mountainous road in Tennesee. Still, they got to watch a movie while they waited for the tow truck. There’s always that bright side. Oddly, this is her second ‘in a ditch’ episode this year from trips she’s taken without family. You might be inclined to blame the weather, or the unfamilar terrain. Sure. But I was just on a field trip the other day with about 17 tweens/teens in a train, and I’m surprised the conductor didn’t jump the tracks and toss us in to a ditch, they were so loud.
If the universe wanted to pull a joke on me, in addition to freaking me out, it did a pretty good job. Ken is in California (Hi K and A, no, he’s in the north so he couldn’t hang) . Before he left I told him to watch out for earthquakes. It’s one thing us midwesterners can be smug about. Yes, we get chased by tornadoes but the earth doesn’t tremble much and the ocean rarely rises us to womp us. So, when he called me yesterday AM saying incredulously “You had an earthquake?!” he was already laughing. “Ironic, eh?” I managed to convey. My mom called somewhat more breathlessly, “Are you guys okay?” Well, it was at 4:30 in the morning and three hundred miles away, so I didn’t feel a thing.
Anoif’s girl scout leader is a lovely brave woman who is taking them all to Canada next week. In preparation, she’s decided to make identity cards for all of these homeschooled girls and asked that we all email her the name of our homeschool. This has caused a small kerfuffle over here. Because 7 years ago we hastily chose Shakespeare Academy for its ability to put off anyone who didn’t feel like writing down a five mile long word that Shakespeare himself apparently had difficulty keeping consistent.
But now I have a tween who wants to spice things up a little, add some character to our name. She has suggested Awesome Homeschool and Really Cool School. Then she got bored and wandered off to slapdown another 500 pages of that vampire trilogy all of the girls are obsessed with lately.
But I got to thinking….with a thesaurus and an imagination, I might be able to come up with a name to stick by. A name to laugh at, or embrace, or to hold dear. A name that will tie our family together on rainy, disjointed days. If I could just have this magical name, I could call out “C’mon Neocurricular Academy of Scions, time for a field trip to the state capitol!” and they would all come running in their matching green jumpsuits. Because a uniform would be fun to design too of course.
So anyway, I made up a little list this morning, some purely fantastic, others lacking the zip that makes a person fork out their trust:
The Lyceum of Learning
The Alternative Institute
Gentle Persuasion
Chicago Finishing School (get it?! Finishing school! Haha.)
Shakespeare’s Alternative School for Local Children
Galewood Folk Homeschool
Shakespeare Free School
Gen-tech School of Video Education
Chicago Retreat School
and, naturally the Neocurricular Academy of Scions
but here’s my favorite;
Schola Abdico
Does your homeschool have a name? If not, what should it be named?
(The mid-day TV-sloucher as frightening blue guy. Well, you can’t really see too well what I mean by blue, so here…)
There was a bit of resistance in the air this morning. Okay, every morning there is a debate about exactly what will get done by whom and how unfair it is largely because one’s sibling has it so much better. It doesn’t matter how many bedtime stories I pad with the school of hard knocks scenarios, or how many Box Car Children books I read aloud. It doesn’t help that I was essentially an only child. Saw my siblings on the weekends and there is a big age gap. So I have unrealistic hopes perhaps for sibling relations.
But when the day starts off with arms crossed and tears over what to have for breakfast, I remember the creative wacky mom routine. Every good parent has one. For some it is as easy as piggy back rides, or dressing a new part. For others there are spontaneous jaunts. For me today it was looking at the face of my boy, the one who just wanted to escape in to tvland rather than have to be active or read or think, and saying “Too bad you want to watch that show so much because we have to leave in an hour and I was hoping to paint you blue with Celtic symbols and help you dig your foam ax out of the garage and put a cloak on you and ask you to make your hair really wild so you could impress us with your Celtic warrior reenactments since we’ve been learning about the Anglo-Saxons and Celts and stuff. But I can see you have plans-” Honestly, I had him at blue. The pronounced slouch vanished, eye contact was made and before I could saunter away to some dull motherly task Mail was digging up cloaks and brooches.
It isn’t that simple with Anoif anymore. Sometimes she takes the bait, like last week: hey,let’s make a family standard like in Roman times! They chose the eagle over a peace heart. And sometimes she looks up over the rim of her glasses from the latest vampire laced young adult tale she is relinquishing human relations for and snorts at us.
(The snorter during more amiable moments taking tea.)
My friend Bryan sent me this video today. Apparently this was what the future looked like back in the 60’s according to the Montreal Expo folks, more of which can be seen at the Expolounge. The whole thing is so close to the truth that is seems like it has to be an elaborate hoax. If it is real they had it spot on as far as technology goes. Except it is probably the most boring homeschool day a kid could imagine. Too bad the past couldn’t imagine a homeschool environment that was less mind numbing and passive. At least mom has time to do some floral arrangements, which is more than I can say for myself. What I want to know is where is the MP3 player and the game system? Where are the constant interruptions from spammers and telemarketers? How come he doesn’t use a mouse and where did he leave his virtual reality headgear? If he left it on the astroturf with his hoverbike again his mom is going to tear him a new one and flush that dessert pellet right down the compostilator!
