On the way home from 826 Chi yesterday from Mail;
“You know what would be so cool? It might start a fire though.”

I tried to suppress my snort and my imagination! Turns out he was only imagining a hot air balloon made out of paper with torches and lighters and candles holding it aloft. Oh yeah. Almost as fun as last week when he described interplanetary travel possibilities based on using the planet’s magnetic fields and electromagnets. You might be thinking, oh, a kid who is always full of wise acre science tips. But no, he is just as likely to spend 15 minutes convincing me that I need to increase his allowance, or that he should be getting some headshots made up soon for his acting career to fully realize itself.

In daughter news, she’s been doing this Improv class which travels around town and does smaller version of Improv Everywhere type stuff. She is hooked. There is something about being twelve and needing to be absurd,creative, and thought provoking all at once.

Me, I learned how to sew by accident. I joined in this round robin of folks, all of us making grocery bags from extra fabric. Figured I could cut and iron, but after awhile I figured I could try a straight line, then I needed to learn how to pin things, then pivot, then fill a bobbin, then make a seam, then a French seam, then a box, then, well, then we had a bag. Thanks ladies for pausing frequently to explain and dig me out! We made about 12. Go see Nancy’s blog for pictures since I have no access to Picasa currently. What I loved about that experience was how organic it felt. I didn’t want to learn to sew, I just wanted a bag and when there were enough machines around I realized I couldn’t be that useless. I might be able to speed things up. Within 10 minutes of course I was hooked. It is the kind of learning adults do regularly once their formal education is over, interest driven. It is also the sort that kids so often get deprived of while they are off memorizing lists they’ve been assigned.

Seriously, it is a word best reserved for Halloween costumes, war correspondents and certain skin ailments. But every once in awhile the average citizen earns the right to use the word in conjunction with their own experiences.

Examples of this might be;

“I’ve just had a ghastly evening. Little Myron was up all night with the stomach flu and pink eye. We didn’t get a wink of sleep.”

I was trying to pull an example out of my hat there, but I notice that there are an awful lot of references to eyes and eye related things that I couldn’t seem to avoid. It must be that eyes are on my mind, especially ever since I felt like my eye was going to be sucked out of my head on Tuesday and the resulting ghastly injury that occurred has since made me feel as if I were a walking demon on earth, unable to make eye contact with all of the small children I adore for fear of frightening them away from me forever. You think I exaggerate?

Here:

Maybe that didn’t scare you enough? Well, I have more pictures of how it has since spread to half of the whites of my eye. But I’ll spare you. Let’s just say swimming laps with children and goggles can prove to be a dangerous enterprise. Something about the suction of the goggles and a rogue hand resulted in me popping a blood vessel in my eye. Still, it is thankfully only a temporary thing and in a few weeks I’ll have regular white eyeball again.

p.s. My pupils are a bit large there due to the drops the opthamalogist put in to examine the eye better. Two hours of blurry vision. Weird.

Oh okay, here’s a more updated one.

What does that spell?! F-E-L-T! Who likes to get wet and messy (and ironically also clean)? We do!

What is the point of this craft?! We dunno! But I think it has something to do with how pretty it looks and how you might not need a washcloth to lather up the soap if you have a bar wrapped in wool. Mostly, it is fun. Complete and thorough directions here.

First, gather ye the ingredients. Excuse the lack of fancy handmade soaps, but we had a surplus of store brand.

Then wrap,

then drip warm water on it,

They look slightly like wet dogs here…

The fun part

Rinse

Found some round soap.

Dry and voila! We’ll need to experiment with layering a bit to get the right look.  Anoif seemed to have the knack more than I do.

(The process of blanket blocking. Not so tricky, unless you’re a perfectionist and want all the lines to be ruler-straight. )

So, exactly 2 months after I began, I finished Mason’s baby blanket. Fortunately, he’s only one month old now. Well, 5 weeks….

Nevertheless, after I laid it out it had the classic problem of being all poochy in the center where I had knitted it too loosely or where the world of physics applied some unknown rule. It required blocking, which meant I needed to first of all wash it by hand or in the “delicate hand washables” cycle of the machine. I chose the easy way out, but stood there lamenting as the machine brutalized the blanket in the most whiplash-like spin cycle I’ve ever seen. My machine does not have a way to open it once it is going. You just have to let the cycle finish. To entertain myself I imagined the two hours of weaving the ends in I’d spent becoming moot as the ends unraveled and I’d open the washer door to a pile of knotted yarn.

It came out alright. I’m such a fatalist. So, I wrapped it in a towel and sucked out the extra liquid. Oddly, this is something my aunt Connie, world traveler (and fellow knitter) just mentioned to me offhand the other day in an unrelated conversation where we were discussing traveling lightly. When she was 19 or so hoofing it around Europe with one pair of pants and one skirt, a nice Italian (?) lady showed her how to wick excess moisture of off newly washed items by wringing them in a towel. I’m not sure how that could come up in conversation but it did. I think we were talking about our upcoming train trip and how I’d need to travel lightly. Something that rarely works for a girl who grew up with the motto ‘Be Prepared’ imprinted in her mind. Except last February when I forgot to put my suitcase in the car and spent 2 weeks in the south with just my purse and the two outfits I ended up buying to get me by. I wasn’t exactly prepared then but I traveled light and marveled at how easy it was, swearing to myself I’d remember that on the next trip. Did not work. I will consult here next time.

Then I laid the blanket out and observed how the logs of the log cabin pattern seemed warped, bloated, twisted, buckled. All it took was some creative stretching to get them lined up and a few hours to dry. We went off en masse to see Journey to the Center of the Earth. Halfway there Anoif decided maybe we’d left the bedroom door open thus giving Kiko that cat full access to the wet wool/cotton baby blanket. Frantic call to the neighbor confirmed the cat had in fact zeroed in on the blanket and was just beginning a cooling afternoon nap when she was intercepted. Generally Kiko is okay, above spite. But you may recall the time a couple of years ago when she decided it would be hilarious to pee on my journal, purse and datebook all in one day? No? Well, maybe I didn’t blog about that one. But the blanket was rescued and dried untwisted and fine and since this is my first big project ever (if a baby’s length and breadth could be considered big) I am now facing this nameless feeling. Something close to remorse and hands-free fidgetiness. Is the only cure to begin a new project? Can I take a few days off or will the feeling pursue me until I cave in and start the socks?

(These sparklers are meant to express my excitement about having another episode of Relaxed Homeschooler radio air on July 28th at 10 am central time. Please call in with your questions and comments and please stay on the line for a few minutes until I switch to you. I’m still brokenhearted about that one caller who hung up…call 347-633-9765)

This show; Michael and Patty Smith will be calling in to share their experiences homeschooling on a Native American reservation.

Also, Dayna Martin of Unschooling America with Dayna Martin will be the guest speaker. Dayna has been very vocal in her promotion of unschooling as a way of life and you will understand why when you hear her speak on the topic. She’s been interviewed on the Dr. Phil show, has a series of segments describing unschooling on youtube and, perhaps most excitingly, she hosts an unschooling conference cruise every year. So call to speak to Dayna and I at 347-633-9765.

Well, I just had to try this slide show program out. I promise I won’t normally sideswipe you with Weezer songs just for popping by…

(Couldn’t bring myself to dump this AM’s leftover coffee down the drain, so I made myself a chilled coffee drink with kefir as the milk. Saved me a 2pm emergency trip to the cafe.)

Just can’t stop making stuff, which is why I haven’t been blogging I suppose. I finally finished the baby blanket this afternoon. The best part was that I was among three friends who’d seen me carting it around all summer. So when I held it aloft there was applause. Now to weave in the ends. There’s no end to that! Oh, and to wash it so the poor baby doesn’t get beach sand and dog slobber and cat hair and general kid dirt all over himself.

Other projects:

I had nothing to do with this one, but the Renaissance apron is finally completed due to the hard work of Anoif and her father. Next is the skirt.

Large chunks of time have been spent admiring my fancy new solar charger that I won, and also getting it to charge completely via the sun. 8 to 12 hours of full on sunlight needed.

We made camp t-shirts for the summer camp of three, using Generation T iron-on decals. Sweet.

Also, the kids started their first week of camps, other than the aforementioned 3 person camp. There’s an awesome homeschool improv class going on , all 3 signed up for a gardening class that is in such an idyllic urban garden I will be taking my camera along next time I visit,  and my two campers are deeply ensconced in a writing program that takes place in a very happening part of town which also affords me the opportunity to visit my friend who lives around there.

(They think of everything at the Taste)

Last Wednesday I met my most adventurous culinary tasting friends at the Taste of Chicago. Basically, you’d have to be nuts about food and the lovely idea of getting all of the foods you like in one place at one time in order to brave the crowds, the heat, the expense, the train station full of sweaty tired workers trying to trample you, the trains filled with heat-addled brains and defensive elbows plowing in to your ribs. Oh, and this year, the gunmen.

Yup, we did. I figure, give me a backpack, a bottle of water, a good hat and I’m ready for anything. Okay, I forgot that my kids should have been tethered to me somehow. It was so crowded on every surface of planet Chicago that I had to fluff out my feathers a bit and hiss at a few people.  At one point a man was so busy in the train station watching the popcorn pop to his left as he walked firmly to the front that he plowed me over and then gave me a dirty look as I stupidly apologized.

Then there was the lady at rush hour who really did trample my daughter as she ran to fetch her train. Its not like there wasn’t another train leaving 15 minutes later. I seriously did get a little mouthy with her. Not characteristic of me, but I felt she should know how I viewed people who put their own punctuality for Wheel of Fortune over the lives of growing girls. The other 300 people around me who must have heard my strong response were either too polite to act as if they noticed or else too hellbent on getting to their own trains to slow down and high five me.

It must be hard to go to work 241 days a year and have the same tempo to the day, rush in, rush home, take this path or that in order to start your free time, and then one week of the year all of the kids, parents and tourists start strolling through your maze, blocking the usual paths. I’d be irked, sure. But I’d bike to work that week rather than try to hurt the people.

Okay, here’s what we had at the Taste to eat. This was shared among  5 people by the way:

• Samosas
• Bahn bao
• Frozen chocolate covered bananas on a stick
• Sweet potato hash browns
• French toast sticks
• Peanut noodles
• Vegetarian tamales
• Coffee gelato
• I’m forgetting something delicious but I can’t recall what

Here’s my intro over at Blogtalkradio:

I’m pretty excited about this. Are you gathered around, reporters? No? Well, who cares. This is for the little people anyway. The ones who unschool/homeschool their kids. We do read the papers, but we get most of our information elsewhere. From word-of-mouth I’d say. Like most parents, we’re a resourceful bunch but we are compelled to share every resource to the point of compulsion.

As in :”Hey, there’s a new park district piano class that only costs $15 a semester on Thursdays and it is right near that ice cream shop that has half off cones on weekdays.”

Or, “Check it out, Milo loves these fiction books that teach geometry concepts.!”
Or, “I don’t give a crud what they say about reading, I am not offering my daughter free pizzas if she reads 15 books this summer. Reading is its own reward.”

Etc…..So, the new resource in town is Relaxed Homeschooler, a twice a month radio show that you can call in for or download to your MP3 player. The main point is that you will finally have a public venue to vent your woes, be they whiny children, whiny in-laws, curriculum confusion, burn-out, over-eagerness, or juggling -to-muchedness. On the other hand, you can call in to tell us what you love the most about homeschooling as well.  We need good bolstering stories to give us all courage. Like last week, when my newly turned 8-year-old who has generally avoided reading picked up a graphic novel and read 13 pages. Now he’s on book two. As if it were no big thing. I’m screaming with joy inside! And I didn’t even stress out like I did for the first kid who waited until she was 9 and a half to lock on to reading as an awesome thing. So, if you’ve got late readers for example, you are at the right place.

Okay, I should tell you a bit about the host. I am Kim and I have formerly co-hosted the podcasts Homeschool Habitat and Shakespeare Souffle with Ken and our kids. We so enjoyed podcasting and were deeply amazed by the community. I have two blogs Relaxed Homeskool my family blog and Chicago Homeschool Habitat which is about the local happenings for homeschoolers in the Chicago area. This show, Relaxed Homeschooler is for homeschoolers and unschoolers everywhere on the globe and I look forward to getting to know you and the guestspeakers I hope to dig up and convince to join in.

It will probably take a few hours after that to post the show to the site, so look Monday night to listen. Also, I believe the first show will be rather short, seeings as how I will have no huge fan base to call me up.