A Year's Growth and Change

I'm just going to put this photo in a post here before I switch it out to my new header photo for the blog. The photo currently on the header was taken a year ago. Wow, these kids have changed so much in the last year, in so many different ways. But you can really see it when you look at the photos!

Here's last year's:

One of the biggest changes is that he's SO much taller now. They used to be a lot closer in size than they are now. And a quick peek at the "How tall in Fall" height chart at our local pumpkin patch shows him closing in on 6' (or at least trying to stretch as tall as possible to look that way!). One look at those huge puppy feet though says he might now be done growing yet!

Asa was having fun stocking up on the small pumpkins from the bin at the pumpkin patch. "Wild Walt" takes everyone on his hayride on a crazy ride, doing donuts in the mud and climbing up the sides of embankments while everyone screeches. Then he takes you through fields with scarecrows and other targets that you can throw the small pumpkins at. What fun!

Birthday Boy

Yeah, he's big. Yeah, he's fourteen now! Yeah, his shoe size is almost a fourteen too... It's my big birthday guy. I don't think I can say birthday boy anymore as he's taller than I am (a fact that he likes to emphasize nearly continually). This is the shirt I found for him, it was just so HIM. Combining a love of zombies, with an environmental consciousness, the shirt says "Zombies: 100% Post-Consumer Human. Reduce. Re-use. Re-animate." It's his new fave t-shirt, not surprisingly!

I've got more birthday photos to come, plus some pics of our annual post-birthday camping trip to Waldo Lake. But I've barely had time to sit at the computer, let alone unload the hundreds of photos. Suffice it to say, he had a fun birthday party in the park with friends, and a great few days hiking, kayaking, and hanging out with friends at the lake. He's such an amazing young man, and I'm so lucky to have been his mom for all these years. As you can see, he's got that infectious smile and a sense of humor to match. This year has brought lots of growth and learning, both in classes and in internships. He's always game to help out a friend or a family member, especially when it comes to technology - a field in which (especially in hardware) he is quickly eclipsing my expertise. He loves to talk about subjects both frivolous and serious. This year I have especially loved when we both read the same book and discuss it. He's the kind of person you just generally enjoy being around (except when those teen hormones take over and the werewolf comes out, but I expected that!)

And of course it wouldn't be a birthday post without a gratuitous photo from way back when. So here's my little guy in 2003, seven years or half his life ago. In many ways, so much the same person. In so many ways, completely different. In all ways, a beautiful person that we love very much. Happy Birthday 'Kenzie!

The Absence of a Whirlwind

For the third week this summer, we are Asa-less. First there was the week at grandma's, then the week at sleep-away camp, now a week at her friend's house. It's an eerie precursor to the future when our kids will be grown and gone. The house seems so quiet. Too quiet. Asa is probably responsible for 90% of the music, talking, chaos, energy, mess, confusion, delays, and cheeriness of our household. A double-edged sword, she's an unstoppable force of nature, a whirlwind of sound and energy and love radiating in all directions. When she's home, she's here, there, and everywhere. She's petting the cats, painting a picture, singing a song, painting my toenails, leaving the radio on in her room, making pancakes and forgetting to put any of it away (the paints, the paper, the fingernail polish, the flour, the eggs, the radio, the pet food...)

I miss her very much.

But the house is clean.

And quiet.

Too quiet.

A Virtual Solution to A Real World Problem

This is a mind-bender of epic proportions, but I think it also gives an insight into my kids' mind and how he thinks, which is very cool.

So Mackenzie just got this Xbox game from a friend, it's obviously in used condition but it seemed to play fine. Then at one point in the game, it got stuck and wouldn't let the character go any farther. As it turns out, there was a scratch on the disk. Mackenzie buffed it a little and tried again, but it still got hung up at the same point.

He reasoned that he might be able to get around this problem because, as he explained to me, games used to load an entire level at one time, which made it take a very long time each time you went to a new level. However now they buffer and load segments of the level while you're actually playing it, loading just the areas that your character is going to travel into. So he figured that there was a scratch in this area of the disk, it would probably only affect that particular area of the map in the level. So he had his character WALK AROUND THE SCRATCH. Yep, he walked way off course, down into some valley and took the long way around, and he walked around the scratch on the disk because he walked into a different map segment that wasn't scratched. Isn't that cool? It just blows my mind how entwined virtual and real can be, and provides a glimpse into the future that's kind of freaky.

It also gives me a lot of insight into the cool deductive way that my kid thinks. No wonder his favorite novels are the Sherlock Holmes series!

There have been many such examples lately that demonstrate to me how alike we are in some ways. It's no surprise that when I worked at Microsoft, Testing was my field. To be a Tester, you need to be able to understand the code and how it works, and then think of all of the different ways that you could stress that code. I'm sure he gets a fair amount of this ability from his dad the jet mechanic as well. Wayne has to do this kind of problem-solving frequently in his job. Mackenzie totally thinks like this on a daily basis. When he finds a problem, whether its hardware or software related, he starts thinking of all of the different things that could be causing it, and then starts methodically narrowing them down.He's the kind of person I would've loved to have on my team at Microsoft! What a cool kid.

Yep, It Happened

He's taller than me. 5'7" and counting...

So Let's Talk About ABC's Unschooling Piece

Where do you start with a media piece like this? With the obvious bias that the reporter carried into it, the fact that she didn't even make a feeble attempt to keep an open mind? Or with the fact that they deliberately focused in on a kid eating a donut and kids watching TV and playing video games in a transparent attempt to skew what viewers think of the family's lifestyle choice?. It wouldn't be nearly as controversial if you showed them eating a green pepper or reading a book, both things that they probably also do. What about the fact that they take what the kids themselves say and deliberately misinterpret it? Like this quote from 15 year old Kimi:"I haven't done the traditional look at a textbook and learn about such-and-such," she said. "If I wanted to go to college, then I would pick up a textbook and learn."


Basically she's saying what both of my kids know: If they have to learn something in order to achieve a goal, they can do it in a relatively short amount of time. This happened when Mackenzie wanted to take a computer science class for which Algebra was a pre-requisite. Problem? No, we just got a textbook and went over the Algebra and in a fraction of the time he would've spent on it in school, he had it down.If he has to do the same thing for college admissions, I don't think it will be a problem.


But the reporter chose to spin the teenager's comment this way: "{she}doesn't even know what grade she'd have been in if she had remained in school, and doesn't feel prepared for college." Where did she say she didn't feel prepared for college? Shoddy journalism at its worst. Maybe the reporter would've been better off unschooled? At least my kids know a fallacious argument when they see one.


So the story really didn't say much about unschooling other than it's radical, it's weird, the kids are unprepared academically and not exposed to other stuff in their lives, they eat like crap and watch too much TV, play too many video games, and are generally unprepared for life.


This is why I wouldn't sign my family up to appear on such a show, though you might remember that years ago our local paper did a front page article on unschooling featuring our family and they were much more open-minded and fair about it. I spoke with the reporter ahead of time and expressed my concerns about wanting an article that presented unschooling in at least a fair light without demonizing it, and I think she did a good job with it. Reading back through that article (written when my kids were 4 and 7 years old!), it's funny how what we were doing then is what we do now, just with older and bigger kids. And it's turning out just fine. I like my kids, they do such cool and amazing stuff. I can barely keep up with all that they do and only blog about a fraction of it, really. They're fun to be around, other people constantly comment on their politeness, their work ethic, their interest level and enthusiasm. I just can't see any way that these kids have been held back in life by being able to pursue their own interests fully. And yes, that often involves video games and sometimes involves donuts! Especially now that we're going to get a Voodoo Donuts shop right here in town. Yummmmm.... 


Oh, but I digress. For instance on the topic of video games, Mackenzie really really likes to play them. And yes, he even plays those first-person-shooter types like Halo, you know the kind that's going to make him into a violent maniac. Except that this weekend he also went with me down to my mom's house, since she had hurt her knee in a dancing accident (gotta love my mom!). He set up some stuff on her computer for her, helped around the house, went on a walk with her through historic Jacksonville (a gold rush town) so he could walk her dog, went on a nice hike with me through the interpretive trails in the gold mining area of the hills, and generally was just such a fun, nice, funny, and helpful guy you could hardly believe he's one of those dreadful teenagers, let alone one that plays those horrid video games.


And still on the topic of video games, Mackenzie has taken to making Youtube videos that explain various stuff in some of his favorite games. Like Blockland, a Lego-based building game, he's made a couple of videos for that. He loves to check back and see the comments, especially if people find his videos helpful and informative. So he's gotten a lot of experience using Windows Movie Maker and is currently helping me with a video project of my own. It's all in a day's unschooling, and contrary to what ABC might have you believe, it's all good.


So as a final antidote to that piece of yellow journalism, here's a bit of what our week holds:


A train trip to OMSI yesterday, the science museum in Portland, which has a nice NASA exhibit right now. 
Asa is spending the afternoon at a friend's house, they are choreographing a duet dance for an audition (ballet, jazz, hip hop). Auditions are tonight
Asa has rehearsals for Little Shop of Horrors
Mackenzie is helping me film my video project
Mackenzie is doing some writing on his first novel
Both kids have their usual classes: Asa has Mime, dance, theater, karate. Mackenzie has computer science, karate
Mackenzie is doing some configuring of our home network
Mackenzie has a couple of hours of work at his web design internship this week
Asa is practicing writing in cursive (another example of a kid wanting to learn something that I didn't even want to learn in school!)
Asa has been doing more and more cooking in the kitchen, for herself and for others.
Both kids are planting and working in the garden


and on and on and on. Such deprived kids!

See How They Grow

The milestones of the year show you so clearly the passing of time, and when you have kids that passage is even more exaggerated. Still, some years go by without the kids changing too much visibly. The year from 12 to 13 however is not such a year. I was just struck by looking at the photos of Mackenzie with last year's spring chickens. He looked like a boy.


Fast-forward a year, half a foot of growth, a smallish moustachy kind of thing on his upper lip, and the teenagey haircut and wow!
My great big honking teenage son! Not visible in photo: size 13 feet.























And then there's Asa:




Granted, the red hair looks alarmingly different, but her face is subtly different as well. Less chubby baby cheeks, more grown-up big girl face. More big-girl attitude sometimes as well, LOL. Ah, I so love my big kiddos, I love every bit of their getting older, even as I miss their younger selves as well. I love laughing at the same lines in movies, having philosophical discussions, having them cook breakfast and even clean it up! They are fun to hang out with and are becoming the most amazing people possible.

It's Showtime!

Opening weekend for Annie was finally upon us, and the week started out with a bang as Asa was featured on the cover of our weekly newspaper!!!! They did a nice two-page spread on the production and on the wonderful theatre organization that we've been blessed to be a part of. Since the theatre group is a non-profit, this was a wonderful opportunity to showcase their organization.

Speaking of which, the theatre group, Upstart Crow Studios, is in the running for a Pepsi Grant, which would bring them $25k, enough money to install a curtain, buy microphones, and create an entrance to the theatre. Please take the time to vote (you can vote once a day) for this amazing youth organization.

From mid-week on there it just got more and more exciting as the dress rehearsals wound to their chaotic close, the original dog playing "Sandy" backed out and I crazily volunteered my own 7-month-old mutt to fill her paws, and the other girl playing Annie in the double-cast show came down with pneumonia, leaving Asa to open on Friday night as well as her originally scheduled weekend shows. Then, mid-week Asa herself started getting sick, and I hit her with an arsenal of herbal remedies and enforced down-time, and she managed to make it to opening night with her vocal chords intact.

I saw the show on Saturday night, and to say I was blown away would be an understatement. Now granted, I'm The Mom and all, but I've seen Asa in plenty of theatre stuff before and let's just say she had a very big plate to step up to in the role of Annie and step up she did. She was so in character, every photo I have of her is full of emoting, and she just belted out the vocals like a pro. Just with the work we've been doing in the last 3 months, her voice has really improved a lot, and even notoriously stoic hubby got all teary-eyed as she sang her way through "Maybe" and "Tomorrow".


She has worked so very hard for this, and I really couldn't be prouder. The rest of the principal characters were also fantastic, it's really a very very talented group of kids and teens in this production (including the all-youth 20-piece orchestra!) Daddy Warbucks was played by a young man of 17 with incredible vocal chords and acting abilities, who we've known since he was a wee boy of 8 or so playing with Legos in the living room. At that point, Asa was an infant, so it's funny to see the two of them in these roles as Annie and Daddy Warbucks, but they really just played off of each other so well that it was a joy to watch.

Even my pup Sophie did a bang-up job, emerging through the audience and running up onto the stage, going off with the dog-catchers and then coming when Annie calls "Sandy, here boy!", which was quite amusing. Sophie's motto is "Will work for hot dogs".

The actors playing Rooster, Lilly, and Hannigan were all fantastic comic actors with great timing and body language. I could gush on all night. I was never a big fan of the Annie movie, but had not seen the stage version. It's very funny, filled with (of course) terrific songs and lots of great characters, as well as some social commentary. I wish everyone reading this could come and see, but for now you'll have to just be happy with my pics!

Don't Know What's Funnier

I'm not quite sure what's funnier, the fact that Mackenzie Rickrolled Wayne (told him to check out a cool airplane video, that was slick!) or the fact that Wayne didn't know what Rickrolling was, and so he watched the whole video, enjoying the musical flashback (I hate to admit it, but my hubby has a thing for 80's music). Mackenzie also managed to get Asa with a link to a "cute baby bear" (he sure knows who's a sucker for what in this family!).

More Life With the Pun-Meister

Over the lunch table today, Mackenzie is commenting on Asa's tendency to only eat the middles of her grilled cheese sandwiches:

"Oh great, my sister is the Anti-Crust!"

Words, Apparently Fail Me

Blogging is a funny thing. It's kind of like a diary, except that you put it out there for public consumption. The really good bloggers are great at dancing a line of witty self-deprecation and a raw self-examination that goes almost, but not quite too far to make us uncomfortable at reading the intimacies of their existence. I don't think I'm one of those bloggers, and maybe the reason is that when an experience in my life gets too intense, it's hard to find the words to share it with family and friends, let alone thousands of random strangers. This is probably why, unlike the incomparable Dooce, you won't ever be reading anything near a birth story on my blog.

So it is that while days and events, blueberry picking and beach trips and funny moments with the kids have flown by for the last couple of weeks, I haven't really been able to write about them. I haven't written a word here since the weekend we spent in Washington with Wayne's family following the death of his sister-in-law. I've wanted to talk about that weekend, which was definitely full of emotional highs and lows, but just couldn't find the words. And then it seemed silly that I couldn't write about it, and then it seemed even sillier to write about some other trivial thing that was going on, so basically I did nothing.

So (deep breath) here goes.

Don't know where to start... Let's see, Wayne's whole family was getting together for a family reunion, camping at Lake Wenatchee, which was planned several months ago. When his SIL died, we knew we would go wherever his brother would be, whether that was home or at the reunion. He decided to go ahead with going to the reunion, so we packed up the camper and headed north.

I can't imagine grieving my spouse's death. It's such a huge loss, none of us wants to think about it. Being with someone who has suffered that kind of loss is hard too because you so much want to make things better and there's really nothing you can do or say that will make that happen. Everything you think about saying sounds dumb because words can only carry so much feeling with them and it's not enough. Still, it was good to be there with his brother and just be with him - sit around the camp fire, laugh at the funny things his dog was doing (one of his 11 Great Danes, this one thinks he's a lap dog), and just be present.

On the total flip side of the coin, the kids and I got to meet their BIG brothers, Wayne's kids from his first (very very young) marriage. And that's really the part that's even harder to write about because it was kind of surreal. I was really nervous because while I know I'm a mom to my two kids, it's kind of different to be a step-mom to fully grown adults (when I don't always really feel like a fully mature adult myself half the time). And the kids had been really excited about this forever and I didn't want it to be awkward or anything. But I shouldn't have worried, because Rick and Rob are really the coolest of guys and Mackenzie and Asa ADORED them, along with Rick's wife Kristen. Being with them was eerie because while of course I knew they'd be a lot like Wayne, they were so much like Mackenzie and Asa in different personality ways and even at one point Rick looked over at Asa and pointed out that they were sitting EXACTLY the same. Like I said, eerie. They were so much fun to hang out with and Mackenzie summed it up with "I feel like we've known them forever even though we just met".

So while we were grieving a big loss in the family, we were also celebrating the growing of our family as well. Which made for a lot of emotional up and down over the weekend. I came back feeling like I needed to sleep for a week and then mentally process for another month or two just to take it all in.

The kids of course aren't old enough to really fathom grief in a big way. But they are able to process joy in the straightforward way that kids do. For days afterward, Mackenzie kept saying "I wish Rick and Rob were here, then it would be more fun" (and I would say "What am I then, chopped liver?" - but of course I can't teach him how to throw a football or any of that other great big brothery stuff like they were doing). And Asa has basically been running up their cell phone bills with phone calls and texts and sending and receiving photos.

And now the little details of life are smoothing down all of that big emotion, so I guess it's easier to process. After all, there's still laundry to be done and dinner to cook and swim meets to go to, and maybe even a few blog posts to write.

Increasing Traffic Safety With Spelling Lessons

What's the best way to teach spelling AND increase your safety while driving at the same time? Get your daughter a cell phone and let her do all the texting instead of talking to people on your phone (an insist like a Luddite that she actually spell words out instead of using u and r). Yes, the last member of our family finally has her own phone, and our home phone has now gone by the wayside.

I think I was the last holdout who really loved having a home phone in our family. I know it's a completely mental construct, the notion of having a phone attached to your house -- I can still remember with great affection the exact ring of the black rotary-dial number at my grandma's house (a ring which is, somewhat ironically, duplicated as a ringtone on my cell phone), and the way the numbers went clickity-click as the dial rewound itself. I remember hating numbers that had too many eights and nines in them since they took so much longer (and one of our local prefixes was 899, so those friends were the slow-dialers on my list). Dammit the home phone was MY mental construct and I didn't want to give it up. But for thirty extra useless dollars a month, it went bye-bye.

You'll notice that instead of the basic jobbie that Wayne had promised Asa she'd be getting, when they returned from the Verizon store he was practically tied in knots from being wrapped around her little finger as she was sporting this flip-out keyboard number in a shiny dark maroon shade. Can you say Daddy's Girl faster than you can say Big Softie???

Now if there's one thing worse than being a technophile whose daughter has a better phone than yours (mine is YEARS old and battered from being dropped from my bike more than a couple of times) it's being a big brother whose little sister has a better phone than yours. Mackenzie is adapting well, but I was wondering if we were going to have to invest in counseling there for a little bit.

And speaking of Mackenzie, at least Asa didn't break her arm jumping around from the sheer joy of getting a cell phone (remember that was Mackenzie's little stunt last summer??) but if she's not careful, she may strain her texting thumbs.

Snowy Days

We've had quite a week with several days of good snow and great sledding. The kids are a bit disappointed that we didn't get the dumping down here that the rest of the Pacific Northwest has been getting, as in several feet of snow! But they're happy that we got enough to keep their school-going friends out of classes for almost an extra week and so there were lots of kids out sledding on our hill.

They were really really hoping for a white Christmas this year, and the weather reports seemed to indicate that's what we were going to get, but now it has changed to mostly rain. Still, we're hunkered down and ready for a great little family Christmas together. No traveling this year after our whole year of crazy travel. And all of our family is elswhere, so it will just be the four of us together. Wayne is planning on making Christmas Day cinnamon rolls with Mackenzie, and the turkey is already defrosting. I got another big package of the world's best Oregon cranberries to make some sauce with, and we should be all set for a nice mellow holiday.

My mom and I went thrift-store shopping together yesterday (50% off day at my favorite place!) and I took her to the train station this morning where she hopped on a completely full Amtrak to Seattle to spend the holiday with my sis and brother-in-law. We got a few little stocking stuffers and had a great time.

To all who are celebrating this time of year, whether it be Christmas or Yule, Channukah or Solstice, I'm wishing you a wonderful holiday time filled with family and friends, love and laughter, and maybe a little white fluffy stuff falling from the sky!