Definitely!

Both of my kids were sling babies, other than my running stroller they were never in a stroller (didn't own one), just carried around. Of course, Mackenzie almost broke my back, hitting 20 pounds at about 2.5 months old! But still, a sling is the best parenting "equipment" I ever owned.

So I Guess It's A Good Sign...

...when your teenage son says to you "Mom, you should write a parenting book. That way other parents or people thinking about having kids could have all the benefit of your wisdom."

After I got done laughing, I thought about it. Trouble is, I don't know what I'd say. Well maybe I do, but it wouldn't be enough to fill a book. When my son was just a baby I remember thinking about how helpless he was, and trying to put myself in his shoes. What if I was in some terrible accident and my memory was wiped out and I had to relearn everything all over again. What if my best friend was my caregiver throughout all of that. How would I want her to treat me? That's how I've tried to treat my kids. And I know my caregiver might sometimes get frustrated beyond all reason, so I hope that my kids can forgive me when I don't get things just right or when I blow a cork from time to time. I always apologize, after all they're my good friends too.

I guess it all boils down to the golden rule. Not enough to fill a book, but I guess enough so that your teenager still thinks you're doing a decent job of things. High praise indeed.

Connecting the Dots

When you unschool your kids, there's no timeline on the wall (unless of course they want one), no chronologically organized curriculum to walk them sequentially through the events of our world. It's really up to us as unschooling parents to help them connect the dots of all of the various experiences that they're exposed to and things that they learn or know. As Kathy commented on a previous post (which I completely agree with), unschooling is not unparenting, and in many ways it is harder than homeschooling. There's no roadmap, and it takes a person who is themselves interested and engaged in the world around them and inquisitive about everything to be an unschooling parent.

Some dot-connecting happened this last week around here. Seemingly disparate things come together, sometimes organized and sometimes by happenstance. One thing that we're doing as a family is watching all of the episodes of M*A*S*H consecutively. We're currently at the beginning of the 4th season. Of course, no TV show in history probably commented more on current events - either directly or obliquely through an analagous relationship between the Korean war of M*A*S*H timeframe and the Vietnam conflict, ongoing at the outset of the series. So a lot of questions come up, mostly about the Cold War, communism, how the U.S. became engaged in those conflicts and how that relates to our current world situation.

Last Friday, we happened to travel up to McMinnville to the new Space museum opened up at the Evergreen Aviation Museum. I have to say, I'm very impressed with both museums, probably the most outstanding that I've seen in this country outside of the Smithsonian's collection. Of course, the history of the space race is simply steeped in Cold War politics, and the space museum itself even houses a large piece of the Berlin Wall. So those topics of conversation that we've been discussing regarding M*A*S*H were re-examined in the light of the Space program. Also Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech was broadcast on continuous loop there, which led to discussions about Kennedy, his presidency, and his assissination. Coincidentally, we had also recently watched an episode of Red Dwarf (Tikka to Ride)that had the intrepid space bunglers landing in Dallas, Texas on that fateful day and inadvertantly causing Lee Harvey Oswald to fall out of the window of the Texas book depository. We had also just read several library books about Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and death, right around the time of his holiday and Obama's historical inauguration, and that all tied in as well.

If the kids watched, read, and experienced these things in an intellectual vacuum with no one helping them tie them together, the effect in their own head might be less than cohesive. But with all of our disparate interests, from the kids' loving to watch The Simpsons (which alluded to the grassy knoll and the Zapruder film in the episode Marge in Chains) to our field trip to our M*A*S*H episodes to our library books, they have a pretty comprehensive look at historical events. Of course, this is just one isolated area of history but discussions and connections like these come up constantly in the course of our unschooling lives, and that's how the dots all get connected, not via a curriculum but one at a time while living our lives. And as Kennedy himself says so eloquently, we may choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept.

A Birthday Weekend

It seems like it can't possibly have been a year since this happened last but here it is again, my son's birthday. The day I met him, the day he was born, the day I saw his eyes for the first time. He has been such a force of joy in my life, and such an instrument of change to the person that I am as well. We had an awesome weekend to celebrate his birthday. Of course, he got his presents from us family members while everyone was still in pajamas in the morning, including this cute hippo headrest from his little sis' (she also gave him a hippo cookie cutter and hippo alarm clock, and noticing the hippos shirt - a birthday present from grandma last year - I'm sure you sense a theme here!). Yes, the boy still loves hippos. "Donation to WWF hippo protection" was one item on his birthday list in fact, and he has talked lately of a future in wildlife biology, studying hippos of course.

Then he wanted to camping, so we headed to one of the most beautiful places on earth: Waldo Lake. Some friends were camping there and we joined up for a couple of days of sunshine, incredible clear water (one of the clearest lakes in the world, with over 100 foot visibility), forest, and an amazing display of stars at night. My mom came to join us and brought her kayak, which Mackenzie really enjoyed paddling around in for hours and hours (I think mom thought she might never pry her paddle back out of his hands)

Besides kayaking, we went hiking, the kids rode bikes all over the place, there's a swimming dock, and they waded around catching frogs in the marshes and had frog races. All the things that make a late-summer camping trip so sweet....

At 4:14 in the afternoon, my alarm went off. Mackenzie and I were alone on the shore, he was still wrapped in a towel, and I wished him the happiest of birthdays in that quiet moment (and of course, snapped a pic of my birthday boy, looking very quietly contemplative here).

After getting home late Friday night, we spent Saturday morning getting ready for his birthday party. I woke up at about 2:30 am in a mild panic. The wind was blowing a cold and pelting rain through the open French doors in our bedroom, and Mackenzie had planned an outdoor party with lots of games (and he had about 20 guests coming, so I was envisioning how I would keep all of those kids busy in our house if we got rained out!) But I shouldn't have worried as Saturday dawned clear, if a little chillier than the usual August weather. The sun shone on his party and everyone had fun playing tug-of-war, capture the flag, and water balloon fights.

And of course, he had fun opening presents, from a chess clock to D&D books, Yu Gi Oh cards, favorite games and gift cards, he got some very thoughtful presents from his friends. Then they all played in the park until the dusk closed in on another turning of the year.
The next day, we went for a hike up a local mountain with my sis and brother-in-law. It was great to have them here for the long weekend, and celebrate together as a family. The good weather held until about an hour after everyone hit the road to go home, and then it started pouring. It was definitely a serendipitous little window of weather for Mackenzie's birthday weekend.


As always, I'm grateful that I've gotten to spend another year on this planet in this young man's company. As he grows and matures, we spend more time together as friends, and less time with me reminding him to wash behind his ears or pouring his milk. He's a great person to hang out with, even if he wasn't my son he'd be one of my favorite people on the planet. With a ready quip, a rollcking laugh, an inquisitive spirit, and a soft spot for hippos, his cat, and all creatures great and small, he's just a terrific 12 year old kid.

Mom Vs. Coach

I've been very lucky in my mommy career that my worlds really haven't collided all that much. In the first two years of Mackenzie's life, I was a working mom, and those times were tough all the way around. He was a high-needs baby and toddler, and it was hard to leave him each and every morning to go in to work. Fortunately, my husband was a stay-at-home parent during the day, brought him in to me every single day at lunch to nurse and play, and then went to work every night. That took the edge off of the conflict for me, and made it workable, at least in the short term.

Since I quit full-time employment though, I've really had it pretty easy. Hubby is an incredibly involved dad who hangs with the kids through my novel-writing, photography, and coaching gigs and even through my training and competing in the Ironman (no small time commitment there). The last few weeks though have brought my mom role and my role as a coach for a Team in Training triathlon team into close proximity with each other. For one thing, his job as a corporate pilot means he can be gone on the spur of the moment with very little notice. Lately, his flying has coincided with almost every critical training for my team, leading me to drag my kids around to lakes and campgrounds and hang out while I help people into wetsuits and onto bicycles. Luckily, they're very good sports and after what we have jokingly referred to as my "suck it up" speech (something about kids in Africa being responsible for their entire family's goat herd all day), they've been great at helping me out in my responsibilities, or at least keeping themselves entertained (for example, by biking around the parking lot in a pirate costume!)

This last weekend was the culmination of six months of training for my athletes, they were to attempt an Olympic distance triathlon near Bend, Oregon. Again, at the last minute my husband got called to fly and the kids and I took off in our camper van without him. Rushing around registration tables, at the same time as juggling my daughter into the kids' triathlon I had promised her she could do just about turned my last hairs grey (and there aren't that many that aren't already!), especially in a crowd of around a thousand parents and a very unexpected (by me at least) five hundred kids participating in the race. I had unwisely hopped out of the car without my cell phone, leaving my friend to park it and bring my son to meet us. It was a total mad house, but we finally did meet up and got to watch Asa smile her way through her second triathlon. She especially loved how the "swim" part of it was really a gigantic waterslide.
After the race, I briefly lost her in the finish line confusion. Fortunately, we had talked about what would happen if we got separated, and she followed our plan and walked to the bike transition area and sat next to her bike. Having a plan in a crowded place is definitely always a good idea! I was so grateful to see her sitting there.

The kids also got to come with me (and the athletes) to the pasta party. They hung out with the other athletes and listened to inspiring speeches, and also to parents describing their children's battles with leukemia (leading Asa at one point to say, not so sotto-vocce, that she hoped she never had to have leukemia. I hope not either sweetheart, which is one reason that Team in Training is so important). Fortunately after that point hubby made it over and my days of juggling coaching and mom duties wound down for the weekend. From that point on I could concentrate on my athletes, and if you want to read more about their experiences, I'm writing it up in segments on my Ironmom Blog.

Untie the Apron Strings, the HMS Freedom is Sailing

I appear to have reached some critical juncture in my parenting life. I didn't see it coming, there was no signpost reading Imminent Demands for Freedom, 10 miles ahead. No warnings. Just out of the blue, my kids want more freedom to do more things. The requests come fast and furious and apparently I wasn't prepared enough to think out the answers ahead of time. This leaves me standing there in the moment thinking "Is it okay if he goes over to a friend's house when I'm not at home?", "Can she really cross the street safely by herself without me to jerk her back by the arm if a car comes speeding around the corner?", and worst of all the recent "Will this kayak turn over and drown both of my kids if I let them paddle out into the lake by themselves?" Of course, in that moment in which a child has asked to do something daring and exciting, the last thing they want is parental him-hawing.

To add complexity to my decision-making task, one of my kids is extremely cautious and one is a risk-taker extraordinaire. Which means that by the time the first one has come to the conclusion that he is ready and responsible enough for a certain freedom, I can usually just rubber-stamp his decision. The second one is just as likely to ask "Can I fly to the moon tomorrow?" as "Can I cross the street by myself?" And I'm not the kind of parent who likes to put unreasonable No's in my kids' path. I want them to have the kind of childhood I experienced: building forts in the forest and riding my bike around town and basically feeling like the world was wide open to me. Unfortunately, I also don't want Miss Risk Taker doing some of the crazy and, I should point out, unsupervised things that I did as a kid. There was a well on our property and we liked to take off the old rotting boards covering it and throw things down it to listen to how long it took before they hit bottom. I grew up in an old gold-mining area and one of our favorite places to play was the "Chinese Diggins", an area of old tunnels with rusted out mining cars and dangerous shafts going straight down into the ground that had been mined by Chinese workers in the late 1800s. As much as I love my folks, sometimes my childhood reminiscences end in my head with the phrase "What the hell were they thinking???"

So it was with great trepidation that I watched my kids paddle off into the lake last weekend. But what can you do when your oldest, who up until recently wouldn't set foot in a boat (I think he might be the only child in Disneyland history to refuse to get into the Storybook Boats because they were "too dangerous") suddenly asks to paddle around in the kayak by himself, and then after an hour of that asks to take his little sister for a ride??

You can unti the apron strings, throw some confetti, wipe a tear from your eye, and watch the HMS Freedom sail away.

Elephants Don't Play Video Games

It seems that in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings (and other random acts of publicized mayhem), every internet group is discussing violence and its causes and implications in our society. This is no less true on parenting groups, where it seems to tend to settle on culprits such as violence in movies, TV, and that devil incarnate, video games. These are what I tend to think of as external influences, perhaps even tangential ones. Much is made of them, but sometimes I wonder if they act as does the purposeful wave of the magician's hand as he diverts your eye from the truly important action. Now I'm no defender of Mortal Mayhem V6.0 or whatever the latest blood-n-gore action on the screens and movie theaters is, but I think to be mistaking such things as causal factors is to either deliberately or inadvertantly ignore the greater societal truths.

When we were on vacation last week, we had the benefit of getting Animal Planet on our hotel TV (a channel we don't have in our cable lineup at home). So we were watching a special on Rogue elephants. In the past, rogues were rare - often a newly-matured male on a testosterone-fueled rampage. But these days they are becoming increasingly common, purposeful, vindictive, and downright violent. Elephants are killing rhinos (a previously unheard-of act) at astonishing rates. In one game reserve, officials shot three bull elephants responsible for the deaths of 63 rhinos. And they turn on each other as well: in Addo Elephant National Parkin South Africa, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants, compared with a rate of 6 percent in other, more stable elephant communities (does that sound similar to differences among human communities?) A biologist studying these elephants on the television show we were watching offered up this bit of wisdom (I paraphrase from memory here): Young elephants are experiencing traumatic incidents as youngsters, and are being taken away from their elders and family structure and left in scenarios where their only social encounters come from equally immature peers. In these scenarios, they resort to bullying other elephants and to killing elephants, rhinos, and humans. Funny, though, they don't have access to violent video games.

I was instantly struck by the parallels between the elephants' behavior and our current society's issues with violence, particularly among adolescent males. Breakdown in social structure, kids who do not grow up with the influence of stable family elders, or kids who are removed too early from family relationships and intimate bonds (elephant studies have shown that young elephants stay within 15 feet of their mothers for nearly all of their first eight years of life, an age by which the average American child has spent a huge percentage of their hours in daycare, preschool, schools, and before and after-school care) are all factors we share with elephants. In elephant herds without the older matriachal females who have typically presided, calves are now being born to and raised by ever younger and more inexperienced mothers, in a downward cycle that mimics one being played out by younger and younger teenaged mothers in our own culture.

Not that there are any easy answers to this dilemma, either for the elephants or for ourselves. The New York Times has a fascinating and informative ten-page article from last fall called An Elephant Crackup? that I found while searching for more information online about these issues with Rogue elephants. One take-away that I got both from watching this TV program and from reading the article is that no act of human connection, either with each other or with animals is unimportant. I know when I was a new mother, I was very passionate about Attachment Parenting, breastfeeding, maternal bonding, mom-care over non-necessary daycare, and parental attachment over larger school institutions for "socialization". But that passion felt unanchored by much more than my own intuitions that such things were of huge and overwhelming importance. Too often they are seen as personal choices, and any discussion thereof must be tempered with a necessity to validate all other choices as somehow equal. When looked at from this ground-level viewpoint, a mother's choice to breastfeed or to put her child in daycare is a very small and personal choice. But when we look at overall patterns of attachment and social fabric, the choices we make on a daily basis combine with everyone else's choices to weave a pattern that either draws us closer to a society of cooperation and harmony, or one of destruction and violence. These small personal choices are of the utmost importance, and anything we do to help parents, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and community members draw together and form strong bonds benefits our entire society.

As for those pesky video games, I see them as symptom, not disease. They're the snot that sprays out when a rhinovirus has invaded a sinus passage. But they're not the virus. What possible lure would choking a virtual victim hold over someone who is intimately connected to their family, friends, and community? Such acts are like the rhino-murdering elephants: sad aberrations that point to a disintegrated social fabric.

Finding the Gifts in Challenges

One of my favorite all-time books, Illusions by Richard Bach, has so many inspirational quotes that come back to me at various times in my life. One that occurred to me this week is:

There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts.

One of the challenges in our weekly routine lately has been getting to our karate class in a timely manner, all dressed in our karate gis (white uniforms with belts). Since we carpool with friends, getting out the door in time is important, not just for us but for them as well. Transitions can be challenging for my kids. My oldest finds moving from one activity to another to be a big challenge at times, while my youngest can get distracted from something like getting dressed by a bead on the floor or the sudden notion to get out her puppet collection or an idea for a new hairstyle she wants to try out this moment. Getting everyone in the right gi and moving toward the door by 9:30 was shaping up to be an exercise in major frustration.

In our culture, frustrations with kids and timelines often results in rules, star charts, or simply pulling one's hair out and yelling louder. In a house where positive interactions and creative problem-solving are stressed over top-down rule, those answers are simply not an option. So our ongoing getting-out-the-door issue continued, involving frustration for all of us.

But one day, a fun and simple solution presented itself to me. I threw all of our karate gis in the dryer for a few minutes until they were nice and toasty warm. Then I called out "Gis for sale, get your nice warm Gis here!" and the kids came running and put on those nice, warm, fresh-smelling gis and I have to admit they felt really good getting dressed all warm like that. It change the whole tone of trying to get ready to go from a struggle to a really pleasant experience that we all share. We ooooh and aaaah over how nice and warm they are. So now I've started doing that with pajamas in the evening too when the kids want me to.

I'm always amazed at how if you take a problem and really look creatively at it, you can almost always find something that makes it better. Sometimes I get too heads-down and don't use that creativity, get stuck and don't see a good solution. This was a great reminder about how easily an experience can be transformed by something simple. When we're presented with challenges, we can always be looking for their gifts.

A Lifelong Friend

I've been looking through old photos and came across this wonderful trio from when my son was a baby, and then this last one from an autumn trip to the beach. Sabre has truly been a lifelong friend to my kids. Things are getting easier, a day at a time, but we will be missing him for a long time. The weather has gotten sunnier this week, a big improvement from the sleet, hail, and freezing rain of the last ten days. We can be outside more and everything looks brighter, even emotionally, when the sun is shining.

Last night, I had a dream that left me strangely reassured. I was walking by a park with the kids, someplace we had never been before. Steve Irwin was standing on the corner of the sidewalk and the kids recognized him and ran over to him saying "You're not dead! You're alive!" over and over. He shook his head and said that he really was dead, and at that point the kids started crying. He said "No worries, I just came here to tell you that I'm with all the animals and they're just fine."
He gave me a hug and everything was so vividly real - touch and smell and sight seemed just like real life. I woke up feeling very peaceful and well-rested, for the first time in over a week, and the sense of peace has stayed with me all day. If there really is an animal heaven, I would love to believe that Steve Irwin is up there looking over them all and keeping them company. They would be in good hands with such a wonderful soul as his.

Coming Face to Face With Grief

We had to say goodbye to our wonderful dog Sabre this week. He was our friend, companion, protector, and he loved the kids immensely. They've both known him their whole lives, and my husband and I have had him since before we were married. For all of us, it is the closest experience with grief that we've had in a long time.

Sabre was more than just a dog. He went everywhere with us. Every homeschool park day, every camping trip, every beach day, every evening we played games or read books in the living room, he was there. He is in the background of most of our family photos, right there by our sides. He went to work with my husband and charmed everyone he met. His kind face and loving soul were evident to all, and his faithful shepherd nature gave him a sense of duty to watch over us all. I think it was hard for him to let go of life, just because he felt so strongly that he was here to protect us.

As with so many of life's most joyous and saddest occasions, I'm grateful to have had the sheer amount of time to spend together. I'm grateful for all of the time we had with Sabre, a dog who didn't like to be alone (as a puppy, if we left him he would dig out from the yard and go spend the day with any neighbor who was around) and thankfully was always surrounded by family and friends. And I'm grateful now to have the time to spend with my kids as we all grieve his loss. Homeschooling has given us this gift of time, which I know I've talked about here before, but it can't be emphasized enough: life is short. The hours we have together are all that we have, when all is said and done. If the kids had been gone all day, I probably also would've been gone all day. Sabre's life would've been very different, that of a dog waiting by himself. Instead, he was part of an exciting maelstrom of kids, activities, and fun places to go. Mountains, snow, beaches, parks, we shared it all with him.

We're lucky to have had him, such a beautiful and sweet soul, in our lives. We're lucky to have had all the time and the wonderful experiences to share with him. Now we're just trying to adjust to the emptiness that's left behind. The beach sure won't feel the same without him.

Biology is Destiny?

When I was a mother-to-be, I had all kinds of high hopes for raising my kids free from gender stereotypes that are so endemic in our culture. My husband is the only one in our family who sews, and he cooks a mean lasagna or crock pot chicken; I own two motorcycles, my pilot's license, and can turn a wrench when I need to, it seems that it would be pretty straightforward to raise children who had no preconceived notions of what men and women would do.

That was before I gave birth to a boy, then a girl. In the early years, we didn't even have a television. They probably watched fewer commercials (you know, the ones with girls playing with dolls and boys zooming trucks around) than any American children on the planet. They had us as role models. They both had access to dolls, Thomas the Tank Engine trains, stuffed animals and superheroes. They would not be trained into any roles by us, that's for sure.

My first inkling that something was dramatically different between the two of them came one day when they were both playing with some plastic Spiderman action figures. M, our son (then six years old), had them flying around involved in some epic battle, complete with sound effects. Whenever he would hand one to our daughter A., then three, she would take them over to the doll house, tuck them into bed, and sing them a lullabye.

Later, I noticed that when M. played with Thomas the Tank Engine, he built elaborate layouts and drove the trains around for hours on end. The same train tracks and trains were passed down to A. but she invented little stories and interactions between the trains and rarely touched the tracks. Frustrations sometimes arose when they tried to play together. M. wanted someone to drive trains with, while A. wanted complex interpersonal character interactions.

As the years have passed, they've found places where their interests intersect. They've come to understand that compromise might be necessary when they play together. Sometimes I will overhear an interaction like this:
M: Do you want to play an imaginary game?
A: Sure. I'm a princess!
M: No, no princesses please!
A: Okay, how about a cute fluffy doggy?
M: Aaaaaarrggh (eye rolling here) Okay, but sometimes you're fierce
A: Okay

Yesterday they each had a friend over to play and my final reservations about biology and destiny flew out the window. The boys immediately dragged the Lincoln Logs and toy soldiers down to the living room and set about building forts. The girls took turns borrowing each others' clothes and dressing up as dancers. The gender differences couldn't be more obvious.

Now that's not to say that they will grow up stereotyped into some roles. Both of the kids know how to cook, and A. is the one who says she wants to ride my motorcycles some day. They are both sensitive and kind, and neither is afraid to show their emotions or give us hugs. But I have learned to honor that in their basic approaches to life, they come from different directions, and that's okay.

Overheard

My son to his friend, talking about robotics:

"And my mom said she would coach the team. Isn't that cool!"

Wow, if that doesn't warm a mom's heart. I love how close we are to our kids. I love that they get really enthusiastic to do things with us. I love how my 10 year old son is not shy about expressing that enthusiasm about doing something with his mom to his friend. And when his friend said "Yeah! Then I might be interested in joining!" Well, that's icing on the cake friends.

The Hidden Milestones

When I was a new mother, a wise mom once told me to pay attention to the Invisible Milestones. Of course, we all wait excitedly for the regular milestones - baby's first words and first steps, the first book they read, the first time they take the car keys. But the Invisible Milestones are not the "firsts" but the "lasts". The last time they crawl, nurse, sit on your lap without squashing you flat.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately because my daughter still uses those cute turns of phrase that only a child's creative mind will come up with. She was telling a friend about horseback riding the other day, and mentioned that Annie, the first horse she rode, was her "starter horse". The pancake at the bottom of the stack is the "under pancake", and when she turned her ankle for the umpteenth time recently, she wailed "I have flimsy feet!".

I guess as children grow, their brains naturally mimic the speech patterns around them instead of inventing them from scratch. But a seven year old is still in the zone of the fresh observation, a seven year old doesn't know a cliche. Just a few short years older, my son at ten rarely does this anymore, and when he does, I treasure it. So I saved a message from him on my cell phone where he called and told me there was a "jumpy surprise" waiting at home (he and my husband had put up our trampoline while A. and I were out) and I remember with fondness how he used to ask me to "unpeel" a banana, and the opposite of "upside down" was of course "upside up".

Just knowing that the hidden milestones, the "lasts" exist is enough to pay conscious attention to the children that I have here, today. They won't be here tomorrow, tomorrow they will be slightly older, different. Tomorrow they might peel a banana, instead of unpeeling it.