Teenagerhood

I just sat on the couch and hugged my big ol' guy who used to be my little teeny guy, and then my funny little toddler, and then my adorable little boy. Now as of 4:14 this afternoon he's officially a teenager. We measured him against the wall today to find out he's grown 3/4" just since July and he just grew out of wearing Wayne's shoes.

It's been a crazy week, he had a birthday party with friends last Thursday and went laser tagging, then Asa had an audition on Saturday, Wayne and I left the kids with my mom and went to Portland for my triathlon on Sunday, came back to our regular week's worth of stuff, Asa's last swim meet and water polo game of the season and now today the boy turned 13. He wanted to go bowling, just our family, and to roll the first ball out at 4:14 exactly (when I always set my alarm to go off every year on his birthday). Then it was out to Sweet Life Desserts for coconut cream pie, and to see Star Trek at the movie theatre. All in all a great birthday to turn 13 by. I'll have to wait until tomorrow to upload some pics of it all.

Pics from Family Reunion

It's taken me a bit to get these up, but here's some pics from the family reunion...
All seven siblings in one place!

Mackenzie's thinks it's cool that he's as tall as grandma...

Asa showing one of the pics on her phone to Rob, Kristen, and Rick

Dana with Shiner, the very big (and very sweet!) Great Dane.


Wayne and I are looking kinda shrimpy next to these big guys!


Mackenzie and Asa were so excited to get to hang out with Rick and Rob.

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.

Checking the P-Mail

With temperatures over 100 degrees here lately, we've been taking our dog to the dog park late at night when it's actually almost cool enough for her to run around (as I biked home from work at 7:45 on Monday, the thermometer read a toasty 97 degrees!). Mackenzie keeps up a running dog impersonation as Callie runs around sniffing "Yep, I'm just checking my pee-mail. 328 messages! Some of these are from two months ago. I'm getting behind on my pee-mail, must check the inbox more often." The kid cracks me up, it's like living with a full-time comedian (when it's not like living with the bouncing ball of hormonal emotions, that is).

Score One For The Mom

Mackenzie had his phone stolen yesterday out of his locker at the pool yesterday (no it was not locked, yes this is definitely a lesson on how to protect one's more important possessions.) Normally he doesn't leave it in his pocket, but going in with friends he got distracted and, well, that's usually when a thief will get you.

How did I discover his phone was stolen? When the creep who stole it texted me something really nasty that for your sake I won't repeat here. So, given the content of the text message, I figured it was a kid or teen who nabbed the phone and I texted this back:

I have put GPS trace on the phone. Turn in to pool desk or I will prosecute u 4 theft!

Guess what? The phone got returned last night.

Just an FYI for those of you whose kids have cell phones, you can turn the GPS tracking on full time (my own phone I only have on for 911).

Summer's Symphony Synergy

Have you ever seen an almost teenaged boy just begging to go to the coolest concert in town, the one act he HAS to see this summer.... and it's .... Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. I'm LOL because at this age my parents would DRAG me to the symphony but I would've killed to have gone to, say, an Eagle's concert. I'm so glad we all ended up going though. We are so lucky to have this beautiful outdoor venue here, right next to the river and the symphony gave a free evening concert with many gorgeous works from Bizet to Gershwin, culminating in Tchaikovsky. Said boy was wiggling out of his skin with excitement as the climactic moment approached (especially when he spied them wheeling cannons behind the stage to the right of the amphitheatre - there had been just a wee hint of disappointment when no cannons were spied on the stage).

It was a perfect summer's eve and it seemed like the whole town had turned out to fill the amphiteatre. A heron did several lazy circles above the audience (garnering some applause, but luckily departing before the cannons made their grand entrance), the clouds above turned orange then pink, and the beautiful early strains of the Overture wafted over us in time with a warm breeze that set all of the leaves on the tall cottonwood trees in motion. Sometimes life achieves a simple perfection, a synergy of every element from the people you're with to your surroundings to sights, sounds, textures, smells, touch. Goosebumps pucker up on your arms and tears leak out of the corners of your eyes from the sheer joy of it all. Such was our evening with Tchaikovsky. As the band lit into Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever for the encore, we decided to march our way out of the amphitheatre (Mackenzie discoursing on the similarities to ancient Roman amphitheatres and me singing something about being kind to web-footed friends) and down the trail along the waterway.

Joyful Joyful

There is something indelibly sweet about the strains of Beethoven's Ode to Joy emitting from under a door frame, with this perfectly angelic voice singing the words to the hymn Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee....

....coming from the bathroom of course. I will definitely miss these days when my littlest angel still sings in the bathroom.

She's still on a Beethoven kick. Big bro sent her the Ode to Joy ringtone for her phone, and within minutes she was sitting at the piano and picking it out, playing the cellphone version then hitting the keys until she got the right notes, over and over. So I brought out my hymnal and since then she has been chipping away at learning the full chorded version. And of course singing it on the bike, at the pool, over dinner, in the bathroom.

Genetic Hoo-Haw

First of all, a pic of my great big gargantuan huge-looking kids. Gosh, does the summer weather make them sprout up like my dandelions?? I have to chuckle because someone commented the other day on how much the kids looked alike and Mackenzie (individuating himself as required in the Big Brother Code, section 1.3.c.) replied that they looked nothing alike. Ummmmm, yeah. Take a look at this photo, big bro.

Secondly, some totally cute stuff from the kids lately. The first is related to this growing-huge phenomenon. One day he just started doing it, Mackenzie in his now-much-deeper voice began to answer the phone like this... "Mmnnnnnyellow". This is EXACTLY how my dad has always said "hello" when answering the phone. But I don't think Mackenzie has ever heard that since I'm always the one to call my dad. It's just plain eerie, but at the same time it never fails to bring a smile to my face. Talk about a chip off the ol' grand-block. It sure makes you wonder exactly how many things are genetic. I mean, phone answering??? On a not-so fun note, both of the kids tend to get a painful knot in the muscle that lies just under the left shoulder blade.... Exactly where I have a killer knot that flares up from time to time and even travels up my neck until I can't turn my head to the left. So Mackenzie quips "Great, I inherited the family knot!"


My Asa funny for the week comes from her first swim meet of the season, where she won her freestyle and backstroke heats. Afterwards, she remarked langorously "I love breathing to the side in freestyle. That way I can just watch all the other swimmers slipping away behind me." LOL! Maybe that swimming thing is just a wee bit inherited also...

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.

Blown Away By Beethoven

Asa took a piano class at the homeschool resource center last term, they brought in little electronic keyboards and learned some music theory, started to learn to read music, etc. At the end of the term they had a little recital and she played a short piece, it was her 2nd piece of music that she's ever played with two hands. One kid at the recital played a version of Beethoven's 5th, and she fell in love with it and asked me if I could get a copy of the music.

In the week after her class got out, she taught herself to play this. Given that she doesn't fully read music, had never played chords before, and barely knew how to play with two hands, I'm more or less blown away by her playing. Check it out for yourself!!!



Watching her work on this reminded me of something our karate sensei said about diligence, that people who appear to have great talent are sometimes thought to just have a gift, for things to just come easily to them. But in reality such people also work very very hard at what they do, and their success is equally, if not even more driven by their diligence and hard work as by their raw talent. Watching her play this, it would be easy to assume that she is just very musically gifted. Well, of course she is. We've known that since she was an infant and started matching tones and notes with her wee little voice. But she also works very very very very hard at this stuff. Wayne was going nuts with how many times a day she was playing this piece, and I had to remind him that there are thousands of parents out there who would kill for their child to WANT to practice their piano music two dozen times a day. I did count one day, she played this song 27 times. Not all at once. Sometimes she sits down and plays it through several times. Sometimes she would go up to her room and play it on the "pipe organ" setting on her synthesizer keyboard and laugh maniacally like the Phantom of the Opera. Sometimes she would play it and only play each note once (even if the note repeated she would only play it once) and hold each note out really long. None of these are any kind of structured methodology, just her playing around and really having fun with her music.

I have no idea if music will eventually be her life's career, but I absolutely love to see her passion for it, her drive to perfect it, and the completely free way that she approaches it. Today I heard her singing upstairs and she had gotten out the music for the Broadway version of Beauty and the Beast and was simply singing through all of the songs. She doesn't think of this as "practice" and isn't in any way coerced to do this. It's just who she is and what she does. And I for one am totally in awe of her.

Thoughts On the Other Side of the World

We're back from our week of camping, kayaking, and adventure (for Mackenzie and I) and another great experience with Missoula Children's Theatre (for Asa). But before I delve into photos of our fun time, I wanted to take the chance to share with you my sister and brother-in-law's blog, East Meets West.

In the time that we were away in the sagebrush side of our state, the aftermath of the elections in Iran have been unfolding on the other side of the world. Since my brother-in-law is from Tehran and much of his family lives here, these events are no longer just news stories for our family, but involve the lives of real people who share many of the same dreams that we do - to freely elect their leaders, to have the rights of self-determination. Not only do Marisa and Nickrooz share their wonderful photos and description of their latest trip to Iran on their blog, but I hope you can take the time to read their insights into what is going on in Iran right now and how important it is that we support the people of Iran and not just think of them in terms of a few stereotypes.

It Is With A Heavy Heart

That I write this blog post. Asa's beloved almost 2 y.o. cat Bandit died two days ago of antifreeze poisoning. It was the most horrible thing I've ever had to go through with an animal, bar none. We still don't know where he got it from, after looking under every car within blocks, it's a mystery (and one that still keeps me nervous for our other kitties.)

Asa is, of course, just devastated. She and this cat were so close, he was her best buddy and her first real true close pet companion. In all my years, I've never lost a pet that wasn't in old age, so this is all pretty shocking and hard to take. My heart is so heavy, especially for Asa, and for Garfield, Bandit's brother and constant companion. Bandit was just the sweetest most loving kitty you can imagine. I used to call him "Bandito the Sweeto", and the morning of his death he came and sat on my lap and gave me the full purr treatment. He just adored Asa, she could carry him around like a sack of potatoes and he would just love it.

I can't believe he's gone. More than that, I can't believe that an incredible toxin (just about 100% fatal to cats, and with huge fatalities in dogs, wildlife, and humans as well) is still just out there in everybody's car, garage, etc. I had no idea. I can't believe I had no idea. I'm still processing this all and finding out about things like bills that have been introduced to even just make the stuff taste bitter so animals and kids won't drink it (why this has not happened yet is simply beyond my comprehension.). I'm sure you haven't heard the last of my thoughts on this matter, but right now we're all just grieving.

R.I.P. Bandito the Sweeto.

Looking It Up

A friend recently gave us an awesome two-volume set of the ENTIRE Oxford English dictionary. Normally this takes up many volumes, but this set has been miniaturized so that the entire thing fits into two hefty books, with four regular-sized pages condensed onto each page. Reading it requires a magnifying glass, but it's completely fascinating. It gives the first known print references for every word imaginable, and many words you've never even heard of. The kids have been having fun just paging through and looking up new and unusual words.

I think we'll have to have some friends over and play "Fictionary", a game we used to play at family camp when I was a kid, which is the no-cost predecessor to boxed games like Balderdash. One person looks up a word that nobody knows. Each person then makes up a definition for that word and writes it down on a piece of paper, while the person with the dictionary writes down the real definition. Then you vote on which one you think is the real one. We had many hilarious nights playing this game at camp, but you need a really extensive dictionary to play it, especially with highly literate players.

According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to type the 59 million words of the Oxford English Dictionary, 60 years to proofread it, and 540 megabytes to store it electronically

Day of Dissection

As I mentioned awhile ago, one of our homeschooling friends set up a GREAT activity. She has a neighbor who is a retired neurosurgeon, researcher, and professor at USC medical school who volunteered to dissect cow's eyeballs with some of the older homeschoolers (who knew you could order cow eyeball dissection kits on the internet!). Mackenzie was very excited about this, especially since he's been thinking a bit more about maybe going into biology or medicine.

It was a really interesting activity. Not having done any dissection before, it was all new for the kids, but they got a lot of great information from their mentor and it really was fascinating stuff. Mackenzie wasn't sure ahead of time whether or not it would gross him out, but he really enjoyed himself. Cutting the tissues was quite difficult, but when it came to slicing away the lens and the iris, he found that all fascinating. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to be a surgeon working with such delicate tissues, and trying not to slice them all up. I call this Mackenzie's "mad scientist" look...

The lens was very hard, almost like a marble, but some of that comes from the preserving of the tissue. The backs of the eyeballs are reflective, like many animals, to aid in night vision. They looked irridescent, almost like an abalone shell.


Of course, no dissection is complete without some hijinks with the finished product.


















One of the moms volunteered to lead a fun activity for the younger crowd. They designed containers using straws to drop eggs in, then dropped them from various heights and recorded whether or not they broke. Then they put on a skit for the rest of us when the dissections were complete. All in all, it was a very cool activity day. As the kids get older and more and more really interesting opportunities open up to them, homeschooling just gets more and more fun.

Chapter 345 of Unschooling Adventures, In Which I Become An Algebra Teacher and Assign Homework

I've been many things in my mothering career - mentor, guide, coach, and of course The Mom, but I've never been a teacher. Unschooling has allowed me to learn alongside the kids, to help the kids, to be their facilitator, but I've never had to sit down and formally teach them a lesson (a fact for which I've been profoundly grateful). It's been an exciting journey to watch their interests grow and change, to take part in their learning without having to explicitly direct it every step of the way. When I've had the chance to overhear homeschooling parents' discussions of curriculums and enforcements of study time, I've felt mildly exhausted by proxy and thanked my lucky stars that I just get to be a participant in the kids' self-directed learning adventures.

So then what's an unschooling mom to do when her son comes to her and says "Mom, I want to learn Algebra"? You see, most of the mathematics up to this point are learned organically - by doubling a recipe that includes fractions of cups, by counting allowance and figuring out how many months to save up for a special item, by helping dad measure the deck and calculating square footage of lumber. But somehow I doubt that anyone learns how to simplify polynomials organically, and negative exponents don't just fall out of thin air into one's head. In short, Algebra kind of needs to be learned in some sort of structured fashion.

Now I've never been the kind of unschooler who completely runs in horror at the notion of any kind of formal learning. I do believe that there's a time and a place for it, specifically when the kid asks for it. And my kid was asking for it. What's more, our unschooled neighbor kids were also interested in learning Algebra, so all of a sudden I had a class! Since my remembrance of all things Alegbra is sketchy at best, it was off to the library and internet for me, and finding PurpleMath.com was a real bonus, I can tell you. Alegbra for Dummies isn't a bad resource either, much better than those old textbooks that I learned from.

Coincidentally, I was going through a box of my old papers and discovered the following poem, written by me at age 13 and attached to a bunch of my old algebra homework:

Algebra (A Rime by Robin)

Addition, subtraction and others
Muddle the thoughts in my head.
And then there's fractions (oh brother!)
I wish I could just sleep instead.

This class is a bore for me
And I imagine it's the same for you
And just think of being a teacher!
Listening to this the whole day through

We look forward to the bell
With visions of food in our brains
But the school food is just plain hell
And always gives me stomach pains

So this is the end of my rhyme
I have an assignment to do
I wrote this instead of using a dime
To place a telephone call to you

Clearly, I was not enamored of Algebra at slightly older than Mackenzie's age. And I certainly wasn't begging to learn it. Moreover, I could imagine no worse fate than being an Algebra Teacher, and yet here I am. On the bright side, I could clearly do no worse than my own public school teachers at making Algebra palatable, and as a bonus I serve better lunches than the school cafeteria.

I read this poem to the kids in one of our first lessons and we were off and running. Immediately I saw the need for them to do homework or they would lose the memory of how to do this stuff from week to week. And I also saw the need to review each of the last week's lessons at the beginning of class or it also could flee from the memory cells. I do my best to keep it lively, and with only three of them I can make sure that everyone understands each lesson before we move on. That was probably the biggest disadvantage of my experiences with math in school - sometimes I didn't understand so well what we were doing and why, and no one could take the time to explain it to me.

So far we've worked our way through Factoring and Absolute Values, Exponents and the basics of Polynomials. We've memorized definitions and formulas, and it's been a real learning experience for me to go back over this stuff and realize how very little of it I actually remember! I couldn't for the life of me have told you how to calculate a negative exponent for instance. It's also been a learning experience to see the world of teaching from the other side of the blackboard.

More than that though, it's a confirmation of all that I've believed about unschooling from the start: when a need arises for more formal education, unschooled kids are motivated to pursue it. Mackenzie wants to do more complex computer and robotics programming, for which some knowledge of Algebra is essential. Lately he's also been talking seriously about wanting to go into medicine, and he knows that this will entail a science and math-heavy college load at some point in the future. Keeping in mind that I've always loved pure math, when I re-read that poem of mine I feel sad for a math experience that caused me to turn my face away from the fascinating puzzles of the Algebra world. It's a wonderful opportunity to hopefully give my kids a different kind of approach to math, one that buoys up their natural curiousity about how numbers relate to each other, and respects their own timelines for learning.

Motherhood: The Tough Job

When it comes to celebrating mothers, the standards are in place: breakfast in bed, cards telling them how wonderful they are, maybe some flowers and chocolate. And motherhood really is awesome, of course, and certainly to be celebrated. The days that each of our kids were born were two of the best days of my life. I can remember the excitement with which I greeted them, getting to meet them for the first time. Heck, I remember Wayne and I crying together over the little blue line on the pregnancy test stick.

As it turned out, Mother's Day Weekend this year was both a wonderful celebration, and a testament to how hard the job of mothering can be. My mom arrived on Friday to celebrate the weekend with us, and as we were all sitting around after dinner on Friday evening, Asa's cat Bandit came wailing up the stairs dragging his hind legs behind him in a crippled fashion. We had no idea what had happened - hit by a car? Fell out of a tree? (he's a notorious climber). We were off to the Emergency Vet, where about half of the city's population of pets also seemed to be having similar crises. After several hours there and X-rays and blood tests, we were no closer to an answer to what had happened to our kitty - no broken bones, possibly snapped tendons, possibly a blood clot, possible a spinal cord injury. The best the vet could give us was a bill for $500 and an appointment with a specialist, and some dire predictions.

I spent Friday night completely sleepless with worry. We wouldn't be able to see the specialist until Monday morning, and I had the sinking feeling that what we would be told was something along the lines of "We can do an MRI (closest feline MRI machine is 100 miles away) and this $10,000 surgery, or we can put your cat to sleep." How could we possibly make that decision? In the good old days (or bad old days if you prefer) there would simply not be this option. A cat with no working back legs would make a trip behind the woodshed with the father of the family and his trusty shotgun. Tears would be dried and that would be that. Sometimes the miracles of modern medicine come with the price of very hard decisions.

Fortunately for all of us, the little patient was on the mend and by the specialist's appointment on Monday he had regained quite a bit of strength and mobility in his hindquarters. The veterinary specialist was a wonderful guy who spent a long time going over possibilities with us. Near as we can tell, Bandit jumped out of one of his high trees and probably did some shock to his spinal cord, causing his back legs not to work. As it is healing, he's regaining his ability to stand and walk. With any luck, a few weeks of rest and he will be back to normal (and unfortunately probably back to climbing trees that he can't get out of).

Completing the Mother's Day weekend picture was a sick chicken who just kept on getting worse over the weekend. By Monday, her fate was not nearly so happy, and Wayne thankfully spared me the job of dispatching her as we were definitely NOT taking a $500 trip to the vet for the chicken, sad as that reality might be. Still, Foghorn was one of our sweeties, and the chicken who recently graced our photos in People magazine. Perhaps one of the most viewed chickens in the country, a poster-chicken for backyard poultry everywhere, she will be missed.


So it was with relief that the rest of the weekend was more along the lines of the Hallmark Holiday Mother's Day. On Saturday night, we got to go watch Asa in A Taste of Broadway, a review of different musical and dance numbers from Broadway musicals, put on by Upstart Crow, the theatre company that she has been acting with for many years now.

On Sunday, we took Mackenzie's kayak up to the lake for its first launching. My mom brought her kayak and the two of them had a grand time exploring the lake together. Although I forgot my wetsuit, I still went for a swim even though it was really a bit cold to stay in for too long. When we got back, Wayne had barbequed up a giant salmon, and my mom had brought a delicious pecan pie that she bought in an auction. All in all, a great Mother's Day, with a reminder thrown in of why we should all value our own mothers. Sometimes, unbeknownst even to the rest of the family, they take on the pain and the worrying and the hard job of holding it all together (even on no sleep.)

Sharing Wisdom

As people go through life, progressing through education and careers, gaining experience and knowledge, they often come to a place and time in their lives when they are suddenly not so busy as they once were with career, children, etc. There are a wealth of such people in the world with specific experience to share, and possibly plenty of time to share it in. Homeschoolers do well to tap into the variety of experiences available.

We have been the beneficiaries many times in our homeschooling adventures of people's specific knowledge - whether its in music or art, writing or science, gardening or cooking. Not all adults are interested in sharing their abilities with kids, but there are many of them out there who are, so finding them and matching them to things my kids are interested in is always a part of our unschooling lives.

Recently, a woman who works at our local market heard that Asa was interested in singing, and she has come over to the house to practice singing with her. Another friend is setting up a physics lecture with a local expert. Another homeschooling mom has set up a really really cool activity, using this cow eyeball dissection kit, and a friend of their family who is a retired surgeon. Mackenzie is especially interested in this, since he has been thinking recently that going into the medical field is something he might possibly be interested in. We've been watching M*A*S*H this winter, in chronological order, and while it's full of lots of funny humor the show also includes a lot of medical terminology and action, so it's something he's become fascinated with.

I checked out the book The Way We Work, a book on the human body by David McCaulay, the same author who wrote and illustrated the excellent The Way Things Work series. We also just went up to OMSI in Portland to see the traveling DaVinci exhibit there. Along with some of DaVinci's codices, working models of many of his inventions and ideas, and an extensive exhibit on his paintings (including a fascinating portion on the Mona Lisa, including multi-spectrum photos taken with a 240-million pixel camera recreating how it looked when originally painted) there was a whole section of enlargements of his anatomical studies and drawings.

Once again, I love how so many of the things we encounter seem to dovetail and weave around each other - once you become interested in a particular subject, it seems that there are endless opportunities to study it from many different angles. One thing may spark an interest, but many different things can feed that interest, and one big benefit in our kids' lives that I see is the number of people who are willing to share their time, expertise, and interest with them as they pursue these different interests.

Pup + Beach = Fun

As you might imagine, our lives have gotten a good measure busier in the last couple of weeks with a new pup around the house. Callie has settled in well, but the calm placid dog of the first few days (lethargic is probably a better description) has gained rapidly in energy and puppy zest as her body became used to good nutrition, sleep, and play. We took her to the beach for the first time this weekend, enjoying the t-shirt weather and taking frisbees and other toys. Her favorite activity though was just running around the sand dunes with the kids. She proved to be quite speedy, passing up everyone in the family pretty darn quickly.

When it came time for Mackenzie's usual burial in sand, she settled in for a snooze up next to his uncovered head, and by the time we got in the car to come home she was plumb tuckered out. It's definitely a challenge to have a puppy in the house, especially with all of our activities and stuff, but overall it's very nice to have a dog as part of our family again.

Huh. Listening To "Experts" Inhibits Decision Making

The Eide Neurolearning Blog has an interesting article about the effects of being exposed to an "expert" on the brain regions responsible for making decisions and calculating probabilities. When thinking for themselves, students showed activity in these critical thinking brain regions, but when given advice from an expert, activity in those regions "flat lined." Interestingly, students in the study "tended to follow [the expert's] advice regardless of the situation, especially when it was bad"

At one point, the article states:

In Nicholas Kristof's Learning How to Think article, he reminds us of the "Dr. Fox effect" to which it seems all sorts of educated groups (college students, medical professionals, academics) are susceptible (..but one wonders whether less educated groups are less susceptible?)

The italics there are mine. One certainly does wonder that. This particular one (me) even wonders whether groups that are not "less educated" but "differently educated" are less susceptible as well. I'd like to think that healthy skepticism and thinking for oneself is a big part of the curriculum of life that my kids are exposed to. I do know for a fact that they are not likely to go along with a crowd just for the sake of fitting in, nor are they likely to take anyone's word as gospel without a grain of salt and some time to make up their own mind about it. I take care not to set myself up as an "expert", even when I am explicitly teaching them something (like our recent forays into Algebra, which I will have to write up separately), always encouraging them to do further research into any subject. On many occasions, they've certainly become more of an expert than I am on their particular subjects of interest.

I've often wondered how the early conditioning of kids to think of themselves as knowledge-receptors given to them by self-appointed "expert" teachers may influence the brain's abilities in the realms of critical thinking and decision-making. It seems that even the presence and instruction of an "expert" is a non-neutral thing, even when their advice is neither correct nor beneficial.

It may even be that the most critical thing that unschoolers "teach" their children is how not to be taught.

Doggerel

I've got a ton of things to catch up on posting here, but our lives were hijacked this last week by an 11 pound bundle of energy and cuteness named Callie. She's a mostly Jack Russell Terrier, with what we think is some Beagle mixed in. Our neighbor rescued her from a not-so-good home situation, and she is just a sweet and fun little thing. A real cuddle-bug as you can see here!



She definitely adores the kids above all else, and just goes bananas whenever she sees them, and the feeling is very mutual. Asa has been wanting a small dog since, well since forever. And Mackenzie grew up with our dog Sabre, always having him around, and has been missing having a canine friend ever since Sabre died two years ago. So far they're both doing great with taking her for walks, keeping her from chewing on anything and everything, and even (gasp!) scooping poop (a requirement stated in my pre-dog speech to them).



Of course, since she's only four months old, she alternates between bursts of energy and tuckering out. Her favorite place to nap is right on top of one of us, but if that's not available she has taken a liking to my stuffed tigers.