Mental Health Day

This has been a really strange week at my house. Both Einstein and I have been feeling really off-kilter, not as a unit, but just thwarted by some recent developments and the emotional energy that surrounds them. Yesterday those emotions came to a head, and we simply couldn't function. So we packed up our kids and our life jackets and went to the lake.

Whenever we venture out like this it feels great. We took many mental health days after my dad died two years ago. We drove down to Galveston Island State Park and miraculously had the entire place to ourselves. We walked along the beach in complete solitude, let the girls play in the sand and the sea, and let the the salt air and the grand forces of nature wash over us, and hold us rooted to the earth.

We went on day hikes along rivers, discovered waterfalls and massive oak trees that had stood witness to more hopes and sorrows than Einstein and I will ever know. We took long drives out in the country, camped, walked, listened to the wind rush through the trees, and the sound of water bubbling over rocks. And we made our best investment yet: a canoe.

We lived in Austin, Texas at the time and dragged our canoe out on the Colorado River that winds its way through the area, where we explored every little crevice of water around Town Lake. We stumbled upon deer and large snapping turtles, nests teeming with duck eggs, swan couples swimming along with their fuzzy-headed cygnets, and a multitude of dragonflies, blue and sparkling as they darted all around us. We found surprise rain showers and warm, clear springs to wade around in. And more than once we rowed out under Congress Street bridge to behold hundreds of thousands of bats take flight at dusk over our heads.

Being in the presence of nature is cathartic. No matter what tragedy befalls us, nature goes on, unhalted. The open air makes room for the energy that swells inside us, causing our hearts to break and our heads to spin-- nature gives us all the room we need for that stuff to dissipate. It helps us slow our heart rates, think more clearly and gives us room to breathe.

Yesterday we ended up at a nearby lake. We made friends with local fisherman, and the kids were a captive audience to three families of geese and their combined 18 goslings. We watched birds and noticed the myriad shades of green in the trees across the lake. We rowed and sat. Contemplated and breathed deeply. And held each other.

We're always teaching our kids something. Hopefully mental health falls somewhere at the top of the list. I hope when they're older they will remember these days on the lake and be able to release their own inevitable sorrows into the wind, and like the geese, find their way home again.

Carpe diem

"So give your children your greatest gift: strive to become the person you always wanted to be."
--David H. Albert, from Homeschooling and the Voyage of Self-Discovery

Sunburst has been making a list of all her great ideas. Every day it's something new, and I just can't keep up with them all. So I asked her to write them down, and one by one I'm helping her knock them off the list:

• Play with cornstarch -check
• Learn to jump rope - check
• Knit ponchos for me and dolls
• Learn to read sheet music

But what about me? My dear friend Moxy Jane asked me if I had done the same for myself. Goodness knows there are things I'd like to accomplish yet in this lifetime, various and sundry things that I forget or continuously push to the back of my plate, things that are mundane, or pipe dreams, or just plain overwhelming. I'm human, I can only do so much in a day... but why not?

Ok, I said, I'll do it... I'll write my own list. But I didn't, I pushed that list to the back of my plate and forgot about it. Good friends don't let you get away with that sort of thing. She pestered me about it again and again, until finally I'm doing it. She turned me onto this website where everyone is doing it. It's called 43 things, a place for anyone and everyone to share their goals and chart their progress.

It's not really a novel concept, is it? Anyone can make a list, but to make that list on a worldwide forum and share the energy and power of a group of people who are aspiring to their own dreams right along with you? That's huge! Small ideas like this can change the world, one act of random kindness at a time. One clean toilet at a time. It doesn't matter, it's all about striving and evolving and empowering ourselves and becoming. Making the impossible seem a little more possible.

I like that.

And it doesn't even matter what your goals are, really. Life is too short to NOT do this. For myself, for my children, for all the people that I love and have lost and will lose...

I have to try.

Playing with chalk

We use chalk for everything-- making pictures for our elaborate stories, studying forms, writing lessons, playing games... and I love the Zen quality of it. Its impermanence allows us to change and grow and discover new things all the time. We're never stuck in the same rut. The impermanence forces us onward, so that we're constantly creating new worlds.

One of our favorite chalk activities is hopscotch. I was a hopscotch addict when I was in grade school. My best pal Carrie and I used to play hopscotch every day at recess, without fail. Of course the lines were a permanent white, and unchanged day in and day out. After all these years, I've come to find that drawing the hopscotch block is as much fun as playing the game itself. Sunburst loves to draw it, in a multitude of colors, and it has yet to look the same way twice. Lately she is very interested in making the jumping aspect of it harder, so she has been planting counters all over the board for added difficulty:

"How far can Mom jump? Hee, hee."

Moonshine finds her own way with the chalk. Sometimes she copies what we're doing, and other times she just explores the color changes. Last week she spent quite a bit of time drawing on the back step. I wasn't sure what to make of it, but then she informed me that it was a "map of the states." The U.S., through the eyes of a 4 year old, looks an awful lot like this:

The blue on the bottom left is Arizona, next comes the white blob, which is Texas. The yellow on the far right is South Carolina. Everything else is the midwest. We live in the red state, apparently, which isn't anywhere close to Arizona in real life... but a girl can dream.

She has pretty much covered everywhere she has been in the recent past, and I find it amazing to see how she's putting these pieces together in her mind and making sense of the world she knows. Wow.

Walking the line

As you know, we've been doing a lot of counting over at our house. I recently introduced the four mathematical processes, er math gnomes, ala Waldorf education-- just to give Sunburst a taste, an idea, a bigger picture of the beauty of counting. And it was a heap of fun.

But, having read a bit of John Holt and other folks, I didn't want to miss this grand opportunity to present a different and important view of the Big Picture of numberland: The Number Line.

In Schools For Thought, by John T. Bruer, it's suggested that if you show a child how to think about numbers as interrelated, or near each other, children develop a spacial relationship with them that helps them with quantitative calculations-- they count better and faster. And Holt suggested in Learning All the Time, that kids can learn to add and subtract easily using two rulers (or number lines.)

They're the same idea, really: See where the numbers are? They go up, and they go down. Infinitely. And the four processes? They just represent different ways of moving about on that line.

The kids foraged around and found their sidewalk chalk had survived the recent week of rain, and we set to work. I didn't have any grand plan, so I just numbered as far as I could on the back patio, spacing the numbers out by about a foot each. I wanted Sunburst to really see them as separate pieces within the whole.

I even threw some negative numbers in because this was the Big Picture, the whole picture, and numbers indeed go both ways. She knows this when Einstein borrows money for coffee and writes her little I.O.U.'s. Negative is what dad owes , or is it what you no longer have since dad has borrowed it? Real life applications.

Thus, the groundwork was established, and the games began.

We grabbed out our green and blue silks and set to work, taking turns being gnomes: Tally (addition) and Minus (subtraction.) Minus dropped things and gave things away and always kept going backwards. When he promised more than he had, he went negative. Tally just kept adding and adding and adding, well beyond the numbers I had constructed. "20" was off the patio and in the middle of a bush, and it was a crack up everytime Sunburst realized she had to go in the bush.

On the second day Sunburst couldn't wait to play again, so we grabbed our yellow silk, and pretended to be Myriad (multiplication.) We counted by twos, hopping. We counted by threes, fours, and fives. Understand, my number line only went to 18, so we were a bit limited, except that Sunburst really wanted to go back into the bush for 20. So we counted by tens... and she kept going--- through the bush, to the big tree, all the way around the yard, calling out the numbers by 10's... She finally leaped over the bean patch and yelled 100.

When Einstein came home she wanted to repeat the whole experience for him, number by number. When she told him she could count by fives, he challenged her. And she did it! We had only gone to 15 outside on our number line, but with that little bit she figured out the pattern and counted up to 95 by fives.

Then it rained again and our number line vanished. Sunburst took it upon herself to recreate it, happily announcing that she managed to fit the numbers up to 21 on the patio, clearly trumping my own attempt by 3. It has since rained again, and her counting has morphed into other realms, like jump rope rhymes:

Mother baked a chocolate cake.
How many eggs did it take?
1, 2, 3...

Drowning in a Loch of Tears

We've been sunk.

Do you ever find yourself most of the way through a good children's book where everything is goodness and light and age appropriate, and then WHAMMO!-- things start to hit the fan?

Last night we finished reading Little House in the Highlands. Great book. Gentle and interesting and good character development. History, haggis, the whole nine yards... it takes place near Loch Caraid aka "Friendly Lake" in the Highlands of Scotland. The main character is six years old and behaves like a six-year-old. Such good stuff, that both my girls were engaged and happy and brimming with excitement about it, connected to it, feeling it in their hearts and souls and then BANG. Something devastating happens in the penultimate chapter that throws us into a quagmire of grief. Sunburst, in particular, sobbed with wild abandon.

Understand that she's seven, and seven-year-olds can be wired like emotional rollercoasters, but still. I don't think it was entirely unwarranted.

***Read no further if you don't want the plot give-away.***

Martha's doll, Lady Flora, drowns in the loch. Her best brother floats her out there on a makeshift boat, unbeknowst to Martha, and she arrives in time to see her doll slowly sink under. It's not just a doll, but her constant companion. To make it worse, the doll is wearing new, fancy clothes to match Martha's new fancy clothes. The doll is even wearing a woolen shawl that Martha had spun and knit herself... and it's this woolen shawl that really does her in--the weight of it when it gets wet drags her down into the depths of the loch never to be seen again.

Ok, so it's a doll, not a person. But to a child? This is big-time. Sunburst has two dolls that she loves more than anything. One, a Waldorf doll I made for her years ago, and two, a doll my sister made for her just this Easter. She cannot and will not sleep without them. She gets them ready for bed each night, and wakes them up in the morning. Life without these dolls would be unthinkable. So this plot twist in the otherwise gentle story set Sunburst to wailing like a siren.

We had to then finish the story at once.... and hope, against hope, that her doll was saved. It wasn't. After a long and painful last chapter, there is some attempt at resolution in the very last two pages, but for Sunburst it was totally sub-par. Martha gets a new special toy (I won't give it all away,) and the "cold, empty place" in her heart gets filled a bit more. But Sunburst didn't buy into this at all.

No. Nothing short of dragging the lake would have brought the sun back into Sunburst's heart again. I fully expect she will go to Scotland someday and attempt to do just that: The resurrection of Lady Flora.

Friendly lake? Hah!

Art makes you smart

"The test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do. Similarly, any situation, any activity, that puts before us real problems, that we have to solve for ourselves, problems for which there are no answers in any book, sharpens our intelligence. The arts, like the crafts and the skilled trades, are full of such problems, which is why our skilled artists, artisans, and craftsmen are very likely to be sharp-witted people. Their minds are active and inventive; they have to be."

---John Holt, from How Children Learn

Sunburst has spent the last three days with a drop spindle glued to her hand. We bought a spinning wheel last month, and she has been driving herself, and the rest of us, near crazy trying to make it work for her. We generally encourage all artistic endeavors in this house: drawing, sewing, painting, music, pottery, knitting, whatever. Einstein and I can't seem to stick to just a few interests. We have to try everything, at least once. And that's an example that seems to have stuck, at least with Sunburst, even though her attempts with the spining wheel always end in a flurry of tangled wool and exasperation.

Conincidentally, we just reached a point in our reading of Little House in the Highlands where the main character, Martha, tries to spin flax on her mother's spinning wheel. And it's hard! And she's just not tall enough yet to make it all work. So instead, Martha ends up learning to spin wool on a drop spindle.

"Don't we have one of those?" asks Sunburst.

Einstein had made some out of old computer cds and a dowel over a year ago, and they worked great... until they got sat on. So Sunburst showed him the picture in her book, and low and behold he emerged an hour later with a wooden spindle. It has been stuck in her hand ever since.

So far she has made:

1. bits of wool fluff appear on every surface in every room of the house
2. one small ball of yarn

She's working on her second ball, apparently confident enough in three days time that I caught her giving an adult neighbor spinning lessons out in the yard. When the neighbor asked her what she was going to do with all that yarn, Sunburst announced that she has big plans.

"Well, I'm thinking I'm either going to knit a doll blanket or mittens. Maybe I'll knit mittens and then dye them if we can find the right kind of dye."

This was news to me. Of course, Martha is also knitting mittens with her homespun yarn, so it makes sense. But when Sunburst got out of bed tonight and announced that she couldn't sleep because she was having a knitting idea about making a huge dishcloth with a hole in it, and it was an idea that couldn't wait for morning... well, I have to wonder.

Where and how does she come up with this stuff? Does art really make you smart?

Mother's Day Obsession

While out driving yesterday, I spotted something that stopped me dead in my tracks: a 1969 Volkswagon Beetle. For Sale!

I almost never see these beauties for sale anymore, at least not while I'm on my way to buy groceries. I had to stop. I had to get out of my car. I had to peek in the windows and peer inside the engine and lay down on the wet asphalt and gaze longingly at its underbelly. Not many people would understand this obsession of mine, but those of you that know the deepest parts of me, know. You know that my heart started aching the minute I set eyes on it and I could hardly sleep thinking about it, trying to rationalize the purchase in my brain.

In the midst of the grand procession of Mother's Day joy, the seller returned my call. He was asking $4,500 for it. A fair price for a car that's almost 40 years old. It had a new engine, new interior, new gas tank and lines, new tires, and all those lovely chrome bits-- ALL of them! Nothing was missing. Everything worked, even the windshield wipers-- which is no small feat.

But $4500?!! That's a whopping sum for a one-income family like ours. And it's not even a family car, or even safe. My last VW bug got busted to bits when I was rear-ended twelve years ago. A newly rebuilt engine, gone in a flash, and me, whisked to the ER with sirens and the whole nine yards. No, definitely not a safe ride for kids, even if I could fit them and their carseats in it, which I can't. It would have to be a grown-up toy. My toy.

I could drive it to the store, I guess, if I ever went to the store alone, which I don't. Impossible! But my brain tried to rationalize it all day long. We could take the money out of stocks. I could host a bake sale. It could be my Mother's Day present! I could drive it to knitting class and relive my youth for ten minutes a week! Sigh. There must be some way to make it sound feasible.... I tried all day.

Meanwhile, while I mulled over the VW, Sunburst gave me this Mother's Day present, a styrofoam ball sculpture of our old, beloved cat, Peppercorn. She ran away 16 months ago.

This is one of the many tributes to Peppercorn that we have acquired over the last 16 months. It's the first planter though, as this is intended to be... something to decorate plants with. A large styrofoam mass of cat-gone-by. Very sweet. It may, however, need its own pot.

This cat will remain in our hearts and minds and now plants forever.



Moonshine, presented me with a whole bevy of hand-crafted items. They know I'm a sucker for handmade goods, and boy do they provide. I will never be left wanting for:




A styrofoam guy










A "turny thing"





OR

A plastic eye glued to a pompom....


The purpose of which was explained to me as:

"It's for picking fuzz."




Sweet, clever children. All this is mine, all mine!

What was I doing pining away for a 1969 Volkswagon Beetle? And on Mother's Day of all days, when I already have a pile of lovely presents, I'm trying to convince myself that the universe must have dropped this car in my lap for a reason. The perfect day, the perfect car --just like the one that I lost 12 years ago, only better. Perfect. Near Mint Condition. A reward for all my hard work and dedication and perserverance and long labors and cheeriness.

I went ahead and took it for a test drive. It was dreamy in that nostalgic kind of way, but it wasn't perfect. It was actually a bit rough and finnicky and awkward. It was easier to handle than our '65 VW bus we recently sold, but still, not the pleasure ride I had been working it up in my mind to be for the last decade. It was actually a lot like work, and goodness knows that with three kids and homeschooling I don't have time for any more work.

And then I realized that that was the part I loved about it. The work. The fiddling, the fixing, the getting greasy and figuring out bits of it, like the time the starter went out and I had to continuously push start it for three months. Or the time my bearings busted loose, killed the speedometer cable, and made the most horrible racket known to man. Or the time my wipers went out in a heavy downpour and I had to blindly pull over and wait out the storm for over an hour. And the time the engine went completely kaput and I asked the mechanic in all seriousness, "How hard is it to rebuild an engine?"

That car and I had memories. It grew me up into the person I am today. If I hadn't ever greased a set of ball bearings, or fiddled with a cable, or gave it a multitude of solo running pushes before jumping in.... If I hadn't ever really listened to the melody of the rain drumming on a tin can roof, or steam-cleaned an engine, rebuilt a carburetor, replaced spark plugs, or loosened a stubborn bolt with a torch... I'd be a VERY different person today. It made me capable of pretty much near anything. Fearless. Strong. Independent.

"I don't think I'll buy this car today," I told my daughters. "But someday, when you're older, we'll get one. It may not be a '69, who knows. Maybe it will be a '63 with an oval window... but anyway, we'll get one. And it won't be perfect. It can be our homeschool project. We'll have to fix it up, you see. We'll get some parts, and some tools, and we'll take the engine out and get all greasy, and make it run good as new."

Moonshine, my princess duck, looked at me with all sincerity and asked, "Tomorrow?"

That's my girl.

Kiddie Mats

Last night I found myself telling an old friend about a recent work dream I had. She and I used to work at a movie theater when we were in college, back in the day. We shared the same shame of donning those awful, itchy polyester suits with stripes up the sides and matching bowties while we served popcorn and nachos to the masses.

We were a stunning sight-- dripping with the stench of greasy popcorn and imitation butter flavor. We spent hours sweeping up stray Milk Duds and popcorn kernels, empty boxes of Junior Mints and Sweet Tarts, filling soda after soda after soda, and scrubbing the popcorn kettle until our fingers ached and we gagged on cleaning fumes. Those were the good times.

The bad times, aside from drunks, vomit, bathrooms, and one particularly degrading manager, were relegated to a few choice shows in the summertime, known to the insiders as "kiddie mats." One day a week in the summer we would open for an early matinee showing of old kid's shows-- animated films like American Tail and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and we'd reduce our admission to a buck. On top of that, we'd bring out these tiny soda and popcorn containers and charge the kids a buck a piece for the pair, soda AND popcorn. It was a win, win situation for the customers... but for us, the lowly servers, it was a nightmare!

First of all, we had to be at work at 8 am... which is not horrible unless we were one of the unlucky souls to have worked until midnight the night before, which was usually the case. We had to clock in, hurry up and throw last night's popcorn into a warming bin, dump the icy cold nacho cheese into the machines, and then start filling and capping a ton of those teeny tiny sodas and prepping box after box of popcorn. At 8 am!

We'd open the doors and it would be a mad rush. Inevitably, most of the crowd would consist of daycare kids... not just a group or two, but dozens upon dozens of excited, screaming, little folks who completely outnumbered their hired caregivers at least 15 to 1. And they all wanted popcorn and soda, of course. And at least half of them spilled a good portion of each on the floors. Talk about mess! And the caregivers always wanted nachos, which were never, ever quite hot enough at that hour of the morning. And then we'd get chewed out, because a woman with 15 screaming kids needs to feel heard by someone, anyone. "Yes lady, you and your need for hot cheese in the morning are important."

Inevitably, at least one kid would get his fat little forearm stuck in a cupholder and be hollering like mad while we greased him like a pig to get it out. More than one kid would pee in the seats or on the floor. Good times, indeed.

After kiddie mats we'd have bits of popcorn crushed into the carpet all over the lobby and have to clean the theaters with blowers and tackle the soda spills with mops. Kiddie mats were like tornados, come to think of it: Loud, frantic, and messy.

And they haunt me still today, apparently. I dreamed my superviser was calling me to let me know I was scheduled to be there at 7 am. From Texas, no less. Nevermind that I don't even live in Texas anymore, my dreamself doesn't remember about that. My dreamself was just horrified at the idea of kiddie mats. My dreamself wanted to sleep in, have a quiet morning to myself, maybe have a read over a leisurely cup of gourmet coffee and NOT under ANY circumstances, grease, wipe, mop, blow, sweep, or serve ANYBODY.

My dreamself apparently doesn't remember that I'm a mom now, either.

It has been 15 years since I worked at that theater. Why would I dream about kiddie mats NOW? After all these years? Then it dawned on me, my life is like kiddie mats. No sleep, get up early, make food, screaming kids ---noise, noise and more noise, and always something underfoot. Everytime I clean one mess up, there is some new disaster, like we're living in a minefield. Kiddie mats. My life has been downgraded to kiddie mats.

Hmph. Well, at least we don't have any cupholders.

Making books

Sunburst is making another book. This one is called, "The Magic School Bus with Snakes."

She has been making books for about two years now, off and on, on a wide variety of subjects: storytime at the library, gymnastics class, birthday parties, Halloween... She goes through these heavy phases of book-making every few months, and yesterday she began again. She got out a pile of xerox paper, construction paper, and an assortment of colored pencils and spread them out all over Einstein's desk and set to work.

"Don't look, Mom." Ok, ok...

I found her a few minutes later sitting on the couch scanning the indices in several science and nature books. "Mom, it says that a ruhtuculah puhthen is the longest..." Huh?

"Reticulated python?" Yeah, that. Big ol' snake. Ginormous. Grows up to 33 feet long, she tells me, something like six bicycles end to end.

Whoa that's impressive, I say. Then she shows me her cover page with the snake bus. Apparently Joanna Cole and her illustrators haven't done this version yet. Cool idea, a snake bus. And she goes on to tell me all the interesting facts about snakes, and how if they were longer than 50 feet they would be too heavy to move themselves. Really.

This would be her first attempt at researching information for a book. So far, so good. She's already got the two most important pages finished: the cover page and the author notes.

"If you would like to learn about snakes, read the book."

My favorite subject is... Waldorf?

Sunburst and I met with our new family doctor yesterday, and the inevitable question came up. "Are you in school?"

"Well, not exactly school..." Sunburst explained. "We do homeschool. You know, we stay home and mom teaches us stuff." --Which to outside ears sounds much better than what she used to say, "No, I don't go to school. We stay home and my mom lets us do whatever we want." In reality, they DO get to do a lot of what they want. We're fully ensconced in the powers of child-led learning, and for the last several months what Sunburst has wanted is something akin to a home version of "school, student, and teacher." So that's what we've been doing, and she loves it.

But then came a doozy of a question, "What's your favorite subject?"

This to a seven-year-old? Sunburst just looked at her as if she spoke Martian. Her eyes narrowed and her forehead wrinkled up while I waited for a variation of "does-not-compute" to feed out of her mouth on a slip of paper like a receipt machine. Not unlike many other homeschoolers and unschoolers, we make a point to connect life and learning in our house, so of course Sunburst doesn't compute "subject." There are no fast and hard distinctions here:

Sit at your desk, raise your hand, only speak when you're called upon, and no passing notes to the baby. Open your math book to page 32 and do problems 1-16. Use your freshly sharpened #2 pencil and be sure to show your work for full credit. --Which when you're little, is not only a grade but accompanied by a smiley (or not so smiley) face or a sticker, right?

Nah, we don't do that here. But despite the growing popularity of homeschooling in the world today, I'm sure there are plenty of people who still think that this is how it goes-- that we, the great body of homeschoolers, keep our learning confined to separate boxes (named math, English, and science) which we open and close and keep on the shelf and never, ever dump them all out together in a huge pile on the floor and jump in and throw up in the air and sprinkle around like confetti --a little in the garden, a little in the kitchen, a pinch or two under our pillows...

Our homeschooling is like a smorgasbord where they don't have those compartmentalized food trays. A little of this, a little of that. It's all out there for the taking, and we heap our plates as we see fit. Sometimes we go back for seconds, sometimes we push things to the side that maybe don't suit our palates, and sometimes we overindulge and need to push our proverbial chairs back and take a break.

Subject? I decided to help Sunburst out on this one. "Do we do anything fun?"

Her eyes brightened, and she turned back to the doctor. "Oh yes. Mommy tells these stories and we make pictures. I'm learning to draw with block crayons made of beeswax, only I don't outline, I have to start from the middle and shape things out."

What subject is that, exactly? That is the Waldorf approach to all subjects, whether it's mathematics, English, science or whatnot, you learn them through storytelling and art.

So she likes it.

You know what? Me too.

My Life with Aliens

Yesterday we talked about the Big Zero. Minus, our resident math gnome, counted the cups of water that spilled from his bucket onto the sides of the path. It wasn't long before his bucket was empty and we were left with a sum of zero. It was a story about subtracting, but also one of giving, for you see Minus had sprinkled some flower seeds along the sides of the path and had chosen to give them life. We do that every day, don't we? We subtract. We give so that new things may come to life. When we hit the Big Zero, the possibilities are limitless.

Today was all about subtraction. Kitty Bill was cutting teeth, and so I gave. The phone kept ringing, so I gave. Sunburst inadvertently ripped the dishwasher out of the wall, and I gave. I subtracted the available minutes of my time and managed to only present the next form in our story of Robin Red: a spiral. In the story, Robin goes to the forest in search of Mother Earth and meets the messenger snail, ergo our spiral form emerged.

The girls then wisely subtracted themselves from the house and played outside for a good chunk of time. I went out to check on them at one point and found that Sunburst had been practicing making chalk spirals on the patio. Ten feet from that was a near perfect circle, sculpted of collected lawn clippings, and carefully decorated with birdseed and flowers.

A crop circle?

"A nest," explained Sunburst.

In Waldorf circles (ha) people talk much about letting a lesson sleep. It's precisely this way that new forms are conquered, new skills are mastered, and so forth. Sometimes we find lessons that we have to let steep for days within our subconscious. I know certain lessons I've been steeping for decades, and still haven't mastered inside myself. But I always forget the power of this sleeping/steeping process, and I'm often startled and amazed by the leaps and transformations these kids make, as if aliens have been visiting them in the night and sharing the secrets of the universe.

The big zero came back, during a time of zero expectations, as nature art. Making something out of nothing. Zero.

And the spirals? At dinner it occurred to me that it's the same; you start with nothing, a center, a zero, and you go outwards in such a limitless fashion. With zero we talked about meditation, a familiar concept in our house, in which the point is to get back to nothing. To let all the outward forces go and return to the center of spirit, the beating of your own heart.

Using the spiral last night, a spontaneous story of Clara came up. Clara, our good story companion, had a time when she was completely overwhelmed, such that she couldn't function. She's a wiseman's daughter and slated to take his place someday, and so of course she took that overwhelmed feeling and just sat with it. She closed her eyes and breathed, and we watched the spiral fold in as her cares washed away and when she reached the center she was still and calm and able to handle anything that came her way. At which point, Sunburst closed her eyes, and began to meditate.

Sometimes I wonder who's teaching who here. I think this one was a lesson for me.


*** Mood music brought to you by Dusty Springfield: ***

"Round; Like a circle in a spiral; Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning; On an ever-spinning reel..."

"Like the circles that you find; In the windmills of your mind"

I am Robin Red

Sunburst has been learning to play the pentatonic flute since February. I've been using David Darcy's booklet/cd set Playing the Pentatonic Flute and the Pentatonic Recorder to teach myself so that I can teach her. I can't say enough wonderful things about this booklet. It has changed the way I think about music and my own musical capabilities.

For instance, I now think capable as opposed to incapable. I live with Einstein who is a musical genius. He can, and does, play anything he can get his hands on. But he can't teach me... he's my husband after all, and I have this Complex about music. Or shall I say had. I no longer play secretively in the laundry room. David Darcy has brought me into the light.

And now I can give that to Sunburst.

Our second form drawing block was based on a story I made up about the adventures of Robin Red and his search for Spring. With that in mind, I found myself being challenged to write a song of my own for Sunburst to play on the pentatonic flute: Robin Red. It's simple-- using only the notes A, B, and D. But simple is key, I think. It met her where she was, connected to her heart, and took her playing up a notch.

She struggled with it for a couple of weeks, but after her experience meeting a Native American flute player, she returned to this song with renewed vigor and quickly mastered it. Her own musical confidence grew by leaps and bounds with this song, as if she's now swiftly flying along, too.

Math Gnomes

This past week I introduced math gnomes to help Sunburst understand the four mathemtical processes. Math can be pretty abstract, and using characters and stories to teach it in the early grades is supposed to help kids build a heart relationship with the material or a deeper relationship, or something like that. Regardless of what it's supposed to do, it was a big hit.

I looked at Path of Discovery Gr 1, Christopherus First Grade Syllabus, Math for the Elementary Grades, Teaching Mathematics, and Journey to Numeria before presenting the material. Even with all those books in front of me, I still couldn't quite figure out the bigger picture and progression. Right or not, Sunburst is connecting with it, and that's the point.

Einstein named the gnomes for us:

1. Divide = Aliquot
2. Multiply = Myriad
3. Addition = Tally
4. Subraction = Minus

To introduce them, I brought back Clara, one of the characters we've been following throughout our other lessons (Intro to Letters and Quality of Numbers.) Clara was given a magical pear flute by the Sky Queen at the end of our Numbers lesson, so she brought that along with her into this lesson. Sunburst loves to hear that Clara is playing, and sometimes, struggling along with her.

My inspiration for this introduction was actually from that news article about the Fairy Rock in Scotland. Clara is the wiseman's daughter, and he sent her to work out a dispute over a new building site that would involve moving a "fairy rock." Only Clara finds out it's not a fairy rock, but the entrance to the gnomes underground cavern. Not only that, the gnomes have four magic trails that run through the area that cannot be built upon.

Clara's task was to work things out between the builders and the gnomes, and the gnomes give their input based on their specific personalities, ie. share the houses among the land; more trails/more houses; fewer trails/fewer houses; faster trails/faster houses. Sunburst thought they had interesting ideas, but that Aliquot's idea made more sense. So lesson 1 was to do just that: divide the houses up among the land.

Now the gnomes have decided to come up with welcome presents for their new neighbors, and Clara is helping them. Tally collected jewels (Sunburst's idea,) Minus will borrow and morph a wonderful story idea from Wonder Homeschool about a bucket with a hole in it, Myriad is going to collect tree saplings, and Aliquot will help him divide them among the 12 neighbors.

We're also playing some counting games, forwards and backwards, with and without beanbags. Sunburst particularly liked the simple one we came up with today to the tune of "Here we go round the mulberry bush." We tossed the bean bags from one hand to the other, singing:

This is the way that Tally counts,
Tally counts, Tally counts.
This is the way that Tally counts,
So early in the morning:
1, 2, 3 ... 12.

This is the way that Minus counts,
Minus counts, Minus counts.
This is the way that Minus counts,
So early in the morning:
12, 11, 10... 1, 0.
I'm learning to never underestimate the power of simplicity.

Wood Shop

I once saw this Waldorf School video where the students had learned to make hammer dulcimers in woodshop. Not one hammer dulcimer, as a group, but each and every student made one herself.-- It blew my mind!

Since seeing that video, I've been wondering how we're going to teach our kids woodworking. I never took woodshop in public school, and I've never really built anything. I've taken a car engine apart, with heavy supervision, but my own experience with wielding a hammer is more about hanging pictures or whacking wind-tossed birdfeeders back together. A hammer dulicimer is a bit beyond my reach... at least for now.

Einstein, on the other hand, is pretty handy with a hammer. He never took woodshop either, but this week he has been banging together garden planters and bookshelves. And where there's noise, Sunburst will follow.

Yesterday she asked him if she could use the hammer. She eyed a long piece of wood he had sitting out and asked him to cut it into 4 pieces. He randomly cut it and gave them to her, and then showed her how to hammer a nail. "Softly tap it at first, until the nail sticks in without needing to be held. Then move your hand out of the way and bang it."

Originally, Sunburst wanted to hammer two boards together, side by side, in one horizontal plane. But then, after realizing that was incredibly difficult, she began to nail the boards together perpendicular. Einstein left her to her devices, and came back awhile later to supervise. He told her, "When you hit yourself with the hammer, that's when you'll really learn how to hammer."

She turned to him and said, "Oh, I've already hit myself Dad. See, I've got a blood blister, but it doesn't hurt."

She managed to whack 5 boards together in all. Can you guess what she made?

Playing with brownies

Moonshine simply doesn't want to be left out of the mix, ever, and I don't blame her. I didn't formally sign her up for the International Fair, but I did let her present. Let? Perhaps not the right word. She fussed when they skipped over her, and insisted on presenting her topic...

"Well, these are cherries."

Um, is that a Brownie? What is a Brownie?

"Well, I don't know."


She does know, I think. The girls and I have been reading Adventures of a Brownie, and Sunburst has been writing letters to see if we have a Brownie in our house (no replies yet, so we think they might only speak Gaelic.) We talk about Brownies an awful lot, and there is some question as to whether or not the woodpecker that lives in a tree next door is really a Brownie in disguise.

For those of you that don't know, Brownies are small, brown house elves that originated in Scotland. Scots believe quite heavily in faerie folk, so much so, that they even rally to save sacred fairy homes: Fairies stop developer's bulldozers in their tracks

Moonshine co-opted the Scotland theme and drew a picture of a Brownie with cherries, sort of a little sister project for team Scotland. She was happy, we were happy, and Grandma found us this FABULOUS link for printing out our very own Brownie Paper Dolls: here, and here.

**EDIT - 02 May 06**

The brownies must be onto us.

The above links to the brownie paper dolls have mysteriously stopped working for some folks. Try copying them into a new browser window. If they work for you, I advise saving them ASAP to print out for your little ones.
http://image03.webshots.com/3/9/99/94/9799994ZrdRyKVqbh_fs.jpg
http://image03.webshots.com/3/9/99/49/9799949XdJTkVQlua_fs.jpg

Just to be on the safe side, I'll leave out some milk and bread for the wee brown folk. We don't want any nasty boggarts on our hands.

Good luck!

Scotland, the brave

She's a brave wee lass to stand up in front of a crowd of folks and give a presentation.

It's painful to be the parent watching it though. Sunburst introduced herself, said, "I'm doing Scotland," and froze. Just for a minute. She stared at all the faces, turned around and stared at her display, and tried to sort out in her brain what she was supposed to do next. The crowd was very patient with her, and I watched her take a deep breath and ready herself. "This is a picture of Scotland that I watercolor painted. And there are lots of castles in Scotland..."

I almost didn't tell her about this international geography fair. I thought she might be too young for it, and I recall reading that with littles you should start geography with where you are, which makes perfect sense. You can own where you are, you can see it, smell it, feel it, and connect with it on a heart level. Formally, we haven't really done local geography. Shouldn't I get out a map of our current state and go from there?

We watch the wildlife outside our window. We see the different colored blossoms on the trees, and notice that the squirrels here are red and fat and fearless. We watch the birds and the bunnies and the deer. We walk and drive. We meet people and see things. We experience the change of seasons and stick our hands in the dirt. How can you live and breathe and not learn local geography?

So I let her jump right in. It helped that bits of Scotland are already familiar to her, that her dad plays bagpipes, and that haggis is utterly foul sounding. It helped that the Loch Ness Monster is a thing to wonder about. And it helped that we're reading Little House on the Highlands. and we have Scottish ancestry, too, just like Mary and Laura Ingalls. That pretty much sealed the deal. The heart connection was there.

And she had fun. The kids that presented were homeschoolers ages 3-16. Some of them whispered and others cracked jokes. It was a chance for homeschooling kids to come together and be a part of something bigger than themselves. And that, at least at our house, doesn't happen every day.

When it was over she turned and said to me, "Mom, I think they really liked my shortbread cookies."

Cha-Cha, the bee, and me

I was waiting in line at the craft store when I found myself standing in judgment of another woman and her kids. It was just Kitty Bill and I, sandwiched in a long check-out line, and at the front of the line was what I presumed to be a Grandma, a mom, and two kids. This wasn't any kind of Grandma we have in our family-- this one had a Cha-Cha DiGregorio thing going on. The big hair, tight clothes, scarf around her neck, the whole bit.

That's fine; I'm a big Grease fan. I'm no Sandra Dee, but I probably lean more that way than the other (we're just going to leave the leg hair and Birkies out of this one, okay.) The mom-type person was also dressed more, shall we say, modern. Or retro-modern. Hip huggers, heels, hairspray, you get the picture. Anyway, aside from the Grease flashback, I wouldn't have paid these ladies any mind, that is until the kids caught my attention.

The little girl with them looked about six-years-old. She sat down on a chair, crossed her legs, put her hands out and exclaimed something about not wanting to "break a heel or chip a nail." And I was forced to do a double-take. She was younger than Sunburst, and she was wearing hip-huggers, high heels, and carrying a bustier purse. At six-years-old!

Then she got up and did some kind of dance, to which Cha-Cha Di-Grandma remarked that they should charge us all for this entertainment. The little girl said, "I make 40 bucks a day." And the little boy, about the same age, said, "Good. You can buy me a gang." And he crossed his arms in that defiant stance and pouted. At least his pants weren't hanging around his ankles, which tells you I've fully crossed over into the 'Don't trust anyone over 30' category.

The other customers and I exchanged glances that said, "Yikes!" And I instantly thought, Thank God my kids aren't like this. I paid for my glue stick, patted myself on the back, and went home to my angelic children.

We spent some time in the yard, and Sunburst announced that she had found "the bee who lost his buzz," and tromped through the house with said bee perched on a dandelion. I started to think to myself, "crazy child," but then I remembered the little bustier girl. High heels or entomologist...? No brainer there.

An hour later we hurried the kids out the door to attend our neighbor's pipe organ recital at a local church, where rows 1 and 2 were reserved for families with children. It was a beautiful room and quite small, I think, as far as churches go. We arrived a few minutes early and waited patiently. Kitty Bill shyly flirted with the women behind us, and Sunburst and Moonshine, glowing in their new Easter dresses, sat very primly and quietly exchanging glances with all the other children. Homeschool enrichment at it's finest. Perfect, I thought. And then the music started.

What was I thinking taking my kids to an organ recital? At a church, no less. People dress up, sit quietly, and don't clap or fidget or anything until the song sequence is over --and these are good ten, fifteen minute songs; it's like a Phish jam but obviously not very Phish-like. Kitty Bill only made it through the first two parts of the first song before he started audibly fussing. And so what does one do with a slightly fussy baby? Breastfeed.

In the past this handy device has worked in many scenarios where I needed to soothe and quiet my children-- whether they were teething, bleeding profusely, or I was trying to handle an important phone call or make it through my father's funeral, breastmilk has always done the trick and done it well. With all the noise in my house, I failed to recognize one thing about Kitty Bill. He does not nurse quietly. It sounded like I was suckling an army of pigs, and oh how the heads began to turn. It's pipe-organ music, and so you would think that it would drown us all out, but it wasn't like that at all. Oddly enough, every cough, sneeze or gulp reverberated just as much as the music did. The room was designed to carry voices, after all, and it was designed well. You could hear a pin drop AND the music, simultaneously.

This is when that coveted aisle seat in the back row would have come in handy for my quick and painless get-away, which was neither quick nor painless. Moonshine lasted until the middle of the next song before she started climbing around on the pew and finally squirmed out of Einstein's grasp and ran for the door where she could see me through the glass. But she couldn't get to me. Only one of the doors worked, and only from the inside. She screwed up her face and prepared to have a full-on shrieking when Einstein ran up the aisle and let her out into my arms.

While Einstein, Sunburst, and all the well-behaved children of others enjoyed the rest of the music, we crawled around the lobby and got to know it pretty well. Moonshine got into a debate with a woman about vegan diets, Kitty Bill fingered the bronzed-eyes of St. Thomas, and I let the irony of the day wash over me.

Pride cometh before a fall.

It was just another humbling moment, one of many, where I'm reminded that no, my kids aren't all that.

Tapadh leat

Today Sunburst worked on her Scotland project. She has been speaking in Scots Gaelic (apparently different than Irish Gaelic) for three days now. Not complete sentences, mind you. Assuredly not anywhere near the correct pronunciation, (I wouldn't even have a clue about that,) but in bits and pieces here and there as she can work it in, opening the book each time and requesting things like lite (porridge) and uisge (water.)

We talked through the planning stages of her display board, and she had me writing out a rough list of words/phrases she might want to recopy to include on it. She sat across the couch from me thumbing through a book on the Loch Ness Monster while I held the other book open and stared at those Gaelic words long and hard trying to spell them right ...uan, uisge, Ciamar a tha thu?

Thinking I was done, I closed the book and started to walk away, "Oh wait, tapad leet!" She yells at me. What? I looked at her blankly trying to interpret. "Thank you, tapad leet." Huh? "Write that one down too." Oh! I opened the book back up and there it was, on the bottom of the page, Tapadh leat. I hadn't heard that one before.

How on earth did she remember that?

Nothing gets past these kids. They remember every story, every promise, every everything. It's easy to see in the girls, as they come up with some new thing to amaze us with everyday (like knitting blind-folded!) The jury has been out on Kitty Bill, though. I mean, we weren't sure if we would be blessed with another sound mind. It's risky business, this gene pool lottery. But it looks like he's a clever one too. He's already watching to see what he can get away with, and as soon as we turn our heads --Zoooom! He's gone after some item of contraband, and he knows it, because he keeps looking over his shoulder to see if he's getting caught. At seven months! These kids can already outwit us, and they're not even close to being teenagers yet.

We are so screwed.

Meet the Family

My original intent in setting up this blog was to share what we're doing as a homeschooling family. I've read so many inspirational and thoughtful things out there, and it seems right to give something back to this worldwide community of non-institutional learners. What an amazing medium we have available to us-- we can connect and share and inspire each other all over the world, easily and instantly. That's nuts, isn't it? And really, really cool.

I've been reading other homeschooling blogs for a while now, and I seem to find myself looking at each one for that one post that gives me the big picture: this is who we are and what we're about. I haven't had much luck finding posts like that; I always feel like I'm jumping right in to the small pictures, which for the most part are either interesting or inspiring. But if the truth be told, I'm a big picture person. I like to check out the scene, get background information, read all the directions, and then get my feet wet --I'm a wader. You'll never see me dive into the water head first or do cannonballs off the roof. Nope. I wade, that's what I do.

So if you're like me, wading in and looking for the big picture, here it is. This is the one thing I can claim to be an expert on: my family.

I'm Sara --that's my real name. If I was going to make it up, it would be something natural and plant-based, but no, this is the real deal. I'm a Virgo sun, Virgo rising --which means I'm pretty scary sometimes, especially if you're my spouse or child, but honestly, at least you'll always know where I stand: pretty much in the same spot, right where you left me. That doesn't mean I'm boring (I hope!) just stable and reliable and honest to a fault. Ok, and a bit of a perfectionist, too. I enjoy making things --knitting, sewing, gardening, cooking, that sort of thing. I have special place in my heart for old Volkswagons. I read a lot, think a lot, procrastinate a lot. Very normal me.

I'm married to "Einstein," not his real name, but this is my world and I can name him what I want. In reality, many folks actually call him that because he's got that same wild, wiry hair, and well, he's smart. He has lots of degrees and plays just about every instrument there is, and if he doesn't, give him ten minutes with it. Really. It's sickening. And even with all the degrees, he still can't figure out where the laundry hamper is... so there you go. He's the person I love, extraodinarily talented, and a great dad.

We have three children: "Sunburst," "Moonshine," and "Kitty Bill." (I figure it's safer to just use code names for my family, since you never know.) It has always been our intention to homeschool them, so they have never been to any school, preschool, or daycare. The oldest has taken some outside classes and such--we're very open to learning from others, just not school. Primarily what we're aiming to do is give our children what they need, when they need it. This means unschooling sometimes and guiding them other times. Everybody gets to help steer the ship: so far, so good. When I steer, it tends to be withWaldorf Education.

Sunburst is 7 and in first grade. She has always been our faster, higher, louder child --walking early and on the run ever since. She believes she's a cheetah (she runs fast on four legs,) and I have to remind her to stand upright and pretend to be human. She tells me she's a wild animal stuck inside a human body, and it's the pits. She loves to climb trees, build forts, read, sing, draw, knit, and annoy the neighbors. She loves all animals and creatures, has a heart of gold, and lead between her ears-- or at least it seems that way. She's really and truly a fearless child.

Moonshine is 4. She likes to think of herself as a princess or a baby duck. She's completely self-entertained, very focused, and great conversationalist. She's sweet and clever and she likes to wear dresses, sing songs, think about fairies, and tell grizzly stories. She's full of questions and quite polite. Sometimes she whines incessantly. And she screams. She once flipped her lid in a bookstore when her helium balloon got away... as I held her, helplessly trying to comfort her for however many endless minutes she needed while gaping crowds gathered around us, I was sure the windows were going to shatter. She may not look it, but she's a thing of immense power.

Kitty Bill is only 7 months old. He's a braw wee lad. He doesn't sleep much during the day, but maybe that has something to do with the noise level in our house when his sisters are awake. He likes to study things intently, and crawl, and stand up and let go and fall on his head. Definitely not a one-time learner.... We're still getting to know him, and his code name may change as his personality reveals itself more and more. For now, he's Kitty Bill, according to Moonshine. And I know better than to argue with her about it.

Tada! Now back to work.

Inspiration and the Flute

The thing we were most taken with at the Native American camp was the flute performance by William Whitefeather. Sunburst has been learning to play a Choroi pentatonic flute for a month or so now, struggling through her third song, and it was neat for her to see real flute playing in action-- on a stage and everything.

I love the sound of the Native American flute. It's different than what Sunburst is learning to play-- the Choroi pentatonic makes me think of angels, sort of a hovering, airy sound, while the Native American flutes seem to sound more earthy, sweeping, and I don't know, connected to the whole of life. Maybe that makes sense to someone besides me?

Anyway, I asked Sunburst to watch Whitefeather's fingers, particularly, to help her get a better sense for what he was doing. At one point she turned to me and whispered, "Hey, I know that song!" He was playing a Native American lullaby off of "Under the Green Corn Moon," a cd that we have listened to on and off since Sunburst was just a day old. Hearing something familiar like that sealed the deal for her.

When he was done playing and started to pack up for the day, Sunburst went up and asked to see his collection of flutes, and she let him know that she recognized the lullaby. He told her that he has the same cd, and he just figured out how to play it by listening to the song. Then she asked him to play a couple of different-looking (and sounding) flutes he had, including a triple- chambered drone flute that was a thing of beauty and wonder in itself, before she admitted to him that she's has been learning to play the flute at home.

Next thing I know he had handed her a small flute so that she could show him. She was shy and reluctant at first, but then she took it and began to play "Deedle Dum," the first song I taught her using David Darcy's wonderful pentatonic flute book. The fingering is different, but she quickly worked it out and then lit into the second song she knows. While she was playing, a group of older school children had materialized behind her, so that when she turned around she found herself giving a surprise concert. Undaunted, she played the song a couple more times before thanking Whitefeather and coming back over to me with a huge grin on her face.

When we got home she took out her own flute and began to play around with it, not practicing the songs, but just trying out different notes and combinations-- happily playing with the sounds. She's used to hearing her dad and I play the pentatonic flute, and she hears her dad play the Native American flute and Irish Tin Whistle (among other things,) but somehow it's not the same kind of inspiration. Apparently Whitefeather struck some chord in her that we hadn't. Life is funny that way.