One Hundred Twinkles

Sometime a week or two ago Fiona surpassed the 100-Twinkle mark. She is now a "Twinkler" rather than a "pre-Twinkler" and can play all the variations (even the diabolical off-beat Variation B) and theme with the piano part almost up to tempo.

Last night the kids played their instruments in informal performance for my mother-in-law, sister-in-law, aunt-in-law (visiting from Alberta and Ontario) and my mother. They each played a solo, Noah playing the first movement of the Telemann viola concerto with Erin accompanying on piano. The grand finale was a simple arrangement of "Blue Bells of Scotland" in three parts that the older three have done together before, but I hit on the fact that open string playing of the D and A strings would fit nicely with the harmonies and set Fiona up playing as well. She was thrilled at the idea, and stood cheerfully in playing position for the three or four minutes it took the older kids to get their instruments out and their sheet music ready. She bowed the open strings enthusiastically but musically and it was a very touching moment ... the first quartet performance my kids have done together. Small beginnings.

Fiona is very excited to be an enrolled student at the upcoming local Suzuki institute. Two weeks and counting!

A chemical reaction

Three weeks ago I wrote about some progress I felt I was making with Noah at establishing a positive, optimistic outlook. By taking into account his need to let ideas sit for a while before accepting them, and offering him a bit more one-on-one in things that seem to be uniquely his interests, I felt our relationship with each other and his relationship with his learning were moving in a good direction.

Now I'm wondering if this subtle change was more than the natural waxing and waning of interests and relationships and was perhaps instead the beginning of a whole new chapter in his education. It's starting to feel like he's found his academic self.

It started with Benjamin Wiker's "The Mystery of the Periodic Table", a romp through the history of chemistry targetted at 8-to-12-year-olds. I can't remember why we chose to start reading it aloud, but as is often the case, one of the kids enjoyed the book a bit more than the other. This time it was Noah who was keen. The night Sophie was heading off for a sleepover, I asked if she'd mind if I kept reading ahead with just Noah, and she shrugged and said that was fine. Noah and I delved in together and read a few more chapters, just the two of us. The next day I printed out and laminated a nice copy of the periodic table for Noah "because you like chemistry."

Somewhere amidst those couple of chapters read to him aloud and the presentation of the periodic table, Noah seemed to gain an identity as Someone With an Interest in Chemistry. Chemistry is something Erin has never really explored, so Noah was able to take it on as his thing.

We've done a little bit of kitchen chemistry inspired by Wiker's book, and have talked a lot about covalent bonding, molecular models, the Bohr atom and other various and sundry chemical concepts. I've put a lot of money and energy into gathering resources, because he is keen on them and I really feel like this is an important shift in his educational life. The Teaching Company's Joy of Science lectures on chemistry have been very helpful and surprisingly well-comprehended. We've got "Real Science 4 Kids" Chemistry Level I on order, as well as a nice (though pricey!) molecular model kit. I often find Noah poring over Larry Gonick's Cartoon Guide to Chemistry. To find Noah poring over anything academic is a very novel occurrence. I have just started an "inventory of interests" on the fridge for each child, to help us plan and prioritize learning for the next school year, and Noah instructed me on no uncertain terms to "put chemistry up there on my list".

It's not just chemistry anymore either. In the past couple of weeks, his interest in math has taken off for the first time in ages. He's asked for a cursive handwriting workbook.

The glasses may be the other half of the equation. We knew he was far-sighted, but as he wasn't complaining about eye strain when focusing up close, we hadn't pursued glasses at his 2005 eye appointment. But this year it was apparent that he was struggling with close work. In May I made an appointment for July 4, and over the few weeks before the appointment I mentioned Noah that I thought a lot of his disinterest in reading, music sight-reading and bookwork was probably due to the fact that it was a real bother for him to focus up close. I knew he was keen on the idea of glasses, and also that he was feeling a little down on himself for the fact that he hadn't been reading five novels a week and roaring ahead through math workbooks like his sisters. The eyesight thing, whether a big factor or not, gave him a way of saving face over his lack of academic interest.

He really likes the glasses (which he just wears for reading and other close work) and they seem to have had a very positive effect on his interest in academic work and reading. Perhaps it's a placebo effect, but we'll take whatever we can get. I was happy to see him playing his viola, playing soccer, imagining, thinking, asking questions and having great conversations, but he was beginning to feel inadequate as Sophie's math and writing skills had threatened to overtake his, with Erin's academic ability always so far beyond his that she seemed to reside on another planet.

Noah's reaction to chemistry, his taking ownership of this interest and this learning for himself, has been a wonderful thing for a late-blooming (by m00minfamily standards) academic. And for the late-blooming academic's mother.

Fifty Twinkles

Fiona, who began her diligent daily work on the violin about eight months ago, at age 2, is now a three-year-old Twinkler. First she learned rest position, and where to put her feet in rest position and playing position. She learned to make a bow hold. She learned to hold her cardboard violin on her shoulder. She learned to mimic the four Twinkle Variation rhythms, and to identify them with accuracy. She practiced ear-training exercises and learned about the form of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Then she got a "real" violin and learned to make a nice sound on open strings, mimicking those same rhythms with the appropriate bowstrokes. In February we started training her fingers to tap the strings. In March she learned a little exercise using three fingers on the A-string called the "Monkey Song". In April she began work on the opening part of the Twinkle variations.

Now, in late June, she is Twinkling! She can play all four Twinkle Variations and Twinkle Theme all the way through without help. She is counting her unassisted Twinkle repetitions on a counting frame and has 50 accrued. She practices eagerly, in good cheer, punctuating her practising with hugs and kisses and giggles and happy conversation.

I wrote about Expectations in a previous blog entry. Things continue in very much the same vein. My excitement at the tangible gains she's making have not yet contaminated the process-oriented work she's doing. I never expected her to be working on the violin at this age, so any progress she makes still feels like gravy to me. She is so pleased with herself and is delightedly looking forward to showing her grandmother, her aunt and the other Suzuki teachers in her life what she can now do. She will be enrolled as a pre-Twinkle student at the Suzuki Valhalla Institute this August and is thrilled. After three older children, I seem to finally either (a) have struck it lucky with an eager, easy-going child who loves to please the adults around her or (b) be doing something right!

PUPD

"Periodic Unschoolers' Panic Disorder" (PUPD) is a syndrome which is receiving increasing attention in unschooling circles. Apparent prevalence is on the rise. Some might claim an epidemic has taken hold; more moderate voices claim that the disorder has always been endemic in the unschooling population, but recent media attention and publication of the cluster of symptoms has led to many new diagnoses.

Classic symptoms are difficult to miss. Otherwise sensible unschooling parents start pressuring their creative, autonomous, self-motivated, hands-on learners into producing tidy completed worksheets, or sitting through chapters of world history read aloud. They reach for their credit cards and begin spending money on structured curriculum they'll discard after a miserable week and a half.

The disorder is, by its very definition, episodic. The first episode typically occurs sometime during the child's kindergarten year, although in retrospect sufferers often identify harbinger symptoms such as overzealously directing their preschool children to magnetic letters, worrying over a 3-year-old's excess fondness for matchbox cars and mud, or being concerned about a 4-and-a-half-year-old's continuing tendency to confuse the letters Y and W.

Despite parents' beliefs that they have deschooled themselves, PUPD episodes tend to occur coincident with the public school calendar. Fifty-one per cent of episodes occur during the school year-end months of May through early July when public school parents are feeling confident and proud of their children's tangible progress from one grade year to another. Another 36% of episodes occur between late November and early March, while public school families are receiving report cards, attending holiday concerts and taping weekly spelling lists earnestly to their fridges.

Mean frequency of episodes during the child's elementary years is 9.2 months. The frequency and duration of episodes peaks when children are 7 and 8 and then tends to diminish into the pre-teen and teen years. Protective factors include (i) early age of independent reading (ii) spontaneous interest in math workbooks and (iii) unschooling-supportive grandparents.

Research into treatment for PUPD is in its infancy. Current promising research is pointing a the beneficial role for parental journaling, improvements in parental anxiety with daily family recreation, especially that which takes place outdoors, and on the self-reported benefits of internet support-groups for afflicted parents. One recent study (Hughes, 2005) confirmed that beating one's head against a brick wall is an ineffective strategy by all criteria.

Teamwork

Once in a while homeschooling skeptics raise the issue of teamwork. "Well sure," they'll say, "homeschooled kids learn really well and can follow their interests at their own pace and all that. But I think there's value in the kind of team-based work that happens at school. Kids need to learn to work as part of a team, to give and take a bit, to be good leaders, and to be good followers, to make collaborative decisions and problem-solve together."

Of course, to my mind, this is what families are for. Families are groups of interdependent people who work together, who collaborate, who problem-solve co-operatively, who tackle big jobs as a team, who learn from and with each other. If kids spend the lion's share of their productive hours apart from their families, then of course they'll need to be taught teamwork using artificially-contrived team learning projects. Here teamwork is learned by being part of a family.

And not just family either. Our unschooling has naturally grown to encompass the community around us, and there's plenty of opportunity for meaningful teamwork that inspired the kids and contributes meaningfully to the world around them.

My children are involved in music, and through playing in duos, trios, quartets, and community orchestra, they're involved in teamwork where "pulling one's weight" is absolutely essential, and where leading and following are both incredibly important roles.

My kids volunteer with me from time to time at places like the nursing home or the local community garden where a crew of community volunteers does all the maintenance. There are many jobs to be done and there's lots to be learned. The kids are learning how to offer help and find places where their help is needed and appreciated, without being directed.

We also have the gardening/environmental club where we do everything co-operatively and democratically. We've built a productive organic vegetable garden from scratch and taken on a number of community service and environmental advocacy / education / facilitation projects.

The kids exist on the fringes of a number of volunteer activities that I'm involved in, and often participate in those activities themselves. For instance, I'm involved in organizing music summer school and my kids have sat in on meetings, watching how problem-solving happens, how budgets are fleshed out, and so on. And they've helped the program take shape by working with me on the tasks I've been delegated, whether by talking to someone about the use of a facility or creating an enrichment activity or laminating nametags or analyzing enrollment data and identifying trends.

The kids are also involved in our community soccer league so they get the more traditional sports team experience that way. This year we also participated with a group of families putting together a series of radio documentaries about homeschooling and how it allows families to follow their passions. While each family or pair of families put together one or more shows on their own, we all had to collaborate with each other on technical aspects, intro and outro scripts, theme music, getting oriented to the studio and learning from and with each other about the audio-editing software we were using. Our family did two shows on our own, and one collaborating with another family from the gardening/environmental club. All were aired on the region's co-op radio station, and the series then evolved into a fundraising project for the radio station.

So for my kids, involvement in family life and in our community is giving plenty of opportunity to work as part of a team, with absolutely no need for school-style "teamwork projects".

My Chick-Pea

Lately we've been making a lot of hummus and falafel, so putting dried chick-peas out to soak overnight is a regular occurence here. I've decided that Noah is like a chick pea. He needs to be soaked overnight.

Three weeks ago I had received information about a summer Soccer Camp in Nakusp for kids 9-12. Two hours every morning for five days. Noah is a soccer dynamo, and Erin has improved greatly this year and is very keen on soccer as well, so I presented the possibility to them. Erin was keen. Noah said no outright. Erin got angry at Noah, knowing we wouldn't be driving four kids 75 minutes round-trip five days in a row if only one of them was doing the camp. Noah cried.

A few days later someone mentioned Soccer Camp again and Noah said "Oh yeah, I want to do it!" I asked him where the change of heart had come from. He said "I'd changed my mind by that night. I don't know why."

I thought of the chick-pea analogy. "You know," I said, "We all need to remember that you're a bit like a dried chick-pea, and you just need the chance to soak in an idea for a while before there's any point in asking you how you feel about it. We'd avoid a lot of heartache that way, I think."

I'm sure that whatever facet of his character makes him a chick-pea when it comes to embracing new activities is the same thing that gives him such a tough time with transitions. It's the thing that keeps him sitting at the computer all day, which leads to him later complaining that "we never do anything fun!" It's the same thing that makes him say "Naw..." when I offer almost any activity or project or excursion.

I'm putting some energy lately into building some one-on-one connections with Noah. It takes time and patience and fair warning (and often an overnight soak) but he seems a happier boy for it. I'm reading some non-fiction aloud to him ... chemistry and geography (navigation) and we're exploring those areas together with some projects. We're doing some math together again on a regular basis ... at times I'm not already working with the girls. With phenomenal fortitude and resistence-to-mounting-frustration, he mastered the concept and mechanics of equivalent fractions and reducing fractions to their simplest form in the course of one 45-minute math session. He has a penchant for shutting down completely when he has to work at something, and I kept expecting him to burst into tears when my explanations moved too fast or came from the wrong direction for him. But for some reason he was able to keep himself trying, and gradually it made sense. I think he managed because he and I have a really good relationship right now, and because, as I said, he is a happier boy. He wanted to "get it" and wanted to please me, and felt confident and optimistic enough to push himself until it clicked. We followed up the next night with a card game to review the concepts we'd worked on the previous night, and he was really pleased with how well-learned everything was.

Today the chick pea and I have built a distillation apparatus together. We are distilling fresh clean water out of the mucky soup of sugar, salt, food colouring and coffee grounds we created. This science-related stuff feels to him like his domain, separate from the sorts of things the girls are pursuing, so it's a great place for us to connect, where he can explore his interests without comparing himself to his sisters. I hope we can keep this up.

Stop-motion fun

A couple of weeks ago a tidying frenzy resulted in the rediscovery of Playmobil castle fun. Playmobil has been enjoyed in many different ways by my kids over the years, but for the past while it's been mostly the figures that have taken on Euwy World personas and served as ballast or characters in K'nex constructions or in stories. But recently, the castle stuff has been big again -- so big, in fact, that the kids decided that they wanted to pool their allowance money and buy an Evil Knight (and his evil steed) and the Rock Castle set.

We ordered it on-line (the kids researching prices, shipping and taxes and finding a good deal) and it arrived this week. They've been up in the under-the-roof-peak space of the loft playing with it for hours.

Now the video-camera has come out and the kids are creating stop-motion video shorts using the frame-by-frame record setting. Most of the vignettes seem to involve beer and drunk & disorderly behaviour (a catapult set purchased years ago came with three or four steins of beer overflowing with froth -- how can three silly kids resist?) and lots of giggling.

Maybe some day they'll come up with something they're happy to share, and I'll figure out how to create MPEG video on-line.

Solstice

Today the three older kids and I got up before daybreak (at 4 a.m.) and drove up to the pass near us. From there we watched the sky lighten in the east. To the west the snowcapped mountains turned pink and then orange as they gradually received sunlight. The mist on the lake at the pass swirled and vapourized.

We came back home by about 5 a.m. and had a breakfast of hot cocao, sunny orange fruit punch, toast and eggs ... sunny side up, of course. :-D

After a long lazy morning punctuated by Second Breakfast, we headed down to the beach. There we created the sun-themed, Andy-Goldsworthy-inspired natural installation pictured above.

The kids' big communal Playmobil order arrived this afternoon so they happily played all afternoon. Tonight we had grandma up for a late dessert just around dusk ... the sunny round yellow cheesecake we made yesterday.

It's 9:15 pm and I'm going to try to chase them off to bed soon. It's been a long but very fun day.

Today I learned....

Today I learned:

1. That 12-year-olds who haven't had their child-like-ness "socialized" out of them at school will still contribute large amounts of their own spending money towards the purchase of communal Playmobil castle stuff with their younger siblings.

2. That unschooling moms who leave their small business and medical practice accounting until three days before their adjusted-year-end Canadian tax return is due will, for the 7th or 8th June 14th in a row, curse their procrastination tendencies.

3. That a brand new copy of Rosetta Stone Latin will keep four unschooled kids, aged 3-12, rapt at the computer for almost 2 hours.

4. That moms who are punchy from too much accounting work cannot help commenting "Sex?? He said sex!!" every time the Rosetta Stone narrator counts to six.

5. That it is possible for a mother to embarrass a 12-year-old by shouting the word "Sex" repeatedly.

6. That "old woman" in Latin is "anus."

7. That three children, aged 7 to 12, can get very good at chorusing back at their mother in voices dripping with playful condescension "oh my, it seems she never outgrew the potty joke phase."

8. That "you learn something new everyday" posts are a welcome diversion from tax-return preparation.

Speed Stack Mania

I help run the Suzuki Valhalla Institute, a week-long summer music workshop for Suzuki families. Last summer I came up with two fun optional activities for families to participate in during their spare time. One was a sort of community treasure hunt, the other a collaborative art & ideas project that took shape in the lounge area during the week. I've been trying to come up with some different ideas for this year.

A couple of weeks ago I heard, on a parenting message board, about Speed Stacks. They're plastic cups (special ones, just the right size, and with holes in the bottom) that are used in sets of 12 to stack in a variety of pyramidal arrays. It's a wacky fad-like thing that has taken many school phys. ed. programs by storm, not so much in Canada, though it's apparently starting here too, but all over the US. I was hearing from parents how much their kids loved stacking, and how much fun it was. I wondered if it might be a kind of fun novelty activity to have available in the lounge area at the Suzuki Institute.

I bought four Speed Stack sets, one for each of my kids, to try them out. I am amazed. The kids, Erin and Sophie especially, have taken to them in a huge way. They have spent hours and hours a day with them. They took them to soccer yesterday and also showed them to some friends who were over for a visit, and they were completely taken with them as well.

For my kids learning to stack quickly and efficiently was an interesting lesson in learning styles. They were very aware of the different options for learning (verbal instructions read from the instruction booklet, enhanced by diagrams, visual guidance in the form of the accompanying DVD, and hands-on trial-and-error). Each of my kids preferred to start with one strategy, and they all found different paths to mastery. Temperament issues have been at the fore as well. Noah preferred to watch and then practice in private. Erin delved in with single-minded, almost obsessive repetitiveness. Sophie jumps in when there are two or more other kids working with cups and chatting and laughing. Teaching Fiona the 3-6-3 stack was a great exercise for the older kids in breaking things down into their simplest components and communicating and instructing in ways that allow for mastery.

Erin has been frustrated by how rusty her skills get after even a short break. After an hour of stacking, her time for the complete cycle is in the range of 15-17 seconds, but after lunch or the next morning, she's back to 24 seconds and has to work her way down again. So we've had some discussions about how physical skills usually require consistent daily work over a period of time to gel securely, and how warming up really is necessary to reach optimal efficiency. These are of course things she should understand from practicing violin and piano, but sport stacking makes it very easy to quantify and examine these effects in a tangible way.

Neurologically Sport Stacking has all sorts of things to recommend it. It involves hand-eye co-ordination and speedy reaction time, and the movements, when done 'correctly', cross the midline repeatedly in three dimensions, something which BrainGym research has shown improves learning. For a bunch of young string players who have to do a lot of learning and lateralized movements, these seem like worthy side benefits.

Mostly I was interested in the social aspect, the novelty and the fun. The cups seem to be winners on all three fronts. I had to play the heavy and get Sophie to put her cups away yesterday at soccer because the kids were all losing interest in the soccer game!

My kids are now talking about using their pooled allowance money to purchase a "stack mat" with a regulation timer.

Prioritizing outside activities

Many kids these days are over-scheduled. Children and parents are constantly faced with tough decisions, trying to prioritize their many outside committments. Our family isn't under quite the same pressure to prioritize, because by virtue of not going to school our kids have 6 extra hours a day for scheduled activities. Activities are also of added importance to homeschooled kids because they're often their sole opportunity for group learning. By some standards my kids do an awful lot. I counted a month or so ago and discovered that with all her various musical ensembles Erin was participating in eleven different activities. That's dropped away a fair bit now that the seasons have wrapped up for some of them, but still ... it's a lot.

However, despite our all the extra time we have, and the added importance of group activities in our lives, there's no doubt that we still need to prioritize to some extent. I think one has to find the principles that fit with one's family and work from those. For us, the principles are:

• travel -- minimizing travel expenses, environmental impact, risk and time
  
• efficiency -- ensuring that what travel we do serves more than one child in more than one interest, or that the activity can be arranged to require minimal sacrifice from other family members in terms of taxiing, waiting, etc.
  
• affordability -- can we afford this activity over the longer term?
  
• growth -- is this the sort of activity that will potentially allow for long-term healthy growth in mind / body / spirit
  
• commitment -- can I foresee my child and myself becoming;remaining committed to this activity over the long term?
  
• balance -- does this activity provide or maintain a balance in the life of our child and family? balance between down-time and activity, family time and 'other'-time, physical and sedentary activities, etc.

We discuss these principles as a family and make collaborative decisions. We take this decision-making process quite seriously. Involving the children helps them understand all the considerations and what the trade-offs are when a new activity is added.

I know that a lot of parents believe that sampling a broad range of activities as a young child will awaken the child's particular interests and aptitudes and provide a range of experience. Personally I've found that we don't need structured activities for my kids to sample the vast majority of things. I tend to believe that it's better to sample broadly in a casual sense, as a family, without signing up for structured activities, and to reserve the structured activities for activities I deem exceptionally important and valuable, for which my kids seem to have an affinity, and then to expect long-term commitment and follow-through. ("Expect" as in "I fully expect that this is something that will continue to inspire you and fulfill your needs over the long term", rather than as in "Young lady, I expect you to continue with this, and that's that.")

Generally speaking I like each of my kids, by the age of 5 or 6, to be involved long-term (meaning from year to year) in something creative and artistic, and something concerned with physical/athletic skill development. Even without school, we find it works best if each child has at least two, and preferably three, days a week with no outside activities scheduled (though rarely, due to overlapping seasons, we've wiggled around that guideline a little). We find that without a minimum of 3-4 hours of "down time" per day creativity, emotional resilience and family relationships begin to suffer. We don't pursue competitive-track activities because (a) I believe competitive situations are risky for children because they haven't yet formed a secure sense of their own identity and because (b) I know that such activities tend to escalate rapidly in terms of their demands for money, time and travel as the child becomes 'successful' -- I'm leery of that 'slippery slope'.

So those are our principles and our practices. For the most part this works for us.

Glowing mushroom stories

This is my morel mushroom lantern. It's made by a local artisan. I'd coveted this lantern at markets and in a gift shop for almost two years. There it was, on sale, a couple of weeks ago. I bought it. It's become part of our evening tradition. We light it every night when I read stories to the kids.

A year or so ago Erin began declining our readalouds. I think my attempts to encourage (er, nag?) her into getting herself ready for the nightly readaloud in a timely fashion raised all her oppositional tendencies and she announced that she didn't like readalouds and had read almost all the novels anyway. She deigned to join us in holiday readalouds, but that was her sole concession.

Since the mushroom arrived, though, she's back on board. She mostly pretends she's not listening, but the books we've been reading lately have interested her and I guess she's no longer seeing her non-participation as an issue of personal autonomy. She situates herself in the vicinity and busies herself with something manual and relatively mindless like origami or a computer game. I do her the courtesy of remind everyone that I'll be starting our readaloud in a few minutes, and I casually wait for her if she hasn't finished her practising quite in time.

It's nice to have her back.

Right now we're working our way through Madeleine L'Engle's "Time Quartet", having just finished the light but fun "Peter and the Starcatchers" by Dave Barry. Both great reads that appeal to the 7-12 age range of my older three.

The Long-Awaited Euwy Map

A few months ago the kids started talking about their desire to create a more detailed and comprehensive version of their map of Euwy World. They had a lot of sketches of various areas, and a lot of pretty clear ideas. I suggested a relief map, similar to what we had done years ago on a paper maché globe back when Erin first got interested in geography (photo on this page). But since Euwy World is, unlike our own world, affixed to the inner surface of its spherical planet (this fact explaining why science has yet to discover its existence), a globe presentation would not be terribly enlightening. So they opted for a flat projection, on a 30" x 50" piece of particle board.

Noah, Erin and Sophie sketched in the land masses. Sophie and Fiona made the first mountains and other relief features. Noah and Erin added some others a month or two later. Fiona, Sophie and I gesso'd the entire surface a couple of weeks ago. Then three days ago Fiona and Noah set about painting the oceans cobalt blue (see previous blog entry for reference to cobalt blue). And over the last two days the bunch of us have spent several hours painting the contour colours. It's amazing how this task has entertained us all. We almost missed soccer today because our "little bit of Euwy Map painting" turned out to have been almost two hours worth. Where had the time gone?

The contour painting has been very instructive. It sure beats instruction about the nature and purpose of contour lines. The kids understand that a ring of dark green will always surround a ring of light green, that in riverbeds and chasms the contours tend to form V's, that gently sloping areas have broad swaths of contour colours, they can spot a plateau easily from its colour and shape, understand what a watershed is and can create logical watersheds based on contour colours and patterns.

We're about two thirds of the way through painting the contour colours. No instruction has been given. A lot of discussion has happened, natural, un-teachy conversation, advice has been given and graciously received, questions have been asked, jokes and ideas shared.

Noah has a lot of trouble with the fine work (of which there is much) in this project. He did a lot of sighing and looking away and eventually opted to focus on the plateaus. It was a wake-up call for me. I think we need to look into getting him glasses; he's quite far-sighted (though Erin is even more so and is an insatiable reader -- go figure) and we were told that if he wasn't having difficulty with reading, he probably didn't need to bother with glasses. At that point (two years ago) his reading ability had just leapt and he was easily managing Harry Potter level stuff. He muttered something non-committal like "yeah, my eyes sometimes get tired, but it's not really a problem." We left it.

He who loves stories and loves alone-time is not the passionate reader I'd hoped he'd be. He struggles with small fonts when sight-reading on viola, and it was note-reading on piano that he really struggled with. His reading speed has not increased as Erin's and Sophie's have, and it's become apparent in the past week or two that he's exceedingly self-conscious about this.

It all fits. I think we need to see about some glasses for him.

Once we finish the contour colour painting, we'll be adding place names. The kids have scores of names in their heads, awaiting the completion of the map. New names are coined almost daily.

The things you learn!

Every day with children is a learning experience. For mom as much as the children. Today I learned:

1. That cobalt blue acrylic paint and three-year-olds don't mix. Wait a second, that's not right. They mix ... only too well.

2. That two children snacking on chives in the community garden will cause an entire minivan to reek of onions for more than an hour.

3. When you leave gardening club 8 minutes late, get caught behind a road-painting crew for 12 minutes, and discover that you need to stop for gas, that if you know the highway really well you can still get to piano recital on time by engaging in judicious use of excess velocity.

4. Twelve-year-olds with high levels of performance confidence can smirkily pull of dynamite performances of under-rehearsed Scarlatti sonata movements when inspired by an audience.

5. That good piano teachers always bring enough helium balloons for all the younger siblings too.

6. That helium balloons are terrific accelerometers when left to their own devices inside minivans.

7. That when you're the fourth Suzuki violin kid in your family, your first ever start-to-finish "Twinkle Variation" might as well be the rhythmically awkward and tough-to-co-ordinate Variation B. Who knew?

8. That suffixes are fun when compounded for sport ... like in words like "agilitousability" and "beautyishfullness".

9. That the benefit of a bath is pretty much negated if you decide afterwards that it would be fun to wriggle your naked body up over the edge of the toilet bowl rim and through the toilet seat ring.

10. That three-year-olds who get up at 6, spend the day trying to keep up with their older siblings, don't nap and believe they're staying up long enough for a pre-bedtime family readaloud should have their teeth brushed before they snuggle up on the couch to wait for their siblings to finish practicing. Zzzzzz.....

Water levels

The danger of extensive flooding has dropped on the Slocan River in the past few days. I've been watching the government's flood watch website all week. Middle of the night on May 21, where the big spike occurred, was the night Chuck got called out by Search & Rescue to do evacuation traffic control. It has been very fun to watch the data.

Anyway, while the danger on the river has abated a bit, the lake levels are higher than they've been in 40-something years. I don't understand why this isn't playing out as rising levels on the river downstream, but there it is. Lucky for people in the river's floodplain!

The GRUBS garden is on the lakefront but normally the lake level is about 1.5 metres below the garden. Today it's about 15-20 cm! The adjacent hospital has dusted off its evacuation plan. The nursing home is on evacuation alert. Pumps are running full-time from the crawl space under the hospital and the main electrical box is only 30 cm above the water level. Fortunately there are concrete barricades up to prevent waves from washing up ... because there were some pretty big waves happening yesterday.

Here is one of our post holes at the GRUBS garden. The water level is holding steady over the past 24 hours, despite rain on and off. The kids' sprouts haven't floated away yet! The photo at the top is of the newly dug area which we were going to put a liner into (to keep water from exiting the soil) and make into a marsh garden. As you can see, the lake has seeped up through the soil. The kids call it "The GRUBS hot tub".

The forecast is for rain for the next 24 hours, but temperatures are also cooler, which bodes well. Here's hoping the kids' seedlings stay rooted where they are now.

Stinging Nettles

For the first time in many weeks we had nothing to do today. Well, Erin had a soccer practice at 9 a.m. but that hardly counted since I just drop her off at school for that and pick her up an hour later. Fiona decided to stay home with Noah while I dropped her off -- a first! One of our mail order book orders came; both Erin and I had picks in this order so we were very pleased.

The day was rainy. After a week of scorching temperatures intent on melting the alpine snowpack all at once we've been hit by a deluge. People farther south in the valley are evacuated or on evacuation notice due to the flooding, but we are sitting pretty up on our mountainside.

Sophie and Noah wanted some help starting work on building a printable paper pinhole camera so I did some cutting and glueing with them. Sophie and Fiona wanted to prime the large relief map of Euwy World that the older kids had started a couple of months ago and done the final relief work on a couple of days ago.

Then the phone rang and it was a friend of mine about to set off to go nettle-picking at a big nettle patch not too far from where we live. She has two kids about Erin's and Noah's age and wanted to know if we'd all like to come along for the fun. Surprisingly everyone was up for it. We dressed in long sleeves and long pants, found five pairs of gardening gloves, consulted our herbal books for inspiration and loaded ourselves into the van.

The patch was amazing -- several acres of what is a winter-time avalanche chute, just full of stinging nettle plants about a foot high. We were only there for about twenty-five minutes but managed to collect two sizeable cardboard boxes full of the plant tops. The kids seemed to have fun. Only one got 'stung' above the wrist of a glove and she was pretty brave about it.

Back at home I adapted a recipe for Nesselsoppa, a Swedish Nettle Soup. It was delicious, like a cross between spinach and asparagus with overtones of mild seaweed.

2 litres of stinging nettles, washed and slightly chopped (with gloves on!)
6 cups of water
2/3 cup of fresh chopped chives
2 tbsp. butter
3 tbsp. flour
2 cubes of vegetable (or beef?) bouillon
1 tsp. balsamic vinegar
1/2 tsp. salt
fresh ground black pepper to taste

Place nettles in water and bring to boil. Boil until green and tender, approx. 5 minutes. Strain off and reserve liquid. Purée chives and nettles together in blender, adding as much reserved liquid as necessary for efficient blending. Dissolve bouillon cubes in remaining reserved liquid.

Melt butter, stir in flour over medium heat. Add reserved nettle water a little at a time. Add in puréed greens. Add balsamic vinegar and salt. Add pepper to taste.

I made a double batch of this soup and still have about two thirds of our nettles in the fridge. I'll dry some for tea, and make another batch of soup for the freezer.

First GRUBS salad

Here is Fiona enjoying her first garden salad of the year. It was just a perfect "Fiona-sized salad", made up of 6 or 8 shoots of fresh chive, a few snippets of fresh parsley, the first harvest of garden cress, planted 2 weeks ago, the tiny slices of the radish thinnings from her garden plot and two chive flowers as garnish. Served up with Fiona's favourite ranch salad dressing it was a fitting way to celebrate a round out a busy gardening day.

The GRUBS had a wonderful afternoon together. First we planted out about half of the seedlings that we had started in early April. There was a bumper crop of pickling cucumbers and basil, healthy numbers of lettuces and assorted other things, many of which had been labelled under conditions of relative chaos and were clearly not what they said they were, but could not be identified. So a number of mystery plants.

Then we went for a tour at the home of a "friend of the GRUBS". R. is a real-life acquaintance of mine, and an on-line friend. We live just a few kilometers apart, read each other's blogs religiously and exchange ideas and inspiration but rarely meet in person. But she invited the GRUBS up to tour her luscious garden paradise amidst the rocky scree of her mountainside homestead and baited us with some magnificent seedlings of pepper and tomato varieties I'd been lusting after. The kids (and adults) also pored over her birds nest collection.

Then we headed back to the garden to transplant the new seedlings and finish planting out the innumerable basil sprouts in any vacant nooks and crannies we could find. We noticed that the post holes I had dug a mere 24" deep a couple of weeks ago had water in the bottoms of them. And the amazing thing was that they were not wet from rain or irrigation but from the rising lake level. Our garden is less than 24" from being flooded out completely! The water is very very high and levels here are uncontrolled (i.e. the lake and river are undammed). However, the lake is massive, and we are optimistic.

I came home with a few dozen baby basils. Somewhere amidst the weeds in the fallow garden beds at home I will find a place for them.

On potties and adolescence

On a parenting message board someone mentioned that her 2-year-old son had no interest in the plastic potty she'd bought for him, and preferred instead to use the regular toilet. She asked if she was alone in skipping the potty stage with her child.

I wrote a simple, factual reply. No, we didn't use a potty either, though we owned one at one point. It just seemed like an unnecessary intermediate stage. Then I realized that we hadn't made much use of a lot of the other "intermediate step" trappings of childhood, especially not with the younger kids ... strollers, cribs, toddler beds, bottles, sippy cups and the like.

Upon thinking it through, I realized that this is a common thread in my parenting approach. I let the kids be little and dependent as long as they want, until they're truly ready to be more grown up. As a result they don't seem to need the intermediate step, nor do they then get 'stuck' at the halfway stage.

This is how I'm approaching adolescence too. I'm the mom who kept her shy 5-year-old home and homeschooled her, rather than push her to adjust to half-day kindergarten. But I'm also the mom who gave her 12yo her own cabin to live in and lets her hike in the wilderness alone. When my kids were 8 and under they were almost never out of my sight, even in group situations, something that other parents probably felt was over-protective. But by the time the eldest was 10 I was happily leaving them home alone for significant periods of time, something that many other parents feel is downright negligent. I'm trying to help the important aspects of childhood to last as long as I can, and then allow the kids to grow into all the independence they want as soon as they want it, thus shrinking the awkward middle ground of adolescence into as brief a transition as possible.

I suppose time will tell whether this is a successful strategy for the teen years. It was certainly very successful for helping the kids attain toileting independence!

Hiking, biking, paddling, ho!

Every year about this time the kids and I vow to get out into the great outdoors more and enjoy the natural mountain terrain that we're so blessed with. Somehow obstacles seem to spring up. Most have to do with the varied stamina, interest and ability my kids have when it comes to self-propelled activity. The year Fiona was small enough to tote around in a backpack, Sophie was still too little to last long. As Sophie gained more stamina, Fiona grew bigger, and heavier, and less willing to be toted.

But so far this year we're finding ways to work around the issues. In the canoe we share paddles around and take turns and Fiona stays amused by chattering and dragging her hand in the water. Last weekend we paddled to Silverton for a picnic and then back again. Provided our hikes are short and not too steep, Fiona will walk about half the time and I can manage carrying her the rest. We hiked the Galena Trail from home to town with a friend earlier this week (picnic on the way) and finished with a swim. I've discovered that we can fit four bicycles and the Burley trailer in the minivan (have I mentioned lately how much we love our Sienna?) so today we drove to Rosebery and rode the slowly but relentlessly climbing railgrade to New Denver, and then the highway back to Rosebery. We came pretty close to reaching the limits of Sophie's endurance, but she managed, and thankfully we finished with a long long downhill. Being able to drive the bikes somewhere helps a lot, since our home is situated on a highway grade that's too steep for cycling enjoyment.

Noah and Erin are so strong this year! Everyone seems to be enjoying the outdoors and the adventurousness of our as-yet-fairly-tame expeditions. I hope I can continue to develop the kids' outdoor interests and abilities. Goodness knows, this is good for me too!

A day outdoors

Today ending up being a day spent almost exclusively outside, the first of the year. First up was Sophie's soccer game. She and Erin were car-pooling with another family to Nakusp (40 minutes away) for their games there while Noah and a child from the other family had their game here. So we were up early to make the swap of children in time for the first game.

The entire morning was taken up with soccer games and transportation. Noah's team lost their game, but this was after donating two of their decent players to the other team who were short, and having those two score the two goals that put the other team ahead. The donation of players really helped keep the game collegial and mutually supportive. Very nice to see. Noah had some great saves in goal and did a great job as centre-forward in the second half.

After his game, we came home with two of his team-mates, one the product of the earlier kid-swap, the other a fellow violin student who was planning to spend the day with us. They played outside a bit, waiting for Erin and Sophie to get home.

When the girls got back, we were left with our four kids plus the extra violinist-cum-soccer-player friend. Erin, Noah, Sophie and their friend D. are all in the same art class which is holding an exhibit next weekend. They have agreed to be the musical entertainment at the Hidden Garden Gallery, so they spent almost an hour practicing outside, working out a "set" of pieces gleaned from the Suzuki repertoire for the most part, but with harmony parts. Fiona was obviously wanting very much to be a part of things.

More outdoor play followed, while I got supper prepared.

After supper the kids retreated to their bedrooms for a quick bit of practising on their current lesson assignments. Then we headed down to the GRUBS Garden for an evening meeting. We did a bit of digging and weeding and then inspected our bat house by torchlight (still no residents), watched for other bats coming out for night feeding (there were a few), played flashlight tag on the lawn and in the woods, and dug small lagoons out of the pebbles at the interface between the beach and the lake. We had planned to float a whole series of floating candles in the waterfront lagoons, but it was a little to breezy to keep the candles lit so while we got a couple lit, we decided to try again another night. The stars came out; we chatted and snacked on popcorn.

Then we headed home. The kids wanted some hot chocolate. Erin, who is getting a big kick out of the geometry problems in her math text lately, insisted on doing a bit of math. She got to work on that while I read "Hat Full of Sky" by Terry Pratchett to the other kids (Erin, as usual, has already read it). Everyone was really tired when they headed off to bed! Hopefully they get enough sleep to be in good humour and well-focused for tomorrow's orchestra and ensemble performance.