Our Moose is Home!

Seventeen months ago we said goodbye to Musette Moose. She's a poseable stuffed moose. I sewed her a little polarfleece vest with a maple leaf on it, attached a Canadian lapel pin, put together a little suitcase containing a tiny violin and a blank spiral-bound journal, and mailed her to some friends of ours in the Yukon, in Canada's far north. Since then she has spent time with about a dozen other families around the world. The families are all involved in Suzuki music, and many are homeschoolers. They took such good care of her! They filled her suitcase with keyfobs and lapel pins, with miniature souvenirs and with hand-made garments representing their corner of the world, and they filled her journal with scores of photos, stories and description. She arrived back yesterday, having successfully circumnavigated the globe.

We have photos of Musette at the St. Louis Arch and struttin' along the banks of the Mississippi River. Musette in the streets of San Salvador. Musette at Geysir in Iceland. Musette at Edinburgh Castle. At Buckingham Palace. In front of the Washington Monument. In front of the Coliseum in Rome. Visiting with a kangaroo in Australia. Under the midnight sun in Alaska. Pictured in a newspaper article in New Zealand.

What an amazing project this has been!

Just a Day in the Life

I got up at 7:30, Chuck shortly after. Noah (8) was next up at about 8:45, followed by Fiona (21 months). I worked on the computer for a while, with my coffee. I'm still trying to get my new 'puter tweaked and all set up with my favourite software and all my restored files. Noah played Neopets for a few minutes but then opted for Playmobil in the loft. Fiona followed.

At 10:00 I got Erin (10) and Sophie (5) up. They stay up very late reading, and are always last out of bed. If I don't get them up they will sleep later and later each day, staying up later and later at night, so I make sure I have them up by 10 am or our ability to do things as a family really starts getting hampered by the unmeshed schedules.

At 10:30 we went to violin lessons. Sophie was first. She's working on Gossec Gavotte at the end of Suzuki Book 1 and everything is finally clicking. It was a very exciting lesson for both her and her violin teacher. Erin was next. Erin is practising very little lately; her enthusiasm is for piano. Yet despite having spent little time on her violin in the past week, she'd clearly done some good thoughtful work, because her Bach a minor last movement was much better! Noah is struggling lately. His teacher (my mom), he and I had a bit of a talk about how we can work best around his perfectionistic tendencies. He did some work on the Suzuki viola book 3 piece he's polishing up for performance at group class. He was given a bit of a nudge to get busy learning his next piece, because he's more than ready for it and just has to get down to the note-learning.

We got home at about 12:30. We ate lunch, fed & watered the chickens, collected the eggs, and did a bit of work on the Hallowe'en costumes. (Almost done! Fiona is Little Red Riding Hood while Erin is The Big Bad Wolf Dressed Up as RRH's Granny. Sophie is an owl. Noah is Anubis, the ancient Egyptian jackal god.) We went outside and did some garden work. Erin and Sophie planted flower bulbs. I planted garlic. We took down the plastic greenhouse, discovering to our surprise that there were three just-ripened tomatoes beneath it, despite the frozen ground elsewhere. Sophie and I pulled some carrots and jerusalem artichoke. We raked some leaves.

We came inside. I started pizza dough. We watched the first two hour-long episodes of "Canada: A People's History" on DVD. We have been reading aloud from "The Story of Canada" so that we get the somewhat same information in two different formats from two different points of view. Before we put it on Erin asked what would be covered in the first episode. I said "probably everything up to Leif the Lucky and his crew -- remember him? She said "well, yeah" (in a kind of a "duh!" voice) and then remarked "I learned about him in school." (She had tried school out for two days last spring.) I asked what else they had been studying. She explained that actually she hadn't learned about him, she'd been there for the end-of-unit test. I asked how she'd done.

"Oh, pretty well," she said, shrugging. "I got perfect, 'cause I was the only one who got the spelling of 'Leif' right." I had to laugh about that. She was the only one who hadn't been taught the material and the only one who got a perfect mark.

We watched the DVD. Noah lost interest partway through and went back to the Playmobil. Fiona napped.

Sophie and Fiona and I made the pizzas. Erin and Noah practised piano.

We had a late supper after Chuck got home. Afterwards we built a bonfire and watched the eclipse. Noah and Sophie had showers. Sophie did four exercises from her new Singapore Math book. Erin wrote some stuff on the computer and played around with Geometers' Sketchpad for a while. I read aloud from "Firewing" by Kenneth Oppel. Noah went to sleep. Erin and Sophie went off to bed with their respective novels and who knows when they fell asleep.

Inviting winter home

Yesterday we could see the snow falling on the mountains above us. The kids were lazy and aimless. I had lots of fussy errands to do and the day was dreary and uninviting. I did some stuff at home, ran to town with the little one, did half of what I had on my list and thought "Snow Day!"

I drove home and picked up the older kids. Told them to grab their new winter boots, their winter jackets and their mittens. I drove up towards the pass. After about 10 minutes of driving we came to a lovely little lake at the saddle of the pass where the trees were cloaked in snow and there was a couple of inches of the fluffy white stuff on the ground. We parked the van and got out.

For an hour we ran around throwing snowballs at each other, building small snowmen, making slushy snow-angles, eating the snow. Then we piled in the van and drove home, the kids cherishing the shrinking snowmen they were holding on their laps. We put the snowmen in the deep freeze, built a fire in the woodstove and drank hot chocolate.

We decided we'll do this every year. The first time winter's in the neighbourhood, we'll go out and meet him and invite him to drop by our place.

Mushrooming

We've lived in our little corner of the province for 10 years and this is the first year we've mushroomed. Back in the 1970's an underground economy sprang up in our area when it was discovered that the pine mushroom, which grows in our region after the first fall rains, was equivalent to the much-prized matsutake mushroom of Japan. People have made as much as $40,000 in 3 weeks in the past. Nowadays there are so many pickers out that profits are much smaller, but it can be lucrative.

Not this year. It was dry for 15 months and then it rained for a month straight. And then the sun came out and the ground warmed up a bit, and the pine mushrooms started popping up by the thousands. Friends of ours went out last week and picked 60 lb. in a single afternoon. This is a mushroom that in a year of scarcity will fetch $50-100/lb for Grade 1 specimens. This year the price is $2-4/lb.

Well, we were given a couple of dozen pounds. They are delicious! They cook up firm with a lovely flavour that's aromatic and almost spicy. And we decided we should go out picking to find some of our own. We had touched and smelled and handled and tasted so many that, when given a few tips by our friends we felt confident that we could find our own and identify them with certainty. We headed out on a long logging-road drive north of the lake and came out at a forestry service campsite area. The kids mostly hung out at the beach playing with rocks, water and sticks, while I went off in the woods and hopped across acres and acres of moss hunting the elusive gourmet mushroom. I found about 10 lbs.

At home we're eating mushrooms like crazy, and dehydrating them like crazy too. I've got a couple of pounds of dried mushrooms (that's a lot... maybe 30 lb. worth!). And tonight I tried out a soup mix I'm concocting ... dehydrated pine mushrooms with spices including wild ginger and dried veggies etc. to make a hot & sour soup. I think it's a go, and we'll send it out as Christmas gifts in ziploc bags.

Our area is just so beautiful at this time of year, I can hardly believe it.

Noah's Birthday Bonfire

There's a magic about the dark.

Last night Noah had a birthday celebration. We had daytime and early-evening committments, but he wanted to celebrate his birthday on the day, and in the dark, in part because it was a full moon. So we lit a big bonfire at our place and arrived back here with a swarm of friends just after it got really dark, just before moonrise.

We roasted marshmallows, popped popcorn and cooked bannock-on-a-stick. We doled out a big birthday cake. Every kid had brought a flashlight and they swarmed around the property, through the woods, to the apple and plum tree for (more!) food, played hide-and-seek. Then I went off secretly into the forest and hung a dozen and a half 'light-pens' off the trees. These were inexpensive ball-point pens we'd found at a store a month or so ago. They have three coloured lights in them, and button batteries and a clear plastic shank. When you turn them on you can select one of 7 colours, or a flashing sequence of all 7. They're really bright. They also had lanyards attached. So I "hid" them around the forest, all flashing like fairies, and sent the pack of kids (aged 3-17) in to find one for each of them. The sight of the lights dancing in the woods was amazing!

Then we had various packs of kids running around the property with their coloured lights spinning on lanyards. They decided you could be on a "team" by setting your light to the colour matching that of the other team members. Joining a team was easy -- set your light pen to a different colour. They roamed for a couple of hours like this at least, just being together. We had the telescope out and practically burned our retinas out looking at the bright full moon. It was totally magical. I don't think anyone will forget it for a long time.

And it made realize again that simply being together in the dark creates magic. I remembered the "Shadows in the Forest" game we have, a Waldorf-style board game played with a candle, shadow-casting wooden trees and little gamepiece gnomes. Everyone loves it and we have a fiercely-guarded tradition of saving it for certain special times of the year. This summer on warm nights we used the air mattress and an Itty Bitty Book Light to do our bedtime readalouds under the stars on the lawn. There was an amazing display of northern lights one night, and there were plenty of shooting stars and satellites to be seen. And we just love power failures. Out come the candles and the lantern, we cuddle in front of the wood stove and read aloud or play guessing games, drinking hot chocolate warmed on the stove. And I remembered the nights we skated under the stars on our home-made rink. And the night Erin and I bundled up at 2 am in snowsuits and sleeping bags and watched a meteor shower. And I remembered one of my favourite picture books of all time, Jane Yolen's "Owl Moon", which evokes the dark so beautifully. And the scene in Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Farmer Boy" when the family clusters around the fire in the winter-dark evening each doing their handiwork.

It's so easy to turn the lights off and create magic. The darkness creates a surrounding cloak that draws people together.

We must do more of this.

On an even keel

Lately Fiona's language has really taken off. "Cheese" is now "chizz", not "zzeee". There are several new words each day. We've lost count. And phrases ... 'happy kids' and 'pee done' and and 'want cookie'. What fun! She's fallen in love with a little doll, and with a harmonica. She is insisting on having picture books read aloud to her.

Today we tried needle-felting and it was a huge hit. Normally when I try out a new skill or craft, the kids (Erin especially) keep their distance. My guess is that they figure I have "ownership" of the activity, so it can no longer be theirs. (This makes it tough to 'strew' and 'model' effectively!) But they were quite intrigued by needle felting, perhaps because I didn't expect them to be. I felted a small beaver tail. Then I added the beaver to match. The kids all helped with the felting. They want to try their own creations tomorrow.

We're back to regular piano lessons. Three days before they started Noah reminded me that early in the summer he told me he didn't want lessons this fall. Oops. That rang a bell; I'd conveniently put it out of my mind. I'd told him that since we'd paid for the music summer school week I expected him to continue with piano until then, and we'd talk later. He cheerfully continued, and kept practising (fairly lightweight stuff, but practising nonetheless) afterwards. But he raised the issue again. Erin was sleeping over at a friend's, and Sophie had a friend over, so Noah and I managed to have a long heart-to-heart at bedtime. It was wonderful. We talked about the joys and benefits and advantages of doing piano, and the challenges and frustrations and difficulties. We did some trouble-shooting and discussed the whole issue of lessons. The upshot was that he decided to continue lessons, but on his terms: no 'testing' or 'scorekeeping' at lessons, and less focus on reading skills. When we attended the first lesson it turned out that his teacher had re-thought her reading approach with him and decided to focus on an intervalaic approach rather than a note-naming approach. Noah was pleased with this; since he's grappling with the alto clef on viola as well as treble and bass clefs on piano, the note-naming was getting even muddier.

He came home with a fair number of assignments, but he's done very well with them; his new piece was easy (mostly rote-learned), his reading work is more to his liking, and his review and technique is getting fluid fast. He's feeling really good about his learning ability on piano.

Erin is amazing me with her piano playing. She's suddenly leapt light-years beyond my own piano ability. The grade 7 & 8 pieces are coming easily to her, even the modern, unpredictable, atonal ones. Her teacher promoted her officially to grade 7 (despite the fact that she only moved to Grade 6 in January) and seems to be fast-tracking her with technique work and theory.

Origami is big around here lately. The kids have discovered (or rediscovered) an Usborne origami book, and they've been teaching themselves and each other out of the book with no adult help. Even Sophie has read her way through the instructions for making a bead, a snapping mouth and a pinwheel. Erin has perfected the star box, and Noah's specialty is the fox.

The Sodaconstructor site has also been big lately. Interestingly the kids have pointed out the geometric similarities to their origami work. The Neopets site has also been getting rather too much play.
All three kids are reading voraciously the past few days, since we began firing up the woodstove on chilly mornings. They grab a quilt and a book, and cozy up on the living room floor in front of the stove. The other afternoon I found Noah and Erin crammed into the wingback chair side by side each with their own novel. Today's choices: Erin - "A Year Down Yonder" by Gregory Peck, Noah - "Moominsummer Madness" by Tove Jansson, Sophie - "The Children of Noisy Village" by Astrid Lindgren.

Noah and Sophie have continued to work occasionally in their math workbooks. Noah is partway through Singapore 3A, Sophie is in the early part of Miquon Blue.

Sophie, Fiona and I harvested some wheat the other day from where the highways department had planted it for erosion control. We've had fun threshing and winnowing on a micro-scale. Winnowing consists of jiggling half a cup of wheat in a plastic cup while blowing into the cup. It's quite spectacularly efficient -- we have to be sure to do this outside because the chaff just flies out of the cup. We shall see if we can grind enough flour for a batch of muffins.

Today we went down to the lake to stake out the site of the future organic gardening children's club. We've got about 2100 sq. ft. marked off. Hopefully the site owners will be okay with where we've situated it.

Our own garden is proving fairly productive. I think I didn't prune back the late tomato blossoms and new growth aggressively enough; the tomatoes are taking months to ripen! So I've done a better job of pinching them back in the past 2 or 3 weeks, and Noah and I built a hoop & clip small-scale greenhouse over the tomato and pepper bed. Things are ripening like crazy in there now, so there are tomatoes, beans, corn, greens and carrots for supper every night, as well as apple crisp for dessert. There's something appealing about eating only "in season" produce from one's own garden. Frost is due soon, though, so this won't last. I'm amazed we haven't had frost yet.

We had our first violin group class of the fall last week and the kids learned to dance a minuet. Noah is being very helpful with the two boys about his age who have just joined the class, having only started lessons last spring. They're nice kids; I'd like to see friendships flourish. We have three more weeks until orchestra starts but Noah has his viola music and is working studiously away at it. Both he and Erin are very keen for the start of orchestra.

Other fall activities haven't really materialized, at least not yet. Art class is delayed a month or two. Gymnastics seems destined not to happen this fall. We haven't really looked into the details for choir yet. I quite like the rhythm of our weeks for now. All our scheduled activities fit between Monday morning and Wednesday noon. Later in the week we get down-time, family time and visits with friends and grandma. Perhaps we should hold steady.

Our readalouds have got stalled a little, because we stumbled upon the two Moomin books we'd only read once at a bookstore last week, and we've had to read those before continuing with our 'in progress' books. We've read "Finn Family Moomintroll" and are almost finished "Moominvalley in November". Noah has nicknamed himself "Thingumy", because he has a good friend named Bob. (Thingumy and Bob are Moomin characters.) The 'in progress' readalouds are "Island of the Blue Dolphins" by Scott O'Dell, "Silverwing" by Kenneth Oppel and "The Lantern Bearers" by Rosemary Sutcliff. The latter has me really intrigued by the historical setting (post-Roman Britain) and I find myself reading through reference materials to fill in my own (appallingly poor) understanding of world history.

Amidst it all we mow the lawn, practice violin/viola/piano, bake bread and cookies, feed the chickens, play games with Fiona, draw, paint, sculpt, attend meetings, lessons and rehearsals, run errands and the like.

It's been a really good couple of weeks.

Digital Blue Days

Last spring the currently-visiting Ontario grandmother gave us some cash in lieu of Christmas and birthday gifts for educational or recreational supplies. We bought a basketball hoop with part of it. A month or so ago a friend gave a great review of the the Digital Blue QX3 microscope. We were really impressed with the images she showed, so we went ahead and ordered our own. It arrived yesterday, while the aforementioned grandmother was still visiting. It was a great mail day. Not only did the microscope arrive, but a new issue of Boomerang AudioMagaizine showed up, and so did Erin's new (oblong! grown-up!) half-size violin case. The microscope excitement trumped everything, though.

It was a cinch to install. It connects to the PC by USB cable. The software is dead simple. Everything shows up on the computer monitor. There are three optical magnification levels: 10X, 60X and 200X. The illumination is USB-powered with a top and/or bottom LED. They're automatically adjusted by the software (with manual over-ride). The image quality is excellent. The optical unit comes off the stand so that it is possible to examine arm hairs, fingerprints, eyeball veins and nose hairs in detail :-P. The kids spent all day gathering specimens, comparing, zooming in, viewing, saving images, gathering more specimens. I'm really impressed with the ease of use and image quality for a unit that costs < $50 US. Amazing really.

Sophie was examining some bits of printed scrapbooking paper with the microscope and then diverged into an interesting little side-project. She cut a couple of dozen bits of paper about 2" x 4", folded them in half and then cut a variety of shapes out of the folds. She ended up with a 'collection' of shapes with one axis of symmetry which she was very intrigued by. As time went on she got very good at predicting what the shape would be when unfolded.

Noah wrote a bit of a story on his own, with no prompting, yesterday morning. He's never done that before, at least not in the last couple of years, not since he became and independent reader. He hs mentioned a couple of time that "I don't have the skills I need to write." I asked him what he meant... whether he was concerned about handwriting or spelling or punctuation. He said it was spelling. I reassured him that lots of reading and lots of writing would help him learn to spell. I said that if he wanted to do some work specifically on spelling with me, I would help, but that I was pretty sure his spelling would come along if he wanted to just do some writing. So it was interesting that he asked for help spelling a couple of words but was comfortable working most of the spelling out on his own. He did pretty darn well. It was only 5 or 6 sentences, but there were words like "bother" and "before" and "party" and "pickle" and "hasn't" and they were all correctly spelled without help.

Everyone did their practising fairly cheerfully and thoroughly. The kids watched a bit of Olympic diving with their dad. Noah asked some questions about China and expressed an interest in learning more about it and maybe visiting some day. I mentioned that the latest Boomerang has an article about China's economic and political changes.

Just before bed last night Erin discovered the sheet music to "Puck" by Edvard Grieg in a stack of old piano music we had. She's mentioned several times since the summer school that it was a piece that she really liked; another student was working on it. The piece is on the Royal Conservatory of Canada's Grade 8 syllabus. Erin is nominally Grade 6, although some of the supplementary pieces she's learning are Grade 7 or 8 level. She sat down this morning and spent the better part of an hour working on it and made incredible progress with it. She will probably have the notes learned and most of it up to tempo within a week. I hope her teacher is okay with her learning ahead on her own like this.

Noah created and taught to Sophie a simple five-finger bass line accompaniment to the first 8 bars of one of his new piano pieces. They had fun 'performing a duet' for both Grandma's. Tonight they've been teaching Fiona to 'perform' i.e. to climb up on the piano bench, bang some keys, climb back down and take a bow.

A week or so ago I found a file on one of the computers that Erin had forgotten to delete or transfer over to her secret bedroom laptop. She's so private about her creative writing that I eventually turned an ancient laptop over to her. It's good for nothing but word-processing and listening to music CD's, which she does sometimes for hours on end. Anyway, she accidentally left this file on one of the computers I use, and I found it. I was really impressed. I hadn't read anything she'd written in 18 months or more. I e-mailed it to a friend who is a writer/editor by profession and has sort of been my unschooling mentor for the past half dozen years. She wrote back:

"This is extraordinary writing . . . really extraordinary writing.
Extraordinary for anyone of any age, never mind a 10-year-old. I've evaluated manuscripts for publishers, and also edited my share of children's novels and chapter books for small publishers, and I haven't often seen stuff of this quality.
One thing that is so very striking about it is the rhythmic quality of the
prose, and how that rhythm carries the meaning of the text."

I thought it was very good, but I don't have much of a frame of reference, and felt that my parental pride was probably colouring my judgement. I was really struck by my friend's reaction.

Here's a little snippet from the file I found:

Nyre, the girl from Wen Revned, the girl of the green eyes, the girl of the black hair, the daughter of the right-hand man to the queen, would grow up to be the Signseeker, the greatest of the Eightfold, and yet she didn't know. No humans can see what is ahead of them. And yet she, Nyre, the Sweetie of the Orchard, as fair as spring herself as just released from Winter's grip, would be able to do it, the first of all humanity to do so. At eleven years old, Nyre's hair was as glossy as placid water, and her eyes were the colour of the forest.[snip] ...

It was a sunny afternoon when Nyre met Louappe, and Nyre was out by the fountain staring at the reflection of the apple tree in the water. Nyre idly watched the branches of the apple tree sway in the cool breeze. The lilting sound of her brother's pipe drifted into the courtyard. He was playing Syh Mugden. The mysterious and melancholy music of the Biekall Pipe made her feel strangely drowsy. She saw a figure pass into the shade of the apple tree. Papa? No, it wasn't Papa. She was too sleepy. She closed her eyes for a moment, and then the drowsiness passed. The man under the tree, wasn't Papa. That was for sure.

I wish I could confess I'd found the file and tell her how impressed I am, how impressed our friend is. But Erin would be mortified and might even stop writing. It would be a huge betrayal to her. She's intensely private about her writing, presumably because it's so important to her, because she takes it so seriously and it therefore makes her vulnerable. My guess is that by age 12 or 13 she'll be ready for a bit of sharing. I think it'll take some more maturity of self-concept and just general maturity. I do hope she learns to share her obvious talent. Still, I need to remind myself that she's only 10. It's probably a good thing that she is growing her own writer's voice free from her meddlesome mother's tendency to micro-manage.

Today we drove the visiting grandmother to the airport. On the way back we listened to our Boomerang issue which we all enjoyed. There was a great D-Day storytelling segment that brought me to tears (not a good thing while driving!). I stopped for a coffee when Fiona got fussy. She got out of the van and proceeded to run through all the rather deep puddles. She was delighted. Fortunately she had spent part of the morning engaging in her favourite pasttime of dressing herself in multiple layers of clothing. We simply peeled off the top two layers of pants and one pair of shorts to discover the shorts beneath were still dry.

Long time, no blog!

It's been a busy month. The local music summer school began a few days after I last wrote. Erin and Noah were registered as piano students, and Sophie insisted at the 11th hour that she be enrolled too, as a violin student. Erin squeaked into the "Lower Advanced" piano class and was also registered in the string chamber music program. She capably held her own in both programs with much older kids. What I'm most proud of is how she performed on violin. She was placed in a string quartet to work up two movements of the Haydn Op. 74 No. 3 quartet in B-flat major. It is not a real "beginner" quartet; it's fairly sophisticated classical music with a fair share of technical and musical challenges. She did just amazingly well with phrasing, balance, dynamics and other musicality issues on a new half-sized violin and bow. I was very proud. They got a huge ovation from the audience. The average age of the quartet was 12 1/2 and they sounded pretty darn sophisticated.

Noah had of course recently switched from violin to viola and he has made incredible strides with tone and musical confidence. He had a stellar lesson with the viola specialist who said all sorts of really nice things about his playing and his potential. His piano experience was a little underwhelming, but he really enjoyed the social atomosphere of the class and discovered that his note-reading and new-piece-learning skills are much stronger (compared to other students at his level) than he'd thought. He easily learned his 4-hands duet part while his older more experienced partner struggled.

Sophie was in the beginner master class and was the most advanced student and the only girl. She worked with a really nice accompanist and learned to give cues at the beginning of pieces and after fermatas.

After the summer school our friends had their baby, much to everyone's delight. And amazing home birth of an amazing little girl. We went for visits: to see the baby, to play with the older kids, and to take the family meals.

We spent some time renovating the little cabin. The kids helped paint, hammer, clean and carry stuff. We installed the beginnings of a low-flow irrigation system in the garden.

Then the kids' other grandmother (my mother-in-law) came for a visit. Things have been very low-key since then, since she's mostly interested in spending time with the kids at home. We've been to the beach, the market, out for dinner a couple of places, and for a couple of social visits, but have mostly been at home. We've done lots of gardening together.

The kids have been pretty creative and self-sufficient at home. I think they appreciate the chance to be home with no outside committments for a while. They've played outside together lots. They're practising violin and piano well. Noah and Sophie are doing lots of math. Noah finished up the second half of Singapore 2B in 3 days and is enjoying the beginning of 3A. Sophie has moved on into the Miquon Blue Book. Erin is doing some music theory bookwork each evening when the middle two do their math. She doesn't enjoy it but did sort of promise her teacher she'd do some work through the summer. I haven't made a big deal about it, so she's managing to make herself do it.

Our family readalouds are happening again more regularly. On the go right now are "The Tale of Desperaux" by Kate di Camillo, "The Dark is Rising" by Susan Cooper and "The Lantern Bearers" by Rosemary Sutcliff. Erin had lost interest in this nightly ritual for a while. She joined us again when we started doing our readalouds by Itty-Bitty Booklight while lying on the big air mattress on the lawn under the stars. We saw an amazing Northern Lights display one night, and lots of shooting stars and satellites.

Soon we'll be sidling into our fall routine. I hope we can keep things sane.

Piano paralysis

Noah has fairly decent note-reading skills but he will not access them while learning to play new piano pieces. Instead he will fumble around trying to learn a new piece by guessing at what he thinks the left hand ought to do while the right hand is playing a remembered melody. I'll wander by the piano and discover that he hasn't even got the book out ... it just never occurred to him to use it as a reference while trying to learn to play a new piece. He's learning tons about harmonization and composition and improvisation in the process, but what he's not learning (and what's annoying him to no end) is new pieces. And after a few seconds of trying to sound out an acceptable bass line and not getting it quite right, he's fed up. I don't know where he thinks the notes are going to come from... it's as if he expects them to materialize at his fingertips out of thin air. Pieces with patterns in them he can learn in about 5 minutes, even if the patterns are fairly complex. He learns easily by ear, but we (he, I and his teacher) all agree that the piano is where he ought to be learning note-reading, theory and transcription skills. His teacher has made an effort to build his confidence with pattern-based pieces, but the confidence doesn't carry him forward when he meets any sort of challenge. He's really at the stage now where he needs to make an effort to tackle things he can't learn in 5 minutes. Perfection paralysis.

His teacher has been very creative and flexible, but the bottom line is that he needs to be able to make a mistake and work through it, rather than leaving the piano for 3 days after eachwrong note.

I've written a few thoughts lately about Noah's piano paralysis, and it caused me to remember many of the creative and resourceful strategies I used when Erin was at the same stage. I realized that I hadn't given Noah the benefit of that kind of support. Sometimes because I'm a less neurotic and obsessive parent to my younger children they get the short end of the stick :-P. So last night we tried out some ideas I'd used with Erin. Amazingly enough, 18 hours later the Minuet he's been stuck on since April is now pretty much learned! This morning he's been jubilantly playing it over and over and clamouring to start the Bourrée that follows it.

A Sandy Beach

I have a friend with a baby due soon and want to be able to attend the birth. Since Chuck is on call so much, and my mom is away on and off through the summer, I thought it would be a good idea to get Fiona comfortable with our favourite 'babysitter'. I use the word in quotes because RoseAnne is really more of an adopted big sister and friend to the kids than a caregiver, but she is 17 and super-responsible and I have occasionally hired her to cope with the older three kids. I asked her to spend a couple of half days with us back to back to see if Fiona would take to her. The first day RoseAnne came to our house. The next day we went out of town to go grocery shopping, have a picnic lunch and then go to the beach. Fiona was happy as a clam with RoseAnne at the park while I did the shopping... her first time apart from adult family members!

The beach in Nakusp is sandy, unlike the rocky beaches around our hometown. I was struck by the fact that a sandy beach is an art and engineering material simply perfect for children. There's no set-up, there's no clean-up other than a quick swim. There's no adult saying "no, don't mix those colours" or "please don't waste the paper" or "how beautiful!" or "let's save that to show daddy" or "how about a little more over here?" There's absolutely no parental judgement or control. And it's ephemeral, so perfectionism really doesn't rear its ugly head. Beach sand is so totally experiential and process-oriented... there's nothing about end-products.

I think we must try to spend more time at the sandy beach.

The kids have been spending huge amounts of time in the dirt near the lawn, mixing water and dirt to make mud of more or less clayish consistency, sculpting, digging, eroding, piling, building, drying, patting, moistening, packing. I thought about all the valuable imaginative play that was involved, but until I watched them in the sand at the beach, I hadn't thought about the value of the artistic exploration.

Three cheers for muck!

Noah is a violist!

It wasn't like he had begged for a viola. I play both violin and viola and he had expressed no spontaneous interest in taking up the viola. But I'd heard about the magnificent little Sabatier instruments and so I planted a seed with him. I said "Maybe someday you'll want to play the viola too." He's the biggest for his age of my four kids, though that's not saying much. And while he's never expressed any concerns about it, I had always had at the back of my mind the knowledge that he's growing up in the shadow of a precocious older sister who is learning the violin and piano as well. We also live in a tiny rural community with very limited group class opportunities but with a thriving community string orchestra which is in desperate need of violas.

He was beginning to outgrow his 1/8th size violin and it looked like yet again he'd be growing into a hand-me down instrument from his sister. He was about to begin a romp through Book 3 and was interested in really focusing on sight-reading and orchestral skills. It seemed like a good time to introduce a new instrument and a new clef and a new role in ensemble-playing. I mentioned the possibility again and he was enthusiastic. I'm sure most of it had to do with the simple business of growing into a new instrument, but whatever the reason he was keen on a viola.

And so I sent my mom off to an institute to meet an instrument I had located and priced out from the Sound Post in Toronto. I told her to buy it on my behalf if she thought it was wonderful. I was at another institute, and I actually called to locate her and give her my number in case she wasn't sure about the purchase. But she didn't call me back. It turned out this was because she was sure -- it was a simply amazing instrument.

The viola is an asymmetrical viola from luthier Bernard Sabatier in Paris France. It is the same size as a 1/4-size violin and has a rich C-string tone. We arrived back from our institute to the news that the viola was on its way. It was driving back across the prairies with some friends of ours. Noah couldn't wait! He asked me to start some alto clef reading work with him. He counted down the days. He wanted to cancel his piano lesson in case it came while we were there! Finally it arrived. Wow! It is at least as wonderful as we'd expected.

It has a much bigger, more mature sound than his 1/8th size violin. And it's a viola in spirit, timbre and tone, all the way to the bottom of the C-string. Noah was entranced by its wacky shape and by the sound he could get from it almost immediately. He began playing through a lot of his violin repertoire. I'd told him that except for 2 pieces all of Books 1 & 2 viola were the same as the violin books, so he should start there, just a fifth down. He knew what I meant, but his perfect pitch kept getting in the way. He'd want to start playing "Allegro" and shift to 4th position to find the high A, then realize that this was his viola so he didn't have to reach for the high notes. So he'd dig around on the lower strings for a lower A and then try to start 2 octaves down only to realize that this wasn't quite right either. Then he'd remember the "fifth down" rule and intellectually figure it out. I could tell his ear just didn't have a blueprint of "Allegro" in D major. I'll be buying some Suzuki Viola CDs, but I was intrigued to see how his mind and ear were competing to be in charge.

Almost immediately he loved his viola best. He talked about quitting violin. I explained that he would want to keep up violin to play in groups, but that the instruments would be the same size, so switching back and forth would be easy as his ear learned to adjust. He played it many times a day. He learned "French Folk Song" on Day 2 and "Bohemian Folk Song" on Day 4. He polished up "Martini Gavotte" in short order and forged ahead into the Book 3 "Bach Minuet". He picked up the viola to demonstrate any time anyone stopped by our house. People are intrigued by its "melted" look, and he enjoys the attention.

The technical transition is going well. Noah has a very intuitive physical sense, and with some encouragement to "really work for the tone" was able to get a big robust sound right from the start. He has a few technical issues (a 'tippy-toes' bowhand, for instance) that were being addressed anyway, but which now have more reason to be treated seriously. "You can't get away with that on the viola," I say. "You really need to be able to sink your arm weight into the string through those middle fingers. It's even more important with these big low strings." And of course he's more motivated to do so. He's finding the Kreisler highway easily, probably aided by the universal tendency to slip a bit towards the fingerboard when moving to a bigger instrument. Intonation is a little unreliable on fourth fingers and he needs some encouragement to use all of his (much longer) bow. But all in all the transition seems scarcely more challenging than that of moving to a larger-sized violin.

He's got the knack of starting a fifth lower, but his darn aural memory still likes to reassert itself from time to time a Da Capos, where he'll often suddenly modulate from C major to G major, for instance. Funny, that.

He's only been practising his violin every other day and very briefly at that. That's fine. His 1/4-size violin isn't available yet, but should be soon, so probably the less switching back and forth from the 1/8th the better. So far he's loving the change and enjoying the attention he's getting.

Home again, home again, jiggety jog

Not much of note on the way home. We spent a day in Spokane, did some shopping, went to Riverfront Park and did some kid-things (rode the 1909 carousel, geocached, fed more ducks, etc.), swam in motel pools and so on. Bought some books and music CD's, drove back to Canada and bought a new truck for dh. Leased, actually. His Toyota is 13 years old and starting to get unreliable, which isn't so great considering he's the sole physician on-call for our ER 50% of the time. When we bought the Toyota we had just got married and were thinking we'd probably have a child or two before too many years went by, so we made sure the two bucket seats in the front were supplemented by a couple of jump seats behind in the extended cab. We had a rude awakening last summer when the minivan ended up in the shop for 6 weeks: you cannot fit a family of 6 in a light-duty 1991 Toyota extended cab! Especially not when 2 of them are in carseats and two ought to be in boosters. So this time around we got smart: the pickup truck seats six in a pinch!

Glad to be home. The garden is nuts with weeds, but many of the veggies are doing well. I've got some performance gigs coming up with rehearsing to do, and we have a packed social calendar for the next four or five days. But I'm hoping things will get a bit more relaxed for a time after that.

Homeward bound

We went to a nearby city (Moscow, ID) for the Farmers' Market because Stanley, one of Erin's instructors, was playing jazz violin for the morning. We met about two dozen friends from the institute hanging about. It was a wonderful friendly wrap-up from the institute. We bought cherries and doughnuts and smoothies and coffee and browsed the market. Spent the afternoon at a terrific aquatic centre.

Suzuki Institute

The institute was awesome. Erin had 6-7 hours a day of instruction. She was the youngest in most of her classes by at least 2-3 years, so she didn't really have any social peers, but she had plenty of musical peers, which was really what she needed since she doesn't get that at home. The Advanced Orchestra was excellent, very challenging and filled with capable players, and she ended up in a master class with two teens who clearly play with lots of passion and committment. The 13-17-year-olds she was with in orchestras and groups were a really nice bunch too and they made her feel part of the social banter even though she was so tiny and somewhat shy. She made some really big strides participating in discussions both during classes and afterwards.

Noah had 4 hours of classes a day and was well-placed for confidence-building. He was the most secure and most advanced kid in his orchestra and master class, which was great, because he doesn't have Erin's stoical "deal-with-it" mentality when outside his comfort zone. He made many friends and proved to be a bit of a social magnet for kids his age and a bit younger. Every time I'd enter the music building with one of the girls, kids would come up to me and ask "where's Noah?" He impressed his master class teacher enough that she promoted him to the 3rd Suzuki Book on the spot and asked him to learn a new piece, which he did. He got a big boost from that. He made a very good friend, another 7yo homeschooled boy, and really enjoyed his company in classes and elsewhere.

Sophie had 3 hours of classes a day. She too was well-placed for confidence-building. She was doing the Junior Institute for "first-time enrollees under 7 and in the first half of Book 1." While she had moved into the 2nd half of Book 1 since registering, and was therefore the most advanced kid in two of her classes, it was the right place for her since she'd never had a lesson or group class with anyone other than her mom or grandma. She loved her group class which was run by a truly gifted teacher who was unrelenting in his expectations. I couldn't believe that the kids were enjoying themselves... he worked them so hard, insisted they toe the line (literally and figuratively) and had them repeat things like standing up and sitting down like a drill sargeant until they were perfect. But the kids loved working hard for him. This particular teacher is an internet friend of mine, and is very unschooling-friendly and child-centred, yet was able to pull this motley group of 4-through-12-year-olds together through leadership rather than coercion. Amazing!

The social activities were low-key and enjoyable. The institute was friendly and warm. We really really enjoyed it. Chuck spent lots of time being the "Suzuki parent in loco" for Noah and also sometimes for Sophie, and really liked being able to be involved. Fiona survived just fine, napping on my shoulder, making countless recreational trips to the washrooms and drinking fountains, watching, singing, smiling.

Pullman Institute arrival

Arrived in Pullman, checked into the dorm (wonderful! a suite of three small bedrooms and a large living / kitchenette area and bathroom) and did some grocery shopping to stock the kitchen for the week. Then we headed 3 minutes' walk up the hill to the music building for registration and the welcoming "play-in" for the week's Suzuki institute. The kids were eager participants and very comfortable up on stage with scores of others. Later we watched July 4th fireworks from our dorm window far into the night.

Into the US

Did most of the southerly drive to get us into the US for our music workshop. Stopped to get a map of the area in the first town on the American side and saw a guy walking across the parking lot to his RV with a rifle casually at his side. Eek! Plenty of interesting discussions and observations about cultural differences.

We stayed at motels on the way to and from the workshop. The kids really enjoyed the pools, and swam every evening and first thing in the morning. They were terrific about practising their violins too. They'd received ensemble music to prepare for the workshop just a few days before we left home, so practising had to continue during our meandering trip, and it did, quite cheerfully. They each did 10-20 minutes of hard work starting at about 9 am each morning.

Fort Steele

We visited Fort Steele, a re-created 1898 town, and spent the better part of the day there despite an incredible downpour. Had a ride on a steam train. Watched blacksmiths (one with a personal interest in swordsmithing, much to Noah's delight!), leatherworkers, candy-makers, etc. at work. 

Creston and Cranbrook

We visited the Creston wetland wildlife preserve. Saw turtles and birds. Walked the boardwalk, hiked the perimeter of some marshes, looked at the indoor exhibits and learned a lot about flora and fauna. We also went to a railway museum in Cranbrook where they had many opulent passenger and sleeper cars restored to Edwardian splendour.

Quite wonderful. I've always had this dream of living in a railway car. It was definitely re-awakened.

Vacation Time

Two weeks off for Chuck and a music workshop to go to in Washington State. Drove away amidst mixed weather. Waited an extra hour to take the big inland ferry (rather than the small one) across nearby Kootenay Lake. Fed the ducks and geese at the ferry dock. Fiona loved this. There were zillions and they were very tame. Kids enjoyed the ferry and the café. On the other side of the lake we stopped and watched a glassblower, blacksmith, weaver and broom-maker at work in the artisans' village there. Erin collected the first of many amazing wildflower bouquets.

Figments of our imaginations

We have the coolest new family of unschoolers here in the New Denver area. After trying out the area last fall they moved away, then moved back, this time quite committed to staying. I feel like I've known Donna my whole life... we are so comfortable together. She's a jewelry maker and watercolour painter, also (in a former life) a high school art teacher. She has four kids, with #5 due in a couple of months. She's managed to get the valley's renegade/underground midwife to agree to let me hang out at the
birth. We're all to just pretend I'm not a doctor in another life .

Anyway, our kids have this instant chemistry too. Bob (11) is Noah's best friend and is a wonderful gentle role model with the work ethic of a Clydesdale. Margaret (9) is a great pal for Erin... they've got Harry Potter and sandboxes in common. Allie (6) and Sophie have hit their stride. And Ezra (newly 3) is my little sidekick. What a sweetie he is!

I told Donna that I had this sneaking suspicion that she and her kids didn't really exist until some higher power decided to create them to fill our social needs. She said she was pretty sure we were figments of her imagination too. We feel lucky to have found each other, whether we're imaginary or not.

On Friday I had the whole gaggle of kids here all day just by myself, and it was really no more trouble than having just my four. And heck, with (soon) 9 kids between us, who needs a homeschool support group!

I'm playing "block mom" a lot lately. It's not a natural role for introverted me, but it's okay when the kids are so "easy". Erin's had an 8yo girl over two or three times. There's a 5yo boy who spends some time here once or twice a week. Then there are Donna's four, who are here a couple of half days a week. And all day today I had another of Erin's close friends and her younger sister. My kids are really enjoying all the social contact, but they always like at least one day at home just as a family in between.

This past weekend we had our Suzuki violin "Performance Party". Lots of food, and solos by all the kids. My three all did really nice jobs. Sophie was a confident and cute-as-the-dickens performer in her little flowered recital dress. Noah oozes musicality as he sways with his beautifully polished Book 2 pieces. And Erin's playing just grows in sophistication and her physical appearance of ease with the instrument has really improved this spring.