News Clips

Lately my blog entries have been more reflective than newsy, so I thought I'd remedy the situation with a few News Clips.

A month ago I got most of my hair chopped off. I like it ... it's sort of medium-short, down to the angle of my jaw. The other day Fiona was asked to say something funny by some members of Erin & Noah's soccer team. She said "Mommy's hair funny, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" That got a big laugh from everyone. At least she's no longer asking me, in all seriousness "Mommy, are you a boy?"

Erin has had a couple of rehearsals of her Bach Piano Concerto in E major 'siciliano' movement with the Nelson string orchestra and it's going swimmingly. Her memorization is excellent and it's absolutely no problem to put together with the orchestra. At the last rehearsal she actually added some phrasing and dynamics, wonder of wonders! She has a lovely dress to wear for the performances, a fairly slim-tailored black velvet one with a lacey ivory white bodice. Nice and formal without being kiddie-pageant little-girlish, or flamboyant and slinky. Unfortutely we haven't found shoes yet to go with it. Besides Walmart, local selection is virtually non-existent.

I did an uncharacteristically sensible thing and booked myself and the kids into a B&B in Nelson for the four days leading up to the Concerto Concert. We'll be staying at a family-friendly guest house run by some homeschooling acquaintances of ours. This will allow us to avoid four additional back-and-forths to Nelson that week for the cascade of final rehearsals (generally speaking more than 2 trips to Nelson a week is considered unacceptable to the kids) and to have relaxing days uncluttered by all the extra things we get busy with at home (soccer, GRUBS, housework, playdates, errands, etc.). I think it will be a very nice time.

Our new minivan finally showed up and it's fantastic. So quiet, a dream to drive, and incredibly flexible in terms of seating and payload. We're also getting at least an extra 150 km on a (marginally smaller) tank of gas. Our trips to Nelson are so much nicer. We can converse with each other. We can listen to music or audiobooks without having to crank the stereo up so loud over top of the road & engine noise that we all go into sensory overload after 20 minutes and have to shut it off.

The soccer season is more than half over. I pushed Noah a little to join up because he clearly enjoyed kicking a soccer ball around at home, but was leery of the team/competitive mentality. He agreed to try it for three practices, and was instantly hooked. Erin didn't want to sign up until she discovered she'd be on the same team as Noah so she was in. Sophie didn't want to sign up until I explained that she wasn't expected to already know how to play, that the whole program was about helping kids learn to play. She's on a younger team which is a good fit for her. They're all enjoying it even though it's taking up a lot of time each week.

However, there's that whole winning/losing thing. Fully a third of their soccer time is spent in games. There's no attempt to compile 'league standings', score is kept in a low-key and somewhat informal way (they stop counting if one team is wiping the field with the other) and it's understood that the teams vary a lot in age and ability due to the varying size of the communities and schools involved. Still, when the two local teams were formed, the kids were divvied up on the basis of personality i.e. aggressiveness. Erin and Noah ended up on the team with all the less aggressive players, and all they do is get creamed in games (10 or 12 to 0 or 1). I think the idea of putting the less aggressive players together makes a certain amount of sense. The rowdiness, rudeness and physical hits of the "other" team are not contaminating the experience of these more sensitive kids. On the other hand, Erin and Noah and three or so of the other kids are pretty decent players, while the majority of their team-mates are either afraid of the ball, uninterested in soccer or totally distractable. We drove 2 hours one way last week to another town for a special game that was supposed to be more evenly matched, but the opposing team got a little mixed up over the format of the game and included, unbeknownst to us, four pretty adept players from an older age-group. So the kids got trounced again.

Erin and Noah aren't overly upset over all of this; the losses kind of roll off them, which I'm a little surprised and very pleased about. But a number of their team-mates / friends are feeling pretty depressed about the losses and that's affecting the whole 'team morale' and everyone's enjoyment of the whole experience.

The problem to my mind is not with the composition of the team or with the poor matching of the opposing teams, but with the focus on weekly competitive games. During practices the kids are perfectly happy to scrimmage in a flexible way with other local kids without rigid team assignments. At "home", they often divide into three teams and rotate playing A vs. B, B vs. C then C vs. A, five minutes at a time. There are goals and there are saves and they are serious about the play. But team assignments are flexible and no one group of kids gets consistently beaten. They learn and take a supportive interest in each other's successes, often high-fiving members of the opposite 'team'. Their coach is just amazing at nurturing this kind of environment. To me this is the ideal format for these kids. The mood becomes much more upbeat by the end of the week's two practices, but the games on the weekend make it tough to stay motivated.

Ah well, overall it's still been a great experience for them.

The kitchen renovation is showing signs of being imminent. Our entire kitchen will be gutted sometime in the next month. This is something that was in the ten-year plan when we moved into our house eleven years ago. Plumbing will be moved, bricks and concrete footings will be broken up and removed, floor leveled, walls insulated, flooring replaced, drywall finished, cabinets replaced, peninsula built, new range and sink installed, pantry built etc. etc.. The two guys who were hopefully going to do the lion's share of the grunt work have somewhat unexpectedly got very busy, and Chuck is facing the prospect of having to work full days in the clinic plus on-call (rather than the half days he currently works) as the clinic moves to Electronic Medical Records. We're still planning to go ahead in about a week, but just writing it here I'm beginning to wonder if we should wait another month. We'll see. We've put together a couple of the lovely IKEA cabinets and they're waiting hopefully in the dining room along with the cork flooring.

Our garden is basically in. With most of our gardening energy going into the GRUBS garden site in town, we've planted a little more conservatively than in previous years. Still, I'm feeling quite good about the home garden, which had gone quite feral in the years I had three very young children. I've made a lot of small cumulative gains in the past three years and have had to put much less energy into preparing the beds this year than in past years. The onions/garlic/shallots, peas/beans, squash/cukes and lettuce/spinach are all up and growing well. The perennials (raspberries, asparagus, rhubarb, strawberries, etc.) are all showing increasing productivity one year to the next.

I think that covers most of the newsy stuff. I'll probably be back in Reflective Mode by my next entry.

The Light Box

At a yard sale last weekend I picked up a light box for $3 and knew exactly what it'd be for. It's a flourescent-lit box about 12 x 16 x 2" that's got translucent white plastic on the top. It's intended for photographers to use when examining and sorting their 35 mm slides or negatives. But I'd always wanted one for the kids to use when tracing.

Mona Brookes (of "Drawing With Children" and 'Monart' fame) mentions the usefulness of tracing when kids are beginning to work on realistic drawing techniques, especially if they're perfectionists. The idea is to start with a stack of drawing paper, setting one sheet aside for the final product. You then work on a drawing until you're not happy with part of it, at which point you trace the 'good parts' onto a new sheet and continue from there. And so on, until you're happy with an entire picture ... and then you take your reserved sheet of paper and trace your drawing onto that. The tracing gives plenty of chance to feel and repeat the execution of certain line shapes, and mistakes aren't some awful dead end, just another step along the way.

The kids gravitated right to the light box. They threw magazine photos onto it and traced out the contours. They're having to make decisions like how far to extend the line that defines the nose, where the contour becomes just a blend of shades. The subject matter has been somewhat bizarre, to say the least. Erin especially is choosing head shots of fashion models in ads from the throwaway waiting room magazines we get. She generally mocks anything of this ilk, having coined the word "beautyish" for "aspiring to the aesthetic standards of the shallow and ridiculous fashion industry". But she's always been fascinated with drawing faces, though she's not been particularly adept at them and hasn't wanted any help to improve. Now, I can only imagine that by repeatedly creating line drawings from large-format facial photographs that she's discovering things about the lines and shapes and proportions that make up the human face. I'll be really interested to see where this goes.

Teaching vs. Parenting

This morning we held a family meeting under the apple tree, and among other items on the agenda was our regular touching-base with whatever structured learning work the kids are doing. I went from one child to the next. I asked Erin how she felt about how she was doing with this sort of work and she explained that right now she's working on Food and Music Theory. I asked what she meant by Food and she didn't want to explain exactly, but she said that so far she'd finished with Bedtime and Nails. As is the norm when discussing things she takes seriously with this kid, I had to guess at what she was saying, and presumed she meant resetting her bedtime for a more reasonable hour (something I wrote about recently in this blog), and stopping biting her fingernails. Food presumably meant working through some of her picky-eating tendencies, and Music Theory was fairly self-evident, as she recently promised her piano teacher that she would do 20 minutes a day of theory bookwork. Math and Housekeeping, she explained, would be next, once she was done with Food and Theory. I found it interesting that as an 11-year-old unschooler, she still makes no distinction between the structured (i.e. goal-directed, self-motivated) work of quitting her nail-biting habit and the structured (i.e. goal-directed, self-motivated) work of music theory bookwork.

A related issue came up on the Unschooling Message Board I oversee at iVillage. Another mom posted:

"I went to a mom's group and the topic was using books to teach your children to read. Most of the ideas presented were things I just did when playing with my kids. But I never considered it teaching them to read.

"... do you think your children just learned or did you teach them? Also do you think maybe the difference is in the definition of teach? "

I too have told people that I didn't do anything to 'teach' my kids to read, yet when asked for suggestions for reading-readiness activities, I discover that over the years I've done lots of things that other parents would consider part of a 'teaching reading' program.

What I think is going on in my head relates to what I think of as the crux of unschooling. It is absolutely parallel to what occurs in fully unschooled children. They see no distinction between living and learning, between work and play and education. They don't know that figuring out the origin of the word 'gargoyle' is language arts, history and mythology. They don't know that making a picture with a compass and ruler is geometry and art and fine motor skills. It's just life.

Similarly, an adult who is fully in the unschooling mindset and whose child is of the same mindset sees no distinction between living alongside a child and teaching, between work and play and education.

Just as children are hardwired to learn (naturally, unconsciously, simply in the course of life), adults are hardwired to teach (naturally, unconsciously, simply in the course of life). It is only when we make the choice to separate learning from living that the distinction between teaching and parenting becomes relevant. When we don't cleave reality into Learning vs. Living, there's no need to cleave our parental interaction with our kids into Teaching vs. Just Being a Parent. The line seems artificial, fuzzy, and beside the point.

Heaving a sigh...

... of relief. We survived the past week. Tomorrow is a completely free day. We haven't had one of those in weeks. Most days we've had at least two, and sometimes more, outside activities. In the past week: two concerts and all the organizing/packing/traveling that those entailed, one extra rehearsal, violin & piano lessons, soccer practices and games (4x per week total), art class, group class, choir rehearsals, GRUBS, trio rehearsal. In the midst of it all Chuck was gone to Vancouver for 3 1/2 days so it almost all fell to me. We made it to everything, didn't forget anything crucial, and didn't kill each other in the process. Not only that but we managed to spend some nice down-time together one afternoon that really recharged us. I'm getting better at focusing us on the routines and expectations that make coping easier and the kids are getting so much more understanding and willing to pull together.

It wasn't easy, and I did have a near-meltdown one morning as we were supposed to be leaving for a rehearsal & concert and two of the kids, both of whom happen to have massive layers of dirty and clean clothes strewed permanently on their bedroom floors while their mother waits for the 'natural consequences' of such mess and neglect to reveal themselves, complained that they couldn't find any dark-coloured socks to wear with their black pants and shoes. Yes, complained, as if it was my fault. Me who had been up since 5 organizing and packing and making lunches and assembling photo displays. But as I say, no one killed anyone. And more than half the clothes were tidied up the next day.

We are all enjoying our less scheduled week this week. And I mean enjoying. We are appreciating the time we have at home in each other's company and feeling that it's a precious thing to have. We've been reminded how important it is.

Fiona was a delight at both concerts. She had a bit of company from Sophie, who didn't play at all in the first concert, and only played a few numbers in the second. But really Sophie was a companion, not an overseer, and Fiona was a perfect member of the audience both times, with no intervention required. How is it that I am so lucky four times over to have children who can be brought to classical music concerts and behave impeccably at age 2? How wonderfully odd are these children?

Fortunately / Unfortunately

The kids invented a new game this week called "Fortunately/Unfortunately". It's a round-robin story-telling game. The difference is that the contributed lines of the story must begin, in alternating fashion, with "Fortunately...." or "Unfortunately..."

"Unfortunately the car was made of cheese and it melted."
"Fortunately I was really hungry, so I started eating the cheese."
"Unfortunately the cheese was rotten and made me very sick."
"Fortunately I was near the Aw-school hospital."
"Unfortunately when I told them what was wrong they just said 'Aw'."
"Fortunately I was feeling much better by then so I left."
"Unfortunately I fell down dead on the doorstep of Aw-school."
"Fortunately Athena brought me back to life."
"Unfortunately I am so evil that this was a bad thing."

And so on. The kids can play this sort of game for hours. Even Fiona was offering up contributions tonight:

"Fort-n-y Daddy is bad!" [laughing herself silly]

They have many other oral games they like to play. "Ask Anubite" puts Noah in the driver's seat having fun with free-association weirdness and big words. "The Question Game" is their co-operative open-ended version of Twenty Questions. They do regular round-robin storytelling and a looser co-operative form of story-telling. And they love making up wacky lyrics for songs they know (including every song they're singing in their various choirs).

We are getting a new minivan in the next week or two. What I'm looking forward to the most (besides not having to get the brakes re-adjusted or fixed on an emergency basis all the time) is us all being able to converse in the vehicle. The kids will be able to play these games all the way to Nelson and back. The new Sienna will be much quieter (smaller engine, less road noise, better sound insulation) and unless Chuck is along we will all be sitting in the front two rows of seats so we'll be close to each other. The Ford simply doesn't allow for conversation in transit and that has made our trips to Nelson every week much more challenging. We've felt positively spoiled the few times we've taken Chuck's truck to Nelson in that we can actually interact with each other without twisting around and shouting and repeating ourselves.

The new van comes at a good time - our Nelson trips will become more frequent through late May and June as Erin begins rehearsing her Bach Piano Concerto movement with the orchestra.

Rhetoric and gardening

Somehow when I was growing up it became a sort of family sport to expound with great assurance about things you knew rather little about, reporting vague impressions as well-founded facts, expressing momentary hunches as well-considered theories. The idea was to see if you could fool your listeners into believing that you were as much an expert and authority as possible. If challenged, you then went into defensive rhetoric mode, justifying your previous comments ... and if you painted yourself into a corner, you'd then smirk and confess "well, actually, I just made that up," and everyone would laugh. My brother Jeremy and I were particularly good at this game.

Echoes of this skill, I confess with some embarrassment, still show through in my contributions to message boards and e-lists. I usually make an effort not to mis-state facts, but I find I have this inclination to write responses that begin "I have this theory that...." and then make up the theory on the spot.

Just over two years ago I wrote something on a message board where a homeschooling parent was asking for help in nurturing study skills. I jumped in with a "theory" and its derivative advice. I've lost the original post, but I found an e-mail I sent elsewhere a week or so later which referred to the post:

"Someone in a homeschooling context recently asked me for help in nurturing study skills (by which she meant diligence, persistence and problem-solving skills). My advice? Take up Suzuki music lessons and gardening!"

The funny thing is that expounding on theories and giving advice I'd never thought through until that moment often provides me with some pretty interesting food for thought. Sometimes the theories my message-board rhetoric-loving alter-ego floats contain snippets of thought-provoking wisdom, and I think this must have been the case above, because I returned to think about my "advice" plenty in the months to come and it's ultimately had a dramatic influence on my behaviour and focus with the kids.

Here we are 2 years later and organic gardening and its related environmental education is where a huge proportion of my parenting / homeschooling energy is going. We've got a kitchen garden, a vegetable garden, a water garden with separate areas for the kids, new fruit trees, a fairy garden area, a worm bin, and an entire community children's garden and the GRUBS club being created to support that. We've reached the point where I'd describe our homeschooling approach as being centred around musical instrument study and gardening.

The littlest choir member

Mondays are our "Nelson days". Today was a typical one. We leave home at 9 am. From 10:30 to 12 noon we have appointments and/or errands. Then we eat lunch (I pack a lunch at home ... soon we'll be eating in the park; through the winter we eat in the van). Our weekly family meeting occurs at lunch, sometimes at a café if we have enough extra time for coffee or steamed almond milk. Then we grocery shop. After that it's off to piano lessons. Noah has his lesson. Then while Erin's having hers, Fiona and I run Noah and Sophie to choir. Boys' Choir is first. Then Fio' and I run back to pick Erin up. Sophie starts Girls' Choir. I get to choir practice with Erin and Fiona. Erin is in Intermediate Choir which rehearses last. After the last choir rehearsal, we head home, arriving at about 7:09 pm. A long day! Fiona (almost 27 months) is generally a cheerful tagalong. She knows the routine well, and though nothing directly involves her, she has great fun feeling like she's a part of the whole day.

Today when we arrive at the church during Girls' Choir, Fiona asks "My turn choir?"

"Yes, when you're older you can be in choir!"

"My turn choir," she says, nodding.

Girls' Choir finishes. Erin goes up as the Intermediate Choir assembled. They start their warmups.

"My turn choir," says Fiona. "You take me mommy."

"Maybe when you're bigger. That's Erin's choir," I whisper.

Choir rehearsals are held in a nice large church sanctuary. Two or three parents are usually there to listen. The kids are well-behaved and hard-working. The Intermediate Choir numbers about 15 girls from age 11 to 15 and they are way up on the raised area behind the altar, in the choir pews.

Fiona begins toddling up the steps towards the choir. She sidles into the middle pew, the one behind Erin, right at the end, about 3 feet from the last choir member in that row. She's quiet as a mouse. She sits there with a serious look of concentration on her face, watching the director, listening to the choir, with her tiny little feet sticking out straight just barely beyond the edge of the pew.

Allison, the wonderful choir director, makes a little comment to the choir about how quiet Fiona is.

"I have a 3-year-old," she says, "and I wouldn't even want him in the building during a rehearsal. Look how perfectly quiet she is. Amazing!"

But that's just the beginning. The first warm-ups are over. Fiona's still sitting, paying close attention. Allison gets the girls to stand up to sing a first piece. Fiona stands. And stays standing for the 5 or 10 minutes they work on the piece. She's so tiny I can only see the top of her head behind the pew in front of her. Allison can't believe her -- she turns around a grins at me. Then they sit. Fiona turns around, climbs up on the pew (it's a long way up for her!), and sits.

I'm just grinning from ear to ear. Sophie and Noah are laughing quietly. Fiona is so sweet. The choir is working section by section on parts-singing. She's still sitting up there, ever so seriously, doing what she calls "my turn choir". I quietly sneak up the steps to the end of the pew.

"Are you done?" I whisper to Fiona.

"No," she whispers back. I sneak back down.

The choir is smiling, loving this. They stand again to sing. She stands. They sing for a long time. It's a couple of hours past Fiona's usual nap time and I can see she's flagging. She's still standing but she's laying her head on the seat. They sit. I look at her, smiling, and give her a little wave.

She's been up there for about 20 minutes. She decides her turn is over and toddles quietly back down the steps. Sophie walks out to meet her and give her a hug. The choir girls are just in raptures over the whole thing, so the whole choir and the director are waiting for her to take her seat in the audience before going on with their rehearsal. At the last second, Fiona trips, the combined effect of new sandals and the sloping of the church aisle, and hits her head on the first pew. There's a small gasp from the choir. Fiona holds in the wail until I get her out of the sanctuary -- well, almost, anyway.

A few minutes later she's happy again, with a small egg in the centre of her forehead. "I do my turn choir," she tells me, with a big grin on her face.

After rehearsal is over, Allison tells me how amazing Fiona is. I laugh and jokingly say "Yeah, but by the time she's actually old enough to be in the choir, she'll probably be a hellion."

"Ah, maybe," says Allison, "but at least we had today."

Indeed.

Reading aloud

Maintaining the kids' interest in being read aloud to as they grow older is something I've been working away at. I'm of a mind to think that the key is to treat reading aloud as something families do, rather than something parents do for children who can't yet read (at least at that level) on their own. In other words, I think that if you create a culture of reading aloud in your family, one where adults read to adults and kids read to adults (for mutual pleasure, NOT for evaluative purposes) and adults read to kids, then children will be less likely to abandon the ritual as they grow in maturity and age. They won't see it as something that "little kids get from their parents when they can't read to themselves yet", but something that "human beings often enjoy doing together".

So I try to include Chuck in our readalouds with from time to time. Often that's tough, as our 'down-time' and bedtime schedules rarely coincide with his. But I'll sometimes save an interesting magazine article to read at supper time. Or we'll share a favourite audiobook with him (perhaps not necessarily at the same time, but we at least share a common exposure that way). And when we're on vacation we always all listen to the readalouds. Chuck and I used to, before kids, read aloud to each other on long car trips, and we share this with the kids.

Two message boards I'm a part of recently had polls asking how often parents read aloud to their kids at bedtime. On one general parenting board 53% said "never". On another over 90% claimed to read aloud to their kids "with some regularity" and this was a poll concerning kids who were already reading independently. The latter was an education-focused board for parents of gifted children. Stark contrast, hmmm? I wonder which direction the causality runs?

I think that reading aloud to independent readers is very important. It allows you to share a common body of knowledge and vicarious experience with your children, to pass along your own love of certain books and favourite authors, to spend time being with your children, to expose them to themes and subject matter that they might not choose to read on their own, and to 'read a little over their heads', expanding their comprehension and vocabulary far more than will happen just through independent reading. Two of my kids were reading independently at 4, and I just never would have entertained the thought of giving up reading aloud at that age... thankfully that early start got us all over the hump of believing that reading aloud is just a helpful thing parents do before their kids can read independently.

I know that families with children in school have a tougher job finding time for reading aloud, and I can't presume to truly understand the challenges of scheduling and time constraints facing families with kids in school. I can't help but wonder though whether, while it's presumably more challenging to find the time, it's perhaps even more important that they do, because relative to families that don't do school they have so little shared experience and so little shared time. Reading independently, though important, does not fill that void.

At the risk of appearing dishwasher-obsessed, I will mention that hand-washing dishes as a family creates a wonderful opportunity for shared reading aloud. One person can be appointed the reader-aloud, while the others wash/rinse/dry/put away the dishes.

Jim Trelease's "Read-Aloud Handbook" contains some very compelling arguments and statistics about the importance of reading aloud as a family. The read-aloud bibliography is also great. Highly recommended.

Another full day

Life is very full lately. There's soccer, three times a week for Erin and Noah, once a week for Sophie. There are Suzuki violin lessons and an upcoming regional concert, with extra preparation for that. There's community orchestra, and an upcoming concert, and extra repertoire to prepare for that. There's GRUBS, just about ready to kick into high gear. There's our monthly visits to the nursing home to play music, and the preparation time involved in that. There are piano lessons. And choir practices for each of the three kids. And we're attempting to trade in our minivan and buy a new one ... extra trips to Nelson for appraisals and the like. And trips to Trail for the music festival. And Chuck out of town for six days over the next couple of weeks. And a garden to put in. And a summer music camp to plan. And a chamber music concert for me to rehearse for, and (hopefully!) practice for. Not to mention a lot of book-keeping and tax preparation to catch up on.

I need to cut myself some slack. And the kids too. Tonight they're playing extremely boisterously in the living room, rather than practising, as they really ought to be. We were up early and on the road by 7:30 a.m. for the 2-hour trip to Trail for the music festival. We've always given it a miss in the past because when we've observed we've found the atmosphere quite sterile and with competitive overtones. But our piano teacher really wants Erin to participate fully next year, so I thought we'd test the waters this year. I registered Erin & Noah as a piano/viola duet, and Noah & Sophie as a piano/violin duet, performing pieces they've been playing competently for months now (Dvorak's Humoresque and Bach's Minuet 1). They put a little extra polishing effort into them, and off we went. Erin & Noah were in the "under 12" class, and Sophie & Noah were "under 9's". They were the only duos entered in each of these two classes.

We arrived in time to hear some advanced teen violinists in the Unaccompanied Bach class. The playing was mostly quite impressive, and the adjudicator was encouraging and insightful in his comments. Erin and Noah were keen to listen to the whole class and the feedback. Then my kids played. They did really well. Noah filled the church with his big viola sound. Erin had no piano stumbles. Sophie carried herself very well, and Noah, who had a tiny memory lapse on piano covered it so well that I don't suppose anyone noticed. What was most impressive was how well they listened to each other.

The adjudicator was very positive and encouraging. He had some useful comments about playing chamber music as opposed to solos. He loved Noah's viola. He awarded my kids "Certificates of Merit" and a bit of scholarship money and invited Noah and Sophie to play on the Honours Concert, an invitation we declined because of the additional travel involved.

Overall it was a very positive experience. The observation of advanced students was an excellent opportunity, the kids played well and felt good about what they'd done, the adjudicator was kind, encouraging and helpful, and there was some tangible affirmation of the kids' abilities. I think they'll feel fine about participating more fully in the festival next year.

Then we headed for home. We stopped at home to change out of recital clothes, grab something to eat and then head out for soccer practice. Then home to catch up on the dishes and cook a quick supper and ... well, they're giggling and running around in the living room now and there I'm going to leave them. They have a game out of town tomorrow morning, a couple of activities on Sunday, and then an extremely full day in Nelson on Monday.

The kids need their down time. They're so much happier, and so much more productive, when they get it. I was proud of them today, not only up on stage, but listening in the audience, and on the soccer pitch.

I'll start working in half an hour or so at winding them down and then it's a night to choose a new novel to start as a readaloud. Avi's "The Barn", which we finished in four nights, was brilliant but very sad for me as it reminded me of providing palliative care for my dad. I'm sure the kids felt the same thing. There was no animated chattering or questioning at chapter's ends like usual.

A Dishwashing Convert

I've won one convert in the dishwashing-by-hand campaign. Sophie is my tireless helper. She really enjoys the quiet time with me, the suds, the warm water, the gentle clinking of dishes, the conversation. We're going on four days without using the dishwasher, with just the two of us working with occasional help from Noah, whose appreciation of the process seems to be growing as well.

Child-led bedtimes

I guess way back when Erin was born I missed reading that book about getting your baby on a schedule. When Erin was an infant she had her own ideas about when to sleep and when to wake up and I never thought to try and change her mind -- I just adapted. She was never much of a sleeper. She catnapped on my shoulder, she wanted nothing to do with a crib. At 18 months she gave up naps. By age 2 she was sleeping less than 10 hours out of 24. Throughout most of the past 11 years she's gone to sleep for the night after 11 and woken up no earlier than 8. For the past three or four years her sleep hours have generally been between 1 a.m. and 10 or 10:30 in the morning. I've occasionally joked that she homeschools because she refuses to do mornings. She always manages to be up in time if our schedule demands it, but her general preference is to sleep well past 9.

So imagine my surprise a couple of weeks ago when I realized she was actually in her pyjamas ready to go to bed before Sophie and Noah were ready for their bedtime story. It was only 10:30 pm! I commented about the early hour, and she said "Haven't you noticed? I've been going to bed half an hour earlier each night for the past week."

Three days later she was heading for bed at 9 pm. I was flabbergasted. I asked her whether she was going to bed at 8:30 the next night. "No," she said. "Now I'm going to work on falling to sleep within 3 hours of going to bed."

And so she did. Now when I get up at 7, she's sitting at the dining room table reading magazines and drinking tea. Why?

"I like getting up early."

She's been incredibly disciplined about it. She rushes to her practising directly after supper so that she'll be done in time to head to bed by 9. She comes in the door from orchestra rehearsal and heads straight to bed. She leaves in the middle of a video if it's 9 o'clock. She bought herself an alarm clock this week, because she's discovered that if she sleeps past 7 am she has trouble falling asleep by 9 pm.

It's truly amazing what children will choose to do when we trust them to make good decisions for themselves.

Goodbye Stikine

I was throwing pizza dough and decided to take a tour around the property while I was doing so. I walked out behind the garden and spotted Stikine, the 13-year-old deaf, arthritic family dog lying in an unusual place under the trees. Suddenly I thought "he's dead." I don't know how I knew. I walked over and sure enough, he was lying peacefully at the edge of the forest, having laid down to draw his last few breaths there in the shadow of a 100-foot white pine. I don't know how long he'd been dead, but not long.

I called the kids. They had watched their grandfather die at home 18 months ago; they're comfortable with death. We had been talking about Stikine getting old, and the fact that he probably wouldn't be around for too much longer. They were sad, they came to see him, and pat him one last time. We buried him a dozen feet from where he died.

We'd already been looking for a new young dog, but our search will intensify now. A dog gives me a lot of peace of mind when the kids are outdoors without me; I know cougars generally avoid human beings, but there are rare exceptions. And I appreciate the effect of a barking dog in keeping bears at bay ... away from compost and the fruit trees and the garden and the garbage.

But we sure miss Stikine. He'd been a part of the fabric of our lives for so many years.

Pestles and my trivia magnet

A month ago Chuck bought a marble mortar and pestle. It had sat on an obscure ledge in the kitchen since then and I've used it several times. Apparently none of the kids had noticed it until tonight when I had it out to grind some dried rosemary to add to pizza dough. Erin asked "when did we get this? It's neat." I told her it had been there for a month. Sophie asked what it was for. I said "It's for grinding or mashing herbs and spices. It's called a mortar and pestle, though I'm actually not sure which is which."

Erin gave me a "duh!" look and said "The pestle is the club-shaped thing."

We've never owned one. As far as I knew she'd never seen one. We've never discussed them. She has no obsessive interest in culinary arts. How did she know this, and with such assurance? I don't know, and neither does she. She really had no idea where she'd encountered this little snippet of knowledge.

She stuns me like this at least a couple of times a day. She's a trivia magnet.

Family Meetings and Computer Use

We've been having family meetings for about a year now. Not always every week, but usually. We have a "standing agenda" of items we always touch on, and anyone is free to add items to the agenda at any point. The Standing Agenda includes

1. Health issues: nutrition, meal planning, exercise and sleep
2. Balance of at-home down-time vs. outside activities
3. Housekeeping division of labour
4. Practising

What I want is for the kids to see that monitoring these items is worth doing so that we can intercept difficulties before they really settle in, and to recognize when things are working well and learn from them. There's a magic to our family meetings. The kids love them -- they're generally lured to them with steamed almond milk or something similar, but there's more to it than that, because they linger long after the drinks are done, suggesting new things to talk about. Family Meetings have proved quite magical in problem-solving. They occur after the heat of the moment has passed, so we're calmer, more rational and more gracious in dealing iwth each other. When we brainstorm a solution, our practice is to agree to try it for a week. That gives us a chance to work past the inevitable bumps at the outset, while allowing that this may not be the ultimate correct solution to the problem.
For the past month or so we've had "Computer Use" on the agenda. We had recognized in our discussion of health issues that we were not balancing active and inactive play and that the computer was the main culprit. Poor weather was certainly playing a role too, as was my poor modeling, and the addition of high-speed internet and some swanky new software to the roster. The computer seemed to be forming an increasingly seductive presence in our family life. I was feeling very close to imposing some sort of coercive top-down parental regime. But I decided to put it on the agenda of our Family Meetings and try that first.

We toyed with a number of possible solutions. I had little hope, because we'd discussed these sorts of issues before with little improvement. We tried "no computer until after supper" and "no computer until after supper unless you've done your music practising sooner" and "2 hours of computer a day." These were all met with intense resentment when it came time for me to enforce the co-operatively agreed-upon rules.

Then, just over three weeks ago, Noah, who usually has the most ambitious schemes (and the least ability to follow through) suggested creating a contingency between music practising one day and computer privileges the next day. Much to my amazement, it's worked and we've renewed the rule on a weekly basis with everyone's blessing. I don't need to nag or step in to enforce anything. Procrastination is always an option, but sooner or later fatigue provides a natural deadline as the kids slink off to bed. They wake up knowing they've chosen a computer-free day. We've discussed it as a matter of balance, not punishment -- if your life has been overbalanced towards sedentary & recreational pursuits, it makes sense to compensate the next day by leaning towards active play and responsibilities.

There's a built-in payback system, though ... if you've missed a day of practising and wake up to a computer-free day, you can do yesterday's practising, and then today's too, and then go outside for some physical activity, and you can then have computer time.

So far every time a child has missed a day of practising, they've chosen payback over a totally computer-free day. But the principle of compensatory balance is being honoured, the computer is being used somewhat less, the practising is getting done without nagging, and the kids are seeing computer use as an ongoing "healthy mind issue." This is progress.

Beaver day

We had a nice homeschool field trip today. We got together at the home of a family that lives near a beaver habitat. We watched a National Geographic video "Rocky Mountain Beaver" or some such title, then had a potluck lunch and headed out to see the work the local beavers had been up to recently.

Things were very mucky, snowy and wet, but we walked along the trail beside beaver dams and marshes and saw tons and tons of beaver handiwork. We were at a small lake where it drains into one of the main creeks that feed our large (Slocan) lake, leading us to wonder if the beaver-gnawed sticks we'd discovered at the GRUBS beach were from that very spot.

Alas no live beavers were seen, but that was no surprise as they're mostly nocturnal. Interestingly, the video suggested that they hadn't been nocturnal until the advent of extensive human hunting. Sophie got lots of snow in her rubber boots and turned back early. She discovered some dry socks in her pocket at just the right (miserable) moment so all was well. Erin and Noah got mucky and wet and rosy-cheeked. I carried Fiona most of the way, and she cuddled inside my jacket like a little marmoset. Those visceral experiences with spring are so memorable.

We also collected some pussywillows, got to meet some Curly Horses, saw a large bat-house that in the summer houses at least 350 bats, and visited with all the chickens and ducks at the farm. Spring feels like it's really taking hold.

Dishwashing

Last week we ran out of dishwashing detergent. Almost. Again. Clearly I have a subconcious desire to run out of dishwashing detergent. When we moved into our house 11 years ago it had a dishwasher. When that one died, we replaced it, lest we have a hole in our cabinetry.

The thing is that lately I've realized that dishwashing is a great opportunity for family communication. There's something about working beside each other at a relatively mindless, routine task, that opens the communication floodgates. Between Chuck and myself as well as between we parents and the child-of-the-day.

I love the empty counters and the satisfaction of actually finishing a job while enjoying time with one of my family members. I love the quiet routine of warm water and clinking plates at the end of a day. Knowing we're on the verge of renovating our kitchen, I decided to see if I could make a case (to myself and my family) for not having a dishwasher. I put off buying the detergent for many days.

I failed to make my case. We enjoyed clean counters not filled with "leftover dishes" destined for the next load, the clutter that attracts other clutter. We enjoyed working together. We enjoyed chatting as we worked. I enjoyed the help the kids gave. They felt useful. But for whatever reason, doing without a dishwasher is just to radical for the rest of my family.

Ten months ago when our breadmaker died I started madly baking the traditional way and managed to convince everyone this was better than a new breadmaker. Alas I haven't managed to convince them when it comes to the dishwasher.

Screen-Free Day

For the first time in a long while we decided to have a 'Screen-Free Day' yesterday. No e-mail, no Sims, no web games, no quick Google searches, no word processor for writing stories, no DVDs or TV. Here's what happened instead:

• lots of K'nex play
• imaginative play with Playmobil
• Noah and Sophie learned to make knotted hemp bracelets; Sophie made one as a gift and wrapped it, Noah made a nice one for himself
• Fiona made herself a beaded pipe cleaner bracelet
• I made a couple of simple beaded necklaces for Erin and Fiona
• I made a small hardcover book using marbled paper Noah had made
• Erin learned to make a new recipe for dinner
• practising got done easily
• Erin and Sophie made peanut butter brownies
• I got my sewing table tidied so that all the papercraft stuff that had been living on top of it got put away and I can now get to a couple of sewing projects
• the house stayed tidy
• we hand-washed dishes because we're out of detergent
• lots of reading
• we painted the pole we'll use for measuring lake levels
• we had a family meeting
• I planted some seedlings
• the kids tended to the chickens
• Sophie did the last two big review exercises in her 2A math book, thus finishing it up
• Noah did a big math exercise
• Erin did two-thirds of her week's music theory assignment
• we sat at the table together and drank herbal tea
• there was some outside play even though the weather was terrible
• the kids got along conflict-free for the whole day

Everyone agreed that it was a wonderful day. It was a reminder of the sorts of things the computer insidiously pushes out of our lives. We have agreed to continue with weekly Screen-Free Days for a time, to keep ourselves in touch with those things.

Bald Eagle, GRUBS and "When You're Smiling"

The GRUBS momentum continues to build. We're into weekly meetings now, and the sod is coming off thanks to a benevolent local guy with a Bobcat. The club is going really well. I love the families who are coming. The energy is positive. The biggest surprise to me continues to be how enthusiastic my own kids are. They generally balk at anything I initiate, or anything that they sense I believe to be particularly important. I expected them to warm up to GRUBS very gradually and begrudgingly. But it's not like that at all! They are loving it, brimming over with enthusiasm. "Being together mostly outdoors with other kids doing real work on something worthy and largely child-directed" seems to be a formula they can't resist.

Yesterday we had a great sunshiny meeting at the garden site. Got lots done. Then we went to visit a bald eagle that had been found on the beach unwilling to fly but looking perfectly healthy. It was given over to the care of a local guy named Jim who had cared for a starving Barred Owl last winter. He's been feeding it salmon and venison and trying to figure out what's up with it. My husband was asked to bring his ophthalmoscope over and have a look at its eyes. Jim had figured it was blind in one eye and is therefore unable to fly and hunt. Chuck took a look and his guess was that it has a complete retinal detachment, although our subsequent research revealed that eagles have something peculiar called a pectin which helps supply blood to its packed retina, so that may have been what he was seeing that looked like a detachment. He was able to get in very close (within a couple of inches) of the right eye with his tool and have a look. There was no way to get anywhere near the left (good) eye ... lots of hissing and flapping!

There were about 12 kids there, so we didn't all go up and touch the bird but we were able to stand really close, within three or four feet. What an amazing bird. And what a wonderful opportunity for the kids.

The bird is being fed lots to get its strength up. Assuming its vision doesn't miraculously return it'll be flying (commercially!) out to the Delta BC to live out its life at the O.W.L. raptor rescue centre.

Later that day the kids went with their musical-unschooling compatriots to the nursing home to do their monthly Tea-time Musical Entertainment. They enjoyed themselves and the residents enjoyed the music and the kid-energy. The arrangement of "When You're Smiling" that I had worked out for Noah and me to play on the piano together was a real hit and he was pleased.

The kids have been outside so much the past couple of days. The cycle of daily computer use seems to have been broken, at least temporarily. Ahhhhh!!!!

Welcome to Planet Egypt

It's official -- my kids are weird. It started about 5 years ago with "Bad Hailey", and imaginary annoying child who the kids would tell stories about to each other. They would build Bad Hailey effigies and do nasty things and enact punishments. Eventually Bad Hailey accumulated a few imaginary acquaintances, some "Nothing Pets" and several evil compatriots. Then a couple of years ago, Ookie Bungo joined the fray. Erin invented her and briefly fooled Noah into believing that she was an ugly and disruptive member of her art class.

In the last 6 or 8 months, though, this imaginary stuff has really taken off. They are constantly enacting imaginary play, writing stories, making up jokes, composing poems and songs. The kids realize adults think this is funny and strange so they've begun delightedly sharing bits of their complex inter-connected "Stories" with the public.

They live on Planet Egypt, all these folk. Some are fashioned after real people (friends and family) but with strange twists. Paul and RoseAnne (two teenaged friends in real life) have a baby called Pepper Oni who was stolen by Mr. and Mrs. Scrappy. Characters from favourite books are modified and adapted for Planet Egypt citizenship. There are the Euwy people who make up the Euwy Choir and sing awful songs, including Cheesus's favourite "It's the Song About Me." Fat and Skinny sit in the back beside the Deerwolf family (including DiaryWolf, DiarrheaWolf, DireWolf and DairyWolf). There are complex lineages, sometimes incorporating ancient Egyptian or Greek mythological deities or heros. Set and Isis are the parents of a few characters. Cheesus is the child of Amanra and Anubite. Anubite, the male member of the dyad, gave birth to him, because when men have babies on Planet Egypt (and they can!) they have swiss cheese. Anubite's favourite restaurant is "Brown Teeth of the Ukraine" so-named because of an unfortunate accident with leather, bright lights and mud. Grotchy & Grotcha, and their children Babotchy and Babothcha, are the frequent subject of cartooning. They perform most of their complex tasks with their nostrils.

There's a lot of free-association and just plain bizarre stuff involved in the stories but each of my kids is totally clear on every last detail. They've begun to codify it in a notebook at my suggestion. They have just over 150 names written down, though they haven't yet recorded the details of more than a handful of the characters.

They spend at least an hour a day, and sometimes several, expanding and embellishing their stories, songs, drawings etc.. It must be important stuff for them to be doing so much of it. Still seems weird.

GRUBS

We're getting our local gardening/environmental club off the ground here. So far it's a dozen kids and their parents, mostly from homeschooling families. Age-range is 6 to 12 with a couple of younger siblings hanging on the fringes. GRUBS stands for "Garden Rangers United in Bio-Sustainability". It's mostly just a play on SLUGS, which is the adult-oriented volunteer group which maintains the nearby community reflection garden. Their acronym comes from "Slocan Lake Garden Society".

I had minimal expectations for my own kids' enthusiasm. They tend to be rather low-key and resistant to anything that's organized by me; they may go along with it -- they may even enjoy it -- but they will keep up a veneer of annoyance or begrudgingness.

So I was pleasantly surprised to have them develop some real enthusiasm over the community garden site and the planning input they've been asked for. Our meeting last weekend started out with a bookbinding session, making simple nature journals. This was probably an ill-conceived task for a group where a lot of the kids were under 10 and needed a lot of direction. We managed okay, but it was a little chaotic and protracted. The results were fine though and the kids all ended up with a journal.

After we finished that, we headed out to the future garden site. Although it's technically still the dead of winter here it's been uncharacteristically warm for the last month and the site on the lakefront was clear of snow. Not only that but the sun came out and warmed everything. It was tantalizingly spring-like, the perfect weather for a first look-see at the site that belongs to the GRUBS as soon as we break sod.

The kids wandered around with pencils and maps of the site, collaborating spontaneously in small groups on design and organizational ideas. They chatted and paced out dimensions, they investigated the woods and the lakefront. They found a stick with wonderful clear marks of beaver activity and Noah deciphered the "nature story" ... the stick had been this way up, the beaver had gnawed here first until the sapling had fallen and cracked here, then the beaver had removed the side branches and taken the stick to his den area where he'd eaten the tender bark off. Figuring out "nature stories" is a tradition when we go for a walk as a family: any time someone sees evidence of animal activity we try to decipher who was there, doing what, in what order and why. The beaver stick was a great serendipitous GRUBS discovery.

Anyway my kids worked studiously away in their nature journals when we got home from the GRUBS meeting. Noah wrote down the names of some dye plants he wants to use. Erin recounted the details of the meeting. Sophie wrote down a description of the weather. Erin refined and edited and re-copied the blueprint of her collaborative garden plans.

I have very high hopes for this club. I had really expected to have to win my kids over gradually though. It was nice to see the excitement there already. Our next meeting is in 2 weeks.