Four different nudges

My four different children require four different types of nudges. They gravitate to many things on their own, but sometimes they get distracted, or are unaware of an interesting possibility, or suffer from traits that lead them to resist new things -- social anxieties, difficulties with transitions, perfectionism or whatever. So sometimes it's helpful, and worthwhile to them, for their parents to give them nudges. A sort of "thought this might interest you -- want to give it a try?" nudge. But each of my kids requires a different flavour of nudge.

For Erin, nudges have to be oblique and offhand. If she gets the slightest hint that something might be my idea, she'll lose interest. So if I think "A" might interest her, I might say "I was looking through such-and-such today, and really wanted to check out B, so I started looking through all the different entries, you know, the ones where they list A and C and D, and then finally I found B. " And sometimes that little passing mention of A will stick in her mind and she'll quietly investigate it later, and it'll grab her. And I have to pretend not to notice or care that she's hooked. I'm getting good at looking like I haven't noticed, so much so that it's not really pretending any more. She's interested in what she's interested in, and I don't have to watch her every move or worry or obsess or over-analyze whether stuff has "taken" or not.

Noah's nudges are very different. They're clearly parent-led and almost controlling and progress through three phases. Phase 1 is the "testing the waters" phase. I'll say something like "I think A would be pretty interesting to try sometime. What do you think?" When something is presented with no imminence and no expectations, I'll usually get a good sense of whether he thinks it would be interesting or not. If he's not interested, that's fine, but if he's interested I'll start quietly setting some stuff up, getting resources organized, setting aside time. Once things are ready, I'll say "Hey, I've got some of that stuff for A. We should get that happening." This is Phase 2, the fair-warning phase. A couple of hours is all that's necessary to prevent him from feeling blindsided, and up to a week or so is okay, but really the sooner the better, before he starts stressing over it. Then we move into Phase 3, the big nudge.

The Big Nudge for Noah goes like this: "Noah, I've got stuff for A all ready. I need you to come with me in 15 minutes, because it's time to give it a whirl." This sounds awfully parent-led for an unschooling family, but the alternative is days, weeks, months of him balking over things he actually really wants to do. With the Big Nudge he may moan a bit and roll his eyes for a minute, but he's generally smirking in a self-conscious way while he's moaning, and despite this posturing, he almost always agrees to get to work on whatever A is without any real resistance. (If there is real resistance, we won't pursue it, but that rarely happens.) Usually within 5 or 10 minutes of starting in on whatever-it-is, he is happy as a clam. Discovering Noah's periodic need for a Big Nudge has made both of us happier.

Sophie's nudges are easy. She is less spirited and intense than her older siblings, so I can be both honest and low-key with her. "Hey, I think A would really interest you. Let's give it a try sometime. Want to set some time aside tomorrow after lunch?" She may say no, or "not yet," but most often she shrugs and agrees and all is well.

And Fiona, well, with Fiona the nudges generally go the other direction. She nudges me. "Mommy, I want to do A. Why are you always forgetting I want to do A? Let's do A right after supper."

Le déjeuner français

Yes, there was wine to be tasted, not to mention cointreau. Many tears were shed, thanks to the copious onion-slicing. Overall, French cuisine was pronounced by the children "okay, but not as yummy as Thai." Here are the two recipes our family contributed. Several of us (those who like onions, not surprisingly) absolutely loved the soup.

Soupe a l'Oignon

3 large sweet onions
1 1/2 Tbsp. butter
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup dry white wine
1 1/3 cup vegetable stock
2/3 cup apple cider
2 cups of water
bouquet garni (parsley, thyme & bay)
freshly ground black pepper, to taste
rounds of fresh French bread (declared "mega-croutons" by the kids)
1/2 cup of Swiss or Gruyere cheese

Cut onions in half, then slice thinly. Melt butter in skillet until sizzling. Add onions and salt in alternating layers. Leave on medium heat to "sweat" the onions for fifteen minutes. Then stir and cook, stirring occasionally, a further 45 minutes or so. Onions should be a medium brown. Add wine, turn up heat and cook down to a syrupy consistency. Add stock, cider, water and herbs, simmer 15-20 minutes. Add pepper and additional salt to taste.

Toast one side of French bread under broiler. Serve soup into oven-proof bowls, leaving at least 1" of head space. Place bread toasted side down in bowls, top with grated cheese. Broil briefly to melt cheese to bubbly consistency.

Serve with the rest of the bottle of white wine, of course.

Crêpes Suzette

(One of my friends growing up lived part-time in France. Her French mother used to make crêpes on Saturday mornings, and when I arrived for a visit there would always be a great stack sitting on the kitchen counter under a damp towel, waiting to be put into the fridge for consumption throughout the week. My friend and I often used cooled crêpes as kitchen frisbees. Serious fun.)

For crêpes:
2 Tbsp. sugar
2 Tbsp. grated lemon rind
1-1/2 cups flour
1 tsp. salt
6 eggs, well beaten
2 cups of milk
3 Tbsp. melted butter

Mix all ingredients together until smooth. Pre-heat griddle to hot but not smoking, dotting with a little extra butter. Pour 3-4 Tbsp. of batter into pan, tilting to create a very thin layer. When crêpe has solidified through (60 seconds?) turn and cook briefly on the other side. A slight golden brown in patches, at most, is all you need. Remove from pan and place on warmed plate. Can be refrigerated in stacks for a couple of days.

For sauce:
1/2 cup butter
1/3 cup sugar
Juice of 5 oranges
Juice of 1 lemon
Grated rind of 1 orange
Grated rind of 1 lemon
1/3 cup Cointreau
A little extra Cointreau for flambéing

Melt butter, add sugar, then juices, 1/3 cup Cointreau and zest. Bring to a boil and simmer a few minutes. Add folded-in-half crêpes to pan two at a time and tilt or flip as necessary to soak in sauce. Fold into quarters, remove from pan and place on a warmed plate. Repeat with pairs of crêpes until all have been soaked. Place remaining sauce, warm, in a heatproof ladle, add an ounce of additional Cointreau and ignite with a match. Pour extra sauce over the stacked, quartered plate of crêpes at the table.

Those of you who are bloggers yourselves might appreciate (or not!) a nudge towards NaBloPoMo. I think I'm going to try to meet the challenge, though it'll be tough without a camera!

Academic precocity

Back in June I wrote about Fiona's desire to start a formal math program. Shortly after that post I caved in and ordered her a new copy of Miquon Math. I'd used Miquon with my older kids, to a greater or lesser extent, and figured its playful, casual, "guided discovery" approach based on manipulatives would be a good fit for Fiona. Sophie had started Miquon at about the same age, and though she'd moved much more slowly through it than her older siblings had when they'd started at age 5.75 or 6, she'd enjoyed it and ended up with strong math skills.

So I didn't fret too much over Fiona's equally early start. The summer was upon us and we were all too busy with musical things to put much energy into math. So at first I thought she'd just putter through the first (Orange) book over the course of a year or so. But about a month ago, Fiona ramped up her math interest and fairly rollicked through the entire Orange Book. She's now well into the Red (second) Book and I'm beginning to wonder if she'll ever slow down. In the past couple of weeks she's made some big leaps in her understanding of place value and new concepts are falling into place quickly. Miquon is supposed to be a "conceptually advanced 1st through 3rd grade program" in that it introduces all four operations in the first year and progresses to things like algebraic-style problems, Pascal's triangle and cartesian co-ordinates over the next couple of years. Common wisdom cautions parents about starting their kids prior to the age of six, and suggests that they expect to move very slowly with five-year-olds. I've never been one to follow common wisdom, but I do try to take it into account as I find the right path for me and my children.

I thought I was past these worries, having dealt with various flavours of academic precocity
with my other kids over the years. Yet once again I find myself worrying about burnout and fundamental gaps and frustration. Should she really be moving into this material at her age? Isn't it too much too soon?

Trust, I remind myself. Trust the child. She wouldn't be eagerly devouring if it wasn't doing positive things for her. She knows what's right.

Colour my Vivaldi

I've been a fan of Cuisenaire rods from way back. Their simple use of colour and length to convey numerical value has led my children to many mathematical discoveries. I think the colour attribute cannot be underestimated -- it enhances the identity and meaning of the rods. A brown is four reds. A dark green is two light greens. The colour is integral to how the rods are remembered, understood and communicated about.

Sophie is psyched to polish up the Vivaldi g minor violin concerto. It's a huge work for an 8-year-old to self-teach. (I confess that she has been doing the majority of her practicing without my help for almost a year now. She's way too young for this, according to the Suzuki party line, and I know she'd be progressing faster if I could be there with her every day, but she does pretty well, and enjoys her practicing more, this way. And I like to think that she's learning some problem-solving skills and diligence that she wouldn't otherwise.)

Anyway, in her lessons she's still doing polishing work on the preceding pieces, and technical work on bow-arm and tone issues. But she's been given permission to work ahead now (truth be told she's been working ahead for quite a while now, but until this week without the official sanction of her teacher) and since she's very much enjoying working at this alone, I thought I'd do my best to help her out without interfering with her sense of independence. I tried a technique that I've used before with older, newly-independent-practicing violin students and it seems to help them deal with big challenges efficiently in manageable chunks.

I photocopied the whole piece (hurray for my photocopier!) and then used scissors to chop it up into logical sections of a few lines. I glued each section onto the centre of a different coloured sheet of construction paper. Above and below and all over the sheet, with arrows pointing to the relevant notes and phrases, I wrote practice suggestions, tips and ideas. I added as much humour as possible so that my ideas wouldn't come across as an attempt to micro-manage and prescribe. Comments like "Oy, yet another 4th finger vibrato note!" or "don't let yourself be won over to the dark side!" and "first, practice 400,000 times with stopped slurs".

Then I hole-punched the construction paper sheets and tied them together in a booklet. The booklet lies flat on the stand, but you can only see one section at once. That's the whole idea. Now the vast first movement is in eight coloured sections, each with its own personality and set of challenges. I can't say for sure whether this will work well for Sophie, though it's been very successful with other students I've tried it on, and I love doing it for myself! Sophie likes the idea, so I think it will likely be helpful.

Lunch in Thailand

We have been getting two (large) unschooling families together about every week to cook ethnic cuisine, focusing on a particular country, region or culture. Last time we explored southeast Asia, with a particular emphasis on Thai spices. We had fun sniffing and tasting our way through curry paste, fish sauce, tamarind paste and the like. With vegetarians in the mix, we avoided the meat and seafood (except for a "contains fish sauce" option on the sauce) but we had a lot of fun and a good meal to boot. Here are three popular menu items from last week:

Spicy Thai Peanut Sauce

1 1/2 cups peanut buetter
3/4 cup coconut milk
2 Tbsp. fresh lime juice
3 cloves garlic
1 Tbsp. soy sauce
1 tsp. sesame oil
1/3 cup brown sugar
2 Tbsp. fish sauce
1/2 tsp. tamarind paste
1 tsp red chili sauce (more or less to taste)

Combine in blender. Whizz until smooth. Serve as a dipping sauce for salad rolls.

Salad Rolls

2 cups rice or bean vermicelli, cooked & cooled
2 cups of mixed julienned veggies (carrots, sweet peppers, cucumber, scallions, eg.)
2 cups of mung bean sprouts
1 cup cooked cooled salad shrimp (optional)
two dozen rice paper wrappers

Fill a large plate with water. Carefully immerse one rice paper circle in the water. Wait 45-60 seconds until the paper has softened to the pliable but not soggy stage. Carefully remove from water and place on clean work surface near fillings. Load your rice paper with your preferred fillings, in a vertical rectangle area in the middle. Fold up the bottom, then roll up from side to side. Serve with sweet chili sauce or spicy Thai peanut sauce.


Coconut Rice Pudding

4 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
2 14-oz. cans of coconut milk
2 cups jasmine (fragrant) rice
1 cup milk
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. nutmeg

Preheat oven to 300 F. Butter a casserole dish. Beat eggs & sugar well. Add other ingredients
and mix well. Place in casserole dish. Rest the casserole dish in a larger pan filled with 1" of water and place the whole apparatus in the oven. Bake 20 minutes. Stir. Bake a further 45 minutes.

Fun and learning

Someone on one of the TP message boards was claiming that playing learning games like Bingo and making other attempts to "make learning fun" eventually leads to educational underachievement and failure, and the loss of any work ethic. The claim was that "fun" and "learning" are two different things, that learning is grunt work that you do first, and fun is what can result afterwards when you've finished with the learning.

I disagree strongly with this dichotomy. My kids have learned tons while engaged in pursuits that are fun. The hard work of learning can be instrinsically enjoyable, particularly when it is being done in a context that is meaningful to the child and led by the child's desires and interests. In the past three weeks Noah has learned to build websites from scratch using HTML and javascript code. He learned by doing, and he had a blast. Learning is not necessarily a bitter pill that has to be swallowed in order to get to the fun stuff later.

I think an important issue was being raised, though. In a nutshell when we assume that learning is a bitter pill, and thus we always sugar-coat with games and gimmicks it to make it palatable, we risk doing three things. First we risk distracting our kids from the fact that they're learning. I think it's important for kids to be aware of the learning they're doing, because it helps them see the deeper value in what they're doing and to get a sense of accomplishment from it. Second, we are implicitly sending the message that "no one in their right mind would want to do this work without the sugar-coating on it." Or that "learning is inherently distasteful, and needs to be dressed up as something else." It's not, as I pointed out in my paragraph above, though many people grow up thinking that it is thanks to their experiences in school and elsewhere. Thirdly, we can create the educational equivalent of sugar junkies, kids who become dependent on the entertainment value of the fun and games and simply can't maintain their focus or attention without the gimmicks.

I believe that good education uses games and gimmicks judiciously so as to avoid the three risks I outlined. Using them sometimes, when they're an extra tool needed to help a learner over a hump, is just fine, in my book, though it helps if the learner is complicit in the decision to opt to use them. And I believe that good education focuses on the thing Noah had when learning HTML -- a meaningful context for the learning and a child-led interest-based pathway to and through it. With those things in place children will appreciate the intrinsic value of learning -- and enjoy it, without all the window-dressing. Learning will not be disguised in fun, it will be fun in and of itself.

Fine French wine

I don't quite know how or why I formed this opinion, but I decided quite a long time ago that it made sense to help my children learn to drink alcohol. I don't want them to learn their drinking habits from teens partying secretly away from their parents, or when they first move away from home. I don't want alcohol to be a tool in aid of adolescent conniving and rebellion, nor do I want my kids entering adult life without any prior guidance and experience in responsible drinking.

The law where we live (as in virtually all Canadian provinces) states that minors can be served alcohol by their parent or guardian in a private home or residence. I always assumed that sometime during their teenage years we'd be offering our kids occasional drinks. We certainly tolerated toddlers helping themselves of sips of beer in good humour, and we do allow the kids to drink tea, decaf coffee or an occasional cup of the regular coffee. And we've never outright refused to serve the kids wine; they've just never asked. So there's some context to next week's Ethnic Cooking Club event that features French cuisine.

Ethnic Cooking Club is just two families with a whole whack of kids between us, and we get together once every week or two to explore a little of the culture and cuisine of a particular nation or ethnic group. Next week is France. Today I mentioned to the other mom, who is definitely a kindred spirit in most aspects of parenting, that our family was hoping to prepare Crêpes Suzette, with flaming cointreau, which would of course burn off the alcohol, mostly. I wanted to make sure she'd be okay with that. She said that of course she would. She also joked that she was having trouble brainstorming French dishes because every time she envisioned a French meal, she got visions of fine French wine, and the wine kept distracting her from the food.

"Kids drink wine with meals in France," I said. "It would be authentic."

She got a wicked twinkle in her eye. "Would you be okay with that?"

"Sure," I said, returning the twinkle. "I wonder if we could use one of the kids' SelfDesign Learning Allowance accounts to pay for a bottle of nice Merlot?"

I was kidding about using the school money, but neither of us was kidding about the wine. Not a lot of social studies programs for middle schoolers include wine-tasting, I'd wager, but with homeschooling, anything goes. The kids think this is positively a hoot.

Werewolves in their spare time

A couple of months ago the kids re-discovered the camcorder. We share it with my mom, so it doesn't always live here, but one night it was here, and the kids noticed it, and were in a particularly crazy creative mood. They figured out the low-lux feature, got out the dress-up clothes, put them on parts of their bodies that they weren't meant for, and recorded each other dancing, howling and generally hamming it up. The resulting video was christened "What Werewolves Do on Their Day Off."

Now we've just finished installing a firewire card on one of our computers, so that our camcorder can talk to the computer and to the video-editing software therein. Noah is having a blast pairing up "Werewolves" with freaky music and hilarious titles, cross-fades and other transitions. He's suggested that this should be an undocumented bonus feature on an otherwise serious DVD of musical performances.

Perfectionism strategies

Erin practising piano, 2003, age 9

I've written about perfectionism before. I have to say that maturity has worked wonders with the most perfectionistic of my children, and I really don't have to think about this as an issue much any more. But I was thinking today again about specific strategies that have proved helpful to us "in the moment," whether dealing with music practicing, handwriting issues or the challenge of building a 3-D paper sculpture.

The thing I've found the most helpful with my extreme perfectionists has been to help them set very specific "imperfection expectations" before attempting a task. For instance, if we're going to work on the first phrase in a new violin piece, I'll say "This isn't the sort of thing kids get on the first try. You'll be making some mistakes. How many mistakes are you willing to make today? How many good tries shall we shoot for?" A perfectionist will be shooting for mastery on the first try, but will usually intellectually appreciate that it's going to take a few tries. By putting the focus on "five good tries" and on willingly accepting four "mistakes", I've had some success breaking down my kids' expectations that they'll master something on the first try. General platitudes like "mistakes help us learn" don't work with my kids very well because they still know that the aim is to get past mistakes to mastery, and they focus too singlemindedly on the mastery. They need help articulating specific expectations about mistakes, like "today I am willing to accept seven mistakes on this math page."

Another strategy that has been helpful has been to encourage my kids to actively monitor their emotional state -- their level of anxiety, frustration and anger. When perfectionists get anxious, they see only one solution to mounting frustration -- mastery! If they can learn to recognize small levels of frustration and anxiety before the anxious feelings get so overwhelming that they can no longer access their coping mechanisms, they'll do much better at de-escalating. We used a colour scale to monitor feelings (I actually drew it out like a thermometer on a paper plate), from "cool blue" through "intent green" to "worried yellow" to "frustrated orange" to "the scary red zone". I'd encourage my child to assess his or her feelings after every try of a piano rhythm, or every time he/she reached for the eraser when drawing, or after every word when printing. Our aim was to intervene when feelings nudged into the yellow realm, long before they hit the orange or red area. Intervention was anything from humour to a snack to a bit of physical activity or a "time in chat" or another form of break.

Overnight adventure

My littlest muffin is pretty outgoing at times, but her umbilical cord is still pretty short. She will talk to almost anyone, but she likes to have her mom nearby. Only rarely has she ever been separated from her parents, and on those occasions she's always been with a sibling or two, and she's almost always been at home. She's never been away from home without siblings, and almost never without a parent. It was only about six months ago she stopped breastfeeding. Most nights she still ends up in her parents' bed. At every personal slight or bump she needs a hug and cuddle. She always wants to come with me if I have to run an errand, or on the half-day trips to Nelson for Erin's piano lesson. She likes to be close to me, my little one. And she loves physical contact. When she joins me in the family bed at night, she invariably wraps all her limbs around me, tight.

So imagine my surprise when about three weeks ago she decided that she wanted to go and spend the night at her grandmother's. I'm not sure where she got the idea. The older kids used to do an annual pre-Christmas sleepover at grandma's, but that hasn't happened in almost 2 years and Fiona clearly had no recollection of that, because she thought she was the first to ask for such an date. She was tenacious with her idea. She brought it up many times with me, and persistently with her grandma.

Grandma had a trip away, then we were away, and then Fiona got a cold. We kept putting it off. But finally this morning, with her cold tapered off into just some sniffles, she woke up and packed her backpack and announced that today was the day.

After supper I drove her down to grandma's. She suggested I could come as far as the door with her, or maybe come in for a minute, but then it would be time for me to leave so she could get on with the sleepover adventure. I said "maybe I'll stay for a couple of minutes to make sure you're feeling okay about everything." She said "well, you don't have to see how I'm feeling, because I'll be feeling fine." Such confidence!

She waltzed in with her bedraggled, too-small backpack with the broken strap. I watched as she unpacked to show off all the treasures she'd brought. She'd brought her toothbrush, a comb, two hair elastics, some lip balm, pyjamas, a tiny night light, a cuddly toy and a book. Pretty good packing for a 4-year-old, completely unaided. (She looked so sweet that immediately upon arriving home I ordered her a lovely on-sale Hanna Andersson backpack set with some of those curiously strong Canadian dollars.)

She sent me off. She had plans for "drawing, a snack, a bath, a game of cards and a story." I half-expected a call at 10:15 saying that she'd like my company overnight in the guest bedroom. But it's past midnight now, and no call. I guess her confidence was more than bold intentions. Although I never would have imagined it was so, she seems to be ready for this big jump in independence. Who'd have guessed?

Well, apparently she knew perfectly well that she was ready. I think when children are not pushed towards independence before they're ready, they know exactly when and how to lead the process.

Screen-printing

Sophie has been wanting to try screenprinting for ages. Today we started working together on a screen for our Ethnic Cooking Club. We'll do these on fabric eventually, but today we tried our hand at printing on paper. First we did a paper print by cutting a circle out of a bit of freezer paper. We printed in blue for the earth's water. Next we painted the image we wanted to print on the silk using drawing fluid (shown right). The earth's water was left empty so that the blue would show through. After that we applied screen filler, and then washed out the drawing fluid with cold water. We'll try printing tomorrow. If we're happy with this screen we'll save it for use on fabric and order up some fabric dye as soon as possible.

For some reason the prospect of making a series of identical prints appeals to both me and Sophie. There's such order in it, I suppose.

Time travel moment

This morning we had one of those moments when a few things intersected and I suddenly thought "holy moly, my life is so different from what I would have imagined 15 years ago." I felt like we needed a tourist sign at the top of our driveway saying "Living History Site."

Our friends / neighbours / unschooling sidekicks dropped by. They were picking up two hens. We''re getting so many eggs, and we know they're short on hens, so we'd offered them a couple of our red rock crosses. So there we were by the chicken coop, chasing the hens, checking for eggs, and I was passing them a dozen of our surplus eggs as well. And they were passing us a gallon of fresh raw milk from their cow. And a container of cream. And meanwhile the kids were all a few feet away watching Chuck in his leather apron pinging away on the anvil at some red-hot steel in the blacksmithy. The hens were clucking and cackling. The kids were chatting and giggling together. For a moment it seemed we could have been 19th century neighbours.

Then I noticed the pickup truck in the driveway and the computer screen glowing through the window of the house.

We made butter, yogourt and kefir today with the milk and cream. The cream got shaken up in a simple Rubbermaid shaker by various family members for 10 or 15 minutes until the butter and buttermilk separated. The buttermilk got decanted off (above). Then we rinsed the butter in fresh cold water. We chose not to salt our butter, so next I pressed it with a dinner knife to shape it into a solid mass and squeeze out any lingering water. (You can do this with fresh store-bought whipping cream too if you don't have a neighbourly cow.)

Finally I packed the butter into our butter bell (right). I'm in love with my butter bell. It keeps butter fresh, protected from cats and other critters, and at exactly the right consistency for spreading. It's a two-part contraption. The outer pot has about a third of a cup of water in the bottom of it. The inner pot gets packed with butter and is then inverted into the outer pot so that the water acts as a sort of protective moat. If you are desperate to have your own butter bell, you can order one, along with any of hundreds of lovely hand-picked books, from Chinaberry Books, one of my favourite on-line retailers.

Speaking of inanimate objects I love, I phoned my camera today. It is patiently sitting in Vancouver waiting for a part and expects to be home within 2 weeks. It misses me, I think. The feeling is mutual.

Work ethic, the sequel

When I wrote last May about Erin's year of being turned tightly inward, I omitted any mention my inner angst over the fact that she seemed to be doing nothing at all. I didn't mention it because I was busy telling myself to trust her, to let her spend the time she needed growing into her new practically-an-adult self. I was busily hushing up that nagging voice in the back of my head that was telling me she was going to end up an anti-social lazy slob. I didn't really believe that little voice, but there's no doubt it was there.

Also last spring I wrote, in my "Work Ethic" post: "... one would expect that the ability to say "I'm gonna do this boring, tedious, prolonged, difficult work because ultimately it will produce some benefits that I value" is something that will evolve during the childhood and teen years as that maturity takes root."

Did I believe it? I hoped it, that's for sure.

Erin is spending less time in her cabin lately, though when she's in the house she's not exactly a highly interactive person. The photo above is quintessential Erin. Hunkered down with music on the headphones and a book or the laptop. I really don't have a clear idea of what she's doing on the laptop, or what music she listens to, but I am comfortable trusting her. She's a smart kid who has good instincts and makes good decisions, and she doesn't live in a bubble of naïveté. If she makes a few poor choices they won't be big problems and she'll learn from them.

But she isn't going to end up an anti-social lazy slob, I know that now. That work ethic, the one that I told myself would blossom as my kids matured, is showing up in spades. These days it's all pouring out in musical directions. Since yesterday afternoon she's done:

Violin practicing (2 hours), piano practicing (1 3/4 hours), orchestra rehearsal (1 1/2 hours), focused viewing of DVD performance of upcoming repertoire (1 hour), ethnic cooking club (3 hours), violin practicing (2 hours), piano practicing (2 hours).

Her days are not full from dawn to dusk. She has loads of down time to surf, write, read and listen to music. But 7 3/4 hours of practicing in the space of about 30 hours? On top of other musical activities? For no other reason than that she loves the repertoire she's trying to master, and wants to improve her playing as much as possible from one lesson to the next? There's a lot of maturity driving a pretty strong work ethic.

In August I declared a 3-month moratorium on obsessive hyper-analytical blog posts about Erin's musical issues, and I've made it half way. But I wanted to take a minute to revel in the fact that things are going very very well indeed right now. As I told J., Erin's new teacher's husband, over dinner last weekend, I think that being left high and dry without a violin teacher last spring was possibly exactly what Erin needed. All her life, poor kid, it's just been assumed that she'd be a violin student. Sure, she liked playing violin, but it had just always been there as a part of her life, rather than being a choice, a commitment, a decision. Maybe it's really good for someone like her to be handed a situation where she has to discover for herself whether she really wants to be doing it.

Apparently she does.

First blue egg

Oh my goodness, I'd almost given up hope, but finally, finally one of our Ameraucanas has come through in the laying department. I think it must be Toy -- she was showing a fair bit of interest in the nest-boxes a couple of days ago and I had started to get hopeful again about someday seeing a blue egg. Our other hens, born the same day, have been laying for five weeks already, and I'd been seriously considering starting to do workups on the Ameraucanas for infertility.

The kids, even Noah and Erin, who much of the time just tolerate their mother's interest in living a simpler, closer-to-the-source kind of life, were thrilled. I was so excited I almost drove to my mom's to borrow her digital camera. Then I remembered that the camcorder she and I jointly own, which is currently residing at our place, has the ability to snap stills too. So I pulled out the manual, followed the directions, managed to capture to the piddly SmartCard we'd never used before, and upload this photo.

Two and a half

What kind of a four-year-old misunderstands the following question in a math workbook:

1/2 of ___ = 5

and answers

2 1/2

without missing a beat? Sometimes her mistakes are the smartest things!

Mind the gaps

Someone was talking recently about unschooling her kids, but having to 'watch for gaps' in case the kids ever wanted to go to school. Whether one needs to watch for gaps, let alone fill them, is a whole other discussion, but that got me thinking about what we consider to be educational gaps. I'm pretty sure that when homeschooling parents worry about gaps, they're worrying about things like "what if he never learns about Roman numerals?" or "she might never learn long division" or "what if he gets to his first job interview and draws a blank when his prospective boss asks him for three adjectives to describe himself, because he doesn't know what an adjective is?"

I had a friend in medical school who was a bright guy, affable, good sense of humour and had led a pretty well-balanced life. He'd gone to a good high school and done very well, was involved in sports and music, had gone on to university and done even better academically, got into medical school and learned pretty well there too. In third year we started our full-time clinical rotations. Mike had a car, like most of my classmates, as we had rounds at insane hours of the morning before public transit was running, in hospitals in far corners of the city. For a couple of years Mike drove his car around. One day his engine seized. He had it towed to a garage. The mechanic asked him what he was doing when it stopped running, whether there had been any warning signs, when was the last time the oil had been checked and changed, that sort of thing.

Mike's response was a befuddled "You're supposed to check the oil?"

See, now that's a gap. While Mike was off at school all those years, his parents were dropping their cars off for oil changes. Mike was out of the mainstream of daily adult life, in school, and no one noticed he hadn't learned this critical fact of automobile ownership -- that you need to check the oil.

So that leads me to think what sorts of gaps schoolkids the ages of mine might have. I wonder if a typical 8- or 11-year-old would know these sorts of things:

• how to change a diaper and participate with a baby in Elimination Communication
• how to package parcels for risk-free shipping in ways that minimize cost
• how to make Nanaimo bars that will make anyone want to be your friend for life
• how to start with natural raw ingredients and end up with a loaf of whole-grain bread
• how to grow a garden
• safe food preservation and water-bath canning
• the embryology of the hand
  
• how to build and tend a bonfire
• how to change a tire
• what kind of supervision a 3-year-old needs in a playground, at the beach or in a parking lot
• how to create a hyperlink in HTML
  
• how to sight-sing and improvise a harmony line
  
• how to check a circuit-breaker
• how to trouble-shoot a malfunctioning networked printer
• how to retrieve a comb from a toilet trap
• how to hem jeans
  
• why Schubert died so young
  
• how to run a snowplough, lawn tractor and a snowblower
• how to design and organize a kitchen renovation
• spreadsheet use in the administration of a large buyers' co-op
• accounting procedures for non-profit organizations
• the name of the elements numbered 1-89 on the periodic table
  
• how to write a grant application
• how to shop for furniture and appliances
• the name of every Norse, Greek and Egyptian god and goddess
  

We all have our gaps. What's more important, knowing what Roman numerals are all about, or that you need to check the oil?

Snowflake fractal

Here's a fractal Sophie and I worked on together, guided by the "Calculus by and for Young People" program we've been dabbling in. If you click to go to the full-size image, you'll see that we actually began the insane task of drawing in the 6th iteration in the lower left corner.

Sophie hypothesized that the series that defined both perimeter and area of the fractal through successive iterations would diverge. In fact, we were able to work out that only the perimeter diverged, while the area converges.

You can see that I have been having fun with the "scan" function on my new copier.

Copier rapture

About 18 months ago I talked my mom into buying a photocopier. I said "in a couple of months, you'll wonder how you ever lived without one." I was right.

But I was still copierless myself. I knew it was only a matter of time. I do so many things that would benefit from copier access -- Valhalla Summer School of Fine Arts stuff, my violin teaching, homeschooling, music arranging, directing the community orchestra, and so on. But I had a functional laser printer already, and a scanner, and a copier was an extravagance I couldn't quite justify.

One of our printers stopped functioning and we had to do some swapping around. The "workhorse" printer that ended up being our main one needed a new cartridge. And my 8-year-old scanner had finally given up the ghost. A friend had to drive an hour from a town 'over the hump' to get me some order forms for our bulk fruit & nut order that needed to go out that day, because I didn't have a fax machine.

So in Calgary I went out shopping for a printer cartridge, knowing full well that I was ready to be pushed over the edge on the copier front instead. It was just a matter of the right machine and the right price. I had my heart set on the Canon ImageClass MF4150, the newer version of the one I talked my mom into buying. The regular price had dropped from $349 to $299. If that printer cartridge was over $100, I was SO going to buy a copier instead.

The copier was on sale for under $200. I couldn't get my credit card out fast enough. I am one happy camper. Additionally I bought three Staples Easy Buttons. These are a sure hit for violin-teaching and home practicing. Practice a problem passage as many times as it takes until it starts to feel easy. Then, hit the Easy Button. A cheerful voice says "that was easy!!"

Second Calgary trip

Our second trip to Calgary occurred this week. We headed out Thursday afternoon and drove the majority of the way, holing up in an empty, inexpensive, and completely adequate motel in Canmore (an hour from Calgary) around 9 pm. The weather was great, and until the sun set the views of the Rockies were fantastic -- clear, blue skies with puffy white clouds, tons of fresh snow on the mountains, but a blaze of birch and cottonwood yellow amongst the pine, spruce and cedar of the lower elevations. The kids talked and read until they got bored, then put a LOTR movie on the laptop and watched that. Before it was over, we were at the motel.

We did the usual deal of a bit of Discovery Channel, some packed-along leftovers for a very late dinner, and then some bedtime story reading aloud.

The next morning we had breakfast and drove the last hour to Calgary. We went directly to the zoo. The weather was beautiful again and we spent a great half-day exploring about two thirds of the zoo. We had a long up-close encounter with the new baby Asian elephant Malti and everyone especially enjoyed the spider monkeys. This was our first time at this zoo. We liked it a lot, especially the fact that the walking distances were small and the animals easy to see -- in comparison to our "gold standard" in zoos, the Toronto Zoo. Unfortunately, but of these are due to the fact that in Calgary the animals have much less acreage at their disposal in their exhibits, which is a little sad. They're not overtly cramped, but I kept thinking back to Toronto and remembering all the space those animals have to live in. Ah well, we had a great time.

Then we headed to T. & J.'s for Erin's lesson. Erin & T. worked together for about an hour and a half before supper, then another hour after supper. T was amazed by all the work Erin had done and really raved about the progress she had seen in the space of a month. In the last month since her last lesson, Erin has polished the Kreisler Praeludium & Allegro, renewed the Beethoven F major Romance, worked up two Kreutzer studies (one easy, one hard), learned the Gavotte en Rondeau from the Bach E Major Partita and learned the first movement and cadenza of the Haydn C Major. The Kreisler is mostly set aside for now, and the new addition is the Preludio from the same Bach Partita. Erin loved her lesson(s) and is looking forward to making something out of the new teaching she's got.

We ate take-out together, and finished up with the Nanaimo bars Sophie had made at home and brought along for the occasion. All the kids are feeling very comfortable at J & T's now. When J. helped himself to one of the scoops of ice cream that Fiona had deemed "too many" on her plate, she grinned and said "tonight you're my daddy!" and wasn't the slightest bit self-conscious about it. We had just been explaining how Chuck is always good to finish whatever Fiona can't.

We played some family games ("Smart Mouth" was a new one the kids especially liked), Fiona performed her "Handel Bourrée" for J & T, and after a little bit of hanging out (but not much, because it was getting late!) we headed to the motel we'd checked into that afternoon. There was time for a short swim, then story, bedtime reading, a bit of internet and a late bedtime.

Today we drove home in more glorious weather. Easy, quick driving ... 7 and a half hours almost to the minute.

With the late-ish start on Thursday, I realized that we could do this same trip after I get off work on the in-between weeks, when Chuck is off call, and Noah and Sophie could stay home with him. They'd only need to be "home alone" during the 4-5 hours he's at work on Friday (and he's only 5 minutes away even then). Well within their capabilities. I mentioned this possibility to them. Surprisingly neither jumped at it. Sophie decided she'd rather come to Calgary. Noah's not sure what he'll decide. So all in all it seems like they're not suffering too badly from the trips.

Back in the swing

We're back in the swing of activities now, I guess. Erin's been doing community choir for a few weeks. This morning we made our first trip of the year to Nelson for weekly piano lessons. This afternoon the other three kids had their violin or viola lessons. This evening violin group class started, and next week it'll be community orchestra. The following week Erin's (new!) student quartet starts, and Noah's student quartet gets back to regular rehearsing. And Erin's piano teacher is teaching an exchange student from Japan who happens to live in New Denver, and is going to put the two girls together on some challenging four-hands piano duet repertoire. Erin is thrilled about this -- on the way to her lesson she was bemoaning her lack of contact with other advanced pianists.

Tomorrow I teach, then there's a farewell potluck for Chuck's colleague of 13 1/2 years. Thursday the kids and I head off to Calgary for another set of violin lessons for Erin. Chuck is back at work full-time, and my clinic work kicks in again next week.

In the works are a few new activities. We're going to try an ethnic cooking club with a group of local homeschoolers once a week. (First up: Thai food.) Sophie is hoping to join a children's choir that may be starting up locally.

And while it's not really in the works, Fiona is agitating for piano lessons. I'm not sure what to do about that. There's no obvious choice for a teacher for her. If she were 7 or 8, it would be a different matter. Somehow she's convinced she should be allowed to start lessons after her 5th birthday. We may have to "homeschool for piano," though I confess I don't have the experience and expertise I should.