Dandelion syrup

About 6-8 cups of dandelion flowers yielded about 1 cup of packed yellow petals. We mixed this with 2 cups of sugar and 2 cups of water, brought to a simmer and allowed to cook for an hour or so, gradually reducing in volume to a syrupy consistency. Then we added the juice of one small lemon, strained out the petals, and cooled.

It tastes wonderful! Like spring sunshine mixed with honey and lemon. Delicious on ice cream.

Art class

One of the main advantages of being part of a Distributed Learning (i.e. homeschool support) program through our local school is being able to ask for specific perks and opportunities and have responsive can-do people on the receiving end who make our wishes come true. Last spring the DL program's principal asked me if I had any ideas for arts-related workshops the homeschooled kids might enjoy. For years I'd been wishing for a way to persuade the local artist who used to run the art classes that Erin, Noah and Sophie thrived in to get back to doing some children's art teaching. How about hiring her, through the school district, to run some classes, I mused aloud? What about enticing her with funding from a grant, a classroom at the school to use, and suggesting a set of workshops focused around a collaborative community-based project? 

The principal wrote a successful grant application, and the artist said yes! And so all this year we've had monthly art workshops for the homeschooled kids. We all met in the school for a basic art warm-up, typically using india ink to focus on an aspect of form, technique or texture, encouraging the kids to think about seeing the world around them through this lens.

Then we would go out on the day's field trip, keeping in mind the morning's exercise. We'd look for shapes, or juxtapositions of light and dark, or different types of lines, or textures, or text. The kids would sketch in their art journals. Various field trips took us along the creek to the lakeshore, to a nearby ghost town in the depth of winter, to the mining museum, to the Japanese internment memorial site and on a walking tour of local architecture. 

Back in the school again, we had lunch and then got busy with the day's art workshop focusing on a particular medium or technique. There would be some examples and explanation, but only just enough to demystify ... never enough to induce the desire to copy. There was acrylic painting, gelatin plate printing, block printing on fabric, papier maché work and shibori dyeing of cotton muslin. The afternoon workshops often pulled together the threads of the morning's warm-up and field trip. For instance, after visiting the ghost town the kids created small block prints based on geometric patterns of light and dark they observed and sketched on the old metalwork and machinery. 

There were several small projects throughout the course of the year. The long-term focus of the program, though, was on the "community ABC project." The idea was to use the explorations and techniques to create an alphabetical representation of our community's natural and cultural heritage. 

We brainstormed words for every letter of the alphabet. Children chose a letter or two or three for their own. They used one or more of the words from our brainstorming session as the inspiration for a larger block print. They sketched their ideas out and eventually refined them into a 6x6" square. They traced the design through onto the back of the piece of paper by taping it to a window. They then transferred the reversed image onto a safety-kut block (similar to a lino block but a much more forgiving material for children to carve). Then the used cutting tools to cut the block. 

Finally the blocks could be printed. Most were done purely with block printing. A few were a combination of small letter-blocks spelling out words and paintings. Our last couple of classes were half-day affairs, focused mostly on printing, and on completing the last of the various lingering projects in time for a gallery showing.

Fiona made F, I and O ... and also U and V. Miranda did Q.

Last weekend we had a wonderful gallery exhibit that attracted over a hundred enthusiastic visitors. The kids' work all looked so wonderful pulled together in a single space, neatly mounted and displayed. The kids were very gratified.

Looking back on the entire program I would of course say I loved the art teacher's wonderful balance of guidance vs. freedom and the honouring of individuality. I loved the final results, and the way they validated the kids' artistic expression. But I especially loved the way the project brought together children of a huge range of ages and abilities and gave them an "all together as homeschoolers" kind of identity, a lovely way to get to know each other and each others' families.

First marathon

It's been 10 days, and thanks to Elastoplast's moist wound-healing SOS Plaster System, my blister has almost completely healed. Which, if you'd peeked at it on May 6, in all its wretched meaty bloody glory, would amaze you.

It was a great run, and blister was really the only regrettable part of it. The day before I was still waffling back and forth about what to wear on my feet. I'd brought my old Minimus shoes, just about completely worn through in the uppers, and thought that perhaps I could run in them and discard them in a garbage can partway through if I decided to run partly barefoot. Or I could wear them the whole way. Or I could take my huaraches, and try for a mostly or partly barefoot run. By dinner time the night before I'd decided to just wear my shoes and forget about the barefoot bravado points. But by the next morning I had swung back the other direction. I set off in my huaraches.

I was early for the race, but I'd hardly slept, and it felt better to be sitting in the SkyTrain station sipping a latté and watching the runners for the Half (starting an hour earlier than the Full Marathon) piling onto trains for the start area than sitting in the hotel room in the dark. Chuck, Fiona and Sophie were still asleep and needed to head to the airport an hour or two after the race started to pick up Noah and his Corazón compatriots. So I meandered slowly out to the start area.

I had checked out the last 10k of the route a couple of days before and it had been lovely and smooth, perfect for barefooting. I'd had high hopes for the rest of the route. As it turned out the first two-thirds of the course was fairly abrasive chip-seal and old asphalt. There were a few smooth streets but mostly it was stuff that pushed the envelope on my sole-conditioning. I shucked my huaraches for a couple of kilometres twice, but soon decided it made the most sense to save my feet for later in the course.

Blister, day 10: almost gone!

I had never run more than 8k in my huaraches before, though, and neglected to snug up the laces as they stretched out over the first 20 km. My left sandal stayed in place pretty well, but my right one was loose, and I ignored the saggy fit since to my eventual peril. The ball of my right foot was riding over the edge of the sandal with every step -- although I couldn't really feel a problem with it -- and inevitably a big blister formed. By the time we reached the smooth asphalt of the seawall, my foot was in no condition to be unprotected on the ground. So I snugged up the huaraches and kept them on until the end.

Having heeded all the warnings to be sure to drink enough, I over-hydrated during the early part of the race. Stopping to pee and to put on / remove / adjust my sandals added about ten minutes to my time.

I finished in 4:24. I had figured if I ran in huaraches or bare feet, anything under 4:40 was fine, though in shoes I would have wanted to aim for 4:15. So I didn't feel like I was fast, but I was fine with my result It was a stunning course and a great run. You can view the route in this video -- really amazing. The weather was perfect: sunny and breezy, with temperatures peaking at about 13ºC.

I had hurting feet during the last 12 km, but I didn't really feel like I'd run out of energy or motivation. And my hurts were all superficial -- chafing at the neckband of my shirt, a neuritis on my wrist from my Garmin strap being too tight given the heat and inevitable bit of edema, and the pain in the soles of my feet. No knee pain, no ankle / Achilles / plantar / hip discomfort. So I think the basic biomechanics of my form are serving me well.

So in retrospect it was not a great move to go with the huaraches and the option of bare feet. Next time I think I'll try minimalist shoes. But the worst move was to head immediately from the end of the race into the minivan and do nothing but sit as we drove home in order to get the kids back in time for bed and school. What I needed was stretching, movement, ice, a shower, some massage, and lots more movement and lots more stretching. Instead I arrived home 9 hours later in time for bed and another 6 hours of relative immobility while asleep. By the next morning I was very stiff indeed.

Ah well, it only took me a couple of days to get myself limbered up. I'm happy and caught up on my sleep and running again now. And thinking about where to go from here, thinking about my next marathon.

Fiona reads

The Arts & Writers School and Community Coffee House was last night. It's the culmination of a week of electives and workshops held at the school with a variety of local and guest artists. In the gallery space was the artwork the kids had produced throughout the week in classrooms, on the lakeshore, in canoes. In the main theatre area the performing arts presentations were queued up.

Fiona was among a couple of dozen students who chose to read some writing to the assembled crowd of parents and community members. She was strangely comfortable, perhaps even eager, in the spotlight. She introduced her piece casually with a couple of leading comments, and then read it clearly and expressively, pausing perfectly before the last line which brought closure and more than a few appreciative chuckles.

Then she headed to the lighting booth. I'm not sure exactly why she was asked to be the lighting technician for the high school play. Likely it was because in addition to her strong work ethic and ability to focus in chaotic situations, she was the one elementary student who was both well known to the theatre coaches and not assigned to particular full-time school classroom. Anyway, she had been commandeered on the final day of the theatre workshop to do lighting for the play. Armed with a copy of the script and lighting directions she managed the console, dimming and flooding, flickering, switching between full-stage illumination and a fixed spotlight. One of the theatre coaches helped by providing a bit of prompting but mostly he was too busy with the actors and Fiona worked on her own. She did a great job!

She was with the school kids for about three full days this week. Except for the last day with the high schoolers she was with the combined Grade 2/3/4/5 classrooms. She really enjoyed herself, but mostly for the reasons that had little to do with the other kids or the sense of being "in school." She connected beautifully with the adult mentors, and loved many of the activities. She loved the feeling of having a schedule and being busy, juggling a variety of activities, being a little independent person not part of a herd, who could get herself places and look after herself without adult shepherding. On the other side she was able to see some of the challenges of school: the early nights and mornings of tired rushing, the disruptive immature behaviour that cropped up repeatedly even amongst kids considerably older than herself, the brusqueness and judgmentalism of a couple of the adults at the school, the weird pseudo-maturity of young children trying to emulate teenagers, and the fact that school is a haven for contagious viruses, resulting in an inevitable nasty cold for her by day 5.

I think Fiona would really enjoy attending a school that suited her. For this past week, our local school with its flexible multi-age enrichment activities has suited her well. But I think it also became clear to her from this little glimpse that "regular school" here would not be a good fit for her. And I agree, so it's all good.

My working parent day

Today I felt like a working parent. I packed all three kids off to school, went to work, picked them up in time to start juggling the after-school activities and homework.

Yes, all three are at school this week. Fiona is busy finishing up the series art workshops that have been offered to homeschooled students this year, and she is also participating in the Arts & Writers Festival the local school is hosting for K-5 kids, so she's involved one way or another all day every day this week. Meanwhile the Grade 6-12 kids are enjoying their elective week, so Noah is attending full days all week (normally he is home at least two days). His elective is about mountain cultures and their spiritual relationship with the natural world. Lots of hiking and snowshoeing and learning about various spiritual practices and philosophies.

My Working Parent Day started at 5:40 when I awoke early for some quiet time on my own. I looked after the cat and the chickens. I made lunches for the three kids. I showered and had a coffee. Then I got the kids were up. I made sure they were organized for their various days. I drove them to school.

I dashed off to the clinic to see patients for the morning. After finishing up my charts in the early afternoon I headed home to check on the sick cat and then back to the school to meet Fiona as she finished up her day. I hung out with her waiting for Noah to finish, at which point Sophie headed from her Theatre Writing elective to soccer. I drove Noah and Fiona home, then dropped by my mom's to deal with some music school details. Then I grabbed a few groceries, picked Sophie up from soccer, came home, taught a viola lesson, made supper, practiced with Fiona, headed out to an evening quartet concert, came home, helped with the editing of a couple of writing pieces, and encouraged everyone to get bed.

The week has been great for all three kids, but I'll be happy when the flow gets back to normal.

Physics

What we do at the rocky beach on a warm spring day when no one has much energy due to colds but we have to get out of the house. The left-hand cairn has more stones, but I think the one in the right-hand photo is more impressive due to the challenging roundness of its base stones.

Hello, trees

Fiona and I have been visiting the trees in the forest that surrounds our home recently, appreciating them anew as they emerge from the snow and prepare for a new season of growth.

Yesterday we checked out the red cedar bark, which we will use for basket weaving. Years ago the kids did a workshop with this lovely local lady, and while they're a lot of work, the tiny baskets we have since made have been very striking and rewarding. It's still too early in the season for it to come away easily in long strips, but we're looking forward to harvesting some in May. We then dug up some red cedar roots, to decide how useful they'd be for embellishing our baskets. I had read that they make great sewing material, but had never taken the suggestion seriously. They really are amazing. The slenderest ones are strong, pliable and lovely to look at, and they dry and increase in strength very quickly once harvested.

We collected armloads of white pine cones to use a fire-starter next winter.

And then we made our acquaintance again with the birch trees. We tapped a couple of birch trees years ago, but our sap collection set-up wasn't ideal and we didn't get enough sap to make a proper syrup. Because birch sap is about five times less sugary than maple sap, you need a heck of a lot of it!

Sometime in the intervening years I managed to purchase four spiles and today we picked up some clear 1/2" tubing at the local hardware store. All it took was a quick bit of work with the portable drill and a couple of taps with the mallet the trees began spilling their sap out for us with eagerness. We plugged a couple of tubes into each of two glass carboys and within an hour or two had a couple of gallons of sap.

I imagine it will be incredibly time- and energy-consuming to boil the stuff down, but I'm happy to do it just once, to experience the process and the taste of the syrup.

Birch sap is sterile and contains trace amounts of minerals, xylitol and various other good things. It's actually a great source of safe drinking water. Not that we don't already have safe drinking water, but hey, when civilization crumbles, this might be a useful piece of knowledge.

Summit Strings Cuba Concert

Summit Strings began in 2008 when our most senior local violin and viola students began playing ensemble music together on a regular basis. It has evolved as students moved away, moved on, graduated or what-have-you. For a couple of years we had a tight group of five, and they anchored the first half of a community concert last year. There are only three of them now. All three sing in Corazón too, which is kind of neat, and the older two will be participating in the big choir trip to Cuba next month. Sophie isn't eligible based on her age, but we hope she'll be able to do cool trips in future years.

They decided that a full-length concert would be a good way to raise money for the trip to Cuba. Sophie, good sport that she is, was fine with doing all the work required to support the others. I did some arranging and gleaning and transposing, vetting repertoire (a lot of it new, though some recycled from previous years) with their input. And then we spent the winter rehearsing. There was a nadir in motivation in November, but they rallied and as it got closer to performance time there was some real energy and excitement there. It was a big program with lots of varied repertoire. Not all of it was challenging, but some of it definitely was, and the sheer volume of music they had to get to know made for some pretty long, hard-working rehearsals.

Noah and Danika put together a poster-board presentation about the choir, about Cuba, and about the trip the group will be doing. We cooked a bunch of Cuban-inspired appetizers for intermission, designed and printed tickets, wrote and submitted ads and press releases, created posters and plastered the community. And we came up with background information to introduce the music.

It was a packed house, and the fund-raising proceeds were beyond what we expected. The community was so generous and supportive. It was a wonderful performance with lots of good feeling surrounding it.

March Break for Fiona

March Break, the one- or two-week spring schools holiday, has never had much to do with us, other than loosening up our out-of-home activities schedule. But with Sophie in school full-time, and Noah part-time, it's gained relevance this year. Those two headed off to Montreal to visit their big sister. And that has made Fiona an only child for a week. With siblings gone and activities on hold, we felt we needed something nice to fill things up.

We had to drive to Calgary to get the middle two on their flight. So Fiona and I made a excursion out of it. We spent a half day at the new Calgary Science Centre (better than the old one, but still not in our top three, and over-run by busloads of Alberta schoolkids who are not on their March Break for another week or so). We went shopping for summer things. Fiona is a great shopper. She likes clothes, but has an eye for bargains and a healthy skepticism for brand names. She was very excited to buy a tank top for gymnastics. After holding our breaths all year, we were finally able to get her registered for gymnastics beginning in April. So buying a gym tank was a major highlight. Then we picked up a couple of small items other people had asked us to buy for them, and in the process wandered past a place that offered ear piercing. Fiona had decided a couple of years ago that she would pierce her ears when she was 9, and then a couple of weeks ago had decided the time was finally right. So she marched in and asked the person at the sales desk and within ten minutes had some lovely little studs in her lobes.

The next notable excursion was to the zoo. We took the C-Train rapid transit system there, which was an exciting adventure all in itself. We enjoyed the penguins, and assorted other wacky animals. It's a relatively small zoo, with enclosures that aren't nearly as spacious and natural-looking as those in Toronto.  We talked a bit about the ethics of zoos.

While Montreal was enjoying summer-like temperatures, we were having a blustery cold day, so we mostly stuck with the indoor exhibits. New to us was the plant and butterfly Conservatory which had opened a little over 2 years ago. Fiona was absolutely entranced. It was quiet, and warm and practically creaking and squeaking with the sounds of growing plants. We spent almost half our zoo time with the plants.

The next day we got up super early and headed to Lake Louise ski area. We put in a few huge runs. It was cold, though the sun did its best to warm things up a little. Fiona got to experience her first rides in a gondola, and on various chair lifts. She was amazed by the length of the lifts and the runs. 

We had a lot of hours of driving ahead of us, so we didn't stay beyond lunch-time, but it was a lovely morning. 

Now we're home, and poking around for a few special things to do here too. Today Fiona cooked dinner for her parents and her grandma. We had Tuscan Bean Soup, fresh-baked herb buns, and tapioca pudding for dessert. She had a little help along the way with the main course, but mostly it was her cooking that brought it all to fruition. 

Mileage and blisters

Marathon training is going pretty well. The green line shows the number of kilometres I've run per week of my training schedule. It's increased dramatically as the weeks have passed, taking "step-back weeks" on occasion to allow my body recovery time following two or three weeks of significant increases. That's the sensible way to do it, I'm told, and it seems to be working. No significant injuries thus far.

It's a lot of running for me. To put this mileage in perspective, look at my monthly trend over the past couple of years. January '12 was an all-time high-mileage month for me: about 70% more kilometres than I'd ever run in a month before. February was higher again, and March will almost certainly be higher than February.

The really cool thing is that this peak in mileage has occurred even though it is the absolute most difficult time of year to run. The treadmills at the fitness centre are both broken this year, so I haven't even had that option. Look at last winter's mileage: nothing in December, and not much more than that until May. But I haven't let the cold temperatures and occasionally atrocious road conditions dissuade me this year.

I'm trying to increase my barefoot mileage. That's the orange-red line on the first graph. Weather conditions have turned out not to be nearly the obstacle I had thought, but it took me a while to realize that. By week 9 I began really pushing to increase my barefoot mileage and moved my distance from 2-3 km at a time up to 8 km. I also built up to being able to run barefoot on back-to-back days as my soles seemed to be getting well enough conditioned to be resistant to damage. Last week's big spike unfortunately produced a blister the day I did 15 barefoot km's after 11 soggy shod km's. I think the blister was already well on its way when I dropped my shoes -- which was in fact why I dropped them -- but the barefoot running wasn't any better, and of course has suffered more this week for the blister. Still, I'm hopeful that a week of duct tape and some moderation will fix that.

And here again is my cumulative 2012 mileage ticker. I wonder if I'll meet my goal for the year by running my marathon on May 6th? After that the trails will have opened up, and I expect I'll be happily running through the forest, having abandoned training goals and simply enjoying being out there. Fewer charts and graphs, more photos.

Recital time

It's been a challenging year musically for all three kids. Erin moved away, and though the other kids would never articulate that she was a motivating force in their music studies, she certainly "normalized" diligent daily practicing around our house. Not only that, but as a member of the Suzuki group class and of Summit Strings she had provided herself as one of the scarce "advanced role models" in our little musical backwater. 

Sophie started school full-time in September. And she joined Corazón Youth Choir. Both of which have enriched her life in many ways, but have also eaten up the lion's share of her creative energy and time. The lifestyle change involved in going to school is not to be under-estimated. And so, with very little time and motivation going into her violin, she decided to drop lessons last fall. She continued to prepare ensemble music for the Summit Strings concert which was a huge program they presented a couple of weeks ago.

She's continuing to mess around with her violin, working on some little Kreisler pieces that she likes, and she's asked for occasional coaching from me or her grandmother. She plans to get back to working consistently on her violin and would like to attend SVI this summer. For this recital she chose to play "Meditation from Thais" with her Summit Strings sidekick Danika. It was an oldie for both of them, easy to pull out and perform without too much polishing work required. It's tough to play in unison with just one other person; I thought they did an excellent job.

Noah had an almost full-time course load at school last semester and the lifestyle change struck him amidships as well. He had a viola lesson on September 9th and that was the end of it. He had been getting monthly or bimonthly lessons in Calgary for the previous two years but he had always hated the travel and felt guilty about the scanty work he'd done between lessons. We were taking Erin, so bringing him along was no big deal and he tolerated it. But this year, with his work ethic on viola still suffering, Erin moved away and no one providing us with a very good reason to drive for two days every month, we decided to just let the lessons go. 

Like Sophie, he's continued to be committed to the Summit Strings ensemble music and performances. And he did a couple of Symphony gigs with me in Cranbrook, where he showed a lot of improvement in orchestral skills and confidence. But as for practicing solo repertoire, that pretty much stopped last August. Yet he pulled out the first movement of Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata, which he had almost finished learning the notes of last summer, and in his usual infuriating way put a mere couple of hours of practicing into bringing up to a fair degree of polish. It's a really big piece, both technically and musically. He did some masterful work with it in very short order.

Fiona continues to take weekly lessons with her grandmother. And for the most part she practices. But with Erin moved away and Noah and Sophie spending so little time on their instruments and doing so many exciting things away from home and away from Fiona, it has been hard to stay motivated. More so than the other kids Fiona's interests have always been socially driven to an extent: she loves doing things in part because the people she loves also like doing them. But she is beginning to figure out that violin playing has value for herself as an individual, not just as a member of a musically active sibship. And so she keeps working away, is looking forward to SVI and continues to practice most days. She played the first movement from Handel Sonata No. 3 in F Major.

Doodling

Fiona and I have both been enjoying doodling lately. The internet is full of inspiration: repeating patterns, geometric iterations, fill patterns, awe-inspiring creations. Suggested search keywords: zenspirations, zentangles, tangle patterns, zendoodle.

Fantastic for fine-motor control, creativity, geometric awareness, and just chilling while listening to a readaloud, audiobook or podcast.

Check your boots

When you hike a couple of hundred metres through the nasty snow and frozen slush of your laneway to reach the road for a barefoot run, it's sometimes nice to wear your boots, especially if you know you'll be doing your longest barefoot run to date and coming home with tired feet that have been pushed to the limits of their comfort. So you wear your boots and leave them at the top of the laneway to await your return 90 minutes later.

It might be good to return while it's still light out, with your powers of observation still keenly functional. Because as you near your boots you might notice the small furry presence of a field mouse considering moving into a new home. And therefore as you move closer you'll notice that, startled by your approach, he has now scurried into the safety of the dark neoprene-insulated recesses of your right winter Muck boot.

And so you thankfully you take the time to invert your right boot (and the left, I might add, just as a precaution!) and give it three good shakes to dislodge any would-be tenants.

Running discoveries

I run with my dog

Who'd have thought that almost three years into this I'd still be discovering completely new things about running? Yet this is how it is, and that's what keeps it all fun and interesting.

First, I had an absolutely terrible long run a week or so ago. It was only 24 km, and I had managed 30 the week before without difficulty. But that fateful day my calves felt tight and sore and within 4 km I was feeling achey in my feet, ankles and knees. It went on like that for the next three hours as I got progressively slower and more demoralized. Yuck.

The next day I went out to at least try and stretch my legs a bit and work some of the aches out. Within a minute or two I felt great. My running mojo was back and my body felt fine.

Why? The only explanation I could come up with was that my nasty long run had been the second of two runs in a row in shoes. My mojo-ful run was barefoot. Shoes are hurting me. A shod run once in a while my body seems able to handle. Two days in a row is too much. At that point I'd better get back to barefoot, or to huaraches at the most.

I accidentally repeated the experiment. Yesterday I had run in shoes because there was lots of gravel on the highway and I was doing a tempo run (i.e. a fast-paced run). And today the conditions were blizzard-like, so I put the shoes on again. The sore calves were back with a vengeance and the aching in the ankles and knees began within 5 minutes. I figured that was due to the previous day's hard and fast run and hoped it would wear off if I ran slowly. It didn't. By the 4 km mark I had reached a point of angry frustration and I took the silly shoes off. Barefoot, the discomfort vanished after a few steps and never returned. Hmm. Hypothesis confirmed, it seems.

Which led me to more on my second discovery which is that running barefoot in the winter isn't really that big a deal. Dry asphalt is a dream, even down to minus 10ºC. Wet asphalt is more challenging, but if I warm my body up to the point where I feel I am just beginning to sweat, and then drop the shoes, my feet are pumping enough heat through them to stay quite comfortable. If I don't go through that warm-up period the cold feels uncomfortable for the first 8 or 9 minutes but once the furnace turns on I'm good. I was leery of running in snow, though. Running through occasional patches of it had always been such a shock to my soles. But today I was kind of forced into it -- or else bail on my run -- and I discovered that it's really not bad. Snow is kind to the feet from an abrasion and cushioning standpoint. There may have been gravel on the highway, but the snow buried it, and the conforming cushioning of the accumulating flakes was soft and enjoyable. Sure, it was cold, particularly when it was deep enough that it was brushing past the tops of my feet. And I would wear a warmer jacket and hat if I was planning a run like that again. But it's certainly no hardship to run in the snow.

Third discovery: my feet are getting much stronger and smarter. Last summer I read the Centre for Endurance Sport's Criteria for Successful Barefoot Transitioning and discovered that the one-leg balance test was something I failed on my right leg every time. My left foot was up to the 30-second task, but my right was rarely capable of going more than 10 or 12 seconds. I repeated the test a couple of weeks ago and now I can not only stand more or less indefinitely on each foot flat on the ground, but I can manage 20 seconds on my toes (much more challenging!) on my left foot and 12 or 14 on my right foot. So there's still a bit of a difference, but both feet are much stronger.

Final discovery: low heart-rate training, also known as the Maffetone method. It's a formulaic approach to the basic strategy of running really slowly and easily most of the time, maybe even all of the time, when training for an endurance sport like distance running. Using the Maffetone method you calculate a maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from 180 (with some possible modifying criteria) and you use a heart rate monitor to ensure your training runs don't have you exceeding that. I've been trying to stay within these parameters for almost two months. Not obsessively so, but mostly managing. It takes a lot of trust in the approach to run that slowly. In the past most of my day-to-day runs would have my heart rate ranging from 138 to 162. To consistently keep it below 135 meant a much slower pace. And to do that day after day, shuffling along at a pace two or three minutes per mile slower than had been my habit, never putting the pedal to the floor or anything even close, and then to trust that you are indeed getting fitter and faster ... well it's certainly an exercise in patience.

I mentioned my tempo run yesterday. That was only my second faster-than-a-shuffle run since December.  I started out aiming to run moderately hard and hit an average pace in the green zone (see graph). But it felt great, and after the first half which was the uphill leg I still had lots in the tank so I poured it on during the downhill return. I beat my target pace by a lot and shaved almost a full minute off my all-time record for 5k, a record I'd set in July 2009 when I was doing lots of fast hard runs and was two and a half years younger. Fifty-three seconds is a huge improvement, especially considering I didn't really turn it on until half way through. So hey, this approach actually works! I'm happily back to running slowly, now confident that it's the right approach. I continue to mind my Garmin when it beeps to remind me to slow to almost-a-walk as I climb a hill.

One last graphic, to show my year to date relative to my (admittedly conservative) mileage goal. Not bad for the last week of February!

TOPScience

Just over a month ago Fiona received her favourite Festivus gift. I bought her a set of four TOPS Chemistry units, complete with the equipment and supplies kits that made them completely self-contained and drop-dead simple to implement in the kitchen. While I'm by nature a scrounger and a make-do-er, I've recognized that the little details involved in, say, finding a little household iodine solution are often time-consuming and sometimes delay the implementation of whatever activity someone wants to do. The learning momentum can easily collapse when there are multiple delays.

So we splurged and got the little kits containing ziplocs of common chemicals, test tubes and pipettes. We had some of that stuff, but the package deal was so simple.

We're both really impressed with the task-oriented teaching in the units. Fiona has just about finished the first of the four units, the one on chemical analysis. It's described as being suitable for Grades 5-10, and though it's perfect for Fiona, I think it would be a pretty light-weight program for a high schooler. Still, it's far more in-depth and sensibly, workably hands-on than similar programs I've seen.

Pictured above is her red-cabbage-water indicator at various pHs. From left to right: pH=3 (with vinegar), pH=6 (with a single drop of vinegar) pH=6.5 (straight cabbage water), pH=9 (with kitchen cleanser) and pH=13 (with lye).

TOPScience can be ordered here.

Running mileage

Here is my running mileage during 2011 and thus far in 2012, broken down by month. At least, these are the runs I used my Garmin for -- most of them, to be sure.

There are two obvious nadirs. One was in August/September, when I hurt my foot. I did a lot of biking during that time, but didn't run for about 7 weeks.

Then there's last winter, shown at the beginning of the graph. Winter is a tough time to run around here. The trails are inaccessible, the road is gnarly and slushy and slippery and boring.

Which is why I'm pleased with my mileage this year. It hasn't been easy. The treadmills at the fitness centre are both broken so I'm stuck with the outdoor conditions, whatever they are. I've run in -23ºC temperatures, in fog with driving sleet, through mounds of slush, across gleaming slopes of ice, through snow that had me high-stepping, I've developed an appreciative relationship with the snowplough crew whom I tend to see most days lately (I cross the road, they honk and wave thanks, I wave thanks), I've arrived home soaked to the skin or with heaps of snow piled on my shoulders and head. January last year I ran 5 km. This year I'll have run 250 km by the end of the month.

My beloved Minimuses are beginning to fall apart after about 700 km of use. I can't wait to pick up a pair of Minimus WT Zeros, the upcoming, even-more-minimalist shoe due out in March or April. I'll have to come up with something in the meantime. I've noticed that my Merrells tend to trigger my Achilles tendonitis, so I've set them aside for now. I'm thinking of picking up some New Balance WT110s. They're the evolved descendant of the WT100s I bought a year and a half ago, enjoyed for a few weeks and then surrendered to Erin, who needed them more than I did, liked them a lot and continues to run in them. I liked them during my brief stint with them in 2010, and I think I'll probably like the pared-down newer model even better.

Math Watershed, the 4th Edition

The math watershed occurs in our family when the kids finish the Singapore Primary Math program. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd editions of the math watershed occurred around age 10 for my three elder kids respectively. That was too young for a traditional academic high school program, especially after the friendly, unintimidating, low-repetition approach of the Singapore Primary consumable workbooks. We made a lot of stabs at finding the right next step and I really didn't feel like I found the right approach with any of them. There was a lot of fallow time, a lot of treading water, or starting out one direction and then back-tracking. Eventually they all sidled into Canadian high school math courses just fine, but there was 3-4 years of aimlessness before they developed the maturity to tackle them.

When Fiona finished Singapore Primary Math at age 8, I felt it was even more important to find a suitable next step, since she was even younger than her siblings, and very keen on continuing her formal math work. So neither of us was really willing to wait through 5 or 6 years of aimlessness.

So far we've been thrilled with Challenge Math by Ed Zaccarro. At the top of the cover it says "Math is often taught as all scales and no music. This book contains the music!" It's a very apt description. It's intended to provide enrichment for children in Grades 4 through 9. Fiona fits smack in the middle of that range in terms of her math level (~Grade 7-ish) and the book is perfect for her. It has a friendly layout with occasional yet undistracting cartoon characters offering insights and fun quips. It isn't overly dense. The problem sets are appropriately varied and sometimes humorous. (eg. A snail-year correlates with a light-year, being the distance a snail can travel in a year.) There are "Einstein problems" for extra challenge, which Fiona seems to be managing just fine. And the concepts and problem-solving approaches are explicitly taught with clarity. Yet it has a more textbook-ish mature format than the Singapore Primary workbooks, and it requires more in the way of creative synthesis of skills and ideas.

I have a feeling that this book (and perhaps one or two of the others from Zaccarro's series) will provide the perfect segué into one of the Singapore secondary programs for Fiona. We'll likely give New Syllabus Math a go, one of the newer secondary programs, which has consumable workbooks and a less dense presentation than NEM or NMC. I expect Fiona will spend a year or so expanding her ability to apply K-7 math skills to deeper and more complex problem-solving through Zaccarro's books and then she'll jump into high school materials very well-prepared.

Best Pizza

 We make pizza almost once a week around here. It's a flexible go-to meal for us. So long as someone takes ten minutes to get the dough started sometime between 2:30 and 4:30 pm, it's a quick and easy meal that we can all pitch in to get made in less than half an hour (plus baking time).

Over the years our toppings have gone through many evolutionary steps. There were the early years when certain kids would not eat anything that wasn't approximately white, so we'd cook one pizza with only cheese, just a molecular layer of marinara sauce, and sometimes a sprinkling of corn kernels. There were the years none of the kids would eat mushrooms, or olives, or peppers ... and so we made one of two pizzas with those things omitted. And then when we had a mix of vegetarians and carnivores, we would have a veggie pizza and one with half meat.

Now with more mature tastes and the demise of our vegetarian ways, anything goes. And this week we adapted one of our favourite panini recipes to the top of one of our pizzas. (The panini omits the marinara sauce and mozzarella cheeses.) The pizza toppings are:

• caramelized onions with a sprinkling of balsamic vinegar, 
• chopped dried figs, 
• spicy beef or pork sausage of some sort, 
• fresh spinach and 
• a sparing mix of cow mozzarella and goat chèvre cheeses. 

1-1-1-1-1-Enough Pizza Dough
1 cup lukewarm water
1 Tbsp. sugar
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. instant yeast
enough flour to make a just-barely-no-longer-sticky dough

Mix, adding flour gradually. Stand mixer with dough hook makes it easy. Allow to rise covered in a warm place until doubled. Punch down, roll/throw/stretch out. Makes enough dough for one 16" pizza.

Using school to fit our needs

Compared to what the kids' educations looked like several years ago, things are much more varied and piecemeal these days. I used to have four kids hanging out and playing at home and in the community, pursuing learning entirely outside of the sphere of influence of school. Now very much fall within the sphere of influence of the school and its community.

I've always liked our local school. A lot. And not just for its community-mindedness. It's staffed by good people who do good teaching. Not necessarily in a format that was more appropriate for my kids than our unschooled home-based learning, but good stuff nonetheless. And therefore when Erin, and then Sophie, and then Noah, decided that they wanted a change of format and were welcomed with such positivity and open-mindedness, I was thrilled for them.

It's semester's end this week, and I'm thinking about how school has become such a part of our lives in unique flexible ways that suit our family.

Sophie is going through her first slate of exams. Two yesterday, and two today. She entered with more trepidation than the endeavour deserved, she's realized. Her experience thus far has showed her that diligence during the term combined with a bit of preparatory review makes the exam-writing itself un-stressful and leads to excellent results. No big deal! She'd been hearing warnings and negative things about exams from other students but has found the experience simple and gratifying. She'll have tomorrow off school and we'll probably head to the ski hill.

Academically Sophie is a grade level ahead in a couple of courses and "on grade level" in the rest. Overall she's not particularly challenged, and her teachers do recognize this, but she is enjoying the experience and the fact that top marks are easily within her grasp. I'm not sure whether she'll continue to be happy toeing the standard school line, but I suspect she will. If not I know that the school will work with her to give her what she wants.

Noah is also having his first exams. He's harder to read, and hasn't received any results yet, but he seems to be coming through things with a can-do attitude and no undue worries. This was the guy who used to break down in tears when his piano teacher suggested playing a game that involved scoring his note-naming ability each week. He seems to have grown into the maturity necessary to deal with having his learning performance judged and graded. He's in school part-time, and despite a heavy schedule this semester his school schedule will drop back to mornings only after next week.

Both kids benefit from the innovation and flexibility of the school in pursuing their interests. Tuesday afternoons they take a block out of school to get to Corazon rehearsals. Next week they'll be doing a week-long photography workshop, using film cameras, making pinhole cameras, getting into a darkroom for some vinegar-scented experience there as their elective week. They're always welcome to miss school days to pursue music trips or whatever. And next semester Noah will be earning credit for PE, Digital Media and Science for his home-based learning, making use of school facilities as he wishes.

Erin's program with the school was a part-time one the past three years, similar to what Noah is doing now. She has proven herself to be highly capable and driven to achieve, with a healthy attitude to any necessary hoop-jumping. This year she's not present at all in the school but she's doing four or five courses electronically through the school and hasn't done much on any of them. First she had 6 weeks of internet access issues. Then she headed into preparation for auditions in January and February and the tour to China in December-January. So she's only put a small dent in her course-work. And her teachers are fine with this. They know that when she says she'll get around to working seriously on the courses after the McGill audition in late February, she'll do it, and move ahead really quickly. She's earned their trust.

Fiona is currently enjoying just the right balance of home and out-of-home experiences, several of which involve the school or people from the school. On Monday she attends the Summit Strings rehearsal with her siblings and another teen. On Tuesday she travels to Nelson with four to six teenagers from the school and stops along the way for Corazon rehearsal. Wednesdays have been ski days this month, putting her at the ski hill with the entire K-7 student body from the school, plus a handful of homeschoolers, for lessons and fun skiing with friends and family. Alternate Wednesday afternoons mean Suzuki group class held at the school. Thursdays are home-based, and Fridays often are as well, but she's often ready for a bit of time at home by that point in the week. Noah is home more on those days, so there's company. And some weeks include Friday homeschool activities hosted at the school: either meetings with our liaison teacher or day-long art workshops with the other local homeschoolers.

The amount of structure created by our out-of-home commitments helps to structure Fiona's at-home time as well, since we have to be intentional about those things or they won't fit. Recently we've been starting the day with some snowshoeing around the property, violin practicing, and then some math bookwork and hands-on chemistry. World geography is an interest these days, fuelled by our read-alouds and by the large flat-screen TV Chuck bought in the after-Christmas sales. BBC's "Human Planet" and Discovery's "Atlas" series are being much enjoyed.

Most days I drive to and from the school at least twice, often three or more times what with various drop-off and pick-up times and extra activities. While I don't relish the driving, I do like the way the school can serve different functions and roles for my different kids at different times, so that it works like a buffet of possibilities.

Festivus

Erin arrived from China a week ago. She'd been there on tour with her orchestra and was on her way back to Montreal, by way of "home" in the Kootenays for a week or so. She had picked up a killer cold in China and spent the better part of the week recovering from that and from the loss of a day and a night or two what with the jetlag, dateline, red-eye flight and the inevitable sleep deprivation of a tour. She brought back photos of the terra cotta army and the Great Wall, as well as of smoggy cities, video arcades in dodgy underground plazas where she fascinated the Chinese teens with her mastery of the motocross game or some-such, markets, plazas, beaches and the like.

I killed chickens. After being vegetarian for the better part of 20 years and having two or three other avowed veg-heads in the family, I was betrayed last summer when both Erin and Sophie decided to start eating meat. My own vegetarianism suddenly seemed like rather a large family inconvenience. So I decided that if I could make my peace with the whole farmyard to table business by immersing myself in it, I'd feel okay about parting from my vegetarian ways. The task I set myself was to kill our own surplus chickens. I selected three of our now-maturing roosters, inverted them in a killing cone so that they settled into somnolence, cut their jugulars, bled them out, dipped and plucked and gutted and dressed them. Into the freezer they went.

We ate one as part of our Festivus Fondue Feast, along with plenty of cheese and veggies and some venison sausage from a friend. I'm not sure I would have been ready to eat it right after the butchering, but the couple of weeks in the freezer allowed some emotional distance for me. I ate it. It was yummy. I feel like an honest carnivore now.

Festivus was great. It snowed a delicious 35 cm of light-as-a-feather white snow overnight and through the day. It was the first big snowfall in a couple of weeks. "It's another Festivus miracle!" said Fiona.

I worried that the lack of all the decorations and music and traditional Christmas rituals would keep it from being special enough, but it was fine. We started the day with fresh-baked cinnamon buns. We opened gifts. Fiona gave me a set of six computer-printed coupons for Free Massages courtesy of herself (she gives great massages!). She imprinted my name on them so they couldn't be stolen and redeemed by other family members. "And," she warned me, "I deleted the file on the computer so you couldn't print any extras." She's got really good business sense, this girl!

The Fondue Feast was swiss cheese to start with veggies and meat, and then chocolate with fruit to finish. After the Feast, we held the Airing of Grievances during which, according to the Seinfeld episode in question, "you state all the ways that your family members have disappointed you over the previous year." Kind of a dangerous place to go, but the kids handled it with humour and sensitivity and a sense of good fun. I'm thankful we never got to the feats of strength, though there had been talk of tickle fights in lieu.

Then we finished the evening by listening to Erin practice the Bach Chaconne in the kitchen.