Snow and worms

Snow and worms don't go together very well most of the time, but when the worms are cozy inside and the snow is outside, the two can touch our lives at the same time.

It has snowed a ton here in the past week. We've probably had almost three feet of snow. Fluffy deep white pristine stuff. The kids have been outside at all hours playing in it. They create pictures against the windows with packed snow. They dig into treewells to find secret forts. They pretend to be Atlas, carrying giant snowballs on their shoulders. They throw snowballs at each other and at snow-laden trees. They dig tunnels and caves. They build totem poles and snowmen. They sculpt their own lands, shovel and pile, explore and create. They just love the freeform creative control they have over their environment when it's made of snow. Sometimes they'll only come in to eat or sleep.

Today it rained, though, so the snow is compacted a bit and very heavy. The beautiful pillows on the trees are gone and there's lots of tree-crud on the surface of the snow. Today was an indoor day. It's snowing again now, but not quite cold enough for it to accumulate. Hopefully overnight we'll get a layer of fluffy stuff again.

On Monday we made a detour on our way to piano and bought some red wigglers from a lady who vermicomposts. We have had a problem with bears in our outdoor compost bin for years, and I decided it made sense to try composting food scraps indoors rather than outside. We found plans for a layered bin system on the internet and had fun constructing a home for our worms. The kids got to use the power drill, always a hit. We don't have very many worms yet but are hoping they'll reproduce well and by summer we'll be able to dump all our compostable food waste in our bins in the basement.

Erin and Sophie have been keeping very late hours, and this is starting to interfere with family things, so we've discussed shifting things back a little. They're making an effort. It's been hard to do our bedtime readalouds when Noah needs to hit the sack hours before the girls are ready to stop doing whatever they're involved in. And it's been a challenge getting Erin up in time to go places. So she's asked me to awaken her an hour earlier each morning over the next while, and she's going to try to go to bed a bit earlier.

Piano went very well this week. Erin is gobbling up challenging new Sonatina movements in a week or two all of a sudden. They're well-learned and pretty fluid, though not musically completely polished, in very short order. I think this must be due in part at least to the hours she's been spending lately just sitting at the piano playing through hours of easy pieces just for her own entertainment and relaxation. Both her sight-reading and her new-repertoire-learning have really jumped a few notches in the past month or two. Noah had a pretty good lesson too. He's handling the Grade 1 repertoire capably, which is a big jump in difficulty level since this fall. Violin isn't as much at the forefront lately. The balance shifts back and forth... I don't worry.

We've been playing Carcassonne, an interesting strategy game from Germany that I just picked up. It's medieval- and map-oriented and very flexible for imaginative play too. Using the proper rules and scorekeeping, it's a complex game for ages 10+. Without scorekeeping, or with various home-made co-operative rules, it's fun for younger kids. Sophie likes it. Fiona wants to eat the followers and chew on the map tiles, so that's a bit of an issue.

The watercolour paints are out this afternoon. Noah has done a painting of Poseidon. Erin is making a carefully-planned painting of an Egyptian city. Sophie did something bright and mostly non-representational. It's been a quiet day.

The rest of the week has included a visit from a "traveling mascot" from a friend of ours (we are journaling his stay with us and will pass him on to someone else), a swim at the hotsprings pool north of us, dentists' visits for the kids (no cavities, and always a fun experience for them... we have a great dentist), a special lunch out at the local café, some creative cooking, and the usual music, math and reading aloud. I'm trying to get some sewing done but Fiona is not co-operating. Life goes on.

Potluck dinners and finding the middle ground

I had to work this morning and Chuck had an all-day meeting, so my mom stayed with the kids for the first time in months. Fiona was quite okay with her which was a pleasant surprise. When I got home I helped the kids get some lunch. Erin and Noah did violin and piano practising respectively and then it was time for them to head out to art class. Erin balked at first. She pulled out the familiar whine: "But I didn't get to do anything today." Meaning, all she'd done was play since she'd got up at the crack of 10 or whatever.

In the past I reacted to the "get to" part of that statement defensively, perceiving an accusation. I assumed she meant "I wasn't allowed to" or "you didn't provide me with the time or opportunity to." Erin has a dreadful tendency affix blame onto others for anything in her life that doesn't make her happy, so she probably did actually mean to imply that it was my fault, that I somehow prohibited her from doing anything worthwhile or memorable. But that's not actually what she says, and reframing this complaint, if not to her, at least in my own mind, has been helpful.

She, and the others too, often don't "get around to" doing the things they wish they would. They have a tendency to get locked into one particular activity and resist the transition to anything else. It can be K'nex, snowman-building, imaginative Playmobil play, quest games on the computer, acrobatics in the living room, a bath, you name it. Worthwhile stuff, to be sure. But they stay at it so long that they really do regret not fitting other stuff in their day. They get mad at themselves for not "remembering" to make cookies, which is what they call it if I ask them if they'd like to make cookies three times and they say "not now, later."

The ability to enjoyably pursue any activity for as long as it holds the kids' interest is really what drew me to unschooling in the first place. But, especially with Erin, probably because she's the oldest and the most ambitious at this point, I'm noticing that the tunnel vision she gets while engaged in an activity is a problem for her. I wonder whether she needs someone to help her disengage from time to time and maybe structure her life with a bit more formality. And so I wander back into the middle ground between top-down schooling and child-structured unschooling and take a look around for something that makes sense right now.

Someone on an e-mail list I'm on put forth the metaphor of the potluck dinner. "I'm not fond of potlucks. My kids never eat anything at a potluck, being far too busy doing other things. Once the potluck is over, they'll chime "What's for supper? I'm starved!" " This is my kids too, and I think the metaphor explains where I'm at right now with unschooling.

Sometimes simply "strewing their path" creates an immense, chaotic potluck dinner situation. There are so many possibilities and so much freedom that they don't eat and later wish they had. That's what today was for Erin.

I've got picky eaters for kids. What works best for family peace and balanced nutrition is to put a small selection of healthy food choices on the table at mealtime and let the kids load their own plates. Maybe I should be doing a little more of this when it comes to education with the kids, especially Erin. I don't mean sitting her down at the table and saying "okay, time for school; want to do math or grammar or spelling or handwriting?" I mean asking her if she'd like some help setting up some goals or guidelines for herself, some help structuring her days and sticking to the structure.

Today Fiona turned 1. She's got what we think is a hip inflammation. After learning to walk around Christmas she was walking everywhere, but then suddenly stopped 5 days ago. She wouldn't bear weight on her left leg and it was mighty sore if manipulated. We Xrayed her and the films looked fine (needed to rule out an occult fracture and developmental dysplasia of the hip), so we're assuming she'll be back on her feet in another few days. She's not in any pain when crawling or sitting, so we're happy to just watch for now. I still worry a bit; she's getting lots of hugs. She loves us to sing "Happy Birthday" to her, which we've been willing to do about 20 times already because she's doing the ASL sign for "more".

Tonight we'll help her open some simple gifts, eat some fruitcake, finish the practising, and hopefully have a relaxing pre-bedtime family time for a change. Noah's been asking for "happy time in front of the fire together before bed" but his physical energy level (and Erin's too) has been getting in the way. I'm tired and wanting to get to bed before they're ready to settle down, so I nag them into pyjamas and announce I'm too tired for anything other than a short story. Since I'm up at 7 and a couple of times through the night with Fiona, I need to head to bed before they do. We'll try again tonight.

Comparisons

More brushes with the age- and ability-leveled world. Sometimes I feel like I'm getting stranger, more radical, less mainstream, while the rest of the world is busy becoming increasingly conformist. Some of the kids' unschooled friends, who seemed incredibly sheltered and naive two or three years ago are now jubilantly bouncing into tween-dom, complete with a burgeoning awareness of achievement milestones like grade levels and popular culture.

Tonight my kids have a friend staying overnight. She spent a lot of time explaining how great her competitive gymnastics program is. When Noah said "maybe when the weather is better we could do gymnastics outside together like we did last summer." And the friend replied (I kid you not, this is a direct quote) "Hmmm, well.... I'd be open to that I guess. I wonder how I could coach you on grass. Well, I guess I could try." Honestly! Eight months ago she and Noah and Erin were in the same program and all doing very well and loving practising handstands on the lawn together.

The questions of so many of the kids' friends have to do with sizing up other kids' rank in the pecking order:

What piece are you working on in piano? I'm going to be starting Grade 2 piano soon, my teacher says so. Do you know how to multiply yet? I know all my timestables. How long are the books you can read? I read one that was 200 pages. Yeah, well, but mine had really small words. And an advanced vocabulary. So who is your best friend? And your second best? Hmmm... she's my fourth-best. My second-best is so-and-so.

I guess I'm just surprised that this comparative orientation is so obvious even in the kids who always seemed so out-of-the-mainstream to me. We meet it at art class, at music recitals, at orchestra, on playdates.

Fortunately it just seems to roll off my kids' backs. I ask them about it later, and they don't even remember the comments or think them no big deal. So I guess it's my hangup.

We got our water back about five days ago. Hurrah! Life is back on an even keel.

We had a successful piano recital today. Erin and Noah played both violin and piano. Erin's violin piece got a special "whoop!" from the audience. Noah did a quite amazing thing and spoke aloud to announce his violin piece when his teacher forgot to do so. Clear, confident voice. He forgot to mention the composer, but this was a spur-of-the-moment thing, so I was really impressed anyway.

Noah and Sam connected again. They'd met at the Christmas piano party. Sam is a more recent piano beginner than Noah, having started this September (Noah last February) but they seem like two peas in a pod... both are very talented and serious pianists, verbally precocious, 7 years old and budding composers. And boys! Someday they'll be great duet partners, I'll bet. Apparently there's a boys' piano event coming up. Sam may or may not be there... his family will be trekking through Central America for three months this spring.

Tonight the kids listened to about two hours of East Indian folktales on audiotape. Erin did some math (multiplying decimals). Sophie blew me away with her math, spontaneously sitting down with her Miquon Orange book and working through one of the "putting it all together" pages without batting an eye. I thought she was still needing help verbalizing math problems to make sense of them, but she was managing 13+2-4 and (3x2)+(2x3) and 11x0 and 15-2 and (3x5)-5 with no help at all. And enjoying the challenge!

Noah declined to do any math today. He has been adding double-digit numbers in his head for a long time, and has reached the point in Singapore where the regrouping algorithms are taught. He's balking a little. He doesn't like the "cookbookish" approach. What he does with 78+17 is to add 8+17 and get 25 and then add that to 70. This bit about disciplining yourself to start with the ones and regroup anything over 9 into the tens column bothers him for some reason. He understands it but it seems like a "long boring" way to do the problems. He resists memorizing an algorithm with the same energy that Erin leaps to do so. Anyway, yesterday I finally showed him how learning the algorithm in its simple form (double-digit addition) would allow him to use it for complex problems that wouldn't be suitable for mental math. I showed him a four four-digit numbers in a stack and showed him how the algorithm let me find their sum. He liked that. Suddenly the algorithm seemed useful and he leapt right into problems of that level of difficulty. This kid definitely needs to see the big picture first, before dealing with the little details.

We started making our worm bin. This entailed measuring and drawing dots on the bottom of a Rubbermaid bin and then using the power drill to make about 200 1/4" holes in the bottom. The kids had fun with the power drill. One bin almost got done before Fiona started crying. This will be a stacked three-bin system for vermicomposting in the basement.

At bedtime I read a chapter from a pretty good, pretty funny book about composers, "Why Beethoven Threw the Stew..." We read that because we didn't want to subject the sleepover friend to chapters from the three novels we're in the midst of. This week's novels are "Inkheart" by Cornelia Funke, "The Monsters of Morley Manor" by Bruce Coville and "The Bronze Bow" by Elizabeth George Speare. I'm totally enthralled by the first and last of these. We'd never read anything by Speare before, but "Sign of the Beaver" and "the Witch of Blackbird Pond" have jumped right to the top of my wishlist. (Of course my wish list is relatively uninfluential, as the kids choose the readalouds. But I can influence subtly!)

Contagious Music Woes

We're still without a permanent water supply, though we did manage to pipe a couple of hundred gallons into our resevoir today. My mom (who is having a renovation done this week while she's away) has her water main back on again, so even if she doesn't have a toilet or shower for us to use, we can do laundry there. So things are looking up a bit.

We've discovered a simple pleasure: doing dishes after supper while Chuck reads aloud. My kids seem never to tire of water play, and washing dishes seems to count as a form of water play. Normally the dishes mostly go through the dishwasher, and Chuck or I wash a couple of the big pots. But this week we're conserving water. So in the afternoon I melt a couple of gallons of water from snow. After supper Sophie, Noah and Erin share the washing, drying and putting away, I carry Fiona and putter around cleaning and tidying tables and counters, and Chuck reads aloud to us from the new Cornelia Funke novel. We are all just loving this ritual.

Today the kids spent the bulk of their day with K'nex. About three hours in the morning and two or three in the afternoon. Lots of building, and then lots of imaginative play combining K'nex constructions with Playmobil characters. It went on forever. About half of what they make is from schematic instructions and about half is creative. Sophie does more free-form stuff than the older two, probably because the more complex schematics are still beyond her a bit. We have a motor kit and a solar kit, and combined it's a lot of K'nex. We've had most of it for 2 or 3 years and it's never been this popular. In the past one or two kids would play with it for an hour or two a few days in a row and then it would get ignored for a couple of months or more. But lately the stuff is very hot around here.

I've started making smoothies for lunch as often as I can. Before Christmas I bought an ancient VitaMix off eBay and gradually I've been getting more and more radical with what I put in the smoothies I serve to the kids. From frozen banana, milk and chocolate instant pudding mix, we're now doing a tutti-fruiti thing with rhubarb, berries, apples and some citrus fruits and today I sneaked a carrot and a beet in and no one complained. Erin's a very picky eater, so this is terrific. I managed to pull the kids away from the K'nex briefly with smoothie and cheese.

I spent some time at my mom's doing laundry. Chuck and I did some water-line work. I took down the Christmas tree finally. The kids watched two episodes of David Attenborough's "The Life of Mammals": "Chiselers" and "Meat-eaters".

Music was terrible today, which is one of the reasons I chose to write a blog entry. You get the good, but also the bad and the ugly.

Noah happily settled down to do some piano just before supper. After supper he went to finish it and had two major meltdowns over new pieces. He's at the same stage on the piano where Erin was afflicted by the same thing. The complexity of new pieces is increasing a lot, and he doesn't seem to access or trust his fairly decent note-reading skills in this context ... he just shuts down and gets upset. I need to be a little more pro-active at "chunking down" his new pieces so that he doesn't tackle too much at once and get overwhelmed. He's quite good at chunking down on his own when he's polishing up a previously-learned piece, so I think it'll come but he needs help now. But once he's melted down he really resists any of this sort of direction. Anyway, I helped him settle down and make some decent progress through his new pieces. But his fuse was already short, and when he went off to do violin, he didn't want any input from me, even though we'd both agreed his new piece needed a look-see from me badly. The best we could agree on was for me to watch and listen but not comment, reserving my suggestions and corrections for the start of tomorrow's practising. Okay. I listened, made note, and kept my mouth shut. He wasn't very happy, but when I left after hearing his new piece he decided to keep practising and did, it seems, some good work.

But this stuff is contagious. Erin started at piano and had a huge meltdown over her scales. She'd been asked to review all 12 melodic minor scales this week and to practice them upside down (which is really quite different for both the ear and the hands) and once she got into the first one with non-standard fingering she had a little trouble and as she repeated it, it got worse and worse as her frustration escalated and I could see the black train rolling into the station. She wouldn't let me leave, wanted my help, but covered her ears or said "you're rude!" every time I said anything. I suggested she just skip today's practising but she wouldn't agree. So I sat there, and she sneered at me and said "well, HELP okay?" and started pounding on the piano, two low notes together, about 100 pounds per minute. I sat there for a couple of minutes and then left for a time out for me. She carried on pounding the piano like a machine, the same two notes at 100/minute for almost 20 minutes, until her boredom outweighed her anger and then wandered off for her own time-out and eventually emerged chipper. Whew.... intense kid!

In the meantime I went off to remind Sophie to practice and that we were going to work together on some things. She said she didn't want to practice (first time she's ever said that!) and that I could give her violin away because she didn't want to play it any more (ditto). I told her it would be sad if she quit because she's put lots of work in and is playing very well, and that if she changed her mind she could let me know. In a few minutes she came out crying and said she'd changed her mind and wanted to start violin again tomorrow. I said that was fine and that if she felt like doing some playing on her own today that would be fine too. She did... she went off and played for quite a while in her bedroom.

Erin got out a piano practising board-game that she hadn't used in ages and spontaneously sat down at the piano and did all her practising except the scales. Then she went and did her violin without any reminders. Go figure.

So in the end everyone did all their practising. I can't believe it. Sort of reminds me of alcoholics going into recovery after "hitting bottom," LOL! I really expected all three kids to leave at least some of their practising today. What a nutty day.

Fiona will be a year old in a couple of weeks but has I think officially entered toddlerdom already. She's now walking most of the time and crawling only occasionally. It's been a change just in the past couple of days. Noah is about to lose his two front teeth. Erin turned 10 this week. Milestones, milestones.

Water troubles

The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. First to January 3rd. Things were going well yesterday morning. We had plans for crafts and expeditions and social events. We wanted to meet my mom to go XC skiing. We got up, dressed, fed, bundled up, and set off. When we go to the trailhead near the lake it was way too windy. Windchill factor pushed the temperature way below the minus 13 Celsius we were dressed for. Noah had his hood, but had forgotten his hat. We drove home, got his hat, and set off for a different trail. By the time we got everyone out (the van hadn't really warmed up) Sophie was too cold from all the sitting around. She wanted to go home. I knew she just needed to get moving to warm up, but it wasn't to be. We went to my mom's place for hot chocolate.

Then we went home and had lunch. The kids did some imaginative play in the loft. Erin started work on yet another notebook of names and characters and an imaginary language. Noah and I tidied a bit. The kids did lots of playdough play. Then we started a major tidying/cleaning because we'd invited a friend of the kids' for a sleepover the next night. We phoned and made the driving/visiting arrangements for today.

For the previous couple of days we'd been flooding our ice rink. Our downstream neighbours had been having water supply problems, so we'd despaired of being able to flood the rink this winter. Then we were told they'd got a secondary line functioning and weren't relying on our overflow for their homes, so we started flooding. After 2 days (very slow flooding because we don't have much water inflow into our reservoir this winter) we were about halfway there. But then Ken from down the road dropped by yesterday afternoon and said their secondary line had quit functioning. So I shut off the tap and brought the hose in. Chuck checked our water inflow after supper ... very slow but still coming. I washed some diapers. Erin worked on planning our as-yet-imaginary future European vacation using atlas and some travel books.

Noah and Sophie did some math and practiced. Erin started her piano practising. We had supper. Erin finished her piano, did her violin and some math. We lost power and internet for a while. It came back on. We did the bedtime reading. We talked about doing some marbling on paper today.

This morning Noah got up early with me. He did piano practising and math and helped me do a bit of tidying. We used coins for place-value work with regrouping and he really enjoyed this, as he's recently become a fan of money. Fiona awoke. I did a bit of work on Erin's birthday gift (a custom-printed hand-bound journal with lock). She woke up so I tucked that away. Then the sleepover friend phoned to say she was feeling sick and they had no water, so they needed to stay home. Then Chuck phoned to say he'd checked our water on the way to work and it had stopped and our reservoir was only 2/3 full thanks to the load of diapers.

Argghhh...

So today has been entirely focused on figuring out how to deal with the water situation. We need to bypass 350 feet of frozen pipe. Chuck is on call so it's hard for him to find the time and even if he finds it he can be called away at any moment. We have signs on the toilet and the faucets ("Think Water!", "Don't Flush!"). We talked about why spaghetti is wasteful of water but soup is not. Called the friend who runs the hardware store and put our name on a 300-foot coil of 1 1/4" PVC which we might be able to put in tomorrow. We talked about what mess-free, water-free crafts we could do.

It's really cold here today. About 0 Fahrenheit (minus 17 C). For us that's really cold and it's led to lots of physics-related conversation. I've lived colder places but our house and water supply are not really built for this temperature. We have large frost-cicles growing on the hinges of our front door. So we talked about the water-carrying capacity of air at different temperatures. We talked about the new low-e double-glazed windows we put in and how well they're working... our kitchen/dining area is actually habitable right now if you don't get too close to the front door. We talked about the drying and warping of the door that's causing the air leaks. We talked about possible ways to solve this problem. Settled on shoving towels all around the jamb for now. We worked out how many gallons of snow we'd have to melt to do a load of laundry (just hypothetically!). We discussed rate of flow vs. surface area considerations in choosing a diameter for a bypass water line that hopefully won't freeze (it'll all be above ground).

At least we can bathe at my mom's. At least I have half a pack of disposable diapers on hand. Small mercies worth being grateful for.

Sophie drew a neat picture this morning using the math set (protractor, compass, etc.). The kids have been cutting official-looking graphics out of discarded medical magazines and gluing them onto cardstock to make "credit cards" and "club cards" for their wallets. Erin is really into the idea of a European vacation and the possibility of actually seeing Venice and Rome and London.

I wish to announce a New Year's resolution. I've never made one before. I'm going to try to do 20 minutes of housekeeping every morning before going on the internet.

Yeah, it's not much, but this won't be easy for me. I am not by nature a productive morning person. I love sitting down at the computer with my coffee for a relaxing me-centred time but I don't like getting busy during my magical hour before the kids are up. But if I'm going to get a handle on the housework enough to keep me happy I need to change something, and I think I have to sacrifice some of that time. If I'm consistent, it will be over 2 extra hours of week devoted to tidying and laundry. It should make a difference.

The New Year begins

I got up abut the time Chuck went to work. Usually Erin hears Fiona wake up from her bedroom and brings her out to me. So this morning when I heard Fiona babble from the living room I assumed she and Erin were there. When Erin didn't respond, I went out. There was Fiona, alone. She'd woken up in "our" bed, crawled down to the end of the bedrail, slipped out, headed out of the room and down the hall, come down a flight of stairs, navigated another hallway, and come into the living room before announcing herself. Wow! Half and hour later after Erin and Sophie got up, she climbed the ladder to the top bunk. She's 11 months, just starting to walk. We have to start being a bit more vigilant about closing doors and keeping an eye on her.

I got a call from a friend saying that the kids' cross-country program ("Jackrabbits") was starting in an informal way, and that we should be at the golf course at 11 if we wanted to be involved. By this time it was 10, so we made porridge, got everyone dressed and equipment into the van and headed out. Sophie had a meltdown. I blew it because we were late and I got really angry. Turned out she had to pee and was feeling guilty that she hadn't peed when I'd encouraged everyone to do so before we left home. Erin and Noah joined the ski group. Sophie and Fiona and I stayed in the parking lot until it was empty and then did a long involved pee-thing, getting her naked in the snow, then dressed again... longjohns, sweats, snowpants, jacket, mitts, boots, the whole deal off and then on again.

I put Fiona in the backpack and Sophie and I skied off to find the group. They were having a ball, but Sophie didn't feel up to joining in, so she and I just skied around a little together for a while. I introduced her to a new friend, mom to a new local unschooling family of four kids, 2-11. In a village of 600, it's amazing to find another family like this. Sophie, Donna and I hung out and watched the rest of the kids. Noah loved downhilling and trying jumps like Nicholas, the 13yo coach and competitive racer. Erin had a blast skiing the flats as fast as she could with Annie, yet another local homeschooler who is just 7 but a phenomenal nordic racer (little sister to Nicholas).

After about 2 hours of skiing, Erin and Noah headed off to Annie & Nicholas' place for the afternoon. Sophie, Fiona and I went home. Fiona was exhausted and fell asleep on my shoulder, so I did some website work. Then Sophie and I got out some Sculpey clay and made some stuff.

We made hot chocolate and then drove out to pick up E & N. Also picked up Bob, one of the new unschooling kids in town, who is 11. Nice kid. Drove him home, necessitating a 20 minute detour. Noah told jokes for a while. Then we listened to some of "Mozart's Magical Voyage" or whatever it's called: the "Classical Kids" music&audio CD about Mozart. Then we were home.

At home I got supper ready. Erin, Noah and Sophie made some more Sculpey things. We discovered the kids had won their first eBay auction, for a CD-ROM they'd owned before, scratched and missed having. I beamed a Paypal payment and they coughed up $8.60 from their piggy bank. We ate supper.

Noah and Sophie played Age of Mythology on the computer. Fiona practiced walking. Noah and Sophie watched a bit of a show about free-diving. The kids ran around playing some silly hide-and-seek-rescue game. Erin and Noah looked through some Usborne "Great Search" books.

Nobody wanted to do their violin practising, but Erin had promised to do her violin every day until her birthday, so we did that together. Noah did a pretty good piano practising on his own. Erin just did some sight-reading, playing through selections from a book of "Best of Bach".

Everyone did some math. Noah did a Singapore exercise on double-digit subtraction, Erin one on rates (multiplication and division word problems), and Sophie a Miquon page combining addition and multiplication. She noticed that multiplication gives a larger answer than addition except when one of the numbers is 1 or 0.

Erin got out a book the medical clinic was given by a forestry firm about "Our Working Forests" and showed incredibly good critical thinking and skepticism. She kept saying sarcastically "They say that because a forest fire killed a lot of trees it's okay to kill more from logging. Like, a forest fire killed ten million trees, so hey, let's kill five million more!" She picked holes in a ton of the PR smear.

The kids helped Fiona practice walking. They're so excited, and sit around in different corners of the living room delightedly summoning her from one of them to the other. She loves it.

Pre-bedtime readalouds right now are:

"The Monsters of Morley Manor" by Bruce Coville (Sophie's pick)

"The Assasins of Rome" by Caroline Lawrence

"The Thief Lord" by Cornelia Funke

Generally we read two chapters of the first, one of the second and three or more of the last.

Christmas Preparations

I'm feeling a fair bit better about what's happening around here. We've had a bit more productive time, less sitting in front of the computer all day, less conflict over things like practising and tidying.

Fiona has cut three premolars in the past couple of weeks, so neither of us are sleeping terribly well at night, and I think that was sending me towards a bit of panic. But for whatever reason (not that we're sleeping better, but maybe just reduced expectations?) I'm doing better.

I've got all the Christmas gifts that need to be mailed into the post and most of the made gifts are finished. The kids and I have put by some Christmas baking. The kids have been drawing and painting, playing outside and playing creatively indoors.

Noah has been devouring easy chapter books for pleasure. His decoding is now easy enough to give him the fluency he needs to read longer books without fatigue. He is very pleased with himself and has joined the ranks of readers-in-bed. The Magic Treehouse and Boxcar Children books are all back on the main shelves and being loved all over again. Today when we were in Nelson, Noah mentioned that he can't not read any more. "I'm eating my lunch and looking around and the words on signs are just there, in my brain. I don't have to try to read them. They just come into my head by themselves."

Sophie can read a ton! Almost any word using basic short-vowel sounds, regardless of length, and some long-vowel words too. I first wondered a week or so ago when she read "Montana's" off a restaurant sign. I thought to myself "this kid is learning to read!" I posted in another thread about making a little book for her of words she can read. We sat down for 20 minutes and I wrote down a hundred or so words, and if she could read them we wrote them in her little book.

Erin has read the LOTR trilogy twice in the past 2 weeks. Now she's working on the Lost Years of Merlin Trilogy by T.A. Barron. We only have the first two; she's on her second time through them. Erin, Noah and Sophie spent about 3 hours one morning this week building a big snowman. It's considerably taller than the tallest of them and they were justifiably proud of it.

We don't have our rink started yet :-( . It's been either too warm or snowing. Today it's the latter. This week I met an unschooling family that is new to our area. They have 4 kids, ages 2-11 and seem really nice. For a rural village of 600, this is a terrific boon to us. We promised to have them up for some skating as soon as our rink is made. So far I've only met the parents, so it remains to be seen whether the kids "click" or not socially but the chances are pretty good, I think.

Monday this week was our regular Nelson routine, with gymnastics, grocery-shopping and piano lessons. Piano lessons were productive. Our regular teacher will be back next Monday. Sophie (all 5 years 0 months and 30 lbs of her) was asked to join the competitive stream at gymnastics. Egads! Noah was invited into competitive after last year's session. That wasn't so surprising to me... he's a boy (I guessed they wanted boys), had been attending for over a year, and was clearly very accomplished compared to the mostly older kids in his recreational class. I guess it was flattering for Sophie to be asked, but competitive at age 5, a mere 6 sessions into her gymnastics "career"? I don't put my kids in competitive situations, and the comp. stream practices on Thursdays and Saturdays, so it was a no-brainer for me. Still, I couldn't believe how quickly she was pounced upon. Maybe they need the enrollment?

For the past 4 years I've put together a CD of the kids' musical output as a gift to extended family. The first two years it was just Erin. Last year Noah was ready to play a few easy violin pieces. He hadn't really started piano, but he played some melodies for fun on piano too, and Sophie did a 15-second sampler of her violin skills (she'd just started practising violin a couple of weeks before). This year Noah has some pretty impressive piano offerings, including a couple of nice compositions, and Sophie has plenty of violin to play. Erin's piano tracks are partly collected... we have a couple more to do over the next week. In the past, finding a decent accompaniment for the violin stuff has been a challenge. I can do the simplest stuff, but by Suzuki Book 2 I'm starting to feel out of my depth on some pieces. This year we found a good accompanist for the first time... Erik, the substitute piano teacher, who plays so well, likes the kids, is an excellent and enthusiastic accompanist, and needs the money. What a luxury! Noah, Erin and I made a special trip to Nelson today in the middle of a snowstorm to spend a wonderful relaxed 2 hours chatting and playing with Erik and in the midst of it all catching enough good takes on the Minidisc Recorder. Chuck stayed with the younger two for 3 hours this morning and then my mom came up and stayed with them for the last couple of hours. Sophie apparently talked my mom's ear off the entire time she was here and read all hundred words to her out of her little handmade book.

After I collect the last of the piano tracks from Erin and Noah, and Sophie's Book 1 violin pieces (probably this weekend) I'll have to get started on the liner notes. These are always great fun for me, and this year we've got a colour printer. I compile photos, artwork, track listings and "biographies" of the kids.

Readalouds lately have been "Winnie the Pooh" (which of course we've read in the past, but it's been a couple of years), "Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger" by Louis Sachar (very weird and funny), "Eragon" (which we finally finished!), "The Golden Goblet" (author escapes me... set in ancient Egypt and very well-written and enjoyable) and we're about to start "The Thief Lord" by Cornelia Funke.

A couple of weeks ago Noah expressed some interest in the Singapore Math program. Erin has been using it for a couple of years. I've had the Miquon books available for my kids at the earlier levels, but didn't have Singapore except beyond the 2B level. Noah, who has a ton of math smarts, simply didn't seem to be moving along in Miquon the way I expected. It wasn't getting him fired up. He was seldom interested in doing formal math. That was fine with me. But he looked at a Singapore 3A book we had from when Erin worked through it and decided it looked "fun and easy". I had him do bits of the SingaporeMath.com placement tests, because I figured his working level was probably more like 1B. But he tested out a solid 2A or a weak 2B. So I ordered the 2A/2B levels for him, figuring we'll use 2A for review and to adjust to the program and fill in any holes. We've had it for 2 days and has done 7 exercises and is really enjoying it. So far so good. It definitely seems to be his kind of math program: clear and logical and bare-bones with a nice presentation. Sophie's continued to do a couple of pages a week from the end of Miquon Orange. Erin, who was enthusiastically finishing up the stuff she'd skipped over previously in Singapore 5B, has given up on math for December, it seems. Okay. She's got other stuff on the go... lots of reading and crafts, most of it very private and self-directed. And she's been relatively easy from an interpersonal standpoint during the last week or two. That counts for a lot around here.

Today started with the snowy 90-minute-plus drive to Nelson, the accompaniment session, lunch and then the drive back. This afternoon is practising and a bit of play. We're having supper at grandma's house, followed by the annual ritual of a sleepover by the older kids after they help her decorate her Christmas tree. So Chuck, Fiona and I will have a quiet evening together. And then Fiona will keep me up all night again :-). Ah well.

Unproductivity

I'm feeling like we're being very unproductive, so it's definitely time to start observing and documenting what's happening in a bit more detail.

Right now the three kids are improvising together on the piano. Sophie's got a bass vamp going, Erin is playing a chromatic sequence in the middle of the piano, and Noah is noodling some odd arpeggios up in the upper register. They're having a hoot.

Today was an orchestra day. Erin got a chance to play her Haydn piano concerto movement with the string orchestra accompaniment. She really really enjoyed this. In the past she'd always rather stay with the violins in string environments, rather than sticking out as a pianist. But she's quite confident and comfortable in the orchestra now and was happy to be the "star soloist on a different instrument".

This morning Chuck and I had to pick up a sofabed for my mom at a local catalogue store outlet and move it into her house. We paid Erin $5 to run interference with Fiona for the 45 minutes it took to heave it into and out of the truck and get doors at mom's house off their hinges and back on again. Erin and Fiona came with us on our errand. We let Sophie and Noah stay home alone together. I gave Noah clear instructions about using the phone if he needed to, about looking out for Sophie and about not taking risks. He did very well. He was dying for the chance to use the phone... he's really taken with the phone lately. So when the phone rang at my mom's I knew it would be him. He just wanted to tell me that he might want me to help him with one of his piano pieces later when I got home. Okaybye. .

Sophie got sick while we were gone. When I came home she was quietly sobbing in her room with a puke bowl. She'd retreated there without letting Noah know she wasn't well. It didn't seem likely that she had been worried about being at home alone, or that she was lonely, but I wondered anyway if that was it because it had come on so suddenly in the 45 minutes we were gone. But then she spent the morning vomiting bilious stuff. So she really was sick. But by lunch time she had an appetite and felt a good bit better by the afternoon.

Noah and Erin were outside on the driveway hill sledding with the new snowsled for about 4 hours. Erin had trouble doing her piano practising because she kept wanting to sight-read through the new Grade 6 repertoire album. She did some practising, but skimped a lot.

I hope we can get some of the things on our "to-do" list done in the next few days. Gingerbread houses, the rink set up and flooded, some Christmas gifts made, maybe get back at some math games, historical fiction, painting, crafts. We shall see. I feel myself getting frustrated and short-fused about the aimlessness and wasted time... I feel the clock ticking down towards Christmas and want all my ducks in a row before then. I think I'm spending too much time on the computer myself. That's part of it. The laundry is piling up, the toy room is a mess. These are my issues, not the kids'.

Neopets

Town day. Gymnastics and piano lessons with "Eric", the substitute. Eric worked both kids a good bit harder than he had the first time they met. Good, productive lessons. We had extra time at lunch after grocery-shopping, so I read a chapter of "Eragon" aloud to the kid on a bench in the mall. We bought fixings for gingerbread houses. Erin has discovered the Neopets site and wants to join a homeschoolers' guild. We talked a bit about the fact that the site serves a marketing purpose and decided that so long as she was aware of that, the educational value was worthwhile. So I printed out the parental permission form to give her access to message boards. She'd love to spend hours a day on the neopets site. Fortunately we have a dial-up modem, a single phone line and a dad-guy who needs access to the phone line when he's on call. That will hopefully keep things in balance.

Weekend in Kelowna

Chuck had a medical conference in Kelowna (a small-to-medium-sized city) on Saturday and we decided to tag along. Originally we assumed it would be Christmas shopping weekend, but I worked really hard to simplify our Christmas gift-giving this year and am making almost everything and cutting back, so there was no shopping to do. We decided to go anyway, because the kids have been dying for the chance to swim, and we know a good motel with 2bdrm suites and a nice pool.

So on Thursday we picked Erin and Noah up at art class and headed out. Chuck just got himself a laptop with a DVD player, and we plugged it in in the back of the minivan so that the kids could watch "Blue Planet" episodes throughout the 4-hour drive. This was a huge hit.

True to predictions, the kids spent 3-6 hours a day in the pool. Noah went from being a "barely swimmer" in the shallow end to doing proper dives in the deep end on the first day. Erin was a little frustrated that it took her longer to learn to dive but she managed. This has definitely been Noah's year to shine. Lots of things are coming easily to him all of a sudden, including piano, composition, reading, gymnastics and now swimming.

We did the usual juggling of needs and priorities when it came to choosing venues for meals out. We spent a great couple of hours in a mega-bookstore. Sophie got lost, though, which was sad. She wandered out of the children's section when she lost sight of me around a bookshelf. I thought dh, who had gone off to wander through adult non-fiction, had her. Then I got paged. She was a little teary but none the worse for wear. We had a reiterative discussion about rules for staying together and about what to do if you think you're lost. I'd forgotten to go over that one in a while. Noah and Erin know it all, but Sophie's still just barely five. She needs to hear it regularly. Anyway, I tried to stay low-key. She was a bit upset and already knew she'd made some mistakes.

We got some great books. Can't wait to get started on Cornelia Funke's "The Thief Lord".

I went shopping consignment clothing. I stopped at the music store to get Grade 6 level books for Erin and Grade 1 stuff for Noah. They were both very excited. They're being "promoted" this month by their piano teacher. We bought some dishes and did a warehouse store stop.

On the way home the kids watched LOTR "The Two Towers" on DVD (a new purchase).

Piano takeover

Recently our home has been taken over by the piano. It has crept up on me but it's quite astonishing, and is perhaps the most persuasive argument for a monolith of a real, acoustic piano rather than a more portable digital one. It's always there, en route between the bathroom and the computer, between the toys and the kitchen, between the dining room and the bedroom. It's always on. It has an inviting two-person bench, good lighting and the warmth of the woodstove radiating from across the room. You can't miss it, and it wants to be played.

My guess would be that it gets played at least once an hour by someone in our household. Noah probably sits down and tinkles away on it at least four or five times a day. He's there for a couple of minutes playing through a new piece he's working on or running through an old one, or dabbling away at improvisation or sight-reading for ten or fifteen minutes. Sophie is often right there, or taking turns with him, trying out melodies, imitating what she's heard the other kids do. Erin is there at least two or three times a day, often for long stretches of playing through old pieces or sightreading through supplementary stuff. Then there's the daily practising.

It's a delightful state of affairs. I feel so lucky. We have a lot of violin music around here too, and sometimes the violin catches a bit of momentum from piano, but piano is definitely a different kettle of fish. It's relaxing and sociable and inviting by its physical presence in the living room, and maybe because I'm not a pianist, the kids are free to have a greater sense of "ownership" over the piano than they do over their violin studies.

Sophie and Noah participated in the regional Suzuki Group Class last weekend. Noah was the more reluctant of the two, but he was fine once he got going. They were the two littlest kids there and held their own very well indeed. The event was mostly for the benefit of a group of 11-18-year-old violin students who will be participating in a youth exchange program to Ottawa, Canada, this spring. They've been meeting to rehearse for a couple of months already. This class was their chance to include, and also show off a little to, the younger students who aren't doing the exchange trip. Because Erin hasn't been involved in the (competitive) music festival or the youth orchestra in Nelson (she does our community orchestra in New Denver instead), she'd had little to no contact with these "older, more advanced" students. It was nice for her to have a chance to play her more advanced repertoire in a group. In our local group classes we focus on the Book 1-3 repertoire because we have so few students beyond that level. Anyway, there was a lot of ogling and pointing at all my kids, but Erin especially, because she's considerably more advanced than many of the teens who thought they were the "senior students" in the region. And she's so petite. Fortunately she was having fun during the snacktime afterwards with some of the younger kids she knew, and seemed pretty oblivious to the attention. I hate hearing "yeah, well, they homeschool, so that's why" muttered defensively by other parents and students. Honestly... yes, she practices more than she would if she went to school. But on the other hand, we chose to unschool in large part so that our kids could delve deeply into things (like music) that inspire them. And just because she has more time to do more work doesn't negate the fact that she actually does more work. It's not an "unfair advantage"... anyone else is free to homeschool for the same advantages. (Sorry about that little rant.)

It's snowed a fair bit here this week. There's been lots of outdoor play and lots of great discussions. Olives aren't a good choice for a snowman's eyes, because their salinity melts the snow. Who would have thought that a snow day would lead to "science lab"? Well, I'm sure it comes as no surprise to those of you reading this board. We have about 15 cm of nice fluffy stuff on the ground, with more falling today. We've starting packing snow and levelling a surface for our annual outdoor skating rink. If the weather is cold enough after the weekend, we might start flooding then.

Today we're heading to "the city" (Kelowna) for a whirlwind weekend. We'll be there Friday and Saturday, returning Sunday. Chuck is doing a medical conference part of the time we're there. The main reason we're going is to do a holiday-stockpiling bulk grocery shopping, get to a big bookstore (where Cornelia Funke's novels are at the top of my list) and to hang out at a nice motel where the kids can swim in a pool for 8 hours a day! Chuck will have the vehicle Friday and part of Saturday, which is just fine since I don't relish packing the kids around department stores and malls by myself. I hate shopping anyway.

Our current readalouds are "Eragon" (finally almost finished! and it's great!) by Chris Paolini, "The Golden Goblet", set in ancient Egypt, and "Winnie the Pooh" (which we last read in its entirety when Sophie was too little to remember much of it). Bedtime has been slipping later and later as the kids demand more and more reading. We have to start sooner in the evening! I'm falling to sleep by the time we get to the second chapter in the third book!

Noah has become a "read in bed reader". So I guess he's quietly crossed the threshold into "independent reading for pleasure". He still prefers stuff with pictures but is comfortable with smaller and smaller fonts and more words per page as the weeks roll by. He's feeling really good about his skills.

Must go pick Erin and Noah up from art class and head across the mountains to the big city!

Snow

Tuesday night was orchestra. Erin is playing very well now in the first violin section. It took her a while to feel comfortable there (she was a 2nd violin last year, a 3rd the year before) but now she's got confidence and is playing nicely. Wednesday was violin lessons. I mentioned the difficulty I've been having getting Erin started on her practising, and her occasional categorical refusal to practice. My mom (her teacher) asked her what the trouble was and Erin said "It takes too long." So my mom, bless her, made up a little schedule for this week's practising that has every minute mapped out, and is so completely bare-bones that it only totals 20 minutes of practising (Erin's been expected to do ~an hour a day for the past 2 years, at least on "good days"). She drew 6 circles at the bottom of the schedule and said "Fill one of these in every day you practice. But only do 20 minutes! And come back with all circles filled."

So since Wednesday, Erin has done two twenty-minute practicings a day. She's quite delighted at the idea of surprising her grandma with the extra work. Hurrah! Something is working on the practising front this week!

It snowed here this week, and the snow has stayed on the ground. The kids have been outside for long hours every day, sledding, throwing snowballs, playing games. Perhaps the added light and activity have helped make Erin a more agreeable member of the family.

We've been teaching Fiona to say "cat". She now says "gha!" or "kha!" with considerable delight when she sees our cat (or, I confess, our dog). She knows it's a crowd-pleaser. She says "Kha!" and then looks for a sibling or parent with a big grin on her face, waiting for the smiles and squeals of approval. Our little performing seal. Way fun!

Art class this week was paper maché. We've done lots of that at home, so it was less exciting than usual, but Erin was pleased with how much faster she was getting her layers on than the less experienced kids.

Erin read "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King" (2nd and 3rd books of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy) in less than 24 hours. She slept about 6 hours, had a violin lesson but otherwise read almost straight through. Then she wanted to watch LOTR1 on video again... twice. So more screen-time than usual this week, but with all the outdoor play that seemed okay. We've agreed we'll buy LOTR2 on DVD while we're in the city in a week and watch it on Chuck's new DVD-equipped laptop. Erin also wrote a neat opening paragraph for a novel. I can't remember every word exactly, but it was more or less this:

My name is Esel Isingdorot and I am the last of my kind, the race from which all others are descended. Father used to tell me I had the courage and strength of the dwarves, the beauty and spirit of the elves, the wisdom of the wizards, the caution and speed of the horses, the humour of the hobbits and, when provoked to anger, even the firey temper of Sauron himself. And well it may be so.

I laughed at the temper bit. Yup, that's Erin . The nice thing was that she hand-wrote this in a spiral notebook. Her handwriting is finally getting to the stage where it doesn't derail her creativity. She did some dedicated work on handwriting a year or so ago which I guess gave her enough of a foundation for further gradual improvement. (Her printing was extremely primitive before that, especially for a kid who had all sorts of strong literacy and fine-motor skills.)

Noah asked about starting Singapore Math. He found Erin's old 2B workbook and loved the pictorial stuff. He's been struggling a bit with Miquon at the Red Book level. We went through a Singapore placement test. I was expecting him to place somewhere around 1B since Miquon hadn't touched on a lot of the stuff in the placement test, but he got almost every questions and is easily at a 2A level. Not only that but he loved the way the problems were presented and really grasped them easily. So I wonder if Miquon, much as I love its manipulative-based "fuzzy math" approach, isn't the right program for him. He never wanted to use the rods, and I think sometimes Miquon's efforts to make the computation simpler (through manipulatives or patterns or arrays) stymied him; they were like clutter in the way to him. He seems keen on bookwork lately... sits down with a music theory book all on his own every day ... and is asking for Singapore 2A so I think I'll order it for him this week.

Erin's making envelopes out of recycled orchestral scores. Together we made a trace-around template (discarded X-ray films from the hospital are great for this!). She's cutting, scoring, folding and gluing. We found a recipe for licky-sticky paste on the internet. It uses white glue, vinegar and oil of peppermint. I thought "eww... licking white glue?" but when we mixed it up it smelled (and tasted!) just like the real thing. So she's using it. Our white glue is non-toxic, after all. These will be a Christmas gift for her grandma. She's made a dozen or so. The pages we're using are from nicely yellowed 50- to 70-year-old orchestra parts, the last page in each part, which is blank on one side. The music is printed on the inside of the envelope; the outside is blank for the address and stamp. They look really nice.

Sophie's done some really hard work on violin with me this week, practising getting the double-up-bows in "O Come Little Children" working consistently, as well as the bow division and finger independence. She's doing so well! She's taught herself the upcoming few pieces by ear. It surprised me when Erin did this, at about the same stage. But now I've watched all three kids suddenly "click" with the by-ear learning on violin, and it's no surprise. Still it's fun to see it happen. She feels confident and happy about what she can do.

I dyed some wool that I'd drop-spun earlier this month... my first foray into both ventures. It turned out fine and I didn't accidentally cause it to felt up. I'll try to knit Fiona some mittens and maybe a hat for Christmas. I'm not so great at finishing knitting projects, but this one is small enough to be achievable I hope.

Tomorrow is a regional Suzuki violin group class out of town. It will be interesting to see whether Sophie and Noah are interested in participating. They've both become comfortable in our home group classes only relatively recently.

Canadian Composers

We had a Canadian Composers Workshop this past weekend and it went fine. Noah played very very well. In some ways he's shining brighter than his ever-so-precocious sister these days. Erin played fine but Noah's compositional skills and his cute extra-small size won a lot of hearts. (He's not as small for his age as Erin is for hers, but being almost three years younger he is still a good bit smaller than she.) There was a game-show-like format to the "learning about Canadian composers" component, and that made Noah a little stressed. He hates winning-losing games. But he coped okay... in some ways better than Erin, because he is willing to speak in public. He asked a question or two out loud. His team "lost" but he liked the losers' prizes better than the winners' anyway, and he found that funny. It was only very gently competitive (sit down if you get a right answer, keep answering if you don't, team against team, no score kept, a fair bit of silliness) and I think it was probably a good demonstration for him of how competitiveness doesn't necessarily have to be emotionally toxic.

Sunday was the composers' dessert recital we were hosting in our living room. We cleaned the house like crazy, made some food and got everything organized. Lots of people came and the kids and grownups all had fun. Afterwards Sophie "composed" a little piano melody and wanted me to transcribe it into written form. I did and she was pleased.

Everyone was really tired for our regular Nelson drive the next day. But we made it to gymnastics and once we got there we were all glad we went. During the little kids' class, a few of the older kids (7-13) got a little rowdy in the waiting area and on the floor of the gym. I wasn't really comfortable with the social stuff that was happening. There's one rather high-energy family of three kids who have been bringing a couple of cousins with them to hang out. The older brother and sister get into verbal sparring (words like b%&ch and f*%k come up as well as gestures) and they draw a number of other kids into a boy vs. girl thing. At one point the older boy told Noah that he was going to punch "his girlfriend" (i.e. Erin) in the face when she came out of the changing room. Noah came and told me this in tears. I went to find Erin and she emerged grinning like she was enjoying this fun boy vs. girl game. The boy had run off somewhere with his buddies and was probably totally unaware he'd upset Noah. I asked Erin if she was having fun and if it was all "just kidding" and she said yes. I told Noah that he was right to be upset, and right to come and get me, but that he didn't need to worry about Erin getting punched, because it was just a bad joke.

Afterwards we talked about the aggressive energy and the lack of respect for others' feelings. Erin didn't feel strongly either way... she was just playing along with the running and chasing and thought it was "sort of fun", but clearly it was too much for Noah. Some of the other parents weren't comfortable with it either. As a family we're going to make an effort to prevent the pack mentality from taking root... step back or take a walk outside if things start getting rude or aggressive or disruptive. Sophie (who is in the gym in her class during this time) is now comfortable enough that she doesn't need me in the gym, so we are free to leave if that proves most sensible. This is the first time this has happened. Mostly the social time has been very respectful and positive in the waiting area at gymnastics.

Piano lessons were fine. Sophie played her composition for Erin and Noah's teacher. Noah taught his teacher how to use the recording feature on the digital piano she has in her warmup room. She was pleased to have someone show her how it worked. Erin had a very good lesson, having pretty much mastered her new Grieg Waltz in one week, and "passing her Grade 5 technique test" (a little formality her teacher likes to use before moving into the next repertoire level).

On the way home we got talking about the roots of English words in Latin and Greek and what English and French share with each other and with these classic languages. We tried to tease apart the meanings of classical roots by brainstorming words that shared those roots (eg. television, teleport, telephone, or contract, tractor, traction, intractable). I told Erin about the Rummy Roots card game and she expressed a lot of interest. Might be a birthday present.

In the evening I finished my first bookbinding enterprise. My first book looked brilliant but Erin noticed that page 2 came after page 5, so I had to pick apart the sewn binding and re-do it. Grr. Ah well, a good lesson in comfort with mistake-making.

Today we spotted the weasel that's eaten all our hens :-(. Except he seems too big to be a weasel. So we're thinking fisher or mink. Now that we've looked in the guidebook, we need another peek through the binoculars to figure out exactly what we were looking at.

Chuck had a long housecall to do this morning so he wasn't able to take Fiona for the hour or so we normally count on in the mornings for "getting stuff done". So we've been very unproductive. I should get off the computer now and help get the last of the practising going.

Sleypeynbag

Erin's been wanting me to practice with her on violin the last couple of nights. She's feeling really mired down in her violin study, and it's really affecting her motivation. Last spring she discovered she could sight-read and play all of Suzuki Book 6, even though she was only technically "studying" the first couple of pieces at that stage. With her grandpa's death and her grandma's travels, she only had a handful of lessons between April and October. She continued to bash through all that Book 6 repertoire but without guidance, without thought. So now, six months later, she's still working on the same 8 or 10 pieces. They're challenging, but she's tired of them because she's been playing them forever. She wants something new. But they're not up to snuff - she hasn't really mastered them with the kind of control and musicality she needs.

So anyway, I told her the other night that her grandma (a.k.a. her teacher) would feed her appetite for new pieces, but only if she was willing to eat what was on her plate first. It's now cold and unappealing, but it really has to be eaten before dessert... it's healthy stuff. I offered to help her organize her practising and make it a little more efficient so that she can more easily get that sense of progress through her meal. And she agreed! She really wanted my help! We've had two practices together. I've tried to be very gentle. Today she balked just once, we took a break and came back and worked together well again.

Her piano teacher is making noises about moving her up a 'grade level' by next month. (She uses the Royal Conservatory of Canada's graded syllabus.) Erin is pleased about that. She really loves these benchmarky things. I'm sure glad she's not in school. It's just full of them. I think she'd lose touch with her own reasons for doing anything.

Sophie decided to join group class this week. She's five now, I guess she figured what the heck. She took the plunge. She played everything she knew (up to O Come Little Children, for any of you Suzuki violin types) even though I'd suggested just trying some Twinkles. She'd never played in a group before and I thought she should step in gently. But there was no holding her back. She smiled, she played, she raised her hand, she offered ideas. She loved it. Wow! Noah played a lovely solo at group class (Musette by Bach). Erin was disappointed she didn't get to play any Book 6 repertoire. But with a group class that covers ages 5-48, from O Come Little Children to intermediate concertos, it's tough to fit something in for everyone every week.

Sophie is writing and really making connections. Today she wanted to write "shaky" on some sort of list of toys or things she wants to buy. Don't ask me what it's about; I have no idea. She wrote

SHAKE

Noah said "that's shake. If you put a Y on the end, it'll be shaky." So she added a 'y'.

SHAKEY

Then she wrote

MASHEN BABLGUM SLEYPEYNBAG

Translation: "Machine, bubblegum, sleeping bag." What I like is how she took what Noah suggested about adding a Y to an E to make the long-E sound and used it in "SLEYPEYNBAG". Isn't that neat?

Noah is working on a more challenging left hand accompaniment for his composition "Achilles' Death." He has it all worked out, but because he's a beginning pianist he's finding the playing a bit of a challenge. So he's practising like crazy, playing through it six or eight times a day, because he wants to play it at the Canadian Composers Workshop he'll be attending on Saturday. He is, as his teacher rightly pointed out, a Canadian Composer. He'll also be performing a piece by Canadian composer David Duke. Erin's doing a Jig by Violet Archer. It's from "Habitant Sketches." She read a bit of Canadian history after being prodded a bit by her teacher to find out some background information on the composition. Habitants were essentially feudal serfs in New France in the 1600's. I had long forgotten this fact.

Every Tuesday David and Jaya come for supper. They're a father-daughter team, and they come for violin activities from way out of town. They have a lesson before supper and group class alternating week by week with orchestra afterwards. We enjoy visiting with them. Jaya is unschooled as well, a smidge younger than Erin and everything that Erin isn't (extraverted, socially gifted, extremely verbal, vivacious, non-academic). They get along great! David wanted me to scan some photos for him. They're photos of his sand sculpture. Sand and snow are new for him. He's a self-taught sculptor who has taken up sand sculpture in the past year. He's applying for jobs and needs an electronic portfolio he can send out by e-mail. The kids spent a long time looking at his photos, including some amazing snow sculpture, and asked to come and watch the next time he's doing a big snow project in our area. (For photos of his sand work, you can go here: http://www.harrisand.org/ and click on Photo Gallery Doubles and Solo.) Erin played lots of piano while David and Jaya were here. I think she did this to show off, but she just matter-of-factly sits down and starts playing in the background and doesn't demand attention, so I guess that's fine.

Time to go read stories!

School math

Wednesday was violin lessons. I was so wrapped up in the fun of bookbinding that I lost track of time and we almost forgot to go! I'm hand-making some hardcover picture-books for Christmas and was having a delightful time seeing my first one take shape before my eyes. I also made some little "jelly-bean books" for the kids. These are about the size of a teabag packet and have 32 tiny pages and a decorative fold-and-tuck softcover. They're bound with hemp or embroidery floss, decorated with beads or baubles on the binding string. I'm using leftover scraps of decorative cardstock from my scrapbooking. I made one each for the kids and suggested that they keep them in their violin cases for lesson stickers.

Their violin teacher, who happens to be my mom, knows how I feel about rewards and incentives, but she's had this ritual of giving the kids a little sticker at the end of every lesson. Because it's not contingent on anything except showing up, and even watchers/listeners can have stickers if they want, I'm okay with this. It's a nice way to keep track of how many lessons they've had, to make the weekly work a bit more tangible. But we always lose the stickers, so now they each have a tiny booklet to stick them into.

Violin lessons went well. Sophie had her second lesson ever, and it was a hard-working 20 minutes or more! Noah had a fairly ordinary lesson, and did some hard repetition work on some of the sixteenth notes in his new piece ("Hunters' Chorus"). Erin had a good lesson where I think she felt some tangible progress had been made and was being recognized. That's great, because she and I had actually worked together on some of her assignments this week, and her being interested in my help was a real departure. She's planning to record the Handel F-major Sonata No. 3 in its entirety (four movements, slow-fast-slow-fast) for our annual Christmas CD in early December. It's well in hand and she's doing serious polishing work on another piece.

Noah has mastered the playing of the new left-hand pattern in his composition, so he's planning to play the "enhanced version" at the Canadian music workshop tomorrow. He's worked hard at it. Another piano task he's worked really hard at this week is doing a simple invention the way his teacher asked. An invention is like a conversation between two people where they're both talking at the same time saying kind of the same things but at different times. His teacher wants him to be able to play one "voice" while singing the other, and then switch. It's *exceedingly* difficult to do. Noah was in tears a couple of times, not so much over it being too hard, but because he hates to sing and so couldn't even bring himself to try. Finally we hit on a solution. He whistles the singing part. It's coming.

Art class was a big hit this week. Erin and Noah got to cut lino blocks with real lino blades. The lino blocks were actually "Safety-Kut" blocks, softer and easier to work with. They printed on paper, cardstock and fabric, using small square stamps, and creating repeating patterns. When they came home they expressed enthusiasm for the idea of doing more at home. Erin spent some time designing decorative monogram rubber stamps she could carve as Christmas gifts. We haven't had time to do any of this, but we will next week.

Noah recounted a conversation he had with a rather condescending older girl at art class. Upon finding he was homeschooled, she asked him if he knew his colours and numbers. (Noah's newly 7, though he looks a bit younger... like maybe a young 6, so I suppose this question wasn't quite as "out there" as it might seem.) He answered yes. She asked him his favourite number ("nineteen, because it's a pretty big prime; prime numbers are my favourite") and his favourite colour ("green, because I really like Greek mythology, and it's the colour of the Greeks in 'Age of Mythology'" and then proceeded to quiz him on simple addition questions. When she lost interest and couldn't fool him with the typical "two thousand plus three thousand" stuff, she lost interest in further questions. So he asked her what 8 - 20 was. She said "you mean 20 - 8?" And he explained no, 8 - 20, and that it was negative 12. I think that shut her up for good. She said she only liked "school math, and that's not school math." Okay. Noah recounted all this as just an interesting social diversion. He's so easy-going and tough to ruffle. It's refreshing. He's also, I'm coming to realize, just a delight in a classroom. He's eager but polite, compliant and patient. He speaks up appropriately, offers up ideas and suggestions where appropriate. He smiles a lot, uses his manners, initiates friendly conversations, offers to help clean up. He's just full of social graces and picks up social cues naturally. It makes me wonder where we went so wrong with Erin. Many of these things are a significant challenge for her.

Noah, who a year or so ago, would matter of factly talk about his expectation that he would "probably go to school when [he is] older" has almost zero interest in school at this point. Today we were packing and sorting dried fruit and nuts for a music fundraising project. We spent most of the day at our friends' place. They are two teens and two schoolteachers and of course weren't home until about 4 or 5. Noah spent the day anxiously awaiting their arrival home. He commented on what a pain it must be to have to get up and right away go to school, and be there so long every day. The fruit and nut sorting was fun. We had a small work party. The kids helped label, weigh, carry and sort. They now have a pretty good sense of what constitutes 2 lb. and 5 lb. and 25 lb. and they know their nuts!

Tonight we watched two episodes of "Blue Planet", the excellent BBC documentary about marine life. We deserved the break because of all our fruit-and-nut work, and this kids had all done their practising first thing in the morning. Erin read a very clever short story an adult friend had sent her, written about a woman writer with a non-functioning key on her computer keyboard, a missing vowel, the one "attached to the hungry self", who decides to try to write around the letter. The whole story is written without the letter 'i'. Very clever!

Tomorrow is an extra "town day" because of the music workshop Erin and Noah are attending.

More and more

The more I write, the more I realize there is to write. Yesterday Noah was noodling around on the piano while Sophie was noodling on her violin in the other part of the house. Noah started playing the horn solo melody from the end of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, a haunting theme he’s played many times on piano. It’s on the Naxos Jr. Audiobook version of the Illiad that we have, just a few seconds of it, and he loves it. Anyway, he happened to be playing it in the key of A. All of a sudden I heard Sophie trying to sound it out on the violin, and she managed just great. So Noah ran off and got his violin and the two of them played the four-bar theme together over and over, wandering around the living room giggling. Then Noah went back to the piano and started trying to harmonize an accompaniment.

Noah’s harmonizing ability is quite impressive. After only 6 spotty months of piano lessons, he’s able to harmonize simple melodies from the Suzuki violin repertoire in A major. He does other tunes too... Christmas carols, nursery songs. He uses tonic triads and dominant seventh chords very capably in a number of keys. No one has taught him to do this, though he has learned the I-V7-I chord progression by working through the Dozen-a-Day technique exercises. Subdominant triads and their inversions are a bit more hit and miss, but I’m sure they’ll click in the next month or so.

Tonight we finished reading "Abel’s Island" by William Steig. What a great story! One of those that's definitely as much for the parent as the children. We still have on the go: "A Single Shard" and "Eragon".

Erin finally finished the last couple of incomplete bits in Singapore Math 5A today. She’s been dabbling in 5B and level 6 stuff a bit for a while, but now she’s enthusiastic about starting to go through 5B systematically and filling in any holes there too.

Sophie helped bake muffins today. She made some neat observations about the array of 3x4 muffin cups. Her math abilities impress me... not so much her conceptual awareness, but how willing and capable she is when it comes to translating observations about mathematical patterns in the real world into arithmetical symbols. She continues plugging mostly self-directedly through the first Miquon Math book. She’s into multiplication now.

Noah is definitely less of a "wow!" kid in academic areas. He has tons of conceptual mathematical smarts, especially of the visual-spatial sort, but he’s actually finding the end of Miquon Red reasonably challenging. A year or two ago I thought he’d be done the program by now (six books; he’s only on the second). But things are clicking like crazy for him in other areas right now, so that’s fine. His violin sight-reading is going great guns, and of course I’ve written at length about his phenomenal piano composing and the leaps he’s taken in his playing ability in the last couple of months.

Sophie's Birthday

Lately Erin, a horribly picky eater who says she'd like to be cook when she grows up (go figure... maybe she wants to develop new ways of putting cheese and bread and rice together?) has been doing lots more cooking. I was making baked beans the other day and doubled the amount of beans I prepared and turned half over to her. I showed her two or three baked bean recipes (none of which she'd ever be caught dead eating) and let her start improvising, adding ingredients that appealed to her to her pot. She came up with something that was not only palatable (though pretty salty!) but which passed her own standards. She ate some! So did the other kids. I opted for Mary's Curried Apple Baked Beans myself, but I tasted Erin's and they were pretty good.

Yesterday was Sophie's birthday. Since most of her buddies live an hour and a quarter away (where we do homeschool activities) and her grandma was away, we did our typical low-key nuclear family birthday celebration. I had made her a skirt to go with an eBay sweater/tights combination that I had bought for her. I also bought a Ravensberger "Mandala Maker" kit, sort of a cross between plastic stencils and spirograph. We have a family tradition that one birthday gift is for all the kids, and this one was a sure hit with all three older kids. There was a book and a soft doll from Grandma. Erin made her a hemp-and-bead anklet. Noah gave her a piece of art he'd made at art class, repeated black and gold patterns on rice paper. I did (if I do say so) a nice job of mounting it on foamboard as a checkerboard array. He had five 9x9 arrays each with a different pattern but the same process, and I made a 3x3 array of arrays (a centre square, then four more at each corner) with cardstock "matting". Noah was really pleased with how professional it looked and wants to take it to art class next week to show his teacher what it looks like all mounted.

The funny thing was that he had a big meltdown over how many gifts Sophie was receiving. His birthday was 6 weeks ago and in retrospect I think maybe he was disappointed with the pile of gifts placed in front of him. He'd chosen to open the one from his Grandma a couple of weeks early, and it was just one of those birthdays when we didn't go overboard. We had a long discussion about why we give gifts... I said that the proper reason for giving is because it gives us pleasure to give to people we love. We don't give because we'll get in trouble if we don't, and we don't give "in order to show how much we love someone". I pointed out to him that if the gift-giver knows that the person getting the gifts expects a certain amount, or might be angry if the gifts don't meet his expectations, that's going to reduce the pleasure the gift-giver experiences, and so it sort of interferes with the right reason for giving.

He got a little angry about that and ran away for some cooling off time. I guess it came across as a lecture, or a threat that I wouldn't give him stuff if he acted the way he was. I was clearly taking the issue very seriously, where I think he'd just felt a bit whiney as a result of the attention being on Sophie. He came back in a few minutes and said he'd changed his mind and he was okay about it all. I pointed out part of the reason Sophie was getting "so many gifts" was because he was offering her a gift. I don't know whether I should have just let it go, or whether it was an important teachable moment to grab. I have strong feelings about gift-giving taking precedence over gift-getting and have put a lot of thought into maintaining the focus on giving through the holiday season. But I'm sailing in uncharted waters here.

The funny thing was that at supper, Chuck explained to Sophie that "we give gifts because we love you" which sounded a lot like the opposite of what I'd been trying to explain. We both had to kind of backpaddle around that one. What a mess. We decided the crucial phrase was "how much". We don't give to show "how much" we love you. We give since, because we love you, it gives us pleasure to give.

I have an on-line friend who had asked if anyone had infant girl clothes for her aunt who has a new baby girl and no money at all. I had offered some of Fiona's outgrown clothes, and while I was packing them up yesterday afternoon I remembered that Tina has an almost-4-year-old herself who is facing a very financially-strapped Christmas, so the kids and I ran around collecting gifts for him to tuck into a shoebox. I didn't realize until I was typing this that this was a well-timed coincidence... a little exercise in giving on the heels of a meltdown over getting. Anyway, Tina's son is getting lots of craft materials, books, finger-puppets, a sprout-growing kit, some Canadian stamps and coins, a music story cassette, a glass prism, some other nice little things.

We tested out our nut milk recipe (which is great with cashews and macadamias and walnuts) with hazelnuts and almonds and decided we either need to win the Vitamix we're bidding on on eBay or strain the pulp off when using harder nuts. We're spearheading a music education fundraiser this fall. We've taken orders for organic dried fruit and nuts and ordered wholesale. When we repackage the orders, we're going to include a set of 4 recipes. We wanted to test how flexible the nut milk recipe is before sending it out.

After supper Sophie opened her gifts and we ate cake and the kids drew and coloured mandalas and then watched a video.

At bedtime we're reading "A Single Shard" by Linda Sue Park, set in medieval Korea in a potters' village. My kids are asking about working with clay. We have clay but no kiln. Our town has a number of skilled artisan potters, one of whom is a really excellent teacher of children. Erin did a workshop with her about 4 years ago. I might see if I can get another 4 or 5 homeschoolers interested in a morning workshop or two.

Today we're doing more fruit and nut recipe testing.

Erics

The last week has felt rather unproductive but I'm sure some useful stuff has happened. We had a day or two of Hallowe'en costume preparations. I had great fun doing Dobby's eyeballs. I had made a paper mache mask anchored on paper plates and bits of cardboard, and left two round holes for those "tennis-ball-like protruding eyes". I plugged a loonie into one of those gumball machine things that gives you a prize in a plastic bubble, and used the bubble for the eyeballs. On the inside of the plastic half-spheres I masked two concentric circles, one for the pupil and one for the iris. Then I painted the pink arterioles, and the white sclerae. I unmasked the first circle and used a combination of gold, green and iridescent paint for the iris, using radial brush-strokes. Then I unmasked the last circle for the pupil which I left clear (and therefore "black") for Sophie to look out through. The effect was terrific!

The kids went trick-or-treating. Erin had a medusa head-dress with immensely bobbly wobbly snakes with googly eyes and forked tongues, and only one person knew she was a gorgon. The others had never heard of the creature or the myth, or only nodded with vague recognition when we explained what she was. Sometimes I wonder if these little brushes with "mainstream" society make the kids aware of how unusual their interests are. Noah's decided he wants to be a "mythology teller" (i.e. storyteller) when he grows up because there are clearly so many people who don't have a clue about these stories that have become such a part of the fabric of our family life. I don't know if he's planning to go door to door or what.

Everyone came down with a cold on the weekend. Blech. Lots of laid-back freeplay and computer time and not much else.

On Monday we went to Nelson. I probably would have cancelled except that Sophie was totally well and really wanted to go, and we had a lesson scheduled with a substitute piano teacher whom I didn't have a contact number for. And I had agreed to courier a violin down to someone, and to drive a kid 2 blocks to her house after gymnastics. So off we went.

It was Sophie's 3rd class and she was in from start to finish, even playing tag, something which had felt a little intimidating to her. Erin decided to do her class. Noah was feeling not so great so he sat part of the class out but joined in for the latter half. He managed a chin-up-pullover at the bar, the first in his class to master it. Erin's next closest to getting it (I think maybe small size helps?) but she didn't quite. This is the first time there's been such a stark and public reversal in their relative mastery of something. Usually Erin is better, quicker, more able and Noah does his best. I was interested to see how Erin would react. She asked why he could do it and she couldn't (a good sign, because when things bother her she doesn't talk about them) and I just said that he's really strong for his size and picks physical skills up very easily. She was fine with it. There really isn't a shred of competitiveness between my kids.

Piano was interesting this week. Our regular teacher, a straight-laced 60-ish woman who is quite a stickler for clean technique and carefully thought-out playing, was off being a spectator at a music competition. So we had "Eric", a recent university grad, cuurently trying to pull together a meagre living through piano accompanying in the area. The Wayside School stories we'd read recently had three Erics in the class: Eric Fry, Eric Ovens and Eric Bacon. Noah wanted to know Eric's surname to see if it was Ovens, Bacon or Fry , which it wasn't, but it turned out piano-Eric had read the books as a kid and loved them, so that was a connection right off the bat.

Eric was amazing... everything that our regular teacher isn't... young, male, silly, an amazing performer, and full of musical spunk and drive. As a regular teacher I'm sure he wouldn't have the vision and organization necessary to build solid skills, but as an occasional substitute, he's certainly got a refreshingly different spin on piano lessons. He had the kids improvising and sharing their compositions. He had them "driving" and "crashing" the piano, reaching deep inside themselves to find excitement and momentum in their music. He (like everyone else) told Erin she needed to slow down when practising, but rather than explaining that it would help her fix her stumbles, he told her that it would help her play faster... that appealed to her. Then he played a Beethoven sonata passage as he's been practising it... a lyrical contrapuntal thing, and then he played it at his target tempo... prestissimo, about 8 times faster. The kids' eyes just bugged out as they watched his fingers.

Eric will be teaching them for two weeks in December when their regular teacher is in Hawaii (her husband is the semi-retired owner of a travel agency... must be nice!). I've also booked him to accompany the kids for their violin selections for the annual recording of musical output we put together as a Christmas gift for relatives. I think the contact is really inspiring for the kids. They have lots of violin role models in their lives (family members, older students they play in orchestra with, etc.) but little in the way of piano ones. Eric will fit the bill very nicely indeed. I hope he stays in the area.

The other day all three kids were sitting on the couch giggling and reading Harry Potter 2. Sophie read the first two words ("Not for"). Noah read the first half page, fairly fluently at times. Then Erin took over and read a couple of pages. It was pretty cute, and a very informative illustration of their relative reading abilities.

Erin and Sophie made cookies together yesterday with no help except for getting the sheets in and out of the oven (we have a wall oven which, because of its cramped access, requires very long arms to reach into it from the side... if you saw our kitchen you'd be amazed that anyone can use it!). That was a first. Usually I help, and I'm way too controlling, micromanaging how they're pouring the vanilla, scraping the peanut butter, etc.. So I just got the heck out of kitchen and I'm sure they learned a lot more doing it all alone.

I'm scrapbooking like crazy, making a big memory book for mom for Christmas of our big musical family reunion before my dad's death. It's coming along wonderfully. Erin's making hemp bracelets and chokers for Christmas gifts.

The kids have been playing with Duplo a lot again (the chunky "toddler Lego"), because it's safe for Fiona. They're using elastics with it to make strange seige weapons that fling or bash. Over and over I notice that my kids are far more creative and happier when the raw materials they're working with are simpler. I think they'd be blissfully happy playing with a piece of construction paper and a stone. Give them a pile of K'nex or Lego and they muck around for a while and then leave it all over the floor. Nothing much happens except mess.

Today's plan is to make pumpkin pies from a pumpkin and to finish a couple of little gifts for Sophie's 5th birthday this weekend.

Learning in the Flow

Noah was using the text-to-speech synthesizer on one of our old programs (DK Children’s Encyclopedia) this morning, practising spelling that could be properly pronounced by the computer. He discovered the use of periods in creating sentence breaks. He wrote: "Age of Mythology is a game of heros and montsters. You build reinforsments. You create beasts." He had help with ‘build’ and ‘create’ and ‘beasts’. It was a useful exercise for him from the standpoint of reading and spelling. He also got some practice at putting thoughts and explanations into writing.

Erin asked for a chance to "do school". By this she means a game and a schedule whereby she and I outline a bunch of semi-structured activities (a lot of them bookwork) for her to do through the day. She asked for some "research questions" as one of the activities. This was a new idea for us. I put together the following list:

What is a "pixel"?
Who was born first, Brahms or Beethoven?
What's the capitol of El Salvador?
What do iguanas eat?
What is "6!" (6-factorial)?
Where does the word "tesselate" come from?
Who said "we have nothing to fear but fear itself"?
Who wrote "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"?
What does chlorphyll do?
Who was Marie Curie and what did she do that was so important?
Where is the magnetic north pole located?
What is a "bearded dragon"?
Who was Guy Fawkes?
Where does the word "bonfire" come from?
What is the origin of Hallowe'en?
What is a menorah?
Draw an isoceles triangle:
She got about 6 of these in half an hour or so and is saving the others for another day (or two, or three). She quite enjoyed it.

Noah was right into group class this evening. It was the second group of the year. Last spring he started participating, after a long period of saying he wasn’t quite ready. Boy, is he ever ready now! Other parents were pulling me aside to ask if he was always this "attentive and full if joy" or always "such a model student". He had lots of grins and laughs, lots of ideas to contribute, tried hard at everything and obviously loved the class.


Erin spent some time writing today (on the computer). She says she’s got farther with this latest story than she ever has with a story before. I didn’t press her on details. She’s intensely protective of her writers’ privacy.

Nelson Day

Nelson day. Sophie was right into gymnastics today... only hung back for a couple of minutes right at the start. I’ve never had a kid so young who partipicated so eagerly. Maybe we’re getting incrementally less introverted kids as we keep at this racket. She’s the youngest kid by a good 6 months and the smallest by far, but is doing great at skills and following directions.

Erin and Noah are doing well in gymnastics too. Noah is feeling strong and capable. He’s the youngest in his (7-to-10yo) class and is definitely in the more able half. His listening skills (and Erin’s too) are exemplary. Erin was actually keen to do some math problems during Sophie’s gymnastics class. She’s feeling quite comfortable with the current work and she always does math willingly when it’s interesting but relatively easy.

Grocery shopping. I left the older two to eat in the minivan and join us in the store when they were done. Just before that we dropped off a friend at her house after gymnastics. She’s older than Erin, and I laughed when I realized it was less than 2 blocks that she’d have had to walk, in a safe little Canadian town. Why don’t people give their kids this kind of responsibility? I had fun shopping. We weren’t in a rush, and I bought a few special little things for the kids for Hallowe’en. Bought them another Garfield book of comics. Noah reads them repeatedly for reading practice and pleasure, so they’re worthwhile. Erin devours them.

At piano lessons, Noah got a lot of positive feedback about his latest composition "Achilles’ Death". His teacher was really impressed and that was clear to him. He was very pleased. Composition seems to be the area Noah has chosen to be comfortable with recognition, much as Erin is with performing.

I had to work tonight. Because Erin agreed to drop Youth Choir this year, I had time to cook and eat supper after getting back from Nelson and before heading out to Nakusp (in the opposite direction). The kids watched the second half of a miniseries on the Halifax explosion of 1917. We have a short historical fiction book about it, which I hope the kids will be interested in hearing aloud soon, but we’ve got so many novels on the go right now it’ll be a while.

No violin practising today. Sometimes a surprise holiday is a good thing. I announced at supper that I thought it was a good day for a break. The kids agreed.