Our Latest Addition

Oh, made you look!
No, we haven't taken on any new children, or pets or anything like that... but check out this little beauty:



See that tiny round ball in the middle of all the foliage? That's a watermelon, growing in our front yard.
But it's not just any watermelon; it's a seed from one of the best heirloom-variety watermelons you ever tasted, and I've been saving the seed since 2007, waiting for conditions to be just right. This year, for the first time, we finally had three important things coincide: a table in the sunlight during spring, good, deep soil in the sunniest, best-drained spot in the yard, and the time to attend to both the baby seedling and the growing plant.
Also, thanks to our hot summer so far, it's growing like crazy. I'll keep you posted as to our new arrival's progress, and I hope that you are enjoying the summer too.
(I'm back by the way... probably going to be slow on posting for a while, but back nonetheless. Did you miss me?)

A Wee Bloggy Break

So, before you ask: yes, everything is okay.

It's just, life can be pretty darn complicated sometimes, y'know?

It won't be a long break, but it will be a break... I'm off to enjoy the sunshine with my guys.

Rube Goldberg, You Rock My World

I hadn't heard of Rube Goldberg before last week, when the boys started a class at our library called Simple Machines. But evidently, Mr. Goldberg is the guy who first combined pulleys, levers, fulcrums, wheels, ramps and balls into those funny machines that do something - smash an egg, drop ping-pong balls on your head, that kind of thing.

Part of our homework this week was to look up Rube Goldberg machines on YouTube, so I thought I'd share some of our favorites.

Here is one called 'Creme that Egg:'



OK Go's newest, This Too Shall Pass:




This one knocks down a whole bunch of bowling pins, in somebody's workplace:



They are fun, and silly, and require a lot more thought than, well, you might think. When Luke and Owen have made their Rube Goldberg machines, I'll post about them.

The Chicken Whisperers

It all started about a month ago, when a visiting seven-year-old friend of ours walked around effortlessly picking up chickens without batting an eyelash. It was so cute! He would just walk up to one quietly, lean in, and pick her up, something we'd never thought possible with our skittish lovelies. His Mom whispered reverently as we watched, "we call him the chicken whisperer."

So that, of course, put the bug in Luke and Owen to be able to do the same thing.

I couldn't see it, especially with Owen who can't hardly stand still long enough to pick up a stick, never mind a chicken.

But after a few weeks of hard work, they are both picking up chickens! They do it the same way their friend taught them, and again it is so cute.

I don't have a pic of Owen, but here's one of Luke, with his fave chicken, Saphira:


(Thanks Erica, for this great shot :-)

And now, all is right with the world.

Speaking of Traveling...

... here is the latest from my parents' global circumnavigation -

They've been in and out of Thailand, Cambodia, Hong Kong, and China.

They loved Thailand, although they were unable to do much in or near the capitol because of the protests, which have turned violent of late. So they spent their time in Chiang Mai, which they loved. My Mom writes:

We fell in love with Chiang Mai, Thailand. We were there during the Songkran Festival (Buddhist New Year), also called the Festival of Water. For 3 days people toss water at each other - tourists are not exempt! Entire families line the streets with buckets, hoses, cups, water guns - or kids pile into the back of trucks and drive around with a barrel or two of water, throwing it at everyone within reach - it was a lot of silly fun! We took a Thai cooking class; rode an elephant, an oxcart and a bamboo river raft - oh, and we crammed in a temple or two! Unfortunately, my camera picked that week to stop working, so we have very few photos of this fabulous stop.

Here they are on that elephant:



Because of their camera's untimely death, they've only got a few small pictures from Cambodia, in Angkor Wat, the seat of an ancient empire. These pics give me the shivers, incredible castles with huge trees growing up inside and around them:





My Mom writes here about life in Cambodia, and her words haunt me:

Dear friends, fall on your knees and thank whatever power granted you life in North America. Yes, we have problems, but the bottom of the barrel is Cambodia. Invasions, wars, civil war, Pol Pot, crooked politicians, nationwide lack of education, horrid climate, Cambodia has it all! And yet people are warm, noisy, friendly and quite beautiful.

Sometimes the randomness of life just hits me, and reading something like this makes that almost palpable.


After Cambodia, my parents moved on to China and a river boat cruise up the Yellow River. This is the part of the trip that Owen and I most wanted to become stowaways for, because my parents got to visit the Terra Cotta Soldiers. According to Wikipedia:

The Terracotta Army is a form of funerary art buried with the First Emperor of Qin (Qin Shi Huang, "shi huang" means the first emperor) in 210-209 BC. (He declared himself the first emperor of China in 221 B.C.) Their purpose was to help rule another empire with Qin Shi Huang in the afterlife. Consequently, they are also sometimes referred to as "Qin's Armies."

Current estimates are that in the three pits containing the Terracotta Army there were over 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses, the majority of which are still buried in the pits.

Here are pics from my parents' visit:









Aren't they lucky?

Dragons, and Knitting, and Gifts from the Sea

That picture about sums up our recent trip to Myrtle Beach. It was awesome. There's really no other word for it. See how the water is the same color as the clouds? It was like that at twilight each night, it almost looked like the water was invisible except for the seafoam.

We stayed in a campground right on the ocean, took walks nearly every day, and swam. A lot. Also, there was this ever-changing waterway just down the beach, which we enjoyed immensely:







Ben took most of those pics up there. He also took several pictures of these dogs, having a blast in the waves:



Together, we took a sum total of about ten pictures on the whole trip. There was just so much else to do!

I brought all kinds of knitting books, and a couple of projects-in-progress, and got a whole afternoon to myself for yarn shopping. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I'd spend so much of my vacation thinking about yarn, but it worked somehow. In fact, it worked well.

And, when I wasn't knitting or frolicking by the sea, I was thinking about dragons. We all were, because Myrtle Beach, South Carolina is home to this amazing place called MagiQuest, where you get a wand, and it really works. This was extra-special since it was Owen's first time, and going on quests and adventures with him reminded me how truly magical things can be, even if they originate with an RFID chip.

Purely coincidentally, I brought the four amazing Dragons of Deltora books for Luke; we shared them back and forth over our trip. So, when I wasn't thinking about evil dragons and wizards and the runes of MagiQuest, I was thinking about the good dragons in the mythical land of Deltora.

These were the threads that ran through our vacation by the ocean. They were brought together into a lovely bright cloth by means of a book, written in the 1950's and loaned to me by a friend: Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. It's about being a wife, mother, and woman in modern America - it could have been written last week, it feels so relevant. Reading it at night, with the surf pounding outside, elevated a merely great visit into an amazing, meaningful holiday.

Scones, The World's Best Baked Good

We've been eating lots of them lately, because they are yummy and, depending how they're made, good for you too.

If you want to try some scones, may I recommend that you scamper on over to my latest Food and Family column in Parents and Kids?

Let me know if you make some, and how they turned out!

Through Children's Eyes

I don't know if you've ever read anything by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, but if you haven't you may just want to run out and do so, right now. Or better yet, here's her blog! - it's destined for my ever-lengthening blogroll, as soon as I finish this post.

She writes about knitting, and I came across her book, Knitting Rules! after I'd been obsessed with knitting for a month or so. She made me laugh out loud, and also relax about knitting perfectly. She kind of helped me come up with my own way to practice this craft, with that book.

Recently I picked up her book of essays, Free-Range Knitter, and while I laugh and admire, I'm also finding answers to questions far beyond the realm of knitting.

Here's a quote from an essay about Stephanie's daughter:

Tenacity. Intelligence. Constructive discontent. Persistence. Sensitivity. A fantastic sense of humor. Independence. Mercy. Fearlessness. Kindness. Equity.

Now, these qualities are terrible qualities in a child. North America wants children (especially little girls) to be polite. Polite, obedient, and pliable... Kids who fight back and challenge you, say "no," and think for themselves are hard to raise and not thought well of at all.... I realized you couldn't tell a kid, "Do what I tell you," praise her for obedience, and then turn right around when she becomes a grownup and suddenly say, "Think for yourself" and condemn adults who are still compliant.

These words keep coming back to me. They make me think of a song by the Limeliters, a band my Dad loves from the era of The Kingston Trio and The Clancy Brothers. This particular song, Through Children's Eyes, is about how easy it is as grown-ups to forget that children are learning all the time, and that they do certain things for certain reasons. Here's the chorus:

Hey Jimmy Joe John Jim Jack/
Even little tigers lose their knack/
When somebody twice their size/
Can't see the world through children's eyes

The preceeding verse was about a tiny little tiger whose nursemaid "made him so afraid, he didn't dare make a noise." And guess what happened to him when he grew up?

He's just a mat
Stretched out flat
On somebody's bedroom floor

A harsh verse for a children's song, you think? But that is where the lesson comes in. We are given exactly one childhood each, and what we learn in that childhood must take us through our whole lives. Will we teach our children to question, to say no, to challenge, to show kindness where an adult might not? As frustrating as parenthood can be, my answer to those questions has to be yes.

Because I'm not interested in an obedient, compliant adulthood for my boys, one in which they're the mat on the bedroom floor. I want them to be as tiger-y as their hearts will allow. I know that they'll be tigers interested in justice, tigers on the side of good.

Banner Parade

I've been looking at past banners, and thought I would share some of my favorites today. They bring back memories of what was going on in our lives at the time, and make a photo diary of what we've been up to for the last two-plus years. I hope you enjoy them!


Owen, at three, admiring some of our morning glories one August.


A butterfly sipping nectar on our very first homeschool field trip, to a nature sanctuary nearby.


Flowers in the amazing rose garden in Portland, Oregon. Gosh, we loved that place!


A snowman the boys built with their Uncle Dave; if memory serves, they named the snowman Jeffrey, for no apparent reason.


Fences at Gettysburg. What an amazing, amazing place.


The light prism at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.


Autumn leaves, happily glowing to themselves as we walked by letterboxing.


At the ocean last summer.


I was so proud of this bread, basically a giant chocolate croissant. Yummmmm.


These little guys were hanging out with me in the warm autumn sunshine on a bench at Old Sturbridge Village.


And finally, our laundry on the line - a favorite, although I can't tell you why.

Maybe it just represents our crazy, fun, good old life.

The Evolution of Writing

Owen is writing, and it is soooo cute.

But it's more than just cute. There is also something profound in these first clumsy attempts at written communication. My heart speeds up when I watch him shape letters, I marvel over what he perceives as so important that it must be written down. Here, other than his name, is the first document Owen's ever written himself:



It is about dwarfs, and what they do, and what they require to do what they do. Because someday, when he's old enough, Owen plans to play Dungeons and Dragons as a dwarf, and he's going to need the information on this sheet.
If you study the letters closely, you will see that he traced quite a few of them from dots that I put on the paper. Also, the words, where you can make them out, are spelled correctly; this is because he asked me how to spell the words and I told him.
But check out this next sample, the name of a store he and Luke are starting up for Poke (like Pokemon, pronounce Po-Kay) York:



It's called The Brothers Pom Pom Store, and they're planning on making pom-poms to sell, for Monopoly money, in Poke York for the Pokemon who live there. (Want to see Poke York? Click here.) You'll notice that 'Brothers' is spelled unconventionally, as is 'store.' Also, the letters are totally of his formation, not tracings of my letters.
When Luke saw this sign, I knew that he might question the mistakes. So I asked him to help Owen learn to write in the way that I wished he had learned to write: by trying to figure out which letters make which sounds to him, even if it doesn't make sense to the rest of us. Luke happily agreed, and I think he is enjoying being a teacher, even in a subject he's not all that confident in himself. Or, maybe it's because of his own lack of confidence.

In this latest sample, you can really see the evolution of Owen's writing - from me telling him what and how to write, to him sounding things out and writing them himself:



The drawing is mostly mine, but the letters that spell 'Pikachu' are all Owen's. They are, in order: P, K, E, D, E. And he sounded out the sounds in the word 'Pikachu' to get to those letters. So although it's barely legible, it is the one with the most personal meaning to him.

Being there at the very beginning of real attempts at written communication, especially when you can see how meaningful it is for the new writer, is one of the biggest joys of homeschooling so far. I can't wait to see what he writes next!

A Different Kind of Yoga Class

Unless you've been hiding in your air-raid shelter, which we homeschoolers are rumored to enjoy as a convenient way to isolate ourselves from the rest of humanity, you have surely heard of the recent, obnoxious Good Morning America segment. The one where a family of unschoolers were portrayed as somehow simultaneously neglecting their teenagers and making them "the center of the universe," which many experts told us in very serious terms would result in the poor teens' inability to "earn a paycheck" or "associate with other adults." I mean, give me a break!

The family in question lives in Massachusetts, as do we, and the whole episode has resulted in lots of playground and Lego club speculation about how the state Department of Education might be planning an investigation of all suspected 'unschoolers' after state officials were caught unawares on national television. They evidently "did not return [ABC's] call" about these questionable educational practices.

It's all caused lots of worry and tension around here, and has me using four-letter words more often than usual. So, when I arrived last night to teach Yoga for Homeschooling Parents class, the hour of sanity that gets me (and the participants) through the week, we were a little more agitated than usual. We just couldn't settle, our minds and hearts were aswirl.

We decided to change the format, just for this one night: we would keep talking while going through the poses. It certainly wasn't as relaxing as yoga usually is, but I think that it worked because we could talk about what was on our minds, and exercise at the same time.

My one hang-up came at a the end of class, a time for silent meditation, breathing, and deep relaxation while lying down. Ordinarily my favorite part, this is when the body rests and the mind's batteries recharge. It is just so cool. But I knew that I wasn't going to be able to get my mind to stop, and if the instructor can't than you can bet the participants won't be able to either... so we did something a little hokey, but for this one time it worked. And it worked well.

We sat together in a circle, closed our eyes for just a minute or two, and chose something positive to share with the others. Doesn't that sound all kinds of cheesy? Oh, my friend, it was so nice.

I shared about a seminar that I got to attend, years ago, on learning through play, and how watching Luke and Owen play gives me great hope for their futures.

One mom, whose son is a type-1 diabetic and consequently needs lots of extra care taken over his food and drink, and about whom she worries lots and lots, told of her boy thanking her for taking such good care of him, such a sweet moment!

Another told of her daughter's experience that day building a shelter out of twigs and sticks, which required the organization of lots of other kids and resulted in an awesome building. It was totally self-directed, unschooling at its best, and the mom was so proud of her daughter for conceptualizing it in the first place - and making it reality, without adult help, in the second.

Another mom's positive thought was about how full of life and wonder her days are; flowers bloom, and her baby chicks are growing, and she's got this fabulous husband and a great family, and all is just right in her world.

I left thinking, it'd take a hell of a lot more than a stupid television show to get in the way of all our positive thoughts.

And I woke up this morning realizing how true that is.

Buzzwords

I am in love with Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Diane E. Levin, two education professors who wrote a moving, passionate column arguing against national English and math standards in yesterday's Boston Sunday Globe. These standards are currently all the rage in education, at least up here in Massachusetts.

And that's where the title of this post comes in:
buzzword - n. A word or phrase connected with a specialized field or group that usually sounds important or technical and is used primarily to impress laypersons (from answers.com).

Fans of The Common Core Standards Initiative want parents to support national standards as The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything. Proponents routinely describe standards, as Dr. David P. Driscoll does in a counterpoint column on the same op-ed page, as "strong," playing "a major role in the academic success of our [Massachusetts] students over the past decade."

Buzzwords like 'strong,' 'academic rigor,' 'challenging,' and 'clear improvement' are meant to persuade laypeople that we must adopt these standards.

Like, yesterday.

But I'm not persuaded.

Dr. Driscoll laments later in his ode to the standard: "We do not hold our kids to high enough standards of conduct [or] work ethic..." On the contrary, I think that too often we impose an adult's standard of conduct and work ethic onto children who are too young to understand why we have these standards.

The other day, when Owen enthusiastically greeted a very obese woman with "wow, you're really fat!" he learned something new: the standard of conduct is we don't speak of these things. Until the statement was out of his mouth, he didn't know there would be anything wrong with expressing it. This was evidenced by his question later: "can I tell really skinny people that they're really skinny?" At five, he just doesn't understand why - but from the reaction of the adults around him, he learned that commenting on somebody's size is not appropriate. Learning is what childhood is all about. (My face is red as I write this. I'm so, so sorry that my son caused such hurt feelings.)

'Work ethic' is another buzzword that really gets my goat. To make young children work at tasks they're not yet ready for seems to be priority number one in modern public schools - and if they express their displeasure, by hitting, or crying, or feeling nauseous and losing sleep, or biting others, they are condemned as having a 'poor work ethic.' (Some may even conclude, at the ripe old age of nine, that they are below average.) I believe that kids who are encouraged to learn on their own timetable end up with a far stronger work ethic than those who are exposed to school standards. The learning that they do is motivated intrinsically, because it's something they really need to know.

Drs. Carlsson-Paige and Levin write that these standards "contradict decades of early education theory and research about how young children learn best."

And they ought to know:
Dr. Carlsson-Paige has written extensively about learning through play, non-violence, and conflict resolution. One year at the Lesley Kindergarten Conference I got to attend her seminar on play and learning (best part: her description of how her two boys played together as youngsters, one creating costumes and sets and the other - Matt Damon - doing the acting). Many of her ideas show up in my parenting/teaching still.
In addition to teaching teachers, Dr. Levin writes about the sexualization of childhood and is a founding member of The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.
Both women are on the board of The Alliance for Childhood, a group of prominent educators who, supported by a raft of research, have concluded that childhood in America is endangered... by all the damn standardized tests.

Now, I know what you're thinking: what about those pesky buzzwords that I use in favor of my arguments? What about 'play,' 'non-violence,' 'conflict resolution'? It's true, I do like to use fancy words, but the difference lies herein: the fancy words I use refer to Real Life, while the standards-fans' pertain merely to school.

I use them because I want to encourage people (laypeople, heh) to think about how there is nobody standing by while adults resolve conflicts non-violently, waiting to grade them on how 'strong' their position is. By adulthood we're supposed to have absorbed the standards of conduct. We're supposed to have a great work ethic.

But how will kids know those things, if they don't get the chance to learn them? Drs. Carlsson-Paige and Levin are two of my heroes today, for writing so eloquently about why standards won't help children learn what they'll need to know out in the real world.

It Beats the Alternative

I'm thirty-nine years old today. Isn't that freaky? It's dangerously close to doddering old age, but I still love my birthday, the only day when I don't feel guilty eating a jar's worth of Nutella.

Here are some favorite pics from my thirty-eighth year, one of the best so far on this merry-go-round:


This was the year that the chickens came on the scene.


Ditto the Chicken Palace.


Last spring we went to Gettysburg, and I got extreme goosebumps watching Luke and Owen play in the woods where Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and his 20th Maine fighters held the Rebels back, determining the course of history.


Old Sturbridge Village, a place where the boys visited for the first time just this past June, has become a constant source of interest and excitement.


My brother's wedding was a highlight, too; here is his bride with all four of her new nephews.

I've looked in on the adventures of my parents:


and learned to knit.


Best of all, I've gotten to enjoy my kids:














And just be in love with, and in awe of, my husband, the sane guy in our crazy madhouse.


Yeah, it's a damn good life.

The Zen of Knitting

My hands are better! Not 100%, but with the miracle of braces, ice, and ibuprofen (not to mention stretches recommended by some of you - thanks), I am back in the knitting zone.

Here are a few of my recovery projects:


My Mom sent me some of the loveliest wool from New Zealand a few months back, and here's what I have done with it. This is a vest made so that I look well-endowed-yet-svelte while wearing it, instead of like a big balloon with legs as with my previous attempt at vest-making. It's finished now, and my goal is to put up a pic of me in it - but first I need to wear it somewhere, which means going somewhere, so it could be a while.

Then, just as I was finishing up with that project and casting about for another, my brother emailed me a pic of something called a golf club headcover, and asked if I could make one? In time for an upcoming golf vacation that he's taking? Heck yes! I said, and here it is:



These two projects together probably represent twenty or thirty hours of knitting, and to pass the time I've listened to audio books, primarily Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. They're fun, especially the short stories, because they hold Luke and Owen's attention and so make for good listening all around.

Also, while I've been healing my hands, I've been riveted to this amazing book, The Best of Vogue Knitting. It's twenty-five years' worth of articles from the magazine, which range from history and philosophy of knitting (seriously - and sooo cool!), to about fourteen different ways to cast on (my new fave: the cable cast-on), to clever ideas like knitting back backwards, to celebrity knitters and what they're making.

And so now you must picture this: me, in my backyard, hanging out with our hens - and knitting. If anyone had said to me this time last year that either of these two pastimes would be even on my list of fun things to do, I would have laughed at them.

But that was before I got over my fear of chickens - and awoke to the zen of knitting.

Food and Family

I write a column for Parents and Kids, called Food and Family, and I thought that I'd share a few of the more recent columns with recipes for you to try:

First, one about veggie burgers, which I used to dislike intensely but then came up with a recipe that hubby and I love.

And second, a roast chicken recipe that turns into two other yummy meals using the leftovers.

Hope you enjoy them!

Finding the Beauty - Day 9

Five-year-old Owen's version of Emperor Palpatine's Chair.

Finding the Beauty - Day 8

Ahh, Garfield.

I'm reposting an oldie-but-goodie about Garfield and the comics in general over at The Relaxed Learning Cafe. If you want to read about how comics help us learn about life, go check it out!

The Unspoken Issue

Hello friends! I am still finding the beauty but, as my hands are a bit better, I thought I would blog about an issue close to my heart, instead of ranting at my hubby about it for like the fifteenthth time. More pics to come, and also a post about the zen of knitting, but in the meantime:

Our education system is broken. Newsweek's recent article, Why We Can't Get Rid of Failing Teachers, is the latest indication of just how bad it's gotten.

The article makes a persuasive argument in favor of wresting power from unions and giving it to administrators to fire teachers when the need arises. As a teacher, I feel conflicted about this; teachers get such a bad rap that the idea of firing them at will just appears to load on the disrespect. Need somebody to blame? Here, have a bad teacher!

But what really concerns me about the article are the assumptions that underlie it.

It's a foregone conclusion, for example, that current teaching methods and curriculum are fine. The emphasis on standardized tests as a reliable measure of children's learning, as well as the idea that all kids should learn the same things, at about the same age, are assumed to be okay too. A student's imagination and interest - the theory that a child should have a say in what he or she learns - has been totally sidelined. Are these ideas really so embedded in the national consciousness that they can be dismissed without mention, in an article about how to fix education?

Also, if teachers are failing, how is that measured? There is not a word about how to determine this in the whole article. Who decides that a teacher is failing? Aside from the obvious, like those who sexually assault students, or overtly abuse them, the criterion I've read most about is... the height of students' test scores.

As this system slides down the rabbit-hole, it's taking kids and adults with it. The system nearly took my oldest son, and we only realized how broken public education is after we started homeschooling.

So, bully for us, right? What about the kids who can't homeschool, or can't afford private school? How do we make it right for them?

Finding the Beauty - Day 7

We're deep into March now, usually the month I have the most trouble with, and I have to say that so far... knock on wood... there has been lots of beauty to find.

Recently, we went on a hike with some friends - that's where today's pics come from:



Thanks, Angela, for that first one!

Why do I love bleak, dry pictures like this? I don't know, I just do.

Here is the view, seen from between two rocks up at the summit. It is an amazing place, and takes my breath away every time I get the chance to climb to it.

I hope you are finding the beauty in March too! If you want to read a bit more about hiking, go to Shannon's post at our new community blog, The Relaxed Cafe.

Finding the Beauty - Day 6

To serve and protect...

the vernal pool in Dragon Woods.