Everyday living and learning

Here are some of the twists and turns our lives (and learning) have taken over the last week:

Yugioh dueling/trading, Pokemon trading, organizing Pokemon card collection, listening to and singing the songs on our new Amy Steinberg CD (everyone should have the awesome experience of hearing their children belting out the words of her song Exactly), making and sculpting with homemade play dough, meeting new friends (including an unschooling family -- yay!), playing with old friends, watching the road crew/trucks resurface our street, Club Penguin, receiving postcards from unschoolers in other states and countries, Runescape, Webkinz, reading and looking at lots of picture books, drawing 8-point stars, drawing pictures of friends and family and trucks, solving for "x," squares and square roots, UNO, Karaoke Revolution on Playstation, tae kwon do, a new (to us) skatepark, a new (to us) playground, reading a flow chart, the Indianapolis Children's Museum, Letterboxing, learning to use a compass, tent caterpillars, Bhutan, the midnight premiere of Spiderman 3 (for Matt and Riley), and a matinee of Meet the Robinsons in 3D (for all of us).

Snapshots

At home:

Maya on the keyboard ; Seth watching the road crew

Around town:

Our first letterbox

From our trip to the Children's Museum of Indianapolis:

Sculpting a plastic version of Dale Chihuly's Fireworks of Glass

Building an ancient Egyptian town

Mayasaur nurturing her nest; Sethasaur on the prowl

More dinosaur play

In the Art Room

Peaking beneath the surface of the pond

Sethy was a race car driver...

National Spank Out Day

Today is National Spank Out Day. EPOCH-USA and the Center for Effective Discipline works toward educating and legislating away physical abuse of children, a.k.a. spanking, corporal punishment, swatting, or whatever term makes easier for so many to justify hitting children. Their website has information about alternatives to hitting children, information related to various religious views, and statistics by state regarding the legality and incidence of hitting children in schools and even daycares. I have a list of links along the right side of my blog to other parenting resources that offer alternatives to hitting (and so much more). There is also a yahoo group/email list run by Pam Sorooshian for parents who want to discuss alternatives to hitting.

My husband could go to jail if he hit me, even if he had "tried everything else" and I "still wouldn't listen!" Why children are not afforded the same protection from abuse that full grown adults are given, why there is not shock and disgust and *rescue* when we encounter a child being hit, is completely beyond my comprehension. And yet...

We went to a children's museum yesterday. My daughter was playing at a water table when a woman came up and hit a toddler 2 or 3 times for climbing on the table (this was the third child I had seen hit in a time span of about 30 minutes). My daughter looked around at me like "Do something!" Do you know what I did? Nothing. I know that what that Mom did is so acceptable in our society that *I* would be the one perceived as stepping out of bounds to intervene; but, by choosing to look the other way, all I did was condone what happened. Here are two articles (that I will certainly be rereading and thinking about) by Jan Hunt of the Natural Child Project: Intervening on Behalf of a Child in a Public Place: Part 1 Is It Our Business, and Intervening on Behalf of a Child in a Public Place: Part 2 What Can We Do.

I do have a story that makes me smile and gives me hope. We have had the book One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss since Riley was a baby. Near the beginning of the book, there is a part where it says "Some are sad. And some are glad. And some are very, very bad." The illustration on the "very, very bad" page shows a big, angry-looking, red fish hitting at a surprised-looking smaller fish. I had always seen it as an adult fish punishing a "very, very bad" fish until my kids told me one time what they saw in the picture: a big, red, "very, very bad" fish hitting the little fish.

Beowulf followup

Riley lost interest in reading the full version of Beowulf after we got past the battle between Beowulf and Grendl (the part he was familiar with from a short story version). Still interested in the original language, we found a website that had audio of a reading from a passage from Beowulf in Old English (you just click on the capital letters at the beginning of each verse to listen -- you need RealAudio Player v3 ). We read a bit more online about the evolution of the English language; and, as we were reading about the Battle of Hastings and the Norman conquest of England, we found this cartoonized version of the Bayeux Tapestry on You Tube. I'll post the video directly on the blog from YouTube if I can figure out how...

Overdue Easter pix and this weekend's TKD tournament

Here are pictures from Easter Sunday:



and some from this weekend's tae kwon do tournament in Elizabethtown, KY:

Riley doing his form

Waiting to do his breaking technique: a blindfolded wheel kick

Sparring with Julie, a friend he met at the tournament

Receiving a trophy

Riley's TKD master instructor, Master Kim, and the group from KMA who attended the tournament:

(side note: if you click on the KMA website, I just realized they have added the video from a local commercial filmed at last summer's open house -- at the beginning there is a quick shot of Riley jumping through a ring of fire)

Maya and her monkey ---------- Matt and Seth

This Week

We had two days of beautiful weather early in the week before it turned really cold -- we even have had little snow flurries several days this week. Matt took one of the warm days off from work. We spent that afternoon at a nearby playground and skatepark. We spent the next afternoon at the park with friends. The rest of the week we spent indoors. The kids got interested in reading Shel Silverstein's Falling Up again, and I added one of his poems to the right side of this blog page. I also added a link to the blog Riley started called "my great life and all my adventures."

Ri got interested in Beowulf from a short story version we had borrowed from the library a few weeks ago, so this week he borrowed the full poem. The book we borrowed has the original Old English on one page with the corresponding translation on the facing page. That has spurred an interest for both of us in learning more about the progression of the English language through history; and we're planning to read more about that as well as about Scandinavian history, particularly during the time period Beowulf was written (between the 7th and 10th centuries).

Maya has been thinking about words a lot lately, too -- the modern English kind. She doesn't read on her own yet, but she spends a lot of time lately looking at words, sometimes asking what something spells but more often just quietly looking by herself. We were looking at some paint chips, and she was asking me the names of the colors on them, and one was called "madras." She said, "Oh, I thought it said 'drama'." I have no idea where she learned which letters make up the word "drama," but I thought it was cool that she saw it in "madras." It reminded me of how she has spelled her own name over the last few years -- sometimes it was "ayam," sometimes "yama," occasionally some other variation. A couple of times I mentioned about writing left to right, but she said she didn't care, so that was that. At some point, she started consistently spelling "Maya." At some point, she will crack more of the code and madras will be madras and drama will be drama. I'm glad she gets to enjoy the process in her own time and in her own way.

Pictures from this past week:

Riley making mosaics---------------Maya drawing

Maya and Seth making things with magic nuudles (cornstarch foamy things)

Maya building with Lego's----- A crane that Seth, Riley, and I are building

Maya playing with air flow at the vent

Seth playing with magnet shapes

Aaaah, Mornings

Every time I see the morning school bus going by our kitchen window, passing up our house, I am reminded to be thankful for this way of living: thankful that no one from our house is rushing out the door to get on board and thankful for all of the experiences and the time we get to share together instead.

First Day of Spring

What a beautiful day!!! After a trip to Jump Zone with some friends, we spent the rest of the warm, sunny afternoon in our backyard reading, playing, swinging, feeding the birds, and jumping on the trampoline. Below are pictures of the kids playing in the dirt: Riley digging, Seth playing with trucks, and Maya on an earthworm rescue mission.

And from earlier in the week, here are Maya and her good friend Rebecca all dressed up to play and jump on the trampoline.

Celebrate, Learn, Love

Last Wednesday there was a lot to celebrate. The weather was warm, sunny, and beautiful. Seth was so, so happy to be digging in the backyard dirt with his construction trucks. The date was 3/14 -- "pi day," so in between playing outside we messed around with the compass, making circles and measuring radii, diameters, and circumferences, and, of course, eating pie. We looked up some stuff on the web about pi and ended up doing a frozen-hotdog-throwing experiment based on Buffon's needle problem. It got quite messy as the hotdogs thawed, making me even more grateful that it was warm enough to do this outside. We discovered that it was also Albert Einstein's birthday, so we read some about him and played a little relativity game that we came across online. We mostly liked reading his quippy quotes and ended up printing and cutting out a bunch of them to tape up on the wall along with a big poster of Einstein that Matt used to have in his office. Riley's favorite quote was an explanation of relativity:

"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it's only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it's two hours. That's relativity."

My favorite:

"There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is."

Here are some other quotes of Einstein's we read that, as an unschooling Mom, I love:

"Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

"It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of education have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry."

"Education is that which remains when one has forgotten everything learned in school."

"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning."

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex...It takes a touch of genius -- an a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."

That last one brings to mind many things that our society makes"bigger and more complex" when it comes to life with children. From the time they are born, we're told to regulate and schedule and control our children's eating, sleeping, and even their play. As they grow, we're encouraged to rush them to master new physical/academic/social skills, to push them through all kinds of exercises to get them reading early and a lot, to separate from their families, and to make damn sure they are not behind. Where I've followed that path, it has clouded the opportunity to witness the miracles of my children's lives unfolding right before my eyes; and parenting has felt like a stressful ordeal. Where I've stepped away from that path and moved toward unconditional love, toward trust, and toward connection, the miracles of learning, growing, discovering, loving are right there to enjoy as they are allowed to unfold simply, naturally, and beautifully.

What We've Been Up To

Matt and the kids have all started skateboarding recently. Well, for Matt it is *re-starting* after a 10-or-so-year hiatus. Below is Riley the day he learned to drop in on our garage mini ramp and Seth rolling around on some leftover masonite in our family/play room. We've made several trips to area skateparks lately and rented Ollie's, the local indoor skatepark, one afternoon with some friends from our homeschool groups.

This is how the back of our van was packed for us to spend a couple of hours at Ollie's. I have no idea how we are going to squeeze in suitcases and all for our upcoming trip to Florida in a few months!!

Besides skating, the kids have been spending a lot of time drawing, doing some of the experiments that Robert Krampf emails out, reading, playing on the Webkinz website, and watching scary movies. They recently discovered R. L. Stine's books and have been happy to have some spooky stories to read. Riley is most of the way through a book from the Ghosts of Fear Street series, and Maya and I read one from the Goosebumps series.

I finally finished making this hat for Maya!! It was a project I started after the 2005 Live and Learn Unschooling Conference, where I had learned about round loom knitting. (That's not a typo -- I started it in 2005) It had been in my closet for a long time til she remembered it and asked me when I was ever going to finish it!

by Riley

by Maya

by Seth

While Matt was lounging on the beach, er, I mean away on a business trip, in Clearwater, Florida, the kids and I shopped for Webkinz pets and then spent much of the week playing on the Webkinz website. They've been having a blast (admittedly so have I) playing the games and activities to earn points to buy virtual food, clothes, toys, furniture, etc. for their online pets. Today they decided to pool their resources, gathering and cleaning up some old toys and outgrown clothes to sell so that they could each adopt another pet.

We also spent an afternoon at the Cincinnati History Museum at the Cincinnati Museum Center. This was our first trip to that part of the Museum Center. The kids loved the room with all of the models of downtown Cincinnati, playing in the old street car, and seeing the model of the Zoo as it looked when it was first built.

They also enjoyed playing with the toy steamboats and flatboats, shipping cargo up and down the Ohio River. Riley and Maya liked touring the big model steamboat, but Seth thought the noise was too scary.