On the road: stopping to play in the sunshine

Riley skating the bowl at the Florence Skatepark

Happy Memorial Day

Matt and Riley skated today in Newport, KY's Memorial Day parade to support their friend Andrew's very cool skateshop, Galaxie.

Here are a few pictures:




Maya and Seth checking out their candy


All the kids enjoying a post-parade visit from the lady with the "bubble bike"



Riley hanging out at the skateshop after the parade


Maya and Seth at the skateshop

I have to start this post off today by saying how very grateful I am to have "found" unschooling, "radical unschooling" in particular. I really do not like to think about what my relationship with my kids might be like had we not so drastically changed our ideas about how we would live with and relate to our children. So, instead of thinking about it any more today, I'm going to blog about some recent joyful living and learning around here.

Riley and I (and sometimes Maya and Seth) have been reading the first Harry Potter book. I have waited for years to read these books because I wanted to read them for the first time with the kids. We're hoping to read a book, watch the corresponding movie, read the next book, next movie, etc.

Maya and Seth have been really into Harold and the Purple Crayon. We heard about this book a few years ago when Riley was into the Captain Underpants stories by Dav Pilkey. We had read, I think on Dav Pilkey's website, that the character Harold's name was inspired by Harold from Harold and the Purple Crayon. It had been one of Dav Pilkey's favorite books as a child and it has proven to be a favorite of all my kids' too. We've read it several times again lately, and we rented a collection of the cartoons. Maya got really excited late one evening after we had been snuggling in the bed reading. She was suddenly way too excited to get to sleep. She said she had decided she wanted to be a writer and a librarian. She got right up and started illustrating several stories and asked me to write them down for her. She also asked me to write a list of titles for stories she wanted to tell for her library's story times, and she borrowed some of my lists and things I had written that were lying around my room for "the grown-ups' section." For the next several days she did her story times from her list, retelling the stories and acting them out for us and for a little neighbor friend who plays at our house and loves to hear stories.

Here are some pictures from the past week:

Saved by Fix-A-Flat

Playing Cranium Hullabaloo

Digging, measuring, playing, and making scenes in dry oats

Experimenting with homemade "clouds" using steam and a cold, refrigerated pan while brewing some tea

The kitchen Maya designed with blocks for her characters, both named Block, who are inspired by and are the little sisters of Plank (not pictured), who was inspired by Plank on Ed, Edd, and Eddy. Later in the day she had built an entire house for this little wooden family.

This is what happens when you leave your 4 year old watching Harold and the Purple Crayon cartoons while you take a shower. No one was there to put any paper up on the wall when inspiration struck for Seth and his purple crayon!

A couple of evenings ago Maya and Riley were downstairs playing in Ri's room (which used to be our family room/play room). We heard some running on the ramp and lots of laughing, excited talk, and occasional squeals. When Seth and I went down to see what all the excitement was, we found them perched on the deck of the ramp, conducting all kinds of experiments with Riley's electricity and magnets kit and his physics kit. I hung out for a while as the kids went back and forth between running around on the ramp and talking with me about the things they were making (a compass, a set of sirens, a working fan, lights, etc).

Here is the ramp side of Riley's room

And here is the other side

After we had all gone upstairs to settle in for the night and watch a movie, we heard the newspapers being put on our porch for Riley's first job. Our city has a once-a-week newspaper, and he is going to deliver on a couple of streets in our neighborhood. I figured we would roll and bag them in the morning, but he was anxious to get started. We chatted about the money and played around with calculations as it is a fixed amount for delivery and then can vary for collection; and we chatted about the job itself and about some of the things going on in our community as we scanned the headlines while we worked together.

Choices

Over the last few months, Riley has been through the process of making a pretty big change in his daily life. For the last couple of years, tae kwon do (and more recently judo and hap ki do) has been a huge part of his life, a major passion, and the driving force behind much of his learning, sparking interests in Korean history, culture, and language as well as those related to other great martial arts traditions. He was almost always practicing his forms or talking about tae kwon do, no matter where we were or what we were doing. He had opportunities to challenge himself physically and mentally, participate in several competitions and demonstrations, lead classes; and he had advanced to a red belt. Our whole family was blessed with the opportunity to meet and become friends with some truly wonderful people at his tae kwon do school.



He did learn and experience some things I wish he hadn't, like saying "yes, sir" when he truly meant "no." He had really great insights from experiences I felt sketchy about him having, though, too. I was less than enthusiastic about going to competitions. He loved them though. He loved meeting people from other towns and other schools. He told me after one competition about how much fun it was to win first place trophies but it kind of took away from it to know his new friend who didn't win wasn't feeling very happy.


Over the last several months, his enthusiasm started to fade. It waxed and waned for a while, but he has pretty surely decided he is finished with martial arts for now. I've been pretty surprised at how difficult this has been for me. For one thing, it was such a huge part of our lives, even though Riley was the only one actually participating. Maya and Seth and I were always there with him while he did his classes (usually 3 or 4 1-hour classes during the week and then I went with him for 3 hours on Saturdays), and we all had friends we enjoyed hanging out with there. And then there were the old tapes resurfacing for me around the subject of quitting. I'm amazed at the way my thoughts about his choice to continue on through the last year of the black belt program or not snowballed for me into fears that he would forever after walk away from everything he was involved with when he got a little bored or interested in something else or that he would forever after stick with something just because he started it, feeling trapped and unable to change directions. I did a lot of "talking myself down" from all of that drama as well as the comments from others that I should just make him stick with it for the Noble Cause of finishing what one starts.


I did however, badger him a bit too much about why his interest tanked so completely. I think it would have been easier for me to understand if there had been some major thing that happened to cause this big turnaround. There wasn't.


As skateboarding and several games and other activities have emerged as new interests, I did ask him if he didn't feel like he had time to do all of it. After all, he doesn't have 8 or so hours of his day taken up with school. He explained that it wasn't that he didn't have enough time for martial arts and his newer passions, just not enough interest right now. That was really the end of my agonizing over the situation. He is simply flowing right along, quite thoughtfully, with what he knows is right for himself -- without a lot of fears and what ifs and shoulds clouding his choices.


We all make these kinds of choices as adults -- changing jobs or careers, moving, stopping and starting hobbies and interests. Kids often have their choices made for them (well, except for lame pseudo choices like "Do you want to wear the red shirt or the blue shirt today?"). They also are often held to a stricter standard of "once you start it you have to finish it" than most of us hold ourselves to. Had I persuaded his direction or presumed to know the best choice for him, he would have missed this particular opportunity to freely choose to walk away from one set of experiences and walk toward others and to learn more about which are most in tune with who he is.

As he goes right on learning and making thoughtful choices, I learn to trust a little more, listen a little more, and enjoy the journey.

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