a scrap of green t-shirt sleeve, followed by the brim of a floppy, khaki hat wobble out from near the front of the line of campers, the one glimpse i’ve caught of quinn on his very first sleepaway camp experience. the t.a. and videographer is bringing up the rear behind the six campers attending Paleontology Explorers: Oregon, and after they take a few steps, the camera pans over the white tufts of beargrass flocking a stark high elevation flatland studded with snags spearing the sapphire sky, an inverted green bunting of young conifer triangles painted across its mid-section.
he is up front behind the leader, hopefully too out of breath to be talking her ear off. the group is already cohesive, one entity moving with brisk purpose in an intentional direction toward a common goal. the sense of anticipation, ownership, and belonging seem palpable, even through the filtered lens of an instagram feed. the one other boy on the trip, D from L.A., is at quinn’s heels, the four young women comprising the rest of the group of six campers marching along in step. i think i spot the one he first introduced himself to, R from california, who, like quinn, has a dinosaur pillowcase. shedding her NASA sweatshirt as they team-carried gear to the van, she revealed her next layer of a harry potter t-shirt. As quinn and D carried either end of a duffel, i overheard a snippet of conversation about “ender pearls,” and i felt it all sinking in – these were quinn’s people. this was him finding a few more of his tribe. The other ones for whom dinosaurs were not something they grew out of, nor got over. the other ones who may possibly be more proud of achieving a grade point average of 3.14 than one of 4.0. the other ones who might see HGTV through the lens of house flipping to afford more expeditions and more plaster. the other ones whose bed stickers may have been classified at age 6 into jurassic and cretaceous species. The other ones whose parents stood around awkwardly at camp drop-off trying not to let on how relieved they were that our kids are finally finding one another.
somewhere in the eastern cascades, a boy is laying his head on his dinosaur pillowcase, among a pack of campers each with their own heads on their own dinosaur pillowcases, out in a big world doing his thing.
we had family visiting on christmas eve. rich’s mom, daughter and son-in-law came, and his mom made dinner for us all. it was fun to impart messages of non-worry and support to my pregnant step-daughter, and encourage her to refrain from consulting the dreaded google about that sore hip or that swollen foot. she had a cold she had been trying to shake for months, and i told her that it was a good sign for her baby, that during pregnancy your immune system is dialed down to accommodate the baby, and that was just what it was doing (accommodating the baby, instead of fighting off the cold particularly efficiently). i know there is a metaphor in there for life, parenting, and everything.
quinn had a good time catching up with the family. that night, he slept in his sleeping bag on the living room floor. everyone came back christmas morning for pancakes and bacon and presents.
quinn fits right into the christmas model of the rew family, with whom he has only spent one christmas when he was not quite two years old. the rews take their time, take turns (in order!) opening presents, and time is also taken to pass around, explore and savor a present, and for expressing thanks. this can take an entire day, with breaks taken for meals, and back in the day, barn chores. rich’s family gets it done in a half hour. quinn took 15 minutes unwrapping rich’s mom’s present, a cool calendar, because he was reading the comics in which it was wrapped. it’s the way that he has always been, in fact, we would often spread just a few presents out over a period of several days when he was younger.
i approached this christmas a bit the opposite of last christmas, when it came to quinn. last year, when he was in 5th grade, a big fish in a small pond, maturing… i gave him practical gifts and not as many toys. this year he is swimming hard into the middle school current, and everything is so serious all the time that i felt like this christmas should be as playful and fun as possible. he got lego sets, a game, a rubik’s cube, a bunch of books he wanted (minecraft guides, life of fred trigonometry, a role play game book four against darkness, hexaflexagons by martin gardner, harry potter y la piedra filosofal for continuing to practice his spanish, and to be extra playful: p is for pterodactyl, the worst alphabet book ever, because it had a dinosaur on the cover and it makes me happy to think of his struggle against silent letters as an early reader. i had fun reminding him about how i had to really play up how funny i thought those silent letters were, to get him to lighten up about them. he can laugh about it now, but he would get so frustrated each time he encountered another offending letter!
rich has been working on a boat called the pegasus, and the skipper had given him a hat and a hoodie printed with the boat logo. when he wore it home, i noted that there was a picture of the mythological winged horse on the boat, and we both remarked how quinn would appreciate it. a few days later rich came home with a hoodie in size (adult) medium for quinn. when he opened it on christmas morning, quinn realized the reason for it (aside from it being the boat rich is working on). quinn smiled knowingly and rich joked, “isn’t it from some chinese mythology or something?” and quinn hilariously downplayed his encyclopedic mythological knowledge saying, “i think it’s greek” and i laughed. “you think?” litotes much? and then we got to hear him tell how poseiden and medusa fell in love but decided to go on a date in athena’s palace, and athena cursed medusa and her sisters to punish medusa for the offense, and then (he included more details i am unable to regurgitate…) when medusa was killed, her three unborn children were released, and one of them was pegasus, god of the winged horses. and everyone agreed, that sounded 100% correct.
he wanted to read each book, look at each lego set, open each yu-gi-oh card expansion pack and read every single card. there were so many good, funny moments. one of the first stocking presents he opened was a bright green cowbell and he shouted, “more cowbell!” and everyone laughed and talked about christopher walken but quinn said, “it’s from the trials of apollo.”
he was 3/4 done with the lego sets by the next morning, and he had opened every book and finished at least one. he had specifically asked for jurassic park legos and was very happy with them. after building each set he went about recombining dinosaur parts and making “hybrid” species (complete with imagined backstory of how rare/common they are, their habitat and diet, etc.)
grammy and grampy gave him a model strandbeest (a wind-powered automaton beach-walker that quinn learned about and was fascinated with a few years ago when he watched theo jansen’s ted talk.) once again, he recounted amazing facts to the live studio audience about the original strandbeests and how the inventor wanted them to exist in the wild so he would add features like a “brain” made from a water bottle that somehow helped them sense the water’s edge and keep them from going into the water.
rich and i were visited by a gray bunny rabbit on solstice in the yard, and it kept returning to visit each evening, including on christmas eve and christmas day, when quinn got to see it as well. we called it full moon solstice bunny. it was gone again a few days later, but we felt its magical appearance was a gift. rabbits are often said to be symbolic of creativity and fertility. with our time off to indulge in creative pursuits, and our anticipation of new family members, this meaning certainly applied. a creature at the mercy of the elements, rabbits are able to make use of mere blades of grass to sustain life, so this bunny in our yard was surrounded by abundance. whereas they can seem afraid and skittish, this one was approachable and less fearful than most. i think bunnies can symbolize overcoming fear and anxiety. with so many predators (eagle, hawk, owl, coyote, bobcat) it is no wonder that rabbit could succumb to fears, but focusing on abundance brings more abundance, whereas giving power to fear can instead bring fear to reality. i am going to go out on a limb and say bunnies are a good mascot for the law of attraction, and manifesting abundance. turning anxiety around, rabbits can be seen as very alert and perceptive to their surroundings, and this gray bunny made me think of how perception can give us flexibility to process the gray areas of life. finally, the softness and vulnerability of rabbit are a great lesson in embracing the softer side of our natures, being open and approachable, being vulnerable enough to put our fears out there can sometimes bring us closer together.
q and i had a fun day of yu-gi-oh (he slaughtered me) and laying around with our laptops (yugioh on netflix and coding a game on scratch). one evening i opened up the martin gardner hexaflexagons book to a random page and found a game called hex, and had dryly mentioned that i was sure he would hate this book, “here i’ve just arbitrarily opened to a game involving hexagons. sounds awful.” he replied, deadpan, “oh man, yeah, i will hate that.” at lunch the next day he brought the book to me and said, “i know we’ll hate it, but will you read to me about hex?” i did, and then we printed out a hex game board from the internet, and picked out green and yellow buttons as game pieces… and he proceeded to clobber me over and over again. the kid is good at math strategy! sheesh. he is seeing things i may be able to see with time, but he’s just already got a handle an 11 by 11 grid of hexagons.
already, that book has proven to be fun and he hasn’t even really read it. martin gardner wrote a column in scientific american for many years on recreational math, and vi hart talks about him a lot, especially in her hexaflexagon videos. i figured quinn would appreciate reading directly from the source. gardner’s columns are collected into a pile of books, so i got him the first one. it’s intended for an audience of adults, but i was reading to him concerning proofs from game theory on how the hex game works, and he was posing really good questions, obviously with no trouble grasping the concepts, seeing new angles, and taking it further in his mind.
142,857, a fun cyclic number i grabbed from facebook for him to puzzle over.
we also discussed his life of fred journey. i asked if he knows what’s next after trig and he said, “yes, calculus.” and i said, “are you planning to go right on to read calculus after trig?” he did not hesitate: “yes.” i said, “ok, but i think when you’re done reading them you might want to go back and do some of the exercises to make sure you know the Procedures to do the problems,” (practice) and he said he plans to. he doesn’t plan to start back at the beginning with fractions, but just with the later books, starting with beginning algebra. he thinks he has the lower level stuff down now, and he can go from there. but his plan is to read the calculus book, and then start doing the beginning algebra problems in his math journal, and work his way on up through geometry, trig, calc, after that. i’ve told him the good things i’ve heard of the math teachers at the high school; the one married to the teacher quinn has had for theatre workshops (she teaches drama and is also the tag teacher up there) is said to allow kids to keep learning on beyond calculus if they are capable, and will hold class for as small a group as needed. i wanted to give him a little bit to look forward to and make sure he is still thirsty to learn this stuff the way he has been. he seems to know that he does his best learning at home, and isn’t looking at school as his primary place of learning. therefore dreading anything about school (as he has sometimes felt with his current math class) doesn’t get automatically linked (for him) with dreading anything to do with learning. i think they are essentially two separate things in his mind. strangely, i think this compartmentalization is a good thing in his case. one can ask why one might attend school if one learns best at home, and it’s certainly an open discussion in my mind.
at least i get to facilitate project-based interest-driven learning on breaks. over this break he worked on a card-based role play survival game with dinosaurs. i steered him into generating dinosaur artwork for the cards. check out his resulting drawings!
we had some outside time before break was over!
he had an emotional meltdown in the car coming home from karate one night. he was feeling criticized, wanting to quit school, life, not wanting to grow up. i helped him name it overwhelm. i gave him a visualization of drawers in his mind, having him picture what the drawers look like and what they are made from, right down to the details of the handles. i said, “sometimes all of your little drawers have their contents tucked inside and are neatly closed, and it’s peaceful. sometimes though, too many things are out of their drawers trying to be dealt with at once, and that is what overwhelmed feels like, and so now i want you to take karate, put it in its drawer, and close the drawer.” i waited to let him do it, and had him visualize closing each topic (school, friends, etc.) in its drawer. we talked about taking them out one at a time the next day, when we’d be able to look at them on their own, and they wouldn’t seem nearly as overwhelming.
another topic we discussed this month had to do with control and compliance and relating to adults as a pre-teen who is used to being in charge of his own person. i don’t remember exactly how it came up, but some adult in his life had expected compliance from him and he had felt it was undeserved. i felt it best to explain why i think he was having a reaction to such a thing. i told him that because i have mostly not required compliance from him based solely on the premise “i’m the mom, i’m older than you, and therefore i’m in charge,” he is used to making the choice to comply with my requests (which are almost always accompanied by information and reasoning) rather than have compliance extracted from him by an adult. if he gives me his respect, it is because i have earned it and he has chosen to give it to me, not because i’ve demanded it. but i explained that most other adults operate in a different way from that, and insist on compliance and believe children owe them that because they are older. since i’ve done it differently i may have put him in a position where he notices it a heck of a lot more than other kids, who are conditioned to the other way, and that may be hard for him on some level. however, i also hope he can see it as an advantage in that he knows his own mind, and knows that when he complies he is doing so by choice, because he has decided he can trust this adult and what they are instructing him to do. on the other hand, he also has the strength to question or defy when he knows or suspects an instruction is unjust or incorrect, and the wherewithall to ask for information about why a command is being issued, rather than blindly following. it’s been my goal to raise a critical thinker, not a blind follower. i think he could see the pros and cons, and the perspective was helpful in alleviating his disgruntled feelings of the moment.
his new haircut makes him look taller yet again. though he is legitimately taller! i measured him xmas day at 5’2 ¾”!
this month marked the first call home from the principal, concerning quinn’s reasonable response to an unprovoked shove/hit by a kid with a neighboring locker. ahh, middle school milestones.
one saturday while i worked farmer’s market, rich and quinn did firewood work together. rich had me look in the back of his truck when i got home and he was starting to unload the wood, and said that quinn had been the one to stack it into the back, though he waited for quinn to “offer” to do this. rich started setting wood in the truck and quinn said, “i’ll climb in the back!” quinn talked alllll about minecraft to rich, and i think stacking firewood appeals to quinn because it’s real life minecraft block stacking. he would stack it ever so evenly like puzzle pieces and then fill in the spaces with smaller pieces. rich said there was twice as much wood in the same amount of space he usually fills because quinn was analyzing how to fit more pieces in the same space. he would ask rich for certain sizes “i need a big one for the base” and rich would be a joker and hand him a “big one” that was a tiny twig. rich commented on quinn’s story telling (or minecraft details) and the way quinn occasionally trails off in conversation; he would be left in the middle of a sentence and would look over like, where did he go? i know that speaking style very well.
we had a mellow, sleeping-in sunday with pumpkin pancakes. quinn and i figured out how to play multiplayer minecraft together on both our laptops, which was hilarious. we held a librarian hostage, installed purple and green stained glass windows, and tamed wolves to be our pet dogs.
the librarian traded with us for enchanted books. i am not sure why he was still willing to trade us when we had commandeered his house and held him captive, but i guess he’s just cool like that.
he finally got a larger size (but exactly the same brand and color, his requirement) backpack, and i was delighted to find his collection of wedding detritus from his step-sister’s wedding over a year ago in the pocket, along with the other treasures (petrified orange!!).
he had math and language arts homework that took him hours even though it was 2 math problems and 3 google slides… but he got it done, and then had a bath and he ate a million pounds of food (he had eaten all the meals and then while we were working on the logic puzzle before bed he pounded 4 fig newmans. this was the evening that he broke google with his logic question.
i got quinn to school ready for his math test that monday, prepared to talk to his spanish teacher about making up a quiz he had missed before break, and ready for his social studies test. he is a long string bean in a green hoodie.
i showed quinn a photo from when he was 4 and fell asleep on the happy spot foot stool. he wanted to re-create it. i’m not sure this has anything to do with lifelong learning, but certainly gives a sense of scale of just how much he has physically grown!
twelve is a sublime number, a number that has a perfect number of divisors, and the sum of its divisors is also a perfect number. there are six divisors of twelve (1,2,3,4,6,12) and 6 is perfect; adding 1+2+3+4+6+12 = 28, which is another perfect number; this double perfectionism defines twelve as a sublime number.
something about two scoops of perfectionism feels familiar, almost like i’ve written about it in the context of quinn before.
sublime also means “of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe.” i think that may turn out to be true of twelve as well. i may be a biased observer, though!
1+2+3+6. i have found the months leading up to 12 to be rather intense. the list of divisors adding up to 12 and making it therefore a semiperfect number all happen to be ages i can look back on and say were also ages where i noticed intensity. it remains to be seen what level of intensity is in store for this new year of quinn.
there are only two known sublime numbers, 12 and (2126)(261 − 1)(231 − 1)(219 − 1)(27 − 1)(25 − 1)(23 − 1). The second of these has 76 digits:
6086555670238378989670371734243169622657830773351885970528324860512791691264, so it’ll be a little while before he celebrates another sublime number birthday. i believe he is excited for next year, however, since it’ll be a fibonacci birthday! his first since becoming aware of the existence of fibonacci birthdays, so it’ll be big, aside from other reasons why people blow 13 out of proportion (eek! a teenager!).
he climbs into the front seat of the car to ride home from school now, so nearly adult-sized (he has surpassed several of my good friends in height, in fact) that he is safe up front. the same kid whose outgrown car seat (with 5-point harness) i had to gently remove while he was at his dad’s, because he was quite attached, not even 3 years ago. i pull away from the curb, and he immediately starts rocking back and forth, the sign that he needs a bathroom badly and hasn’t gone all day. we chat about strategies for actually using the multiple bathrooms provided by his institution of learning, i have him picture them, decide which ones he likes most, picture where they are in relation to each classroom, and then have him mentally walk through his daily schedule to try to find the most likely mid-day opportunity to fit in the use of his preferred one en route between classes. he decides on the way to or from band will work best, since he passes a good one, band takes place just before lunch, and he is only carrying sticks and music books, as opposed to his gigantic binder and computer.
later that same day, he is finishing his math homework with some reluctance, when he notices that the last problem is about the great pyramid of egypt, and forges ahead so he can get to that one. when he does, he reads that he is to calculate the lateral surface area of the pyramid, which (the math text claims) originally had dimensions of 754 feet slant height and 610 feet along each side of the base.
q: oh! 610 is a fibonacci number!
me: um, is it?
q: i remember, because 144 is a fibonacci number, and 610 is the one that breaks the pattern of double numbers… 144, 233, 377, then bam, 610.
me: huh.
q: maybe the ancient egyptians knew about fibonacci numbers! and phi! do you think they could have?!
he is cuckoo for irrational numbers, and phi is one of his faves. the asynchronous life of a poppy at twelve is struggling with bathroom planning, while being 100% set for a dissertation topic.
actually, it turns out he is not the first person who noticed something phi-ish about the pyramids at giza. he was thrilled to hear the google results, as he really didn’t much fancy the idea of writing a dissertation, but he does want to go visit the pyramids one day, and is glad they may reflect a number sequence near and dear to his heart.
although i have gotten away from enumerating quinn’s life in months, he can appreciate that he is now 144 months old! 12 squared! 144 being a member of the fibonacci sequence, to make it extra awesome.
other than being sublime, 12 makes an uncanny number of important appearances in mathematics. i read in a paper on the occurrence of 12 as the solution to lattice polygons that the various methods of proving this fact suggests connections among seemingly unrelated branches of math. which reminds me of another math research paper we came across recently. we were tackling a logic puzzle together, and quinn had wanted to try the most difficult one. after two nights of post-dinner work, we were getting close to finishing, but the final steps were dependent on a single clue we weren’t entirely sure how to interpret. we did trial runs of the results based on two different interpretations to see if either one came up with a valid solution, or hit a dead end. if we decided to read the clue as “neither x nor y is z” implying that x is also not y, then we could complete the grid without conflicting results; but if we decided that “neither x nor y is z” leaves the possibility that x could be y, we could not complete it, but also did not end up with conflict, we simply lacked enough information. quinn felt we couldn’t be sure, and said, “i have to google something,” pulled out his computer and typed in, “if neither x nor y is z, does that imply that x is not equal to y?” and google gave him one result. both of us reacted with, “that’s never happened before,” and laughed about that one time quinn broke google. the one result was for a 51-page dissertation on math logic which mentioned david hilbert on the first page, with whom quinn was familiar because vi hart talks about him. not a lot of other 11-year olds would say, “ooh, hilbert!” but now he is no longer eleven, he is twelve.
one of the biggest deals in math relates to 12, in that a function in number theory, the riemann zeta function, is considered to be of great significance, in fact it is considered the most important unsolved problem in pure mathematics, and its solution promises a million dollar reward, as one of the millenium prize problems established in the year 2000. hilbert, that guy who quinn and vi hart keep mentioning, had declared the importance of the problem exactly 100 years before that in a celebrated speech at a 1900 international conference. the function relates to the distribution of prime numbers, and where 12 comes in is that the value of the zeta function at −1 i.e. ζ(−1) = −1/12
-1/12 is the theoretical sum of the harmonics of all the primes. the zeta function not only relates to prime numbers, it also describes the music they make, which, if the riemann zeta hypothesis is true, turns out to be beautifully harmonious, and if it is false, dissonantly ugly. the hypothesis has yet to be proven, but this has not stopped its provisional use in a towering pile of proofs of other theorems on the assumption of its being one day proven true. if not, the pile will collapse like an epic game of jenga. euclid, euler, gauss, have all worked on this problem of the primes; riemann took it to imaginary number land, wrote a ten-page paper, and cracked the mystery. with how tickled quinn is by irrational numbers, i think imaginary numbers will be right up his alley when he gets there.
twelve is symbolic for quinn in other non-math venues. he is of course an avid fan of greek mythology, and the twelve olympians and the twelve labors of hercules are just two of many examples of the appearance of twelve therein. in norse mythology, another of quinn’s interests, odin has twelve sons. quinn was born a fire pig in the chinese zodiac, a fact of which he is fond, and we have now come full circle to a new year of the pig. so anyone born this year is a pig like quinn (can we think of any newborns? yes we can! though this year’s babies are earth piglets! and speaking of people with twelve sons, one of our new babes is named for a couple of the sons of jacob!)
uncle quinn holding new pancake w
there are twelve lunar cycles in a year, so each time quinn travels once around the sun, the moon goes from kayak moon to boat moon to fender moon and back again a dozen times! many other aspects of timekeeping (a skill around which i hope to see much great development during his year of twelve) involve twelve, of course.
it’s the number of noon, of midnight. of magnesium and cranial nerves. of a hurricane wind on the beaufort scale. of humans who have walked on the moon. of the seats filled around king arthur’s round table. of notes on the chromatic scale (see also twelve tones by our favorite mathemusician.)
speaking of music notes, i just learned from my twelve-year-old that his synesthesia extends to them. i finally thought to ask if he saw music notes in colors like he does letters and numbers. “eighth notes are orange,” he told me. “quarter notes are blue. whole notes are green. they used to all be orange and yellow, but now they’re different colors.”
“what about half notes?” i asked.
“i think those are white. sixteenth notes are red.”
“and rests and other symbols?”
“rests are black. they’re devoid of color because they’re devoid of sound. i think.”
i had wondered about it, thinking maybe he saw the color corresponding to the letter name of the note (A orange, B red, C gray, D black, E white, F brown, G red), rather than colors designating each type of note, and when i brought that up, he said that yes, he does also have those letters still associated with the same colors when they are naming a note, but the note itself has the note color, not the letter color (reference chart here – and he still names the same colors for the same letters, 3 years later).
things about quinn at twelve:
he knows how to self-soothe with graph paper.
he is a nonlinear learner. giving him harder version of problems helps him articulate the procedures laypeople might use to solve them, when he just *knows the answers without knowing how he knows.
he still wants to be a paleontologist. for a presentation on occupations that he had to give to his spanish teacher, he included a slide about it. he was nearly undone by the dreaded literal interpretation nemesis, given that he was supposed to write 10 sentences about future occupations, and technically, he did. he wrote 5 questions and 5 answers for his 10 sentences, however, his “sentences” for the answers were “no,” and “si.” i spent a few days convincing him that wasn’t what his teacher had in mind, and he finally agreed, added 5 more slides and questions to his presentation, and scored 100% instead of 50%.
as he cruises past 5’3”, he still manages to tuck himself into position to tell me, “you find an egg.” being his mama, i feel even more sublimely lucky than if i found a dozen eggs! happy dozen years to my mighty quinn!
before i get too carried away with the school year just begun, i want to update about last month…
it’s been a dino month. (i was concerned that angry birds star wars had eclipsed his first great love, but dinosaurs still get this boy very excited!) a dino project patchwork quilt:
dinosaur/fossil “unit”: we read the magic school bus series book dinosaur detectives. then, the final week of summer library program “dig into reading” was a puppet show by the dragon puppet theater, entitled “i dig dinosaurs.” even if it was not for the way the ampelosaurus burped loudly each time it swallowed a mouthful of fern, or the way the paleontologist (one sean’ry o’connory) stated at one point, “i’m a paleontologist! i only pick up fossilized dino doo-doo, not fresh dino doo-doo!” (which i can only transcribe here because quinn memorized it instantly and has repeated it back to me, dissolving in fits of giggles each time), i bet you can still guess which six year old boy thoroughly enjoyed himself. afterwards, we got to do a cool project where we made dinosaur “fossils” by embedding a plastic toy dinosaur inside a ball of goo which we then let dry for a few days, before chipping away at our “rock” to reveal the “fossil” within. the goo was made from coffee grounds, flour and salt (2:2:1 plus add some cold coffee or water until it holds together like dough) and then left to dry on a sheet of waxed paper (in the back window of our car… that is where hot and dry conditions are best imitated in our climate). i love this idea and have ideas of expanding on it in treasure hunt format.
the following day, quinn and i spent our screen time on bill nye’s fossils episode (bill nye is so great- consider the following in that episode gives a sense of billions of years by showing bill jumping around in a silo full of popcorn kernels. naturally.) i googled “dinosaur skeleton building game” and got this link, which allowed quinn to articulate three different skeletons: gastornis, mammoth, and australopithecus. that day on the beach, quinn was sean’ry o’connory, digging in the sand and finding some very interesting specimens (feathers were a popular item, which obviously could have come from archaeopteryx). the following morning, the first words out of his mouth were, “can i draw a picture?” but of course! he drew a dinosaur skeleton, then proceeded to dig up fossils from the blueberry/blackberry layer under the “dirt and mud” (cheerios and milk) that had been sitting there “for millions of years and turned into rock!”
the excavating of fossils including the one we created at the library, and another one he received for christmas from grammy and grampy, took place out on the front steps one evening when dinner was supposed to be getting started. dinner must wait for science sometimes.
i have since found another dinosaur fossil digging game on the phone which takes him to all the continents of the world except antarctica and challenges him to find fossils of a more impressive list of dinosaurs. once he has dug out all of the various parts of each skeleton, they get placed in the museum, which is one reason i think he has decided his room shall become a museum. the first skeleton in his exhibit will be completed soon- an eel skeleton that had been in pieces in a box i had tucked away. he took the 12 sections of vertebrae and laid them in the order they should be glued, taking into consideration the gradual, subtle increase and decrease in size of each vertebrae from skull to the tip of the tail. a 3-dimensional puzzle from nature (specifically, a beach in baja california sur on which i hiked alone when i visited there via schooner 13 years ago). we plan to glue them all together so we can hang it from his bedroom ceiling, “so my room can be a museum!” an idea that is very exciting to him.
also inspired by the dino dig game (called dino quest- it’s a droid phone app that i am sure there are approximately 6 of us using, in case anyone is interested), quinn has been making a paper version of the game, and has gotten a game board glued together as well as a half dozen or so skeletons of dinosaurs he has traced out of his reference books onto tracing paper.
he is basically on fire about dinosaurs! in my efforts to continue strewing dino goodies in his path, i also came across some awesome dinosaur origami that is out there to be done, but i am pretty sure we are not ready for that yet, in the department of building flexibility and skills for handling frustration. but soon!
pteranodons sighted near south beach
oh, and if you need your budding paleontologist to eat his dinner, turn it into a paleontologist’s face with a dinosaur bone (chicken leg) to gnaw on. faces have been the popular food item this past month. i think it makes veggies taste awesome! especially when they are carrots from the garden, some of which grew to look exactly like dinosaur limbs (there is a photo in the quilt above of quinn holding a velociraptor carrot leg, complete with toe claw.)
quinn’s dad has been able to recently begin taking him on outings and it has been a great addition to quinn’s life. he has begun tying his own flies for fly fishing (his dad says he studies the book and has made drawings of flies he plans to tie), and they have been fishing and canoeing a lot in the nice weather. quinn caught a cutthroat trout on a fly rod and cooked and ate it. he also went crabbing with dad, and after eating a crab sandwich for breakfast, he brought crab home to us to share (maybe his dad saw that as a trade for the peaches i shared; either way, there is a much nicer example being set for quinn recently of how coparents should get along.)
we went blueberry picking, and quinn got to hang out with a friend he only sees when we go to the blueberry farm, a girl just his own age named salix. both there, and at home, he did lots of imaginitive playing: he built a tipi in the bamboo grove and also used the bamboo to make magic wands, broomsticks, spears and lightsabers. inspired by the book if you give a pig a pancake, he drew blueprints for a treehouse he plans to build.
we spent more time with our friends, including quinn’s pisces brother, noble; before they left town, we got to visit the aquarium together, where the kids drove a yellow submarine, worked a fishing boat and a fish market counter, and dug for shells under a quote from albert einstein reading, “play is the highest form of research.” very fitting for these particular kids.
games last month quinn was in game-making mode, and he made another one this month. it was once again inspired by angry birds star wars, but this one i could actually follow, and we played a successful round of it. i was all for borrowing dice from another game to get playing, but he came up with his own unique idea for rolling how many spaces we could advance. he grabbed a penny, a nickel and a dime, and we shook the coins, advancing the total value of change of the coins that landed on heads. it kept it very interesting, because we could go anywhere from 0 to 16 spaces, with various numbers in between. once you arrived on one of the planets, you had to roll a perfect 16 to get back out again, and you had to visit each of the three planets before you could advance to the game’s conclusion.
giraffe juice; one of the most important lessons quinn got to be a part of for summer program at ols was reading the book giraffe juice (free ebook!!!!! download it now!!!!) i know i have some non-violent communication mamas among my readers, who may already know about this amazing free resource. if not, go and check it out! this book is aimed at children, but is inspired by marshall rosenberg’s nvc style of dialogue, and for many who stumble on nvc, it is a game-changer.
on a similar topic, the kids made felt faces to represent their anger, inspired by the book anh’s anger by gail silver, in order to help them to sit with and make friends with their anger, something many folks in our society grow up without learning to do effectively (raising my hand!). quinn has had anh’s anger on his bookshelf for a year or so now, and it has been very influential on him.
along with making friends with our anger, teacher kelly gave a great presentation on parts of the brain, to help the kids get familiar with their prefrontal cortex (conscious thought) and our amygdala (reactive emotions like aversion, resistance, and desire that can bring about impulsive reactions) and how to think things through.
observations/senses; at home, quinn and i finished the observation/evaluation worksheet (yes, there is a free e-workbook from giraffe juice, too!) our followup discussion continued days afterward in which quinn and i took turns observing what was going on with our five senses. “i see quinn’s hair sticking up like harry potter.” “i hear “ “i smell” “i taste” “i feel”. quinn spent one reading of giraffe juice doing “experiments” at the science counter of ols, where there is always a set up where the kids can mix up chemicals (acetic acid, citric acid, sodium bicarbonate and dihydrogen oxide) and use the associated tools and containers and notepads to record their observations. quinn took the notepad very seriously. we recorded what he saw, heard and smelled going on with his “potion”. (he dictated, and i took down his notes.)
the last picture he drew in the notepad was of him as an adult (it is of when we will be adults together, when, he declared, we will be good friends) and lots of living school kids sitting on steps, where they are learning about potions and experiments from him. i asked if he thought he would be a teacher at living school when he grew up, and he stopped for a minute, then said, “yes, i will. and on the days when school is cancelled, i will be out digging for dinosaur fossils to bring back and show to all the kids at living school!” i’m guessing they will then jump on their magic school bus and time travel to the time of the dinosaurs to see them first hand.
for the last show and tell of summer program, he brought in his piece of driftwood that is slowly becoming a dragon that will hang up in his room. it’s not finished yet, but he plans to bring it back in to school to show when he has it completed.
quinn was super excited to do all of the projects the summer library program (dig into reading) had to offer; he made a volcano, a digger, pop-up digging animals (a burrowing owl and a pair of meerkats, which quinn apparently knows an astonishing amount about due to a movie he has at his dad’s.)
some of the more school-ish things about learning to “do school” have been on the agenda this month: standing in line for the bathroom before lunch… raising his hand to talk during group time… putting away his own lunch (and on the last day of summer program he packed it all up and put it away by his hook before i even realized it! be still my heart.)
he is ever so gradually improving on getting himself dressed in morning, which of course is harder for someone who is such a dreamy guy.
also in the department of self-knowledge, quinn told me his only spirit helper is the owl. i do not know much of what went on in his mind to determine that, but he sounded very sure. and of course, the newly re-organized narrative of his early life has been a major source of learning for quinn this month.
on a lighter note, he is always acquiring new non-literal phrases, a few of the ones he worked on this month were “get on the same page” and “it’s a given.”
and finally, in spite of his overabundance of ongoing projects, quinn still manages to find me in the garden and help me dig potatoes every now and then.
