~thankful thursday~ going on

Posted on November 12, 2024 by marybethrew

~30 days of gratitude~ day 1

11/1/24

Did November 1st sneak up on me? Yes. And no. I knew it was coming, but it arrived in the blink of an eye. So after a jam-packed Friday, it’ll be a shortie for day one.

Michael J. Fox says, “My optimism is fueled by my gratitude. And with gratitude, optimism is sustainable.”

I’m grateful for this borrowed wisdom because optimism seems crucial in this moment, and if gratitude can fuel it, it is just one more reason to kick off another year of 30 days of gratitude.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 2

11/2/24

I am grateful to have been under the Friday night lights for last night’s high school football game. I am no big fan of football, although I am a reluctant fantasy football player to fit in with the guys at work. (Okay, maybe I still don’t fit in; I called my team She-rah Princess of Sportsball.) I root for my husband’s team and my family’s team, because it matters to them, while harboring no illusions nor denial of the toxic aspects of the sport. At any rate, I’ve attended all the home football games at NHS the past three years while Quinn has been playing at the games in the pep band. You all definitely know by now that I’m a band mom.

PSA: the band kids are in danger if we don’t defeat the felon. The homophobic, transphobic, anti-Department of Education, anti-gun-safety, anti-choice, anti-environment, hatred-fueled candidate for president. Please vote for the band kids: for their safety, their ability to be themselves in the world, their autonomy in their own bodies.

Last night, in their final game after a mostly losing season, our team won in an epic manner, and it was senior night, during which the football team seniors and the cheer team seniors were honored, and I have a band senior (the band seniors stayed invisible in their corner of the bandstands, but whatever.) And the band sounded great, and the cheer team is always amazing, and the football team was winning, and the kid who usually plays the drum set had to leave at halftime.

For the second half of the game, Quinn got his chance, at long last, to put down the bass drum and sit at the drum set and play all the songs he has been practicing throughout high school. This was something he had ardently wished to do. I was so grateful to be there to witness it, to take inordinate amounts of video of the fight song, let’s go band, pokerface, funkytown, tequila, school’s out for summer, the hey song, and all the songs he got to play. He also got to play the snare drum, as he alternated with his snare drum player friend so they could both have a chance on drum set. You know that thing the drummers get to do, to start off the song, where they whack their sticks together above their heads, to give the rhythm for the song they are all about to start playing? Watching your kid do that particular thing, to lead the band, is a crazy awesome feeling.

There is so much going on in the wide world and my own much smaller world, that it is difficult to even know how I feel on a spectrum from despair to joy, from anger to hope, much less what to write. But I was jumping on the bleacher seats, fist pumping and screaming at the top of my lungs happy last night when that boy carried that ball down the field, and my boy whacked his sticks to make the band play the fight song. I am grateful for one uninhibited moment of joy.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 3

11/3/24

A friend I met in an online group when our boys were infants, so a friend I have now known for seventeen years, posted a confession sometime this past year about her gratitude practice. She said that sometimes she wonders if it can be another form of spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity. At the same time, she shared that she believes her gratitude has been life saving for her in the years since her oldest son died. This woman has done so much awe-inspiring work on raising awareness around grief, and I take her thoughts on gratitude very seriously. I commented on her post that I, too, wonder about the potential for harm coming from a practice that has such good intent. I’ve thought about this so much in the months since our exchange. Don’t worry, I’m not quitting, I just never want to show up to the gratitude without being authentic.

It’s like this: there is a lot that goes on in any given day. Yes, I can almost always find something I feel grateful about during a given day, but also? Some days, there are some very large elephants in the room that make it more difficult to access gratitude, and more importantly, I would not want to negate all other valid feelings by trying to tamp them down beneath a gratitude that is forced.

Take today for example. I am super grateful for yet another annual fill-your-pantry market, another bucket of honey, another freezer full of humanely raised meat. I am ever so grateful for my husband who drove me not once, but twice, to the valley, and sat with me through a very difficult event.

But not mentioning that the event he was driving me to was one where we witnessed and joined in the grief of a family whose twelve-year-old son has died, would feel wrong. To not acknowledge sadness doesn’t do my gratitude practice any favors. I am not just going to say I am grateful for the life of this boy while I am so torn up that it is over. I don’t want to use gratitude just to spin every negative thing that happens into positive vibes.

So I guess that’s another thing to be grateful for: increasing clarity about exactly what my gratitude practice means to me. I am earning this over the years. Today’s clarity: I’m not interested in weaponizing gratitude.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 4

11/4/24

After some weekends, it’s possible to be grateful for Monday. I am grateful for a productive day scrubbing a fish tank until it sparkled. I am grateful for a simple evening of tuna melts (thank you local fishing community for supplying cans of tuna that have spoiled us for life against grocery store cans), strawberry ice cream, and watching Farm Aid with Rich while we each provide a resting surface for a cat.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 5 and 6

11/5 and 11/6/24

Speaking of elephants in the room, I couldn’t really post last night. But this morning someone on social media somewhere quoted lines from a piece by Ursula K. Le Guin:

“The death way or the life way? The high road of the warrior, or the river road?

I know what I want. I want to live with courage, with compassion, in patience, in peace.

The way of the warrior fully admits only the first of these, and wholly denies the last.

The way of the water admits them all.

The flow of a river is a model for me of courage that can keep me going—carry me through the bad places, the bad times. A courage that is compliant always seeking the best way, the easiest way, but if not finding any easy way still, always, going on.”

I spent most of my day walking around the lab, controlling the flow of water, or being baffled by my inability to control it. I was grateful for the distraction, something to focus on, something to keep my body moving. I had a short break and took a walk on the estuary trail, paused and listened to the sound of the water for a few minutes. And then I went on.

As for tonight, I am grateful for the official meal of November, served proudly on national nacho day.

Here is the full blog post the quote is borrowed from. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/119-the-election-lao-tzu-a-cup-of-water

~30 days of gratitude~ day 7

11/7/24

I am grateful for date night, same dreamy husband, different year. He is good to talk to. Five stars, would marry again.

~seventeen~ supersingular

Posted on February 23, 2024 by marybethrew

Happy seventeenth to Quinn.

In keeping with tradition, here is the grid of birthdays:

We will celebrate Quinn’s seventeenth birthday next weekend when he is home, but I could not let the day pass without marking it in my usual way, wandering through random tidbits of science and math and literature while reminiscing about this young man I have had the privilege of raising.

My photos of Quinn as he approaches seventeen are of him playing in band, and of him holding kittens. These seem to be the two moments he doesn’t mind having his photos taken, so I will take what I can get. Luckily, others were holding cameras at Quinn’s winter band concert, and I have another band parent and Quinn’s English teacher to credit with some of those images.

Seventeen is the seventh prime number. It is the only prime number which is the sum of four consecutive primes (2 + 3 + 5 + 7) because any other set of four primes results in an even number. It’s a lucky number of Euler, which is different from the way 13 was lucky, but still quull. In abstract algebra, seventeen is a supersingular prime, the explanation of which I had no comprehension of, which is probably a sign I never took abstract algebra, but I still think supersingular sounds intriguing.

Quullest photo. This was taken by Q’s English teacher.

Quinn is not taking math this year as a junior, but he would still be the only person I know who will find some of these tidbits quull, like the fact that the Pythagoreans abominated the number seventeen (I imagine he will giggle at this). I think he will be tickled that Carl Gauss chose mathematics as his profession because of his proof that heptadecagons (polygons with seventeen sides) can be constructed with a compass and unmarked ruler, and that this is because seventeen is a Fermat prime, whatever that is. Quinn likes Carl Gauss as much or more than the next seventeen-year-old. I think Quinn would like that there are seventeen fully supported stellations in an icosahedron. And I also think he will find it interesting that seventeen is the minimum number of givens needed in a Sudoku with a single solution.

According to MIT, seventeen is “the least random number,” which is because it is the most commonly chosen number when someone is asked to choose a random number from 1 to 20, according to several experiments.

Quinn is taking chemistry this year, and the element with the atomic number 17 is chlorine (which rhymes). Also, it reminds me of swim lessons. The element with a molecular weight of seventeen is ammonia. Which reminds me of diapers. Doesn’t time fly?

But the subject Quinn has been the most excited about this year (possibly with the exception of band) is English. So it will bring me great joy to remind him that the Haiku form has seventeen syllables (5 + 7 + 5). In other literary greatness, seventeen is when a wizard comes of age, and is the number of sickles in a galleon in wizard currency.

There are the same longings as ever. I wish I had more time with him. I wish I had his birthday with him. I wish I could fully support his stellations.

When we left off at sixteen, NASA was getting ready to launch a mission to space object 16-Psyche, an asteroid made of iron and other metals. The launch was successful in October, and in December, the spacecraft turned on its cameras successfully, the moment on a space mission called “first light.” The craft will fly by Mars in 2026, receiving a gravity assist from the planet named after the god of war, and then will continue on to Psyche, arriving in 2029. This asteroid may be a planetesimal, the building block of a planet, or in other words, an opportunity to look at what our own planet looks like on the inside. Our own earth is a hunk of metal at its inaccessible center, and this is our chance to learn more about our own core. Maybe. Or find out something else.

Messier space object 17 is the swan nebula. What is a nebula, you might ask? So might I.

A nebula is

Luminescent star-forming

Interstellar stuff

From my vantage point crowd controlling the middle school band at the winter concert, I got this back-of-the-band shot of my tall drummer.

Nebulae are those colorful, foggy space places whose images would make good Trapper Keeper covers, and they are full of cosmic dust. They are the places where the particles of cosmic dust clump together and attract tumbleweeds of more material until they give birth to a star. I picture a grain of sand in the mushy mantle of an oyster gathering ocean bits to form a pearl, only space. After the stars get born, the remaining material leftover is thought to be the makings of planets and their rings, their moons, their comets and asteroids. A nebula is like a solar system womb, then. And the swan nebula is one of the largest star-wombs in our Milky Way.

NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G. Illingworth (UCSC/LO), M. Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team and ESA

Wombs. Milky ways. Quick subject change before I get too weepy.

Cicadas! Some species of cicada have a seventeen-year life cycle. Probably a lot of people already know this, but every time I hear it, I still think it’s miraculous. Between mating seasons, they are buried underground for seventeen years. This seems excessive and impossible and also has very cool ecological reason and rhyme. Also there are fossil cicadas dating back to the Triassic in Australia. Automatically quull.

Also, the periodical cicadas (including the 17-year varieties) are part of the genus Magicicada. I just learned this and I think it’s magical.

Magicicada

Underground for seventeen

That seems excessive

Cicadas are of course known most for their music, and as musicians, they are basically percussionists. I can keep going.

Did you know that the different stages of nymphs that develop during the 99.5% of their life that takes place underground are known as instars? There are few words I love as much as “instar.” See star-womb nebula discussion above.

There are a hypothetical thirty broods in the Magicicada genus, which are exclusive to North America. Many of the hypothetical broods have not been observed. I try to wrap my head around this and picture the type of nerd whose job it was to hypothesize mathematically occurring cicada broods, and I am picturing someone not that different from Quinn. (They numbered the broods with Roman Numerals. Am I wrong?)

We will not be enjoying roasted cicadas for Quinn’s birthday, though this is a culturally important delicacy to the Onondaga people.

Despite the hypothetical brood abundance, only fifteen of the broods are known to survive today, and their timelines are mapped out for our entomology ecotouring convenience. Brood XIII, the Northern Illinois brood from the Midwest, is a seventeen-year cicada expected to emerge in 2024. The next time they do, Quinn will be turning 34.

Least random number

Happy Birthday Quinnigan

You’re Interstellar

edited to add belated celebratory photo epilogue…

belong

Posted on June 6, 2023 by marybethrew

Maybe it’s the sunbeams I stared into through my camera lens yesterday, as our band gathered into the staging area, or the pollen in the air, or maybe I have something in my eye. Pretty sure I’m allergic to backlit sun-drenched brass sections looking like angels are bending from the sky to kiss their foreheads.

I had the privilege of chaperoning the NHS marching band to the Starlight Parade in Portland yesterday. I love our band. I love watching them embody something Glennon Doyle says: “We belong to each other.” I love watching them lift their chin to let a friend reach in and close the clasp at their throat or adjust the chin strap on their shako (that’s what the hats are called). “I trust you,” they say, exposing their vulnerable soft parts. “I can be trusted,” they say, with their helpful hands.

I loved looking into the eyes of each student with a squirt bottle in my hand and saying silently, “Trust me.”

“I trust you,” they say silently. They open their mouth.

We used to call it “baby bird style” when Quinn was in second grade and we’d squirt water into the open mouths of the kids on field trips. I realize/remember when I watch another band mom, Carol, hydrating them, that our mouths open, too. It is so human, so motherly. Here comes the airplane. Ever since we started squirting things in their mouth as babes in arms, from breasts or bottles, spoons or fingers, we’ve opened our mouth when we want them to open theirs. We are mirrors.

Speaking of they/them. Happy Pride. I know one reason the band room is home to many kids is that they don’t exactly fit the regularly sanctioned acceptable categories of high school. The band room is home to the neurodivergent, the nonbinary, the nonconforming. Which is why I like taking them to Portland, where the 2023 Starlight parade Grand Marshal is Poison Waters, a drag performer and social activist. I like the exhibit behind us in the parade being TriMet, the bus I rode to work while I was pregnant with Quinn, with the slogan All Are Welcome. I like the Portland crowd with their rainbow light sabers and their heart-shaped glasses and their clowns on bicycles and their llamas on leashes and their boy children in tutus and their girl children in dinosaur crocs and all their children dancing and wielding guns that fire nothing but bubbles.

I like that their band teacher introduced so many of the end-of-year awards at their spring concert using they/their as he talked about each student, however they identified. I like that they can be boys tucking ponytails up into shakos with bobby pins and girls with pixie cuts or pigtails and nonbinary young people being whoever they want to be.

I like how kids from a rural coastal town go to a city fair. When told to be in groups of no fewer than three, their threes adhered to each other like Velcro and grew into fifteens, wandering under huge, gnarled city trees, venturing together into the dust-mote-filled sunbeams to hop on carnival rides, then congregating again under the boughs to loan each other cash for slushies and elephant ears. I like how they belong to each other.

They all have doubts and fears and preoccupations. I know I did as a teenager. I want to tell them… I still have so many doubts and fears and preoccupations, most recently upon my return to being a band mom who barely sees my son. The last Starlight parade we attended, I had a sixth grader who lived with me half time. Since then, a pandemic pulled us apart. We are coming back together. We are still here. We are not the same. But we still belong to each other. The band room is still home. I want to tell them to keep reaching for what they love, and especially for the people they love.

A beautiful mural featuring a blue bird up at the top of a tall building on SW 2^nd and Salmon caught my eye, and I felt sure it had not been there four years ago on the parade route. Sure enough, this painting, called Inheritance, was created just last year. In it, an elder’s hands offer a bowl to a younger set of hands. The bowl brims with fir cones, trilliums, and butterflies.

I want to tell them: Look up, little birds. Do not let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t look up.

Also, there will be school bus fender benders, anxiety, garment bag chaos, missing shoes, forgotten backpacks, mood swings, vomit, blisters, dying phone batteries, and body odor.

There are enormous bands before us and behind us, with military-level discipline and polish and prestige, plumes spearing from their caps in waterfalls of sparkle and glitz. The band behind us filled at least four buses, maybe more. But I’ll take these kids, these coastal sardines packed into one bus, the ones who worked for their uniforms (the sophomores through graduating seniors remember the many nights they haunted the haunted house in 2019), with their proud plumes of blue feathers. I’ll take them and I’ll tell them silently with my eyes: Soar.

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ black holes and parabolas

Posted on September 17, 2020 by marybethrew

~4-23 to 5-23~

Quadratic and executive functions

Executing school tasks took some additional remote mama support this month. He found the format of electives for school to be uninspiring. However, I talked him into doing one of the robotics options. Once he was convinced, he lit up while telling me the steps a robot would need to take to reach the Hogwarts kitchen from the front doors.

For language arts, Quinn was assigned to read The Outsiders but was putting it off. Once I found that out, I told him I thought he’d really like it (he was of course surprised I was familiar with the book), and encouraged him to read me the first paragraph. He grumpily obliged and discovered the teen male protagonist with green eyes and long hair. He came around quickly after that, read to me through chapter two, and read the entire rest of the book in just a few sittings.

Then there were quadratic functions. Quinn started caring deeply about parabolas as a freshly minted eleven-year-old, and has read an entire math curriculum through calculus in his spare time. He is not often thwarted by new math concepts, and had been quite self-sufficient learning quadratic functions, the math magic of the parabola, with only online lessons. However, two weeks before school ended, his teacher contacted me to let me know he was on his way to earning an incomplete in algebra. As usual, I only understood more about what happened in hindsight (2020) and it amounted to being stuck on one sub-concept, not seeing the obvious available ways to solve that (ask his teacher, ask me, consult textbook/video, google it) and just not doing it, or any of the following lessons. He stayed stuck and started blowing off everything, but then ended up caught up in a lie and that only added to his anxiety about the whole thing. Once I found out, we got him sorted out on completing the square, (we used khan academy and life of fred and fred is who ultimately got him there; by which I mean he was right back to doing it all in his head the instant he grasped it). I asked him afterwards if he felt relieved to not have to continue the lie, and I could see the relief written all over his face when he said “yes.”

He was overwhelmed and said he thinks about the pandemic even when he’s not thinking about it.

I wanted him to know I heard him: that he felt like no one was taking him seriously (because he has said “I can’t work under pandemic conditions.” He did try to let me know he was struggling.

I am trying to coach him through handing in enough to earn a Pass when he feels like this, but it is hard when he is just seeing the pile and is stuck in overwhelm.

He did a programing in scratch assignment and a video tour of Iceland for his elective; in Iceland he enjoyed how they drill into magma to harvest energy. The morning after the teacher clued me in, I sent him the mp3 of his favorite song seven nation army and a ten minute meditation and he listened to both. We spent more time together on google hangouts just so I was “in the room” if he needed support. He watched a Smithsonian zoom about octopuses, something he had planned on attending prior to the math debacle. I liked watching him watch it and seeing his face light up at certain parts. I wanted him to do these other things that feed him, because we were also talking about the importance of self care in keeping up our ability to handle tasks. He is now also signed up for both dinosaur discoveries and ancient seas online camps. He had been hesitant on the dino camp because a) he already knows a lot about dinosaurs and b) he wasn’t sure the end of June would feel like enough time out of school, but in the end I told him there were 2 spots left and he wanted in. Then we did talk about the math concept, but it was sandwiched in between those lighter topics and our quality time (reading aloud). Maybe life is a little like a parabola, you have to get to the bottom of it at some point, but you can look forward to it going back up on the other side!

His paleontology camp community continued their zoom lecture series for camp alumni through May, and Quinn participated enthusiastically. He was proud because, “I asked a question!” He asked, if I understood correctly, about how they tell things about a prehistoric animal based on eggs; and got answers about how environment determines a lot about egg shape, whether an animal is aquatic or terrestrial, and where they place their eggs in order to keep them moist or from being submerged or dry. He is so quull!

He had a paleontology text flurry with his camp friends and they apparently have a conspiracy theory that, “all of the birds died in 1986 when Reagan killed them all and replaced them with spies. They are in league with the bourgeoisie.” A couple of the other camp friends consistently show up for the lectures. It is such a nice balance of getting to be nerdy and getting to be weird teens together.

The flavor of video calls this month – physics and fantasy

A friend mentioned she and her husband have been doing madlibs so I printed a dinosaur one for Quinn. It is logistically tricky to play games over hangouts so I take all good suggestions very seriously! Quinn then picked some out to do for me. Some of our favorites were, “What happens when a unicorn poops”, one about pizza, and another about how to hatch a dragon egg. We ended up with 3 new species of dragons; chartreuse dragons, butterbeer dragons, and flibberty-gibbet dragons.

During recent video calls we have continued to read Zero, do a daily logic puzzle, sometimes a vi hart video, and usually some talking and cat gazing.

Zero has been good fodder for discussion and vocabulary (new word: carom): Quantum leaps, general relativity, etc. It sends us on other tangents. One day we looked up Dr. Katie Bouman who photographed a black hole successfully in 2019, based on spinoff conversations from the book. Quinn’s imagination was quite stimulated, and I managed to convince him to speak one of his ramblings into a document using the speech-to-text function:

“First get two black holes, a star, a spaceship capable of moving at 90% of the speed of light and with a fuel cartridge big enough to hold a star in, and a very heavy object. Then get the star into the fuel cartridge of the spaceship (the spaceship must run on helium). Once you have a spaceship running on a star, connect your two black holes via 4D space-time Continuum breaking and attach one end of the wormhole that results to your spaceship and the other end to the very heavy object. now take your nearly light-speed wormhole with a very heavy object on the other end and wait 46 years because you will have messed up the space time continuum, you will have effectively ruined mathematics to the point where one year on one end of the wormhole is 2.3 years on the other end of the wormhole so after 46 years you go through the wormhole and bam you’ve gone back In time by almost 46 years. some problems are: 1. it is currently impossible apparently to define “very heavy object” in my sources. 2. it is currently impossible to go at 90% of the speed of light in one spaceship. 3. it is currently impossible to obtain a star let alone to stick it in the fuel cartridge of a spaceship. 4. it is currently impossible to collect two black holes and connect them via four dimensional space-time Continuum breaking. 5. it is currently impossible apparently for you to actually go back in time to the point where you are before your own birth and keep living on to infinity by traveling back in time infinitely and going forward in time infinitely after that so that you have infinite life-span at the time of your birth and live forever because your star even though it will last for like 8 million years is still finite so you can only become 8 millionish years old but hey, even then you are older than Yoda so…”

Tom Gauld

I also convinced him to share the document with me and he did, with the note, “I’ve invited you to comment.” Well, thank you for inviting me!

My comment:

“I don’t know if you understand why I ask you to do things like this… and that is okay! I am thankful that you humor me, and do it when I ask. It may not seem like a big deal to you to be able to speak this kind of complicated thought in such an organized manner, but this is a skill not everyone has. It’s a skill I’d love for you to continue to nurture, and it’s a skill that I think will really help you build up your writing ability as well. Being able to speak a story or an essay is the same as being able to write it – if you use the right tools. I think the speech-to-text tool is potentially very useful for you and I hope it helps empower you to do more writing, more recording of the amazing ideas and stories and lines of thought that you have inside you, waiting to get out into the world. One day you may look back at these and really treasure them! I know I will.”

Upon finishing Zero, we discussed quintessence theory. As you do.

Then we got started on re-reading Fellowship of the Ring! The day before mother’s day, we read about when the nine leave Rivendell, and their fight with Caradhras, when they turn back and the men have to carry the hobbits through the snow, but Legolas can walk on top of the snow to bring hope back to all that the journey is one they can endure.

I end up reading most of the time, but since we both have copies of the trilogy, he has been reading to me as well.

When the fellowship were departing from Lothlorien and Galadriel gives them each a gift, Quinn became quite absorbed with the gardening box that Sam is presented. He brought it up several times thereafter, and it gave me an idea. I ordered a plain wooden box and some gray wood tint so I could make him one like the description in the book. I planned to mix some flower seeds into it for him so he could spread it out somewhere at his dad’s house to grow.

still trending: quokkas (mama attempts her first memes)

On mother’s day, I had a lovely extra visit with Quinn. He showed up at noon after sending me Sierpenski’s triangle mother’s day card, freshly showered, and wearing a button-down shirt. He dressed up for me.

We also started an email story where we each write one line and send it back and forth. It began, “Once there was a boy who lived in a land where the only things were a chain of islands and the ocean.” I’m excited to see where it takes us!

In other vocabulary news, I learned of Quinn’s pronunciation of onerous “one rus” and we both chuckled when he was reading aloud about a “biplane” in our logic puzzle which he mispronounced with a short i.

We like it when the logic puzzle is about particle accelerators and one of the researchers is named Dr. Quinn.

Subatomic particles

I listened to a nature news podcast and learned all about pions, and then Quinn and I discussed various subatomic particles, learned that we should call them elementary particles instead, and he is pretty into particle physics after our last book, but he wasn’t even aware of all the particles that have been named and identified… he particularly liked the ones named after pi and tau, of course. I think I fairly blew his mind when I told him that Ender’s Game had been written well before many of these had been discovered to exist. In 1985, electrons were still the smallest known particle, and I remember a big deal being made about quarks back in the mid 1990s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_particle_discoveries

The podcast also talked about Galileo, so it was easy to convince him to listen.

Life skills

Quinn said he used the lawn mower to mow the yard so they could move their kayaks. It is a battery mower. Certified lawn mowing technician!

Music

Aragorn sent Quinn two guitar tracks he had recorded, and Quinn has added a drum track to them. So rad!

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ not so little drummer boy

Posted on May 3, 2020 by marybethrew

~11-23 to 12-23-19~

Quinn spent a ton of time playing with his Turing Tumble set the weekend he got home for Thanksgiving. He told me his math teacher has posters up in her room and one of them is a quote by Albert Einstein that says, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” And he said he really could relate to that. He had me sit with him a lot while he worked on the puzzles he is working on – they are getting insanely complicated, and I am almost no help at all, except I am also willing to sit with it longer, with him. So he has gotten a lot of the algorithms solved (such an amazing game/toy/puzzle/brain stretcher/birthday present) and he feels really great when he achieves one, (I think he is about halfway through the 65 activities) but often there is a period of “I’ll never get this one” just before he cracks the code. He is starting to see that pattern, too, so it makes it easier to trust he will be able to solve it if he stays with it. I love how it is encouraging him to persevere.

While he was sitting with one of the algorithms, he was telling me how it was “just a variation” on the puzzle before, because it was based on registers and counting in binary. You know, like (and he started counting on his fingers… in binary.) My jaw dropped, and he said, “I learned that from Vi.” Of course! (I was not sure how to do justice in words to the amazingness I was witnessing, so I made him do it again on video!)

We had W pancake among family members who came for Thanksgiving, and I just love how she appointed Quinn as her agent. She would need someone to transport something from her hand over to her mom, and she would just glance at Quinn and gesture, and he would jump to do her silent bidding. She crawls over to sit on his lap, completely assured he is one of her people. It reminds me of the way Quinn was sure about Rich’s daughter wanting to color dinosaurs with him when he was five and she was in college.

He was telling someone that all the 7^th graders are drinking coffee “these days” and they say it’s what they need to wake up in the morning. He said he thinks because his mom and dad both like it so much, he may like it one day, too, but for now he doesn’t want to drink any. It came up again when we were at home, and it spawned a great conversation about different wiring. He said “caffeine makes people all wired and hyper,” at one point, and I said well, that’s mostly true, but one way you can tell if a person has ADHD is if you feed them caffeine and they calm down – it has the opposite effect on them, because of their brain wiring. So he thought that was fascinating, and it launched a whole other conversation about misunderstandings or misconceptions of what peoples’ learning differences are, and how people think “talented and gifted” means a person should easily have all A grades, and how they don’t realize that there are some things that are really a struggle for him even though he is talented and gifted. I thought it was interesting to hear him identify that way!

We did a lot of logic puzzles this week. We do them a lot while we eat. Sometimes the clues are roundabout and you have to go over them a bunch of times as you accumulate new information in order to make sense of them. And other times a clue will just say “the person who ate toast is not Janet” and you can rule something out directly. Quinn said of one of these clues, “well that was explict” pronounced like I just typed it: “explikt” and I knew he meant explicit so I said explicit, and he said, “it’s not explict?” And I wrote it down so he could see the second i, and he said, “oh, well, in plants vs. zombies, they left out the second i. (Note to self, he learns words from video games! Not just books.)

He is SO LARGE. He needed hugs and snuggles this week, and I do my best but it is hard to actually let him on my lap… I still do, but I basically give him a very short countdown from ten. We invented a “snug” which is a cross between hug and snuggle, it’s not standing, it’s sitting on me, but it’s very, very brief. When we have time, we do longer snuggles on the couch with either his legs or torso draped over me, but not both.

I am reading the self-driven child, a good book recommended on the tilt parenting podcast. This week I was getting to the chapter on radical down time, and how important it is for learning and general well-being, and how we need to stop jam packing our children’s schedules and managing their downtime like, “shouldn’t you be doing SAT test prep if you don’t have something to do right now?” Instead we should say, “let’s snug.”

I just love watching his biweekly swim lesson. He is the absolute most awkward swimmer the world has ever seen and is so earnest and so into working on improving! This was the first time she attempted to teach him backstroke! He has been working on front crawl for a few lessons now, and he is impressively gangly at it so far, but she figured she’d try backstroke. The first attempt on his back, his arms were still going forward so he just folded in half and sank to the bottom. The next attempts were comically awkward too, but he improved each time. He would get his arms kind of going, but then lean his head too far back and reverse somersault and go under. He would get his arms kind of going but get stuck and you could see his arm pause mid stroke so he could think what his other arm needed to do… long pauses. He’d sometimes roll onto his side or go under again, because of whatever he ended up doing with whichever arm. He was working on the hands so his elbow would be bent at a 90 degree angle, or he’d work on the arms but just get stuck in the middle. His teacher is so good with him. And he just kept going back and starting again.

When he woke up Friday to do his math review he made it out of bed over to the couch and laid back down. He needed extra rest more than math review. Radical down time. So I encouraged him to not stress the math if he felt he could handle doing it over the weekend and he said he could. It crossed my mind he had seemed extra emotional and hungry all week, so I had him get up to the measuring station and put a new mark on the wall – sure enough, he is growing.

Friday was going to be committed cubs day, the second one of the year, and he missed the first one and sorely wanted to be included in it this time. He had a few assignments he needed to have teachers sign off on, and he did a lot to chip away at it over the course of the week, but got home Thursday night and was down because he had forgotten his one last signature, which he could have gotten during class because the assignment was finished. I let him problem solve, and he decided there was still a chance he could do it in the morning, and while that did not guarantee he could do CC day, he wanted to still try. He told me Mrs. F had said they would be free reading in class Friday so people could finish up assignments, and so his plan was to ask her right away to go see Mr B to get his last signature. He even put a post-it note in his book (Ender – speaker for the dead) right with the bookmark, so he would remember to do it even if he went to start doing his free reading. When he came out of school on Friday, he was so pleased because, “I made it in!”

Speaking of Ender, Quinn loved the concept of paired beings from the books. In the story, piggies are paired with trees as an adaptation to protect them from a planet-wide plague. Quinn stretched the concept to a human-star pairing.

I had encouraged him to speak his idea into a google doc so he could harness the way his brain is able to articulate ideas verbally much more quickly than he can get those ideas to come out of his typing fingers. I had been talking to him about the speech-to-text options on numerous occasions, but had not gotten him to try it yet, and this was the perfect opportunity. Here is my transcript of an audio recording I took as a backup while he was speaking into a doc:

“…And then once the star gets even stronger it would start smashing carbon into oxygen and once it gets to its strongest point which is usually right before it supernovas, it starts smashing oxygen into iron and I was thinking, well, if you created some sort of, like, could a man, could human beings create a man made star that could smash together stuff to create like an atom with a whole bunch of stuff like a whole bunch of protons and electrons and neutrons and then harness that… and this would be a star that’s the size of like a chrome book, it would be a really small star… like you could fit it in a fish tank… or in a drum. But then the star would create something like fermium atoms or something like that and the fermium atoms would then be used in like a nuclear laboratory or something like that and you would split the fermium atom into like a whole bunch of neutrons and protons and electrons, and you would use those neutrons and protons and electrons to basically make a whole bunch of atoms out of those separated piles of neutrons and protons and electrons. And then if the theory went right then it would become like speaker for the dead where all the animals on Lusitania are paired with a plant and they basically just coexist so it would be something like each human would create like their own star, their own personal little star the size of their chromebook, or their drum, if they have one, and then use their star to like get some fermium atoms, which they would split up, and then use those atom pieces to make more atoms to get the star bigger, and then like once the human dies of old age, the star should then be approximately the size of a human, and at that point the star would then use its power of making atoms to create another human, like create a new human child, at which point it would supernova and then that human child would grow up with its own personal star and so on and you could pair humans and stars… with like a weird biological bond but yeah… and then… yeah….”

“So that’s what you wanted to get out of your brain onto the page! Isn’t that awesome, look…”

“And I typed several paragraphs!”

“And so adams are going to have to change spelling so do this cool trick ready? Go up to edit on the bar, and go to the find and replace, find all “adam” and replace with “atom”. So if you said a word 50 times and it did them all the wrong way you can just replace.”

“You can replace all adams. And ‘madams’ haha.”

“’When sister gets even stronger’… I think it’s supposed to be ‘when the star’…..”

I wanted to capture a raw version of what it’s like trying to hang in there with this kid who is mashing up Ender’s game and the periodic table, contemplating the synthetic elements of the actinides series and seeing what he can do with them to advance the genre of science fiction! I’m trying to provide him some tools, fitting those in edgewise, trying to keep my head above the current as the absolutely torrential flood of imagination comes pouring out. This is a pretty great example of what it’s like.

This month had some sadness; Quinn’s friend Pippin is moving away.

His voice has lowered dramatically the past month or two. I am not hearing a lot of cracking, but what I have noticed is that his laugh remains a few octaves above his speaking voice. I do not know if he will keep that long term, but hearing him reminds me so much of my older brother’s voice and laugh right now, the way he speaks in a mellow tenor but his laugh reaches up to tickle the rafters. My brother’s laugh is one of my very favorite laughs in the world, and one of my very favorite things about him, and it would not be a disappointment if Quinn inherited this trait. Even if it is for a temporary period, I’m thoroughly enjoying the way his laughs ring in the air, jingling like the bells at the upper reach of his mallets, perhaps because they contrast so with his new low speaking register in the timpani section.

At his band concert, his teacher made a brief intro of the first song, little drummer boy, saying they did have one of those (M is very small), and also a not-so-little drummer boy, and a drummer girl. Mine is the not-so-little one! He was on the snare drum for all three songs! And he was absolutely wonderful! He played both with and without the snares engaged (the beginning of little drummer boy starts out with it disengaged and sounding like a tom). He played some pretty complicated parts! Triplets, rolls, lots of variations. He did so well! He was holding so still for the first song I wasn’t convinced he was drumming, but then on the several measures he was not playing but counting, he bopped around just like he used to when he was playing sleigh bells last year. I think the rhythms he was playing were seriously challenging, enough to really keep him on his toes!

Last weekend was Turing tumble, this weekend was Rubik’s cube!

He worked on his cube for the entire day Saturday while I was at farmer’s market, and solved it. By the time I got home, he was a pro. If you watch that very long video, you can see him solve it again, and if you notice he is not pleased, it is because he “figured out” that there are “multiple solves” to the cube, based on the orientation of the Rubik’s emblem on the white face of the cube; there is a solution where it is right side up, and if you have it in the stand you can see red, yellow, blue. Apparently, he spent a good part of the day after solving it his first time, trying to get it solved to that solution, and it was thwarting him. Because perfectionism. But also because of staying with the problem longer.

After farmer’s market we went to get a Christmas tree. After we chose our tree and the helper had set it into our truck, Rich went to pay, but Quinn noticed the tree wasn’t all the way tucked in so the tailgate would close. Quinn jumped up and angled the trunk where it needed to go in the one corner so the top would go in the opposite corner and not stick out the back. I love it when I see him take initiative to fix something or do a job that needs doing, without being asked or having it pointed out at all.

When we got home I asked him to work on cleaning up his room a little bit so that his Turing tumble could move from the living room back to his room to make room for the tree. He just jumped right to it, no complaints, and organized some of his Jurassic park legos that he had out on the floor into a lego box, and put the instruction booklets into the right section of the accordion file, etc., again without me having to point out or assist with these steps.

In his video production elective, he learned about a fun music making module in chrome. For science he had to make a poster about an element in the periodic table, so he picked boron. He really liked the boron entry in his elements book.

He worked on cubing quite a bit more, and he also sent me a bunch of texts about wanting to collect all the different ones. He has the standard 3×3 one, but wants to get 2×2 next, then 4×4, 5×5 etc up to 11×11. Then and only then does he want to get the triangle and other shape ones.

Handmade solstice present for his dad.

I feel grateful for having gone through what we did when Quinn was little, and approaching learning in a self-driven way from the start, because he ended up knowing the difference between school and learning, and still knows it. Otherwise I doubt he would spend weekends doing hard puzzles, or light up like a Christmas tree this morning when I said “I’ve heard you can program robots to solve Rubik’s cubes” as we drove to school. The boy has a lego robotics kit coming to him for Christmas, so I know future weekends will be occupied with such things.

Finally, for the grand finale this month, Quinn rocked his Half green belt test!

~two months in the life of a lifelong learner~ percolator

Posted on May 18, 2018 by marybethrew

a long and winding hodge podge of learning and living that i have decided to stop editing and move on from… read at your own risk (warning! verbosity ahead!), and probably pour yourself a cup of tea first.

science fair! i had the privilege of being the science fair mentor for quinn’s 5th grade class. his teacher had a very clear plan and it made it very easy to guide the kids through the process of gathering their data. they worked in groups to build worm compost bins, and then ran experiments based on, in most cases, food preferences of the worms. quinn’s group chose to compare the worms’ preference for raw potato to cooked potato, by adding equal amounts of each food at the start of the 4 weeks, and weighing what was left of each type after each week passed.

after i got done doing science with the kids one afternoon, i had a great conversation with quinn’s teacher. i opted quinn out of the state smarter balanced testing this year. it’s a matter of filling out a form, and since the detriments to quinn seemed to be outweighing the benefits, i filled out the form. his teacher had emailed me about another test called oaks science, that he will take as a 5th grader, and letting me know that if we wanted to try to opt out of the OAKS, it required a religious or learning disability reason and apparently involves a great deal of writing on the parents’ part.

this is all aside from star testing which actually provides some insight on specific skills; in quinn’s case the insights are limited based on how far out of range he scores. he still takes a star test at the beginning and end of the year.

i had emailed her back explaining our reasoning for the SB opt out was that Q was showing signs of stress last year and that all the rest of my misgivings about standardized testing aside, that particular test doesn’t even seem like it offers teachers any feedback on how to help kids learn. i have seen the results for the past two years, which aren’t returned until fall (when quinn wlil be a 6th grader with a different set of teachers) and seemed fairly useless to me.

i asked her what her take on the OAKS was, whether it was like SB, whether she felt some other way about SB, acknowledging that i’m not the teacher, and want to know if i am missing some truly helpful aspect of it. i said i’m happy to write something though i could prove neither religious nor learning disability for quinn.

she eased any potential worries about the science test, said she thinks he should take it because it’s far less involved… 40 science questions with definite answers, not open-ended essays. she doesn’t think it will stress him out the same way the other one did, she sees that he gets hung up on writing answers, he percolates in his mind and it takes him a while to start writing. i loved that she has such an accurate observation of him, and also that she phrases it in such positive terms; she says she is fascinated by his differences. if she saw any sign that he was experiencing stress from the science test, she would “find a glitch” and that would be that.

she ended up sharing her own dislike of the sb tests, is glad i’m opting quinn out of them, encouraged us to opt out all the way through high school, and even finds the star only so useful for his level. she feels what he might really benefit from is tag testing, and even moreso, pre-sat testing when he gets to middle school. she told me she thinks i will really need to advocate for him over there, because she feels he really needs more tag programming and isn’t getting it. i’m so glad i shared my reasoning for opting out, because i think it freed her to share her take on things, and it turns out she is a pretty incredible ally in terms of seeing clearly what is needed with this boy’s education.

we planned what he will do during testing week, and while there were several good options for students opting out, we agreed the best was for him to do an independent project. she liked the concept of genius hour that google uses to foster ingenuity, and she felt quinn could handle an open-ended project on a topic of his choice. she wanted it to entail some sort of end product that he could then share with the class (a presentation, animation, essay, artwork, etc.)

she was also supportive about us going to new york for a week, saying he will learn a lot from traveling!

“percolating” is such a perfect word to describe quinn’s thinking process, especially when it comes to getting ready to write something. he does most of his work inside his head, then it comes pouring out in the eleventh hour, spilling onto the page in a form that requires little editing. what wonderful images and memories the word “percolator” brings to mind: from recent fourth of july camping trips, enjoying breakfast around the campfire, to long ago visits with aunt margie and uncle george in their cabin in the adirondacks. again, it’s amazing to find someone who has the capacity to observe such things about my kid so thoroughly in spite of the fact that he is “number 27” out of 30 kids in her room. seen, known, valued for who he is; sense of belonging, connection. see also: educational priorities.

this story has been percolating along, about a page every few weeks or so…

mapping was a big topic covered in recent weeks. quinn’s imaginary land of canith has realistic longitude and latitude lines, a legend, and all the physical features of a map that you could want!

his tag class also included some compass and map work. another week involved animal tracks. one week, they worked outside and made miniature shelters. at the end the instructor let them all destroy their structures, but quinn had built his off to one side by a rock and said he was the only kid who decided to leave his up in case a squirrel needed a place to hide.

i picked quinn up from school one afternoon, and he was his usual one-word answer, surly after school self, which i’ve come to think of as “feed me” and so i didn’t start asking a bunch of questions (i’ve learned to wait until later for the most part). he was coming from a dad day and therefore no lunch leftovers to eat, but i had a tangerine. i did ask if he had remembered to bring his state book home (because when i was in class for science fair on thursday, his teacher had mentioned he still needed to finish it up). he said no. then when i asked if we should go back in for it, he provided self-defeated answers, “no, we can’t, because…” and “it’s raining” and “we’ll get hypothermia.” in the meantime, i had showed him the pack of brightly colored paper i had picked up (including martian green and cosmic orange) for making more of the origami octahedron project he liked doing the previous week at school. i had gotten a smile out of him with the martian conversation (because he read it aloud and then i said oh, like marTEEans, from martia?) but he was still mopey, so i re-parked and started peeling the tangerine, and then handed him a slice, calling it a marTEEan orange power pack, and said it would protect him from hypothermia as we returned to the mother ship… and also from scurvy. and by then he was laughing and walking in the rain into the school to get his stuff. and he said they were cosmic orange power packs, duh.

so, handling moody tweens is easy. just be a goofball. and provide snacks.

in his homework folder, he had a handwritten note from a friend saying to please bring himself and his family to go bowling at 3:30. (no bumpers). no date was specified, so i asked quinn, and he was pretty sure it meant the following day, saturday. luckily, i had background info that this boy’s dad is a fb friend of mine and rich’s due to being in one flew over the cuckoo’s nest with rich, so i did some parental fact checking, and sure enough, it was legit. the response i got was, “i had no idea the Quinn he was talking about was your Quinn!”

our two families got along quite well, and the boys are a lot alike. two smarty pants stick figures.

after bowling, we had dinner with rich’s mom and some friends, which was fun and fancy. quinn did well with the fancy factor (napkin in the lap, multiple forks and spoons and courses). he is fun to be around, which i’m glad i can say about my ten year old. here he is at home the next day eating the leftovers of his herb chicken, still painstakingly scrubbing his sprig of rosemary and slice of lemon over each bite before consuming.

it’s been a time of ups and downs with friendships for quinn. while nothing major has taken place, i get the sense that things are shifting a bit for him and he is finding that he values certain things in friends, some of which he hasn’t quite found yet. one friend he has thought of as a best friend named another boy as his best friend while he and quinn were playing one day. i had a chat with quinn after overhearing that, deciding to risk bringing up a touchy subject rather than let it go untalked about. it did definitely come up on his radar, though he didn’t give it any energy with the friend. he got his feelings about it out with me, and though it didn’t feel great, he also realized it didn’t have to mean anything terrible, either.

we talked more about what he values in a friend. one thing he likes about the bowling friend (he’s going to need a pseudonym soon, i can tell) is that, “he understands what i’m saying.” i probed further to find out that what he means by that is, the vocabulary and language quinn uses are understood and do not need further explanation with this boy, do not need to be simplified or defined. they keep up with each other. they have a compatible sense of humor in that they both like word play, and they can get pretty complicated with their discussion topics without needing to slow down.

there’s a lot going on in social development. some intriguing correspondence from a female karate friend inspired quinn to respond in cursive to her letter. i’m glad to find that: he is eager to fill me on the details and let me read both his and her notes; that he seems to have a sense of the appropriate level of friendship at this age level and kept it all in friend terms; and that he writes with good reciprocity, both sharing some of his ideas but also asking her likes and favorites.

i just wanted to mention/appreciate that i love my dojo. sifu and mrs. todd have been so supportive of working with quinn in the limited time they have with him (to date his dad has remained insistent that he cannot bring him to class during his week) and they’ll even refuse to charge me full price for quinn since he is there only half of the time. meanwhile, they work hard to catch him up on his techniques when he is around, and they see who he is and what his strengths are, and emphasize those while helping him in areas where he is not as strong. they recognize things like perfectionism (they ease up the test pressure and focus on the fun), they recognize his desire to one day teach, and his cognitive abilities to retain all the details about each move of each technique, and they put him to work helping other students. i talked with them about how i feel he will become less tolerant of his dad’s refusal to bring him to activities, as he becomes a teen, and sifu was in agreement that time would come. it’s what i hope for with everyone who enters quinn’s life in any meaningful way, that the focus will be on quinn and what is best for quinn, that quinn will be seen and known and valued for who he is, and that the connection is alive and foremost between him and anyone in a teaching capacity. (once again, see educational priorities.)

they constantly express how happy they are that we’re a part of the dojo, so i know the feeling is mutual!

he has been reading up on egyptian mythology, and requesting books on hieroglyph translation! he also read riordan’s greek heroes tome, now that he has read pretty much everything else the man has written.

cats are sacred in egyptian culture, right? this one expects to be worshipped… the past few months she often helps quinn fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning.

one morning the day of his music lesson, i got him up a half hour early and he played a full third of the drum section of his book… he has much better focus in the morning. we have had some discussion about how he may need to work at the bells harder (the snare drum just comes so easily to him) but that it will be just as rewarding or even more so to get better at the bells, since he will have to work harder. i’m trying to do things to keep practice fun for him, and continue to help him when he gets stuck in perfectionism mode. rich helps by furthering his musical education, putting beatles cds on the stereo. i mix up what instruments we play (recorder, guitar, piano, miscellaneous percussion), rename his tunes, play along with him on a drum, piano, or recorder, and inform him of silly lyrics trivia.

quinn and i went to the talent show at his school, because his friend (of the bowling invite) was in a skit and also playing his guitar in the show. we ended up sitting right in front of his friend’s family and that was cool and random. he came to sit with us and they got to chat. after we left i was musing with quinn about the band they’ll form together, and quinn thinks they need more players, “like maybe a flute and a trumpet?”

we try to fit in a few of the “art fridays” classes offered through the visual arts center, and the one called mayan metalsmithing caught quinn’s eye this session. he loved the owl image he saw in one drawing, and ended up borrowing from that idea to make a very intricate pyramid with symbols representing four elements and other details. he certainly had fun using this new and different medium for creating.

we had a fabulous family visit in new york, complete with lots of learning about: wizard chess, drums, winter olympics sports, shelter building practice, plane de-icers, and the origami yoda series his cousins had out from the library.

i got quinn on friday from school, and took him to his “mayan metalsmithing” art class at the visual arts center. we went home, ate pizza for dinner, and got ourselves packed up.

before the trip, we got to spend the afternoon with rich’s daughter. she had on hgtv show called fixerupper, which was impossible for quinn to pull himself away from. still, he manages to learn things, and while we were waiting in the airport he told me that he wants a fixer-upper and to fund his paleontology research by flipping houses. his exact words were that he would “use the money for more expeditions and plaster”. i encouraged him to learn all the building skills he possibly can from his dad, so he can put them to good use. i think it’s an excellent plan, better than trying to compete for grants. the part he loved the best was taking a “blank” room (his word) and deciding what to do with it and putting all the things in it (he will also have a warehouse… to hold the optional items.)

we took a red-eye flight there as usual. as we were landing in newark, quinn and i were able to see the empire state building and the statue of liberty from the plane. flying to syracuse, quinn spent a long time looking out the window at the view of snowy new york countryside – i can picture him gazing out with his with hands folded in his lap.

i will also be able to picture quinn’s cute upturned face when he finally hugged grammy. their bond is like nothing else in the world.

after some soup and corn muffins for lunch, the boys began dueling with lightsabers. as soon as that got rowdy, i strongly suggested we go sledding before the snow melted all the way, and we had a fun afternoon sledding, tobogganing, and generally playing in the snow.

we had a picnic dinner, as is the christmas tradition of the rews, and since we haven’t all been there for one since quinn was just shy of 2, we observed the christmas picnic tradition together.

by the time i woke up the next morning, uncle t and grampy had already left for work, and quinn had gotten up and was on the loveseat snuggling with grammy, just the two of them, just chatting. lots of cousin play time happened, and quinn began drawing a game on graph paper in his spare moments. quinn and i talked some about being a person who needs to do some recharging in between being with people, and i see how self-aware he is in this department nowadays.

we had so much fun watching the olympics. we mimicked the vocalizations of the curling athletes and feigned understanding of the subtle intricacies of the sport. we cheered on the men’s bobsled teams who incredibly tied for gold, and reminisced about olympics of yore when germany was still divided into east and west. rich and i had recently learned that the berlin wall has now been down as many days as it had been up, and grampy remembered having written an essay about the berlin wall in his younger days.

quinn got up before me again the next day, but it was because he had fallen out of bed (from a mattress on the floor, so no biggie) and he immediately went downstairs to grammy, who tucked him into her bed for another 15 minutes so he could have a gentle wake up. my favorite thing is that he doesn’t bother to wake me up, because why would he when there is a perfectly good grammy to go to?

the paper airplane shop began in earnest on this day, and lasted through the rest of the week. mario’s design for an airplane called a scooty was a big hit, and many prototypes were made. the living room was a big mess after a while, but i grabbed a brown paper bag and named it the “airplane garage” at one point, said it was time for the boys to park their airplanes in the garage if they were ready to go outside, and they were, so they did. it got called “the garage” the rest of the week.

luigi made himself a parachute and wanted to do an egg drop, and i encouraged him (he was inspired by quinn’s parachute which he had seen in oregon) and then he and i went up to the barn to drop it off the hay loft, and it worked great! he was so thrilled.

in the world of olympics, it was the day lindsey vonn was doing her downhill skiing and we were screaming our heads off just as though we actually care about skiing.

that afternoon the kids played outside in the 60 degree weather for hours on end: swinging on the tire swing, climbing trees, building shelters, riding bikes, trying to jump on the pogo stick… and generally running around in the breezy mild weather.

before dinner, boys were hanging around the table so i put a pile of place mats and napkins, a stack of plates and a pile of utensils on one end of it and asked who would like to help with setting the table. quinn and schroeder (quinn’s newest cousin) handled the whole thing. quinn made a comment that he can’t refuse because he is a certified technician, and the tone of what he said was so cheerful and positive (instead of “i’m obligated” it was more like “i feel compelled to and proud to do it.”)

quinn did so well with bedtimes and routine, possibly motivated by the fact that he then ended up being the first cousin up every morning to monopolize grammy time.

i got up early and went to see my friend the next morning and when i got home, quinn was playing chess with uncle t (who took the day off wed) and i guess they got a few games in before the other boys woke up.

we all cheered on the olympic short track skaters because… well, because!

then rich and quinn and i went to visit uncle b, and got to see his baby goats (bowie and pixie, boy and girl, so cute!) and then go to his practice space so quinn could see his drums and he could show him some stuff. i took video of each of the beats he showed quinn so i can put them on his computer for him to play back and try to replicate… he had this look of awe listening to uncle b on the drums. he was kind of shy once he got behind the drums himself and it took him a minute to play anything, but he did do the basic rhythm he knows, and then he ad libbed a little bit and it was pretty cool. uncle b said, “he’s got that rew music gene” and seemed proud to have a nephew following in his drumming foorsteps. i am so glad they got that time together. he encouraged quinn to listen to certain drummers, and named several bands who have inspired him… quinn was soaking it all in.

that night i happened upon a scene in which quinn, luigi and mario were trying to make an origami cat using a you tube video, and uncle t was trying to help them. i sat in to try to help as well, but it was a difficult one, and we ended up watching the second half and realizing we should bail. then the boys helped quinn make an easy 5-fold origami yoda they had learned, and then i put quinn to bed.

the next morning at 8:00 i started seeing snowflakes… quinn came downstairs a few minutes after 8 and it was snowing in earnest, and the sound of him gasping… priceless. he told me he never saw it snowing before, only had woken up to snow being already on the ground, so he was feeling the magic. i asked if he wanted to go out right away, but he said no, he wanted to wait until there was some on the ground and then go out and play. it just kept falling and falling all day! 8 hours later there were 6 inches on the ground, and many giant snowballs, snow people, the base of an igloo, and ski tracks. quinn’s snow person had a big base, and tapered to a very small head, and he called it the security guard.

skiing was such an intense emotional experience for him. i found all of my gear from when i was his age (miracle… shoes in attic, skis in barn. poles in cellar…) and we realized the boots fit him fine! so we snapped him into the skis, and he was excited! and then he was frustrated! and then he was angry at me! and then he was angry at skis! and then he was on top of the world again! like that, for the whole time. he was so happy to be doing it (i mean, olympics mania was not lost on the boy) and yet it did not come easily, and he fell and it didn’t feel great, and he didn’t think i was right that falling is an essential part of the learning process with skiing. later on, we had yet another conversation about how sometimes we can be perfectionists…. and i think he is gaining insight about that all the time. so all in all, i am very glad i put him on those skis, and put that good challenge in front of him, and though it was not easy, it was enjoyable and a memory he will love forever.

schroeder came over, and quinn and mario went sledding with him and they had tons of fun. the snow kept falling… then at 4:00, it stopped and the sun came out! so we retired to the indoors for tacos! it was a wonderful, snowy birthday eve.

birthday!

there has been much written on the subject of this day already, a cold and rainy, paper folding, family gathering, peach pie eating, wonderful day of celebrating with his whole family all together on his birthday for the very first time.

in the morning we went to the cider mill and got to see andy and molly. they had been out of town visiting family for spring break, but it was so good to get to see them again. we got apples and donuts and went back to the house for play time until we had to leave for the airport.

quinn used his new birthday present book on star wars origami when he got home to create r2d2 and c3po. he had a frustration at one point and as i was trying to talk him through staying with it and staying calm, he told me, “i’m a perfectionist.” his increasing level-headed awareness of this inner challenge will help him so much in overcoming the associated obstacles!

he has been exploring more game programming using scratch. on one occasion he looked at trying to make a dinosaur bone digging game in scratch, and he played some other peoples’ games about dinosaurs.

he also started making a game called kashyyyk battle. one of the books i gave him for his birthday was about making star wars games in scratch. he read a bunch of it on the plane ride, and it is amazing to me how he started with making the (someone else’s icon design) whale swim across the screen to now googling “how to make gravity in scratch” and implementing all this crazy code and designing these characters himself (drawing individual pixels). yoda has a lightsaber that appears if you press space bar, to kill the clones… it’s a work in progress, but he got gravity working… and he knows exactly what he is going to do, he just needs more time to implement it all.

one afternoon, he thought of an idea for a new “story mode” game, after experiencing “scratch – story mode” and given some prior experience with “minecraft – story mode.” he worked in his graph notebook that bears the label “quinn’s games” to develop 3 characters (they bear striking resemblance to quinn himself, and his cousins mario and luigi) and began percolating some ideas about the story line of the game, in which he knew the heroes would encounter at least one dragon.

on time management… i’ve had him start using a white board to plan his time. one non-school friday he woke up just before 9 and he had until 2:30 when he’d leave for his dad’s, so i had him plan out his day in segments of 30 minutes. he got to choose when to have breakfast, lunch, music practice and homework, and then see how many other half hours were left for free choice (a game of bone wars, time to himself, time with me; i gave restrictions on my own time such as needing the time slot before his lunch free for making lunch) and he followed the plan pretty much to the letter and with only a little bit of grumbling/processing and a growing awareness of the passage of time (we used a timer for each 30 minute segment). i haven’t asked him to plan every evening, but some evenings i do bring it up, so he does less leaving things until the last minute or skipping them entirely (music practice is hard to fit in without some intentional planning, with all the karate and trying to get to bed on time and lengthy dinner and bath processes). this seemed like an area that could do with more scaffolding and coaching, and it seems like the right time to get some practice in before middle school.

one small victory in this area was that he got caught up on a whole week of reading summaries in one night. typically, he struggles against writing even one summary, and he is required to write four of them per week. he didn’t write any while we were in new york, believing he did not need to, but found out when he got back that he actually did need to. he set a goal for himself to have it done by wednesday, and worst case scenario friday, so he wouldn’t have to miss any recess to finish it at school. (that would take place after the one week grace period, so the following monday). he got home from karate one night and set to work and got 6 summaries written; not only did he get the back work done, but got himself up to date on his current homework for that week. all without a single mention from me, he just did it.

also in the department of planning ahead, he knows that he wants to do a comparison of the various mythologies he has learned about- greek, roman, egyptian, norse – when he spends his week opted out of testing.

for his karate birthday, i brought mini cupcakes and sifu gave him an amazing gift of throwing knives that quinn has been ogling in sifu’s weapons case for a while now. it’s so neat how he pays attention to what the kids care about. i brought cookies to school for his birthday on the monday he went back, since he had his actual birthday while he was in new york.

hat day ~ guitar and other instruments keep him interested in music even if his principal instrument is causing frustration ~cracking crab

“look out, snack shelf, because here comes winter storm quinn!” we had to laugh that winter storm quinn came and hit new york the week after we visited.

we celebrated st. patty’s with our local family. corned beef, green jello, plasma cars, and all the usual fixings!

quinn’s class took a 3 day field trip to outdoor school at the local omsi site known as camp grey. i chaperoned for two out of three days, so i got to photo document as well.

on day 1, the topics were marine mammals and birds. after stretching out a rope and visualizing the actual lengths of various marine mammals, from sea otter to blue whale, the kids got to cycle through stations, checking out bones, retrieving “food” out of water using different tools to represent baleen (strainer) and teeth (chopsticks), donning a blubber glove to see how much warmer it makes the water feel, dropping slinkies from their ears to the ground to test out echolocation, and designing their own marine mammal based on the adaptations they’d learned about. after lunch, they hiked to the jetty and did some great bird watching, spying an osprey nest, many cormorants, and a few other species, in addition to some harbor seals.

on day 2, our group went on a nice long hike to the beach! to warm up our brains before we left, we did an exercise using a crumpled up piece of paper to represent a watershed. the kids drew waterways where they seemed likely to exist based on the paper’s “topography”, and then the leader used a squirt bottle to demonstrate how the water would flow around the watershed. the hike involved some plant identification, a fun game of tag to represent the food web, and a fair amount of free time to explore and play.

and one certified cursive signature writing technician!

pi day!

quinn had his half-purple belt test! he tested alongside two of his peers who were receiving their green belts, so it was a pretty intense and thorough test, in which each kid was truly taken to their edge and made it back safely. each kid also had a chance to showcase the areas in which he shines, and while the other boys were both very strong in sparring, quinn’s talent for memorizing forms and for understanding theory were also displayed.

origami!

the science fair event was held at quinn’s school. i appreciated quinn’s teacher’s approach once again in that her class did a group effort sandwich board and a nice bulletin board, and skipped the individual displays (aside from worm bins! the actual experiment!)

it was a nice opportunity to talk with his teacher about him, whereas my usual capacity as a classroom mentor or field trip chaperone doesn’t often allow for that. she is looking ahead to middle school and said that she will recommend him for the 7-8 accelerated math class beginning in the fall. even better, she knew more about the teacher than i do, and said “i want him to have her right away.” this bodes very well, coming from this wonderful teacher with whom i feel very lucky he has gotten to spend fifth grade.

i also got to hear about how she feels quinn “thinks so outside of the box” and uses language in “ways i’ve never heard from other students.” she told me, “sometimes i put quinn’s assignment on the bottom of the pile to save it for last, it’s like dessert!

i looked over at quinn, who was listening in, and said, “it’s story ice cream in a bowl.” and he smiled.

~two months in the life of a lifelong learner~ anthropomorphization of vegetables

Posted on March 23, 2018 by marybethrew

lifelong holidays learning!

one saturday rich was working so i brought quinn to farmer’s market with me. i parked him in front of my display that i was building and had him put bundles of broccoli raab into a rainbow arch around the basket where the bell peppers would be going, and he got right on that. then after he finished that job, i showed him that the cauliflower would be going in a big basket, but kind of cascading out of it onto the cloth, and he was like “great! i can make a cauliflower cascade!” and just kept following my instructions and being legitimately helpful. he likes all the people i work with, and they all like him, so i would ultimately look around for him and he’d be helping someone else doing things. he helped put up the price signs and someone would tell him “cipollini, those are the flat onions.” and give him hints so he could learn what things were (he knows a lot but the farm has a LOT of veggies and some of them are hard to differentiate if you don’t know that, say, parsnips have an innie belly button and parsley root have an outie! actually he knows those two… and one of his favorites is romanesco! but some of the other turnips and roots and shallots… less so.) if he started needing my attention more than i could handle while i was helping customers check out, i would send him on a task. i had him fetch some empty totes and build me a side table and cover it with a piece of fabric so people could set their basket/bag on it while checking out. then i sent him to buy himself a pastry and get rich a cinnamon roll, it’s only about 100 yards away and in line of sight of numerous people who would throw themselves in front of a bus to protect quinn, but still… it is not lost on me that he is getting big and independent. then he went and picked up my coffee for me, including adding the milk “and about 3 blups of honey and 3 shakes of cinnamon.” i let him buy a honey stick and a small honey bear even though we have 4 gallons of honey at home. his final task was to figure out how many apples for his lunches he could buy with the money he had left over. he entertained himself really well reading his book, drawing in his minecraft journal (a graph paper composition book) and then he ate most of my lunch from the german food vendor, which was really yummy meatballs and mushroom sauce. he loved it and said he wanted me to figure out how to make mushroom sauce.

he brought home some interesting and unique vegetables like the cutest tiny jalapeno pepper… he and my friend rachel found it together, and were chatting (i heard later) about its cuteness and describing its attributes, and then he came over to me with it and asked me with a grin, “how do you feel about anthropomorphization?” and then giggled uncontrollably. i love how he knows what will make me laugh or surprise me or catch me off guard. he gets my humor, it’s almost like he’s related to me.

he was my farmer’s market elf when he was a toddler, and he is still my farmer’s market elf now as a big kid. at the end of the market day, i tasked him with sorting the baskets by shape and fitting them onto the cart, a job we both have the right kind of brain for.

another day i brought him with me again, since the first time had gone so well, and he was very taken up with a project, so he helped a bit less, but was still delightful to have along. “i’ve just created a new runic language. if you want to take the oath to join my tribe, you can be allowed to learn the language!” again with the graph paper. i should buy stock in graph paper.

when we got home, i took a bath while he read and then we had leftovers and got ready to go to a play. the addam’s family was fun, and it’s entertaining to watch quinn watch a play. he gets so sucked into the plot but at the same time he can analyze what’s going on back stage, on how they made a certain effect: “i think the lever was just a prop, and they made the chains move from behind the panel” was discussed at intermission. he memorized his favorite lines “wednesday is growing up, before you know it, she’ll be thursday!” and so on. after the play he got a hug from his theatre camp counselor, who was a member of the cast. i love how he reads through the program now and finds all the people he knows…. it’s a small town after all.

in december, i had quinn for the very beginning and very end of the month, for christmas. this is our second year of doing a two-week swap around the holidays (we used this trick last summer as well) which has worked out very well. it is one of the things that i am proud of after the years of toughing it out with a difficult coparent, that on topics we once couldn’t handle negotiating at all, we have become rather flexible and win-win about the process. the biggest winner, of course, is quinn, who gets the best holidays in either household (solstice there, christmas here).

the one drawback on this end is that he misses a large chunk of the season of advent at our house, which has always been something he really savors. the anticipation and expectancy of the coming holiday has always been my favorite part of christmas time as well. this year we made the most of our one week of advent together, feeling a little more settled into dragon house 2.0 for our second christmas in residence here.

on that sunday, we slept in and had pumpkin pancakes. rich’s mom had given me a form that makes the pancakes into christmas shapes just the day before, so i figured i’d use it right away. we already had his playmobil and lego advent calendars out, sparkle advent stories and color-in calendar in use. since this day was turning out to be glorious, we figured we should get the tree now, while he could help pick it out and decorate it (as opposed to last year’s tree which we put up on december 23rd).

we took a drive to get our tree, and it’s out past where we camp in the summer, so on the way back we stopped at the campsite to see the river. at the tree farm, we walked up the hill, rich with his chainsaw in hand, and the three of us walked and pointed out trees of the right height. we told quinn that it needed to be not much taller than rich so he was looking back and forth between rich and the trees. then he got to one and it was the first one where he commented “ooh this one looks nice.” just then i heard a hawk screech and looked up to try to find the hawk, then started taking pictures of it flying over our heads. rich asked right then, “which tree should we get?” i said, “i think the hawk just told us.” and quinn said, “yes, this one!” so it was decided. i had quinn hold my camera while i held the tree and rich sawed it. quinn’s documentation is mixed into the photos above. then we carried our tree down the hill and took it home with us!

quinn got in his bed and spent the rest of the entire day reading calvin and hobbes.

i made my mom’s swedish meatball recipe but added mushroom soup to the gravy to make it mushroom sauce for quinn. also since he’s reading norse mythology i pointed out the connection there, and told him we have norwegian ancestry, but he said, “mom, magnus chase takes place in boston.”

after dinner rich went outside and then stuck his head in the door and said we should come outside and to bring my camera. so we went out to look at the supermoon. quinn went back inside because i sent him to check if his bathtub was full, and it was, so he didn’t come back outside. instead he read his trials of apollo book in the tub.

on monday morning taking quinn to school, i realized that i haven’t been at school much to pick him up or drop him off, it had been 3 weeks without me going there… his dad had him, then i had him for the thanksgiving week off, then dad had him again. so i’ll have him for drop offs and pick ups this single week in december, and then i won’t do it again until january! i was remarking on that as we walked up to the school, and i decided to be a dork and squeezed his hand more firmly and said, “so i’m going to do a really good job taking you to school this week! don’t you feel like you’re being taken to school well?” and he played along swinging our hands and we giggled the whole way there.

we spent monday evening putting on the lights, garland, and decorations!

he chose to finish waking up the next morning beside the tree.

and whooooosh! it was christmas. lots of fun presents were opened, and a modest family gathering revolved around playing risk and parcheesi.

in the department of books, he received wizardology, a minecraft book, 365 days of wonder (mr. browne’s precepts), and the mother-son journal called between mom and me. i wasn’t sure how his presents would be received this year… i felt as though i gave him a few that were organizational tools disguised as presents (a mallet holder, a music stand, and a karate belt display hanger). i thought he would like the book of precepts, having read and watched wonder in the early days of fifth grade, but i was not sure he would embrace the mama-son journal. then to top it off, he got a shirt, a hat and a scarf… clothes! but he was delighted with every single gift, and expressed his gratitude.

it turned out that he was very into the journal, and was excited to start working on it with me. i’m pleased he sees it as more than another writing assignment, and instead as a way for us to connect through writing. he does like to write, even if it isn’t his easiest subject, and opts to write for his own creative purposes frequently. one night at bedtime he was torn between reading his book (the second in rick riordan’s kane chronicles), writing in the mama/son journal, and drawing “because i just thought of a book series i want to write and a movie i want to make” with 5 minutes until lights out. the flood of ideas right at the time he needs to fall asleep is epic as ever!

i told him about thumbnail sketches and had him do a few for the movie script, then put down a jot list of reminders for the book series so he’d remember his idea, and we filled out our “guidelines” pages in the journal. “people who are close to us are allowed to know about it” is one of the guidelines, so i don’t have to keep it a secret. it’s a pretty good format. we decided how we’d keep track of where we are with a special bookmark (and when he misspelled special we added a guideline that we will correct each other’s spelling because i asked if he wanted me to correct him on things or let them go and he wants the spelling “100% perfect.”) the bookmark will need to be made but will have a green owl stamp on the left and a purple dolphin stamp on the right. and our address with “return to” on it, but written in pencil, so it can be updated as needed.

we still often lean on the “dolphin story” during bedtimes like these for relaxing and emptying his busy brain, but he shared that lately his best strategy to calm down alllll the thoughts, is to choose one thing to really focus on. at bedtime he will name it out loud “i’m working on the next chapter of my mage novel in my head tonight” and then he can drift off.

something dragon-related is happening here… on graph paper.

he and i played risk again, and he beat me as usual. then he became inspired to work on programming a risk game in scratch, on his piper computer. he started out by drawing a world map (divided into the proper territories for risk) out of shapes in the background, but realized he would need to start again and make each territory a sprite that could behave independently (attack, defend, be conquered). he did further research on the scratch website and played someone else’s versions of risk on scratch, a wwii version and a napoleon version, which he then plans to study for how to code his own. as he was playing, he ended up with the world atlas in his lap, studying flags of european countries. when i talk about using the screen as a tool (for learning/creating/accomplishing goals), rather than simply a platform of consumption, this is what i mean.

we talked a bit about his progress in khan academy, where he is going through the 6th grade math curriculum at school. he is plugging along, and he was explaining his latest lesson on calculating volume of a rectangular prism. we got to chatting about finding volume of spheres, pyramids, cylindrical prisms, and such, and he was having so much fun that we developed a math problem for calculating the volume of goods able to be carried by an oregon trail conestoga wagon.

brain surgery (still going strong with lunch-making!)

is it wrong to tell your child you will only buy them tangerines for their lunches if they write it on the shopping list in cursive?

one night we were driving to karate for open mat, and he let out a gigantic sigh. “hey buddy, keep breathing.” he said, “it’s just… the paper mill.” (we have one in our town…) “it makes me upset because it’s destroying the earth.”

what do you even say?

other worries he carries are… less worrisome.

“something that has been worrying me ever since the end of 4th grade is, if a fly is flying inside of a train car, is it still going the same speed, or is it going faster because of how fast the train is going?”

i gave him the “it depends” answer based on what frame of reference we are measuring velocity with respect to, the ground or the train itself, we discussed some high school physics definitions, and talked about how the math works, depending on whether the fly is flying in the same direction as the train is traveling, or the opposite direction. oh yeah, and mentioned that this was the type of question that inspired albert einstein to develop his special theory of relativity, bringing a big paradigm shift to the field of physics.

i came across a podcast called brains on that had an episode entitled the flies on the bus that further addressed his “worry”. he listened to it, and then proceeded to choose a few more of the brains on podcasts to listen to next (they’re great, i think the segment called “um” is my favorite name for a radio show segment ever) and his first pick was farts smarts; understanding the gas we pass. so you know, it’s rare, but sometimes he does act exactly his age.

i love finding new audio for him to explore, he is soothed by it. he can be overstimulated through his ears (with sound, water, etc), and yet that is also the sensory pathway that is easiest to reach him to help restore calm in him. it is not lost on me that my sound-sensitive one who used to flip out over the use of the coffee grinder or vacuum cleaner, is the kid driven to take up drumming. within the problem are the seeds to the solution, sometimes. i wonder how many other sensory channels this can be said for, in other kids with sensory differences.

we had the delightful opportunity to offer quinn a chance to go to a winter wonderings 6-week saturday class on a nearby college campus, and be a poppy in a field of other poppies. he got signed up at the very last minute, based on his initial lukewarm response to the pamphlet that was sent home from school (you’re pre-approved!), and my uncertainty whether my coparent would drive him the 45 minutes to it on his 3 saturdays, and especially since we knew going into it that we’d miss the final week due to our upcoming trip. given that this was such a cool opportunity, though, i jumped on his last minute enthusiasm for signing up, and we made it happen. the clincher was really him getting on the phone and advocating for himself with his dad, which is an ongoing theme, and worthwhile lesson. i called the head of the program and although quinn’s top class choice of minecraft ancient civilizations was full, he was excited to try the outdoor survival skills class. i got him in just one day before he was set to attend the first one! and the first one went very well!

wake-up time with lisa kitty, a boy folded up in child’s pose on the couch, and another yoga pose of unknown identity while reading calvin and hobbes. (he’s pretty perpetually reading calvin and hobbes!)

these months in music: “there needs to be a way to write in the music for it to go in a circle.” like his insightful observation of “fourth person point of view,” quinn grasps yet another concept (the musical repeat, and the need for its notation in sheet music) before being taught the formal lesson.

now that we’ve been doing lessons and practice for a while, it is becoming trickier to keep him motivated to practice. writing his own songs definitely helps, and playing along with the practice cds, or with me on another instrument, is helpful. but sometimes it is as simple as me renaming “clair de la luna” as “luna lovegood” and he smiles and tries to play it. he has also arrived at the space where he cannot instantly memorize the entire (8-measure) song (of repetitive half and quarter notes), and must actually fail at the first attempt, and absorb the imperfection and go on to try again. even now, each song (now with 16 measures and more variation in quarter notes) may only take 3 or 4 tries to master, but that was the first high hurdle for him in his musical education. his perfectionism can be a huge stumbling block. after he mastered luna lovegood, he tried the next one… felt like he had failed, and had to be talked into trying again. i used the “be goofy” trick again and sang him the lyrics to “down by the station” which include the word “pufferbellies.” finally, he worked through the page of luna lovegood and pufferbellies, with the added bonus lyrics learned as well, and i think he is in a better place to keep learning increasingly difficult pieces.

back in december we also attended quinn’s school concert, and a good time was had by all.

karate practice in the sun!

this is the happy face i want to see after a long day of learning… there is one pretty spectacular title teacher at his school, and even though there is no tag program at school this year, she has her ways of reaching them all, including the way she made sure his pamphlet for winter wonderings came home, but also her time in the classroom is always something quinn looks forward to. he got so excited about learning origami after her lesson on making an octahedron! he was so on fire that i heard about it after school, on the day she introduced the project, when he had only reached the halfway point of his finished octahedron. describing it, he told me, “it has 6 vertices!” and other fancy geometry jargon. by the next afternoon, he was bringing it home completed, feeling accomplished, with a big smile on his face.

eleven ~ the time of returning

Posted on February 28, 2018 by marybethrew

cue the soundtrack… the eleven by the grateful dead is the only song i know that has a time signature of eleven beats per measure! also, i liked that this version was recorded on 8-23-68, quinn’s half birthday, 50 years ago! if we add my age and his together right now, we get 50! oh the number fun to be had on birthdays….

eleven is such a delightfully large, odd, indivisible, palindromic, prime number! but i’ve had a thing for the number eleven for a while now. my young synesthete sees 1 and therefore also 11 in the color red, but for me it’s got a red violet hue.

the eleven

High green chilly winds and windy vines
In loops around the twisted shafts of lavender,
They’re crawling to the sun.
Underfoot the ground is patched
With arms of ivy wrapped around the manzanita,
Stark and shiny in the breeze.
Wonder who will water all the children of the garden
When they sigh about the barren lack of rain and
Droop so hungry neath the sky.
William Tell has stretched his bow till it won’t stretch
No furthermore and/or it may require a change that hasn’t come before.
No more time to tell how, this is the season of what,
Now is the time of returning with our thought
Jewels polished and gleaming.
Now is the time past believing the child has relinquished the rein,
Now is the test of the boomerang tossed in the night of redeeming.
Seven faced marble eyed transitory dream doll,
Six proud walkers on the jingle bell rainbow,
Five men writing with fingers of gold,
Four men tracking down the great white sperm whale,
Three girls waiting in a foreign dominion
Riding in the whale belly, fade away in moonlight,
Sink beneath the waters to the coral sands below.

Songwriters: Philip Lesh / Robert C. Hunter

now is the time of returning… back from another revolution around the sun… to our other homeland of new york… to seeing my child at an age of my own childhood that i remember more vividly than the ones he has been before… now is the time of returning with our thought jewels polished and gleaming!

the more i mull over these lyrics, the more appropriate for a birthday they seem… now is the time past believing the child has relinquished the rein… at first glance this line suggests passing beyond a point of no return, an ending to the innocence of childhood, but upon further reflection, it seems to get beyond assumptions that growing up means the child has gone away, and instead a realization of the child’s intactness in spite of added years. he’s still there galloping along, and we’re past believing he has relinquished the rein.

we might do another double take with the initially despairing thought of wonder(ing) who will water all the children of the garden, but bringing that thought back around to its beginning once more, we might realize it is wonder who will water all the children of the garden. simple yet profound in the layers of meaning. seeing quinn’s delight in the falling snow, hearing him gasp on the morning he awoke to see it falling, and watching his gleeful play assured me that wonder is still watering his garden.

arriving at this age that already seems pre-packaged with extra attitude and a side of, “mom, why do you have to be so embarrassing?” it is easy to feel like childhood may be approaching an ending, but there is so much childhood still inside this kid, and truly in all of us troubled grown ups as well, so much wonder and joy and spunk. yet, this season of what brings new levels of flexibility, awareness, and resilience (evidence of all of these i can already see, mere days into his time as an eleven year old) that shine like thought jewels polished and gleaming, ensuring this will be his best year yet. it may require a change that hasn’t come before, but already i see him rising to the challenges and responding with an ever-expanding consciousness.

i like the word indivisible, concerning eleven’s numerical properties. i think it’s resonating for me given how far quinn has come in his ability to roll with changes and handle emotions, and i think he’s well equipped with tools to keep his spirit whole and intact. indivisible.

for his birthday, i bundled up my stick figure in a hodge podge of hand-me-downs and rapidly serged old pieces of fleece, and stuck him on the cross country skis i used when i was his age. (now is the time of returning…) with olympics mania running rampant through the rew house, he was very excited to try, but he has yet to embrace the concept that falling down a lot is a required part of the skiing process. he did say, however, that if he wins an olympic medal for skiing one day, he’ll tell them to thank me.

it was special for the whole family to get to celebrate the birthday of this particular boy together, for the first time ever!

he is startlingly tall, standing with his grampy. this is all going according to his plan to avenge his mama by becoming taller than his uncles… 6’7″, here he comes.

he opened one birthday present early in the day, because i had an inkling the cousins would get a lot of fun out of using this gift together. there has been a simultaneous bi-coastal dive into origami among the cousins, between their reading origami yoda books and his learning octahedron folding in school. much of the rainy, windy birthday was spent inside, folding colored paper into dinosaurs, yodas, and more octahedra! the entire week produced several large bags full of paper airplanes, and many empty rolls of tape, so the grand finale of origami paper and books was a fitting culmination.

make-your-own-birthday-decorations. we kept it low key, and the kids provided all that was needed in the way of birthday decor.

snow – his birthday (eve) wish come true!

so much good quality time with family made his birthday all the more wonderful. homemade pizza for dinner, time with his aunts, uncles, grammy, and grampy, and playing with his cousins… the simple joys were all he needed.

given his arrival at the age at which harry potter first stepped aboard the hogwarts express, a harry potter theme ran throughout his birthday week, including a gift of some sheet music from the movie soundtrack to play on his bells, and a tournament of wizard chess games played against his uncle t. i love the way this boy makes connections in unique ways with each individual member of his extended family.

high green chilly winds and windy vines… now is the time of returning…

this past year it has finally occurred to me that his time of birth, 3:14, has numerical significance. yep, my baby was born at pi o’clock. and he is nerdy enough to find that quull. we also ate pie for his birthday, homemade peach pie to be exact, a gift of summer made by his grammy’s loving hands, and delivered across the kitchen with flaming candles by his uncle b, accompanied by a chorus of voices of cousins, aunts, uncles, parents, and grandparents.

turn it up to eleven!

uncle b also showed him a thing or two on his drum set, much to quinn’s delight! he’s a proud walker on the jingle bell rainbow… (i hadn’t noticed the rainbow lyric in this song until this writing, but… of course!) not only has he progressed well with jingling his bells with mallets in the past several months, he has begun to learn drum rolls and paradiddles! again, watching him connect with my brother on this level made me so very happy.

a very happy, snowy, indivisible, jingle bell rainbow, eleventh birthday to my favorite boy!

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ composer of his own destiny

Posted on February 9, 2018 by marybethrew

when i was looking back through photos of quinn from 2010 for my previous lifelong learning post, which my hilarious husband said i should have titled two months to read, i found this little drummer boy…

which seemed like a great way to start off this month of lifelong learning, during which quinn took his first music lessons!

this is just before his first lesson, after receiving his new drum pad and bell kit. i can’t help but notice he still likes to march in a circle around the drum, as he was doing with the tinker toys can, and numerous other unpictured objects throughout his life.

checking out his new bells!

first lesson! it also happened to be halloween that day, so he has on his charizard costume. he is having his lessons with the same teacher he has for music during school, and this also happens to be someone rich and i know from the theatre community. he’s a great guy, and seems to appreciate quinn. he had a straightforward plan to suggest for getting him started (including the idea of the snare/mallet percussion starter book and kit). quinn gets to learn snare drum alongside bells, so that he is learning how to read the music for both, and familiarize with the extremes of what a percussionist might delve into, or specialize in later on. when we talked beforehand, quinn was very much interested in drums and rhythm, but was open to the idea of reading notes and playing mallet percussion as well. i told him stories about the girl in my high school band who played mallets, who also played everything all the rest of the percussionists could play, but who got the really special jobs like playing the chimes for the christmas concert, and the steel drums when we played the little mermaid medley. i always admired her versatility, and i think she got to play some of the best parts because of it! he seemed like he liked the idea of being versatile like that.

not too long after his first lesson, quinn had composed his first song, entitled bird song. he was nervous about naming it that, because he felt there may be copyright issues, given that he knew of another song by that name (my little dead head). i assured him that if he wasn’t planning on selling it to anyone yet, he could name it whatever he wanted for now. he relaxed.

he was completely overjoyed that his very own mama had a plain sheet of staff paper already in her possession, and ran off to make “i think about 10 copies should be good for starters.” it is love. he spent some serious time between practicing, then writing his song, playing it, looking at a star wars book of songs i happened to have on hand, then just playing around with no music in front of him. making musical sounds.

one awesome aspect of his musicality is how he ties in emotion, he really has a sense of how certain pieces will make a person feel, and asked me how bird song made me feel when i heard him play it. i told him i felt a little melancholy when i heard it (it was in a minor key) and he was delighted because he had been going for expressing “epic sadness.”

this photo was taken belatedly, but quinn made a linocut stamp of an apple to decorate a birthday card for grammy the previous month, so i wanted to make sure and include this image somewhere. we must have art in our lives!

just a boy with harry potter hair.

parent-teacher conferences were held during this month and it was the first real face-to-face i had with quinn’s teacher, because i really coasted through the first part of the school year and had yet to volunteer in the classroom. i was delighted with our conference. she seemed equally delighted with quinn, and her main commentary had to do with hoping she will be able to keep him challenged. she is thrilled about his love of the fantasy genre, because she feels it is the genre with the most potential for finding books on his reading level and also with appropriate content for his age and interests. because, his star test results indicate that:

“quinn would be best served by instructional materials prepared at a ninth grade level.”

i love his teacher even more for understanding how that test score is to be taken with huge grains of salt, that its usefulness is limited, that while it is true that his level is high, a person reading at that level should be tested using… a test prepared for someone at that level, not the grade 5 level, and she had already determined she would test him only the required beginning and end of year times, and refrain from having him test at intervals throughout the school year with the rest of the class. hurray for less testing, and especially hurray for a teacher with mindfulness of the limitations of testing.

she generally seems very experienced, has great ideas for helping quinn with things like time management and awareness (she felt that just letting him know about how long an assignment might be expected to take, helped him keep it close to the time, rather than dragging on and succumbing to overthinking; that she picked up this observation in a few short weeks was telling as well.) she seemed to be pleased about having him as a student, and optimistic about a good school year. i feel we got really lucky, and it makes so much sense that quinn wanted to keep all options open and let the universe put him in the right classroom for him for this year.

in early november, quinn spent nearly an entire weekend typing a novel inside of a book inside of a minecraft world. it is an epic adventure, and i need to transcribe it from the minecraft book so it can be read by the world. we discussed that it may make more sense for him to type future novels into a document instead, so he does not monopolize my computer for entire weekends.

he had a theatre workshop on veteran’s day and he had a blast. parents were invited in the afternoon to watch the skits they put together, which was very impromptu because the plot was dictated by whatever the kids wrote, separately, on index cards labeled who, what, where, when, why and quinn’s group had criteria something like: who: pregnant lady with mood swings, where: in a hospital, when: during world war ii, and i cannot recall the what and why… quinn’s character was steve, a wounded soldier. he was off to one side being wounded, and any time he would say a line, the rest of the cast would chorus, “no, steve!” or “shut up, steve!” and he got many laughs. the pregnant woman did pretty well, in a sitcom sense, of being moody and in labor, and then another girl her same size was the baby, which provided great physical comedy to have the “mom” oohing and ahhing her new baby on her lap. then there was drama over who the actual father was, and that was a bit confused in the dialogue but funny, and finally, quinn-steve chimed in, “can i be the father?” “NO, STEVE!” and that was the end of the play. ridiculously funny for throwing it together in 40 minutes. he obviously had fun, because then they were allowed to leave if parents were present (which i was) but they could also play one more game since there were still 15 minutes left, and of course, he wanted to play the game.

quinn’s class took a field trip to see the movie wonder, and i finally got to do something helpful for his class, and went along as a chaperone. holy moly, i had no idea i should have brought a box of tissues with me. the kids had read the book in preparation for seeing this wonderful movie with its profound and multi-faceted and in-depth discussion of differences and universals and bullying and kindness.

later in the month, quinn attended a seminar with sifu diaz, our sifu’s seventh degree black belt sifu. last time they met, they both had ponytails, and this time they both had haircuts. sifu diaz is very good with the kids, and it’s great to get a different perspective on the same techniques. i always love doing that when learning yoga and feel i learn more when i can see it from different teachers’ persepectives, so the same goes for karate.

we got to have ruby over thanksgiving break, when i had quinn home for the week. our days were game-filled and puppy-enhanced.

tinker crate! quinn received an awesome present from aunt lau, a tinker crate subscription. the first box in our subscription was a make-your-own spin-art machine! obviously, quinn had fun, both building and wiring up his machine, and then making some art!

we had a mellow thanksgiving at our home, with rich’s mom and daughter and son-in-law, and ruby and quinn. quinn helped with pie baking as usual, and was entirely responsible for the apple slicing for the apple pie. we also had pumpkin and pecan pies, and a whole bunch of other food, though i was aiming for low-key and low-waste this time around, and i think i accomplished my goal.

it’s hard to keep up with quinn’s literary journey these days. he is rapidly devouring the entire body of work written by rick riordan. he is getting caught up on the trials of apollo, and simultaneously demolishing the first two books in the magnus chase series. as a follow-up to that, he has of course decided to study norse mythology in greater detail, just as he did with percy jackson and greek mythology, and introduced me to the ice cow goddess audhumla, my new spirit animal. some quick-read minecraft fan fiction gets inserted into the book pile as well. i bet we are in the running for most frequent flier miles on the inter-library loan system for our local public library, and 4 out of 5 librarians at our branch are on a first name basis with quinn. this kid loves to read!

~rainbow mondays~ birds, blossoms and a rainbow of eggs

Posted on March 28, 2016 by marybethrew

happy rainbow easter monday!

it’s an overdue, overstuffed rainbow of eggs and flower buds and all things symbolic of springing forth new life! hurray for spring!

psst! rubber bands were a fun, accidental discovery for using what we had on hand for egg dying!

pink: sunrise on sunrader

red: easter cake we were forced to eat by our housemate… it’s a hard life here at the vacation house, but somehow we find a way to carry on.

red: quinn declared this random organic design on the egg he dyed purple and red for rich to be “a perfect suncatcher!”

red: this is the situation in our basement right now.

red: blossom bonanza!

orange: more sunrise goodness.

orange: blossoming oregon grape on the roadside

orange: i confess, i purposely use glass jars and shiny spoons for egg dying, to enhance photographic potential! this year i managed to time it during an afternoon sunny spell as well. by a big window. contrived for the best possible color and reflection fun!

yellow: not sure if this is the same species of bird that visited bernie (a lesser goldfinch, that is), but i’m definitely feeling the bird.

yellow: it’s violet season!

green: pear blossoms… when we arrived in vacation land, the pears were small and not yet ripe, and it looks like we will nearly close the circle on the pear’s annual cycle before we depart vacation land.

green: norma, the neighborhood blossom tree.

green: happy belated st. patrick’s day! it’s not all sunshine and easter eggs around here.

green: st. patty’s jello. we had fun declaring its different flavors (bertie bott’s style): mmm, this bite tastes like kiwi! um, i think i just got grass clippings! ack, that bite was sticker bushes!