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~thankful thursday~ light cone

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

11/22/24

I was full of gratitude moments yesterday, but was not on social media to share, so please accept my belated day 22 gratitude. I accompanied fifty-three high school students (band and friends) and two teachers to Portland for a very full day (from an 8:30 departure Friday all the way until the kids said “we’re at school on a Saturday” when we got off the bus at 1:30 am.) I have written about band kids before and my love for them. Yesterday, being with them as they visited the music department of PSU, I loved the tiny insights into their psyches revealed by the questions they asked and observations they made aloud. As we took a self-guided tour of campus, I loved how they looked up and took pictures of tall buildings. I loved watching them arrive on the rec field and expode into activity: run, skip, hacky-sack, jump for the goal posts, race, climb, kick a water bottle, manifest a soccer ball out of the bushes, flop on the ground and be with each other. As we ate pizza at an arcade, I loved filling the water pitcher eleven times and hydrating them as they refueled, cheered each other on at silly games, discovered infinite ways to play with a rubber chicken, sang a friend happy birthday, and in the case of Quinn and his friend, performed a good chunk of the Hamilton score a cappella and in harmony. I loved helping a student who wasn’t feeling well feel better, and I loved sitting in the very last row of the Arlene Schnitzer’s upper balcony and seeing them absorb Mariachi Sol de Mexico perform a phenomenal show. I loved the way some of our students glowed to have their first language predominate the show, the way they knew the call and response parts of the songs, when to clap to the beat, the way they got up and spun each other at the back of the hall like it was their own quinceañera. I loved the way some of our students cheered and laughed, remarked how they understood none of the words, absorbed that moment of empathy for the students who feel that way most of the time instead of only on a field trip. I loved how all of our students instantly lit their phones up when the band called for the crowd to do so. I loved watching them sway back and forth, combining their individual tiny lights and reaching for the sky.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

11/23/24

After one friend (and gratitude reader) I saw today remarked that it might be a good nacho night, my bestie sent me this photo. Even though it’s hot dogs and mac-n-cheese tonight, I’m grateful for easy dinner and friends who celebrate mediocrity in the kitchen.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

11/24/24

I am grateful for a weekend with Quinn during which he designed a fleet of fantasy ships he can use as D and D shipboard adventures. He knew I might have a small clue about ships, having lived on and sailed them for a couple of years long ago, so he asked me a zillion questions. Types of ships, names of masts, how many decks, how many crow’s nests (he was disappointed in the answer), what is a stun’sl, below decks configurations, how many crew, what was that word again? (The word was bulkhead.) I taught him beam and draft, fore main and mizzen, topgallant and royal, that the lazarette would be an ideal location for a character to stow away, and we even discussed skysails. We talked about the shapes of hulls, the lines to control sails, and how the rig is meant to flex. He decided “difficult terrain” would be an appropriate penalty for pretty much any character without high dexterity, anywhere on board a ship, and I agreed.  It brought back a lot of memories, but mostly just made me grateful for every minute I get to spend with him.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

11/25/24

I am grateful for a dinner of bbq brisket and ribs made by the same guy who catered our wedding. I am grateful for my fabulous mother-in-law who picked up the food for us and kept us company while we feasted.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

11/26/24

I am grateful for my birthday boy brother B, and my unbirthday boy brother T. I always do this on B’s birthday and I’m not going to start bucking tradition in the ninth year. Instead I’ll find the photos that make me smile the widest from our visit this past June: T at my nephew’s baseball game keeping the sun off his delicate skin with a dainty pink umbrella; B and Dad standing in the potato field they’d just planted. My reasons are still the same: they are great brothers, great dads, great uncles, great men, great at doing specific things like punk power chords or defragmenting your hard drive. I am grateful for their sporadic text messages, whether they feature roman numerals or not. I heard there was quite a bumper crop of potatoes this year.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ days 27 and 28

11/27 and 11/28/24

Two quick gratitudes for two very good, full days. I choose kitties and pie.

 

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

Observed 12/1/24

I’ve been both busy and full of sinus pressure for a couple of days, so I’m getting to penultimate gratitude a few days behind schedule. Luckily, I’m still not taking this class for a grade. Indulge my semi-lucid gratitude musing for today.

Sometimes Quinn talks to me about physics.

“Picture a flash of light above your head moving out in all directions. The second that flash begins, it is impossible for you to ever get outside of that light, because to do so you’d have to travel faster than light.”

“Mmm.”

“That’s your light cone. It gets bigger as time progresses, and a greater area of the world is illuminated in that light. You also have a past light cone that defines all the area where anything can travel at up to the speed of light to reach where you are right now and give you information about the past, so anything you can have ever experienced is also defined by where you are right now.”

“Whoaaa.”

I told Quinn I thought this was a great metaphor. He thought that was silly but I’m sticking with my metaphor assertion. Because I have so often found light to be a part of the conversation about gratitude, I think they are intertwined. I can picture the act of choosing to pay attention to gratitude as a type of light, and maybe this gratitude light, too, moves outward, maybe it defines a cone of experience around me, maybe it informs and enfolds within itself everything about my past, everything about my future. Maybe all of it comes back to this moment I am in right now.

And even if I am a glow slug in the midnight zone of the high-pressure, chilled-to-the-bone, fully dark ocean, I can make my own light, a flash that moves outward, a pulse that grows and expands and defines an area around me.

I learned a few more things about the glowing nudibranchs. The research carried out on this species was based on none other than the research vessel Western Flyer. Iykyk. But on the nudibranchs themselves: They are a marvel of evolution: they represent the third independent evolution of bioluminescence in nudibranchs, and they swim and evade predators, unlike their nearest known relatives who typically crawl on the sea floor. They are so evolved that they have created their own family, like a lot of us are known to do when we don’t fit easily into the classification schemes of others. They are growing on me, these dark-dwelling light-makers with their soft, transparent hearts.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

Observed 12/2/24

I am grateful for paid sick leave and a day of Tea, Tay, and Turkey Broth (shoutout to bestie for the playlist and we are grateful for music in case we haven’t said so this year).

I am grateful for several days in a row of sunshine! I am grateful for all the forms of light that have shined on this November. A non-exhaustive list might include:

Friday night lights

clarity

light cone

sunrise

stage lights

cousin Rita

head lamp

sunlight on water

sunlight on kitten fur

glow slugs

cell phone lights in the hands of teenagers, swaying

you, and you, and you.

I am sincerely grateful for all of you and your comments and hearts and grocery store acknowledgements. Thank you for beaming your lights my way, too. If you are among those for whom the light has seemed dimmer than usual this November, I am sending you as many beams of bioluminescence as I am able.

When Rich was driving me home from the funeral I mentioned earlier this month, one of the darkest days of this November, we noticed someone’s not-put-away-yet Halloween decoration, a skeleton perched as though it was driving an antique tractor alongside the highway. It was too dark to get a good photo, but the image has stuck with me anyway. No matter how lovely and wonderful a life we might be privileged to enjoy (and I am so lucky, comfortable, and privileged), it does feel as though the whole machine we are rolling forward on is an antique and that there is a reckless skeleton behind the wheel. No ocean of gratitude, no arena of swaying teenagers with their phones lit up, can change that. Loss and death and grief, we do not get to escape them.

I have thought about it a lot, and without veering into the toxic positivity lane, I have decided to keep myself hitched to the gratitude wagon. I will strive for mediocrity and honesty in this practice, always.

Thanks everyone, for climbing in the wagon with me again after all these years.

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ character building

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~5-23 to 6-23~

I feel like posting this one in journal format, the way I actually typed it into my word document… Each day in the life of a month in the life of a lifelong learner, day by day.

5-24

Quinn mowed their driveway and then said he spent “a long time” outside, picking dandelion greens for his guinea pigs. He said Squeaky will eat anything green, but Ms. B is a little more picky and her absolute favorite is dandelion greens. (Now that I am documenting this, after Ms. B’s passing, it stands out to me how particular his observations are of his guinea pigs’ eating habits and how attentive he is in tending to them.)

5-25

Quinn said he did not do any more mowing, but he did build a fire last night in the wood stove! He is also very into the electronics projects they have been doing, and is learning how to solder and connect up lots of detailed circuit board/resistors/connections. We are reading about Sam and Frodo traveling into Mordor, but then turning and passing through Ithilien with Gollum to go “the other way”.

Wednesday 5-27

Q seems rejuvenated somehow, rallying to end the school year strong, and showed up in a button down to our video call and stated a goal of getting all schoolwork done by the end of tomorrow. He is redoing where he needs to show work, etc.

He told me about how his factoring polynomials project (one he was procrastinating) “turned out to be my favorite assignment.” When I asked him to explain it to me (after having heard from his teacher about needing to redo and “show his work”), he said, out loud, without hesitation:

“To convert from x2 + bx + c to a(x+b)(x+c) find two numbers p and q where p+q=b and p times q equals c and those are going to be the b and c of your x2 + bx + c and p and q will be b and c in the a(x+b)(x+c)”

He just rattled that off verbally, that quote you just skimmed over because blah blah math blah, which leads me to believe he is able to grasp the concept and articulate it, whether he has showed his work or not.

But we did revisit the topic of showing one’s work, with the reasoning that the 99% of people who do not just see/know the answer, may appreciate him having the ability to walk them through/teach them the steps they should take (even if you don’t take them, Quinn!) Also, as he gets into more advanced math, he may at some point reach a threshold where he does actually need to put some of the math on paper to keep track, or be able to trade proofs among scholars.

Friday 5-29

Quinn is getting all caught up on school! He did two math assignments today. So proud of how hard he rallied. So grateful he will soon be done. But wow. DONE with seventh grade! He has been sending me photos of the electronics project. I have been hearing words such as “potentiometers, LED, PCB, circuit board, jacks, capacitors, resistors, transistors, diodes, switches….” during our chats.

5-31

On hangout with Quinn we began to read The Return of the King today. Our page numbers no longer match (his book 3 is from a different paperback edition) so we tried to do algebra to it, specifically to our page numbers to calculate the other’s page number based on whoever reads, where the reader left off, and where the listener should pick up next time.

6-3

We went to the Black Lives Matter protest and stood and marched.

painting by Hayden Sargent who some of my readers will know!

I am reminded of fourth grade Quinn with his peaceful protesting… just after Mrs. Schroeder assigned the MLK essay, and he would peacefully bring his drawing stuff even when I felt he should leave it home.

Lots of people turned out – marine science people, farmer’s market people, goldberry and family (she and Q waved at each other from a safe social distance) and so many young people. There was car honking and it felt good to be there…  I think he was glad to be there. His sign. His awesome sign.

6-4

Quinn had to do one more elective credit, and after talking it through with me he realized a really easy one would be the short presentation of “a new skill you’ve learned during quarantine” and he even had pictures of his electronics project ready to put into a presentation for it.

6-11

We watched a quetzalcoatlus you tube video Quinn found. Yay for paleontology!

6-14

Camp robber (gray jay named “Brad”) landed on Quinn’s hand!

6-16

Q set up a google meet to play D&D with Goldberry and Aragorn. Tonight at 5pm! Yesterday in our hangout he answered my question of what plans he had for the rest of Monday with “look forward to tomorrow!”

As we were planning our upcoming hike, I sent him photos of his last trip down to Drift Creek; snowman pants and river rock snowmen!

6-17

Hearing about how his D&D session went with friends. The electricity went out on him right in the middle! But it wasn’t out for long, and when he got back into the meet, the other two were there, and filled him in thoroughly on what had happened while he had been gone. There was a nearby town that a bunch of orcs had been attacking and there was “like a whole encampment of them,” so Goldberry’s character “went in and singlehandedly dealt with that, and then I came back in right as the boss orc came out. I was still level one because I missed all the experience points from that, so that only worked semi-well for me. So we defeated that orc, and then we went to the nearby town and hung out for a while, and apparently the blacksmith has a quest for us… that’s next time. Oh and I’m level two… and I also got my arm lopped off by the orc, but it’s growing back.”

“So when you say next time do you already have an idea when it will be?”

“Friday.”

6-18

Drift creek hike!

We had one conversation during our hike where Quinn shared some of his early memories. So much fun to hear what he remembers!

Draconis story details…

Our first egg, found in a rose bush, was glowing turquoise-green and looked like a seed, and we placed it in a nest of moss and hatched a Photosynthesim draconis we named Douglas Fircone. Doug for short. His power was absorbing sunlight and transmitting (through breathing green gas onto things) plant nutrition.

After we got to the river’s edge and started seeing crayfish, we found our next egg, a blue one that seemed like a fish egg, in a water erosion hole. This was an Aquarius draconis egg and it nested in river silt until hatching. We named this dragon Crayfish Ripple (Cray for short.)

Next, we found a bright red Volcanis draconis egg in a sinkhole, but the egg, which looked like it was made of obsidian, was not sinking. In a nest of oasis mud, we hatched Lavaspark Flameflow (nickname Lava).

Finally, we explosively hatched a never encountered dragon that could only be seen as a shadow or sometimes a bend in the light… We named the new species Lumenergescens draconis, and its name was Shimmer Shade.

Binary hand counting on the trail.

6-19

Reading Return of the King, he stopped me mid-paragraph to do the math on “a month of Mondays” and we realized a month of weeks is the same as a week of months, or 210 days, given that there are 30 days per month in the Shire calendar.

We stayed on our call for an extra half hour. I was a bit tearful, discussing how it’s the first day after a nice long day with him, and not knowing when it will happen again, it feels long. And I miss him.

But we also talked about how this time is shaping us and changing us, but that doesn’t have to be bad, in fact in our case, having to think about heavy things and having to make difficult choices is character building (Quinn laughed and referenced Calvin and Hobbes; “character building is painful”).

Which reminded me that I should add some Calvin to his next care package, as it is such comfort reading for him. I think we have two copies of one of the books anyway…

We ended our call on that note; holding onto the thought of using the energy of this time to become better humans. More strength, more empathy.

6-20

On Thursday I sent a 2-bag care package home with quinn including lots of food (white chocolate chip cookies, pancakes, chocolate covered acai snacks aka “deer poops”, popcorn made by his stepdad aka best popcorn ever, seaweed snacks, almonds, pasta, goldfish), a hexaflexagon I decorated for him with fractals and mathy art, some books (calvin, Born a Crime by Trevor Noah and Stamped by Ibram X. Kendi, as well as his D and D player’s handbook and a book of Oregon Fossils, and with my version of “Sam’s gardening box” that has so enamored him as we have read about it, and his set of rubik’s cubes and instruction book for solving. He got the 4 by 4 solved today for the first time and also found instructions in the book he hadn’t seen before about how to solve the orientation of the emblem, which had caused him much consternation with his 3 by 3 cube.

6-22

Sam’s gardening box is unleashed and brings renewal and abundance to the Shire during our reading and Quinn is content with this outcome.

6-23

The gardening box has been planted in a pot!

We realized Q is 13.333 repeating today when we signed off an evening call (we had not been able to do a noon call because his electricity was being worked on, but it was back on and he CALLED me on the phone and we had a bonus half hour to read and have some time together.

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ my backstory is yes

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Three parties and a dance, not bad for a birthday month!

Quinn got to have a sleepover on Sunday of MLK day weekend. Sunday afternoon Aragorn invited Quinn, Legolas and Goldberry over, and they played D&D. He described some of the action to me, and a lot of it seemed to center around Legolas’s character’s tendency to eat foreign objects in his environment, which strangely is a tendency the real-life Legolas has been known to exhibit. His character got eaten by whale, only to eat the whale from the inside out, and so on. It sounded like Quinn had a ton of fun. Goldberry of course left before sleepover time, but I love that she was there up until that time. I suggested to Quinn that he could invite the three of them for D&D on his Sunday birthday, but of course without sleepover since there will be school that Monday.

Pancake W came for a visit (Christmas observed)! She loves Quinn so much. She wanted to eat his Hawaiian burger, used him to push herself up to standing a million times, held onto him for balance, crawled over to him and climbed onto his lap while they played with the big duplo legos.

He is so good with her, and she already adores him like B and Z seem to do. He is a big enough kid now that he is game to build things for her to deconstruct, because that is the phase she is in developmentally. As soon as he heard that, he built structures all night for her to take apart. He just laughed as she opened his Christmas present for him. Rich and I reminisced about how he was a bit less flexible when B was the baby pancake deconstructionist, and Quinn was only five. Q got a lesson in backgammon from his brother in law; my game knowledge is finite, so it’s good he has a large pool of adults to glean games from!

Another find-out-at-last-minute middle school dance, this time Rio theme. He said, “I think bright colors?” I loaned him my Hawaiian shirt that I bought in Fiji twenty years ago which FITS HIM and he put on his gray owl hoodie over it and no one ever saw what he wore. He said Goldberry wore all black, the boys just wore their normal stuff but friend M wore light blue. Apparently, M and Legolas are “together” so that was the big deal of the evening.

same shirt size, but his hands are now wider than mine.

mammoth tooth

baby mammoth femur

coprolites!

We went to “fossil fest” at the marine science visitors center. Quinn spoke with a few people who have found some cool fossils in Oregon, including mammoth teeth and bones, parts from sharks and turtles. He had me take pictures of coprolites and some of the fossils and send them all to him. One guy gave us his card to call him so we can send Quinn floating down the Yamhill river with him looking for fossils (including snorkeling – which inspired some “I’d better practice snorkeling!” on the way home) over the summer.

Lots of building lego robots this month. Still to come: the programming of said robots!

We got to go to a friend’s birthday party being hosted by Goldberry’s mom, and when I asked if 13 year old boys were wanted at this party, Goldberry’s mom said “Goldberry would love to hang out with Quinn.” I had been wanting to connect with their family more… they are also theatre folks (Goldberry’s mom was dear sugar in tiny beautiful things). I let them know Goldberry was invited to Quinn’s birthday party in two weeks and they said she can come!

The biggest deal of the weekend (for me) was Quinn started independently cleaning his room! I mentioned on Friday that he’d probably want to think about cleaning it this weekend, since when he gets home the next time, it will be time for his birthday party and having room for friends would be good. After we got home from the party he really started turning onto the idea of cleaning, and Sunday he worked at it a whole bunch. “I knew how to clean a room, I just chose not to.” He’s being thorough, putting things in reasonable places, pulling things off his desk, organizing it, making it so he can use the surface again, organizing legos into their cases, thorough. All this time I’ve been invested in my hippie approach of not nagging/requiring room cleaning with the optimistic hope that one day self-motivation would actually occur. It is a wonder to behold. He’s doing it cheerfully!!!!!

It may seem that not much academic learning is going on; it is, and it’s not that it’s unremarkable to speak about, it’s that time is racing by. I have these funny images of Quinn letting me know how he knew the exact dimensions of the unit of measurement “hogshead” and if I had not taken them, I would have completely forgotten the hilarious memorization moment of him showing me the inside cover of a composition book.

We had a Friday night karate class with Sifu Diaz (our sifu’s sifu).

Then a Saturday trip to go to a birthday party for pancake W. Cuteness overload, and a special big sister got Quinn and her little W each their own special giant birthday cupcake. She said, “I hope he likes lemon…” it’s only his favorite!

Then on Sunday we had a Quinn birthday!

His friends are so cool. Goldberry showed up first, just before 2:00. She was so sweet, “your house is so nice! I love it here!” and loved our cats, too. She did the same with Quinn’s room, “oh your room is so awesome!” and he gave her the tour of his (clean!) room. I was still baking cookies but eavesdropping of course. She gave him a card and a pack of peeps! “I didn’t know what to get you for a present!” I thought her choice was perfect.

Legolas came next, and his present was also food: ramen! Ahh, he must have had good memories of last year’s Naruto/ramen birthday. Then Aragorn showed up, and he gave Quinn a tiny 3D printed D&D figurine.

Then the snack bowl emptying/D&D playing began, and Aragorn had my guitar in his hand as soon as I gave him permission to use it and apologized for the old strings and out-of-tuneness. He can play quite a few tunes! After they worked on their characters (and emptied all the snack bowls) for a while, they took a break and went out and swept off the trampoline and jumped.

They came back and worked on characters some more, the conversation was entertaining. Quinn was being dungeon master (“DMing” is the lingo) but the other three were making characters. Legolas had John the paladin who apparently ate his family. Goldberry worked on her dragon-born bard Bob, who played death metal on his ukulele. Aragorn didn’t have a character because he had been DM the other times they played, so he made up Swaylor Tift, a ranger. “My backstory is yes,” he announced. They drew stick figures of their characters in the box provided, and Legolas and Aragorn both had pretty pathetic drawings, but the banter about their stick people was gold: “he missed leg day; he has muscles on his muscles; he has a keleven-pack….” just hilarious. One of them said something about Bob, I don’t know which pronouns were used (male for Bob or female for Goldberry?) but she responded, “don’t assume my character’s gender!”

There were singalongs galore. All star, Africa, Bohemian rhapsody, etc….

At dusk, the teens just came inside briefly to stack pizza on plates and take it back out to the trampoline – it was dark out! I couldn’t help feeling like they’re such teens already!!!! Wahhhh! I finally lured them inside with ice cream and lemon cookies, and every one of them had seconds. All cookies gone.

After they left, I asked Quinn if he wanted to blow out candles but he said that he had done that the day before, and one wish is enough, but that lit candles would be nice. He finished his thirteenth birthday reading by candlelight.

lucky thirteen

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I sent this photo to my bff a few weeks ago on a Friday afternoon when Quinn came home to me after his week at his Dad’s:

Her response was, “wtf. Did he become an adult in a week?”

Straight to the point, exactly what I was thinking. She always does that.

When I was pregnant with Quinn I had the requisite pregnancy dreams, but I could never see my baby’s appearance, no facial features at all. Just one time, in one single dream, I saw him clearly, face, hair, posture, but as a teen, maybe sixteen, not a baby or even a young child. And this person standing in front of me looking me almost squarely in the eye is becoming exactly the boy I saw in my dream.

It’s a Fibonacci birthday for Quinn! The next time he has one of those, he’ll be turning 21! Eek! Time feels like it moves along like a Fibonacci sequence, spiraling ever more quickly, in bigger bites each year. It does feel like he was 1 for a while, then 2, then 3, then started jumping from 5 to 8 to 13, soon he’ll be 21 and before I know it he’ll be 34!

This spiral I printed on Quinn’s birthday card represents the Fibonacci sequence up to 13, and I have talked before about how I love the idea of spirals as a metaphor for watching my child develop, and the way we are both now able to look back together on his younger years from our positions higher up our spiral staircases, a feeling I couldn’t have anticipated when I was having a baby, or when he was little. I couldn’t picture coming home from our w pancake’s first birthday party yesterday, pulling out the baby book to show Quinn photos of his own first birthday, and listening to him make comparisons between his one-year-old self and his little niece.

Prime numbers are just cool. When he has his next prime birthday, I imagine he will look exactly like the teen of my pregnancy dream. How crazy to think seventeen is such a short few years ahead of us.

Thirteen is the smallest emirp, any prime number that is also a prime when its digits are reversed (31).

Thirteen is also a Wilson prime, and there are not very many of those! A Wilson prime is a prime number p such that p2 divides (p − 1)! + 1.  I checked the math on this: 132 is 169; 12! +  1 =  (12x11x10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1) +1 = 479,001,601; and 479,001,601 divided by 169 is 2,834,329. It divides evenly! The only known Wilson primes are 5, 13, and 563, so Quinn’s next Wilson prime birthday is way off in the fourth dimension!

Though a year contains twelve solar months, part of the thirteenth lunar month is also included in one year. A baker’s dozen tide cycles to enjoy!

Thirteen is cleaning his room independently, having a passport, opening a checking account, getting a debit card, taking ownership of his google account, having an A in Algebra, reminding me not to buy anything “too dorky” when I went to buy some paper party plates at the dollar store. It’s sitting here writing this blog post while some new teenagers sing Take on Me and fling themselves around the trampoline, then carry out a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, emptying bowls of snacks while one of them strums my guitar. Imagine thinking 13 is unlucky. In Italy, where Quinn is heading soon, fare tredici (translated literally, to do 13) is to hit the jackpot! Any way you calculate it, 13 feels incredibly lucky to this mama! Happy birthday, mighty Quinn!

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ holy coprolites, he’s in seventh grade!

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~8-23 to 9-23~

Our end of summer family trip to New York!

The cousins absconded with Quinn and were barely heard from. It was neat how at their current ages (9, 11, 12) they do a lot more talking as they play, so there is less action and a lot of times if you observe them they are just standing or sitting and discussing whatever it is they are playing. On day one they spent time outdoors and began a trend that lasted throughout the week of playing dungeons and dragons (LARPing, in other words). Quinn was dungeon master (i heard later) and uncle t was a dwarf cleric (i think i snorted with laughter at the idea of a 6’6” dwarf.) mario was a human wizard, and luigi was an elf wizard, the only one who had named himself was luigi who was “thomas cloudwhisper”. They are able to do imaginitive play on a level I don’t think Quinn finds in many other kids and it is easy to celebrate the kindred spirits that cousins can be.

bonfire!

They played a lot of Mario video games and minecraft throughout the week. We adults were all pretty slack with the screen time limits, but we did shoo them outside regularly. The boys were content and fell instantly into their usual routine and it was easy to let them be.

They piled themselves in the hammock that had been set up between two of the cherry trees, which was hilarious and slightly nerve-wracking with feet and elbows protruding every which way. Nobody lost an eye, though.

They took a few wagon rides up to visit the apple orchards. On one trip, the boys ran back down to the house together when it was time to head back, which was when i was able to get “the picture.”

One evening at sunset, the boys were launching a spinning toy they named the “bisquito”. Whoever caught the thing got to launch it next, so everyone got turns. they were all so playful and they kept looking upward towards the sunset-painted sky, resulting in some of my favorite photos of the trip.

Chicken spiedies and black raspberry ice cream are the quintessential central new york foods, and we ate as much as we could of both.

One evening we played a lively game of scrabble with a double set (twice as many letters) so by the end the board was so overloaded it got a little silly and the boys were spelling off the edge of the board.

Uncle T figured out how to make a minecraft server that the boys can play on from each of their computers, even from thousands of miles away, if they get on at the same time. The kids played minecraft in the evening, i think they like being on the “rew family server” together. They were all reading the stack of minecraft diary of an 8-bit warrior books. Quinn has read 5 of them but they had a few more in the series that he didn’t know about so he got caught up.

We went out to dinner with the whole family and ordered a bunch of pizzas. quinn ordered two dinners- cheeseburger and chicken fingers, and ate most of them, plus some pizza…

Mittens the cat is alll about snuggling in bed with a boy and quite a few times quinn had him in bed with him including the first night we were there and the last night we were there. Mario graciously loaned cousin Quinn his bed tent for the whole week, which was really swell.

The boys filled up their red wagon with fossil rocks in the field grampy had plowed up across the road.

 

 

 

 

First day of seventh grade!

Quinn’s seventh grade schedule looks pretty rad. He starts his day with a lovely person rich and i both admire for her positivity and healthy outlook on life (she is a theater friend) for language arts. He also got his same homeroom teacher as last year, and has her now for social studies as well, which is fabulous. She is the one who said Quinn gets her jokes.

Band now seems to be a foregone conclusion for his schedule, thankfully no more parental marching into the office is needed to arrange it. He is excited to be in the first chair for the percussion section! He is one of three players, one fellow seventh grade boy and a girl who is new to the district who is in eighth grade. He practiced very hard for the audition, which was played on the bells. Their section seems to be a good group, they each have strengths and are happy to share what they know with each other.

The first homework from algebra was spiral-laterals… in which quinn drew sequences of lines according to the algorithm, and discovered that palindromes (at least a subset of palindromes whose inner numbers are lower than the bookends, so 91719 but not 46764) make squares! For math, he also had to create a “myself in numbers” design.

He doesn’t have many classes with friends, but he does have band-lunch-recess-homeroom with Aragorn, a nice section of the day during which they can interact without having consequences for his grades or ability to pay attention in class. Goldberry is in band with them, too, as well as two of the other three girls Quinn says are part of their “friend group”. It seems that 5/7 of the friend group plays in band. Somehow that seems about like my school experience.

There has been zero complaining about homework thus far. He has 100% in 3 classes, the only grades that have turned up yet (science, health, and algebra). I am already seeing some major growth from last year!

 

Doctor

In preparation for his upcoming international travel, Quinn is getting caught up on a few vaccinations I chose to postpone when he was younger. He also needed a tdap booster for entering seventh grade, according to the school nurse. He hadn’t been seen at the new hospital facility yet, so he needed to have a whole well-child exam as well, which included a hemoglobin check. He wanted to watch his finger being pricked, and thought it was cool how the blood droplet got sucked into the cartridge. Then he wanted to watch the vaccine, (this was all based on being very anxious about it) though the nurse had been carefully not showing him the needle. She seemed to roll with his questions about the mechanics of the operation, though you could tell this wasn’t her usual experience (I’m guessing most kids just look away or cling to a parent), and what was in the syringe (“but is it a liquid?”). He watched her administer the shot and kept his muscle relaxed just like she said to do, not flinching at all.

He got home from the doctor and immediately signed on to the Rew family minecraft server and played with his cousins until they had to go get ready for bed (8:30 EST) and quinn had to get ready for karate (5:30 PST). We may institute Minecraft Mondays because i think the cousin connection is so important and even if they are connecting via chat about what kind of barricade to build around their fortress, i think that feels like very meaningful connection to them.

 

Text life

The paleontology camp group text featured a video from remus of her preparing a cup of tea using her microwave to heat the water. Quinn was intrigued by this amazing “life hack” as he called it and asked her for details on how long she microwaved the water for. (insert laughing emoji).

Also in the group text, Lead challenged them to only use names of rocks in place of any curse words, and quickly they came up with “what the fossil?” “’oh, coprolites.” And “holy shale!” (i didn’t suggest schist as an alternate choice!)

Phone reciprocity has seen a small incremental improvement. Often at the beginning of the week, he is better about checking it, and I may hear back from him once or twice, but then later in the week I get crickets until he is back at my house. Reframing as positive encouragement, I let him know that the goal is that by the end of the year he is 7/7 and right now he is 2/7!

 

Miscellaneous

At karate, Quinn helped sifu work with a younger friend who is experiencing some bullying in school, through role play scenarios.

There was Rubik’s cube work this month, and a D and d lego minecraft dungeon that he created and had me play my way through. I am often the test market for his game innovations.

He is still a lover of cartoons; Strange Planet is a new favorite, and he really liked this one that I texted him:

Somewhere between the end of summer and the beginning of school, I taught him the game Taboo. He is incredibly fun with word games, and our first round of Taboo was hilarious. We have continued laughing about some of his ways of getting me to say the word on the card, such as “lots of wood plants” for forest.

baby tending.

bathroom mopping

He got his hands on a piano at a friend’s house and picked out some favorite tunes:

 

Skills and tools

He is reading the newest rick riordan book trials of apollo (tyrant’s tomb) but when i asked one day if he was reading any books he said, “no, because right now i’m writing books.” he has been working on his “eternal elements” book which is sort of a d and d spinoff. he is typing it in a google doc. He feels he is faster at typing than handwriting, and it appeals more to his inner perfectionist who likes spelling, grammar, and neatness to all be good. Way to use technology as a tool, buddy.

We are also having good talks about organization and executive function skills. note taking; hearing teachers’ instructions (or not); checking the “done/submit/turn in” boxes in google classroom; putting his papers into the binder, or bringing it home thursday nights to do that the night before binder checks; he likes the notetaking set up for social studies because it is in google slides and he has no trouble keeping up; i suggested he remember that for classes he is having trouble keeping up in, and request to do it that way; he threw down the word “advocating” in one conversation and i’m just so proud. He is using his very basic $5 planner (no clutter or quotes or word searches or puzzles in the margins, just dates with lines for writing items. he has not missed a day or even a subject yet… i got it on a whim to give him the option to use it in addition to or instead of the school Avid binder and his homeroom teacher is letting him use it instead, with his four color pen – he is all about the four color pen. I think he is all about the planner just because he had a choice. Buy-in seems key with executive function, and he is starting to be bought-in on the school organization at last. The binder he has been keeping impeccably organized since he was 8? It holds Pokemon cards.

On the executive functioning topic, I learned about Seth Perler on a Tilt parenting podcast I listened to recently, and he seems to have a lot of resources and tips. A lot of it felt like validation of the adaptations we’re already making: uncluttered planners, extra scaffolding on tasks that are hard to execute, then “gradual release of responsibilities,”  and how we have to celebrate the microprogress that is made, helping identify priorities (he has daily plan templates available online), posted visual routines, web browser optimization/bookmarking, creating a sacred study space (we’ve always called it finding a successful spot after his 4th grade teacher’s phrasing), and tricking yourself into executing a non-preferred task (maybe by making it a game!). He also uses the same phrase we do, about how the only way you can eat an elephant is one bite at a time, and extends this metaphor in many ways in his speaking about tackling tasks. One thing I identified from the podcast that I want to work on doing better as a parent is giving more wait time after asking questions. The more I learn about it, the more I think processing speed plays an important role in Quinn’s struggles and Seth Perler’s coaching on waiting – longer than you think you need to wait – when listening to their answers, gave me a lot of food for thought.

He had a lot of catch up to do over the last weekend of this month but he did it cheerfully and fairly efficiently. I am encouraging him to apply some strategies to get things done more efficiently and result in more of the free time he so values. I think he’s almost to the point where he might be able to start generalizing skills he learns in one household to the other one… almost.

 

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ math goblins

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we had an eventful weekend of pressing apple cider and playing with friends on saturday, and then attending a very exciting gender reveal party for quinn’s step-niece! he has been elected as future babysitter already for this new bundle of joy, coming to our family in march.

once he handed in his historical interview, his overall grade in social studies went from F to B, and it was a lovely piece!

he got to choose a book for blackout poetry in language arts, and he picked anne mccaffrey dragonsong. he is excited to create poetry in it, but also to now read anne mccaffrey. his friend l got him into a game concerning the warriors series about cats, so we were off to the library to collect some supplemental reading beyond the math textbook variety. (we ended up with the next rick riordan installment in the trials of apollo as well.)

this age is the odd juxtaposition of hearing him obsess about a crush on a girl, to waking him up in the morning and having him say to me, “you find a planet” and being requested to carry him while spinning (he was orbiting me?) and set him in his chair for breakfast. my completely oblivious to time/date son, knew the date of the first middle school dance. i knew i’d have to remind him to put his shirt on frontwards, but he was already committed to going. probably even with deodorant on. sheesh!

we had another parked car meltdown of a similar theme as last month; “pressure” and school sucks and everything is bad in middle school and “i just want my old life back.” it ended on a pep talk from me about how it’s really normal to feel like so much has changed and to want to go back to your old life, and feel overwhelmed a lot, and have a lot going on, as a brand new middle schooler. i reemphasized the “This Is Super Normal” part several different ways. at one point he was angry about the president. he was in tears over it, as though the angry apricot is somehow responsible for putting quinn through middle school. i tried to reel him back in to his immediate self and stop trying to take on unfortunate political officials, and he came around in the end. it is normal to not want to do your homework. and feeling pushed is normal. even if mama isn’t trying to push but just support. and i stated that and he agreed he feels i do support him and he does want me to remind him to do his homework. there was no actual problem i could put my finger on besides emotional overload, and once he got it out of his system he went and cheerfully did his last 5 problems (verbally while writing his answers… which helps him get it done faster).

 

on his last day with me of the two weeks, there was a day off from school, so quinn participated in a theatre workshop that was being offered (and had a great time performing in his group’s skit) and then he and i spent the remaining afternoon hours on the beach, something we haven’t been doing very regularly as of late. once again, my big huge middle schooler revealed the little person still inside, as he scampered around on hands and knees, re-enacting cat battle scenes from the warriors book he had just finished. then he buried my limbs in the sand.

after a week away, quinn came back to me on friday, the last day of his first 6-week term, and although he handed in a few things at the very last minute, there was only one assignment that was left incomplete. the assignment was an autobiographical “my name is” poem for language arts, but since that was worth 50 of his 250 points for the term, it meant the difference between a 94% A and a 81% B. he had 2 lines of the title typed into the google doc, after two full class periods of work time, so at least he’s using his class time efficiently. it was due thursday, and at that point, the teacher entered an F, and quinn despaired and didn’t communicate or finish (or really even start) the work.

 

until he got home to me. after a brief discussion, he stated he did want to try to finish it and hand it in, and we both suspected it may be accepted for a grade if it was done by midnight. i sat him down and filled him full of food, then encouraged him to do a verbal brainstorm of what he wanted to write. he jotted a few words on a list that he wanted to include, but what finally got him going were my outlandish examples of imagery and sensory details. after one descriptive phrase about slaying orcs in a tunnel of trees in a forest (vs. “i kill orcs”), he jotted down “tunnels” and in the end, he crafted his whole poem as a d and d adventure, taking along his band of merry elves/dwarves/rogues. (the teacher’s instructions for the poem were “Peel the onion…you have layers.  You have MULTITUDES. This can include your hopes, dreams, fears, talents, family, personality, history, future plans, and ideas. Use imagery.  Make me see and feel your poem.  Show me your life.  Show me who you are!”

he wrote (crew names changed to pseudonyms by mama):

Name: Quinn

Date: 10-17-18

Period: 2

 

My Name Is Quinn

My Favorite Color Is Green

My Favorite Animal Is An Owl

My name is Quinn

I am a dragonborn wizard

I have a pet owl

My crew of adventurers is strong

We have me

Aragorn the human fighter

Legolas the elf fighter

And Gimli the dwarf rogue

We walk in diamond formation

On a quest to find the ancient mithril drum set

We have a map to show us the way

To the treasure

A dragon will be guarding the other treasure

The mithril drumsticks

They are required to play the mithril drum set

I alone can read the map

It leads us through the forest of Everygreen inhabited by ninjas

The tunnels of Diamondrain inhabited by ninjas

And the Skytrayl of the high mountains inhabited by ninjas

We reach the dragon and it’s ninja minions

They are very powerful

But we defeat them

And gain the mithril drum sticks

We now possess limited but large power

After we find the mithril drum set we will have unlimited power

Our journey was difficult

But we return home with both treasures

The mithril drum sticks

Whose power is to play the mithril drum set

And the mithril drum set

Whose power when played remains unknown

Who knows

Maybe one day

All mithril instruments will have been found

 

he doesn’t know what happens when the mithril drum is played yet! it remains unknown! i told him it keeps it very mysterious and he agreed. it makes us all want to know, and sets up for sequels with these other mithril instruments! i loved his requirement for all of the place names (diamondrain!) to have unconventional spellings so google docs would red underline them. hence skytrail became skytrayl.

on saturday i worked farmer’s market, and left him pancakes and bacon for breakfast. and a couple of haikus (they wrote some in language arts, but apollo also begins each chapter with a haiku). he sent me one in response, via text:

my life as it should

be. nothing to do but what

i want. thank the gods.

when i got home on saturday, quinn and rich were watching monty python and the search for the holy grail, after quinn’s social studies teacher used clips of it to elucidate economics principles, and quinn came home quoting them, with a perfect accent.

in between resisting math homework, it was a weekend full of finding him on page 503 of his advanced algebra textbook, asking me for more logic puzzles, and asking me to play “guess the function” with him. i made up functions for him to guess, after he gave me an example because i didn’t know what he meant (or what fred meant). his example was:

dog 4

cat 4

human 2

fish 0

bird 2

the function is “number of legs.” i was making pancakes while he was asking me so i gave him:

pancakes 3

pizza 4

cookies 2

biscuits 1

playdough 1.5

the function was “number of cups of flour” and even though he knew it had something to do with ingredients, it took him a while to get it. it’s so clear to me that he digs math, and yet resists it so strongly when it is “forced” as he believes of the homework.

good old fred.

we went to a midsummer night’s dream because once quinn heard that his friend l was in it, he stated “we’re going.” his friend was one of the little goblin-minions of puck in the play, and had quite a few lines and some great action. she is in a lot of quinn’s classes, and has played magic with him. the play was great, lots of 80’s references and songs, quite a few kids with real roles, and a great balance of making you like shakespeare while also poking fun at shakespeare. (the funny rhyme stuff… with characters correcting each other on pronunciation followed by “but that doth not rhyme” and so on. also song lyrics changed by varying degrees, but always with “you” changed to “thou”. “every step thou take, every move thou make, i’ll be watching thou.” when we got home quinn asked, “so are there any plays coming up?” and i think his lapsed interest in participating in one at some point might be rekindling.

he wanted to go back to the green room to talk to his friend, and they gushed at each other with thanks for coming and what a great job she had done. rich asked if he got all the 80’s references in the play and he said um, no. none of them.

i rolled up strips of dinosaur kale into mobius strips that i held together with toothpicks… hoping to get him to eat raw kale. and he totally did! and called them mobiosaurs. then he took the toothpicks, stuck them between his fingers, and said “i’m freddy kruger.”

me: what?! how do you know that 80’s reference?

q: “everyone knows freddy kruger, it’s not from the 80’s.

(i told him to ask rich, who proceeded to read him the copyright dates for the entire nightmare on elm street series.)

he also made me chuckle with his use of the word “litotes” which i recall learning in maybe 9th grade enriched english. litotes means understatement; he likes to announce overstatement with “‘hyperbole” so when i said something that was an understatement and he said “litotes” i said, “what? how do you know that?” (i seem to say that a lot.) that one came from life of fred. more than just math in there.

he sat on my lap (painful torture and laugh therapy all in one) and we were covered with the blanket and lisa decided to sit on top of him on top of me for a few minutes one morning. he’s a confusing mix of big and little and clueless and know it all right now!!! knows exactly what pokemon he wants to dress up as for halloween (rowlet the owl) and exactly how many components of his costume to wear to the dance to be extra quull.

i mixed up cookie dough sunday night after dinner and stuck it in fridge, so i was baking the cookies monday morning while i made breakfast and packed lunches. when i woke him up, i told him pancakes for breakfast and a cookie for breakfast dessert. that got him out of bed on a monday morning.

after his pancakes, he chose a cookie, and i got out a plate for him to catch crumbs. i came walking back into the kitchen and he was at the sink running the water, and i witnessed him wash his plate without being asked! then when he put it in the drainer, a jar lid fell into the sink, and he rinsed it and put it back in the drainer! when he turned around i made a super big deal hugging him and fake-sobbing about what a wonderful thing i had witnessed.

while sitting in a boring monday morning meeting, i jotted ideas on a sticky note (i have no idea where quinn gets his distractedness!) about how to make math homework more playful and less torturous. i decided to try making it into something of a d and d game…

  1. he has to roll the d12 to see how many goblins are attacking.
  2. for each problem he completes, he gets one chance to attack them, and
  3. if he completes the problem in under 3 minutes they don’t get to attack back (surprise bonus).

i had already tried giving him one of the egg timers from a game, to show him time passing while he did math problems, and it was just a distraction, something to fidget with. i had tried using a stop watch while he did problems and giving him his lap times as he finished a problem, which only seemed to make things more stressful, and made them take longer. i have had 4011 versions of the logic of time management conversation with him. if quinn had 35 math problems to do and each problem takes him 1 minute, how long does his homework take? what if he takes 10 minutes per problem? etc. the resistance is strong. i was hoping to use the game idea to bring him more awareness of time passing…. or connect it to his reality in a way he could actually embrace.

the game worked like a dream. he slayed all the goblins for days. he wanted to add features to make the game both more fun and more mathy, such as renaming it integers and irrationals. he built a table of goodness knows what, and all i know is it involves pi, tau, and wau, and other irrational numbers!

he was excited when he saw my rules sheet (complete with pi rats/midsummer nights dream slant rhyme/vi hart dragon dungeons proprietary mama inside joke blend) and then spent 10 minutes creating his grid of wonder. something about upgrading from level 1 to wau?

i eventually just said ok, time to roll for your goblins!

he did most of the problems in under a minute.  some were done in 15-20 seconds. we adapted rules as he played, such as allowing 2 attacks for problems completed in under a minute. he has added different enemies and when he had a problem or two left in a section but had already defeated the enemies, out of nowhere a couple of pesky twig blights would swoop in and attack. a clever mama always keeps a couple of twig blights up her sleeve.

of course it worked; he is the kid who couldn’t get in the car; but he could get in the batmobile.

i told him he could do this for his homework any time he wanted; with any work he “has to” do. there is usually a way to make it fun. there are always choices.

i guess that goes for parenting as well. thankful to be remembering these lessons a mere 6 weeks into middle school.

there is almost nothing easy about the steep learning curve of embarking on a middle school journey. except for, in quinn’s case, probably figuring out the slope-intercept equation for said curve.

~thankful thursday~ third annual nacho november

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11/1/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 1

unlike last year when i debated joining in on 30 days of gratitude, this year it was a no-brainer to sign up for a third season. a few of the odds are stacked in my favor, such as my husband being away at play rehearsals on week nights this month (time to write), the pantry being stocked with tortilla chips (easy dinners planned), and on off days, say, when i’m standing over my eleven year old cracking the homework whip, i will just lazy-post facebook memories from gratitude challenges of yore. (let’s be honest, we don’t remember what i wrote, so it’ll be ok if we air some re-runs. it’s not lying, i’m still grateful for all that stuff!) i was curious how much i posted since last november, and while my timeline is sprinkled with fun messages from friends, as well as karate functions and family weddings in which i am tagged, my single original post for the rest of the entire year appears to have been about the founder’s day sale on tillamook cheese. but no one here is deluded about my priorities: gratitude and nachos.  exhibit a, word art compiled from previous 2 novembers’ gratitude topics.

i am grateful for a sweet little out-of-print children’s book by bruce balan called buoy that i found when quinn was obsessed with boats as a toddler. i was a tad isolated as a new mama, which i know is common for new moms, especially those who have moved places without family or friends, and/or been the target of someone’s emotional abuse for a while. the book got lukewarm reviews, apparently some critics don’t think children can be captivated by a story about an inanimate object, but i find it to be a delightful piece of literature, winnie-the-pooh-esque in the way that its messages have meaning for people of every age who might come to read it. i revisit it often, and so does quinn.

on one evening with just the right conditions, Buoy and his friends Seal and Gull were watching for the green flash, and arguing over what caused it. the ruckus dies down, and Buoy decides to trust in his hunch about what was causing the green flash. when he saw it, he flashed his own light as brightly as he could in response, so The Other Buoy could see it, so The Other Buoy would know he was not alone either.

Buoy has a characteristic flash, as all navigational lights do, which in his case is flash flash flash… wait…wait…wait… flash flash flash … wait…wait…wait… (repeat forever). i am trying to be like Buoy in my facebook postings, and if i can’t find anything nice to say, i’m doing a lot of wait…wait…wait… apparently around 11 months of that. but come november, i am set to flash my light as brightly as i can, moored to a sentiment called gratitude that keeps me safely focused on the right things.

the spaces between the flashes are part of Buoy’s identity, part of how his light has the ability to shine out when he flashes it. i’d like to say i have spent my waiting time storing up summer sunshine to boost my ability to radiate light to share with my fellow humans, but as is my usual status this time of year, my light feels depleted. a friend flashed a beam of light recently through a post that had an impact on me. i don’t even think i liked or commented, or told her that it did, we all know how potential meaningful connections slip away into the abyss of the endless scroll-down. but a snippet of what she shared said, “if your body doesn’t make enough neurotransmitters, store bought is fine.” i spent $1.10 on my own self care and brought home st. john’s wort and made myself a “collect light like a plant” tincture that i am happily taking every morning. as the dimmer switch of fall gets dialed down i think i’d like a little help to make the most of what light there is. i am visualizing my newly enhanced light-absorption capacity gathering to myself what is needed and actively converting it into life-affirming, life-giving necessities. anyway, that other buoy shining her light made me feel less alone. and i am grateful for that!

11/2/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 2

tonight, quinn attended his very first school dance. and today i am feeling grateful for middle school teachers and the invisible capes they wear. the transition from fifth to sixth grade, from elementary to middle school, has been rather daunting, with bumps on the roller coaster ride that hearken back to the ones that derailed his successful matriculation into kindergarten. luckily in this case, he has stayed enrolled past the two-week mark and doesn’t even have any Fs anymore as of this writing. i have now met each of his teachers and i have been delighted to find that they are all wonderful people who clearly care about my kid and every other student they teach. it takes something just a little bit extra to willingly, enthusiastically, spend all day with a rotation of 30-40 (how ‘bout them class sizes?) eleven-year-olds. and then to give up their friday evening to show a crowd of tweens a good time on the dance floor! just feeling very grateful for the local superheroes who teach my kid.

11/3/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 3

feeling well fed and quite sleepy after a bowl of curry winter squash soup (varieties: scarlet kabocha and buttercup, if you must know), it is easy to feel a lot of gratitude for the good people and land over at gathering together farm. i lucked into this sweet veggie-slinging gig over 4 years ago and i still feel like i’ve won the lottery every time i go home with my saturday haul of organic produce. this year i feel like i leveled up as a part-time farmer when i embarked on an evening you-pick adventure with my husband and son in late august to “clear out” the siletz tomatoes still lingering on vines slated for ploughing under the next day. we cast our long twilight shadows across the first 10 feet of a tunnel that felt like it might be a mile long. we filled up the bed of the pickup truck with tomatoes too ripe to go to market, and therefore no longer worth the price of the real estate they were occupying. now they are filling up our bellies every week, tucked away in their 67 quart jars for the winter. and the good farm people acted as though i was doing them a favor by not allowing those ten feet of the crop to go to waste, when i was really the one reaping all the tomato wealth a gal would ever want to put up for one season. don’t tell nachos, but i love pasta just as much, and a pot of organic sauce simmering on my stove is a happy thing in cool november weather.

 

11/4/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 4

cracking the homework whip on a sunday night is making me feel grateful for another book, one that i read back when my three-year-old was full of intensity and a sense of his own agenda. the book playful parenting was not the only source of the concept that has been so helpful in my parenting journey of infusing even the most mundane aspects of parenting with play, but it was the most succinct and direct communication of the concept i came across.

middle school is turning out to be a timely moment to recall this concept, and i’m feeling pretty grateful to have remembered to engineer a playful approach to math homework just 6 weeks along. at 3 (and 4, 5, 6, & 7) he just would not put on his clothes or get into the car when asked, but he would get dressed in his hogwarts robes or hop in the batmobile. “do your math homework,” has been about as appealing and likely to rise to the top of his priority list as “put your clothes on,” but once it became about slaying goblins, he was down.

i was just telling him about when he was 3, and how even that long ago, he had the endearing quality of completely ignoring what i was saying. back then, i was explaining to him in calmer moments how i really wanted him to acknowledge what i was saying, even if it meant just telling me you heard me and aren’t going to do what i asked, for whatever reason. one time when he sensed that i was about to get testy after several repeats of a request receiving no response, quinn shouted, “i recognize your knowledge!” which given how it made him giggle tonight may soon be trending at our house as the way to “use your words” when you ignore your mom.

11/5/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 5

i wrote about my gratitude for karate during my first annual gratitude challenge, and just over a week ago i tested for my green belt in the art of kenpo. as i sat nursing my sore muscles, i reflected on what i have learned from this journey the past two years since that writing.

like my time on board a schooner, karate has turned out to be something i love even more than i anticipated. also like sailing, i have taken some serious hits and have been lately in a process of reassessing to try and articulate what i am doing, risking injury on a regular basis, to continue to practice and progress in this art. my years of sea time ingrained in me a respect for the ocean that means i’ll never take it for granted, but also means i don’t live on a boat anymore.

when i was a kid, i added “find out how i would do in a real fight” to my bucket list. i’m not sure i ever wrote it down, or admitted it to anyone, but this has always been something i wondered about myself. it turns out, i can hold my own in a sparring simulation-of-real-fight, and it’s sort of thrilling to know that for sure. what i said 2 years ago still holds true: i would not cower.

while i feel my odds of surviving any attack encounter have greatly increased as a result of my training, i am also very much more aware of how vulnerable i truly am, and the limits of my skills against truly sinister forces that exist in the world. it’s not that i live in fear of being attacked in my actual life in rural oregon, and truly i know i would handle any true attack with much more competence, confidence, and reflexive skill now than i would have any time before 3 years ago. it’s the old conundrum of, the more i know, the more aware i am of exactly how much i don’t know. (i remember rolling this around in my mind when the knife attacks happened on the portland trimet bus, the same bus system i used to ride around on several times per week with my infant… would i, given my training, be able to counter a knife attack any better than those men who stood in harm’s way? probably not.) i am keenly aware of my own limitations as a result of paying this much attention to honing this skill set.

for example, my husband is 3 inches taller than me, but weighs one and half times my weight, plus in the dimensions that really matter, such as upper body strength, he is truly four times my size. when i sit shoulder to shoulder with him, it hits home that anyone in his same size range (a good percentage of the male population) who truly wished to do me harm, even without any training, most certainly could and probably would. my best bet is to be married to a soul who would never raise a finger or even his voice to hurt me, because as i know too well and is well documented in statistics, harm is ever so much more likely to come to a woman from within her home than from anonymous sources. if i were to be faced with an actual attack, i know my non-karate husband would stand in front of me and be the one to do the actual defending. (i haven’t had a fit of mushy husband gratitude overtake me yet on this year’s posts, but it’s sure to happen. so grateful for him!)

a few years ago, i went out there on that mat because of my kid, and after all this reassessing, i’m staying out there because of my kid. it’s a bond between us, and a way we can both practice asserting ourselves in the world, in a safe environment. it’s also how i know i would stand the best chance of being able to defend him in a fight, because you never know.

i have learned what my assets are in a fight, how to assess the opponent, see their weaknesses, and use them to my advantage. my reflexes are trained through all the repetition – i routinely catch heavy round vegetables falling off the veggie scale at farmer’s market, so these skills even play a practical role in my every day life.

before my test, i helped one of my fellow testers adjust some things in one of his forms, and at the end of my test, i read aloud the green belt pledge which plainly states that the requirements of this belt rank are to actively teach in the art. huh, i guess that does start happening if you just keep showing up long enough. i remember the thing that hit me from the blue belt pledge, last time around, that i will actively defend the weak and vulnerable; and the purple belt pledge before that, to never use my skill to harm or make afraid. there is much more to the art than how to punch and kick and win a fight. one could even apply these principles to voting in tomorrow’s election! i’m grateful for my instructor and all i have been able to learn, as well as the character traits that have been instilled in my son that reach a long way beyond the edge of the mat.

11/6/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 6

one of my goals is to only be grateful for nachos one time during this round of gratitude… and today is the day! it’s national nacho day, and gosh i think there’s something else going on, too. oh yeah, voting! it was my pleasure to vote against several appalling measures on our local ballot, and i think everyone ought to reward themselves for voting with a big plate of nachos. last year i could not think of any appealing images of nachos, but as i was scrolling through the toddler archives i came across one i quite like.

vote nachos! vote gratitude! gratitude for voting! gratitude for suffragettes, the 19th amendment, and the equal rights amendment (oops, still haven’t ratified that last one yet! gratitude for e.r.a. pending future ratification!)

11/7/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 7

i am grateful that i can just take the night off, because you don’t have to get an A in gratitude!

~two months in the life of a lifelong learner~ becoming a dragon

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10-23 to 12-23

quinn and i collaborated once again to create a fun halloween costume: bulbasaur the pokemon.

we took quinn’s fourth grader free state park pass on the road and hung out at the yaquina head lighthouse one afternoon to watch waves and marvel at their enormity.

quinn’s fourth grade class took a hike and toured the community college.

 

reading… too many books to make an exhaustive list! he has been reading the red wall series at his dad’s, so we listened to the audio book and he borrowed the book from the library to finish when the last cd was scratched, then ended up re-reading the entire novel; he spent more time with calvin and hobbes, and i could tell even if i hadn’t seen him reading it, because he mused one day, “i wonder if anyone on mars is looking out and saying i wonder if there’s anyone on that planet with all the blue on it.” he read all 8 greek gods graphic novels owned by our library; he could be found spread out on the floor with newspaper comics on several occasions; he read an article in national geographic about a dinosaur fossil found trapped in amber with complete feathers (!) that a friend had shared on facebook. all of this in addition to listening to the last of the heroes of olympus, then switching to harry potter on audio while reading a variety of other books (the latest diary of a wimpy kid, trials of apollo, and a few other graphic novels.)

quinn attended another seminar with mr. sepulveda at aurora martial arts in corvallis. he had a good time, and learned a lot once again.

he became a certified bed making technician

games a-plenty these days! pictured are a fraction of those played and created: a pirate card game called loot, a pokemon role-play-game of his own invention (here he is drawing up a character attribute sheet), pokemon go, scrabble, thanksgiving scattergories, numerous computer games (lots of knights, forging of armor, settlements, that type of thing going on in recent games), we learned to play settlers of catan at long last, and then got to play it again, and quinn drew up his own set of catan hexagon cards, and played quite a few games with his buddy luke, including risk (thank you, luke, for one less game of risk i have to play!) there were numerous other games not pictured!

the recent book fair, as always, was a big deal for quinn, and he bought himself a book about coding games in scratch (a kid-friendly programming platform). he was telling me about a game he is going to code in scratch about pirates, and the pirates start at the lowest rank and work up to becoming first mate. but then the only way they can become captain is “if the captain is slain, or the captain resigns.” others might say “is killed/leaves” but quinn’s vocabulary strikes again. my pirate name for the game is barnacle beth the brave, on board the ship the blue bottlenose. so far we are still playing it all in quinn’s mind, but he has big ideas!

in fact, he made a list of “jobs to have when i grow up,” and game designer is on the list.

  1. a musician
  2. a famous kenpo teacher (karate)
  3. a paleontologist
  4. a game designer (it came up in conversation when he formulated an idea to play pokemon go as a d&d style role play game, with character sheets for the trainers; we can hide pokemon in imaginary maps (not realistic ones like our back yard, so this is a different game but similar to what he originally invented) and roll dice for how many pokeballs, etc. i told him he always had such great ideas for coming up with new games, and he thought being a game designer seemed like something he could do.)

in his journal list by the above title, he wrote numbers 1-23 all the way down the page.  i am looking forward to seeing what other “jobs to have” he comes up with!

number one on the list: musician. time to get him some music lessons!

enjoying green eggs and ham, sam i am.

enjoying time with family at thanksgiving.

baking sugar cookies to share with friends! he got creative with the cookie cutters, and generously sprinkled his star tree with “snow” powdered sugar.

when i searched “cookie” in my media files to see whether i had already uploaded the recent cookie photos, this is the one that came up. my cookie helper, in his mini form. i can’t believe his whole legs, including feet, fit on top of the counter…

outside time, stolen bits of fresh air on sunny days when we could get them. including a day spent at the lab with mama (school conference days). he also got in some cursive handwriting practice that day.

 

i attended his student-led conference, and there were writing samples, creative projects (3-D self-portrait, map of his special place), goal-setting plan for the school year, and the last item on the conference agenda was, “ask your family to take you out for ice cream to celebrate!” i did. he ordered cookies and cream and vanilla.

another school field trip, this time to the aquarium and for a tour of the noaa vessel rainier. the ship tour was fascinating, and the kids asked some really great questions about the use of sonar to map the sea floor. we came up with an analogy of the “layers” created by the sonar, that if you made a fort with chairs and blankets, then lifted the blanket off of the chair legs, keeping all the dips and peaks in place, the blanket would act like a layer of sonar data.

science projects at school: kinetic and potential energy using string, straws and balloons, and then mechanical rollers made from cups, rubber bands, and straws, trying to roll a certain distance and stop in the “sweet spot”, both of which i got to help out with in the classroom. i liked how she had the kids write up their results, but modeled for them how to do that on the overhead projector, and i liked how she sat down with individual kids who were having trouble getting started. that included quinn, but when she sat down and asked him about his potential/kinetic energy string/straw/balloon experiment, he had brilliant insights to share about how “the air wanted to come out of the balloon”, and then after he’d gotten to tell them to her, he was able to go forward with putting them on paper. i also got to sit in on a presentation of why a class award, if won, should be spent on obtaining a bearded dragon. quinn is a natural at public speaking; he does not inherit that from me. also in school learning: essay publishing, and of course, the dab.

one of my favorite features of quinn’s classroom is the mood meter. each day (and at various times throughout the day) his teacher asks them to write on a sticky note something that is on their mind and place it on the mood meter, which has four quadrants. the kids choose where they are feeling along the continua of energy, from high to low, and pleasantness, from happy to sad. where they intersect along these two axes (bet they don’t realize they are working their coordinate plane skills… sneaky) is where they place their sticky note. i walked in one afternoon and found quinn’s in the far happy quadrant, reading, “i feel happy because i am going to my mom’s house after school.” insert all the rainbow heart emojis.

when you walk up to the school building, quinn’s classroom is the one with all the shades open (fluorescent lights off, sunlight pouring in) and a peace sign in the window. that’s how i can tell i asked for the right teacher.

while i’m singing her praises, i will also share that she builds a yoga flow into the start of each school day. quinn demonstrated one morning’s “flow” that they did, and as a yogi myself i can see that they have learned quite a lot in their daily practice. it was fun to watch, because he is such a gangly, bouncy, and angular string bean that he just springs into position and names the pose, then springs into the next one, with all of his bones sticking out every which way. he knows most of the poses by their traditional names, tree, triangle, mountain, but a few have obviously been made more kid-friendly. low lunge is “dragon” and then becomes twisting dragon when he plants his shoulder behind his knee like no adult could ever do at the rate he does it. i like the “wash away” pose they do at the beginning, crossing their mid-line, always good for brains. the way he gets into triangle pose… priceless… had to be captured on video.

also in reading, i assigned quinn some advent reading. a little background on the “you are brave” affirmation…

one night recently, quinn got up to use the bathroom at 3am, and came and got me to re-tuck him in. rich mentioned it to him in the morning, to point out logically that he is brave enough to walk around at night with no lights on (downstairs to our room, back up to the bathroom because it was actually an emergency, then back down again to retrieve me), so he shouldn’t feel scared to go in the bathroom during the day with lights on throughout the house. rich also put in that one day he’ll be able to get back into bed without even waking anyone up. after rich went off to shower, i translated for quinn that rich wanted quinn to know that he is very brave! that seemed to unfurrow his brow, the look that sometimes follows in the aftermath of a “talk” with rich. i then reassured him that i will miss it in a few years when he no longer comes and gets me to help him back to bed, adding that i’m glad it’s not something that happens every night anymore. we chatted about when he was a baby/toddler and woke me up multiple times every night, and he thought that was funny and wanted to know all about it. then he was finished eating breakfast. into the bathroom he marched, hands covering his ears, and then i heard, “i’m brave!” and the sound of peeing… with the light still turned off.

back at the vacation house quinn would ask me to accompany him to the bathroom to help him turn on the light. it was around a corner and through a dark small hallway which had a light switch which  the rest of us didn’t turn on to get to the bathroom but he did. he would turn on all the switches on the way to the bathroom, but the switch for the bathroom light required you to go inside and reach behind the door for it (poor design, granted) and so he never liked it and always felt scared to go in and pee no matter how many conversations he had with rich on the subject.

since we’ve been at dragon house 2.0, he has been fine with bathroom use and turning on the light himself, it’s not down a dark hallway, the light switch isn’t hidden behind door, and it’s on the same floor as our living room/his bedroom/kitchen. he does, however, often cover his ears (inexplicably, unless you consider it a form of sight-sound synesthesia) while he walks into the bathroom until he gets the light on (which i think he must do with his elbow!)

after i explained to quinn that rich was trying to point out that quinn is obviously brave enough to walk around in the dark, because he has seen him do it, quinn seemed to grasp it with that positive spin. leaving the light turned off wasn’t exactly the intended result, and indeed i told him he needed to turn it on when it came to face washing, so he could see his grubby face in the mirror to get it clean, but i was happy that the internalized message was affirmative.

courage and indomitable spirit… yes, he has them. he is brave. he endured a particularly grueling belt test and promoted to his green belt just before christmas.

still bringing the smiles.

elfing. relaxing in the happy spot on christmas eve, just back from his dad’s for two whole weeks! i picked him up the afternoon of the 23rd, stuffed him full of food, had him take his first bath in two weeks, and then he slept for 15 hours, so it’s no wonder he looks so refreshed on the morning of christmas eve. i was just remembering that we called my rocking chair “the happy spot” back in the day, when he fit in it on my lap just a little bit better than he does now. we’ve shared some quality snuggle time in it this week, in spite of his gangliness. he also helped me elf together some friend presents, and wrapped the gift he chose for luke himself.

christmas morning! a glorious sunny day, spent with family.

   

after explaining (with hand gestures) how one would make a robotic bb-8 and what his motion is like, quinn pulled out his birthday present piper and showed off having built his own computer. that brief detour enabled me to show him that scratch is already loaded onto his piper… so i imagine there will be some game programming updates in future lifelong learning posts. after a while he continued opening presents, including lots of pokemon cards, some legos, and a few books.

 

an epic pokemon battle occurred, during which the rest of us sat around shaking our heads in awe of the way he could backtrack several steps of the battle and change the outcome, seeing it all in his mind like a chess game. he also built k2so, a droid we all recently grew fond of watching star wars: rogue one.

sun and kitties.

pokemon and wrist warmers.

he’s holding the dungeons and dragons player’s handbook, his 300+ page present from grammy and grampy, which he obviously loves! he has spent lots of time reading it and designing new characters with it since. he also got to meet the artist who did the cover art (and a few of the pieces on the pages, as well as many magic cards, one of which quinn was in possession of…) because he’s my former boss’s nephew. he got these items autographed, but the best part was listening to these 20-something guys talking with quinn about d and d adventures, and beyond that, relating things like, “yeah i was always being told i needed to pay attention, and instead i was drawing.” others who don’t fit all the molds. they exist, and they’re okay. your people are out there in the world, quinn. i love that in answer to my question, “how big was the original painting,” tyler answered, “i painted it digitally, so it’s actually of infinite size,” and quinn just kind of nodded like, yeah, i get that. kids these days.

for quinn, it’s not always drawing that steals his attention, but he is often “out there” in his brain, creating in some other realm. i think it’s great for him to meet people who took their creative talents and made a living. i also love that he came home and was inspired to actually draw his new character (a wizard) and the character’s pet owl.

we got in some play time with buddies over the holiday break.

 

we’re transitioning right now to a new karate dojo and instructor, and so far that has all been going very smoothly. we got to go to extra classes over the break, and although quinn may backtrack a little bit on belt rank to catch up on some curriculum, he seems very game to make this overall positive change, and his belt rank will now be considered adult instead of junior, so in many ways, he will come out ahead. he will also get to practice teaching karate, himself, which is one of his stated goals. his new teacher mentioned that karate students naturally start out as tigers, fierce and impulsive, but as they mature and progress in their practice, become dragons, with more tenacity and wisdom. i like the metaphor, of course, and though i have nothing against tigers, i do have a special place in my heart for dragons. i see the maturity of which he speaks starting to develop in this young lad, who has become reinvigorated for karate in the past two weeks. while i was anticipating some resistance to this fairly substantial change, he has shown an amazing amount of resilience and perspective and has gone with the flow. just another aspect of amazing lifelong learning to look forward to in 2017!

~two and a half months in the life of a lifelong learner~ dragonflies to dragons

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clearly, this is long overdue!

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i’m writing this during the cold november rain, so it warms my heart a little to look back over summer sunshine and fun! and of course, learning.

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i’m mostly relying on photographic evidence to remind me of what we did all those long months ago… i know we took a wednesday morning off and went to the aquarium together for $5 local day, and enjoyed some time with the puffins, the sea otters, the seals and sea lions, and of course, caught a few pokemon. we hiked around the community college enjoying nature (and pokemon) as well.

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rich motivated quinn to help pick up the apples in the orchard by referring to them as pokeballs needing harvesting.

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checking out marine mammal artifacts and parts at an aquarium exhibit.

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karate in street clothes; karate with mama; karate on the beach

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soccer and kids camping with friends!

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pear upside down cake, baked with pokeballs pears from the yard.

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designing, building, painting, and playing with his new minecraft lego habitat. there was also extra paint that got used for an art project on a board.

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tidepooling.

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happily lugging around a chunk of conglomerate.

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a found duck, found bird prints, little green crab, and whales lurking in the surf zone.

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someone was waiting for mama, so he found a comfortable perch underneath a waterfall to ponder life.

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borrowed baby to read to. love that he got to spend part of his summer with camp boss, and baby koala bear.

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art projects, mapping for pokemon go irl game, photography practice, and a certified cherry pitting specialist.

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first day of fourth grade!

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second week of fourth grade… in new york! studying many things…

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…like barn repair, pomology, minecraft, tree climbing…

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…basketball, grandson stuff, cousin stuff, more tree climbing…

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…more pomology, more tree climbing, mushrooms…

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…the oregon trail, certified soap assistant technician, kickball…

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i loved walking in from a walk to find the two self-motivated learners camped on the porch making games and identifying apples.

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fun with food… bulbasaur apple pie, biscuits and jam, certified carrot crinkle cutting technician.

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he is listening to percy jackson while reading mokie and bik. certified literary multitasking technician.

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karate and more karate. a fun-filled day camp day of karate in corvallis, complete with broken boards and traditional trip to laughing planet. quinn also earned another tip on his blue belt.

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bayou and beach walks…

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and a harrowing dungeons and dragon mission completed! his character finally excavated the dragon skeleton i hid for him months and months ago, and hatched his found dragon egg. he also obtained some dragon-hide pants and boots, and other miscellaneous dragon-related items, as well as slaying all orcs in hickory glen. as soon as he had unearthed the skeleton, i realized i had not foreseen and built into the dungeon all the eventual needs: “now i need to look for wood and metal ore to build a museum for the dragon skeleton!” see, i’m learning all the time, too.

a month in the life of a lifelong learner ~ green eggs and herring eggs

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2-23 to 3-23

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herring embryos under microscope; it’s bring your child to work day more often than once a year in my world.

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the new hatchlings under my care; tiny eyeballs with tails!

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in the body cavities of the adult herring who supplied the gametes for our experiment were many worms of the genus anisakis, which made my former employer (a parasitologist who works down the hall from my current lab) very happy. quinn acted as her personal assistant while she observed and preserved some specimens to identify later through genetics. he’s getting to be legitimately helpful at this age…

anisakis video (click only if you like to watch parasitic worms move!)

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pokemon chess; our housemate got quinn 144 or so pokemon figures for his birthday, and he quickly invented a new game, of course.

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birthday grace periods are lengthy around our household, so this is how he looked opening his birthday legos (minecraft ender dragon set) from grammy and grampy.

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grammy and grampy were featured in his “thankful list” written one night on a page of his journal. i suggested this as an “assignment” because he was a bit stuck on a negative thought spiral concerning one of his classmates. he readily embraced the challenge and quickly had a list of ten items written down… and more importantly, was thoroughly centered and cheerful once again.

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the last time we played dungeons and dragons, quinn took me through another dungeon and reminded me that my dragon opalonyx was granted a power of blue fire by the old man of 189 years of age. i have in turn been creating a new dungeon for him that contains a dragon skeleton dig site, and a dragon egg for him to discover. we also obtained a set of story dice we could print on card stock and glue together (they are filled with rice to give them heft). these have been a fun enhancement to our adventures.

we accidentally discovered a defunct series of star wars adventures books and cards that comprise a role play game, somewhat more basic than d and d, but we’ve been able to grab a few of the books and print some of the cards online in spite of this series having been out of print much longer than it was ever in print.

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that sam i am

do you like green eggs and ham on dr. seuss’s birthday? he just kept shaking his head while taking bites of his breakfast, saying, “this whole thing is just great.” his school did a whole week of  funky socks, hair and hats in honor of the good doctor, but i think i blew his mind with my breakfast surprise.

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pinewood derby

we had a winner this year! quinn’s red car (built with his dad, since it was a dad week preceding the race, and oh yeah, dad has more power tools than mama) placed first in his division, and also won an award for “sleekest.” he enjoyed his giant almond joy prize!

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holding a future pinewood derby champion.

training other kids one of his karate forms during an open mat session… back to working hard on earning his next black tip, and bringing smiles.

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drums! i sat in the basement with him and sang “the mighty quinn” along to his drum beat… he was playing a basic 4/4 time standard beat, but when i started singing a song in 3/4 time (the rowing song by patty griffin, one of his favorites), he was able to quickly adapt what he knew so far to come up with a 3 beat rhythm to match the song.

he was telling me one day that he thinks about when he is grown up and that he wants to be a parent “but i also don’t want to do it like you and dada. like, you know, be broken up.” (sad face). i asked, “oh you want to have a partner you stay with?” “yes.” i know i thought a whole lot about those big things as a kid, so it’s not that surprising to me that he goes there. not surprising… and yet, it rather takes my breath away to realize he is tackling such huge concepts. i am glad to be providing a positive example of a “together” relationship with rich that, whether he realizes it yet or not, will probably have some influence on him in his future relationships.

he also recently requests “a sibling” with some frequency. other kids might say “brother or sister” but quinn and his vocabulary choose the word “sibling” instead. it’s a big opportunity for me to offer empathy (i felt the same way about wanting more siblings even though i had two perfectly good ones) and yet not alter reality according to his desires.

i got a sense of how he spent his spring break from a chat with coparent at karate: the highlight was fishing; he is really excited to fish in the lake in the new boat they fixed up together, frog. it’s named after frog girl, quinn tells me, which is a conservation-oriented tale of youth empowerment. they fished 3 times, and the first time caught 7 fish, one of which was a cutthroat trout quinn reeled in himself, the biggest of the lot. the next two times, they had one that got away, and nothing else. coparent says quinn seems to have a certain zen about that, and seems to understand that you have to go fishing a lot and will only sometimes have a good catch.

i also heard about how quinn picked out a totem in an antique store that he simply had to buy (enough that he was willing to use his own money for it) of a bear with a salmon in its mouth. quinn decided, “maybe it’s the fish god!” reverence and gratitude training, courtesy of fishing. they’ve also been having some fly tying fun, with bunny mammoths and woolly buggers.

walk-to-read and walk-to-math were completed for the school year by mid-march, in order to accommodate all the testing the kids have to get done before the end of the school year. i notice quinn seems not only unfazed by testing, but maybe even seems to like proving what he knows. he doesn’t always take tests seriously, and it is interesting to me to realize he seems to have a sense of which tests “matter” and affect his placement  (such as for walk-to classes, about which he proudly spoke of having to walk all the way to the other end of the school to the fifth grade rooms). and yet, i have watched him completely hack a test that he was taking, when it was a quiz in his raz kids reading app on the classroom ipad. he went through and answered all 10 comprehension questions “a”;  without reading any questions, he then went back and answered all the ones that still had red x’s instead of green check marks “b”; by the time he got to “c” most of the questions were green checks, so the last couple he changed to “d” and in the amount of time he would have needed to answer just a few of the questions by reading them, he had moved on to the next book to read. somehow he seems to have a handle on exactly when he needs to apply himself and take a test seriously, and when a simple hack will do. partly, he seems to like to prove himself, and other times he just wants to get back to the stories. as his mama, i have a few lessons in zen left to learn about all this testing and letting  go of my beliefs about how tests can be detrimental. this kid has always been one of my best teachers, though, so i am just holding on for the ride at this point.