~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ existence

Posted on May 4, 2020 by marybethrew

Christmas was just the three of us. We were sick so I called off plans and visitors. There was something sweet about it, and though we missed our family we know we will see them soon. For me it resembled Rew Christmases of days of yore; we took turns opening presents and took time to express our thanks. We sank into the slow simplicity, Quinn explored his gifts and learned some html on the side; learning extra as he does when he has a break from school. Speaking of school, this fall has been pretty laid back; comparing in retrospect to sixth grade, seventh grade has been a breeze.

Quinn made me a trio of origami dolphin ornaments, which I adore and will treasure for years to come.

Quinn is rocking the texting this week! I heard from him tonight and the last few days and he’s been gone over a week so this is a big deal. getting closer to italy so the timing is perfect of course. putting in his paleontology camp application tomorrow for the first round deadline, and some of the texting was about getting letter of rec from his teacher and he texted me back “i did it” and I’m just feeling proud of the kiddo.

Quinn had a tearful moment writing his letter of intent for his paleontology camp application. He was bogging down and asking for wording suggestions… a wall went up when I suggested he not only say why he felt the camp would be fun for him, but also why he would be a good candidate for the camp – why they should invite him, why he would be a great addition to the group. It took some time to see behind the wall, but ultimately what was bugging him was trying to say he was any better than any other kid. At first he was phrasing it that he didn’t want to “make the decision for them” with his letter, and then I explained all kids applying would be writing similar letters, and the admissions people would have to make a tough decision if more than enough kids applied… well, he was just hating all of this information, but it was presenting more like anger or just simply aversion to “having to” write the letter but I didn’t go there… and then I finally got it. “Are you picturing the kids who don’t get to make it into the camp?” and the tears spilled over. Oh, not stubbornness, resistance, or aversion. Just empathy. Just intensity of emotions. That’s my kid. I finally got him convinced that most kids got in, that if there were kids who would cause problems, they’d figure it out from their teacher letters or things like that and maybe not invite those kids, and that worst case scenario, worthy kids who didn’t get in this time around get put on waiting list and get in next year. He still had scenarios he needed to cover, “what if this year would have been their only chance?”

“You mean if they’re a senior in high school?”

“Yeah.” We talked through all the scenarios, and how the instructors want for all the kids to go, and that’s why they have been expanding these camps (there are a whole panel of new ones this year- more fossil prep, one on illustration, etc.). I had been giving him words like “positive attitude” and “making contributions to group work” and he hadn’t been able to start typing yet but then I said let’s think of a time at last year’s camp when you showed these qualities… and tell it that way, like a story (finally a good idea) and he ended up using the story of last year’s camp having rainy weather and how he maintained a positive attitude and they still found fossils, and even pitched in to redo their instructor’s tent that flooded.

Since last time he was here, we have been playing lots of double nine dominoes (the game called chicken foot that Aunt Margie taught my brothers and I as kids). I guess I got a set of dominoes at the thrift store a while back and forgot about it, but they have been so fun. Funny when all the new Christmas toys are sitting here and we’re playing the 50 cent game. Hid play with his new stuff too, but playing games together might be his love language.

All the dinners last night. I made pizza for third dinner for everyone. He ate lots of pieces while playing dominoes. I am bragging about winning at point accumulation (which means I’m losing). I had market today, and while I was gone, he ate breakfast and more pizza, and by the time I got home he was back in bed asleep! He never does that. He slept for a couple hours and I woke him up at 4:30 to play more dominoes and eat more pizza.

We giggled a lot about contranyms.

As we played dominoes I would ask him one of his spelling words (on our list from words he had been misspelling that I gathered from his homework) every so often. One was field (he was writing feild). I told him about i before except after c, and then showed him, “except when your foreign neighbor Keith receives eight beige counterfeit sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters.” because that also made him giggle.

He wasn’t ready to sleep last night at 10pm because of his nap, so I left him with headlamp and magic cards (his dinosaur themed deck needed some rearrangement to add in his new rampaging brontodon card from his christmas stocking) and went to bed.

I did a free two week trial of the headspace meditation app. Originally it was to help me kick off my new meditation habit, but it ended up being a help to Quinn in a few difficult moments. One afternoon, overwhelmed about his homework piling up from not being up front with his dad about how much work he had, I encouraged him to take a break and listen to his favorite song. When seven nation army didn’t do the trick and he still wasn’t feeling able to get started, I asked him to come do a five-minute meditation with me. He was still grumpy after that but no longer flopping around refusing to even start, and was able to make some headway on his work. At bedtime I told him that headspace has sleep meditations and he said, “yes!!!” with both arms thrown up in celebration. I let him choose from the options, one of which is “sleepcast” which is “storytelling in a range of soothing voices” and he scrolled through and found one with an owl icon called “sleeper mountain” and he fell asleep that night listening to a 45 minute sleep story about the mountain and meditating with crickets and forest sounds.

In thinking over what to do about Quinn’s homework stress at his dad’s, I do think something will need to be said, but I think it’s going to have to come from Quinn. I am trying to keep my eye on the long term goal of Quinn self-advocating, even with his dad. The short term fix of me bringing it up to coparent could risk a blow up and I already told Quinn I wouldn’t. I’m having an ongoing conversation with Quinn about how preventing his dad’s anxiety attacks is not his job, and that it is causing his own anxiety to increase when it gets in the way of him getting his homework done for a week at a time.

He was doing better a few nights later… mostly caught up, and in pretty good spirits.

I have always sort of figured I should be able to meditate yet I have never done it. On the other hand, I realize I actually do it all the time, just not for very long. I quiet my thoughts, focus on my breath, when I’m feeling like I need to re-center. I also do it with Quinn, so he’s quite familiar. Another morning I gave him another 5 minute headspace one and he just sat on the couch with it and it’s a beautiful thing to see him sitting with his eyes closed just breathing. What do I want for him in life? That. Being ok in there.

Q asked me for a snuggle today after school and he had me sit on couch and laid himself on my lap with two fuzzy blankets over him (he was basically in egg configuration but didn’t play the egg game just then) and then Lisa kitty came right over and climbed up on top of him and curled up and we sat that way for ten minutes. I kind of want to brag on facebook about my kid, but not necessarily that he is in bed reading statistics right now, but, “my son, age twelve years ten and a half months, five foot eight inches tall, still asks to get on my lap.” It’s mildly painful but it is so sweet at the same time.

He is writing something but I don’t know what, and when I asked he wouldn’t tell me but said, “when I’m done you can read it.” I told him I totally get that, I am the same way! The apple doesn’t fall far.

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ enigma

Posted on February 26, 2020 by marybethrew

~9-23 through 10-23-19~

One Saturday in October Quinn was invited to a d and d sleepover party at the house of Legolas. The fellowship seems to be going strong, and I am so pleased he has these friendships. I know friends can be a very challenging area in middle school, and especially with poppies, but it is one area I just don’t feel I need to worry about him. These kids want to play d and d together!!! Soon they’ll be wearing trench coats! Legolas got a whole bunch of dice so they can each use a set of one color (Quinn chose green).

I listened to Quinn read sections of the latest Trials of Apollo (Rick Riordan) out loud – hilarious as usual. He pronounced the cat’s name (Aristophanes) as ah-RIST-o-fanes. I countered, “Air-ist-OPH-an-eez,” but he would have none of it. Then Tarquinius superbus, an emperor the characters were trying to defeat, instead of superb-us (picturing someone grandiose) was pronounced super-bus (it’s big and yellow and full of school children). I got him laughing but he would keep reading it the same way. He also came across a couple of words he didn’t know. “Ella the harpy was an enigma wrapped in red feathers, wrapped in a linen shift. Mama, what’s an enigma?” And Apollo talked about he and Meg being “sympatico” about some topic. I had him look them both up in the IRL dictionary from the shelf in the living room.

Meanwhile, he spent the week with me getting caught up on work he missed from skipping school on the Friday of the climate strike. He ran into one issue with a class where he hadn’t realized he had been expected to be taking notes each day, and here it was week three. He had to problem-solve that, which took a few days, and he was only just getting started on that when he went back to his dad that Friday, but got all his other assignments done. There were several for social studies like a map of Rome – Rich was incredulous again, “he procrastinated that?” and current event summary, which I helped him not take too seriously and just get-it-done, a health assignment or two, something from language arts, studying for math test, and getting his math notebook all caught up as well.

He problem solved the math notebook on his own, having figured out where in the online textbook the notes were coming from, he knew he could just copy them from there. He made plans to stay more on top of that now that he knew how long it took to catch up from a whole unit with seven sections. He had taken some notes during class on some of the sections, and a few not at all. He needed to make them very neat and the perfectionism is still a big hurdle, but he can also talk about that, and this awareness is an ability to take one step back from it and therefore be just a teensy bit less likely to succumb. His attitude for all of this homework was just so good. On the following Thursday night he told me, “I would like to participate in the climate strike again, but I really don’t think I can afford to take tomorrow off.” He is being very pragmatic and level-headed. For math note taking, we talked about strategies for staying on top of it in class. I asked him what it looked like for him during class- was it hard to split his attention between teacher and notes, etc. He said he thinks it’s hard for him to switch back from group work to individual notetaking work- once the group work is activated it stays activated. So we talked about picturing a switch and being able to activate the notebook work again and what does the switch look like. He could describe his image and what it would do and how it would help him in the long run to take most of the notes in class instead of having to copy them over after school. Again, his dawning awareness felt like such a huge step in the right direction.

The next Saturday, Quinn got up early to ride with Rich for firewood. They came to market when they were done and surprised me. They hugged me a lot then went together for pastries.

It was nacho night!

map of Rome!

I was forced to play Risk, and of course Quinn took over the world. He put an app called my singing monsters on his phone (he asks me permission and also knows I have to electronically approve the app based on the phone family link thing, and he seems good with that arrangement. I tell him I trust him to let me know if something seems off or there are inappropriate ads.) This app is cute, each monster you add to your collection does one type of music and then they all do their thing together and make songs. You can also add your own music, so Quinn googled the sheet music for his current jam, the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army and got the monsters to play it. That night I overheard him in the shower singing the Beatles song do you want to know a secret, which seems like it is on our local radio station a lot. Ooooooh is one of the major lyrics. I remember being a sponge for radio song lyrics at his age.

Sunday morning after pancakes, he hadn’t tackled homework yet so he got his social studies current event homework done quickly so he could play my singing monsters some more. Then he got his math homework done quickly after lunch for more video game time. He’s getting more efficient for sure.

I worked on the Haunted House that day, and I’m still not sure why slicing into a salt dough brain, spray painting creepy skulls onto plastic tablecloths, and developing a menu for a haunted cafeteria was so satisfying, but I strangely enjoyed myself. When I got home, we had dinner on the earlier side and Quinn asked me to play his new game he was creating. It was a build-your-own Jurassic park game, and I managed to accumulate 8 triceratopses in a forest enclosure on a piece of graph paper that evening.

Quinn had a rough day at school on “committed cubs day” during which those students who have all their work done/turned in/graded/passed get to take off the last hour of the school day. He worked really hard to finish things, but couldn’t get the follow up signatures with the teachers done in time. He went in that day feeling hopeful, and got in the car at the end of the day looking defeated. I just let him tell me about it and validated his disappointment, and then when we got home I copied the white stripes album with seven nation army into his computer and he played it on repeat for about an hour. He felt better. I made sure to point that out to him. Music makes us feel better!

I told him I was sorry that this reward for some kids can feel like a punishment to others like him. I told him he didn’t do anything wrong and I was proud of him working hard. I also told him I think he has a chance to try again and that the first one of the year (it happens every six week term) was bound to be harder for him because he takes a little longer to get the procedures (aka executive functions) dialed in with each teacher, whereas other kids might not have as much trouble with that. In this case, he had handed in health current event assignment #1 one day late, but the health teacher does not accept current events late at all (Quinn hadn’t caught that detail at first), so Quinn got a fail on that; the teacher was still willing to sign off that he did it, because he DID do it, but he didn’t get to follow up with him so he was lacking that one last signature on his form. He had really hustled to get the math caught up, so he was a disappointed kiddo.

I was glad this happened for Quinn while he was with me so I could help him deescalate his emotions, rather than make the school the enemy and encourage Quinn to quit trying. I want to encourage him that even when things are hard it is worth trying, and that the trying is what shows his character, and that we can do hard things. It felt kind of like one of those moments the Asperger’s parenting books talked about: if your kid can’t deal with adversity, you need to let them come up against some small adversities incrementally so they can get to a point of being more able to deal with life’s unpredictability and difficulty. I am never one to arbitrarily put stumbling blocks in his path, or make his life hard intentionally, but when those things arise organically and he has to come up against hard things, I’m for it. I’m for him learning he can handle the disappointment, I’m for him figuring out how to bounce back from it, learning how resilient he can be.

Quinn was a zombie both Friday and Saturday nights for the opening weekend of the Haunted House fundraiser for marching band. He was awesome. The previous set of marching band uniforms are amazingly creepy. they looked SO cool behind their screen under black light in the haunted band room… Quinn loved all the details – stuff you may not even see when you are a customer touring the house, but the “band concert today” poster in the band room has some sheet music attached to it… only when you looked closely could you see it was music for the itsy bitsy spider. His band teacher is arachnophobic, and one day she told the class the two sources of material for the haunted band room were that “the only excuse for missing a concert is that you’re dead” (hence the zombies still making it to the concert- they are undead). And number two, the legend of spider mouse… a spider she found in her band room one day that was so huge she thought it was a mouse. She had the principal come and remove it from the room for her. So fake spiders (and itsy bitsy spider music) were featured heavily in the band room.

It was pretty amazing taking all the money from all the people who wanted to go in our haunted house. I mean I DIDN’T WANT TO GO IN IT. I did go through one night with Rich, and Quinn went through it with a few of the band kids, all in their zombie garb.

He had a hard time with makeup removal and I was no help. Thank goodness another mom passed on some removal wipes and the awesome tip of using coconut oil.

We kept playing his Jurassic park role play game. He really developed all the details to an impressive level. In addition, it encouraged him to work on his spelling, because he wanted to spell each dinosaur name correctly so he kept consulting his dino book. Words like field and other “ie”s and research have given him trouble so we also made a list of spelling words to continue to work on.

Seventh grade parental relationship with the gradebook: checking my motive for looking, and then not looking if it isn’t necessary. He is now looking at it as needed, and is doing well with recognizing what he needs to do about his work. He had mostly As and Bs and I think a C in health class.

His homework waited until one Sunday because he was busy being a zombie all weekend. Sunday morning I had him draw up a schedule for his day, and he alternated hour-long “HW” sessions with half hour “break” sessions, in which we played dinosaurs. He also helped me bake zucchini-blueberry muffins after dinner. He told me stories about school, such as the fun warm-up in social studies where they have to rename objects using words other than what they’re normally called. The first example was his phrase for trees “wood plants” that he had used on me in a game of Taboo, but the best example was “Magical knowledge pianos,” as one kid renamed chromebooks.

minecraft monday with cousins!

The one math teacher at the middle school who he hasn’t had yet is the one going on his Italy trip in March, and she subbed for his math class one day. She is known to be very enthusiastic about math (I think Q will really like her on the trip and they will bond about rubik’s cubes and mathy nerdy things). He was at the back of the room with his hand raised to answer her question about what to do with x³. Other guesses were “square root?? Divide?” But Quinn knew: “cube root!”

He is an enigma, wrapped in a flannel dinosaur sheet, wrapped in a Grammy quilt, wrapped in a mama pokemon rainbow star quilt, wrapped in a fuzzy owl blanket, which he sorts into four separate piles in his sleep.

He finished off the month doing dishes, “because I am already good at vacuuming the car, but I need to get better at washing dishes” in work trade for the Lego set I had bought him at the grocery store. The Jurassic world Dilophosaurus set, of course.

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ more cowbell

Posted on April 5, 2019 by marybethrew

~12-23-18 to 1-23-19~

we had family visiting on christmas eve. rich’s mom, daughter and son-in-law came, and his mom made dinner for us all. it was fun to impart messages of non-worry and support to my pregnant step-daughter, and encourage her to refrain from consulting the dreaded google about that sore hip or that swollen foot. she had a cold she had been trying to shake for months, and i told her that it was a good sign for her baby, that during pregnancy your immune system is dialed down to accommodate the baby, and that was just what it was doing (accommodating the baby, instead of fighting off the cold particularly efficiently). i know there is a metaphor in there for life, parenting, and everything.

quinn had a good time catching up with the family. that night, he slept in his sleeping bag on the living room floor. everyone came back christmas morning for pancakes and bacon and presents.

quinn fits right into the christmas model of the rew family, with whom he has only spent one christmas when he was not quite two years old. the rews take their time, take turns (in order!) opening presents, and time is also taken to pass around, explore and savor a present, and for expressing thanks. this can take an entire day, with breaks taken for meals, and back in the day, barn chores. rich’s family gets it done in a half hour. quinn took 15 minutes unwrapping rich’s mom’s present, a cool calendar, because he was reading the comics in which it was wrapped. it’s the way that he has always been, in fact, we would often spread just a few presents out over a period of several days when he was younger.

i approached this christmas a bit the opposite of last christmas, when it came to quinn. last year, when he was in 5th grade, a big fish in a small pond, maturing… i gave him practical gifts and not as many toys. this year he is swimming hard into the middle school current, and everything is so serious all the time that i felt like this christmas should be as playful and fun as possible. he got lego sets, a game, a rubik’s cube, a bunch of books he wanted (minecraft guides, life of fred trigonometry, a role play game book four against darkness, hexaflexagons by martin gardner, harry potter y la piedra filosofal for continuing to practice his spanish, and to be extra playful: p is for pterodactyl, the worst alphabet book ever, because it had a dinosaur on the cover and it makes me happy to think of his struggle against silent letters as an early reader. i had fun reminding him about how i had to really play up how funny i thought those silent letters were, to get him to lighten up about them. he can laugh about it now, but he would get so frustrated each time he encountered another offending letter!

rich has been working on a boat called the pegasus, and the skipper had given him a hat and a hoodie printed with the boat logo. when he wore it home, i noted that there was a picture of the mythological winged horse on the boat, and we both remarked how quinn would appreciate it. a few days later rich came home with a hoodie in size (adult) medium for quinn. when he opened it on christmas morning, quinn realized the reason for it (aside from it being the boat rich is working on). quinn smiled knowingly and rich joked, “isn’t it from some chinese mythology or something?” and quinn hilariously downplayed his encyclopedic mythological knowledge saying, “i think it’s greek” and i laughed. “you think?” litotes much? and then we got to hear him tell how poseiden and medusa fell in love but decided to go on a date in athena’s palace, and athena cursed medusa and her sisters to punish medusa for the offense, and then (he included more details i am unable to regurgitate…) when medusa was killed, her three unborn children were released, and one of them was pegasus, god of the winged horses. and everyone agreed, that sounded 100% correct.

he wanted to read each book, look at each lego set, open each yu-gi-oh card expansion pack and read every single card. there were so many good, funny moments. one of the first stocking presents he opened was a bright green cowbell and he shouted, “more cowbell!” and everyone laughed and talked about christopher walken but quinn said, “it’s from the trials of apollo.”

he was 3/4 done with the lego sets by the next morning, and he had opened every book and finished at least one. he had specifically asked for jurassic park legos and was very happy with them. after building each set he went about recombining dinosaur parts and making “hybrid” species (complete with imagined backstory of how rare/common they are, their habitat and diet, etc.)

grammy and grampy gave him a model strandbeest (a wind-powered automaton beach-walker that quinn learned about and was fascinated with a few years ago when he watched theo jansen’s ted talk.) once again, he recounted amazing facts to the live studio audience about the original strandbeests and how the inventor wanted them to exist in the wild so he would add features like a “brain” made from a water bottle that somehow helped them sense the water’s edge and keep them from going into the water.

rich and i were visited by a gray bunny rabbit on solstice in the yard, and it kept returning to visit each evening, including on christmas eve and christmas day, when quinn got to see it as well. we called it full moon solstice bunny. it was gone again a few days later, but we felt its magical appearance was a gift. rabbits are often said to be symbolic of creativity and fertility. with our time off to indulge in creative pursuits, and our anticipation of new family members, this meaning certainly applied. a creature at the mercy of the elements, rabbits are able to make use of mere blades of grass to sustain life, so this bunny in our yard was surrounded by abundance. whereas they can seem afraid and skittish, this one was approachable and less fearful than most. i think bunnies can symbolize overcoming fear and anxiety. with so many predators (eagle, hawk, owl, coyote, bobcat) it is no wonder that rabbit could succumb to fears, but focusing on abundance brings more abundance, whereas giving power to fear can instead bring fear to reality. i am going to go out on a limb and say bunnies are a good mascot for the law of attraction, and manifesting abundance. turning anxiety around, rabbits can be seen as very alert and perceptive to their surroundings, and this gray bunny made me think of how perception can give us flexibility to process the gray areas of life. finally, the softness and vulnerability of rabbit are a great lesson in embracing the softer side of our natures, being open and approachable, being vulnerable enough to put our fears out there can sometimes bring us closer together.

q and i had a fun day of yu-gi-oh (he slaughtered me) and laying around with our laptops (yugioh on netflix and coding a game on scratch). one evening i opened up the martin gardner hexaflexagons book to a random page and found a game called hex, and had dryly mentioned that i was sure he would hate this book, “here i’ve just arbitrarily opened to a game involving hexagons. sounds awful.” he replied, deadpan, “oh man, yeah, i will hate that.” at lunch the next day he brought the book to me and said, “i know we’ll hate it, but will you read to me about hex?” i did, and then we printed out a hex game board from the internet, and picked out green and yellow buttons as game pieces… and he proceeded to clobber me over and over again. the kid is good at math strategy! sheesh. he is seeing things i may be able to see with time, but he’s just already got a handle an 11 by 11 grid of hexagons.

already, that book has proven to be fun and he hasn’t even really read it. martin gardner wrote a column in scientific american for many years on recreational math, and vi hart talks about him a lot, especially in her hexaflexagon videos. i figured quinn would appreciate reading directly from the source. gardner’s columns are collected into a pile of books, so i got him the first one. it’s intended for an audience of adults, but i was reading to him concerning proofs from game theory on how the hex game works, and he was posing really good questions, obviously with no trouble grasping the concepts, seeing new angles, and taking it further in his mind.

142,857, a fun cyclic number i grabbed from facebook for him to puzzle over.

we also discussed his life of fred journey. i asked if he knows what’s next after trig and he said, “yes, calculus.” and i said, “are you planning to go right on to read calculus after trig?” he did not hesitate: “yes.” i said, “ok, but i think when you’re done reading them you might want to go back and do some of the exercises to make sure you know the Procedures to do the problems,” (practice) and he said he plans to. he doesn’t plan to start back at the beginning with fractions, but just with the later books, starting with beginning algebra. he thinks he has the lower level stuff down now, and he can go from there. but his plan is to read the calculus book, and then start doing the beginning algebra problems in his math journal, and work his way on up through geometry, trig, calc, after that. i’ve told him the good things i’ve heard of the math teachers at the high school; the one married to the teacher quinn has had for theatre workshops (she teaches drama and is also the tag teacher up there) is said to allow kids to keep learning on beyond calculus if they are capable, and will hold class for as small a group as needed. i wanted to give him a little bit to look forward to and make sure he is still thirsty to learn this stuff the way he has been. he seems to know that he does his best learning at home, and isn’t looking at school as his primary place of learning. therefore dreading anything about school (as he has sometimes felt with his current math class) doesn’t get automatically linked (for him) with dreading anything to do with learning. i think they are essentially two separate things in his mind. strangely, i think this compartmentalization is a good thing in his case. one can ask why one might attend school if one learns best at home, and it’s certainly an open discussion in my mind.

at least i get to facilitate project-based interest-driven learning on breaks. over this break he worked on a card-based role play survival game with dinosaurs. i steered him into generating dinosaur artwork for the cards. check out his resulting drawings!

we had some outside time before break was over!

he had an emotional meltdown in the car coming home from karate one night. he was feeling criticized, wanting to quit school, life, not wanting to grow up. i helped him name it overwhelm. i gave him a visualization of drawers in his mind, having him picture what the drawers look like and what they are made from, right down to the details of the handles. i said, “sometimes all of your little drawers have their contents tucked inside and are neatly closed, and it’s peaceful. sometimes though, too many things are out of their drawers trying to be dealt with at once, and that is what overwhelmed feels like, and so now i want you to take karate, put it in its drawer, and close the drawer.” i waited to let him do it, and had him visualize closing each topic (school, friends, etc.) in its drawer. we talked about taking them out one at a time the next day, when we’d be able to look at them on their own, and they wouldn’t seem nearly as overwhelming.

another topic we discussed this month had to do with control and compliance and relating to adults as a pre-teen who is used to being in charge of his own person. i don’t remember exactly how it came up, but some adult in his life had expected compliance from him and he had felt it was undeserved. i felt it best to explain why i think he was having a reaction to such a thing. i told him that because i have mostly not required compliance from him based solely on the premise “i’m the mom, i’m older than you, and therefore i’m in charge,” he is used to making the choice to comply with my requests (which are almost always accompanied by information and reasoning) rather than have compliance extracted from him by an adult. if he gives me his respect, it is because i have earned it and he has chosen to give it to me, not because i’ve demanded it. but i explained that most other adults operate in a different way from that, and insist on compliance and believe children owe them that because they are older. since i’ve done it differently i may have put him in a position where he notices it a heck of a lot more than other kids, who are conditioned to the other way, and that may be hard for him on some level. however, i also hope he can see it as an advantage in that he knows his own mind, and knows that when he complies he is doing so by choice, because he has decided he can trust this adult and what they are instructing him to do. on the other hand, he also has the strength to question or defy when he knows or suspects an instruction is unjust or incorrect, and the wherewithall to ask for information about why a command is being issued, rather than blindly following. it’s been my goal to raise a critical thinker, not a blind follower. i think he could see the pros and cons, and the perspective was helpful in alleviating his disgruntled feelings of the moment.

his new haircut makes him look taller yet again. though he is legitimately taller! i measured him xmas day at 5’2 ¾”!

this month marked the first call home from the principal, concerning quinn’s reasonable response to an unprovoked shove/hit by a kid with a neighboring locker. ahh, middle school milestones.

one saturday while i worked farmer’s market, rich and quinn did firewood work together. rich had me look in the back of his truck when i got home and he was starting to unload the wood, and said that quinn had been the one to stack it into the back, though he waited for quinn to “offer” to do this. rich started setting wood in the truck and quinn said, “i’ll climb in the back!” quinn talked alllll about minecraft to rich, and i think stacking firewood appeals to quinn because it’s real life minecraft block stacking. he would stack it ever so evenly like puzzle pieces and then fill in the spaces with smaller pieces. rich said there was twice as much wood in the same amount of space he usually fills because quinn was analyzing how to fit more pieces in the same space. he would ask rich for certain sizes “i need a big one for the base” and rich would be a joker and hand him a “big one” that was a tiny twig. rich commented on quinn’s story telling (or minecraft details) and the way quinn occasionally trails off in conversation; he would be left in the middle of a sentence and would look over like, where did he go? i know that speaking style very well.

we had a mellow, sleeping-in sunday with pumpkin pancakes. quinn and i figured out how to play multiplayer minecraft together on both our laptops, which was hilarious. we held a librarian hostage, installed purple and green stained glass windows, and tamed wolves to be our pet dogs.

the librarian traded with us for enchanted books. i am not sure why he was still willing to trade us when we had commandeered his house and held him captive, but i guess he’s just cool like that.

he finally got a larger size (but exactly the same brand and color, his requirement) backpack, and i was delighted to find his collection of wedding detritus from his step-sister’s wedding over a year ago in the pocket, along with the other treasures (petrified orange!!).

he had math and language arts homework that took him hours even though it was 2 math problems and 3 google slides… but he got it done, and then had a bath and he ate a million pounds of food (he had eaten all the meals and then while we were working on the logic puzzle before bed he pounded 4 fig newmans. this was the evening that he broke google with his logic question.

i got quinn to school ready for his math test that monday, prepared to talk to his spanish teacher about making up a quiz he had missed before break, and ready for his social studies test. he is a long string bean in a green hoodie.

i showed quinn a photo from when he was 4 and fell asleep on the happy spot foot stool. he wanted to re-create it. i’m not sure this has anything to do with lifelong learning, but certainly gives a sense of scale of just how much he has physically grown!

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ sierpenski’s rubik’s tetrahedron

Posted on January 24, 2019 by marybethrew

~covering 10-23-18 to 11-23-18~

social learning

the first middle school dance!

he was so quull. he decided to wear his owl jacket with jeans and sneakers. legolas went with another friend, and quinn was hoping aragorn and gimli would go, but they didn’t. he ended up hanging out with two other boys who were into dancing, and “by the end of the night, i knew how to dance!” he stayed on the dance floor all night. i asked if he did the escape room and he said no, he just danced. the only money he spent was $1 for a bottle of water so he must really have been dancing!

he said hi to the girl he likes, but they didn’t hang out or dance. his last minute questions in the car going over “what if she asks me to dance” were priceless.

legolas invited the fellowship to his birthday party. quinn’s card making involved sharpies, his four color pen, and google image searches of yu-gi-oh characters. at the party, they played laser tag!

we had aragorn over for a day. they played shogi chess, yu-gi-oh, and star wars monopoly. by 1:45 when we were supposed to take them both over to his house for the evening, they had just ventured outside to do some shelter/fortress building, so we extended the visit to accommodate more outside time. quinn is amazing with a hatchet, and i like it when he has others around who help anchor him outdoors, long enough to swing one around a bit.

school learning

we had conferences this month and met with every teacher. his math teacher was enthusiastic about his dramatic “improvement” and it was nice for quinn to hear it from her. we met all the other teachers as well: tag, spanish, social studies, homeroom, p.e., language arts, science, and band.

tag is held every other week, and they’ll go on field trips, so it has been my “in” as far as volunteering, not just because i sell organic veggies to the teacher. i think since it is his break period on normal days that he has to give up, he is happy for any help. apparently the rest of the tag kids are as forgetful as quinn, so quinn (whose mama had set a loud phone alarm to remind him about it) was the first kid to show up the day i started volunteering. he “complained” about the alarm with a big grin on his face. it was nice to see him and he wanted me to be his cribbage partner. the class was small, around 12 kids total. it’s a cool classroom full of tools and projects and stuff, this teacher teaches all the “STEM” classes such as engineering and robotics as well.

games, puzzles, and fizzbuzzes

we are doing lots of logic puzzles, often in the evening after dinner. anagrams have been a recent pastime as well.

vi hart’s latest project was called 50 fizzbuzzes, a panel of 50 python programs, variations on a script to write fizz for every multiple of 3 and buzz for every multiple of 5, and we were both intrigued. once he found out that version #48 was a “FIZZ DUNGEON GAME” he played all the way to the conclusion of the game (101).

her reasoning behind writing the program 50 times was to truly explore all the facets of learning python that she could, eliminating assumptions and challenging her thinking along the way. many of the results turned out to be very creative. quinn and i both especially loved version #42 which prints beebs and froods instead of fizzes and buzzes, and for 42 prints ******DON’T PANIC******

it was a learning experience for us as well, as we have never worked in python either, but in order to run the scripts, we had to install a python interface to work in, and it was neat to see both the code she had written and the working programs, side by side. i liked that not all of the programs worked flawlessly, all good things for my young perfectionist to observe of his hero.

he stated that he wants to create a set of cards on graph paper (a project he has started in many forms – spinoff games on pokemon or magic the gathering) “but this time i want to really follow through on it.” i thought that was a very interesting observation for quinn to make, knowing how much of my life i have spent as a project creator/not necessarily finisher. i would not be surprised if his own project motivations are ultimately what inspires him to come to grips with time management.

he made a game from legos, including separate playing boards for two people, but explained to me “this is only a prototype of the game.” we played a few rousing games of yu-gi-oh. we had a fun discussion about rubik’s cubes in which he thought of a cool way to make sierpenski’s triangle into sierpenski’s tetrahedron. and then we thought of sierpenski’s rubik’s tetrahedron and had a geek session of doodling ideas on paper of how it would work.

he still needs a ton of prompting to get his homework done, and then to hand it in, and then to retake tests, or follow up on finishing them when he doesn’t finish them in the allotted time, or freaks out and decides he can’t do them on test day. in outside-of-school math, however, he is finished reading life of fred geometry and is ready for me to order him trigonometry.

the other kind of pi

the morning after he finished the geometry text he told me, “i had a dream that you me and dada and my sister who was my twin, were going home to the barn. but we didn’t have a car, so we were walking along a cliff edge, and me and my sister fell off. and then my sister and i made it to shelter but then we got separated. then we found each other, and the dream ended.”

the main source of material for the dream, i knew, had been the life of fred geometry book, in which part of the plot (spoiler alert) is that fred falls in love with P, and then in the end it turns out that P is his long lost twin sister. it made me want to read the whole series now to get the back story of fred!

i asked if he knew where the rest of it came from, and he said, “i don’t know because that’s never happened before, it’s always either me and dada, or me and you” and i said, “well, when you were very little all three of us were together, but even though that couldn’t continue, i think it’s really normal for a kid whose parents aren’t together to always wish for a way it could be. and sometimes when you dream and you’re not in control of your thoughts, things that are a deeper part of you can come up that you didn’t realize you had thoughts about.” i think he appreciated that validation.

he said his twin looked a lot like one of the characters from yu-gi-oh named ishizu.

he is using the duo lingo app to learn italian, inspired by signing up to go to italy in just over a year, and i caught this audio of him saying “butterflies are insects” in italian:

on thanksgiving day, i caught him mouthing the words to rock me mama like a wagon wheel through mouthfuls of pancakes when rich put it on the stereo and started building a fire. quinn helped by making personal pies, and eating 3 pumpkins, 2 pecans, and an apple before heading off to his dad’s.

a month or two in the life of a lifelong learner ~ quintuple blast!

Posted on March 16, 2016 by marybethrew

christmas happened! it was a big day for legos, pokemon, and games… why does it feel weird to be posting this in the middle of march? ah, well. this post concerns the time from december 23 through february 23, spanning both christmas and birthday, so it’s no wonder i have been too busy to keep things up to date!

the board game risk was a special request and rich got it for quinn for christmas. we all played that very day and haven’t played again since, but world domination is truly right up his alley, as he suspected.

bart wants in on the lego fun.

in anticipation of christmas, i convinced quinn that we should clean up the lego area and we worked together to achieve the above state of “ready for more legos”. thank goodness i had the presence of mind to keep all of the legos out of the storage garage when we began our long vacation… in the foreground, you can see the stack of veggie trays we’ve accumulated from thrift stores that make sorting through lego pieces a lot easier when you’re looking for that certain one, and provide a way of keeping them just ever so slightly up off the floor. (in theory.)

during a bike ride to the jetty we encountered a helicopter flying crazy loops dangerously close to the bridge, and realized, “they ain’t from around here.” it turned out it was the film crew for the new tv spinoff of the deadliest catch, capturing the departure of the lady law, a local crab boat (a friend’s husband was on board, and rich has worked on that boat with his welding torch; just to give a sense of the small town we’re talking about here).

i got quinn his own journal just before new year’s day, and made him some writing prompt cards to choose from on days he can’t think of what to write. he loves it! he decided to write his own ideas mostly, and has filled quite a few pages. writing at bedtime seems to be a calming activity for him. he also got a karate journal so he can keep track of his karate accomplishments and practices. his writing has come such a long way during this school year.

quinn helped me play with my own new years’ day project. i spent the day with my exact-o knife, cutting out some new bokeh shapes for my camera. he was especially fond of the lego guys and dragons, shown here.

some of quinn’s recent photography work. i was feeling pretty crappy the day he took this photo, and bart had crawled into my lap (he’s a healing kitty). quinn spends weeks at a time not thinking about photography, but every now and then will just *need* my camera, or my phone, quick! here are a few of his other recent shots:

movie studio update! it is about time for another long-awaited stop motion movie, don’t you think? here are some “making of” images, and you can watch the newest movie below!

arctic 2 quest for the crystals by quinn’s movie studio; grab your popcorn!

lots of reading, snuggling, drawing, studying, building of lego dragons. he drew a really cool band of musicians for himself on graph paper with many different instruments. it’s no wonder he’s into music as i’m always making up songs to sing him, like good morning boopaloo (nobody knows that song but him and me) and the grubby song, which is reserved for bath time inspiration.

in other personal hygiene news this month, the tooth fairy came, in spite of the fact that the tooth was not just lost, but also lost. quinn lost his special 21st tooth (most of your kids have 20, but quinn always had 21!) and the extra tooth came out in some mysterious way during his school day and was never found. the tooth fairy must have known it was a big deal to him to lose that one, so she wrote him a special letter, left him some glittery one dollar bills, and some bigger kid toothbrushes and tooth flossers shaped like animals. also, here’s a gratuitous baby photo.

he got a new karate bag and sparring gear. as a purple belt he moved up in sparring level and now needs to wear extra padding to practice. i got him a pair of prescription sports glasses and am so glad i did! i don’t think his regular glasses would still be intact in just a few months of advanced sparring, and i like that his eyes are protected… quinn has gotten very good at folding his karate uniform and keeping his gear in good shape. the uniform folding has also helped him with his newly adopted chore of doing his own laundry. he is now a pro, and i think he takes pride in knowing how to do it all by himself.

we did a simple machines project in his classroom, as part of the local school science fair. i acted as “science fair mentor” every friday afternoon, and then hung out at the huge science fair exhibition night (held at my place of work) and got to greet the kids coming and going as they showed off their work to their parents.

of course, he’s no stranger to using simple machines in his creative endeavors. (shown here on the movie set, constructing pulley mechanisms to lift his helicopters off the ice and lower them down for a landing.)

jan 23-feb 23

same wonderful posture as his mama, sigh. same need for paper and pencil to always be within reach, grin.

we consciously made an effort to be in the wild whenever possible.

sometimes he brings up a topic from calvin and hobbes that i recognize, such as, “when you look at your reflection in a puddle, do you ever wonder whether you’re actually the reflection, and your reflection is really you?” (while we walked to the wind chimes and took pictures of cherry blossoms.)

on his first tip test as a purple belt, quinn, and many other of the students in the advanced (purple through brown belt) class, did not fully earn their tips. (each increment of curriculum earns you a “tip” which is a band of black or red tape on the end of your belt to mark progress.) it takes longer to earn tips as an advanced student; the purple curriculum is simply that much harder than yellow, orange and white, during which quinn always advanced another tip any time he tested. this time, he got “half a tip” as he calls it, which meant he got tape on the other end of his belt, showing that he had indeed been working hard and had learned a lot this round, and would probably get there in the next testing cycle.

he was really upset and stomped off the mat after class, and in my opinion, his dad fueled the upset, both before the test by building up his expectations of advancing, and afterwards by encouraging quinn to quit if he wanted to and claiming that the teacher engaged in “shaming” of the kids.

and this is one more way in which i feel that leaving my son’s strong will intact is a favor that i have done him. he ultimately didn’t want to quit, and once he calmed down enough, he was making magic cards of his karate instructor, “because he’s a black belt!” he knew what he wanted, and had the presence of mind to realize quitting might feel good temporarily, but getting a black belt was his goal, and quitting would make that impossible. he was ready to understand that testing will take longer from here on out. i reminded him that he set a very specific goal to be a green belt by the time he is 11 years old, and helped him realize he was still very much on track to meet that goal, even if purple and blue belt tips take several cycles apiece to earn. he bounced right back to his regular smile-bringer self. even if highly tempting negative choices are presented by someone quinn loves and looks up to, he follows his own internal compass.

during a two-day break from school (i like to call them “can’t afford to keep the lights on days”) quinn attended a theatre workshop for 3rd-8th graders for a whole afternoon. i wanted him to check it out to see if he will want to sign up for week-long theatre day camp this summer, which i was thinking he might enjoy. when i dropped him off, i wasn’t sure if he’d be ready for me to leave right away, but he didn’t even look back once he saw an older boy he knows and likes from karate. when i came to pick him up, he didn’t want to leave, and kept playing the game that was going on, even after his group finished their improvisation performance (pictured on the left). the pictures are awful but you can see his face all lit up nonetheless. he is definitely going to sign up for theatre camp, he says.

i also signed him up for an extracurricular art class on a friday afternoon – he learned to make paper bird masks and use paper folding to add shape and texture to the mask. we have a piece made by the teacher of that class, which is why i knew he’d love it. (the dragon that hangs in our dragon house and was a prop in the first play we got to watch rich perform in after we first met him: the woman who fell from the sky.) once again on drop-off, he saw a friend (from both ols and karate) and i was not needed.

in school, quinn’s teacher is happy with his grades but feels he could accomplish more than he does. they get along well, and he isn’t being harsh on quinn about it. from quinn’s side of things, he has mentioned that the math review (one of the things he accomplishes very little on, daily, but not because he lacks the ability to do so) is “hard” for him, and i think the way in which it is hard is that is under-challenges him. he also seems very unwilling to perform the tasks involved in showing and explaining one’s work in math lessons. instead of writing the expected reflection paragraph explaining how he solved the problem in step-by-step manner, he one day wrote, “i am very very very quick and good at math.” which is, truly, a type of reflection, just not what is expected. i recently learned that his favorite class at school is “walk to math” at first because of the multiplication, but now “because of decimals! and even better, we get to do rounding and adding and subtracting decimals!” yippee skippy! since walk to math placement is based on test scores, i can tell he feels more adequately challenged by the material, hence his love for decimals.

~~~

also in the department of school challenges, quinn is working on some social struggles. there has apparently been an ongoing dynamic with a few of the boys in his class that has been hard for him to shake, and he finally spoke up about it just recently. he had been getting kicked in the knees under the school lunch table by the same two boys every day, and there had also been some pushing and shoving, as well as general bugging/taunting by the boys.

i do everything i can to help quinn speak the language of nonviolent communication, including refraining from labels and judgments, and sticking to the facts in a situation. instead of calling it “being mean” or “bullying”, i feel it’s much more useful to say what was actually done and said, and encourage him to explain what went on in those terms. it makes it easier to move on and find solutions, and harder to get stuck in victim mentality.

i wish i was not the only parent who felt that way. when quinn says, “he kicked me” and i ask “and what happened next” or “and what did you do/say” or “did you ask him to stop?” we can get somewhere. some of this is a matter of quinn taking a while to grasp (because he’s not wired to intuitively grasp social nuance with the same command he has of, say, decimals) things like, “other kids say things just to get a reaction sometimes,” or “i don’t want to be kicked/taunted and it’s okay for me to say that or get help to make it stop.” these are not “givens” in his mind like they might be for other kids. these areas needing extra social scaffolding are more and more spread out all the time, but they remind me of having to spell out for quinn when someone was (good-naturedly) teasing, how to recognize when someone who isn’t familiar with his chosen conversation topic is ready to move on to another subject rather than continue to listen to quinn’s treatise on the subject, or when it’s best to keep your honest opinion of store-bought vs. homemade waffles inside your own head.

still, i think a meeting with quinn’s teacher and my coparent was beneficial, because teacher made my coparent aware (as i already suspected) that quinn does retaliate physically when he is hurt, and is sometimes the one who initiates a physical interaction. this has been an ongoing conversation now for several weeks, and definitely feels like progress is haltingly being made, albeit in a week-on (regroup and progress), week-off (fanning the flame on the neuroses) sort of rhythm.

my mom bestowed a bit of wisdom on me after her years of teaching first and then third grade. i may butcher her words, but the gist is that in first grade, kids are still playing side by side. in third grade, they are now interested in being friends, having friends, exploring friendship… “but they are the worst friends you would ever want to have!” she would say, lovingly. the work of being a third grader is learning how to have, and be, a friend, and they’re just not good at it right now. i am trying, in my own way, to give quinn a piece of that helpful insight from grammy, in that, i think these boys are being doofuses (or doofi) but it may be because they admire and like quinn, and want to be his friend, but have no idea how to go about being a friend yet.

~~~

one lazy afternoon, we sat around looking at a big book of animals that belongs to our housemate, and hippos were a hot topic of conversation. apparently, more people are killed by hippos each year than any other animal. quinn flipped through the book and found many other animals to comment on, and we mused about rhinos and pufferfish and other animals and how they’d fare against a hippo (either in a fight or in a race). then asked me for some blank comic strip pages so he could make a comic strip about a race among various different animals. it took several heats of one-on-one animal races, but in the end (spoiler alert!) the hippo won.

magic cards are a new interest, and we bought a few, but he is pretty happy to make his own right now, more than anything.

i can’t remember which came first, the magic card or the egg, but close to when he made the above card, we re-watched the ted talk by jack horner about making a chickensaurus that quinn used as part of his “dinosaurs are birds” presentation at ols.

he also made these awesome pokemon cards of our family. i love the details he paid attention to in deciding on our special attack powers. quintuple blast! watch out, or mama dragon will wise flower you!

sometimes it’s easier to absorb the words you’re reading if your foot is strumming a guitar…

birthday and piper.

i mentioned in the piper post the ongoing work of emotional development… when he asked for the sledgehammer to “solve” a challenge he was facing with his piper, i recommended listening to stories to help him get centered. at dinner a half hour later i asked him if the story time had helped, and he calmly told me with a smile, “yes, and i think it was the right thing! because the story that came on was the day when martin and sylvia were feeling grumpy.”

~~~

one of the boys from school has told him when he wears a ponytail, “you look like a girl.” i am working with him on realizing that what matters is how he feels about himself. i also told him i think that other kids might be jealous and wish they could grow long hair, or have been told things like that by people close to them so they don’t know any better. he is strong in spirit, so i am confident he can handle the taunts and know that he doesn’t have to give them any power over him.

also, i told him who he and his ponytail remind me of:

“imagine all the people sharing all the world…. yoo-hoo-oou, you may say i’m a dreamer, but i’m not the only one…” ~john lennon

my young man has that kind of ability to imagine. i will end by sharing a vision he regaled me with during a meal (i can’t even remember now which one it was, but it wasn’t dessert! that part was all in his vivid imagination.)

” i am eating an ice cream cone, 5 scoops high! and watching 3 movies!” when asked what flavors, he told me two of the scoops were vanilla, two were strawberry and one was caramel. it took him the whole first movie to eat the first two scoops, a second movie was watched while the third and fourth scoops were polished off, and the last movie was the shortest, and is only one scoop long.

i hope you have a day filled with imagination ice cream.

~rainbow mondays~ comfort food

Posted on January 18, 2016 by marybethrew

red: the vacation house is a dragon house, too.

orange: to kick off the weekend, quinn built his ideal band. i believe he had in mind to make this into a video game of sorts, hence the graph paper. he is especially jazzed about having two drum sets. his band also has 2 upright pianos, 2 grand pianos, 11 guitar players in a row downstage from the drums, and 8 violinists just downstage from them (not drawn yet), 4 flutists, 4 singers with microphones, and 4 saxophones, right out front. i know only the pencil is orange, but it’s his favorite one, and it clocked a lot of miles this weekend making games, so i feel like it earned its place in this week’s rainbow.

yellow: january 17th, the daffodils looked lovely that day.

green: walks with my kiddo, when i could pry his orange pencil out of his hand.

green: comfort food, on green dishes. i sigh inwardly when he asks me for this upon first arriving back from his dad’s house… grilled cheese and tomato soup is something i associate with my mom, too.

blue: i mentioned this new nephew of mine last post, and although i make a point to avoid posting other peoples’ children, and especially their faces, on my little corner of the internet, i was urged to post photos of this beautiful boy by his mama, who thinks he is too cute to not shout about from the rooftops, and besides, the other person who reads my blog already knows his name and where he lives. xoxo

blue: so here he is… one day old. can you even handle that smile in his sleep? we are all very much in love with him already. his next oldest sister keeps professing to me how “yeah, cute” he is, sister just older than her says, “he is as cute as a candy cane!” and one more sister votes that he is, in fact, “even cuter than a baby koala bear!” i couldn’t agree more with their assessments.

purple: my camera missed out on the most epic part of the sunset on this gorgeous afternoon, but still managed to catch some purply-gray clouds over the bridge, bay and ocean.

purple: you can never have too much purple in a rainbow, i always say.

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~rainbow mondays~ wave-ing goodbye to 2015

Posted on January 4, 2016 by marybethrew

rainbow wave-ing goodbye to 2015. i spent an afternoon all by myself on a rock looking at the tiny far-off breath of migrating whales… so much cheaper than therapy.

red: false lily-of-the-valley berries still clinging to their stems along the short hike to my whale lookout spot. (i bet you wish you had your own whale lookout spot. nyah-nyah.)

orange: sunset of the same day as the whale hike… after i came home due to my hands being completely unusably numb with cold, and took a scalding hot bath until the feeling returned to my extremities, i inexplicably went back outside in the cold for a walk. i had to, the sun was putting on a show…

orangey light: there’s a cemetery right down the road from the vacation house, and i’ve walked around in it a few times. i guess it’s kind of my version of the buddhist idea of making friends with death to walk around in there. when i say making friends with death, it doesn’t mean i like to dwell on it or even really venture into thoughts-of-death territory. if anything, i spent the whole time finding symbols of ongoing life, of timelessness, of new growth, while i watched the sun reflecting off of the slabs of marble.

orangey-yellowy light: i think it’s more about finding metaphors that make me want to live life as fully as i can… the angle at which some of the stones are settling in means certain ones end up catching the setting sun and glowing. in the same way, i feel like we each settle into life based on our set of circumstances, and given the angle we end up looking at things, the sun can reflect off our surface more or less intensely.

on this walk, i was drawn up next to the giant sequoia tree growing in the center of the cemetery, and the way the sun was bouncing off of each and every branch… it made me think of branches of generations of families reaching into the future.

yellow: sequoia seed cones, containing the trees that will be as large as this one long after we’re all gone, and even this tree has fallen and receded back into the earth.

yellow-green: small birds and large trees alike seem to counter the whole death theme, chirping and setting out seed cones defiantly.

green: <3 this tree….not sure if you can see the windchimes hanging from the branches to the right… or if anyone saw the movie cake…

right over here… they had such a peaceful melody in the gentle (freezing cold) breeze…

green: there it is again, the metaphor for life going on, the cracks in our hearts opening space for new growth to occur.

green: not that any of this contemplation makes me able to handle or comprehend the thoughts of any of my loved ones ever dying… so blithely back to denial i skipped, tra-la-la, and picked quinn up for our new years’ eve at home doing just what we pleased.

green/blue: unintentional selfie as i arrived at my whale lookout spot.

green/blue: the forest curtains parting to reveal heart-shaped glittering ocean.

blue: best seat in the house for whale watching, albeit a cold seat.

blue: ocean love lights

blue: my friends hanging out way out beyond the giant breakers.

blue: this group was pleasingly large… probably a gang of teenagers heading to mexico for spring break.

blue: steller’s jay; i love how ruffled up his feathers were in the steady winter breeze.

gray/white: love and light and more glittering and blinding white light and lightness of being and lightheartedness. somewhere in that jumble, i do believe, may be my word for 2016, and i am sure i will say more about that in due time. happy new year, friends!

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

heroes in a half shell

Posted on November 19, 2013 by marybethrew

a quick post to get some quinn photos out there to grammy. i realized my rainbow this week only covered the adults in my little family.

things are good. school is incredible, and quinn is thriving. he has discovered a love for the teenage mutant ninja turtles, his favorite being raphael, the one who wears red.

our biggest challenge right now is to find time for him to be home and be a kid. we are at school and then after-school program, and when we get home it’s time for dinner/bath/books/bed, and that leaves very little time for re-building every single lego set he owns from start to finish while warbling along with brandi carlile songs on the living room floor.