Tag Archives: martin luther king

~thankful thursday~ if the weather holds

Posted on by
Reply

A non-exhaustive list of classes I’m currently not getting an A in:

Gratitude

Being a friend

Parenting

Meditating

Karate

The list goes on. Good thing I’m not taking any of these classes for a grade. This will be my last thankful Thursday post for a while. It was helpful for me to document the fast-moving current events of the early phase of the pandemic as a way to keep myself integrated, and now I feel like I’m past the urgent-care emotional triage stage and moving beyond it into that more integrated place. How I write tends to shift with the changing seasons and this year is no different, even though 2020 is very, very different, as years go. Stay tuned for summer, which will not be devoid of gratitude, but will most likely be its flighty, fickle self, rushing by much too quickly for my liking, but I will do my best to still stuff a few of its choicest fruits into the canning jars here.

~Week of 5-22 to 5-29~

I am grateful for the return of beautiful weather. For time spent reading the Outsiders (which Q just finished for school) on the loveseat by the campfire in the yard, then as it got dark just leaning on Rich staring into the flames. I am grateful for the spontaneous dates of early summer: breakfasts, coffees, and cocktails with popcorn outside in our Adirondack chairs by wedding trees. I am grateful for my solid husband who lets me soak his shirt front in tears as needed, so I can get it out and go on. I am grateful for a lovely long weekend extra day – we had cabana coffee to start the day and Caribbean sunset cocktails to end it – a completely fictitious getaway. That evening we had our drink (I had made fruity syrup that day as part of my freezer clean-out effort and mixed it with our whiskey) and sat in the gathering dark watching bats. He got me laughing until we fell asleep. Laughter is antiviral, and has many more benefits besides.

I am grateful for Rich, that every time adversity comes along it makes Us stronger. You name it: moving, road trips, challenging coparents, unemployment, pandemics, everything that can be hard for couples.

I am grateful that every now and then Quinn wants to read to me, instead of the usual where he wants me to do the reading. Then I can just watch him and listen to his voice and soak him in.

During another cocktail hour in the Adirondack chairs by the wedding trees the western tanagers visited, flaunting their bright plumage. A new clutch of robin eggs is incubating under the mama in the nest. And I saw a baby rufous hummingbird in the bayou! I am pretty sure it had just fledged.

Pizza night, a ride on the bay road, gelato and a harry potter movie marathon. I am grateful for the simplicity of the days, the ease of the evenings.

I am grateful to be gardening a bit while the weather holds.

Speaking of if the weather holds… the Indigo Girls and Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach did a live feed together and it was magical. Holy. I have been watching the Indigo Girls do their music live feeds as well, and when they remarked that “this was the most requested song,” I was surprised that it hadn’t been Galileo or Closer to Fine or Power of Two… and then I realized it is also a favorite of this former wooden ship sailor: the Wood Song.

The thin horizon of a plan is almost clear

My friends and I have had a tough time

Bruising our brains hard up against change

All the old dogs and the magician

Now I see we’re in the boat in two by twos

Only the heart that we have for a tool we could use

And the very close quarters are hard to get used to

Love weighs the hull down with its weight

But the wood is tired and the wood is old

And we’ll make it fine if the weather holds

But if the weather holds we’ll have missed the point

That’s where I need to go

No way construction of this tricky plan

Was built by other than a greater hand

With a love that passes all out understanding

Watching closely over the journey

Yeah but what it takes to cross the great divide

Seems more than all the courage I can muster up inside

Although we get to have some answers when we reach the other side

The prize is always worth the rocky ride

But the wood is tired and the wood is old

And we’ll make it fine if the weather holds

But if the weather holds we’ll have missed the point

That’s where I need to go

Sometimes I ask to sneak a closer look

Skip to the final chapter of the book

And then maybe steer us clear from some of the pain it took

To get us where we are this far yeah

But the question drowns in it’s futility

And even I have got to laugh at me

No one gets to miss the storm of what will be

Just holding on for the ride

The wood is tired and the wood is old

We’ll make it fine if the weather holds

But if the weather holds we’ll have missed the point

That’s where I need to go

 

~Week of 5-30 to 6-5~

I am grateful for:

More beautiful days! A butterfly sighting. My Dad’s birthday. A completely cleaned-out freezer. Rich and I on our knees, weeding together. Twelve quarts of chicken broth tucked in the freezer when I turned it back on.

My work contract is a source of stress. Even when I know there is funding for next year, I will expend an incredible amount of mental energy between now and September when the new one is set to begin, concerning whether I stay with the same or have to switch to a new contracting agency (fill out new hire paperwork, change health insurance plans, add another retirement fund to my already out-of-hand “portfolio”, none of which contains that much money), whether the new contract will go into play on time (or will I have a gap in employment, and health coverage), updating my resume (I save it for days I’m feeling like a badass scientist, and put it away on the days I feel resentful that NOAA doesn’t recognize this by offering me a permanent position). I am not grateful for this stress, but I am very grateful to have a job in these stressful times when so many are out of work.

On the anti-racism front, I am in that uncomfortable space between reading all I can and listening to Black voices more because I need to confront myself, but also needing to speak up, but also trying to keep silent so Black voices can be amplified, but also acting in solidarity. I really can overthink like it’s my job! But seriously, the one uncomfortable thing in my life should be this.

If the weather holds, we’ll have missed the point…

I am grateful the world is awake.

I decided not to do any posting this week at all, in #muted solidarity. Which means next week silence is out, because speaking up is necessary. Studying. Gathering resources.

Worked on my resume all day in between sending emails demanding justice for Breonna Taylor, shot in her own home on a no-knock warrant by police on March 13th. On June 5th, she would have been 27 years old.

I told Quinn I was thinking about going to the Black Lives Matter protest and explained my desire to support the movement. And while it is not entirely safe for us to go out in the world right now, we can do it relatively safely with a mask and while staying 10 feet apart, but Black people live in a world where they can’t go out safely every day. I explained to him that during the pandemic, the inequality that is already present in society only became more extreme, so they are even more unsafe now than they are “normally”‘ and how that version of “normal” isn’t right and never has been. I thought it would take some discussion, but he didn’t hesitate. He wanted to go.

I was selfishly excited to see him and thrilled that he was open to this change in perspective from “the only safe thing is to stay at home” to “some people are never safe and I can do this to show I care.”

So for my own part with educating myself… my normal way of handling uncomfortable feelings is to deal with them as fast as I can so I can put them behind me… I’m in the middle of a few things right now that don’t sit well but with this particular one, it is good and right to sit in the middle of being uncomfortable about it. It’s uncomfortable to think about a whole group of people living in fear and grief every day of their lives, but it’s imperative that I sit with that; it is what we’re being asked to do and I feel that it is quite literally the least we can do.

There are many opportunities for feeling uneasy, for self doubt. Staying open is the key. If we sit with feeling uncomfortable about not knowing how to do it right, and keep that awkward conversation going, maybe we get somewhere.

I stood and marched with Quinn. We held our signs.

I made that mask for him, and gave it to him when he and I hiked on my birthday… the last time I saw him… on April 3rd…

The protest was on June 3rd.

Two months…

It was way too short…. but I was a pretty proud mama to stand with him.

sitting with the uncomfortable truth of systemic racism

Posted on by
3

I am not here to teach anyone anything about racism, just to get that out of the way up front. I’m still learning a lot about myself when it comes to this subject, and I’m consciously, actively pursuing this learning. I know enough now to know that I have a long way to go, and while I will share some resources I’ve been using to do this learning, I have not researched extensively enough to know if they are the best or most thorough or accurate resources. Still, I share in case others are looking for a place to start.

I am posting from inside that place of discomfort, where there is a tension between, “I am not the right person to talk about this,” and “I must not be silent about this.” By not being silent, I am not trying to be an ally on a performative level, only speaking out to paint a rosy picture of myself and all the wonderful things I am doing for the cause. For show. Words without actions. I am saying something about striving to become a better anti-racist, because saying nothing makes me complicit in this moment in time when the world is paying attention to exactly how alive racism is in this country, in our communities, and in ourselves. We are either racist, or we are anti-racist.

I do not want to simply re-share others’ words without making it clear that I personally am saying these words. I am outraged by injustices that continue to occur to Black Americans based on race. Also, at the same time and as another source of tension, my words are irrelevant in this conversation, and amplifying the voices of Black Americans is one thing that is needed, so we can hear about the effects of racism from the voices of Black Americans themselves. Using my own voice is helpful only so long as it does not drown out the voices who matter on this subject: voices of people of color. And even so, I am hearing calls for both silence and non-silence by the Black voices I am turning up in my feed, and I have felt paralyzed about how to show up and show my support without making it about me, without being performative, without diluting Black voices, but also without being silent.

In an extremely low-risk setting, (minus the coronavirus concerns), Quinn and I marched in a local protest, where we had no real fear of violence or retaliation by law enforcement to our chants, from behind our masks, of “Black lives matter.” I want to be careful not to believe now that I’ve done this one action, that I have now done my part to end racism. Anti-racism is going to be a lifelong practice, and most of it will go on behind the scenes, in my own insides, where I have to find a way to stay in this zone of discomfort, knowing I can’t fix it, knowing it’s in me even though I reject it, knowing that I have benefited from it and finding a way to get curious about what racism still looks like in my own heart. My place in the conversation is primarily one of listening. Noticing when I feel defensive, taking that as a signal of where my garden has some weeds I need to pull. Digging in deeper. (Also, signing petitions for justice, emailing people in positions of power, showing up in my community, donating to organizations helping people of color.)

I have believed my whole life that I was not racist. Growing up, it was because we attended school with a Black family, The Walkers. My brothers and I each shared a classroom with one of the Walker boys, and their Dad was the baseball coach. We were definitely not racist because they were our friends.

I remember learning that the church I grew up in, the Free Methodist church, was founded in 1860 (and named “Free”) because their breakaway sect from the Methodist denomination was anti-slavery, and because they refused to charge a fee for sitting in pews, as this would exclude the poor. Despite this inclusive beginning, among the congregation I belonged to over a century later I heard many overtly racist attitudes verbalized, when such matters as interracial marriage arose, say, because someone’s daughter or son-in-law was Black. I heard how someone, “had no problem with Black people,” just so long as they didn’t mix in marriage with whites. It took a long time before I thought about how being anti-slavery as a denomination didn’t necessarily mean our church was welcoming to Black members, or actively fighting racism. I had learned about slavery in school, and knew it was wrong, and being on the right side of that issue was comfortable.

I nodded my head in agreement in 1992 when En Vogue played on the radio, “free your mind, and the rest will follow, be color blind, don’t be so shallow.” The next year Michael W. Smith, my favorite contemporary Christian musician, really got me on board with being color blind:

There’s not a world of difference

Out in the world tonight

Between this world of people

Red, Yellow, Black and White

But instead of riding a rainbow of love

We still are fighting with prejudice gloves

Of anger

With something to claim

But nothing to gain so

Why can’t we be color blind

You know we should

Be living together

And we’d find a reason and rhyme

I know we would

Cause we could see better

If we could be color blind

Being color blind was comfortable, because it meant that we were unable to see differences like skin color. The problem is, if we can’t see them, we can’t celebrate them, nor can we recognize how they are used as an excuse to oppress. There is no shortcut to erasing four centuries of oppression.

In college, I had friends and housemates with brown and black skin, and they were my friends. I was definitely not racist. I was a little miffed that some of them had been admitted to college on scholarships because of their skin color, because I had actually had to earn my scholarship through academic achievement. I wasn’t sure I liked Affirmative Action, because I felt the playing field should really be level and have nothing to do with the color of one’s skin. Wasn’t it just racism in reverse, if someone like me with good grades could be bumped out of a position by someone with grades not as good, who happened to be Black? I did not like to think my generation needed to pay the price for previous generations of white people who committed grievous acts like owning slaves. At that time I did not recognize how I started off life on second base simply by being born white, when my Black peers were trying to make it on base at all, just based on the difference in our skin color. I did not know that reverse racism cannot exist, because racism is prejudice plus power, and can only exist in one direction – coming from the people with the embedded power from a long history as a racial majority, aka white people.

I attended my friend’s graduation from University of Delaware, where Ben Carson delivered the commencement address, and I felt the surge of pride and hopefulness that a Black man could be so successful, could do groundbreaking conjoined-twins brain surgery and achieve so much. We really had come a long way since the olden days, a long, long time ago, when racism had been a thing. I did not realize that pointing at the token successes of a few wildly successful Black people such as Oprah and Obama and black ball players is just one of the many forms of covert racism, one of the many ways to stay comfortable in white supremacy.

(Source) Scaffolded racism resources – I really like this resource and the way it presents an easy grid to find your stage in confronting racism and access resources to help you move past it.

In graduate school I encountered for the first time the poisonous line of research known as eugenics, in which race inferiority was the a priori conclusion motivating a whole branch of “scientific” inquiry. I only discovered this because I was studying whale conservation genetics and looking at the concept of fitness in behavioral ecology. Until then, I had had no idea that science had been misused to justify slavery, segregation, the denial of voting rights. Luckily, that type of belief being underpinned by false scientific conclusions was a thing of the past. (I thought.) I did not know that the horrifying legacy of abuses of people of color in the name of “research” still pervades contemporary science and medicine.

I became a parent, and consciously included toys and books representing people with different skin colors in my son’s life, wanting to make sure he didn’t end up with any unconscious biases based on race. I think this is when I finally started to realize I, too, had biases to overcome, when I started to realize that actually, racism might not be totally in the past, that maybe some of my beliefs might have some evolving to do.

In kindergarten, Quinn had three teachers: a white lesbian, a Hispanic woman, and a Black woman, and I felt so great about providing such a diverse learning environment for him. Long time readers will remember Quinn spent exactly two weeks in kindergarten, but that was still plenty of time for me to realize my clumsiness in this area in which I had just gotten done congratulating myself about my enlightenment. The day Quinn described his teacher’s skin as chocolate, my post was entitled “diversity”. I’ll never delete this part of my process, though it is a tiny bit painful to read now. This post, in which I committed many of the faux-pas I am now learning to be aware of, such as “I’m so ashamed,” claims that I do not have a race bias, and the urge to “fix” anything to do with awkward feelings around the uncomfortable topic of race, depicts where I was truly at, and looking at it is uncomfortable because I kept going in the process and did not stop there. It is an insightful mile-marker for me to look back on. I’m starting to be able to see where those “I’m ashamed of my whiteness” thought patterns just center the conversation back around my white self, rather than keeping the spotlight on the very real, atrocious experiences of Black people. I’m uncomfortably aware that this current post centers very much around my own white process, and my goal is to show up and be accountable, not to make the story about me, but to hopefully highlight how everyone is at a different place in the process. I have been at a lot of different places in the process, too. I am 100% sure I am saying something now that in my ignorance I will look back on and wish I had known to say differently. Nevertheless…

Right now where I am in the process is a place that is not nearly as comfortable as some of the other places leading up to this one. The more aware I become, the more uncomfortable the truth of the issues becomes, and the more unlearning I realize I have to do. My goal right now is to stay in that place of discomfort. I think that is how I will know if I am going in the right direction, because the more I know, the more I realize I should not be comfortable with anything to do with systemic racism in America. I should not work at becoming comfortable that a system that was established to catch slaves (the police) is committing violence against Black and Brown bodies every day. Even when they are not literally deprived of breath, they have to walk in fear, as described poignantly in a passage I stumbled across by Shola Richards about how he only walks his dog with one of his daughters along, never as a lone Black man, and his follow up post describing how everyday life events white people take for granted, for him, present a relentless stream of challenges; “death by a thousand papercuts.” My place in the conversation is as a listener. The links in this post are an effort to amplify a few black voices who have gotten through to me in some way. I am committed to continue listening. When I hear, “racism work is NOT a self improvement space for white people. If protecting bodies & empowering Black lives aren’t at the center of your work then you’re not here for Black people – you’re simply going through motions to make your white self feel better,” from a voice (Rachel Elizabeth Cargle) I am listening to, I am committed to noticing how uncomfortable that makes me feel, and pressing against that discomfort to be able to hear the truth in her words. And keep going to figure out how to protect bodies and empower Black lives in my community.

The framework of DARVO from which Rachel Elizabeth Cargle presents anti-racism work parallels something that I experienced in a domestic violence context. I’m saying that not to make this about me, but to say that her words turned on a light for me. DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.”

“White supremacy is being the ex boyfriend who somehow always came out of the argument as the one who was hurt.” ~ Rachel Elizabeth Cargle

Reconciliation is only possible when the abuser can get to a point where they can listen to the person they’ve hurt define the hurts they’ve delivered. Many of us never receive this from our abusers, even if the abuse stops. Even if the abuser has completed a searching and fearless moral inventory and enumerated for themselves the ways they think they abused us, it falls short.

When I hear, “all lives matter,” it sounds to me like a refusal to listen to the victims of abuse say in their own words how they have been abused. There are a million examples on the internet you can google of how this feels just like replying to your spouse asking if you love them with, “I love everybody,” or sharing about the loss of a loved one and being told, “all people die.” To say all lives matter in response to Black lives matter is a refusal to listen to someone who is in very real pain. I don’t get to tell them about the hurts I think I’ve delivered. They get to tell me. I’m listening.

The uncomfortable truth about systemic racism is that it’s inside me. Wanting to maintain comfort is a white supremacist yearning.

 

If that thought makes you squirm, find a way to enter the conversation as a listener. Do it as a sports fan. A history buff. A scientist. A Christian. Stay uncomfortable. Sit with it. Keep listening.

The truth of systemic racism is uncomfortable, but I’m not going to die from it; many, many Black people are dying from it. I am committed to staying awkward and vulnerable, and uncomfortable, because it’s the best indication I have that I’m going in the right direction, towards justice for their lives. I don’t want to get comfortable with this ever again. I appreciated the sign of one of the teens at the protest that read, “Don’t Look Away.”

~two months in the life of a lifelong learner~ peaceful protests and a lot of alliteration

Posted on by
1

it’s been a good couple of months to be review listening to harry potter audio books, with so many themes having heightened relevance to our current events. it was quinn’s idea to listen to them again, when we finished with the heroes of olympus. while we were waiting for the order of the phoenix to come in at the library, we briefly reviewed some lemony snicket, and quinn observed, “these titles sure have a lot of alliteration.”

when he turned 10 *gasp* a month ago already, i borrowed from some of my lifelong learning notes for the birthday post, so you’ve already heard about peaceful protests, fourth person point of view, and our chatty walks up to the school building each morning.

the peaceful protests, of course, were a residual effect of his essay on martin luther king jr, an essay of which i think he is quite proud now that it is finished. he put a ton of effort into it, and i personally learned facts i hadn’t known before, such as that the day of his assassination, mlk:

“…went to Memphis, Tennessee to help black garbage collectors get the same amount of money as white garbage collectors for the same amount of work.”

i could copy and paste that snippet of his work into this post because we live in such a fancy modern age that our children can “share” their google doc essays to their mama’s email address when prompted to do so!

i went to school one friday while they were doing their martin luther king jr essays and i was circulating and helping kids. the first 10 minutes of the 45 minute class was a mindfulness breathing exercise… the teacher had them sit tall and breathe along with a drum beat for each breath, and a breathing ball (it expands and contracts) that the two team leaders handled. this was followed by a loving kindness meditation: “may i be safe and healthy… may i be happy… may i be… ” was the first of 4 rounds; second, she had them think of a person they love, and hold that person in mind and repeat “may he/she be safe…. “; third, “this one is harder… think of a person that it’s hard for you to like… “may he/she be….”; and finally, “may everyone be…” this was such a good investment of ten minutes, because the kids proceeded to spend the next 35 minutes acutely focused and getting so much accomplished on their essays. with lots of direction from her (they were working on conclusions so she provided examples of transition phrases that work well for beginning a conclusion…. and then had kids share their first sentences… then they worked on how to include the 3 main ideas of the essay in that first sentence… and went back to work on their first sentence some more… very methodical with them on actually how to write.) quinn had a ton of writing on his piece of paper, and also arrows going here and there of places he wanted to insert sentences he wrote later… the kids completely understand “drafts” and they get excited when it is time for “publishing” and writing their final drafts… he picked the right year to work on improving his writing, with such graceful guidance.

 

he is a certified… guacamole masher, steam mopper, fireplace filling technician!

(i clearly was unable to put a log in the wood stove, with 30 pounds of cat on my legs, so someone had to do it!)

risk and play date fun with a panda, and birthday celebrations with a koala.

beach clean-up class field trip! we found some cool rock formations including some that quinn claimed were dinosaur eggs in a nest! we filled a pretty big pile of garbage bags from our little stretch of beach.

 

first belt test at his new dojo! quinn earned his half yellow belt, something he was very keen to do. i appreciate sifu’s approach, and the way he tunes into the individual needs and interests of each kid. he knew and understood that quinn wanted to “collect them all” and was happy to oblige with a half belt test! quinn actually already knew almost all of his yellow belt curriculum, so his full yellow test was scheduled for soon thereafter.

this dojo is a really good fit for us. i personally enjoy the self paced curriculum, because if i feel ready for new techniques, all i have to do is ask for them. if i need more time to practice, i can take more time. i am not lumped in with a group all trying to advance at the same pace, and yet somehow teaching everyone new individual techniques does not seem to become unmanageable even with large class sizes. i am trying to use as many opportunities in life right now to help quinn learn to assert himself in positive ways, to advocate especially for what he wants to learn. since our debut in public school, i have wanted to reinforce his right to self-direction in his learning choices. in the conversations we’re having about learning, i keep trying to set the tone that what he wants matters, and that speaking up about it is always a good choice, even if his wishes can’t be accommodated right away. he is getting to practice that in his karate pursuit, and i am glad for the parallel to his schooling that i can point to as an example.

creative reading postures; eye rolling

a visit from ruby tuesday! she’ll even hop up on his loft bed with him to snuggle him into bed at night. we are so lucky to be her fairy dog family.

games! playing games with panda, playing games with grammie e, who recently added quinn into the weekly rotation of her grandkids so he could play games with her and have some undivided attention. they played monopoly for their first round. when he’s not playing games, he’s usually making games…

some recent game themes included wilderness survival, owl evolution, battle islands, an angry birds spinoff, and a few others that he didn’t not have fully developed or named yet. graph paper!!!

most of his peaceful protests had to do with bringing graph paper, pencil and markers along to work on a game design. he also made some new “elements game” cards one afternoon, based on magic the gathering, but with his own spin. i was glad i had already turned on google safe search when he started google image searching terms like “mermaid queen.” all of the mermaid queens he found were fully dressed, thank goodness!

it will be fun to find out how this game is played!

one of our vacation house roommates came to visit! he hadn’t been to our new house so we got to give him a tour and feed him dinner and treat him to our air mattress. he brought a king cake for dessert (awesomeness, straight from NOLA) and i made soup and bread for dinner and we all ate and got caught up. we told him he needs to bring his other half and come back in july for a get together we’re having. we also showed him the bayou, the name of which was of course inspired by our new orleans roomies.

after dinner we got out the king cake which had a warning label “inedible baby figurine included” or something to that effect. they don’t hide the baby in the cake anymore because of litigation so the baby was sitting inside the wrapper. i took it over to the counter and hid the baby under a piece that had green sugar on the frosting, thinking quinn would want a green piece, so maybe he would get the baby. (if you have never had king cake this all sounds incredibly ridiculous!) i brought it back over and handed rich the knife and he asked quinn what color he wanted. quinn said green, and rich cut the exact piece where i had put the baby (which was a long shot!) and the baby popped out as he was putting it on the plate. lots of laughing, quinn was happy he got the baby, and our friend told stories about king cakes he’s eaten in the past; how some high end places use gold babies, and how his cub scout leader had a king cake one time with 15 babies in it so all the kids got a baby and it was a fun surprise, and several other funny scenarios involving king cake.

our friend had been tracing the geneaology of his family, who it turns out have been living in the 9th ward for something like 8 generations. he has been visiting old family homes, graves, and digging through old microfiches to trace family members back even farther. we were talking about the naming conventions of various family members and he would say to quinn, so who is your grandfather’s son (and quinn would answer, um…. my uncle) and then it got more tricky and there was a discussion of what “once removed” means in cousin terminology. i told the story of how luigi always called q “cousin quinn”, and that one time when we went to visit when q was 5 and luigi 4 and i was coaching them on being kind to each other “after all, you’re cousins” and luigi saying, “wait, i’m a cousin?!” mind blown. that led to principles of family like “you can’t have a cousin without being a cousin” and you can’t have a sibling without being a sibling, and quinn was coming up with more. then we talked about how it applies to friends too, but can you have a friend without being a friend? that was discussed, but then it got silly with “but what if the second friend is really a spy, and only acting like a friend to extract information from the first friend…” so then to be even sillier i asked, “well then what if the first friend is a double agent” and then it was “oh yeah, what if the second friend is a triple agent?” and by this time we were all giggling hysterically at the table, to quadruple and quintuple agents, and beyond.

when our friend asked quinn about school, quinn said they are learning mostly about martin luther king jr. right now, and also about native americans. he told us all how their land was taken away, and talked about the sioux and knew where in the country to point to on the map of where their land was, and didn’t know what states’ names that corresponds to now, so he went to look for an atlas, and wandered away. i went and found him after a while and he was on his bed reading calvin and hobbes. we looked at an atlas together and he pointed right to the dakotas, with an “oh yeah, that’s right.” i am glad to know he is learning such things right now. i got him a young peoples’ history of the u.s. on audio cd (howard zinn), one of his stocking presents for christmas and i think he will get into it once he starts. knowing how he absorbs auditory information, he will be an american history expert (from the zinn perspective) in no time.

i chaperoned a field trip to the art department at the local community college. the kids had all prepared a drawing they would use to carve and print a linocut, so they set about carving right away. this was full of ups and downs for a few of the kids who struggle a bit with perfectionism. not that i  know anything about that. at one point he wanted to give up and felt he had ruined the whole thing, but as he worked through it, he found equanimity again, and then he tried a print even though he wasn’t finished carving and beamed, and said, “it looks like an old black and white photograph!!”

using the brayer; printing his first draft

pleased with his print

“just like an old black and white photograph!” i guess i’m not the only one in this family who likes spirals… i quite like the way this spiral has a beam of light shining out of it, and even if he continues to carve away the rest of the outer portion, i will treasure this first print.

recently the name “the happy spot” has come back into vogue; lately he likes to get cozy in my chair with my laptop and my heating pad on the low setting… often it is his first activity upon arriving home from his dad’s week.

he started back up studying computer programming on khan academy and got caught back up to the point where he left off a year or so ago in one night. after that quick review he moved forward. this was a totally self motivated effort.

in the department of “life lessons we wish we didn’t need to learn” these past few months, one of the teachers quinn had for walk to math last year in third grade was arrested for sexually assaulting a teen minor at a summer camp. the teacher had already left quinn’s school, and was now teaching in a different county, and so our school system did not even appear to address it, which was disheartening. for my part, i discussed it with quinn, preferring him to hear about it from me rather than from classmates (i heard about it via facebook, where a friend had originally learned of it from her 6th grader reading the online news article aloud at the breakfast table (!), so i felt it was safe to assume it was going to circulate around school), and we sat together and read the brief few pages in it’s perfectly normal that cover the things that are not normal or okay when done by an adult to a child. i had just recently ordered this book, since we had the 7 and up book it’s so amazing but are now approaching 10!

the song happy by pharrell williams came on the radio on a random weekend day when we had npr on the radio. quinn loves listening to all of those shows (wait wait don’t tell me, radio lab) and laughs at the political jokes. happy came on and quinn was singing all the words and rich and i made eye contact over his head and grinned as we do when stuff like that happens.

he’s getting so big… he has favorite songs he knows the lyrics to…

he got past the part where leslie dies in bridge to terebithia.

he has inside jokes with me like “whatever sleet is.”

karate is a fun long evening twice a week, and i feel good about the time we’ve spent every time i’m leaving there. he is learning a lot in sparring, which in this dojo has a lot to do with control vs pummeling your opponent, and he is finding he likes working with some of the adult class green belts because they teach him while they spar.

one day quinn and i were all by ourselves for a day class, and he got to go through all of his moves for his full yellow belt test. he had fixed one foot maneuver sifu had worked on with him in his short one form, and sifu noticed that he had fixed it and said “i’d give you your belt just for that.” that was a nice acknowledgement of quinn’s attention to detail.

and the full yellow test was again a success! this time he tested with a friend, and they both did a wonderful job. and better yet, they left feeling like they knew they had done well, their hard work had been affirmed and encouraged.

valentine’s day; excuse for dorkery in the kitchen and receiving handmade cards!

some random learning moments this month; listening to his friend read to him (as part of their daily 5 reading program, i think quinn has probably helped this one boy with his reading quite a bit this school year, by being such a loyal listener and patient decoding helper. plus they are awfully cute sitting in their camp chair together. we also attended a fun movie night at the dojo, to which each and every student brought their fuzzy fleece blanket. before the show, board games were played, which of course is always a good time for quinn! he even got to eat an off-brand lunchable, poor deprived child that he is, he has had precious few of them in his lifetime, like possibly only one other one, but i succumbed to his special request.

and then he turned ten….

his birthday weekend was nice, and not stressful. by deciding to keep it simple, i ended up free to make it fancier. he helped, and it was so low key that i could have fun and be creative. the pizza pokeball and the type symbols on the veggies were last minute add-ons, because i had time to sit around and briefly google “pokemon party.” quinn set up the pokemon figures, and also decided he liked my balloon curtain idea, so he hung 4 out of 5 of them, after i hung up the first.

the boys played outside quite a bit, and would come in and do pokemon and legos and stuff in between. quinn got a minecraft medieval fortress book from grammy and grampy and that was his favorite. for a while they played minecraft, and then they would revisit the table and load up on more pizza and veggies. the three of us sang to quinn and he joined in singing to himself and laughed, and then he made his wish and we ate cupcakes. we put on a movie in the evening so the boys could transition to inside voices. we watched indian in the cupboard  since they’re both familiar with the book.

then they went to bed and read and drew and talked. i turned the light off at 9 or so, and they fell asleep 9:30ish. not too bad, they were actually noisier the next morning.

it’s wild that he’s 10 and having sleepovers…

he hasn’t parted with the minecraft book (it rode to school in the car with us several mornings) so that definitely won best present. he does like his jedi robe though, and he was listening to music on his mp3 player morning while he got dressed for school. because he’s happy… “clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth.“

~rainbow mondays~ rainbows for america

Posted on by
1

rainbow juice ingredients!

President Barack Obama boards Air Force One at Norman Manley International Airport prior to departure from Kingston, Jamaica en route to Panama City, Panama, April 9, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

this image caught my eye and seemed like an appropriate way to bid farewell to the president. bye, potus. also, i’d like to be photographed as i leave on my honeymoon like this. #2017goals

oh, that reminds me, there’s someone else i want to make sure to say farewell to this week… yeah he’s always gonna be a fave, i don’t care what anyone says.

bye, joe.

also, a happy birthday to dr.  martin luther king, jr. this week in rainbows is high on the prominent public servants!

rainbow jars: modge podge, food coloring.

night rainbow! nyah nyah, we still have our christmas tree!

red: in this corner of the shell table… some strawberry top shells i picked up in tonga, and some teepee canyon agate picked up by rich’s mom and dad in south dakota, if memory serves.

orange (burnt sienna?): get a load of this healthy guy!

orange (salmon?): heavy on the public servants and sunrises. yup!

orange: that black sand under the shells in the upper left is from rialto beach, washington. i love that beach. my favorite beach here in oregon is the one that reminds me most of that beach.

orange: but the north jetty beach will do in a pinch, if i just got done with work and the sun is about to melt into the freezing cold water.

yellow: sun kissed surf zone

yellow: cassette tape case survivor

yellow: glowing leaf in the frosty grass

yellow: the moon startled me when i turned around from photographing sunset on wednesday.

yellow: opposite horizon from that moon.

yellow: sunrise this very morning!

green: sparkly twinkles

green: freezing rain created this beauty

green: we worked with what we had

green: the sea glass really makes the green section of the table pop

blue: hard to find many blue seashells, but blue sea glass and jay feathers i do have

blue and gold: one more sunrise, what the heck.

purple: cowries from tonga, sea urchins from here, abalone shell from all over the west coast, purple sea glass from all over the world

purple: finally feeling a little more homey! i put up some curtains, some on the window and some to hide the boxes under that sewing counter. some hemming required, luckily i can sit down at my sewing machine now! (deep sigh of contentment.)

purple: one of those after-work sunset shells

purple: sunset-illuminated gelatinous mass looking ethereal. may all your walks on the beach lead you to what you were looking for!

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday

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