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

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~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~ holy coprolites, he’s in seventh grade!

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~8-23 to 9-23~

Our end of summer family trip to New York!

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

bonfire!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

First day of seventh grade!

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

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

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

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

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

 

Doctor

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

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

 

Text life

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

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

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

 

Miscellaneous

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

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

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

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

baby tending.

bathroom mopping

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

 

Skills and tools

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

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

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

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

 

~summer shorts~ striking out

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a scrap of green t-shirt sleeve, followed by the brim of a floppy, khaki hat wobble out from near the front of the line of campers, the one glimpse i’ve caught of quinn on his very first sleepaway camp experience. the t.a. and videographer is bringing up the rear behind the six campers attending Paleontology Explorers: Oregon, and after they take a few steps, the camera pans over the white tufts of beargrass flocking a stark high elevation flatland studded with snags spearing the sapphire sky, an inverted green bunting of young conifer triangles painted across its mid-section.

he is up front behind the leader, hopefully too out of breath to be talking her ear off. the group is already cohesive, one entity moving with brisk purpose in an intentional direction toward a common goal. the sense of anticipation, ownership, and belonging seem palpable, even through the filtered lens of an instagram feed. the one other boy on the trip, D from L.A., is at quinn’s heels, the four young women comprising the rest of the group of six campers marching along in step. i think i spot the one he first introduced himself to, R from california, who, like quinn, has a dinosaur pillowcase. shedding her NASA sweatshirt as they team-carried gear to the van, she revealed her next layer of a harry potter t-shirt. As quinn and D carried either end of a duffel, i overheard a snippet of conversation about “ender pearls,” and i felt it all sinking in – these were quinn’s people. this was him finding a few more of his tribe. The other ones for whom dinosaurs were not something they grew out of, nor got over. the other ones who may possibly be more proud of achieving a grade point average of 3.14 than one of 4.0. the other ones who might see HGTV through the lens of house flipping to afford more expeditions and more plaster. the other ones whose bed stickers may have been classified at age 6 into jurassic and cretaceous species. The other ones whose parents stood around awkwardly at camp drop-off trying not to let on how relieved they were that our kids are finally finding one another.

somewhere in the eastern cascades, a boy is laying his head on his dinosaur pillowcase, among a pack of campers each with their own heads on their own dinosaur pillowcases, out in a big world doing his thing.

 

 

 

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

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~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!

 

~two months in the life of a lifelong learner~ a new era

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as summer days dwindled, quinn could be found alternately picking up books from two awesome series, the wings of fire by tui sutherland (a series about young dragons which he started years ago, but had a few recently published titles to catch up on) and gregor the overlander by suzanne collins. he spent early summer on collins’ series the hunger games, much to mama’s consternation (i would have put that one off a bit longer but he felt sure he was ready) and i can tell he loved both of her series. gregor the overlander is definitely less edgy in ways that give mamas of sensitive children pause, but still quite pithy and substantial in its content.

 

i seem to have a lot of evidence of kitchen helping this month. he offered quite a few times this month to help me by chopping the numerous jewel-toned bell peppers i would bring home from market requiring immediate attention. i have a few ziplock bags full of sliced peppers in my freezer thanks to my sous chef! he also helped with the making of our household specialty of personal peach pies.

we got to have our ruby dog for a short time, which was a wonderful way for us to get grounded in nature and snuggles.

speaking of dogs, i wanted to remember quinn’s pretend play scenario with the children of camp boss one day this summer, which found him in the role of a 10-day old special type of golden retriever called a silver retriever named cedar. i really like the specific details allowed to flourish during the truly free and unencumbered play of summer.

towards the end of summer, i brought him into work with me a bit, having him work on his cursive handwriting (i am determined that my kid will have a signature that is written in cursive) and computer programming. on one of those days, he drew a diagram of how to build two versions of a piston door in minecraft. the narration of his diagram is hard to re-create, because i get a little lost in discussions of sticky pistons, redstone repeators, and hopper droppers!

during this part of the year, wildfires were raging all over the country, and our enjoyment of the red sky colors in our own area is not meant to diminish how awful and scary that was for people living in fire zones. in fact, having just spent a week in glacier national park, rich and i were feeling strong empathy for the region we had just visited so recently. one friday evening after dinner rich and i walked outside on a windless, beautiful evening following a hot day. a minute later, quinn came outside too. we walked around the yard, just remarking on different flowers and birds and the red moon and sights and sounds we noticed.

while i worked market on the saturday of labor day weekend, camp boss took quinn out to the camp site for fish’s birthday party at the river. rich and i joined them in the afternoon, and we had burrito/nachos and chocolate mousse moose cake (complete with moose on top!) it was a wonderful last hurrah of summer on the river.

just days before school would start, quinn had his hair cut short. as he was sitting down for lunch, he told me he wasn’t sure if it was the hair, or starting fifth grade, or what it was, but, “it feels kind of like the beginning of a new era.”

he spent some time by himself in deep thought before school started, and from what he shared of his thoughts, i know he was feeling the mix of pros and cons of heading back to school. i tried to remind him that his learning really belongs to him, and how he wants to approach it is something he has a lot of power to decide. i was trying to reinforce “it’s a new era” in a positive way, in that life is what you make it. i want him to be empowered to direct his life in ways he feels good about; not stay in any situation that isn’t good or healthy for him; but instead, to be solution-oriented when he has a need that isn’t being met, to use his problem solving skills to find a good solution. we talked some about how he can use fifth grade to accomplish goals that he has, in the same vein as our chats about using 4th grade to hone his writing skills. i followed up with him on that and he felt he had really gotten better at writing during 4th grade. it was a good conversation on being conscious of what he wants to do this year and how he can make the most of it.

i had him listen to glennon doyle’s “dear chase” letter about being a good friend in school and being a love warrior. i hoped that perspective might shift his focus from self to others, and keep him from straying into anxiety. he also wanted to hear the version of brandi carlile doing country roads and then rocky mountain high, which he hadn’t heard yet but had been discussed to encourage him to sing his version even though he hadn’t memorized the ending. we had talked about how sometimes singers do different endings to songs – we told him brandi probably does it a different way every time and most likely so did john denver!

the boy is getting a john denver education. i’ve been playing the compilation i got that has brandi’s version on it, and it has other artists doing his other songs… and john himself singing country roads came on the radio yesterday during breakfast and rich turned it up so q could hear the real thing. i can sing “rocky mountain high” and he’ll follow up with “colorado”. quinn had to come hang out at the veggie truck with me one wednesday after school, and one of the women working with me had a puzzle book. we were all trying to solve this word puzzle and the bonus question was to use all the letters to come up with a place name. the other girl asked “what does it mean by place name” and quinn said, “you know, like colorado.” and thus the john denver brainwash may be deemed successful.

i took him to karate for open mat so he could run through his techniques, and then home for burgers, corn and purple french fries. last summer supper. when i asked him what he wanted for breakfast on the first day of school, he said, “oh i don’t know. maybe just something fancy.” we settled on pancakes with two fruit toppings, peach and strawberry.

we came up with a list together of goals/responsibilities for his fifth grade year… he still has all his lego magnets, aka “the instructions” up on the fridge, but a few things have been added over time so this was to make that more formal. he has been helping do his own laundry for a while, and folding up his karate uniform after karate, but those are now on the list, for example. we spelled out when bedtime is (8:30 now, instead of 8, for starting on “bathroom chores” with lights out still at 9 because he wants to be asleep before i go downstairs to bed myself.) we made a plan that this year he takes on making his own lunch, and basically set as a goal that by the end of the year he is doing it independently, but at the beginning of the year with some help. i asked him his thoughts on baths and he figures one every other day is good and his goal is to brush his teeth twice a day.

the lunch making feels timely, because it gives him more control over his lunch contents, which i am optimistically hoping results in him eating more of his lunch, and it is symbolic of taking on more responsibility for himself, in this new era. he liked the idea. i got out a white board and wrote “protein – fruit – veggies – other’ on the top and wrote things on each list that are available in the fridge and pantry right now (for example he had strawberries or melon for fruit options… that way he wouldn’t go looking for apples that aren’t there). for his first day of school lunch, he made cream cheese and jelly tortilla “sushi,” and put strawberries, cauliflower and ranch, and leftover purple french fries and ketchup into his lunch containers. in the morning he packed it all in the box and put in his backpack.

first day of school pictures!

{insert all of the dumbfounded parent comments about how big he has grown and how quickly time has flown}

just some beginning of fifth grade photos… reading on my lap in the car, which is what he does when we arrive at school early on occasion… it’s truly amazing to watch him perform tricky origami folds of his long limbs to determinedly still fit in the space between me and the steering wheel. reading survey “getting to know you” worksheet he brought home from the first week of school… homework! 30 minutes of reading and a two sentence summary is his nightly homework assignment as a big fifth grader… and still going strong in karate!

we went to a fun get-together hosted by my dear friend for all of us who work the farmer’s market together, and quinn loved playing the table hockey game with every single other party-goer, all of whom were adults. then he got out the train set my friend keeps for her grandkids! he also liked eating the fish tacos and the delicious snacks! and carrying on animated conversations with adults, something he has always loved.

more peppers and peaches! such a willing kitchen helper has been a blessing to his mama!

we went to a lady rizo cd release show… rich and i helped usher, but quinn wasn’t allowed to usher as a kid, so he just read and drew in the lobby and then he got to come to the show, which was awesome. quinn loved it, he paid more attention to the drummer than anything else, and during one song was actually air drumming along with the guy. only 2 other kids were at the show, one of them another our living school alum (we know what’s good). we told quinn afterwards that lady rizo’s name is actually amelia, and that she grew up in newport (she talked about that during the show) and that her mom is our friend deborah, who founded theatre camp, and that amelia was in theatre camp as a camper, a counselor, and a leader at one point, and that his leader this year ethan, is amelia’s brother. quinn just nodded and took it all in. imprinting subliminal message about kids from around here being able to do anything – check.

quinn had his next karate belt test, and we now have an orange belt! this was a fun test, the older boy he tested with (who earned his purple belt) has been standing right next to me in belt rank in the adult class, and has really grown on me. they both did well, and such a great crew of friends and classmates showed up to cheer them on and help them earn their belts (by acting as sparring opponents).

we left that very evening after the belt test, to head up to rich’s daughter’s wedding! the pancakes were reunited and happy to be playing together again so soon after the last wedding. quinn had to miss one day of school, but he wasn’t too sad about that. there was much to be done in preparation for the wedding, so i kept feeding snacks and meals to children and adults, and sewing and painting my way down the to-do list. the kids had fun with legos that quinn had brought along, and played hide and seek and lots of pretend games.

   

   

we had a beautiful evening for the rehearsal dinner. i don’t know if anyone else sees a pattern, but i notice a number of instances of b pancake and quinn being quite inseparable. it was a nice group of kids who all played well, including a young girl cousin flower girl and the maid of honor’s son who were both around quinn’s age. there was some mini-golf, and a colossal game of tag. in fact, quinn told me later on, “it was a long and fun day, and we played a long and fun game of a tag.”

fun on the porch swing towards the end of that long and fun day.

the next morning, quinn had pancakes and somewhat reluctantly tried on his suspenders. the kids played legos for a while, but the pancake parents were busy putting finishing touches on the wedding cake, and rich and i thought it would be easier for the kids to run around in a larger space, so we took them back over to the site of the rehearsal dinner the night before (the groom’s parents’ house) for more tag. while the grown ups were making final preparations for the wedding that afternoon, and rich and i were loading things into our truck to transport to the wedding venue, quinn got to try out a onewheel. which was cool, because there’s no way i’ll ever be able to buy him one. wowzers! they are expensive. so it was neat he got to try out such a cool toy.

it was truly a beautiful wedding, and all came together so well. it was a proud moment for rich, who made his daughter laugh as he walked her down the aisle, true to form.

quinn seemed to immerse himself in every experience the wedding provided. he played hard, ate lots of food and cupcakes, filled his candy treat bag up to bursting, and even lined up for the garter toss. he didn’t get a good briefing about what this crazy ritual (which we skipped right over at our wedding, and i never thought to inform him – parenting fail!) was about, so he didn’t realize he was supposed to vacate the area immediately for the bouquet toss, because he’s a boy, to clear the way for girls. and when the bouquet landed on the ground, he ended up being the first one to pick it up to much laughter! the bride re-tossed it and it was then caught by a female. and as i stood across the way, grateful to be married and therefore exempt, and physically providing cover for one of the single bridesmaids who did not wish to participate, i had to chuckle at the confusing tradition and how it must have been perceived by my sweet unsuspecting youth who hasn’t been socialized to think flowers are only for girls. one more social custom to spell out, though i am not even sure where to start with that one!

quoting quinn, who like to quote hobbes, “words fail me.”

fifth grade is turning out to have a concentrated focus on increasing executive functioning skills (paying attention, managing time, prioritizing). one weekend this month, quinn stayed home on a saturday while i worked farmer’s market, and by the time i got home, he hadn’t had a drink of water yet, and crawled into his bed with a headache and slept for the afternoon. (executive function lesson: remember to drink water, even if you’re sucked into a good book.) on sunday around 6:00 he remembered that he was supposed to have been doing homework all weekend (we had discussed on friday breaking it up into smaller chunks and then promptly forgot to do any chunks). after a brief meltdown, “i’ll never get it all done, i can’t possibly do it all in time, i’ll flunk because….” tears, and agony, it all worked out fine. i reminded him that we can only eat an elephant one bite at a time… then i wouldn’t let him look at the whole elephant, just brought him one piece of it at a time (he was copying paragraphs he had already written onto notecards) and he finished one, then had dinner. i had him finish one more while i cleaned up his dishes for him, then gave him 10 minutes to read and when the timer went off he made quick work of the rest. (executive function lesson: eat elephants one bite at a time, manage your time, and don’t let anxiety drive the bus.) we discussed how anxiety is, and how now that he’s done he can see that what looked like a mountain of work really took him no more than 30 minutes total to do, once he got his brain focused. when he was panicking, he couldn’t even remember which cards were already in his “done” folder at school and which ones he still needed to do… but once he was calm of course he could remember.

we spent a lot of time outside on sunday to help get sleep back on schedule. quinn swept off the trampoline and picked up apples. then he played outside some more with the kids of one of rich’s coworkers who was giving us compost. they picked up chickens and pretended they were on an island and visited the goats. after we got home i jumped on the trampoline with him. he went to sleep pretty easily after the homework got done.

on monday on our way to school he told me about khan academy and how last year he was working on the 4th grade curriculum but this year 6th grade, and he feels like he is going really slowly because he is missing things. he couldn’t remember long division, which he learned back in 2nd grade but didn’t get any practice on for the last two years and was upset about that. i quoted mark twain to him, “i never let my schooling get in the way of my education,” and i have been repeating that to him a lot lately. i told him that now that he had identified a gap in what he was learning, he could look it up, or ask me to show him, or ask his teacher, etc. and then in the 2 remaining minutes before the bell i showed him on a scrap of paper and he remembered right away. divide multiply subtract bring down… he told me a teacher gave him the Dad Mother Sister Brother mnemonic device and i hadn’t heard that one. he inevitably knows more than i do about many topics. sometimes i act merely as the keeper of the list of things he knows, for when he doubts himself.

while he often expresses mixed feelings about school (wanting to go, but also not wanting to go, because of time away from home) he does have fun at school. he is hanging out at recess with a boy he knows from karate and a boy who went to theatre camp, which i’m happy about because i think those two kids, from what i know of them, are wired pretty similarly to quinn.

quinn has been a bit exasperated with his dad that he isn’t bringing him to karate. i’m supportive of quinn in his efforts to keep making his requests and needs known to his dad, and validating his disappointment that he keeps receiving the same no answer, in spite of creative solutions quinn is suggesting. he knows it is holding him back in the pace he can progress, since he misses an entire week every other week, and therefore misses learning a new technique for the time period. in spite of asking to be taken just once during his week (which was what was originally agreed to by dad when we switched dojos), and in spite of offers on my part to provide the transportation, this is still a no. quinn and i have discussed how there are other extracurricular activities to explore, but none of them really like it when you skip a week at a time (play rehearsals, music rehearsals, track practices, etc).

i have been accused of trying to come between him and his son before, in the recent past, at another time when i was encouraging quinn to advocate for himself to get his needs met (which at that point involved staying at my house extra days before the first day of school to ensure he could begin fifth grade minus hitchhiking arthropods on his cranium). my message is never to divide them, but to encourage quinn to be true to himself. this has been a predominant theme throughout my parenting career, and one i still feel good about. he will know when he is older who showed up for him to help him achieve his goals, will have made accurate observations of the people in his life and how their actions and words align, and will have learned a great deal about integrity.

parents need to be sane, sometimes parental needs must come first so that parents can then carry out all the duties and care of their children, but i feel that having to place parental needs above child needs should only be in the department of emergency self care (put on your own oxygen mask first shouldn’t need to be a daily practice! because every day life should have minimal emergencies) and the rest of the time, at least how rich and i see it, the kid needs to have his needs met in a both/and, healthy household where parental and child needs are all being met in a coordinated manner. he is only with us as a child for a brief time in the grand scheme of things. 8 more years?! he’s already 10, it’s crazy brief, and small sacrifices like driving out of our way for a practice or a lesson or a game will be a matter of course for us, as they were for rich with his own kids. quinn has been asking to go to new york during the snowy time of year, and our approach is, how can we give quinn what he’s asking for in a way that works for all of us? when it’s about karate, the conversation should similarly be about quinn getting to his class, “how can we make it work?” not whether it can happen based on adult life.

being isolated at home is going to sit less well with this tween as he becomes a teen. he has started speaking up for himself, and i imagine it will continue to bug him, which may spur him to make choices to constructively change his circumstances to be how he wants them.

more processing on a day shortly thereafter… as he was eating his lunch at 5pm, before karate… (executive function lesson: eat your lunch at lunch time! it’s possible to both eat and talk!) he said his teacher mentioned a tragedy and that “if we knew about it and wanted to talk to her we could, but i just figured i’d come home and ask you.”

music to a mama’s ears!!!!

i told him i was guessing she was talking about las vegas, he said yeah he thought there was a v in the name of the place… i gave him an overview of mass shooting, didn’t really sugar coat but also didn’t lay a lot of emotion or political stuff on him either, just sort of told him the facts and he understood, was dismayed by it, but also asked some good questions and had some insightful thoughts about it all, and it didn’t seem to phase him beyond the conversation.

more processing later that night… at karate he had hard time, which is pretty typical when he first comes back after a week away, or in this case, two weeks away. he remembered his one purple belt technique, but sifu showed him the next one, and he was having a hard time making it work, and no amount of encouragement or being told, “it was hard for me to learn that one too!” really helped. i see it as a perfectionist thing, where he is hard on himself if he doesn’t get it right the first time. i always felt that way, too.

in the car on the way home from karate i asked him what was going on for him, and he said it wasn’t just karate, but also school, and “ever since third grade” when he first received high test scores, he feels like his dad and i have put pressure on him to be really smart and do really well (!) and he feels like in third grade he was smart, but then fourth and fifth grade he feels less and less smart, the more he sees how smart all the other kids in his class are. he was in tears by this point, telling me how stressful it is for him.

i was not trying to be on the defensive, but i wanted him to take a minute and realize that my message to him is always “i love you no matter what” and that i am often, very often, saying things to him about not being so hard on himself, taking things less seriously, don’t expect to be great at it the first time, etc. because i’ve been mindful of the perfectionism and of the backfiring praising dynamic that sets up a kid to feel like they’re not meeting approval if not being praised. i don’t really do the praise thing, not like most parents do. i verbalize what i see him accomplish, or what i see him doing, but i don’t tell him a judgment of it that it’s good or bad or better than someone else’s or he’s smarter or better at stuff, or that his painting is pretty. instead we talk about the content of the painting or the content of what he is writing or storytelling about, how he feels about it, whether he is having fun doing it, rather than about his performance. sure, i tell him “i love that” at times, i let myself experience thrill or wonder or awe at his work, but i do try to go the other direction, and am more likely to ask him what he thinks of his work than to tell him what i think of it… i know other people also praise effort instead of ability, but i try not to really stress that either. it feels like the same thing, where it sets up a kid to need to show effort to meet approval… same cycle. the whole “grit” conversation on social media is beyond me. praise of any aspect of the child is a judgment. my message to him is, “i see you, the actual you in front of me,” not “i deem you worthy of praise.”

i gave him the example from moments before at karate telling him to go easier on himself and realize it’s a tricky technique and there’s nothing wrong with taking a while to get the hang of it (like all of us needed to do with that particular move) and also the example of encouraging him to only take his homework summaries so seriously; to just write whatever comes to mind, not to sweat it, just write “i don’t want to write, i want to keep reading” if it is really holding him back from reading, and that would be perfectly okay with me. my message is never about achieving the best scores or being smart.  and i also said that there are so many ways that intelligence can be expressed, and 99% of those ways cannot be summarized in a test score, or tested at all. i told him how i hear him use words in such beautiful and unique ways that stop me in my tracks and take my breath away, and even if he doesn’t spell those words correctly every time he writes them, he has a way of using them that i have never heard any other kids do. i said that doesn’t necessarily mean he will have the best grade, but it is certainly a way that his intelligence comes out of him. i gave other examples, storytelling, imagination… he was visibly doing better by this time (we were sitting in the car in the driveway in the dark in our karate gear still) and then as we were going in the house he was coming up with examples from his own experience of karate teachers telling him they hadn’t perfected a move they had been doing for 8 years, or 20 years, and i was glad he was drawing on previous experience with others giving him examples that help him with the perfectionist stuff.

it came out of the blue for me that he felt i was putting pressure on him. i asked him later, after our talk, if he still felt that way, and he said no, not about me. he said dada does a little bit when he says things like “you’re smart, you’ll be able to figure it out” and i just sort of nodded and listened. he wasn’t upset for long…

it seemed like soooo much processing was getting done that week in his world… he even brought up the “new era” comment and said part of what he had meant by that was not feeling as smart as he wanted to be; he felt smart in third, but as hard as he tried to stay smart, he felt the other kids were smarter… i told him one reason i have always been pro-homeschooling is that there’s so much less comparison of yourself to other kids… and ability to just be you and not always feel like it’s a competition. but that i believe he can work on focusing on comparing himself less, even in the public school context. at any rate, we worked through things enough that the shadows cast upon this new era have had some light shined on them and are a bit less threatening to him now, i think.

i have been downsizing my book collection, but one parenting book came back out of donate pile because i had scribbled quinn quotes in the front cover:

1/6/10

“something in my tummy told me, harold and the purple crayon”

1/17/10

“it wasn’t a bird, it was just a pile of bird food bugs!”

i love finding those little time capsules of happiness.

just for fun… here is what quinn looked like in january 2010:

and now back to october 2017:

quinn’s halloween costume is made out of organic fabric i still have from earth huggy days and it’s super comfy. he has had several years now of pokemon costumes made by mama, and each time i send him off to celebrate halloween with his dad. it has just been the way the parenting calendar works out, and i’m perfectly ok with it, feeling like i still play a pretty key role and i’m glad he likes the costumes i make for him. i’m sure i won’t be asked for very many more, so i’m savoring it.

 

to round out autumn, we made apple cider in the barn of camp boss (it was a rainy day) and that was fun. the kids bobbed for apples, and though quinn did not bob, he had a great day of playing, and i barely saw him. gratuitous shots of koala instead! before cider, quinn and i visited my farm friends who had to sell veggies in the sideways rain, with the stand set up inside 2 big trucks. we brought them a pot of coffee and quinn picked out veggies for the week – he chose broccoli raab and cauliflower and some things he thought i’d like.

with all its expanded veggie palate, executive function skills, emotional processing, celebrations, accomplishments, goals, self advocacy, and responsibilities, this new era has gotten off to a great start!

 

~two months in the life of a lifelong learner~ turrets and portcullises

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minecraft fortress building was a frequent occupation these past two months. quinn has also been inspired to build games in scratch, making use of a book fair purchase to familiarize with how to use code within the scratch framework to generate a game.

 

birthday books; on the right, an excellent story called eagle boy that i found at our local book store.

contemplating fortress features (like hidden sky libraries) with kitty ball.

mission control; where the scratch games are made, as well as some of the minecraft work accomplished. the head lamp slays me.

we cleared off a small area of his desktop so his piper can fit there, alongside a story cd. (he was listening to harry potter and the deathly hallows). i asked him if he felt he had figured out how to work in scratch, how to use the various commands.

“the only one i don’t know what it does yet is pen.”

“have you ever just played around with the commands and figured out what they do?” i asked.

“yeah! i figured out how to make someone jump! you go “face in direction zero (which is up) and then say move 5 steps then wait 1 second, then face in direction 180 (which is down) and then move five steps. and you actually JUMP!

“…and i know how to make gravity.”

he made his “first game ever” called whale saver, in which you have to click the space bar quickly enough to get the mama whale across the screen to the baby whale. if you are too slow, the mama whale drifts towards the left, and you lose if she gets all the way to the left and her thought bubble reads “defeat”; if she makes it to the baby, her thought bubble reads, “victory!”

then he made it more difficult by adding a shark that the mama whale has to out swim in order to reach the baby whale before the shark does.

we have an ongoing discussion concerning cool math games, and before he played it one day, we talked about using it to research how parts of a game work together, with his new perspective of game making in scratch, i.e. how you make it look like a penguin is swimming even if he is in the middle of the screen, by making other objects move past the penguin. though in my opinion there is nothing cool and a negligible amount of math embedded in cool math games, a site which i resent the schools promoting because of its blatant ads targeting kids and its ability to require restarting my computer, i am trying to find the middle ground between adamant disapproval of (big air quotes) cool math games and finding some redeeming value since it is obviously something quinn enjoys. reverting back to my principles, i asked how can we use even this despicable platform as a tool for learning?

 

he came home pretty psyched about his tag program one afternoon, just absolutely buzzing with inspiration about automata. they are going to build automata. i played dumb and asked what’s an automaton? he regurgitated the definition, understood what it meant, and was able to discuss it critically, such as when i asked “ok, so what makes it different from a robot?” we ended up watching some of the you tube videos he had seen in class, finishing up with the TED talk of theo jansen, which quinn subsequently reenacted, listing each adaptation that was added to each new iteration of strandbeest. his capacity to memorize reminds me of my ten year old self, while my 39 year old self has trouble remembering where i parked.

raspberry storytelling.

becoming entrusted with more dangerous kitchen jobs; serrated knife use, birthday candle transportation, and (the incredibly risky) making of guacamole.

shown above, his finished essay on martin luther king, jr., plus a collection of notes and research on the subject. one worksheet (most of which was empty, classic quinn) contained a space to write one connection made during reading/research on mlk where quinn had written “martin and i both are as non-violent as possible.”

 

we’ve been getting outdoors between bouts of rain. when we trek to the bayou, we sometimes catch imaginary pokemon; other times we observe trilliums, trout lilies, the flora and fauna. he was compelled to do some irl minecraft brick laying. i was intrigued to realize that he understood to alternate the way the bricks are oriented so their seams are offset in each layer. play is never pointless.

his class took a field trip to cape perpetua. we hiked, wrote and drew in nature journals, did a visitor’s center scavenger hunt, and hiked some more. our final hiking destination was the giant spruce, under whose roots the whole class crawled. walking together alongside a stream, quinn and i brainstormed descriptive language; gushing slushing sploshing galoshing giggling clapping hooshing whooshing shhhhhh… were just a few i can recall, describing our impressions of the different character of various sections.

he fell asleep on my lap on the return bus trip to school.

the library hatched a batch of baby salmon, so we stopped and paid them a visit.

baseball! i am surely biased, but i believe that quinn has very good aim, and i adore his pitching style of raising his left arm as though to place his pitch where he wants it. he has been practicing archery since he was quite small, and i noticed that when he began learning to use throwing stars, he aimed well with them, too. we are looking forward to more throwing stars, nunchucks, eskrima sticks, and bo staff classes that are going to be happening soon at our dojo.

quinn worked diligently on a birthday present for the baseball buddy pictured above (aka panda)… his very own pokemon collection. quinn sorted through his own binder to find cards of which he had duplicates, to put together a pretty awesome starter collection. he put them in a binder for panda, colored the front and back covers (raichu and greninja, panda’s faves) and he was very excited about giving him his gift.

earth day! more (slightly unfinished) school artwork.

one day when i was volunteering, quinn’s class discussed and voted on several topics, items that had been submitted to the suggestion box. one was written by quinn about rotating between play porch, gym and classroom when brain break has to happen somewhere other than the playground due to rain. his suggestion was the one voted into effect, after careful consideration of pros and cons of each alternative. their discussions are amazing to behold. (“who can show proof of listening to jasmine, and add to what she said; do you agree or disagree… because…” were some of the prompts the kids are accustomed to receiving.) they also voted on saving spots in the classroom for work (this was sorted out in all its nuances of when it is and is not okay to save spots), as well as whether to do yoga both at the beginning and end of the day (they already do it at the beginning) and they did institute an end of the day yoga session by majority vote.

quinn was pretty elated when his suggestion about brain break won in a landslide.

we also got to do a yoga session while i was there. quinn asked if we could order a set of the yoga cards for home, “so i can teach you yoga.” so we ordered some! we have done quite a few sessions so far. as yoga has been an incredible source of self care, solace, exercise and healing in my own life, i am quite pleased to see quinn embracing this positive practice.

feeding ice cream for mama’s birthday to the family of camp boss. beautiful sunny day to play with friends!

easter egg dying and hunting, and a fun (belated) easter basket when he got back from his dad’s.

one recent wendesday morning wake up (after a late bedtime due to karate then dinner then bath) was not one of my better ones (nag nag nag), so for thursday morning i decided to do a better job. when i went in he was burrowed under his grammy quilt, head and all, and my usual “good morning boo-pa-loo” song turned into more of a david attenborough narration.

“here we see a rare undescribed burrowing creature in its natural habitat. this animal has a fuzzy head and is very quiet, just before emerging from its sleeping burrow. we are hoping to catch a rare glimpse of this new species, which we shall give the name boo-pa-loo boo-pa-lee-doo, as it rises to consume one of its favorite foods; biscuits. with any luck, the aroma of the biscuits will entice the creature out of its sleeping burrow at any moment.”

for some reason, that worked better. it was easy to then coax each appendage out of the sleeping burrow with further narration, sans nagging. (i say it again: play is never pointless!)

play can be a science experiment. quinn made some spinning tops from legos, and it was a great avenue to discuss experimental design. he was telling me that the one made from the big lego wheel and the taller stick spun for the longest duration because it was the biggest. i asked him if he thought it was the larger diameter of the wheel or the weight of it (which aspect of “bigger”) that helped, and whether he could design an experiment to determine which factor was most important. he hesitated, then told me “you just gave me an idea” and came back having tested the wheel on an even longer stick, having found out that with the same wheel, the longer stick helped the top spin longer (yet another aspect of size). then he was able to verbalize how one could test two different diameters of the same weight on the same length of stick, or two different weights of the same diameter on the same length of stick, to test the diamater vs weight concept.

“concept” is a word he is using quite frequently. his battle/dungeon/castle/mythology/pokemon story language is as lyrical as ever.

in the realm of d and d, he has me on a mission to defeat a dragon, who is guarding a treasure stolen by some orcs/goblins from the elf high council (my character is an elf and she is apparently a member of said council) and right now we are discussing an alternate plan, instead of killing the dragon, to get him on our side. i freed one of the original guards who wasn’t killed when the treasure was stolen but who was taken prisoner, so he informed me that the dragon has one scale missing over his heart and that’s his weakness and the way to kill him if i wanted to, but i suggested making the dragon a shield/artificial scale and offering it to him in trade for the treasure (agreeing to set him free in the process) but then it turned out one of the orcs has the missing scale (made of mithril) and is using it as a shield so before i face the dragon the new plan is to go kill the orc with the missing scale and bring it to the dragon to return it as a peace offering.

and the experience of actually playing d and d is a lot like an incredibly long run-on sentence, so i’m going to leave that exactly how it is.

 

there was more work to be done these past months on the theme of advocating for himself. quinn arrived at the conclusion after one frustrating karate session (frustrating because of a missed week of class, and because he had forgotten the techniques he had learned the previous week) that he was disappointed about not being brought to karate at least once during his dad’s weeks. we had a pretty good conversation about how he, quinn, has a lot more power to change that than i do, and how he would be wise to communicate his wishes to his dad.

karate has provided a plethora of opportunities for self-advocating and initiative practice. our sifu believes in letting the kids have space to learn how to initiate their own advancement through curriculum; this implicitly allows them space to flounder, until they realize they are in charge of their own destiny. i very much appreciate this, and have had numerous discussions with quinn about this dynamic; such as discussing how open mat classes allow an ideal time to “bug sifu” for a new technique, given the smaller class size and therefore increased availability on the instructor’s part. children deal with so much powerlessness, and i want to teach quinn how to use what power he does have, teach him that, “it is what you make of it” and the structure of self-paced learning at karate is helping him see how much control he can have over his learning.

both his classroom this year at school, and his dojo, are achieving some of the educational priorities i hold nearest and dearest, such as connection with his teachers and a sense of belonging.

though my favorite memory this month is not my shoulder injury, one bright spot in that particular evening at the dojo was the way quinn rushed to help me with carrying my bag, and holding doors for me.

one morning we parked at school several minutes early so quinn sat on my lap and snuggled while we finished a deathly hallows chapter. when i turned it off and took the keys out of the ignition, quinn tried to take them back, then got this twinkle in his eye and said, “i’ll roll you for your keys!” and i laughed so hard. our sifu uses that particular choice bit of slang (and other good ones… “you talkin’ mess?” for example… when he’s creating a scenario for using a given self defense technique). sifu had joked the previous night to quinn, about his new day-glow safety green karate hoodie, “i’ll roll you for that hoodie” but having q use it on me (and immediately start giggling uncontrollably) was hilarious.

and i will leave you with one final gem from the school spring concert, during which such rites of passage as 50 nifty united states, found a peanut, and the rattlin’ bog were sung. but this one really says it all!

 

~rainbow mondays~ a happy return of the day!

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i spent part of spring break on wedding projects, including dying and cutting the fabric for prayer flags i am asking my guests to help decorate.

checking items off the to-do list feels pretty good!

i also gave my rainbow jar/flower plan a test run, even though i didn’t have any orange or green flowers yet to work with.

 

my son requested that i buy him a set of the yoga cards his teacher uses in class. i felt like this particular card was a sign that it was a good addition to our library. he has been setting up flows for me to do with him ever since they arrived.

rainbow tidepool creatures from a low tide walk with a good friend on sunday… with sunshine! on my birthday weekend, i couldn’t have asked for nicer weather for our walk!

red: sunlit crab in the shallows

red: another, larger sunlit crab!

red: gooseneck barnacles are not often seen on land, as they often grow on pelagic flotsam. we saw a cluster on the beach yesterday, looking like they’d just arrived from outer space.

orange: crabs seemed to be prevalent!

orange: including hermit crabs! i loved this little guy perched on the baby orange urchin.

orange: as part of my pre-birthday celebrating, i tested for my orange belt! had an awesome test alongside some inspiring young women.

yellow: test day, the last day of my previous belt rank of yellow.

yellow: and one of my first days of sparring. i was dreading it, but it turned out to be very fun!

yellow: a friday night outing with some girlfriends included a fun dessert, which came with sparkler candle! the friend who took this pointed out my angel over in the lower right corner.

green: minecraft, irl! (in real life, with real bricks.)

green: more sparkly twinkles. dew on clover.

green: twisting dragon pose!

green and blue: sharing smores with camp boss!

blue: smiley face rock!

blue: eagles always visit us at this beach. this was a juvenile.

purple: we picked up some trash from the tidepools, but some trash has become a growing surface, like this sparkly red plastic. i had reached in, ascertained that it was not one to be removed due to baby sea urchin, and stooped lower to take this picture before i saw the sculpin lurking in complete stillness! they are incredible at hide and seek.

purple: still quite sparse after the wasting disease that diminished their population to almost nothing, we did see a hopeful handful of sea stars.

purple: sea urchins with tube feet visible!

purple: some of my birthday flowers, and another purple birthday present, from sparring. it looks much worse than it feels!

purple beauties.

purple: crocuses in the terrace garden. i’ve always loved the stripey ones!

red violet: speaking of stripey, the trilliums are beginning to do their magical color change trick. trilliums in red violet, 3 petals on the 3rd of april, a lovely birthday present!

white: but a few of them are still white, providing a nice camouflage substrate for the cute white spider.

~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

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

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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.“