I am feeling grateful for Rich again (it’s fine if I repeat myself, I make the rules). But also, been thinking about the man who raised him, and missing him today.
11/27/20
~30 days of gratitude~ day 27
I am grateful for good men. It is a gratefulness saturated with grief today. I am listening to the good man I am married to talking to his Aunt on the phone to let her know her brother, his father, passed away today. My father-in-law was the wonderful man responsible for raising the wonderful man I love. I am so sad, and wanted to let tonight be a moment of silence, but I decided to google gratitude and grief… and here is what Brené Brown says:
“Gratitude is vulnerability. I’ve had the honor of sitting across from people who have survived tremendous things. No matter what the trauma was, they said: “when those around me are grateful for what they have, I know they understand the magnitude of what I’ve lost”. So often we’re afraid to be grateful for what we have because we think it’s insensitive to those who have lost. However I think gratitude, in some ways, is healing for people.”
I always loved to be the one to make Bob a cup of coffee or pop open a beer for him, on the extremely rare occasions he’d indulge in either one. Tonight we toasted him using the glasses he gave us, and I imagine some popcorn will be popped in his honor in the next couple of days. (Yet another divine thing he is responsible for teaching my husband.) I’m posting one of my favorite photos of our dads from our wedding. I am so very grateful for the memories we get to carry forward with us, of this good man.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 28
11/28/25
Rich and I took a walk in our woods down to the bayou today. Moss, trickling water, bright orange fungus, a newt. I got to thinking about frogs again. Earlier this year, I worked with a film crew who needed access to arctic cod eggs, and who had tracked down our lab. Before I met them, I did not know we were literally the only lab in the world—World!—with arctic cod of age and healthy enough to spawn. The guy behind the camera told a story about another time he was standing inside a freezer, only he was filming a frog that was fully frozen as it began to thaw. I had not been aware of frozen frogs, but it’s an adaptation that wood frogs and a few other species have: to send sugar into their veins to protect their blood, and let their bodies succumb to freezing. For the winter. It sounds approximately like my worst nightmare, as adaptations go, and I can’t help but wonder if it hurts?
It’s another shining example of the vulnerability of frogs. Imagine shutting down your metabolism, all the processes in your body, losing your vision. Imagine your heart stops beating, and you’re just a frogsicle in the moss, waiting for spring.
I sometimes think I wouldn’t mind going fully dark for winter and waking up when spring comes. Sometimes my heart has had enough, and wouldn’t mind taking a long winter’s nap. But we humans have our adaptations, too. We have strategies for coping, bayou walks for grounding, friends to help us hold it all.
I liked hearing how the camera was zoomed in on the transparent eye of the frozen frog, fixated on one motionless red blood cell, which then began to move along the blood vessel as the frog thawed, and then more blood cells came along behind it. I am grateful for the astounding abundance of examples in the natural world of survivors.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 29
11/29/25
I am grateful for granddaughters and games!
~30 days of gratitude~ day 30
11/30/25 (observed 12/1)
Last year’s gratitude mascot was our friend the glowing deep sea nudibranch, who inspired us to send beams of light out from our soft, transparent hearts from the deepest darkness.
This year, I’ve spent some of the month of November grounding, kneeling on earth, being closer to the moss. I’ve painted a moss-colored writing nook, contemplated mole tunnels. And this year’s mascot, also close to the soil, has been frogs. Cold and wet, absorbent and vulnerable, but with secret powers. Brumation. Slowing down her heart and allowing it to freeze, knowing even this cannot prevent her survival.
Most years there is a lot of light threaded through gratitude season. This one has felt darker than most. This year there has been light, too, but it required effort to seek it out.
I was pretty sure we were out of luck when it came to frogs making their own light. And, in a way, that’s true. But I did look into it, just in case of metaphors. It turns out, with frogs being mostly nocturnal, they do have reason to attempt to use light to their advantage. But unlike a deep-sea nudibranch creating light within her own cells, frogs have a different strategy.
In blue light, the kind of eerie light that is most abundant at dusk, some frogs biofluoresce. It’s a little different from bioluminescence, like sea slugs and fireflies. Instead of making chemical light themselves, they absorb all the dwindling, cool, blue light of the gathering dark, and send it back out from themselves in a slightly greener, more glowing form.
Nobody knew much about this until five years ago. Our eyes aren’t really equipped to see it. But then some scientists took their blue flashlights out among the cold, dark, dampness. When the effect is exaggerated enough, the human eye can see glowing patterns and colors in frog skin. They found 151 more species that carry this trait. Every frog they shined on, shined back.
Maybe it is still worthwhile gathering even the smallest shards of dim light in the dark times.
Some experts point out that this doesn’t prove the feature has a purpose. Many species aside from frogs biofluoresce for no reason we can reason out. But others note that frogs with big eyes and extra rod cells on their retinas are equipped to see each other’s subtle glow. We don’t know if they use the information, or how, but it’s an open possibility.
The parts of frogs that glow were most often their spots, their undersides, and their throats. Parts involved in communication. It might mean some complicated signaling is going on. A frog friend network that they can see, but that predators may not. It might mean simply: “Here I am. I’m here.”
And it takes exposure to specific lighting conditions for this message to go out. For it to be received.
As it happens, this set of conditions does provide a perfect metaphor for the light of this November. It has taken more effort this year, for me, to gather the small parcels of light that I can still find in the gathering darkness. And I am not saying that I am doing any type of glowing right now, but what I am trying to say is: I am here.
And all month long, as I’ve come to be able to count on, for TEN years, my friends, you have been here, too. Glowing back at me: here you are. And I’m grateful for you being here.
I am grateful to have Quinn home, where he can up his apple-peeling game.
~30 days of gratitude~ days 24 and 25
11/24 and 25/23
Giving myself two days of gratitude credit, because I was away from my laptop for a full twenty-four hours (and I know it’s unusual, but I don’t use Facebook on my phone). I am grateful for the uniquely special relationships you can come across in blended families. There is something so refreshing about a four-year-old saying, “Nana, can you ask Quinn if he will play Candyland with me?” In earshot of the sixteen-year-old, who says, “Sure!” without reservation, and then they go play. Something extra tender about the way the sixteen-year-old knows how to play up what a tricky hiding spot the four-year-old has hidden in this time, during hide-and-seek. It reminds me of when the sixteen-year-old was just barely five and cheering on the college track athlete, yelling along with her teammates to “push it, girl!” and how she was totally game to color with him in his dinosaur coloring book in the stands after her race. Now he is showing her daughter how to dig up dinosaur bones in a phone app, and trots along by her side in the park as she pedals her princess bike with training wheels.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 26
11/26/23
I am grateful for these brothers of mine, this year and every year. I’d be grateful just for their excellent brotherness, but they are also superb in the department of uncleness. I hear B’s laugh and T’s sense of humor in my kid, and it was sure nice of them to share.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 27
11/27/23
It was just four days into my first year ever of writing gratitude posts when I first declared my gratitude for “sleeping kitties purring near the crackling fire.” One of the things that has hit home for me during this eighth grateful year is that gratitude does not stop or even slow down time. My kitties were so much younger then, and this year, their age suddenly showed. Three years ago, I included this Brené Brown quote in my gratitude post, and it still resonates.
“Gratitude is vulnerability. I’ve had the honor of sitting across from people who have survived tremendous things. No matter what the trauma was, they said: ‘when those around me are grateful for what they have, I know they understand the magnitude of what I’ve lost.’ So often we’re afraid to be grateful for what we have because we think it’s insensitive to those who have lost. However I think gratitude, in some ways, is healing for people.”
It was earlier that day that my father-in-law had died. There have been a fair few November nights over these years when I have felt daunted by my commitment to keep on showing up to reflect on what I’m grateful for. Two years ago, November arrived just as we returned from Oklahoma following my mother-in-law’s death. This November I spoke at a gathering of Don’s friends and family because Don died earlier this year. In these times it’s not that hard to access gratitude, it’s more that it’s hard to rein it in, to narrow it down, to not feel compelled to attempt to reckon with every single thing about a person’s whole life for which I feel gratitude. Those nights when nachos, while a great dinner option, cannot be the subject of the post because there is too too too much else.
As I sit here deciding what I’m grateful for tonight, I keep glancing over at Lisa kitty where she is lying stretched out on the cushion in front of the wood stove, and I stare for a minute to see if the fur on her belly is still lifting with another breath. She has let me give her four baths now. On the last one, she barely complained, but lay in front of me, letting me wring warm washcloths across her back. If you know Lisa like we do, you know she curses like a sailor, dropping f-bombs every other meow, so this submissiveness was telling. Last night she climbed on my lap and let me pet her for a good hour or more, though she has been extra solitary lately, crawling into a box or a drawer for long stretches of hours. But after work tonight she greeted Rich with meows to hurry up and light the fucking fire, then curled up in front of it. It feels meaningful that she is here with us this evening, front and center by the warm crackling fire, in our midst, for a wee bit longer.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 28
11/28/23
Lisa held on until this morning, but before I went to work, she took her last breath. Rest well, sweet kitty, I will miss you.
I am grateful that work asked so very little of me today, other than to absorb research talks about Pacific cod, one of my fish loves, so basically I watched tv about Alaska and flashed back to my summer wilderness time in Kodiak. Some nice escapism. Usually my job asks much more in a day; on Monday I tagged fish—performed thirty-one minor surgeries—before lunch. Today, light duty, but lots of brain engagement, which was what I needed.
And my friend of the uncanny impromptu casserole timing nailed it again, so that after I got home an hour late after driving home the long way to avoid the accident bogging down traffic, dinner was already made. (I’m looking at you, camp boss.) So grateful.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 29
11/29/23
I am grateful for this month of sunrises. Every November marks a new beginning for me, ever since I started doing this crazy thing. Sunrise seems a fitting symbol, and the ones I’ve witnessed this month, including this morning, have been exquisite.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 30
11/30/23
It has been a month. I sprinkled some seeds on our Lisa kitty’s grave this afternoon, to get a nice soaking now that our rain is setting in, so some wildflowers can start rooting in before spring. Three years ago, I said this about seeds: “If I had a theme this year it might be the seeds of gratitude planted in the gratitude garden, and how they are an investment in my future nourishment. Whenever I notice and appreciate the snuggly kitty on my lap, the warmth emanating from the wood stove, or my hardworking husband coming home from work, it’s another seed in the seed bank. These dormant spirals of potential, storing an idea for next year, waiting it out through the harsh conditions of winter. So many adaptations to fly, float, cling, catapult, shake, or shatter, to make sure they deliver on the promise of future abundance.”
It hasn’t been all eulogies and graves this November. It has also been Candyland and apple peels, sunrises and sunsets, yard kittens and mini writing retreats, nachos and casseroles, twinkle lights and wood stove fires, warm towels and heirloom apples, poems and bay road drives, garlic bread and ocean soundscapes. I’ve been warmed, fed, cheered on, cheered up. A chorus of voices of complementary gratitude has sung out from all of you who climbed on the gratitude bus with me for yet another year. I’m so grateful to begin winter once again from this gratitude grounding.
There is a cavity left behind when a sea urchin dies, and sometimes other things come in to attempt to fill it. They don’t fill the spaces in the same way; maybe they glue themselves to the ceiling of the empty grotto and extend fleshy tentacles when the tide is in; maybe they snail along the walls grazing any newly settled algae; but they aren’t the purple spiky echinoderm that is made to fill such a hole.
Two – cardboard box boats
I’m not sure what got Quinn thinking of Baby Kitty one night, but he was sad he couldn’t remember her very much, only where we buried her. I offered to send him some photos, and he liked that idea. The following night we talked about how kitty was in the background of so many photos of him, like one where he is in the foreground inside a box boat. I remembered him taking A Lot of Otters into his box boats with him to read. The child in the book is also in a box boat.
I pulled A Lot of Otters off the bookshelf and read it to him over our video call. The basic plot premise is that Mother Moon and her child become separated, her tears fall into the ocean and become stars, the otters play with the stars and draw her attention to the child by concentrating their light, and she and the child are reunited.
“Mother moon was looking for her child…”
Three – my arms
That night I had a dream about hugging Quinn again, finally, when this is all over, and when I hugged him in the dream he was so much bigger than me.
Four – mothers’ hearts
A local mother delivered her baby still born. I imagine a fresh space prepared for this babe, like an empty sea urchin grotto painted pink, and now a closed door tries to hold back the tidal wave of love reserved for this little one it cannot be showered upon. Suspended in an impossible position, this mother whose face I know, this friend of friends, carrying this staggering weight of this love she cannot bestow, carrying breasts heavy with milk with whom she can nurture no one. Full where she should be empty, empty where she should be full. If my grief cries tears into the ocean to turn into stars to light my way to reunite with my child, her grief must be the kind that fills the ocean basin from bottom to top.
Five – guinea pig kennels
Quinn’s talk of pet grief seems prophetic and he is now missing one of his beloved guinea pigs. Ms. B and Squeaky came to him when he was seven. I couldn’t sit with him through the night as he held Ms. B in his lap and worried, or hold him the next day after she passed away. On our video call that night I read him a long meditation I had written in which a guinea pig stood on a bridge crossing over a stream, not knowing how else to bring him comfort from far away and defaulting to using my words as usual.
“You cannot see what is on the other side of the stream, you can only see that this side is very lush and beautiful, surrounded by forest, but a thick fog hides the opposite bank from your view. You can see little rainbows appear here and there as the sunbeams sneak through the trees and touch the fog. It’s a beautiful mystery on that other side.”
He turned off his web cam while he listened to the visualization of Ms B crossing the bridge to the other side.
Six – forests and homes
Oregon is on fire. The winds on Monday night took out trees and power lines and brought fire and smoke and landslides to even our coastal community where we can no longer take our position beside the sea in a rain forest for granted. Breathing carcinogenic air for days intersects with the health concerns we already face and I find that this situation is helping neither my breath holding tendencies nor my anxiety. I checked the folder with the important documents, though I will probably continue pacing my house, looking out at the orange sky, looking at items and wondering which ones I would grab if we were to be evacuated, too.
I know people who had to grab their house cats in the middle of the night and get out with their lives. There are so many more who I do not know. I try not to feel sorry for myself that my overnight backpacking plans with Quinn have been postponed.
Hundreds of geese huddled along the edge of the bay as we drove through foggy smoke after picking up pizza for date night at home. Robins had sat in the grass all day looking stunned. So much dryness. So much stillness after such a turbulent wind. The lawn crunched under my feet as I pick pears up off the ground, embarrassed by the plenty falling into my hands while others are losing everything, or still waiting to hear the outcomes of their everything.
The next morning I couldn’t take the pacing anymore and flipped a hundred pancakes for evacuees sheltering in a church.
Seven – farmer’s markets
Even when farmer’s markets have been canceled in the past, my farm would still show up, in full marine foul weather gear, and sell tomatoes and cauliflower and bundles of fresh parsley out of the truck as cold rain fell in sheets and we sipped hot drinks from thermoses. This week, we did not sell any tomatoes, the markets and even the harvest were paused while we all held our breath and prayed for that manner of rain to fall.
Eight – aquarium exhibits
Max lived thirty years – a long sea lion life – but it still makes me cry that he is dead now, too. My toddler would point him out to tourists back when we had an annual membership to the aquarium and went there regularly, and they’d remark on my son’s lengthy attention span and articulate commentary about Max’s activities during the daily feeding routine. Other children would peel off after thirty seconds and Quinn would stay, narrate, re-enact, commune with Max, beyond even the attention span of the adults. I wonder if Max is finally allowed to be released back into the sea, but I have doubts.
I can’t bring myself to tell Quinn about this fresh heartbreak.
Three parties and a dance, not bad for a birthday month!
Quinn got to have a sleepover on Sunday of MLK day weekend. Sunday afternoon Aragorn invited Quinn, Legolas and Goldberry over, and they played D&D. He described some of the action to me, and a lot of it seemed to center around Legolas’s character’s tendency to eat foreign objects in his environment, which strangely is a tendency the real-life Legolas has been known to exhibit. His character got eaten by whale, only to eat the whale from the inside out, and so on. It sounded like Quinn had a ton of fun. Goldberry of course left before sleepover time, but I love that she was there up until that time. I suggested to Quinn that he could invite the three of them for D&D on his Sunday birthday, but of course without sleepover since there will be school that Monday.
Pancake W came for a visit (Christmas observed)! She loves Quinn so much. She wanted to eat his Hawaiian burger, used him to push herself up to standing a million times, held onto him for balance, crawled over to him and climbed onto his lap while they played with the big duplo legos.
He is so good with her, and she already adores him like B and Z seem to do. He is a big enough kid now that he is game to build things for her to deconstruct, because that is the phase she is in developmentally. As soon as he heard that, he built structures all night for her to take apart. He just laughed as she opened his Christmas present for him. Rich and I reminisced about how he was a bit less flexible when B was the baby pancake deconstructionist, and Quinn was only five. Q got a lesson in backgammon from his brother in law; my game knowledge is finite, so it’s good he has a large pool of adults to glean games from!
Another find-out-at-last-minute middle school dance, this time Rio theme. He said, “I think bright colors?” I loaned him my Hawaiian shirt that I bought in Fiji twenty years ago which FITS HIM and he put on his gray owl hoodie over it and no one ever saw what he wore. He said Goldberry wore all black, the boys just wore their normal stuff but friend M wore light blue. Apparently, M and Legolas are “together” so that was the big deal of the evening.
same shirt size, but his hands are now wider than mine.
mammoth tooth
baby mammoth femur
coprolites!
We went to “fossil fest” at the marine science visitors center. Quinn spoke with a few people who have found some cool fossils in Oregon, including mammoth teeth and bones, parts from sharks and turtles. He had me take pictures of coprolites and some of the fossils and send them all to him. One guy gave us his card to call him so we can send Quinn floating down the Yamhill river with him looking for fossils (including snorkeling – which inspired some “I’d better practice snorkeling!” on the way home) over the summer.
Lots of building lego robots this month. Still to come: the programming of said robots!
We got to go to a friend’s birthday party being hosted by Goldberry’s mom, and when I asked if 13 year old boys were wanted at this party, Goldberry’s mom said “Goldberry would love to hang out with Quinn.” I had been wanting to connect with their family more… they are also theatre folks (Goldberry’s mom was dear sugar in tiny beautiful things). I let them know Goldberry was invited to Quinn’s birthday party in two weeks and they said she can come!
The biggest deal of the weekend (for me) was Quinn started independently cleaning his room! I mentioned on Friday that he’d probably want to think about cleaning it this weekend, since when he gets home the next time, it will be time for his birthday party and having room for friends would be good. After we got home from the party he really started turning onto the idea of cleaning, and Sunday he worked at it a whole bunch. “I knew how to clean a room, I just chose not to.” He’s being thorough, putting things in reasonable places, pulling things off his desk, organizing it, making it so he can use the surface again, organizing legos into their cases, thorough. All this time I’ve been invested in my hippie approach of not nagging/requiring room cleaning with the optimistic hope that one day self-motivation would actually occur. It is a wonder to behold. He’s doing it cheerfully!!!!!
It may seem that not much academic learning is going on; it is, and it’s not that it’s unremarkable to speak about, it’s that time is racing by. I have these funny images of Quinn letting me know how he knew the exact dimensions of the unit of measurement “hogshead” and if I had not taken them, I would have completely forgotten the hilarious memorization moment of him showing me the inside cover of a composition book.
We had a Friday night karate class with Sifu Diaz (our sifu’s sifu).
Then a Saturday trip to go to a birthday party for pancake W. Cuteness overload, and a special big sister got Quinn and her little W each their own special giant birthday cupcake. She said, “I hope he likes lemon…” it’s only his favorite!
His friends are so cool. Goldberry showed up first, just before 2:00. She was so sweet, “your house is so nice! I love it here!” and loved our cats, too. She did the same with Quinn’s room, “oh your room is so awesome!” and he gave her the tour of his (clean!) room. I was still baking cookies but eavesdropping of course. She gave him a card and a pack of peeps! “I didn’t know what to get you for a present!” I thought her choice was perfect.
Legolas came next, and his present was also food: ramen! Ahh, he must have had good memories of last year’s Naruto/ramen birthday. Then Aragorn showed up, and he gave Quinn a tiny 3D printed D&D figurine.
Then the snack bowl emptying/D&D playing began, and Aragorn had my guitar in his hand as soon as I gave him permission to use it and apologized for the old strings and out-of-tuneness. He can play quite a few tunes! After they worked on their characters (and emptied all the snack bowls) for a while, they took a break and went out and swept off the trampoline and jumped.
They came back and worked on characters some more, the conversation was entertaining. Quinn was being dungeon master (“DMing” is the lingo) but the other three were making characters. Legolas had John the paladin who apparently ate his family. Goldberry worked on her dragon-born bard Bob, who played death metal on his ukulele. Aragorn didn’t have a character because he had been DM the other times they played, so he made up Swaylor Tift, a ranger. “My backstory is yes,” he announced. They drew stick figures of their characters in the box provided, and Legolas and Aragorn both had pretty pathetic drawings, but the banter about their stick people was gold: “he missed leg day; he has muscles on his muscles; he has a keleven-pack….” just hilarious. One of them said something about Bob, I don’t know which pronouns were used (male for Bob or female for Goldberry?) but she responded, “don’t assume my character’s gender!”
There were singalongs galore. All star, Africa, Bohemian rhapsody, etc….
At dusk, the teens just came inside briefly to stack pizza on plates and take it back out to the trampoline – it was dark out! I couldn’t help feeling like they’re such teens already!!!! Wahhhh! I finally lured them inside with ice cream and lemon cookies, and every one of them had seconds. All cookies gone.
After they left, I asked Quinn if he wanted to blow out candles but he said that he had done that the day before, and one wish is enough, but that lit candles would be nice. He finished his thirteenth birthday reading by candlelight.
Quinn spent a ton of time playing with his Turing Tumble set the weekend he got home for Thanksgiving. He told me his math teacher has posters up in her room and one of them is a quote by Albert Einstein that says, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” And he said he really could relate to that. He had me sit with him a lot while he worked on the puzzles he is working on – they are getting insanely complicated, and I am almost no help at all, except I am also willing to sit with it longer, with him. So he has gotten a lot of the algorithms solved (such an amazing game/toy/puzzle/brain stretcher/birthday present) and he feels really great when he achieves one, (I think he is about halfway through the 65 activities) but often there is a period of “I’ll never get this one” just before he cracks the code. He is starting to see that pattern, too, so it makes it easier to trust he will be able to solve it if he stays with it. I love how it is encouraging him to persevere.
While he was sitting with one of the algorithms, he was telling me how it was “just a variation” on the puzzle before, because it was based on registers and counting in binary. You know, like (and he started counting on his fingers… in binary.) My jaw dropped, and he said, “I learned that from Vi.” Of course! (I was not sure how to do justice in words to the amazingness I was witnessing, so I made him do it again on video!)
We had W pancake among family members who came for Thanksgiving, and I just love how she appointed Quinn as her agent. She would need someone to transport something from her hand over to her mom, and she would just glance at Quinn and gesture, and he would jump to do her silent bidding. She crawls over to sit on his lap, completely assured he is one of her people. It reminds me of the way Quinn was sure about Rich’s daughter wanting to color dinosaurs with him when he was five and she was in college.
He was telling someone that all the 7th graders are drinking coffee “these days” and they say it’s what they need to wake up in the morning. He said he thinks because his mom and dad both like it so much, he may like it one day, too, but for now he doesn’t want to drink any. It came up again when we were at home, and it spawned a great conversation about different wiring. He said “caffeine makes people all wired and hyper,” at one point, and I said well, that’s mostly true, but one way you can tell if a person has ADHD is if you feed them caffeine and they calm down – it has the opposite effect on them, because of their brain wiring. So he thought that was fascinating, and it launched a whole other conversation about misunderstandings or misconceptions of what peoples’ learning differences are, and how people think “talented and gifted” means a person should easily have all A grades, and how they don’t realize that there are some things that are really a struggle for him even though he is talented and gifted. I thought it was interesting to hear him identify that way!
We did a lot of logic puzzles this week. We do them a lot while we eat. Sometimes the clues are roundabout and you have to go over them a bunch of times as you accumulate new information in order to make sense of them. And other times a clue will just say “the person who ate toast is not Janet” and you can rule something out directly. Quinn said of one of these clues, “well that was explict” pronounced like I just typed it: “explikt” and I knew he meant explicit so I said explicit, and he said, “it’s not explict?” And I wrote it down so he could see the second i, and he said, “oh, well, in plants vs. zombies, they left out the second i. (Note to self, he learns words from video games! Not just books.)
He is SO LARGE. He needed hugs and snuggles this week, and I do my best but it is hard to actually let him on my lap… I still do, but I basically give him a very short countdown from ten. We invented a “snug” which is a cross between hug and snuggle, it’s not standing, it’s sitting on me, but it’s very, very brief. When we have time, we do longer snuggles on the couch with either his legs or torso draped over me, but not both.
I am reading the self-driven child, a good book recommended on the tilt parenting podcast. This week I was getting to the chapter on radical down time, and how important it is for learning and general well-being, and how we need to stop jam packing our children’s schedules and managing their downtime like, “shouldn’t you be doing SAT test prep if you don’t have something to do right now?” Instead we should say, “let’s snug.”
I just love watching his biweekly swim lesson. He is the absolute most awkward swimmer the world has ever seen and is so earnest and so into working on improving! This was the first time she attempted to teach him backstroke! He has been working on front crawl for a few lessons now, and he is impressively gangly at it so far, but she figured she’d try backstroke. The first attempt on his back, his arms were still going forward so he just folded in half and sank to the bottom. The next attempts were comically awkward too, but he improved each time. He would get his arms kind of going, but then lean his head too far back and reverse somersault and go under. He would get his arms kind of going but get stuck and you could see his arm pause mid stroke so he could think what his other arm needed to do… long pauses. He’d sometimes roll onto his side or go under again, because of whatever he ended up doing with whichever arm. He was working on the hands so his elbow would be bent at a 90 degree angle, or he’d work on the arms but just get stuck in the middle. His teacher is so good with him. And he just kept going back and starting again.
When he woke up Friday to do his math review he made it out of bed over to the couch and laid back down. He needed extra rest more than math review. Radical down time. So I encouraged him to not stress the math if he felt he could handle doing it over the weekend and he said he could. It crossed my mind he had seemed extra emotional and hungry all week, so I had him get up to the measuring station and put a new mark on the wall – sure enough, he is growing.
Friday was going to be committed cubs day, the second one of the year, and he missed the first one and sorely wanted to be included in it this time. He had a few assignments he needed to have teachers sign off on, and he did a lot to chip away at it over the course of the week, but got home Thursday night and was down because he had forgotten his one last signature, which he could have gotten during class because the assignment was finished. I let him problem solve, and he decided there was still a chance he could do it in the morning, and while that did not guarantee he could do CC day, he wanted to still try. He told me Mrs. F had said they would be free reading in class Friday so people could finish up assignments, and so his plan was to ask her right away to go see Mr B to get his last signature. He even put a post-it note in his book (Ender – speaker for the dead) right with the bookmark, so he would remember to do it even if he went to start doing his free reading. When he came out of school on Friday, he was so pleased because, “I made it in!”
Speaking of Ender, Quinn loved the concept of paired beings from the books. In the story, piggies are paired with trees as an adaptation to protect them from a planet-wide plague. Quinn stretched the concept to a human-star pairing.
I had encouraged him to speak his idea into a google doc so he could harness the way his brain is able to articulate ideas verbally much more quickly than he can get those ideas to come out of his typing fingers. I had been talking to him about the speech-to-text options on numerous occasions, but had not gotten him to try it yet, and this was the perfect opportunity. Here is my transcript of an audio recording I took as a backup while he was speaking into a doc:
“…And then once the star gets even stronger it would start smashing carbon into oxygen and once it gets to its strongest point which is usually right before it supernovas, it starts smashing oxygen into iron and I was thinking, well, if you created some sort of, like, could a man, could human beings create a man made star that could smash together stuff to create like an atom with a whole bunch of stuff like a whole bunch of protons and electrons and neutrons and then harness that… and this would be a star that’s the size of like a chrome book, it would be a really small star… like you could fit it in a fish tank… or in a drum. But then the star would create something like fermium atoms or something like that and the fermium atoms would then be used in like a nuclear laboratory or something like that and you would split the fermium atom into like a whole bunch of neutrons and protons and electrons, and you would use those neutrons and protons and electrons to basically make a whole bunch of atoms out of those separated piles of neutrons and protons and electrons. And then if the theory went right then it would become like speaker for the dead where all the animals on Lusitania are paired with a plant and they basically just coexist so it would be something like each human would create like their own star, their own personal little star the size of their chromebook, or their drum, if they have one, and then use their star to like get some fermium atoms, which they would split up, and then use those atom pieces to make more atoms to get the star bigger, and then like once the human dies of old age, the star should then be approximately the size of a human, and at that point the star would then use its power of making atoms to create another human, like create a new human child, at which point it would supernova and then that human child would grow up with its own personal star and so on and you could pair humans and stars… with like a weird biological bond but yeah… and then… yeah….”
“So that’s what you wanted to get out of your brain onto the page! Isn’t that awesome, look…”
“And I typed several paragraphs!”
“And so adams are going to have to change spelling so do this cool trick ready? Go up to edit on the bar, and go to the find and replace, find all “adam” and replace with “atom”. So if you said a word 50 times and it did them all the wrong way you can just replace.”
“You can replace all adams. And ‘madams’ haha.”
“’When sister gets even stronger’… I think it’s supposed to be ‘when the star’…..”
I wanted to capture a raw version of what it’s like trying to hang in there with this kid who is mashing up Ender’s game and the periodic table, contemplating the synthetic elements of the actinides series and seeing what he can do with them to advance the genre of science fiction! I’m trying to provide him some tools, fitting those in edgewise, trying to keep my head above the current as the absolutely torrential flood of imagination comes pouring out. This is a pretty great example of what it’s like.
This month had some sadness; Quinn’s friend Pippin is moving away.
His voice has lowered dramatically the past month or two. I am not hearing a lot of cracking, but what I have noticed is that his laugh remains a few octaves above his speaking voice. I do not know if he will keep that long term, but hearing him reminds me so much of my older brother’s voice and laugh right now, the way he speaks in a mellow tenor but his laugh reaches up to tickle the rafters. My brother’s laugh is one of my very favorite laughs in the world, and one of my very favorite things about him, and it would not be a disappointment if Quinn inherited this trait. Even if it is for a temporary period, I’m thoroughly enjoying the way his laughs ring in the air, jingling like the bells at the upper reach of his mallets, perhaps because they contrast so with his new low speaking register in the timpani section.
At his band concert, his teacher made a brief intro of the first song, little drummer boy, saying they did have one of those (M is very small), and also a not-so-little drummer boy, and a drummer girl. Mine is the not-so-little one! He was on the snare drum for all three songs! And he was absolutely wonderful! He played both with and without the snares engaged (the beginning of little drummer boy starts out with it disengaged and sounding like a tom). He played some pretty complicated parts! Triplets, rolls, lots of variations. He did so well! He was holding so still for the first song I wasn’t convinced he was drumming, but then on the several measures he was not playing but counting, he bopped around just like he used to when he was playing sleigh bells last year. I think the rhythms he was playing were seriously challenging, enough to really keep him on his toes!
Last weekend was Turing tumble, this weekend was Rubik’s cube!
He worked on his cube for the entire day Saturday while I was at farmer’s market, and solved it. By the time I got home, he was a pro. If you watch that very long video, you can see him solve it again, and if you notice he is not pleased, it is because he “figured out” that there are “multiple solves” to the cube, based on the orientation of the Rubik’s emblem on the white face of the cube; there is a solution where it is right side up, and if you have it in the stand you can see red, yellow, blue. Apparently, he spent a good part of the day after solving it his first time, trying to get it solved to that solution, and it was thwarting him. Because perfectionism. But also because of staying with the problem longer.
After farmer’s market we went to get a Christmas tree. After we chose our tree and the helper had set it into our truck, Rich went to pay, but Quinn noticed the tree wasn’t all the way tucked in so the tailgate would close. Quinn jumped up and angled the trunk where it needed to go in the one corner so the top would go in the opposite corner and not stick out the back. I love it when I see him take initiative to fix something or do a job that needs doing, without being asked or having it pointed out at all.
When we got home I asked him to work on cleaning up his room a little bit so that his Turing tumble could move from the living room back to his room to make room for the tree. He just jumped right to it, no complaints, and organized some of his Jurassic park legos that he had out on the floor into a lego box, and put the instruction booklets into the right section of the accordion file, etc., again without me having to point out or assist with these steps.
In his video production elective, he learned about a fun music making module in chrome. For science he had to make a poster about an element in the periodic table, so he picked boron. He really liked the boron entry in his elements book.
He worked on cubing quite a bit more, and he also sent me a bunch of texts about wanting to collect all the different ones. He has the standard 3×3 one, but wants to get 2×2 next, then 4×4, 5×5 etc up to 11×11. Then and only then does he want to get the triangle and other shape ones.
Handmade solstice present for his dad.
I feel grateful for having gone through what we did when Quinn was little, and approaching learning in a self-driven way from the start, because he ended up knowing the difference between school and learning, and still knows it. Otherwise I doubt he would spend weekends doing hard puzzles, or light up like a Christmas tree this morning when I said “I’ve heard you can program robots to solve Rubik’s cubes” as we drove to school. The boy has a lego robotics kit coming to him for Christmas, so I know future weekends will be occupied with such things.
Finally, for the grand finale this month, Quinn rocked his Half green belt test!
Late july… TAG program had finished, nobody was visiting, the dojo was closed, it wasn’t time for theatre camp yet, and the only thing quinn had that week was 2 afternoon swim lessons. it was some much needed down time. We got to do things like family boating and have the family of camp boss came over to bounce. q binge listened to audio books to catch up on the wings of fire series- i took him to the library to get a few books (actual ones with pages) and it reminded him of series he wants to continue.
pancakes
our pancakes visited! they seem like they are getting so big… until i see them next to quinn! He truly grew so very tall this past year. We all went to Arr place for breakfast, and then played at the big pirate ship playground. We flew kites at the beach, and went home for spaghetti dinner. Quinn is still branching out little by little with foods, and instead of his normal plain noodles with only parmesan on top, requested his noodles “lightly stained” with sauce.
Laptop repair
quinn made it through last school year using my old laptop, but by the end he was limping along with a cracked screen which would cause glitches (it is touch screen so the cracked area would act like it was the place being touched instead of wherever you were navigating with the actual mouse). after a tiny bit of research i spent $20 on a new screen/digitizer and one evening we took it apart, and the next morning we finished putting it back together! and turned it on! and it worked! It is hard to overstate how pleased we were with ourselves! It now acts as just a standard screen and no longer does touchscreen, so there might be a loose connection but the touch screen feature is not necessary. just the fact that it runs and didn’t completely get broken beyond repair by my repair is a win. Hurray for a second year of school with this laptop (fingers crossed) for $20!
Here he is putting in the last screw, whooping when it actually turned on, and then testing minecraft to enjoy the lack of glitches!
it’s been kind of nice that his laptop was under the weather. i didn’t rush to fix it for summer and i think he spent more time unplugged because of it. he used it some when it wasn’t acting up, but would eventually lose patience with glitches and do off screen playing.
reciprocity
he has days where he is not always up for conversation and will just silent treatment me. not in a mean way, it just seems he is inside there percolating. fixing the laptop screen was a fun activity together and we had a couple of good nights at karate, as he has been learning his green belt techniques, so it’s not all surliness. sifu was joking with him, “who is this person named quinn, we used to have a student named quinn a long time ago but he hasn’t been here in a long time,” and quinn was a little quiet then too, and at the end as we were leaving and sifu was concluding, “it’s just that i missed you and i’m glad you’re here.” Quinn was still quiet so i said, “and i missed you too, sifu.” i think our theme for 7th grade might be reciprocity… it covers the need for reliable two-way communication on the phone that lau and i talked about on the florida beach over smoothie bowls (memories!) and i have established is an area i want to see growth in; and reciprocity also covers being polite and, well, reciprocal in conversations (even if he didn’t feel like saying “i missed you too” then i still want him to say something that acknowledges the other person has spoken.
We had a reciprocity conversation in the car soon after that and i explained my thoughts on the phone and conversational aspects and said it’s my goal for him for 7th grade (like kitchen lunch making skills were a focus in 5th grade). he understood and seemed cheerful about it all. he hadn’t checked his phone since the previous morning, and he pulled it out to check and had messages from aragorn. he and aragorn are forming their band, naming it “the poets” and the song they want to learn right now is seven nation army (the white stripes). i know come as you are (anyone here familiar with the band nirvana?) is also on their list to learn.
sneakers and the perception of coolness
another interesting topic arose around shoe buying… he wanted the same exact pair (saucony raptor) of running shoes as last year (still resists change as a general rule), but since he can’t (all i can find is a size 14) i looked up some other saucony and found a cool looking black pair with “slime” lime green accents, totally his color. i showed him, and he seemed to like them, but then he told me he wasn’t that excited about shoe buying because he’d still be uncool. Hold up, what? He explained, it’s the middle school thing where you have to have the In Brand of things and it’s all some kids talk about… so i asked what brand was cool last year, and he said it was Nike. i said, “well here’s the thing. i wear nikes because my feet are narrow. your feet are wide, so they might be wrong for your feet. but if you want to get nikes we can try, but i want you to try them on at the store first.” he was sort of relieved, “you mean they’re not too expensive?” and i said, “a lot of nikes are too expensive, but there are some i can afford, you would have to choose from those.” as we scrolled through them online so he saw the $8000 air jordans and the $75 dollar air pegasus (the ones i get). so a spinoff conversation happened about perceived coolness, how it changes later on into wanting to be set apart from others instead of being just like everyone else… and how it’s normal to want to do what others are doing in middle school, but that i wanted him to weigh his own likes and preferences and comfort above what others would think or like. Why be cool when you can be quull?
The next day he tried on nikes, they felt bad (too tight around his ankle) and the store only had black/white (no good colors). So he tried on saucony again. he said they felt exactly right like his old ones, and wanted to order the quull slime green ones. so i did. size 9 for those keeping score at home.
Theatre camp
q loved theatre camp as usual. they did a lot of who/what/where/when/why improvisation skits for the first few days and the first day he was a narrator, something to do with a bank guarding a cat shaped cake, and a rat came to try to steal it but it was not stolen in the end? The second day he told me, “i was a goldfish that was being carried in a sock, and really didn’t have any lines.” then we went up to middle school for registration and saw another kid who had just been at theatre camp as well who shouted across the parking lot, “hey goldfish in a sock!”
In quinn’s theatre camp performance this year, he was a battle-weary nutcracker toy who came to life with his gang of other animated toys (a ballerina on whom he had a crush, a teddy bear who liked to give him hugs when he would have war flashbacks, and a jack in the box) who all together came to life to try and save the toy shop from the evils of online shopping. the oscar may have to go to the girl who would enter each conversation the toys were having with, “did i hear you say….” and tried to entice them, in her “creepy house lady” automaton voice, to buy from her company spamazon, “which in no way was meant to resemble a copyrighted billion-dollar corporation” oh, how i love theatre kids. The icing on the cake was the spamazon emblem with, instead of an orange smiling arrow, an orange frowny face arrow.
q’s costume really accentuated his height- he wore a light blue soldier costume, with a very tall faux fur hat on his head – he looked impossibly tall. He did well with his role, and i love that they managed to feature him drumming in one scene where they did a talent show and his talent was drumming (just as the ballerina doll was an actual ballet student and got to showcase her moves). In the 2:00 show quinn had a small tom-tom type of drum, and the other toys danced while he drummed. In the 6:00 show, his entrance with the drum was late, and i heard his voice side stage call “on with the show!” and he came out carrying the helmet of the spamazon creepy lady and drummed on that. afterwards, he told me the drum had been completely missing, and so he improvised and grabbed that and carried on. I asked if someone was off stage helping him problem solve that… nope! I am SO proud of his ability to stay cool when things don’t go perfectly (he was downright cheerful about it and laughed it off) and that resilience right there is me getting my money’s worth on theatre camp.
Quinn told me that he met two girls r and e, and was happy to see his friend c with whom he has attended every theatre camp so far, but who goes to a different school, and the four of them played settlers of catan in between the 2:00 and 6:00 performances. goldberry was also attending this session, and played a hilariously emo teen character in one of the other groups. As usual, some of the youth screenwriting impressed me with the level of humor, worldliness, and existential depth.
we left for portland after the 6:00 performance and woke up to snuggles with our 6 month old (!) w pancake. She is the squishiest girl. Then it was time to head for the airport for our trip to new york!
On the planes and in the airport, quinn looked at his d and d players manual, looking like such a teen with his devices all plugged in charging and sipping a soy steamer. he also read his warriors book (he is about 6 books into the 25 or so there are in the series). On the long flight he turned on the map on his seat screen and obsessively updated me on our flight speed over the ground and amount of time to our destination. He asked if we would be getting our connecting flight in “the airport with the dinosaur” aka chicago o’hare, which was going to be the case on our return journey. The flight there went through boston, where we ate burgers for dinner.
We didn’t arrive at grammy and grampy’s house until after midnight, so you’ll have to stay tuned for next month’s lifelong learner installment to find out what happens next!
we visited baby pancake w and quinn was great with her. she woke up from a nap sooner than expected and i had handed her over to him but she had started fussing in his arms, so i went to reach out and take her back thinking he might be worried or uncomfortable with her being fussy. he said, “no, just hand me her binky.” and the cutest ever mini-me moment of her falling asleep on him followed. he really is my son. he puts babies to sleep, and likes to read in the bathtub.
then he was so sleepy from having her sleep on him (it overcame him instantly) he was yawning and asked me to put something by his head for a pillow.
green home tour
At spring conferences, just about every teacher said a version of, “i just love the way his mind works/i am fascinated by the way he thinks/i love his mind/he has a great mind.” Also in the mix were “has such unique perspectives/i look forward to hearing the things he will say/he is one of the only students who gets all of my jokes.” The overall conference experience seemed to speak to the teachers’ recognition of an amazing amount of growth and adaptation to middle school for quinn.
quinn encountered some opportunities for growth in asserting himself this month. At the prospect of not being allowed to play his instrument and march in the parade due to a uniform shortage, he let his teacher know where he stood. He negotiated a deal in which he only marched if he got to play, which meant he would only march in the second of the two parades, but would also not have to march while carrying a banner instead of playing. I was pretty frustrated with him being excluded from playing, but opted to try to model making the best of a bad situation for quinn by volunteering for the band boosters, instead of encouraging him to stop going to rehearsals or quitting the band. On the side, however, rich got to hear quite a few rants about how kids join band so they don’t have to be cut from the team! I feel it is important for quinn that i find a way to support him continuing with band, as i heard him telling colleagues that band is his favorite subject in school (with math being his favorite subject at home, apparently. Oh the things i learn when listening to conversations he has with other adults!)
quinn did well using the days off for conferences to catch up on travel hacking assignments. It can take him a long time to do them but he is coming along. one assignment was 10 questions about a chosen “underrated” travel location (chosen from a list). he picked western australia “because penguin island is right off the coast of western australia!” and he had answered all but one question when i checked on him- but it was question 5 (not 10!! not the last one! he skipped ahead and answered 6-10! a tiny but significant success!) and he said to me, “i’ve read 15 articles to answer this question!” then wrote his answer. the question was “what do australians think of americans?” and his answer (after reading 15 articles) was the one sentence, “Australians like us as individuals, but they don’t know what to make of us as a whole.”
and if i wasn’t hung up on “maybe more than one sentence would be good”, i would be able to pay more attention to how succinct an answer that is about how citizens of other countries often feel about americans. the thing is, he learned and summarized and synthesized information from 15 articles and i just don’t know how apparent that is to teachers from just the one sentence.
Going down the google rabbit hole is a major reason his classwork often doesn’t get done – it is hard for him to regulate browsing and manage his time simultaneously (each is a difficult executive function skill on its own, so the pair of skills is difficult squared), because there is more to learn everywhere you turn on the internet!
he has been spending more time on duolingo working on his italian!
~more cowbell~
books
we finished listening to moon over manifest which was written by the same author as navigating early which we adored last month (clare vanderpool is the author). this one was awesome, too. i like when quinn listens ahead, then he listens to whatever part i’m on and says “‘you have to hear this part!” it reveals parts he really liked or thought were intense or wants me to also pay close attention to.
I’ve been reading born on a blue day by daniel tammet, which i learned about in the authors note in navigating early. it has me almost in tears in parts that read so much like quinn. The author so eloquently described how social situations are hard for someone with asperger’s, how teachers would see him as spacing out when he was engaged in other thinking. he even talks about difficulties riding bikes and swimming, and uncoordinated walking because of looking at his feet. i still sometimes waffle back to my stance of quinn maybe being an aspie with a bunch of neurotypical quirks from having a quirky mama, rather than the other way around. In the first chapter he describes his extreme number-color synesthesia. prompted by a paragraph about “showing work” in math and how in his brain there wasn’t “work,” there was an answer, and how he struggled to follow the “carry the one” rules the teacher wanted him to use, quinn said, “i bet he had trouble in school.”
when quinn got home one friday i had finished adding legs to his lego table (grateful my husband helped me with this project; much lego activity ensued) and i had also added a new extra green shelf to his room. he was all ready to put his whole life of fred series of books in one place, in order, on said shelf, filling the rest with finished lego creations. he has been reading one of his birthday books called elements about the periodic table. the writing is hilarious, a little rick riordan-esque, and he is memorizing lines. he was reading aloud to me about how most metals are a dull gray in elemental form, and that there are only 3 metals that are non-gray: gold, copper and cesium. gold is nice but expensive, so a lot of people make jewelry out of copper because it is also not gray and much cheaper than gold. As far as the third option, “the main disadvantage of cesium as a metal for making jewelry is that it explodes on contact with skin.” he started giggling like crazy. he woke up the next morning quoting it to me, and laughed all over again. he is also reading the stars beneath our feet (a novel about a 12 year old boy in harlem; we heard about it when signing him up for summer TAG program and although he did not want to take the book discussion class, he did want me to check the book out of the library so he could read it). and of course, he is still reading calculus when the mood strikes. i impulse-bought him chess mathematics which is a chess math puzzle book, which i didn’t know to google until i read about a chess math puzzle in born on a blue day. he hasn’t picked that up yet but i know he will soon – still strewing like an unschooler over here. he has also been re-reading percy jackson’s greek heroes.
since he was doing state testing for two weeks out of this month, it was nice to see him want to come home and learn/read/absorb. he seems to have percolated on state testing and decided to go ahead and do it, with no fanfare and no fuss.
School vs learning
There was a post in my raising poppies group from a mom who was wondering how we keep our poppies’ learning lights from being dimmed by the damage public school can do, and described how her son’s had been so dampened in a year. I am ever watchful for this while quinn is in public school, and it is the thing that would cause me to go back into battle with his dad to fight to home school. It was good for me to reflect on how quinn has been able to, i don’t know how, draw a very big distinction between what is Learning and what is School. School he tolerates and likes for social reasons, and for being able to play in Band. Learning is what he is always doing (and loves, and thirsts for, in fact he seems driven more by this than by food or water!), and if you ask him where he learns best, he will say at home. He is double accelerated in School math (doing algebra) and comes home and grudgingly does the homework assignment so that he can go read his Life of Fred calculus book. It seems particular to his personality to be able to keep his light burning in spite of how school circumstances can sometimes seem bent on dimming it. I am thankful for the bright spots in his schooling, such as the teachers who recognize his wonderful mind, who do what they can to encourage his light to continue to shine brightly.
mother’s day brunch
May-whelm
Looking ahead to summer, quinn is getting excited for paleontology camp, theatre camp, and tag adventures in learning. I also spoke with a karate mom friend about working with him one on one for swim lessons. I have stopped saying “yet” attached to “he doesn’t ride a bike” this year, he simply doesn’t ride a bike and it is well with my soul. But by golly, the lad will swim.
May is 42 kinds of busy with school, marching band rehearsals, karate classes, as well as thinking ahead and signing up for all of what the summer will bring. One day i wrote, “may is overwhelm month. tonight we had papa murphy’s (take and bake pizza) for dinner. tomorrow probably nachos.”
Quinn also found may to be overwhelming on at least one occasion. he had a momentary bout of resenting activities because of not having enough spare time. he said he doesn’t understand why other kids don’t feel this way and are all about the activities and don’t need down time, and i told him it was good to know this about himself. We had a good discussion about honoring that need, prioritizing goals, finding balance, all things i want him to be reflecting on regularly.
for spring break we had no big plans other than reconnecting a bit with each other.
spring break breakdown:
monday
q went to work with me; listening to lemony snicket audio again; also a sparkle stories installment of the “how to be super” series he hasn’t listened to yet entitled “the dragon within.” i love that he is 12 and still wants to catch up on new installments to stories. he has been a sparkler since he was four! we also went to the bank and i walked him through depositing checks into his savings account including filling out the deposit slip and writing his cursive signature. the lesson also covered speaking to the teller: “i’d like to make a deposit” etc. he is fun. he’s been depositing my checks at the atm as long as he’s been listening to sparkle stories, but when he goes to italy, he may need to make some in-person transactions to exchange money (or maybe it’s all machines, but he’ll be fine with that). it seemed like something everyone should know how to do even if you rarely do it anymore. he gets “scottie saver bucks” when he shows up to do his banking in person, so he can save them for prizes. with him it’s a matter of whether he’ll ever spend any of them. or his real dollars for that matter!
we baked gooey yummy scutoid cake! we watched the hobbit; he stayed home alone for part of the morning while i went to work. i came home to him reading his calculus book. we did logic puzzles and anagrams all week, some inspired by navigating early (coxswain seat and its pesky silent w!).
wednesday
he helped me take care of koala and wombat for camp boss, and ruby dog! we started a new favorite habit of playing scrabble dice at dinner. the scrabble dice are now a permanent fixture on the table.
thursday
he watched the desolation of smaug, snuggled ruby, drew on graph paper. he had picnics in the bathtub throughout the week.
friday
a math meltdown turned into a hammock therapy session. i am working on instilling the concept of self care. sometimes you need to take a break from homework and visit the trees…
…and peek at the owl pellets! it’s no surprise to me that we have been hosting quinn’s spirit animal in our back yard forest.
pancakes and warm butter tortillas
every time our pancakes visit, there are always striking visible signs of how much all three kids have grown. this time quinn looks like he towers over them. he has clearly grown the most in the past year. it is just so good to watch the 3 of them fall into their play like nothing has happened and no time has passed. the longer they’re together, the more and more comfortable they get, and the more they’ll go in serious pretend play directions.
one thing i was noticing about the girls (a similarity they have with quinn) is they know what they want. they got to our house friday at 4, just when quinn and i were pulling into the driveway. sometime that evening, b asked if i would make pancakes for breakfast the next morning. i said i couldn’t because i had to go to work so early, but that i planned to make them sunday, and she was fine with that. saturday night she was getting ready for bed and looked sideways at me, “mary beth, pancakes tomorrow?” oh yes. then they both helped me make the pancakes. “do you have some chocolate chips for the pancakes?” and i did. and z said she would like hers with blueberries, so we did both. and grandpa had his with chocolate chips and blueberries. they did lots of art as usual, but at one point z asked, “do you have colored pencils?” because she was wanting them instead of markers. b had a little cold when they arrived, and was a lot better after a few days at our house but her appetite was a little low the first day or two. i made pizza friday night that everyone else ate but she wasn’t feeling it. she thought maybe a quesadilla sounded good, but she likes the cheese that is yellow and white, and i only had pepper jack and yellow cheddar. so she settled on “warm buttered tortilla” at which point i said sure! and walked into where her dad was in the living room, “so, fill me in on the preparation of a warm buttered tortilla?” and he laughed. in case you are curious about the recipe, it is:
warm buttered tortilla
spread butter on a tortilla.
microwave for 10 seconds.
by the end of the weekend she had eaten about a whole package of tortillas and she was independently cooking her own warm buttered tortillas.
the girls still have the tendency to be able to get a little wild, but they are so mellow compared to when they were younger. it is really easy for me now to steer them into something indoors-appropriate, which is good because we had rain all weekend. a little novelty goes a long way. i put out graph paper instead of plain, because it was what i found first, and they loved it and dove into making cool pictures on graph paper. later on they had a paper airplane contest going between the 3 of them, and it was very controlled and awesome (they tossed them towards the stairway so nobody would be “impaled” by an airplane, as quinn put it. the girls got SO into the scrabble dice we had on the table that i pulled out a couple of other sets of them i have collected from the thrift store so each one of them could have enough to really spell some things. they played a little bit of minecraft together, but mostly they were very off-screen, playing hide and seek in the house and playing with the game qbitz. when we went to watch their dad’s alumni basketball games, i brought uno and a deck of cards and they played war. at one point they were playing a four-way version with another little girl they had absorbed into their midst.
for rich’s birthday the kids helped me make brownies. they kept it a top secret birthday dessert and would go to the kitchen doorway and announce, “no one is allowed to come in here!”
then they got into playing a pretend dog school game (there was training and giving the dogs treats and taking them on walks involved…) i can see why they adore quinn who is a giant 12 year old but will still crawl around on the floor and play doggy school with them.
more hide and seek. the funniest moments. one time grandpa helped z hide and the others took a half hour to find her. she would wait until she could hear they were in the other room looking and would say the funniest things from her hiding spot and grandpa and i were in stitches. then she had a great hiding spot once while b was counting but before the counting finished, z got tempted by the bubble wrap beside her hiding spot and we kept hearing *pop* giggle… *popoppopop* teehehehe! and of course b found her right away. z’s kryptonite is bubble wrap.
quinn read them the first dog and some of nim’s island at bedtime.
a few times during the visit, quinn went to the other extreme from the little kid pretend play and entered the nerd zone and it was kind of cute. the girls just accept his nerdiness and don’t really seem phased by it at all. he would take a break, “i’m going to go read calculus.” the other book he is reading is about the periodic table called elements. he’d come back from reading some of that, having memorized choice lines about alkali metals or how bananas are radioactive.
academics, culture, and miscellaneous learning
i had a conversation with quinn about the oxford comma when he brought it up, borrowing a tip i learned from a fellow poppy mom. To quote her, because someone else needs this:
“Zombies, or dinosaurs. Whenever you have to describe an abstract concept, pull out zombies or dinosaurs.
“You were so hungry, you were a dinosaur at dinner.” That is super easy for kids to see, feel, and understand and it then makes a REALLY good jumping off point for figurative language.
Also good for Oxford comma, etc.
“Go get your brothers, the zombie, and the dinosaur, for dinner.” (There are children, a zombie and a dinosaur.)
“Go get your brothers, the zombie and the dinosaur for dinner” (There are two coming to dinner, the zombie and the dinosaur.)
Passive voice: I am being eaten by zombies.
If you can add “by zombies”, it’s (almost always) passive voice.
Zombies or dinosaurs man, I’m telling you.”
quinn will sit down at the table and then look over at me in the kitchen and say “can i have a fork?” and i think it’s ridiculous he doesn’t notice there’s no fork before he sits down, or just get back up and get one himself. so i give him a hard time for it. i said, “you’re a dork without a fork,” and got him one. and he said, “yes, i’m a forkless dork.”
quinn and i went to the high school play. i have so much love for today’s youth and their natural skepticism for disney’s princess-marries-prince storyline. saturday night the three of us went to othello. quinn has such a grip on shakespearean language, it just doesn’t seem to phase him. goldberry was in the play and rich had several friends in it so we went back to the green room afterwards to say hi to the cast. q had a headache during the first act, so he leaned on me and took a nap and it went away! he was totally fine the rest of the night, and he didn’t even lose track of the plot… he is quull. he just needs to remember to hydrate.
it was a weekend of theatre and half-baked easter celebration. i did plan ahead enough to order him a dino-themed magic card deck. the artists who paint the cards are rad, the dinos have feathers and are colorful – they do their research. quinn also approved heartily. he made me play a game with him sunday night, which completely boggled my mind. but i also did not provide the boy with a sibling, so this is what i have to do. When i say half-baked i’m mostly referring to how i filled his plastic eggs with costco snacks we already had on hand, but quinn and i also dyed easter eggs.
catching up on homework each time he comes home is an ongoing theme, but he is doing a bit better. he had an F in travel hacking last term, as he wasn’t turning in anything. it’s all google-classroom based, and i didn’t know that last term but now i do, and now he is getting caught up. he is also feeling a lot more positive about travel again, and saturday while i was at market he was back on duolingo for the first time in a while. he has goal of “being able to talk with the locals” when he is on his italy trip. the teacher for that class is the one who leads the italy trip, so i’m glad he is turning it around. his teacher is very understanding, “most of them are 8th graders, i’m used to 8th graders.” and i know this because i sell him organic veggies.
he is pushing 5’4″. he is “wah don’t make me do homework” and “please pretty please can i read calculus and learn italian before bedtime?” all rolled into one. he had his first marching band rehearsal and he came home and had several dinners. (he is now having multiple breakfasts, too. oy!)
