Tag Archives: pi

fifteen~love

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The first player to score in tennis earns fifteen points. Fifteen-love. I guess no one is sure why zero in tennis was originally called love, however “the most accepted theory is that those with zero points were still playing for the ‘love of the game’ despite their losing score.”

Maybe it’s immature to think of this coparenting journey as a tennis match but sending a child back and forth between two households was a never ending volley, until it wasn’t. Many times I remind myself I’ve consistently chosen to play the long game when it comes to parenting, that I may be in a streak of losing game after game, I may be about to lose this set, but if we’re lucky, it’s still early in the match. In the long game, maybe I have a chance. The long game is the basket I have all my eggs in.

In the short game I’m at zero. Zero is love. Love is zero. Love is a big goose egg. Love is missing the egg I could be finding. Love is emptiness. Empty spaces. Empty nest. Empty loft bed with dinosaur stickers on the side, dinosaur flannel sheets, fuzzy owl blanket, and a quilt each from Grammy and Mama. Empty seat at the table. Empty green plate that I’m sure is too small for him to eat off of now. Except for maybe eating birthday cake. Which he isn’t going to eat from it this year.

Image credit Roberto Mura

 

We left off at fourteen, chatting about galaxy NGC 14 and a quasar called the Einstein Cross in the constellation of Pegasus, the winged horse. Well, 4.2° west-northwest of the brightest star in Pegasus, there is a globular cluster called Messier 15. M15 is 360,000 times the luminosity of the sun, contains pulsars and a planetary nebula, and wouldn’t you know it: astronomy suspects its center may contain a black hole.

In another galaxy called Holmberg 15, a supermassive black hole was recently discovered, one of the largest black holes ever known (40 billion solar masses, I guess that does sound big). I thought, huh, I wonder what constellation Holmberg 15 is found in. Wouldn’t you know, it’s in Cetus, the whale. (I’ve said it before, you can’t make this stuff up.)

This little planet Quinn has now taken fifteen trips around our sun on, rotates 15 degrees per hour, making the sun and stars appear to move fifteen degrees per hour over our heads.

From the music of the spheres to the music of our own solar system, fifteen is a special number. Not a lot of time signatures involve 15, but there is one I know of:

15
8

Which is sometimes called compound quintuple meter. Or it can be called triple quintuple time. Marking time in our ongoing separation feels complicated, like it might need a special time signature. It feels compound, in the sense that a fracture can be compound. It feels like I need to concentrate hard. Then it feels like I need to avoid thinking about it at all. I think compound Quintuple meter fits.

My ability to document the lifelong learning that is still ongoing despite our separation has ebbed and flowed. The notes have been tucked away, and I have not given up on one day backtracking to revisit this time, but for now, my heart isn’t ready for much of it.

A few of his presents are Rubik’s cubes. He recently solved his 6 by 6 Rubik’s cube, so I got him the 7 by 7, as well as some other shapes that remind him of D&D dice, and finally, a Molecube. He told me about solving the 6 by 6, detailed step by step his approach to solving it, which reminds me that I’ve never entirely trusted the evaluation that disqualified him from being on the tippy end of the autism spectrum, and come to think of it I wonder about myself sometimes, and if you’re still reading this verbose sentence you must really love us for who we are. Example:

“The three by three is interesting to solve, because you can’t move the centers in relation to each other. You can only move other things in relation to the centers. You have to solve all the corners, of which there are eight in any cube puzzle, and you also have to solve the grand total of twelve edges between all these corners. My method solves four adjacent corners that are all on one face, then solves all the edges between those corners, all with the center obviously solved for those. Flip the cube over, solve the other four corners. I always do the same colors. I go to the yellow, I solve the yellow corners, along with the yellow layer, like not just that side of the yellow is solved, but like the green and the red on the side of it, whatever. Then I flip, and I solve the four white corners, then I flip it like this with yellow on the left and white on the right. And from that there are some other sequences you can use to solve the white edges. So, you use sequence A1 and A2, E1, E2, E3 and E4 to solve the yellow side. Flip it, and use sequences C and A2 again to solve the white corners. Then flip it so the white is on the right. And using sequences G1 and G2, solve the white edges….”

At this point in my audio file we are at 4:41 of a 39:43 minute “dialogue” concerning cubing solutions and it will probably take me until he is sixteen to type in the rest.

 

As usual with birthdays around here, there are the mathematical fun facts. Fun facts about 15, according to Wikipedia:

15 is a lucky number.

Fifteen is a triangular number:

12 months 8 sock monkey 

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Picturez 006 happy 7 orange IMG_6629  

 

When I first made a grid of Quinn’s previous nine birthdays as he turned ten, I reflected on him being halfway to 18 one year and halfway to 20 that next year.

Now he’s halfway to 30.

15 is a hexagonal number:

 

hexagonal grid of circles oe each for Quinn's 15 years

Fifteen is a repdigit in binary, and there are few people who love binary counting as much as Quinn, age 1111.

15 is a magic constant of magic squares.

In pi, 15 comes after 14:

3.1415….

All of which is to say that 15 is quull.

In navigation, every 15 degrees of longitude equals one time zone. These lines of longitude, also known as meridians, are farthest apart at the equator, but they come together at the poles… eventually.

In the meantime, we can span time zones on computers, even three of them if we need to, as Quinn recently has to connect with his cousins Mario and Luigi on Discord. The three of them are peas in a pod still, even online, where Quinn is leading his cousins on a D&D quest for which he prepared a nine-page campaign script, five spreadsheets worth of maps, and an ancient scroll to introduce them to the quest.

Fifteen is the number of months Quinn had been out of the womb when he started walking. Now that he is 180 months of age, the moments I am going to look back on are our walks together. Our pre-birthday hike was a good one, and we noted that our spot in the forest is also visited by owls:

Someone has pruned a lot of the regenerating trees on either side of the trail, limbing them up so they will grow taller (the trail goes through former clear cut). On the way back down the hill, the light was just right for me to see what is left of some of the mother trees, still present there, still supporting the lanky youth.

Quinn, you are the magic constant in this mama’s life. Wishing you a happy fifteenth birthday today!

fourteen ~ quasar

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In recent years, I have been learning math concepts and obscure number facts for each birthday Quinn reaches, in keeping with his own fascination with math. It helps me grapple with things like the slippery acceleration of time, and learning how to accept that my baby is growing up. It brought comfort to me that 10 was an order of magnitude, 11 was indivisible, and 12 was sublime.

I wasn’t sure numbers would be consoling this year. On the day before Quinn’s fourteenth birthday, the United States surpassed 500,000 Covid19 deaths, so the flag today outside my work was flying at half-staff. Quinn has been living solely at his dad’s house since March 14, pi day, so we have now been separated for 346 days with only a few in-person social distance masked hikes infrequently taken. These are numbers from which I can derive no comfort on this birthing day.

That 14 is part of pi, however, is a pleasing aspect of Quinn turning 14. He was born at 3:14 PM, pi o’clock, a time that catches my eye on a digital clock occasionally and makes me smile. So I thought I’d find out if there was anything fun about 14 that might help me create some joyful meaning on a day when I am painfully aware of some numbers whose meanings are devoid of joy.

I asked Quinn during our video call last night whether he thinks 13 and 14 feel different and he said a definitive yes, though he did not articulate the difference. I wrote last year that, “Thirteen is cleaning his room independently, having a passport, opening a checking account, getting a debit card, taking ownership of his google account, having an A in Algebra, reminding me not to buy anything “too dorky” when I went to buy some paper party plates at the dollar store. It’s sitting here writing this blog post while some new teenagers sing Take on Me and fling themselves around the trampoline, then carry out a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, emptying bowls of snacks while one of them strums my guitar. Imagine thinking 13 is unlucky. In Italy, where Quinn is heading soon, fare tredici (translated literally, to do 13) is to hit the jackpot! Any way you calculate it, 13 feels incredibly lucky to this mama!”

At least, that’s what it seemed like thirteen was going to be. Instead, we found ourselves in a global pandemic, and so much of what we anticipated about lucky 13 was irrevocably changed. No trip to Italy, nor even to the bank to obtain the debit card, no more friends on the trampoline, not even emptying any bowls of snacks on my kitchen table.

So I hesitate to say what I think fourteen will bring, unsure if the trip to Italy or other much hoped-for events such as reunion with each other and with beloved family members will be occurring during the year he is fourteen.

But I’ll give it a shot anyway. I think fourteen is: taking charge of his own schooling in unprecedented ways. Being informed and opinionated about the wider world. Humor that grows deeper, darker, richer, funnier all the time. Empathy that grows long tendrils reaching ever outward. The first taste of cynicism, of disappointment in his fellow humans. Realism, but also relentless hope. A fervent belief in the long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice if we push on it right.

I’m going to forgive myself if my assessment of fourteen doesn’t sound as perky as some years. It’s taking courage to show up and write today at all, and I am cutting myself some huge slack if the light of my metaphors does not escape the event horizon of the black hole that has been sucking my motherly soul for nearly a year. I also took myself to the beach briefly, as the sun came out after days of rain on this day of celebrating my son. The first thing I saw in the sand was a fossil, of course.

Then I met Quinn in the lab parking lot and delivered him his “birthday garbage,” a big trash bag full of presents, and I took this one photo of him. Tonight I will watch him open presents over zoom, where they will be piled at the foot of his bed just like in Harry Potter.

And now for some other fun facts about fourteen…

Silicon has atomic number 14. Quinn is a big fan of the periodic table, especially as written by Theodore Gray in his book, Elements:

“Silicon based life forms have been the subject of speculation in science fiction ever since chemists pointed out that silicon, of all the elements, is most like its neighbor, carbon (6), in its ability to form complex molecular chains, in some ways not unlike the long-chain carbon molecules that are reading this text. (That means you.)

“About the only thing that doesn’t have a lot of silicon in it is you: while some sea sponges grow bones of silica glass, your bones, assuming you are not a sea sponge, are calcium phosphate, in the form of rigid hydroxyapatite foam with almost no silicon.”

An honorable mention goes to nitrogen, with its atomic weight of 14.0067 g/mol. As an indispensable component of fertilizer, we depend on it for food. In its liquid form, it cryo-preserves specimens to -196 degrees C, useful for, say, ensuring the integrity of a coronavirus vaccine, or preserving elephant cell lines into which you might want to splice woolly mammoth genes, or putting Han Solo into cryogenic stasis. (Oh wait, that was carbonite).

Quinn has been making an elaborate D and D scenario (character, map, script) for his dad to play, and said that on the province-level maps he makes, the side of one graph paper square is one mile. “Or, square root of two, going diagonally.” Just showing off his knowledge of right isosceles triangle geometry.

Speaking of Diagon Alley, we are closing in on the ending of the final book of Harry Potter, and Quinn was delighted to hear that I had spied someone wearing the sign of the deathly hallows printed on their face mask. I made Quinn some math equations to graph that turn into a message for him that I think will remind him of that symbol. But the message really says I cardioid U Q.

 

In other comfortingly familiar pop culture, 14 appears in Star Wars when Rey, in The Force Awakens, realizes she’s on the Millennium Falcon. “This is the ship that made the Kessel Run in 14 parsecs?” Han of course barks, “Twelve!”

But back to the square root of 2. Last year we were thrilled for Quinn to celebrate a Fibonacci birthday, but 14 also belongs to an infinite sequence of numbers called companion Pell numbers or Pell-Lucas numbers. The closest rational approximations of the square root of 2 in fractions follow a sequence

1/1, 3/2, 7/5, 17/12, 41/29…

The denominators of said fractions are the Pell numbers 1, 2, 5, 12, 29…

And if you double the numerators you get the companion Pell numbers 2, 6, 14, 34, 82…

14 is in that group!

Like the Fibonacci sequence, the Pell companion sequence grows exponentially, like other things that shall not be named, but in this case to powers of the silver ratio 1 + √2. Quinn would happily embrace this ratio, irrational though it may be. Like the golden ratio of Fibonacci, the silver ratio can be represented visually as a spiral. My forever favorite symbol for the passage of time as a mother.

Spiraling outward, we can look at the universe at large for more instances of 14, like Messier object M14, a globular cluster in the constellation Ophiuchus. Better yet, NGC 14, an irregular galaxy in the constellation Pegasus! Not as far away as GNZ11, maybe, but located in a winged horse from some of Quinn’s favorite mythology is good!

His birth story aside (let’s just say maybe his mother was a bit misunderstood), it is said that when Pegasus was born, he flew to where thunder and lightning are released. Everywhere he stepped on earth, springs of water sprouted (naturally, as his dad was Poseiden). My favorite detail: when Zeus rewarded him by transforming him into a constellation, a single feather fell to the earth.

He earned that reward for helping Perseus rescue Andromeda from the sea monster who was going to eat her as punishment for her mom bragging her beauty exceeded that of the sea nymphs. Perseus turned the monster to stone by showing it the decapitated head of Pegasus’s dear old mom Medusa, and they lived happily ever after. So Pegasus will forever shine in the night sky, as will Delphinus, the dolphin who comforted Andromeda while she was chained to a rock at sea.

Anyway, NGC 14 galaxy is irregular because it appears like it is separating apart. I feel that. Separation can feel pretty irregular. It’s not the only galaxy inside Pegasus – there’s a whole cluster. There’s a spiral galaxy in there, some 40 million light-years from Earth. A supernova exploded there in 2014 while astronomers watched. One of the stars in the Pegasus constellation is also the first star known to have a planet orbiting around it, also known as an exoplanet, about fifty light-years from Earth.

Then there’s the Einstein Cross, also located in Pegasus. It’s a quasar, which starts with Q, and is therefore awesome. This quasar is 8 billion light-years from Earth and does a nifty thing called gravitational lensing. Because it sits behind a galaxy from us, one that is 400 million light-years away, and because quasars are intensely luminous, the gravity of the galaxy bends this intense light to project four images of the quasar around the galaxy. And that is just rad.

just a beach picture that reminds me of galaxies

So this Q thing, with its extreme luminosity, gets its powerful energy from matter being sucked into a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. It took a while to work this out. Around the time of the flu pandemic just over a century ago, astronomers were figuring out that some of the objects they were looking at in space were galaxies like our own. In the 1950s, some of the objects being detected out among the galaxies had properties that defied explanation. They were thought to have very small sizes, but to put out the amount of light they did, they either had to be enormously powerful for their size, or be traveling at a velocity beyond the speed of any known star. These astronomical puzzles were named quasars. In the 1960s, measurements and observations were made and their implications debated. Were unknown laws of nature invoked?

Though no mechanism could explain the enormous luminous power of quasars, some astronomers held this as the most likely scenario – that they were very small and very far away but packed a lot of punch – more than the energy conversion of nuclear fusion. In 1964 the currently accepted explanation was put forth but was rejected by many because black holes were still theoretical. Now we know that many galaxies, ours included, do have supermassive black holes at their center, but at the time this was unconfirmed.

Quasars played a big part in drawing together the fields of physics and astronomy. In this time of separation, I like to think of things that are instead drawing closer. Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted the gravitational lensing of quasars, and in 1979 this was confirmed by astronomical observation.

In summary, quasars are found at the heart of galaxies; they are some of the most luminous Q-named objects in the universe, with an energy output greater than the hundreds of billions of stars of our Milky Way. The light from some of the most quasar-y quasars had to have left its source only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang in order to be reaching our eyes, that is how profoundly distant, and bright, quasars can be. And if light from such a corner of the universe can meet our eyes, there are far shorter distances we can hope to traverse in far shorter periods of time, even if the times are unknown for right now, and that is a nice thought. Distances larger than the distance light could travel in the 13.8 billion year history of the universe have been traveled by quasars, because space itself has also been expanding. Wrap your head around that.

And even those distances are smaller than the size of my love for another luminous being with a Q name: fourteen quintillion light-years traveled by the light of a quasar. To me, Quinn is out of this world. Happy Birthday Mighty Q!

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ smuggle in a dinosaur

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~february 23 through march 23~

 

The day after quinn’s birthday, as soon as sleepover friends went home we set out for a visit to see/meet our new pancake w. rich had met her on the day she was born, but this would be quinn’s and my first time meeting this new little person, still very brand new at only two days old! Quinn has always liked babies, but i think he has a special even softer spot in his heart for his new niece, born the day before his birthday, and he wasted no time getting her into his arms.

triceratopses and tesseracts

There is a little pisces boy i know who just turned 3 who reminds me so much of quinn. he loves drumming and dinosaurs and is very articulate… when i see him he reminds me a lot of those days. His mom posted a video from his birthday of him opening a present. he gasped, “a triceratops!” then put his little hand out to the side how quinn used to do, “i love triceratopses!!!” studied it some more, found a slot with his finger, “it’s a triceratops so you can put pennies in it!” as his mom elaborated on that, he turned and looked up at the camera with this smile, “it’s for me!”

Quinn and i both watched it over and over. and then we did an anagram of the word “triceratopses” (plural) because, well duh. and i don’t know if it was because we had just re-watched a wrinkle in time that weekend, but one of the first words we found in “triceratopses” was “tesseract.”

he had some poetry homework to catch up on from missing several days of school one week. he was venting about how long the poetry unit had been and how he felt like it was making him hate poetry instead of like it. i told him he should reclaim poetry for his own, and whenever he was assigned to write a poem, smuggle in something he likes, regardless of the assigned topic. we got off on a tangent of smuggling dinosaurs into every poem. To test this idea, he would give me a topic such as “book” and i would say, “the small boy turned to the diplodocus page of his book,” and got him doing it too. all that week i’d ask “did you get a chance to smuggle in any dinos today?”

sand and sea lions

on a wednesday afternoon i picked up quinn from school and took him to the maritime museum. there were tibetan monks visiting, and they were creating a sand mandala all week. They had started creating the mandala on tuesday so by wednesday they had gotten a portion of the work done, and would keep working outward from the center until sunday when it would be swept… it is such a cool concept to me because of the celebration of impermanence, of putting time and effort and love into something in painstaking detail knowing it will all wash away… so much to reflect on there of course. a mystery and a paradox that is central to the human condition, really. i did not know quinn would be so captivated. when we went in, i gave him a tiny bit of background but not much. but he just instinctively knew it was a calm quiet space, he sat down and folded his hands and quietly watched. a woman came over to where we were sitting and watching and showed us where we could make a small mandala of our own and use the tools and get the feel of it… quinn loved making a sand mandala. he was so into it, saying, “we need to do more of this.” and then he was completely fine with brushing it all away at the end! that was the part i was most amazed about, i think. the metal tools for the sand sounded like such a happy sound, and reminded me of frogs. bayou frogs have been vocal the past week so it is starting to feel like spring, but when i said that both quinn and another little girl who was making a mandala thought i meant the wooden musical frogs (she apparently has some at her grandma’s house and quinn has one as well). the monks were all smiling and doing their work but when they’d take a break they were all on their smartphones and ipads. one of them came over to the table the kids were working at and played a video of the dissolution ceremony of the big mandala (another time they did it) to show them the idea of the whole thing, but it was just so funny (to me- the kids were not phased) to have him prop an ipad up and hit play.

something about the calm of those monks, the happy sounds of the metal tools they were using, the beauty and color of the sand, the sun glancing off the bay in through the windows. he didn’t want to leave.

 


on our way in he had said he wanted to visit the sea lion dock while we were on the bay front, so eventually after an hour went by i suggested a walk to the sea lions and he was ready. so we walked. he held my hand the whole walk to the sea lions, up and down the bayfront and back to the car. i know he doesn’t even really think about it but i just love that he wants to hold my hand.

at the sea lion dock we watched them for a while (there were lots, all sleeping and jockeying for sleeping positions on the floating docks) and we were commenting on their behaviors. one had a strap or collar around its neck looking like it needed to be removed and it didn’t look healthy, and quinn was moderately upset by that (“someone needs to DO something about that”). our other observations were more amusing. one huge sea lion we nicknamed grandpa was situated on the corner of the dock with his face hanging over the edge. he would lift his head enough to breathe but then let his head loll into the water. you could watch him exhaling bubbles into the water as he slept! there were other snorers above water level, whose cheeks/whiskers you could watch as they would shake or flap, and we’d point them out to each other. the way sea lions assert dominance by opening their mouth at each other… sometimes it gets much more heated with barks and bites, but a lot of times it’s, “i open my mouth in your general direction,” and that settles the dispute. we had fun doing behavioral ecology observations.

social studies homework on ancient civilizations

Also this month we played a game from christmas called tiny epic quest, that we hadn’t had a chance to play yet. It is roughly a board game d and d adventure with lots of little props and pieces and spells and quests and goblins. when he was going to school that friday morning i asked him what his best parts of the week were, and he chose making the sand mandala and playing the game.

he spent some time with his birthday present called turing tumble, a fun marble-programming gizmo with an anime workbook full of challenges that build on each otherr in story format. basically a toy made precisely for quinn.

with 2/3 of 6th grade behind him, he attended his 3rd dance (glow in the dark theme).

pie!!! lots of little blueberry pies. i dropped quinn off at the dojo on pi day (march 14th) for jump tag and pi day pie fest.

a dear friend commented on quinn’s birthday post that he might like the book navigating early by clare vanderpool so i immediately requested the audio book from our library. he loved it, finished listening to it before i had gotten to the halfway point, so continued to listen again along with me as i caught up. It’s a book that takes place in maine in 1945 about 13 year old boys, friendship, mothers and sons, and brothers. There is hiking on the appalachian trail, boat building and rowing, and fly fishing. It is also a book about pi, which coincidentally made it a wonderful book to happen to be listening to on 3/14. One of the boys in the book knows pi in colors and textures and reads the digits of pi like a story. He is not only a synesthete, but has other quirks of sensory, intellectual, and emotional intensity that remind me of someone i know who also likes numbers. sock seams and shaking water out of his face; in a metaphor for his friend’s ability to be irrationally stuck on an idea, the narrator likens his brain to a lobster in a lobster trap; literal interpretations and sureness of being right; jelly bean sorting to organize his neurons in emotionally or intellectually puzzling situations. highly recommend.

executive function skills

he remembered at 7:15am on the last day of 6 week term, after completing 2 missing assignments (for days on end) and getting up to speed on how to do his upcoming math homework, that he also had an art project to finish and hand in first period that day. doh!

one day he was getting up to speed on graphing linear equations, y= b+ mx; he knew what all the variables meant and understood what recursive functions are and how to find the ordered pairs that solve this equation and how to graph ordered pairs and find the y intercept. and yet… was getting stuck on how to do it. He did not stay stuck for long. however I spent quite a bit of energy trying to convince him that graph paper would be a good thing to use for his homework this time since it is all graphing which is what graph paper was invented for. one feels one is stating the obvious sometimes. he finally came around. again, the culprit was stuckness. having used blank paper all year for math homework he was in a groove and reluctant to change, but in the end realized it’s ok to change your way and adapt to what is happening in real time. increasing flexibility one millimeter at a time!

i distinctly recall feeling thankful for spring break on the horizon!

 

~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~ sierpenski’s rubik’s tetrahedron

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

social learning

the first middle school dance!

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

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

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

 

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

school learning

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

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

games, puzzles, and fizzbuzzes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the other kind of pi

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

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

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

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

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

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

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ the wau of quinn

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2

(pronounced, “wow.”)

just one month this time. still make tea.

this month in executive functioning…

rich suggested getting quinn a watch, and he wore the one i ordered for him all weekend and gave us frequent reports: “it’s 5:36.” we’ll see if it helps with time awareness in the more applied sense…

quinn spent hours on the computer, making a “build your own droid” game in scratch, and didn’t realize he wasn’t logged into his scratch account. when my computer crashed, he lost the whole thing, many hours of work. i think i was more upset than he was. he learned a lesson about how you have to be logged in to have your work saved. on the plus side, he’s doing really detailed work with drawing things (one pixel at a time) and building skills towards his game designing goals.

emotional intensity is still trending. quinn’s handling of the computer crash, the subsequent interactions between us, and between him and rich, all indicate work he is doing in the emotions department. i can see new levels of capability in his resilience to challenges. in several cases, i’ve received a response from quinn of not wanting to talk about something because he already knows what i’ll say. he’ll then eventually talk with much coaxing and reminding that sometimes i am unpredictable with what i say, and sometimes what i say turns out to be worth hearing after all. in one case in particular, i think he actually enjoyed the latter part of our conversation about how he could handle his friend at school who had stomped on and eaten his paper spring. (he knew i was going to say that “people are more important than things,” but agreed to discuss the details with me anyway.)

i think quinn felt validated that i didn’t think it was okay for someone to eat his spring without his consent. (at ols, we always valued safety of our bodies, feelings, and work. this would fall under the heading of the safety of his work being jeopardized.) he did know my stance on retaliation for such an offense (people>things), and the serious part of the discussion was a reminder of his belt status in karate and how he was approaching a purple belt for which the pledge is not to harm or make afraid. we talked again about how boys of his age group may not all be fully cognizant of the types and nuances of humor, and how the receiving party must find the joke funny for it to truly be a joke, but that 11 year old boys may not know that yet. we also reviewed the grammy wisdom we explored back in third grade, when we were learning about a different boy attempting to be quinn’s friend in the most awkward, doofusy way possible… and i pointed out that this seemed to me another likely example of a doofus attempt at friend-making. i felt that although we didn’t know the boy’s motivations, we could assume the best of him given the facts, and give him the benefit of the doubt that maybe he didn’t know you didn’t want your spring eaten… so you should tell him that, but also indicate that he is forgiven (i reminded him that forgiveness is one of the school’s eight essentials and pointed out how this was an opportunity to practice it). once we got to the solution-oriented part and were discussing taking charge of the situation and clearing the air between them in a proactive move to make the next 6 years of school together more friendly, a darning needle dragonfly appeared before quinn.

we walked through some potential dialogue, thought about worst case scenarios (that the boy would not want to talk but remain unfriendly) but realized we predicted he would instead be receptive and likely to respond positively.

i couldn’t see the dragonfly at first so i had him describe it to me. he said it was shiny blue, and i said it must have been there for him specifically. i said he should take dragonfly spirit helper medicine with him the next day, because they are good at maneuvering, and deciding which way to go, and by being brave (dragon) and bringing up a difficult topic, he would be taking charge of the direction he wanted things to go between himself and the friend.

the next day he told me he talked to the friend, asked him to not eat his springs, and the friend said “ok, whatever.” ha!

later that same week, we arrived 15 minutes early for school and quinn climbed on my lap and told me, “life is sucking for me right now” at school because “everyone basically thinks i’m a jerk.” he had resisted doing his homework summary during the drive to school, but that wasn’t the thing bugging him, so this conversation took some coaxing and guessing as well… mainly guessing that there wasn’t actually a major event, just a knot of social anxiety that had taken hold.

i asked questions to try to get to the heart of it, trying to narrow down who “everyone” was, it was not the fellowship; not spring-eater; not any of the girls. finally i named some of the boys he has never really hung out with, and he said, “yeah, i mean if i go up to them on the playground they don’t do anything. they just walk away, or keep doing what they’re doing.”

by the end of my line of questioning it was clear no one had been particularly mean, but he hadn’t felt included warmly when attempting to mingle with other kids he doesn’t mingle with daily. it took me a bit longer to put together why he was trying to do that in the first place.

it turns out aragorn, gimli, and legolas are all currently obsessed with yu-gi-oh cards, playing the game and having pretend battles on the playground, and also naruto (another anime series) and quinn has felt unable to truly participate because he doesn’t know those series or cards or the game.

he was pretty upset about it, saying he liked yu-gi-oh and wanted to know more, but *hates naruto because he knows absolutely nothing about it (yu-gi-oh he at least can look at their cards and familiarize with, but for naruto he has no reference at all). when they make up complicated spells that have intricate hand gestures, he has no idea how to do any of it. i guess he drifted off and tried to play with other kids, who probably already had their own thing going on, and he felt snubbed.

we discussed how it would be okay to appreciate your friends’ excitement about a subject even if you are unfamiliar with it, and the validity of sticking with the friends who are historically warm and welcoming towards you. but also, we covered that if he is interested enough in the subject, we could look up yu-gi-oh at the library and see if we can find books or get online and do some research. the shift was so immediate, it was like flipping a switch. “yeah, can we do that tonight?”

with 3 minutes until the bell would ring, he changed the subject, “oh, can you text dada and ask him if he will take me to aragorn’s for a sleepover tomorrow night?”

more educated guessing… i found out that they had been planning a sleepover for a week or so, and aragorn had invited all 3 boys, but since quinn knew it was scheduled for a night he’d be at his dad’s, he thought he wouldn’t be able to go. then (time management/executive function) he forgot to follow up and ask and all week went by. my speculation is that between not wanting to feel let down about not being allowed to go, and not being into the game his friends were into, he used the latter to alleviate the disappointment of the former. he didn’t want to feel too excited if he might not be able to go, so he decided not knowing the game mattered more than it did.

however, once i unlocked the yu-gi-oh problem for him (he has been watching episodes through the library app ever since, and we used his christmas money from grammy and grampy to get him a dinosmasher’s fury yu-gi-oh deck, plus a two-headed king rex card), he realized he truly did want to be at the sleepover.

his dad was somehow on board, and i got the details from aragorn’s folks, since we were missing approximately all of the details.

after we got home that afternoon, quinn and i snuggled and watched first 2 episodes of yu-gi-oh on my phone.

homework that afternoon was still a struggle because, “i just wish i was already at the sleepover.”

we have a new purple belt in the family! he had spent that day at our friends’ house while i worked and then i went and got him and played a little settlers of catan with them.

quinn got changed into his uniform and we drove to the dojo. i had quinn talk to sifu, because he was stressing about the part at the end of the test where sifu kicks you, which is tradition and it’s not quinn’s favorite part. at his last test he flinched, and if you do you have to get kicked a second time. i was explaining it is a trust thing, but he said it has hurt him enough to cry every time… and i told him i thought he should tell sifu that and ask if he has advice on getting through the kick well. “i know what he’ll say and i don’t want to talk to him about it,” but i got him to eventually give sifu the benefit of the doubt that he wants to help q cope with the kick and is an expert and probably has advice. it was around that part of our discussion that i realized that quinn had been thinking all this time that he should not tighten his core muscles but leave his stomach relaxed. i said, “well no wonder it’s hurting you, but sifu has told you to tighten up, right?” he said yeah but that he figured it’s like when you strain to hold your breath you can’t hold it as long, so just relax and you can hold it longer… DIFFERENT CONCEPT, BUDDY. i assured him i had tightened up my stomach for my kicks and not gotten hurt at all, and he should try that instead, but to ask sifu what he thinks. he went out on the mat with sifu and he took quinn to the far corner to discuss and then to practice getting hit in stomach (just with a light punch, but practicing how to get ready for a kick) and then had quinn punch him to feel the difference from the kicker/puncher end, and by the end had him laughing and totally relaxed about the whole thing. it was a much needed and very successfully delivered pep talk.

i made coffee for parents and grandparents, and especially rich and i since we were getting up at 4:15 and rich was working lots of overtime, and the kids started warming up for their test.

the dojo was crowded because there were 4 kids (including quinn) testing for purple, one testing for blue, and 2 testing for half brown/advanced green. 7 kids total, all testing for intermediate/upper ranks, was very cool to witness. the kids were serious right from the start, and the test was dialed in right away.

when there was a break so the kids could have a drink of water (and so sifu could deliberate with mrs. todd about some aspect of the test) quinn came right to his dad and hugged him, then rubbed his shoulders, and then said he was giving backrubs to all the people who came to watch his test. then proceeded to move to me, then rich. rich joked “are you rubbing?” and i told quinn rich would need karate chops and so he did chops to rich’s shoulders and they were both laughing and then quinn had to get back on the mat. it obviously means a lot to quinn to have the men in his life come see him do karate.

so if karate is broken down into techniques (these are short), forms (these are longer), and sparring (this is spontaneous/not choreographed), quinn really shines in techniques and forms.

they had to show short form 1, which most of them had mostly right, but quinn’s was pretty stellar among the purple belt testers. then sifu had just the purple belts do long form 1 together, and quinn executed it perfectly, and was done before anyone else (not rushing… just confident and sure of what to do) and the other 3 all had small or big areas they struggled through before finishing. one kid was obviously nervous and didn’t even finish it that first time. so sifu said he’d watch them do it again, but then he said, actually quinn, i don’t need to see you do it again, because i saw you and that time was solid, but would you like to showcase it? and quinn said yes, and so he had quinn do it all by himself, which he did super well again, and sifu was so pleased he initiated a round of applause for it… i could see how proud quinn was. then sifu asked quinn to do it alongside the others even though he didn’t need to see him do it again, and quinn obliged. so they eeked out that one, then went to short 2 later on, and quinn again did very well, and markedly better than he had done on his previous test (because it’s a new form for him as of this belt and he literally learned it a couple days before the half belt test but still went ahead and tested on it). earlier in the week he had some feedback from sifu about lining up his stances on the proper angles (which was where he had struggled last time around) and quinn had clearly incorporated that new feedback. the other kids had minor or major struggles again.

the test went smoothly, and the kick wasn’t as bad as last time, but there was an added surprise that mrs. todd got to kick them all as well, since she is now a black belt. so quinn still had some trouble with flinching, but he didn’t get hurt, so that moved in a positive direction. also there is a whole rumor going now of “mrs. todd kicks harder than sifu!” which diverted the focus away from fear. she and i were laughing at the way urban legends are born.

all in all it was a great test, very positive and well balanced (the kids were all pretty well matched for sparring in size and ability). it was two hours long but with a fast-paced, good mix of material to keep it interesting, and kids got to show their stuff… he had them all do the activity “point of origin” where instead of going back to the normal starting spot, you do the next technique (several in a row) from where you end up on the previous one. then he had them continue doing that, but with their eyes closed. so in addition to letting them all show their strengths, he took them into uncharted territory and showed them all ways in which they can all still grow a lot in the future.

 

this month, quinn took possession of his phone. it is my former phone with the cracked screen, and it is mainly intended for him to be able to communicate with both his parents directly. he wants to paint the (blue) hard case lime green, and we had a really good discussion of expectations and responsibilities. he immediately used his 4 library app borrows for june, watching yu-gi-oh episodes. we discussed taking plenty of breaks and observing the same limits we’ve always observed with phone/screen time: not before school, not between dinner and bed. he is to keep it in the “parking lot” in the kitchen when not in use, and i was suggesting he use it only in the main house, not his room, but then realized he would be watching yu-gi-oh and he wanted to do that in his room (and i realized i wanted him to, too) and so i think i’ll amend it to “in room is ok with door open.” it charges in the parking lot, and just like my own phone, is not in his bedroom while he sleeps. he has to check with me to put new apps on, he agrees to not get any apps or accounts that require him to lie about his age and say he is 13. which he doesn’t want anyway, he says (he is particularly vocal right now about not wanting to join facebook). he does want to be able to text, not just email, so we talked about the $10 phone plan and he felt the specs of 500 phone minutes, 500 texts, and 500 MB of data would be sufficient… that means he can play pokemon go once in a while, but he can’t consume it endlessly with a modest data plan; and can call and text within reason but not excessively.  i left a fair number of my own contact numbers on his phone who are friends and family i think he might call in a pinch, and whom i trust to be on the receiving end of such a call.

 

we got to take care of our fairy dog. quinn stayed up past his bedtime to greet her. ruby jumped up on quinn’s loft bed to help tuck him in. i had market that saturday and left quinn a note of ruby tasks (feed and walk) and he did a great job being her caretaker. the afternoon following market was lovely, glorious sunshine. i laid on a blanket on the lawn with ruby for quite a while. quinn joined me and drew on graph paper. (a game with army men.)

i played risk outside with quinn and he destroyed me while ruby kept us company. then after dinner  he got out scrabble and i dominated. near bedtime, i was leading by over 100 points, and he said, “let’s just be goofy and do whatever now,” and started making up words. i strung together as many ooooo’s as i could and was singing operatic “ooooh” whenever i’d point to it. he made up “QFAXEXL” and put it on a triple word space for 99 points… i added a Y to it to make QFAXEXLY and he protested, “that’s not even a word” at which point i was rolling on the floor laughing, because i had clearly crossed the line. “mom. you can’t just add y to a word, and make dogly, or boxly.” he was giggling like crazy in between mock-serious statements. i loved pronouncing all the double consonant two letter words created at the intersections with QFAXEXLY, and XJ was my favorite because it’s the sound made by a light-sabre.

 

for their end-of-year science unit, quinn’s class was discussing geology, and i got to help them with several hands-on projects in crystal-growing that, if nothing else, taught them through experience that things don’t always go the way we plan. our rock candy project crystallized in the jar, but not onto the candy sticks (we learned we need to let it cool more, and let the sugar crystals dry onto the cake pop stick before inserting into the not-boiling sugar water mixture. our alum crystals completely failed (we think it was a product issue with the alum quinn’s teacher had ordered). but the borax crystals were wonderful, and it was nice to culminate the year in science with one success under our belts, and a nice souvenir to take home.

on the penultimate day of school, i was very under the weather with a bad head cold, so i did not get to participate in the all-day field trip. luckily many other parents stepped up to help, and i know the kids had an amazing time bowling, playing in the park, swimming, and stopping for frozen yogurt! because his teacher and aragorn’s mom both sent me photographic evidence.

at last, the final day of fifth grade arrived. i picked up all four of the boys from school, and they came strutting out of the building, shoulder to shoulder, chanting, “we’re middle schoolers now!” they immediately wanted to show me their gifts from their wonderful teacher, who had every kid choose several words to describe each of their classmates, then configured them into word art pieces for them to take home. quinn’s classmates said of him that he is helpful, kind, clever, inventive, mysterious, and “follows his own path.” i’m not sure why no one chose, “most likely to get lost in the library,” but they didn’t ask me. the boys got right down to business playing yu-gi-oh and pokemon when we got to our house, snacking on cherries and peanut butter pretzels. they made use of the trampoline for a time before they ventured into world domination (i always try to encourage quinn to find opponents for risk other than myself!) finally, their families joined in the celebration over pizza, ice cream cones, and cupcakes. rich made a campfire and some of the younger siblings indulged in s’mores. it was a nice way to mark the end of their elementary years!

 

the following day, legolas and quinn were both participating in yet another sleepover, this time at the karate dojo. there was a trip to the pool, lots of food, and the movie black panther before they even thought about sleeping. the next morning, they tie dyed a new set of dojo t-shirts before heading home for a nap.

after his nap, quinn woke to find his new quilt (a graduation present from mama in addition to his new old phone). i think he likes it.

he then started in on his math placement test, and went to the movie solo with his dad for father’s day.

his teacher asked me to administer the placement test at home because she had run out of time in school, but trusted me to oversee it. at first quinn resisted the test and “borrowed trouble” (anxiety) about not being capable of working out such hard questions. he told me he should be placed in low math class and would barely look at it. by the time he got going and i needed to drive him to meet his dad for the movie his tune had changed, “aww, but i want to do the graph!”

his score would indicate that he is at least 97% ready to be done with grade 6 math, and that’s considering that the person who created the answer key (presumably the grade 6 math teacher) only scored about 96% on the test. i know that because quinn’s answers that differed from the key, instead of being errors, pointed out to me where there were errors in the key. (i checked and made corrections.)  although he had 100% of the math numerically correct, he had a small number of notation omissions, and that was where i deducted the 3 points.

i don’t think he will have any trouble with the 7th-8th accelerated math class intended for him by his teacher!

[lunch at the picnic table at work:]

quinn: (shoving fava beans in his mouth until green is dripping down his chin)

mama: you’re being embarrassing.

quinn: (giggling at me stealing his line)

~

later, discussing his method of eating fava beans…

quinn: first i like to put a myriad of fava beans in my mouth…

mama: thank you for using words like myriad.

quinn: it’s only normal for a kid my age.

~

mama: do you remember growing fava beans?

quinn: i remember the gardens at the orange house, the community garden, and the dragon house. at the orange house, the fava beans were growing right next to the peas, so that was convenient.

mama: (shaking head in amazement)

later, i did a quick search of the blog for fava beans, and sure enough, peas and favas were growing side by side, as he said.

“look at that captain and crew of peas in there!”

 

still looking closely at veggies; in this case, to determine the fibonacci-ness of romanesco.

quinn’s mathemusician hero, vi hart, has an amazing patreon site (one option is to support her for $3.14/month!) where he can now access ongoing new math videos and content.

and i got this awesome green hexaflexagon shirt for quinn!!!

we had fun with this video about hexaflexaflakes… the logical progression once you’ve conquered both snowflakes and hexalfexagons is naturally to combine the two (and i hope you watch the video i linked to experience her refreshingly layered, dry humor). quinn and i made a hexaflexagon and i was cutting the centers out and folding and testing what it would do. apparently he didn’t think i did a skillful cutting job because he told me, “i’m surprised it functions at all after that lob-oh-TOE-me you just gave it.” there was a whole beat before i understood what word he had just said and i burst out laughing. i asked where he learned the word; calvin and hobbes, of course, and he’s been “saying it to myself that way in my head for years!” waiting for a chance to drop the word “lobotomy” on an unsuspecting mama…..

~~~

one night quinn asked to watch star wars after work. i started dinner prep and then took a bath while rich joined him for the rest of the movie. i could hear them chatting. when i was done with my bath and finishing making dinner, quinn was playing minecraft, still sitting in the living room with rich, and they were chatting about minecraft stuff. rich told me later that he was just saying outlandish things to cause quinn to correct him. then quinn told rich something about a mathematical constant called wau. rich teased him, “you’re making that up,” and made quinn giggle.

me: what were you telling rich last night about wau?

q: if you take euler’s identity, but then you replace all the pi’s from it to be wau instead, you end up with 1 instead of -1.

me: what’s euler’s identity?

q: it’s like e to the i pi is equal to negative one. or something like that.

me: how do you spell euler?

q: e-u-l- something. why?

me: because i was curious

q: everyone knows euler’s identity.

me: …

me: so how much is wau?

q: i don’t know. i don’t even know if it has a value, i just know there are a lot of cool things you can do with wau.

~~~~~~

all i can say is, wau.

~two months in the life of a lifelong learner~ enfolded eggs part 1

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camp boss informed me that comments were inadvertently closed on the previous lifelong learner post. i have updated it so commenting is back on, and can only assume wordpress is punishing me for my 5770-word verbosity. i have not reformed myself, in fact this post is split into parts because it got out of hand again. (another cup of tea is in order if you actually plan to read this one.)

the past few months have felt like a surge in quinn’s intellectual life, in the same way that the fall and winter months felt like a time of extreme vertical growth.

now he is flexing his mind muscles… hexaflexing them, that is.

if i had to point to a day when the current intellectual surge began to sweep us along in its current, i would say it was after seeing the movie a wrinkle in time. it was spring break, and since i was working, quinn was with me at work most of the week. on wednesday, we left work early and went to the afternoon matinee. his class had seen the movie the week before, but he had been at home with his dad nursing a cold, so he had missed the field trip. they had read the book in class and we had both re-read the book at home (it sat beside the bathtub for when either of us was soaking) in preparation for seeing the film. after the movie, it was incredibly fun to share our points of view on how the movie triumphed in ways that only movies can, and ways in which it failed to honor the book we hold very dear. we agreed point for point.

near the beginning of the movie (this would only constitute a mild spoiler, but just in case: spoiler warning), there is something not from the book, but which quinn and i both felt was a good visual representation of the feelings between meg and her parents. she holds a paper hexagon that folds into itself, and one of her parents says, “my love is there, even if you can’t feel it.” meg folds the paper, and a new design appears, having flipped inside-out, and one final fold surprisingly reveals yet a third image of a brightly colored rainbow heart galaxy (quinn’s description). meg murmurs, “not gone, just enfolded.”

when we got home from the movie, i wanted to show quinn what that paper hexagon was all about, so i looked on khan academy for a tutorial on hexaflexagons, and was not disappointed.

   

vi hart, the author of this, and 49 other awesome videos under the heading “math for fun and glory: doodling in math,” is now a hero to quinn. and between that day and this, he has watched all 50, most of them multiple times. our hexaflexagon journey began that very day, including both trihexaflexagons like meg’s, and hexahexaflexagons which can flip to 6 different faces. i highly encourage you to watch some of vi’s math for fun and glory videos, as they are both educational and witty. some of our favorites from the hexaflex section included her warnings in the safety video concerning possible ways in which hexaflexing can go awry, warning us against, amongst other things, the danger of hexaflexaperfectionism. we started asking each other to please pass the “interdimensional void” when we wanted the black marker. probably the most quoted line by quinn has been, “perfectly healthy snakes may turn into snake loops; or worse, become decapitated. either state is fatal for the snake, as having no head can lead to starvation.”

another favorite safety concern: “a change in chirality could be a sign that your flexagon has been flipped through four-dimensional space and is possibly a highly dangerous multi-dimensional portal.”

we made our own version of meg’s hexaflexagon, as well as a pile of others with rainbow colors, snakes, celtic knots, and mandalas, each enfolded with love, of course. enfolded isn’t just a collapsing of geometric shapes upon themselves… it’s a swaddling blanket surrounding a babe in a mama’s arms, a protective cocoon around the transformation of a youngling, a container underneath the overflowing emotions of a pre-teen whose gangly limbs can relax against the sides after that which needs to spill out has receded and what is left is love.

on quinn’s next foray into math for fun and glory, he tackled spirals, fibonacci, and being a plant, in which pinecones, and other things that begin with pine-, are examined to find that their spirals are arranged according to numbers in the fibonacci sequence. i’m kind of into spirals, but this is all new and magical math to me, so it’s been inspiring to learn about it alongside my kiddo.

i wore a spiral necklace for the last month of pregnancy, and on through quinn’s babyhood. i have a pair of silver spiral earrings i wear pretty much every day. i had a fancier pair of silver spirals made for my wedding day. my wedding ring is also a spiral of sorts, and i’ve explained the meaning behind that. i resonated with midwife ina may gaskin’s descriptive writing about how babies spiral into the world head first, facing down, then turning and facing up. each time i think of spirals, i think of birth and of beginning again, always having an opportunity to return to myself, return to a grounded place. the spirals quinn started drawing when he was barely 2 years old jumped off the page at me, but then having a child is a great way to rediscover everything you know and love about the world as they hand it back to you again and again. this verbose quote from one of the parenting books i read years ago with an emotional intelligence angle uses spiral imagery to describe the normal course of human development.

from: giving the love that heals a guide for parents

by harville hendrix and helen hunt

(quoting edward edinger ego and archetype): “the process of alternation between union and separation seems to occur repeatedly throughout the life of the individual, both in childhood and in maturity. indeed, this cycle (or better, spiral) formula seems to express the basic process of the psychological development from birth to death.”

hh and hh:

“there are two rhythms that move through the developing child at the same time: oscillation from the center that expands and then returns, and progression through stages of growth as the child moves through his preordained evolution toward adulthood. the interplay of these rhythms shapes the spiral pattern of healthy growth.

oscillation begins with attachment, expands into exploration and differentiation and then subsides back into attachment again. the baby internalizes this rhythm during the first years of his life and repeats it naturally as he progresses through the stages of growth. he is born emotionally connected to his mother, and as he feels that this connection is becoming secure, he cautiously moves out (still attached) to explore and connect with his nonmaternal environment, regularly returning to his mother’s presence for reassurance.

if this first and most basic rhythm is supported and allowed to follow its natural course without impediment, it will be repeated successfully later when the child falls in love with a romantic partner- or a job, a cause, an idea, or his own child, when he becomes a parent- and then learns to express his unique self within the context of a romantic relationship or other important life experience.

in fact, all of the primary tasks of childhood recur in coordinated rhythms throughout the individual’s life. the newborn child has within him all the impulses that will later flower at their appointed time. he falls in love with someone or something. he explores it and crafts a new aspect of his identity with it; he develops new skills; he manifests caring for others. he comes to know the rhythm very well and will repeat this cycle over and over again. the degree of his success depends on how well he has completed his basic evolution during the first eighteen to twenty years of his life.

perhaps you are aware of this rhythm in your own life. think for a moment about how it shows up in your experience as a parent. when your child was born, you fell in love with him. with this marvelous and mysterious creature in your life, you began to explore the world of parenting. that may be why you are reading this book. as you cared for your newborn and got used to your new role, you acquired a new layer of identity as a “parent.” with increasing experience, you learned to handle yourself more confidently as you expanded your competence. perhaps you also sought the support and guidance of others who shared your experience, your peers in parenting. and recognizing your participation in the preservation of the race, you became interested in the welfare of others and the quality of life in society. this expansion outward is a natural cycle in our lives.

the child’s growth depends also on the other rhythm that propels him forward, even as he comes back around to revisit previous tasks. this rhythm is not just an oscillation but also a progression through distinct developmental impulses. the seeds of them all are present at birth, but each blossoms in its own time in response to an inner impulse and the readiness of the environment. if his parents have nourished the first flower appropriately, the next bud will open. each time he responds to another developmental impulse that pushes him forward through the developmental stages, he returns to his primary connection with his caretaker for the emotional security to move to the next stage. each impulse solidifies and then dissolves, one into the other. it is as if the child were being blown unerringly toward the gates of maturity by the wise breath of nature. his life flows from one transformation into another and continues to do so even after he arrives at adulthood.”

~~~

“these two rhythms of oscillation and progression move together in a pattern that is both circular and progressive, suggesting, as edinger says, a spiral. think of a spiral staircase: each step is a progression upward in space and is also a revisiting of a particular point around the circumference of a circle. we spend our lives walking up our own spiral staircases. at each turn, we get the same view we had before at the same spot, but because we are higher up, the view is broader.

~~~

the beauty of the spiral is that we will always get another chance. encountering the step again at the same place on a higher level, we can learn to do it better the next time. we can become more surefooted as we get older.

so, having fibonacci spirals delight my eleven-year-old is not so out of left field, and serves to bring me back to myself yet again.

one of the delightful revelations of the fibonacci videos was that music notes also correspond to fibonacci numbers, and it is beyond me whether this is mere magical coincidence or something more tied to the rules of nature or mathematics. what was magical coincidence, was that quinn and i were exploring the piano keyboard at nearly the same time, as it relates to his percussion and musical training. while we watched rich’s son play his alumni basketball games, i taught quinn how to draw piano keys and he kept busy for many octaves. recalling the miles of piano key doodles of my own youth, i was yet again returned to myself, this time to the sound of basketballs dribbling down the court, sneakers squeaking on the polished floor, and the scratch of a pencil across a piece of graph paper.

when making math doodles, it’s hard to avoid sometimes making a don’t-dle, but i’m excited for quinn to be launching back into drawing, a form of creativity he has always ebbed and flowed with a bit, due in part to perfectionism. the math doodle genre seems to have really struck a chord with him, and he bounced from pascal’s triangle to sierpenski’s triangle and soon he was inventing quinn’s triangle.

the compass and protractor set he got for his birthday from his aunt and uncle have been handy during this math drawing phase. one of our new favorite math shapes is a cardioid. as vi explains, a cardioid is the inverse of a parabola. but i just learned from wikipedia that a cardioid is also an envelope of a pencil of circles (enfolding them!) and, get this, a cardioid is also part of a family of curves known as sinusoidal spirals!

starting to embrace nerd metaphors: parabola, because i cardioid you. (translation: smile, because i love you.)

after watching vi hart’s story about wind and mr ug, a tale woven along a mobius strip, quinn began to ponder the interesting form of a mobius strip in a more abstract sense – he postulated that the shape of the universe might be a mobius strip, and that there is always an alternate reality for every reality we experience.

another most-frequently-watched candidate was how-to-snakes! (one greeted him in his car seat at pick up time, cradling a fibonacci pinecone… more were hiding in his room when he got home. that way he could make an oroborus; snake knuckles; baby snakelets, supersnake; borromian ring snakes; snake spirals; and a many-headed hydra snake! of course, all of this led to graph paper drawings of many different configurations of snakes.

if you peruse the list of videos, it is easy to see how a guy like quinn got sucked in, given such titles as “doodling in math: dragon dungeons” and “infinity elephants” and “are shakespeare’s plays encoded within pi?” i was finding phi angle-a-trons tucked into his homework folder that he had ostensibly constructed during class time, and he spent the duration of his parent teacher conference drawing this:

quinn even watched every episode of thanksgiving math multiple times, learning about such culinary wonders as green bean matherole, borromian onion rings, apple pi and pumpkin tau, and turduckenen-duckenen.

     

speaking of food, quinn has helped me immensely in the kitchen recently, cheerfully offering help or asking if he can be involved in meal preparation on a pretty regular basis… some things he has been up to: prepping and making pancakes; making broccoli soup (operating the blender); meatball/sauce prep (can opener, garlic press). he became a certified muffin baking technician, because after he got past being “not good at eggs,” he decided, “i’m going to do all of the steps in the process myself,” right down to putting in and taking out of the oven. the filling of cups with batter got frustrating, and he was getting increasingly agitated, but i made jokes. he said you could smell the frustration in the air, and i said, no, that’s just the fish frying you smell – our neighbor had given us a lingcod fillet, and we were having fish and chips for dinner. i said, “it’s confusing because they sound alike. fish frying, frustrating…” and then i’d purposely use the wrong word in every sentence thereafter. he giggled, worked through the fish fry, got a cup of water to put the rubber spatula in after each cup was filled so the batter wouldn’t be sticking to the spatula so much. problem-solving in action.

vi warned us about hexaflex-mexican-food-cravings…

quinn had bought a goose egg for $1 at farmer’s market, and he had requested that we use it for something very special involving lemon (that was after i broke the news that he could not incubate this egg and hope for it to hatch, that these were for eating.) on a saturday morning i told him my idea was to use it to make lemon filling, which we would roll up into crepes and top with whipped cream.

“ooh, can i help?”

this was after his muffin adventure of the previous evening, so i was pleasantly surprised that he was ready so soon for another kitchen marathon.

he got to work, beginning with zesting an entire lemon, about which he was extremely thorough (the recipe only called for half, but we like it zesty). then he measured all of the lemon filling ingredients into the saucepan. while he stirred, i whipped up the heavy cream, and by then the filling was simmering. i took over stirring it while it thickened, and quinn measured crepe ingredients into the blender. he sliced strawberries and then arranged them on our plates while i sliced oranges and flipped crepes. then we worked together to enfold lemon filling into each crepe, top them with whipped cream (and a sprinkle of sugar, he settled on as a final touch) and he arranged everything on plates to serve.

later that afternoon, quinn’s 5’1” frame was enfolded into my lap, curled into a ball. he pulled the fuzzy owl blanket up over his head, and said, “you find an egg.” i laughed… and said how surprised i was to have found an egg, i had only ever found one billion other eggs since giving birth to quinn. “you find an egg” is the beginning of one of the most-frequently-played pretend scenario games of the boy named quinn, a boy who has played a higher than average number of pretend scenarios in his time on earth. i never know what creature may hatch out of the egg i find, and the main narrative arc of the game revolves around my suspense and anticipation of the secret that awaits me curled inside the egg. it could be a puffin, a penguin, or an owl. it could be a dragon or a dinosaur. it could even be a pokemon character, as it was today, once we finally got back on track after my teasing about always finding eggs i’m not even looking for. that day he was spheal, and i hope my teasing did nothing to discourage him from going on having me find an egg one billion more times, even though he can’t sit on my lap curled in a ball anymore without inflicting some small amount of pain.

the following day was sunday, so i made pancakes, which we topped with strawberry rhubarb sauce and maple syrup. quinn’s weekend consisted of studying math for fun and glory and computer programming on khan academy, adding turrets and reinforced walls to his minecraft fortress (i love finding the page in the book open to portcullises), making math doodles, dabbling with his robotics kit, planning out how he is going to make a bb-8 and a lin-v8k droid after i showed him a make magazine video of a homemade bb-8 using many cheap hacks (like old speaker magnets and cut off tops of roll-on deodorants for parts of the mechanisms; making the body out of paper mache using a dollar store beach ball). he couldn’t fall asleep by bedtime. he is just in one of those spongey phases, absorbing absolutely everything and asking for more and blowing me away with how much he already knows.

quinn: tau is bigger than pi! it’s 2 pi! it’s approximately 6.28!

me: um, ok, if you say so…

quinn: mo-ommmm, you didn’t know that?!?!

continued in part 2

~two months in the life of a lifelong learner~ percolator

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a long and winding hodge podge of learning and living that i have decided to stop editing and move on from… read at your own risk (warning! verbosity ahead!), and probably pour yourself a cup of tea first.

science fair! i had the privilege of being the science fair mentor for quinn’s 5th grade class. his teacher had a very clear plan and it made it very easy to guide the kids through the process of gathering their data. they worked in groups to build worm compost bins, and then ran experiments based on, in most cases, food preferences of the worms. quinn’s group chose to compare the worms’ preference for raw potato to cooked potato, by adding equal amounts of each food at the start of the 4 weeks, and weighing what was left of each type after each week passed.

after i got done doing science with the kids one afternoon, i had a great conversation with quinn’s teacher. i opted quinn out of the state smarter balanced testing this year. it’s a matter of filling out a form, and since the detriments to quinn seemed to be outweighing the benefits, i filled out the form. his teacher had emailed me about another test called oaks science, that he will take as a 5th grader, and letting me know that if we wanted to try to opt out of the OAKS, it required a religious or learning disability reason and apparently involves a great deal of writing on the parents’ part.

this is all aside from star testing which actually provides some insight on specific skills; in quinn’s case the insights are limited based on how far out of range he scores. he still takes a star test at the beginning and end of the year.

i had emailed her back explaining our reasoning for the SB opt out was that Q was showing signs of stress last year and that all the rest of my misgivings about standardized testing aside, that particular test doesn’t even seem like it offers teachers any feedback on how to help kids learn. i have seen the results for the past two years, which aren’t returned until fall (when quinn wlil be a 6th grader with a different set of teachers) and seemed fairly useless to me.

i asked her what her take on the OAKS was, whether it was like SB, whether she felt some other way about SB, acknowledging that i’m not the teacher, and want to know if i am missing some truly helpful aspect of it. i said i’m happy to write something though i could prove neither religious nor learning disability for quinn.

she eased any potential worries about the science test, said she thinks he should take it because it’s far less involved… 40 science questions with definite answers, not open-ended essays. she doesn’t think it will stress him out the same way the other one did, she sees that he gets hung up on writing answers, he percolates in his mind and it takes him a while to start writing. i loved that she has such an accurate observation of him, and also that she phrases it in such positive terms; she says she is fascinated by his differences. if she saw any sign that he was experiencing stress from the science test, she would “find a glitch” and that would be that.

she ended up sharing her own dislike of the sb tests, is glad i’m opting quinn out of them, encouraged us to opt out all the way through high school, and even finds the star only so useful for his level. she feels what he might really benefit from is tag testing, and even moreso, pre-sat testing when he gets to middle school. she told me she thinks i will really need to advocate for him over there, because she feels he really needs more tag programming and isn’t getting it. i’m so glad i shared my reasoning for opting out, because i think it freed her to share her take on things, and it turns out she is a pretty incredible ally in terms of seeing clearly what is needed with this boy’s education.

we planned what he will do during testing week, and while there were several good options for students opting out, we agreed the best was for him to do an independent project. she liked the concept of genius hour that google uses to foster ingenuity, and she felt quinn could handle an open-ended project on a topic of his choice. she wanted it to entail some sort of end product that he could then share with the class (a presentation, animation, essay, artwork, etc.)

she was also supportive about us going to new york for a week, saying he will learn a lot from traveling!

“percolating” is such a perfect word to describe quinn’s thinking process, especially when it comes to getting ready to write something. he does most of his work inside his head, then it comes pouring out in the eleventh hour, spilling onto the page in a form that requires little editing. what wonderful images and memories the word “percolator” brings to mind: from recent fourth of july camping trips, enjoying breakfast around the campfire, to long ago visits with aunt margie and uncle george in their cabin in the adirondacks. again, it’s amazing to find someone who has the capacity to observe such things about my kid so thoroughly in spite of the fact that he is “number 27” out of 30 kids in her room. seen, known, valued for who he is; sense of belonging, connection. see also: educational priorities.

this story has been percolating along, about a page every few weeks or so…

mapping was a big topic covered in recent weeks. quinn’s imaginary land of canith has realistic longitude and latitude lines, a legend, and all the physical features of a map that you could want!

his tag class also included some compass and map work. another week involved animal tracks. one week, they worked outside and made miniature shelters. at the end the instructor let them all destroy their structures, but quinn had built his off to one side by a rock and said he was the only kid who decided to leave his up in case a squirrel needed a place to hide.

i picked quinn up from school one afternoon, and he was his usual one-word answer, surly after school self, which i’ve come to think of as “feed me” and so i didn’t start asking a bunch of questions (i’ve learned to wait until later for the most part). he was coming from a dad day and therefore no lunch leftovers to eat, but i had a tangerine. i did ask if he had remembered to bring his state book home (because when i was in class for science fair on thursday, his teacher had mentioned he still needed to finish it up). he said no. then when i asked if we should go back in for it, he provided self-defeated answers, “no, we can’t, because…” and “it’s raining” and “we’ll get hypothermia.” in the meantime, i had showed him the pack of brightly colored paper i had picked up (including martian green and cosmic orange) for making more of the origami octahedron project he liked doing the previous week at school. i had gotten a smile out of him with the martian conversation (because he read it aloud and then i said oh, like marTEEans, from martia?) but he was still mopey, so i re-parked and started peeling the tangerine, and then handed him a slice, calling it a marTEEan orange power pack, and said it would protect him from hypothermia as we returned to the mother ship… and also from scurvy. and by then he was laughing and walking in the rain into the school to get his stuff. and he said they were cosmic orange power packs, duh.

so, handling moody tweens is easy. just be a goofball. and provide snacks.

in his homework folder, he had a handwritten note from a friend saying to please bring himself and his family to go bowling at 3:30. (no bumpers). no date was specified, so i asked quinn, and he was pretty sure it meant the following day, saturday. luckily, i had background info that this boy’s dad is a fb friend of mine and rich’s due to being in one flew over the cuckoo’s nest with rich, so i did some parental fact checking, and sure enough, it was legit. the response i got was, “i had no idea the Quinn he was talking about was your Quinn!”

our two families got along quite well, and the boys are a lot alike. two smarty pants stick figures.

after bowling, we had dinner with rich’s mom and some friends, which was fun and fancy. quinn did well with the fancy factor (napkin in the lap, multiple forks and spoons and courses). he is fun to be around, which i’m glad i can say about my ten year old. here he is at home the next day eating the leftovers of his herb chicken, still painstakingly scrubbing his sprig of rosemary and slice of lemon over each bite before consuming.

it’s been a time of ups and downs with friendships for quinn. while nothing major has taken place, i get the sense that things are shifting a bit for him and he is finding that he values certain things in friends, some of which he hasn’t quite found yet. one friend he has thought of as a best friend named another boy as his best friend while he and quinn were playing one day. i had a chat with quinn after overhearing that, deciding to risk bringing up a touchy subject rather than let it go untalked about. it did definitely come up on his radar, though he didn’t give it any energy with the friend. he got his feelings about it out with me, and though it didn’t feel great, he also realized it didn’t have to mean anything terrible, either.

we talked more about what he values in a friend. one thing he likes about the bowling friend (he’s going to need a pseudonym soon, i can tell) is that, “he understands what i’m saying.” i probed further to find out that what he means by that is, the vocabulary and language quinn uses are understood and do not need further explanation with this boy, do not need to be simplified or defined. they keep up with each other. they have a compatible sense of humor in that they both like word play, and they can get pretty complicated with their discussion topics without needing to slow down.

there’s a lot going on in social development. some intriguing correspondence from a female karate friend inspired quinn to respond in cursive to her letter. i’m glad to find that: he is eager to fill me on the details and let me read both his and her notes; that he seems to have a sense of the appropriate level of friendship at this age level and kept it all in friend terms; and that he writes with good reciprocity, both sharing some of his ideas but also asking her likes and favorites.

i just wanted to mention/appreciate that i love my dojo. sifu and mrs. todd have been so supportive of working with quinn in the limited time they have with him (to date his dad has remained insistent that he cannot bring him to class during his week) and they’ll even refuse to charge me full price for quinn since he is there only half of the time. meanwhile, they work hard to catch him up on his techniques when he is around, and they see who he is and what his strengths are, and emphasize those while helping him in areas where he is not as strong. they recognize things like perfectionism (they ease up the test pressure and focus on the fun), they recognize his desire to one day teach, and his cognitive abilities to retain all the details about each move of each technique, and they put him to work helping other students. i talked with them about how i feel he will become less tolerant of his dad’s refusal to bring him to activities, as he becomes a teen, and sifu was in agreement that time would come. it’s what i hope for with everyone who enters quinn’s life in any meaningful way, that the focus will be on quinn and what is best for quinn, that quinn will be seen and known and valued for who he is, and that the connection is alive and foremost between him and anyone in a teaching capacity. (once again, see educational priorities.)

they constantly express how happy they are that we’re a part of the dojo, so i know the feeling is mutual!

he has been reading up on egyptian mythology, and requesting books on hieroglyph translation! he also read riordan’s greek heroes tome, now that he has read pretty much everything else the man has written.

cats are sacred in egyptian culture, right? this one expects to be worshipped… the past few months she often helps quinn fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning.

one morning the day of his music lesson, i got him up a half hour early and he played a full third of the drum section of his book… he has much better focus in the morning. we have had some discussion about how he may need to work at the bells harder (the snare drum just comes so easily to him) but that it will be just as rewarding or even more so to get better at the bells, since he will have to work harder. i’m trying to do things to keep practice fun for him, and continue to help him when he gets stuck in perfectionism mode. rich helps by furthering his musical education, putting beatles cds on the stereo. i mix up what instruments we play (recorder, guitar, piano, miscellaneous percussion), rename his tunes, play along with him on a drum, piano, or recorder, and inform him of silly lyrics trivia.

quinn and i went to the talent show at his school, because his friend (of the bowling invite) was in a skit and also playing his guitar in the show. we ended up sitting right in front of his friend’s family and that was cool and random. he came to sit with us and they got to chat. after we left i was musing with quinn about the band they’ll form together, and quinn thinks they need more players, “like maybe a flute and a trumpet?”

we try to fit in a few of the “art fridays” classes offered through the visual arts center, and the one called mayan metalsmithing caught quinn’s eye this session. he loved the owl image he saw in one drawing, and ended up borrowing from that idea to make a very intricate pyramid with symbols representing four elements and other details. he certainly had fun using this new and different medium for creating.

we had a fabulous family visit in new york, complete with lots of learning about: wizard chess, drums, winter olympics sports, shelter building practice, plane de-icers, and the origami yoda series his cousins had out from the library.

i got quinn on friday from school, and took him to his “mayan metalsmithing” art class at the visual arts center. we went home, ate pizza for dinner, and got ourselves packed up.

before the trip, we got to spend the afternoon with rich’s daughter. she had on hgtv show called fixerupper, which was impossible for quinn to pull himself away from. still, he manages to learn things, and while we were waiting in the airport he told me that he wants a fixer-upper and to fund his paleontology research by flipping houses. his exact words were that he would “use the money for more expeditions and plaster”. i encouraged him to learn all the building skills he possibly can from his dad, so he can put them to good use. i think it’s an excellent plan, better than trying to compete for grants. the part he loved the best was taking a “blank” room (his word) and deciding what to do with it and putting all the things in it (he will also have a warehouse… to hold the optional items.)

we took a red-eye flight there as usual. as we were landing in newark, quinn and i were able to see the empire state building and the statue of liberty from the plane. flying to syracuse, quinn spent a long time looking out the window at the view of snowy new york countryside – i can picture him gazing out with his with hands folded in his lap.

i will also be able to picture quinn’s cute upturned face when he finally hugged grammy.  their bond is like nothing else in the world.

after some soup and corn muffins for lunch, the boys began dueling with lightsabers. as soon as that got rowdy, i strongly suggested we go sledding before the snow melted all the way, and we had a fun afternoon sledding, tobogganing, and generally playing in the snow.

we had a picnic dinner, as is the christmas tradition of the rews, and since we haven’t all been there for one since quinn was just shy of 2, we observed the christmas picnic tradition together.

by the time i woke up the next morning, uncle t and grampy had already left for work, and quinn had gotten up and was on the loveseat snuggling with grammy, just the two of them, just chatting. lots of cousin play time happened, and quinn began drawing a game on graph paper in his spare moments. quinn and i talked some about being a person who needs to do some recharging in between being with people, and i see how self-aware he is in this department nowadays.

we had so much fun watching the olympics. we mimicked the vocalizations of the curling athletes and feigned understanding of the subtle intricacies of the sport. we cheered on the men’s bobsled teams who incredibly tied for gold, and reminisced about olympics of yore when germany was still divided into east and west. rich and i had recently learned that the berlin wall has now been down as many days as it had been up, and grampy remembered having written an essay about the berlin wall in his younger days.

quinn got up  before me again the next day, but it was because he had fallen out of bed (from a mattress on the floor, so no biggie) and he immediately went downstairs to grammy, who tucked him into her bed for another 15 minutes so he could have a gentle wake up. my favorite thing is that he doesn’t bother to wake me up, because why would he when there is a perfectly good grammy to go to?

the paper airplane shop began in earnest on this day, and lasted through the rest of the week. mario’s design for an airplane called a scooty was a big hit, and many prototypes were made. the living room was a big mess after a while, but i grabbed a brown paper bag and named it the “airplane garage” at one point, said it was time for the boys to park their airplanes in the garage if they were ready to go outside, and they were, so they did. it got called “the garage” the rest of the week.

luigi made himself a parachute and wanted to do an egg drop, and i encouraged him (he was inspired by quinn’s parachute which he had seen in oregon) and then he and i went up to the barn to drop it off the hay loft, and it worked great! he was so thrilled.

in the world of olympics, it was the day lindsey vonn was doing her downhill skiing and we were screaming our heads off just as though we actually care about skiing.

that afternoon the kids played outside in the 60 degree weather for hours on end: swinging on the tire swing, climbing trees, building shelters, riding bikes, trying to jump on the pogo stick… and generally running around in the breezy mild weather.

before dinner, boys were hanging around the table so i put a pile of place mats and napkins, a stack of plates and a pile of utensils on one end of it and asked who would like to help with setting the table. quinn and schroeder (quinn’s newest cousin) handled the whole thing. quinn made a comment that he can’t refuse because he is a certified technician, and the tone of what he said was so cheerful and positive (instead of “i’m obligated” it was more like “i feel compelled to and proud to do it.”)

quinn did so well with bedtimes and routine, possibly motivated by the fact that he then ended up being the first cousin up every morning to monopolize grammy time.

i got up early and went to see my friend the next morning and when i got home, quinn was playing chess with uncle t (who took the day off wed) and i guess they got a few games in before the other boys woke up.

we all cheered on the olympic short track skaters because… well, because!

then rich and quinn and i went to visit uncle b, and got to see his baby goats (bowie and pixie, boy and girl, so cute!) and then go to his practice space so quinn could see his drums and he could show him some stuff. i took video of each of the beats he showed quinn so i can put them on his computer for him to play back and try to replicate… he had this look of awe listening to uncle b on the drums. he was kind of shy once he got behind the drums himself and it took him a minute to play anything, but he did do the basic rhythm he knows, and then he ad libbed a little bit and it was pretty cool. uncle b said, “he’s got that rew music gene” and seemed proud to have a nephew following in his drumming foorsteps. i am so glad they got that time together. he encouraged quinn to listen to certain drummers, and named several bands who have inspired him… quinn was soaking it all in.

that night i happened upon a scene in which quinn, luigi and mario were trying to make an origami cat using a you tube video, and uncle t was trying to help them. i sat in to try to help as well, but it was a difficult one, and we ended up watching the second half and realizing we should bail. then the boys helped quinn make an easy 5-fold origami yoda they had learned, and then i put quinn to bed.

the next morning at 8:00 i started seeing snowflakes… quinn came downstairs a few minutes after 8 and it was snowing in earnest, and the sound of him gasping… priceless. he told me he never saw it snowing before, only had woken up to snow being already on the ground, so he was feeling the magic. i asked if he wanted to go out right away, but he said no, he wanted to wait until there was some on the ground and then go out and play. it just kept falling and falling all day! 8 hours later there were 6 inches on the ground, and many giant snowballs, snow people, the base of an igloo, and ski tracks. quinn’s snow person had a big base, and tapered to a very small head, and he called it the security guard.

skiing was such an intense emotional experience for him. i found all of my gear from when i was his age (miracle… shoes in attic, skis in barn. poles in cellar…) and we realized the boots fit him fine! so we snapped him into the skis, and he was excited! and then he was frustrated! and then he was angry at me! and then he was angry at skis! and then he was on top of the world again! like that, for the whole time. he was so happy to be doing it (i mean, olympics mania was not lost on the boy) and yet it did not come easily, and he fell and it didn’t feel great, and he didn’t think i was right that falling is an essential part of the learning process with skiing. later on, we had yet another conversation about how sometimes we can be perfectionists…. and i think he is gaining insight about that all the time. so all in all, i am very glad i put him on those skis, and put that good challenge in front of him, and though it was not easy, it was enjoyable and a memory he will love forever.

schroeder came over, and quinn and mario went sledding with him and they had tons of fun. the snow kept falling… then at 4:00, it stopped and the sun came out! so we retired to the indoors for tacos! it was a wonderful, snowy birthday eve.

birthday!

there has been much written on the subject of this day already, a cold and rainy, paper folding, family gathering, peach pie eating, wonderful day of celebrating with his whole family all together on his birthday for the very first time.

in the morning we went to the cider mill and got to see andy and molly. they had been out of town visiting family for spring break, but it was so good to get to see them again. we got apples and donuts and went back to the house for play time until we had to leave for the airport.

quinn used his new birthday present book on star wars origami when he got home to create r2d2 and c3po. he had a frustration at one point and as i was trying to talk him through staying with it and staying calm, he told me, “i’m a perfectionist.” his increasing level-headed awareness of this inner challenge will help him so much in overcoming the associated obstacles!

he has been exploring more game programming using scratch. on one occasion he looked at trying to make a dinosaur bone digging game in scratch, and he played some other peoples’ games about dinosaurs.

he also started making a game called kashyyyk battle. one of the books i gave him for his birthday was about making star wars games in scratch. he read a bunch of it on the plane ride, and it is amazing to me how he started with making the (someone else’s icon design) whale swim across the screen to now googling “how to make gravity in scratch” and implementing all this crazy code and designing these characters himself (drawing individual pixels). yoda has a lightsaber that appears if you press space bar, to kill the clones… it’s a work in progress, but he got gravity working… and he knows exactly what he is going to do, he just needs more time to implement it all.

 

one afternoon, he thought of an idea for a new “story mode” game, after experiencing “scratch – story mode” and given some prior experience with “minecraft – story mode.” he worked in his graph notebook that bears the label “quinn’s games” to develop 3 characters (they bear striking resemblance to quinn himself, and his cousins mario and luigi) and began percolating some ideas about the story line of the game, in which he knew the heroes would encounter at least one dragon.

on time management… i’ve had him start using a white board to plan his time. one non-school friday he woke up just before 9 and he had until 2:30 when he’d leave for his dad’s, so i had him plan out his day in segments of 30 minutes. he got to choose when to have breakfast, lunch, music practice and homework, and then see how many other half hours were left for free choice (a game of bone wars, time to himself, time with me; i gave restrictions on my own time such as needing the time slot before his lunch free for making lunch) and he followed the plan pretty much to the letter and with only a little bit of grumbling/processing and a growing awareness of the passage of time (we used a timer for each 30 minute segment). i haven’t asked him to plan every evening, but some evenings i do bring it up, so he does less leaving things until the last minute or skipping them entirely (music practice is hard to fit in without some intentional planning, with all the karate and trying to get to bed on time and lengthy dinner and bath processes). this seemed like an area that could do with more scaffolding and coaching, and it seems like the right time to get some practice in before middle school.

one small victory in this area was that he got caught up on a whole week of reading summaries in one night. typically, he struggles against writing even one summary, and he is required to write four of them per week. he didn’t write any while we were in new york, believing he did not need to, but found out when he got back that he actually did need to. he set a goal for himself to have it done by wednesday, and worst case scenario friday, so he wouldn’t have to miss any recess to finish it at school. (that would take place after the one week grace period, so the following monday). he got home from karate one night and set to work and got 6 summaries written; not only did he get the back work done, but got himself up to date on his current homework for that week. all without a single mention from me, he just did it.

also in the department of planning ahead, he knows that he wants to do a comparison of the various mythologies he has learned about- greek, roman, egyptian, norse – when he spends his week opted out of testing.

for his karate birthday, i brought mini cupcakes and sifu gave him an amazing gift of throwing knives that quinn has been ogling in sifu’s weapons case for a while now. it’s so neat how he pays attention to what the kids care about. i brought cookies to school for his birthday on the monday he went back, since he had his actual birthday while he was in new york.

hat day ~ guitar and other instruments keep him interested in music even if his principal instrument is causing frustration ~cracking crab

“look out, snack shelf, because here comes winter storm quinn!” we had to laugh that winter storm quinn came and hit new york the week after we visited.

we celebrated st. patty’s with our local family. corned beef, green jello, plasma cars, and all the usual fixings!

quinn’s class took a 3 day field trip to outdoor school at the local omsi site known as camp grey. i chaperoned for two out of three days, so i got to photo document as well.

on day 1, the topics were marine mammals and birds. after stretching out a rope and visualizing the actual lengths of various marine mammals, from sea otter to blue whale, the kids got to cycle through stations, checking out bones, retrieving “food” out of water using different tools to represent baleen (strainer) and teeth (chopsticks), donning a blubber glove to see how much warmer it makes the water feel, dropping slinkies from their ears to the ground to test out echolocation, and designing their own marine mammal based on the adaptations they’d learned about. after lunch, they hiked to the jetty and did some great bird watching, spying an osprey nest, many cormorants, and a few other species, in addition to some harbor seals.

on day 2, our group went on a nice long hike to the beach! to warm up our brains before we left, we did an exercise using a crumpled up piece of paper to represent a watershed. the kids drew waterways where they seemed likely to exist based on the paper’s “topography”, and then the leader used a squirt bottle to demonstrate how the water would flow around the watershed. the hike involved some plant identification, a fun game of tag to represent the food web, and a fair amount of free time to explore and play.

and one certified cursive signature writing technician!

pi day!

quinn had his half-purple belt test! he tested alongside two of his peers who were receiving their green belts, so it was a pretty intense and thorough test, in which each kid was truly taken to their edge and made it back safely. each kid also had a chance to showcase the areas in which he shines, and while the other boys were both very strong in sparring, quinn’s talent for memorizing forms and for understanding theory were also displayed.

origami!

the science fair event was held at quinn’s school. i appreciated quinn’s teacher’s approach once again in that her class did a group effort sandwich board and a nice bulletin board, and skipped the individual displays (aside from worm bins! the actual experiment!)

it was a nice opportunity to talk with his teacher about him, whereas my usual capacity as a classroom mentor or field trip chaperone doesn’t often allow for that. she is looking ahead to middle school and said that she will recommend him for the 7-8 accelerated math class beginning in the fall. even better, she knew more about the teacher than i do, and said “i want him to have her right away.” this bodes very well, coming from this wonderful teacher with whom i feel very lucky he has gotten to spend fifth grade.

i also got to hear about how she feels quinn “thinks so outside of the box” and uses language in “ways i’ve never heard from other students.” she told me, “sometimes i put quinn’s assignment  on the bottom of the pile to save it for last, it’s like dessert!

i looked over at quinn, who was listening in, and said, “it’s story ice cream in a bowl.” and he smiled.