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~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ null gravity

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I’m playing catch up on some lifelong learner posts… I had put this process on pause during the early stages of the pandemic when it still felt too raw to look at such normal memories full of things that felt certain (like going to school); now it feels like more of a comfort to remember these moments, so the time is right. Also, we remain lifelong learners; time marches on and more lifelong learner posts are always in the making… can’t let the backlog get too out of hand. Sending love to all the home learners, whether it’s what you’ve always done, or a new path laid out before you.

~10-23 through 11-23-19~

This was the first Halloween in quite a few years that I got to see Quinn! It takes all the fingers of one of my hands to count the years I sewed Pokemon costumes (Spheal, Kyogre, Bulbasaur, Charizard, and Rowlet) and sent them off with him to wear while his dad took him trick-or-treating, or didn’t. This year, Quinn advocated for himself and made his own Halloween plans, and I was lucky enough to be involved (and with no big sewing requirements of me). Although Halloween fell on a Thursday (the day before he would come back to me from his Dad’s), he asked me to pick him up from school that afternoon and take him to the dojo to have a cookie contest with Sifu and another karate kid, each of whom baked their own batch for a cookie-bake-off. Since Quinn was going to be at his dad’s the night he needed to do his baking, he measured out his ingredients in a tupperware to bring to his dad’s, and made a plan to bake them in the toaster oven there. He baked his jam thumbprints and he brought them to the dojo! Then he participated in the final Haunted House of the year.

Quinn is navigating his homework journey with the added component of coparent’s tension on the subject. He seems to be keeping his dad in the dark about some of his assignments in order to protect against added anxiety and stress in that household. We had some serious talk about that, and about how kids aren’t supposed to have to take care of their parents on an emotional level, but he was very matter of fact. “It’s in my own best interest,” he explained, and I acknowledged his point, but also asked if he could think of any areas where he had to handle me and my emotions that way so they didn’t overflow onto him. “Nope!” He seemed relieved I wasn’t going to be an informant, but I just nod and smile when coparent tells me Quinn is all caught up, because Quinn lets me know the real work load when we get home. He is going to have more work to do in this area so he doesn’t fall behind each week he is at his other parent’s house, but I think he is already developing those strategies by metering how much communication he is doing about homework at all. I have encouraged him that he can just get to work without saying much at all, and that “less is more” can sometimes be a good communication policy on topics that can cause stress. He is also developing some capabilities such as finishing an assignment during another class (!) which, while it is less ideal than doing it at home, is an executive function skill to be sure, and one I wasn’t sure I would ever see him do.

When I got home from farmer’s market on Saturday he made a plan for the evening. He is rocking this – I give him some parameters like, it’s 3pm now, and you have until 8:30 when you get ready for bed, and you can fill in that time however you think would work well. Please fit in dinner somewhere. Then he sets his timer and sticks to the plan. No nagging! In two different sessions of one hour he got his binder completely organized. On Sunday he made an all-day plan (we had 12-2 blocked out for going to the Fill-your-pantry market to pick up our 4 gallons of honey, and I asked him to fit in meals and a shower). He stuck to the plan, opted to shower in the earlier of the two possible shower time slots, doesn’t need twenty-seven reminders and assists with showers anymore, it’s really crazy how development is just speeding along right now. That day he completed two math assignments, a couple pages of math notes, a social studies current event, a science assignment, and a language arts essay!!!!! It was five hours of homework but he wasn’t judging it because “things take me longer.” Much of it was past due work but the current event was turned in early.

That was what I meant when I said he was majestically rising to the occasion.

We had some details to work out about the holiday calendar, and Quinn got to practice letting his dad have his feelings, then deciding to do what he wants to do (take his belt test, even though it would take place on their evening of solstice). I asked if he felt caught in middle and he said it was more like he felt like all alone, like he alone could settle and decide things. I think he is noticing that he is growing into a lot of decision power and it’s good, but hard.

We got home one Friday and food was administered, but around 5:30 I recalled that last year’s day two or three gratitude had been about the middle school dance, and I had been thinking there must be one coming up soon… sure enough, it was that night. We’re still working on the two-way communication while he is at his Dad’s… But he showered and changed and I took him back to the dance, since he knew some of his friend group would be there and wanted to go. When he got outside after the dance, he looked like he was a little bummed out. When I asked what was up he said, “the friend group might break up,” and explained about two unrequited crushes, and if they both find out their crushes don’t like them, it could really destabilize the whole group and he worried that it would break. He was very upset, and I tried to tell him I thought as friends they would still have their friendships, even if it was uncomfortable to hang as a group for a time. I thought maybe it was going to be ok because maybe they wouldn’t all break each others’ hearts all at once, and maybe there is more we don’t know that can happen. I said if the group did split up, he’d still be friends with each person, and if there were brokenhearted friends, he could look around and see which friend needed him most and be a good friend to them. By the time we got home he seemed to feel better. These car ride conversations. There have been others lately with high emotions and deep topics, he and his friends being at an age where the various dimensions of their identity are really being explored.

I noticed this week I can see his Adam’s apple. and his voice has gotten one level deeper.

One night he fell asleep upside down in bed on top of his covers before he brushed teeth or said good night.

The next morning, he ate a stack of pancakes then decided he would also have the biscuits and sausage gravy that rich and I were having. I always make Quinn a biscuit, but he used to say the gravy was too spicy. This morning he just gobbled it up for second breakfast (which was eaten while he was still sitting at first breakfast.)

Quinn finished reading Ender’s Game… he loved it. That series is one of those that I’ve been waiting all his life until he would be ready for it. I recently took his hoopla (library app) off of kids mode, because I feel like it’s time for him to not have his literature censored… he may come across something more graphic, but he also is getting old enough that I think he needs more unfiltered access to the world, where he decides on the filtering out… and can come to me with questions of what he encounters, etc. I still have google on safe search – that’s still letting a lot through, but keeping out the most obscene things, and I haven’t lifted the you tube safe mode controls yet either (again…. still a lot available with that filter in place).

He got another booster shot, this time for MMRV (measles mumps rubella and varicella aka chicken pox).

He had some major fear/anxiety this time, leading up to the appointment. It was like stages of grief. he shed tears, he bargained, he did denial… I just sort of let him process. We had same nurse who was great last time (lets him watch the needle like I’m sure zero other children besides poppies). The room had dinosaur stickers on the wall but they were cartoonish and we laughed about the triceratops with four horns. Then we were talking about Ender’s Game now that he is reading the second book (Speaker For the Dead), and he was reminding me of all the cool null gravity combat details and why Ender was so good at it. Quinn really loves the use of three-dimensional space and x-y-z coordinates in the book. Ender’s trick of designating the enemy’s gate as “down” was a big deal, and once he said it, I remembered it from when I’ve read the series myself. When I told him that I have been waiting for him to be ready to read that series, he said, “and I finally am reading it, and now I’m like obsessed with null gravity combat!”

After the shot, the nurse asked him, “so how much did that hurt?” He said, “not much!” I said, “can I get that recorded?” and we all laughed. When we went out to the car Quinn actually did record a video selfie to his future self about how the fear is worse than the shot itself, and that he should not worry about the pain and just be calm.

On the ride home, we  discussed the way Ender travels between planets that are x number of light years away and how it only takes him a week or so to get 22 light years away and meanwhile his brother had been the ruler of Earth after he and his sister left, but 3000 years have passed on Earth while Ender is only a few years older. Relativity space-time stuff. “It’s kind of like wrinkling, I think,” he said.

His current math unit is the Pythagorean theorem, and he loves that, but especially that besides a2 + b2 = c2 there is also a2 + b2 + c2 = d2 to handle the third dimension. He is all about x-y-z coordinates and null gravity combat right now so math and literature are really syncing up nicely for him at the moment.

~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~ math goblins

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we had an eventful weekend of pressing apple cider and playing with friends on saturday, and then attending a very exciting gender reveal party for quinn’s step-niece! he has been elected as future babysitter already for this new bundle of joy, coming to our family in march.

once he handed in his historical interview, his overall grade in social studies went from F to B, and it was a lovely piece!

he got to choose a book for blackout poetry in language arts, and he picked anne mccaffrey dragonsong. he is excited to create poetry in it, but also to now read anne mccaffrey. his friend l got him into a game concerning the warriors series about cats, so we were off to the library to collect some supplemental reading beyond the math textbook variety. (we ended up with the next rick riordan installment in the trials of apollo as well.)

this age is the odd juxtaposition of hearing him obsess about a crush on a girl, to waking him up in the morning and having him say to me, “you find a planet” and being requested to carry him while spinning (he was orbiting me?) and set him in his chair for breakfast. my completely oblivious to time/date son, knew the date of the first middle school dance. i knew i’d have to remind him to put his shirt on frontwards, but he was already committed to going. probably even with deodorant on. sheesh!

we had another parked car meltdown of a similar theme as last month; “pressure” and school sucks and everything is bad in middle school and “i just want my old life back.” it ended on a pep talk from me about how it’s really normal to feel like so much has changed and to want to go back to your old life, and feel overwhelmed a lot, and have a lot going on, as a brand new middle schooler. i reemphasized the “This Is Super Normal” part several different ways. at one point he was angry about the president. he was in tears over it, as though the angry apricot is somehow responsible for putting quinn through middle school. i tried to reel him back in to his immediate self and stop trying to take on unfortunate political officials, and he came around in the end. it is normal to not want to do your homework. and feeling pushed is normal. even if mama isn’t trying to push but just support. and i stated that and he agreed he feels i do support him and he does want me to remind him to do his homework. there was no actual problem i could put my finger on besides emotional overload, and once he got it out of his system he went and cheerfully did his last 5 problems (verbally while writing his answers… which helps him get it done faster).

 

on his last day with me of the two weeks, there was a day off from school, so quinn participated in a theatre workshop that was being offered (and had a great time performing in his group’s skit) and then he and i spent the remaining afternoon hours on the beach, something we haven’t been doing very regularly as of late. once again, my big huge middle schooler revealed the little person still inside, as he scampered around on hands and knees, re-enacting cat battle scenes from the warriors book he had just finished. then he buried my limbs in the sand.

after a week away, quinn came back to me on friday, the last day of his first 6-week term, and although he handed in a few things at the very last minute, there was only one assignment that was left incomplete. the assignment was an autobiographical “my name is” poem for language arts, but since that was worth 50 of his 250 points for the term, it meant the difference between a 94% A and a 81% B. he had 2 lines of the title typed into the google doc, after two full class periods of work time, so at least he’s using his class time efficiently. it was due thursday, and at that point, the teacher entered an F, and quinn despaired and didn’t communicate or finish (or really even start) the work.

 

until he got home to me. after a brief discussion, he stated he did want to try to finish it and hand it in, and we both suspected it may be accepted for a grade if it was done by midnight. i sat him down and filled him full of food, then encouraged him to do a verbal brainstorm of what he wanted to write. he jotted a few words on a list that he wanted to include, but what finally got him going were my outlandish examples of imagery and sensory details. after one descriptive phrase about slaying orcs in a tunnel of trees in a forest (vs. “i kill orcs”), he jotted down “tunnels” and in the end, he crafted his whole poem as a d and d adventure, taking along his band of merry elves/dwarves/rogues. (the teacher’s instructions for the poem were “Peel the onion…you have layers.  You have MULTITUDES. This can include your hopes, dreams, fears, talents, family, personality, history, future plans, and ideas. Use imagery.  Make me see and feel your poem.  Show me your life.  Show me who you are!”

he wrote (crew names changed to pseudonyms by mama):

Name: Quinn

Date: 10-17-18

Period: 2

 

My Name Is Quinn

My Favorite Color Is Green

My Favorite Animal Is An Owl

My name is Quinn

I am a dragonborn wizard

I have a pet owl

My crew of adventurers is strong

We have me

Aragorn the human fighter

Legolas the elf fighter

And Gimli the dwarf rogue

We walk in diamond formation

On a quest to find the ancient mithril drum set

We have a map to show us the way

To the treasure

A dragon will be guarding the other treasure

The mithril drumsticks

They are required to play the mithril drum set

I alone can read the map

It leads us through the forest of Everygreen inhabited by ninjas

The tunnels of Diamondrain inhabited by ninjas

And the Skytrayl of the high mountains inhabited by ninjas

We reach the dragon and it’s ninja minions

They are very powerful

But we defeat them

And gain the mithril drum sticks

We now possess limited but large power

After we find the mithril drum set we will have unlimited power

Our journey was difficult

But we return home with both treasures

The mithril drum sticks

Whose power is to play the mithril drum set

And the mithril drum set

Whose power when played remains unknown

Who knows

Maybe one day

All mithril instruments will have been found

 

he doesn’t know what happens when the mithril drum is played yet! it remains unknown! i told him it keeps it very mysterious and he agreed. it makes us all want to know, and sets up for sequels with these other mithril instruments! i loved his requirement for all of the place names (diamondrain!) to have unconventional spellings so google docs would red underline them. hence skytrail became skytrayl.

on saturday i worked farmer’s market, and left him pancakes and bacon for breakfast. and a couple of haikus (they wrote some in language arts, but apollo also begins each chapter with a haiku). he sent me one in response, via text:

my life as it should

be. nothing to do but what

i want. thank the gods.

when i got home on saturday, quinn and rich were watching monty python and the search for the holy grail, after quinn’s social studies teacher used clips of it to elucidate economics principles, and quinn came home quoting them, with a perfect accent.

in between resisting math homework, it was a weekend full of finding him on page 503 of his advanced algebra textbook, asking me for more logic puzzles, and asking me to play “guess the function” with him. i made up functions for him to guess, after he gave me an example because i didn’t know what he meant (or what fred meant). his example was:

dog 4

cat 4

human 2

fish 0

bird 2

the function is “number of legs.” i was making pancakes while he was asking me so i gave him:

pancakes 3

pizza 4

cookies 2

biscuits 1

playdough 1.5

the function was “number of cups of flour” and even though he knew it had something to do with ingredients, it took him a while to get it. it’s so clear to me that he digs math, and yet resists it so strongly when it is “forced” as he believes of the homework.

good old fred.

we went to a midsummer night’s dream because once quinn heard that his friend l was in it, he stated “we’re going.” his friend was one of the little goblin-minions of puck in the play, and had quite a few lines and some great action. she is in a lot of quinn’s classes, and has played magic with him. the play was great, lots of 80’s references and songs, quite a few kids with real roles, and a great balance of making you like shakespeare while also poking fun at shakespeare. (the funny rhyme stuff… with characters correcting each other on pronunciation followed by “but that doth not rhyme” and so on. also song lyrics changed by varying degrees, but always with “you” changed to “thou”. “every step thou take, every move thou make, i’ll be watching thou.” when we got home quinn asked, “so are there any plays coming up?” and i think his lapsed interest in participating in one at some point might be rekindling.

he wanted to go back to the green room to talk to his friend, and they gushed at each other with thanks for coming and what a great job she had done. rich asked if he got all the 80’s references in the play and he said um, no. none of them.

i rolled up strips of dinosaur kale into mobius strips that i held together with toothpicks… hoping to get him to eat raw kale. and he totally did! and called them mobiosaurs. then he took the toothpicks, stuck them between his fingers, and said “i’m freddy kruger.”

me: what?! how do you know that 80’s reference?

q: “everyone knows freddy kruger, it’s not from the 80’s.

(i told him to ask rich, who proceeded to read him the copyright dates for the entire nightmare on elm street series.)

he also made me chuckle with his use of the word “litotes” which i recall learning in maybe 9th grade enriched english. litotes means understatement; he likes to announce overstatement with “‘hyperbole” so when i said something that was an understatement and he said “litotes” i said, “what? how do you know that?” (i seem to say that a lot.) that one came from life of fred. more than just math in there.

he sat on my lap (painful torture and laugh therapy all in one) and we were covered with the blanket and lisa decided to sit on top of him on top of me for a few minutes one morning. he’s a confusing mix of big and little and clueless and know it all right now!!! knows exactly what pokemon he wants to dress up as for halloween (rowlet the owl) and exactly how many components of his costume to wear to the dance to be extra quull.

i mixed up cookie dough sunday night after dinner and stuck it in fridge, so i was baking the cookies monday morning while i made breakfast and packed lunches. when i woke him up, i told him pancakes for breakfast and a cookie for breakfast dessert. that got him out of bed on a monday morning.

after his pancakes, he chose a cookie, and i got out a plate for him to catch crumbs. i came walking back into the kitchen and he was at the sink running the water, and i witnessed him wash his plate without being asked! then when he put it in the drainer, a jar lid fell into the sink, and he rinsed it and put it back in the drainer! when he turned around i made a super big deal hugging him and fake-sobbing about what a wonderful thing i had witnessed.

while sitting in a boring monday morning meeting, i jotted ideas on a sticky note (i have no idea where quinn gets his distractedness!) about how to make math homework more playful and less torturous. i decided to try making it into something of a d and d game…

  1. he has to roll the d12 to see how many goblins are attacking.
  2. for each problem he completes, he gets one chance to attack them, and
  3. if he completes the problem in under 3 minutes they don’t get to attack back (surprise bonus).

i had already tried giving him one of the egg timers from a game, to show him time passing while he did math problems, and it was just a distraction, something to fidget with. i had tried using a stop watch while he did problems and giving him his lap times as he finished a problem, which only seemed to make things more stressful, and made them take longer. i have had 4011 versions of the logic of time management conversation with him. if quinn had 35 math problems to do and each problem takes him 1 minute, how long does his homework take? what if he takes 10 minutes per problem? etc. the resistance is strong. i was hoping to use the game idea to bring him more awareness of time passing…. or connect it to his reality in a way he could actually embrace.

the game worked like a dream. he slayed all the goblins for days. he wanted to add features to make the game both more fun and more mathy, such as renaming it integers and irrationals. he built a table of goodness knows what, and all i know is it involves pi, tau, and wau, and other irrational numbers!

he was excited when he saw my rules sheet (complete with pi rats/midsummer nights dream slant rhyme/vi hart dragon dungeons proprietary mama inside joke blend) and then spent 10 minutes creating his grid of wonder. something about upgrading from level 1 to wau?

i eventually just said ok, time to roll for your goblins!

he did most of the problems in under a minute.  some were done in 15-20 seconds. we adapted rules as he played, such as allowing 2 attacks for problems completed in under a minute. he has added different enemies and when he had a problem or two left in a section but had already defeated the enemies, out of nowhere a couple of pesky twig blights would swoop in and attack. a clever mama always keeps a couple of twig blights up her sleeve.

of course it worked; he is the kid who couldn’t get in the car; but he could get in the batmobile.

i told him he could do this for his homework any time he wanted; with any work he “has to” do. there is usually a way to make it fun. there are always choices.

i guess that goes for parenting as well. thankful to be remembering these lessons a mere 6 weeks into middle school.

there is almost nothing easy about the steep learning curve of embarking on a middle school journey. except for, in quinn’s case, probably figuring out the slope-intercept equation for said curve.

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

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(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.

~rainbow mondays~ stars and flames

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a week of sunshine brings out the rainbows, even in dead flowers and table clutter.

a rainbow veggie grand finale to a great outdoor farmer’s market season.

red: chickens!

red: the special effects department spray painted a plastic cup to give charizard a flaming tail!

orange: i wanted this year’s halloween costume to be worn beyond halloween, so i made his charizard costume out of some comfy organic cotton i had lying around from the days of earth huggy, and now he has a new set of pajamas, with wings!

orange: quinn’s jack-o-lantern.

yellow: the yellow center of this late season hollyhill starburst dahlia seems appropriately wind-tossed.

green: a forest and its keeper.

blue: little stars of borage.

purple: and a purple star leaf.

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

creative reading postures; eye rolling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

using the brayer; printing his first draft

pleased with his print

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and then he turned ten….

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

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

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

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

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

~rainbow mondays~ poke party

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rainbow in the morning… the symbiosis between the warming up of my car and the redwood trees, carbon dioxide traded for oxygen, plus a bonus rainbow from the sun.

rainbow selfie in a bubble (i wanted to try the cool bubbles-on-snow trick, but our snow was already too melted and wet for crystallizing soap! but i still had fun playing!)

low-key poke party and sleepover for the birthday boy and his best bud.

rainbow streamers and balloons: decorating his doorway with a quull curtain.

being sung to, and singing to himself.

making a wish…

red: pokeball mini-cupcakes! rocking the yay, it’s wednesday cake! cake recipe once again, it’s a keeper, easy-peasy and yummy.

red: poke pizza

orange: fun with streamers

orange: fire-type carrots

yellow: electric-type oranges

yellow: i snagged the last fish print card off the shelf by local artist bruce koike, and wrote my own mama message concerning orders of magnitude on the blank inside.

green: reading his card from grammy and grampy.

green: after he set up his pokemon figures to decorate, he noticed they were forming a q!

green: bulbasaur guacamole, and grass-type broccoli for snacking

green: my fiance was incredibly productive in outdoor projects during the birthday festivities, though he made sure to be around for key moments like present-opening and cupcake-eating. he found some awesome new nooks in our backyard forest, like the one not done justice by this photo.

blue: water-type… water!

purple: instead of forming crystals, these bubbles changed color from rainbow, to various single colors, to colorless, then shrank until they disappeared. bubbles on wet snow experimental results, in case anyone wanted to know!

gray: new bathrobe for this young jedi apprentice. his old one was up past his knees and elbows, so it was time. i made this out of some organic cotton french terry (the loopy part is on the inside of the fabric).

 

black: hands down his favorite present, a minecraft medieval fortress book. he will be talking of turrets and portcullises for the next few weeks, i can tell!

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday

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

a valentine’s day in the life

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rich came into the kitchen to put something in the sink over the weekend, and quinn was at the table watching us and when we comically both turned the opposite way and missed each other, i said to quinn, “i could have sworn someone came in here.” rich was now behind me in the kitchen as i asked quinn if he saw someone come in, and could he describe the person. quinn told me, “yes. it was a boy. i mean, a male. tall, with the beginnings of a beard….”

then rich bear hugged me from behind, and after a brief loss of composure, i continued my commentary to quinn, “hmmm, rear bear hug with arms free, that’s crashing wings, right? (that is the name of our karate self-defense technique for said bear hug attack) and quinn said, “yup!” and proceeded to giggle while i did crashing wings on rich (who was also laughing) in the kitchen.

last night quinn had a headache so he fell asleep with junior strength ibuprofin at 6:30, then woke up at 8:30 to eat dinner, draw and listen to a story, and then i turned his lights out at 10. i had been in the bath when he woke to eat, so he microwaved himself a tupperware of brown rice and ate the rest of a corn muffin that had been in his lunch. he’s getting to be pretty self-sufficient, my almost ten-year-old.

after i tucked him in the second time, i printed out his star wars valentines that i had downloaded from etsy last year for his class party today. print-our-own star wars cards were a good $5 investment, because star wars will always be relevant.

this morning i put a valentine card and reeses peanut butter hearts on rich’s chair for him to find after he got up from stoking the fire. i wrote mushy stuff in the card, which had owls and said something like “to tell you the truth i like doing nothing with you” so i ran with that theme and also pointed out that this will be our only v day as fiances, so we’d better savor it! for quinn i put a pack of pokemon cards (in which he was thrilled to find a blastoise ex) and a jar of capers on the table (the back story: in the series of unfortunate events books, the baudelaire orphans make puttanesca sauce in the bad beginning, and the recipe involves capers, which quinn has never tasted. we had discussed making the recipe from the book sometime, so it was a literary/culinary present.)
i cookie cuttered hearts out of the middle of two pieces of bread, made a tiny heart pbj for his lunch (with another corn muffin, and a juice box, at his request) and then scrambled egg and cheese in the middle of the outside pieces of the bread for his breakfast which he gobbled. the biscuits were heart blob shapes this morning too, for biscuits and gravy.

rich called up the stairs that i should look outside, and i ran out the door with my camera to photograph the sunrise, which was heart shaped. of course, my valentine would arrange such a thing for me. he also serenaded me with a fun medley of love songs.

me: heart biscuit blobs. rich: jedi atmospheric control. he always has to outdo me.

i drove quinn to school, then got back in my car, got a momentary flash of his valentines in a stack on the kitchen table, and drove home and back to school one more time for good measure. his class was all doing yoga with the lights off. so lovely to find the long frame of him folded like origami into eagle pose as i snuck his cards into his backpack.

as of sunday, the christmas tree now has only lights on it… it is still standing in the living room as of this morning, still with lights. my friend wedding boss tries to keep me on task, but today another deadline comes and goes and my save-the-date cards are closer to completion, but not yet sent.

i baked my fellas a cherry death star pie. i baked them heart-shaped pizza for dinner. i declined to carve each whole olive into a tiny death star, as requested by quinn, but i think he enjoyed his pizza in spite of it. they each gave me a valentine card (swoon).

i may be behind on life, but taking it one day at a time, my priorities set on making my guys feel loved today and every day, feels right.

~two months in the life of a lifelong learner~ becoming a dragon

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10-23 to 12-23

quinn and i collaborated once again to create a fun halloween costume: bulbasaur the pokemon.

we took quinn’s fourth grader free state park pass on the road and hung out at the yaquina head lighthouse one afternoon to watch waves and marvel at their enormity.

quinn’s fourth grade class took a hike and toured the community college.

 

reading… too many books to make an exhaustive list! he has been reading the red wall series at his dad’s, so we listened to the audio book and he borrowed the book from the library to finish when the last cd was scratched, then ended up re-reading the entire novel; he spent more time with calvin and hobbes, and i could tell even if i hadn’t seen him reading it, because he mused one day, “i wonder if anyone on mars is looking out and saying i wonder if there’s anyone on that planet with all the blue on it.” he read all 8 greek gods graphic novels owned by our library; he could be found spread out on the floor with newspaper comics on several occasions; he read an article in national geographic about a dinosaur fossil found trapped in amber with complete feathers (!) that a friend had shared on facebook. all of this in addition to listening to the last of the heroes of olympus, then switching to harry potter on audio while reading a variety of other books (the latest diary of a wimpy kid, trials of apollo, and a few other graphic novels.)

quinn attended another seminar with mr. sepulveda at aurora martial arts in corvallis. he had a good time, and learned a lot once again.

he became a certified bed making technician

games a-plenty these days! pictured are a fraction of those played and created: a pirate card game called loot, a pokemon role-play-game of his own invention (here he is drawing up a character attribute sheet), pokemon go, scrabble, thanksgiving scattergories, numerous computer games (lots of knights, forging of armor, settlements, that type of thing going on in recent games), we learned to play settlers of catan at long last, and then got to play it again, and quinn drew up his own set of catan hexagon cards, and played quite a few games with his buddy luke, including risk (thank you, luke, for one less game of risk i have to play!) there were numerous other games not pictured!

the recent book fair, as always, was a big deal for quinn, and he bought himself a book about coding games in scratch (a kid-friendly programming platform). he was telling me about a game he is going to code in scratch about pirates, and the pirates start at the lowest rank and work up to becoming first mate. but then the only way they can become captain is “if the captain is slain, or the captain resigns.” others might say “is killed/leaves” but quinn’s vocabulary strikes again. my pirate name for the game is barnacle beth the brave, on board the ship the blue bottlenose. so far we are still playing it all in quinn’s mind, but he has big ideas!

in fact, he made a list of “jobs to have when i grow up,” and game designer is on the list.

  1. a musician
  2. a famous kenpo teacher (karate)
  3. a paleontologist
  4. a game designer (it came up in conversation when he formulated an idea to play pokemon go as a d&d style role play game, with character sheets for the trainers; we can hide pokemon in imaginary maps (not realistic ones like our back yard, so this is a different game but similar to what he originally invented) and roll dice for how many pokeballs, etc. i told him he always had such great ideas for coming up with new games, and he thought being a game designer seemed like something he could do.)

in his journal list by the above title, he wrote numbers 1-23 all the way down the page.  i am looking forward to seeing what other “jobs to have” he comes up with!

number one on the list: musician. time to get him some music lessons!

enjoying green eggs and ham, sam i am.

enjoying time with family at thanksgiving.

baking sugar cookies to share with friends! he got creative with the cookie cutters, and generously sprinkled his star tree with “snow” powdered sugar.

when i searched “cookie” in my media files to see whether i had already uploaded the recent cookie photos, this is the one that came up. my cookie helper, in his mini form. i can’t believe his whole legs, including feet, fit on top of the counter…

outside time, stolen bits of fresh air on sunny days when we could get them. including a day spent at the lab with mama (school conference days). he also got in some cursive handwriting practice that day.

 

i attended his student-led conference, and there were writing samples, creative projects (3-D self-portrait, map of his special place), goal-setting plan for the school year, and the last item on the conference agenda was, “ask your family to take you out for ice cream to celebrate!” i did. he ordered cookies and cream and vanilla.

another school field trip, this time to the aquarium and for a tour of the noaa vessel rainier. the ship tour was fascinating, and the kids asked some really great questions about the use of sonar to map the sea floor. we came up with an analogy of the “layers” created by the sonar, that if you made a fort with chairs and blankets, then lifted the blanket off of the chair legs, keeping all the dips and peaks in place, the blanket would act like a layer of sonar data.

science projects at school: kinetic and potential energy using string, straws and balloons, and then mechanical rollers made from cups, rubber bands, and straws, trying to roll a certain distance and stop in the “sweet spot”, both of which i got to help out with in the classroom. i liked how she had the kids write up their results, but modeled for them how to do that on the overhead projector, and i liked how she sat down with individual kids who were having trouble getting started. that included quinn, but when she sat down and asked him about his potential/kinetic energy string/straw/balloon experiment, he had brilliant insights to share about how “the air wanted to come out of the balloon”, and then after he’d gotten to tell them to her, he was able to go forward with putting them on paper. i also got to sit in on a presentation of why a class award, if won, should be spent on obtaining a bearded dragon. quinn is a natural at public speaking; he does not inherit that from me. also in school learning: essay publishing, and of course, the dab.

one of my favorite features of quinn’s classroom is the mood meter. each day (and at various times throughout the day) his teacher asks them to write on a sticky note something that is on their mind and place it on the mood meter, which has four quadrants. the kids choose where they are feeling along the continua of energy, from high to low, and pleasantness, from happy to sad. where they intersect along these two axes (bet they don’t realize they are working their coordinate plane skills… sneaky) is where they place their sticky note. i walked in one afternoon and found quinn’s in the far happy quadrant, reading, “i feel happy because i am going to my mom’s house after school.” insert all the rainbow heart emojis.

when you walk up to the school building, quinn’s classroom is the one with all the shades open (fluorescent lights off, sunlight pouring in) and a peace sign in the window. that’s how i can tell i asked for the right teacher.

while i’m singing her praises, i will also share that she builds a yoga flow into the start of each school day. quinn demonstrated one morning’s “flow” that they did, and as a yogi myself i can see that they have learned quite a lot in their daily practice. it was fun to watch, because he is such a gangly, bouncy, and angular string bean that he just springs into position and names the pose, then springs into the next one, with all of his bones sticking out every which way. he knows most of the poses by their traditional names, tree, triangle, mountain, but a few have obviously been made more kid-friendly. low lunge is “dragon” and then becomes twisting dragon when he plants his shoulder behind his knee like no adult could ever do at the rate he does it. i like the “wash away” pose they do at the beginning, crossing their mid-line, always good for brains. the way he gets into triangle pose… priceless… had to be captured on video.

also in reading, i assigned quinn some advent reading. a little background on the “you are brave” affirmation…

one night recently, quinn got up to use the bathroom at 3am, and came and got me to re-tuck him in. rich mentioned it to him in the morning, to point out logically that he is brave enough to walk around at night with no lights on (downstairs to our room, back up to the bathroom because it was actually an emergency, then back down again to retrieve me), so he shouldn’t feel scared to go in the bathroom during the day with lights on throughout the house. rich also put in that one day he’ll be able to get back into bed without even waking anyone up. after rich went off to shower, i translated for quinn that rich wanted quinn to know that he is very brave! that seemed to unfurrow his brow, the look that sometimes follows in the aftermath of a “talk” with rich. i then reassured him that i will miss it in a few years when he no longer comes and gets me to help him back to bed, adding that i’m glad it’s not something that happens every night anymore. we chatted about when he was a baby/toddler and woke me up multiple times every night, and he thought that was funny and wanted to know all about it. then he was finished eating breakfast. into the bathroom he marched, hands covering his ears, and then i heard, “i’m brave!” and the sound of peeing… with the light still turned off.

back at the vacation house quinn would ask me to accompany him to the bathroom to help him turn on the light. it was around a corner and through a dark small hallway which had a light switch which  the rest of us didn’t turn on to get to the bathroom but he did. he would turn on all the switches on the way to the bathroom, but the switch for the bathroom light required you to go inside and reach behind the door for it (poor design, granted) and so he never liked it and always felt scared to go in and pee no matter how many conversations he had with rich on the subject.

since we’ve been at dragon house 2.0, he has been fine with bathroom use and turning on the light himself, it’s not down a dark hallway, the light switch isn’t hidden behind door, and it’s on the same floor as our living room/his bedroom/kitchen. he does, however, often cover his ears (inexplicably, unless you consider it a form of sight-sound synesthesia) while he walks into the bathroom until he gets the light on (which i think he must do with his elbow!)

after i explained to quinn that rich was trying to point out that quinn is obviously brave enough to walk around in the dark, because he has seen him do it, quinn seemed to grasp it with that positive spin. leaving the light turned off wasn’t exactly the intended result, and indeed i told him he needed to turn it on when it came to face washing, so he could see his grubby face in the mirror to get it clean, but i was happy that the internalized message was affirmative.

courage and indomitable spirit… yes, he has them. he is brave. he endured a particularly grueling belt test and promoted to his green belt just before christmas.

still bringing the smiles.

elfing. relaxing in the happy spot on christmas eve, just back from his dad’s for two whole weeks! i picked him up the afternoon of the 23rd, stuffed him full of food, had him take his first bath in two weeks, and then he slept for 15 hours, so it’s no wonder he looks so refreshed on the morning of christmas eve. i was just remembering that we called my rocking chair “the happy spot” back in the day, when he fit in it on my lap just a little bit better than he does now. we’ve shared some quality snuggle time in it this week, in spite of his gangliness. he also helped me elf together some friend presents, and wrapped the gift he chose for luke himself.

christmas morning! a glorious sunny day, spent with family.

   

after explaining (with hand gestures) how one would make a robotic bb-8 and what his motion is like, quinn pulled out his birthday present piper and showed off having built his own computer. that brief detour enabled me to show him that scratch is already loaded onto his piper… so i imagine there will be some game programming updates in future lifelong learning posts. after a while he continued opening presents, including lots of pokemon cards, some legos, and a few books.

 

an epic pokemon battle occurred, during which the rest of us sat around shaking our heads in awe of the way he could backtrack several steps of the battle and change the outcome, seeing it all in his mind like a chess game. he also built k2so, a droid we all recently grew fond of watching star wars: rogue one.

sun and kitties.

pokemon and wrist warmers.

he’s holding the dungeons and dragons player’s handbook, his 300+ page present from grammy and grampy, which he obviously loves! he has spent lots of time reading it and designing new characters with it since. he also got to meet the artist who did the cover art (and a few of the pieces on the pages, as well as many magic cards, one of which quinn was in possession of…) because he’s my former boss’s nephew. he got these items autographed, but the best part was listening to these 20-something guys talking with quinn about d and d adventures, and beyond that, relating things like, “yeah i was always being told i needed to pay attention, and instead i was drawing.” others who don’t fit all the molds. they exist, and they’re okay. your people are out there in the world, quinn. i love that in answer to my question, “how big was the original painting,” tyler answered, “i painted it digitally, so it’s actually of infinite size,” and quinn just kind of nodded like, yeah, i get that. kids these days.

for quinn, it’s not always drawing that steals his attention, but he is often “out there” in his brain, creating in some other realm. i think it’s great for him to meet people who took their creative talents and made a living. i also love that he came home and was inspired to actually draw his new character (a wizard) and the character’s pet owl.

we got in some play time with buddies over the holiday break.

 

we’re transitioning right now to a new karate dojo and instructor, and so far that has all been going very smoothly. we got to go to extra classes over the break, and although quinn may backtrack a little bit on belt rank to catch up on some curriculum, he seems very game to make this overall positive change, and his belt rank will now be considered adult instead of junior, so in many ways, he will come out ahead. he will also get to practice teaching karate, himself, which is one of his stated goals. his new teacher mentioned that karate students naturally start out as tigers, fierce and impulsive, but as they mature and progress in their practice, become dragons, with more tenacity and wisdom. i like the metaphor, of course, and though i have nothing against tigers, i do have a special place in my heart for dragons. i see the maturity of which he speaks starting to develop in this young lad, who has become reinvigorated for karate in the past two weeks. while i was anticipating some resistance to this fairly substantial change, he has shown an amazing amount of resilience and perspective and has gone with the flow. just another aspect of amazing lifelong learning to look forward to in 2017!

~rainbow mondays~ bulbasaur, bayou, beets, blue squash

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do you ever just think your food is so pretty that you take it outside, arrange a (rainbow) still life, and take a picture?

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red: i found this stack of dried leaves curling up in my car from the day quinn and i went to our karate day camp and broke boards. we took a walk at lunch time, and he talk-played a ninja game with me and we picked up leaves.

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red: sweetgum tree at camp boss’s house. i went to take pictures of her cubs in a brief sunlit window between extended dance remix rain showers.

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orange: pretty star shaped leaves.

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yellow: golden beets, among friends. also this week in yellow (not pictured): mama earned her yellow belt in karate!

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green: romanesco, cousin of broccoli and cauliflower, but with much cooler florets – 3-d spirals with texture.

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green: cabbage leaf or topographical map of a river?

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green: reminder.

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green: i am proud to have finished this year’s costume well before the deadline. it wasn’t even 2 am, and it was finished on thursday night, allowing for this cute frog photo shoot before he went to his dad’s on friday. this year’s pokemon is bulbasaur, in case you were wondering.

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blue: mini blue winter squash make me happy. they also fill a crucial role in the vegetable rainbow, for blue veggies are rare!

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blue: hawk in the blue sky over camp boss’s house.

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purple: napa cabbage in red violet. what a beautiful batch of produce this week!

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brown: my fiance and i happened upon this bayou wildlife on a walk we took recently. bayou walks have been less frequent, due to play rehearsals and rain, but we were rewarded for sticking with the tradition on this particular day.

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black: one last produce photo, a black radish that i altered with my zester. much quicker than a jack-o-lantern, so i will chalk it up to self care, just like this post. self care for the win!

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday

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