~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ sprouting spring spirit

Posted on May 28, 2016 by marybethrew

spring means sprouts… bringing back an old favorite easter tradition, we grew some wheat grass in an easter basket. r2d2 and baseball eggs filled with jelly beans rounded out the holiday fun, since easter (and christmas) were all still in storage.

we celebrated our traditional st. patty’s day family gathering a little belatedly. i took surprisingly few photos of my kid, who had fun playing chess, watching baseball, and eating bertie bott’s every flavor jello.

dying easter eggs ~ always has been, always will be, one of my favorite seasonal traditions. highlights this year included rubber band egg die dying, and dying the dino egg green.

the larval herring are growing, and looking like little strings with eyes, swimming around in the tanks at my work.

it’s not the sun, but it’s yellow. it’s a little bit like the moon, because the reflection of the sun bouncing off of it brightens up our world; it’s the national geographic section of the household library. we will have such fond memories of the vacation house, and this one photo of my hobbit perching by the picture window near the front door sums up so much.

reading… it didn’t really seem to matter that so many of our books were in storage this past year. between the housemate library (quinn has enjoyed pulling out vintage peanuts comics off the shelf), the public library (we’re continuing with the spirit animals series, and listened to the audio book of the swiss family robinson – quinn thoroughly enjoyed this, although *spoiler* i wish i had remembered the part about a boa constrictor eating the family’s donkey grizzle so i could have skipped that for quinn’s sake; otherwise he found the shelter-building, exploring, inventing, adapting, harvesting, hunting, living-off-the-land-ing very enchanting), and the school bookshelf (quinn has begun reading percy jackson; as my best friend said better than i could, “i have waited for this his whole life,” he has not wanted for books.

expanding into his writing game, all the wonderful reading has inspired him to start writing fan fiction. he came to work with me one day while his dad left for camping and wrote a spin off story to the spirit animals series called (working title) a guide to the great beasts in which a character named quinn must bond with all of the spirit animals from the series. quinn has actively been working on his writing all during the school year, writing fables and using writing as a tool to make lists for things like his fantasy baseball team.

because you’re so nice for reading this blog, i will treat you to paragraph one of his great beast guide, which blew me away!

Briggin felt hot. Despite the cave’s cool air Briggin felt very hot. He lay down and looked at the cave entrance. Suddenly He felt a tug he knew it well. It was a tug of bonding, and all of a sudden, he was gone.

we took a trip to the beach after school one afternoon, enjoyed the sun and climbed aboard imagination log ships, brought along imaginary log dogs when we settled swiss-family-robinson-esque dune islands, and had a grand time running around in the sand.

sensory sand time is so important for recharging my boy’s neurons. it isn’t nearly as in my face as it used to be, but quinn is still a pretty sensitive guy to sound, smell, and certain tactile sensory experiences, especially around his head/ears/hair/scalp, that i think i automatically put calming sensory experiences in his pathway to counteract the stress he can build up from one too many sensory stimuli. he was particularly on edge one afternoon and i popped his headphones on with sparkle stories and parked him in front of the bird seed bin. i don’t know a lot of 9 year olds who crave the calming feel of sifting bird seed through funnels, but 30 minutes of that really mellows this kid out.

he also got to spend some time in the pool on a friend’s birthday, and sitting on the poolside, i realized that i needed to get him some goggles and earplugs to see if that would help him learn to swim. he is quite eager to learn now that he sees his peers gaining proficiency at it. i think 90% of his reluctance to swim thus far has to do with his head being underwater, or having water in his eyes, nose and ears. sitting there, i realized that i think the ears might be the biggie, and shortly after the pool visit, bought some for him to try soon.

we have spent time outside again playing whiffle ball, enjoying more glorious sunshine.

homework made an appearance in quinn’s life for several months (not until the second half of the school year did his teacher assign any) and he handled it fairly professionally.

this time around, quinn earned his black tip during his karate tip test; so did a lot of the other kids. it reinforced that no one is being singled out, shamed, or made an example of, and also reinforced that as a group, they can help each other stay on task and achieve their goals. not a team sport, and yet…

quinn articulated his philosophy on the eating of sprouts; this avoidance of nature interference now extends to not participating in the feeding of live sea monkeys (i.e. live fish food) to the larval herring in my lab. he is against it and refuses to participate in such barbaric activities. i am hoping he holds off a bit longer on really thinking all of these food concepts through, because it’s already hard enough to get food into the child.

at last, a pancake visit! we have sure missed our pancakes, and it was so lovely to have them stay for a week long visit.

on pancake arrival day, we waited for pancakes while celebrating his recent earning of his black tip with a food co-op treat date.

soon they arrived, and fun was had! baseball was played, basketball games were watched, playgrounds were frequented, a birthday mama turned 38, fluffy purple fabric was gifted, and mousse was consumed.

quinn had been to the library in anticipation of the pancakes coming to visit, and chose wonderful books to read to the girls – he picked out age-appropriate books about unicorns (uni) and a dinosaur ballerina (brontorina). it was cute to see him being thoughtful of their interests and preferences, while sharing favorites of his (owl moon!) with the girls.

there was some epic extended-pretend-play going on, including an elf king, a princess (as b pancake explained, it’s because she’s wearing pink) and a tagger: “if she tags us we get game over. and she throws hot dogs at things to burn them.” and stuff.

i had to laugh and sigh at rich’s son’s description of his youngest daughter when she wakes up in the morning and sneaks around to attack his feet… he described the way he is semi-aware of her being awake because of “the sound of cheeks” as they’re getting ready to smile.

grandpa got his time in with the pancake granddaughters. they wanted to play yahtzee, and he was just the twinkly eyed and crinkly smiled expert they were looking for to teach them. z pancake has a way of saying her older sister’s one-syllable name with 3 syllables and in a bronx accent. b pancake has grown so much into an almost kindergartner that i just kept shaking my head and gasping, sighing and smiling some more. they are so great.

b pancake now fits into (with some cuff rolling) the karate uniform that quinn has now outgrown; it was found underneath the stairs as we were moving out of dragon house 1.0, having belonged to rich’s son many years ago. it is making the family rounds! it needed new elastic when it was unearthed but once i replaced that, it was quinn’s tried and true uniform for many months. quinn doesn’t relinquish clothing items easily, but happily gave his blessing when it came to passing it down the pancake line.

it was over too soon, we miss the little lines of pink rainboots and unikitty/princess leia/hermione spaceships underfoot, the unmistakable signs of little girls having been here.

quinn got to go on several fishing trips with his dad this month; one quite remarkable event occurred that i will not tell much about other than to say that quinn told me an osprey stole his fish from right beside the boat just as he was about to net it; he requested i not tell much about it, because he did not want to disspell the magic of that moment, and i will honor that request, while still recording the hint of the memory here for him to come back and be reminded of one day.

still a fan of the garbage can! even after all these years.

my assistant baker helped me make cinnamon rolls for rich’s birthday.

also continued to help in the pizza decorating department.

we enjoyed playing with new baby chicks with adopted cousins.

at parent teacher conferences, we learned that quinn’s test scores remain pinned at the 99^th percentile. but he’s never really had much use for percentiles, anyway.

(height/weight stats from his first year scrap book!)

on another day at work with me, i think because his dad had a test and there was no school, he told me, “you smell like fish. and plastic gloves.” he said this with no judgement, good or bad, just a completely neutral observation. i was highly amused! he also built a mouse droid out of legos and spent each walk between lab and office rescuing caterpillars that happened to be going across the sidewalk. sidewalks, all interfering with nature and stuff.

quinn’s idea of helping move into the dragon house is emptying each box onto the floor and spreading its contents out so that nobody can walk. i am endeavoring to set up his room in such a way to maximize floor space; the more space to encrust with legos and layer with pokemon cards, the better.

we got to experience a sizeable flock of doves flying over and roosting in trees by the vacation house, on the very day prince died. i was glad we got the doves, and not the purple rain.

every morning i peel back the flannel sheets from this boy’s head, and inhale deeply as i kiss his cheek: morning breath, sleep warmth, the baby cake smell of burts bees shampoo and the native cinnamon that he was born with. every day, it’s a good day to be a mama.

miles under my moccasins

Posted on July 9, 2013 by marybethrew

i’m lying with my eyes still closed, most of my head huddled under the covers trying to ward off hypothermia (rich opened windows in the middle of the night without knowing he did so, and also my hair takes 28 hours to dry and i had taken my fortnightly shower just before bed). i am trying to avoid getting up just yet, when i swear i feel a bird land on the piece of my head that is not covered. this is what makes me finally open my eyes, and when i see a bird actually fly across the room away from me, i keep them open, the covers now clutched under my chin, waiting for rich to come back into the room.

“honey? there’s a bird in here. it just landed on my head.”

somehow, in my sleepiness, i have determined that this falls squarely in his department, and with both duty and joviality (“i bet it thought your hair looked like a good nest”), he takes it upon himself to throw the sliding door open wide and usher the bird out. we laugh all day long (off and on, including via text) about how he is really outdoing himself with his wake ups and if monday was this creative, just imagine what tuesday will bring!

my wake up technician

~~~

maybe because we live so rurally, rich and i tend to refer to any trip into town, in each others’ presence, as a date. i like it. you know, we don’t want to let the romance fade just because we are a year and a half into this relationship. some of the dates were what others might think of as dates, like watching shakespeare over dinner and a beer. others are borderline- watching fireworks from a bridge (two nights in a row) or swinging by the new maritime museum after perusing the farmer’s market. others are just plain excuses to be in each other’s presence as mentioned, such as sunday’s date: to buy a newspaper and a new lawnmower blade, and put gas in my car.

~~~

the bird situation sorted, i head for work, where the child i nanny for (k) is finding out what the different textures of wood chips, rocks, sand, pavement and grass feel like under his moccasins, and seeing how much mileage he can get out of the word, “uh-oh.” quinn, meanwhile, is explaining to me the intricate details of how crabbing works, including tides and weather and timing and what comprises a “sunny night”, and seeing how much mileage he can get out of the word “technically.”

last wednesday morning quinn and i went to our living school for the day. he is now welcome as long as i am present, and we plan to go on wednesdays for the summer program, and see what will make sense for fall in terms of how much “enrichment” will feel right. i hesitate to make any pronouncements given that i have seen circumstances change rapidly and dramatically several times before around his schooling and my work life, but i will just say that i feel pretty happy with our current unschooling life and quinn’s world seems pretty enriched. quinn picked out his clothes the night before going to school: orange shorts with orange shirt, and red socks. this is an ewok outfit, one of several. he also quite calmly chose his underwear with luke skywalker and his blue light saber on them, the calm contrasting wildly to the controversy we experienced over them the day before. that day’s ewok outfit, a light colored hawaiian button down shirt with light colored sweatpants, had to be worn without underwear, because the luke skywalker underwear with the blue light saber were not available, and no threats about wearing other dirty pairs of underwear or not going to take care of k with me that day were able to goad me into extracting the special pair of undies from the laundry basket locked in the trunk of my car where it was being held in order to be laundered later that day. assuring him that he could wear them the very next day, just as soon as they were clean again, i allowed him to gradually come up against that disappointment, trying to place fenders in between the hard places so they didn’t hit too awfully hard, but knowing in my mama heart that handling disappointments smoothly is an important life skill, i allowed this one to unfold.

quinn brought with him a drawing he had done the day before to share for show and tell; it was a map of the zoo from the book goodnight gorilla. he explained to the class very thoroughly how he had drawn each animals’ cage, and how the zookeeper’s keys were color-coordinated to open the cage of the same color, and proudly showed the compass rose of his map. he went with the flow of the ritual as it has been established in the school, for how to ask, “does anyone have any questions or comments?” and then how to ask, “does anyone else have show and tell?” and then chose the next child to share. when he fielded questions, he would ask, “what?” instead of naming the individual asking, but that was the only piece of the ritual he needs to work on. mainly what i noticed was that he felt comfortable belonging in this group, even though it was a brand new group for him (a few of the kids are the same, or are children he knows from outside ols, but some were brand new faces for him).

teacher kelly prepared a lesson on independence day for the morning, and later quinn told me that the best part of his day was watching the battle of lexington and the shot heard ‘round the world (a reenactment of it on youtube). she showed the children a parchment replica of the declaration of independence and talked about what the american revolution was fought about. we also watched a reenactment of the ride of paul revere.

while quinn and the other kids were occupied on the play structure outside, i got to chat with kelly about handwriting curriculum, and the importance of correct letter formation. i think i have a better handle on the why behind that now, and the reading i’ve been doing on neuroplasticity makes me think there is something to it, that handwriting practice is not just tedious busywork. i left feeling armed with some new strategies of how to encourage him in beginning his letters from the top (he often starts from the bottom) and then got online and got even more insight from the handwriting without tears website. kelly explained the wet-dry-try method to teach a letter using a small handheld chalkboard, where i would write the letter in chalk, then he would use a small wet sponge to trace it, then a dry cloth to trace it dry, and then “try” it himself with chalk. i appreciate the full sensory approach to handwriting that this curriculum uses.

quinn seemed to be quite comfortable being back in a school setting, and i couldn’t remember if that was how it had been last year. in fact, i think it was more comfortable now, given the way we have spent the past year, including homeschool group and just being a kid in the world growing a year older. he sat on a bench with another boy at lunch, and proceeded to cover his face with berry juice.

~~~

this year on the fourth, i have been feeling the miles that have passed underneath my own moccasins more acutely than in years past. holidays in general seem to call up previous holidays in my mind, along with whatever attachments they bring. this year i sifted through all the fireworks i could remember… the ones where quinn and i went to bed before the fireworks, the ones more recently when he has stayed up to watch them, the ones i watched 14 years ago from the deck of a schooner in the middle of new york harbor, the ones even earlier when i ran track at the empire state games. still farther back, the ones when i was a teenager holding baby cousins in my lap on a dock on a lake in the adirondacks and listening to their cooing voices exclaiming, “ooh, yay!” the ones in 2010 when i declared my independence from oppression. the ones in 2012 when i stood on a bridge with rich and watched fireworks together for the first of what will be many, many times.

the three of us joined our local adopted family for camping over the weekend. i baked my first rhubarb upside down cake in a dutch oven. quinn went with the rest of the gaggle of children to kids’ fishing day at the hatchery and caught his limit (3), two of which were “this big! 17 inches! too big to fit in any of the pans!” he helped tend crawdad traps, got married to snow white (you do a dance and have a hug) and wore a plastic bucket helmet on his head to fight battles all weekend. he was nervous about crawdads pinching his toes, but he still waded in the river and joined the other kids at the swimming hole which one of the uncles helped all the kids “swim” across. quinn’s bride is one of my favorite children, and she is the most warmed up to rich of all the children. she consistently calls him richard even though no one else does. she and rich could be found being “vampires,” both had on sunglasses and were alternately growling and giggling, and then she chased the rest of us with her vampire care bear.

quinn experienced porta potty sensory overload this year, and flatly refused to use it. i insisted he use it exactly two times, the rest could be handled in the great outdoors, but in his effort to avoid using it, he experienced a few close calls. i basically had to inform him that he actually had to go, even though he would insist he didn’t (dancing a jig all the while) and bodily place him inside the john, hold the door open for air, as he tried to decide whether to use his hands to cover his ears or plug his nose. the onslaught of sensory input in there was simply overwhelming, and really, i can’t say i disagree. i had the fun of “playing pioneers” with my friend one morning, washing a few sleeping bags and pajamas in the creek and hanging them to dry in the tree branches.

~~~

sitting around a campfire with my sister-friends is always therapeutic for me, and it also occurs to me that i have grown enough as a person that i may actually have something to offer in friendship. the miles i have walked have not always been easy ones, but i’ve come all this way for good reason. the more i share my story, the more i feel i gain from that sharing, and receive so many gifts in return: gems shared from their lives, and of course, inside jokes about olympic hand holding. each time i try to articulate how it is that i have found a way to open up my heart to love again, i find it opens up even a little bit farther, sometimes so wide that a little bird flies in.

a month of unschool

Posted on July 1, 2013 by marybethrew

field trips! unschooling is always a field trip-oriented way to learn, but there is something about late may/early june that inspires an upsurge in field trip activities even for us. the gravitational pull of the open world becomes stronger and we do not try to resist. we went tidepooling and saw one of our local harbor seal colonies quite up close. we caught an especially negative tide that was perfectly timed for mid-morning, and got to hike to the very farthest extent of that beach- quinn is getting to be an impressive hiker and didn’t complain a single time, rather, he urged me to hike out to the tippy-farthest rock we could stand on, which afforded us a beautiful view of a natural arch i had never laid eyes on. unfortunately, i had forgotten to charge my camera batteries the night before, so we will have to return to that spot someday soon. quinn proceeded to land his whole right leg in the ocean upon disembarking from said tippy-farthest rock, and experienced a moment of despair at having his boot filled with water, but we recovered and after dumping out boots and wringing out socks, proceeded to hike slowly back, stopping to study critters (hermit crabs, anemones, urchins, chitons, etc.) and build rock snowmen on the way.

another field trip was strawberry picking with friends, and from there we convened a picnic in the waterfront park, where the kids could splash in the fountains, their orbits around the picnic blanket sized naturally according to their age.

creativity; quinn is interested in puppet shows lately. after reading if you give a moose a muffin together, he began making scenery and sock puppets for a puppet show; he also cut out “battle scene from hoth” printouts that i belatedly downloaded (did you know may the fourth be with you is star wars day? i will remember to celebrate this holiday in the future!) and added paper loops to them to make finger puppets, and re-enacted battles on hoth for me numerous times; captain pirate made strawberry jam; also we are building ewoks! so far we have tackled the pattern making, which involved tracing, enlarging (big ewok), shrinking (for two baby ewoks that he plans the big ewok will carry in a basket); cutting out the pattern after i drew it was all quinn; and we began cutting fabric from an old furry brown coat, though given quinn wants the big ewok to be quinn-sized, we will need to scavenge more old brown coats; quinn helped me do a round of tie dying for some custom etsy orders- he has good hand-eye coordination and control with a squirt bottle and made an excellent assistant.

reading; we moved up a level to a new box of bob books– we recently tackled one that involved the word family crown-clown-town-down and also contained many of the color words, as well as the word “another” (!) and he is really getting the hang of it; he read parts of the grinch who stole christmas to me one day- i learned from my mom while we were on our trip that it’s not necessary to discourage him from using what he knows from memorization- he obviously knows much of the grinch by heart, but he did notice when he had a word just slightly off, like would instead of could, and he’d go back and correct it. my mom also encouraged him to “use your picture clues” and that was one thing i had not been doing with him, like somehow if i expected him to decode the letters themselves, devoid of “clues,” it would make him a better reader. after a little thought, i think i’m getting the hang of this, too; bedtime reading now is the star wars trilogy; i just found some star wars books online that i wish i had seen before i ordered the plain text one i am reading, these have lots of great pictures from the movies. i am going to save up my pennies to get them for quinn at some point (they are only one penny, used, actually, but i have to save up for the shipping) because i can envision him spending hours reading them to himself in the not-too-distant future.

reading/geography/paleontology/history/miscellaneous…. one day quinn was asking questions about the continents, so i pulled out the atlas and he sat for a long time flipping through pages naming continents; that same day, based on thoughts that occurred to him while gazing at an atlas, he was interested in skeletons and mentioned dinosaurs, and when i pulled out two more books- one on skeletons, and one on dinosaurs- he flipped through the dinosaur book for a while and found a page on which he recognized a photo. “this is crystal park palace, mama. it’s where they built a life-sized iguanodon model, but before they completed the model, they had a whole dinner party inside the ribcage! for twelve people!” i glanced at the caption, and sure enough! crystal park palace it was. he seems to retain facts that he learns from what he calls “learning movies” with a great deal of accuracy. sometimes i swear i even hear a trace of the accent of whoever was narrating the movie, and wonder if he is actually quoting, not just paraphrasing what he has learned. but again, i think memorization is a talent i should encourage. though i am an unschooler, and obviously not big on assigning arbitrary rote memorization, i do think the things he chooses to lock into memory have meaning for him, and that is what unschooling is all about- making meaning for ourselves from the world around us.

“…for hundreds of years educators did seem to sense that children’s brains had to be built up through exercises of increasing difficulty that strengthened the brain functions. up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. then in the 1960s educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum, because they were too rigid, boring, and “not relevant.” but the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. for the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and a level of auditory brainpower unfamiliar to us now. in the lincoln-douglas debates of 1858 the debaters would comfortably speak for an hour or more without notes, in extended memorized paragraphs; today many of the most learned among us, raised in our most elite schools since the 1960s, prefer the omnipresent powerpoint presentation – the ultimate compensation for a weak promotor cortex.” a little food for thought from my embarrassingly overdue library book the brain that changes itself; stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science by norman doidge.

handwriting- quinn continues to have excellent writing skills, and practices on his own terms, such as writing the message on his cousin’s birthday card. i am looking forward to there being more correspondence between the two boys in the near future when they are both writing!

pe; speed and coordination- running laps around the house; agility- playing chase with the waves; endurance- bouncy house for four hours straight.

chores and money; he helped me snip apart long strings of diaper pieces i had sewn on the serger, and i gave him some money for helping, letting him know that since i would make money from the diapers, and since he had genuinely helped me, it made sense for me to share what i would earn with him. he liked that, and it happened again when he helped me tie dye. he has continued to show his innate desire to help, and routinely now will “help” in some way with dinner, sometimes stirring something really quickly and running away to play, other times hanging out for the duration and asking “what next” until i run out of toaster operating, stirring, measuring, sponging, table setting, condiment retrieving jobs for him to perform. each time we go to fred meyer, he asks to visit the lego aisle, and we do, though i have to remind him every time that i am not going to buy any legos today, that we are just looking, and that he can take note of the prices of things that he would like to save money for. he then proceeds to ask me the prices of every single box of lord of the rings, hobbit, and star wars legos on the shelves, and when he is finished looking, we move on to buying the groceries. monopoly money math must be acknowledged here, as well as quinn’s recent interest in helping me work the atm machine at my bank.

quinn and his good buddy have been playing a game with legos where they sell or rent each other spaceships or droids or what-have-you, and they will sometimes keep it going for a good hour or more, playing with small change. quinn then developed his own math lesson in his drawing book based on the game they had been playing. up until that “lesson”, he had never practiced counting change amounts, though he knew vaguely which coin was worth which amount. so this launched him into finding out that when you have 0 quarters, 4 dimes, 2 nickels, and 5 pennies, you have 55 cents!

math; aside from his money math, quinn is pretty fired up about math in general right now. (i did mention to him that the people who designed the angry birds games had probably worked very hard at math.) he is on page 82 of his jump math workbook as of this writing, which is impressive only because i have not once required him to sit down and work in his math book. each time i suggest doing some math, he decides, and often he does decide in favor. when he does sit down to do it, he will go through many pages, the other day breezing through a whole section on addition and moving right into subtraction before deciding he was satiated and ready to move on to something else. i am happy with the curriculum, there have been quite a few pleasantly playful/fun pages for him. one involved drawing pictures of the items to be added (he drew an elaborate birthday party scene with 3 balloons, 2 presents, 2 people and 3 candles on the cake; in another box he drew an angry birds star wars scene in order to add 4 + 2 + 7.) the actual math problems so far are seemingly very easy for him, but i like that for now, for confidence building, and i like that the workbook is fun-oriented. math can be seen as a foreign language to many of us, and we often hear how it doesn’t apply to our real lives, but drawing and puzzles and games do apply to quinn’s real life. another page was a very simple word puzzle, where he had to bring down the letters corresponding to certain numbers, and decode “monkey”, “bird”, and “cat”. it’s excellent cross-training with his reading level. one day recently i shared his math book and the current bob book he was reading with my coparent, with whom i have been working with a counselor in order to parent more as a team. coparent’s jaw dropped when i told him, “if he does any math over the weekend, you should know that he can now read the instructions himself.” i think he was somewhat unaware of quinn’s fast progress in reading, which i tried not to feel too smug about. it seems quinn finally did come to understand that just because he hadn’t ever read before didn’t mean he couldn’t do it. he is internalizing the message “yes i can” more and more and realizing his competence as a person.

socialization; always the big buzz word with us unschooler/homeschooler types, but i think we are enriching quinn’s life in this department as well as the others. we attended a dance performance of jane and the giant peach one night, and since james is one of quinn’s favorite stories of all time, and since quinn also has expressed interest in being one of the dancers (we are thinking maybe this coming fall might be the right time to sign him up), he was completely mesmerized. i heard an audible “awww, is it over already?” from him at the end, and he clapped quite vigorously for the dancers. in addition to our usual diet of weekly playdates with homeschooling friends, we also attended a wedding reception where quinn easily mingled among the children. when i went to extract him from the bouncy house at the end of the day he could be heard, along with the 4 remaining children, engaged in a pretend scenario in which 3 of them were wolves, one was a lion, and the other an elephant. he was disappointed to leave, but his transitions are going much more smoothly, as he finds something to help his resilience (in this case it was picking out some “easter eggs”, those little sugared almond table favors, to take home). he is more socially independent by leaps and bounds; he didn’t know any of the children at this party beforehand. i heard from him very little during the bouncy house session, only seeing him when he was desperately hungry and thirsty. he came back at one point clutching 2 pieces of hard candy and a wrapper from a butterscotch, which he told me he had already eaten and let me know how good it had been. he let me know later that all of the kids except one had been nice to play with, but one had “kept on saying mean things” to the other children. he said none of it had been directed towards him, and couldn’t remember what the mean things had been, but said that he and the other kids just tried to ignore the one boy when he said mean things.

there have been so many success stories of homeschooling and unschooling families in the news recently, and i love seeing the good press. it helps to counterbalance the negative vibes and judgment that one can’t help but encounter on this road. we recently read in the oregonian of a young woman of 16 years named tesca fitzgerald, who just graduated from portland state university at the top of the computer science department. (you thought i was going to say high school?) she is off to georgia tech to earn her phd combining her computer science with cognitive science and neuroscience. she led her robotics team to the world championships several years running, where she consistently stretched the boundaries of what the robotics software designers intended and ended up teaching them about their own tools. now just think how amazing she could have been if she had only been sent to school.

this feels to me like the most accurate picture of our typical month that i have managed to portray in the past year, and though i did go back and fill in the missing months just recently, i know they were much sketchier pictures, as i was working from the hazy distance of months gone by, when things like “the physics of the cherry pitter” have slipped from my mind if i didn’t take a picture of them. still, they are there (if you ever want to fill yourself in on our months of unschool or look back through them, you can hit the handy tag a month of unschool in the tag cloud in the sidebar and get the full list; the same goes for the tag baby which will get you the list of posts from quinn’s first years that i am still slowly entering, and am now caught up to his first birthday).

(and while i am paranthetically handling housekeeping matters, if you want to get on the email list to receive updates of new posts, it’s easy to do. if you go to the upper right hand corner of the blog, there are three little icons, and one of them is an envelope with the words “by email”. click on it, and you will be asked to enter your email address, and then you’ll get an email asking you to click a link to confirm.)

up

Posted on May 6, 2013 by marybethrew

quinn and i have a scrabble game going on, laid out on the table in his bedroom. he got interested in it because he “helped” me play a few words in the game words with friends (ie scrabble on a smart phone) and one time he looked over my shoulder and told me, “mama, you can spell up! u-p!”

slowly but surely, he is gaining more confidence with reading and he seems to relish all of those little quirks of the english language. he will pose questions, “carrot starts with /ck/ (saying the sound). is that a c or a k?” he delights in observing silent e’s on the end of words. it’s like he’s in on all these big secrets now, and he loves being in the know. replenishing his scrabble tiles he tells me, “mama, i have 3 vowels in my tray now. two a’s and a u.”

can you find “up”? hint: he used a blank tile for p.

now that the evaluation wave is behind us, and the swell of our ocean has calmed down, we are back to diy methods for helping quinn learn to tolerate frustration with more flexibility. i am making a conscious effort to enhance quinn’s “sensory diet,” that concept i mentioned from the out of sync child. i don’t know that quinn has sensory integration problems, though i suspect it’s like the rest of his “stuff”- it’s there in quantities too small to register on a neuro-developmental pediatrician’s yardstick. either way, i know that sensory play often seems to calm and center quinn and so beefing up his sensory diet can’t hurt and might help. (i think that is probably true of any child.)

i made myself a list of things quinn already enjoys on a sensory level. sand and water are thing one and thing two in our coastal lives. we spend a few hours on the beach each week, lately as part of my nanny job. (aside: i often get looks of pity when i tell someone of my career change from science to nannying. i know the automatic first thought is other peoples’ childrens’ fecal matter but to me it means i get paid to take children to the beach. i went into marine biology because i love the ocean, and now i get to spend time with it instead of a computer screen.) the beach is of course a full-immersion sensory experience (the sound of the waves, the smell of the salty seaweed, the feel of the sand in your toes, in your fingers, scooping, sifting and pouring, building sand castles, stacking rocks, the feel of the sun, wind, rain, space to run and gallop and spin, drift logs to balance on, and if you are only one, the taste of the sand and the feel of it crunching in your teeth! (my little charge is at that fun stage of exploring everything orally.) similar to the sand theme, we used to get a lot of mileage out of a tray of birdseed i would bring to the farmer’s market, which somehow attracted all of the market urchins to my tent for hours on end as they dug their fingers through it and filled plastic eggs to make shakers, shoveled, funneled and poured it among containers. i may have to revive the birdseed bin- which i do recommend over popcorn or dry beans, because birds will still eat it after it’s been played with. also, it is that wonderful time of year called gardening season. digging in the soil is therapy for anyone, and quinn has always enjoyed it.

what quinn really enjoys about gardening is watering. he will dip a yogurt cup into a 5 gallon bucket 431 times to water tiny seedlings, right to the bottom of the bucket, then ask me to refill it. he will hold the hose in the greenhouse and squeeze the spray nozzle for so long i usually need to put a stop to it so we don’t empty the tank or drown the plants. he will hydrate foliage using a full spritzer bottle until it’s empty, as though he is hypnotized. like his mama, he will soak in the bathtub for an hour or more, though he likes tepid water and i prefer it boiling. he has a fun time pretending all sorts of things in the water (one time recently a pink rubber duck was hermione, and she had been captured by the giant squid). he can usually be heard talking non-stop to himself, moving water from here to there, squeezing ducks to fill them up, and squirting water out again.

he doesn’t love the sensory experiences involving hair washing, cutting, or brushing, (in fact he finds them excruciating), but we have made some strides. he likes having apricot oil rubbed on his scalp, something i do at night occasionally to try to loosen the last remnants of cradle cap. he knows that means the next morning’s bath will include a shampoo, but he likes the head rub enough to agree to it. i just have to be super gentle and not get any water in his eyes at all. the last haircut he told me he only wanted if it could be gentle and fast (it hurts and it’s so boring!) so i did my best. i definitely lost style points, but on the other hand it may have enhanced his harry potter look. we just picked up a little rubber duck scrub brush, and i know that skin rubbing/brushing is a sensory integration tool that helps kids organize their neurons. there has been many a night when quinn simply will not fall asleep, but after a good backrub and dolphin story (the baby dolphin has his body parts listed and mama tells him to let each part sink into the waves while focusing on his breathing) he is out like a light. we also like to start our days, when we can, with a good 10 minute snuggle.

of course, sometimes snuggling turns more into things like steamrolling and hiding under the blankets, sometimes “being an egg” (which he will ask me to sit on) and then hatching out, other times requiring tickling. i am a stickler about tickling, i rarely want to do it, and will only do it on request and will stop at any indication it is not wanted any longer. yet, because i have done it this way, respecting his boundaries, quinn seems to crave it. usually things devolve into horseplay then, and quinn can be seen hanging upside down by his ankles from my arms, wheelbarrowing around the house, or dancing to whatever happens to be on the stereo (the other night it was the band, and the grateful dead hour dead air is also a favorite on saturday nights.)

i notice that he is interested in swinging more than he used to be. he has never been a natural at swinging, but is starting to get the mechanics of keeping himself going. he doesn’t like to go very high, but seems to enjoy the constant motion as long as it’s a gentle arc. when he finally does come off the swing after a session, he seems more grounded and flexible, speaking of neurons becoming organized. we just put a swing up in a big tree at home, from a board and some rope we hauled off the beach.

there is a putting green in the yard outside our nanny house that quinn has been drawn to, so we went to the second hand sporting goods store and got quinn a putter. i imagine putting as a skill that causes one to have to integrate both sides of the brain, as the hands have to move across the body’s centerline. the significance of crossing the midline might be very great for children with sensory integration issues. i imagine quinn’s archery practice (he does this with his dad) is great for this as well.

my little perfectionist does not want to try skipping (i wonder if he will let grammy and grampy work on it with him in a few short weeks- they are the ones who taught me!) but i got him a jumprope while we were buying the golf putter, and he has been having a great time with that. he is supremely uncoordinated at it, of course, but as he doesn’t know it (as he seems to have some indication with skipping- maybe because of the evaluation) and he thinks it is a barrel of laughs, he is happy to practice. he will jump over once and stop, then ask me “how many times now?” and then will do two individual jumps, stopping in between. i keep increasing the number as long as he is into it.

another thing quinn got to do for the first time recently was jump on a friend’s trampoline. he had such a blast! he and the friend spent a whole afternoon on it, alternating between bouts of bouncing and then periods of sitting and talking, imagining all sorts of things together. he also thoroughly enjoys yoga balls, and loves visiting the yoga studio and getting to use them. i am planning on getting him one for home. rich handed me a newspaper article about schools starting to trade in desk chairs for yoga balls, and it is said that the kids’ focus is vastly improved.

probably my favorite sensory stimulus is when quinn asks for a sandwich hug. it happens just about any time he comes into a room where rich and i are hugging. it is so routine we all know the script now. it goes like this: “make me into a sandwich! i will say, ‘don’t squeeze me too hard’ and then you squeeze me as hard as you can! ok! don’t squeeze me too hard! aurghlmph!” i like having my arms wrapped around both of my guys at once. it it the best thing i have found for organizing my neurons.

mb

magic & bioluminescence

Tag Archives: sensory diet

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ sprouting spring spirit

miles under my moccasins

a month of unschool

up