our first unit study planning session

(After I was done taking notes, Hypatia had to see if she could make her handwriting as small as mine)

Both of my children have a great deal of institutional and democratic experience - they see it all the time at church and then the Sudbury school excels at democratic process. So, I shouldn't be surprised that they brought a lot of this savvy to the process of planning our first unit study. It started a bit like this:

Me, at breakfast time: "I think we should do Ancient Egypt as our first unit study, because we know we want to go see the King Tut exhibit when it comes to town." (Idle conversation, really.)

Carbon: "I like that idea too!" Hypatia: "Yeah!" Carbon: "It's unanimous then - we'll do Ancient Egypt."

Hypatia: "Can we do the Ancient Romans after that?"

Me: "Maybe, we'll have to see. Ooooh - you know what I saw - hieroglyph rubber stamps! Wouldn't that be fun to work with for this unit study?"

Which then led to a session of me googling educational kits and toys with an egypt theme, and finding out that a lot of them are pretty expensive.

Me: "I don't think we can buy all these."

Carbon: "We need a budget. What's our budget?"

We don't currently have an annual budget for our homeschool, so we ended up just adding up how much it would cost to buy Everything. Too Much. They each went down the list then and said what their top priority was, and we added just those things up and found that the number was more reasonable. We got the Daddy in to the meeting at that point and proposed that budget, then all voted.

So we will be studying ancient Egypt this summer - and we have a great precedent in place already for how we will proceed going forward with planning and choosing topics in our homeschool.

Happy Mothers Day

Seven years ago, I had my first Mothers Day as a mother. It's a hard job, and I celebrate all who do it. At the same time, it's the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me, and I cherish the joy my children have brought to me.

Whether you understand this holiday as it was originally envisioned - for peace - or as a time to thank your mother, or as a time to improve the lives of mothers around the world ... Happy Mothers Day to you. I share all three values, and I'm happy to call this a beautiful holiday. :)

quilting memories

fabrics:

a thrifted sundress she wore two summers ago, too stained to re-donate, and I cut up the ruffles and made that pseudo log-cabin square

left-over fabric from our recent My Doll and Me nightgown project, first sewn in one design then cut up and "fixed" (just barely) into this new design, without enough hot pink to really fix it

fabrics:

a fun scrap of jungle print from an outfit I made for her when she was a toddler, a tiny amount of light green scrap from who-knows-what-origin, and an old curtain I had made for the daddy and my first apartment together

More than a year ago, I finished making a Memory Quilt for Carbon. I wrote about it here. I'm not a quilter - AT ALL - but I wanted to do something with his favorite t shirts he outgrew, his little pants, the scraps from projects I made for him, etc. The result was definitely a CRAZY quilt, but he loves it and that is the blanket he sleeps under every night. I imagine that when he grows up and moves on, he'll have that blanket to take with him and remember that whole era of his childhood (I have similar things to remember my childhood by, and I love that).

But as parents, we have to be fair, right? I can't do something for one child and not for the other .... they are keeping track, believe me. So it's time to start a Memory Quilt for Hypatia. And here is the beginning of that effort - as you can see I've been bit by a much more ambitious bug this time. Not that this is quilting like my serious quilting friends would do -

a. I hate to actually measure anything. I really do - I prefer to sew by the seat of my pants.

b. I don't read the directions.

c. I'm very comfortable with wonky seams in a lot of things.

d. I learned to sew by helping my mother make costumes for community theater, so the rule was - will this look okay from 50 feet away? That kind of sewing can be very sloppy.

But this is pretty fun, and I'm actually motivated to put more into the details than I have in the past. Now - if her quilt turns out nicer than his quilt, does that mean I have to make him another one as well?

Say Yes to your children

As we drove home after dropping the daddy off at work and the boy off at school, Hypatia asked me to play a board game with her when we got home. My first reaction was NO. It's so easy to say No - No, I have too much work to do. No, I'm busy. No, I'm tired. No, I don't want to make a mess right now.

It's harder to say Yes. It's harder to get past my first reaction and to go ahead and spend the time doing something I don't necessarily want to do.

But doesn't it feel good when people say Yes to you? Doesn't it feel good to have someone spend time with you? What kind of relationship is built by that word - "Yes"?

It will help your kids feel good about themselves. It will help them have confidence to ask again, to talk to you, to share with you.

It will help them see the world as a more positive place, creating more optimism - a personality trait that has been shown to lead to greater resilience in life.

It will create a closer parent-child relationship. Every time you say yes to anyone, you are putting an investment in your relationship bank. No, I don't want to reduce human relationships to "mere" transactions, but I do find it incredibly useful to remember the concept of "relationship capital" in my life - and saying Yes to your child is building up relationship capital.

And it makes for an environment of Yes. An environment in which everyone is more likely to say Yes. So when I say, "do you want to help me in the kitchen?" they say Yes. And when they say "can you bake cookies?" I say yes. And when I say "I'm tired - will you all be quiet while I lie down for a bit?" they say Yes.

All good reasons to say YES.

Second Nature

My latest book to finish reading is Second Nature: A Gardener's Education by Michael Pollan. Pollan has become well-known as an advocate for sustainable food practices (The Omnivore's Dilemma, and his contributions to Food, Inc), but Second Nature is from 1991, a bit before all that became part of the conversation.

Second Nature isn't about food, but rather about gardening - and about how gardens are the arena for nature and culture to come together in various ways. Pollan writes of weeds, hybrid roses, planting trees, lawns, and much more, but the prevailing thread is how we as humans interract with nature and how we balance nature and culture.

Much of the book seems to be arguing with Thoreau - something I enjoy as I'm often mentally arguing with Thoreau as well :) - about the nature of man and "the wild" and culture. It's beautifully written and deeply thought-provoking. A truly lovely meditation on humanity's history, culture, and nature, all set in the garden.

From the book:

.... finding a good answer to that question will involve a much more complicated set of choices than the usual American alternatives, which seem to consist of either raping the land or sealing it away in a preserve where no one can touch it. That the first approach is bankrupt goes without saying. Yet, right as it sounds, the second one may be a dead end too. Gardening quickly teaches you to distrust all such absolutes, to frame the questions a little differently. Must we always shrink before our own power in nature?

My plan to balance work/homeschool

Several people have asked for hints about my plan to balance a full-time job with homeschooling the kids. It's a trick, that's for sure. My mother did it two ways: running a home daycare for 15 years and then running a tutoring center for the last 12 years.

I am very lucky, in that I have a full-time job with flex hours and a flexible workplace. My big work-day is Sunday, when my husband is available to watch the kids. If he's ever not, it also works fine for the kids to go with me now that they are old enough to not be hanging on my hip as I do the many parts of my Sunday role.

The rest of my work week is Office Hours, Meetings, Study, Lesson Planning, sometimes facilitating Classes, and a ever shifting assortment of prep tasks (shopping, cooking, crafting, photocopying, etc) for Sunday school. A lot of that is done in the evening, or on Saturday, because we are working around the schedules of other folks who have school and work.

I plan to shift my Office Hours to the afternoons, probably 1-4pm, and work four days a week. One of those days will be a full-day, 10am-4pm most likely. So that will be 15 hours a week of during the day time that we'll be in my office. As you can see in the photo above, the kids can just hang out in my office with me - like I said, I'm very lucky. There is also all the rest of the unused church building for them to hang out in: nursery, Montessori-style classroom, youth room with sofas and tv, empty classrooms, outdoor space, pianos, etc.

I plan to mostly let them do whatever they want during my office hours. We will buy them a simple laptop so that they can be on the computer if they want. I'm also a big fan of borrowing DVD's from the library and letting them watch those at work. If the mood moves them, they have tons of art supplies at their finger-tips there. They hang out there now, and I'm confident they'll be able to keep themselves busy for those 15 hours a week.

So that settles where the kids will go during my work hours. Now - how will we find time for the homeschooling?

We will do "Breakfast School" and do our small quantity of daily work in Reading, Writing, and Math first thing in the morning.

We will do one family unit-study at a time, which the kids will choose the topic for and then we'll let unfold rather organically. Lots of library books to read, documentaries to watch, a field-trip if appropriate, etc. We'll work that all in around our schedule.

I'm going to arrange for a Spanish class for the kids, and for a few other homeschooling friends. That will be one hour a week, scheduled on a morning. We'll do home-learning tucked in here and there as well.

Other mornings will be assigned for a once-a-week nature study and keeping a nature journal, and then a once-a-week science lab time and keeping a lab journal.

A music lesson once a week, some kind of physical activity or class, and one class per week at the Homeschool Connect program that is provided by our school district - yes, there is going to be running around for me to do. Some of it may have to be after 4pm, when I leave work.

There is also a park day with the local homeschool group, and playdates to schedule. I know I'm going to be keeping a big family calendar to keep it sorted out.

Will I be tired? Yes. But I'm going to give myself one afternoon a week off, by hiring a babysitter for four hours a week. Then I can get out and do something for myself, with no kids for those four hours.

That's my plan!

Ideas for Mother's Day

Carbon has been saying that he "hates Mother's Day". He groans when we talk about plans for next weekend. "Why?" we ask him, and his answer is that it is "so hard to find the perfect present for Mom". That whatever he gets is never good enough.

Say what? I have no idea where that is coming from! Is it hard to get me gifts? What about:

Kid-made art that can go up on the wall of my office

Flowers - both cut or for planting in the garden

Bubble bath or bath salts

Momma-jewelry, like this

Dish cloths

gift-certificates for doing extra chores around the house

cute puppy accessories for my new puppy dog

Chocolate, red wine, and coffee

yoga DVD's

Framed photos of themselves

Is that really that hard? Their Dad is a hopeless case and will probably leave this until Saturday afternoon and take them out shopping at the last minute only after I gently remind him that the next day is Mother's Day, but still ....

In the meantime, today I'm off to mail some nice little packages and cards to some of my moms, step-moms, and mother-in-laws ....