Terrible/Perfect

Christmas in July

Monday was June 25th, which reminded me that Christmas is a mere six months away.

I'm not kidding! This year promises to be extra thrilling because, come Christmas, if all goes well, we will have been in the thick of new baby care for two months. I am going to get absolutely nothing done from about mid-October.

The line-up is a doozy: the big kid's birthday at the last call of summer, the new baby's birth sometime in the midst of the Halloween season, then the Christmas season, then the soon-to-be middle child's birthday in January. That's a whole heck of a lot of making if one is inclined to make things for such occasions, which I am.

I could completely let it go this year, which would not be a bad idea, but we have a tradition in our little family of one homemade wrapped gift and one wrapped book under the tree on Christmas morning; those are the gifts from Mom and Dad. I'd feel a bit sad to lose that. I'd also like the kids to have a little something handmade for their birthdays (and in one special case, the birth day). So the simple solution is to start making now. No big deal. A knitting and sewing summer sounds pretty rad.

I have a vision of woolly cardigans, dresses and matching dolly dresses under the tree, but I think I'm going to start with home-dyed playsilks (they will go in the stockings...good grief, three of them!). I have some purchases in mind for the gift-giving season, but obviously buying something six months out could be a recipe for disaster. But my kids (and the kids that come into our home) play with the silks all day, every day, in one way or another. Having the full rainbow (and then some) isn't indulgent, it's positively sensible.

And you get to strap babies to your baby's back, which is heart-melting. Sweet one.

Light reading

It's time to throttle back on the intensity of the bedtime stories. The adventures of Harry Potter are fantastic, but at the end of the day, some six year-olds might find the ever-intensifying return to absolute power of a physically and spiritually mutilated, deathless and unstoppable sociopathic wizard a little less than soothing right before lights out, knowwhadduhmean? Maybe it even keeps them up past 10 p.m. scared witless some nights, who knows.

It's interesting, but if you want a charming and engaging but ultimately lighthearted and safe read, it seems like you have to go back to mid-century children's literature. What's up with that? It's fascinating, really. Harry Potter well and truly appears to have altered the entire landscape of children's publishing, and thereby what children regularly read and have read to them. That's not even counting the shift towards graphically depicted themes of harm and abuse in young adult fiction (you can read articulate opposing views on that particular issue here and here). Is this a good, bad, or neutral thing? I have not explored my own opinion, I just know my own kid needs something else right now.

Harry Potter and other dark fantasy may still have its place in the earlier light of day, but I'm working on a big ol' list of gentle titles to reserve for before bed. I haven't read most of them, so please give me a heads up if there's a glaring ommission, or if behind one of these titles hides disturbing themes or scenes (Betsy Tacy is out because I understand that Tacy's infant brother dies near the end; I'm not going there right now). We just finished The Borrowers by Mary Norton, and it was very well received.

Here's the list so far, in no particular order:

Pippi Longstocking

The Cricket in Times Square

The Moffats

Sarah, Plain and Tall

Strawberry Girl

The Melendy Quartet: The Saturdays, The Four-Story Mistake, Then There Were Five, and Spiderweb for Two

Twig

That should probably carry us through the summer. There's a whole passel of that sort of old books to choose from, and thankfully the always helpful "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" feature on Amazon.com to point the way to similar fiction.

About that whole notion that you need a time machine to find a gentle and engaging story with relatively child-like child protagonists, feel free to read (and barf) a little bit about Kids Getting Older Younger (also called "age compression") from the mouths of advertising professionals. Gross.

In the bedroom

We've been struggling with Big Kid's disordered sleep since forever. I can without exaggeration say it's a central feature of family life around here: the One Who Can't Sleep. It influences every aspect of her behavior and our routine, not in positive ways. I have a child who is emotionally fragile all day, then frequently both hyperactive and stumbling around like a drunken monkey from 3 o'clock in the afternoon until she finally shuts down. The pediatricians haven't been much help. I'm not sure if they take it seriously. Maybe they just don't know what to do.

I did some research on my own recently and am making some targeted changes. Taking a page or thirty from Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne I pulled the girls' room into line, but hard. They wake up in a pristine space and they go to sleep in a pristine space. Toys have to live in there, too, but they are all picked up at the end of the day and stashed away quietly in cubbies and baskets, out of the girls' line of sight when they're in their beds. I am discretely doing a fair amount of purging to keep things as simple as possible. Their room has always been pretty lovely, all peachy-pinky warm and light. Now it's a calming and peaceful space, too. 

I'm working on shifting that tranquil feeling out into the rest of the house, working through organization projects and changing my own routine during the week so that we have no built up anything. No laundry hanging out anywhere, no dirty dishes in the sink, no papers on the counter. I'm not done yet by any means (hello, wall that has been half painted since October), but from where I sit I see a bunch of very clear surfaces. One day at a time.

Perhaps most importantly, we're moving up and regimenting sleep and waking times. Prior bedtimes seemed early enough (always before 9) but with far too loose a range. The little one has always been easy to put down, but it's surprised and chastised me to watch her quickly and easily fall asleep at 6:30. She apparently needs that full twelve hours! At least now she'll get it. The Big Kid ought to get to sleep at about 7:30, and both girls are up by around 12 hours past their respective bedtimes. We're going to be absolutely Prussian about those times from now on.

From just one tiny/huge aspect of childrearing, the single insomniac child, we're shifting the entire family routine: early to bed, early to rise for everyone; an earlier dinner before their dad gets home; spreading the housework into smaller tasks across the week; ensuring no transition time finds us unprepared (the snacks are packed and the swim bag is all ready to go the night before, and so forth). All these small changes add up to a totally new rhythm.

Toss in a bunch of work on destressing family dynamics across the board, particularly the stress that has been arising from sibling rivalry, as well as nightly conversations with the big kid to help her unload anything that needs unloading, and, with both unease and deep gratitude, low-dose chewable melatonin, and we may fix this yet...and gain an exponentially more peaceful, joyful, rewarding family life in the bargain.

Just in time for a newborn.

Oh, snap!

The big kid asked for a Snap Circuits kit over a year ago, but they're not exactly cheap, and we weren't sure it would be of any interest to her once she actually got into the box, so she never got any. She was thrilled to learn that we could check a kit out from the district's homeschool resource library, and has enjoyed her borrowed kits quite a bit these last weeks.

Then I saw this one at Goodwill and nabbed it for a cool $6. This is basically the Snap Circuits "Extreme" (ha!) 750 kit although it's a slightly older kit that appears to have been produced for Radio Shack and has a couple of minor differences. All of the parts work and the kit is complete except for the computer interface software, which she isn't ready for and it sounds like to company will replace for free if she was, so no big deal. If she maintains interest we might expand her kit at Christmas. The Snap Rover looks pretty cool. Yesterday she made a low frequency oscillator that sounded like robotic rain on the one hand, and a bit like a fart on the other once she replaced the resistor and pushed the slider bar all the way to the right, so we're probably in for the long haul.

Her dad and I spent a good half an hour last night figuring out precisely where all the parts are supposed to fit in the tray, which means we're soul mates.

I'm considering ordering the student guide, but probably not unless she continues to be excited about making circuits for some time. No need to ruin a perfectly good hands-on experience with electronics. Just for fun I requested a few resources from the library about electricity and Nikola Tesla, who I personally find fascinating. Just a little easygoing, spontaneous summer science.

I would be a complete liar if I said I didn't hope this portends well for Mindstorms in our future. Those look amazing.

In essentials, I believe, he is very much what he ever was.

We had an extremely rough Father's Day.

My husband and I don't fight much at all; most of our disagreements are settled quickly and respectfully. We're both good at introducing humor to diffuse bad feelings. I'm very fortunate.

But sometimes we really fall down. Who doesn't?

Unfortunately we did just that two nights ago and it took a long, long time to find our way to a place where we could unpack the hurt we were both feeling and look at it all clearly. We did, and we were able to reconcile completely. He turned out to be a little bit out of line, and I turned out to be a lot out of line in the way I dealt with his little bit of out of line-ness, and we walked out of the day having been torn down a fair bit but rebuilt even better.

And my God, I thought. The man I married is so good.

Everyone goes into marriage having made some decisions, consciously or otherwise, about what is most important in a partner and in a partnership. When I met my husband-to-be I had the luxury of coming off a couple of really shitty relationships having done deep soul-digging and psychological repair work of my own, and had decided that what was most important to me in a long-term partner (foundationally, underlying a handful of other "musts" like a wicked and unabashedly dorky sense of humor) was a steady character, a willingness and ability to deeply commit, and a fundamental understanding of and appreciation for the necessity of respect.

I met him, within two years I married him, and I got all of that.

"A steady character" sounds right out of the pages of an advice pamphlet for early 20th century young women looking to marry well, but marriage is not always a smooth sail on the U.S.S. Happy Times. It's a long sea voyage, sometimes quiet, sometimes stormy, best undertaken in a sound vessel with strong and even hands on deck. It's a voyage on the Golden Hind, or, if you want to have a bit more fun, the Queen Anne's Revenge.

I expect to have a son in a few months and the idea of raising a son, boy into man, is a little daunting. I shouldn't worry. He will grow up with a father who, though terribly imperfect as we all are, is a good man. A man who deeply respects women, who lives out his values of loyalty and commitment, and who is, against what seems like all odds in this age of moral ambiguity, selfishness and the expectation of instant gratification, a true gentleman.

I re-learned that about my husband yesterday. And, lo, it made me realize that I want to be a better wife. Old-fashioned, again? Sure. But by the time we're completely grey I suspect we'll have set up a tidy little mutual appreciation society. We'll cross the country with a small Airstream trailer and a Corgi named Frodo Baggins, thoroughly comfortable and doting. There will be knitting.

I think we have a decent shot at that future, of walking through a long life hand in hand, in no small part because he has, frankly, chosen to be better than he really has to be.

Which means that, for me, for the demands of my heart and soul, I chose wisely.

Just like Indiana Jones.

Slowly, slowly, slowly

Both of my kids are pretty weird, but the younger of the two is definitely an odd duck. I have had well-meaning friends and family make some disheartening comments about her development, from casual observations that she seems really young, to noting that she's not doing things many other children her age can do, to a pretty open concern that stops just shy of wondering aloud if she's maybe not quite right.

By this age my child was out of diapers.

By this age my child knew her colors.

You're brave; it would worry me if my child wasn't willing to sit through a book by now.

So on.

But despite the unwelcome pressure I have been a champion of not-worrying. I've been a freaking gladiator. I burned my first kid pretty badly with an overly intense focus on her development. I expected too much, didn't respect her timeline and permitted my ego a seat at the table.

I learned my lesson: watch for serious aberration (developmental checklists are easy to find and will tell you exactly what to look for; you can also ask a child's pediatrician), offer plenty of positive, fun enrichment without attaching the strings of your own ego to it, and then freaking let go. Every child deserves to be allowed to unfold at her own particular pace.

The second kid has benefited enormously from my mistakes with my first. She has experienced a kind of benign neglect. You don't want to read board books? That's cool. You're back in diapers? Damn, that sucks for me and your dad but you do what you gotta do. 

Most of all, though, I try to ignore the things other people say and believe in her. I've peeked at the milestones to make sure I'm not in denial about a serious problem, and finding nothing to worry me there and getting the tumbs-up from her pediatrician I am free to believe she's just fine. She's on her own schedule and anyone who has a problem with that can sod off.  

I had a good conversation with a friend today though that made me pause a bit. I'm dealing with intense sibling rivalry right now, which is partially a result of having enormously high expectations for the big kid and pretty low, relaxed expectations for the little one, among other differences in parenting, and it's created bad blood. My belief is that the right answer is to relax about the older kid, not tighten up on the little one. Sure, the preschooler gets more of what she asks for and doesn't hear "no" as often, which I need to be mindful about, but overall she's pleasant to be around. I think we actually found a really nice groove discipline wise with the younger child.

But in the midst of all this easygoing relaxation I may have given her brain short shrift. I haven't spent time with her at all in that regard. I've just loved her and fawned over her and read her books (once she wanted to sit through them).

Lately, though, she's wanted her turn at the table to do "math" and "letters", and I will admit that I thought she was nowhere near ready for that kind of thing.

But today we did some old preschool activities that I did with her sister years back, and damned if she didn't figure them all out. So we pulled out the Unifix cubes and did a little one-to-one counting, some stacking and sorting and whatnot. She hung with it and we had a great time.

Then she made a long line of cubes and said it was her "freight train", so I went and got her book and together we went through and made a Unifix model of Donald Crews' beautiful rainbow Freight Train and ran it through a toilet paper tube tunnel, over a trestle made of Unifix cubes, past a Unifix city, through darkness and daylight and then off the end of the table when it was time for the train to get gone, gone, gone. 

It was rad.

I'm so sorry, kid. Just because you're not winning the developmental derby doesn't mean you're not ready to go somewhere.

Let's roll.

Dealt with dance, now Dealing with Dragons

WHOOSH! And like that, we're out the other side of the late spring push. Recital costumes, for several weeks trollishly guarded in their garment bags in the front closet, are now in the dress-up box.

I've also pretty much locked down what the big kid's learning plan for the 2012-2013 year will be, and finally feel less worked up about it. I have a meeting with her consulting teacher this week, and then we're done and I can forget about it until September.

This summer she will continue to move along in math, and read independently, have read alouds and listen to audiobooks. We also have some family camping trips planned in national parks that offer Junior Ranger programs, and I hope to visit a few more close-by sites for a smackerel of very casual outdoor learning. Everything else will wait until fall.

I switched up her language arts plan to something much simpler. She's just entering first grade; simple is still the name of the game. We'll begin Language Lessons for the Very Young in the fall, but the bulk of her language arts hours will be devoted to independent reading. We'll also do some periodic responsive work (we'll have to come up with some projects, which shouldn't be too hard) but nothing complicated. A diorama or something similar every now and again should do it.

Right now she's reading the first book in the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series. I'm not sure if she'll want to read any more of those (there are twelve of them!; also, that Scholastic site is the most helpful thing ever in terms of finding books your kid might like and feel comfortable reading). If so, great, but if not I've checked out a bunch of books that feature dragons.

Here's the list I've pulled together so far:

Dragon Slippers by Jessica Day George

Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Colville 

Dealing with Dragons by Patricia Wrede

I'm also throwing in The Neverending Story by Michael Ende because Falcor is a dragon and HELL YES.

We'll get through those and see where she's at interest-wise. It's really fun putting a list like this together. Just one unifying idea and a HUGE field of good-quality, appropriate chapter book choices.

Her "owls" list was much harder.

*Ironically, I never wanted to read most of these kinds of books as a kid, and still kind of feel my hackles go up when characters have names like Ayliannagwyyn Jaydahla Forsythiantaurine. "AT LEAST ONE MAIN CHARACTER IN THIS STORY IS GOING TO BE GINGER," I think. My sister is a book wizard and consumed (and I think maybe still consumes?**) novels about witty, sword-wielding maidens with auburn hair and the dragons they loved and/or slayed like they were going out of style, but I could never really hang with them. Either a book jams its fist into my soul or I'm closing it up***. True story: I couldn't sleep in a hotel one time and all there was to read was my mom's Kindle. She likes thrillers and that sort of thing, Stephen King and whatnot, and after trying two books I ended up reading the introduction to the Oxford English Dictionary. I take zero pride in that. It makes it difficult for me to find fiction that I enjoy, which sucks, and has had a much more serious impact on the books I'm willing to read to my kids than I care to admit. Not cool, but there it is.

**My sister also reads excellent books, often, she just has a general sort of need to gorge herself on the printed word. 

***I will say unequivocally that good writing, soul-fist-jamming writing, is not confined to straight fiction. You know what Slaughterhouse-Five is? Science fiction. I am no genre-hater.

A sweet haul

We went and got a bunch of good, good stuff from the district's homeschool resource center today. I felt like a highway bandit, walking out with 18 items I'll be able to keep for a full year. Some of it I'm celebrating not needing to buy myself or use my district curriculum allowance on, and some of it I'm not sure we'll use, but I have the summer to look through everything and try things out.

Teaching Textbooks looks like a clear winner for our family. It's a complete CD-ROM-based math curriculum with some impressive features. She did the first lesson this afternoon and the second one right before dinner when I told my husband I wanted to show him her new math curriculum and she insisted on showing him herself. I actually think she likes it. Like, like likes it. In about 50 lessons she's going to hit multiplication so it's by no means a sure deal, but I'm enthused by her enthusiasm.

It's going to be wonderful to step out of that subject almost completely (the program appears to be truly capable of teaching without parent involvement given a child who is developmentally ready for the material). I'll just hover a short distance away awaiting any cries for help. So far everything is very do-able for her (and we'll stop and step back if it becomes not do-able), but she DOES NOT like getting problems wrong. She didn't miss any problems on her second lesson, but on the first she missed one and made me go back and reset that problem so she could re-do it. Perfectionism is not fun. But, she is who she is, and if 21/22 makes her world go all wobbly, so it goes.

The Literature Pockets were a nice find. We are mostly likely going to do a social studies curriculum next year after all, which will be a Western-heavy survey of the ancient world. This project book on Greek and Roman myths will be fun to work adjacent to that.

We picked up a huge Snap Circuits kit and expansion set, which is something the kid has been asking for for about a year. It was lovely to just grab it off the shelves, check it out and take it home. She begged me to let her do it all morning, and then worked through a bunch of circuits in the afternoon while listening to A Wrinkle in Time on audiobook. She took a break to read the Bruce Colville Romeo and Juliet then went right back into it until dinner time. When the kid found out she gets to keep the Snap Circuits for an entire year I swear she was close to exploding. HUGE grin. It was awesome. We had dinner, played a couple of rounds of Sum Swamp, read some Harry Potter, and called it a night.

It was such a good, good day. Much more akin to how things were in the past. In recent weeks I have experienced overwhelming doubt about the entire home learning project. She had become disengaged and it was flat out unpleasant to be together so intensively. It was painful to go from the sense that I couldn't stop my child from learning to the sense that I was having to force her to learn, but I'm enormously optimistic that it was just a rough patch rather than a metamorphosis. 

I think the key piece in all of this is that she needs me to keep the materials coming. I always did that in the past and it worked beautifully. If she has a steady supply of brain food in the form of new books, new music, new films, and new ideas, she positively flourishes. It's out of control and beautiful. If I expect her to go out and forage for herself (by idly telling her to "pick out some books" at the library, or waiting for her to pick up on some new thread of interest rather than being highly responsive to her casual lines of inquiry), she shrivels up and doesn't want to do anything but watch My Little Pony.

Keep that fire burning, Casey Jones!

In which I come to love Big Brother

Things are going to work pretty differently around here next year. I'm hitching our wagon to the local school district's homeschool support program, partly because things didn't go so hot around here last year without structure and outside accountability, and partly because the kid wants to spend more time around other kids. This way she can take a couple of classes on a school campus and see how that feels. But it means changes, some pretty sizable ones, beginning with the requirement I need to satisfy in the next couple of weeks to write up a learning plan and syllabi for the subjects I'm teaching at home. Those documents need to cover the entire 2012-2013 school year.

I'm a big-picture person, so planning that far out doesn't hang me up, but I also tend to make long terms plans and then not follow through with them. Then some distance into that long term I look back at the plan and go "Huh. It's interesting that I thought I would do all of that." Hence the need for the bureaucratic hand on the shoulder. Freedom actually does not suit me at all. I'm finding it quite refreshing to be able to admit that.

But having made the decision to go through the district, I find myself doing rather a lot of hand-wringing about academics lately. Someone wants to know what we're going to do! And I don't rightly know! What do we do about math? Now that she's been a fluent reader for nearly a year, how can I work with her beyond saying "go read for an hour"? 

Fortunately this switch means I now have access to certificated educators tasked with helping parents like me put together a solid school year for a kid. Not only has it been hard for us to float untethered to an institution in terms of having someplace to go and someone to answer to, but I'm simply not sure what's appropriate for her.

Go read for an hour, I say.

Okay, she says.

....

Now make a diorama?

I have no idea.

KHAAAAAAAAN!

A friend recommended Khan Academy for math practice for the big kid, so we tried it out. Naturally after our two weeks of internecine tablework warfare she loves it. (Thank you, Ms.B!)

The site gives virtual badges for activity on the site (watching tutorial videos, gaining proficiency in skills, and so forth) and (I already knew this about her) she is incredibly motivated by that sort of thing (unsurprisingly she also loves Girl Scouts). It's nowhere near as graphically engaging as the Web Rangers program she adores, but so far she is showing that same drive to fill up progress bars, light up proficiency stars, and generally be rewarded with visual representations of progress and completion.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. In my Master in Teaching program (which I didn't finish, I don't want to misrepresent myself here) we joked about "gold stars", or external motivators, because they are thought by some to be detrimental in the long term (the ideal being "intrinsic" motivation, or doing something for its own sake, to please and satisfy oneself). In this context I don't know. With those progress bars lighting up her eyes she's been happy to blast through multiple digit arithmetic with borrowing and carrying (taught to her in a crash course on a crumpled slip of paper when she called her dad over to ask how a person might subtract one three digit number from another) when single digits on paper foam her up into high melodrama.

She's a funny and frustrating one, our kid. 

But hey-she's not one moment "behind". And it's almost summer. We have plenty of time to find the shoe that fits. That I will be thankful for without reservation.