Three Plus Two

Reading The Gift of an Ordinary Day

What I'm Reading: The Gift of an Ordinary Day: A Mother's Memoir by Katrina Kennison.  Katrina Kennison also wrote Mitten Strings for God.  To be honest, I am enjoying The Gift of an Ordinary Day more, although I don't think that this is the opinion of most of the other homeschooling moms I know.  I had a problem reading Mitten Strings.  Her life seemed so... cozy and peaceful, but in a way that was unobtainable for me, a homeschooling mother of 6 kids, mostly small, mostly male, and mostly very, very active.  At the time, we were not enrolled in very many activities, we were home most of the time, we did not do crazy consumptive birthday parties... and yet I could not imagine being able to sit on the couch and knit with ONE child in the QUIET for HOURS (for example).  The whole book seemed to me like a picture from a picture book.  Of course it was a beautiful picture, the kind of picture in which most of us would like to take up residence.  But I felt as if the advice should be taken with a grain of salt, like the sort of well-meaning advice given to parents of willful, hyperactive, sleepless children by parents whose children would never think of telling them "no" and have slept through the night since they were 6 weeks old. 

Or maybe I am just a grump.

Anyway, everyone is older in The Gift of an Ordinary Day, but that's not what set it apart from Mitten Strings for me.  (Of course I'm only about 120 pages into the book, so I'll give you my final analysis when I'm done.)  Kennison and her family pack up their seemingly perfect life and move to New Hampshire about the same time that her oldest starts high school.  At that point everything starts to seem a little more real.  Their younger son does not want to move.  They have to live with her parents for most of three years.  She succumbs to New England "romance" and they end up with a 200 year old "quaint" New England cottage with sloping floors, rotting wallboards, a crumbling foundation, and bats in the attic. 

This probably sounds like I'm being somewhat vindictive, but no -- what I really appreciate are passages like this one:

    "Heading back over the mountain in the late afternoon, on my way to pick up Jack from school, I am     always content, fulfilled by the day.  And what I begin to think about is something that I've surely         known all along but that somehow, in the midst of our small day-to-day crises and preoccupations of     the last few years, has been all too easy to forget.  Real life isn't out there in the future    somewhere.  Real life is not going to begin when we move into our own house at long last, or when I     figure out what to do with myself, or when we're out of debt, or when our possessions finally come     out of storage and we can sit down around our old kitchen table again.  Real life is now.

    It is the thirteen-year-old son who's at odds with his best friend and takes his frustration out on me.      It is the husband bent over the newspaper, glasses sliding down his nose, the dog with a tick in her     ear, the carpenter calling to say the bathtub doesn't fit.  It is the apple picked from the tree and          eaten by the side of the road, the quiet pond, my own stiff shoulders and aching feet.  It is my            mother and me, side by side, chopping vegetables for chicken potpie, our hips bumping in her         narrow kitchen.  My dad chinking ice into his glass and pouring a drink.  The breeze through the     screened door, the early darkness."

This is what I have always thought myself.  I see so many women trying valiantly never to acknowledge (publicly) the messes of life, never even with a fleeting mention.  But the messes are just as much a part of life as the pretty pictures -- the bathtub that won't fit and the apple.  This doesn't mean that I think we ought to dwell on the messes, the mistakes, or the chaos, or that I think that people who are cheerful and completely optimistic by nature should spend time looking for that the dead bugs under their refrigerators so they can show them to the world.  What I do wonder is whether it's healthy to constantly force ourselves to focus on the beautiful, the cozy, and the ideal when life is handing us a mix.  Shouldn't we feel like it is okay to say, "You know, today did not go well.  The kids were cranky and I was cranky and dinner burned and no one would eat it.  I had to take a few minutes at lunchtime just to watch the snow come down.  I took some pictures of it, but I really hope tomorrow is better."  Or, "We are going through a tough time right now.  I am so worried I can't sleep, but on the upside, I am learning a lot about how houses are built.  I never knew there were so many choices to make!" 

Real life is the toddler who spends all night kicking you in his sleep because he has a cold and his nose is stuffy and his throat hurts.  Real life is the snow swirling through the gray sky like tiny white moths, the ice that makes you slip on the steps, the chicken in the van, the thirteen year old who fixes his little brother's light saber with duct tape when it breaks.  It is the stress of relocation and the excitement of a new adventure, all at the same time.

That's why I am liking this book more than Mitten Strings.  Kennison may be the 50 year old mother of two traditionally schooled teenage boys, but this book speaks to my experience so much more. 

Uncle

Just a brief note to anyone who is going to wonder where is Angela and why isn't she posting (all two of you ;-)...

I tried to post some learning notes over the weekend, but every time I tried to add a picture, my browser would lock up.  I have glittery pictures, pictures of St. Lucia buns, pictures of our Christmas tree... but after about 45 minutes of nothing working, I just gave up.  I will try to post again sometime, but...

I have a two year old with croup, one 4 year old who woke us up at 4 AM by throwing up in his bed (I feel kind of mean being thankful it was his bed, as we already had one sick kid in our bed), and another 4 year old who just came down with the general ickiness today.  And...

Andy has a busy week, which means he'll be working late most days.  And...

Christmas is next week and I am not done shopping.  And...

My parents are coming up to spend several days with us (finally!), so somebody had better pick up this house. 

I have made it to 13 weeks, and after a tense moment yesterday at my OB appointment, the midwife was able to find a good heartbeat.  (Much relief there.)  The first trimester ickiness is beginning to lift a little, but I'm still not moving fast enough to be very efficient at all of this.  So the blog will probably be quiet for a while as I try to get the kids to wrap up some of their schoolwork, sit with little boys in the bathroom with the shower on cold, and (ahem) do laundry. 

Wishing everyone a peaceful Advent and a merry Christmas!

Seven Quick Takes: Ordinary Life

Because I have a lot of odds and ends in my head...

One

The recent wave of tragedies in the online community has left me feeling shaky, with a whole jumble of emotions.  I don't feel like I ought to post anything normal when the worlds of so many are anything but.  I wonder what there is to say.  What do you say to a family that has lost a child? There isn't anything.  It's an event that renders us all shocked and mute.  I try to turn the shock into me being a better parent.  I take that extra deep breath when one of the kids has done something infuriating. I take that extra deep breath when the toys and laundry have piled up, and I pick up the paintbrush to paint with the child who wants to paint instead of picking up the laundry. The laundry will wait for later.  But will the painting wait?  No.  I think it will not.

Two

So on the one hand I am continually turning these events over in my mind, feeling terrible for those who have lost their children, and on the other hand, I dread going online anymore, fearing more bad news.  I pray fervrently for an uneventful, unremarkable, unknown life.  I feel selfish when I do.  I feel as if I am completely focused on myself.  In reality, I pray for comfort for those families in  mourning -- I pray most fervrently for that, too -- but when I pray for the hum-drum, I am really praying for my children.  I am praying for them to grow up and grow old.  I am praying for them to outlive me.   I used to want to be famous.  My dream was to write and publish books, to see my name in print, to be able to go into a bookstore and pick up my own book and smell that book-smell when I rifled the pages.  But now I see that I would hand God all the books I could ever write if it meant keeping my family safe.

Three

Which, of course, I can't do.  I can't keep them safe.  And you know, this gets right at the hardest thing, the biggest obstacle I have in contemplating more children.  The worry.  The constant anxiety at not being able to keep them from getting sick, or having to wrestle with Tourette Syndrome, or falling on their bicycles and needing to be rushed to the ER, or maybe another child will have a febrile seizure while eating a cookie and nearly choke to death... I can find so many things to worry about.  By nature, I am a worrier.  I don't watch the news.  I don't read the headlines.  I can't and function on a daily basis.  I know that I am called to have faith, but faith is hard.  Faith is not a noun.  Faith is a verb.  It's a constant process, day after day, like climbing a rock wall and learning not to look down. 

Four

So I put aside my stack of books to read, because all of them seem to be... well, depressing.  Dystopian.  I need something boring and ordinary.  Today I read the Dick Blick catalog.  The Dick Blick catalog is actually fascinating.  I learned a lot about the purpose of mixing media for acrylic paint, and the effects of paper on paint, and that canvas is not that expensive.  I learned that you can mix your own oils and acrylics.  I learned how pastels are made.  I learned about Japanese paper.  The Dick Blick catalog turned out to be just what I needed.

Five

We've actually been sick here for the past couple weeks -- nothing serious, just a cold -- and are just starting to feel better. I had to cancel the Little Flowers/Blue Knights meeting we were supposed to have here on Sunday. Wednesday Gareth did actually fall off his bike and need a trip to the ER: 6 staples in a cut on his leg, about which he was remarkably calm. Today is gorgeous -- sunny and 78 degrees -- and so I called off school this afternoon so everyone could get outside.  Katydid spent two hours doing watercolor.  I sometimes wonder whether all my "plans" don't interfere with the real learning that could go on around here if I would get out of the way.

Six

There was a lot of laundry to do, but I sat down with Katydid and Farmerboy this afternoon to experiment with wet-on-wet painting.  My little tree leaves (it wasn't supposed to be a pun, honest) a lot to be desired, but it's a start.  I'm thinking maybe that I will call off school on every Friday, so I can enjoy the kids and writing and reading and painting and a sunny day.  We do our extra chores in the morning, and then -- it's nice to have a companionable afternoon, so very ordinary.

Seven

There are a lot of things to be said for ordinary life.  Yesterday morning we walked into the dining room and found that the prisms on the nature table had been placed just right to reflect a vivid rainbow over the crucifix that hangs above the door to the kitchen.  We were all amazed.  Someone moved the prisms and the rainbow disappeared and we never could get them back to the place where they cast their light on the Cross.  I felt that I had been given a gift.  I wish I had thought to take a picture right then, but it didn't occur to me that I might be able to take pictures of the rainbows until later, when the kids were playing with them.

  

Lord, whose ways are beyond understanding,
listen to the prayers of your faithful people:
that those weighed down by grief
at the loss of this [little] child
may we find reassurance in your infinite goodness.

Week 5: Reggio Emilia, the Emergent Curriculum, and a lot of art

Lately I've been questioning whether or not it's worth it to post these weekly reviews, considering the fact that I often lack the time to do a careful (useful) job.  But I've come to the conclusion that it is worth it -- whether anybody reads them or not -- because it's helping me keep track of the year.  This summer, when I was packing up our finished school year, I missed those missing weeks from last year.  This year I hoped to do better.

Another reason for keeping up with these weekly reviews... some reading I'm doing about Reggio Emilia and the emergent curriculum.  The first time I encountered that term, I laughed.  See? I told myself.  It's not that I'm incapable of planning ahead.  It's just that our curriculum is *emergent*.  All joking aside, the more I read about Reggio, the more familiar it seems.  Apparently I've been doing a lot of this all along -- observing and talking to the kids about their play, their reading, their interests -- in order to figure out what we should be doing at home.  Reggio educators stress documentation as a means of communicating the children's work.  As a home educator, I don't have an audience of parents (or an international audience of researchers) to whom I need to communicate my children's work, but it occurred to me that home learning blogs often serve a similar purpose: we use our blogs to synthesize, display, understand, and communicate our work with our children, our children's independent work, our own work, our family's work.  So I think that perhaps these weekly reviews should be written into my job description.  They aren't frivolous.  They're about understanding and respecting what we do.  (And maybe I should do a more careful job of them.)

Gareth, working on a soapstone carving kit I'd set out on the table after a discussion of statuary in ancient Greece

Week 5 saw a few changes in how we have been doing things.  I'd become a little dissatisfied with the way Choice Time was going.  We had a few problems.  The first was that chores and dressing were taking too much time (not because there was too much to do), and/or the big kids were having trouble getting out of bed in the morning.  This meant that Choice Time was getting squeezed.  The second problem was that the kids expected new choices every single day, regardless of whether or not they had actually finished what they'd begun the day before.  Another problem -- one which has been around since I started writing things on the whiteboard -- is that too often the kids would say to me, "There's nothing really on the board that I want to do."  I would try to set things out on the shelf or the table, Montessori-style, but more often than not, it would be ignored in favor of the whiteboard.  Then I would get upset or at least frustrated that all of my work was being ignored... etc., etc.

So. (Pardon me while I attempt to collect my thoughts, considering the NOISE LEVEL IN THIS HOUSE RIGHT NOW. Ahem.)  I had already been driven to the depths of despair frustrated by my complete inability to make standard Montessori work in any kind of organized fashion.  (Which, if you understand Montessori, means "at all", basically.)  Looking at things realistically, I'm not sure how I thought I could set up an ordered Montessori environment when 6 of the 8 people in this house could run down the list of AD(H)D symptoms, checking off the majority of them (and the ones for whom the jury is still out are not those in charge, if you know what I mean.)  However, the twins were in the process of driving me so insane that when Andy came home for lunch one day, I showed him what I had been googling: the nearest Montessori (or rather, Montessori-inspired) school.  This was not actually because I hoped to push them out of our way, but rather because I could not conceive of any way I could ever hope to engage their enormous supply of energy.  And I felt like I was letting them down.

This was the point at which I took a deep breath, picked myself up (I feel like I have to pick myself up quite a bit), decided that I would not think about being a "failure", and went searching for some new ideas.  After a long period of investigation, I had borrowed a few bits and pieces from Waldorf -- which I had begun researching because of its emphasis on art -- but as a family we're much too scientific, and the standard fairy/gnome/elf menu seems a little too scripted to me.  I'd bought a few books about Reggio Emilia last year when Chipmunk was a newborn, but they had languished unfinished.  Now I took them down off the shelf and finished them.  (I'll put up my list of books later.  This is turning out to be a really long post already!)

One of the things I find refreshing about the Reggio approach is how often the Italian educatiors say: "This is what we do, but don't copy us.  If these ideas are useful, use them, but you need to make your own way in your own context."  

So, for week 5, I decided to make a few changes based on my reading.  First, I decided to stop writing down my ideas on the whiteboard in favor of encouraging Gareth and Katydid to choose and work on their own interests.  Gareth has been doing quite a bit of reading on prehistoric mammals, and Katydid's interest in missionaries has been stewing for quite some time.  I also let them know that they could work on art projects at any time.  Because we had been talking about statuary in ancient Greece, I started by setting out some clay and a soapstone carving kit that had been sitting in the closet for a long time.

 

The clay was a huge hit.  I'd had it for years.  But we had done nothing with it.  Inspired by all the work in clay done by children in Reggio Emilia, I set it out on the table.  And I took a big step and got out the paint... which I had not been brave enough to get out for a long time.

Pip loved the paint.  Katydid and Gareth both chose to paint, too.  Farmerboy enjoyed mixing colors.  Pop liked playdough more, but that was okay.  Because a funny thing happened.  When everyone was involved in the art materials, we had peace for almost an hour.

I have to tell you that this success made me feel like a big dip.  I first started trying to use Montessori about three and a half years ago, and my kids have always chosen to do art.  They have never freely chosen a Montessori language or math work.  They have never chosen a 3-part card.  In fact, when we first started, all anybody would choose was watercolor.  Day after day after day.  I always blamed this on a faulty environment.  But I now think that I should have clued in to the positive nature of this information.  Honestly?  I should have just let them do art.

Week 5 was a very successful week, which gave me some good ideas on ways to proceed.  I'm not ditching Montessori completely, and I am happy that Reggio's ideas of the "environment as the third teacher" and free choice fit so well with some of the Montessori ideas I also like so well: "freedom within limits" and independence.

It's probably past time to end this post, but I do hope to post more on this topic sooner rather than later.  Leave me a comment if there's something you'd like me to write about!