The Learning Umbrella

Last week, in what could be described as a four-day worship service, I had plenty of time to calmly reflect on my life and think “big” thoughts free from the mundane of daily life.  The overall life-lesson I’ve brought home with me is to focus on love.  By that, I mean that I want to focus on feeling and acting out of love, and avoid actions and energy-uses that are motivated by other things.  This will mean that I can’t just categorically say I will stop doing certain things, such as cleaning or buying myself new clothing, but instead I need to work on identifying the motives behind my actions.

I tend to stress and fuss about the cleanliness of our house.  Part of that is fine - I’m motivated by a desire to have a comfortable and lovely home, and it is part of my love for myself, my family, and any guests who might walk through our door to make the house something nice to be in.  But then there is another part of the house-fussing, motivated by shame and guilt and embarrassment and a good dose of habit and broken-record self-talk from my family-of-origin.  And what it boils down to, is that I don’t want to pass that on to my kids.  I don’t want them to primarily remember home as a place where I yelled about what slobs they are, or complained bitterly about having to live with pigs, or shamed them by saying that we couldn’t have friends over to this “sty”.

The cold, hard fact is that homes can be really neat and tidy, but it’s very hard to do that and also actively live in your house.  Especially if you have a small home where there is only one “multipurpose” living space that isn’t a bedroom or bathroom.  The kids are going to have stuff sitting out (the “horizontal surface” issue my dad always railed against - he said his dream home would have no horizontal surfaces so you could never set anything down), and animals will shed fur, and feet will track in dirt, and people will leave fingerprints on things.  I want to focus on how active and full of life my house is, and stop giving myself an ulcer fighting against signs of that life.

But I’m still going to try to have a nice, pretty, clean, and hygienic home.  It just needs to be done out of love and loving kindness - and without yelling or shaming the people around me.

I had quite the week, which I am still processing.  I had lots of inspiration, ideas, personal resolutions, and emotional ups and downs.  I’ll probably write some more about all that later.  But for now, here are the pictures:

The banners of the congregations attending General Assembly were paraded through the hall. Here they are outside lined up to go in.

The program was full of lots of good content, and it was hard to choose which workshops or lectures to attend. My traveling gnome was along for the trip.

The big worship services were wonderful.

The slogan is “standing on the side of love”, but for a short gnome, it was better to stand on top.

I spent a lot of time sitting in these big rooms crammed in with a bunch of other people.

But I did have to get out and do a bit of sight seeing, so the gnome and I took the tour of Temple Square, since we were in Salt Lake City.

My bags are packed and I’m waiting for the airport shuttle to come pick me up at my house.  I’m off to the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association, held this year in Salt Lake City.  I’ve never been to GA before, so I’m curious what it will be like.  I’ve heard that it’s big, fun, and full of stuff to buy.  I’m looking forward to some good workshops, and to just getting a feel for the national level workings of UUism. 

And, this is 5 days without my family, or any real responsibilities whatsoever.  Work is sending me to this convention, but I have nothing I have to do, really.  What will I do with so much personal freedom?  We’ll see, and I’ll be reporting back in a week!

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.

This was a great book to launch myself into summer on, with its tropical settings and cinematic descriptions, as well as plenty of action and suspense.  This is the story of a family, which may or may not be under a curse (or fuku), and three generations of tragic encounters with corrupt officials in the Dominican Republic.  The story is not told in straight chronological order, and the narrator shifts several times, but the author keeps it tight and interesting.

There is a lot of spanish and spanish slang in the book, and in some places I’m sure I was missing some good stuff because I couldn’t understand it.  My SIL, who spent a study abroad year in DR and can speak some spanish, reports that she didn’t understand all the slang either, however.  Also, a warning for the sensitive: lots of swear words and sex and violence.

Oscar is a massively overweight nerd, obsessed with science fiction and fantasy and doomed to strike out with girls.  His family lives in New York, after his mother had to leave the DR because she became the lover of the wrong man and was almost killed.  But there is more to the story of his family in the DR, and eventually he will do the research to uncover the fuku that has hung over the family since his grandfather’s time - but not in time to save himself from falling victim to it.

Hypatia announced the other day that she “needed” to paint.  As I watched her working, I realized that she’s been missing out on some of that stuff that I did with Carbon while we had daycare here.  I jumped into preschool with both feet with Carbon, doing all the arts and crafts and alphabet stuff and number games.  Hypatia just tags along, for the most part, on whatever Carbon is getting.

That’s not going to work, and clearly she wants work of her own.  She has been asking for her own homework to take to their nanny’s house, so I got an “I Can Trace” workbook and I bought the new My First Bob Books set so she can have a Bob book when Carbon does.  She wants to play boardgames, and I think it’s time for me to make a math game box for her like I had for Carbon. 

She also has developed a much greater interest and attention span for read-alouds, so I am spending much longer on her bedtime story each day, and she picks out big stacks of books at the library.  She has different taste than Carbon did - he was all about the science books and stories about boys and dinosaurs, and she likes fairytales and animal stories. 

Of course, the great thing is that Carbon will hover or participate in what I put together for Hypatia, so he gets a review of all that fun preschool stuff.  And she hovers or participates in what I put together for Carbon, so she’s getting a preview of K/1st.  Multi-age classroom synergy is a beautiful thing.

I just need to complain!

 1.  I hate it when people peel the little food seals off stuff like yogurt cups or milk cartons and then just leave it on the counter.  How hard is it to throw that away?

2.  My neighbors have four daughters that play in their front yard unsupervised, and they come over and ring our doorbell all day long asking if my kids can play or if they can use my bathroom or have a bandaid.

3.  Laundry.  It’s never done.

4.  The giant dust bunnies my cat makes by her constant shedding.  These things are going to smother us.  And I vacuum all the time!

5.  The little neighbor girls keep pulling my flowers up out of my garden, and stepping on and crushing the baby ferns in DH’s garden. 

6.  Our sofa is disgusting - we are coming up on the one year anniversary of my saying I was going to buy a new one any day now.  I want a new sofa!  (I’m not kidding about the disgusting nature of the sofa - it has a broken back, the padding on the arms is basically gone, the fabric is stained and ripped, and many kids have peed on it).

7.  Dishes.  OK - I really want a dishwasher now.

8.  My spinach bolted before I got it all harvested! 

9.  I have to balance a checking account that has my DH charging a parking fee and gasoline almost every day.  Losts of little debit charges = a time consuming chore to do the household bookkeeping.

10.  Our library has had budget cuts, and cut back on the hours it’s open and on how many books we can have. 

Carbon has been wanting us to buy him a telescope, and we’ve put him off for a bit.  Well, he’s not a boy to just sit around and mope.  If we won’t buy him a telescope, he’ll just make one!

His materials were a pair of binoculars, a paper towel tube, masking tape, and a magnifying glass.  None of the materials were very high quality, so he didn’t have much luck.  But we admired the spirit and the effort, so I got him two kits that would make it easier to be more successful.

One that I got him is a kit that can be built and rebuilt, into a telescope, binoculars, or a magnifying glass.  It is super easy to build, and a really good way to see the point of the focal length, since you can mess up the focus of the telescope by putting in the wrong number of connectors.  The only problem is that it isn’t very strong.

I ordered another kit from Home Science Tools, which was also easy to put together, even for a little guy like Carbon.  It has also been fun, but we haven’t tried yet to look at the moon or anything. 

As much education as we’ve had with making our own telescopes, I think it’s also time to go ahead and buy him a telescope that he can use to do some stargazing.  More fun to come!

I started yesterday on what I thought would be a simple tidy-up of Carbon’s room, but discovered that the mess had gone too far.  He tends to stuff things out of sight when I tell him to clean up, so there were odds and ends stuffed behind furniture and in the corners of the closet.  We ended up moving furniture, completely emptying the closet, and filling the back of the car with donations for Goodwill. 

And here’s what it looks like now: (sorry I don’t have any before pictures)

To make it all fit I had to turn this shelf around and put in the doorway, so this is what you see now from the hallway.

We didn’t do anything to Carbon’s “Natural History Museum”, because it’s all attached to the wall. It’s about time for him to sort his collections, however, as they are overflowing the shelves.

Having a loft bed leaves space under it to play, and we’ve set up his costumes down there. It’s pretty dark though, so we put a lamp down under there too, and he likes to put a colored light bulb in it.

His new passion for legos was always on display on our dining room table, so now I put this folding table in his room to keep the legos contained. He started using it while I was still working on the rest of the room, and he’s very excited to have his own lego table.

And there’s still storage left to fill in the closet!

It’s that time of year again, when kids are about to get out of school and spend a whole season of the year not studying.  I wrote a long post about this in 2007.

This year, things are a bit different, because my job has a seasonal side to it and the work load is changing as I go into the summer.  Carbon sees the mood shift, and he’s started complaining about not getting that summer vacation.  He told me a few days ago that if he had to do summer school at home, he’d rather be in school. I just looked at him, and in a couple minutes he had changed his mind, but still, the urge to rebel was there.

We are not going to take the summer off from homeschool.  We’ll take off from swim lessons and sports, and I’m taking some time off work, but we will not stop our homeschool lessons.  Why?  Well, a major reason is that I believe that brains need as much working out as bodies, and the kids would get “out of shape” if we took that much time off.  I think their brains are growing, just like their bodies are growing, and keeping with our “diet” of brain enrichment is best for them.

I also think that every season has its distractions and fun, and going year-round means that you don’t have to do as much during the “school” year.  A mom down at the YMCA asked me why I was going to keep on during the summer, and I told her that it’s no big deal when it only takes us an hour a day.  She looked at me like I was crazy - only an hour a day!?

Yes, right now we can do it all in an hour a day.  That will increase as he gets older, but I never spent more than four hours a day on school during my entire homeschooled childhood, and I wouldn’t expect to need to with the kids now.  It’s more efficient with fewer children, and we are going year-round and not stressing about seat-time and school days.

So, we are not “done with school”, and we are not “out for the summer”, but don’t feel bad for my son.  He gets a day off all the time - a random “it’s too nice out for school” day off in the Spring, a planned “we have a playdate” day off at any time, and sometimes even “we just need to be lazy today” days off.  That’s what we earn by doing school in the summer.

Last week I took the kids to my cousin’s art show, which was the result of her senior year in college here in town.  I told the kids we were going to an art show, and when we got there Carbon was upset to discover that that meant just looking at art, and not doing any.

It was probably a natural confusion, because the only show we’ve gone to recently was a fashion show that was a fundraiser at church, and the kids got to be models in that show.  But, because he was so bummed out, I let him be a photographer and take pictures of the art show.  Here’s what he took: