Friday bullets - April 30, 2021

It feels as though it has been a very long week, possibly because parts of it have indeed felt very long indeed. Today was better. Well, parts of today were better. Other parts of today were atrocious. I'm feeling kind of done with atrocious.

• I am more and more convinced of the power of grounding, mindfulness, and self-regulation. Today, during the atrocious part of the day, I managed to get myself enough in hand to remember to practice what has worked before. So, I sat down in front of my bedroom door (R. and I were inside my bedroom) to stop her from eloping and just breathed. Concentrating on just my own breathing and relaxing and not paying attention to the screaming, flailing child next to me. Within ten minutes, my regulation had communicated itself to her and she started to ratchet down. I told her that she seemed to have a lot of angry feelings and that I loved her. She calmed down more. She told me she was scared. This led to a real conversation which ended with calmness and connection.
• I don't want to compare my daughter to a horse, but the mirrored regulation is very similar. Java is a very fearful horse. I don't know what happened to her in her earlier life, but I'm not sure parts of it were good. It takes very little to set her off and you suddenly find yourself confronted with a 1000 pound mass of reactionary biting and kicking. She has taught me a lot, because if I become scared due to her behavior, she reacts even more. She can sense my fear and just knows that I am afraid, not that I am afraid of her. If I can calm myself and remain focused, she will ratchet back down because she senses there is nothing to be afraid of. For our children with little self-awareness or language, who are reacting solely on unconscious instinct, they only know that the adult with them is becoming upset and disregulated. I am convinced that they do not see their role in this, but see the adult's disregulation as confirmation that there is indeed something to be afraid of. Having experienced both, I can tell you that having your emotions mirrored back to you by a horse is far more accessibly than by a child. It is too easy to assume volition on the part of the child. 
• This is the basis of Equine Facilitated Learning. My last class is next Thursday, and I'm kind of sad about that. I have loved everything that we have been learning and discussing. I have loved the international aspect of the students (lots of people in England because that is where the program is based, plus Northern Ireland, Scotland, Luxembourg, and New Zealand, with me being the sole American.) It's been great. I have my private meeting with the two facilitators next week where I can ask my questions about going on to work on moving to the diploma level. 
• With all that in mind, I would really like to get some more practice working with clients. If anyone wants to come and be one of my guinea pigs practice clients, I'd be more than happy to have you come and hang out with the horses with me.
• I think my family has a language learning addiction. On a whim, I asked some of my adult children how many languages they had on DuoLingo, with no one having more than three. It kind of cracked me up.
• D. and P. are challenging each other to learn Esperanto. They wanted me to join them, but I'm pretty sure my schedule does not have enough time in it to learn a language that only language geeks speak. D. said it would be cool to speak to other language geeks in Esperanto. I pointed out that if they know Esperanto, the chances are extremely good that we share at least one other language.
• Y. has discovered the practical nature of the dictionary. She loves to read, but because she has only been speaking English for five years, her vocabulary is still growing. This means that as she reads chapter books, she will often come across a word she doesn't know. When this happens, she'll often come to find me so she can learn the word. I'm not always available, though, which can be frustrating. It was an exciting moment for her to realize she could just look the word up in the dictionary, read the definition, and move on without having to find or wait for me. She now keeps her chapter book and dictionary together. How can you not love that?
• We finished our last chemistry lesson this past week, it being the concept of using a base to change an acid back to neutral on the pH scale. When L.'s stomach was upset a little later that week due to an overindulgence in lemon juice, she came to me saying that her stomach hurt because it was too acidic. I was out of a otc remedy, so suggested that she needed to find a base to do the job, so she drank a little baking soda heavily diluted in water... just like our chemistry experiment. She was thrilled that she used chemistry for a real life problem, but wasn't so thrilled with the taste of the diluted baking soda.
• When you do all of your homeschool planning in August, by the time you get to spring, it has been a very long while since you had anything to do with the lesson plans you created. Sometimes I surprise myself with how everything fits together because I have completely forgotten all the thinking and work I did so many months ago. This is a pretty decent architecture unit study I created. 
• We finished Applewhites Coast to Coast this afternoon. It is the third book in the series. While we liked it, we didn't love it quite so much as the first two. Much of that was due to the focus on various teen romance pairings. There were actual moans from my children when one of those story lines moved to the focus because that is now what they love about the books. That said, there were still a lot of good bits that everyone enjoyed.
• We have our family's summer schedule planned... and it's still just barely April. This is a first for us! Usually, we wait until summer actually arrives and then sort of figure it out as we go along. But I needed to schedule horse classes, and I couldn't do that until I knew what we were doing as a family. If your nearby and have children interested in horses, let me know and I'll get you the schedule.
• My seedlings are not dead. You should consider this a great accomplishment because my attention hasn't really be on them this spring at all. It will be good for them to finally be able to be put into the ground.
• We are only working on architecture now during school and everyone is extremely motivated to finish as soon as possible. If we are diligent, I think we can be totally done in two weeks.
• I will be buying Y. a new math book for the summer because she was disappointed at the thought of not doing math until the fall. 
• G., L., and K. do not share this feeling of disappointment.
• I'm going to be teaching a class at our co-op in the fall on memory palaces. I'm really kind of excited about it.
• Finally, I need a moment to briefly vent. Sometimes moderating adoption groups is touch because I cannot always write what I want to say quite as forcefully as I want to say it. When you are parenting a child from a hard place and you are in the thick of it, there is a difference between getting honest support and encouragement and joining in a gripe fest over how rotten your kid is. In the first it is possible to acknowledge that life is definitely hard and your are struggling without laying the blame for it at the feet of your child. The second does not allow for any parental responsibility in the equation. It may feel good in the moment to place all the blame on the child being disrespectful and not following the rules and making life hard, but in the end all this does is harm the parent-child relationship at the very root, making the assumption that the only person who needs to change is the child. From experience, we only began on our journey towards healing when I made the realization that it was me who had to change first. And it was hard. There are so many parenting groups out there who are purportedly saying they are support groups for parents of difficult children, but all they do is reinforce the idea that these parents 'got a bad one' and the best you can do is wait until they're 18 and can leave. This is tragic. Do not fall prey to this lie. There is hope. There is the possibility of healing. But the parent must first take responsibility for making the change needed first, because without that, the child cannot hope to.