Ordinary Time

I have told this story in many different places, but after doing a search here, I realize I have never blogged about it... at least as far as I can tell.  One of the most difficult aspects of parenting a child with a trauma history for many parents is the sometimes outright defiance. I should change that and rephrase it to perceived outright defiance because that is more accurate. Usually the story goes something like this: Child is engaged in an activity. Parent needs something done and asks child to do it. Child says no and goes back to activity. Escalation ensues.  Traditional, consequence-based parenting says that you can't let that happen. If you let a child get away with saying no to you like that, you have lost their respect. The child will become a brat at best and some sort of rude, lazy basement dweller or felon at worst. The parent must assert their control and their authority to make sure their child grows up to be a decent, hard-working, polite human being. Limits...

A while back, when I was asking for suggestions about what I should write about, a reader asked me about the individual projects I was having my children work on. Since I saw most of them with their books out today doing just that, it seems like a timely topic. I called a holiday today. I woke up feeling totally done in from my weekend away and knew I just needed to spend the day mostly resting. It has done a world of good, as I am feeling significantly more myself. We'll be back to our usual schedule in the morning. Because I had cancelled school this morning, at least my part of it, I was rather heartened to see quite a few people at work in the dining room on their individual animal projects when I got in from the barn. I hadn't asked them to do this, they just did it. That's always a nice homeschooling moment that one likes to share. It sounds so much more impressive than if I say that my daughter ripped her math book up in frustration, which is equally likely to happen...

I'm back home, and boy, I am tired after getting to the airport around 4:30 am. I had a lovely time visiting my mom, reading in the sun, having lunch with friends I've known since first grade or longer, warming up, and eating a lot of good food. Oh, and I judged a lot of pianists. In with all that there was a trip to a fiber store. So tonight's post will be short, and I'll stick with showing you what ended up being crammed in my suitcase. First I want to show you this. You may remember this quite from a few years ago when I took that quilting class. The top was finished, but I knew I didn't want to quilt it, so there it sat. When a family friend decided to start a quilt finishing business with her long arm quilter, I jumped at sending the quilt top to her to be finished.  She brought it over while I was there. She did a phenomenal job. (She also did the binding for me. Hooray! I hate binding.) You can see a bit of the quilting in the photo below. Do you see the musi...

That is an orange blossom, the world's most fantastic smelling flower. I can take a picture of it for you because I flew into Phoenix this evening. I was thrilled to discover that the orange blossoms held on until I arrived.  I'll be here until Monday, visiting my mom and judging a piano festival. J. is holding down the fort at home. I didn't bring my computer, so I'll be having a little bloggy break until I return. (I'm writing this on my phone, and it is not my preferred way of writing!)  It will be a hard life sitting in the sunshine and reading books, but someone has to do it. 

I promised yesterday that I would continue sharing my disturbing memories from my gifted education experience. Fun times, huh? My elementary school began a pull-out gifted program when I was in fifth grade. More specifically I should say the school district began a gifted program because it wasn't housed at my grade school. Instead, a couple of times a week, I was bused in the middle of the day to another grade school where the gifted program was housed. As much as I can remember, it was essentially free time in a classroom filled with interesting things we could use and look at. I don't remember having extremely strong feelings about it one way or the other, but did wonder why these cool things weren't shared with everyone. You want to know what I remember most about that year? The school the program was housed in was an open classroom model. (I know that I have just significantly dated myself as open classrooms were definitely a 70's thing.) It was the open classrooms...

Last night, I announced to J. that I needed to revise my self-image a bit because I had a revelation that I wasn't actually a perfectionist. I've been calling myself a 'recovering perfectionist' for years, so this felt like a huge shift. Since I'm writing about it here, I'm evidently still doing some processing. It is processing that I think might be useful for other people, though, so there is more going on than just my own navel gazing. It was all because of reading Brené Brown's recent book, Atlas of the Heart. Here is what I read: "Shame is the birthplace of perfectionism. Perfectionism is not striving to be our best or working toward excellence. Healthy striving is internally driven. Perfectionism is externally driven by a simple but potentially all-consuming question: What will people think? It may seem counterintuitive, but one of the biggest barriers to working toward mastery is perfectionism. In our leadership research, we've learned that a...

That would be batts, two 't's', not bats, one 't'. The first being spinning related, the second being a small flying mammal. One of the fiber-y things that happened here over the past couple of weeks is that various children and I made batts. I'll show them to you in a moment. You see, also over the past couple of weeks, I impulsively ordered two pounds of mill ends that I found online. Mill ends would be the leftover prepared wool that a mill ends up with after preparing fleeces. These were a whole huge bag full of various odds and ends of different colors and fibers. There wasn't enough of any one type to do something with, so combining them together was definitely called for.  Enter the drum carder.  What you can't see in this picture is the smaller drum that feeds fiber on to the larger drum. There is a handle on the other side to make them turn. (The reason for the odd picture is because J. needed it, which I'll get to in a moment.) I bought thi...

As promised, one of the surprise crocus in the garden. There are also the beginnings of tulips and daffodils coming up. Those I know about it. But here is the other side of spring. Emmy, the formerly grey horse, loves to roll in the mud. This is how she spends most of spring despite being groomed regularly. That pasture? It is probably my biggest source of anxiety and stress at the moment. J. and I have had many discussions about how to allow the horses turn-out while protecting the pastures from further degradation. Many of those plans involve money... money to purchase an attachment for the back of the mower to reseed, money to hire someone to come and turn part of this particular bit of pasture into a larger dry lot so that horses can go out without everything turning into mud, money for a run-in shelter for the horses in the dry lot...  Spring is currently summed up as mud and money and a couple of flowers.

And it's Friday! TM has moved into his new apartment. He seems to be enjoying it, though he has been working such crazy hours this past week, I'm not sure that he has been able to enjoy it much. D. has been home for spring break this week, which has been very nice. He heads back to school on Sunday. R. has been doing much better since her difficulties on Wednesday. I feel she is slowly making progress because usually when she is totally disregulated we see non-epileptic seizures. This time, she cam close, but was able to pull back from the edge. In the six years that she has lived with us, we have never seen her be able to do that before. It's amazing what a warm, sunny day can do for one's outlook on life, isn't it? Today was not sunny, but I feel as though we are finally moving in the right direction. A. got a promotion at work this past week and we are very proud of her. Here is the list of animals which L. has mentioned that she wants as a pet over the past week...

What is better than hitting 70 degrees in mid-March? Not much, I think. I held one of my co-op classes outside, we had teatime outside, the pastures are much drier so the horses can be out, and I could do stalls without a winter coat. Heaven. When we lived in Evanston, four blocks from Lake Michigan, I truly disliked this season. We would hear the weather report for places farther away from the lake, but we would often be twenty degrees colder. This is lovely in the middle so summer when it is beastly hot, but really not so nice in March when you just want to stop shivering. Each year we have been out here, I have enjoyed immensely being the one to get the better weather.  I even have some small yellow crocus coming up in the garden. They are crocus that I had completely forgotten we planted. (And by we, I'm pretty sure I mean B., because I have no recollection of doing it.) They are such a hopeful sight on top of being a complete surprise. I'll have to remember to take a pictu...

R. had a rough night last night and an equally rough morning. It meant that I spent a lot of time sitting with her helping her to stay somewhat regulated. Eventually she improved and I was able to work at the dining room table with her near me combing some wool. Well, when you spend a good chunk of your day sitting, you do a little thinking. I have seen various places that people, usually in a fit of compassion and a need to do something, are interested in adopting children from Ukraine. I understand the desire, but here's why these ideas need to be shelved. The most basic reason is that adoptions are not currently being processed for obvious reasons. If an agency or person tells you that they can facilitate an adoption, they are outright lying to you. This is not adoption, this is child trafficking, pure and simple. Adoption is not the answer for children in a war-torn country. It is too easy to have parents and children separated in the midst of chaos. There needs to be enough ca...

So it appears, based on looking at my blog analytics, that the majority of readers would agree with my children on sentence diagramming. Just by the numbers, it seems people saw the work 'diagram' and ran for the hills. Or, they remembered it was Monday, are not interested in fiber, so didn't check in. I forgot it was Monday, thus the diagram post. All five of you will have to wait until next week so see what I've been up to in the spinning/knitting/weaving department.  But that was just an interesting little side note. What I really want to talk about tonight is professional women's basketball. Well, sort of. Since I don't actually follow any sports except when the Cubs are heading to the play-offs, I am really not able to discuss women's basketball. Sports will just be tangential to this post.  I was listening to NPR yesterday as I was driving to my riding lesson. (The station which I sent a pledge to in their pledge drive really in the hopes of winning th...

Even though I slept pretty well last night, I am just dragging today. I didn't think the weekend was all that taxing, but maybe it was. Maybe it was the time change? I'm all for blaming just about everything on the ridiculousness of changing the clocks. (I didn't grow up with it, you know. Arizona always figure they had enough daylight and they didn't need to save it.) The whole thing is silly. I wish they would just pick a time, I don't much care which one, and stick with it.  Anyway, I don't have a lot for you at the moment. I can show you some pictures, though. The seeds are starting to sprout and I have a good amount of seedlings which are growing. These are tomatoes. I also have a lot of basil, poblano chiles, broccoli rabe, leeks, and various flowers growing. At the end of the month, I have quite a few more seeds I will start. I received my official certificate showing I am now a 'senior member' and not just a member of the ACCPH. I worked hard for...

It's been a whirlwind 48 hours. A very close extended family member received a very significant diagnosis which meant that we wanted... needed... to get over to visit as soon as we could. So our plan was to leave yesterday, visit today as was possible, and then head home.  Now, there are a lot of moving pieces when you have this many children as well as this many animals. One of those was D. started his spring break today and needed to get home. The original plan (or at least one of them, I'm not sure exactly how many different plans we came up with) was that we would take two cars to Indiana, then I would drive people home and J. would continue on to Ohio, pick up D., then they would drive all the way home. This didn't sound like a lot of fun for anyone. It also meant that D. would have to sit in the student union all day waiting because the dorms closed first thing in the morning. It wasn't exactly an ideal plan. Then yesterday morning as I was getting dressed, I thou...

Thursdays do me in. It is our co-op day and not only are we gone for much of the day, we have to get going earlier than we usually do and I teach three classes. By the time we get home, it is pretty much time to make tea and have teatime. I am not good for much else past that.  I thought I would update you on how Jane Eyre is going. That is the book that we are reading at teatime, remember. I'm happy to report that everyone is pretty engaged with the book. Y. in particular loves it, and since Anne of Green Gables is her all-time favorite book (a girl after my own heart), I'm not surprised by this. L. and G. are eagerly anticipating getting to the mad woman in the attic, which we had some foreshadowing of today. I'm realizing that I actually remember very little from the last time I read it. Since the last time I read it was well over thirty years ago, I probably shouldn't be surprised by this. I had totally forgotten about how dire Jane's early childhood was, and ca...

I know I say this somewhat frequently, but if you want to really think about education and learning, you need to be in the process of learning new things yourself. If you are not learning anything new (and frankly, that's just bad for your brain), then the rosy hue of amnesia will settle in, not unlike how parents eventually forget how exhausting and difficult having a newborn can be and really only remember the good parts. We tend to remember the good things about school, blocking out the more difficult things, lending our school memories a somewhat idealistic hue. (This, of course, is not the case if there was nothing good about school for you. In that case, there is nothing to idealize.) We also forget exactly how difficult and vulnerable learning something new can be.  Along with reminding us of the challenges of learning, when we attempt new things, we might discover that we don't learn in ways we thought we did or ways that are common in a traditional school setting. By e...

Deschooling is the term used to describe the process of taking time after withdrawing from traditional school in order to homeschool before jumping into doing any sort of academic work. Think of it as detox for all you thought you knew about school. While most people initially think of it as being needed for their children, I often think that it is the parent who probably needs it just as much. So why would a student need a period of rest and a time to do a major reset before changing educational methods? I can think of several. First, there is usually some catalyst for a family deciding to jump of the traditional school train and into homeschooling. It could be any number of things, including bullying, anxiety, a student's academic needs not being met, escalating behavior due to stress in the school environment, a lack of appropriate services and plans for a child needing support, or some combination of these. If things are going well, it is not as likely that a switch to homescho...

Let's start with the thing I finished.  This is the scarf that L. requested. The picture makes it look blue, but it is actually very purple and black. She is very excited to have it to wear. Sadly, I'm afraid she is still going to get a lot of use out of it before spring actually arrives. Spring did arrive very briefly on Saturday, so we all did outside things. You know, before the world looked like this again.  This was from this morning. But on Saturday it reminded us all of what nice weather can feel like. I took advantage of it and brought out the raw fleeces I had bought so I could take a good look at them and skirt them. (Skirting is taking off any parts of the fleece that are felted or too dirty or have short second cuts in them.) It is dirty work and not something that I want to do in the house. First to come out was the large moorit fleece I bought. There were actually two parts. One part was mostly waste, but the shepherd that there might me enough salvageable so sen...