Takin' A Breather

I'm going to put this blog on hiatus at least until the end of the summer, and possibly stop doing it all together or change it a bit--as in, making it less about me and more of a true family collaboration, with more posts from my kids and husband (it is, after all, subtitled "Adventures in Family Learning.") I've so enjoyed and appreciated the give-and-take with people who have commented here and with other bloggers whose work I've gotten to know in the last few months of exploring the blogosphere. It has meant so much to me and been a huge source of encouragement and connection.

But.

My yard is so full of weeds I feel too embarrassed to have a bunch of awesome women from the neighborhood over for wine and beer around the firepit.

My husband all too often goes to bed by himself while I prowl around online so late that I'm tired and grouchy the next day.

I'm way behind on returning calls and letters to old friends and my own mom--yet I seem to find time for blog posts. Seems like a discrepancy that needs correcting.

The thought, "I wonder if anyone has commented yet on my last post?" has taken on depressingly compulsive dimensions.

My book project needs attention. When it comes to writing ideas, I find myself devoting more of my mental space to blog posts than I am to book revision. Something's gotta give.

I made a vow to start meditating every day again. Has it happened yet? Nope.

I've realized I really like the blog-type form as I've been doing it--taking small, everyday moments and trying to pull out larger meaning from them--and I'd like to find a way to do it in a less ephemeral, nebulous form, like finding a place to have a regular column with a set deadline. I'm thinking that way, I could "compartmentalize" it a little more rather than having it take over my brain so much on a day to day basis, the way blogging seems to do.

And finally--when I thought about stopping the blog, I felt a sense of relief and possibility.

That's reason enough, wouldn't you say?

This is not to say that I'm not going to miss doing it, and miss the miniature "conversations" it has sparked with you.

I'll check in at the end of August and let you know how the blog hiatus has gone, then take it from there.

Unusually Rich Days

The last few days of being back from our trip have felt so good--a chance to reconnect with the kids and our home and our lives here in St. Paul. And the kids and I have been doing so many lovely things together, mostly either at home or in the neighborhood. There are many, many days when I feel awash in self-doubt and uncertainty about unschooling the kids. Days like the ones we've had lately, when it's so clear how much they're learning and so beautiful to see the way they're learning through play and living, are the kinds of days that keep me going.

Yesterday we started off by reading some Greek myths in Cassidy's bed right after we woke up. The kids have really been enjoying D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths, a book I've been holding on to for a while, waiting for the right time to introduce it, and the right time appears to be now. I'd warmed 'em up by telling an oral version of the Persephone story as a bedtime story, and then I pulled out the book to show them the pictures for that story.

After breakfast, we made little miniature clay mountain scenes, with tiny lakes, rivers, snowcapped ranges, waterfalls. At first Bridger didn't want to do it, but pretty soon he drifted over, checked out what we were up to, and said, "Oh, I'll do one, too." It was a lovely way to remember some of what we'd seen in Montana and shape our memories with our hands in a small, kid-scaled way.

We played at home for a while, then took a late-morning bike ride to lovely Newell Park. The hills and trees there made a perfectly fine Sherwood Forest for us to play Robin Hood until we were ready for lunch. On the way home, we stopped to admire our neighbors' gardens and identify some of the vegetables and flowers we saw growing. We spent the afternoon acting out a story with craft stick puppets and paper dinosaurs. In the evening Bridger went to martial arts, and I attended a task force meeting to help save our neighborhood library from closing, so we even got a little time out in the neighborhood with other people--a really nice balance.

Today, more Greek myths in the morning, then we picked up where we left off with the craft stick puppet/dinosaur story. The story even involved some spontaneous, kid-initiated math (i.e., calculating how many steaks each carnivorous dinosaur needed to be fed so they wouldn't eat the human characters).

At lunch, Cass mentioned her current aspiration to be a ballerina/speech therapist when she grows up. I said there would probably be a lot of work available for a speech therapist in the future. We ended up talking about the rise in autism and some of the theories about what causes it, which led to talking about Temple Grandin and her innovations in how cattle are treated, discoveries made possible in part by her autism and the unique insights it gave her into animals.

"So maybe having autism isn't necessarily all a problem," Bridger pointed out.

Bridger listened to a "Hank the Cow Dog" book on CD while Cassidy and I hauled out the wooden train set for the first time in a long time and played trains, which morphed into "bad giant" when Cassidy decided to play a bad giant kidnapping trains. When Bridger finished his CD, he joined in and brought "Lego Pest Controllers" on to the scene to shoot her with a goodness missile that made her into a fairy who loved art instead of a bad giant. He went on to build three different pest controller vehicles along with various unusual pests. For instance, one vehicle used special saws to surgically alter a rampaging lion into a docile kitty cat; another captured yetis and hauled them to zoos.

Meanwhile, Cassidy's good fairy was set up at an easel happily painting picture after picture.

Finally, to top things off, when we went to Target this afternoon, Bridger had two small but exhilarating reading breakthroughs: He sounded out the word "large" in "Large Grade A Eggs" on a carton (though he said it "larg-eh," spurring a little reminder about silent "e"). Then, in the checkout line, he pointed out the princess in the Starbuck logo to Cassidy, knowing how much she loves princesses. Then he asked, "Does that say 'coffee'?"

I was kind of flabbergasted. We don't frequent Starbucks, so I don't think he has associations with the logo--I guess maybe he inferred the name based on context, but hey, isn't that how a lot of reading works?

"How did you figure that out?" I asked him as I loaded bags in our cart.

"Well, I know that "c-o-f" says 'cof,' and 'e-e' says "ee," so I know 'c-o-f-f-e-e' spells 'coffee'!"

It reminded me of how I felt the day he was sitting at the kitchen table, a chubby baby of 10 months or so, when he pointed at the whirling ceiling fan and said, "Fa, fa, fa" with a big, sassy grin.

When things are going well for us, it's easy to look back at the tougher times, the times when not much learning seemed to be happening, and say, well of course--that was just the fallow period that makes growth possible. That was the period of disequilibrium that always seems to come before a time of grace and ease. It's a lot harder to remember that when I'm in the middle of a hard slog of days. That's part of why I wrote all this down today--to help me remember, and to help me appreciate, and to help me relax.

Perhaps some day I'll even get to the point of not evaluating times in our lives so much as good or bad, hard or easy--when I'll simply attend to what's happening with a greater, more open-hearted curiosity and fewer value judgments. We'll see!

Spawning Wrigglers

Some of our friends are currently raising monarch butterflies from egg to caterpillar to cocoon to butterfly; others are raising tadpoles. Us? We're spawning mosquito larvae.

We'd often warned Bridger about leaving standing water in some of the big buckets in our back yard and told him that mosquitoes might lay eggs in it. I wasn't really sure I believed they actually would, but it was a good parents' cautionary tale. Apparently, he left some water in a big bucket while we were in Montana. When we got back, Brian and Bridger noticed that there were some wiggly little creatures using the water for a swimming hole. They put one under our microscope, and lo and behold, we realized we had spawned our very own mosquito larvae!

I was both fascinated and repelled when I got a good look at the critters, both under magnification and with the naked eye. When we looked them up online, we found out that mosquito larvae are commonly called wigglers or wrigglers, and I could see why, watching them scootch around their makeshift pond, with their hindquarters wagging back and forth to make little L shapes as they moved. (If I'm remembering correctly, they weren't much bigger than the L right here on this post.)

I thought we should get rid of most of them, but scoop out a few for further observation--we probably would have mosquito pupae within a few days! Oh the joy! But Brian opted to up-end the whole bucket on the lawn, thus ending our wriggler-spawning adventure. We did learn some interesting things from the whole experience, like the fact that only female mosquitoes suck blood; males sip nectar from flowers. It may have been some comfort to Cassidy to know that the many Montana mosquitoes who left her with red welts all over her body were girls just like her, though then again, maybe not.

I have to admit it was seriously gratifying to have one of my parental prognostications come so vividly, accurately true. Gratifying, too, to find out that leaving stagnant water out in the yard could lead to such a memorable learning experience.

The Big Issues

A friend commented on my last post that I was lucky to have a child who says "Wow" to nature. I agree that I am lucky. However, I must add a slight codicil (I think that's the right word).

This week Bridger and I were debating about whether we should camp on the way home or take the lazier, more expensive way and stay at motels.

"Well, motels are nice because you sleep better in a real bed," Bridger said, using an argument he's heard me spout out before. "And there's not so much packing and unpacking from the van that way, so it's faster." (That's Brian's gripe about camping on road trips.)

"But when you camp, you get to spend more time in nature," I said.

"I hate nature!" Bridger said. "I LOVE plastic!"

He elaborated a bit: "Matchbox Pop-Up Play Sets and Legos are made of plastic, so that's why I love it."

This made me laugh, but it also gave me even more motivation to try to get that boy out into nature a bit more.

A few days ago, the kids and I rode bikes out to the town cemetery. I find the Conrad graveyard wonderfully, festively Day of the Dead-ish, and I thought Bridger and Cass would appreciate it, too. Many of the gravestones are carved with images that represent important things in the dead person's life: a sheaf of wheat, cattle, mountains, tractors, RVs, a blackboard with the ABCs written on it and a desk with an apple, and in one woman's case, a steamin' cup o' joe.

One boy who'd died in high school had a grave that had turned into a sort of ofrenda, with rifle cartridges, an unopened can of Mountain Dew, a "Stay Alive, Don't Drink and Drive" key chain, a pair of aviator sunglasses, and laminated photos of the boy himself posing shirtless and in his football jersey.

Just as I expected, the kids loved speculating about the people buried there and what their stories were. They loved the colorful pinwheels and artificial flowers on almost every grave.

"When I die, will you decorate my grave with lots of flowers?" Cassidy asked me.

The thought of it left me breathless.

"Sweetie," I said, "I hope I'll be gone long before you have a grave."

I explained that most of the time, children outlived their parents, so she'd probably end up decorating my grave, but likely not for a long, long time.

"But if you die, I won't have a mother!" Cassidy declared.

I felt my heart catch--as my husband put it later, she found it easier to conceive of herself being in a grave than she did conceiving of having no mother. Another way of putting it: she found it as hard to conceive of living on this earth without me as I find it to conceive of living on earth without her.

"Yeah, but by the time Mom dies, you'll be an adult so you won't need a mother so much," Bridger explained to her.

I indeed do hope that I live long enough to ferry my kids safely into adulthood, but I don't take that possibility for granted. My father died accidentally and suddenly when he was only 33 and I was twelve years old, so I've seen that parents can die young, and that children can die long before their mothers and fathers die. It is a sobering thought, and one that I try to use as a kind of steadying ballast. No guarantees, right?

A few weeks ago, sitting at the picnic table in our back yard with Cassidy, I looked at her and thought, if my dad hadn't died when he had, I wouldn't have had the life that led me to the family I have now. Gazing at Cass, the thought flashed through my mind--before guilt or propriety could stop it--well, it's a fair trade.

I think my Dad would understand, and be glad, that I am able to feel that way.

Montana Update

After Fairmont Hot Springs, we camped at Holland Lake, a beautiful little spot nestled up against the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area in the Seeley-Swan Valley. When the kids and I walked down to the lake and took in the view of mountains and a waterfall, I started to cry. "Happy tears!" I explained. Happy tears, indeed. I'll try to post photos soon. Cass and I hiked to the waterfall and we all got thoroughly nibbled by mosquitoes. A wedding reception at a nearby lodge provided a soundtrack of Stevie Wonder and Sly and the Family Stone covers for a few hours, but it didn't really detract from the overall experience--and Cassidy and I actually got a glimpse of the bride and her retinue of bridesmaids. Fancy heaven for Cass!

From there, we drove up to Glacier. I'd told Brian I wouldn't be satisfied with just driving through and stopping at overlooks, but that's what we ended up doing--we just ran out of time for more on this trip. And I ended up feeling fine about it. It was definitely better than not going at all, even if it was far less satisfying than being able to get out and hike and soak up the smaller sights you can't see from the car--the glacier lilies and Indian paintbrush along a trail, a hoary marmot sunning itself on a rock. When we first arrived at the West Glacier entry gate (after waiting in a line of cars for 25 minutes, something I'd never experienced at Glacier), Bridger said, "You said this place was so pretty. But it doesn't look any more beautiful than places we've already been."

"Just wait," I told him. "I'll stop talking it up and let you draw your own conclusions."

I was quietly overjoyed when I heard him breathe an awed, "Wow," once we got up high into the mountains on Going to the Sun Road. At the Logan Pass Visitor Center, he got a huge kick out of slipping and sliding on patches of snow and getting glimpses of pikas, rare little rodents acclimated to high alpine meadows who make a cute squeaking noise as they poke in and out of their hidey-holes. He snapped photos like mad of the mountains, waterfalls, and I don't know what all else.

Before we had kids, Brian and I used to go on motorcycle trips to Glacier with a good friend of ours just about every summer (I was on the back of Bri's bike--I learned to ride in a weekend course but decided I wasn't aggressive enough to be a good biker--I'd be the one who'd jump off my bike screaming when I should have had the guts to accelerate). Our memories of Glacier are full of road dust and the smell of hot leather jackets and chaps and clothes we wore until they were crusty because we could only carry so many clothes on the motorcycle side bags, of singing and keeping up a steady chatter of dumb jokes while we hiked so we'd scare away any bears in the vicinity, of downing cold bottles of Moose Drool beer after days of hiking that left us weary and sore but deeply, profoundly happy.

A friend of mine wondered if Glacier would seem different to me after seven years away--diminished, perhaps--with global warming melting the glaciers into oblivion. Signs at the park did warn that the glaciers would likely be gone by 2020. "So the kids will be teenagers then," Brian commented. Certainly there were many threats there that I didn't even notice--invasive animal and plant species crowding out the natives, I'm sure. I did notice some differences: notably, there were vast swathes of trees scorched by forest fire on the east side of the park and more brown, dry trees in the midst of the green valleys and mountainsides. The park was definitely more crowded than I remembered, too. But the waterfalls and rivers fed by the mountain snowcaps and glaciers were still flowing and churning, at least for now. The mountains themselves were still there.

Now we're at my mother and father-in-law's place in Conrad, a small ranch and farm town on the plains, just east of the Rocky Mountain Front. Well, here come the kids from the basement, where they've been playing that the bed where Brian and I have been sleeping is a boat, the mattress on the floor is the ocean, and the blankets are sharks--that is when they're not pretending to be secret agents. On this vacation, they have really discovered each other as playmates, and after playing the mediator role between them for the last three-plus years, I couldn't be happier about that.

From Fairmont Hot Springs Near Butte, MT

We're at the Fairmont Hot Springs Resort, a place we last visited almost two years ago for my mother-in-law's 80th birthday celebration. Our original plan was to be in Glacier Park by now, but after two long days of driving across North Dakota and Eastern Montana, we were all ready for a break from the car. We planned on stopping here for only one night last night, but as soon as we got into the heated-by-thermal-springs pool, with its backdrop of mountains and its canopy of cloudless blue Montana sky, well, I felt rather motivated to stay a spell. So we signed on for a second night.

It's been fun to mark the ways the kids have grown since our last visit. Cassidy can touch the bottom in the shallow end now, where before I had to hold her in the pool the whole time. Bridger was wearing a life jacket last time, but now he swims and dives and cannonballs all over the place. They're also playing together and enjoying each other so much more than they were two years ago.

A few other memorable (to me, at least) moments of the trip so far:

-Driving through North Dakota, I perkily suggested playing the "Categories" game--one person picks a category, like Billboards or Semi-Trucks, and then counts out loud every time they see something in that category. The other players try to guess their category. I chose "Pick-Up Trucks." And then several long, loaded minutes went by on that flat plains highway. No vehicles from either direction. No billboards. No buildings. Just grass, grass, and more wind-blown grass. The kids basically declared "This game totally sucks" in their three-year-old and six-year-old ways, and the van exploded into a chaos of backseat bickering when they realized their only hope for entertainment was to pick on one another. Brian thought it was hilarious that I'd thought there would be enough different categories of anything on a North Dakota interstate. I admitted defeat and resigned my position as van entertainment director and took the driver's seat for the rest of the day.

-Bridger, Cass, and I came up with a pool game in which Cassidy was a catfish, Bridger was her friend the killer whale, and I was a shark trying to eat Cassidy's kittenfish. At one point Cassidy described to Brian her predatory kittenfish's favorite dessert: "Raspberry pie with human teeth, a baby calf, and chocolate ice cream on top."

Tomorrow we head to Glacier National Park for one night of camping before we go to my in-laws' place to spend 4th of July with them. It'll be our first time at Glacier with the kids, and I wish we could stay longer, but between camping with friends in Minnesota last weekend and trying to get to Conrad for the 4th, there just wasn't much time left. I hope to be grateful for the time I get in Glacier rather than greedy for more, trusting that there will be longer visits in our future. It almost seems silly to subject us all to several more hours of driving for only a few hours in Glacier. But I think once I'm there I'll remember why I feel so determined to get back there, even for just a day.