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!