Hug a Chicken Day

A few changes in progress around here lately, worth a few posts, but today is rushed -- more about those another time.

Today, though, we celebrated Hug a Chicken Day. The kids are in the midst of creating a randomizable selection of 365 special celebrations, one for each day of the year. Amongst the more peculiar days: Loose Temper Day, Feed Liquor to Children Day, Wide-Eyed Day, Foraging Day, Notice Weird Things About Your Body Day and Worship a New God Day. Zany, irreverent, out of left field these celebrations are. Just like my children.

Today's festivities were roundly enjoyed by all, with the possible exception of the chicken.

Spinning girl

We are YouTube and Google spinners, self-taught with the assistance of low-resolution videos and superior keyword choices.

Sophie as usual is intuitive with her fine-motor skills, particularly as pertaining to fibre crafts. So far we are practicing on the undyed fleece, saving our four fleecy colours for a skein of multi-coloured Noro-style single ply.

Repeat copier miracle

I bought my copier / printer / multifunction machine a couple of years ago. I loved that machine. As soon as I got it home I was questioning how all the music teachers and homeschooling parents and society board members of the past had ever survived without one.

Then it died last February. Nasty error messages concerning the toner cartridge that responded to none of my resourceful trouble-shooting. I put the thing on the floor for a month. I despaired. But after some time passed I plugged it in and tried it again -- and there was a miracle! It worked.

Until the middle of September. Same error message. I tried all the same trouble-shooting. I turned it off for a couple of weeks. I moved it onto the floor. I put it back. I turned it on. I tried everything all over again. No miracle.

I was talking to a friend today about the lack of a repeat miracle, and how I'd ask for a new one for Christmas except that I couldn't bear to landfill a great hunk of glass, plastic and metal after just a couple of years. Jokingly I said I'd try turning it on again.

A second miracle has occurred.

Fleecy colours

A friend of mine re-iterated her offer of the loan of a spinning wheel today. We're getting closer ...

Unschooling is for parents too

"... we are currently on the fence about sending our child to public school in a very small rural town or homeschooling ... One of my biggest concerns is wondering if I have the ability to teach my children. I don't feel like I remember/know everything and also don't know how to teach."

If the teaching/learning equation were really about the teacher knowing it all and passing her knowledge on effectively to the student then clearly the public school system failed you (since you don't remember everything!) -- and why the heck would you entrust your child to the very system that failed you?

But really, I think that's a rather misguided educational paradigm. Children are not empty vessels into which 'experts' pour their knowledge according to some pre-ordained system or method. Children are people, and incredibly capable learners at that! Given a reasonably nurturing environment and a bit of freedom they create, they invent, they question, they respond, they engage, they explore, they infer, they grow, they learn. They don't need you to know everything and dispense it to them according to a time-tested system. They will show you or tell you what they need. Because you as their parent are in love with them, you will listen to their needs. And because you are a human being too, you will do your own exploring, creating, learning and growing in order to give them what they are asking for.

Miranda

(who can now ice-skate [backwards!], understand a fair bit of Japanese, weave cedar baskets, conjugate Latin verbs and dye wool thanks to the impetus her children have provided her with)

Viral trends

This is the story of our past week and a half. Lovely, isn't it? Three of the kids have been sick twice. Erin had the worst of it initially -- likely the H1N1 thing, contracted in transit back from Calgary that week. She quarantined herself quite effectively in the cabin and we essentially didn't see her for three days. She slept, I delivered fluids, and we all washed our hands after her once or twice-daily trips into the house to use the toilet.

The younger girls then got something that I'd feared might be Erin's flu, but turned out to be much milder. Erin then got sick again with cold-like symptoms which I assumed was the milder virus Sophie and Fiona had had. But then today Sophie and Fiona have come down with exactly whatever Erin now has. And Noah is in the midst of a nasty thing that's somewhere about mid-range in severity.

Two significant blessings: Sophie was in a small window of relative wellness on her birthday, and the viral trend curves of the parents in this family (not shown) are nice flat lines at the bottom of the graph.

In the midst we managed to (mostly) participate in the Baroque Dance workshop, and to perform at the Baroque Concert. Tomorrow brings a Remembrance Day quartet performance for the middle kids at the local school. I'm hoping they'll be able to play during the laying of the wreaths, even if we have to wheel them in and prop them up.

Baroque Dance

This is fun! We have a visiting clinician in the area this weekend running a set of workshops for music students, teaching them about baroque dance. For years these kids have been playing minuets, bourrées, gavottes, sarabandes, gigues, courantes and the like. Now they're learning about the historical roots and kinesthetic forms of the dances they were meant to accompany. The afternoon was the session for kids under 12, during which Fiona learned to dance a minuet. In the evening, and continuing tomorrow, is the session for older and more advanced kids and adults. They learned the minuet, gavotte and sarabande tonight. Tomorrow will bring a bourrée as well, and a few other fun movement games and no doubt a lot more interesting background on the social conditions and traditions these dances evolved in.

Music students are such cool kids. There were about a dozen and half in the school gym on a Friday night, pretending they had frock coats and frilly shirts on and pointing their toes in stately steps -- focused, attentive, having fun, getting to know each other, learning, laughing, being totally respectful of the teacher, each other and the space they were in.

Five hundred

I was putting on about 100 miles a month through the summer and would have finished my 2009 goal of 500 miles by mid-September if I hadn't been injured. But I was about 30 miles short when I had to take a long hiatus. Finally this week I managed to jog my way to my goal.

Today's goal-reaching run fit into a warm spell which has melted most of the snow, so I ran what will likely be one of the last trail runs of the year. My route took me over a carpet of yellow and brown leaves, along a trail deserted by the fair-weather tourists. Just me and my dog, the sounds of our feet and our breathing, and of the forest itself. The hip still bothers me a bit, and oh, I've got slower for the long break. But I am so much happier to be running again.

Carding jag

Thanks to a borrowed drum carder, this phase is going reasonably efficiently. But it still takes ages. We've spent hours at it over the past couple of days.

Fall and fibre

It's fall. Every fall for the past few years I am struck by the urge to get out yarn and needles and start creating things. The kids have all got sweaters and hats, countless Christmas gifts -- socks, hats, mittens, scarves -- have been knitted for various people. And it starts every fall, sometime in late September or October. I think it has something to do with the wood stove. Its cozy glow invites knitting.

And now it seems that Fiona and Sophie share my annual awakening of knitting passion. Sophie even has her own Ravelry account which she diligently updates. I suspect Fiona will want her own before too long. I'm working on a cardigan. Sophie is finishing up the back of a felted cushion for which she did the fair-isle top last year. She's also gone into production with korknissen. She can finish a hat and sweater, and do the gluing to the cork in the space of about 20 minutes. Yesterday she made four. Her ambition is to create enough of the cute little guys that she can assemble a battalion for a surrealistically sinister effect. Her demented sense of humour invades even this.

Fiona has begun work on some leg warmers which will match some of her Lands' End outfits. Yesterday she successfully reviewed the knit stitch, then learned the purl stitch and did the two inches of 2x2 ribbing at the top of her first leg-warmer. She was thrilled with the success.

This sketch shows Ms. Knit with her furry-collared coat and Mr. Purl wearing his scarf. It was my attempt to show Fiona the difference between the appearance of a knit and purl stitch on the needle, so that she could more easily keep track of her ribbing. I drew the yarn pattern, then the faces got added by Sophie and we went on embellishing until we had little friendly-looking characters. It's fun to see how much more capable the girls get in their knitting from year to year. Fiona is much faster than she was last year, when it took her the better part of a month to knit a bean bag! And she makes fewer mistakes. Even better, when she makes little mistakes, Sophie is incredibly capable at helping her fix them by un-knitting, picking up dropped stitches, undoing accidental loops and the like. So I don't even need to be around.

We're also busy with washing, carding and dyeing fleece. Our fleece adventures are moving slowly but relentlessly forward. Most of the immense bag of raw fleece is now fully washed. About half has been carded. Dyeing has begun. Spinning, well, we're still thinking about that.

Math mornings

Two of my kids have caught the school bug. The last few mornings have looked like this. At 8:30 a.m., no less! Sophie likes to be a night-owl, but she is pushing her bedtime back and is now up by 8 in the morning.

Unfortunately Sophie and Fiona also seem to have caught the flu bug from their big sister, so I doubt tomorrow will look like this.

Happy feet

New running shoes, again. On the advice of my chiropractor, who is also a distance runner and seems to really know his stuff, I bought myself some shoes with ultimate stability and cushioning for over-pronation. (I got them off eBay so they were actually cheaper than the basic shoes I bought last spring, so that's something.)

I'm not a gross over-pronator when you look at my feet and my gait. But for whatever reason my hip problems seem to be very sensitive to slight over-pronation. The hope was that really serious stability shoes might help my hip.

I've been running again since a bone scan earlier this month ruled out a stress fracture or anything else sinister that I could wreck by running through a bit of pain. So after almost two months off I started out with walk / run intervals three weeks ago. Sometimes I ran in my old worn-out Asics shoes. Sometimes I ran in my newer Nikes. My hip only got a little worse after each walk/run, then got enough better over the next four days that I could run again.

Then I got the new shoes this week.

Now I run and my hip doesn't get worse. And it has continued to improve gradually between runs. For the first time since the end of August I no longer feel like crying when I think about running. I actually believe now that things are going to improve for good. I've gained back 5 of the 20 pounds I lost. Not that that's a problem -- I like this weight better on balance. But I can feel that my muscles need a bit of retraining. So I'm doing easy runs, a maximum 6 km and no faster than the 10-minute miles I was running in May. I don't want to jinx it and say these things are magic bullets for me, but right now I sure feel that way.

Mountains from molehills

There was some snow, but not much. Three or four inches, maybe. In an effort to preserve it from expected above-freezing temperatures of the next few days, the kids heaped it up. And up. And up.

Our frosty Mt. Vesuvius is much festooned with unraked twigs and leaves. Noah has his suspicions that the remains of the facial bone of a deer, which Limpet retrieved from the woods a few months ago and furiously gnawed for quite some time, got rolled up in one of the giant balls comprising the foundation.

I wonder how long this will last. Rain is in the forecast for the next little while.

Hanging over our heads

The first colour, the first twenty per cent of our washed and carded fleece, hanging to dry above our heads at the apex of the living room ceiling. This is about 250 gm or half a pound. We have a spinning wheel we can borrow, provided we can self-teach (the owner has never used it).

We're still not sure what we're doing with all this wool, but it sure is looking pretty! More colours to come.

Calgary trip

Noah and I have now made three trips to Calgary this fall. Erin has made four. It feels like it's working for us. Here's this week's trip:

On Thursday morning I drop Erin at school for writing class. Then I go home and get Noah mobilized, pack the van. I say goodbye to Fiona who is feeling a little sad about my leaving. She has Sophie and her dad home with her, and arrangements have been made for a visit with her grandma while her dad's at work on Friday. She has an aikido class. I remind her about the fun things she has to look forward to. I've also made a list of ten things for her and for Sophie. Things to do, and check off, while I'm gone. Some chores, some creative stuff, some personal-responsibility jobs, a couple of novel ideas for things to do. She'll be okay. I promise to phone her before I relinquish the cellphone to Erin the next day. Noah and I hop in the van. After Writing Class Erin heads to the independent study centre and picks up enough coursework to keep her going for a few days. Noah and I swing by the school and pick her up.

We head north. It's an hour's drive to the inland ferry that takes us across Arrow Lake. The ferry service is a bit out of whack because the main ferry is in drydock. We wait for half an hour, then spend half an hour on the boat. I begin knitting, a project I abandoned in March. The days get short, I start knitting. It's an annual thing for me.

After the ferry we drive for 45 minutes and then stop for lunch. We stop at what is for us a recently-discovered favourite café in Revelstoke and a woman behind the counter says "Oh hi! What are you doing here?" and that's when we discover that the co-owner of the place is an SVI mom who comes to New Denver every summer. Small world. The food is fabulous. The coffee is bold and delicious. Caffeined and caloried up as appropriate, we head east through the Rockies.

Erin and Noah chat, or read, or write, or (mostly) sleep. I have my iPod loaded with Margaret Atwood's new novel and so I don't miss their company when they nod off. We roll into Calgary around 7 pm (it's an hour later there). We pull into the motel where we are so well-known, such loyal customers, that we now get the rate that's reserved for employees' families. Liz grins when we come in. She has our keycard ready to go, with the wireless internet access code written on it. Check-in takes 20 seconds.

We dump the instruments and Erin's laptop and head out for an evening of bookshopping. I drop Eirn and Noah at Chapters bookstore and do a few errands. I pick them up at 9 pm and pay for their armload of books. No one's really hungry, so the kids just have smoothies at Starbucks. We head back to the motel. Watch a bit of TV.

The next morning we grab coffee and head to Noah's viola lesson. He's doing so much better! He seems to be able to take home the instruction he gets during his monthly lesson and really do something with it. Rather than procrastinating, practicing mindlessly for three and a half weeks, and then panicking two days before we leave for his next lesson due to his lack of preparedness, he seems to be working well with a month-long view. His teacher also feels like things are going much better this year. Noah is developing the planning, sight-reading, self-assessment and problem-solving skills he needs to make a go of it with only infrequent teacher input.

After Noah starts his lesson, I drive Erin over to the University where she meets with her accompanist. They spend most of the time rehearsing Erin's Mendelssohn, which she's performing this weekend, but they also spend some time working on Erin's piano piece. She's learning a Mozart Sonata movement to play with a violinist friend of hers. I hear one run of the Mendelssohn but miss the rest, because I need to head back to Noah's lesson. I hear a few minutes of his work, but they're still going strong and aren't done when I have to get Erin. I run back to the University to get her. By the time I get back, Noah's lesson is finally done.

Erin moves her suitcase and violin up to "her room". Her violin teacher and Noah's viola teacher are the "More Fun Parents" whom she lives with in Calgary. Erin is getting an accompaniment session or two a month, plus 7 or 8 hours of teaching a month. She's practicing lots, and getting plenty of guidance. She rarely goes more than 10 or 11 days between lessons. She seems very motivated and is certainly mastering repertoire and technical points quickly. Unfortunately she's not getting chamber music or orchestral experience. But she's getting far more training than she was a year ago and is happy about that.

We say a quick goodbye. Noah and I head out. We do a couple of quick shopping errands on the way out of the city.

Noah plans to sleep the whole way home. I put "The Year of the Flood" on my iPod and drive. We make really good time. Noah is keen just to get home, so we decide to put lunch off until mid-afternoon and get through with just one meal break, even though we skipped breakfast.

When we get to our planned lunch stop the timing looks good for catching the next ferry, so we just blow off that meal. But the ferry is seriously backlogged. We end up waiting almost three hours to get loaded. Normally we drive on within 10 minutes. We eat a few candies we have in the van, and a granola bar or two. We are starving. We haven't eaten a proper meal since lunchtime the day before and it's now 8 pm. At the next town, a mere half hour from home, we buy a bunch of junk food when we stop for gas. By the time we get home we are regretting the indulgence.

Erin will get some lesson time, play in her recital and stay in Calgary until Monday evening, when she'll jump on the overnight bus. She'll arrive in Nelson at a civilized 8-ish in the morning. Fiona's piano teacher (Erin's former piano teacher) will pick her up and dump her in her guest room for a long morning nap.

At noon I will load Fiona, Noah and two other local teens into the van and head to Nelson. I'll leave Noah and the teens downtown and drive to Fiona's piano lesson where I'll awaken Erin. After piano I'll drive Erin to choir, where she'll meet up with Noah and the other girls. Fiona and I will do the grocery shopping and stop at a café for a London Fog. Then we'll pick up the four choir kids and drive home, arriving at about 7 pm.

That's one Calgary cycle. We'll repeat that in four weeks.

In two weeks, we'll do a Revelstoke cycle. These fit between the Calgary trips. They are similar to the Calgary trips except that (a) Noah is not involved at all and (b) to get Erin to Calgary I drive only a third as far, dropping her off at the bus station in Revelstoke from where she does the rest of the eastward journey herself. There's no overnight in a motel, and I'm home before dinner the same day.

It's amazing how it all fits together. Like a jigsaw puzzle that doesn't fit any other way. Erin doesn't miss any of her writing classes, ever. She still works a shift a week at the café. She is in Calgary for all the recital Sundays. She gets her violin and piano coaching while she's there. Fiona's piano lesson and Erin's choir rehearsal are on the same Tuesday afternoon in Nelson, and Erin can always get to Nelson on Tuesdays, whether she's coming from Calgary or home. Erin is always home on Wednesday evenings for group class and Summit Strings. Fiona never has to miss an Aikido class. Noah gets to choir with no extra driving required. Sophie gets her much-treasured days home alone. My clinic half-days fit into the weeks I'm not in Calgary. My teaching fits into Mondays and Fridays, and when it doesn't fit into Friday, it fits on Saturday.

Last of the apples

And still the processing of fruit continues. Just a few more batches of apples to push through the dehydrator. Gallons of juice are frozen. Litres of sauce grace the pantry shelves. And jars and jars and bags of dried fruit fill cupboards and shelves in the kitchen.

Fashion show!

Outfit number one of many for each girl. They made good choices, and sizes are perfect -- room to grow but not too big.

The role of home teacher

Copied from a message board, where someone asked "how important is it to be like a teacher when homeschooling?"

I think it's important to recognize that institutional schooling represents a sort of contracting out of the academic education portion of the responsibility for raising a child, and that this is a relatively recent practice in the scope of human history. The idea of having separate roles for "teacher" and "parent" is a little artificial.

Imagine if you will that the government began providing universal free meals for children. Cafeterias would be set up in neighbourhoods and three times a day children would be delivered there to receive the meals cooked and served by trained nutritionists. These nutritionists attended special training in handling the cooking needs of large groups, and in managing the crowds of children, their table manners, their social behaviour during meals and so on. This quickly became the norm, with almost all children reporting to their nutritionists for their meals. If you as a parent decided to feed your children at home that would be allowed but considered a little unusual.

So if you decided to feed your kids at home, you would not say "It's important to be clear about my dual roles -- at certain times I'm their mom, and at certain times I need to act like their nutritionist. I need to learn how nutritionists act in order to successfully feed my kids at home."

A little silly, don't you think?

I see the distinction between "being a mom" and "being a homeschool teacher" in a similar light. They're not separate roles. We tend to see them as separate because culturally we have made an artificial separation, assigning the roles to different people. If they're not going to different people, they don't need to be different.

Hyperbole

Thirteen staples per gram. Seventy-three point eight grams of staples this afternoon, meaning just under a thousand. Combined with yesterday's now-disposed-of staples, I suppose I must revise my staple estimate to more like three thousand for the whole chair.

Still, when every single one must be pried out with brute force (read: two-hand grasp, feet planted, twist and grunt) that seems like a lot. This is a well-made chair.

The chair

This chair was removed from the living room to facilitate reflooring three months ago. I couldn't bear to return it. Partly because the burgundy / green / blue upholstery is pretty weird with our orange and red walls. Partly because of its state of repair.

It's a nice reclining wing-back chair. We bought it more than 16 years ago. A good-quality classic piece. I loved the upholstery for many years, and I'd still love it, if it wasn't permanently filthy and full of holes and if we didn't have red and orange walls. But it is, and we do.

So this weekend we're beginning to disassemble it with a view to re-upholstering it ourselves. I've put my
crew to work with pliers and screwdrivers. It seems that our chair is made of some nice fabric, some foam, some wood and about 47,000 staples. We're now something like 29,000 staples into the endeavour and we have blistered fingers and thumbs and sore wrists.

I'm taking a zillion photos in the vain hope that I'll be able to efficiently retrace the dis-upholstering path backwards with the new fabric.

So far we've discovered where all the potato chip crumbs, popcorn kernels and Christmas tree needles have ended up over the years. We've discovered why the wing on the left was wobbly -- only the fabric was holding it in place. We have yet to discover where the broken wire is from, but that will probably reveal itself around staple number 42,145.

Here's what we're thinking we'll re-upholster it with. We'll pull all the old fabric off, lay it out and measure the yardage we need. This new fabric works nicely with the wall colours and the floor. And it has the added bonus of pulling the couch into the décor, because the blue in it matches the blue couch almost perfectly. And since the couch is somewhat less bedraggled looking than the chair, and likely has over 100,000 staples, it's going to be a while before we re-upholster it.