Sent this picture to Alice the other day because I knew it would get her the way it got me. She pointed out that four out of five of these girls are in college now. Well, almost! Jane moves in next week.
She was barely a month old when I decided I wanted to homeschool her. I’d been poking around the AOL parenting boards (having obtained my first modem and my first baby within six weeks of each other) and stumbled upon the Home Education Magazine boards. Before long I was devouring back issues of Growing Without Schooling and amassing a collection of Holt and Gatto books. Sandra Dodd and Pam Sarooshian were among the moms-of-youngish-kids enthusing about unschooling there, using the word in the broad Holtian sense, living and learning outside school. By the time Jane was six months old, Scott was on board, with reservations. Those dissolved over the next year or two, as we talked and talked and read and read (well, I read and talked, he mostly listened). Really, the notion had me at hello.
It felt right for us, and it kept on feeling righter and righter, all these past eighteen years. When Jane was five, finally finished with her cancer treatments, an early and voracious reader, addicted to the Magic Tree House books, I hung a sheet of butcher paper the length of our hallway and we pasted little copies of the book covers in the pertinent time periods. We still have that timeline, now ripped here and there and crammed with tidbits. It was on the wall in this house until last year; it comes and goes as the urge hits us. There in large wobbly letters are young Jane’s notations: “Golden Age of Pirates,” “Charlemagne,” “King Alfred BURNED THE CAKES!!!”
Back up to when she was—around four? Alice will remember—we’re in an educational supply shop, Alice, her small girls (two of them on the slide above), Jane, probably a couple of babies. We’re browsing at a placemat spin rack. I put a few in my cart: planets, U.S. map, presidents. On the next aisle, I drop something else in and discover a placemat I hadn’t selected: the periodic table of the elements. Seems a bit early for that. I put it back. But a minute later, I glance in the cart and there it is again. I’m perplexed. “Did you put this in?” I ask my wee daughter. She nods. I’m taking it out to return it to the rack, we have enough in the cart already, and she bursts out earnestly: “But Mommy! I need to learn about the EE-laments!”
(Sold. We still have that placemat.)
One year I was speaking at a homeschooling conference, and the teenaged daughter of my boothmate took Jane—around age six, I think—to the drinking fountain. She reported back that when Jane saw the water arc out of the spout, she exclaimed over getting to drink a rainbow. Took a drink. Frowned, puzzled. “Funny. I always thought rainbows would be crunchy.”
She so often surprised me with the knowledge she’d absorbed from I knew not where. Scooping something out of water one day (had the baby dropped Cheerios into Jane’s cup? it was something like that), she remarked that her fingers were like a whale’s baleen. I didn’t know what baleen meant, but luckily I had Jane to enlighten me.
The year she was eight, we read our way through a tower of America-themed historical fiction. Witch of Blackbird Pond, Moccasin Trail, By the Great Horn Spoon, Understood Betsy, whole bunch of others. That was a fabulous year. We were in our big house in Virginia then, with the propane fireplace you flipped on with a switch. That thing drew me like a magnet. I’d stand there toasting myself, reading aloud while the snow fell heavy on the hills and the juncos hopped beneath the feeder, and Jane lolled on the sofa with Beanie banging dents into my cedar chest with Wedgits—the first in a line of toddlers to bash away at that spot. Its entire surface is pockmarked with enthusiasm and glee. Sort of the best-loved-doll of furniture.
Project Feederwatch. Journey North Mystery Class. Shakespeare Club. Piano Guild. Film Club. Living Earth School—a nature camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains where Jane learned to make fires, to eat violets and chickweed. She had sold all the kids on our street on the virtues of chickweed for iron and violets for vitamin C, and they’d comb our yard, nibbling weeds until their teeth were green. I delivered a hasty lecture about pesticide and lawn fertilizer, and extracted a promise that the kids would only eat from our lawn, because I couldn’t be sure the others were chemical-free.
And that weed book! I blogged about this years ago: “Two summers ago I wanted to know what was growing in our unlandscaped side yard, so I checked a book on weeds out of the library. I glanced at it but decided this book was too dry to make it worth the effort and tossed it onto the kitchen table. The next day I returned it to the library. The next day, then-7-year-old Jane summoned me with an anguished wail. ‘Mommy, where’s that great book I was reading? The one about weeds? It was SO interesting!’ She’d found it lying on the table and naturally assumed that it was meant for her. I admitted I’d returned it, and she was crushed. I had to promise to schedule a special trip to re-check it out.”
Through high tide and low tide, we’ve learned a million things together. And now she’s heading off to go on learning somewhere else, and I couldn’t be more grateful, and more excited for all the adventures she has ahead of her.
Only some of them, you understand. Most of the game-playing and show-watching and walk-taking happens during my work time.
Wonderboy started back to school on Tuesday. That kicked the rest of us into—perhaps not high tide, but the tide coming steadily in.
We watched the first twenty minutes of that Vermeer documentary I posted a link to the other day. It’s riveting so far. The only reason we didn’t view the whole thing in one gulp was because I didn’t want to overwhelm the kids (especially Rilla, who was entranced) with too much information. We’ll take our time with it…a sort of Slow Reading philosophy applied to YouTube.
(“Master of Light” indeed! I learned a lot in that first third of the video—learned to see some things I hadn’t known to look for.)
Earlier this summer, Jane asked Scott to give her a course in the history of rock and roll. So after our busybusy July was past, he put together a playlist for her and commenced the seminar this week. All three of our older girls showed up for class. 🙂
Rilla learned a little Latin (dry-erase markers and a whiteboard continue to be a sure-fire way to ensure enthusiastic vocab practice…ditto colored chalk and a little slate). And I love getting to dip back into the stories her sisters loved at this age. The Sword of Damocles went over like gangbusters. And the “Albion and Brutus” opening chapter of Our Island Story, which she’s heard before but likes because mermaids!
Which made it extra fun when “the white-cliffs-of-Albion” showed up in our Just So Stories pick today—“How the Whale Got His Throat.” I’d forgotten that bit, and my Mariner of infinite-resource-and-sagacity was an Irishman until he mentioned his natal-shore. Hasty accent-change required. At the end of the tale, Rilla peered closely at the grating the Mariner had lodged in the Whale’s throat (you didn’t forget about the suspenders, did you?) and commented: “So that’s why whales eat krill. They’re filter-feeders.” I’d been prepared to launch into an exploration of baleen, but I’m informed Octonauts beat me to it.
I was then required to read “Dingo! Yellow Dog Dingo!” (exclamation points very much a part of the title), which is how she refers to “The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo.” Try as I might, I can’t make that inordinately proud creature sound remotely Australian. Gotta step up my game.
(Tangent: upon reflection, if I absolutely-please-don’t-make-me HAD to choose one single storybook for all future readalouds, I do believe I’d go with the Kipling. Playful language, magnificent vocabulary, surprising and amusing narratives, magnetic subject matter, sense of humor, discussion-fodder, colorful locales, magic, and crocodiles. You really can’t go wrong.)
Let’s see, we also spent some time with this book: Assembling California by John McPhee, the fruit of my hunt for something to satisfy the local-geology itch created by our drive to Denver last Month.
First chapter quite promising. Begins at Mussel Rock off the shore of San Francisco, and dropped us right into the San Andreas Fault. Perfect. Then of course we wanted to see Mussel Rock for ourselves. YouTube obliged with this gem:
Those lingering shots on the uneven pavement of the parking lot, and later the cockeyed houses on a San Francisco street, really bring home the reality of shifting plates. And from McPhee we learned that the science of plate tectonics is quite new! Just barely older than I am.
Rilla is learning “The Walrus and the Carpenter” by heart. She had the first three stanzas down last spring but we forgot about it over the summer. She likes to practice when we’re walking around the corner to pick Wonderboy up from school.
There were other things…the visit to the Mammoth and Mastadon exhibit at the Museum of Natural History on Monday (and a carousel ride, mustn’t forget that), and the hopeful rescue of some withering veggies from our sunbaked garden. We relocated the cukes and canteloupe, and both tomato plants, and a poor, parched blueberry bush. Something’s quite different in that corner of the yard this year. Everything’s struggling. Or maybe it’s just that I’m off-season. I don’t usually do much out back during the late-summer months. January’s when my garden really perks up and starts producing.
We’ve got loads of monarch caterpillars, though. And goldfinches galore.
Rose got her ears pierced. Jane and Wonderboy and I cleaned out a Staples. Her college pile is growing.
I was going to say July was a month like we’ve never had—on the road almost the whole time—but I remembered that’s not true, of course; three summers ago the kids and I spent three weeks on that cross-country trip from San Diego to Virginia and back, and a few years before that was the grand expedition to our new home, which also took the better part of a month. I guess that’s our pattern: hardly any travel for three or four years, and then something epic.
We drove through Utah and across the Rockies to my parents’ home in Aurora, Colorado. Spent the 4th of July in St. George, UT, where our hotel parking lot afforded a view of six separate fireworks displays across the valley. Spent hours goggling out the van windows at spectacular scenery: so much beauty none of us remembered to read the books we’d brought, or to fiddle with the iPads.
Spent a week in Colorado visiting with my old friends and family. A whirlwind week, full of chatter. At the tail end, I gave three talks at a homeschooling conference and (so very marvelous) spent a series of evenings sitting up late with my pal Karen Edmisten and her husband, whom it was high time we met in person. A very good week. A full week, capped with a wagon ride to a buffalo herd on the prairie I love so much.
Then we drove home just in time for Comic-Con. Had a family playdate with Jenni Holm and her gang—one of our favorite families on the planet. Spent the next four days in the usual blur of crowds, meetings, lunches, dinners, late nights gabbing at the bar. More good time with faraway friends. These conversations with our writer and artist pals are why I love conventions. That, and the panels—I’m an oddity there; few of my pro friends spend much time at other people’s panels, but for me it’s a highlight of the summer. This year I hit Graphic Novels and the Common Core (illuminating; perhaps more anon); Graphic/Prose Hybrid Works (delightful, and dangerous to my reading list); Today’s Kids’ Heroes…and Why They Don’t Wear Capes (featuring my hubby, among other stellar panelists—a most excellent discussion); and a Prismacolor Shading Workshop, which included to my delight and surprise a handful of Prismacolor brush pens and markers. Heaven.
And then! Because that wasn’t enough! The college I attended for my freshman and sophomore years—before it was sold out from under us and we all had to transfer—has never had a reunion, for obvious reasons. Until last week. A number of my theater classmates converged in Denver, and Scott and my mother conspired to send me back out for the fun. The photos tell several thousand words of that story. I’m so glad I went.
All of it, each day of July, merits a post in itself. But here I am back at home, slipping back into routine, and I find that mostly I want to write about my garden. It suffered less than I expected during the month of neglect, but still there’s a lot of cleanup to do. I’ve spent the past two days digging out bermuda grass and planting a few new natives in the butterfly garden. And the new veggie garden is in. Pole beans, cucumber, cantaloupe, tomatoes (I had one good plant in already and expected to find it withered upon our return, but instead it was green and happy and loaded with ripe tomatoes!), strawberries. I’ve ripped out a lot of ice plant and took at least a dozen cuttings off a geranium gone haywire. The red rose bush and the yellow one each presented a single blossom upon our return. The salvia was limp as old lettuce, but perked up after a good soaking. The goldfinches are having a field day with some giant dandelions gone to seed in my absence. The scrub jays have returned to their favorite perches, where they harass us until we’ve filled the birdbath. Home sweet home.
Yesterday we had our Journey North Mystery Class wrap-up party. Huge fun all around: each family revealed its Mystery City location and we celebrated with a feast of dishes from the far-off locales. (Even the one American city in this year’s batch is far-off from us here in San Diego.) I won’t say more about the secret locations, since I know some of you are participating in your own groups and may not have had your big reveals yet. But ohhhh, was the food good.
I’ll give this much away: Beanie’s and my contribution were these Icelandic pancakes (pönnukökur).
(Beloved Carl Larsson print hiding a snarl of electrical cords.)
Here’s the recipe we followed, and here’s a delightful video demonstration by Icelandic cook Margret:
At the end of the video she demonstrates the most common ways to serve the pancakes: sprinkled with sugar (as we did above) or spread with jam and a generous dollop of whipped cream. I didn’t think the cream would hold up at a potluck, but you can be sure we’re going to give that version a go very, very soon.
*My sweet broom is in bloom, lightening my heart not only with its sunny blossoms but also the way it puts one of my favorite Scottish ballads into my head every time I glance its direction.
Tomorrow Jane, Rose, and I are off on a new adventure—a Peterson family first: open house at the university Jane plans to attend in the fall. Talk about blinking. Seems only last week this happened:
“Those little stars that seemed to speckle a not too dreadfully distant blue ceiling were farther away than he could make himself think, try as he might. Those little stars must be enormous. The whole earth must be a tiny pebble in comparison. A spinning pebble, and he, on it, the astronomer, looking at flaming gigantic worlds so far away that they seemed no more than sparkling grains of dust. He felt for a moment less than nothing, and then, suddenly, size did not seem to matter. Distant and huge the stars might be, but he, standing here with chattering teeth on the dark hillside, could see them and name them and even foretell what next there were going to do. ‘The January Sky.’ And there they were, Taurus, Aldebaran, the Pleiades, obedient as slaves…He felt an odd wish to shout at them in triumph, but remembered in time that this would not be scientific.”
We went for a drive this morning to look at rocks and low mountains—Beanie is studying geology, which means everyone is—and happened upon an egg farm with ostriches and ducks and a cage of finches and of course dozens of hens. Beanie and Rilla went to look at the finches, and I went inside the little shop and bought some honey from their hives. The woman in charge—wiry, gray-haired, serious-faced—was a taciturn sort, not what you’d call effusive but great of heart, for as I was unbuckling Huck from his carseat so he could get a look at the birds, the shopkeeper appeared behind me and said, “Come on, I’ll take you to meet Elvis.”
Elvis! A pot-bellied pig, it turned out, black and bristly, with a shock of upstanding hair, a veritable pompadour. Truly a King among pigs. The shopkeeper produced some crusts of bread for the children to feed him. Nearby, two large, muddy, pink, Wilburish pigs watched with envy.
“Those are pig pigs,” said the egg lady. “Bacon pigs.”
She invited Huck to come back and play with “Thomas”—her grandson? great-nephew?—whose toys were heaped outside the shop; he was at Montessori, she told us. We headed home, Beanie calling out rock types as we wound through the boulder-strewn hills. Our mountains here look unfinished, the hillsides littered with car-sized stones. For lunch the little ones ate peanut butter and honey sandwiches. “I’ve never seen such beautiful honey,” said Rose, holding up the jar to the light. “It’s almost red, it glows.”
We read our chapter of Winter Holiday—Dick and Dorothea met the Martians today—and then everyone scattered for games. We’ve got our weather back: low seventies, bright, breezy. In the afternoon, the older girls took a long walk to the library where they had some Patricia Wrede books waiting. I think that’s right; they’ll correct me tomorrow if I’ve got it wrong.
This baby turned four yesterday. How’s that for a shocker?
Our celebration included a trip to the farmer’s market, where we bought local honey, fiendishly hot salsa, and a gorgeous loaf of cinnamon-apple-walnut bread.
Rilla’s favorite sight: the sea urchins at the fishmonger’s booth.
My favorite sight: this guy’s suitcase drum.
For dinner (stop the presses) I actually cooked! As in, really really cooked, with chopping and browning and basting and everything. Came out yummy, too: Chicken in Prune Butter Sauce.
I have lots to say about things I’m reading, but for now it’s full steam ahead on my Downton Abbey recap, which will go up at GeekMom later this morning. (Here’s last week’s.) Join us for the open thread if you like!
Scott thinks I omitted the most riveting detail of yesterday’s racklenake encounter, which is that all those day camp kids I mentioned—and their counselors—were wearing pajamas.
I like the foreshadowing in this photo. He warmed up by climbing on the park’s non-poisonous reptiles before leaping over the venomous one.
Yes, again. This is what happens when you build suburbs in the chaparral.
This time, we weren’t on a hiking trail in the hills. This time, we were running down the path from the water fountain to the playground at a park we only just discovered this morning. Upon arrival, I wrote Scott: “This is the best park I’ve seen since we moved here.” Beautiful place. Towering trees shading a narrow creek (more stones than water) and an elaborate playground—a welcome improvement on the sunbaked playgrounds we usually frequent. Enormous rocks for climbing, glorious golden hills rising up just beyond the park’s borders, a conveniently located restroom, a functioning water fountain. Before the first child had reached the top of the slide, I was envisioning a regular weekly park day at this heretofore undiscovered (by me, at least) gem.
The kids ran around the playground for half an hour; Beanie spent a long time pushing Rilla on the swings. Then we meandered over to the creekbed, watched a squirrel, climbed a tree, and after a bit, I decided it was sunny enough on the trail beyond the park fence that we could risk a short walk. Too hot for rattlers on the path at that time of day, I reasoned. But Wonderboy was spooked by the memory of that other rattler, the big one we happened upon on a similar trail, and we turned back after a only a few minutes. Back to the swings, the rocks, the blissfully cool shade under the trees.
On the way to the water fountain, Huck complained of mulch in his shoes. I stripped them off: he’s happier barefoot. He raced up the short stretch of sidewalk between playground and fountain, following the others. I trailed behind, stepping over a few fallen leaves and scattered twigs. Drinks accomplished, we turned to head back to the playground. Huck was in front, still barefoot, and I registered that the stick he was about to jump over wasn’t a stick at all just as he did, in fact, jump over it. His chubby bare foot hit the ground about an inch from the slithering, diamonded, triangle-headed, rattle-having stick.
I screamed. Launched myself in front of Huck. It wasn’t a big rattler, and it was leaving the path in a hurry, heading for the aforementioned blissful shade under the trees. I backed the kids way up, looked around wildly for snake companions, because in my imagination they always come in packs—and then, yes, took a picture. I mean, I was already holding my camera, and it was clear the thing wanted to put some distance between itself and my pack of wild monkeys.
By this point the playground was filled with a group of day-camp kids who’d arrived for a picnic. I hustled my kids back toward the parking lot, stopping to alert the camp counselors to the presence of the snake. They put in a call to Animal Control and herded their charges to the cement-floored picnic area. The snake hung out under the swings—Rilla’s swing—for a bit and then changed its mind and hastened toward the tennis courts. A fire truck arrived. I had my kids back in the minivan by that point, but we hung around to watch the exciting capture. I explained the mechanism of the long pinch-handled snake-catching stick. The firemen returned to the truck and opened their bucket to display the furious, coiled, really not very large at all rattlesnake.
“I adore rattlers,” said Beanie.
The firemen raised their eyebrows. “Well, maybe don’t adore them,” one said.
“From a distance,” said another.
“Me don’t like racklenakes,” announced Huck.
“ME EITHER,” declared his big brother in the firmest of tones.
It’s Monday again. Another week has zoomed past. We’re all in a whirl here, the usual year-end activities (how is it that even when you don’t live by a school calendar, you live by a school calendar?) and a bundle of errands as our Jane prepares to fly the nest for the summer. At the end of the week she’s off to Texas for a big adventure: an internship at a software developer. We’re thrilled for her and of course wondering how we’ll survive without her. 🙂 But mostly thrilled. She’ll be staying with friends, a perfect arrangement that sets this mama’s mind at ease. My own parents put me on a plane to Germany at age fourteen to spend a summer with a family they’d never met—and they didn’t have the internet for keeping in touch with me. I marvel, now, at their cheerful confidence and hold it as a model for my own attitude about my kids’ adventures, which are bound to come faster and carry them ever farther in the years ahead.
In eighth grade, a year or two before my Germany adventure, I had to choose a poem to recite aloud in class. I knew immediately what it would be: the various verses of Bilbo’s “Road” song in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings—ending with the verse that gives me the same thrill up my spine today that it did when I was twelve:
The road goes ever on and on,
down from the door where it began;
now far ahead the road has gone,
and I must follow if I can,
pursuing it with eager feet,
until it joins some larger way
where many paths and errands meet—
and whither then? I cannot say.
(Happy sigh.)
The rest of us will be homebodies this summer, more or less (and there’s a happy sigh in that, too). I imagine we’ll spend a lot of time at the Y, swimming and whatnot. I love the YMCA because my older kids can swim, my little ones can play in the playroom, and I can (gasp) go sit alone on an exercise bike—an activity I enjoy not because of the exercise (ugh) but because it means twenty uninterrupted minutes of quiet listening time. To an audiobook, a lecture, the News from Lake Wobegon. We let our membership lapse last summer, but this year we’re back and I’m thrilled.
Later this month I’ll venture to Anaheim for ALA—just an overnight trip for me, but it’s bound to be a fun one. And then fast on the heels of that convention will come Comic-Con. Plans are already buzzing for that one, and I’m realizing I have a lot of pre-con reading to do…
Speaking of reading, I’m still savoring The Scent of Water in small morsels at a time—and devouring, in enormous, greedy bites, an advance copy of the new Quinn Cummings book, The Year of Learning Dangerously, which is as wickedly funny as all of Quinn’s writing, and is about one of my pet subjects, and in which I have a cameo—but that last reason has little to do with my immense enjoyment of this book. You could change “Melissa” to “Melanie” and I’d be just as riveted. I haven’t even gotten to the bit about my group, is what I’m saying. By page three, I’d snickered two or three times and laughed out loud, an honest-to-goodness laugh, once—the first of many audible guffaws that made Scott look up from his book with a quizzical “Yes?” So then I read the funny bit to him, and he laughs out loud too, and then the children want to know what the heck is so funny. When I read Quinn’s first book, Notes from the Underwire, her voice was so wry and smart and laugh-inducing that it sent me to her blog in search of more. Her writing made me want to know her in person, and luckily she was in the middle of researching Learning Dangerously and my Shakespeare Club was gearing up for its big spring performance, and it helped that we happened to have a mutual friend in the awesome Karen Edmisten. Serendipity. Usually it transpires that I make friends with a writer via writerly circles and then hunt up all that person’s books. This time it was the other way around—her writing made me want to be her friend. Because the internet is magic, I got my wish.
Which made it extra fun when “the white-cliffs-of-Albion” showed up in our Just So Stories pick today—“
Let’s see, we also spent some time with this book: 
