2021

Worst year ever. That is all.

Holiday Time

It's been a pretty chill December so far. Laurel and I read a Christmas Carol and finished her unit on the Industrial Revolution (2 thumbs down to child labor and debtor's prison, says Laurel). We watched the Muppet version, and I wanted to watch some other ones, but my kids are so freaked out about ghosts! They even considered the Muppet version to be too scary. We discussed the book in our Aunt Niece Book Club, which meets once a month on zoom, and one of the highlights of the month. Thank you so much to my aunts for showing up every month for it, since like April 2020. 

We have been doing lots of hiking and playing outside with our homeschool friends. I love the fact that we can be outside during the day when the sun is out, especially on these extremely short days. 

We are reading Heartwood Hotel for Brave Writer. So far, it's a really sweet novel and Max is totally into it. Marko stole my kindle and read the whole thing in one sitting, which he is not supposed to do. It's supposed to be a read aloud, where you discuss it along the way and do things like Copywork and little writing projects based on what you just read. Oh well. He is listening along again as I read it aloud to Max at breakfast time.

Marko is hyper focused on Minecraft. He starts a video call almost every day and various friends join in. Some of the play gets a little on the murderous side (!) but it seems to be a good way for the kids to practice working out conflict. He has a google doc where he logs all of his research on ways to build things and other cheats, which he shares with the other kids. I like that they all look forward to connecting at the end of the day and it kind of reminds me of daily happy hours with friends when we were in our twenties.

Laurel is working on a gingerbread house. The first iteration experienced a catastrophic collapse. She enlisted M's help on a second one, and they are busily measuring angles and cutting out a new template. On Brave Writer this month, the focus was on project time and it's so cool to witness Laurel's project unfolding. In the beginning it was all recipe research, and whimsical sketches. Actually tackling the baking and assembly herself was pretty stress inducing, but she talked herself off a few emotional ledges. There are crumbs everywhere, royal icing everywhere, sketches and crumpled cardboard, and baking pans and wet rags. It's a hot mess down there. 

We have some shopping to finish up and will be smoking a turkey later this week to take to my parents' house. My brother and Laurel are working on a "Christmas Light Bingo" driving tour that we will all do sometime on Christmas Eve. 

I love how relaxed our schedule is these days. I don't miss being busy at all.

Max is 6!

 He's still as cuddly as ever, so don't worry. I'm not sure he'll outgrow that. I think for his whole life he's going to be one of those people who will give you a hug when you need one.

He seems to have taught himself to read, the decoding part anyway. He still loves being read to, and we are continuing our daily routine of "Max reads 5 books" which means he hears books from each of us and reads to one of us each day. We bought him the new Cat Kid Comic Club for his birthday and also got him a gift card to the bookstore, which he can't wait to use. I'm not sure about his spelling and handwriting. He can write notes and add things to our to do list, but he really balks any sort of writing assignment. I didn't even submit paperwork on him because school is not compulsory until the school year after they turn 6. 

He is definitely the least schooled of any of the kids, so it's kind of interesting to see what skills and learning practices he develops on his own. He's very intuitive about numbers and computation, and works out a lot of problems in his head. He works on Khan Academy on his own sometimes. He is an enthusiastic participant in Poetry Teatime.... reading and sometimes even writing a poem, to share with everyone. He enjoyed his homeschool co-op classes in the fall, and was able to participate appropriately whether they were on zoom or in person.  I don't have any solid assessment data points to know that he is 'on the right track' but I also feel super confident that he's doing fine. Maybe that is just part of the homeschool journey, you start to trust your intuition more?

He loves playing Minecraft with the older kids, pretty much any board game with Marko, riding his bike, hiking and running around in the woods with friends, and cooking. 

His bedtime routine is to take a melatonin gummy, brush his teeth, and listen to a story or snuggle in his bed with either M or me. He's almost always awake by 6:30, and eats a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast every day. He has not lost any teeth yet. 

I am such a different kind of parent to him at 6, than I was to Laurel when she was 6. I ponder this a lot, but I wonder how it will turn out in the end.

November is Almost Over (already??!!)

I'm in a cycle of observing and listening to the kids more. I've been reconsidering my role as teacher in the house, and wondering what happens if I, basically, don't teach. This might sound crazy because if I am not going to teach the kids then WHO is going to teach the kids? I recently came across the acronym W.A.I.T. that stands for Why am I teaching? Or sometimes Why am I talking? I definitely talk too much in classes/scout meetings/homeschool situations, especially if I'm nervous that kids are getting rowdy or are veering off the path of understanding. More talking on my part, of course, doesn't really correct anyone's behavior, and usually I'm saved by the proverbial bell. I don't have any solid conclusions, I've just been trying to think my thoughts instead of saying them out loud to the kids constantly, and asking them more questions. 

Max has been working on a little 3x5 index card that has the days of the week, the word "dinner" and a meal for each day. He started making this spontaneously during a dinnertime conversation in which we discussed our upcoming schedule and meals we might cook. He mostly writes in capital letters. He can read back what he writes. The letter S always seems to confound him for a moment. 

Marko set a goal to improve his writing in November, but he continued to protest about pretty much any writing practice I offered up to him. He doesn't have anything very nice to add to his portfolio, but we'll stick it in there anyway. 

Laurel wanted to focus on the Middle Ages as a topic to study. She enthusiastically dug into this activity book we got last year from my aunt. There were six models to build (things like a castle that showed a cut-away so you can see how the rooms were arranged). The book also contained some basic information about life in Europe in the Middle Ages. We found a website called the Medievalist, which had tons and tons of great articles, a whole podcast series, and links to youtube videos. It is not for children, so has the downside of being pretty technical and academic. However, there is something very compelling about listening to scholars talk about their passion....whether it is how coconut shells were actually widely used in Europe or how the peasant class felt about the Hundred Years' Wars. She also read a few of the Canterbury Tales, with the help of SparkNotes, which is like the CliffsNotes that I remember from my school days, but better. There are nice little charts that show the characters and annotated text. The internet is an amazing thing these days. So much garbage. So much amazing content.

We wrote some letters to friends and family. Marko met with his aunts about the book they are publishing together. Laurel and I had a book club with these same aunts, where we all discussed Raina Telgemeier graphic novels. 

The Brave Writer One Thing topic was Service, and we picked an organization that collects gifts for kids (at the urging of my mom, who organized huge gift collections every holiday season when I was a kid). We didn't really talk much more about service, but we are helping a loved one navigate a really difficult situation, and definitely building our empathy muscles that way. 

Laurel and I toured the Chatham University arboretum with our Girl Scout troop. We went to the zoo with another homeschooling family and had a blast. We finally made it to the library to swap out our books again. My mother taught them all about bones. We finished our homeschool co-op classes, and Gymkhana classes, and took a break from horse lessons, and had some completely free days at home. 

Modge-podge All the Things

Last week, we went on a lantern walk with some homeschool friends. To prepare, we decorated some plastic containers from our recycling bin with colored paper and leaves, and then modge-podged the heck out of them. Our headlamps fit perfectly inside the lanterns and by screwing the lids on, the headbands even made a nice handle. The weather was really lovely that night, clear with a sliver of a moon and many visible stars, even in a city park. On the walk home through the park, it was only about 6:30, but pitch black in the woods. Walking in the dark can be unnerving, but the cheerful colored lights from the lanterns made it feel much less scary. Max observed that his feet work differently in the dark. We were hoping to hear an owl, but only saw deer. We liked the whole experience so much we went on another lantern walk the following night, this time with our next door neighbors, and all week we lit the lanterns in our living room each night when the sun goes down...which is super early this time of year! 

I have a habit of collecting leaves when I go walking and now the kids pick up leaves they think I will like. Today we walked to the bookstore to pick up Laurel's order and she and M got a whole bunch of gingko leaves for me. I modge-podged those ones onto another plastic container for another lantern, as well as onto the cover of my journal. Modge-podge all the things! Humans have a need for creative outlets, and it doesn't have to be high art to meet this need. It's also interesting to see the kids observe the leaves that are always lying around in a pile until they get too dry and crumbly to keep. So many different varieties of maples and oaks. Even leaves from the same tree are sometimes different sizes, or even shapes. I'm looking at you, sassafras trees. The color of the maple leaves this year is particularly interesting, I think due to the fluctuation in temperature this past month. They are more variegated that I can remember from past years, with lots of vein-y yellow streaks in between the red. Absolutely beautiful. (But not good for modge-podging because they get dry very fast.)

This month, we are supposed to be studying the Middle Ages, and playing math games and doing service projects, but there's been a flurry of medical appointments and vaccination appointments and lots of opportunities to play with friends outside and also playing Minecraft with friends on a daily google meet playdates, so at this halfway point of the month I really need to stop and consider if we need a reboot of our academics, or if maybe lots of learning is occurring despite our lack of attention to the plan. 

Here are some things that I would classify as learning but may or may not have been part of the plan...

Max built a simple circuit with M.

Marko wrote 8 things about himself in response to a Brave Writer writing prompt, spontaneously and without me nagging him about it.

Laurel cantered on a horse! She's learning lots of slowing down and speeding up and postures. She also got to go on a trail ride this week which was pretty much her birthday dream come true.

Our Girl Scout troop visited the arboretum at Chatham University and identified about 30 of their trees. 

Marko and M ground some rye berries into flour, with the hand mill. 

We wrote letters to friends and family. 

We are all learning the melody of Little Drummer Boy on various musical instruments we have laying around the house.
The kids learned lots of things about bone health and healing from my mom, who prepared a bunch of wonderful anatomy lessons for them. 

We are learning to throw boomerangs. 

We read the first few paragraphs of the Canterbury Tales at poetry teatime....in Middle English! 

Marko and his aunts had a meeting on zoom about a book they are writing together.

Laurel and her aunts had a zoom book club meeting on Raina Telgemeier. 

We wax dipped leaves with some homeschool friends. 

Laurel dyed a piece of clothing using natural walnut dye. 

We made some of the models in this kit of medieval history we got several years ago. 

We watched a video where modern day kids ate medieval food and reviewed it. Nobody liked the rabbit. 

They all learned lots of Minecraft skills by playing with other kids, watching youtube videos, and finding books at the library.

We are listening to a ton of Greeking Out podcasts.

We raked some leaves at my brother's house and Max read one of my favorite childhood books to his cousin Oscar. 

Sick Day

It's bound to happen occasionally...somebody is sick and you have to cancel plans. Nobody here is very sick, but there are enough symptoms to stay home. I appreciate participating in a community where people take this seriously. This is a major bummer because Thursdays are the one day we have in person classes for everybody and we meet at a lovely park outside of the city and then go for a horse riding lesson after. It's been a wonderful routine this fall. M is out of town on a business trip right now, but normally he would be baking pizza from scratch so that it is ready when we get home from our day out. 

I'm taking the opportunity to do some fall deep cleaning around the house, and letting the kids relax and read and watch tv and play video games. We have finished a lot of our goals for the month...wrapping up the Dart and Arrow guides and choosing our next novels. Laurel is working her way through the history textbooks...currently responding with a fair amount of outrage at the child labor practices of the Industrial Revolution. Max is reading so fluently! We have a habit of five books a day for him. He listens to a story, article or poem from each member of the family and then chooses one person to read out loud to. Once in a while I pull out my Wilson Reading System cards to do a little phonics/spelling, but he is mostly just picking it up naturally. Sometimes I despair over Marko's reluctance to write anything by hand, but he is working on an extensive Google Doc that he shared with his Minecraft buddies, so when push comes to shove, he actually can produce something. 

I've been listening to a lot of Sue Patterson podcasts and thinking about how experts can and should be used in learning...and whether or not an elementary teacher, or even a secondary teacher in a school would fall into this category. I certainly have known lots of teachers who were experts in pedagogy, because that's the majority of what they teach to early childhood or elementary teachers. Back before NCLB, teachers had more freedom to do units on topics of their choosing and that's where you would see their expert knowledge or interest. Secondary teachers were more likely to have a passionate interest in a subject. I will never forget Mr. Brown and his collection of bones. I only had him for homeroom, but I learned so much about the skeletons of local woodland creatures in those 15 minutes. Not that he was teaching a lesson, he was just boiling and assembling skeletons and we would ask questions because holy-crap-teachers-were-weird-in-the-90s. He had a definite passion for anthropology. But on the other end, I was hired to be a math teacher purely because I was the most qualified candidate, having taken Calculus in community college 10 years earlier. I just had to take a test and BAM I was certified. So in this century, you never know what sort of "expert" your kid's teachers are, and unschoolers love to point that out. 

I hesitate to climb aboard that train, though because there are a lot of Americans running around saying they did their research and basically ignoring or disputing what actual professional and life-long researchers are putting out there. Twitter is a place where I often see people very convincingly write about a topic but sometimes it turns out they are missing some important nuances. Still it gets shared 1.1million times and becomes part of the American canon.

Somewhere there are facts, right?

Confront Your Fears

We went to Titusville over the weekend to volunteer at the Oil Creek 100. I thought it would be a really good thing for us to 1) see some friends we haven't seen in a while and 2) get back to an ultra to clear the bad mojo from our last experience. I'm not sure when/if M will run one of these events again, and I didn't want Western States to be our last experience at an ultra as a family.

Back in 2015 (which now feels like a million years ago), OC was the first hundred that M attempted. I have really fond memories of that weekend. The weather was gorgeous, my parents watched Laurel and Marko (I was pregnant with Max) and I was free to wander (waddle) around and enjoy the scenery, weather and general good vibes of this race. Some of our friends came up to to keep me company and cheer for M. This is when I first met Paul and Jeff, who came to pace M. Being new to ultras, I was blown away by the efforts of the volunteers, who were cooking up a storm and keeping up a festive vibe. The forest was a magical, technicolor rainbow. M ran well. We slept blissfully in the back of our 4Runner in the parking lot. 

M was thrilled to get his first belt buckle. For some people that might have satisfied their urge...you want to see if you can do something hard, so you do it, and then that's it. But M genuinely enjoyed the experience, and went on to run a lot of races over the next few years. Like, a LOT. I think he did ten hundreds in about 3 years, plus many more 50K/100K/50mi races. Ultra/trail running became a part of our family culture. I started a weekly running club for kids in our local park. Evening walks/runs with our next door neighbors helped the kids sleep better. Our travel became very oriented towards finding trails to explore or races to run. We developed real friendships with M's running buddies. The seasonal rhythm of our years were marked by certain events. Always Hyner in the spring. Oil Creek in the fall. Volunteering at an aid station at the Rachel Carson in June. The pandemic pretty much killed races for a year, but they were starting up again and I think all of us were happy about that.

The weather was terrible at OC this year.  Pretty much the complete opposite of Western States....cold, rainy, epic mud. We weren't too bothered by the conditions, as we had a cozy tent to sleep in and were volunteering in the aid station, under cover. It was definitely a slogfest for the runners, though. It was great to see some friends, and I also had a chance to talk in person to a lot of people who messaged me on Facebook over the summer.  It's really different to go to a race when you aren't waiting for a runner. When the boys got tired, I just took them to the tent and put them to bed. So many people dropped out of the race, that there wasn't a lot to do at our aid station. But it definitely still had that ultra vibe. People huddled around the fire all night, the kids made signs, somebody had a cow bell. 

I was worried that a runner would get hurt or sick, and how that would feel if the kids saw it. I was worried we would feel like we didn't have a place there anymore. But that wasn't how it was at all. It just felt like we were home. 

Got the car back....again

Shortly after returning from Reno the second time, the transmission in our Yukon broke. For reasons related to an internet misunderstanding over the location of a horse riding lesson, I was with the kids way out in the country at the time and after failing to get AAA to send a tow truck, and also failing at getting an Uber to drive us to Pittsburgh (basically expected, as I only have one review and it's from Reno), I limped the car into a dealership in the town of Washington, PA. 

There is a classic children's book called That's Good! That's Bad! (Rabbit hole alert, I got a kick out of the reviews on Good Reads, people really have strong negative opinions of this book! But I remember my students loving it.) The story shows a ridiculous series of events, many of which seem bad on the surface, but then turn out to be good, and vice versa. 

I find this to be extremely relatable.

Anyway, I rolled in there just before they closed for the day and at the exact moment I was describing my transmission woes to the service tech, another customer came in to return the keys to the dealer loaner car. My children were being extremely well behaved while simultaneously looking a bit weary, which made them all the more charming. Before I knew it, we were back on the road back to Pittsburgh in a brand new Buick. (That's Good) M had some homemade pizza and a cold beer waiting for me when I got home. (Also Good)

It took 3 weeks for them to get the transmission in (That's Bad), but it was covered by the warranty (That's Freaking Fantastic, actually). And now we are left to wonder if we somehow toasted the transmission by towing, although it is well within the weight parameters and we never experienced any problems while actually towing. The mechanics said sometimes they just fail at this mileage and there is some sort of advisory issued by GMC on this particular transmission. We could sell it while it's in good shape and get a truck, but I would definitely miss the 8 seats, and the fact the Yukon fits in our garage. To tow, or not to tow, that is the question. 

I try to make good decisions and exercise reasonable caution. But life happens and something will happen. It might be bad, but also good. Or it might be good, but also bad. 

Refining It

I am enjoying this third year of homeschool since I feel like we have a good general framework and I can focus on refining habits and routines to make it work better for us. 

"Closing out" a month of homeschool, for us, means finishing filling out a reading log and a checklist of subjects covered, choosing work to save for the portfolio, adding photos to a digital album, and shredding all of the work we are done with and don't want to save. (Some of my children find it very satisfying to shred their work.) This has made compiling portfolios at the end of year a breeze. I look at the things we planned to cover but didn't, and decide if they should be bumped ahead to some future time or abandoned altogether. Over the past two and a half years I have drastically reduced my expectations for the quantity of work I plan for the children to do, but I still sometimes over plan. Writing the intended plans on paper has been very useful for keeping to reasonable amounts of work. Quality over quantity every time. If I am running out of space on my planning calendar, I know I'm planning too much. I am actually on my last sheet of blank monthly calendars, so I need to decide if I want to stick with the wall version, or buy a book with monthly spreads. The wall calendar is nice to have posted when we are home, but it's too bulky to take in the camper. 

A lot of our textbooks are digital at this point and I struggle with the amount of screen time this requires, although I love that I have access to literally everything on my phone through the Google Classroom app, and never have to print stuff out. The downside is that whenever you open a computer or iPad, the temptation is strong to check email, chat with grandparents, mess around with the Google Doodle....it's a real struggle for ALL of us. A few months ago we turned off pretty much all the filters, because they blocked out a lot of useful content, and I found myself spending half the day fiddling with settings. Now there is more work in paying attention to what the kids are doing on the computers, but this is time well spent in my opinion. 

I continue to love, love, love Brave Writer. There is a companion website to the products called Brave Learner and it is basically professional development for people homeschooling kids in their care. Last month the topic of video games really made me reconsider some of my long-held beliefs. I also like that, through using Brave Writer, I have come to understand home education/homeschooling as something the whole family participates in and not something I am doing to the kids. One thing that often floats into my mind is how different a teacher I would be with this current mindset, and also wondering how much of the pleasure of education is incompatible with the mechanics of school.

Is Homeschooling a Lot of Work?

This question comes up a lot. It doesn't really feel like it at the moment. It actually feels like the lazy way out sometimes. Today is really rainy and gray. Everybody slept in and is in a little bit of a funk. But so what? Eat a leisurely breakfast and get started when you are ready. Instead of getting far behind when we need a slower day, we have it built in so you always feel like you have a little wiggle room if something goes wrong. Believe me, this approach saved our sanity this summer when everything was going terribly wrong. It is the polar opposite of our pre-pandemic life. I was always yelling at someone to hurry up and stuffing kids into car seats while cursing the constant missing shoe.

Marko has been working on a science unit about plant and animal life cycles, even dipping into hereditary traits a little bit. He's growing some plants from seeds and making observations. Laurel is working through some textbooks on various philosophical time periods. Her thoughts on the Enlightenment are hilarious. 

This month, we've been going to actual in-person classes! The boys started gymnastics in August, and we found a place for Laurel to take horse riding lessons. Laurel and I have Girl Scouts a few times a month. We attend a few virtual classes with our homeschool co-op one day a week and in person classes that take place in a park one day a week. I have been really impressed with the classes, which are all taught by parent volunteers. Marko learned how to make cordage, which is actually very useful to me personally, as I love to make things out of the weeds I chop down in my yard. Laurel is studying American artists. The classes provide a lot of launching points for further study or exploration. As a new family member, I do jobs like cleaning up after, or assisting the teachers. 

We've also been reading Shakespeare and memorizing a few lines. We were able to see a performance of Hamlet that featured an all-female cast. I get all the Shakespeare ideas from Brave Writer on the One Thing page. This is a set of curated activities for lots of different age levels that focuses on one topic. We've also done a month on Sand and a month on Simple Machines. Zero planning on my part, and the kids all seem to get something out of it. Next month is Sports, which will be interesting, as we are not involved in the playing or watching of many popular sports. 

Khan Academy continues to be the most popular math choice for the two older kids. Max plays around on this old play cash register that has a calculator. I don't pay too much attention to the math, since Khan sends weekly reports that show how many minutes they used the site, as well as content that they have mastered. We have two other workbooks they can use if there is no internet, or if they need additional problem sets. 

Things I am going to try and focus on more next month include spelling and grammar for Laurel and Marko, as well as making sure we touch on art, music, anatomy, physiology, civics, fire safety and foreign language....those subjects often seem to get bumped even if I do have something planned. Laurel has specifically requested more 1:1 time with me for her studies, as well as movement breaks throughout the day.

Closing Out the Summer

M and I managed to fly to Reno and drive our car and camper back with good weather and no craziness. It was so uneventful I don't even have much to write about. We were able to stop in Truckee to say hello to some folks at the RV park, and to get one last Truckee Tracks ice cream cone at Little Truckee Creamery, and bought way too many books at Word After Word. The skies were even pretty clear up there, although everything is crispy dry. The smoke was heavy all through the Great Basin, but once we got over the Wasatch it cleared up a lot. We hit a little rain in Wyoming and a little wind in South Dakota, but for the most part it was easy driving and the Yukon handled the Winnebago really well. 

Now that we have our car and camper back, it feels like the summer is officially over. There were some seriously high highs and low lows in this latest chapter. We had some amazing adventures on our road trip and were blessed by so much kindness from family, friends and strangers. 

Fall is coming and some Kidney news

I just logged off the orientation for the homeschool co-op we just joined. I did not plan to join a co-op because I thought we would be traveling to amazing places all fall and winter (I've had my heart set on returning to St. Augustine for years). But after the craziness of this summer, we all thought it might be good to hit pause on the travel-schooling. When I submitted my application to the co-op, M was still on dialysis and even a weekend away seemed impossible. I am happy to report that his kidneys are doing great. He will have a lot of monitoring over the next few months to make sure he's fully recovered, but as for right now, dialysis is a thing of the past and he's free to put salt on his food again (thank goodness). He can even do some light exercising again (also thank goodness for that). Next up is to wean off all the prescription medications he was put on during his hospitalization. 

An Odyssey

Taking the kids to a play has been on my list for a long time, but the pandemic put a damper on this for the last year and a half. Last week, I saw an ad for a production of the Odyssey that was being performed outside. My kids are all very familiar with the story, so I decided to take a chance and bought tickets for all of us to go. It rained all week here, but the skies cleared on the afternoon of the play. We took a picnic dinner to the park and watched a beautiful sunset right before the play started. This version of the Odyssey was told from the perspective of the female characters, and Odysseus was not really portrayed as the hero he usually is. They performed on an ice skating rink and the audience sat on bleachers for a slightly elevated view. There was no intermission and it was almost two hours long, with the final scene involving the entire cast and audience leaving the rink and hiking up a hill to see Odysseus reunite with Penelope. It was amazing! The kids followed every word closely, leaning forward in their seats and laughing and clapping along with the audience. All three kids know the stories from the Iliad and Odyssey pretty well, as well as Greek Mythology in general, so they were well positioned to understand an alternative perspective on the story. I didn't really know anything about the company, Quantum Theatre, but they are known for their progressive story-telling and using unusual spaces for performances. 

To prepare for the play, we read the playbill, which was available as a digital copy before the performance. We looked at the photos of the cast and the characters they were playing, read some reviews of the play and discussed appropriate theater behavior. We did our best to round up some slightly fancier-than-usual clothes, and fixed our hair (helped tremendously by fresh haircuts from Julie). 

In terms of Covid safety, they did say that all cast members were all vaccinated and that unvaccinated people should wear masks. The seats were movable and we were encouraged to "pod" up our seats by moving them closer together and leaving space between parties. The whole thing was outside. 

I could not have asked for better circumstances for a first theater experience, and I'm truly looking forward to going again. 

And So We Walk

Our summer travel itinerary is usually defined by trail races, or training for trail races. Necessary features of a campground for us were always more about the proximity to a minimum of a few thousand acres of state forest than any type of amenity like hookups or cable! Running is life, must find trails. I rolled my eyes sometimes when M would nix a place I thought looked cool because it only had 10 miles of trail. But for the most part, this parameter took us to really beautiful places that had good hiking, fishing, wildlife viewing and less crowded places to camp. On our last road trip we opted to stay 25-50 miles off the freeway and even though this added slightly to the travel time, I would do it again. 

With the race schedule cleared for the foreseeable future, and also the lack of either a travel trailer or vehicle (ours are still parked in Nevada), we have taken to exploring surrounding neighborhoods on foot. Most evenings you can find us walking in the cemetery or up to Squirrel Hill for some Italian ice. A few months ago we bought the kids pedometer watches and they love to see how many steps they can get.

Solo Time With the Kiddos

Like most people, we spent a lot of time together over the past year or two. Some of that was by design, but we got a little more than we bargained for with the pandemic. I dropped Max and Laurel off at my parents' house yesterday and I think it was the first time Max and Marko had been apart in a really long time. They gave each other big hugs and a secret handshake, which I thought was pretty adorable. The reason I dropped those two off was so M and I could hang out with Marko, doing the second of three "solo" nights with the kids. M is cleared for light physical activity and italian ice is renal friendly, so we went for a walk to get some dessert. We also visited the used bookstore and the game shop. The people at the game shop taught Marko and M how to play a new game. We bought Wingspan to try. We played a lot of cards on our road trip, but didn't have any strategic board games with us. When we got back here, we realized with everybody being able to read and do basic math now, we had outgrown a lot of our board games. Luckily (or perhaps dangerously for our budget), we are within walking distance to a very cool game store.

We did a "soft opening" for homeschool this week. We are reading the Dart and Arrow books for this month but only discussing the Juicy Questions. Marko and Laurel started working on the next math course on Khan Academy. I downloaded their social studies and science textbooks and they started reading them and doing a few of the worksheets that come in the teachers guide. We are using the Core Knowledge Series and the entire curriculum is free to download, although we don't really follow it that closely. We are swimming, biking and hiking for exercise. We are doing the activities from Brave Learner's "One Thing," and the theme is simple machines. And of course, we are doing poetry teatime. 

Even if we weren't all recovering from the trauma of M's injury and our subsequent separation and sudden end to our road trip, I would still probably want to ease into homeschool. However, it is a particularly useful approach right now because we are taking a lot of time to rest and relax, cry, and talk about what happened. Alongside that very necessary process, we are slowly adding back in things that we truly enjoy doing for school and hobbies and life. 

I have to constantly remind myself to not rush, to keep the margins around activities empty, to avoid worrying that we aren't doing enough. It can be very hard for me to not compare myself to my friends and their kids, many of whom are doing really cool things with their careers or hobbies, have nicer houses or things, or are planning awesome adventures. JOMO over FOMO (Joy instead of Fear of Missing Out). It is possible to celebrate other people's choices and be really happy for them, without needing to keep up. It sounds a little ridiculous that I struggle with this, because this blog is a testament to all of the awesome in my own life. But for every single thing that I have chosen, I had to give up pursing something else. There are only so many hours in a week, your money only goes so far, your mind can only handle so many inputs. 

Homeschool for the Next Year

I'm taking a break from thinking about renal failure because, you know, life goes on and one must continue to raise children, figure out school, track down the checks your city's tax collector never cashed and mow your grass. Especially in Pittsburgh, in July. The weeds are out of control!

Homeschooling is something we do because our kids asked us to do it, and we are able to accommodate them right now. Prior to Western States last month, we had plans to continue to travel a lot and were booking places all over Pennsylvania and West Virginia for the fall, and Florida for the winter. Visiting state parks, doing junior ranger programs and checking out rocks and lizards and birds was definitely a big part of our homeschool curriculum during the last 2 years. I didn't have to do a ton of planning...it's pretty much show up and learn together. I also appreciate the necessary minimalism that camper life requires. I tend to plan too much content, and this can put pressure on the kids, as well as just cause me to have a lot of on-going and unfinished projects laying around. However, what I have learned about setting parameters for homeschool while traveling, can also be applied at home. 

I'm currently working through the Brave Writer intuitive planning workbook, which is helping me to identify the unique strengths and needs of each kid. With a 6 year span between oldest and youngest, I have always been able to see the different academic skill levels they have, but now I'm thinking more about learning preferences and the little things that can derail each kid. Surprise! (not really) Our kids are really different from each other. One likes to have a very detailed list of everything that needs to be done and will tackle that first thing in the morning. Another child is completely overwhelmed by a long list and just wants the next thing on the list. Show the whole list, and it becomes overwhelming.  I'm also trying to identify the work environments that help each child be most efficient. Listening to music vs. quiet. Different types of seating. Time of day. I'd really like to get out of the mentality of doing everything as a "pack." 

On everyone's list was to add some in-person activities to meet new people. The local homeschool co-op is  still doing virtual classes one day a week and then a half day of outside activities. I just started the process to join and the kids are excited about the proposed classes. The boys also want to stay in gymnastics and Laurel wants to keep Girl Scouts and horse-riding. 

Poetry teatime has been a universally popular weekly event for us and will take place on Tuesday afternoons. This is hands-down my favorite homeschool ritual.

M is going to continue with the synthesizer and music stuff he has been doing with the kids. He is also the best one for picking out games and playing them with the kids and teaching them to bake and cook. For years, he has been reading aloud to the kids at bedtime and I think one of my favorite things about his style is that he picks completely different books than what I would choose. Running With Sherman by Christopher McDougall and Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck were two books he read on our cross country trip that we all really loved. 

I'm "X-ing" off Sundays as my day of rest. I love this habit! It really helps me to have a specific time of the week to do non-Mom or non-homeschooling things. I will read frivolously, nap excessively, paint without a lesson plan and sit on my porch and go on bike rides or hikes with my friends. The kids also like to have a day free of chores and school. 

Also on the list of priorities for fall is healing and reconnecting with each other after a traumatic summer. I anticipate that with time, I will write more about this process. Right now, it's still unfolding, and very raw.

The Lows Are Low

There was a small plane crash in Truckee yesterday, very close to the playground where we hung out at a lot. If I were still there, it would definitely have felt like another apocalyptic sign, like when a brush fire ignited on the mountain next to Boomtown a few days before I was set to move the camper there. 

But from where I'm sitting this morning...watching Shadow chase a fly around the dining room while I sip a cup of tea...everything feels sort of normal and boring. Has it really only been a month since the race? We would have been arriving home this week anyway. The 2,500 miles of country we were supposed to cross slowly, stopping at the vacuum cleaner museum in Idaho and looking for wild horses in North Dakota, instead passed underneath us in hours, as we flew back home in separate groups. 

M is at a very boring wait-and-see part of his recovery. We can make no plans for the future, because there are several very different paths in front of us. We just have to do the laundry and take the kids to the dentist and figure out how to adapt to these circumstances. Sometimes it feels fine, like we have a handle on everything and an appropriately cheerful outlook. M ordered button down shirts to accommodate his port. I found sodium free seasoning at the grocery store. The kids are digging our new cable tv subscription. So many channels! Shadow loves being back at the house. IT'S FINE!

We have a saying in our family that all feelings are acceptable but some actions must be controlled. I forget where I picked up this phrase, but we usually apply it to kicking your brother when he steals the Lego you were saving for your creation. I'm definitely harboring some resistance to this new reality. I hate it, actually. It's ok to feel that way. I still have to do the laundry.

Let Me Catch You Up....

Well.

Let me catch you up....

We were having a fabulous time in Truckee, getting excited for the race, and planning our route for the way back. We managed to find a reservation at the KOA in Salt Lake City for the July 4th weekend, which we knew the kids would love (swimming pool!) and had a lot of neat roadside attractions and state and national parks to check out on the northerly route home. We had plans to drive out of Truckee on June 30. 

Race day happened, we had a really fun time, M managed to finish the race, but became life-threateningly ill with rhabdomyolysis in the days that followed. Many terrible things happened over the past three weeks, but many amazing things happened as well. Family and friends rallied around us and helped in so many ways. We are now back in Pittsburgh and M is starting dialysis here, we're figuring out how to feed him a renal diet, getting used to living in a house again (it's so big! so many rooms! the toilet doesn't have to be manually emptied!) and in the process of meeting a new medical care team. 

I'm not going to lie, this kind of sucks. There's an afterglow of relief when your loved one recovers from a near-death experience. You can really only think about the next hour, sometimes the next minute, in the critical care unit. Making it through that feels triumphant. We were filled with gratitude and rightly so. But when that part was over and the dust settled, we had to deal with the messiness of an unexpected illness in a faraway city. Right now, the people are in Pittsburgh, but the cat is in California and the camper and car are in Nevada! Our kids experienced a lot of trauma from the way things happened and our separation. We're all alive, and M is feeling better every day. But you can be grateful and excited and frustrated and sad and angry all at the same time.

If you read this blog, you know we love road trips and outdoor adventure. This particular trip was many years in the making. Lots of saving and dreaming. So many times in the weeks leading up to Western States, we looked at each other and said, "This is it. We did it. Everything we said we wanted, we have and it's amazing." And it was, and nothing crappy that happened since then can erase the memories we made over the past few months. 

Stay tuned for more stories of the adventures that happened along the way. And I am so very grateful to everyone who reached out to us during a very dark hour. Thank you. 

Sister Time

Although we talk on the phone almost daily, I haven't seen my sister in 3 years. I am so happy that we were able to coordinate and meet up here in Truckee. 

Truckee is the best. It's exactly the right town for us to ease out of the pandemic and run races and camp and meet up with our besties. Also, it's very windy all the time and all activities are outside so the mask mandate is ending, but there's not too much to worry about with Covid. 

Things have been a little tumble down around here. We got our car back (yay!) and bought a new camper (wait, what?) and M is still figuring out his new job and we don't have any sort of structure around homeschooling. Amazing things continue to happen, though. The other day we went to down to a creek near our camp and Omar pulled out a little bag of equipment and taught the kids how to pan for gold! 

We tried to fish today but didn't catch anything.  I am looking forward to a session of our Auntie-Niece Book Club where we will actually be in the same room! Zoom is great, but being together is better. 

Homeschool - How is it going?

We're not doing too much formal homeschooling right now. Our lives have become very unstructured. We are basically just reading a lot and wandering around looking for places to swim or run or fish. 

Brave Writer has something called One Thing, which is basically a themed collection of resources. This month the theme is sand. There are articles, videos and activities to do, and you can post your thoughts or pictures of activities on a thread in the discussion board. I like that it's something all of us can do together and other than wrestling with internet, it's extremely low-effort on my part. We observed a lot of sand and sandy soils and sand dunes and dried up lake beds on our way here, so the kids made a lot of connections to the material right away. I failed to document this, as we hit our 180 required hours in April and haven't done much documenting since then. But it's also nice to disassociate learning from school sometimes. Humans are wired to learn, we just do it all the time, not always for credit or for a particular reason. 

The other day Max used some modeling sand to construct a relatively accurate model of the United States (although it was a mirror image). He placed two markers...one on Pittsburgh and one on Truckee. It's pretty impressive that a five year old could do that with such accuracy and I was relieved to know that he was paying attention to our travels beyond counting down the minutes until the next time he gets to play Nintendo Switch. However, I didn't even pull out my camera to take a photo of his rendering, so it'll be lost to the ether. We are never short on geography activities for our portfolios, but I am sketching out some ideas on how to document the next year and hoping to get some technical support from M. 

Truckee Life This Week

The past week has been a whirlwind of activities, or at least it felt like that...I'm not actually sure we did all that much. It just felt like a lot because we are not used to hanging out with other people. My friend Leah came to Truckee with her family for a week. They rented a cabin not too far from our campground and we spent lots of time hanging out, sharing meals, hiking, swimming at the lake, playing video games, and building puzzles. It was totally crazy, because there are even more kids than there were during our last cabin vacation two years ago....she had a baby in November, so now we each have 3 kids. Our previous two cabin meet-ups took place in Pennsylvania as they have family in Philadelphia. Those cabin trips were characterized by cool, gloomy weather, with some epic rainstorms and flooding. We spent a lot of time trying to light wet campfires. This time, the weather was very dry (no fires allowed here!), but varied widely in temperature. It was 90 degrees last week one day, and last night, it dipped to 35! It's so funny to me that we have our down coats and bathing suits out at the same time. They left today after we had one last playdate at the Truckee Regional Park. It is cool and partly cloudy with gusty wind, and her baby fell asleep in my arms while I was carrying him around the playground. I was surprised at how fast he warmed up to all of us and let him hold him. Her almost-four-year-old has grown so much since we were last together. He said so many hilarious things and was fun to play with. Her oldest is just a little older than Marko, and plays very well with both Marko and Laurel. My kids really wanted to learn how to play Dungeons and Dragons and while we were not able to get a full game going, he did help them with character development and understanding how it works. It is amazing to me that Leah and I have been friends for 17 years, that we have all these kids now, that our spouses are so similar and get along well and that we managed to pull off another transcontinental reunion, despite the pandemic. 

Last week, M took our Yukon in to the dealer in Reno to check the AC, which we realized wasn't working when we started driving in hot places. We also wanted to make sure the brakes were ok after all the steep grade towing. Due to a number of things we ended up not having our car back for 10 days! Luckily we had a rental and this did not put a dent in any of our plans, although the kids complained mightily about having to ride smushed together in the backseat. He is on his way to Reno now to get the car back. 

I was finally able to connect with our homeschool evaluator and mailed our portfolios off to her from the Truckee post office. We'll have a zoom meeting where she will interview the kids and then hopefully send off a positive report. Everyone wants to carry on with homeschooling for the next school year and I already have our books and materials picked out.

It feels very quiet all of a sudden without our friends around, but we're eagerly awaiting the arrival of our next visitors, my sister and her boyfriend!! They also rented a cabin nearby, and we look forward to lots of fishing, swimming and boating together. 

Life in 20 Foot Travel Trailer

Well, we have been in the rPod for a month straight now and people constantly have questions about how we make it work. First of all, we chose this camper for its size, because 3 years ago we had a Toyota 4Runner and this was pretty much the most it could tow. We have a larger vehicle now, but we continue to appreciate the small size because we can always find a campsite, we can pull into almost any gas station and maneuver easily around the pumps, and it's very easy to keep it cool or hot. I had my doubts about how we were going to keep food for a longer trip, but it turns out the 3 cubic foot refrigerator is pretty adequate, and we have gone at least a week between grocery shopping at times. I did have to take out the freezer compartment, so we don't have ice. 

The rPod (we have the 176) is 20 feet long on the exterior so we actually have closer to 16 feet of interior living space. On the one end is a set of double bunk beds and on the other is a dinette that converts to a bed, so there's basically just a little kitchenette and hallway that's about 6 feet long. We all fit around the dinette comfortably, and there is plenty of room for everyone to sleep, and the kitchen actually feels pretty adequate, although we are definitely limited to certain dishes. M did manage to bring along his sour dough starter, and not only keep it alive, but also make some sour dough English muffins, which were pretty darn good. 

When it is cold we either turn on the propane furnace, or if we have an electrical hookup, we plug in a tiny electric heater and stay very toasty. When it's hot, we either use the vent fan, or turn on AC and it is cool within minutes. Solar panels can keep our batteries charged up pretty indefinitely to run the fan, lights and water pump if we are off grid. The fresh water tank keeps us going for 3-4 days when boondocking. When we are parked at a place with hookups, we can use as much water as we want, because we can flush out the gray and black tanks anytime. We even have a tv! It's really a pretty great little trailer.

The only real downside is the complete and utter chaos that occurs when we need to get ready for bed and all the closets and storage nooks are opened up. Messes get big fast. We're all tripping over each other and shouting and cursing. But then it somehow gets picked back up and shoved away and then we are all tucked into our beds with the lights out, listening to M read Travels with Charley. Magical! 

We know that we are close to outgrowing this camper. We've been looking for a new one for a while, but the pandemic has made camping very popular and RVs very hard to get! If we can find one of the models we are looking for on this trip, we may try to get it. If we can't, we'll continue to happily use the RPod as long as we need it to do the things we want to. We have had the dream of a cross country road trip with our kids for years, before we even had kids actually. The dream was about seeing the places and going on the adventures together, not about the accommodations we would have on the way. And we are willing to take navy showers in a wet bath to make it happen. 

Truckee, CA

Memorial Day weekend was very exciting, with M having his Western States training run and all sorts of people coming into the area. Now Truckee is pretty empty again and we are settling into our campsite here, just outside of town. There is a bike path that goes from where we are staying right into the business district and the kids and I have used it to walk into town for ice cream, to go to playground and to the farmer's market. We've been doing lots of beach time at Donner Lake and fishing and hiking in whatever patch of woods we stumble upon when walking or driving around - which is basically any direction you go in. We tried out a few local restaurants for takeout. We met some of our neighbors at the campground, and Laurel likes to take the cat on a walk in the evening, which always attracts a little attention. M met some local runners and will hopefully be able to go on some group runs. 

The weather here is pretty great....cool at night and hot enough midday to want to dive right into icy snow-melt fed lakes. We are slathering ourselves with sunblock and wear hats and sunglasses everywhere we go because we are just not used to this sunshine! 

During the next few weeks, we are having a couple of long-awaited visits with friends and family and Laurel is going to horse camp. Other than that, we are just homeschooling and working, doing laundry and dishes, all the same-old-same-old but in a different spot. It's also a little simpler than at home. Dishes go fast because we only have 5. Laundry dries super quick outside due to the low humidity and I love that I can throw in ALL of the family laundry at once in several machines. I used to do laundry every day, but now it's only once or twice a week. Meals are easy to cook because we have two burners. Limits can be good. 

Loneliest Road

We had 5 days to make it through Nevada, and decided to follow Route 50, also known as the loneliest road. Many years ago, M and I took a car trip down historic Rt. 66 and we loved all the old motels and weird road side attractions. Route 50 isn't as kitschy, but still has some historic buildings. Mostly it is known for wide stretches between services. We filled up our gas, propane, and freshwater tanks before heading out. Our first stop was Great Basin National Park. Even though it was a weekend, the campground was pretty empty and we snagged a spot with a view of Wheeler Peak. The kids and I did some short hikes and they earned their junior ranger badges and M got a few good runs in. We did not find the 4,000 year old bristlecone pine! The conditions at the top of the mountain were a bit too extreme for us to do the 5 mile hike (25 degrees and snowing). 

Nevada was not what I pictured at all. I had been to the Las Vegas area many times and in 2019 we drove through on I80, to the north. However, it being spring, the scenery was really beautiful. Lots of wild flowers, aspen groves starting to open up pale green leaves on the mountains, snow-capped peaks in every direction. After leaving Great Basin N.P., we had a general plan to head towards some hot springs M had heard about from one of his friends. We ended up stopping at the Hickison Petroglyph Recreation Area which had free camping (BYO water, there are no services). It was a great spot, being only 1/2 mile down a bumpy gravel road. I hate taking the camper down long bumpy roads because things fall down in the cupboards and some of the screws shake loose. This area had some cool places to hike and view petroglyphs and camping area was also next to pretty much endless acres of BLM land. 

One morning, the kids and I walked a few miles down a trail and found a rock to sit on. After being very quiet and still for a few minutes, we started to spot lizards and birds doing all sorts of things. Two raptors on a cliff started screeching and swooping at a tree, which scattered a bunch of black birds. It was really cool to watch and also a novel experience to sit still and be quiet and also hear so little man-made noise around us. We are trying to practice mindfulness and being quiet more often so this was a perfect place.

We did end up finding the hot springs. We had to follow a very long, very bumpy road. There are a series of natural pools fed by the hot spring, but at one end, someone had placed a large livestock trough and piped the spring into it. You could swing the pipe out or into the pool depending on how hot you wanted the water. It was only about 65 or 70 degrees outside and the hot water felt amazing. The panoramic views and peace and quiet were an extra treat. 

Before we knew it, it was time to drive the rest of the way to Truckee, which is our temporary home-away-from-home for the next month. I'm glad we had some time to experiment with all our off-grid equipment. M was able to work from all the remote places we stayed thanks to our solar panels and mifi. 

I highly recommend route 50 in spring. Towing our trailer was not a problem with the grades and we topped off our gas tank at every opportunity as recommended. Definitely bring water and plan to conserve if you are camping.

We Made It!

We made a last minute decision to wash the car and camper at one of those big rig truck washes. You pull into an enormous bay and a team of people armed with power washers and brushes scrubs everything. We are all still looking pretty grubby, but the vehicles look nice from the outside. We're celebrating with takeout hamburgers and hot showers.

Part I of the road trip is complete. We had a great time camping in Ohio, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah and Nevada. 

Part II is parking in Truckee, CA until the end of June. M is doing the Western States training runs this weekend and he will run in the trail race next month. We'll be exploring the area, meeting up with some friends and family, finishing our homeschool paperwork for this year and launching our next school year. M just started a new job a few weeks ago so he'll be ramping up with that and, of course, running.

Part III will be getting back to Pittsburgh someway, somehow. We haven't made any plans yet, except a general intention of heading north to beat the heat. 

A Very Windy Birthday

We left Hanksville early in the day in order to arrive at our next campground in time for M to log on for some work meetings. There was a high wind advisory, which meant a lot of dust blowing around and difficulty driving high profile vehicles. It's times like these that we are happy we have weight distribution bars on our hitch, even though our trailer is small. We took the road back through Capitol Reef National Park, which is an absolutely gorgeous drive. On the way through, we stopped at the petroglyphs site, since M missed that when the kids and I went the other day. We drove two lane roads through Utah, stopping at a little grocery store, before heading up the hill to Palisade State Park. The campsites circle the lake, but it was so windy we couldn't even sit outside! The kids played at the playground for a while, but soon took shelter in the car, making themselves a video game lounge. I tried to eat a salad for lunch on the picnic table, but the leaves blew right out of my bowl! Later in the evening, the wind came to an abrupt stop, and the waves on the lake calmed down. I took a sunset walk on the loop around the lake and was delighted to receive some birthday calls from friends and family. 

Slot Canyon

M read about a slot canyon hike that was pretty accessible and we decided to all go up and try it. Little Horse Canyon is just outside the Goblin Valley State Park. From one parking area, there was a loop hike of about 6 miles. M planned to set out from one direction and we would go from the other, and turn around whenever we ran into him. It was 90 degrees and extremely windy, which also means extremely dusty. However, we thought that if we went into the canyon it would be less windy and also that if we went later in the day, there would be shade. On the way up there, we discovered that perhaps our air conditioning in the car wasn't working well. It felt very hot and perhaps a little dumb to head out into the back country in separate groups, with some hikers being rather reluctant at the beginning. We could only get them out of the car by bribing them with post-hike milkshakes and burgers. I wet some bandanas and tied them over the kids' faces to block the dust. M set out on his run. 

It took the kids and I almost an hour to go the first mile. Max was so not into hiking. He looked at every lizard track and stopped in every shadow to "rest." But once we hit the slot part of the canyon, he changed his mind and was running, leaping, scampering over rocks. It was suddenly fun and fast! We soon ran into M coming the other way and all of us ran back down the slot canyon and down the sandy river bed back to the parking area. 

We enjoyed our hamburgers very much.

Who Lives Here? Who Lived Here?

These two questions provide a good framework for homeschooling while traveling, and whenever I feel like our experiences are getting a little too strange and random, I return to them for context. Many current events like climate change and politics can be better understood by getting a taste for the geography and economy of different areas.

The first thing we think about is who lives here right now. What is the population? How close is the library? Where do kids go to school? What languages are spoken? Are the stores national chains or more regional or local? Who are their elected officials? 

Then we look at geography and weather. Where is the water? How does the weather travel? What are the sorts of extreme weather events that people have to deal with?  What kind of pollution is in the area? What wildlife can be observe directly? 

Next, we peel back the layers of history. Yesterday we got to view some petroglyphs made by some people who left the region 1,000 years ago. We also saw some orchards that are were planted by people who came about 150 years ago. It can be a little hard to piece together indigenous history of an area, but I start by checking out the map on https://native-land.ca and then look up the tribe website, if there is one in the area.  We have two myths/legends anthologies that we are working through.

The biggest lesson from this is generally that humans are on the move! Especially in the last thousand years on our continent, people have been moving around quite a bit, sometimes by choice, and sometimes under duress. There are very recent examples of migration, such as what happened on the Gulf Coast and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. All around the west, you can see places where people tried to make a go of it, but the land is too overgrazed and drought-ridden to survive now. In Pennsylvania, the houses get gobbled up by the moisture and the encroaching forest or meadow, but out here, they stick around for decades without collapsing. 

The final thing we do is add our observations to our timeline. Right now, we're just using a free version of Time Toast to do this. 

Today we took a walk around Hanksville, Utah. This is a tourist town that is not really near, but more on the way to several popular national parks. The nearest library is 50 miles away, but they do have an elementary school. Its current enrollment is 24 students in grade PreK-6. People have lived here for many thousands of years, cultivating in the river valleys and flood plains. The petroglyphs were made by Fremont people, which is more a group of similar cultures that lived in this area for a long time, rather than the name of a specific tribe. 

If you come now, be sure to stop at Carl's Creature Garden and pet his goats and donkeys and look at the art.  

Colorful Colorado and Long Drive Days

We drove up and over the Colorado Rockies and into Utah in one go. Ideally, we would have spent more time in Colorado, but we needed to make it into Utah for the work week. We took full advantage of the KOA stay in Central City, arriving exactly at check in time. M got to run in the mountains twice, directly from the campsite. The kids loved playing at the playground and using the campground's wifi to stream a movie and do a watch party with their friends back in Pittsburgh. I took a walk around the campground to admire the scenery. Later M and I had a real wood campfire. When we left in the late morning, we knew it was going to be a long drive day, but the I70 was much slower than we anticipated. The mountains were gorgeous, but Colorado is so crowded! Rest areas were packed, there were hardly places to pull off and park without navigating a traffic jam (it was a gorgeous spring Sunday). We have learned the hard lesson of not stopping frequently enough many times, and we had to learn it one more time on this drive. The kids were really grumpy and argumentative - probably actually just hungry and needing to run around. The road was pretty rough for an interstate and one of our fenders partially detached. We stopped for groceries and did a quick removal and duct-tape/splicing of the wires job in the parking lot, but we need to figure out how to get a more permanent fix. 

It's pretty normal to experience the occasional mechanical problem, and driving as much as we do just shakes a lot of things loose in a camper. At least everything is still functional, although I think we need to get a new fender as soon as possible. Marko went around the camper with a screwdriver this morning, tightening up all the loose stuff. 

I'm really glad to be out of the cool, wet weather, and away from tornado threats. The midwest was cheap and empty, but storm-watching is too nerve-wracking for me. Now we are in the exact opposite in the San Rafael Desert...clear skies and tons of sun. We did our laundry this morning and swapped out all the fleece pants for shorts. 

M started his new job this morning, and I took the kids to Goblin Valley State Park. Tomorrow, we will either return to Goblin Valley or go to Capitol Reef. There are also supposedly some wild horses around and Laurel would love to catch sight of them.

First Harvest Host and camping at 9,000 feet

We stayed at our first Harvest Host last night and it was quite an experience. 

On our last night at Lake Scott, a small, but intense storm developed in the area and ended up missing the campground by just a few miles. It was nerve-wracking to watch it head straight for us and watch the NWS alerts become increasingly alarming. (Golf-ball sized hail!!??) Then at the last minute, it veered south, and pretty much missed the campground completely. On Friday, on our way to our next stop, a similar storm system appeared. Could we get lucky twice? 

Most of the Harvest Hosts seem to be wineries or breweries that are just off the highway and you basically overnight park for free in their lots, in exchange for buying something from them. This one was a little different as it was advertised as a farm. When the host confirmed my reservation she sent turn-by-turn directions with pictures....it was all unpaved roads...and dire warnings to not use GPS or we would end up in the middle of a cow pasture. We were a little nervous, as the RPod is not exactly an off-road vehicle, but it looked flat at least. As it turns out the directions were very good and the road was in decent shape, a mixture of gravel and dirt and it was well-graded. When we arrived at the farm, she directed us to pull in behind a windbreak of trees. The storm wasn't a tornado, but could have 60 mph straight line winds. Not ideal in a 20 foot travel trailer! She also showed us their underground storm shelter. It felt a little tense, but we chatted with her and two other travelers who had pulled in for the night while she monitored the storm. After a little while she announced that she thought it was going to miss us, and in fact it did. 

The farm was littered with piles of debris, which we later found out were piles of various types of recyclable or reusable materials which they were cleaning up from all over the grounds. Even shards of broken glass were gathered up to be melted down.  The barn contained an astonishing number of ducks, rabbits, chickens, sheep and goats. One of the hosts was a blacksmith and he ended up firing up his forge to show Marko how to worked! They also showed Max how to dig for fossils and let him take some that he found. It turned out that they had only recently purchased the land and while they had big plans for it, were just at the beginning stages of execution. They were also very new to Harvest Hosting, but I thought, every good at it. When we woke up in the morning, the farm was shrouded in fog and the coyotes were howling. It was a wild place, a completely delightful and unexpected stop. 

We left in the morning to beat the afternoon storms and are now camping in the mountains at 9,000 feet, just west of Denver. There are snow-capped peaks all around us! Colorado is another new-to-us state. We will just be passing through on our way to Utah tomorrow, but we can possibly come back on our return trip. 

Kansas!

We made it to Kansas! It felt like a big goal to drive over 1,000 miles in three days, but it happened without too much stress. We didn't get an early start on any of the days, and ended up pulling into the campgrounds just before sunset each night. We had general goals of where to get to each night, but we shifted these a bit, based on weather, which was not great. We joked about "following the brown signs" since we have stayed at state parks every single night. The first night we got a late start from Pittsburgh and even managed a last minute visit to M's parents on our way out of town. Not on the way at all, but it still worked out. We made it across Ohio and stayed at Hueston Woods State Park. The second night, we made it to Saint Louis and stayed in Cuivre River State Park. And then finally on Sunday, we pulled into Kanopolis State Park in Kansas, where we stayed for 3 nights, so M could work and we could rest a little bit. Just as we arrived, another homeschooling family pulled into our loop! They were traveling east, so it was fun to have playmates and someone to talk about curriculum and schedules. On Wednesday, they headed east and we moved over to Lake Scott State Park, still in Kansas, with a pit stop in Hays to do laundry and buy some beer from Defiance Brewery. 

State parks are definitely our preference. Being able to hike and run directly from the campsite is very convenient. It did require driving 20-30 miles off the interstate, which obviously adds miles and time, but state parks are pretty cheap to stay in, even if you get hookups (and super cheap if you don't). This time of year is great for birding and looking at wildflowers. Since it's before Memorial Day, sites were easy to come by. We gambled a bit with cell service, which is important for M to be able to work, but it was ok at each place. 

Kansas is beautiful....mostly flat, but with interesting canyons. It's very empty of people and sprawl. When driving we passed a lot of corn and wheat fields, cattle grazing, wind turbines and oil wells. I have never spent time in Kansas, so I really wanted to come here and check it out. The kids are unimpressed with the scenery when we're driving, but did like to hike in the state parks. Lake Scott has the northernmost pueblo ruin ever discovered and that, along with the 1890s homestead they have preserved here, helped us to answer our big question, "Who lived here before now?" The question always leads us to wonder why they came, what they did and why they don't live there anymore. Peeling back the layers of history is always a little complicated.

Having rested in Kansas, we're about ready to take off on another big drive weekend, going through Colorado to get into Utah, where we will hang out next week.

Road Trip Prep

It's T minus 2 days until we leave, and for all the experience we have packing for trips, and all the time I have put into making lists over the past few months, I still feel like I'm forgetting stuff. 

Do not google, "road trip activities for kids" . . . it just stressed me out more with the lists like 40 THINGS TO PACK FOR YOUR KIDS TO KEEP THEM BUSY. I cannot have 40 things rolling around in the car, and no, I'm not letting my kids draw on the windows with markers. (Although if I did give them markers, at least one of them would occupy himself for a very long time trying to figure out how to write fart in reverse so that other drivers could read it.) Markers dry out too fast. Crayons melt if the car gets hot. Colored pencils for life. 

More important than printing road sign bingo cards is setting intention for this trip. We want to spend time together and have fun. We want to see new places and learn about who has been there before us. We want to run on trails and meet up with a few friends and family and try all the regional fast food. 

Trips like these, during which we have to do a certain amount of work and school and vehicle maintenance, are not the same as taking a vacation trip. We have to balance a certain amount of opportunistic sight-seeing, with exercise, sleep, downtime, chores and work. 

The elephant in the room is the pandemic. Traveling with an RV is a pretty easy way to maintain distance from others, but leaving our state after staying home for much of the past year feels weird. 

Quantifying

We're putting on the finishing touches on our portfolios and wrapping up all the obligatory paperwork for the school year. 

The lines are blurring between active learning and the quiet pondering that happens after, or before. There are things that look like nothing at first glance, which actually turn out to be huge developmental leaps. Sometimes what the kids pursue on their own is way better than any of the lessons where adults show up to teach them. It's a little hard to know what to include in the portfolio. Which part of the day was school? 

If I've learned anything from the past two years, it's to expand the margins. Put lots of space in between activities. Do. Not. Rush.

Max disappears sometimes and I will find him wandering alone in the backyard, telling a story to himself (or the trees? or the universe?). He started to crave this alone-time to work through his own thoughts and imaginary scenarios, maybe to break away from the worlds that Marko and Laurel create. 

We started a routine this year we called "Max reads 5 books" (original, I know). We each have to read to him and he reads to one of us, his choice. A very simple daily task, but with many layers. M usually reads to the kids at night. This winter it was Cat Kid Comic Club over and over again, when they were not reading terrifying Norse myths, or memoirs about ultra-running. (The kids loved Born to Run.) Laurel and Marko read graphic novels to him. Pokemon and Minecraft, mostly. I read picture books, the ones with lyrical text that rolls off my tongue, that I read about on literacy blogs. Or sometimes a few pages from one of our references books. He reads Cat Kid Comic Club to us. We have all grown to love the characters of Cat Kid Comic Club.

Marko and Max split off more and more to play, where it used to be Laurel and Marko. They drag home sticks and logs, whittle them down to spears, try to make bows and arrows, fold hundreds of paper airplanes, play board games, arrange stuff animals, create elaborate scenes out of legos and construct forts. They read their Highlights and Cricket magazines carefully and I often see them doing whatever craft or recipe or project was in the magazine. 

Laurel is more fun for me to do stuff with now. We can ride bikes or go on walks and match our pace. We chat and listen to music during chores. We can wear each other's shoes. She can go off with her friends now more and more. They go on walks together, or paint each other's nails. 

Quantifying all the areas of growth feels incomplete without including these examples of not-school.

#CamperLife Trial Runs Part 1 and 2

We just finished our second of two shake-down trips to test out our camper's systems after a winter in storage, and to try out some recently purchased equipment. The first weekend was at Laurel Hill State Park and the second was at Hyner Run State Park. These are two places that we love and know very well, so it was fun to see some familiar sights and faces. We've been going up to Hyner Run in the spring for many years and the same mother-daughter camp host team is always there. Laurel Hill is our go-to spot for a quick weekend getaway since it's only about an hour from where we park our camper. There were days of nice weather on both trips, but it's not particularly warm yet, and we had rain or snow on both trips. At Laurel Hill we had full hookups and flushed and sanitized the tanks, watched a movie on our dvd player and baked cake in our convection oven. At Hyner, we had no hookups, but there is a water spigot in the park where we could fill up our fresh water tank. The solar panels worked great to keep our batteries charged up, even camped in a hemlock grove in a holler, as we were. The waste tanks were pretty full by day 4, though. We could have stretched it to another night, but only if we were really careful and nobody took a shower. The propane tank powered the furnace, water heater and refrigerator without problems. We did have a spare tank with us, but didn't need it. I don't think we'll carry an extra tank when we drive to California, but we need a way of reliably measuring what is left. M just found a scale you can use, which should be pretty accurate. Still, if we were in a sunny place, I think it would be pretty easy to keep the fridge going on battery setting if we had our solar panels set up. 

Space is tight in the rPod. We all fit, but everything must be carefully evaluated for volume and weight. We got some synthetic down blankets to replace the piles of fleece we had before. I moved the dishes to a lower shelf so the kids can reliably help with washing and putting away. I got a new puzzle and a special felt roll-up puzzle keeper. Books and art supplies will be our downfall...the kids somehow always sneak in 5 or 6 enormous hardcover books AFTER we've already checked their bags. (And insert a mental note that Max always needs at least twice the number of pants as the other kids.) I took the freezer insert out of the refrigerator. It doesn't really hold that much anyway, and it's so much easier to store tall things like milk without it. Who needs ice? Haha. 

Sometimes the less you bring, the easier it is for the kids to entertain themselves. When we went to Hyner, we had no power...no video games, no tv, no endless supply of eBooks on an iPad. The kids went fishing, reread the few books they brought, played Uno, went hunting for wildflowers and played hide and go seek. We all went to bed at the same time and M read out loud from his book. I forgot to bring paper so they carefully tore out pieces from Max's notebook when they all wanted to draw. There were three big chunks of stump that the boys dragged around to make obstacle courses. It's actually nice to have a small amount of stuff. Dishes don't take long when you only have five plates and one pot. 

We are getting better at working through the "pain points." For instance, travel days go much better if we stop for an hour for every two-three hours of driving. Playing a podcast or audiobook while everyone gets dressed keeps it calmer during the chaos that happens when we open up 5 suitcases at once (and it's totally crazy until we can get everything stuffed back into the underbed storage). We need to find some way to tame the shoes. 

We're Done!

Well, not exactly, but we did discover that we have logged the required 180 days of instruction required by the state. We started in July and typically logged 5 or 6 days a week, with several large breaks throughout the year. I made recording forms that have a reading list on the back and a grid of required subjects and days of the month on the other. It's pretty easy to check off subjects if we keep up with it on a daily or weekly basis. I added "fill out homeschool log" to the list of things that have to be done before tv/video games, and this was enormously helpful in shifting the responsibility of logging to the kids. We use a lot of digital resources like Epic Books and Libby, so if we forget stuff, it's pretty easy to go back and add it later. We review the sheet monthly and then tuck it in a file box along with any work we want to save for the portfolios. 

We do have a few more things to work on. Laurel has to take her math final and a standardized test. Marko needs to finish his handwriting book and work on the final revision and editing of an essay about Shadow. Both of the older kids will write a letter to the evaluator describing their challenges and triumphs of the past year. We did this last year and the evaluator gave us good feedback. Hopefully we can meet with the same person this year. It does feel good to have a system in place that works for us and to not have stressed about meeting the basic requirements.

Things that were so great this year that it was a pleasure to have them in our schedule and we will definitely keep doing :

Poetry teatime

Exercising with the neighbors

Laurel's virtual book club with her aunts

Outschool class for Max

Brave Writer Arrow guides for literature study

Brave Learner subscription for my own professional development

Things that seem like they are good enough to keep doing:

Spectrum + Khan Academy for math study

Duolingo

Girl Scouts

Things to improve for next year: 

Grade level reading - I've taken a "backwards planning" approach, where the kids follow their interests and I kind of trust that we will cover all the topics. We have What Your Fifth/Second Grader Needs to Know books, which they periodically read from. They do learn new things, but it feels tedious, not exciting. I think I need to plan some deeper dives into content to make it more exciting. 

Foreign language study - everybody loves clicking through Duolingo, but nobody can hold anything beyond a basic conversation. 

Making new friends - it's time to look for some homeschooling buddies. The pandemic definitely hampered this over the past year. Luckily, we have next door neighbors who were basically homeschooled this past year, but they will be going back and my kids need to meet some new people.

Happy Easter! Still a pandemic...

Well, it's been over a year of living during a global pandemic, and the holidays keep ticking past. It's super strange to not see our extended families, but we have managed to have a good time by ourselves...and developed some new traditions along the way. 

Several people sent little treats and cards for the kids. I made a dutch baby pancake with Cracker Barrel apples and whipped cream, which always gets the kids out of bed. 

I made a hilariously difficult egg scavenger hunt for the kids with "Easter Surprises" at the end. It took them over an hour to get through it! I hid clues in eggs directing them to the next hiding spot, and they had to move all around the house, and then use the letters written on all the eggs to figure out a secret phrase, which was a hint to the final hiding spot. M bought each kid a new headlamp and an exercise tracker watch. They loved the watches and checked up on their progress of steps the whole day. Marko was aggressively logging steps and ended up with over 17,000! We'll see if that keeps up. I couldn't find peanut free chocolate this year, so we mostly skipped candy, except for Peeps.  My neighbor's brother baked us a beautiful box of cookies and pastries, so nobody felt deprived for not having a candy filled Easter basket. We dyed eggs last week and read all the gospel stories about the trial and death of Jesus. Today we did the traditional egg cracking contest (my egg prevailed!) and watched the Pope's mass on TV.  We played soccer with our neighbors and chatted on the phone with some of our family. We ate leftover jambalaya and cold pizza. Overall, it was a pretty low-stress but also celebratory day. The sunshine definitely helped.

Books and Movies and Takeout

Day of rest! I actually felt like I really rested from work today. I made a dutch baby pancake with apples fried in butter and cinnamon for breakfast. It really puffed up today. It rained hard all morning, which did not stop the kids from playing outside with the neighbors. They dug some holes in the yard and got extremely wet. They are still working through the bottles of bubbles that Marko bought everyone last week. They like to blow a whole bunch at once and swing at them with tennis rackets. I stayed inside and read a book almost all day. M went for a run. We ordered food from the Turkish restaurant down the street for dinner and took a short walk to pick it up. 

After dinner, we split up...kids downstairs watching Clone Wars and M and I went to the attic to watch Nomadland. I loved the movie. Frances McDormand is very convincing in the role, and the tension between the nomads and those concerned for their well-being was one I very much recognized.

So, that's it. I set a goal to write a blog post every day in February and I did it! 

Girl Scout Outing

We have somehow managed to keep our Girl Scout troop going for an entire year of pandemic restrictions! We alternate virtual meetings and in-person outdoor activities. Today we met for some bike riding at a local bike track. It was raining at first, but luckily it cleared up quickly. The girls had fun just riding bikes around, and we briefly chatted about our upcoming service projects....seed balls for a community pollinator garden.  

Marko had another Scratch class today, and Max had a Pokemon battle with Uncle Pete via Zoom. Uncle Pete won! Laurel went on a walk with her friend who lives in our neighborhood.

I made some progress working on a door that needs to be rehung, and I took my evening walk early...while the sun was still up! I went to the cemetery today and there were lots of deer hanging out and the birds were very noisy and active.

Closing Out the School Month

We have school "months" more than we have years or quarters. We do not do any grades. I will record percent mastery for things like a math test where you can definitively count correct answers, but otherwise, we are mostly just collecting completed work to demonstrate mastery. For a while I tried to plan quarters or seasons, but I am best at setting reasonable goals for a four week period. Yesterday I spent a little time reading over the Pennsylvania standards for social studies to see where we are at. Current events are certainly providing a lot of fodder for discussions about "identifying the requirements to vote in local, state and national elections" or "explaining the effects of physical systems within a community." 

Laurel finished her last Brave Writer Book Club discussion. She enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately the classes are all sold out for the rest of the term so she can't take another one. We will go back to reading the next novel and using the arrow guide as a family. 

We also completed our art project from Art With Mrs. Filmore. Marko picked the lily pad project for this month. She lays out all the step by step instructions and even talks about the elements of art (line, shape, color, form, texture) and some art history (Monet). I had previously gathered up Modge Podge, glue, scissors, paint, tissue paper. I was a little worried we wouldn't get to it this month, but then I decided to just focus on it today and it snowballed into a really good lesson!

I pulled out my old photo album of the trip to France I made with my aunt, because we actually went to Giverny and saw the water lilies in person. I also found our copy of Linea in Monet's Garden and a big coffee table book about Impressionism. This book actually had a really interesting introduction about how the original "Impressionist" artists got together and exhibited their work and how it was a big shift from the former state sponsored art organizations that were the norm. All the videos from the PBS Art Assignment have already laid the groundwork for us that art doesn't just occur in a vacuum....it reflects cultural and political events. It was interesting to read a little more about what was going on in France at the time. I didn't know about the Parisian rebellion against the Prussians which resulted in 20,000 dead civilians. 

We tried to think of places we have seen water lilies and remembered a huge patch of them in Black Moshannon State Park. However, I think those are actually American lotus. I found a passage in my Incredible Wild Edibles that describes how indigenous people ate various parts of those plants, but that they have more recently been targeted as "invasives" that should be eliminated (mostly by recreational fisherman who have boat engines that get tangled in the thick roots). While we were going down various rabbit holes about French socialists and wild edibles, we were painting with concentrated water colors and applying tissue paper with modge podge and using a salt finish on our painted water. 

The art itself turned out really well. The kids had to use a variety of techniques. We all learned something new about art or foraging or Prussia. We all have questions that remain unanswered, which to me is the mark of a really great lesson. 

Road Trip!

Splitting up the kids creates new and wonderful (and peaceful) dynamics. Today I took Marko and Laurel on a mini-road trip and Max stayed home with M. The most notable difference was apparent to me immediately...the car was so quiet! Laurel and Marko were both instructed to bring as much schoolwork as they thought they could accomplish, plus recreational reading. I also told them to pack snow clothes. We headed for Elk County to deliver some Girl Scout cookies to Cousin Sam, and then went to Parker Dam State Park. 

Marko didn't believe me about the snow. Our snow mostly melted overnight in the rain. He didn't even pack a coat. So when we got to the park, he was very surprised to see a foot of snow still on the ground. It was pretty warm out, though, and very sunny, so he still ran around. Laurel had listened and was wearing her lace up snow boots. I brought our Coleman stove to heat up burritos. I flew my kite over the frozen lake. I love being in the Pennsylvania forest and seeing snow-covered ridges boosted my spirits greatly. 

Meanwhile, back at home, M and Max baked a cake, did some skateboarding and went to zoom meetings. Max had his zoom science class. Max loves being 1:1 with a parent and he will entertain himself for long periods of time with Scratch or Epic books. He still needs help with a lot of things....mostly reaching what he needs and fixing meals, but he's much less screech-y when he's alone. 

We listened to the entire Galentine's Day playlist (think lots of Beyonce) and looked for signs of elk. Laurel worked through several pages of math fractions. Marko mostly read books. They ate our popcorn snack without spilling it everywhere. On the way home, we got a message that Laurel's new glasses were in so we stopped by to pick them up. 

Overall it was a lovely and relaxing day.