When the Earth Crumbles Beneath Your Feet

Yesterday morning when I got up, I heard a ton of sirens passing in front of my house. The roads looked very icy, so at first I assumed car crash and went about my business. But then there were just too many of them to be that. My neighbors were posting on Facebook about weird noises and a strong natural gas odor. Then somebody said a bridge over a creek collapsed and I was trying to think of where that could be. When I saw the first picture, I actually jumped up and ran around the house because I was so shocked at the image of pieces of Forbes Avenue laying in the ravine of Frick Park. True, the bridge does cross a creek, but it's at least a hundred feet high and probably 500 feet across! When you walk across it, you are looking down at the tops of the tallest sycamore trees. We more often are looking at from below, because the trail passes underneath. My kids liked to scamper up the steep hillsides and tag the underside of it. Yeah, it was rusty, but what isn't in Pittsburgh? The image was horrifying because so many of my neighbors and friends and kids I know travel on that bridge. During a normal rush hour, cars would be backed up at the light across the whole span. A lot of school buses pass through that intersection. Thankfully the winter weather + Covid closures kept a lot of people home and only a few cars and one bus fell down in the collapse. 

I was also briefly panicking because M was in the park, as he often is at that time, running with his friends before work. There is no way someone could make a complete recovery from multiple organ failure just to get crushed by a bridge in his neighborhood park. Right? RIGHT?? Anyway, he was fine, but had to take the long way back to our house, because police were closing everything off, due to the natural gas gushing out of the pipeline. 

Our street was closed all day while they figured out what to do, which I guess is put up some Jersey barriers and hang a few detour signs. Car and bus and bicycle traffic is going to be really negatively impacted, as this was a major four lane road in and out of my neighborhood, plus connecting all the suburban commuter routes from the neighboring boroughs. The bridge fell directly onto the main path that goes through the whole park. 

There were helicopters buzzing overhead all day and night, and it made national news, mainly because the President was already on his way to make a speech about infrastructure. But I imagine it will quickly fade from everyone's minds, except those of us who live here and will have to look at this pile of rubble for a long time, and be reminded of our collective priorities and fragility.

Marko is nine!

Wow, we have big kids in our house. Marko turned 9 years old today and I love how self-sufficient he is with many things. He has a really sweet personality and is thoughtful about including others and making sure everyone is having fun. His best quality is just always being so true to himself and knowing who he is. He spends a lot of time playing with Max these days, but also has made some good friends in the homeschooling community. He loves playing Minecraft, doing art projects, building with Lego, reading about Greek and Norse myths, fart jokes, and being cuddled at night before falling asleep. For this next year, I hope for him to continue to meet new friends and find things he is passionate about. 

January Homeschool

 Snow day! It snowed a ton on Sunday night so the kids have been digging snow forts and sled riding nonstop. The city actually closed all the schools today so our neighbors can even join in on the fun.

For January, I had a few things I wanted to prioritize. The first thing was to somehow connect over activities we could all do together. I downloaded a two week calendar of prompts from a blog called the Natural Learner and invited M and the kids to do them with me every morning. They were pretty simple little things for the most part. One day we painted name art using masking tape. Another day we each came up with a question that we would like to be asked about ourselves. My favorite activity was creating scratch n sniff art with salt and essential oils. There were additional prompts for the adults to pay focused attention to the kids and add more physical contact, if the kids desired it. For example, holding hands when you walk, or snuggling on the couch while reading. 

The second thing I wanted to kick off was project time, or self directed learning time. It's not that my kids never do projects they come up with on their own...they actually have a lot of things going on at any given time, and M and I are also very self-directed with our projects and how we learn to do them. However, it didn't feel very integrated with our homeschooling. The kids often talk about the workbook or textbook or copywork type things we do as being more recognizable as learning experiences, even though building a circuit from scratch or programming their Spheros to navigate an obstacle course are just as good, if not better. The projects were lumped in with "fun" stuff that could be done after you did a workbook page of math. My hope was to formalize our project time by dedicating a certain amount of time where they could work on stuff and I could be available to help them if they needed it. I also wanted to honor and respect the work they were doing by creating some kind of routine check in where they could talk about their work. So far this month, we have done a good job of setting aside specific time to work on projects. I am doing a good job of working on my own projects and being more transparent with my process behind them. M already serves as an excellent example of a life-long learner. He is never without a project, actually. Currently, he's trying to build a synthesizer. (From scratch!) The trials and errors are pretty endless, but he persists. 

We are also spending a ton of time playing outside with friends, especially when there is snow. Disney+ is giving us lots of viewing material for the times we want to cozy up. 

Laurel and I just finished reading a graphic novel version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and the new Rick Riordan book, Daughter of the Deep, which draws heavily on cultural references from Jules Verne. We had our monthly book chat with her aunts. 

I'm going to do a reading assessment on a homeschooling friend in a few days, so I'm brushing up on my assessment skills with the kids and giving them tests this week.