Miscellaneous Thoughts on Living In an Enormous City

Mexico City is a very modern city...skyscrapers, an underground metro, wifi everywhere. But the process for residential recycling is this:

1) recycling truck stops in the middle of the street, blocking all traffic

2) a man gets out and rings a bell while walking up and down the street

3) neighbors carry out bundled cardboard and glass and so forth, or sometimes just bags of mixed recycling. 

4) the rest of the garbage men collect and sort the trash in the street and load it onto the truck

There are so many jobs here, or at least when you go to a business there are a lot of employees. Restaurants are staffed up. Stores have multiple people inside to offer assistance the second you walk in. Security guards stand at every door. Workers are employed by the city to sweep the park sidewalks every single morning. A man mops the stairs outside of our apartment every single morning. All five flights. On Monday mornings the whole city smells like Fabuloso. And if you aren't employed, you sell stuff.  I was sitting at a cafe with my Spanish tutor and was offered candy (typical), pumpkin laser pointers (not typical but it was Halloween), finger puppets, and tiny potted cactuses! There was a man selling some gorgeous MCM tables on the sidewalk. Two ladies open up a stand with second hand clothing every morning at the end of our block. It's really expensive here, so even people with college degrees and professional jobs, have side hustles. Maybe Uber, maybe running tours for tacos or Lucha Libre, or teaching Spanish, or teaching art to kids, or they're in a band. 

A lot of people wear uniforms to work. The nannies wear scrubs. The guy that opens the door in the apartment building wears a security uniform. The people that work in the pharmacies wear white coats. There are people that walk around with public health information and they have special vests on emblazoned with their political party (Morena! Currently in control so it's everywhere.) 

The background noise is constant. A solo trumpet player circling the block, a man shouting about fruit for sale from the back of a truck, the amplified recordings of the junk buyers looking for scrap metal, the horns honking when gridlock happens, the whistle of cyclists and police officers, someone singing while washing dishes. 

I do not worry about my kids being too loud, at all. 

Bots and Docs

I recently spent a few days playing around with a variety of AI bots to get help with analyzing my blood work and imaging from the last year. There's a lot of research and development going on with pharmaceutical treatments and cures for my condition. The FDA actually just approved a drug regimen that could halt the progress entirely, before it breaks my bones or trashes my kidneys. My condition involves frequent monitoring of a dozen or so blood markers, and it can be kind of dizzying to scroll through MyChart screens and try to figure out if the changes I'm looking at are noteworthy. Those little red exclamation points can be unnerving!! But they don't always indicate an emergency. I also have two other benign conditions that can impact how my disease markers could be interpreted. I have spent a lot of time trying to explain them, and they aren't always documented in a useful way.  ChatGBT ended up being very helpful. It generated easy to view charts of how my labs are changing, concise paragraphs I can paste into MyChart to alert each new doctor of my benign, but relevant, conditions, and a list of lifestyle and diet choices I should prioritize right now. 

In the United States it is imperative that you communicate relevant information to your doctor in the first 1-2 minutes of an appointment. I have learned a lot about asking for documentation, and the doctors themselves now use AI notetaking apps which actually really improve the quality of my records, and hopefully save them a lot of time charting! 

Risks include sharing all of this personal data with a profit driven corporation, of course. And the AIs got some things wrong. They corrected them when I pointed it out, but I wouldn't just load your results in and say what's wrong with me? The bots will tell you clearly that they are not doctors. However with targeted requests, it gave me exactly what I was looking for, saving a lot of time combing through research papers.

Another important factor about choosing when to start treatment and which treatment to choose is cost. The patient advocacy groups for my disease run monthly financial seminars and AI bots can really help to synthesize this information. (Healthcare for All! Someday, hopefully, but until then the reality is that finances do influence what you can access.)  Unfortunately the myeloma specialist in my city retired and has not been replaced. I could travel to another National Cancer Institute, wait for them to hire someone new here in Pittsburgh, or continue to receive care at the community hospital.

I've been really diligent about educating myself on my medical issues. For the first year, every doctor said it was IBS or perimenopause, a rheumatological issue or...the vast majority of time....stress. I knew there was something else going on. I can literally feel it in my bones! So, as much as it sucked to get a diagnosis, it was also sort of affirming. I think the only reason I have weathered the last five years and remain in relatively good overall health is that I am pretty devoted to all the recommended lifestyle choices that fend off chronic diseases. Eat fiber, chew a lot, sleep enough, move your body. Hydrate. Get some sun. Read poetry. Laugh with your kids. Hold your husband's hand and linger over coffee in bed every morning. Prescriptions for good living. 

So my verdict on AI is that it is a very useful tool for both doctors and patients,  but that the lack of regulation around it definitely means your data is not secure or private. Use it with caution.

DITL CDMX Version

I woke up as I do most days, with coffee in bed with M. Usually he makes it. We are back in the Nuevo Leon apartment, which I am very grateful for because it has a lot more space. However it has a lot more noise, as it is on a busy street and Mexico City is a very loud place. The first thing I heard today was the scrap truck and a lot of horns. 

Today was a special day because it was Laurel's birthday. We were able to find a Feliz Cumpleanos banner, and hung it up in the living room. The boys gave Laurel their birthday present, which was a set of very nice alcohol markers and some special paper. M and I gave her a new watch and a gift certificate to have her nails done. M packed his bags to run to work, and the kids and I had a slow start morning with school in pajamas and a breakfast made of what we could scrounge from the fridge. We had papaya, pineapple, toast and yogurt. Marko started off his school by watching some videos from Khan Academy and taking a unit test. He is working on Middle School physics right now. Max and I read a section of the Cricket magazine ( in English ) in which we read four news stories and had to decide which one was made up. Max is in fourth grade now, so a lot of his reading is done independently. I do try to listen to him read out loud several times a week to make sure that his fluency and reading comprehension are developing. We spent a lot of time reading these stories back and forth and then discussing what parts of them seem to believable. In the end we did not guess right though.

Laurel is working on writing a novel, as she does every November. Even though nanowrimo is no longer operational she continues this tradition. I think this is the fourth year she has produced somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 words in a month. We usually add this fiction writing component and take away math. (We call it No Math November, because aliteration makes every routine or ritual more beloved.) However Laurel has been really struggling to get through Algebra 1. It's gone on a few years now, and both of us have decided that she has to do a little bit of math every day to try to get this wrapped up by the end of the year. 

The kids are also focusing on learning to speak Spanish. We got a solid jump start on this study by enrolling any Spanish language school during the first 4 weeks of our trip here. Now we meet a tutor on Saturdays, and during the week they practice using Duolingo, the Ella verbs app, and listen to Spanish language YouTube and spotify. They write sentences telling about what they've done, and of course practice in situ around the city. This morning we went out on an errand to pick up cupcakes for Laurel's birthday, and on the way back saw a vendor with a basket on a bicycle. The kids knew that this was called tacos de canasta, because we watched a documentary about the different types of tacos. This type has a very distinctive blue plastic bag that lines the basket. Marko is eager to try any kind of new food on the street, so he took responsibility for that transaction. Everyone agreed that the tacos were tasty, and also they are extremely affordable. Three tacos for 24 pesos, which is about $1.25 US dollar. 

After the errand we returned home for some more school work, playing video games online with friends, eating some snacks, and waiting for M to get home from the office. Normally he comes home around 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening but today he came home early so we could go together to the Cat Cafe which was Laurel's special request for her birthday outing. This turned out to be a delightful and relaxing excursion, which also gave us the opportunity to practice some more Spanish. I complimented another customer on her cute cat themed glasses. And we chatted with the staff about the cats that were up for adoption. 

After the Cat Cafe, M took the kids to the park where there is both a playground and some workout equipment, and I came home to rest, because my energy reserves are very low these days. 

Unfortunately during this trip my blood work has been trending in a negative direction in terms of disease progression. (I was diagnosed with smoldering multiple myeloma earlier this year, which is a precursor stage of multiple myeloma. It requires no treatment, but frequent monitoring because you don't want to let the disease progress too far before beginning treatment.) My main symptom is fatigue, and it has been very tricky to handle this while we're in Mexico City and the kids don't have the independence to move around the city by themselves as they do in Pittsburgh. And there are so many cool things here that we are not doing, I feel guilty about staying home so much.

We have found a nice group of homeschoolers, and go to parkour classes, art classes, and museum outings several times a week, but there's nothing I can drop the kids off at.

Another notable event of the day, is that I saw my first fender bender traffic accident involving two cars. We have seen several moto and bicycle accidents where people skid out and fall down, but this was the first time I actually saw a car hit another car. This is notable after our years living on Braddock Avenue, where high speed crashes in which multiple vehicles were totaled happened with an alarming frequency. So despite the traffic being completely bonkers in this city, maybe people are better drivers here. Another thing I really like about the streets here, is that most of them are one way. So when you are walking around as a pedestrian you really only have to cross one direction of traffic at a time and then there will be a traffic island or something to stand on while you wait to cross the other side.

Overall we are having a pretty relaxing and unschooly time of it here. Generally I am pretty satisfied with what the kids choose to work on in a day, and as long as I find a private space to meet with each kid one on one I can provide the accountability piece that is really important, mostly for my comfort. There are seemingly unlimited opportunities to observe and participate in all kinds of culture here and we will probably be thinking about what we've learned during this trip for many years to come. 

I said that I wanted to come here to learn Spanish and to meet some Mexicans and have some real conversations about topics that matter to me...for instance education policy, art, poverty, literacy, Venezuela and other headline related issues, perceptions of the US, and what it's like to grow up in this country. I've been very lucky to meet some people who have enthusiastically shared their opinions with me, but it shows up in unexpected places, and it's honestly really hard and humbling to have these conversations in Spanish.

So my advice (to myself and to everyone) remains.... remember that you are on time for what the universe has in store for you. Take it slow and pay attention. You already know what to do.

The Sun Came Out!

The last few weeks have seen a lot of rain and overcast skies here. The rain situation across the whole country has actually been terrible this weekend, with widespread flooding in several states, destruction of towns and loss of life. Here in CDMX it seemed to mainly flood the Metro system and any sunken roadway, which makes traffic. (But everything makes traffic here.) The mood of people generally seemed to be a little more annoyed, a little quicker to honk horns in gridlock. I even saw two men get into a literal fistfight after a small collision between a car and a bicycle. This happened on our street after a box truck sheered off a massive limb of a tree, dropping it onto some power lines, dangling dangerously over Avenida Nuevo Leon. Eventually a fleet of bomberos arrived, but it was probably a good 30 minutes of rush hour traffic swerving around tree branches and electrical cables. It was an extraordinary enough event that many passersby stopped to look or take a photo. But there was also a steady wave of commuter cyclists pouring down the street nearly running directly into the power lines as it got dark, even after the police closed the road to traffic. Lots of horns honking and police blowing their whistles. This story would not surprise any Chilango. They say "Mexico, Magico" or sometimes the slightly more vulgar "Pinche Mexico, te amo." Basically, this place is crazy, but people love it, despite that or maybe because of that.

I had to navigate the medical system for the first time. One of the kids got sick, but we were able to get a doctor to come to the house, provide a thorough exam, and give me a list of medicine. I went across the street to one of three pharmacies on the street. There are much cheaper ways to do this, but even with name brand medicine and a house call from an English speaking doctor, the total cash price was still under $200 US. 

So rainy season is winding down, hopefully we will be back out doing fun things around the city in the coming weeks and all of our family members will be feeling better. 

One Month

It has been a month. El tiempo ha pasado rapidísimo. Walk Spanish language school was intense and at times exhausting. We arrived on a Sunday night and started Monday morning. Getting homeschool kids who generally enjoy a very relaxed schedule, up and to a cafe at a different location each day, in CDMX traffic, by 9 am was a challenge. However, it turned out to be an overwhelmingly positive experience. We loved our teachers, and the instruction was fun but challenging. They spoke to us in Spanish almost all the time, offering explanations in English as necessary. I have several years of Spanish study under my belt- I studied Spanish in high school, and worked in a bilingual school for two years. Oral fluency has long been challenging for me, but I can read and understand fairly well. The kids were basically coming in cold with a few weeks of Duolingo practice and exposure to whatever Lucha Libre matches M shared with them. This made their growth over a few weeks especially exciting. 

We finished school each day around 1 and for the most part began our journey back to the apartment straight away, often on foot. If the walk is less than an hour, you may as well just walk, to save yourself the trouble getting gridlocked in an Uber. Getting groceries, finding dry outdoor places for Max to run around in, figuring out what to do with trash and recycling...all of these little daily tasks take a lot of thought. Bathrooms are very common in sit down cafes and restaurants and are free. But in the parks you need some coins to get access. They are staffed by someone who will hand you a few squares of toilet paper. Not actually a bad system as the public restrooms remain clean and safe, but I found that I needed a lot more coins to account for four people using the bathroom when we go out. 

It is rainy season, the rainiest rainy season in the history of meteorology here. It is often sunny in the morning and will rain somewhere in the city at some point in the afternoon most days. Sometimes, though, the rain is widespread and heavy. Umbrellas are sometimes forbidden in the museums, as are backpacks. But you definitely want to carry a full arsenal of umbrellas and ponchos at all times, so bring extra pesos for the bag check. But don't leave anything valuable in that bag, so bring a secondary, small bag to bring your wallet and phone with you. If you do not bring a poncho it is guaranteed to rain on you. 

I designated a week to be a sort of rest week, to catch up on non-Spanish school work and clean the apartment and try to figure out some more meals to cook at home. We also connected with some of the homeschoolers/unschoolers here and are trying out some of the activities they do. Parkour was a big hit. 

CDMX First Impressions

We arrived in the evening, so the spread of lights across the valley stood out, ringed by mountains. The sun was setting through towering thunderheads, but our landing was pretty smooth despite the thunderstorms. Taxiing in to the gate, a message of welcome in English and Spanish and then, pouring off the plane with everyone else, a sea of people sorting themselves into lines. Mexicanos to one side. Extranjeros to the other. Wheeling our brand new suitcases out of baggage claim. Nothing to Declare.

That first car ride, as well as the evening stroll we took to stretch travel weary legs, did not convince me that we were in fact in a metropolis of 22 million. It was kind of quiet and peaceful on a Sunday night, dark and drizzly under the tree canopy. CDMX stretches across a valley, so you are cradled in the neighborhood. Thick walls block the noises. Disturbances even a few streets away are often inaudible. During the first week, we came across a noisy demonstration...there is always a strike or a protest....but walking a few blocks and turning a corner muted the sounds of chanting and drums to silence. Occasionally we find ourselves on a hill or on a high floor of a building with a view, and if it is a clear day, the city is a sea of rooftops, spreading out with no breaks, in all directions. 

People are friendly, everything is in Spanish. I am utterly lost when it comes to the self checkout stations in the grocery store (but the clerks are helpful). Anything that could be happening is happening somewhere in this city. The street food, public transportation and markets are cheap. Uber, cafes in Condessa and supermarkets are expensive but our dollars go a long way.

Spanish school starts this week.  I have no idea what to expect.

Living Water

We just spent a glorious 3 weeks on vacation together. It's been a while since M has been able to take time off when we are traveling. I think our 2022 bike trip was the last time he was really off from work for a continuous stretch. Our destination was the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia, mainly because we have friends there and the provincial park was available and familiar territory as a place to stay. We really made no plans in advance, other than booking an unserviced camping spot. This meant that we had to carefully ration water and electricity as all water had to be hauled in (or as it were, OUT) of the camper and the electricity came from the sun. Mostly we swam in lakes and went to the beach, read books, played cards and built a puzzle. 

It was so quiet at night. Even though many people were staying at this campground, the sites are spread out and sort of separated from each other by dense shrubby forest, so you can't really see anyone else, and people are extremely respectful of quiet hours. We could hear loons and foxes at night. The porcupines in the park were huge! I've actually never seen a live porcupine outside of a zoo and it was funny to come across one waddling through the brush, eating grass and berries. There were a few foxes living near the park and many, many signs warning us not to feed the wildlife. The foxes were not very skittish, sometimes coming right up to your car, so I'm guessing some people have been feeding them. One of the foxes had a very unique coat compared to most red foxes I've seen....this one had brown and black and even some white mixed in with the red. 

One question that came up during the many hours of driving (1,200 miles aka 2,000 km each way!)  was "Why does it feel good to look far?" And you can look far in many directions, across a lake or out to the horizon from the beach. 

The coast in Nova Scotia breathes, drawing wind off the ocean at certain predictable times of the day. The tide in the Bay of Fundy is extreme, dropping 20 or more feet, exposing viscous red mud. When it refills the rivers, it rises as a visible wave moving upstream that people actually ride in small boats for fun. 

I've been swimming almost every day this whole summer, at home it was in a pool, but in Nova Scotia it was what you call wild swimming. Lakes and oceans. The lake we camped at is connected to the ocean, so has a little salinity. This keeps the leeches down, but there are some eels living in it. Now that all my children are pretty competent swimmers, lake swimming is much more fun and relaxing. Our friends have a floating dock in their part of the lake, so you can swim out to it and dive off. One day we all went to the beach and took a surfing lesson, which I was, frankly, terrified to try, but it turned out to be very fun, and felt much less dangerous than I expected. This was partially due to some favorable wave conditions on the day I went. M and Laurel and Marko went back a few days later and the surf was much more challenging. 

Since we didn't have water hookups in our trailer and there were only two showers for the whole campground, I was glad to be in the water so much. We had some debates about whether a lake swim counts as bathing. Certainly ocean swimming and surfing in a rented wetsuit calls for some scrubbing, at least to get the sand out. We noticed that there was a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo sitting near the dock where our friends live, so clearly some consider the lake to be an adequate bathing setting. 

One thing we didn't do was have a campfire. Ironically despite being surrounded by water, the conditions are extremely dry and the fire bans were in full effect, even closing the forest trails to all recreational traffic with a $25,000 fine. Hopefully they will get some rain soon.

While Canadians were universally polite and respectful to us, the news coverage and topics of conversation were often centered around the Trump administration's policies. For the first time I saw widespread pro-Canada flags and signs, and while there was nothing anti-American per se, there was lots of talk of admonishing Americans to do something, as well as a general sense of betrayal.

Beginning Again

I spent most of the summer unpacking and setting up our new house and working on recovering my fitness and strength. The kids have been hanging out with friends, going to the pool a lot, and reading. M has been traveling a ton, working, and running. Max went to an ultimate frisbee camp with his friend and loved it so much. Laurel went to two weeks of CIT camp with the Girl Scouts and also loved it. Marko did not go to a camp but spent a lot of time with his friends and exploring our neighborhood on foot. Many things are going very well for us. 

It's time to launch the new school year! As always, this is a soft start for us, and begins with talking about goals (and yes I count this work as 'school'). I ask the kids what they want to be able to do or know next year at this time, and then we spend a fair amount of time teasing out what it would look like. This year each kid is making a list of books they want to read. We will go Brave Writer style with one book a month, and assign chapters to encourage slow and close reading. I'm hoping to organize book clubs with family and friends for most of the months, to occur virtually as well as in person. There is also a lot of interest in economics so I ordered Kyla Scanlon's book In This Economy, and we will read that together along with her Substack. CrashCourse and Khan academy will also probably occupy a fair amount of our 'school' days. The most exciting thing is that we will be going to Mexico, where we will focus on learning conversational Spanish and Latin American history. Laurel will be using the Help for High School essay writing book from Julie Bogart, and I ordered a book of essays for us to read, Breakfast on Mars and 37 Other Delectable Essays. We are also getting more involved in the Outdoor Serve Guides scouting, which is a great framework for mastering all sorts of practical and civic skills. 

I read two books this summer that had a big impact on me. The first one was Stolen Focus by Johan Hari, which gets into the systemic reasons we all seem to be struggling with attention span these days. The second one was the Five Resets by Aditi Nerukar, which was a basic self-help sort of book, not particularly revelatory, but extremely well organized, at least to my brain. I paged through it in one sitting at the library, then took it home and took notes. I'm just hungry for a little direction right now, I guess. Anyway, I've noticed my attention slipping the last few years. Many of my peers complain about this as well, but  often attribute it to perimenopause or middle age or stress. Many people talk about their kids struggling with attention. My own kids complain about it. We try to exercise and take magnesium supplements or avoid sugar or meditate. But I wondered if it could be the rewiring of my brain in response to notifications on my phone. I deleted Facebook and Instagram, turned off all app notifications, set my phone to dim/sleep mode between 7pm and 7am and blocked Reddit. Now I'm trying out monotasking. I stopped listening to podcasts or audiobooks while I cook or clean. I stopped reading while I eat. And this is going to sound kind of weird, but I stopped thinking while I walk, especially if I was taking a walk because I felt stressed or angry. Instead I started saying a mantra, Yes, yes, thank you, thank you. It astonished me how quickly this simple phrase made me feel better, how disruptive a mantra is to anger or hurt. It's Buddhism 101. But I can feel my attention shifting, my memory improving. Exercising personal control is not the solution exactly. Tech companies, like all corporations, need to be held more accountable for the impact they have on people's health and well being. Lots of money can be made while still putting people first. But personal self control is a lever we can pull right now to reclaim a small part of our brains that have been altered by our environment. 

So I guess I'm also going to bring some mindfulness into homeschooling. Slow things down and lean into deep mastery. Provide lots of opportunities for rest or quiet minds in between work to allow things to simmer and gel. Get off the FOMO train and stop worrying that we're going to fall behind those who say they are doing more. I'm all in on accountability and helping us discern when we truly understand something or know how to do something. Assessment is key for this. But we will have to work on our attention to make this a reality.

Another homeschool year in the books!

I have submitted papers, dotted the i's and crossed the t's for another homeschool year, although I guess technically I homeschooled two and a half kids, instead of three. Max enrolled in a cyber school halfway through the year, and it ended up being a very good experience for all of us. You aren't really totally off the hook as a parent with cyber school, because the kid is still in your house and under your care all day. But it did relieve me of most instructional duties and all curricular decisions.

Laurel and Marko did their usual portfolio routine, where we basically stop school in April and spend a month or more gathering work, reflecting, revisiting unfinished projects...often finishing them with less angst (which is sort of a trick of mine, because they feel like school is over, but I know this part is really integral to their education). This year was complicated somewhat by moving into a new house right in the middle of it, which we did slowly over a month and a half, with very little rhyme or reason other than setting up beds and the kitchen in the new house first. This seemed like a brilliant first step, but actually resulted in us losing interest in the rest of our possessions, because it felt like we had everything we needed. For everything else, we packed a few boxes and threw them in our car every time we were in that end of town. The boxes were pure chaos by the end. Nonetheless, it got done, and hopefully this is the last move for a good, long while. 

Despite the moving chaos, our evaluations with the Dandelion Project were delightful, reflective and rejuvenating. Rock climbing team finished up this week, PALS co-op is done until September, and Laurel is pausing her horse and voice lessons for most of the summer. The older kids are figuring out public transportation from here, and we have discovered our new neighborhood has a public library, weekly farmers' market, extensive woodsy trail system and a public swimming pool. Plus a basketball court which is a block away (far enough that you can't hear the sound of the basketball, but close enough that the kids actually go there all the time and meet up with neighborhood kids and play together). 

I am really excited to be setting up space in our house, we have more rooms than ever. Every kid has their own bedroom, and we have two extra rooms in the basement. Lots of space for projects and hanging out. In many ways, things are going very well for us. 

In less pleasant news, I have been pretty sick this entire year, and have landed in a frustrating liminal space between learning what is wrong and being across the threshold where you treat it. Watch and wait, is what the doctors call it, and it's an actual treatment plan for my diagnosis of smoldering multiple myeloma. Blood tests every 12 weeks, look for trends. The good news is that it may not progress very quickly or at all. The bad news is that it's anyone's guess if you are in that no-worries category or if you have the kind that gnaws your bones to shreds and breaks your kidneys before anything shows up in your bloodwork. I would very much like to avoid the horror of pathologic fractures, thank you very much. In the meantime, I at least got an iron infusion, which did seem to lift the fatigue somewhat, as I had some significant iron deficiency alongside the plasma cell stuff. And yes, I'm getting a second opinion, and forcing myself to go on daily walks and eating lots of anti-inflammatory foods. It seems that if I make it through 2-5 years of no disease progression, I don't have to worry about it too much. I'm honestly pretty cranky about the whole thing, but what can you do, life is strikes and gutters. 

On the schedule for this summer, hopefully a return trip to Nova Scotia to visit friends, Laurel is going to 2 weeks of CIT camp, Max is doing an ultimate frisbee daycamp, Mark is running a race in West Virginia and Marko is playing lots of basketball. I hope to be at the pool a lot, and work in the garden. 

A Deep Dive Into the Sea

Middle School is a delightful time to homeschool. The tweens and young teens in our circle are still very playful and active in the woods and at the playground. They love board games, video games, role playing games, and icebreaker games. They are learning how to cook and take care of younger children and are reasonably trustworthy to go off on their own. 

My middle schooler (currently in the sixth-ish grade) is very independent and ready to stretch his wings. I can trust him to take the bus and arrive at his intended destination. If something goes awry, he is comfortable admitting mistakes and asking others for help. I can send him to the grocery store or other little errands. He works hard at the climbing gym, helps to babysit his cousin every week, and loves going on playdates and sleepovers.

As for studies, middle school, in my opinion, should be all about solidifying your basic math skills, developing literacy and critical thinking skills, starting to write more, and exploring all the different ways there are to learn. This exploration is really fun if you can find an interest to deep dive into. For us, it's been marine biology. I can't remember when this interest began to take hold, but we went on a whale watching tour this summer and that's definitely when he started asking to do more things. We also listened to some of Rachel Carson's books, which contain amazing lyrical descriptions of sea life (highly recommend!) and are very soothing for falling to sleep.  For now he is working on a Harbor and Sprout interdisciplinary unit called Oceanography, a marine biology Coursera, an Outschool class that features two sea creatures a week in a live zoom lecture, and an online watercolor class where he is going to learn to paint realistic pictures of whales. He attended a Smithsonian homeschool lecture on marine life (a scientist was showing how they collect samples of coral to study it) and has checked out a lot of encyclopedia-type books from the library. We watch a lot of nature documentaries. There are frequently relevant articles in the National Geographic magazine subscription we receive. Recently there was a lab in his sister's high school biology course that had to do with population fluctuation. Having a partner made sense for this lab, so he stepped up to join her. There was a card game that modeled population changes, questions to answer in writing and a final project in which they designed a presentation for the imaginary city council of a coastal town. We have been to the zoo and the museum, where exhibits expand on his knowledge of the topic in new and interesting ways.

I don't know if he will actually become a marine biologist, or if this interest will fade in time. But for now, it's an excellent hook. Whereas in elementary I would have been satisfied to watch, read, visit museums, and play, the middle school level is a time to try out different ways of learning and to practice demonstrating what you have learned and what you can do. He now knows that he definitely prefers the kind of class where there is a live lecture from a knowledgeable expert. He has also learned that he can make it through a Coursera or Khan Academy course, but that he probably needs to develop some new study or test taking skills to pass the tests. 

Here are a few potential things to do next...

-Read Playground by Richard Powers and discuss with mom and dad

-Investigate summer camp options, like Sea Camp in Galveston that my cousin recommended

-Go whale watching again! We're hoping to visit Nova Scotia again and there are lots of opportunities for marine life viewing there

-Read some poems or classic literature about the sea