Snow Day

"...There is no bill to be paid, only union to be made...." - This line is from the Richard Rohr daily meditation email and references a certain Christian view of salvation, but it keeps running through my head as a personal slogan as we settle into this homeschooling life. When I was a teacher in a school, the learning was very transactional. Not that I expected to be repaid by my students, but we operated on the principle that I would say and do certain things and they would learn and grow in predictable ways. Inputs. Outputs. At home, I have had to lean into the reality that my children do not owe me anything as learners, nor are they firmly stuck in the position of learner. We are all learners. We are all teachers. We do best when we come together. I'm not figuring out world peace over here; it's just fractions for days. But a cozy approach, tucked under a blanket on the couch, high-fives after every correct answer. Tea for me, always. Low cortisol all around. Trusting that when she says enough, it's enough.

Friday Free Write

Every Friday, we have been doing a free write, with varying degrees of success. I ask the kids to write what they want or in response to a prompt for 8 minutes. After 8 minutes, I ask if they want to share. If they do, I listen and compliment anything I liked. If they don't, I fold it up and put it into an envelope. After 8 weeks, I will open up their envelope, ask them to reread their work and choose a piece to revise. Hopefully they will have something worth revising out of those 8 pieces. (Last week, Marko was delighted with his work of copying the word "the" over and over again for 8 minutes, so this is requiring a little bit of faith from me.) I got this process from Julie at Brave Writer, who also advises parents to do activities along with their children. It's a good way to gauge how appropriate (or difficult or ridiculous or scary or tedious or boring) the task may be, and also follows that whole children learn what they live approach. If you don't want your children to swear, don't swear. Ahem.

In the spirit of doing what I'm asking my children to do, I'm sharing this poem that I wrote during free write time (and then revised) and I will tell you it is taking an unexpected amount of courage to hit Publish. But doing this exercise myself is really helping me to anticipate and plan for reasons that my kids might have trouble with writing and editing. This was the only thing I wrote in weeks and weeks that I felt even had the potential to be shared. This is reminding me that a lot of what my kids pull out of their envelopes will be trash and that's fine and hopefully there's something in there they are excited to fix up and expand upon.



Sit With It

Sit with uncertainty, sit with your sadness.
Sit with your neighbor while she tells you all of the messy details you didn't want to know.
Sit with your bread while it crackles, just out of the oven.
Sit, especially on the Sabbath, while the laundry taunts you.
Sit with your daughter while she painstakingly pens her letter.
It's not how you would do it, but sit with that idea and wait for it to pass,
And compliment her cursive, and smile at her.

Sit under a a tree, on a cold mossy boulder, a park bench with a dusting of snow.
Sit with your coffee while it's hot, instead of migrating it from room to room and in and out of the microwave a half dozen times before noon.
Sit with your son, while he sobs in your lap, for reasons you can't untangle.
You don't need to fix it right now, or maybe the sitting will do the work.

Sit for one extra minute at the end of dinner, to see who else lingers,
Who has a last thought they need to say out loud, now that bellies are full.
Let the sitting be enough, as it is. It may fix something, but then, it may not.
Either way, you can still enjoy the feeling of your ankles curled around each other against the chair leg,
And the assuasive liberation of not doing a thing.

2019

Currently all five us us are wearing matching plaid pajamas and the kids are laughing and shrieking their way through a MarioKart race. They plan to stay up until midnight, but they do not like watching the Times Square countdown party. They just want to play video games until it's obscenely late and then go outside and bang pots and pans together. I'm not sure how my neighbors will feel about this, so I might have to veto that last part.

I just scrolled back to the start of this blog and read all of the year end posts. Things have changed a lot since 2006!

Spiral Jetty, UT

2019 has been a wild ride. We finally bought a road-worthy camper and spent about 12 weeks in it this year, traveling through 23 states on several different trips. We love a good road trip and this one was full of excitement like forest fires, a car break-in, unseasonably cold temperatures, and even an earthquake. Also, beautiful scenery, visits with friends, junior ranger badges, sunsets on the beach, aquarium visits, giant trees, bison, meeting campground friends, and sharing way too many jerky sticks.  This trip had some highs and lows. The hardest thing was probably balancing the work-from-road and the driving with the needs of our kids, which turned out to be...not driving so much. They like the stopping part a lot more.

We started homeschooling our kids. This has been a huge shift for everyone, but an overall positive change for our family. Everyone is getting better sleep and exercise and way more outdoor time. I'm confident that they are keeping pace academically. Marko learned to read really fluently in the last few months. Even Max is starting to read a little. Laurel just took an online class and she enjoyed the format a lot, so I think we might try some more of this style.

Marko tried kung fu for about six months, but he decided to switch to gymnastics recently. Laurel went to sleep away Girl Scout camp for the second time and she moved up to Juniors. She rides horses whenever she can get to the stables. M's grandmother died and we gathered with all of his aunts, uncles and cousins for the first time in many years. I started working with my aunt and uncle at their restaurant (as a cook!) and the kids usually go to my parents' house while I do that. I love that they have the opportunity to spend time with their grandparents and also get a taste of that running free through the backyard kind of suburban life. We met up with my friend Leah and her family for another successful Pennsylvania cabin vacation. We babysat some guinea pigs.

Photo Credit Jennifer Kamienski

M did some running this year, naturally.  (I can't even remember what he was like before he started running.) His favorite races this year were Hyner and World's End, and I would have to say these were also the most fun for our family. We also went to the Vermont 100, and M finished it and got his buckle, but the heat was brutal.  M and some of the kids ran an aid station at the Rachel Carson Trail Challenge. We have lots of friends in the running community now so going to these races has a very social feel to it. It's also so much easier to cart along three kids now that everybody is out of diapers and naps. It helps that they love going to races. Endless snacks + M is easily convinced to stop for ice cream for up to a week afterwards.

On the GAP.

I turned 40 this year and did a solo bicycle trip from Washington DC to Pittsburgh, something that has been on my bucket list forever. It was a really fun trip and my 5 day itinerary was just challenging enough for me, although I would have put fatter tires on my bike for the C&O portion of the trip. I had great weather and met some cool people on the trail. My dad biked down to meet me for the last stretch into Pittsburgh and that was pretty awesome. Traveling alone is so different, but I loved it and I am planning to do more bike trips like this. There is actually a trail in Missouri with my name on it. Literally!

So that's what I can remember from 2019. I wish I'd written about it more as it was happening. I hope my kids will remember the good parts. I am aiming for 2020 to be even better.

Homeschool Update December

We just finished Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, using the Arrow Guide from Brave Writer to study literary devices, vocabulary, capitalization and dialogue markers. I was happy (but not surprised) to see that Marko was able to follow the story and the activities even though the guide is for grades 3-5. I have to modify his writing to what the guide calls "Jot It Down" - which basically means he has great ideas and I should just write them for him, unless he grabs the pencil away from me and wants to write independently. This would be impossible in a classroom setting, but it works quite well at home. I'm saving these drafts in the hopes that they will look impressive next to whatever he will be able to produce on his own by June. Focus on progress. To get through this book, I borrowed an audio copy of the book from the library and we listened to it in the car. Nobody talks or fights because they want to hear the story, although Max falls asleep, more often than not. Our next book is Artemis Fowl and now that I know how these Arrow guides work, I think we'll be going a lot deeper with it.

We have still been plugging through the Spectrum math workbooks and alternating that with Khan Academy. Marko just needs to keep practice sums/differences to 100, but Laurel is going to get into geometry and is going to need a lot of instruction for that. I'm going to take a break from the workbooks and Khan until January and just play games.

I got a bunch of the Girl Scout Badges that we probably aren't going to do with our troop and Laurel is going to work through some of those to meet her social studies/civics standards.

We've been watching a lot of Crash Course World Mythology videos, singing along to holiday songs, and doing some HIIT inside because it's super cold and gloomy outside all the time. Youtube makes it so easy right now and I'm sure it's going to be either riddled with ads or require a subscription before long.

Icy Morning Walk to the Bakery

We started the day out with a walk to the bakery and did our read aloud while munching on chocolate croissants. One of our neighborhood playgrounds is being fixed up and there was a lot of new equipment to explore. Max doesn't love Mrs. Frisby yet, so he can be a real pill about being quiet. Pure genius on my part; he was busy peeling his croissant apart and didn't interrupt too much. I bought a literature guide from the Brave Writer website. As a former teacher with a lot of materials stocked away, I am extremely resistant to paying money for more of these things. However, sometimes it's easier to have it all spelled out for you.  Sometimes someone else just did it better than me. The guide gives you a passage to study each week and suggestions for talking about spelling, grammar, literary elements and a few sample writing activities. Nothing contained in the packet was new information to me, but I love having a routine of activities to follow. You can pick the novels you do and order guides a la carte, and it's pretty easy to scale the activities for kids at different levels.

I keep having to wiggle out from under this idea that if the kids are having fun and the work is completed with ease, that they are not learning anything.

Marko made a drum out of a little candy tin he found and several layers of paper and stickers fixed to the top. Then he made a drum stick out of a little branch he found outside, sanded down until it made the sound he wanted. Laurel planned some activities for her birthday celebration this weekend (watching the Percy Jackson movie, making candy sushi). Max played Minecraft and Zelda with Marko. I sat down together with each child and went through some Khan Academy videos and exercises together. Marko set up and read through the directions for a very complicated board game called Oregon Trail.

I am reading so much these days. Wilding by Isabella Tree, No More Mean Girls by Katie Hurley, Food Not Lawns by Heather Flores. Flat Broke with Two Goats by Jennifer McGaha. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. The Year of Less by Cait Flanders. Farming While Black by Leah Penniman. There are books stacked on my bedside shelf, and always something on the Libby app on my phone, and a number of items on the holds list at the library. I signed up for movement videos from Katy Bowman and a class on homemaking by Hannah Marcotti. I'm working through an online course on permaculture. I'm going on an organized hike on the North Country Trail. Somehow I didn't have time for my own learning when all the kids were in school, or at least I didn't prioritize it...I squeezed it in. It feels different now.

Are you curious about the home-schooling?

Ah, yes, so we're homeschooling and I know you are curious because everyone asks, but the leading question is usually something about curriculum, which is, frankly, boring to talk about, so the conversation fizzles. 

What I think you really mean is "How do you spend your days? Do your kids listen to you? How do you decide what they should learn? Do you teach all the subjects? Are you paying tutors? Are they playing video games all day? Do they annoy you? Are they above grade level? Below grade level? How do you test them? How much are they reading? Do you give them homework? Will they be able to get into college? Is it better than school? Is it worse than school? Could I do it?"

And truthfully, I would love to talk about it to anyone. There's an incredible amount of freedom and flexibility and that can be daunting. I know we haven't hit our stride....yet. However, I can see it coming. 

I did make some decisions about curricula at the beginning of the summer. Spectrum workbooks and Khan Academy for math. Wilson Reading for any spelling and phonics issues. Core Knowledge Series textbooks for language arts, social studies and science. There are 12 required subjects, which I dutifully check off each time I feel I have provided some meaningful instruction. But this never feels like the meat of their learning for the day. I think it does serve to anchor us a bit and I do usually squeeze in what I needed to, but this is what actually happened:

Max built a 100 piece puzzle with help. Marko and Laurel did some math workbook pages.  Laurel and I looked at paragraph indentation choices in a number of books. I made an accordion book and then there was a flurry of crafting and I don't know where any of the finished products ended up, but they were all making little books and collages. Everyone played Minecraft. I played two rounds of Uno with the boys. Laurel made approximately 1,000 rainbow loom bracelets. She read a lot of graphic novels. We had a tea party and discussed the composer Debussy and whether or not "Impressionist" could be considered an insult, and how his music sounded like Chopin, or did it? We went to a library homeschool group and Marko and Laurel made little water color sketches of squash, corn and beans. It snowed on and off all day and they all went outside and played in the backyard for little chunks of time. I would have taken them to the park but our new snow/rain boots have not arrived yet. So they just wore their sneakers and dried them out in between. We decided to stop reading Pax (getting too scary and violet for some of us) and to begin reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I have a Brave Writer unit plan to go along with that novel so we'll see how that language arts approach works for us. Marko read a lot of Star Wars books and then checked out even more Star Wars books at the library. I found a book on Islam with a lot of pictures to go with the unit Laurel is reading in the Core Knowledge textbook. We listened to a podcast called Tumble and the episode was about peregrine falcons. Marko practiced the next phone number he is trying to memorize. We read some more poems from The Lost Words by Robert MacFarlane nad Jackie Morris. We cut open the massive osage ball I found on my hike over the weekend. It looks tropical, they said. And then put it outside to see if the squirrels would take the seeds out of it. We tried our hand at sketching the osage ball using nature sketching principles but our colored pencils are very dull at the moment and the pencil sharpener was not effective at bringing them back. Marko made some attempts to fix his helicopter wing with tape, and failed. He watched some youtube videos that showed a guy fixing the wing by tracing it onto a shampoo bottle and then cutting out a replacement wing. The videos were all in French, but it was the exact same helicopter! We don't have an empty shampoo bottle yet, though, so this also failed. Sometimes there is a lot of failure and I think that's my favorite part of homeschool. Not that they failed, but that we have the space and time to fail. I think he'll probably keep working on that helicopter tomorrow. 

So that's the current status. 

Re-Entry

You have to ease back in after a trip like that. It was intense. We spent more time together than we had in many years. Homeschooling felt rough at times, but the kids actually managed to work through 2-3 chapters of math while we were gone. I thought we would do a lot of corresponding with people back home but we hardly wrote any letters or post cards. I thought they would have these beautiful journals full of thoughtful reflections, but they did a lot of random sketching in their notebooks. Looks like corn, is what they wrote on a lot of pages. I cannot disagree, there was a lot of corn. We drove about 7,000 miles, if you count all the driving around the East Bay we did. They did read a lot and we listened to a lot of interesting podcasts and books. One was called "To the Best of Our Knowledge" and the episode about the caves had us all breathlessly captivated. With all the distractions of home gone, we learned a lot about ourselves and each other. We learned to tell each other exactly what we needed. Not that we could always get it right then, but we learned to ask anyway. The decisions to travel and to homeschool were on rather different threads, although they do go together well. But what that hints at is that there were growing pains, along with the wanderlust.  Now that we're all back home again there's a temptation to settle back into the roles and spaces that were not serving us well.

Anyway, there was not a lot to come back to, schedule-wise. The calendar was blissfully clear. I did laundry and had my neighbor over for tea and we celebrated Laurel's birthday by eating breakfast at our usual breakfast spot down the street. I took the kids for a hike at a park near my brother's house and the hillsides were almost glowing, from the last of the fall leaves. When we went down into the trailhead, two hunters were dragging a buck out of the woods, much to my surprise. The trail smelled of blood and wet leaves. The most Pennsylvanian thing ever. Our feet were soaking wet because everyone outgrew their rain boots on our trip. I had sort of forgotten about rain boots, actually, until that moment I felt my feet sink into the water-logged soil under the grass. The next day we planned to go on another hike to look for the fox we had seen over the summer, but it rained and rained, hovering near 32 all day. We didn't actually leave the house the entire day. It was all dance parties and Nintendo. Today we we visited our librarian and got new books to read. It was sunny, but very cold.

I ordered rain boots.

Snow Canyon State Park

We came to Southern Utah to 1) wait out the snowstorm that is happening at the pass in Colorado and 2) to see the wonders of Zion, Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef. However, as soon as we entered Utah, we marveled at the low gas prices, the open space, the courteous drivers and the fact that nobody gawks at a family with 3 kids out here. Utah is very orderly and tidy compared to California, which was literally catching on fire when we drove out of there. They fix their potholes and have wonderful, spacious, cheap laundromats. Personally I'm a fan of the low alcohol Mormon beer, too.

I took the kids to Snow Canyon State Park, where we walked through pink sand dunes and looked at hundreds of animal tracks. They were so clear, it was almost as if a museum curator had arranged them, but no, that's just the real animals running around at night. The kids loved tracking the prints and figuring out which animal went with which print. Marko then built himself a little print-maker out of sticks and went about laying his own crazy footprints. This park also has a small slot canyon that is a short hike from the parking area. It was kind of scary to look up and see the boulders wedged directly above us. We saw some people rock climbing. We also saw a hawk hunting and Marko found a print of his wings brushing through the sand. The canyons were beautiful. Not as high as Zion's but just as colorful.

We really need to start driving home, but each weather report is worse than the last. We are keeping our furnace running high and unplugging our hoses at night when it freezes. We made some impulsive Halloween costume impulse buys so we are ready to have some Halloween fun, although it will be really different from our usual Halloweens. Happy Birthday to Mary and Grandma Cake!

Rig

If you scroll way back to the first entries on this blog, you can read about the road trip we took in 2006. We traveled in a Saturn sedan with a borrowed tent, a basic coleman stove and an ice chest. We saved up for that trip, quit our jobs and expenses were pretty low. Circumstances are a bit different now. We have 3 kids, and M is working remotely. There are smart phones now which is a real game changer for maps and weather. I can remember back in 2006 watching an extremely scary black cloud emerging over the horizon and then frantically flipping through pages of a Rand McNally road atlas to see what county we were in while listening to some random AM radio station describing where the tornado was hitting. PS, it was close. PPS, most midwestern rest areas have a severe weather bunker you can go in.

We are now traveling with a 2016 GMC Yukon towing an RPOD 176. It's a tiny, lightweight trailer. Narrower than most trailers because the wheel bases are on the outside, it's easy to tow. You can see around it without special mirrors and it usually fits in a regular parking spot. It's less than 10 ft tall, so clearance is rarely an issue and we can fit in the smallest sites at campgrounds. The kitchen is nested in a half slide. Things we especially liked about it were the double bed bunks, and the u-shaped dinette we can all eat or play games at, the propane furnace, hot water heater that runs on propane or electric, 3 way refrigerator, fairly large black and gray tanks, a convection microwave (yes I have baked cakes and cornbread in it!) and even television and an air conditioner. All spring and summer I loved going on trips where we just had to pack our clothes and some food. All the cookware and sleeping stuff was already stowed and ready to go. In the most inclement weather, the kids can lounge on the top bunk and watch tv (if we have a 30 amp hook up). If we have no hook ups, it's easy enough to keep a few gallons of water in the fresh tank for the toilet and we can keep the fridge cool on propane.  The convection/microwave is tiny, but it definitely works well for toasting bread, baking corn bread or cakes, and heating up leftovers. I also bought a small Instant Pot, which is useful for cooking rice, soup, chili, hardboiled eggs and oatmeal.

Downsides of this are mainly that's it's just a very small amount of space for 5 people. M and I are pretty short and I  would not recommend these beds to anyone who is on the taller side. When we are getting up in the morning, it's just silly how much bumping and cursing we do while trying to make coffee, fold the dinette bed back into a table and get all the little kids to go to the bathroom before they pee their pants. It has a fair amount of storage, but it's hard to keep the clothing in places where the kids can actually reach it on their own. Ditto with dishes. I feel like all the kids had a regression with their independence on this trip. They needed a lot of help reaching everything.

They say you are ready to camp when you pull out of the RV lot, but we have bought a lot of things to improve our trailer. We installed sway bars on the hitch, which keeps the trailer from blowing around in the wind or on rough roads. We also upgraded our sewage hose from the one that came with the trailer. No way did I want to risk a spill with that stuff! We had regular hoses at first for drinking water, but swapped those out for the collapsible kind. We also have a five gallon jerry can for water in case there's no hose at our site. We bought a small box fan and a small electric heater to augment the furnace and ac/fan. We have a pressure regulator for the hose and a surge protector for our 30amp cord. We've been carrying around two cast iron pans which we used all the time in Pennsylvania because we cook on fires there. But out west, there's way fewer options for safely lighting a campfire, and we haven't done it at all.

Our biggest regret is not installing solar before we left. M's computer is the main thing we need to power, and there are lots of times when we could have opted for a nicer campsite or park if we didn't need the 30amp hookup. But then, we couldn't really do this trip if he didn't have an awesome job that let him work remotely.

I keep meaning to take pictures of the inside, but it's a tough angle. I want to show you how it looks like when our stuff sort of explodes all over the place, but then I end up tidying everything up too quickly, and it really does all go back together in about 30 minutes. The kids love doing chores when "sweeping up" or "clean the bathroom" is a 5 minute thing. I love how the bunks are tucked into the front and behind the pantry. It's very cozy. I think it will be hard to go to sleep at home when I can't hear my whole family breathing.

Death Valley National Park

There are a few "rules" often given in RV forums about how long to drive, how long to stay somewhere and at what point in the day to stop driving and set up camp. Something about driving no more than 200 miles, stopping every two hours, and setting up camp by 2pm. We wholeheartedly agree with the rules....and hardly ever follow them. Part of this was because we were working around M's schedule. He had a lot of video conference calls, therefore needing really great wifi and a quiet place to take them. We ended up driving into the evening pretty frequently. Also, nobody ever had to pee at the same time, so some days we stopped a lot more than every two hours, really dragging things out. On the day we went to Death Valley, we entered the park from a remote 2 lane road on the southwestern side of the park. I'm not sure why we chose this road. We had long since realized that blindly following google maps was a terrible idea, especially in California and most especially while towing a trailer. We usually checked for clearance or road condition or grade issues on RV Parky and technically this road was fine for all that. It was just really remote, really rough, really steep. However, our reward was that it was also really beautiful.

I thought of Death Valley as just being the low elevation salt flats, but it's weather is so extreme because the valley is surrounded by several mountain chains. Some of them were sandy, some were covered in volcanic rock, some had big boulders, or purple and pink tops. They are stunning. As we were driving further into the park and passing very few people, the sun started to set. Sand was blowing across the loneliest road I had ever been on. I started to really notice the differences between the rocks, and there were so many different kinds, colors, sizes, shapes, formations. In a very road-trippy moment, we ate some jerky sticks, each taking a bite before passing it to the next person. There were some white knuckle moments for M, who was driving. It was so hard to anticipate where the road was going next. Later I discovered that the bumpiness of the road had dislodged our camper door, so there was a lot of Death Valley dust inside!

Eventually we made our way into the park itself and sadly found that the campground we wanted to stop in...despite having rows and rows of open sites....was not open for the season yet. We drove past the sand dunes as the sun set and then in darkness to the next camping area 20 miles down the road. The developed campground with all the hookups was pretty full, but we went down the street a little way to what was basically a parking lot and for $14 had an awesome view of the night sky. Shooting stars and the milky way.

The next day we went to the visitor center to look at the exhibits and so Laurel could do a junior ranger program. Then we drove to the Badwater Basin, which is the lowest point in North America. They have a plaque upon the mountain above that shows sea level, but this concept was way too mind blowing for the kids. They did like the salt flats, although they kept trying to sneak tastes of it. There is a ton to do in this park and it's an easy drive from Las Vegas (not on the road we came from). I would like to go backpacking there sometime and I understand they have great wildflower blooms during certain times of the year. If you like driving through interesting scenery, you could easily spend a week or more driving through this park, although you need something really rugged to get into parts of the park.