Last weekend felt both small and memorable. Friday our small neighbor was over for the morning, and by staying outside for a few hours myself, I was able to keep the kids outside. When it's not summer so that everyone is home from school, it feels like such a battle to get the kids enough outdoor time. They rode bikes, puttered around, and collected and decorated pinecones with peanut butter and bird seed. I hung the cones in our little front tree, which I also pruned, and used the long sticks to make some sort of strange Earth Mother decoration which I hung on our front porch. I also pruned our three hateful front shrubs, hauled the clippings to the compost, and hung our hose up for the winter. Other big projects for the weekend.... I hung a VERY heavy mirror I had sitting on the floor for some months in our kitchen/dining/laundry/mud room, and... moved litter boxes.
When I was a child, we had some neighbors who moved away from their duplex for a while and came back maybe a year later. I don't remember the circumstances exactly, but I remember one day my mom and another neighbor went over their to clean out their freezer. The freezer wasn't working and the rotting meat therein was full of maggots. I didn't go in the house, but played in the yard for hours while these VILE smells, like I have never smelled before or after, came wafting around. That smell and my visualization of what has caused it has been my benchmark for *nasty* ever since.
...Due to the drainage problems in our sloping bathroom, and the fact that the cats kick litter out of their boxes no matter what, our bathroom had reached a crisis. Despite the philosophical and space reasons for keeping a litter box in the bathroom, it. was. not. working. So now both of our litter boxes are in our kitchen/dining/laundry/mudroom. It's crowded in here. I do have future solutions on my mind for the time soon when we don't have to move the sofa in here during group classes.... The cleaning of the vileness under and behind the industrial shelving in the bathroom, previously meant to be part of the solution, didn't rate quite as high as the maggot-ed duplex. But it was not completely out of that league. Cleaning involved a trash bag, a vacuum cleaner, a brand new roll of paper towels, a metal blade found in the garage, and enough bleach I could still smell it two days later. "Gag a maggot" is a phrase used in my family. It was that. And when I was done, the floor was likely clean enough to eat off of, but my interest in doing so was a negative ten. I was very proud of the result, and proud of myself for tackling and finishing it.
Saturday morning, I was on for playing piano in the little kid Sabbath school class, and as the girls were still sleeping at departure time, only Lazarus and I went. He petered out partway through the church service so we came home to find the family band going wild in the living room. Jared was improvising on the piano, Anne had made drums out of our bulk bins, and Laurel was dancing and playing arm violin with a practice bow.
Saturday night Linda was hosting a house concert, and as Jeffrey was out of town, either Jared or I was slated to attend and help move furniture, etc. Since I'd been down to Auburn already that morning, it was Jared's turn.
Backing up a night...What transpired, though, on Friday evening, and throughout Saturday afternoon and evening was very wonderful - both completely ordinary, and completely magical. We put up our little tiny Christmas tree purchased the previous evening at the corner lot and lugged home on top of the stroller, as well as our two strings of indoor white lights, and we got out the unbreakable decorations. It is constantly in a state of being decorated and undecorated by small hands. Very fun. We created a whole Christmas corner with the tree, a windowsill of angels, and the wooden nativity. And then... the snowflake factory started. Between Anne and Jared and me, we must have made fifty or more snowflakes in all the hues available from a pack of construction paper and a pack of printer paper. Amazing!
Saturday night while Jared was gone, I threaded all those flakes and hung them from the ceiling. We also took down our felt Thanksgiving tree and tacked up our felt Christmas tree. I also set up my great-grandmother's electric/ceramic tree in another windowsill. Additionally I cleaned the kitchen and most especially the kitchen sink, which had moved onto the *vile scale*. And found a new spot for our ALWAYS IN THE WAY rolling dishwasher. It's the little things. Also it's probably stress cleaning, although that's vaguer and harder to pinpoint.
Jumping ahead to yesterday... I pulled out the cloth diapers again and reconfigured the bathroom storage for them, so we're going to have another go with that. I am trying to cut down on waste and consumption and especially PLASTIC. Every toothbrush manufactured since they started making plastic toothbrushes in the 1930s is STILL out there. Lots of them are floating in the ocean. That is also vile. Recycling mostly doesn't happen, no matter what you put in your recycle bin. So that leaves it down to reduce and reuse...
I have moved so many times without cleaning out. And have collected so much STUFF. So many places felt temporary, and I didn't want to get rid of things I'd want in the next place. Now we have added three more people and their stuff. The necessities of life are expensive these days. And the luxuries are cheap and badly made... I'm only a few months from forty, and I sort of vaguely imagined I would not be living like a clutter freak and hoarder at such a distinguished age. So now I've joined a cleaning-out group for mothers and the Buy Nothing Project (both amazing facebook groups), and I'm getting the inspiration and the destination for all the stuff that is not working in this house. I'm expecting to live in this house for a LONG time, because it has been such a slow and tricky move in, and moving seems extremely unpractical/financially unfeasible for any years I can imagine in the future. I feel sentimental about almost all kid stuff, especially baby stuff, but I've managed to offload some unused toys and the baby bath and walker that Laurel has outgrown. Some people are not sentimental at all and can declutter easily. I am not there, but I am irritated enough about the mounds of junk on every horizontal surface, that I can do hard things so I don't have to live the rest of my life this way. Maybe it's not stress cleaning. Maybe it's Swedish death cleaning. I can't wait for our two-week Christmas break coming up so I can WORK on the project without having to be ready for students at various hours.
Sunday afternoon, just as I was finishing up typing the programs for tomorrow's and Tuesday's studio recitals, I received an email saying my reservation for the library for Sunday was cancelled. The whys and wherefores are not entirely clear, and I think it might have been my fault. I ran out to garage where Jared was installing the baseboard heaters to ask him to help me brainstorm a solution and saw Anne coming down the alley with our neighbors. I hadn't seen her yet that day, as I had been out on a walk when she woke up and was invited to their house. I joined them and told my friend about the problem. She brainstormed for some moments, too, but the best thing she said was, whatever happens, it will all be over in a week. I thought that was such a great way to look at the problem. It was only temporary! I texted and emailed some people whom I thought might have some ideas for me, and put it to bed. Monday morning I started making cold calls (something I despise!!!!!!!) to various retirement facilities, and mercifully got a yes in under half an hour. ("Hi, this is Ruth Marie Balance, and I am a local violin teacher. I have twenty young musicians ready to give a recital at 2:00 on Sunday, but we don't have a venue. Can we come perform for your residents?")
There's so many more details I'm leaving out, but that's the gist of it for now...
I have another post I have been wanting to write for a month about bedtime stories, but blogging time is pretty limited these days.
Saturday, December 14, 2019
Friday, October 25, 2019
Connections and Tetris
Connections
If you know me, you know I love all my students, and have found ways to connect successfully with a wide variety of profiles, but in replaying comments that Jared and I have made to each other over the years, I realized I heard myself saying that I really want to keep investing in beginners and growing together over the long haul. I did some research over the summer by connecting with people who have done group starts, as opposed to the one-at-a-time starts I have always done, and I got some great ideas, and frankly, a good feeling about the group dynamic, and the easy out on all sides for those who start in our studio but find that Suzuki lessons with us is not what they were looking for.
Despite various methods of trying to reach out over the years to new students (because there really are people out there who want to play the violin, viola, and cello, and who will mesh well with our particular way of doing things!), nearly all of our students have come down to word-of-mouth connections. With some great advice on how to "language" things from my dad, I communicated with so many people I have connections with. Emails, and text messages, and fliers, and in-person communications EVERY day for some weeks. As a result, not only do we have the two new students, but actually several more who are very interested in starting with us in the next few months, but for a variety of normal logistical reasons couldn't do this particular class. It feels very hopeful. I have also come to realize that despite my introversion, I am definitely someone who is looking to connect with people and connect people to each other.
Now that we are off to a solid start with this class, I feel like I can relax a little bit. Make some cookies or something...
***
Tetris
Earlier this year I was talking to another parent who lives in a house only a little bigger than our 840 square feet, with as many family members. She described her home life as constantly shuffling *things* around. I can't tell you how much that applies in our house, too. Especially since Jared and I are teaching in this same tiny space.
Group class days at home (currently Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday), we reorient our dining table and chairs by 90 degrees in our dining room/kitchen annex/utility room, and add our sofa (truly only a love seat) so that we have room in our tiny living room for our class. This sounds simple, but it involves massive clean-up (see: three kids). And also, if anyone needs to access the fridge or bulk goods during the hours of rearrange, it involves literally climbing over the table to reach them. (Let's say Jared wants to put rice in the rice cooker for dinner in between two lessons. He is standing on top of chairs and the dining table to reach the corner where the rice bin is located, and then climbing back over everything to reach the pot, hidden from view behind a curtain in the so-called kitchen.)
Let's talk about our official *kitchen*. The so called foot-space, if no cabinet or over doors are open, is about seven feet by three feet, boxed in by a weird pillar in the middle. Smack in the middle of that small walking space, we have a full-size dishwasher on gimpy wheels (you know that shopping carts which doesn't run smoothly? > Those wheels.), which came with the house. The dishwasher is at all times blocking a) the silverware drawer and the kids' dishes drawer, b) the sink, c) the oven, and/or d) the cabinet. It is truly the most difficult small kitchen we have ever had in all our dwelling places. When I gave my parents their first tour of our house on Skype, I showed them the kitchen, and my dad kept insisting he'd like to see more of it. But that was it. He'd seen it all. I have done less cooking in this house than I have in any place I've ever lived, and I'd like to think it's because Jared likes to cook and would rather I do more kid stuff. That is likely true, but also, it's because it is such an awful kitchen to work in, I usually want to give up before I start. In order to do anything in there, one is physically shoving the dishwasher back and forth, climbing over chairs, walking in wide arcs in and out of the kitchen around the pillar, squeezing past the table to access the bulk goods and refrigerator, and becoming totally exasperated. Jared is a saint (truly a SAINT!) and cooks copious amounts of tasty and nutritious food for all of us, and then washes the dishes. I honestly don't know how it doesn't drive him insane.
There is also the laundry. The clean laundry migrates from the dryer and various precarious hang-drying spots to the sleeper sofa, and then sometimes to the beds or tops of bedroom cabinets before it gets folded and put away, often in a hurry before students arrive. Hurriedly dumped on the bed, that is. Next to Jared's nice cello in its case, and a pile of books which fell off the adjoining bookshelf, a sleepy cat or two, and hopefully not on Laurel's napping spot.
These are all the most obvious examples of work-flow issues and TETRIS in our house, and I could go on for hours if I wanted to. There have only been two places I've lived as an adult where I thought my home was tidy and organized, and both of those had a LOT more square footage per person than my truly charming 1940s War house.
Anyway, this is not a complaint. It's really to preface my excitement about some genuine change coming down the pipeline, which is so close, I can almost... feel it.
My 9'x5' mini-studio attached to the end of the garage is in full use for all of my lessons now, and the larger 13'x20' studio is getting close to usable. Plus, of course, Jared and his dad added the 12'x12' storage shed last year (which could use some more internal work on my part to get everything stored well). Right now! > the garage studio is sheet-rocked minus the window and skylight openings and the attic access. There is still taping and floating, texturing and painting, and eventually flooring and baseboards to go (and probably several things I don't know about). The new donor upright piano our neighbors passed along needs work before it is ready to lead improvisation in Dalcroze or accompany the string group. It is playable (although a half-step flat), but we need a professional to work on it - no one has maintained it in at least 20 years....
But as soon as we deem that room suitable for all group classes, I have grand plans for interior house reorganization, which I know will improve our family flow. The kitchen will be more functional (although a full remodel/addition would be the true solution to its issues). I might even consider cooking something more complex than popcorn. The living room will be friendlier. The laundry room/dining room/kitchen annex will be a wee bit less crowded. We will have TWO bedrooms in which to store beds, toys, books, and homeschool stuff, and I will not have *six people stepping on my bed pillow as part of their normal throughway every day*. This evolution will not be instantaneous. It will probably take several months from start to finish, but I am excited. Also, in this house, I am ALWAYS trying to clean out. (Which goes against my nature. But so does looking at the horrible headache of clutter all the time.) I have no illusions that our space is going to be showing up in House Beautiful, but I have hopes that certain things will be more functional for all family members. I have been committing Tetris in my mind with all the furniture in anticipation.
Saturday, October 12, 2019
Peach Bundt Cake
For that huge segment of the population DYING to know the recipe for Laurel's birthday cake...
I did some serious internet scouring for a peach bundt cake which was also... vegan, gluten-free, no added oil, and lower sugar. Ha.
Most of the recipes along this line started with: six eggs, two cups of sugar, two sticks of butter, a cup of sour cream... I am sure they are delicious! But they will not suit our family eating issues. So I found a somewhat unrelated recipe and altered it, and this is what I came up with:
2 cups all-purpose gluten free flour (Namaste is what we have on hand)
1 cup almond flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1tablespoon ground golden flaxseed
1 1/2 cups almond milk
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup maple syrup
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups chopped and peeled fresh peaches
oil and almond flour for the bundt pan
Mix flax, milk, and vinegar and let it sit. Sift dry ingredients together and pour in liquids. Fold in peaches. Pour into bundt pan.
Bake in a at 350 for 45 mins. Let cool completely.
It turned out fine, but was far from spectacular. I was vaguely disappointed.
Next time I *might* add some cinnamon, which showed up in various recipes, and also more maple syrup - perhaps around 1 cup total, and cut a 1/2 cup of the almond milk. I would also up the almond flour to 1 1/2 cups and lower the flour blend to 1 1/2 cups as well. And dice the peaches even finer.
I did some serious internet scouring for a peach bundt cake which was also... vegan, gluten-free, no added oil, and lower sugar. Ha.
Most of the recipes along this line started with: six eggs, two cups of sugar, two sticks of butter, a cup of sour cream... I am sure they are delicious! But they will not suit our family eating issues. So I found a somewhat unrelated recipe and altered it, and this is what I came up with:
2 cups all-purpose gluten free flour (Namaste is what we have on hand)
1 cup almond flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1tablespoon ground golden flaxseed
1 1/2 cups almond milk
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup maple syrup
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups chopped and peeled fresh peaches
oil and almond flour for the bundt pan
Mix flax, milk, and vinegar and let it sit. Sift dry ingredients together and pour in liquids. Fold in peaches. Pour into bundt pan.
Bake in a at 350 for 45 mins. Let cool completely.
It turned out fine, but was far from spectacular. I was vaguely disappointed.
Next time I *might* add some cinnamon, which showed up in various recipes, and also more maple syrup - perhaps around 1 cup total, and cut a 1/2 cup of the almond milk. I would also up the almond flour to 1 1/2 cups and lower the flour blend to 1 1/2 cups as well. And dice the peaches even finer.
Wednesday, October 2, 2019
Imperialist Gardens
Yesterday morning as I was walking the neighborhood solo while the kids were still sleeping, basking in the morning sunlight, enjoying exploring everything I can see, my mind was whirring, as it is often wont to. Some themes from the previous night's post came spinning out in new ways, and now I have more to say, and it is not about schooling, although maybe it is...
It is about colonialism in all the negative senses of the word.
As I look at yards around houses, I see familiar things. I see a few large native trees. I see some smaller ornamental trees, usually imported from another continent. I see lawn. The lush lawns are made up of only one or two species of grass not from around here. The scraggly lawns are made up of whatever felt like growing. Most of them, lush or otherwise, are regularly mowed into submission, chopped to a length deemed attractive by the residents, or to a length imagined to be deemed attractive by the neighbors. There are flower beds containing shrubs and flowers and various plantings, mostly imported from other continents. And there are the gardener's nemesis: weeds. Weeds, of course, are ugly plants that we don't want soiling our space. Or a gentler definition: weeds are any plant that is not where we want it to be.
In a naturally balanced ecosystem, of course, there are no weeds. Weeds are only defined by what humans don't want.
Think me crazy, but I have always been sympathetic to weeds, and I have felt badly about pulling them, preferring to let life live its own way. But of course, that isn't practical is it?
I realized on my walk, all of a sudden, that the imperialist culture of Western Europe (which we erroneously conflate with Christianity ALL THE TIME) that took over the world, snatching unknown people for forced labor, and rounding up or killing other unknown people which were in the way, to create a lifestyle of comfort for ourselves, is exactly how we create havens of rest around our homes, too. "Weeds" are how we see the native plants which are the foundation of the carefully balanced ecosystem in our place. And "weeds" are how we see native people who don't fit in with our culture of comfort. We bring in other, more-comfortable-to-us species to please our senses without considering the soil, the water systems, the insects, the birds, or anything else that lives in symbiosis.
This was heavily on the back burner of my mind while I was teaching in my corner room at the church in Gig Harbor late yesterday afternoon, when a man came around the corner with a LARGE propane torch, setting fire to the weeds growing up between the landscaping rocks just outside my window. He got carried away, and accidentally burned some young trees and ferns and shrubs which were meant to stay. With heavy clouds of smoke going up, he had to run the hose on his fires and stomp them out, leaving charred blackness in the so-called landscaping. Then he came back with a huge plastic bucket labelled weed-killer.
The man was merely doing his job.
I felt angry. Vaguely angry that he was endangering the building with roaring fires so close to the eaves. Very angry that he let the fires burn some carefully bedded plants. Partially angry at the environmental degradation caused by unnecessary smoke, the production of propane for this purpose, and the poison of the weed killer. But I was most angry that we see the miracle of tenacious, beautiful native life, growing in its own perfect spot, as a nuisance which must be killed.
But the man was merely doing his job.
We do this stuff ALL the time in so many ways. And we have NO idea what we are doing. We are all just doing our jobs. This is how its always been done. This is the most efficient, expedient way. This is what's practical. This is what the neighbors expect. This is normal.
We never stop to think outside the box - our little box of cultural comfort handed down to us generation after generation. I come from slave-owners many generations back. Slavery is officially illegal, but do you think all the attitudes which made it possible are dead? I doubt it. There are tiny whispers in the way we do little day-to-day things, handed down from parents to children, grandparents to grandchildren.
Looking at imperialist gardens, it is easy for me to see today how we could slash and burn whole forests, kidnap families in the middle of the night and ship them overseas to work unpaid under the eye of the whip until death do us part, selling off their family members at a whim, pour poison in people's drinking water for financial gain and lock the clean-up in irrelevant legal battles for years, create damaging earthquakes to wrest bits of ancient forests out of the ground to propel us from place to place at our convenience, laugh at the possibility that the only way we have left for the few tough-enough-to-still-be-alive remaining rightful inhabitants of the continent to find their way forward is to let them swindle us in casinos, consider nomads eyesore to be rounded up and placed somewhere out of sight (was that the Plains Natives in the 1800s? or is that the tent-dwellers in large cities in the 2010s?). We are a culture that uses force, coercion, and abuse to control those we see beneath us, and THAT INCLUDES OUR VERY OWN CHILDREN. And then we are unhappy people, and we wonder why.
I wish I could take all this baggage to the dump, leave it there, and start fresh. The enormous dump filled up with things that should never have been made in the first place. Garbage that will never rot. Plastic that will break into smaller and smaller pieces and haunt us for hundreds or thousands of years. The everything that you buy which is packaged in plastic. Or the garbage that never even made it to the dump, which the sea water has collected in rafts the size of Texas. Unprecedented-in-the-history-of-the-world conspicuous consumption at a daily level, and we can't even see that we're doing it. It's cheap. It's convenient. It keeps us in our comfortable box. If we want to imagine we don't need it all, never fear: every day we are advertised to in so many ways. And we have the biological push to keep up with those around us, so we keep chasing all this pointlessness...
I wish I could take all this baggage to the dump, leave it there, and start fresh. But the reality is slower and more difficult. We must work through it little by little, day by day, painfully. True change is often slow.
Noticing the problem is the first step. Anger is a signal. When we notice the signal as a call to action, we are letting anger work its magic. Get good and angry...
It is about colonialism in all the negative senses of the word.
As I look at yards around houses, I see familiar things. I see a few large native trees. I see some smaller ornamental trees, usually imported from another continent. I see lawn. The lush lawns are made up of only one or two species of grass not from around here. The scraggly lawns are made up of whatever felt like growing. Most of them, lush or otherwise, are regularly mowed into submission, chopped to a length deemed attractive by the residents, or to a length imagined to be deemed attractive by the neighbors. There are flower beds containing shrubs and flowers and various plantings, mostly imported from other continents. And there are the gardener's nemesis: weeds. Weeds, of course, are ugly plants that we don't want soiling our space. Or a gentler definition: weeds are any plant that is not where we want it to be.
In a naturally balanced ecosystem, of course, there are no weeds. Weeds are only defined by what humans don't want.
Think me crazy, but I have always been sympathetic to weeds, and I have felt badly about pulling them, preferring to let life live its own way. But of course, that isn't practical is it?
I realized on my walk, all of a sudden, that the imperialist culture of Western Europe (which we erroneously conflate with Christianity ALL THE TIME) that took over the world, snatching unknown people for forced labor, and rounding up or killing other unknown people which were in the way, to create a lifestyle of comfort for ourselves, is exactly how we create havens of rest around our homes, too. "Weeds" are how we see the native plants which are the foundation of the carefully balanced ecosystem in our place. And "weeds" are how we see native people who don't fit in with our culture of comfort. We bring in other, more-comfortable-to-us species to please our senses without considering the soil, the water systems, the insects, the birds, or anything else that lives in symbiosis.
This was heavily on the back burner of my mind while I was teaching in my corner room at the church in Gig Harbor late yesterday afternoon, when a man came around the corner with a LARGE propane torch, setting fire to the weeds growing up between the landscaping rocks just outside my window. He got carried away, and accidentally burned some young trees and ferns and shrubs which were meant to stay. With heavy clouds of smoke going up, he had to run the hose on his fires and stomp them out, leaving charred blackness in the so-called landscaping. Then he came back with a huge plastic bucket labelled weed-killer.
The man was merely doing his job.
I felt angry. Vaguely angry that he was endangering the building with roaring fires so close to the eaves. Very angry that he let the fires burn some carefully bedded plants. Partially angry at the environmental degradation caused by unnecessary smoke, the production of propane for this purpose, and the poison of the weed killer. But I was most angry that we see the miracle of tenacious, beautiful native life, growing in its own perfect spot, as a nuisance which must be killed.
But the man was merely doing his job.
We do this stuff ALL the time in so many ways. And we have NO idea what we are doing. We are all just doing our jobs. This is how its always been done. This is the most efficient, expedient way. This is what's practical. This is what the neighbors expect. This is normal.
We never stop to think outside the box - our little box of cultural comfort handed down to us generation after generation. I come from slave-owners many generations back. Slavery is officially illegal, but do you think all the attitudes which made it possible are dead? I doubt it. There are tiny whispers in the way we do little day-to-day things, handed down from parents to children, grandparents to grandchildren.
Looking at imperialist gardens, it is easy for me to see today how we could slash and burn whole forests, kidnap families in the middle of the night and ship them overseas to work unpaid under the eye of the whip until death do us part, selling off their family members at a whim, pour poison in people's drinking water for financial gain and lock the clean-up in irrelevant legal battles for years, create damaging earthquakes to wrest bits of ancient forests out of the ground to propel us from place to place at our convenience, laugh at the possibility that the only way we have left for the few tough-enough-to-still-be-alive remaining rightful inhabitants of the continent to find their way forward is to let them swindle us in casinos, consider nomads eyesore to be rounded up and placed somewhere out of sight (was that the Plains Natives in the 1800s? or is that the tent-dwellers in large cities in the 2010s?). We are a culture that uses force, coercion, and abuse to control those we see beneath us, and THAT INCLUDES OUR VERY OWN CHILDREN. And then we are unhappy people, and we wonder why.
I wish I could take all this baggage to the dump, leave it there, and start fresh. The enormous dump filled up with things that should never have been made in the first place. Garbage that will never rot. Plastic that will break into smaller and smaller pieces and haunt us for hundreds or thousands of years. The everything that you buy which is packaged in plastic. Or the garbage that never even made it to the dump, which the sea water has collected in rafts the size of Texas. Unprecedented-in-the-history-of-the-world conspicuous consumption at a daily level, and we can't even see that we're doing it. It's cheap. It's convenient. It keeps us in our comfortable box. If we want to imagine we don't need it all, never fear: every day we are advertised to in so many ways. And we have the biological push to keep up with those around us, so we keep chasing all this pointlessness...
I wish I could take all this baggage to the dump, leave it there, and start fresh. But the reality is slower and more difficult. We must work through it little by little, day by day, painfully. True change is often slow.
Noticing the problem is the first step. Anger is a signal. When we notice the signal as a call to action, we are letting anger work its magic. Get good and angry...
Monday, September 30, 2019
Always Learning
As I last posted in mid-August, I was hoping to write something before September ended and I would have missed an entire calendar page. The truth is that my life is very full, and writing this is currently a luxury afforded by not being able to sleep.
We are only three months into our homeschool journey with my first-grader, but the deeper I get into it, the more I feel it is the right place for us to be right now.
We are about a third of the way through the first-grade math curriculum I bought, and my first-grader is really growing in her skills, not only of addition and subtraction, but of geometry, learning to count money and tell time, understanding calendars, measurements of length and volume, and skills which will ultimately lead to multiplication and division. She is learning things which are practical in every way and will make her a well-rounded mathematician, regardless of how far she goes in math.
Phonics is the other first-grade skill that I think is super important, and we've done a tiny bit, but too much book work isn't our cup of tea, so that's mostly on hold until we finish our math in a few months. We have the flexibility to work deeply on one subject at a time if we need to. I have a feeling that once we delve into phonics deeply and daily, she is going to become a real and fantastic reader, which I know she will LOVE.
We are reading, reading, reading together. Some of it we are reading together on the sofa. Some of it is read to us on the CD player carried, from room to room in the house, or built into the car stereo. My first-grader really connects with stories, and she is hearing (mostly) fictional stories, mostly written for children older than herself. Behind the scenes they are teaching her about big feelings and emotional regulation; strong, independent girls with passionate interests; how people just like her live in other times and places; how some Native cultures live in harmony with their surrounding ecology, and how those cultures and colonial cultures have clashed; how some brave children walked across fight lines to integrate American schools... These are all things my six-year-old is thinking about from reading. Her vocabulary is growing as is her cultural and historical literacy. There are so many delicious things to talk about. Can I tell you how much we appreciate the public library?
We are also finding some great videos at the library. Lately the elder two have been watching a documentary about Mr. Rogers, the kindest man we have ever "met," as well as about sea horses - their biology, as well as joint efforts between conservationists and fishermen at protecting them.
There are drawing lessons with my mom - lessons which teach the eyes to observe reality closely and analyze it to understand its constituent parts. Excellent skills for growing in the areas of science and philosophy, as my mom has pointed out. Nevermind that we live several states away; video conferencing is amazing. Somewhere down the road, I hear there is also an excellent geography course based on this more foundational drawing course. It is art, but it is so much more.
There are now double bass lessons with a wonderful young man who has never taught a kid before. Anne loves him and is excited to practice his assignments. Her mother, because of her many years of teaching experience, is able to translate this wonderful teacher's rambling piles of brand new information into concrete practice lists. This young fellow will NEVER know how much grief he is saving our family. It is so good for my child to have a music teacher who plays an instrument her parents don't, and who is the boss when it comes to what she should practice. I think he might have saved our family relationships. You think I'm kidding, but I'm not.
She also plays in two of our weekly group classes and participates in the adjoining Dalcroze half-hour. One is on Monday at home, and one is on Tuesday in Gig Harbor. Teamwork and careful listening skills are growing.
There is a weekly Bible club in the neighborhood which involves memorizing Bible verses to earn badges (not a huge fan of the rewards set-up, but anyway...) and large-body activities with big groups of kids, which is quite popular with my child.
There is the possibility for interesting projects. My child thinks up many of her own - she has lately been trying to figure out how to start a dog-walking business, earn money babysitting her siblings, trying to discover if there is any way she can get her own dog, sewn clothes for her Barbies, started ghost-writing a book about babysitting, tried to imagine what it would be like to break a leg, drawn series of pictures depicting various stages of human pregnancy, taught her brother music lessons... Those are all things she has done of her own volition in the last week. She has a fertile mind which needs space and time to create and grow, which it has when she isn't confined to the industrial walls of the wonderful school down the street, where the caring teachers must spend so much effort maintaining order in the group and teaching to improve test scores. (None of which is to say that wonderful school might not be exactly the right fit for our family in the future.)
I have a project of my own inspiration which we are going to do in the next week or so (fit in around the rest of my life... ha.) Along with my mother in Texas, I am very interested in ecology, and realize that native plants support native insects which support native birds and other wildlife... Whole ecosystems are delicately balanced and when we humans tinker too much, the whole thing collapses needlessly, at our loss and the rest of creation's loss. At my mother's suggestion I joined a group on facebook called Plant Identification. Today I took photos of about ten different plant species growing in the "lawn" of our yard and sent them off for the plant nerds to identify. Anne and I are going to take clippings from these plants and press them. Then we will mount each on its own page and add the Latin and common names to them, and find out their range and habitats and whether they are native or invasive here. I plan to hang this catalogue in our house for us to study so we know who we are living in the middle of. I feel like we inhabit such a strange cultural space where most of us have no idea who our natural neighbors in the creation are and feel that we have no relationship to them other than to use them.
As I mentioned at some point before, in June I joined another facebook group called Christian Gentle Parenting, which, frankly, has been amazing. There are so many resources listed, with more popping up all the time, including books, articles, videos, podcasts, specific strategies, advice for specific situations, etc. to help parents develop positive life-long relationships with their children while raising them to be responsible, kind, thoughtful, and honest without the use of manipulation, force, punishment, or shaming, all of which are SO deeply imbedded in our culture. They just added a whole new unit on dealing with racism, which I am excited to study when I catch up with the material I am currently working through. I read bits of things from this group almost every day, and I feel that I am becoming a much better parent/human-being-in-relationship-with-others for it, while also realizing *how much* more growing I have to do. I am so grateful for this group. It, like Anne's bass teacher, is truly a life-line. God has been very good to me.
Homeschooling is wonderful, and I am *almost* in over my head.
We are only three months into our homeschool journey with my first-grader, but the deeper I get into it, the more I feel it is the right place for us to be right now.
We are about a third of the way through the first-grade math curriculum I bought, and my first-grader is really growing in her skills, not only of addition and subtraction, but of geometry, learning to count money and tell time, understanding calendars, measurements of length and volume, and skills which will ultimately lead to multiplication and division. She is learning things which are practical in every way and will make her a well-rounded mathematician, regardless of how far she goes in math.
Phonics is the other first-grade skill that I think is super important, and we've done a tiny bit, but too much book work isn't our cup of tea, so that's mostly on hold until we finish our math in a few months. We have the flexibility to work deeply on one subject at a time if we need to. I have a feeling that once we delve into phonics deeply and daily, she is going to become a real and fantastic reader, which I know she will LOVE.
We are reading, reading, reading together. Some of it we are reading together on the sofa. Some of it is read to us on the CD player carried, from room to room in the house, or built into the car stereo. My first-grader really connects with stories, and she is hearing (mostly) fictional stories, mostly written for children older than herself. Behind the scenes they are teaching her about big feelings and emotional regulation; strong, independent girls with passionate interests; how people just like her live in other times and places; how some Native cultures live in harmony with their surrounding ecology, and how those cultures and colonial cultures have clashed; how some brave children walked across fight lines to integrate American schools... These are all things my six-year-old is thinking about from reading. Her vocabulary is growing as is her cultural and historical literacy. There are so many delicious things to talk about. Can I tell you how much we appreciate the public library?
We are also finding some great videos at the library. Lately the elder two have been watching a documentary about Mr. Rogers, the kindest man we have ever "met," as well as about sea horses - their biology, as well as joint efforts between conservationists and fishermen at protecting them.
There are drawing lessons with my mom - lessons which teach the eyes to observe reality closely and analyze it to understand its constituent parts. Excellent skills for growing in the areas of science and philosophy, as my mom has pointed out. Nevermind that we live several states away; video conferencing is amazing. Somewhere down the road, I hear there is also an excellent geography course based on this more foundational drawing course. It is art, but it is so much more.
There are now double bass lessons with a wonderful young man who has never taught a kid before. Anne loves him and is excited to practice his assignments. Her mother, because of her many years of teaching experience, is able to translate this wonderful teacher's rambling piles of brand new information into concrete practice lists. This young fellow will NEVER know how much grief he is saving our family. It is so good for my child to have a music teacher who plays an instrument her parents don't, and who is the boss when it comes to what she should practice. I think he might have saved our family relationships. You think I'm kidding, but I'm not.
She also plays in two of our weekly group classes and participates in the adjoining Dalcroze half-hour. One is on Monday at home, and one is on Tuesday in Gig Harbor. Teamwork and careful listening skills are growing.
There is a weekly Bible club in the neighborhood which involves memorizing Bible verses to earn badges (not a huge fan of the rewards set-up, but anyway...) and large-body activities with big groups of kids, which is quite popular with my child.
There is the possibility for interesting projects. My child thinks up many of her own - she has lately been trying to figure out how to start a dog-walking business, earn money babysitting her siblings, trying to discover if there is any way she can get her own dog, sewn clothes for her Barbies, started ghost-writing a book about babysitting, tried to imagine what it would be like to break a leg, drawn series of pictures depicting various stages of human pregnancy, taught her brother music lessons... Those are all things she has done of her own volition in the last week. She has a fertile mind which needs space and time to create and grow, which it has when she isn't confined to the industrial walls of the wonderful school down the street, where the caring teachers must spend so much effort maintaining order in the group and teaching to improve test scores. (None of which is to say that wonderful school might not be exactly the right fit for our family in the future.)
I have a project of my own inspiration which we are going to do in the next week or so (fit in around the rest of my life... ha.) Along with my mother in Texas, I am very interested in ecology, and realize that native plants support native insects which support native birds and other wildlife... Whole ecosystems are delicately balanced and when we humans tinker too much, the whole thing collapses needlessly, at our loss and the rest of creation's loss. At my mother's suggestion I joined a group on facebook called Plant Identification. Today I took photos of about ten different plant species growing in the "lawn" of our yard and sent them off for the plant nerds to identify. Anne and I are going to take clippings from these plants and press them. Then we will mount each on its own page and add the Latin and common names to them, and find out their range and habitats and whether they are native or invasive here. I plan to hang this catalogue in our house for us to study so we know who we are living in the middle of. I feel like we inhabit such a strange cultural space where most of us have no idea who our natural neighbors in the creation are and feel that we have no relationship to them other than to use them.
As I mentioned at some point before, in June I joined another facebook group called Christian Gentle Parenting, which, frankly, has been amazing. There are so many resources listed, with more popping up all the time, including books, articles, videos, podcasts, specific strategies, advice for specific situations, etc. to help parents develop positive life-long relationships with their children while raising them to be responsible, kind, thoughtful, and honest without the use of manipulation, force, punishment, or shaming, all of which are SO deeply imbedded in our culture. They just added a whole new unit on dealing with racism, which I am excited to study when I catch up with the material I am currently working through. I read bits of things from this group almost every day, and I feel that I am becoming a much better parent/human-being-in-relationship-with-others for it, while also realizing *how much* more growing I have to do. I am so grateful for this group. It, like Anne's bass teacher, is truly a life-line. God has been very good to me.
Homeschooling is wonderful, and I am *almost* in over my head.
Monday, August 19, 2019
Summer Sunsets
The summer sunsets are getting earlier and earlier, which always makes me sad. The days of June feel so hopeful when it is light at 5:00 in the morning and doesn't get dark until 10:00. Now autumn is coming, and with it a return to the weekly schedule. And rain. And more darkness. The flowers are winding down. We aren't starting our fall teaching schedule until the second week of September, although some of the districts around us go back to school in just another week.
This weekend felt refreshing and heavy, both. I needed a little space and time without events, because I was SO tired. And all weekend I felt inordinately sad about not taking any of our annual camping trips or going on any of our favorite hikes this summer.
Last year we said a pre-emptive no to all camping trips, with the intention of making time to work on the garage. Then we did not work on the garage, because we ended up preparing for a concert, which takes daily focus and preparation for weeks and months. At the end of that summer, we regretted the camping ban, and vowed never to have a no-camping summer again.
This summer I planned at least one camping trip, which was then cancelled due to exhaustion and actual work on the garage. Then in addition to a remix of the same concert from last summer, we got asked to do a much bigger concert in September. So that means lots more preparation for weeks and months. Which I, for one, am behind on, on account of slicing my finger two weeks ago. It is not completely back to normal and may not be for some time, but I am able to use it at about 90% normalcy now when I am playing.
The upshot of our vow to enjoy summer is, we got to go to the beach for a few hours on July 4, but there was no camping. We still haven't had a chance to do anything for our anniversary yet, which was a month ago. I had to back out of going on my brother's birthday hike at Mt. Rainier yesterday due to needing to practice and family logistics. Also this was the weekend I would have planned to do my annual birthday camping trip at Mowich Lake, which of course, was out of the question, too. Plus if we want to back up for some added drama, we didn't get to do Jared's annual birthday trip to Hurricane Ridge in January as the government shutdown meant they didn't plow and no one could get up there.
About the birthday this week... I'm feeling sad about that, too. Turning 29 was really hard on me. Painfully hard. 39 coming up doesn't seem quite so bad, but I am feeling like it's the end of a good era... Why are we Westerners so obsessed with numbers? I always have been, and I always loved math. There is no escape.
What I want most is to cancel all obligations for the next week (not possible!) and escape to the rugged wilderness of this beautiful state. I'm paying out the ears to live here for a reason.
While I watch summer winding down and am investing time trying to get my fall schedule organized and recruit more students to fill it up my empty hours, I keep waiting for my summer to start. The time when I go swimming and climb mountains and watch my kids play at the beach. I guess that will have to wait for next summer...
This weekend felt refreshing and heavy, both. I needed a little space and time without events, because I was SO tired. And all weekend I felt inordinately sad about not taking any of our annual camping trips or going on any of our favorite hikes this summer.
Last year we said a pre-emptive no to all camping trips, with the intention of making time to work on the garage. Then we did not work on the garage, because we ended up preparing for a concert, which takes daily focus and preparation for weeks and months. At the end of that summer, we regretted the camping ban, and vowed never to have a no-camping summer again.
This summer I planned at least one camping trip, which was then cancelled due to exhaustion and actual work on the garage. Then in addition to a remix of the same concert from last summer, we got asked to do a much bigger concert in September. So that means lots more preparation for weeks and months. Which I, for one, am behind on, on account of slicing my finger two weeks ago. It is not completely back to normal and may not be for some time, but I am able to use it at about 90% normalcy now when I am playing.
The upshot of our vow to enjoy summer is, we got to go to the beach for a few hours on July 4, but there was no camping. We still haven't had a chance to do anything for our anniversary yet, which was a month ago. I had to back out of going on my brother's birthday hike at Mt. Rainier yesterday due to needing to practice and family logistics. Also this was the weekend I would have planned to do my annual birthday camping trip at Mowich Lake, which of course, was out of the question, too. Plus if we want to back up for some added drama, we didn't get to do Jared's annual birthday trip to Hurricane Ridge in January as the government shutdown meant they didn't plow and no one could get up there.
About the birthday this week... I'm feeling sad about that, too. Turning 29 was really hard on me. Painfully hard. 39 coming up doesn't seem quite so bad, but I am feeling like it's the end of a good era... Why are we Westerners so obsessed with numbers? I always have been, and I always loved math. There is no escape.
What I want most is to cancel all obligations for the next week (not possible!) and escape to the rugged wilderness of this beautiful state. I'm paying out the ears to live here for a reason.
While I watch summer winding down and am investing time trying to get my fall schedule organized and recruit more students to fill it up my empty hours, I keep waiting for my summer to start. The time when I go swimming and climb mountains and watch my kids play at the beach. I guess that will have to wait for next summer...
Sunday, August 11, 2019
Mayhem in Review
Starting from the last week of June:
Week 1: Jared was out of town. I was alone with three kids for the first time. Anne had her last day of kindergarten and her first day of summer swimming. I taught a few lessons and hosted an end-of-year party for Anne's class. No one died, but there were meltdowns amongst my kids.
Week 2: We had a few days off due to the Fourth. There was garage-cleaning and planning that happened in addition to teaching and rehearsing.
Week 3: We taught our in-house group class workshop all week, and had an electrical team here to put the line and panel in for our garage conversion. And also rehearsed with Linda.
Week 4: We taught lessons and my dad came to stay with us and do all the interior electrical work on the garage. Also, we had five evening rehearsals in Seattle with Linda and Adam.
Week 5: We taught at the Walla Walla Suzuki Institute. It involved a road trip (not so fun). It was kind of an easy week there since we had Jared's parents there to do EVERYTHING for us. They took care of the little kids while we were teaching, took Anne to all her classes, took Anne swimming daily, and cooked dinner for us. And the campus is so small and everything was clustered right together.
Week 6: We taught lessons and gave a full-length (sold-out! :-)) chamber concert with Adam and Linda in Kent. And painting over the graffiti that showed up on our garage door while we were out of town the previous week. Also Anne had her first vacation Bible school experience nightly, which she loved.
Week 7: Zombie week. We taught at Japan Seattle Suzuki Institute, and thankfully this year cut out hours of commuting by staying in the dorm. But we had piecemeal hour-by-hour childcare that I didn't always have lined up until 45 minutes before it was needed. Some incredibly generous people helped us out! Also, the night before it all started, I smashed my middle finger on my left hand. It bled for several hours, and had to be iced. I thought of going out to find a doctor on Sunday night, but trying to find something on our insurance while packing for the early morning departure was not awesome, so I used bandaids and paper towels. Thankfully, my group class pianist at the institute got me some super glue, and by the third day of the institute, my finger was no longer bleeding, and I could start to play a little bit.
Now we have three easy weeks. Just some summer teaching, in-house rehearsing for our pair of chamber concerts in Bellingham the first week of Bellingham, and working out the fall teaching schedule. There are some big changes coming to group class (I think?), and thinking about childcare, and recruiting some new students to replace our moving-away and graduating and changing teachers students... And maybe cleaning out the huge and disgusting pile of boxes left over from last year's move, which are now in an unattractive and somewhat soggy pile under a big, blue, wet tarp in the back yard.
Week 1: Jared was out of town. I was alone with three kids for the first time. Anne had her last day of kindergarten and her first day of summer swimming. I taught a few lessons and hosted an end-of-year party for Anne's class. No one died, but there were meltdowns amongst my kids.
Week 2: We had a few days off due to the Fourth. There was garage-cleaning and planning that happened in addition to teaching and rehearsing.
Week 3: We taught our in-house group class workshop all week, and had an electrical team here to put the line and panel in for our garage conversion. And also rehearsed with Linda.
Week 4: We taught lessons and my dad came to stay with us and do all the interior electrical work on the garage. Also, we had five evening rehearsals in Seattle with Linda and Adam.
Week 5: We taught at the Walla Walla Suzuki Institute. It involved a road trip (not so fun). It was kind of an easy week there since we had Jared's parents there to do EVERYTHING for us. They took care of the little kids while we were teaching, took Anne to all her classes, took Anne swimming daily, and cooked dinner for us. And the campus is so small and everything was clustered right together.
Week 6: We taught lessons and gave a full-length (sold-out! :-)) chamber concert with Adam and Linda in Kent. And painting over the graffiti that showed up on our garage door while we were out of town the previous week. Also Anne had her first vacation Bible school experience nightly, which she loved.
Week 7: Zombie week. We taught at Japan Seattle Suzuki Institute, and thankfully this year cut out hours of commuting by staying in the dorm. But we had piecemeal hour-by-hour childcare that I didn't always have lined up until 45 minutes before it was needed. Some incredibly generous people helped us out! Also, the night before it all started, I smashed my middle finger on my left hand. It bled for several hours, and had to be iced. I thought of going out to find a doctor on Sunday night, but trying to find something on our insurance while packing for the early morning departure was not awesome, so I used bandaids and paper towels. Thankfully, my group class pianist at the institute got me some super glue, and by the third day of the institute, my finger was no longer bleeding, and I could start to play a little bit.
Now we have three easy weeks. Just some summer teaching, in-house rehearsing for our pair of chamber concerts in Bellingham the first week of Bellingham, and working out the fall teaching schedule. There are some big changes coming to group class (I think?), and thinking about childcare, and recruiting some new students to replace our moving-away and graduating and changing teachers students... And maybe cleaning out the huge and disgusting pile of boxes left over from last year's move, which are now in an unattractive and somewhat soggy pile under a big, blue, wet tarp in the back yard.
Saturday, August 3, 2019
Outsider Eyes
During our week in Walla Walla (more properly, the adjoining smaller town of College Place) I took a lot of photos during my early morning perambulations. I was fascinated, looking at the place with eyes of an outsider. The town started in the 1890s with the construction of a Seventh-Day Adventist College, truly out in the middle of nowhere. It is in high desert, not dissimilar to parts of Arizona or West Texas, for those of my readers more familiar with those landscapes. You wouldn't know that from these pictures, because the area is HEAVILY irrigated. I tried to capture lots of pictures from around town which contain the water tower - a central landmark which the locals probably give very little thought to, but is the only thing making the town a green and even agricultural oasis, rather than hardscrabble desert where nothing grows taller than the tumbleweeds and grass. The church is a central influence, and this particular university church is more progressive in its traditionally conservative SDA theology, with its quirky 19th-century eschatology and emphasis on holy and practical living. It is certainly, also a college town, with lots of small rentals. A third influence, which I did not get a photo of, is the Super Walmart which has invaded the town in recent years and is open until quite late. And a fourth is the Fort with its canons, which was built to defend White invaders (aka settlers) from the Natives whose land they stole. (Again, no picture.) The town is so small that in only a few blocks of walking you are not "in town" but in rural agricultural areas. Then you are in the Interior American West with its Go West Young Man concept of limitless land and limitless resources for the exploiting (and keep your hands off my business, buddy.) College Place has had homes built in it from every decade from the 1890s through the present. Truly fascinating.
Currently abandoned, my best guess is that this was the very first house of worship built in town:
The tallest building in town, by far, is this dormitory:
Seventh-day Adventists have their own scouting organization called Pathfinders:
In town, there are alleys between all the houses pre-1940s:
Someone has found a way to harness the sunshine which is in full supply here to subsidize modern life:
The cemetery here is called New Hope, and was founded in 1892, just a year after the college. Life and death go on and on. I walked in it last year, but I couldn't bear to do it again, because I can't stop myself reading headstones, and the headstones of children are particularly heartbreaking.
And a little piece of family history. Nancy's grandparents lived in this house, and she visited them here frequently as a child. I captured all the descendants in front of it.
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