Stick in the Mud

P was a real grouch for much of this week. She didn't want to leave the house most days, and while home she seemed to spend a lot of time looking for new and better ways to needle T. I pointed out once how much more everyone gets of what they want when we behave as if we are on the same team than when we behave as if we are against each other. That message sinks in a little, I think, because I do see more cooperative behavior and mutual enjoyment for a while; but P may need to learn some lessons the hard way about losing a younger sibling's interest or trust. She likes playing with T, but sometimes she gets too bossy or interferes too much with what he wants to do, and then the play stops being fun for either of them. Or she crosses a line too many times, gets told to give T some space, promises to do better, and learns that after too many of the same kind of transgression, her actions speak louder than her promises.

Fortunately, not every day or piece of learning has been hard. P has been continuing to read a lot, with this week's books including Magic Tree House books (fiction) on King Arthur and Shakespeare, and Magic Tree House research guides (nonfiction) on Rome, Pompeii, and deep sea life (e.g., giant tube worms near mid-ocean ridges). She's listened to the first two Green Knowe books on CD, and she and T went through some of The New Way Things Work after P received it as a birthday gift. One one quick visit to the library to pick up some holds, P also got her own library card. She was pleased as punch to check out her first few books all by herself, having talked through the process with me in the car (she's watched and helped many times before with my card).

Another birthday gift (at P's request) was a geared student clock. She is wanting to figure out telling time beyond the hour and half hour, and this should help. It has the minutes printed in very small numbers around the edge, so you can look closely to find the minute value, or look from farther away to figure it out without that prompt. Being a big sister, she enjoys most the learning that looks like teaching T to tell time. Heck, three is young for that, but he may learn!

We did take one big outing, a day trip to Fort Collins to look for letterboxes there. We hatched the plan the night before, and I scouted out suitable clues for us to try. The letterboxes were placed by lovers of northern Colorado history, so while reading the clues and looking for the boxes, we learned about Auntie Stone and other figures in the Euro-American settlement of Camp/Fort Collins. We saw some houses and a school building preserved from those early days, with construction ranging from hewn logs with mud chinking to clapboards with wallpaper inside. We talked about why folks might have used such narrow, steep stairs to subtract less from the interior living space. We saw period wood stoves, school desks, a working pump organ, a hand-rocked washing machine with wringer, and other remnants of our regional history. Today, perhaps following up on that day, P asked me what it would be like "if there were no power." I asked what she thought first, and that led to talking about different kinds of "power" (electricity, people power, animal power, steam engines, etc.) and how do the same jobs using different energy sources.

There's been a fair amount of physical activity, too, for a week with so much time at home. We did a lot of walking around and playing in Fort Collins, and P and T ran about with huge abandon after P's birthday dinner out with relatives, and at a lake where we went to nab a convenient letterbox that evening. On that brief outing, P also contemplated the perfection of the sunset reflected in the lake, and we saw our first great horned owl in the wild, as it began its evening of hunting. On our way back to the car, we saw people catching fish from the shore, and P was curious about why people fish. (For fun and/or food was the short answer; we also talked about how fish could be a low-cost meal for a family who needed one.) Finally, P started her next session of gymnastics lessons today, and she's still having a lot of fun there while improving her strength, flexibility, and balance.

On the way back from gymnastics class, we saw an Accident Investigation vehicle checking out the site of a recent fender-bender. This led to questions and explanations about the word investigation, liability insurance for drivers, what happens if you don't carry it, criminal charges, how a criminal trial works, and qualifications for serving on a jury. I could tell P was interested when she closed her car window, even though the car was hot, so she could hear our conversation better.

P and I borrowed Babe: Pig in the City from the library and watched it this week while T napped (it's pretty intense for preschoolers). We stopped to talk about what animal control departments do, why a dog might need a cart to hold up its hindquarters, what drug-sniffing dogs do, and about mortgages and foreclosures. We've visited that last topic before, when talking about why we make payments on a house we "own," but it seems to be an elusive target for a seven-year-old.

T had a great morning today while P grumped and played at home. He and I went to a hardware store for a part for our swamp cooler, and there was an 18-wheeler unloading garden supplies. T has been puzzling about what pallets are for, and today we got to see one in action, used with a pallet lifter to get potting soil into the store. Then the truck driver said hi to T and asked whether he'd ever seen the inside of a big truck. He let us look around inside his cab, which had bunk beds and a fridge and microwave in the back for long hauls. T was dazzled. He's just been enjoying a picture book from the library, The Trucker, about long-haul trucking, and this dovetailed beautifully with that. T's also been continuing to play with the Brain Quest fan-books of questions and answers, and it's fun to see what he has absorbed, and talk with him about unfamiliar things.

This is such a hodgepodge of stuff. Such is the unscripted life -- sometimes the themes all come together, and sometimes it's a dash of this and a pinch of that. If there are big connections this week, my tired brain can't find most of them. But perhaps yours can, the human brain being the pattern-finding machine that it is.