Agriculture, Economics, and Iwo Jima

Our biggest outing recently was yesterday morning: we went to an Agricultural Heritage Center in a nearby town. The place was a homestead starting in the 1870s, and several subsequent buildings and improvements were made before the land was given to the county as a museum. The farm still keeps some animals and has a small garden, but no big field crops. They have added an area of hands-on, museum-type exhibits in one of the barns. One of my favorites, which the kids also liked, was a wooden birthday cake divided up into 8 wedges that you could pull out and examine. Each wedge had a picture of a typical cake ingredient (butter, eggs, honey, flour, etc.) on one flat face, and a picture of where that ingredient came from (cows, chickens, beehives, wheat fields, etc.) on the other. There were higher-tech exhibits, but that one just tied things together so nicely in a way that isn't obvious to young kids raised in the city.

The exhibit-area experience was a little loud and overwhelming because we were sharing the area with two first-grade classes on a field trip. Much more relaxed and enjoyable were our self-guided tour of the farmhouse, outbuildings, and grounds, and some opportunities to ask questions of a friendly volunteer. After the school groups left, the volunteers let the chickens out, and we hung out with the chickens and watched them hunt grasshoppers; judging by the mad dashes the chickens made to try to catch the grasshoppers, they really like to eat them! P has been around chickens before, but this was T's first opportunity. He was tickled pink. One chicken nipped curiously at the sleeve of P's dress but did no harm; she was tickled as well once she got over her surprise. We saw bunnies that lived in a woodpile, checked out the crops in the war garden (noticing the striking similarities between the chard and beets, which are different varieties of the same species) and the damage that had been done to them by various pests, and reflected on the meaning of "loafing shed," as one building was described on the map we had.

Some of the things P and T got a chance to learn about or try were:

• Tools and implements from the early 1900s or so, including lariats, lots of tack and farm implements,  water pumps, windmills, iceboxes (the pre-refrigeration type that used blocks of ice), wood-burning heating and cooking stoves (including air inlet for controlling temperature), corn sheller, grain grinder, older stone grinding setup for grain, and some initially mysterious things like calf weaners. 
• Other stuff related to lower-tech ways of living, like outhouses (there was an old wooden one on the site, plus a newer, better-ventilated one for actual use); milking areas with stanchions for hand milking of cows; and a wooden yoke for draft animals that we could take apart and reassemble.
• Bits of history, especially war gardens/victory gardens and why they were important.
• Changes in building technology, and adaptations to the weather here: The old barn was built with unusual mortise-and-tenon joints that allowed it to flex in the high winds rather than breaking down as so many old barns in this area have. The silo at the farm was built of concrete staves with a tongue-and-groove shape, encircled by metal hoops to hold it all together; this was a new technology around 1900. (P noticed another concrete-stave silo on the way home and remarked on it.)

It hadn't occurred to me before that silo and silage are probably related by more than sound! I'd encountered both, but not previously encountered the one being used to store the other. P got to hear about silage (partially fermented grains and/or grasses -- it stinks to high heaven, but if it's made right, the cows love it!). She also learned where mules come from and that they generally can't reproduce. (We're not sure whether the animal we were watching was a donkey or a mule, but it was still a good conversation.)

On the way home we talked about a silent-auction school fundraiser we were attending that evening. P had never heard of an auction, so I described how a live auction works, and then how a silent auction accomplishes the same thing without the noise and more quickly. I hope she'll be willing to talk more about it -- I can show her a silent auction bidding sheet, since we won one item -- and how it ties in with her recent yearnings to sell things. She's been wanting to sell her outgrown and unwanted stuff for money, and begging to go out and set up in the driveway to try to sell it garage-sale style. The problems with this have been that 1) she gets this notion at odd times, like a chilly 6 p.m. on a Thursday night, and wants to do it right then, and 2) we live on a street that gets very little non-resident traffic, since it doesn't follow a useful path for anyone else. I've tried explaining how essential advertising and location are (not to mention having desirable goods) for a sale, but she says she doesn't care and just wants to go do it. The deal I made with her was that she could do it on a Saturday morning when we could plan to hang around and wait for people (and maybe run an ad on craigslist the day before); or I would help her try to sell stuff on eBay if she wants. Maybe having the auction as a bit of background will help with the eBay idea, which seems to me like her best bet at actually selling her stuff, albeit not for much money.

P is getting more confident and effective at interacting with people in the world at large. Lately she's been very willing to ask adult strangers questions or make requests of them when it's appropriate. Sometimes I suggest she do it (asking for something she wants in a restaurant, for example, or asking if she could play with the pump at the Agricultural Heritage Center), and sometimes she takes the initiative herself (asking her choir director if her sparkly black shoes would be okay for her concert uniform). She used to do this only reluctantly or with a lot of coaching, but now she's pretty good at deciding to do it and using an appropriate tone and level of politeness for the situation. This is the sort of thing we get more opportunities to try because of unschooling, since she sees a wider variety of people in different situations than if she were in school all day most days.

Here are a slew of other recent bits of learning:

• We've been seeing a particular ad a lot, one promoting Obama's jobs bill with an excerpt of his speech to Congress. P knew who was speaking -- she remembers Obama being elected, as it was something we cared about and worked on a lot. In the speech, he mentions "the people who hired us to work for them," and I asked if she knew who he was talking about. She didn't, so I explained it was people like us, who voted for Obama and the members of Congress he was addressing, since they wouldn't have their jobs without winning those votes.
• P and I took a wrong turn on the way home from her pottery class the first time and ended up driving through a cemetery, so we got a chance to talk about how cemeteries work and some of the alternatives (cremation, for example, and different things people do with the ashes, including entombing them in a columbarium). P liked going there and wants to go back, so we may have more chances to talk about the end of life and the many aspects of the "what happens afterward" question.
• We talked a little about the portrayal of Indian language in the Peter Pan musical we'd watched recently -- almost the entire song was made up of "Ug-a-wug" kind of noises. I told her at the time that this was a gross mischaracterization, but more recently I was reminded of the Navajo code talkers who provided rapid transmission of undecipherable messages during World War II, with particular value in the Battle of Iwo Jima -- Navajo was chosen because it has a highly complex grammar and because it was mutually unintelligible with even its close linguistic relatives. P was interested to hear about that. This led into a discussion of war in broader terms. We talked about the international effort to stop "ethnic cleansing" in Yugoslavia as a war many people consider justified. P is of the firm opinion that war is stupid and people should talk about their problems and work them out. On a certain level, I couldn't agree more. We talked a little bit about how diplomacy works (ambassadors from countries to other countries, with the job of communicating between governments).
• We've been continuing to read the Song of the Lioness books to P, and she hasn't been shy about asking the meanings of unfamiliar words we run across there. She's more forthcoming with such questions than she was when in school, maybe because we just tell her the meanings as straightforwardly as we can, without launching into a lecture (unless she's interested in the topic) or handing her a dictionary. 
• On another reading level, T is starting to ask what some words in books say, and sometimes sounds them out after I tell him. Exciting stuff!
• Adventures continue with sewing and cloth. P has been making things with buttons on them for T, who is still in love with buttoning and unbuttoning his clothes, and starting to branch out into zippers and snaps. P and I investigated one of her dresses with a magnifying glass to determine whether it was woven or knit -- I thought it was knit because of its stretchiness, but P didn't believe it until she saw the stitches up close, at which point she recognized it clearly as a knit fabric. P and T have also done some counting and sorting of buttons from a big bag of inexpensive buttons we had from the fabric store. I think more button acquisitions are in our near future.
• Recently P mentioned a "thousand million billion" of something, so I asked if she know how many zeros were in a thousand. She knew that a hundred had two zeros, and we talked about a thousand having three and a million having six. Then I started asking questions like, "How many zeros in ten thousand?" She did pretty well at using that concept, especially considering we were in the car and had no visual reference. It's still an emerging concept for her, but it was a good start.
• A week or so ago, P and I were talking about how mountain lions are naturally nocturnal, but how some of the lions around here have adapted to their prey, as house cats adapt to their human caretakers, and are hunting during the day. Then just a couple of days ago, I overheard P telling T, "When we got them, our cats were probably nocturnal. Do you know what that means? It means they mostly like to sleep during the day and be awake at night. But they like to get lovies and food from us, so they wake up during the day. But they still sleep a lot." I added that cats, big and little, sleep a lot more than us (16 hours per day or more).
• P has not been wanting to talk about choir. It's been seeming like she wasn't having much fun. But when I told her I had really enjoyed singing in choirs and missed the chance to do it now, she perked up and taught me a couple of the songs she's been learning. I'm hoping the sharing of the music will increase the fun for her. We'll see. She still wants to stick with it through the first concert, so we've ordered her uniform, which fortunately was on deep discount.
• Last time I wrote that after hours of a sore leg, P still said she preferred the flu shot to the nasal mist. The next day, though, she told me unsolicited that two days of soreness was too much, and next time she'd choose the mist.

And one more nice thing happened. P told me out of the blue a few days ago, "I don't resist when you want me to help clean up. It's not my favorite thing, but I do it when you ask me to." This was news to me! I do a lot of the cleaning myself or with occasional volunteer help, but I ask for help for 15 minutes or so every few days in the living room, which gets strewn with toys. The next day I asked for help, and P helped cheerfully. She did ask to change from the CD I was playing to one of her own, and since we both know the songs on that CD, we danced and sang our way to a beautiful living room, ready for play dates. It was actually fun, and I don't normally enjoy cleaning up (I know, that's part of the problem -- I'm working on making it look and be more fun so maybe I won't pass that attitude along). I'm looking forward to the next time!