Chores, Choices, Chromosomes, Contact, and Crystals

I seem to have reorganized part of the inside of my head. This is hard to show pictures of, so here's a crystal tree to keep you going:

I recently finished reading Sandra Dodd's Big Book of Unschooling, which I bought from her at the Always Learning Live unschooling symposium. Lots of it was familiar from reading on her website; the book is a sort of snapshot of the web site from 2009. But there were many parts I hadn't seen before. One of them involved chores such as housecleaning. Sandra wrote that one of the principles they try to live by at her house is, "If a mess is bothering you, YOU clean it up." Really? Even if someone else made the whole thing? Even if I know who it was? This was in deep conflict with my existing ways of thinking about parenting. But it also resonated with some of what I'd heard at the symposium from other parents, and it sounded good, especially to my inner kid. I decided, provisionally, inside my own head, to try it out for a while. If P's room was really messy and bugging me and she didn't want to clean it, I'd spend some time on it myself. (This took some convincing of P the first time; she thought I meant to go in and get rid of things because she wouldn't clean them up, a sad memory from our older ways of doing things. We're still working on rebuilding trust from that sort of thing.) If the living room was too messy, I'd spend some time on it. (The living room is often a hard one to assign responsibility for anyway, since many people's messes intermingle there.)

I found that cleaning P's room by myself felt entirely different from cleaning it with her, in a good way. I didn't feel I had to teach her or somehow entrain her into doing it correctly on her own. I was just doing it, seeing it as my own project. I put things where I knew they went, or if I wasn't sure, I left them in a little pile in the middle of the room, so P wouldn't have a hard time finding them later. I enjoyed seeing what P was playing with and what kinds of juxtapositions she had made. I made some judgment calls I felt comfortable with as far as what bits and pieces to keep and what to recycle or throw away; and with some effort, I avoided the passive-aggressive urge to throw away more than P would, since I (!) was the one doing the cleaning. I felt at peace in that I was simply doing the task that I felt needed doing, not trying to get an unwilling other person to do it. I did feel a little irritated the next day, when most of what I'd cleaned had been messed up again. But I continued trying to be honest with myself, internally, about whether it was bugging me and why, and cleaning up when it felt like that would make my world better; and the irritation has passed for now.

In the rest of the house, focusing on tidying up and cleaning because I, personally (not some external arbiter or internalized voice in my head), would like things to be neater or cleaner, has had interesting effects. Parts of the house get a little messier than they used to, at least for a while. Other parts are cleaner. The kitchen looks great; I use it every day, and it really makes a difference to me when it's clean and ready to use. The bathroom is clean; I like using a clean sink and toilet and looking in an unbespattered mirror. I either put others' laundry away, feeling I'm giving them a gift and/or making my world better; or I wait until I can feel that way about it, or until they put it away themselves, whichever comes first. The living room only bothers me sometimes, so it gets picked up less frequently. Yesterday I saw UnschoolerDad walking across pieces of trash on the floor (there had been a pretend game involving lots of paper tickets or something) and asked him if it bothered him to be doing that. He said yes, and I said it was bothering me, too, so how about if we cleaned up? In about 10 minutes, the living room was looking great, and we were both feeling better about it. There was no browbeating the kids. Okay, we did tell them there were a few paper playthings we'd have a hard time telling apart from trash, so if they wanted to keep them, they should pick them up. Mostly they didn't care; the fun had been in making the things, more than in using them past the first couple of days.

Would I want my kids to sit, unheeding, while I clean up their messes, forever? Nope. I'm not there yet, if indeed I ever will be. And I still do ask them to clean up some of their own messes (used tissues, and sometimes things I let them get out on the condition they would clean them up), though I try to let them have some say in the timing. I reserve the right to change where I draw the lines. But for now, I find cleaning up by myself much faster and less stressful than making the kids do it with me. And I don't think the kids are benefiting from my making them clean up. I think they're learning to resent it, and that their resistance to helping is likely to get worse, not better, unless and until they have their own reasons for wanting things cleaner or for helping me. (Empathy is not a strong point of their current developmental stages, but that won't be true forever.) Sure, by being made to pick up trash and put toys away, they learn how to do those tasks, but they aren't rocket science. It's easy stuff to figure out, and T (who has had far less required of him at age 3 than P has at ages 5-7) does tidy up spontaneously now and then. They do enjoy certain kinds of cleaning, like scrubbing the floors, if I let them choose when to do them. One unschooling writer, Joyce Fetteroll, often has unschooling moms consider whether what they're telling their kids is okay, by imagining their husbands saying the same things to the moms. I would be pissed if UnschoolerDad tried to tell me when to scrub the floor, or that it was time for me to pick things up off the floor right now, while I'm in the middle of writing a blog entry. If there were a good reason I could understand (if someone on whom we wanted to make a good impression were on their way over, say, or if he would be willing to vacuum if the floor were tidied up before he had to go do something else), I'd be on board. But I'd have to understand it, or at least trust his reasoning. When the chores required and the times for doing them are arbitrary as far as they're concerned, it's hard for the kids to get on board.

What many parents of older unschooled kids say is that, once the parents switched from requiring kids to do chores to doing them cheerfully themselves, the kids first kicked back for a while as they came to trust they wouldn't be forced to work, and then started pitching in fairly frequently without being asked, or even going beyond the original scope of work to do other chores they noticed needed to be done. I can hope for that. But I think that if I fix that in mind as my goal, it will lead to more of the same old resentment if it doesn't pan out on whatever schedule I have in mind, or for a particular task. So for now, I'll keep trying out the theory that chores won't be hard to learn when the kids are ready, and that doing them myself preserves more peace for me and everyone else than trying to conscript the kids into doing them. The more I can let go of my angst and resentment around chores (and I have had plenty), the more attractive helping me will look. We'll see how it goes.

I've continued trying to think in terms of two choices -- think of at least two ways to handle a given situation, and choose the one that matches my goals better. I've talked with P a little about this, too, to help her handle times when she's exasperated with T. It's sinking in a little. "Did you make a choice?" is becoming a useful question between us.

I saw a great TED talk this week and shared it with P and T. It's about scientific visualization of molecular processes within the human body. It had amazing visuals of DNA folding into chromosomes, and of mitosis, especially the part where microtubules pull one duplicate set of chromosomes to each end of the cell, forming two new nuclei. P enjoyed it, too. We paused a lot to talk about the basics (DNA replication, chromosomes, cell division, etc.). T, who watched most of it with us, asked at one point, "Is that going on in my body right now?" Yes, everywhere, my dear! I love it!

P watched large portions of the movie Contact with me this week. She wasn't much interested in all the talk and arguing about scientific funding policy in the beginning (no surprise), but once the prime numbers started coming in over the Very Large Array in New Mexico, she was pretty well hooked. We paused to talk about ham radio and some of its conventions, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), what prime numbers are, and why hearing them on a radio telescope would indicate a transmitting intelligence.

Before I get to crystals and everywhere they took us, here's a brief roundup of other highlights. There's a notable lack of anything involving leaving the house here, since we're still convalescing from the flu.

• I made a new robe for P this week. In the process, I showed her a few things about garment construction and how to use a sewing machine. She's not super-interested in machine sewing yet, but she listened and took it in, and she hand-sewed herself a little purse that day.
• P and T were playing a pretend game based on SuperWhy at one point (the SuperWhy board game was a total bust for actual game play, but the game pieces inspired extensive pretend play!), and when P tried Princess Presto's line, "Cue the sparkles! Cue the music! Princess Presto to the rescue!" only she said, "Do the sparkles! Do the music!" I realized she was missing the word cue. We talked about what cue means in stage and screen productions. With all the pretend play, this was right up P's current alley.

• P was looking with me at an online gallery of art-history references from The Simpsons (which she doesn't yet watch, but the gallery was linked on an unschooling list) when we saw a portrait in the style of Pablo Picasso, complete with too many eyes showing in a profile portrait. P remembered that Major Monogram on Phineas and Ferb is always shown the same way:
I showed everyone a video I found a while back of a vortex cannon (air cannon) being used to blow down structures made of straw, sticks, and bricks. That was fun! 
The kids and I watched Toy Story 3 together. This was mostly simple fun, but we did see a way that magnets could be used to sort ferrous metals out from trash, and the kids learned what an incinerator is. There was also some Spanish music and dance toward the end, when Buzz Lightyear got reset.
One morning, both kids were measuring everything with retractable metal tape measures. P told me a certain laundry basket was 13 inches across. I asked how many of those it would take to equal her height. (She's been telling me about some math of about that difficulty that she's doing in her head.) Rather than try the numbers, she started measuring 13-inch segments up her body, concluding that about three and a half of them fit within her height. I like her sense of what division means, there.
T has been having a lot of fun playing with my decommissioned electric toothbrush; seeing what the moving parts are and how they connect, seeing what kinds of noises it can make, changing brush heads, feeling the brush against his hand, enjoying the vibrations, and so on. 
P said something about platypuses being the only egg-laying mammals (monotremes). I thought I remembered otherwise from a museum exhibit, so we looked it up. We found out that four species of spiny anteaters (echidnas) share this distinction. And we found out the "mono" in "monotreme" comes from the fact that eggs, solid and liquid wastes all exit through the same cloacal opening. Guess it's a good thing those babies are inside protective shells, eh?

Okay, now for the crystals! This morning I got out a "Mystical Tree," which I bought recently on a toy store run with P. We set it up and got it growing. The finished product, after 6 hours, is shown at the top of this post. Here it is halfway through its growth:

I warned the kids not to touch the liquid, and then wondered whether my warnings were too strong. So I looked up the main ingredient, monopotassium phosphate. Yes, it's an eye, skin, and lung irritant -- and it's used in fertilizer and Gatorade! Okay then; I started thinking about other crystal-growing experiments the kids could be more hands-on with. I remembered making rock candy by growing sugar crystals in elementary school. So I heated up some water, dissolved a whole lot of sugar in it, and put it in two pint jars with wool yarn hanging down into them from craft sticks on top, below:

Then I got to thinking -- was that really enough sugar? I looked up a recipe for doing this and found that I'd put perhaps a third as much in as I should to saturate the solution. P watched as I boiled the solution again and put in more and more sugar, and always it dissolved out of sight. We talked about how the sugar molecules were associating with water molecules, and how we wanted to get to the point where every water molecule was doing all it could to dissolve the sugar molecules, with none left over. The dissolving got slower and weirder-looking (floating islands of granulated sugar, anyone?) until finally the solution wouldn't take any more and went all grainy. We added tiny bits of water until things dissolved again, and then re-jarred the solution to sit overnight. I gave the kids each a bit of the saturated sugar syrup in a bowl to feel and taste, and meanwhile I browsed online for other ideas. I found a page about making a Borax snowflake. P decided to try it with a spiral shape, which she made, below:

This time she did the stirring-in (only about 4.5 tablespoons of borax would dissolve in our jar of water, compared to more than 2 cups of sugar!), enjoying the swirling clouds of borax that slowly dissolved away, and the musical notes the spoon made against the jar. The jar was getting a little overfull, so I took out some water, and we found the notes got higher -- it seems the water, not so much the jar, was what determined the functional size of the resonator. After we put the jar up to cool and sit overnight next to our hopeful rock candy and (just for comparison) my weaker sugar syrup (I'll post photos of the finished crystals next time), we watched YouTube videos of glass harp music. I tried to show P how to play by rubbing the edge of a glass, but most of our glasses are too massive to vibrate well that way. We tried filling up a few with different amounts of water and striking them, but we could only get a range of about a fourth in those chunky glasses. One delicate glass teacup did allow us to stroke its edge just right to make a note of sorts. But it was nothing like the wine glasses in this Toccata and Fugue in D minor:

After a while, though, hearing Bach on wine glasses is like watching a bear dance: It's not that it's that the bear dances wonderfully that holds your attention, but that it can dance at all. So we looked up an organ version of the Bach and found this lovely video:

The piano-roll-style digital notation here is wonderfully intuitive, whether you read music yet or not. We listened to several pieces more by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and more with similar visuals, enjoying the interplay between sound and sight and the artistry of the varied visual representations we found. P gave us the play-by-play for those pieces included in either version of Fantasia (1940 or 2000), but she also watched with total attention through Bach's entire Cello Suite No. 1, which isn't in either movie:

This exploration also led to watching videos on how a harpsichord works, discussing the differences between harpsichord and piano, and making a mallet from a skewer and rubber bands to try on P's lap harp. She says it sounds a little like a piano.

And if that isn't a nice excursion of ideas from a Mystical Tree, I don't know what is.