A Family Valentine's Day, Time and Money, Bugs and Dolls

This week, P was missing the Valentine's Day festivities she remembered from kindergarten and first grade. We'd picked up some Valentine's Day loot from the store on clearance February 15 and enjoyed it together, but she was still feeling bereft. She really wanted to celebrate somehow -- decorate some special cookies, make each other valentines, and so forth. I have a fine rolled-cookie recipe, but no heart-shaped cookie cutter (this shall soon be remedied!), so we tried making peanut-butter cookies with jam-filled fingerprint hearts, from a recipe on one of my favorite mama blogs, that of Catherine Newman. Here are a few of the ones that came out nicely:

Okay, so really I made those by myself while the kids played. I asked P if they could be my valentine to everyone, and she was content. She's been giving me little hug coupons, hand-made valentines, and other treasures for days, and I was feeling behind in the game, but today she told me she felt bad because I'd made the cookies and she didn't feel she'd given me anything. I reminded her of how loved I'd felt with her hugs and pictures. Perhaps we have satisfied the valentine urge for this year, though it never hurts to give love notes and cookies for no reason at all!

Earlier this week, during T's nap, P and I played a number game I'd learned on the Always Learning unschooling email list. Pam Sorooshian posted it there, in response to a question about learning powers of ten or place values. Her version starts with a dollar bill and a pile of dimes and pennies in the middle of the table. The players take turns rolling a die and taking the number of cents they roll. Whenever they can trade in 10 pennies for a dime, they must do so. The first player to accumulate 10 dimes to trade for the dollar is the winner. (You can play for keeps or not.) We didn't have enough dimes for that version, so P and I both emptied our change purses and played with what we had: a motley collection of pennies, quarters, a few dimes, and one lonely nickel. This made for a really interesting game, actually, since we had only 10 pennies, so sometimes we had to make change from a dime to end up taking the right number of cents. As we played, I watched P get better at identifying coins, adding, subtracting, and counting out coins quickly. I suggested we play again, but P wanted to take turns identifying coins without looking, by their size, weight, and edge texture. She got better at that, too. Then I asked if she wanted to play the original game again, and she said, "Let's play for five minutes, and whoever is ahead when time's up will decide what we both do for five minutes after that." P was ahead when the timer went off, so for a while we were friends of animals in Antarctica, strategizing about how to get a large number of evil, wasteful hunters to go away and never come back to hunt our friends. Our best solution involved the good swimmers swimming away, lots of scary leopard seals keeping the hunters at bay until they starved or left, and an elaborate igloo with good camouflage to hide the non-swimmers. (Veteran readers of this blog will recognize links to previous investigations!) I'm glad P won; I probably would have chosen to clean up the living room floor together, and her choice was more fun.

More number play has been happening this week. P came to me yesterday, complaining bitterly that I had not kept a fresh battery in her purple analog watch, which was one of two gifts she'd specifically requested for her third birthday. I reminded her that I'd replaced that battery a couple of years ago, but that she had not wanted to wear the watch or learn to tell time on it; and I told her I'd get her a new battery when she showed me that she could tell time to the nearest five minutes, which I thought she could accomplish within a day if she tried. P took on the challenge. She let me explain the basics to her (again), and she asked several times during the day to have me check her reading of the clock. In the 36 hours since then, she has learned to tell time to the minute, including doing her own multiplication by 5 for the long hand. As if to reward her efforts more quickly than I could, the watch mysteriously started working right after P caught on!

When I asked P recently if she'd like me to read to both of them from T's beloved bug book, she made a great show of saying how gross bugs were. But bugs have nevertheless been another theme this week. A few days ago, P and T were pretending to be cicadas (I'm betting that was T's idea), and T asked what cicadas ate. I looked it up and found that they suck juices from the xylem of plants. I passed that along, and it got put to good use. It was bothering me, though: why xylem, the tubes that mainly carry water from the roots upward? Why not phloem, which carries sugars down from the leaves? Later I looked it up more specifically, and found that the original reference was correct, but that I was also correct to find it counterintuitive -- most sap-sucking insects do sip from the phloem because of its higher sugar content. Cicadas' diet is high in fluids and amino acids and low in sugars. The larvae use the resulting copious, liquidy waste to cement together the cells they build for themselves. I drew a diagram of a plant, showing the xylem and phloem, to share my discoveries with P, who was interested in them and later showed the diagram to UnschoolerDad, excited to tell him what she'd learned.

And then today, yet another beetle came in from outside. I wish I knew how they get in; we throw one back outside a few times per week in the winter, to keep them from breeding in our house. This time, I didn't get it right away, and P watched it for a while, interested in its appearance and behavior and keeping me updated. She asked what kind of bug it was, and we found it on a web site about insects common in Colorado: a western conifer seed bug, Leptoglossus occidentalis. Native to the temperate and warm west coast of North America, it has spread across the U.S., and there are plenty of tasty trees here for it to feed on.

I made one more attempt to interest P in The Friendship Doll before we had to take it back to the library. This time, it caught her interest, as I'd thought and hoped it might after reading it myself and enjoying the flavors of history in its pages. In three days of lots of reading, we've read and investigated about:

• Coming-out parties and other social customs among wealthy New Yorkers, circa 1927
• The existence of a group of exquisite dolls sent from Japan to the U.S. around then to promote good international relations (this really happened)
• Rag curls and how to make them
• How the economy changed between 1927 and 1933
• The situation in a town near Chicago in 1933: many fathers out of work, 25 cents' admission to attend the Chicago World's Fair was a hardship for many
• What a gong is and how it sounds 

• What it means to get 99 percent on a test
• Lots of new words
• Who the character Aunt Jemima was
• The geographical and economic divide between rich city dwellers and "holler folk" in Kentucky, circa 1937
• Flu as a more deadly disease then than now, and a bit about why
• How wills and bequests work
• Reminders of several things we've run across before: rock types and how they form, A Little Princess, and a story of an emperor's daughter who flew away on a kite to convince her father to remedy the huge divide between the lives of courtiers and peasants.

...and we still have a quarter of the book to go! UnschoolerDad stood nearby and listened for most of the third section of the book this evening, and T played quietly in P's room as I read to everyone. I love it when a story can draw all of us in together. P and T have also been enjoying the Sunday comics a lot lately; P reads them to T, and they both laugh. P says Garfield is her favorite, so we have a Garfield book on hold at the library now.

And in closing: Today I learned, though I haven't yet shared it with the kids, that the reason mint soap makes my hands feel cold is that menthol (along with other chemicals, such as one from eucalyptus) activates the same nerve ion channels our bodies use to sense temperatures below 26 degrees Celsius (79 F). Hot stuff. No Wait -- cool. :)

Embodied Learning

We've been learning a lot with and about bodies, including our own bodies, this week. One day I took P roller skating at a nearby rink. We got great exercise, and my skills from when I last roller skated 25 years ago came back pretty well. P didn't make it away from the wall on her own this time, but she determinedly worked her way around the edges, getting faster and faster, and when I took her hand to help her away from the wall and around obstacles, she got steadier each time. She loved it and would like to go back. The rink has a "pixie class" for 2-6 year olds on Thursday mornings (I wonder if they'd let P participate?), so we might get T into the act as well, if he's interested.

Then P and I were invited to Buddy Week at the martial arts dojo where P and T's cousin and his mom (my sister-in-law) train. P and I went to two classes. P had a blast and wants to join up right away. She's unfazed by the homework requirements (kids must do at-home chore lists, logged reading, and other things designed to improve their discipline at home, and most of all in school, in order to qualify for their next belt test), and even wanted to practice "Yes, sir/ma'am!" at home! I had fun and a couple of good workouts, but I have some misgivings about whether the dojo is a good match for our family's values or unschooling philosophy. While all dojos I've experienced require respect for those of greater rank and courtesy toward everyone, the "respect" at this dojo takes the form of a lot of "yes, sir/ma'am," which is expected immediately, without time to think or digest the information or instructions. I've heard from my sister-in-law about some great things that are happening with her son's confidence there, and P would love to take a class with her cousin -- but he's due for a belt promotion, and then they'd be in different classes for at least a few months, and probably longer. Plus the place is quite expensive, money is very tight for us now, and they require months of notice to get out of the monthly payments if you decide to quit. All this has me looking for other options. Our current plan is to try the introductory week at a dojo much closer to us, which is probably less expensive (finding mat fees on a dojo's web site is harder than getting car prices from a dealership over the phone!) and sounds more agreeable in general philosophy, based on their web page. There are so many variables! When is sparring required? How much does it cost? How easy will it be for us to get to classes? How do they handle the balance among fun, challenge, discipline, and safety? And so much more. We'll see where it all leads. We might still end up at the cousin's dojo (I won't let my philosophy stop me if P is still enjoying it after a 30-day free trial -- I know that people can learn to move among home and other places with different expectations, and benefit from the experience), but at least we'll have an idea of what another place is like first. T is still on the young side for local dojos, but he'll be four in a couple of months, and if we're still at it, maybe he'll want in.

One night this week, the kids wanted to sleep together on the fold-out couch in our living room. We made it up with bed linens and they bedded down willingly, excited about  a new thing to try. P ended up going back to her room after a couple of hours, though -- she learned that she is a light sleeper, and even though UnschoolerDad and I were holed up in other parts of the house, there were too many little noises in the house for her to get good sleep. (When she was about two, she was having trouble getting to sleep in our shared bedroom, and after she chose to move to her own room, she slept much more soundly.) T was surprised, but not upset, to wake up without P in the morning. There hasn't been another request for that sleeping arrangement, which is okay with me -- it's hard for us adults to stay out of the living/dining/kitchen space that is the core of our house after the kids are in bed. We did have a very productive evening focusing on our paid work, though!

This morning, I was trying to decide whether T was over his cold enough to go to church with me and not give all the other kids colds. I asked if I could look inside his nose, and it seemed pretty clear. Then he wanted to look in my nose. He said I had a lot of yucky stuff in there. I asked if it was liquidy and shiny, or solid and boogery, and he said, "It's a lot of hair." I told him he had hair in his nose, too, and that it was to keep us from breathing in things like sand or bugs. He promptly went to P and asked to look in her nose, extending his data set.

Besides those first-person body learnings, we did lots of learning about bodies this week. One day T and I were reading about the lymph system in the anatomy book we still have from the library. That evening I was alone with P, and how the body deals with infection came up in conversation. I asked if she wanted to know what I'd learned about the lymph system, and she listened with interest. She's encountered the idea of swollen lymph nodes before, when we were checking her out and deciding whether to treat an illness at home or see a doctor. A couple of days later she told UnschoolerDad something about white blood cells helping to clean out   invaders from the body, as they do in the lymph system and elsewhere.

We found a great Doring-Kindersley book on bugs at the library book sale (more on the sale below),and T has been asking for bedtime reading from it every night. It's too long to read in one sitting, but we covered most of it in a few evenings, and now we're going back to T's favorite parts. He's fascinated with the detailed photos and models, he has lots of questions, and he was troubled that several of the ladybugs in the mass of ladybugs on one page have no spots. Today we looked that up and found that while they may be a different species (one source called them Asian beetles, in contrast to native ladybugs), they eat aphids and other pest insects, so they have the same garden benefits as ladybugs. T is fascinated with cicadas and the noises they make (below is one of the YouTube videos we watched), and he learned to make the R-rolling sound, unvoiced, as the best way we could come up with of imitating them.

Both kids have been watching a Magic School Bus video on the human body a lot this week. They love the episodes, which cover the digestive system, immune response, and the musculoskeletal system. They've seen them before, but they get new things out of them each time. As I write, they're watching a sports-themed Magic School Bus DVD, learning about friction.

We made it to our local library's annual children's book sale this week, and it was wonderful. We walked out with 19 books for $4, and some of them are large volumes that would cost $30 or more new. Some are encyclopedic volumes on countries in different regions of the world, that should be fun to browse or perhaps reference. Some are volumes of fables, medieval tales, and tales of mythical creatures (one of P's strong interests). There's a book with photos and stories about kids during the Great Depression -- we browsed the photos and found one of a California tent camp for migrant fruit-pickers that could have been where my maternal grandparents spent parts of their childhoods. There's a book of first-person stories from young people living with physical disabilities. We found a book on string games (P and I have tried a few), The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, the bug book that T's been enjoying, a book on world religions that P wanted, plus some picture books the kids picked out and more. Now a bookshelf for the living room is on our wish list; I'm looking forward to having these easily available for anyone to enjoy.

The Great Depression has been an ongoing theme. P doesn't want to hear The Friendship Doll, which I really thought she'd enjoy, but after we looked at the photos from the Depression, she started some more pretend play about that time. She's absorbed enough information that she could tell us our pretend family was somewhat rich before the Depression, but most of our money was in the stock market, so our circumstances changed a lot after the  market crashed. She tried to put together an outfit from her closet that might fit the game, and it was interesting to talk about how things are different when you have only a few things to wear (if you're lucky enough to have more than one set of clothes) and they are mostly made, or at least washed and repaired, entirely by hand. Her things are also made from fabrics and yarns that would have been difficult or impossible to find 80 years ago -- cotton/synthetic blends, space-dyed knitting yarns, etc. -- so it was a tough dress-up challenge.

Other highlights from this week:

• P's been listening to UnschoolerDad read The Hobbit most nights, enjoying the story and learning lots of new and archaic words.
• We watched an old favorite movie, My Neighbor Totoro, again, and together noticed elements of life in the country near Tokyo, including large family baths, tatami mats and their shoe-related customs, rolling out futons to sleep instead of having separate bedrooms, rice-planting days off from school, getting around without cars, the abundance of small shrines around the countryside, and more.
• P and T were building things with an Erector set, and P noticed that one of their creations looked like a chariot, though she needed help remembering that word. Once we figured out what she was talking about, she wanted to know more about chariots, We found lots of images online that helped us pick out the common features of chariots and see how they were drawn and driven. P asked to use one line drawing we found as a coloring page, and she put a lot of thought into what materials it might have been made of as she chose her colors.
• P learned a little about the term "baker's dozen" from an adult she spoke with at UnschoolerDad's badminton gym. She told me about it, and we looked it up in the encyclopedia of phrase origins we have checked out from the library and learned even more. Apparently the penalties for selling underweight loaves have been so draconian in some places and times (in Ancient Egypt, a baker caught short-weighting his customers would be nailed to his shop door by the ear!), and it could be so difficult to make sure loaves met the expected sizes, that bakers included an extra loaf in each order of a dozen to make sure their customers received their due.
• Today P brought me an iguana grabber toy of T's and told me she'd figured out how it worked. She was right on target. 

The iguana in question

• On a recent trip to the bank, both kids wanted to know more about what banks are for and how they work. We talked about how ATMs work (and all the money that has to change hands electronically when you use an ATM that isn't at your own bank!) and what savings and checking accounts are for.
• P used subtraction and division out loud to figure out how many apple pieces she'd eaten based on how many she started with and how many were left, and then to decide how many more she could have without eating T's share. She did some more division out loud, thinking about how to divide eight pieces of apple fairly among two or four people.
• Since P had enjoyed reading Sideways Stories from the Wayside School, I grabbed its two sequels and another book called Sideways Arithmetic from the Wayside School on this week's library stop. I read a problem from the latter to P -- about eleven kids deciding whether they wanted to play basketball or freeze tag at recess, based on how many people each kid thought would make each game fun. P's intuition that they would all play freeze tag turned out to be correct, and we had fun with follow-up problems about how things would change if one kid changes his or her mind. We read some other problems, but P found them contrived, and I agreed.

The Beat Goes On

It's been a busy couple of weeks -- I've been getting out less with the kids than I like, but I've been able to put in some productive time on UnschoolerDad's current programming project. Not being a software engineer myself, usually I'm confined to bookkeeping and helping to wrote ticklish emails; but this project has some stuff I can sink my teeth into. This the longer break between blog entries. Oh, and Blogger eating some of my notes didn't help. :(  Nonetheless, learning continues... as if I could stop it if I tried!

The Bob the Builder spree has died down, but one of the last episodes the kids watched was about a dinosaur dig. I took that opportunity to get out the plastic dinosaur we long ago buried in plaster and let the kids continue digging it out. We put it away, back then, because sharing tools became too contentious. This time we talked about some ways of sharing, and things went much better -- particularly after we discovered that craft sticks, of which we have plenty, made the best tools for getting the plaster off. We exposed enough to figure out we were digging out a biped (P thought she remembered it was a stegosaurus); I'm sure we'll get it the rest of the way out at some point. The kids enjoyed the feel of the plaster dust, and figuring out ways to handle it so we wouldn't inhale a bunch of it. They also explored the use of gentler tools and techniques as we began exposing the buried dinosaur.

Learning to share more peacefully has been a theme:

• There's been some lovely cooperative play with the wooden train tracks and our many trains, as various combinations of family members have built track layouts together, modified them, played with trains on them, and improvised shelters and garages for the trains and their friends, the cars and trucks. T's really getting into social pretend play with the wheeled beings, much as P did at his age. 
• The kids made and baked some things from Sculpey clay, including a bunch of play coins; it turned out this was so P would have some play money she'd be willing to share with T, as she felt her existing play money set was "too special." It's true that T mostly still loses things with many small parts, so I can understand. They had fun painting their play money with acrylic paints after it was baked.
• One morning when UnschoolerDad and I were on a phone call for the software project, the kids made a museum in their rooms, with multiple exhibits of different objects of interest from their collections. P helped T put together an exhibit of some of his favorite toys (dinosaurs, cars, trucks, transformers, and airplanes), and she made exhibits of musical instruments, sewing accoutrements, and stuffed animals, as well as a please-touch exhibit with fun tactile stuff for T to play with. T didn't get the memo; he enjoyed the sewing exhibit the most. But it was delightful to come out of our phone meeting, for which we'd equipped the kids with snacks and technological toys, and find the time had instead been spent in pure creativity and cooperation!

After the kids made their own museum, we spent an afternoon at our local museum of nature and science, which has a new exhibit of snakes and lizards, including dozens of live animals and several hands-on activities. The kids were engaged by a little stage show about snakes' sensory abilities; several times P mentioned she'd learned about various things in the show from watching Wild Kratts. Both kids loved seeing the snakes and lizards up close and making links between what we saw there, what they'd learned before, and the kinds of toy snakes they had at home. They shopped for snake and lizard toys (P did some money math to decide what she could afford), and played snakes and lizards with both toys and their bodies after we got home. P saw a picture at the museum of an Indian Cobra and recognized the markings on its back as matching one of her toy snakes, which she showed me when we got home.

There's been lots of fun with books. T has continued bringing me the anatomy book from the library for questions and general exploration, and P's been drawn in a few times. Once, T was looking through the book on his own, when he excitedly called out to me, "Mama! I found the baby page!" He'd found the sequence on fetal development. We looked through it together, talking about how the baby developed and how similar the baby in the book was to T when he was inside me. Then we looked at the pages on birth, infant development, and puberty, talking about how kids' bodies and abilities change as they grow. Both kids were rapt, though P was more interested than T in the puberty information. T correctly pointed out that the baby in all the fetal development drawings was a boy, but that some of the babies and kids shown later on were girls.

On another day, T asked lots of questions about the circulatory system pages. Arteries and veins have been catching his attention in all the diagrams, so now he learned about the chambers and valves of the heart, capillaries and how they bleed slowly when he gets scraped up, balloon angioplasty (this seemed intriguing and somewhat confusing), and more. He asked what the red blood cells were, and we talked briefly about the roles of red and white blood cells in the body. The next day, he brought me the book again, and I asked what he wanted to look at. He asked, "How do I pee?" So we found the pages on the urinary tract in boys, and I showed him the path urine takes from kidneys to bladder to penis and out. He traced over that path a few times with the superball he'd been playing with. Then he traced it backwards and asked, "What happens if the pee goes this way?" I said that if it brought any germs from the outside with it, the germs might get into the bladder and cause an infection. Without missing a beat, he said, "And then the white blood cells would fight the infection." Hooray for connections!

Another day, P pulled out the children's dictionaries we have and took a fun exploratory trip through hers, which has more interesting pictures and sidebars. For an hour or more, she excitedly pointed out her finds to me and T. She found pictures of the Earth's structure and linked this to lots of recent talk about volcanoes, including questions about calderas, volcanic chimneys, what colors lava can be, and so on. That same afternoon I found myself humming a theme from Beethoven's 6th symphony. T wanted to know what it was, and P recognized it as coming from Fantasia but misidentified it as the "forest spirit music" (Stravinsky's Firebird Suite), so I played both on YouTube so she could hear the difference. The Firebird clip I chose was the forest-spirit sequence from Fantasia, and as P watched it, she realized for the first time that part of that sequence takes place in the caldera of a volcano. We made the connections, including the super-fertile soil that comes from the breakdown of volcanic rock (the volcano in the Fantasia sequence gets covered with rich vegetation after its eruption,albeit with magical speed) and proceeded to listen to a bunch more great music as I finished making dinner.

Though P looked at pictures more than words on her dictionary expedition, she's definitely using text to make sense of her world. She frequently points things out to me or asks questions based on what she's read in her environment. And a few times recently, she's read aloud to T, which both of them enjoy immensely -- me, too! T is enjoying hearing short chapter books read aloud. Most recently I read him the Magic Tree House book Buffalo Before Breakfast, in which Jack and Annie visit a Lakota encampment before the destruction of the buffalo herds. Later, T told P, "Holding up two fingers means you're a friend."

Some other recent highlights:

• I helped P get her room really clean. She did a lot of the initial work, and I came in to help with the later, more difficult stages. I've been helping her clean a lot in the evenings, which can get frustrating for me, since it seems like we're picking up the same things day after day, and it seems no cleaning is happening during the days between activities. So I've started trying to help out during the day, when a minute or two of tidying up can save several times that effort later on. Trying to get things clean with minimal stress is still a work in progress, but P is pleased with how her room looks, and we actually had space to play in her room during T's nap today.
• During some alone time with me, T asked, "Why do babies have to stay in hospital long day?" (He meant, for a long time.) He was in the NICU for a week after he was born with several issues -- thankfully the NICU here lets moms stay with the babies 24/7, so it was a lot less scary than it could have been -- and we talked about how some babies (not all) need to stay for a while to help them get healthy so they can go home. He asked why he was sick, and I replied truthfully that we never really knew what caused his problems. He said, "I think maybe something went down the wrong way and I got sick." That's close to one of the possibilities, which is that he aspirated some meconium, leading to pneumonia. I wonder how much he remembers about any of that; I have some vague memories of very early events, and I've talked to others who have earlier and clearer memories than I do. It's good to be able to help him think through it.
• P and I, on our date night at a restaurant alone together, talked some about calories. UnschoolerDad and I have both been trying to shed a little extra weight, and P had gotten the idea that excess calories could be problematic. I kicked myself a bit for discussing it in front of her without giving her useful context, and proceeded to give it -- that calories are how we measure energy from food, that we all need them, and that gaining weight is good at her age, since she's growing quickly. She says she doesn't want to gain weight because she really likes her current car seat and knows she'll outgrow it at 65 pounds. I assured her we could find her another good one, and also assured her that growing kids who eat a good variety of healthy foods and eat only when they're hungry will stay healthy and grow as fast as they should. We also talked about how sweets give quick energy that goes away quickly, while other foods give longer-lasting energy, which is why I encourage the kids to eat something non-sweet first when they are hungry. Food and sweets lost some of their tension after that conversation.
• We watched Bambi together for a family movie night. We'd previously thought T might be too scared by it, but he requested it. He was a little sad about Bambi's mother dying, but relieved that he still had his dad. He had lots of questions afterward about fire, and why the animals would be safe on an island while the forest burned.
• There's been some good physical activity. Both kids went to gymnastics classes and to an open gym. They had fun playing in the snow one very snowy day, and taking advantage of its freshness to eat as much snow as they could hold. I also had chances to take each one swimming without the other, so they could do what they wanted. (Since neither was swimming strongly yet, they had to go where the other wanted to be a lot, so I could be with both of them.) P, who quit swimming lessons a while back, has been continuing to experiment on her own. I challenged her to swim across the deepest part (where she can still touch) without touching the bottom, and though her methods were highly unorthodox, she managed it! That was enough to let her go down the waterslide, so I offered that, but she was having fun and wanted to practice swimming more. This is a great milestone, since her being safer in the water means there will be more chances for both kids to swim. T, in his swim time with me, wore water wings and spent almost the whole time in the deep end, enjoying the sensation of floating and perfecting his kicking for propulsion. I think they'll both become swimmers yet!