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!