UnschoolerDad replaced his work laptop a couple of weeks ago, and he recently finished transferring everything he needed off the old one, which has now been reformatted for the kids to use. P is thrilled. We've signed her up for an email account, which hasn't seen much use yet, but I think it is likely to. I've offered to type for her, but she's learning her way around a keyboard, so I'm not sure what kind of help she'll want. Spelling, perhaps. It will be interesting to see how she interacts with a computer spell checker. She's already learned some of what goes into inventing a secure password.
Most of P's time on the new computer in its first several days has been spent playing World of Warcraft (WoW, a massively multiplayer online adventure game) with me; we have compatible characters on the same server, so we can adventure together. This means lots of map use (we use compass directions and the in-game map to direct each other to things in the WoW world: "Look just at the south end of that lavender patch on the map for the quest giver, and then you can find me to the east"), reading (quests and how to accomplish them, as well as game interface tips), spelling (typing her passwords, which are combinations of real words, and typing commands such as "/dance" into the chat interface), math (handling money, budgeting for equipment and training, buying and selling items in the game, subtracting to figure out how many more of a particular kind of monster she needs to defeat), and other fun stuff like comparing two items to choose which one should be her quest reward (usually this is about which has the most positive effect on her character's stats, though sometimes it's so close that the choice is aesthetic). We get other random stuff from WoW as well. We talked about the suffix "-oid," as in "humanoid monster," and what it means. We've also talked about the meanings of "good guy" and "bad guy," since one of the characters I play is part of the Horde faction, a group of somewhat creepy characters aligned against the human-led Alliance. P's and my characters who adventure together are Alliance. So when my Horde character fights a monster, is the monster a bad guy? It definitely gets away from the binary, Disneyfied idea of good and bad guys. And as in real life, sometimes WoW characters form unexpected alliances -- a Horde member with a human, say -- just as in real life, enemies can reconcile and alliances can shift (U.S., Germany, and Japan, say, or U.S. and Russia going from allies to enemies back to allies, if uneasy ones).
Before she got the replaced laptop, P was spending some time playing Minecraft on my computer. I should install it on hers. The open-ended, sandbox-style play in Minecraft is so different from the linear, quest-oriented play in WoW, and she enjoys both. P built a house in her Minecraft world, and she gave me a tour of it on video, which I'll share with you here.
On another outing with UnschoolerDad, P learned how to play disc golf and got some good exercise following him around. She also chose to take the bus home from a family dinner with him (he'd met us there on his bike), running most of the half mile home from the bus stop as UD rode his bike. Between running, riding, and open gyms at a couple of local gymnastics gyms, P is getting stronger and improving her stamina. It's great to watch as she gets more of a sense of her own physical power. T is enjoying similar things, and their energy is infectious, getting me running with them when their enthusiasm picks up their pace.
Books have been fun recently. We spent some time reading in a library book about how fashions have changed over time and why -- for reasons related to politics, the roles of women in society, and other interesting things to learn along the way. We read part of a book about daytime raptors, and I hope to read more in it before it's due back at the library. And just in the last few days, we've started Book One of The 39 Clues, The Maze of Bones. This immediately caught everyone's interest as I read it out loud. Tonight I read a few chapters and then said I thought it was time to head for bed after a big day. P really wanted to read more, so I said she could read herself to sleep if she wanted. P's not been reading novels on her own for a while, saying that she isn't interested in reading anymore. I haven't been pushing it; I think nothing is likely to destroy her interest in reading faster than being forced to read when she'd rather be doing something else, and it's one of the issues over which we decided to leave school. Twenty minutes of reading homework per night was becoming an unpleasant forced march and having the wrong effect on P's interest in reading! Well, as I write this, late at night, P is powering on through The Maze of Bones and enjoying it thoroughly. I am reminded of the time, when I was 8 years old, when I got The Chronicles of Narnia for Christmas and read far into the night, finishing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in a single stretch of reading. I'm so glad my parents ignored bedtime that night, if they saw my light under the bedroom door so long after bedtime! I was reading before that, but I date my love affair with novels and their rich stories from that night. And as it turns out, P didn't want to read alone in her bed, so she's on the couch next to me, enjoying the book and the company at the same time. I'm sure she'll head to bed when fatigue overtakes the pursuit of the story. I think I'd better put Book Two on hold at the library...done.
As we move toward the kids making more of their own decisions in more areas of their lives, how we handle food continues to change. T is still eating a lot of peanut butter and jelly, but after one day recently when we decided to give him as much PB&J as he asked for (and that was quite a lot!), he now rarely asks for it more than once in a day. I have a large container with various hard candies and lollipops on the counter, and I usually keep some kind of gummy something or other around too. They have a few pieces a day, sometimes more, but they also willingly eat other foods, including fruits and vegetables. Recently P was heard to say, when T was getting a piece of candy and offered to get one for P, "No thanks, I have had all the sweets I need for today!" And when the kids decided to try some Coca-Cola with their kids' meals at a restaurant recently, they both said it was too sweet after a few sips and asked for water instead. It's gratifying to see that, given more freedom of choice with food, their bodies still do seek a balance, or at least accept it most days when it's offered. I do have to stay on top of offering healthy snacks and not fall into serving only easy foods. They'll ask for fruits or veggies eventually, but they'll eat them earlier and more often if I offer them when hunger is likely but before it's expressed, and especially if I bring the food where the kids are rather than asking them to interrupt their activity, whatever it is. Yummy is good, too; dips help.
We're enjoying the process of doing a makeover on T's bedroom. It's much smaller than P's, and there's starting to be frequent conflict between the kids when T wants to play in P's room and P would rather be alone. A makeover was on our to-do list, but given the conflict, I accelerated the process. Now the kids have experienced Ikea: how this huge, mostly self-service store works, measuring things to see if they'll work together and fit where we need them to, and helping make decisions about what will work well in their rooms. T helped me assemble his new dresser, cinching the cams and helping tap in the nails holding on the back panel. Today we bought some painting supplies, since none of our bedroom walls are painted yet; and I expect we'll tackle the painting of T's room together in the coming days. When I was about six, my mom put up wallpaper with garish cartoon flowers -- my choice, if memory serves -- in my bedroom, and the trim and doors were painted robin's-egg blue. Mom let me help paint a door, though she did the trickier bits of baseboards and such. I will have to let go of some perfectionist tendencies to let the kids help with the painting, as my mother did, but I hereby resolve to do so!
With all those boxes from Ikea and some grocery boxes from Amazon (to get foods harder to find locally, like nori snacks and chia seeds), the kids have been doing a lot of imaginative play with boxes. They are beds, cars, trains, homes, boats, and more, and a roll of masking tape and skein of yarn add to the possibilities. After a while I get fed up with bumping into boxes everywhere and we recycle whichever ones the kids don't want to save in their rooms; but that just makes the next phase of box play, when it comes, that much more fun.
One weekend, we went as a family to a show given at our local library by a clown -- storytelling, puppetry, juggling, and lots of physical humor. We all enjoyed it. And now, since someone hit our car in the parking lot while we were at the performance (she did tell us, thankfully!), there is more learning happening, about body shops and what they do, how cars are put together to absorb the impact in accidents, and soon, I expect, about insurance and what it's for. T enjoyed the antique barber's chair in the body shop office, investigating everything he could about which of its parts moved and why.
After we got our estimate at the body shop, we washed the car at a self-service car wash, something I do far more rarely than most car owners, judging by how our car usually looks. The kids didn't get to do much there, because I was still learning how to use the equipment myself; but I want to take them back another time and let them experience the high-pressure nozzle and how it feels to wield it. It's a dollar per minute, but I think that experience is more than worth a buck or two per kid. Today they helped with the low-pressure foam brush, scrubbing the dirty residue of winter's slush from the bottom part of the doors and fenders, and noticing the many nicks and scratches that were hidden under the dirt.
A few nights ago, we were having some fun with a metal Slinky, and UnschoolerDad showed the kids how if you hold it near your ear (with someone else holding the other end stretched out) and send longitudinal waves along the Slinky, it sounds like the laser guns in Star Wars. (Pew, pew!) Then I pulled out a trick I learned when I was teaching physics -- tie strings to two corners of a metal oven rack, wrap the strings around your index fingers, stick them in your ears so the rack hangs down in front of you, have someone else strike the rack gently with different materials (skin, wood, metal, etc.) and see what unexpected noises you hear.
The kids are often curious about sound. Today they asked what sounds chipmunks make, so we found some sound files online and found out. Then T wanted to know what sounds whales make, so we found a long YouTube video with enough sound from one whale that we could start to make out some repeated phrases. That led to watching videos of lava flows; of people playing with lava flows in Hawaii (and how very, very hot the lava is -- people roast marshmallows next to it and catch the soles of their shoes on fire if they touch it!); of quicksand, how people get stuck in it, and how to get out of it; and then a couple of SciShow videos. One of these covered "mindreading" (specifically, how researchers have used fMRI to record brain activity as subjects watch videos, and then to work backwards, reconstructing what people are seeing from their brain activity), and the other was about epigenetics (P and I stopped the video a lot to clarify things like what it means for a gene to be expressed or not expressed). After P moved on to other things, I enjoyed another video about what the Higgs boson is, having wondered exactly that a few days ago.
And on we go!
