Those Gold-Medal Moments of Motherhood

Yesterday I took the kids to the Aquarium. I knew we’d be gone for a few hours, so I packed up my backpack with all the things an experienced mother knows she needs to bring. For us that included the Sigg bottles each child got for Christmas, raisins – in two small containers because their ability to equally divide food seems to be proportional to the size of the item, gloves and hats in case we ended up playing outdoors, and all those other things you know could make the difference between a happy outing and a disaster.

While we were there, the kids had to use the bathroom. I had one kid in one stall, another in the handicap stall, and I went back and forth between them making sure that everybody got up on the toilets okay (why are public toilets so high off the ground?), cringing as the pants around their ankles slid up against the condensation-wet front surface of the toilet bowl. After positioning Daughter correctly I went back to check on Son. He’d said he had to poop so I sat him on the seat, but turns out he had to pee as well. From his precarious position perched high up on this adult-sized toilet he had no free hand with which to direct the flow downward…There was not only a puddle on the floor but his underpants, pants, and socks had gotten wet. 

He was distressed. Not only had he made a mess (I think he tends toward a certain degree of perfectionism, as does his sister) but he was wet, too. His skin is sensitive, and he can’t stand the slightest bit of spillage on his clothing.

Sound like a disaster? Not for SuperMum! Because included in my backpack is a change of clothes for each child, a bag of wet wipes, sealable wet bags for soiled clothes, and a small towel to dry off legs that have been wet-wiped. It’s not that my kids have accidents very often anymore, but such an event can make a big difference in how the day turns out. I reassured my boy that, in no time, he’d be all fixed up.

As I got my little guy all cleaned up, dry and comfortable and we continued on with our excursion I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. Did I solve world hunger? No. Did I set a new world’s record in downhill skiing? Nope. But I did turn one little child’s misery into comfort without ending our visit to a beloved destination. And THAT is one of those little triumphs that mothers around the world achieve every day, in a million little ways.

We may not be rocket scientists (though some of us do that, too!) but it takes a Mother to remember that the striped red mittens make his hands itchy so you need to pack the blue ones in case his hands get cold. Or to know that when the kids start screaming about which side of the car belongs to them, it’s really about hunger and nothing that a proffered snack can’t solve. Those are our Gold-Medal moments. And while it may seem that our heroic acts go unseen and unappreciated, know that there is a whole sisterhood of women out there who know that you are a Hero.

A perfect day-in-the-life

This morning I eagerly awoke (okay…it was 9:45 am but I was still eager) to a very sunny morning. Lately we’ve gotten into a night owl pattern: as the kids mature they are better able to quietly entertain themselves in the evening, giving me and Husband an opportunity to watch movies or downloaded shows (Battlestar Galactica premiere last night – woo hoo!). And so we’ve all been going to bed later and getting up later. I prefer earlier mornings for productivity’s sake, but it’s also nice to have the option of being night owls when we feel like it. Hooray for opting out of the rat race!

And although it was Sunday, which is typically a day of rest for most folks, this day could be any day of the week in our wonderful Unconventional Life…

It was the day of my Weekend Run when I usually head off somewhere scenic for a good long run. After bad weather forced me to take a week off (I’m no wimp: sidewalks were buried in snow and it was very slippery) I’m back in peak form and have finally progressed beyond (albeit brief) walk periods (one minute walking for every 15 to 20 of running) to non-stop running and today I was going to go for a full 50 minutes. I headed up to my favorite local place to run: the Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve, conveniently located about 5 minutes from my home by car. There is a service road that is paved, relatively flat, with kilometre markers and breathtaking mountain forest scenery and it was along here that I had my fabulous 8 km run. I took this photo, which really doesn’t even do it justice, somewhere around the 2 km mark. 

I was all alone listening to various birds, and the sound of rushing water along various streams running down under the roadway. It was a fabulous run and I felt great!

I spent the afternoon working on a report for a client, then went to clear off the crafting table so Husband could work on putting an old laptop back together for the kids to use. Every home should have a crafting table! (preferably with a crafting shelf behind it). This is our “crafting nook”, one of my favorite features of our home. 

This is the view from the kitchen counter, so while I’m busy cooking or cleaning in there I can be with the kids while they work on projects. The bookshelf is loaded with paper, glue, scissors, paint, tape, stickers, pens, markers, rulers, magazines for cutting, toilet paper rolls, foam, you-name-it. The table is brightly lit by the window and the wall becomes a gallery for artwork and displaying such items as Daughter’s Melissa and Doug wooden calendar (very cool learning material) and a number line I made with Daughter last year. It’s a place where the kids can create, be messy, and leave projects that aren’t completed without them getting in the way. And it’s a great way for us all to hang out together, too.

That evening I enjoyed a yummy pasta with bolognese sauce that Husband had been simmering all afternoon (secret ingredients: coconut milk and lots of wine!). I went back on the computer to do Daughter’s learning report and came out of the room to find this:

This is our little hallway and that’s my daughter. She has two chairs and a yoga mat making herself a little reading nook, around which she has piled books that she is slowly reading through. Typically, they are virtually all reference books. Daughter is right outside the kids’ bedroom (to her left). Behind her Son has put together a Playmobile display and is battling “bad guys” in front of the bathroom (to the left). Husband wasn’t too impressed when he came upon the crowded hallway, but for me personally I don’t mind at all. I love the creativity and I love that she has created this fun space devoted to the joy of reading. I love to see my son engaged in imaginative play (especially given his love of computer games these days). 

Yup, when you are an unschooling family you need to deal with the mess that Life makes sometimes, which often seems to be in direct proportion to the amount of learning that is going on!

Are you Affected by PUPD?

This funny article was posted on our learning program forum. It was written by Miranda over at Nurtured by Love.

“Periodic Unschoolers’ Panic Disorder” (PUPD) is a syndrome which is receiving increasing attention in unschooling circles. Apparent prevalence is on the rise. Some might claim an epidemic has taken hold; more moderate voices claim that the disorder has always been endemic in the unschooling population, but recent media attention and publication of the cluster of symptoms has led to many new diagnoses. 

Classic symptoms are difficult to miss. Otherwise sensible unschooling parents start pressuring their creative, autonomous, self-motivated, hands-on learners into producing tidy completed worksheets, or sitting through chapters of world history read aloud. They reach for their credit cards and begin spending money on structured curriculum they’ll discard after a miserable week and a half.

The disorder is, by its very definition, episodic. The first episode typically occurs sometime during the child’s kindergarten year, although in retrospect sufferers often identify harbinger symptoms such as overzealously directing their preschool children to magnetic letters, worrying over a 3-year-old’s excess fondness for matchbox cars and mud, or being concerned about a 4-and-a-half-year-old’s continuing tendency to confuse the letters Y and W. 

Despite parents’ beliefs that they have deschooled themselves, PUPD episodes tend to occur coincident with the public school calendar. Fifty-one per cent of episodes occur during the school year-end months of May through early July when public school parents are feeling confident and proud of their children’s tangible progress from one grade year to another. Another 36% of episodes occur between late November and early March, while public school families are receiving report cards, attending holiday concerts and taping weekly spelling lists earnestly to their fridges. 

Mean frequency of episodes during the child’s elementary years is 9.2 months. The frequency and duration of episodes peaks when children are 7 and 8 and then tends to diminish into the pre-teen and teen years. Protective factors include (i) early age of independent reading (ii) spontaneous interest in math workbooks and (iii) unschooling-supportive grandparents.

Research into treatment for PUPD is in its infancy. Current promising research is pointing a the beneficial role for parental journaling, improvements in parental anxiety with daily family recreation, especially that which takes place outdoors, and on the self-reported benefits of internet support-groups for afflicted parents. One recent study (Hughes, 2005) confirmed that beating one’s head against a brick wall is an ineffective strategy by all criteria.

LapBooks!

A past reader of my blog (whose blog link I have lost, so if you read this please send me a note!) once directed me to her post about LapBooking, suggesting we might have fun with that activity. It sat in the back of my mind, largely forgotten until recently when a friend’s unschooled kids started going crazy for LapBooks. I decided it was time to try it ourselves, but of course with Daughter you have to be careful how you suggest things – any hint of “should” or “my idea” and it might not be so well-received, lol. So I found a YouTube video describing how to make a LapBook, I casually called Daughter over to take a look, and then nonchalantly asked “is this something you might like to do?”. The answer was a resounding yes, with even more enthusiasm when I told her we could start right away. We headed to the crafting corner to get started.

She came up with the subject matter: Reptiles. I helped her by writing down some topic ideas that we both came up with, and by suggesting some layout ideas. She was mostly tolerant of my instruction for this first attempt, but by the second LapBook she was rolling her eyes at me and reminding me “I can do it, mama!”. We both had a laugh about that.

Here’s the cover page:

 

When you open it up, it looks like this:

 

The section called “which animals are reptiles opens up to this:

The section called “What do reptiles eat?” was a multi-page mini-book. Here is one page from inside:

The second lapbook, for which Daughter held total control over the design and contents, was called “Bugs”:

Here’s what it looks like on the inside:

The top section has a flap that says on the outside “What’s the difference between bugs and insects?” Daughter wrote this herself in response to me, who kept getting confused as to whether insects were subsets of bugs or vice versa! Under the flap she wrote this:

The other section in the lapbook she called “Predators of Bugs”:

Inside was a multi-page minibook. Here are two of the pages:

 

We had a great time making these and Daughter proudly showed them to her father and anyone else who came by to visit. There were so many skills involved in making them – organizing facts, artistic layout and design, writing, etc. Most importantly, it was fun! We will definitely be doing these again!

Don’t label my kid

A while back I wrote that a “classroom consultant” was being brought in to observe and assess the situation in Son’s preschool, specifically his hitting issues. Well she finally came this past week but we only had a few minutes to talk after class, so it’s not clear if any conclusions have been made as to how to improve the situation. We’re supposed to get together for a meeting with her and the teacher to discuss her findings. I’ll write more in a subsequent post when I have more details.

She did, however, leave me with a big package of “parent information” about the program she is in. From what I’ve gathered, it’s a way to help kids integrate into care situations (private daycare, preschool) when they have issues that present a particular challenge to the teacher. In the context of just preschool, I’m okay with this. I adore the teacher and Son really loves the place and anything people can suggest to make it a more positive experience for everybody in the class is fine by me (and I’ll add this important caveat: right now he’s at an age where he is only barely aware that this is going on around him). However, upon reading the packet brochures I got a funny feeling, like this was just the start of something much bigger, something I wasn’t going to like…

There was an application form that required, among other things, a section to be filled out by a doctor or other health professional. That set alarm bells ringing. As did a comment by the consultant that we needn’t worry about Son’s speech because “when he’s in kindergarten they’ll monitor that closely”. The more I talked about this with my husband, the more suspicious we became that Son was going to end up with some sort of “diagnosis”.  

Personally, I’m a bit leery of all the diagnosing that is going on with our society’s children these days. And I can’t help but notice that all the assessing, evaluating, diagnosing, and treating is done in the context of the school setting. The goal seems to be to integrate children into the school environment with no real discussion about whether such an environment represents a normal, healthy environment for young homo sapiens. I would argue that the social dynamics most definitely do not (age-segregation, very low adult:child ratios) and the realities of classroom management require uniformity in the level of physical and mental activity at any given time during the day (understandable, but how reasonable given the variety of temperaments and personality types in a class?).

While there are many children who do just fine in this setting, could it be that a child who can’t sit still or focus is simply a child who is not suited to the classroom environment? And let’s remember that often this focussing is expected despite the fact that the child may have no interest in the topic, or may not wish to pursue that activity at that particular time. Is it the child who has the problem? Or is it that school simply cannot provide an optimal environment for each and every child?

We need to ask ourselves as a society whether the goal for our children is for them to understand themselves enough so that they can create lasting healthy relationships with the people around them? or whether our goal is to make life less difficult for schools and teachers. Should we try to force our kids to fit into a school environment even if that means medicating them? I suspect if more people understood what homeschooling really involves they would think twice about the answer.

And lest you fall victim to that whole “socialization” argument, try and recall a single work environment you’ve ever experienced where people are segregated by age, have to line up to go to the bathroom, have little if any input into how their job should be done, and who are subjected to standardized testing every few months. I doubt such a workplace is where you hope your child will end up one day. 

For my son, it soon won’t matter if he can put his socks on at age 4 (which I’m sure he’d learn quickly if his impatient mother didn’t always do it for him, using the opportunity for conversation to transition him from one activity to the next) because there won’t be twenty other 4 year olds to compare with, no arbitrary standards he’s expected to meet, and no Putting On Socks standardized tests for him to fail. Instead, the only reason it would become an issue is if he shows signs that his inability to perform this task is bothering him.  

And there, folks, is the real beauty of homeschooling. Because classroom management is a non-issue, learning can be tailored to each individual child’s unique temperament and personality. The highly active ones who like to move to learn can be accommodated as readily as the quiet child who needs a certain amount of alone time, or the visual child who learns better by seeing and doing rather than reading about it.

I know this is the goal of many dedicated and wonderful teachers, but these modern day heroes are shackled by the constraints and realities of administrative and managerial concerns that inevitably arise when hundreds or thousands of children must be brought to a certain standard of fact-knowing and moved through a system at a regular scheduled pace. For the record, I most certainly do not fault the teachers – I think it’s the system that is suboptimal. And while it works for many children, it’s the children for whom it doesn’t that most concern me.

For my son and our family the journey into the world of diagnoses, interventions, occupational therapists, teachers aids, and classroom strategies will end before it even gets a chance to begin. There are less than six months left in the term and since Son will not be going to Kindergarten the only thing I’m expecting to get out of this process is some tips for making the last few months of preschool go as well as they can. My husband and I are both determined to keep our son out of any system that wants to stick a label on him, and since my dearest friend has a 19 year old son with Asperger’s we have a first-hand account of what that system entails. I shudder to think about what life would be like if he stayed in the school system if this level of intervention is already appearing in preschool, and what would happen to his self-image and self-esteem when he got old enough to realize he was being labelled. And while we don’t yet know if that is the path the consultant is going to recommend, fortunately we will have an escape clause if it turns out to be just that.

New Year’s Resolution: 2009

The start of a New Year is a natural time to reflect on the past and what it has taught us, to consider the present and how it’s working for us, and to make plans for the future. In terms of my attempts to live a more Simple Life, I have listed some goals in terms of sustainable living. However, when it comes to home life and our daily activities there is just one resolution I would like to make this year: spending more “sit down” time with my children.

As a homeschooling mum with a small home-based business you’d think I’d have plenty of time with my children. And I do. I’m there for the runny noses, the spontaneous snuggles, changing of clothes, mediation of disputes, and all sorts of other moments that mark the precious years we have at home with our young children. 

Aside from being a mum, I am also a homemaker. This is a job that, surprisingly, I find very fulfilling and enjoyable (if you told me that 10 years ago I’d have screamed in denial). And, as any homemaker knows, there are always things to do around the house and never really enough time to do them all. Being blessed with children who self-entertain for the most part, it is easy for me to spend an entire day without sitting down to play, read, or craft with them (thank goodness for our bedtime routine which,  although exhausting some nights, guarantees special alone time with each child). And this has become particularly relevant with regards to my Daughter, since she isn’t attending any weekly classes this term. 

And so I have decided to make a concerted effort to put down the apron (kidding; I only wear an apron when I’m washing dishes in my pajamas!) and do some homelearning projects and activities with Daughter, especially when Son is at preschool 3 days a week. Today, I introduced her to lapbooking (see this blog for sample lapbooks) and we got a great start on a lapbook about Reptiles. I’ll post about it when it’s complete. 

I had a wonderful time and the house didn’t seem any worse for the time I took to spend with her! Truth is, she is growing and maturing as a learner and I need to start paying closer attention to what she is doing, both for the reporting requirements of our program and also because it helps me to facilitate her learning by directing her to resources that support her current interests.

warning: mini homeschool rant —> Folks who don’t understand unschooling often believe that child-led learning means the parents don’t do anything. Far from it – an unschooling parent is involved in their child’s learning by sharing the experience with them and by seeing where the child is going and providing the resources, concepts, and experiences to enrich their learning experience. We assist, we facilitate, we suggest, we share…we just don’t control or direct. 

And of course, there is the most important reason of all to spend more sitdown time with Daughter: because learning with our children is a fun and wonderful way to get to know them and to further strengthen the relationship with have with them.