You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March 2010.
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Spring cleaning lead to spring knitting. A bright spot in the kitchen. Texture for the hands and eyes.
Pattern: Lacy Mock Cable Towel
Everywhere I look, I want to add a touch of brightness and freshness. Time for a few more handmade touches.
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“Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.”
Langston Hughes
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What is lifting you up today?
Both kids have been playing around with the blur effect introduced in the book “Things for Boys to Make and Do”. Matthias has been recreating the original; Sandra has used it as a starting point.
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Grandmother’s Favorite Dish Cloth
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Cheerful bright blues, simplest of patterns, a refuge for a tired mind.
Sun on clean sink.
Spring cleaning and a new cloth.
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“He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.”
Johann von Goethe
March takes the snow; March brings the snow.
March is difficult. This is the time of year when homeschooling seems hardest, emotions run roughest, hope seems smallest. All of us get cranky and I start to shop for new curricula in the unexpressed hope that new programs will translate into a new life. I worry and fret. I know in my heart of hearts that I am failing us all miserably.
At least, that’s been the pattern in past years. This year, only 7 years after it all started, I’ve remembered the pattern before it began. I saw it coming and awareness changed it. I’ve noticed that the fluctuating weather systems and vast swings in barometric pressure make us all testy. I’ve noticed that Matthias handles it most poorly and always says something that makes me cry. I’ve noticed that this period of seeing spring but not having spring seems to steal our patience with nature, with ourselves, with each other. I’ve noticed its the season of burnout, and so I’ve stopped taking March seriously.
Like a surfer on a powerful wave, I just ride. I just let things happen without trying to make plans or force them into being.
Homeschooling. Winter. Parenting. Spring. March. It’s a circle of life kind of thing.
Every time I type “recommend”, I have a very worried feeling that I’m spelling it wrong. I’ve even tried to find other words for it so that I don’t have to use it. But it’s such a good, sturdy word.
rec-om-mend: to present as worthy of acceptance or trial; to endorse as fit, worthy, or competent
A few good things have come our way, and we’d like to recommend them to you as being worthy and far more than merely acceptable.
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Our first recommendation comes from Matthias. I held an Usborne book party last month and thought he might like one of the books. I asked him to flip through Things for Boys to Make and Do and let me know if he wanted it. He didn’t come back, and so I went looking for him. I found him surrounded by paper, tape, scissors, and pencil crayons.He had made a wanted poster from the book and was then inspired to create paper mustaches and a variety of other cowboy gear. That seemed like all I needed to know and I ordered it.
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The book has now been in our house for 18 hours. In that time, creativity has been unleashed to an extraordinary extent for Matthias. Paper hat, badge, holster, gun, and belt all completed. Soccer drawing underway. Wanted poster underway. This book has really great projects that have simple, eye-catching illustrated directions and a wide range of great topics: pirates, knights, mummies, soccer, cowboys, dragons, and more. The types of projects are equally broad: drawing, collage, building, paper mache…I’d tell you more, but he’s using the book.
Our next recommendation is from Sandra. Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly is a wonderful book by the renowned author Gail Carson Levine. (Here’s a review.) Sandra loves to write and is working on a number of stories. She started writing even before her reading took off. During all those years of struggling to learn to read and vision therapy, we never stinted on promoting a love of stories. In her spare time she’d reenact books and movies in her room, adapting them as well as faithfully repeating their plots. This naturally led to thinking of her own stories and wanting to get them down. Her spelling – to this day – atrocious. That didn’t need to stop her, though.
Reading Writing Magic has encouraged her and inspired her. She feels reassured on a number of points. The other day I walked in to find her writing beside a piece of paper that had “Shut Up!” emblazoned across it. I was taken aback. She explained that it was written to her nasty voice, the one telling her that her writing was stupid and that she was lazy and that her story was boring.
She’s been inspired to set her own challenge.
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10 minutes of writing per day, 100 days in a row. She plans to reward herself at 50 as well as at 100, and is currently mulling over such prizes as a fountain pen and a new iPod Nano.
My recommendation, aside from being compassionate to yourself and aside from allowing your children to have time for whimsy and self-directed projects, is to read To the Heart of the Nile: Lady Florence Baker and the Exploration of Central Africa. Well written, this book takes you into a life almost too fantastic to believe. You’d dismiss it as outlandish if it were fiction: a beautiful Hungarian girl raised to be an Ottoman courtesan rescued at her auction by an Englishman; a love story that becomes a tale of adventure and suffering as they set out to discover the source of the Nile.
And lastly, from all of us, the album Ocean Eyes by Owl City. You’ve probably heard the ‘Fireflies” song already. We’re finding these cheerful, whimsical songs the perfect soundtrack to our days as we wait for spring to arrive.
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“Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make life so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, drop a jar of applesauce.”
Natalie Goldberg
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What if we stopped forcing the idea of ‘orderly’ into our lives and aimed instead to balance rhythm with adaptation and excitement?
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A little experiment on the roll of background colour in colour perception. 4 walls in my house used as backdrop.
Red, yellow, cream, orange.
(The pattern is Knitty’s Fetching, working up satisfyingly speedily in Araucania Ruca)
Permission is hereby granted to the reader of these words to examine life and then, without guilt or turmoil, declare the need for change.
Permission is hereby granted to those who feel responsibility becoming a burden to rest that burden on the ground for a time; for if we are to be human, we must recognize that change is important, refreshment is vital, and passion is primary.
Permission is hereby granted to those who need it to spend time doing new things, old things, exciting things, restorative things.
Permission is hereby granted to consider the following as essential to being human and thereby essential to your days:
-vast stretches of time spent on art, Lego, craft, or reading
-baking up whatever strikes your fancy
-a week spent in concentrated focus on an unusual topic: a unit study on beaches as an excuse to turn up the heat and wear bathing suits while watching shows on the oceans and listening to the Beach Boys, for instance.
-walking with or without children
-field trips every day of the week
-multiple bubble baths
-boardgames and puzzles
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Be kind to yourselves. Burnout isn’t pretty. And there’s no point in powering through it if you don’t have to. And you don’t have to if you’re homeschooling.
Laugh. Love. Loaf around. Listen. The learning will happen.
Permission is hereby granted to remember that we’re humans and not robots. Move with the flow. If the flow is blocked, unblock it.
