Please welcome Lila!

Emma and Ella have a new sister! Lila Elita Jean was born at 4:16 Saturday morning. She was 9 lbs., 6 ounces, has lovely dark hair and eyebrows, and is sweet and calm. Mom Erin and Dad Erik were both troupers (Mom through labor and delivery and Dad through a nasty bout of food poisoning).

In addition to her immediate family, Lila's arrival was attended by her aunties Megan, Denise, and Ronnie, and cousins MJ, Chloe, Chelsea, and Megan. The livingroom was a bit crowded, but it was sure a special time!

Blog neglect

I know, I know, no posts in weeks. Sorry! September is always a busy month for us, usually with at least one birthday party each weekend. This September has been even crazier because I had a big deadline last Thursday. I made my deadline, but that's about it for my news because I've spent so much time at work.

MJ and Chloe have been quite the social butterflies. In addition to all the birthday parties, they've had a couple of get-togethers with some of the kids from Not Back to School Camp. They spent one afternoon in Seattle, first in the University district and then downtown at the new library and beyond. There was a pack of about 12 of them, and they ended up having so much fun together that they organized an impromptu slumber party at one boy's house (a boy who obviously has very accommodating parents). That was so much fun that MJ and Chloe invited several kids over here for a sleepover the next week. It ended up being 5 girls and one outnumbered-and-loving-it boy.

As you can see, we have definitely entered the teen years. It's going to be fascinating.

Perhaps because of all this new exposure to other kids, we've had two different colds hit various family members this month. I got both of them, of course. Fortunately, the second one didn't attack until after my deadline.

Frank has been working pretty consistently, doing a second pass on all the files they threw at him so hurriedly in order to make one of their legally mandated milestones. But he's finished that now, so he should get a couple weeks of getting paid for being on call. I'm sure the girls wouldn't mind a tad bit more attention.

MJ continues her work at Hope for Horses. She got to be one of the bosses the day 30 or so Microsoft employees showed up at the barn for the Microsoft/United Way Day of Caring. Also, HFH is gearing up for their annual fundraiser auction, so she helped put together the packets and invites for that. She plans to work the auction, so we went to our favorite thrift store to find appropriate attire for an event at Bellevue's swank Meydenbauer Center. Mom and daughter disagree just a bit about what "appropriate" means. I found her this gorgeous, 100% silk Georgiou dress that looks fabulous on her -- the steal of the century at $5 -- but she thinks it's too boring. She prefers a cute spaghetti-strap number in blue (that I think is a bit casual). Her opinion will no doubt rule the day.

That thrift store is so fun! The three of us spent about $70 total and ended up with six dresses, a skirt, a jacket, and several shirts between us. All like new. Love it!

As you might have noticed, Chloe has not returned to Summerhill. In late August, she started expressing serious reservations about going back. We had a number of conversations about it, and Frank and I shared our best advice ("Go back"), but ultimately she decided that the good times she had there didn't outweigh her loneliness and boredom and some things about the school that made us all uncomfortable. (Here, I'll just say there was an incident that left us with serious doubts about the headmistress' competence. If you want the gossip, send me an e-mail.)

So, we have our daughter back. We felt compelled to advise her to go back, but Frank and I couldn't be happier that she ignored our advice! :-) She's been filling her time with the usual Chloe Variety Pack, but the last week or so has been devoted to watching over a hundred episodes of Inuyasha (anime) on YouTube. She is quite excited about it and now wants to learn Japanese. She's already putting together a bit of vocabulary, just from reading subtitles. The series is set in feudal Japan, so we've made some neat connections to other video ("Shogun" especially) and Dad's sword-based Japanese martial arts.

She's also conducting a bit of an experiment on herself. All this Inuyasha watching has taken place mostly at night, so she's started charting her sleep hours to see if her body runs on a 24-hour clock or not.

Anyway, all is well at our house (except maybe our upper respiratory systems).

Big news from New Orleans

Judy and Gary are engaged!!!!

No date has been set yet.

Happy Birthdays

To Gabrielle yesterday (12)
To MJ, Pam, and Judy today (14 and never you mind)
To Madison tomorrow (8)

The latest on Marty

Judy says:

"We're not real happy with the nursing home. It seems that another nursing home wouldn't be any better. We're VERY seriously considering taking him home once he's done with therapy. I need a little more info on what Medicare will cover and we need to see if we need to make some modifications to the house... I'm just not comfortable with him there & Gary has been very unhappy with their performance even with us going every day & keeping on them about stuff."

We'll keep you posted.

MJ the college student

We enrolled MJ in a drawing class at the community college today. Art 100. At the end of Fall term, she'll have her first two college credits. Not too shabby for a 14-year-old, eh?

Unschooling and allowance and math

Each of my kids gets an allowance. The amount has varied some over the years. Right now, they each get $10 per week. They don't have to do anything to earn that money; it's simply their share of the family income. (And when you think of it that way, $10 per week is not so much!)

The idea is that having money to spend will help them learn how to spend money. I think having a relatively generous allowance gives them more room to learn. I mean, about all you learn when all you have is $2 is that $2 doesn't buy much! At the level they're at, they can actually buy something now and then. They get practice choosing between desired items and saving for more expensive items (without being completely discouraged about how long it's taking), and they are learning how to make a dollar stretch.

The other area that this ready money addresses is math. Every time they go shopping anywhere, they get some math practice. They don't think of it that way -- they're just shopping -- but math happens anyway. Without teaching, they can figure percentages, estimate totals, multiply prices by quantities (or, in Chloe's case, add all those like prices together impressively quickly), and so on. This real life math is natural to them, stress free and practical. It's a far cry from the "I hate math" comments we were hearing when they were in school.

In fact, for most of us, it is only in school that math is something separate. The reality is that math is as much a part of everyday life as reading, writing, and speaking. Here's something I wrote recently about math in our lives:

"I've noticed quite a bit of math going on in our house lately, but I'm probably the only one who characterized it as such. My daughters were figuring out how many of these, estimating how much of that, playing with a new calculator, figuring a tip, calculating how many dollars this many [British] pounds is, measuring each other for their passport applications and talking about converting inches to feet, noticing patterns in some fractions, figuring out which new cage would give the rats the most floor area, asking questions about sales tax percentages, figuring out how many notebooks they could get for so many dollars at Target's 10-notebooks-for-a-dollar sale and how many pages that would be at 70 pages per notebook, and so on. They did all of this in a very matter-of-fact way: I need or want this information, and I'm going to figure it out. It's not 'math' to them, it's just taking care of business."

And how does all this translate to the math-on-paper skills the schools hope (but so often fail) to impart? Very well, actually. Neither girl has plans at the moment for going back to our lovely public schools, but I have every confidence they could slide back into the school flow with their former classmates without any difficulty. Except perhaps extreme boredom! ;-)

Artist Trading Cards

MJ has started making Artist Trading Cards. These are baseball card-sized pieces of art that can be collected, traded, or given away as a friendly sort of business card (title and artist information goes on the back). The content is as varied as the artists who create them.

Here are four of MJ's creations, our mutual favorites:





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To my Republican readers

I would be curious to know if your continuing support of the Republican party (meaning the more traditional, small-government, fiscally conservative Republican party) extends to Bush and his cronies. The speech linked below, delivered by Salt Lake City's mayor on the occasion of Bush's visit there, outlines several of the reasons that I, even if I were Republican, would find that particular group of people beyond tolerance.

I am aware that parts of the speech are easy-to-spout one-liners, especially near the end, but the middle part -- where he's describing the deliberate misinformation that led us into the war in Iraq -- outlines some of why I consider GW terrifyingly incompetent at best and a traitor and criminal at worst.

I am truly puzzled about why anyone would support him after all that. It's one thing to be determined to continue to vote Republican, whether due to concerns over a particular issue or because of a lifelong affiliation with the party, but why support Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld in spite of their clear failings?

Here's the speech: http://www.slcgov.com/mayor/speeches/2006%20speeches/SPdemonstration83006.pdf

Doing the Evergreen

The girls and I spent yesterday at the Evergreen State Fair. We ate and rode rides until we were green around the gills. A fine day!

The high(?) points:

* The Scrambler!!! This is a family tradition -- it's always the first ride we go on. (Two summers ago, Chiara -- newly arrived in America -- found our passion for it just a bit puzzling.) The girls are big now, so they took the outside and I got the joy of squishing them for a change.

* Visiting the pig barn and admiring the cute little babies, then turning around to see recipe posters and pamphlets prominently displayed.

* Walla Walla burgers!!! It's all about the onions, baby.

* Shriners corn on the cob!!! It's all about the butter, baby.

* Riding the Yo Yo at sunset. Gorgeous territorial views!

* Taking turns swinging the sledgehammer-bell-ringer thingy. Macho we are not, but we all won prizes anyway. Mine is a big blow-up sledgehammer that says "Girl Power."

* Seeing the Clydesdales and Percherons all hitched up and doing their thing.

* Hearing bits of "Footloose" from the Kenny Loggins concert at the grandstand.

* Finding a booth that was selling Crocs and getting to see all the colors in person. They have silver now! And the baby-sized ones are adorable (but sticker-shock-inducing at $25/pair).

* Buying the girls tacky $8 air-brushed straw cowboy hats. Yee haw!

* Taking my junk-food hangover and the remains of my Mother Goose handstamp into meetings at Microsoft today.

The fair runs through Labor Day at the fairgrounds in Monroe. We give it three thumbs up!

On a lighter note

One more Nazi quote

"...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Hermann Goering, attributed by Gustave Gilbert

On my so-called confusion

The Republican speeches coming out of Washington (via Utah) as the anniversary of 9/11 approaches are, in my opinion, reprehensible. Keith Olberman has written a response that says most of what I want to say. Read it here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12131617/

He closes with a quote from Edward R. Murrow that bears repeating (again and again and again, if necessary).

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty."

Evidently now we need a new version: We must not confuse dissent with stupidity, just as we must not confuse a person's occupation of high office as proof of his intelligence or honesty or, indeed, morality.

Here are some other quotes that bear contemplation:

"It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion."
- and -
"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play."
--Joseph Goebbels

"What luck for rulers, that men do not think."
--Adolf Hitler

Work/camp

About a week ago, Frank got word from his manager that his "one-month" contract, which had already lasted two-and-a-half months, would go on for another eight to ten weeks. Then last Friday, she asked if he's available until next June! Since this job regularly involves full-time pay just for being on call, we're jumping on that offer. We're trying not to count on anything -- it's Microsoft, where nothing is ever written in stone, and this is just about the weirdest project ever -- but we intend to enjoy the extra paychecks for as long as they last.

I picked up four rather dirty, very tired, very happy unschoolers from the train station Monday night. MJ is sad to be home! She had a fabulous time at camp, made lots of friends, and is counting the days until next year. Her four new best friends are from Minnesota -- evidently a big Minnesota contingent comes out every year -- so she's hoping to travel out there sometime. (Should I be concerned that these friends are all boys? Nah.)

Some highlights from the camp:
* Each camper was "fairy godmother" to another camper, leaving him or her notes, small gifts, and so on. The fairy godmothers' identities were never revealed.
* The campers spent a lot of time entertaining each other. MJ has lots of pictures of colorful characters doing flamboyant things (songs, acting, squirrel impressions). They also spent time making each other more colorful. One boy went home with blue hair, two others ended up with spiky mohawks (or maybe one of them arrived with that), a girl with waist-length hair got a shoulder-length bob, and one boy had his ear pierced with the old apple-and-needle technique (and his mom's permission). MJ came home looking pretty much the same as when she left (six holes in her ears and formerly-blue blonde streaks in her brown hair).
* At the prom, nearly everyone wore dresses. Yes, including the boys. :-) She's got some hilarious photos. One boy had this Marilyn Monroe look going on, with blonde wig and tiny red dress; he looked gorgeous!
* At the beach (a field trip out to the coast), the kids buried each other in the sand. MJ has a really cool photo of herself and three or four other kids, all buried into the same huge mound.
* One night, they played "Unconditional Love," a game where half the kids close their eyes and the other half goes around hugging people. Then they switch. It's evidently pretty cool, because you don't know who's hugging you, so you just relax and accept the hugs without the pre/misconceptions of identity.

Since she got home, Frank and I have learned some new vocabulary. An "emo" is a goth-like person who is full of emotion. "Nu Ma Nu Ma" is a bouncy song, in Romanian, that is evidently all the rage. And "skeet" is a bad word. (Hint: MJ cracked up when, during a conversation yesterday about Grandma and Papa's upcoming hunting trip, Frank made a passing comment about "shooting skeet." When Frank said it, it meant firing a shotgun at a clay pigeon. The teen meaning is a good bit more sexually explicit than that.)

As predicted, Not Back to School Camp has been educational for all of us! Chloe will be old enough to attend next year. MJ is looking forward to sharing it all with her.

One year after Katrina

The media is doing a pretty good job of showing how much recovery is left to do in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, so I'll just mark the anniversary of Katrina with a couple of anecdotes and a poster baby.

Our friend Bob has spent the past year embroiled in recovery efforts for his properties uptown, plus his mother's house in Gentilly and rental house in Chalmette. He discovered a few days ago that there is a cutoff on August 31st: remodel/renovation projects that don't have building permits by then have to adhere to the new building standards. The new standards involve raising buildings onto stilts or posts and expensive stuff like that, or more probably razing the old house and starting over, so he became very concerned. How could he possibly get all the inspections, structural engineering, and so on in just a few days?!

Well, he didn't count on good old free enterprise. When he left whatever government facility he was visiting, he found a line of electrical inspectors, structural engineers, and contractors, vying for his business, carnival-barker style. With a little old-fashioned New Orleans greased-palm wrangling, he just might make it.

Bob's second story is about his recent visit to his mom's rental house in Chalmette. As you may know from the news, Chalmette is still in a ravaged state. The houses are in bad shape, debris and trash line the streets, and blue-tarp roofs abound. So Bob was standing in this wasteland, no doubt wondering if recovery is even possible, when he heard the faint drift of tinkling music: the ice cream man was making his rounds. It must have been like landing in a Bergman film. :-)

In closing, I'll let a friend's grandbaby sum up what we think needs to be done:

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Note: These t-shirts are available from New Orleans-based www.metrothree.com. Proceeds go back into the community.

Ernesto takes aim at the Keys

Tropical storm Ernesto is expected to strengthen as it leaves Cuba then run over the Keys sometime tomorrow night. A hurricane watch is in effect throughout the Keys and along the east coast of southern Florida.

On the bright side, the storm has shifted somewhat to the east, aimed right at Miami. This means Key West and the Zombie Princess will probably be in the better quadrant of the storm, since the area south and east of a hurricane is usually the worst place to be.

In other boat news, the yard where the boat is stored has been sold and we've been given 30-day notice to vacate. This morning, we talked to Vanessa, our broker, and she said the local gossip runs toward the new owners being developers who are trying to circumvent the state moratorium on converting boatyards into condos. Regardless, it seems like we have to find a new home for the ZP. Vanessa has a guy who is interested, so keep your fingers crossed that finding her new home will be somebody else's problem!

MJ is on her way to NBTSC

I dropped MJ and three unschoolers at the train station bright and early this morning. There, they met up with two other unschoolers, to make a sixpack of very excited teenagers. They're headed down to Oregon to Not Back to School Camp, a camp for unschoolers that was founded by Grace Llewellyn. She's the author of "The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education." I highly recommend it, even to adults. It's all about grabbing the world by the tail.

Anyway, the kids are traveling down together by train and bus. They'll spend a week hanging out, attending each other's workshops, swimming in the pond, and being inspired by each other. There may not be much sleeping. Then they'll come back home to us, probably a bit worse for wear. :-)

A Midsummer Day's Fun

This past Saturday was another great day. We drove into Seattle to Seward Park and met up with a sailing/homeschooling family that Frank met online. They had their catamaran anchored in Lake Washington and dinghied to shore to pick us up when we arrived. We had some lunch aboard (Frank made Rosie's scrumptious crab mousse!) and the five girls (aged 5 to MJ's almost 14) swam and got acquainted. I jumped in the water, too, but levitated right back out again when I discovered the temperature.

After a pleasant couple of hours visiting, we ferried to shore and watched a Shakespeare-in-the-park presentation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. We all baked in the sun, but it was really fun anyway. The players were energetic and humorous, and all the kids had prepared by watching the movie version, so they were able to follow the action pretty well. The littlest girl, Aeron, decided Frank was her new best friend and spent much of the show on his lap. He said his legs went to sleep a couple of times, but I didn't hear him complaining. She's a sweetie!

After the play, it was back to the boat for more swimming and more food. We were all having such fun that we ended up spending nearly 9 hours together. Not your typical first meeting, eh?

A note about Puck: In this presentation, the mischievous one was played by a cute, spiky-haired female. She did a really great job and was obviously having a terrific time doing it. Chloe found her quite inspiring and came home to read the play herself. She has memorized Puck's epilogue ("If we shadows have offended...") and is answering mostly to "Puck" now. :-)

EndFest

Saturday the 12th, MJ and Chloe went to EndFest, a rock concert/festival put on by local radio station 107.7 The End. They saw a whole string of bands, including the Subways, Mars Volta, and the headliners, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. There was also a carnival midway and a whole bunch of sponsor booths with freebies to keep them entertained for 10 hours.

The concert was held way down at the White River Amphitheater (south and east of Seattle), so Frank and I decided to drop them off at the shuttle buses and then make a day of it instead of driving all the way home and back again. We spent a nice couple of hours at Kanaskat-Palmer State Park, on the Green River (yes, the one the killer was named for). We waded a bit, and walked a bit, but mostly we stretched out under a tree and went "Oooh, leaves." It was very peaceful and refreshing.

After the park, we had some food then went to Southcenter Mall. It's a completely integrated place and made us realize anew just how white-suburban Everett is. Anyway, we were wandering around, not finding much to interest us until we walked into Kennelly Keys. Frank picked up a guitar and started plucking, and I had an epiphany.

Let me tell you about Frank's guitar. It's an old friend, but as such, it's been through a lot. It once upon a time served as an emergency canoe paddle, and, more recently, it shared a household with a couple of toddlers. The body is scarred, one of the tuners is completely gone -- he's been using a pair of pliers to tune it -- and the neck is just a bit warped. As you can imagine, the sound is less than perfect. I knew this, or I thought I did. Then Frank picked up one of those shiny, beautiful new ones. It only took a single chord for the light to dawn over my oblivious little head. Oh, yeah, that's what a guitar sounds like. Even a relatively inexpensive guitar!

So Frank has a new friend. It's very pretty, and we talked the guy into a 20% discount because it has a tiny scratch on it. Plus, we managed to resist the $600 one with electric pickup.

The next stop on our EndFest odyssey then was a pleasant hour or so in the mall parking lot, with Frank playing songs while I read a new book. It was growing dark now -- only 3 or 4 hours to go!! -- so we headed back down to Auburn. Despite eating too much food earlier, we decided the perfect thing to do was popping into a Mexican restaurant for more food and strawberry margaritas. We sat in the bar and watched the end of the Seahawks preseason game (can't even remember who they played, but they lost regardless). Then we drove the two blocks back over to the shuttle stop, stretched out on cushions in the back of the van, and napped and chatted until the buses started rolling in.

Soon, the air was filled with revving engines and cries of "Woohooo! Chili Peppers rock!" Chloe and MJ appeared not long after, full of stories and smiles. While MJ has several under her belt (she became a music fanatic at age 8, I think), it was Chloe's first rock concert. Nothing like starting your 12yo off with a festival dedicated to alternative rock! I'm sure it was very educational.

And Mom and Dad had a good day, too.

Unschooling and chores

An unschooling friend pointed out that the following sentence in my previous post makes it seem like we require the kids to do regular chores: "She's discovered things she likes better at Summerhill -- no chores there...."

Well, this is biting off a big mouthful, presenting all this to a mostly non-unschooling audience, but I'll give it a go. Just bear in mind that the topic of chores is one that inspires hours of debate and discussion even among those of us committed to unschooling. I'm probably not going to convince you that this approach is right, but by the same token, you won't be able to convince me that it's not. With that understood, here we go.

To clarify, while chores do get done at our house (eventually), we no longer believe in assigning them to specific people. Frank and I chose this lifestyle -- having a house with a lawn, eating in, using stoneware and stainless instead of paper and plastic, etc. -- and we tend to set the standards for how that lifestyle should be maintained. We are, therefore, ultimately responsible for maintaining it. That's it, the bottom line.

As part of our family, the kids often voluntarily contribute to that maintenance, and when company is coming over, we all participate in the fire drill that makes the place guest-ready. Beyond that, the "chores" that the kids "must" do are things like occasionally hauling all their stuff to their own rooms, carrying dishes to the sink or dishwasher, and bringing me their dirty laundry.

Some unschoolers don't ask their kids to do even that much. Or if they ask, the kids are free to be too busy. It's all about respecting that the child's needs of the moment are as important as the parent's needs of the moment, and fostering an attitude of cooperation and joyful sharing of tasks. My schedule tends to be too tight to allow for that ideal flexibility. If now is the stolen moment when I have the time and willpower (an elusive combination) to start a load, now is the time the girls had better bring me their dirty clothes. However, they are free to choose to go without clean clothes for another week, and to accept the risk that one week might stretch into two.

I suppose I'd better talk about teaching responsibility, since that's what people always ask: How will your kids learn how to be responsible if they don't have any responsibilities? My answer is that OF COURSE my kids have responsibilities. Responsibility is unavoidable, and anyway, avoiding it is not something they have as a goal. Without external force being applied to them, my kids care, create, work, clean, correspond, keep schedules, remember details, pick up slack, invent, investigate, and help out. Making them do the dinner dishes once a day is not going to improve on that. Especially when they probably would have preferred cheese pizza on paper plates. :-)

Do Frank and I wish we had more help? Of course! What parent doesn't fantasize about having faeries that clean up all the messes overnight? Are we willing to assign, remind, harangue, harass, and punish in order to have that help? No way! Talk about time-consuming, nasty work! Ugh. Anyway, the peace of our family is not something to be sacrificed in the name of passing the white-glove test.

Even in our frantic moments, we try to help-because-we-love. And in our better moments, we are able to remember that everything we do, we do because we choose to. I don't clean the bathroom because I have to, I clean it because I like having it clean. Or because I like my kids to have a clean bathroom. Or because I don't want Frank to feel stuck with it. In my better moments, every chore I do is a gift to myself or someone else.