Life is Good

We had the hardest time getting here. Missed our flight, waited at Heathrow for the next flight in the Yotel, had a flat tire on the next plane, Linnaea was sick from exhaustion getting to and through Minneapolis. But today, 3 days in to being here, I am so wonderful full and happy and joyous! I feel myself expanding like the Grinch's heart when he heard the Who's singing in Who-ville, and I was already so big to start! I am huge! And it is fantastic to live this large.

Must go and do and be. Wanted to say hi! Having a great time! Wish you were here!

Outta here!!!

Alright, there may be a brief break in broadcasting while we zoom across the globe. If there is connection at the hotel that we can use I'm sure there will be pictures to post!! If not, well, if I really must post I'm sure I can figure out a way!

Offspring

Last night as Linnaea and I were reading the last book in the second series of the Warrior Cats I read the word "offspring". Linnaea said "What does that mean? Is it that the kittens were born not in spring?" And I said "No, it is the child of a person or animal or plant." I said "I always think of it like "offshoot" which is from a plant." I wanted to share her wonderful interior dialogue about the word "offspring".

Brain development

Over at Dare to Know there is a link to an article in the Guardian about changing the curriculum to come in line with new findings on brain development that argue against testing and recitation of facts. The article isn't interesting, nor are the changes. What is interesting, to me, is the study from which the article arose:

02/07/2007 - The brain never loses its capacity to learn, according to a new publication from the OECD. Contrary to the myth that “everything important about the brain is decided by the age of three,” Understanding the Brain: The Birth of a Learning Science suggests not only that learning never stops - especially if actively pursued - but that it physically transforms the brain.

I know that. I can remember when Randy Thornhill was ranting once about the findings that the brains of homosexual men were different from the brains of heterosexual men. Of course they are different. The difference is unlikely to be causal, though, it is the effect, perhaps.

More interesting, perhaps, is this:

With this in mind, the report recommends that early education should ensure enjoyment from learning by providing children with such experience of “enlightenment”. Drawing on evidence provided by neuro-imaging of adolescents, in which high cognitive potential is shown to be combined with emotional immaturity, it also raises questions about the practice in some countries of streaming school students at a relatively early age, as well as about whether it would be more efficient to offer young people learning opportunities later, once they have matured.

On the other hand, we have this from the Guardian, a discussion of the Sats, Standard Assessment Tasks, and the crap they leave in their wake. In the article is this story:

A teacher-turned-tutor wrote to EducationGuardian.co.uk to say she found a girl with reading difficulties, whom she helps once a week, sobbing in distress after sitting her Sats and not being able to read the instructions.

She had asked her teacher to help because she couldn't read the long words, and the teacher, as they must under exam conditions, told her to try harder and do what she could.

In the tutor's words, the girl is now deemed "a failure" - at the tender age of seven - "and they wonder why under-achieving teenagers take to the streets and alcohol?"

The fact that we can say that the brain develops over time and yet press children to do what their brains aren't ready to do, sigh... I am so glad to embrace this slow grown life.

Reading

I've been reading books lately. I haven't read books for ages. I mean I usually have some book that I'm sort of dawdling through, that stays next to the bed for an era. I have one there right now, actually, and I want to read it, but, the light disturbs my co-sleepers, so I rarely ever read in bed. If I cannot sleep by the time Linnaea falls asleep than I usually play on my DS (I'm playing Zelda Phantom Hourglass right now, which is really good). But the other day I was following reviews of Tony Horwitz's newest book and found a link to his wife, Geraldine Brooks and read about her book March. I ordered with my most recent amazon order, to get free shipping really. And I am reading it and enjoying it. It isn't a pleasant story, it isn't nice, but it is engaging and has me thinking about things that I never paid a lot of attention to, not really.

Yesterday Linnaea put blue streaks in her hair using a colored styling gel. After a bit she wanted to wash it out, it didn't feel comfortable. We went upstairs together to clean out the bath and run the water. As always, I talked a lot. And I talked about how cleaning out the bath had been one of my favorite chores as a child. I loved taking baths because it was a time to read. I would lie in the bath for hours with a book, sometimes nodding off and only waking when the book had fallen into the water. Linnaea thought she would enjoy reading in the bath, but didn't have a book that she wanted to read. For her birthday a friend had given her The Nine Lives of Montezuma by Micheal Morpurgo and I fetched it for her while she finished scrubbing out the bath. She called me back to her bath about an hour later, glowing from the joy of having read for an hour in a hot moving to tepid bath and talked about the book, and how the kittens that the mother cat had borne had been drowned by the dad of the boy who had Montezuma, the one kitten that survived. The kitten had been kept warm in the oven and fed milk through an eye-dropper. She spoke of how relaxing it was to lie in the bath and read. She said she thought she would be having more baths like that.

Yesterday, on the way back from swimming, we stopped at Tesco to get eggs and milk and bread and a few other things. Tesco has toys and Simon and Linnaea both decided to get a Yugioh set. Simon spent much of Linnaea's bath preparing his deck to duel with her. He handed me the cards he had put together, to show me his mind and his might. I have no means of assessing a deck without dueling it. I do not have a sense of strategy when it comes to Yugioh. But as he was pointing out the different aspects of cards effects and outcomes I realized he was reading these cards. And I asked him about his reading, and he read a card for me. I asked him, because I am fascinated with the leap from barely literate to literate, if he noticed the words as letters still, or if they were whole words. He said they were more often whole words than not. And that yes, the letters had changed, at some point, from being a series of letters to being words. He was excited to talk about it, he was excited to be reading. I asked him if he ever worried that he wouldn't read, that it was taking too long, that it was something wrong with him. He said "No." I said "Good."

David is writing at the moment. Well, just finished writing. I don't think he is doing much reading outside of work. There is a book on evolutionary medicine that he was curling up to at night, and he there are lists and things that he reads on-line and the newspaper. But reading is not something that his life makes much time for. It is such a leisurely activity.

Other people's grouchiness as personal inspiration

I've been feeling really a miserable old grump the last day or two. I've said mean things and I've thought meaner and I've grumpled and grouched all over the place. There have been moments when I've been bigger than my mood, but not enough. Not enough to stretch and cover and make peace and such. But today, while walking the dog, the school down the road got out. And so, as I was walking on the return leg I got to see mothers and children. The first was this miserable, yowly moment between mother and son because he wasn't washing the car to her satisfaction. And it was awful and sad and mean and tense and a horribly normal everyday kind of yowling. He just took it and didn't say anything and continued to wash the car. Maybe he said something after I passed or before I got there, or maybe not. But it just made me wince inside and want to be bigger and better and brighter. No more than 2 minutes walk down the road Pickle and I ran into a mother and her 2 daughters walking along the embankment by the road as it leads up to my house. Both of the girls were dressed in blue and white checked uniforms that looked like they had come in a missionary box, poor waifs. The elder girl was walking alongside her mother, and called to Pickle while the younger was picking leaves off of the hedge that ran at the top of the embankment, framing the garden of the house above. The mother turned and shouted to her daughter, "What did I tell you?!!! Leave those leaves alone!" and turned to me and smiled. My heart broke, and much of the tension that I've been feeling did as well. Pickle and I walked home and I am now working to hold those negatives in check. To recognize that I am being absurd in my negative, PMS, post-flu malaise self. I will not yowl and howl and shriek. I will play the glad game and breathe and pause before speaking. I do not want to be mad and bitter and angry at Simon and Linnaea, not even if I am caught up in the hormonal wash of PMS or whatever. It is not their fault that I am letting my reproductive system rule my perspective.

So, thank you my twin harpies on my path home. Thank you for chiding and shrieking, because without you to give me perspective I might have remained the misery I have been.

Addams Family

Man, talk about good parenting!! I got this from Laura.

Using Mario to make music

Again, just a link, but a really (Kelli I think you should definitely click and watch) amazing piece of video game art. Zach posted this to the unschooling gaming list.

Kissing Hank's Ass

This is too brilliant! You must read about the benefits of kissing Hank's ass. Thanks Karen for posting the link!

The weather has been amazing for the last two days

Something that in England is important to comment on. The bugs are on the rise, we have had a few ant invasions, and flies all over the windows and bees everywhere. The bees are so wonderful to listen to; their incessent humming fills the air around the flowering trees and bushes. The cats love to hunt them. Hamster likes to hunt worms. He brings them into the house. It doesn't bode well for future presents from Hamster. The bats are out. Last night, while looking for Hamster, David got flown around by bats. We all went out to join him and they were there, skimming over the hedges and over the surface of the pond. I love bats.



We've been biking lately. There is a small village shop in the next village along, about 2 1/2 miles (according to Map My Run) round trip. It makes a good, leisurely, bike ride with whatever candy or ice cream or drink or whatever, really, added in to the mix. Linnaea got a new bike, well, a new, used bike being sold by the side of the road last weekend. It's a 10 speed, and she likes to keep it in 3rd gear which means she pedals and pedals and pedals. It's fun to ride behind her.


It's nice enough for sunshine tea.


Swimsuits hanging in the tree from yesterday's hot tub run. The mosquitos drove everyone back inside.


The woman who built this house and filled the garden with flowers left us an amazing legacy. It is so much fun for Linnaea to gather petals and mash them into pastes and use them for potions and healing ointments and perfumes.


There is a lot of weeding, and I'm not always good at telling weeds from desirables, but I know dandelions, although I like dandelions, and I know nettles. We've been eating nettles. David made a delicious nettle soup the other night. This week we'll try a nettle lasagna.


Punkin in a tree, with Dudley behind her.


Dudley's chin.


Hamster looking very aristocatic (snort).

There are more photos, but there are other needs going unmet as I do this. So, maybe another day?

Maternal grief

We went to the zoo on the day that the kittens went to the vet. Linnaea didn't really want to be home without them there. So we went to the zoo. It wasn't a great day to be out. The weather forecast and the actually conditions didn't coincide. But it was emotional. There are babies all over the zoo, it is the culmination of earlier breeding. So there are Tamarins and Marmosets and Meerkats with young babies, and we spent a lot of time peering through the glass to catch a glimpse of the youngsters. When we got to the Black and White Colobus Monkeys there was a baby there as well. And the keeper was there. David asked how old the infant was and was told that she was born yesterday, but was a stillborn. The mother however wasn't letting go of the baby just yet. She was still "adjusting to the situation". While we watched, and I teared up, another female came and asked to hold the baby. The mother passed her dead infant over and the other monkey realized, fairly quickly, that all wasn't right with the baby. She dropped the body to the floor of the enclosure. The mother rushed from the tree to the ground and bundled the baby into her body and went to a corner to sit with the body. Oof.

That day we got to see our own mother cat grieve over the loss of her babies. I had thought that Shadow might enjoy the quiet of the house while the kittens were at the vet. She often bats them about if they come to near when she doesn't really want them there. But she didn't. She refused to eat in their absence. Something she doesn't do normally. And as soon as they returned she wolfed down food. It made me so glad that we'd kept them all.

It's funny, I know I am anthropomorphizing the responses of these animals. Something the zoo was very careful not to do in the sign they'd posted to tell visitors of the dead baby in the cage. They had written "adjusting to the situation" on the sign. They said this was normal in Colobus monkeys, but they hadn't written grief., because that is a human emotion. I suppose grief is an adjustment to a loss, to a situation of terrible loss, but it seems so clinical, so without sympathy or empathy to talk about it in those terms. Shadow was lost without her babies prowling around the house, and this Colobus monkey momma needed her baby in her arms.

New beginnings

Nothing major. The kittens went in to the vet today to end their potential reproductive future. It wasn't cheap, but it feels such a relief to know that our current batch won't have anymore batches. And I decided that I would like to make Linnaea a shrug out of some really lovely yarn I got last Mother's day, or something celebrating something else. I don't know. But it is this pretty blue fluffy stuff. I'll have to find the camera and take a picture. And looking at shrug patterns on-line it isn't that complicated a knit.

So, those are the doors that have opened today. Oh, and yesterday we got to see a moth who had just come out of it's chrysalis. It sat on the window all day and only disappeared at dusk. I have pictures of that. I'll put them on later.







Hope your day begins things for you.