On blind spots (or: it's hard to eat sustainably, from scratch and earn a sustainable moral income while unschooling your kids)

There is a field

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing

And righting there is a field

I’ll meet you there

When the soul lies down in that grass

The world is too full to talk about - Rumi

I don’t know the right way to be in this complicated, sometimes fragile world, but I know that if you’ve found it: if you definitively figured out a right way, that seems a sure sign something is wrong. My version of the good is all about having enough uncertainty to stay humble, but not so much that you lack direction or, you know, go insane. 

To see ourselves (not the collective ourselves, but the personal) in all our weakness, and to say that we can be brave and step forward tentatively, but never with such certainty we squash the parallel hopes of those who walk alongside us. I never want to be the one who has it all together, because that is the place that excludes the rest of us.  

On labels: mother, wife, unschooler, permaculture, Christian, zero waste, farmer, daughter, researcher, activist, friend. I know for certain these are all spheres of huge importance to me, and that I cannot fully inhabit all these identities or knowledges instantaneously or simultaneously. Though perhaps I will have the opportunity to if I am lucky enough to grow really, really old.  

But for now: I know that I can’t produce my own food and gently support my kids in self-led learning while caring for my community and supporting myself and my family on an entirely moral, non-exploitatative and fair income stream (doing altruistically motivated, moral and mutually helpful research, or selling enough plants to earn an income but not creating plastic waste while paying our two staff members adequately without making it harder for our neighbouring nurseries to function). (and a million other tensions: bearing 3 kids in a world of climate change, flying to Korea to visit family...or not)

It's a lot, right? But those are the folds-- like villi in our intestines, the surface area if you zoom in enough is infinite, and you cannot be zoomed in and yet see all the folds at once. Family and community helps- family that is willing to come alongside and do bits of things that fit with their own vision of where they are and where they are going. One priority has to be embedded in us, like muscle memory— we have to inhabit one thing so much that it becomes second nature… then another thing, perhaps. In the interim— before I have that layer, the best I can do is to be honest about it. I remember a few years I had a bit of an academic crush on a great economic philosopher, a very famous woman, and I bent over backwards to attend a conference where she was speaking. It was terrible. She came from the U.S. to Cape Town, and deeply misread the circumstances in which we lived and couldn’t understand or imagine another way, yet was fully assured of her own genius. Which didn’t diminish her contribution or her work, but reinforced my sense that we cannot be whole in every sphere. None of us needs a pedestal.

That is, we cannot be right about everything. 

We can be brave and say that we do not understand the lives and experiences of all people. That is not to say we give up our perspective, but that we try our best to inhabit and understand the experiences of others, including narratives where we are cast as the bad guy. A dear friend with a very different upbringing than mine once told me something deep: that shouting at a loved one is not always hurtful, and that one can be deeply hurtful without shouting. In my polite world, an alternate dimension (including as a parent) seemed to open up when I thought about that statement. 

This idea may be hard to apply in a linear way to the political divisions in the U.S., or in South Africa, yet I think some bit of that does apply, particularly when someone proudly says they are non-racist or not patriarchal. In some ways where we are comfortable and wealthy, we have the comfort of saying the equivalent of “I never raised my voice” or “I always gave money” or “I learned and applied anti-colonial language,” or "I did better than most." It is too easy to cast ourselves as the consistent heroes of our stories. In some ways people like Trump and Zuma make it easier: you can feel superior and self-righteous just by telling the world that you don’t like sexual harassment or inciting racial violence, or by refraining from stealing billions in tax and being married to four people at once. It’s a very low bar. And it is always easier to articulate your rightness when you are already comfortable and have had a few evenings to think about your worldview with a diverse group of friends. It is pleasant and idealistic to embrace a vision for the world when you’re not the one it’s experimenting with, the one who has been discarded by colonialism or capitalism or both, time and time again. 

Which is to say, I think we need to have a higher bar, but also be humble about our virtually infinite blindness. I deeply desire a society that cares for the poor, that is inclusive and generous and principled and safe and sustainable and transparent. And yet: I have layers and layers that are none of those things, does none of those things. Yet.  It is disingenuous to argue for your vision of the world without acknowledging your blind spots or actually doing the work of changing and experiencing the deep limitations of our capacity to change.

In the world of morality and faith, I don’t really think we should rank or feel that we are not measuring up. I think we can say: we are finite— there are ways in which we are not acting rightly, and we can do better, slowly (perhaps prayerfully)— one step forward, one sickness or financial emergency and we slide back— but we do not measure the progress exactly. We can check ourselves on the direction and forsake the judgement. We are not seeking redemption through our actions. We are redeemed already, we are simply doing our best with the gifts we have, in our small corner. 

A snapshot of things that come up unschooling three little kids

A lot of this is likely to change as we find a new rhythm with my parents on the property, but I thought my last post about unschooling was pretty abstract so I wanted to be more specific today. A lot of people ask about unschooling if you work or do other things-- and this is us-- we juggle and it works out!

The last few months of building my parents house has meant our schedule has been complicated and busy, and coincided with Noah (8) and Eli (6) getting really into Minecraft (and now Terraria), while Hana (2) has needed a lot of our hands-on time. Part of me thinks that they got so into Minecraft because we were not as available to do fun and interesting things with them, and because the winter has brought a lot more illness this year than previous years. So the boys have played a lot of Minecraft. I say that totally fearful of judgement, and yet supportive of their strategy because our house has remained peaceful and happy during a potentially intense, overstretched time.

I'm not [yet] an unschooling mom who totally understands when my kids want to spend large chunks of the day gaming, but I have learned that it's all in how your perceive the situation (even if there are limits how far you can stretch yourself in the moment). I have said on various occasions to Eug "I think they are playing too much Minecraft!" I like that that hasn't led to us reverting to control. If a partner or another loved one was doing something you were concerned about: you might talk to them, see if they perceive an issue, discuss how to support them, protect your own boundaries, see what their motivations were or what they were going through or getting out of their approach. This is more or less what we've done,  and it's been an opportunity to reflect, and to think through how to support the kids in their interest, while also figuring out the extent to which they're playing to numb difficult feelings. It has been a chance to notice and appreciate that they have found ways to to meet their own needs and spend their days tremendously gracefully during a busy time. I appreciate that they'll know themselves better from these few months-- we talk about what we're doing with our days and why-- not in judgement but with interest, to reflect and think through choices and options. In doing this, I also notice that I'm making not-perfect choices: I have kept up with farm chores and propagation for our nursery, and with from-scratch cooking-- both of which require a huge amount of time and energy-- because that's was what I needed to do for myself. Yet this has come with costs and I could have sat with Noah, Eli and Hana more than I have done. So I'm working on doing that, now. In an ideal situation, we'd be giving them plenty of opportunities to connect and do other things if that's what they want. We were working to bring up the adult-child ratio on the farm, and so the temporary trade-offs seemed right to us.

Most days, either Eug or I wakes up early to start work (I sometimes go into work when I need to be at meetings, and then I leave very early to avoid traffic), and the other person gets to wake with the kids, start coffee and oats, feed the animals, and check on the state of the farm with Hana. When Eug is working, the boys don't play Minecraft because we don't have enough devices, so the kids and I will do something inside together, or work on something out on the farm (or sometimes I'll work on something, and they'll just join me). I bake a lot with Hana and occasionally do some cooking with Noah; Eli's favourite thing is to play boardgames and make up elaborate stories together. When with Eug, they'll often play Minecraft, with Eug in the background participating where he can (he'll sometimes play with them also).

Eug and I will switch after a few hours, and whoever is caring for the kids will make lunch. In the later afternoon, we will either be with individual kids, or Eug will work on the house and I will take the kids out to the beach, or to a couple of classes they participate in (clay lessons, swimming lessons, speech therapy, Scouts). I do speech therapy practice with Eli, while playing Star Realms, his favourite card game! It's not rushed most of the time. I will sometimes walk down the street with one or two kids, to our nursery and check in on how things are going. The kids will sometimes pair up and play together for a while-- legos, magnatiles, or telling stories outside, until something happens (If Hana is involved) and conflict comes and goes. I sometimes feel very busy if I look at the number of jobs I seem to have in addition to my actual full time job at the university. Then I settle into the actual day: what I actually need to do, and it is always doable-- though the issue of our kids' less visible needs is definitely something I'm thinking about more, as I tend to go from one task to the next, and kids are not tasks.

Amidst the imperfection, all three kids seem to learn what is relevant to navigate their day-to-day life, and what they enjoy-- I remain convinced that we can learn naturally, given interested and supportive people around us. We try to offer lots of interesting options, which sometimes are taken up, and sometimes aren't. I am not measuring whether they progress similarly to others of their age, though I do try to observe if they are stuck in a rut and if we can help. I do marvel at all they know from our reading of copious fiction and non-fiction together, and from watching Youtube-- this is even without me understanding all their skills from playing Minecraft-- and those are abundant. We discuss so many things together during the course of the day. I read quite a lot for work (and enjoyment), and talk to them about what I'm learning, and about what I'm learning about farming, also. All three kids can spot a spekboom from 100m (CUTTINGS MOMMY-- they even know the spekboom-on-pavement map of our routes and sometimes will generously say "There's a spekboom coming up soon, you can stop the car"). They know the kind of pelargonium that only grows naturally on Ou Kaapse Weg, know the difference between English, Dutch, French and Spanish lavenders (I learned this like a month ago) and can identify which chicken laid which egg based on size and colour. They know how to care for many different animals. More than what they know or don't know, we are learning how to relate to one another, and how to relate to other people, also.

Star Realms

We still get to the beach a lot

Soap carving

Found a lizard tail- it was still moving!

matching Minecraft and real life stones

Silvermine dam- it was too cold to swim so we walked around the dam instead. I could not keep up with my 2 year old, which is a bizarre twist.

dinosaur tea party.

Some experiences unschooling

A few people have recently asked about how and why we are unschooling, and in the moment I usually mumble something incoherent about autonomy. I wanted to reflect a little more deeply here, though not comprehensively, as supporting our kids' education is inevitably complex. Noah would be in Grade 2 this year, and I've written about unschooling in the past (though I cringe at some of those posts). School can seem really innocuous to those who thrive in those settings (or seem to), so I'm grateful for a firstborn who is sensitive and challenged so many of my assumptions.

The experience of unschooling, to me, has been a move away from outcomes, towards the journey, and towards connecting with my kids. If you've ever read this blog, you know I plan and scheme and will suffer seemingly endlessly for a goal (I think this is partly a result of school). This can serve me well, at times, but it also means I struggle to be present for the ride.  It also means that my tendency is to think of the future for my kids-- and inevitably, because I'm that kind of person-- to constantly be measuring my kids' successes.

In fairly Calvinist (conservative Christian) settings as a child, during college and our early years of marriage, there were a lot of fairly awful ideas about children. Alongside these were also quite negative ideas of God-- and these were tightly wrapped up in a highly patriarchal social structure. What was terribly confusing is that God (and parents, leaders, and teachers) did not necessarily have to be kind or considerate-- they could do anything and say it was "for our own good." A consequence of being in this kind of setting is that one cannot trust one's own feelings. Don't even get me started on what it was like to be a girl and a woman in these settings! Not only could we not trust our own desires and motivations, we also could not trust God to be good, all the time. I am not sure if this influences how kids in schools are being taught around the world-- I am outside of that world right now-- but I want to move away from my tendency to see my children as vessels to be urgently filled (with skills, or knowledge, or even values), whether or not they want that skill. While self-reflection is powerful-- I want my kids to be the ones doing the reflecting on their desires and motivations, not me or another adult. In this sense, unschooling is less about learning and more about relating-- knowing that in healthy relationships it is easy to learn and grow.

There are a lot of people who believe God is always good who don't unschool, so I think my experiences are the result of a particular, non-universal, journey. Still, unschooling has brought a helpful consistency: In imagining a more relational, less capitalist, less power-based, less shame-filled/competitive society, a lot of ideas align, albeit messily (and inconsistently). We can enjoy our lives while remaining responsible and responsive to our contexts.

So as I grow with our kids, the value of unschooling is less about outcomes and more about finding ways to be consistently kind and support our kids, while being careful to attend to our own journey, responsibilities, and boundaries. It is a way to trust our children and try our best to connect with them, which is harder than it sounds. It does not mean leaving them to do their own thing, but finding opportunities for them to get to know themselves, and to shine. It means creatively finding ways to meet all the needs of all family members, and be explicit when we are struggling to do so because of financial, time, or energy constraints. What I want them to feel is an abundance of opportunity, and an abundance of love-- a complicated abundance, given friendships with those who have much less than we do-- but abundance nevertheless.

Change, growing lots of vegetables, planning my parents' house.

Our street seems poised to change from primarily rural to... we're not quite sure what. So as a psychological exercise, I thought I'd write down some of my thoughts here. Our fears are rooted in the recognition that for all our dreaming, work and building, the day-to-day stuff we can't control-- whether we get in trouble for our crazy rooster and the building material constantly piling up, whether there's bike-killing traffic, whether your kids can safely go down the street-- can start to crowd out other stuff. We have neighbours who once farmed in other parts of Cape Town, and had to leave their farms because of safety -- and where daily theft forced them to stop farming, and that is also something that is on my mind. Change can feel as though the dreams we've cultivated are tenuous somehow, that they can be taken away quite rapidly.

Which made me consider the dreams themselves. As we moved to the farm we stepped onto a particular path, not just into a particular space. The space seems deeply important-- not only our house but also our fruit trees and the work I've put into the soil. Yet what's perhaps surprising is the number of things we can take with us if we ever have to leave: we're learning and internalizing ideas and lessons about growing food, bringing up our kids, being sortof-off-grid. Year-to-year, there'll be more things that tie us to this place and there'll also be ways in which the land is giving to us gifts in the here and now, in which we don't have to worry about the future.

A friend asked if I stopped blogging regularly because all our dreams of farming or unschooling or working at stuff we enjoyed were already fulfilled, and I was thinking about how it doesn't feel like that for me-- there's constant space for growth.* It feels like over the next ten or twenty years, we can continuously create a more beautiful productive space, but each year we learn stuff, and we change whether or not that beautiful space in my mind ultimately comes to be. And each year, there are things that do well and things that fail-- things that the kids love about being here, things that they don't love.

Ultimately, this farm, and now the nursery, is under our stewardship for as long as it is given to us (we hope for a good long time-- don't worry mom!), but I don't want to feel aggressively protective of it-- I want to hold on loosely, even if it goes against my controlling personality. Maybe that's where accumulation of property or money is particularly problematic-- they become markers that signal whether our lives are going well or poorly.

In the long-term, I hope we can be progressively more radical in our understanding of growth, as these outward measures don't speak to growth in our ability to communicate, our ability to know our own heart, our ability to convey kindness, to relate to those close to us in a non-manipulative way. All these things are not things that we are born with, even if we are "kind", there are different kindnesses for different circumstances.

Pig is doing very well... and has a lot of character.

All roads lead to vegetable gardening
These days, I spend a lot of my time thinking about vegetables. I've been growing vegetables-- at least a little bit-- since I started this blog ten or eleven years ago. For a while, I gardened on our fire escape in the summers in Boston-- probably in contravention of fire code. For a while in Observatory, Cape Town, I was all about urban gardening in a very small space. Then I got really discouraged about the difficulties of how little we produced. For the last two or so years, we've been on our 1-acre smallholding, but the first year or so I did very little vegetable gardening because our hugelbeds were not mature enough and our water access presented real challenges.

This year, I've been thinking a lot about our own vegetable garden, as well as about two school vegetable gardens (one for a preschool, another for a primary school) and also about creating a market garden at our nursery.

All in all, this has involved a lot of planning and a lot of gardening relative to previous years. Absolutely NOT all successful, but still, a lot of food produced. As with everything, gardening is an exercise in grappling with control-- doing what you can, knowing what is in the realm of possibility, and leaving some stuff alone. What I'm learning is that there are a lot of ways to garden successfully, and that just trying lots of different stuff, and being willing (and lets be honest, having the time, money and energy) to keep trying eventually leads you to good things. So it's just worth just trying.

I re-read Fukuoka's work recently (and also went down the rabbit hole of Korean Natural Farming), and what struck me in re-reading was not the techniques, but the journey. I'm convinced by the idea of working with nature rather than against it, but I think the process of figuring that out for each space is actually quite winding and indirect.

When I feel discouraged, as though growing on this scale is not efficient or that I kill too many plants, I think it's valuable to remember that most of the world's food is produced by smallholder farmers, on a very small amount of land. Large scale agriculture is what is inefficient and unsustainable. We often get fed a message that big farmers feed the world, but that is not true. While I don't really believe the average person can grow all their vegetables on a space the size of a door, just because a lot urban agriculture pinterest boards are not terribly realistic doesn't mean you can't grow a lot in a small space, over time, once you get to know your conditions and adapt to fit your circumstances. [I also think that it is meat and dairy-based diets that need larger farms, as this is where I have found it hardest, and most inefficient, to figure out how to be self-sufficient].

When I produce yucky tomatoes, I can cut the bad bits out, give them to the chickens or ducks or pig or worms, and eat the rest. When large scale farmers produces yucky tomatoes (and I'm convinced if you're gardening completely organically, you'll always have quite a lot of not-up-to-standard tomatoes) their options are much more limited, so the pressure to produce good looking tomatoes, at whatever environmental cost, is so much higher.

On our farm, as I plan better for the future, I begin to see a way to produce all our vegetables and fruit and quite a few of our calorie crops pretty efficiently. Not all our calories, by any means, but a lot of food nevertheless, and we're creeping up calorie wise. At the school garden, suddenly it doesn't take much to produce all the greens needed for two schools for lunch for 160 kids, even if we can't produce a lot of other items just yet.

Propagation by cuttings
With the weather cooling down, it feels like we finally emerged on the other side of a very hard summer. Some of our nursery stock died, some survived. On the other side, I've learned about cuttings. I even have a pair of secateurs in the car, in my bag, or even in my pocket, to whip out if someone has something nice sticking out over their fence... My kids are a mixture of embarrassed and totally into it. 

Propagation (and growing all our ginger and tumeric indoors, since our climate is not warm enough to grow it outside)

My parents' house: Connecting to the grid
We're looking forward to having my parents living with us on the farm, hopefully later this year. After six months of waiting, we thought our building plans for my parents little house were close to being approved, but not yet. It's been a really long and painful process.

So, you ask, will my parents house be off-grid? Will it be built with mud and hay? Sandbags? Tires?No, sadly none of the above. We did pursue the possibility of building with sandbags but we weren't successful -- the combination of expertise, availability, affordability and council approval is pretty challenging to get right. I hope if we ever build another structure, I hope it will be something exciting and fun (TIRES-- earthships-- are still my favourite), but this time around we feel ok about building small, but pretty conventionally.

On being off-grid-- sortof. We'll going to have many of the things we have at our house that only increase our standard of living (consider this the definitive list of things that won't significantly impact on your happiness): (1) low-pressure Solar geyser (water heater) on the roof, (2) household water going out to greywater systems-- moringa trees and banana trees, hopefully, (3) rainwater tanks (4) composting bucket toilet.

So I guess the main thing that isn't on there is our PV solar panels. Having those, rather than municipal electricity, does significantly impact our standard of living (no fridge or booster for the geyser on the roof, so sometimes no hot water) and we're pretty sure we're messing up our battery because in winter we sometimes want to use our computers at night. 

Anyway, I'm still really excited to be hopefully close to building my parents' house, and also to growing a lot of stuff on their corner of the property-- I haven't grown anything there because we knew their house would be coming, but once their house is up we'll be growing a lot more.

Noah tried out his first day-camp last week, where he learned ukulele, trampoline, and hula. Felt like a milestone-- our boy is growing up...

*I slowed down blogging because I figure there's enough content out there on elimination communication (replace with any hippie topic), and I don't care enough to evangelize on any one life choice. I also decided around the same time that I didn't want to monetize the blog.

August 2017: Using waste for urban farms, lots of ducks sitting, unschooling and power

Farming, heading into year 3!

Farming in an urban space can seem like a poor use of space, especially when there is really high density right next door, and a desperate need for adequate housing. Sometimes I think that it would be great for our family to have more land to work with (!minicow!), and for this land to be less threatened by developers. We have intermittent pressure to succumb to rezoning (our land is currently agricultural, within Cape Town city limits, which gives us quite a bit of freedom-- to own bees, livestock (though with rules about how many), and chickens/ducks). Our response to this is partly pragmatic-- we really want to stay here and raise our children here, and don't want to have to start over. It's also spiritual and connected to calling, though perhaps in a very tangible, we-don't-have-a-five-year-mission-to-change-everyone way: what we are doing is connected to where we are living. 

The other thing is that, while urban land is much more expensive and not very good for growing, there is a lot of organic waste in the city, and diverting this waste from landfill makes urban agriculture fulfill a role that isn't easily fulfilled by other types of farming, or other types of urban action. This month, one of our sources of waste diversion was large amounts of spent brewing grain. I'm working on scaling up our worm farm to take on more barley. The ducks and chickens eat some, but it ferments quickly, so we have to have a bigger/faster plan to turn the grain into something helpful for the farm.

Rain came to us in August-- it hadn't in July (usually our rainiest month). Our trees have responded by budding and leafing out. Our winter seems to last about one month-- our stone fruit were dormant only briefly. I am loving the signs of life around and about, and the hope of a summer that brings a lot of growth, and maybe even fruit crops. Tiny almonds are starting to form on at least 7 of our 9 almond trees. Our trees don't look like YouTube permaculturist trees seem to at the beginning of year three. Partly that's because of our drought, and some have been in the ground just a few months, some a year, very few two years. I think it's partly that the journey is truly slow, and that we have to be very patient.

Of course it's also a time of a lot of work: making sure trees have everything they need to grow, checking irrigation, prepping our annual garden to be on a drip system. Right now, our biggest long-term struggle is around mole rats. We have a LOT of mole rats, which can destroy an established fruit tree in a matter of moments. We've been planting with wire as a way to get trees established, but in the long term the wire will decompose, so we have about 2 years to figure out how to get rid of the moles.

Unschooling, money and power.

In a way this is its own post, but I don't seem to have the bandwidth to make a separate post so this is it: 

We continued to do many of the same things as before: Noah got to dissect pig organs, which is totally the type of thing he loves. He also got to make a lot of dog food, for which he earned organic biodynamic bacon for our family! It continues to be up and down and up again, but the trajectory is firmly positive, so we keep at it. The time it takes to talk through stuff, and to work through our own stuff as parents is good. I sometimes worry that we don't offer the certainty that small kids need-- I apologize a lot for being quick to judge, for being nitpicky, for nagging. But we keep at it. This month, despite the cold, we went to the beach a lot, continue to go to clay lessons pretty often, and generally we learn a lot together. As Hana edges towards two, I do feel things begin to shift as we suddenly begin to have 3 children, not 2 kids and a baby. 

One way that there has been synergy between unschooling and other aspects of my life is in relation to power, money and "earning" your place. One criticism of unschooling seems to be based in the idea that one earns one's place by working hard in school, perhaps by suffering, perhaps by working at a job you don't really like or doing things you don't really like. That escaping this is somehow dangerous. It's a grim drivenness that is very hard not to fall into as an adult. I sometimes will say "hey be careful with that, it took me time to earn money to pay for that!" Then I cringe. That's not the reason I want them to be careful. I want them to be careful because I'm worried that they're going to be a jerk, however defined, in the future, or because I really like whatever they're playing with, or because I want them to respect material goods. The message I hear so much of the time is that we must teach our kids the value of money, that they must be prepared for the "real world." Kids must even "earn" their pocket money.

When we live in a society as socio-economically unequal as ours is, one of the hardest things to figure out is how to navigate this idea that one's hardworkingness defines one's success. This gets woven into earnings and money. I don't think this perspective of "you earn what you have" is good for kids, at least not without nuance. When kids earn their pocket money, for example, they risk internalizing that their value is somehow related to this ability to earn, and counterintuitively also get the sense that earning money is pretty easy. For example, in our neighbourhood, there's no way most kids could earn money for toys, and it seems silly to imply that that is for lack of effort. That is, amongst the well-off (that includes the middle-class) it's ultimately the parent earning the money or building the social connections needed to earn-- all of which could well be valuable, except if it teaches kids that resource-poor people should put in more effort. 

A better narrative, which I think is consonant with unschooling and which better reflects our reality, is this: "we are really lucky and will share whatever we have with you (and others)". Life is not lived in the abstract, of course, and sometimes I give my kids a confusing mix of these two narratives, and they have their own navigating to do. 

Unschooling has something powerful to add to dreams of a kinder world: kids need dignity, parents share what they can constrained by their own background and values, and what we have is not what we deserve. If we know ourselves well enough perhaps we will not need so much, we will not need to prove our worth either to ourselves or to others quite as much. Which is not to say that one cannot work towards all those things without unschooling, but that it's been a helpful framework for me.

I suppose it is also worth acknowledging that unschooling is a manifestation of power; we're open to it because we are doing well financially. A lot of people (particularly in wealthier countries) say that homeschooling is not only for the privileged. I disagree, and think it is totally an expression of privilege, at least right now. Yet I don't think it is necessarily a negative expression of privilege-- I don't think schools or our community is worse off for wont of our sending our kids to school. We have time and energy to be better connected to all ages in our neighbourhood, and to spend most of our money within a very small radius. The task is to make alternatives to school better and more accessible to more people. 

It is a struggle -- it's yet another layer of privilege. But it feels better to own it than to feel self-righteous about one's brilliant choices. I feel very frustrated at people who are super smug about consuming only organic local food: not only are you enjoying physical (health) privilege but you also get to feel great about your choices! The task in both cases is not necessarily to say that organic local food isn't good, but to acknowledge the world in which only a few people get to eat like that, and work towards changing that, step by step.  

Noah got to climb with my dad again!

pig heart dissection at our neighbour's place...

Watchtowers at Soetwater beach...

This is a game called Timeline (bought while in the U.S.), in which you guess the order of historical events (albeit a very Euro-centric history). Noah likes to memorize the cards to give him an edge on his opponents when we play. Even though he can't really read, he's memorized a lot of the cards.

We were so grateful to friends who sold us their entire collection of trains and duplos, very cheaply, after their son grew out of them.

Did you wonder how the seal is doing? Not well. We're going to check today in case there's a skull in it for us. We've cobbled together almost a complete skeleton, from a few different seals, but never been able to get a skull-- seeing this decomposition I can understand why, as the skull is clean well ahead of the rest of the body.

Free the frogs and dinosaurs. never seems to get old...

The dam was notably deeper, thanks to a much better August of rain.

We arrived to our spot to find that this Keurboom tree had fallen over because its roots were pretty shallow, right next Silvermine dam. The kids took turns jumping, before we realised we might be able to root it again...

Wait, we can stake this in the ground, and maybe it'll be just fine! We'll check.

This is our cat's first kill. We were going to dissect it, but our scalpels were a bit blunt so Noah said "let's not." and we gave him to the chickens instead. 

Guava's were our best (*only*) fruit tree crop this year. They kept coming for a while. Okay, there were 10 total. But they were big and tasty so I'm counting it a win.

More beach as we prepare for spring...

Blue bottles on the new moon. Check out that sting! 

It can be hard to find napa cabbages (Chinese cabbages) for kimchi here, so we grew some... Okay, we grew six. Enough for some kimchi.

You know how I said we weren't going to eat our ducks any more??? Well, in August 5 of our ducks went broody on eggs. We keep removing them but have to be a bit careful about how many we remove, because if they stop laying completely then it can be a while before they start up again. Here, I switched out 13 duck eggs for 13 chicken eggs, as we'd happily have more chickens (and have 4 other ducks sitting on a mixture of duck and chicken eggs-- we've never had success with hatching chickens out of a mixed nest, but I'm hoping a nest of just chickens might just work out. I'll know next month!

friendship. Sortof. cat licks guinea pig, but not sure if she's just tasting her.

tamarillo! hoping for fruit this season...

Guava 

Bear lime getting its spring growth!

pomegranate in spring-- by now we have over 20 pomegranate trees. Again, I'm hoping some will bear this year.

July 2017: Unschooling, vegetables, no more duck killing

July! We're coming out of the fog of our trip to the US and Canada, which felt like it took about three months out of our year. (A month before, a month there, a month after). Even though our trip didn't turn out quite as we hoped, coming back I've noticed we're taking all these leaps, maybe because the kids are growing up, or maybe because we were outside of our comfort zone and that caused unexpected growth. Perhaps because we saw people we love and were able to take stock, in a small way, of where we've been, where we are, where we hope to be.

This month I've had to evaluate my work (like, the paid stuff) for the next few years... I'm set to work until the end of 2019. I am so grateful that I was able to negotiate to continue in a space where I can largely work from home, which is not the case for many people in academic research. I am also able to do research largely in my own neighbourhood, which means that my (public health food) research meaningfully intersects with our farm dreams.

Unschooling sometimes requires leaps of faith, but I think usually what is best is if you take progressive tiny steps of trust, rather than leaps. When it's tiny little steps of trust, you're able to see signs of growth and flourishing, whereas when you're trying to take a leap, it sometimes implies that you ignore signs from your family, waiting it out, thinking you haven't yet landed after the leap. When we've decided "no bedtimes!" "No screen limits!" it generally doesn't go well (I think it is too confusing for the kids!), but when it's gradual: when we sit with our kids and help them decide what they love on an iPad, or when we're open to the possibility of a gradual shift in bedtime routine, it goes much better. Which is to affirm that it's centrally about the fruitfulness of the process, rather than the destination. Which isn't to say we should endlessly tweak things until the process is perfect-- I sometimes do that! I think it means we try to rest in relationship with our kids, as best we can.

One irony about being on the farm is that a lot of times the kids are indoors. We came to a new awareness of this when they were bouncing off the walls at bedtime, and we realised they hadn't done any exercise all day. We don't force them to do chores, though I suppose sometimes we do coerce Noah (trying not to). The kids love the animals and I want to keep it that way... I'm not quite sure how to make the farm a joy and not a burden that takes us away from them. Perhaps as it becomes less of a burden (uhh... labour of love??...) to us, we'll be able to invite the kids into sharing the process in a way that feels less like we're trying to unload the burden of our values onto them. So Eug and I spend quite a bit of time doing chores, and if the weather is good then usually the kids sortof gravitate with us. Anyway, we've been intentionally getting outside on the farm a bit more. I still take the kids to the beach or mountains once or twice a week, which can make it feel like they are getting plenty of time to roam and exercise, but actually this is not the kind of daily, continuous bursts of speed they seem to need.

Our duck population was large, and we'd finally found a duck stew we really enjoy and were regularly killing ducks (6 since we got back from our trip). There were two major problems with the duck farming strategy. One was that it never got any less time-consuming, though dry plucking first did seem to help. So Eug would spend his entire working day on a Saturday killing two ducks-- they took about 90 minutes per duck, and each duck gave us just one meal for the five of us. So we knew this was not a great approach to meat, after all. The plucking is just too difficult for us as a regular part of our week, and an entry level mechanical plucker costs about R9000 here ($750). Hard to justify right now.

The second problem was bigger: Noah has never gotten used to our eating ducks. He's actually ok with pigs and chickens going to slaughter, but never ducks. Everything I've read suggests that children under the age of about 10 are intuitively matter-of-fact about the process, but for Noah each duck death felt like a trauma (though we've certainly never had him actually witness it. He was happy to be part of the rooster processing). Which added to the labour (I needed to take the kids off-farm, and it was by no means a learning opportunity, though raising the ducks has certainly been), and to the sense that the process just didn't add up. His tears were an expression of very real pain... not really what we were hoping for as far as farming goes... So no more duck killing and eating. We're gradually selling the ducks we already have, and will keep just a few for the sake of our farm's diversity, for eggs, and in case Noah changes his mind or we have more time. It has been a major lesson in meat production, but at least we can say we tried it. I feel huge gratitude now whenever we eat meat, and am thinking more about how we should eat on the farm.

I imagine it will change as the farm changes. Right now I am spending a lot of time thinking about our vegetable garden. Growing vegetables year-round seems to be one of the best things we can do as a next step. We have a lot of trees in the ground-- I would love to put more trees in, but with the drought the question would be how we could water them next summer given the layout of the farm. In August I'll be focused on setting up water systems for vegetables (a small hand pump, together with a pump coming out of our reservoir). Vegetables can be very water intense, but we'd have systems in place to make it as efficient as we can, and then, I am sure, begins a new stage of learning. I've grown vegetables here and there, but this is a real effort to supply a much bigger portion of our diet with vegetables we grow ourselves.

Anyway, we are living and learning. We had our first taste of home-grown guava this month, which Noah said was "magical." While it is sometimes hard to see what exactly we are doing, or whether our kids are maturing, our kids say excitedly each night "I can't wait until it's morning!" That seems like enough.

Noah is helping out on the neighbour's farm once a week, feeding 100 pigs and 200 chickens. It's lovely for him-- he's learning and growing from the experience.

Barley feed!

Chicken feed!

Noah also got to go on a hike to the nearby waterfall with just his grandfather! There hasn't been nearly enough rain for winter, but the waterfall is still flowing, which is a really good sign.

I didn't expect that Cape Point would be the kids' favourite spot in winter, but it is. Noah and Eli are in this picture, as they run out of the car so fast that they're by the ocean before Hana is even out of the car seat. 

We found a dead seal on the beach, and did what anyone would do...

inspect its large teeth.

Drag it up away from the waves, so that it wouldn't be pulled back into the ocean...

... and come back weekly to see how the seal's body was doing... (week 2 it was completely buried, but week 3 it was back)

Week 3: The skull is almost ready for relocation...

We saw a Cape Clawless Otter, which made me extremely excited. Can you spot it?

Otter is still in the picture!

The kids felt that if they approached on all fours, the otter would not be scared and run away. Mmmm.

tracks

Cape Point has the most amazing shells. We go at low tide so that we can look at a lot of rockpools, and we put them back carefully.

Unsafe modes of transport. This is a directionless trolley gifted to us by someone. It's basically used to crash at high speeds.

These waves are extraordinarily cold. 

Epsom salt crystals. 

building with spielgaben. 

Another winter's day, another.... beach???

Silvermine hiking

Big girl doesn't need a ride anymore.

She does, however, need to pick up every single rock on the way.

Boys ran ahead and had to circle back to find Hana and I.

penguin babies are everywhere. 

We had the entire penguin beach to our selves, because the penguins are all hiding in the bushes with their babies, and it's the middle of winter.

Noah made me call a ranger about this adolescent penguin because at first she looked... dead.. and then... uncomfortable stuck between two rocks. But she's just a firstborn, waiting for her younger siblings to grow up so her mom can come out of the bushes, onto the rocks to hang out with her. A metaphor for first borns of all species?

Mid winter swimming.

with auntie Kim.

These are our annual beds. 2 years and a lot of labour (and a lot of horse manure) in the making... finally ready and starting to grow stuff.

starting to grow vegetables...

Noah's toad raft... our reservoir is a good breeding ground for endangered toads, but if they get in they can't really get out.

Eli's Toad raft...