March homeschooling update

All in all, March was a difficult month. On the positive side, we're almost all moved out of our sold house, and into my parent's place while we wait for our new house to be built. More on that in another post. It's lovely to be moving forward, and south, towards our plot, even if slowly.

So, not to dwell on the difficulties of regular (generally very good) life: I discovered fish sticks. Which I suppose could be interpreted as a humblebrag: "look at me, we lasted at 4 years 10 months and 3 days without fish sticks! Ha!" (I mean, what kind of crazy mom would measure that kind of stuff!!?)" That aside, it's not. It's a tip to you hippies who've been holding out. If you need to, and you're not in, like, a place or situation where they don't have fish sticks, there are always fish sticks. Use them. Unless...you know... allergies or whatever... ok, well, not a great tip... but hopefully you get the spirit in which it's intended.

Anyway, so here's buying fish sticks in gory detail: I'm not going to start talking about how I made them from scratch. I did not. Neither did I buy them at Woolworths (annoying expensive pretend organic food). I bought them at Pick 'n Pay, and the kids entered a kind of euphoria. Eli slept through the night in the other room because his stomach was just so full of whatever fish sticks are full of (we don't even know what to call the other room because usually the kids are in with us most of the night). And so I bought another, family-sized package of them. And it occurred to me that these things are awesome. They're fish, kindof, and they make my kids happy. More of that.

Which I suppose is part of a broader softening of my beliefs about stuff. I don't think people typically think of themselves as "hardened" or opinionated, except perhaps in retrospect. I certainly don't, until I do. But there it is. Fish sticks softened me a little. And also led to some eating joy in the household, because I saw that occasionally having foods the kids really like leads to less anxiety and stress. I guess I was afraid the floodgates would open or something if I occasionally let in food that didn't live up to my (pretty inconsistent) ideals. But they didn't. For the most part, the kids eat well. And balance comes over time.

On to homeschooling goals. March= goal lite. We kept up with our speech therapy goal, which the kids love doing (there is chocolate involved). We had a goal about prayer (it's lent, we'd love to help the kids learn to pray). Other than hearing us pray, this goal just slipped through the cracks. Maybe it was a bit contrived and I was forcing it. The month isn't over yet, so maybe there'll be great opportunities in the next couple days.

Our final goal: To move without being stressed, or causing stress for the kids. Or something like that. It's a tough ask- sometimes being worried is just a sign that we need to get advice on how to navigate difficult circumstances- advice from God or from eachother or from friends/family. I guess the goal is there in the spirit of making this month a good month, despite the difficult bits. And to an extent, it's worked great- we spread our move out over several days, doing 3 hours or so of intense work/packing while my parents were with the kids.

Stuff the kids loved in March:

Fluff: my mom was throwing away a bag of stuffing from an old pillow, and Noah grabbed it gleefully and brought it home. They're super jealous of those experiencing snow, and so the house became a winter wonderland until finally (a month later) we moved, and the fluff was tossed.

Cracking pinenuts with our old stove fuse boxes. These ancient fuse boxes that had been holding our fire-hazard electricity finally got replaced during inspection. It hasn't been a great year for pine nuts, but we got enough to eat, though not make pesto...

Noah is still swimming. The rest of us feel cold just looking at him...

Making and decorating cupcakes. I finally conceded that trying to make healthy baked stuff with the kids was a stretch, so now I'm trying to alternate healthy stuff with just baking whatever they find in a kid's cookbook and want to try. There's something about having books in print from the library that the kids love- they're not nearly as into recipes I pull up on the screen of my computer.

Hitting stuff with sticks. 

Other stuff I don't have pictures of...

• Eli started using my cell phone flash light to look at books before he went to sleep (something Noah's been doing with a solar jar lamp for a while). Don't ask what it's doing to his eyesight.
• How to Train Your Dragon series continued as the focus on Noah's interest (together with the Magic Treehouse books). In fact, we ran out of books. Here's hoping that my parent's library has the 2 missing Train Your Dragon books. Noah and Eli both really like Quentin Blake books, or any books where you have to search for things.
• Electricity! Noah is super into electricity, so we got him his first, very basic circuit board to practice on. 
• Eug and I found a tortoise on our plot! totally not homeschooling related, but readers, we might have a tortoise! And probably a bunch of snakes. We'll focus on the tortoise until I buy a pair of closed shoes.
• Sticker workbooks. Eli's can't concentrate very long on drawing, but he can spend an hour or more figuring out where stickers go.
• Making seed bombs- balls of vermicompost mixed with tree seeds, ready to throw down on the plot. 
• Making air rockets, flying things of various kinds. Eug might write about that in his newsletter. Eug is pretty awesome when it comes to making stuff out of found material.

Here's to April!

February homeschooling update

Rock sculptures. Mainly parent-made.

I've been pondering how we as parents express beliefs in relation to who we are and what we do. In these updates, I want to focus on what we're actually doing, because I guess a lot of the belief stuff can just be jarring and alienating, whereas the stuff we do with our kids, and how we do it, that tends to be stuff that we're all doing, in one way or another.

February was a month of visits from friends from the U.S., and unexpected dental surgery for Noah. There is nothing quite like toddler dental extractions (2!!!) to dampen the smug self-satisfaction (well, actually mainly insecure hopefulness) of one's parenting. Actually, it was that and the fact that the dentist asked "is he speaking English??" (YES!!) that led to some self-doubt.

A golden tortoise bug, just because it's awesome.

For goals for the kids, we kept on with swimming but with not quite as much passion as in hot January. Noah is almost swimming without water wings, but Eli is more enthusiastic in rivers.

After the dentist visit, we're working every day with Noah on helping him pronounce words so that others can understand him. We use Mommy speech therapy rather than seeking out a speech therapist, because it feels like something to work on daily (and, well, money...). There are a bunch of sounds Noah struggles to pronounce in specific settings, and we've tried to be up front about what we're doing and why. He seems happy to try talking through worksheets with one parent, and sometimes Eli will join in pronouncing easier words. He gets a smartie per worksheet, so it's not exactly self-motivated, but it feels somehow important enough to try.

The third goal was related to having time alone with each child. When one of the kids had a little time (15-30 minutes) with one of us attentively willing to just hang out, everything felt more manageable. We still put the kids to bed separately, which is ridiculously lengthy and involved, and so I guess they get plenty of attention, but perhaps could use more time apart from one another.

The lesson from February has been something about being in the zone, where the kids feel genuinely able to continue doing something without squabbling. The electrician came to bring the house up to code before transfer, and removed 100 year old electric fixtures, which the kids could play with for hours (even better when Eug hooked up an old bell to actual batteries!) Noah was super excited because he electrocuted himself a few times (on small batteries) and thought he was extra awesome.

Other activities that worked well: giving the kids a big piece of plywood (2 ft X 4 ft), tilting it and showing them how to make clay "roads" for water and marbles to run down. The messier, the better. The less involved I needed to be, the better. I freak out because I want it to be a Proper Learning Activity, and they just want to go wild. So I leave and go and cook something. And it works perfectly.

Eug built them a little woolen zipline in our kitchen for little things to travel down, which had to be put up every day for a while.


They can play at the beach for ages without needing to involve Eug or I.

Finally- back to the penguin beach, to show friends.

Noah's lentil penguin.

They'll occasionally get in the zone doing other things- looking at books or playing legos. Noah has become obsessed with the "How to Train your Dragon" books.

Ride a bike, change the world

Today (Saturday), near our new (future) home, a bike rider- a cross-border migrant from Malawi- was killed by a truck, and it was terribly sad. So this post is preachy and sentimental, because that's where I'm coming from right now. And in amongst the preachiness, I just want to acknowledge that not everyone has the margin to ride or take public transportation everywhere. But I hope there are enough of you that do, to make this helpful.

I work in a field (public health) where we talk a lot about equity. We talk about the fact that, if you're born in a certain place in a certain time, you have a likelihood of 40 fewer years of life that your brother or sister who happened to be born elsewhere. Half a lifetime taken from you at birth. And this chafes at us. So we look at ways to change this, so that everyone has an equal chance of living a good, long life. When the UN or the WHO gets together, they consider all the ways to alleviate poverty around the globe. Some efforts work better than others.

In these attempts, the underlying argument is that some basic needs must be met-- for water, sanitation, and housing. Perhaps education. These are human rights, we declare. So many of my peers and loved ones are hard at work to promote greater equality of opportunity, and it's awesome.



Where am I going with this? The problem comes when we imagine if we were, in fact, collectively successful in our efforts towards equality. The tough question that I struggle with is this: Could everyone live the way I live without the world's resources becoming utterly overstretched? What if "equal" meant living like I live.... would that be ok? If not, how can my family live a joyful, abundant life that does not use more than our share of the planet's resources? If, by "equal", I mean a little worse off than my life, why?

In 2006, each individual on the planet could make use of the resources of about 5 acres (including raw materials for clothing, fuel, etc). This is rapidly declining- it'll likely be around 2 acres by the time my children reach adulthood.

Using this acreage, a family car is simply not tenable for every family or adult in the world. It's intuitive, too. There are traffic jams in China that last for days. But it's so hard to imagine not having a car. If you're in places like South Africa or the U.S., and are vaguely middle-class, it's our norm. I dare say that many South Africans consider the level of convenience provided by a personal vehicle, their "right". Bought and paid for. But one can't put a cost on reproducing this notion of the car as a right. We reinforce this picture of what "middle-class" looks like. It is weird and very difficult to be a professional without a car, and there is a strong assumption that one MUST have a car if one is to be a busy and productive member of society. As the middle-class grows, so does the demand for personal cars.



The knee-jerk reaction to the death of the cyclist today has been "we should ban riders on busy roads" or "we saw someone with a child, riding!! that's not safe!" I understand such responses. But I think we need to turn our perspectives around, recognising that many people do not have a choice but to ride or take public transportation.

This week in Cape Town, if you are going less than 5km, consider being brave and ride there. Or if you don't have a bike, walking. Taking a minibus or bus or train is certainly an great alternative to riding- and there's a desperate need to improve these services in many parts of Cape Town. Find a day when you can practice riding during a relatively quiet time of day. Then later, try during rush hour. Tell your friends. If a hundred people took their cars off the road during rush hour, imagine how much calmer Kommetjie Road would be. Then a hundred slightly less brave people will be willing to try riding, or taking a minibus, also. And a hundred more. Soon enough there'll have to be a dedicated bike lane and bus services might progressively improve, as they are in other parts of the city. If we are willing to offer up our collective vulnerability, or some level of comfort, so much could change.