Unschooling and Meditation

I just found the coolest thing by total accident: http://www.poodwaddle.com/meditation.htm
Then, in the process of me playing with this, an astounding thing happened. I managed to explain meditation to the hyperactive almost-6-year-old-- briefly enough that he listened!-- and then since I was doing it I asked if he wanted to try. (Baby was asleep.) I lit incense, we both sat on the zafus and I set the timer for one minute. He totally copied me and I am pretty sure he kept his eyes closed the whole minute. When the gong went off he was just peeking to see if I was looking, then gave me his total charmer smile :) I asked if he wanted to do it again, and for how long, and he said 2 minutes, so we did it again. Then he says, in a protesting tone, "MOM! this will make me forget about all the things I want!"

!!!!!!!!!!

He figures this out after three minutes of meditation. My child is the Buddha.

And what a thing to realize, to choose not to forget those things-- to choose actively to remain engaged, rather than being a victim of your thoughts-- what a completely different place to be in!

The OTHER miraculous thing he said today-- as if that wasn't enough-- was this about the dog digging under the chicken fence (as he was perched on a ladder saying "go Pedro go!"): "Mom, to get him to be a good dog we have to encourage him to do what he wants to do!"

Maybe I'm succeeding at this unschooling thing after all.

To Build A Dragon

So far today (by 2 pm) Galen has had three chocolate-covered ice cream cones and Chef Boyardee dinosaur-shaped Spaghettios. That is all. Guess I won't be winning any best nutrition awards today.

There is a theory widely promoted among the "crunchy" crowd that watching television inhibits creativity in children, and that given the opportunity, kids will consume the "TV drug" all day without ceasing. I have seen friends of my son behave in this way. At our house, the only restrictions on television stem from the natural limit of having to share it with everyone else in the house (we only have one). To honor my own environmental ethics, I do encourage turning it off when no one is actually watching it to conserve energy (and I always explain this as I do it, and ask first, showing my son the same respect I would show anyone else). The friends who turn into screen zombies have been only those with limits on their TV consumption at home. To take this "zombie effect" as evidence to support the need for limits without considering that it might be the limits causing the zombie effect is to commit an experimental error. There be bias in that there data!

The TV has been on all day here. We have watched or listened to "Back at the Barnyard" (which I hate-- what idiot put an udder on a bull?), "SpongeBob," "Max and Ruby," "Fairly OddParents," and "Pink Panther" (one of my favorites, gotta love the Boomerang channel!). During all this, Galen has mopped the kitchen floor (yes, really, and yes, by his own insistence-- "I want it to SPARKLE!" he said, and yes, it's extremely clean), gone to the mailbox with me (about ten minutes round trip, down and back up a very steep hill), and rediscovered his abacus, on which he designed a dragon, figuring how to arrange the beads to make feet, legs, wings, body, neck, head. My little engineer. Now, he's playing with Hot Wheels and an old motorcycle that turns into a helicopter (it was my brother's when we were little). He is directly in front of the TV, and is not looking at it at all. He has told me all about a movie he imagined about a dragon egg being found by a Viking, who helps it to hatch, then it grows into a grown-up dragon... there are two leaders, a good guy and a bad guy, both Vikings, both with dragons. The good Viking had an ax, which he lost, but the dragon and Viking together find a dead Viking (eek!) and get the dead Viking's ax, and go on with their adventures, finding chess pieces and crystals, and at the end there is a big battle and the good guys win, "'cause the good guys always win," he tells me in that tone that says "Duh, Mom!"

Now if you'll excuse me, Popeye is on...

Sunday Morning Thoughts

Sitting on the swing outside this morning, I thought of those well-intentioned comments people make about my parenting when they see me with what's considered a "well-behaved baby." People see me with Iris, who is just off-the-charts darling, and they say "You're such a great mom!" The thing is, my babies always make me look good. Both have been sweet, adorable, and cuddly. I wear them most of the time when we're out, so they are generally content. Even when they get mad, well, it's a baby, ya know? Babies are just too damn cute no matter what they do.

What the heck is a "good baby," anyway? How does one go about being bad at being a baby?

Now don't get me wrong-- attachment parenting is important, and crucially so. But there is huge risk inherent in taking too much credit-- or responsibility-- for the behaviors of our kids at any age. So much of who our kids are is completely outside our control. As they grow older and more and more into themselves as individuals, they will make choices that will differ from the ones we would make for them. (Don't think so? Think attachment parenting will protect you from this heartache? Guess again!) They will behave differently than we expected. We may be tempted to take credit for their accomplishments and responsibility for their mistakes, neither of which are ours to claim. And that, fellow parents, is deadly dangerous. Taking credit for what our kids achieve steals power that rightfully belongs to them, weakening them over time and reducing their ability to continue to achieve for intrinsic reward. And taking responsibility for their mistakes disempowers them even further, not only teaching them they can't solve their own problems, but worse, implying that someone else is always to blame when things go wrong and they can't craft their lives for themselves. Now there's a prescription for time on the therapist's couch...

And with that, I think it's time for a second pot of coffee :) Happy Sunday!

Must. Remain. Sane.

Just in case anyone was wondering, it takes a ten-month-old under five minutes to completely empty 50+ CD's from a shelving unit. But they're so shiny!

The thing about babies is that they are so darned cute when they are in the midst of total destruction. Five-year-olds, not so much. Today we instigated a pay-per-offense regime in an effort to curb the few supremely irritating habits Galen has that are constantly occurring. How very NOT unschooly of us, you might say. And verily would I reply, you're darn tootin' it ain't, and it's working so far, and thank God because otherwise I was soon to have to call DFACS on myself. (Not really, but I have been well beyond perturbed for way too long.) It may be argued with great validity that I need to work on my issues behind having such a short fuse; it may be argued that medication for me would be better than violating the unschooling principles for him, breasfeeding baby notwithstanding. But, I have decided and therefore decreed, that unschooling in this house does not mean that I am a doormat to my child, however his age limits his ability to reason and remember, and so there must be a way to facilitate his process of learning how to get along with others without driving them insane. In fairness, everyone in the house has to pay everyone else, so both I and Brad have lost our share of quarters today too. It seems so far to be calling the appropriate level of focus to the issues (such as "Stop hitting me when I say stop") without adding too much drama. We'll see.

In other news, the new clothes dryer arrived yesterday. Woot! Now I have to go pick up some sack-crete so Brad can install it. (No, I'm not going to do it myself.) Of course, it's rainy. How utterly predictable.

A Day (Or Two) in the Life

In my insistence on trying to write things in chronological order (meaning that my birth story should come before any events that occurred after June 28) I am managing instead to write absolutely nothing. Perfectionism strikes again... thank you, Chronos, now please may I write?

Yesterday I attended robot school (where one learns to build robots, of course). Looking around the room, the instructor indicated the materials to be used in the construction of the robot: a switch like this (pointing to the switch on the infant swing in the classroom), flower feet like this (indicating the picture on the computer screen of a cluster of daffodils). After receiving these minimal instructions, bequeathed with an air of formality, I was to begin. I considered the universal nature of this training and wondered whether I could learn to apply this knowledge to other areas of my life in sore need of attention: could I drop my preconceived ideas long enough to see my surroundings with fresh eyes, to take inspiration-- artistic or otherwise-- from random objects in my line of vision? It was like McGyver meets shamanism.

Today I begin with chef school, and a lesson in improvisation as applied to baking banana cookies. Again I am confronted with universal lessons: go with the flow, trust your instincts, pay attention, use what's at hand. Is there a hidden camera somewhere? I am uncomfortable with these lessons. My instructor pushes my most sensitive buttons, ignores even my simple requests, tramples my boundaries. Why do I tolerate this? Martyred at the feet of my guru, slavishly pursuing some enlightenment ideal? This is supposed to be about making cookies!

In fact, it isn't at all about cookies, and the camera is imbedded in my instructor's memory. Only twenty or thirty years from now will I see whether I learned anything useful. In case you haven't figured it out by now, my instructor is my son, Galen, who is four years old. Also yesterday (Haha, Chronos! I defy you today! Tomorrow you kick my ass! Ha!) I spoke on the phone with my dear teacher and friend Francesca De Grandis. We were discussing how I've been managing Galen's reactions to his new sister. She made the comment, "What do I know about parenting?" (Even though she is a mother herself.) Later I thought, I don't know anything about it either, I'm just learning what to do from my kids. And so I realized in a very solid way that it is fact, not opinion, that our children are our teachers, and not the other way around. No one, no matter how much they read or study, knows how to parent before doing it. And even after doing it once, no one knows exactly how to do it the next time, because all children are different, and because we change in the process. It sounds ridiculously trite, but I can assert from experience that it is also perfectly, and often painfully, true. I think it is a Buddhist saying that you can never step into the same river twice...

The cookies, by the way, turned out rather nicely, a cross somewhere between a scone and a cookie, perhaps a bit like the British concept of biscuits (although I wouldn't know, having never been to England):



Try them sometime, if you dare-- the ingredients are as follows: two bananas, white sugar, whole spelt flour, 2% milk, baking powder, baking soda, vanilla, and brown sugar, all organic where possible. There are no measurements, no ratios, and no instructions, other than baking at 375. Observe, and enjoy!

Oh, and it helps to have your guru with you.