Thanks once again to Animal Planet's Most Extreme, my son has a new fascination - water bears! I don't recall ever hearing about water bears (tardigrades) before, but now that we have we're hooked. They are totally fascinating! Water bears are wee microscopic beasties that look like some weird combination of moles, frogs and bears. Although they are microscopic in size (measuring about 0.3-0.5 mm) they have legs (4 pair), a mouth (which they use for sucking the liquid from moss and lichen), a brain, and eyes. They have skin, muscles and nerves. Some even have tiny claws! Just watching them walk is mindboggling because they look so familiar yet so foreign. And they're actually quite cute! There are two sexes and they exhibit sexual behavior and lay eggs. But perhaps the most interesting thing about them is that they can "dehydrate" themselves (called a "tun" state). In that state they can withstand extreme conditions such as radioactivity, intense heat and cold, pressure, and acids. But it only takes a drop of water to revive them! We don't have a good microscope at the moment, so we have been scouring the Web for pictures and videos of these little critters. Our favorite by far is this one:
http://tinyurl.com/55yab
This site has some interesting clips and pics as well (including the one above):
http://www.baertierchen.de/wbwb.html
Once we move into our house, which has a wooded area with lots of mosses and lichen (a great place to find water bears), perhaps we can finally get a good microscope and go on a "bear hunt" of our own!
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
How We Came to Unschooling
I find that the way I was lead to unschooling was rather complicated yet also fairly easy to trace. Looking back, I can see how my parent's parenting styles influenced my own. They were not "permissive" but neither were they overly authoritarian...at least not with me. My sister was another story. To keep the explanations short let's just say that I was what might be called "compliant" while my sister was what some people might call "defiant". I feel like my parents did pretty well overall, but I can certainly see how they treated my sister and me differently because of our different personalities. I just don't think they were prepared to cope with my sister's strong sense of self, so they did the best they could. Unfortunately, that often meant that they (especially my dad) tried to *force* her to be more compliant, even though they weren't usually overly forceful people. So essentially I had two styles of parenting right there within my own home that contrasted strongly with one another - the heavier handed discipline that was used most frequently with my sister and the more thoughtful approach that they tried to use with both of us but which went out the window when my sister's "willfulness" entered the picture. Seeing both reactions gave me a lot to think about and strongly influenced the way I wanted to parent my own kids. My own parenting style swung largely in the direction of the more thoughtful approach that I recall seeing most frequently, but the reactive style still comes out at times when I'm under stress. It's something I'm working on and will likely be working on for the rest of my life. What was it that Haim Ginott supposedly said in response to a question about how long a parent needs to work on communication skills? His response was something to the effect of "how many times does a musician have to tune a violin?" Definitely food for thought.
Anyway...back to my parents. Most of the time my parents (especially my mom) were very much UNlike my friends' parents. I remember being over at a friend's house once when I was around 12 or 13 and her mother threatened to "ground" her. I'd never heard of that before and asked my mom about it. She explained what it meant and said that she never believed in it. She thought such tactics were stupid and pointless. They don't teach the kid anything and it usually punishes the parent as much as the child. Around that same time I also began to notice that we were different in other ways as well. We didn't get allowances. Again, Mom thought they were pointless. "If you need something, just ask" was what she used to say. But the idea of having *my own* money appealed to me so I persisted. Eventually she told me to pay attention to kids who got allowances. She pointed out that they go through a lot trouble of deciding on allowances and then they just turn around and take them away to try to get their kids to behave. She basically said that if wanted to change the dynamics of the situation she would go along with it, but after really paying attention I had to say she had a point. I quit asking for an allowance and decided that the way we were doing it was definitely better for all of us! We also didn't have bedtimes. She believed we would sleep when we got tired. We weren't forced to eat at certain times or eat certain foods. She figured we'd eat when we were hungry. Actually, both of my parents were and still are very big on the idea that we needed to listen to our own bodies to tell us when and what to eat, when to sleep, etc. It was a stark contrast to my friends' homes where desserts were witheld until the plates were "clean" and children were left to cry over their uneaten peas long after everyone else had gotten up from the table. No wonder I was traumatized by visiting friends' houses!
As I got older I didn't really experience the need to "separate" from my parents as other teenagers seemed to. I was very close to my parents and still am. My mom was and still is the type of mother who respected us and our needs. She very rarely forced her ideas on us and instead invited us to think for ourselves. She just gets better and better at it as the years go by too. She was (and still is) a fun person to be around. I don't understand the whole "you can't be your child's friend and their parent" thing because I have living proof that you *CAN* because that's exactly what my mom was and is to me.
By the time I got married and was thinking about having kids, I had lots of things from my parent's bag of tricks that I wanted to re-create in my own family and a few things that I *didn't*. It was several years (five to be exact) before my husband and I had our first child, so I had lots of time to think about these things and sort them out before I had the chance to put them into action. Once our son was a part of our family I figured out rather quickly (within days) that *HE* would be the one who would teach *ME* what it meant to be a parent and that all of the plans I had meant little. All that planning did give me an overall "ideal" though, which gave me a little light to see by, but mostly I forgot all about my lofty plans and just tried to figure out what this little guy needed and how to give it to him. That was my main goal at that time in my life: figure out what he needs and find a way to make it happen.
Cameron came into this world a highly sensitive soul. As an infant was sensitive to foods, textures, sounds, tastes, etc. He also needed to be close to me at all times, otherwise everything felt *wrong* to him. He would not go to other people and rarely left my lap. He didn't sleep without being in physical contact with me for years. He still to this day feels most comfortable when I am within reach most of the time. Some people who are used to being away from their children for large amounts of time would probably find that wearing, but for us it's just a way of life. He is moving away from me, slowly and surely, but at a pace that *HE* is comfortable with, and I'm okay with that.
I can only remember being sure of a couple of things - that I was committed to breastfeeding, and that I would NEVER send my son off to public school - and it seems that everything else that eventually happened stemmed from those things. It's difficult now to remember what came first, but it's enough to say that during those first couple of years I got a crash course in attachment parenting, extended breastfeeding, co-sleeping, child-led weaning, and many other child respectful practices. Those ideas led me to information on gentler schooling which eventually led me to homeschooling and then unschooling. At the time it seemed that this process of making one leap of faith after another took a long time, but looking back it seems so short. By the time he was a toddler I was pretty certain of the path I wanted to take. I made adjustments here and there as he grew and our needs changed, but overall my ideals have changed little since those first days. That doesn't mean we haven't had difficulties along the way though. We most certainly have! The most obvious one would be the fiasco after Catherine was born.
There are 7-1/2 years between my kids, primarily because Cameron needed that time to become more comfortable with himself and the world around him and he needed me to be there for him during that time. We waited until he was ready to have a sibling as much as we were ready to have another baby. Unfortunately, Catherine's arrival came at a time when stress levels were extremely high for my husband and me. It also coincided with the time when Cameron decided to "do school". It went okay for the better part of a year. While I was pregnant, Cameron and I had a good time "doing school", but after Catherine was born my stress level shot through the roof for a combination of reasons (mostly due to prolonged work on our house which is *still* going on). My reaction to the stress was to become much less patient and more coercive. (After 7 years of gentle parenting!) I was feeling overwhelmed and my life felt out of control. I was angry and disappointed and I reacted by trying to control other things...like Cameron's "schooling". One day I actually heard the words "after you do your reading then we'll do science" come out of my mouth and I decided that was enough. That may not sound like much to some people but to me it was a wake up call. Not only were those not the kinds of things I used to say to my son, they were *harmful* to him and I could see it. I could see it on his face and in his eyes and in the way he related to me in a less open way than he used to. I started looking at other areas of our lives and could see how I had become coersive, obsessive, controlling, and manipulative in other ways and I was *apalled*. How did I come to this, I wondered. I never used to yell. I never even used to raise my voice. It wasn't necessary. But there I was doing it quite frequently. And what a difficult habit it was to break too! I didn't anticipate that. I thought that going back to my former ways would be a fairly simple process, but Catherine is now 2-1/2 and I'm *still* working at it. It's a difficult process but the results have been worth any amount of work it may take.
I feel I must point out that we weren't totally RU before. I was more of a gentle/peaceful parent and an unschooler, but I was not 100% committed to all of the ideas behind radical unschooling at that time. I was on some of the RU boards for a while but many of them felt too...negative. By that I mean that the focus on the lists (though not necessarily in the list members' lives, mind you) tended to be on the negative, on what NOT to do, on how NOT to act, on how parents SHOULD/SHOULD NOT act, etc. It really put me off. But after my revelation I needed help and support and was willing to take it even if it were of the negative type. Luckily I found a link to the Shine with Unschooling list. Though it is more moderated than some unschooling lists, it has the more positive focus that I was desperately in need of. I have very little time to actually talk on that list because I'm still in the thick of my "recovery", but it has truly been my lifeline during the last year or so.
And that's essentially where we are today. Committed to the idea of a *positive* RU lifestyle, yet still growing, still learning, still in the process of "figuring it all out"...but making progress none the less. I know I've said very little about the *kids'* experience of unschooling, but I think that they, or at least my son, will do that for himself as he lives his life and perhaps posts about it here.
Anyway...back to my parents. Most of the time my parents (especially my mom) were very much UNlike my friends' parents. I remember being over at a friend's house once when I was around 12 or 13 and her mother threatened to "ground" her. I'd never heard of that before and asked my mom about it. She explained what it meant and said that she never believed in it. She thought such tactics were stupid and pointless. They don't teach the kid anything and it usually punishes the parent as much as the child. Around that same time I also began to notice that we were different in other ways as well. We didn't get allowances. Again, Mom thought they were pointless. "If you need something, just ask" was what she used to say. But the idea of having *my own* money appealed to me so I persisted. Eventually she told me to pay attention to kids who got allowances. She pointed out that they go through a lot trouble of deciding on allowances and then they just turn around and take them away to try to get their kids to behave. She basically said that if wanted to change the dynamics of the situation she would go along with it, but after really paying attention I had to say she had a point. I quit asking for an allowance and decided that the way we were doing it was definitely better for all of us! We also didn't have bedtimes. She believed we would sleep when we got tired. We weren't forced to eat at certain times or eat certain foods. She figured we'd eat when we were hungry. Actually, both of my parents were and still are very big on the idea that we needed to listen to our own bodies to tell us when and what to eat, when to sleep, etc. It was a stark contrast to my friends' homes where desserts were witheld until the plates were "clean" and children were left to cry over their uneaten peas long after everyone else had gotten up from the table. No wonder I was traumatized by visiting friends' houses!
As I got older I didn't really experience the need to "separate" from my parents as other teenagers seemed to. I was very close to my parents and still am. My mom was and still is the type of mother who respected us and our needs. She very rarely forced her ideas on us and instead invited us to think for ourselves. She just gets better and better at it as the years go by too. She was (and still is) a fun person to be around. I don't understand the whole "you can't be your child's friend and their parent" thing because I have living proof that you *CAN* because that's exactly what my mom was and is to me.
By the time I got married and was thinking about having kids, I had lots of things from my parent's bag of tricks that I wanted to re-create in my own family and a few things that I *didn't*. It was several years (five to be exact) before my husband and I had our first child, so I had lots of time to think about these things and sort them out before I had the chance to put them into action. Once our son was a part of our family I figured out rather quickly (within days) that *HE* would be the one who would teach *ME* what it meant to be a parent and that all of the plans I had meant little. All that planning did give me an overall "ideal" though, which gave me a little light to see by, but mostly I forgot all about my lofty plans and just tried to figure out what this little guy needed and how to give it to him. That was my main goal at that time in my life: figure out what he needs and find a way to make it happen.
Cameron came into this world a highly sensitive soul. As an infant was sensitive to foods, textures, sounds, tastes, etc. He also needed to be close to me at all times, otherwise everything felt *wrong* to him. He would not go to other people and rarely left my lap. He didn't sleep without being in physical contact with me for years. He still to this day feels most comfortable when I am within reach most of the time. Some people who are used to being away from their children for large amounts of time would probably find that wearing, but for us it's just a way of life. He is moving away from me, slowly and surely, but at a pace that *HE* is comfortable with, and I'm okay with that.
I can only remember being sure of a couple of things - that I was committed to breastfeeding, and that I would NEVER send my son off to public school - and it seems that everything else that eventually happened stemmed from those things. It's difficult now to remember what came first, but it's enough to say that during those first couple of years I got a crash course in attachment parenting, extended breastfeeding, co-sleeping, child-led weaning, and many other child respectful practices. Those ideas led me to information on gentler schooling which eventually led me to homeschooling and then unschooling. At the time it seemed that this process of making one leap of faith after another took a long time, but looking back it seems so short. By the time he was a toddler I was pretty certain of the path I wanted to take. I made adjustments here and there as he grew and our needs changed, but overall my ideals have changed little since those first days. That doesn't mean we haven't had difficulties along the way though. We most certainly have! The most obvious one would be the fiasco after Catherine was born.
There are 7-1/2 years between my kids, primarily because Cameron needed that time to become more comfortable with himself and the world around him and he needed me to be there for him during that time. We waited until he was ready to have a sibling as much as we were ready to have another baby. Unfortunately, Catherine's arrival came at a time when stress levels were extremely high for my husband and me. It also coincided with the time when Cameron decided to "do school". It went okay for the better part of a year. While I was pregnant, Cameron and I had a good time "doing school", but after Catherine was born my stress level shot through the roof for a combination of reasons (mostly due to prolonged work on our house which is *still* going on). My reaction to the stress was to become much less patient and more coercive. (After 7 years of gentle parenting!) I was feeling overwhelmed and my life felt out of control. I was angry and disappointed and I reacted by trying to control other things...like Cameron's "schooling". One day I actually heard the words "after you do your reading then we'll do science" come out of my mouth and I decided that was enough. That may not sound like much to some people but to me it was a wake up call. Not only were those not the kinds of things I used to say to my son, they were *harmful* to him and I could see it. I could see it on his face and in his eyes and in the way he related to me in a less open way than he used to. I started looking at other areas of our lives and could see how I had become coersive, obsessive, controlling, and manipulative in other ways and I was *apalled*. How did I come to this, I wondered. I never used to yell. I never even used to raise my voice. It wasn't necessary. But there I was doing it quite frequently. And what a difficult habit it was to break too! I didn't anticipate that. I thought that going back to my former ways would be a fairly simple process, but Catherine is now 2-1/2 and I'm *still* working at it. It's a difficult process but the results have been worth any amount of work it may take.
I feel I must point out that we weren't totally RU before. I was more of a gentle/peaceful parent and an unschooler, but I was not 100% committed to all of the ideas behind radical unschooling at that time. I was on some of the RU boards for a while but many of them felt too...negative. By that I mean that the focus on the lists (though not necessarily in the list members' lives, mind you) tended to be on the negative, on what NOT to do, on how NOT to act, on how parents SHOULD/SHOULD NOT act, etc. It really put me off. But after my revelation I needed help and support and was willing to take it even if it were of the negative type. Luckily I found a link to the Shine with Unschooling list. Though it is more moderated than some unschooling lists, it has the more positive focus that I was desperately in need of. I have very little time to actually talk on that list because I'm still in the thick of my "recovery", but it has truly been my lifeline during the last year or so.
And that's essentially where we are today. Committed to the idea of a *positive* RU lifestyle, yet still growing, still learning, still in the process of "figuring it all out"...but making progress none the less. I know I've said very little about the *kids'* experience of unschooling, but I think that they, or at least my son, will do that for himself as he lives his life and perhaps posts about it here.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Welcome to our family blog!
Cameron (almost 10):
Our family is so cool! This is where we will write about the fun stuff we do. This is my first time writing in this blog. My sister and I are playing right now and watching "Go Diego, Go!". I did some really fun stuff today. I made a holiday wreath and some paper decorations.
Jessica (aka Mom)
Welcome to the first post on our new family blog. Cameron wanted a place to write about what we do and why it's so cool to him, so we started this blog for that reason. He's watched me blog and even had me put things on some of my blogs for him, but lately he's been itching to do it himself. We are a busy family so we probably won't be adding to this daily. We do like to talk about our unschooling life though, so we'll be adding to it fairly regularly.
In case you haven't guessed, this pic is of me and my two kiddos, Cameron (who is now almost 10) and Catherine (who is now 2-1/2). The picture was taken last year, so we've all grown a little bit since then. I wish I had a more recent picture of all of us, but unfortuately I'm usually the one taking the pics. I have LOADS of pics of the kids though! I'm sure you'll be seeing quite a few of them here.
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