We will miss her very much next year;
all the same, this is some exciting news : ).

Blessings to you, our beautiful daughter!

Thanksgiving

From the Carnival of Homeschooling #152:

Test from a Curriculum, Not Standards (and I like the name of the blogger's book not yet released: Why Don't Students Like School:A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom).

Also, games to implement with sight words. I like the idea with the popsicle sticks for word families.


For how we celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday:

Thanksgiving photo-journal by my daughter Clare

Week in Review -- Week #14

I occasionally used to do these Weekly Reports, inspired by Trivium Academy. I like the idea, but I was not that successful in keeping it up consistently. Why? Here are some possible reasons:

• I WAS successful -- ie, I did it when it met a need, but it didn't need to be done weekly.
• We don't generally do the kind of thing that's easy to record in that format.
• I was already keeping a daily log, so a weekly log was mostly redundant.
• They take a looong time.....
  
• Some reason that I haven't figured out yet.
• Some combination of the above.

That covers all the bases, doesn't it? (Which is something we're learning in Introductory Logic, by the way : ))

Maybe because I haven't been keeping the daily logs over at Schola et Studium, I've been motivated to try again with the weekly reports. So here goes

--- first, here were my original plans for this week:

Kieron, Year 7

General Overview -- we seem to be in a bit of a slump. It's hard to focus on standard academics during the holiday season, and I don't like to force it much. Also, this was a short week -- 3 days -- and his siblings are home so the fact that we got anything done was a bonus.

Math --

We've been using this British curriculum. Year 7 is the equivalent of American 6th Grade, so I do the "express" version in the curriculum -- it's broken down into standard, academic and express. I like it because it is a thoughtful approach and suits the way he does things. We're on Unit 10 -- started using it sometime in September after a general review. I supplement it with computer drills and that kind of thing, and we do a lot of math discussions. If I have an over-arching goal for this year for him, it's to encourage him to realize that there are usually several ways to approach a math problem, and to encourage him to figure out his own ways to deal with a mental challenge.

This week we didn't actually use the curriculum -- I just looked up comparable exercises online. Most of the fraction work was review anyway.

Literature:

Finished Legend of Sleepy Hollow and have started reading The Gold Bug. I'm getting these from the American Cardinal Reader 7. Mostly we just read, but you can get a bit of literary discussion in there too. I'm collecting notes and links over at Google Docs. ... not much there yet. So far, Gold Bug has held his attention better than Sleepy Hollow.

History

Reading the first unit in Our Country together.
He is starting to read some of the material on Native Americans and the Meso-Americans.
He colored a map and did a geography quiz.





Latin

Several exercises from Latin is Fun. ... and trying to review grammar.

Science, Logic

We mostly skimped on these this week. He started reading the Newton chapters in The Boy Scientist. Haven't done a lot of formal religion recently either. He has been reading all the saints' bios in the house so lots of informal learning.

General Review:

I've been putting review games up at Quizlet.

Aidan, Year 1

General Overview: He seems to be in full swing! These are a few of the things he's been doing -- click the links for more details and pictures, if you want:

• I've been making him lots of card games.... he gets them out often.
• He has been counting, and wordbuilding.
• Another language arts game he loves is making up his own readers, or journaling.
• Another one we just discovered yesterday is making his own word puzzles.
• We worked with Starfall downloads yesterday.
• For fine motor, he's been focusing on work with scissors.

Paddy, Year 1

Math

• -- we focused on money and 10's. So we worked with dimes on several levels .... in real life, in his workbook and on the computer. He is now telling me it is too easy.
• He also worked with simple fractions.

Language Arts --

• I read him several childrens' stories from an anthology, including Rumpelstiltskin, The Three Pigs, a shorter version of Lassie Comes Home, and The Poppy Seed Cakes.
• Reading -- mostly just oral practice, correcting mistakes. Usually I just grab a reader or an easy children's book and he goes on for a couple of pages then asks me to take over.
• Also, some work on phonics mostly using the downloads from Starfall.

Fine Motor

• For Penmanship -- a few days ago he drew large X's and today he drew large "C's".
• He did a bit with scissors, following Aidan's example.

Nature:

• Adventures and Treasure Hunting with Clare.
• For some reason, he's also been fascinated with our dog and feeds him, plays with him and talks about his motives all the time : ).

OK, I can see once again why I have trouble with the week in review format. The week definitely felt sparse but it took me forever to write this out, and it doesn't look too bad, and I didn't even get everything that went on in there, so I guess we did do more than I thought.
There are a few more visuals here.

Incidental Note:

Sean, my high schooler, has been home all this week. It's funny that he has been doing some of the same things the homeschool siblings are doing -- he had to try out Kieron's geometry quiz, and play phonics with Aidan and math fractions with Paddy, and he read the Native American Legends, and yesterday was describing the stories in great detail, and listening to Clare describe a book she is reading.

He's also been their PE coach for the week -- organizing all kinds of impromptu ball games and wrestling matches. Having him around makes us realize how different life is when he's NOT around.

Here's his last football game, against Yosemite.



He had to turn in a five-page research paper for Language Arts last week -- interesting to see him work his way through it. ... the research, the listing of sources, the other accoutrements.

Kyrios, Kairos

St Therese Relic Makes Space Flight (HT: The Catholic Bubble).

"I have the vocation of an apostle. I would like to travel over the whole earth to preach your name and to plant your glorious cross on infidel soil. But oh, my beloved, one mission would not be enough for me, I would want to preach the Gospel on all five continents simultaneously and even to the most remote isles. I would be a missionary, not for a few years but from the beginning of creation until the consummation of the ages."

St Therese of Lisieux, who said this, entered the Carmelite convent at age 15 and died at age 24. She is a Doctor of the Church and is the patron saint of missions. Talk about Kairos! .... a moment, or a succession of them, that turn into a cascade. She was the one that said as a small child "I choose all!" and God heard her. In following a Little Way of doing small things with great love, she is an icon for Our Lord's words:

My grace suffices thee; for my power is perfected in weakness.

Pope Benedict wrote:

“I must say that all of us have moments when we can lose heart in the face of the great many things there are to be done and of the limitations of how much we can really do. This is also true of the new Pope. What things should I be doing at this very moment for the Church, with the many problems, many joys, many challenges in regards to the universal Church? Many things come up from day to day and I cannot answer in relation to them all. I must take my part, and do what I can, but I search for the priorities.”

He goes on:

“The time put aside for prayer is not time wasted from our pastoral responsibilities – it is a proper pastoral work to pray for others… It is proper for a pastor that he be a man of prayer, that he stand before the Lord praying for others, even taking the place of others, who perhaps don’t know how to pray, don’t want to pray, don’t find time to pray.”

St Therese wrote:

“I understood that the Church had a heart and that this heart was burning with love. I understood that love comprised all vocations.”

Simple.... not easy, though. I have been struggling with love. Easier to move through the day in routine, easier to follow old patterns and choose things because they are comfortable and convenient, easier to get out of balance and affected by things outside of myself. .

Another Greek word sometimes opposed to kairos ... is metanoia.... a rethinking, a change of self that is somewhat like looking at oneself from outside, or pulling oneself up by one's own shoelaces. Can't easily be done on one's own, and that is understatement! but something that is a key. Prayer is probably an answer here too.

It seems to me that this love, not a feeling but a sort of continual kairos and metanoia, a choosing and a continual converting, is the answer to the difference Our Lord describes in the gospel reading for today, which has been on my mind. It is very closely related to prayer, in a way I wish I could glimpse more clearly than I do.

This is Your Brain, Young Person

Another From the Files.

I don't remember why I originally printed this one out -- The Teenage Brain -- Walrus Magazine. I am thinking JoVE might have linked to it or sent it to me?

The idea is that MRIs and other neurological research have shown what we always suspected just from having been a teenager -- that the adolescent brain is not quite like a child's brain OR quite like an adult's brain.

Recent research into childhood neurology seemed to emphasize the importance of early childhood in brain development. ... Rob Reiner, advocate of Universal Preschool, says “by the age of ten, your brain is cooked” and I have read other studies that say that over half your adult brain development has taken place by the time you are school age. As a consequence, the article points out, parents have made superhuman efforts to maximize their child's early cognitive and psychological development by Baby Einstein music in utero, Teach yourBaby to Read programs, scads of enrichment activities and playdates, and a bunch of similar things.

The article affirms that:

by the time a child reaches the age of six, the brain is 90 to 95 percent of its adult size. But massive changes continue to take place for at least another fifteen years. They involve not just the familiar “grey matter,” but a substance known as “white matter,” the nerve tissue through which brain cells communicate — literally the medium that delivers the messages. White matter develops continuously from birth onward, with a slight increase during puberty. In contrast, grey matter — the part of the brain responsible for processing information, or the “thinking” part — develops quickly during childhood and slows in adolescence, with the frontal and temporal lobes the last to mature.

And this is the crux: the frontal lobe, or more precisely the prefrontal cortex, is the home of the so-called “executive functions” : planning, organization, judgment, impulse control, and reasoning. The part that should be telling the sixteen-year-old not to dive off the thirty- foot cliff into unknown water. The seat of civilization.

So the MRI research shows that an early adolescent brain -- age 12 to 15 -- undergoes another flourishing of synaptic connections similar to early childhood's -- before a pruning and consolidating takes place in later years. This flowering and consolidation help explain why a young person can seem so mature in some ways and yet make drastic misjudgements. The Teen Brain -- "A Work in Progress" -- mentions the same phenomenon.

Time-lapse MRI images of human-brain development between ages five and 20 show the growth and then gradual loss of gray matter, which consists of cells that process information. (Red areas contain more gray matter, blue areas less.) Paradoxically, the thinning of gray matter that starts around puberty corresponds to increasing cognitive abilities. This probably reflects improved neural organization, as the brain pares redundant connections and benefits from increases in the white matter that helps brain cells communicate.

Cognitively, then, people are still in the development process past early childhood, into the adolescent years and perhaps beyond that. If you've worked with young people or been one, you've probably noticed this yourself. One thing of interest is that it's often during the "pruning" stages that a young person seems to show the most obvious cognitive leaps. When you are parenting, you often notice a "disorganized" time in a child's life and then a developmental surge somewhat after that. I am wondering whether the "disorganized" times are when the synapses are connecting and the quieter times of more obvious development are pruning times. Just a thought.

Now, for more on the history of the psychology of adolescence:

Here is an article called Perspectives of Adolescence that gives an overview of past historical thinking on adolescence. Apparently Stanley Hall, in the mid-19th century, first discussed adolescence as a unique stage in development. He took Goethe's early romantic novelette, The Sorrows of Young Werther, as a sort of model for his ideas about adolescence as a time of "Storm and Stress". This model was deeply influential, and was consolidated by Anna Freud's thinking about adolescent development. She worked clinically with disturbed teens and her theories were thus skewed towards pathology. It took the field quite a long time to recover fully from this, as I understand. In popular thinking, adolescence became a unique life stage, set apart drastically from childhood OR adulthood.

Recently, there have been attempts to rehabilitate the concept of the "teenager". In a book called The Good Teen, which I haven't read, Richard Lerner makes a case that the teenage years don't have to be a time of "Sturm und Drung". In this Smithsonian interview on "the good teen", Lerner says:

As early as the 1960s research began to show that only a small minority of the pathways through adolescence were characterized by storm and stress.

He goes on to talk about the "5 C's" of successful teenage living, which look much like the C's of successful adult living, in fact:

The 5 C's are competence—not just academic but social, vocational and health competence. Confidence. Then character, that it's fundamentally important to do what's right. Connection, or working collaboratively with parents, peers, siblings, teachers, coaches. Finally, caring, a sense of compassion or social justice.

In an article called the Myth of Adolescence, two teenagers called Alex and Brett Harris write about some past historical figures who did adult things at an early age. ... for example, George Washington who got a job as a surveyor at age 16 and by age 21 was a major land-owner:

These examples astound us in our day and age, but this is because we view life through an extra social category called ‘adolescence’, a category that would have been completely foreign to men and women just 100 years ago. Prior to the late 1800s there were only 3 categories of age: childhood, adulthood, and old age. It was only with the coming of the early labor movement with its progressive child labor laws, coupled with new compulsory schooling laws, that a new category, called adolescence, was invented. Coined by G. Stanley Hall, who is often considered the father of American psychology, ‘adolescence’ identified the artificial zone between childhood and adulthood when young people ceased to be children, but were no longer permitted by law to assume the normal responsibilities of adulthood, such as entering into a trade or finding gainful employment. Consequently, marriage and family had to be delayed as well, and so we invented ‘the teenager’, an unfortunate creature who had all the yearnings and capabilities of an adult, but none of the freedoms or responsibilities.

This perspective from teenagers brings up one of the main things that I noticed while weeding through these linked articles, and several others that I didn't link to.

It was that, many times even in otherwise worthwhile articles, and perhaps inevitably because of the very purpose of the research, the "teen" or "adolescent" is thought of as an object of research and study (and concern) rather than an active agent. Whereas, on the other hand, the agent of the study, the theorizer, is thought of somehow as an objective force, someone who studies and manages this thing called "adolescence". For example, Lerner, though he's positive in his ideas of what teens CAN do, will talk about "programs" for teens:

Through programs that embrace three characteristics: sustained relationships between adults and young people, teaching knowledge and skills to navigate the world and—this can be the most difficult—allowing kids to use those skills in valued community and family activities. Let your kids plan family vacations with you. Let them help set the menu for dinner. Or, if the parents give resources to charity, let young people help make that decision

I am not knocking his ideas for remedies, because I am finding out while writing this how difficult it is to treat a vast subject in a few words. I'm merely using this as a jump-off point for my own point, which is: While admirable in some ways, these remedies don't seem to address what seems to me the central point. Do you remember being a teenager? I do. Are you around teenagers? What do you think of them? To me, they are first and foremost people. Putting them in a class of their own, with special "programs" devoted to their expansion of potential, seems patronizing to me. While I don't know what Lerner's solutions would look like -- I admire JT Gatto's ideas about education, and it could be that these would be similar -- I do think there is always a possibility that good solutions, in the hands of second-rate practititioners who get control of "teens" as a "group", can end up just as band-aid fixes, and usually expensive ones.

When I was an adolescent, I was as smart as an adult, and smarter in several key ways. I have lost some of that audacious genius. Sure, I developmentally lacked judgment; probably the losing of one was a corollary to the gaining of the other. But I was smart enough to know when I was being patronized, and a severe, critical dislike of patronization was a primary trait. My brain was more fluid and more active than a middle-aged person's. I could think outside of the box better than the majority of adults I was in contact with, and I was more idealistic than most adults... partly because of my very lack of experience. Consequently, I preferred to interact with adults who had high expectations and warm support than adults who tried to "manage" me or "understand" me, perish the thought, especially if they hardly knew me, and MOST especially if they lumped me in with other adolescents who were very different people than I was. I valued honesty and excellence, which are two areas where adolescent and middle-aged people can generally find common ground.

I think there are two things that theorists about adolescence tend to miss (I am probably missing them too, in this discussion, but that doesn't detract from the point -- which is that things that are excluded are not less important because they are excluded).

• One that I already mentioned -- that a young person is an active agent, not just a passive thing to be acted upon. This is always true, but extraordinarily so when the child gets past the receptive, "latent" period of mid-childhood. If adolescence is about anything, it is about potentiality in the process of being actualized. A kind of respect is needed here, hard to delineate, but you can probably retrieve an understanding of it from your own adolescent years, by remembering who was a force for good in your life.
  
• Another is that adults are changing too. A few psychologists, like Erik Erikson, have addressed this, and as the research "grows up" with the baby boomers, there will probably be more and more neurological studies showing the plasticity vs fixedness of the brain through mid-life into old age. A middle-aged adult -- the age group that's most likely to work directly with teenagers because that's the age group of most parents and teachers of adolescents -- has certain good characteristics that are of advantage to young people. Judgment, skills, authority and perspective could be mentioned. But in this area, a kind of humility is needed to leaven the other qualities.

What I am trying to say is that a middle-aged person also has certain relative deficits which need to be recognized and allowed for. The ones I have noticed most markedly in people who work directly and "consciously" with teens AS teens is a kind of fixedness and complacency which takes three basic forms nowadays:

• The old-fashioned form -- "I know what's best for you, young man. Snap to it. And cut that hair!"
• The progressive form -- "It's all about the young people.... I'm just like you, man, only you're a bit cooler.... I can learn from you, let's chill together!"
• The "helper" form -- "Let's make programs. Let's let/force the young people to have "ownership". Let's put them in little peer groups so they can have their peer experiences, but also control them pretty darn carefully so they don't actually do anything that we can't predict."

I'm not saying that ANY of these is all bad, I'm just saying that they all miss the point in some way, and to me it seems like basically the same way. They all isolate the young person, set him apart in some way, "inadequatize" him (or her) and don't allow for the particular virtues of the unique ages and the ways they can be of actual, individual help to each other.

I am speculating here, but I think perhaps the reason that athletic coaching is relatively often a successful middle-age/youth relationship is because the coach tends to have a reality check, an ongoing demonstration of youth potential as well as where the youth needs intervention. He will make immediately noticeable mistakes if he is too authoritarian OR too buddy-buddy or too micro-managing. I am not saying that all coaches avoid these dangers, just that the territory they are working in tend to make these excesses more immediately obvious. Going back to what the Harrises said, I think probably the reason that young people were accepted as adults in earlier times were two-fold:

• People had a shorter life-span and thus had to make their mark faster.
• The endeavours that were important to earlier days of civilization were those where a youthful type of brain and body -- flexible and dynamic -- were quite valuable.

These things are still true in the athletic world and to some extent in new industries like computer tech world (though not so much nowadays as it was in the days my husband was coming of age, when Wozniak and Jobs could make a PC in their garage and subvert the main-frame industry). They don't tend to be as true in some of the areas where teens are found most collectively. Schools and church youth groups seem to be "top down" in several key respects, which makes it a challenge for the young people to make a difference without collecting in "niches" defined by weird clothes, quirky fascinations, secret subversion or other things that are signs of a cultural black-market ecology. ... which in turn is a sign of over-regimentation and under-involvement. It is a hopeful sign that young people like the Harrises are trying to reclaim the territory, and I do think this is what is going to end up being needed.

Obviously I've only skimmed the surface on this subject, and probably, as I said, shown some relative deficits of my own. That's probably somewhat in the nature of the subject.

Books that might be of interest (I've only read the Hard Things book, but I've requested a couple from the library and will try to write out a few notes when I read them):

• The Primal Teen: What New Discoveries about the Brain Tell Us About OUr Kids
• Parenting the Teenage Brain: Understanding a Work in Progress
• Do Hard Things
• The Good Teen: Rescuing Adolescence from the Myths of The Storm and Stress Years
• The Case Against Adolescence

Season's End

Clare took some pictures of Sean's Final Game of the Season. Sean is in the foreground in this picture which I borrowed from her-- he is #14.

Today, he will turn in his football gear. Today, he will get back home at 4 pm instead of 6:30 pm. This will make it a lot easier for him to get everything done before the next day. Extreme time management was a way of life last term -- come home, eat, take his shower and get his homework done and be ready to get up at 6 am the next morning.

Unfortunately, early home because of no football is like cutting off your head to lose a few pounds of weight. School with no football ....? where are the priorities there? : ). Something's wrong, somewhere. A new, quieter time will start. No tension about the upcoming game, but none of the expectant electricity either. Just school. Interesting to find out how that will be.

It will be happiness to see him walk into the door before dusk -- Kevin and the older kids had gotten into the habit of going down through the dark (COLD) forest to meet the late bus, and now Sean can head up by himself in the late (still cold) afternoon. But it will be a bit sorrowful, too, to know what is missing from the day for him.

Yesterday I gave Sean some dividers for his school binder and it he was quite pleased by this simple solution. He takes notes in class but then can't always find them when he needs them -- a couple of the teachers ask for them on occasion. Now he can put the relevant notes behind the proper color coded, labelled divider. He was happy about that. Football, for Sean, is enough to make it OK to have to go to school and get used to a significantly different way of learning.

Next week is Thanksgiving Break -- the high school kids get the whole week off, and Liam will be home. Sean is looking forward to that. We all are.

Homeschooling for us has always been most essentially about family. I wish I could find the Chesterton quote where he said that education was primarily about equipping the person to live in a family. He said it way better than that. I think part of it is that the education of the child also is a stage in the education of the parents. Someone said "Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your kids." I think learning is like that, too. Because learning is a matter of forming relationships, raising kids brings a whole new richness to relationships, to others and to the world.

This bleacher picture is titled by Aidan:
Bleachers with nobody on them... Nothing. Football has been a way to tie our family together even when Sean is gone 11 hours times 5 every week. Every Friday evening was about sitting on the bleachers cheering for our team, celebrating their highlights and agonizing with their difficulties. Now the rhythm of the week will change. It's sad to see a season drawing to an end, even when we know it will be replaced by a new season that will bring good things of its own.

not quite ready for winter

These pictures turned out a strange color; I'm not sure what I did to my camera settings to make these pictures so khaki-colored. But I wanted to memorialize today -- the day Kevin and Brendan stained the front of the house!
We are having unseasonable warmth, and Brendan had taped the windows, so they were ready to go. Maybe the odd colors work, sort of. Or maybe not.

Aidan and Paddy had a great time outside, blowing bubbles and painting a stump with acrylic paints (they had intended to help Dad paint the house, using bright blues and pinks and greens, but were redirected in time). But Paddy did paint Aidan's face, as you can see.

Silver Threads

Oh, and in regard to community and chore checklists -- a post by Leonie at Living without School on Social Capital.

I also think that each individual in a group, a homeschool or church or other group, plays a role. If social capital can be an evolving, grassroots kind of thing, then changing a negative into a positive is best done on an individual basis. One person making a change, then another and another. To promote the Good Things of social capital.

A few more posts that I didn't want to drop off my "shared items" list without noting:

The Story's Loose Ends -- reflection on hope and the mystery of life, by author Regina Doman.

Putting myself in His hands day by day is the only thing that makes sense. I don’t understand the mystery of the present moment. The future doesn’t exist. Only by looking at the past can we sometimes see a pattern. But I believe, as a writer and as a Catholic, that if I seek to tie up each loose end at the end of a story, then God must plan to do the same. And when we reach “The End,” there will be not only a cessation of tears, but a deep sense of satisfaction in the readers of the Great Story.

A few random thoughts about blogging, by Dawn at By Sun and Candlight.

I like to focus on the good things - these are the things I like to pass on. To me, they're like sunshine and fresh air: they help me grow. My newly neatened learning room is a good thing; my overgrown laundry pile is, decidely, not.

While I might love and respect Martha Stewart, I wouldn't want to be her. I'd really rather be me, even though I'm far from perfect. But I don't think any of us are meant to be so. I do think we can try to be our best. (Operative word try.) But remember, my best is not yours and vice versa.

Studeo's Building a Culture of Life series, and more about hope:

To have Christian hope means to know about evil and yet to go to meet the future with confidence. The core of faith rests upon accepting being loved by God, and therefore to believe is to say Yes, not only to him, but to creation, to creatures, above all, to men, to try to see the image of God in each person and thereby to become a lover. That’s not easy, but the basic Yes, the conviction that God has created men, that he stands behind them, that they aren’t simply negative, gives love a reference point that enables it to ground hope on the basis of faith (Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth).

The Joy of Learning, from Quiddity. This excerpt is long, but it is really worth it. The whole post is even better.

Of course, we only have that joy of learning if we ask questions. It follows that if we want our students/children to continue to grow in their own joy of learning we have to listen more to their questions and spend less time giving them information they aren’t ready for. The latter will not only fail to promote the joy of learning, it will confuse the child into thinking that learning (which he hasn’t experienced, though he may have been told he has) is boring. Which it is, by definition, because he just learned something he didn’t want to know.

Sometimes the moments are quite glorious, the result of days, weeks, years, even decades of inquiry and contemplation - the resolution of an ongoing mystery, the settling of an unending issue, the discovery of a vital piece of information that completes the puzzle, the connection between ideas that seemed to contradict each other.

When that happens, the joy can be overwhelming.

I just had one of those moments, and its particularly compelling to me because the epiphany I’ve just experienced explains why epiphanies bring so much joy.

The reason is because the soul of man in its intellectual function (which doesn’t mean that part of us that goes to college to unlearn how to relate to people; it refers to that part of us that seeks understanding, which is the energizing force of the two year old’s mind) is impelled to move in the first place by a need (not a mere desire) for harmony.

......The quest for harmony is, quite literally, the thing that makes us think in the first place. Survival may make us act, but survival is a practical application of harmony. We want to be in harmony with the world we live in. If it trips us or runs us over, our harmony is broken. While the pain bothers our body, the sense of a broken relationship bothers our souls even more.

The quest for harmony moves the mind. When we see it in a person, we call it integrity and we admire it. When we see it in a painting, we call it beauty and we love it. When we hear it in music, we call it beauty, and we weep. When we see it in the government, we call it justice and we rejoice. When we see it in math, we call it equality and we exult. When we feel it with another person, we call it love and we live.

Is there a theme here? Something about connections?

Sometimes I think, like Einstein, that there is One Answer to every question. Only he thought of it as a mathematical equation and I feel like there is one Word or phrase, that is to be known -- not just read or heard, but understood and contemplated upon and acted upon.

Yesterday, Brendan finished taping the windows (Kevin is going to be spraying and sealing the exterior logs, hopefully before the real cold weather strikes) -- I had been helping by holding the ladder. Brendan came in and asked me to look -- not at the blinded windows, but up towards the sun above the roof ("look indirectly, Mom, so you don't hurt your eyes").

When I looked, I saw what he saw. ..... an amazing trail of delicate silvery strands falling away in perspective as high as the eye could see. It was hundreds of spider threads, I suppose, but just figuring out what it was does not convey WHAT it was . It looked like a fragile tunnel of gleaming filaments reaching to the sun. ... or perhaps, gently descending down from the sun. ...a subtle, mysterious message.

I think Brendan tends to see that One Reply as something not so much spoken in a beautiful word or written in mathematical language, but as an aspect of nature, by the way. ... something visually and inexplicably there, something that you could not have predicted or imagined until you saw it. When he shares the way he sees the world with me, it enriches the way I see things; and that has been true of all my children.

Sorry, two meandering posts in a row -- I meant to be brief today! Oh well... now the house is waking up around me and I am off to make hot chocolate for a teenager, help a 9 year old make a fire (his Answer seems to be service to others) and make some coffee for myself and my husband (coffee is a great form of Social Capital, and so is hot chocolate, and so are hearth-fires : )).

Cleaning Checklists and Community

When I look through my box of old files and papers, I feel like I'm on an archaeological dig of my past years as a mother. Printouts on liberal education and Marian devotion jostle "how to schedule effectively" and math grid paper. You see a big stack of scholarly documents on Neonatal Hemochromatosis next to recipes and "career planning for your teenager". It makes me realize again how much of an adventure my life is. When I was a teenager, even supposing I could have predicted the internet and personal computers and home printers, almost none of these documents would have been anywhere on my list of projected interests and abilities. Deo Gratias. The life I have been given is a far vaster one than I would have asked for.

Anyway, I decided to leave all that aside for now, and deal with the forms in the picture above.

These forms are from the Chart Jungle (scroll down and look on the right hand side) and I probably liked them for the same reason I still like them, because they are pretty and streamlined.It took me a while to track down the site where I had originally gotten them, because I had clipped the name off the bottom and the site doesn't show as far up in Google as it used to -- I suppose the "chore checklist" has proliferated online since 1998 when I first printed this out. There are a lot of people out there looking for resources and a lot of people who are willing, even eager, to share their own creativity and energy and skill asking no return.

These checklists, as you see, I backed with cardstock and sealed with contact paper back in 1999 when we were living in a 3 bedroom apartment in San Francisco (off 19th Avenue a few miles from University of California: San Francisco, if you want to know the details).

Now, did I use these forms which I so carefully assembled? No.... (small voice). I never did. I think I envisioned either hanging them up in the relevant room, or carrying them around with me as I cleaned. No reason why it shouldn't have worked. It just didn't. I didn't use them.

Why then have I kept them for almost 10 years? Well, I did invest that time in sealing and backing them, which I think always made me feel guilty about tossing them. Also, they have memories associated with them. Somewhere else in my boxes of old things, I have an "Aidan's Room" sign made in much the same way, with stickers on the sides and contact paper sealing. Most of the and Long Term Parking parents in the hospital pediatric ward tended to put up signs on their childrens' doors, just like you tend to decorate your college dorm door when you're a student. I got in the habit of making a new sign every time we showed up for the long term. I have several of those, and I probably won't throw them out.

I probably WILL throw away these household forms, though, now that I've photo'd them and pondered over them and released them from my emotional keeper list. I think I never used them because even though I tried to personalize them, they were not mine. What DID I end up using at San Francisco rather than these forms? I used a list of jobs written on 5 X 8 index cards. I wrote these out in the NICU after I had rocked Aidan to sleep, and I had one taped in every room of our apartment right above the lightswitch. They were simple 1-2-3 format, and strictly necessary. When I got home from the hospital every afternoon I was exhausted. Almost every day brought a new crisis -- a bleeding episode, a failed IV and a whole series of new "tries" in tiny exhausted veins, a temperature spike, a drop in infant weight that pushed the transplant time back further, an oxygen desaturation caused by retained fluid pushing on immature lungs or by drastically low hematocrit. Over it all, the mingled pain and joy of holding the dearest infant in the world, seeing his large brown eyes fix on mine in that deep golden-from-failing-liver, suffering, trusting face. The cards I wrote out when the eyes closed in sleep and the little body nestled in my arms gave me a procedure, a cleaning protocol written for a complete zombie-mommy who would stand stock still in the bathroom wondering where the cleaner was, for hours, if it was not specified on the list "take cleaner out of top shelf in closet". Plus, as a bonus, the kids could do some of the jobs since they were so carefully written step by step. My brother in law saw them and remarked how organized I was, but I was not organized. I needed something that would work, and this worked.

The household forms above, cute and simple as they were, weren't ours. My index cards WERE ours, targeted to our own needs and situation. The printed forms were helpful as idea-starters, but not as actual guides.

This is something I have internalized slowly through the years since then. .... that I get lots of good ideas from outside sources, that these are valuable in helping me do things that otherwise wouldn't occur to me, but they have to become mine, OURS, somehow. These days, when I look online for ideas I consider this gathering process the "research" or input phase; the second phase is to personalize the ideas that I like, customize them, adapt them. Usually only THEN can I actually make it work for us. Nowadays, looking at those household forms, I would take what attracted me -- the clean simple format, the cute little pictures -- and transfer those things over to something that would be MINE. It takes longer and I have to work harder but it is a creative work.

Though it has taken years to sink in, I think I first discovered that consciously during our stay in San Francisco. We had brought hardly any of the kids' toys, so one weekend I made a sword and shield for my 6 year old out of stiff, high quality dark cardboard from a packing box. We didn't have our Christmas ornaments, so we made our own out of paper and scraps. It was makeshift. But it was meaningful, too. The time and creativity we invested was brought back to us. At one dear nurse's suggestion, the kids made a tape for Aidan to listen to in the hospital, and the nurses played it for him while I was gone, again and again. We took ideas from other sources. But the time and work and care made them ours.

That was also the year I first realized we were pretty much outside of the statistical average of EVERYTHING. We were literally the only people from our small town in the mountains who had EVER had a sixth child born with a rare liver disease. We were homeschooling into the bargain. We were Catholic. As our child was out on the stratosphere of the medical statistics, we were out on the stratosphere of demographical statistics.

No sooner had I realized that then I realized the obvious corollary: that everyone is like that, unique and yet participating in that main stream. They start out with many things in common, but the details, the flowering of their lives are completely individual. The hospital really brought that out. So many people from very different lives, united in their love and worry for their children. The more you live a "real" life, with its various eventualities set by love and commitment, the more you get out into a zone where every detail is an individual treasure. The saints take that to a measure beyond the rest of us... living with a common purpose, they are yet, each of them, a true individual. Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assissi and Paul of Tarsus and the Little Flower of Lisieux -- through the catalyst of life, their own individuality and the integrity and lovingness of their service to God, they become living treasures.

Even while being original, though, they do not move away from what they share in common; in fact, they enrich the community and are emblems of the universal things we share.

Now the body is not a single part, but many.
If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?
But as it is, God placed the parts, each one of them, in the body as he intended.
If they were all one part, where would the body be?
But as it is, there are many parts, yet one body.

A far journey, from cleaning checklists to First Corinthians and community! But I do think that the variety of household helps you can find online is one token of both the commonality and the individuality of our lives.

In case you are interested, here are a few more checklists I found while I was looking for the other ones -- I have not lost my interest in seeing how other people do these things, just gotten more insight into how the process works for me:

• Spring Cleaning
• Simple House Cleaning Checklist (pdf)
• Housecleaning for Busy People

Here are a couple of approaches I've taken this past year:

• Household Journey (photo journal of house improving efforts)
• Household Checklists (a series of lists I made for myself)

Happy to be Home, with Chocolate

Cool and gray November days here still, we don't have anywhere to go till tomorrow, and Sean is home from school for the day -- a good occasion to make chocolate zucchini bread. I've found that if you don't have zucchini, applesauce works quite well as a substitute. You may just want to add a bit less sugar and oil, since the applesauce is sweeter and more runny than the shredded zucchini.


Chocolate Zucchini Bread

1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 3/4 cups sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup sour milk or buttermilk
2 large eggs
2 1/2 cups flour, all-purpose
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon cloves
4 tablespoons cocoa powder
2 cups zucchini shredded
1/4 cup chocolate chips (we used carob chips instead)


Directions

• Cream together butter, oil, sugar, vanilla, sour milk, and eggs.
• Add flour, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, and cocoa; mix well.
• Fold in zucchini.
• Put batter into 2 greased and floured loaf pans.
• Sprinkle chocolate chips on top of each loaf before baking.
• Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour.

Here's a version that you can print out.
Here's a slightly different version using slightly healthier ingredients.
For decadence, if you lived in Eugene, Oregon, you could make it the way my dear friend did who gave me the recipe... and sprinkle some Euphoria chocolate buttons on top. Oh, sometimes I am homesick for Oregon!

Tastes great with Chocolate Caramel Enchantment Chai Tea, given to me by a friend.

Aidan likes to help bake things, and get into pictures, too. : ).




















This is a neat idea. I could go on forever once I started but a few that come to mind right away are: fires in the hearth, the smells of cinnamon and coffee, giant conifers, cloudy skies, high school boys home from school for the day, ruby red laptops, cameras, early dusks, football, and voices of a range of kids involved happily in various activities. And chocolate caramel enchantment tea, and friends, even if they are far away.

Sierra Highlights #7

My occasional Daybook.

Outside.... gray and cold. The first snowfall to stick was yesterday, though it is gone now.

Inside.... the wood stove makes it nice and warm in the center of the house, at least, though the perimeter is still chilly.

Waiting.... for Sean to get home from school. He gets the day off tomorrow! and has to study for an Earth Science test.

Catching up on.... laundry. It's been getting ahead of me these days.

In the Kitchen..... the freezer and pantry are a bit sparse right now. We are due for a shopping day. I will probably make tuna casserole, and supplement with fish sticks for the teen boys.

Schoolroom Events.... it's exam week.

Reading .... The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The title in French is more poetic: Scaphandre et la papillon. Kevin and I watched the screen version last week, so I requested the book.

Hearing.... Paddy singing the Mighty Mouse theme song. I know why he caught on to that. Kevin watched Man on the Moon last week, and talked about Andy Kaufman a bit to the teens.

Seeing.... Brendan pacing back and forth. Which means he is thinking. I asked him and he is physically thinking out a story. That's what I used to do. I should try it again sometime, actually.

Remembering..... for some reason, Jean Claude Killy. Maybe because of the book I'm reading. Killy was the graduation speaker at the school from which I graduated. My dad was impressed with his speech... on how important education is. This Olympic skier basically said he wished he had not devoted quite so many brain cells to his sport, because he had to live many more years than his athletic prowess lasted.

Recent Past -- we cleared our lot of tree-brush yesterday, since Smokey Bear had left a gentle note on our door saying that one of his representatives was going to come and check. Damp, cold, hard work but having five and a half workers (the half was Aidan) meant less than 2 hours of time to do about 10 man-hours of work.

Near Future -- Liam will come home for Thanksgiving, and Sean will play his last JV game.

Plans to Focus On -- holidays, and tackling the house, and getting things winter-ready.

Football and Starfall

Aidan is helping me embed this, the second to last game of the season:



Sean's team won this time (they're the ones in white since it's an away game, and he is #14 playing QB). He got to make some nice passes.


Here's Aidan watching the game.

Now he wants me to let him play Starfall. His favorite game right now is matching sight words.

And Sean wants me to make him a protein drink. He's gained 6 pounds recently and wants to maintain. He's also grown an inch, it looks like, but may not make it to Brett Favre size. He's trying though!

Signing off!

Trifles and Plays

GK Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles:

‘I will sit still and let the marvels and the adventures settle on me like flies. "There are plenty of them, I assure you. The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.’

Quoted by Father Schall in his series of interviews on education.
Also, a neat passage on sports by Father Schall:

Students wonder why games fascinate them because they do. It is because they behold there something that need not exist, that could be otherwise, but which exists according to the rules, according to the drama of the game. We do not know how it will turn out. Our lives themselves are exactly like this if we think about it.

So play is both an introduction to ethics — play fairly — and to metaphysics, to the fascination of the things that are but need not be. Msgr. Sokolowski often makes the point, as does Pieper, and Aquinas for that matter, that the world need not exist, but does. Games need not exist but do. Life cannot be properly lived and games cannot be properly played unless we know their order, how they proceed. As spectators we behold something unfold before us, how things will turn out, according to the rules of play that need not be, but are.

..... Aristotle says that games are not so exalted as drama, but none the less they are like unto it. They take place in freedom. We can see in them that there really are things that are worthy for their own sakes," we suspect that there might be other things even more worthy."

• On Learning and Education
• On Reading and Writing
• On Chesterton, Sports and Politics

Invisible Balloons

Paddy at our homeschool Halloween party last week -- Clare took the picture.

Yesterday's JV football game went well. It was a fine warm autumn day and our team played decisively. They won by a margin.

On the stands, Paddy pointed and tugged my arm and said "Look.... it's an invisible balloon!"

I looked where he was looking. Over the field, caught and illuminated by the stadium lights, was a gossamer strand. I think it was one of those long single-threaded spider webs that drift around until they find a place to settle. Paddy saw the strand and deduced his own explanation.

I still call him a "baby" sometimes since he is our youngest and I'm still catching up in time -- my pace of assimilating changes seems to have a 3-year lag to it -- but looking at him last night, I realized I have a young person on my hands.... a curious, sometimes sarcastic or demanding, questioning, thinking philosopher. A real person, with eternity ahead of him.

I am an older mom, 40 years older than this little son of mine, so my prayer is that I never get socaught up in the "dailiness" and middle-aged complacence of life that I forget the invisible balloon behind the floating strand.

Too Little, Too Much?

"We emphasize reading and seeing more than writing. We do not demand that the children write until they are mature enough to have something to say and some reason to say it in writing. Consequently, writing comes much later for them than it does for the conventionally schooled. It astonished us to see how much writing the schools demand of young children these days. .....

We've done some tutoring of middle school students and we see how often these students confront more writing assignments than we think are healthy for a middle schooler. They show us notebooks with homework assignments to quotations from Herodotus, essays on "picture prompts", book reports and more. The little middle schoolers produce what is demanded of them as well as they can, usually cranking it out in simple declarative sentences without attention to style or concrete details. One such student came to our daughter Bridget, pleading, "Help me to be more creative! My teacher says I need to be more creative."

For us, writing is not a subject assignment but an ancillary part of other activities....

from Homeschooling: A Family's Journey, which I'm enjoying.
The authors' blog is here; a quick review, here.

Why did I pick out this quote?

I think for the same reason that I appreciated it when a physical therapist who consulted about Aidan recently expressed reservations about the brace he wears on his left leg. I had inquired of different therapists and orthopedists, several times, if the brace wasn't causing some of the problems it was meant to help with. For one thing, he walks with a stiff knee, hauling up his hip in order to proceed. For another thing, his left calf muscle is significantly smaller than his right one. I couldn't help being reminded of my football-playing son when he had broken his leg. While he was wearing a cast he walked with a stiff-kneed, heel-strike pattern. When they removed the cast, his healed leg was an inch smaller around the calf than the other one. Until this therapist of Aidan's mentioned her concerns, no one had really been willing to converse about possible drawbacks to brace-wearing, which left me feeling weird. Anyway, that is beside the point for now; it's just that having my longtime concern addressed and affirmed for the first time in regard to the brace was a relief.

With the writing, I had often said "We unschooled writing and the kids all learned to write well and enjoy writing when they saw a reason for it." But I'd often felt a bit troubled about it. I had often read especially at the beginning of my own homeschooling journey that one of the advantages of homeschooling was that kids wrote more -- that the conventional school usually skimped on writing in the curriculum. The reason was that teachers didn't have time to grade writing assignments so they tended to assign multiple-choice or short answers from a textbook.

This quote above seems to say the opposite. Now, what is with that? My speculation, based on often looking at teacher's lesson plans on the internet, is that "journaling" has become a trend. The kids are writing in response to prompts, etc. Perhaps volume of writing has gone up, but it doesn't seem to have completely solved the basic problem. Maybe the problem with kids' composition is something besides volume of written work, or lack of it? Maybe it has more to do with relative lack of reading-literature and back-and-forth talking experience, now that so many children are in school or other places for the bulk of the day, and spend another good part of the day watching TV? (the book says the average child watches something like 4 hours of television a day, which seems quite high to me, but is corroborated here). I don't know the answer, but it's an interesting question.

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In my family, my kids usually did not write a significant amount until they were in high school. Before that, they attempted little stories for their own amusement, practiced handwriting through small amounts of copywork, and sometimes worked on written narrations or small research reports. The main focus for these was just bridging the gap between thinking and putting thoughts down on paper, and in finding projects that are meaningful. The child usually makes plenty of mistakes at this age. I prefer to think of them as "approximations" similar to the mistakes a toddler makes when just learning to talk. Sure, you can address the mistakes; I usually went lightly on this, jotting down difficulties privately so that I could tailor a future grammar or punctuation lesson towards the difficulty. My young children needed sympathy and encouragement of their "voice" more than they needed direct critical feedback.

Perhaps emphasizing too much writing at too early an age forces the child to use a different part of his brain for developing skills than he would use for writing later. I'm not talking here about how some children love to write stories and letters and copy things out. Children develop different skills on different timetables, and have different interests. I'm talking about the school-child who is writing a lot without much developmental readiness.

At school, I wonder if some middle school kids are doing a lot of "journaling" and "responding" without much chance to read excellent literature and soak it in. Sometimes, teachers prepare well-intentioned literary analysis lessons for kids who simply haven't had a background of appreciative, receptive reading. The analysis becomes a trick without understanding, and the child looking at a journal prompt may well wonder what the teacher expects of him. He might end up spilling out things one imagines the teacher wants to hear, just to have a filled page. This sense of falsity is debilitating, I would imagine, and falsity is an enemy to good writing.

Now back to my own family's experience.... at some point, usually in the early high school years, my three older kids all started writing for their own purposes. Lots of good reading and discussion with family and friends prepared them to want to say something. At this point they usually asked for some feedback. Again, it was much like the development of verbal skills -- lots of opportunities and interest in what they had to say, and a bit of tactful correction IF the child seemed open to it.

My husband and I sometimes point out poor language in the media or elsewhere. Often, it is in the context of poor thinking, so our emphasis is not on micro-details of syntax but on shoddy workmanship in general. This probably helps young teenagers start thinking about WHY people use language in a particular way and how to get their own writing to work for what they want to say.

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Not requiring much writing isn't the same thing as just sitting back and waiting for writing to appear like a full-grown tree. It's true, I did a lot of waiting, but I realize now that there was a process going on, even if it wasn't systematic. The Millmans, in Homeschooling: A Family Journey, say that they put an emphasis on Rhetoric. Their daughters and sons joined a debate team, memorized speeches and learned to improvise them quickly, and thus mastered many of the basic skills necessary for writing.

"Weekly debate practice included impromptu practice, in which they had three minutes to organize a five-point speech in response to a quotation. This practice gave them the skills and confidence to compose essays under time pressure, for testst, college admission, scholarship applications, and the like.. In turn, memorization of good models of rhetoric quicly improved the way they spoke and wrote. We suspect that the pressure on student in to write early may be as damaging as the pressure to read early. In any case, our patient and tactical approach seems to have served our children well."

As for us, we do not have access to debate clubs in our area, and I do not think our kids would thrive in that environment. In our home, our "writing curriculum" seems to consist of reading and discussions, starting with picture books and pursuing "why" questions that the little ones ask about the book content, repeating lines from favorite stories or sometimes making up our own stories. It carries through read-alouds of chapter books and small research follow-ups and conversations after the chapters are read. During this time the children usually try their hand at simple keyboarded creative stories which they usually share with the family and sometimes with friends and relatives as well. It proceeds all the way up to the pre-college level where the children read books that have been major influences in the lives of their parents, and we have some great discussions. At that point, the projects get more ambitious. One child wrote a novel, another wrote extensively for newsletters and online story forums. Even now, when my son who is a senior in college calls on the phone, I often end up discussing books with him, or literary theory. He is even writing his senior dissertation on a topic related to literature.

I think this interactive, conversational format can improve mental composition skills as the child is developmentally ready, and according to his or her own unique temperament. Each child has his own different focus and gifts in how he (usually "he" in my house) approaches things mentally. One child has a terse, active style of writing; another is master of vivid, tiny details; another likes to think through things on paper; and so on. These interactions sharpen my own ability too, and when the children do start writing on their own in the high school years, our writing meetings are on a fairly equal level. Quite often their writing is better than mine and my major advantage is simply experience.

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When you are teaching a child to read, there are two "streams" of learning. One is a wide, pleasant exposure to many books in a context of relationship and love for reading. The other is brief phonics practice as the child seems ready (it doesn't have to be a workbook -- refrigerator magnets and letter games work, too). When the child is ready, the two streams come together.

I am thinking that this is similar to writing. A child needs motor skills to learn to form letters properly and develop handwriting fluency. My kids are late on this, generally, and from Aidan's therapy I have learned there are a lot of foundational things you can do to work on this -- large motor exercise like crawling, chalk circles, mazes and dot to dots, etc. At an older age, copywork and dictation may be nice, though I admit we don't practice this regularly in our home. But at the same time, the child can be learning to arrange thoughts and express them in a natural manner. When the child is ready, again, the two streams come together.

Narration is a time-honored way to improve composition skills verbally. We've used narration patchily. So far in my homeschooling, I've had most success with conversational narrations, where I or the child throws a question related to the reading into the conversational ring and we discuss it back and forth. The point is not to lecture the child but to model thoughtful interaction with a book. The parent does not have to be an expert. Being willing to discuss and mostly, listen, is the main focus. Almost any topic of interest can become a natural "extension". This conversation makes bridges between different subject areas.

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Julie Bogart's Bravewriting Lifestyle exercises show some of the ways you can work on composition without sitting the child down to a piece of paper and a topic he could care less about. Her blog discusses and chronicles the writing life in a perceptive and respectful way. I haven't used her materials, because they weren't around when we were working out our family method by trial and error, and now I have what works for us basically in place. But I know many people I trust recommend her programs highly. Her online courses and forums probably give many children a chance to share their writing and get response.

We usually do things less formally.

We've had success with an informal family Story Society.
Novel in a Month is another activity some of my family have participated in. It's going on right now, as most of you probably know! Someone on my classical group shared the link to its Young Novelist Workbooks.

I personally am fascinated with the progym, as I've often mentioned here. It seems like a wonderful developmental outline, and it is pretty much the only "structured" writing method that has not been a complete wash-out for our family.

If you have any thoughts on this, pro or con, I'd love to hear them! There are different perspectives on these things and some of them are informed by our own perceptions of our kids and how they learn best. Some kids and parents thrive on structure and clear assignments. I guess my point would be that some of the fear or rigor associated with "writing" in the homeschool isn't necessary. You can address some of the composition goals by informal methods that suit your own family.

Tomorrow

Yesterday, as we watched the election results come in, it was snowing a little.

This morning the sky is California blue, but the air is very cold, and there were ice crystals crackling and gleaming on the edges of the puddles as we walked to the post office with Aidan in his wheelchair which he uses for longer distance trips.

Kevin shoved the wheels over tire tracks deeply embedded in mud. Aidan sat up straight in his wheel chair, wrapped in a coat and a blanket for warmth, holding a trio of toilet paper rolls. When he holds them all together in his fingers they look like the decorative lights at a church down in town that we attend occastionally, so he calls them "St Anthony Lights". He has been carrying them everywhere for the past few days.

Everything has an overlay of quiet, for some reason. Kevin sat down by the fire to go through mail, coffee in hand, which makes the day feel like a vacation -- a slower pace, a more companionable atmosphere. It feels like our oldest, Liam, should be here too. The two grown children still at home, Clare and Brendan, who were voters for the first time this election, sat with us and we talked about all kinds of things. Somehow, the fact that they got to contribute their bit to this election gave us a sense of being adults together. They watched the results seriously yesterday and their comments today were thoughtful and considered. The national election did not go the way any of us had wanted, and we talked about that. Clare is in the college application process and during the afternoon talked by phone with one of the admissions people at her college of choice. Brendan is studying the driver's handbook. The two of them are starting to live their own lives.

Kevin and I commented on our eyesight in our mid-forties -- how I can see a normal paperback font, just barely, but he has to wear those Costco magnifying spectacles. To illustrate, he tried to read without them, extending the book out to the full reach of his arm and peering to guess at words. "the detective made his way to..... Cambridge, or Carebing? ... Court and met with ...." The grown children watched and smiled at his attempts.

Picture by Clare

For some reason all this made my mind range forward to the future. Just a month ago my parents and my siblings and their spouses and children met up in Oregon for a reunion and my dad set up a slide show of our younger years, when I was a teenager a bit younger than my grown daughter is now. I was the oldest of the three children in my own family. It was strange to look at myself and my younger brothers and think of how we now all have children of our own.

I could almost see my husband and I in ten or twenty years. In ten years, probably only Aidan and Patrick will be at home. In twenty years, it could be just Aidan, depending on how things work out for him. I hope we will have a bigger wheelchair by then; we joke that maybe he will be pushing us. The kids may have children of their own. Kevin and I will have more afternoons to sit by the fire and read together.

Of course, we never really know what tomorrow will hold in detail. As a teenager, I could never have envisioned where my life would be now. I am glad that there was so much in store for me that my teenage mind couldn't even have dreamed. Even during our worst days, on trips to San Francisco following an ambulance, or once a medical helicopter, where we didn't know what the future held, I knew that life was a gift.

Now, for one conscious vacancy of sense,

The stream is gathered in a deepening pond,

Not a mere moving mirror. Through the sharp

Correct reflection of the standing scene

The mind can dip, and cleanse itself with rest,

And see, slow spinning in the lucid gold,

Your liquid notes, imperishable Time.

--Christopher Morley