Copasetic Flow

When asked "How do unschooled kids learn to read?:  My best answer so far is, "Randomly." No. 2, our four-year-old, who is rather uninterested in the whole alphabet thing is learning to sight-read while denying that he can.  He seems to have taken to heart the Spiderman admonition that with great power comes great responsibility and he wants none of it.  He'll look at exit signs, turn to us, and ask "What's that exit for?"  When I ask, "Are you learning how to read," his quick response is "No!"  His most amusing reading slip-up to date has been to tell us throughout our road trip from San Francisco to Wyoming that he'd seen Donald Duck's.  I thought he was perhaps just going pleasantly divergent until we drove through a town small enough that we were right next to a McDonald's when he proclaimed "There's Donald Duck's!  I love the food there!"  He peruses Donald Duck comics frequently, and had put the ...

We had a rare treat yesterday.  The whole gang, all five of us , got to descend upon our local Farmers’ Market together.  Normally, I’m up by 3:30 on Saturdays.  I putter around the house, work a bit, clean a bit, and then, at the still pre-dawn time of 4:22, I  wake up No. 1, our  six year-old, and No. 2 our four year-old to get ready to head out to do our weekly fruit and vegetable shopping.  The kids hit the potty, put on their shoes and socks, a sweater or two, and perhaps a jacket depending on our weirdly cold San Francisco weather, and we’re off.  Our corner buses don’t run at quarter to five in the morning, so we make our way along the eight tenths of a mile downhill trek to the main artery bus that does run through the night. No. 1 re-coined the phrase midnight long ago to mean “the middle of the night”, and tells everyone we got to our Farmers’ Market at midnight.  We trundle along, warming up with the activity of walking, running, and ...