Copasetic Flow

Two things happened today that could have been bummers, but weren't: one in the morning, and the other in the afternoon. In both cases, as a parent, I could've thrown a fit. One of the things was way easier to deal with than the other though, and because of that, I got to learn something about myself, and that was also kinda nice in addition to getting to have a pretty cool day. In the morning, we got to fish for a bit. The nine year old got the second fishing rod out of the car, and started making his way around the lake. The fish were biting, the dogs were staying generally out of the way, and things were fun. Then, the nine year old wound up with a twisted up, near to knotting line.  My heart rate went up, adrenaline started to pump, I really did not want to mess with the knots. I breathed deeply, I kept my mouth shut, and soon the situation was reolved, and we were both catching fish. In the end, I'd tamped down my reaction, bit my tongue, survived, and we'd wound u...

The gang and I are getting ready to go camping across the Western United States. Just recently,  the bigger kids graduated to larger backpacks, so they can haul a bit more stuff, (they’ve been hauling their own tent and sleeping bags for years, but now they can take more food, water, the collected works of Elf Quest Vol. 1, and whathevs.) There was a bit of a conundrum though. Even though the gang has larger packs, it behooves one to practice with the heavier weight for a bit to get used to it, but there’s a pandemic, and therein lied the rub.  The pandemic has—perhaps paradoxically—actually thinned out the number of camping trips we take each year. You’d think out in a forest would be better during a pandemic right? I agree, but our camping route, no matter how we’ve tried it so far always involves a bus ride for the last leg. Even if we walk to the ferry terminal in downtown San Francisco, even if we take the ferry—where we sit outside—across the bay rather than the bus over...

 We’re living in the time of covid. There’s another surge right now; it started just before Christmas, and with the cold, rainy wether and holiday gatherings it’s cruising along. As a result, I’ve been somewhat terrified of the kids injuring themselves. We’ve never had to go to the emergency room. It seems that now would be a terrible time to start. I made myself worry even more when, on an early morning walk, I stepped onto one of the rocks scattered throughout our local park—for people to perch on or to create borders—and promptly and unceremoniously slipped right back off, my hiking sandals finding no purchase atop the boulder made slick by the morning’s fog and the previous night’s rain. Things got so bad—in my own mind—that a few days back I did one of the thing I try very hard never to do. I asked the kids to be careful when they were playing on the rocks. It was ridiculous. I regretted having said it immediately. The kids grew up in that park. They know every single rock lik...

 The gang—Daize, Towser, and Tawnse, all aliases, aged 9, 8, and just for  a little bit longer 5—have picked up a new skill in the pandemic. Disappearing into their surroundings.  Before you go there, no this isn’t a pandemic socialization piece. It’s not a learning loss and socialization piece either. This is a post about an honest to goodness new skill the gang has picked up. In  retrospect, I suppose it started with Towser years ago. Walking though a park near our home in San Francisco,  we realized that five year-old Towser was  just gone. We looked around for him a bit, but I had a feeling in my somewhat panicked gut that I knew where he was. We headed for the house. Sure enough he was sitting on the steps by the front door.  “Hey! I’ve been waiting for you!” Towser groused. “I just picked a different path through the forest when you weren’t looking. I wanted to see if I could sneak all the way home.” We talked a bit about  the  importan...

Yes, yes I do rip off Dire Straits almost every time I write about free stuff.  Let’s talk about camping! We camped this week. We’re incredibly lucky to be 15 miles from a campground that is deserted on weekdays, and to be able to work remotely from there.  We’d made a habit of doing this sort of thing, albeit further afield, before the pandemic. In Hawaii, on the island of Oahu, we hopped the 60 bus—on the bus system lovingly, and officially known as The Bus—from the airport, and two hours later hopped out on an ocean-front campground where we paid on the order of, maybe, seventeen dollars a night. Again, we lucked out with really good phone signal. Waking up at 3:30 as one is wont to do when they have kids, I managed to get a lot of work done there as well. Here in New Mexico, we’re paying seven dollars a night, or at least we were until last week. Next week... We’ll pay nothing. Why you ask? I’ll tell you! Because, fourth grade. “But wait”, I hear you say, “you unschool.”...

 I went perusing the education literature a few days back, and once again, I was struck with the thing. The thing I  always forget about between jaunts into the education literature world: The assertion that kids learn differently, than adults, and must therefore be especially catered to. I  don’t believe that  assertion to be true, but there it was again. An article asked me to accept that different age groups should  be exposed to  different aspects of nature—endangered species, activism, animals themselves—differently. I got the gist of what they meant, and they didn’t have a bad message: Research  has  substantiated  that  an empathy  with  and love  of  nature,  along  with  later positive  environmental behaviors  and attitudes,  grow  out  of  children’s  regular contact with  and play  in the  natural world. But that fact that I had to decode aro...