Copasetic Flow

 Daize, the 11 year-old, swam from the beach to the end of a pier in the San Francisco Bay today! She can now officially swim in the ocean, and since she was not the one kid that got to take swimming lessons pre-pandemic, that also means that she can officially swim at all! The whole swimming thing has been a very incremental, very unschooling sort of process. Before the pandemic struck, we were able to cycle one kid through swimming class, the now nine year-old Mota. Meanwhile, because of the one adult per kid requirement, the other two kids, Daize and Tawnse, had to wait—and then pandemic. And that meant, thanks to my lungs, we quit going inside swimming pools. But, all was not lost. Now imagine you're a kid whose dad developed pulmonary embolisms after catching something that looked a lot like SARS-CoV1, then, years later, lost two feet of his intestine because clotting; who also has a grandmother and aunt who had/have Type 1 diabetes. https://t.co/gUoSOqcJ6A — antigrav_kids (@...

In her most recent blog post Evelyn Krieger asked if readers were trying new things, and it reminded me, that yeah, the kids and I are in the midst of that! We've taken up an unfamiliar sport—Bay swimming in San Francisco—wrapped in a familiar one from when I wa a kid—competitive lap swimming in a pool. It was one of the kids here, the seven year-old aka Tawnse who got me back into the water. On a trip to a beach at one of our coves, she fell into the water. She did what we’d talked about a dozen or so times before, and she’d practiced once or twice before—she stood back up—and all was well. Right after that though, she declared that she wanted to learn to swim at that beach. And, since we unschool, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing! It’s been kinda cold—the water temperature this month has hovered around 65 degrees —but it’s been a lot of fun! The learning’s been small on some days, and immense on others. In general, everything is moving along rather swimmingly, ( yeah … I wen...

Unschooling has become a bit of a breeze for us in the last few weeks.  We put in our work: we have socialization opportunities setup for the kids, we have places for them to go, things for them to do, adventures for them to have, and learning resources for them to work with if they’d like.   It’s taken me probably two weeks to realize that we’re in this state.  The hardest thing for me at the moment is to learn to just sit back and relax now. So, along those lines, let me tell you about an awesome unschooling ‘learning’ that’s been taking place for about the last month.  Six year-old No. Two and I got to spend three days camping in Hawaii last month.  While we were there, Two watched people head out on kayaks to the nearby island, Chinaman’s Hat, as well as just to toodle around with no destination, or perhaps to go fishing.  He desperately wanted to go on a kayak, but there was a problem, he didn’t know how to swim.  I explained to him there w...