Copasetic Flow

A few weeks back, Mom-person lost her wedding ring.  I was walking across the room one morning, and noticed her engagement ring laying on the rug, but the wedding ring was nowhere in sight.  She and I started a search for the errant ring.  We looked under the rug, then under the bed.  I emptied out the recycling bag, (Ick!), since we’d been cleaning house the night before.  We looked in all the places the ring should be.  It wasn’t in any of them.  Finally, we asked five year-old No. 2 if he happened to know where the ring was.  He’s frequently the moving force behind ‘misplaced’ items.  He earnestly told us he had no idea. Having assured ourselves that we weren’t shipping the ring to the recycling plant, we got on with life figuring the ring would turn up, and that we’d remount a more extensive search later.  Life, as it does around here, proceeded to trod rapidly along.  Before we knew it, a week passed before we’d even though...

I've been catching up on my old X-Files episodes this week after bedtime.  It may be more proof of our hive-mind theory that the kids picked up two urban-legend themed books on their latest trip to the library: Snip Snap! What's That? by Mara Bergman and Nick Maland; and Vampire Baby by Kelly Bennett and Paul Meisel. Five year-old No. 2 took the time to snuggle in so we could read Snip Snap! What's That? as I was recovering from whatever kind of sinus/allergy/snot sort of croop has hit this month.  I loved the book, and it's clearly one of 2's favorites!  To be honest I liked that 2 is picking up more and more letters and their sounds all the time.  He's pointing at letters, making the sounds, and sounding things out!  Now that he's started in on this learning to read thing , it seems he's unstoppable.  I also enjoyed it because it brought up two tropes I'd forgotten about long ago. The first is a big-city trope I had as a child.  From watch...

Lots of people ask how unschoolers learn without classrooms or teachers.  The perhaps paradoxical answer is that they have classrooms and teachers, just not in the traditional sense.  The kids' (7 y.o. No. 1, 5 y.o. No. 2, and 3 y.o. No. 3), teachers are whoever they happen to be around when they're curious about something.  Their classrooms tend to be anywhere but our house, where we all typically decompress for a few hours around dinnertime before we head off to bed.  We do have haunts form time to time where we spend more time learning.  When the kids were younger, we had a favorite coffee shop with a grass lawn and an upstairs.  We'd hang out upstairs practicing numbers and division.  Since we've come to San Francisco, our favorite learning haunt has changed.  Google came the closest to what we use for a classroom when they implemented rolling study halls: More times that not, the gang and I find ourselves discussing 'school' subjects...

So, I have it on good authority that Washington public schools are on Spring Break this coming week.  Perhaps this is the last week of Spring Break for the country in general.  I don't know.  Like every year since we've moved here, I have noticed that the population of San Francisco has been augmented over the last few weeks with interested families excited to be here.  The gang, (seven y.o. No. 1, five y.o. No. 2, and 3 y.o. No. 3), get out and about in San Francisco all the time.  Consequently, we've picked up some San Francisco travel tips I'd like to share. First though, the obligatory shoo off.  You may want to go somewhere else for Spring Break, and if so we're all for that.  Lines will be shorter here, and we'll get to get out and do a few more things during the Spring Break weeks.  If you'd rather go somewhere else, that'd be OK.  Still coming?  OK, here's what works for us. Getting Around We don't drive here.  Ever....

Our unschooling math comes in bits and pieces.  The oldest kid here, seven year-old No. 1 loves math problems, so math moves along pretty fast for her.  Here’s how she arrived at the distributive property recently.  Tldr; it came about only because she needed it. “Give me a math problem!” No. 1 asked Mom-person. “OK, what’s 18 divided by 2?  But, you’re going to have to do it as you walk.  You and Dad need to head out.” And so, No. 1 and I found ourselves headed out on our mini-adventure with a new math problem to discuss. One looked at the ceiling of the library lost in thought as we walked.  She glanced down at her fingers for a moment.  “Is it six?” “I don’t know, let’s see,” I hedged.  “What’s two times six?  Is it eighteen?” One looked at me hopefully heading back into her mental math. I needed to visit the restroom before we left, so I hurried her calculation along.  “What’s two times five?” I got a grin, and anoth...

And We Went the Other Way My life has been punctuated of late with various utterances of “No,” and “That’s not allowed,” regarding our day to day unschooling activities.  These admonishments have touched on topics including sitting on bar-stools, participating in museum classes, and  even helping out at volunteer soup kitchens.  It’s been kind of exasperating to say the least.  For the longest time I found myself sinking into a pit of embitterment.  I almost wrote about my negative feelings a time or two, but then narrowly talked myself out of it after jotting down a few notes.  Each time I’d giggle, and admonish myself with one of our local idioms, “What would Tatum do?”  If you’ve never heard of JB Tatum, he’s a physicist from Vancouver, Canada who may have never impolitely uttered a negative word, as especially illustrated by this, his most vehement of scientific diatribes. I wondered and wondered how Tatum would handle these situations. ...

4:30 AM "Get up.  It's time to get ready to go." Every weekend, seven year-old No. 1, and five year-old No. 2 get up with me at midnight.  That's what they call it: Midnight.  Since it's the middle of the  night, it's clearly midnight!  We bundle up if we need to and we feel like it; we find out which by stepping out the front door to check.  Then we head out on the mile long trek to the bus stop with our backpacks and shopping bags.  Usually our walk down the hill to Lisbon and Silver where we catch the 44 involves skipping, running, skunk-spotting, and racing down the last block. Today though, with the clouds blowing across the starry sky in air so chill that my fingers aren't quite awake typing this, today, things took a more academic turn.  I spotted the Big Dipper so we took a moment to look at that.  2, who I didn't think knew the word dipper, but who's visual acuity is through the roof, looked at it, and said, "Oh yeah, it looks...