Nature posts galore, right here.
Monthly Archives: June 2007
Saturday Morning Rabbit Trail
I was catching up with my friend Silvia’s blog, Po Moyemu, and saw this post about her brother’s Google Sketchup tutorial.
Google SketchUp? This was new to me. I liked the sound of it (probably because it rhymes with ketchup) and went to check it out. Ooh, fun. It’s a 3D drafting program. You can draft buildings, furniture, all sorts of stuff. You can even plunk your buildings down in Google Earth.
This, I thought, might be useful for Alicia’s Architecture for Kids blog. Have you visited that yet? Gorgeous photos, interesting links.
Every time I visit it I mean to ask Alicia (aka Love2Learn Mom) if she has read our favorite kids’ architecture book, Round Buildings, Square Buildings, Buildings that Wiggle like a Fish, which I wrote about on Bonny Glen a while back.
Back to SketchUp. I wanted to read Silvia’s brother’s tutorial, and that clicky-click introduced me to Make Magazine. Wow. Who knew? It’s a quarterly magazine full of techie projects. You can subscribe to the paper edition or a digital version (or both). You can also purchase single issues, if there is a particular article that catches your eye on the website. (I was able to watch Silvia’s brother’s SketchUp video tutorial for free, but I couldn’t read the article.)
There is even a Make blog, the top post of which right now is a link to a video podcast of How to Make a Balloon Flinging Siege Weapon—guaranteed to make any teenage boy’s heart go pitty-pat.
And! And! Are you ready for this? Make has a sister publication: Craft! (Did I just hear a collective Oooh… from the homeschooling mom crowd?)
What is CRAFT?
CRAFT is the first project-based magazine dedicated to the renaissance
that is occurring within the world of crafts. Celebrating the DIY
spirit, CRAFT’s goal is to unite, inspire, inform and entertain a
growing community of highly imaginative and resourceful people who are
transforming traditional art and crafts with unconventional, unexpected
and even renegade techniques, materials and tools; people who undertake
amazing crafting projects in their homes and communities.
There’s a Craft blog, of course, as well as a Projects page which includes links to project instructions elsewhere on the net, such as these gorgeous felted beads at Maryjane’s Attic.
All this from one post at Silvia’s blog. Oh, internet, you are a marvelous, terrible thing.
Raffle for Charity @ Danielle Bean’s Place
A beautiful blogger, an important cause, a boatload of prizes. Need I say more? And yet, I will. Danielle Bean is holding an online fundraiser for the St. Gianna Maternity Home. Every $5 you donate will earn you a chance in a drawing for one of more than 50 enticing prizes. Go see!
A Wave of Understanding
We had a birthday here yesterday. I call her Jane, he calls her Max (a baby nickname, from when she made the funniest growling noises—like a Wild Thing—and Max is the friend of the Wild Things, you recall).
She can’t possibly be twelve. It was just the other day that I was toting her in the sling all over Manhattan and Queens. Sometimes we took the stroller along, to hold our groceries. Scott favored the backpack, especially while vacuuming. I tried it once. I missed having her up front, on my hip, where I could kiss the top of her head. Also, I got stuck between the inner and outer doorways of our building’s vestibule when we came home. The outer door opened inward, and the inner door opened out, and there wasn’t room for the first door to close with me and the backpack inside the vestibule, so that I needed to hold the first (big, heavy) door open while opening the second one too. And I didn’t have the muscle power. (This has ever been a challenge of my motherhood. I’m a shrimp.) The outer door began to swing shut while I was trying to maneuver the second one open, and it wedged the backpack frame so tightly that I couldn’t budge. Jane chose this moment to start pulling my hair, and I had no free hands with which to stop her. She was laughing, so at least I knew she was all right.
I don’t actually remember how we escaped from our predicament. Did the landlords come to our rescue?
After that, I stuck to the sling.
She could practically wear her baby sister in a sling now. Sometimes Rilla lunges out of my arms toward Jane, crowing with laughter. I think about baby Jane chuckling over her fistfuls of my hair, unaware that the heavy door threatened to slam shut on her. Laughter and Jane go together; she is a throw-back-her-head- and-howl sort of girl, always quick to see the joke, even when it’s on her. Scott wrote about how she laughed yesterday, out on a seawall by the harbor-seal beach, when a wave broke against the wall and splashed her with spray. I was back on the shore with Rilla (in the sling), watching through the camera’s zoom lens.
That will be increasingly the pattern, won’t it? I’ll be standing on the shore, watching her venture farther and farther out to sea? Reality breaks over you like a wave sometimes, drenching you with salt spray. Babies grow up. They untangle their fingers from your hair and turn their faces toward the great blue expanse of the horizon. They throw back their heads and laugh, welcoming the adventure.
Speechless
Oh, the irony. Today is Wonderboy’s final speech therapy session before the summer break, and I have completely and totally lost my voice.
Not that I’m normally the one who does the talking during his sessions—but today there would have been a fair amount of summing-up chitchat between me and the speech therapist.
I guess she’ll get to be the one who sums up.
As for my boy, all I can say is thank goodness for sign language. The girls can hear my hoarse whispers but as far as Wonderboy’s hearing-aided ears are concerned, I’m just mouthing in silence. This is frustrating for him, because he is in the middle of a huge language explosion and wants to practice verbal speech all—the—time.
You know how it is with toddlers—practicing speech means they say something, and you repeat it back, and your part of the game is vastly important to them because it shows you know what they mean.
I was thinking about that, how important it is to human beings, from our earliest days, to be understood.
There’s a reason "you know?" and "know what I mean?" are common tags in our conversation.
There’s a reason St. Francis included "grant that I may never seek to be understood so much as to understand" in his famous prayer.
Even the baby has this desire. She is beginning to use sign language herself. When she signs something, and you understand and sign it back or say the word in English, her eyes light up; she beams. Your comprehension of her meaning delights her utterly.
It’s the same look on my boy’s face these days when I know that what he said was, "Daddy puts his phone in his pocket."
We are now going to be LATE for speech therapy because I’ve been sitting here overlong, writing. But I can’t tell the speech therapist today (because she doesn’t speak ASL) how excited I am that Wonderboy is so excited about saying sentences like the above.
And I am excited. It’s awesome, in the old sense of the word, to see him making these leaps of expression. And I had to share it with someone, you know?
How to Teach a Toddler to Blow Her Nose
Not that we’re calling Rilla a toddler yet. Just because she is now toddling all over the darn house does NOT mean she’s a toddler, do you hear me? She’s a baby. A BABY. I’m just saying.
Now that we’ve cleared that up, I’ll move on. Scott taught THE BABY to blow her nose this weekend, making him four for five. I think I get credit for teaching Jane, but the rest of the noses go in his column. He used my trick for most of them, though. And it occurred to me that this little trick might be a good Works for Me Wednesday tip, because it has indeed worked for us, many times over (and not just on Wednesdays).
Here’s what you do: you sneak in a nose-blowing lesson with that tried-and-true toddlers’ favorite pastime: Making Animal Sounds. What does a cow say? Moo. What does a pig say? Oink. What does a BULL say? And here’s where you snort air out your nostrils. (You want to do this BEFORE the child has a goopy nose, did I mention that?)
If you include ‘what a bull says’ in your litany of animal sounds, then when the day comes (probably tomorrow) that your wee one has a nose that needs blowing, you get your tissue ready and ask Little Snookums what a bull says. Snort! Little Snookums has just blown her nose!
When Jane got sick at the tender age of 21 months, she was famous at the hospital, FAMOUS I tell you, for being the only immuno-compromised kid under two whose nose didn’t have to be suctioned out with one of those baby-snorker gizmos. What does a horse say? Neigh! What does a sheep say? Baa! What does a bull say! Whoosh! Gross? Yes. But mighty effective.
Rilla does not know what a bull says, nor what a bull is. Scott just taught her to snort. He don’t need no stinkin’ tricks.
Unabridged Martha & Charlotte at Keller Books
The wonderful Keller family runs a used-and-new online bookstore, and they kindly hosted my booksigning at the Virginia Home Education Association conference a few years back. They had me sign some extra books for their inventory, and they still have a few of these in stock if you’re looking for the unabridged editions of my Little House novels.
Unschooling Blog Carnival
The new edition of Unschooling Voices, a collection of posts by unschooling parents, is up. Enjoy!
The theme for this edition is "How has unschooling changed you?" And I think that’s fascinating to contemplate: how has homeschooling your children affected you?
Scott told me once about how Eric Clapton learned to play guitar. He wanted to learn, and so he sat down with a guitar and just played and played and played, to the exclusion of all else. It’s called "woodshedding," as in you go out to the woodshed and practice for hours.
What was funny about Scott telling me this (it was before we were married, I think) was that it sounded so much like HIM to me, the total immersion in an interest. It sounded like me, too: I have always been one-track that way, wanting to throw myself intensely into a new subject or interest.
The first Christmas we were married, I gave Scott a guitar of his own, and he hunkered down and taught himself to play.
A year later, when we had a six-month-old and I was reading about homeschooling and thinking this was the path we should take, I remembered about woodshedding. When I talked about home education in those terms, it made total sense to him. From initial skepticism he shifted to receptiveness and eventually to an enthusiasm for homeschooling that was (is) as vocal and wholehearted as mine. All this was before the baby’s first birthday.
Deciding to homeschool changed us both in granting us a sense of freedom about learning—how naturally it happens when there is an interest in a subject or skill. The change was in regard to how people work, how people learn. In school, I was always so good at seeing just what I needed to do to get the grade. I was more focused on the benchmarks than on the knowledge itself. Through the decision to homeschool, I pulled back from that very narrow focus and saw how there were times I had woodshedded to learn something I really wanted to know. I learned to weave that way, autodidacticly, immersing myself in weaving books and warp and weft until one day there was a towel in my hand, and I’d made it all by myself.
I’m seeing that happen with the kids now: the origami animals everywhere, everywhere; and the Sculpey creations, and the stories, and Jane’s pretty book she is filling with algebraic equations she wants to remember.
500 Years of Women in Art
Was mesmerized by this at my hubby’s blog. He got it from Charlottesville Words. I imagine it’ll be making the rounds, because it’s fascinating.
One thing that struck me was how you get to the twentieth century and the dehumanizing begins. It was strange to feel so repelled by that, because I have always found cubism and abstract art to be interesting and often quite beautiful or striking. Something about seeing the fracturing happen in this progression, after so many lovely images celebrating the female face and form, is a shock to the sensibilities—perhaps a taste of what a shock those styles of painting were to the audiences who first viewed them.
Pardon My Dust
Sorry about the stray test posts popping up in Bloglines. I’ve been working on a template overhaul, and I seem to have hit a snag. Argh. I followed Jimmy the Geek‘s instructions for creating a top menu bar, and it worked—or so I thought—and then the error messages started coming fast and thick. Argh.
To make the top menu, you have to convert to Advanced Templates. For some reason, when I apply my spiffed-up advanced template, I can’t get new posts to, well, post. I have to switch back to an earlier design (not an advanced template) in order to put a post through. This involves republishing the whole darn blog. Did I mention argh?
I could just let it go, I suppose…
But now there’s a puzzle to solve. I’m hooked.
Another glitch is that the menu bar doesn’t appear on the main page. It’s only present on individual posts, and on the "About My Books" and "Best of Bonny Glen" pages. Weird.
(If you don’t see it at all, anywhere, that means I’ve reverted to the old template.)
Maybe I need to go pester Jimmy the Geek.
(Is that the best internet handle, or what?)
AHA! Problem solved! Typepad answered my help ticket with a simple explanation.
Build error in template ‘sidebar1’ : Error in <MTListInclude> tag: No list in context This means that the MTListInclude tag is referencing a< TypeList that does not exist. The name of the list referenced in the MTListInclude tag should match the name of the list exactly as it appears on the TypeLists tab, including capitalization and spacing. If you’ve recently deleted or renamed a TypeList, this would be the first thing to check.
That totally makes sense to you, right? Right?
But it really was an easy fix. See, I did "recently rename a Typelist." I changed "Our Rule og Six" to "Our Rule of Six." Because that’s just the wild and crazy kind of girl I am. But my template doesn’t care about spelling. It grabs fast to the first name you save, typo-infested or not.
Isn’t this just the most interesting post I’ve ever written? Heh.