Monthly Archives: July 2006

Charlotte Mason

Charlotte Mason Was a Wise Woman

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It’s been about three years since the day at the park when I realized my daughters were lacking a vital, a crucial, an indispensible piece of knowledge. I don’t know how we’d missed it—these kids knew Tennyson before they could read and discussed the periodic table of the elements over dinner. (Okay, so we had a placemat with the periodic table on it. Still. We did discuss it. As in: "No, dear, we don’t smush peas on helium.") They’re bright kids, well-educated kids, but there was a giant hole in their education and it was the kind of hole that left an opening for serious pain. Literally.

See, we were at the park, as I said, and a bunch of kids were playing ball not far away. Suddenly a cry rang out: "DUCK!" Every person in the vicinity ducked out of the way of the large ball hurtling toward our group. Except my kids. All three of them (there were only three at the time) LOOKED UP AT THE SKY. I kid you not. "Where?" cried Jane. "Is it a mallard?"

Is it a mallard. The kid knew her times tables at age seven but had no clue that when someone hollers "duck," you get your head out of the way. When I stopped guffawing, I decided I’d better rectify that little oversight right quick. Back at home, I put the kids through a bit of boot camp. I figured while I was at it, I might as well throw in some other quick-response commands. I lined up the three little girls, ages eight, five, and two, and drilled them in Duck, Hit the Deck, and On Your Feet Maggot. It was a smashing game and we played it every day for a week. They made mighty giggly little soldiers but they got the point and I felt reasonably comfortable out taking them back out to dangerous places such as the park.

At some point I added another command, and for something that started out as a whim, it has turned out to bring immense peace and pleasure to my home. It had occurred to me that one of my biggest pet peeves was calling one of the kids and having her yell back, "Wha-at?" instead of coming to SEE what because if I’d wanted a conversation of shouts, I’d have hollered what I wanted in the first place.

I remembered what Charlotte Mason has to say about habit-training, how a mother should pick one habit at a time to cultivate in her children. Start with a bad habit that vexes you, Miss Mason says (somewhere; I no longer remember which book—probably all of them), and devote a period of several weeks to replacing it with a good habit. This is the best parenting advice I’ve ever encountered. Such a simple principle: instead of punishing for the inappropriate behavior, you take the time to develop the behavior you want to see.

Of course my children didn’t know what kind of response I wanted when I called out their names: I’d never bothered to explain it. Did I just expect them to instinctively know that the "whaaaaa-ut" hollerback drives mothers up the wall? When I examined the situation, I understood that I’d never given much thought myself to what kind of response I’d prefer. I just got annoyed by the one I didn’t prefer.

So after the Duck drills, I started working on the "what to do when I call your name" routine. And oh my goodness has it been a pleasure to see it in action these past three years. By now it’s completely automatic. I call a name and the child in question cries out, "Coming!" Simultaneously she leaps to her feet and runs to wherever I am, landing before me with a "Yes, Mom?"

It’s marvelous. Maybe the script isn’t your cup of tea but I truly love it: the quick response, the way I can take it for granted that all I have to do is say a name and the needed child will appear before me—with no irritation, no resentment. It’s all automatic; we hardly notice it anymore; it’s simply what one does. It is, in fact, a habit.

Habits (good and bad) are catching. Wonderboy has picked up the routine too, without our doing anything to teach it. In fact, he’ll see your "coming!" and raise you one—half the time I holler out for Rose or Beanie, the boy will chime in his own "Commmmm-ee!" in chorus with theirs. Sometimes he just stands at the bottom of the stairs barking out his sisters’ names and supplying their responses for them. Or maybe he just thinks their names are Rosecoming and so forth.

I know the drill-sergeant routine is a little hackneyed, but it’s been a most successful means of following Charlotte Mason’s habit-training advice. Very Mary Poppins-esque, really: the silliness of the drills (nothing says fun like calling your children maggot) is the spoonful of sugar, far more palatable than the pill I used to be, scolding them for not coming when I called. Kids pick up an awful lot by osmosis, but not everything. Just ask my little birdwatchers. No, dear, it isn’t a mallard. It’s a soccer ball and it’s about to give you a concussion. Now DUCK!

Books, Family Adventures

Keeping Calm During the Storm

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Well, we’re beginning to catch our breath here after the whirlwind of the last few weeks. Not that the whirlwind is over, since there’s still the whole sell-the-house-pack-the-house-move- cross-country thing ahead of us. But now that the house is on the market, we’re settling into a new rhythm of cleaning and waiting, and I’m finding that it’s really quite a mellow rhythm after the frenzy of the past two weeks.

Rhythm is good. Lesley Austin has some lovely thoughts on that subject this morning. (I love her idea of making cards with the kids’ daily chores on them—Jane oohed and ahhed over her examples.) During times of upheaval like this, pegs become even more useful and atmosphere more important than ever. I am leaning heavily on our pegs these days: poetry with meals to keep them from being rushed and cursory; singing (very loud; seldom very good) with housework to make the work merry; and the all-important bedtime read-aloud to keep things cozy while the hurricane roars.

For a while there, we had cast aside all read-alouds. It was
comforting, last night, to start a new one. I went with something light
and easy: James and the Giant Peach. Jane has read it before
but doesn’t mind listening in, and neither of the other girls has ever
heard it. Beanie was appalled by the first chapter’s breezy depiction
of the grisly demise of James’s parents, but the satisfyingly
ridiculous names of Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker reconciled her to the
tone of the book. I always remember that Jim Trelease (he of The Read-Aloud Handbook fame) calls James and the Giant Peach the best read-aloud ever, and while I don’t agree with him (I’d put By the Great Horn Spoon and Understood Betsy above it, to name two), it does fit the bill when you want something fast-paced and funny.

One thing my pegs are not helping me with at all is email. I have over a hundred emails piled up and waiting for answers. If yours is one of them, forgive me! (But don’t stop writing…I can read mail, just can’t find the time with both hands free to answer it!)

Family

I Think I’ve Found a Kindred Spirit

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I swear it’s like Jill at The Happy Homefront has been watching footage of my life:

"Okay, this is the plan; we’ll divide into three teams. Each big kid will take a smaller one by the hand, and I will carry the baby in the sling. You will wait for my signal, and when I say it’s clear, we will cross the street together. Once in the building, bigger kids will continue to hold the hand of their assigned smaller child, and you will direct their attention away from the candy. We are not purchasing sweets, we will make cookies this afternoon at home. If we are separated, remember your training! We never leave a man (or a toddler) behind! Are you ready? Operation Grocery Store: Execute!"

Yes! Exactly! I do feel sometimes as if I have to be a strategic mastermind in order to accomplish the simplest, most mundane tasks. Like the carseat situation. Frankly, I seem to be slipping in the mastermindery department when it comes to figuring out how to fit my five kids into our minivan.

See, all my kids are small for their age. Even Jane, who just turned eleven, isn’t tall enough to go without a booster yet—unboosted, the seatbelt cuts across her neck, which isn’t safe. But it is darn near impossible to fit three booster seats, one toddler carseat, and an infant seat into the back of our Honda Odyssey. I have tried every configuration possible and the only arrangement that fits all five seats has the three older girls wedged into the back row so tight that not one of them can reach her own seatbelt. I have to scrunch back there myself and wrangle the buckles into their sockets. It’s laughable, the amount of time this process takes. Forget buying ice cream at the grocery store because it’ll be thawed by the time we finally roll out of the parking lot.

I know there’s got to be a better solution. Maybe I can find some other way to boost Jane high enough for the seatbelt to fit right, a phone book/cushion combination or I don’t know, something narrower than a booster seat but still firm enough to lift her up the necessary four or five (?) inches.

Either that or we’ll just have to stay home until the kid hits a growth spurt.

(She’d better hurry up—we’ve got a big fat road trip in the [we hope] near future.)

Drama

Drama for Children

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Jane and Rose are putting on a play with some friends this weekend. For weeks they’ve been carrying around dogeared scripts festooned with yellow highlighter, running lines in an arcane actors’ ritual that seems to require Rose to jump on my bed. The Bounce Method?

This got me thinking about how much the kids love to put on impromptu plays, and how much I loved acting at their ages (and far beyond—I started out a drama major in college and had my sights set on Broadway until I met That Boy). I realized I’m a bit out of touch with children’s drama these days and wondered if any of you had favorite play collections your kids have enjoyed. I know there’s a collection of Aesop’s fables in play form somewhere out there, though I’ve never seen it. We have acted out many a fable in our living room, improv style. I think our biggest hit, though, was our rendition of how Caligula conquered Britain (except that the Roman soldiers kept dissolving into giggles).

So how about it? Got any good kids’ plays to recommend?

Family, The Cross-Country Move

The New Abnormal

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(Before I start talking about the tremendous change in our lives that began today, I should just mention in passing that we live in a fishbowl, surrounded by eagle-eyed neighbors, many with guns. One of them, the guy across the street, is a cop. Next to him is a retired gentleman who spends his days sitting on the front porch lovingly polishing his collection of rifles. The guy on our left is captain of the neighborhood watch. Every time I sneeze, a chorus of bless-you rings up and down the street, because these people have their ears open. Just, you know, putting that out there.)

So. Yesterday was Scott’s last day as a stay-at-home dad. I wrote a very long post about that, about how incredible it has been to have him at home full time these past eight years—a rhapsody about how he was there to rock newborn Rose while I wrote Little House by Boston Bay, there
to grind up Jane’s chemo pills and hide them in spoonfuls of (prepare
to gag) ketchup, there to haul yet another load of spitty baby clothes
to the laundromat and there for so many other things that I realized it wasn’t a post, it was a novel, and anyway he’d be reading it in a lonely hotel room several states away and that probably wasn’t a nice thing to do to him on his first night away from the family he is so crazy about.

So I bailed on that post, for now. Maybe I’ll finish it someday or maybe I’ll just write the book. Not anytime soon because now I am flying solo with five little kids and a house to keep very very clean for that buyer who is even now thinking if only I can find a house with a blue room big enough to sleep six children, and a cunning basement office with nice big windows and an attractive laminate floor, and an abundance of prolific berry plants in the backyard not to mention a nesting pair of bluebirds every spring and also many compassionate and watchful neighbors such as an officer of the law and a captain of the neighborhood watch…if only I can find a house like that, I shall be tremendously happy.

I didn’t do much in the way of keeping the house clean today for that prospective buyer who will be so tremendously happy here—but not as happy as we have been because that is simply NOT POSSIBLE—because I had to spend the first part of the day pretending I wasn’t crying because daddy was leaving and the second part of the day wiping everyone’s tears because daddy had left. We attempted to console ourselves by setting up a brand new blog—for daddy’s eyes only!—because yes, geekiness is genetic and my children have inherited it in full force.

Later I discovered that Elizabeth had written a post just for me containing that exact advice: blog to ease the pain of separation. She also recommends making a point of "sharing the minutia" of our days while we’re apart, which makes me feel much better about having already had nine or ten cellphone conversations with Scott since he left. Because, you know, how could I NOT tell him about how I was just heaving a sigh of relief over having gotten four out of five kids to bed with just the very sleepy baby to go when Rose burst into the room (catapulting baby out of sleepy into oh so very wide awake and waking up Wonderboy in the process) to announce that Beanie had just thrown up all over her bed. "Oh, and also there’s some in my hair, Mommy."

The good news: Beanie isn’t sick. Apparently she was just laughing so hard it made her lose her dinner. The whole thing struck me as so ridiculously funny—that my inauguration into flying solo should be a Yaya-Sisterhoodesque frenzy of scrubbing vomit off one kid’s mattress and out of another kid’s hair at 9:30 at night with a kitchen full of dishes waiting for me—that I was overcome with giggles, which of course set all the girls off and almost made Beanie toss her cookies again. When I left the room, icky sheets on one arm and bright-eyed baby on the other, the girls were arguing about who would get to blog about this in the morning.

Well, ha, I beat them to it.

Clippings

Blogs of Beauty Awards 2006

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2006bobfinalist
Well, that was a nice surprise! Just now I was checking out referrers in my site meter and discovered that Bonny Glen has been nominated for a Blogs of Beauty award! I’m a finalist in the "Best Homeschooling Blog" category along with the most excellent Spunky  Homeschool and the lovely Higher Up and Further In (which latter I enthused about recently after noticing that extremely cool picture-study Flickr badge in the sidebar). (Speaking of which—this month she has a Mary Cassatt badge. Scroll down the page to the "This Month’s Artist" section. Beautiful.)

The fourth finalist in this category is a blog I hadn’t encountered before: Enjoy the Journey. I have just spent most of my early-morning blog-writing time on a thoroughly enjoyable exploration of Lindsey’s site. Great essay on motherhood near the top of the page.

Voting instructions can be found at A Gracious Home. There are many other fine blogs in the various categories. If you had any free time left you can kiss it goodbye now.

Many thanks to the person who nominated me, whoever you are!