another absolutely fabulous TED talk with Sir Ken Robinson

Ah yes. Another piece of brilliance from the amazing Sir Ken Robinson: How to Escape Education's Death Valley. In this TED talk, he "outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish." Another nomination from me for Ken Robinson for president! Yes, President of the U.S.! I would love that.

Seriously. Twenty minutes here, do yourself a favor and watch it through to the end. He presents a really amazing and beautiful metaphor at the end that touched me. I would love to hear your thoughts.

born artists

after nature center class

(This post has been stuck in draft for TWO years!  SO much has changed since then, including the addition of the third artist child, Takoda Diin!  Publishing this as-is, with a to-be-continued... ;)

My children are born artists. It's really amazing to witness. I'm not just saying that or pushing it on them because I'm an artist, it's just totally natural to each of them in their own ways, part of the fabric of their being. I'm sharing this story as an example of what happens when you follow your kids' lead, from as early as possible, observe, see what they're into, let go of convention, and really give them time and space to go with it and explore themselves and their world. I think some of my biggest lessons as a parent have been letting go of control - you have to pick your battles, and so many are just not worth it; learning to say 'no' (I was never very good at that - sometimes it's necessary); and learning when not to say no, to say yes as much as possible.


Phoenix (my 3-yo son) has always had such an interesting spatial relationship with his world. When he was a baby, if he got in a fussy mood (which was not often, except for one period of about a month when he was cutting teeth and was inconsolable in the middle of the night), accidentally we discovered that he love to be upside down. He was fussing, crying, carrying on, and his Baba held him upside down like a bat, and he was happy. He stopped and was quiet. He loved it.

Then, he didn't crawl much; he would scoot around on his butt, backwards especially, usually with one leg out rather than on hands and knees. Once he could stand well he would climb to the highest point in the room, as often as he could. He walked a good 15 steps one day around 11 mos. when we were at the TaeKwonDo school and then wouldn't do it again for a month. He learned to walk just after his 1st birth day when my mom was visiting and she said, "C'mon Phoenix, walk! You just do this, waddle like a penguin." And he just took off after her, waddling like the little grandson penguin.

my painted boy balancing blocks at the American History Museum

He went through a phase where he was constantly a painted boy. Marker on his face, kinda like a warrior, and he always had to do his nipples and his belly button and his arms too. Or he would draw all over his chest. He had to have the Aang arrow (Avatar The Last Airbender) on his forehead for a few months straight. And when his hair was short, he had to have the arrow extend up over his head and down his back, and had to have the arrows on his hands and feet too. Attention to detail. Convention would say "No, don't let him do that. He can't go out in public like that!" Why not? Who really cares? He's a little boy that wants to decorate himself. It's not hurting anyone, including him! What would hurt him is if I made him feel bad, guilty, or like he did something wrong.

doesn't want to come down!

Then, as he's gotten older, he still loves to climb, and is quite good at it - I'm very confident in his climbing skills. He can scale a fence up 9 feet at least, and would go higher if the fence is tall enough and someone would follow him up there (because of the adults' fear, not his). Definitely no fear of heights. He does things when we're out and about that make people cringe sometimes, like "He's 3! Aren't you afraid he's going to hurt himself?!" But I just watch him calmly, knowing that he has the situation under control. He's not reckless, but brave and assured.

nakey boy wrestlin' with papa in the backyard

He love love loves to wrestle and 'fight' with his dad, and anyone else that will humor him. His dad is his favorite because he can really test his strength and go at it as hard as he wants, knowing that Daddy's Tough and he can't hurt him. He knows when to be gentle and make it a lot of show with little impact. He goes at it in total fun and is so conscious most of the time of who's on the receiving end. He's smiling, laughing, and squealing in delight. He is my peaceful warrior, usually. He most certainly has a temper which flares from time to time though. Then, look out. I'd say his 9-yo sister, unfortunately, is the most frequent recipient of that type of outburst.

He's developed an interesting relationship with objects. He shows a very natural knack for sculpture without any prodding or suggestions from me whatsoever. He just does it instinctively.

When we are at the river (any river - we're river people) he will collect and arrange sticks in a fashion somewhat reminscent of an Andy Goldsworthy installation. He might stick them in the ground in two parallel lines, making what appears to be an old abandoned ribcage of an animal beached in the mud. (If you're unfamiliar with Andy Goldsworthy, he's an amazing 'earth artist' who creates mostly ephemeral land art. If you have Netflix, his movie "Rivers and Tides" is available for instant play, here. Check him out!)

'drawing' with blocks

He will use objects including various shaped building blocks to make lines on the ground, and he likes to build very tall lego block towers just so that he can knock them down. Convention might say, "But wait, you just built it! Why would you knock it down?!"

When I started getting Play-Doh for him, his first instinctive use for it was to wrap his "guys" (the super heroes and other characters) in it. He completely covers them with the Play-Doh, bit by bit, often using his body to smush it onto them well by standing in his chair and leaning on the guy with all his weight, pressing his belly against it to make sure that it's really well stuck. And then, after a while, he'll take it off, and it can go back into the container. He also pretty quickly manages to mix most of the colors together. Convention would have him trying to make a cat or a dog or something, and of course, you mustn't mix the colors all together! God forbid!

a Batman Masterpiece who's missing at the moment :(

When I offer him paint to use, he's not really interested in painting on paper. About a year ago when he was 2 and a half was probably the first time paint was offered to him and he wanted to paint one of his brand-new Batmans. Convention would say "No! You can't paint on that! It's brand new! If you paint on him, it's not going to come off. You're going to 'ruin' him." But hey, what the heck? Who cares? He wants to enhance Batman's appearance. And does so quite well. Now the "guys" have become real works of art. Some of them look soooo cool, they have so much character, with this kind of weathered look. What he likes to do is paint them, and then wash the paint off, sometimes almost immediately after. Now, sometimes he leaves the paint on. And guess what, he uses my (gasp) expensive paints - my acrylics and nice gouache (high-quality watercolors), or the window art paint, which dries like colored translucent plastic. At first, I struggled with "Oh Phoenix, but you're wasting it!" Especially since he would slather it on and then sometimes just wash or peel it off right away. There it goes. Down the drain. But then I thought, Well, small price to pay for his fun, joy, happiness, learning, exploration, and freedom. Big deal. I'll buy more.

Now, there's Adobe. My first born. My thesis project. And my only girl.  Also a true artist.  And considering that two years has passed since I started this post, and this is where I had left off, there's so much more to tell now, so I'll have to dedicate a whole 'nother post to her, soon. To be continued...

you never know until you're doing it

'Homeschooling' - it's just like parenting in a way.  Well, of course, it is a special subdivision of parenting, if you wind up finding yourself going this route, taking this very special road....

What I mean to say is that before you have kids, you have this idea of what parenting will be like, what your kids may be like, what you think you will do if certain situations arise, what your life will be like living with children, what 'type' of parent you will be, how you will handle issues like discipline, how you will do things differently from your own parents, and so on.... But the fact is, you just really don't know until it happens.  You have all these great ideas, maybe you have read some books, blogs, articles, talked to other friends who do or don't have children, but you really just don't know until you are right there, in the thick of it, in the gloriously messy mixing bowl of family life, figuring it out as you go along.

Without digressing too far into this tangent which could be a whole 'nother post, (and in fact, I think has been...) I will just say that I was raised in a very unconventional way, by a single father whose attitude about childrearing was expressed thus: 'Everyone thinks your whole life has to change when you have a kid, but that's not true.  There's nothing to it!  You just clothe it , feed it, give it love, and go on with your life!'  This was my attitude going into parenthood also, at age 28.  Well, I was in for a big surprise.  I did manage to sustain that perspective to a certain degree for the first couple of years, but of course, things did change.  Undeniably so.  Sooo much has changed in my life over the past 11 years of parenting.  

To return to the original point of my post, before I ever had children, I had an idea that I wanted to homeschool them, for a variety of reasons.  But in my mind, it looked very neat and compartmentalized compared to what it is now.  For one, I visualized a possible scenario in which we would be involved in some type of co-op with 4 other families, and that the kids would rotate houses, which would give each responsible parent one day on and 4 days off to work, freelance, or whatever their needs dictated.  This is part of how I envisioned I would be able to 'afford' doing this as a working artist of one sort or another.  The group of kids would all be together, each day of the week, but under the supervision and tutelage of a different parent each day.  Sounds nice.  Having lessons in various subjects, with each responsible parent getting to focus on their area of strength with the kids, complimentary studies happening....

Well, the fact is that it's difficult enough to even get a co-op scenario to gel for even one day a week, for a number of reasons.  For one, part of the reason most people homeschool is because we actually want to be with our kids all day, or most of the day, pretty much every day.  We formed and sustained a co-op with a few other families that lasted for a couple years (see previous posts) that was really fabulous, and it started off with the intention of being a swap-off situation so that each of us would have a chunk of time most weeks to do some work or whatever we needed to do, but that rarely happened, because we just enjoyed being with our children, each others' children, and each other so much that we just all stayed together most of the time, swapping off responsibility and who would host and give the kids a lesson that week.

And there are so many activities and classes offered for homeschoolers that the kids would miss out on if they were committed to being at someone's house 5 days a week.  Which leads me to why I place 'homeschooling' in quotation marks to begin with.  Homeschooling is actually a bit of a misnomer for most of us.  I tend to refer to what we do instead as 'lifeschooling' because working or 'schooling' at home is only a portion of what we do, and in fact most of our at-home 'lessons' do not really resemble school at home (again, another post).  There is also 'carschooling' (all homeschoolers know this ;), when we are going from place to place, and doing our Spanish lessons - Pimsleur approach to conversational Spanish, or singing, or listening to classical music, jazz, blues, quizzing from 5th grade Brainquest cards while at stop lights, making up stories, and so on.   That's in between our Museum class that I'm teaching, our art classes, Earth Champs meetings, writing class, Shakespeare rehearsal, and so on....  Then there are other real-world experiences like going to the bank, the grocery store, thrift store, comparing prices, budgeting, going to more museums, nature walks, historical tours, bike rides, other field trips... it's boundless really.  That's a big part of where the inspiration of the name for my businesses came from, this overall attitude that
We Can Do Anything We Want.

Reading this, school-going families may think, 'well yeah, of course, we do a lot of those things too.'  Yes, you do.  As homeschool families, we are held accountable (in most places - it depends on where you live, and varies) and called upon to show evidence of learning, thus we may come to value these real-world experiences in a different light as we begin to see the learning opportunities inherent all around us, every single day.

My original point is that homeschooling, or lifeschooling, like parenting, is a beautiful, unfolding, sometimes chaotic, sometimes harmonious, ever-changing process with twists and turns, revelations, successes and failures.... And just when you think you have it all figured out, that you have found 'a way,' life will throw you a curve ball just to keep things interesting, and you have to try again, change it up, find a new way.  Some things change, some things stay the same.  There is so much more to education than schooling.   

Until next time....

'Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.'
-Yates

giving thanks for networks

Jan 5:  I give thanks for my awesome homeschool tribe.  We went to the Shenandoah Valley Discovery Museum in Winchester for the day with some of our posse, and everyone had such a great time.  If you've never been there, well worth the trip.  Similar to the way DC Children's Museum was set up for those of you who grew up in the area, except way smaller.  Totally awesome.  We wrapped it up at a yummy Thai restaurant there on the pedestrian mall a few doors down, and then stopped by a coffee shop a couple more doors down to refuel for the ride home while the kids ran around outside a bit longer.



These mommas and their kids (shout out to Kristen, Melanie, and Stephanie) are such a vibrant part of our network, and I'm so thankful for our freedom to explore and learn in a natural & fun way. 

Jan 6:  I give thanks for Facebook.  Yes, it's true.  Such a great centralized wealth of information, a great virtual community, a great voice for those who want to share their thoughts with any segment of 'their' public, whether mundane or profound, a great place to network, and of course, a great place to reconnect.

What are you thankful for?