Nature Calls

We live in a suburb. A “greater metropolitan area.” Lots of pavement, buildings, cars. Lots of people all around us.

Still, there is also a lot of nature to be found, even in the suburbs. For our little ones, even the front yard, side yards, hill-down-to-the-street, and plantings around our swimming pool—small though these natural oases were—seemed filled with all kinds of interesting, constantly changing natural organisms.

The kids had favorite spots and secret places. Underneath some huge elephant-ear leaves was a hide-away, and behind some nandina bushes was a little fort, and there was a “trail” blazed through the ivy on the escarpment, and a little “room” in the middle of the dreadful yuccas some previous homeowner had planted. There were beetles and spiders and ants and birds and snails to watch. Pill bugs under the rocks, earthworms in the soil as we dug holes in order to plant seeds, a paper wasp nest left empty, a caterpillar on a leaf, a ring of mushrooms growing unexpectedly in the grass. All of it was fascinating to little ones.

We walked to the park on nice days, when we didn't have TOO much to do, and when we weren't sick. That little neighborhood park was almost always empty during school hours, so it served as a sort of large backyard for us, just a couple of blocks further away than our actual backyard (which was basically a pool). Further away were actual wilderness areas; about an hour away were some mountains, an hour and a half in another direction were stretches of desert, and to the southwest, again about an hour away, were seashores and the Pacific Ocean. We were able to get to non-suburban nature a couple of times a month. And of course much further away were huge swaths of wilderness that we were able to experience a few times a year. Getting out into nature was a pretty big priority for us during vacations.


Some families don't prioritize nature quite so much, I have noticed, and other families are driven to live closer to nature than we do, moving out of the cities and the suburbs, into rural areas or forests, along the coast or in the mountains and deserts that we only visit. Surely there is a wide range of healthy choices about exposing kids to the natural world, not one “correct” way. Still, I'd like to explore a few thoughts on the topic.

1. My husband and I quite naturally talked to the kids about the aspects of nature that we treasure, and it definitely rubbed off. After years of us all gabbing about the sky and stars and planets and weather and clouds and storms and landscapes and rock formations and wildlife..(and so on and so forth, pant, pant!), especially as we went on outings or took road trips, we noticed that our kids are much more tuned in to natural stuff than some people are.

Parents would tell us that they would have their kids watch every video they owned on a road trip in their special back-seat VCR system or RV—and we would wonder why they wouldn't prefer their kids to look around at the land they're traveling through. Books on tape or music can keep kids entertained on road trips—but they will be able to engage with the landscape at the same time... On one camp trip we were all in ecstasies over all the live sand dollars and Pismo clams revealed by a retreating tide, and we were mesmerized by the sight of otters and dolphins in the surf, and later we were electrified by the beauty of an amazing gold-and-crimson sunset, and still later we were thrilled by a meteor shower (still, to this date, the most “falling stars” I've ever seen!). But as we abandoned our picnic table, our fire ring, or our tent to point and call out, to take photos and whoop for joy, there were moments when I would glance sidelong at the campers and RVs that lined the beach on either side of us, and I would realize that none of the other people camping at Pismo were noticing (or caring about?) any of the above.

Luckily, we seemed to have infected our kids with the noticing-and-caring attitude.

2. Whatever is learned in nature is so rich in context it seems to “stick” better than much of what is viewed on TV or read about it in a book. The kids learned more about geology walking around Yellowstone Park and Lewis and Clarke Caverns than they did from any other method. Our zoo passes were a passport to learning about animals even more than our library cards were. Tropical rainforests in Hawaii and temperate rainforests in Washington taught lessons of biodiversity, ecological niches, and interdependence. Of course, we should all enjoy a combination of experience, reading, and quality shows, but I can't help thinking that being in nature is the greatest teacher of all.

Even if it's just a backyard garden in suburbia.

3. Our kids became the teachers. On some aspects of nature that my husband and I weren't quite so knowledgeable about, nor so interested in, my kids turned the tables on us. They began to inform us about issues and update us on the the latest science. For example, sustainable agriculture, high-fructose corn syrup and margarine, grass-fed cows—I didn't tell them about this stuff, they told me. Which is cool.

In other words, our kids have the ability to infect us right back.

4. Alone-time in nature can be hard to come by for kids, but it is possible to arrange. Back in the “good old days,” when things were either safer or at least seemed safer, many kids were allowed access to the big outdoors all by themselves. But these days many of us do not feel comfortable allowing our kids to walk alone to the neighborhood park, say, or hike alone in the regional park. (It's always been good practice, even for adults, to use the buddy system in the wilderness, at a lake, or in urban spaces where mountain lions have been sighted.)

Even with the worries of our times, there are ways for kids to be safe and at least somewhat solitary out-of-doors. Obviously many fenced-yard situations would fit both bills, but even in parks and the wilderness, our kids can be away from others but within eyesight and hearing range. For example, as a teen Lindsey arranged to hike partway up a Colorado mountain trail, alone with her sketchpad and poetry notebook, while I stayed in sight at the chair lift station at the base of the mountain. She could easily see me (if she stood up), and we could have called to each other if we had needed to. It wasn't totally 100% safe (nothing is), but she and I both felt that it was pretty darned near perfect.

So mostly alone out in nature is doable, even for kids. And valuable.

5. Being in nature presents opportunities for confidence building. Conquering the challenges presented by the outdoors, it seems to me, gives a boost of self-confidence much more potent than that gained from conquering an opponent in a game or sport. For example, there was something very primal about the feeling my youngest experienced when she walked, hiked, and climbed almost all day and finally reached the top of a mountain at age 8. She had that same exalted, I-did-it feeling when she kept up with “the guys” and scrambled, swam, and climbed all the way up a cascading river at age 18.

In nature, our kids can meet real challenges. Build real confidence.

So I'm a big fan of nature. Big swaths of it, or even the kind we find in bits and pieces in the cities and suburbs.

Peaceful, Pleasant, Positive

One of my goals as a parent is probably shared by every other parent: I wanted a peaceful, pleasant family life and positive family relationships.

Rumor has it that the social atmosphere of public schools is rife with problems. Bullies, cliques, peer pressure, gossip, racial self-segregation, playground roughness—and these are just the problems between kids! Add to the list the mutual disrespect, mistrust, and us-against-them mentality that can poison the relationships between students and teachers, and the whole idea of “socialization” at school begins to sound like an oxymoron.

Well, let's not get carried away. There are lots of great social interactions to be found at schools, too!

Basically, avoiding the social problems found at schools was never a primary reason for my choice to homeschool my kids (although it was a fringe benefit). Also, in acknowledgment of all the good stuff to be found in schools, I tried pretty hard to make sure my kids got lots of positive interactions like those that they would have had at school—with other adults and with lots of different groups of kids as well.

Still, the bad rep of social life at schools gave me some pause as I chose homeschool. For one thing, I wanted to make sure that adding “schooling” to our home life wouldn't cause tensions and problems between mother/”teacher” and kids/”students.” For another, I hoped that my daughters, being together so much more than ordinary siblings are, wouldn't have a proportional rise in sibling rivalry as well.

In other words, as I said before, I wanted our home to be mostly peaceful, pleasant, and positive. Looking back, I think I achieved that general goal—but of course with a lot of little blips-and-bleeps of non-peace, negativity, and unpleasant times.

The really bad stuff tends to stand out in my memories. Like the shameful time that I finally got Mindy and Lindsey to stop hitting each other by hitting them myself—and, get this, I was saying, as I slapped their legs, “We [hit]—do not hit [hit]—in this house [hit]”!

Still, my memories have a general “good-stuff” glow, and I'm pretty sure it's not just rose-colored glasses when I say that the peaceful moments outnumbered the pitched battles. Also, my daughters are and almost always have been pretty close friends. They share a lot of childhood memories and even friends, and that provides a shared context like no other relationship either of them has...

Looking back at this homeschooling journal confirms that, although we suffered many blips of non-peace, the general tone of our days was pretty darned peaceful, pleasant, and positive.

“Classics”

As I read my homeschool journal, written more than 20 years ago, I began to think about toys and books that have become classics. They never go out of style (although they sometimes get reinvented and reinterpreted), and they are played with at least several generations.


I think that Colorforms—those thin vinyl pieces that would cling to shiny “boards” to make pictures—fits the definition of a classic. Not necessarily the versions that come with pre-printed pictures of whatever is popular at the moment—Popeye, back in the day, or Dora the Explorer, now—but the original solid-colored shapes invented by Ogden Kniffin. Bright blue and yellow and red and green and white. Circles, squares, triangles, rectangles.

I had Colorforms when I was a kid, and I loved making almost limitless pictures with the bright-colored shapes. My kids had a huge set and loved it. I imagine little kids these days still play with Colorforms (if they have access to them), and that my grandkids, if I ever get any, will love them, too.

Classic toys include super simple (and endlessly variable) toys like balls and kites and yo-yos. Of course wooden blocks need to be on the list. Kids can use blocks to build almost anything. Legos are fabulous because, like wooden blocks, they can be used in thousands of different constructions—and these creations are far more durable because of the interlocking nature of the bricks. I also like colored number rods and magnetic building sets.


As much as I like classic toys, classic books can be another matter altogether. Many of the books considered “classics” in children's literature failed to earn fans in our household. We all loved Lewis Carroll's Alice books, along with the books by a trio of women authors—Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, and Jane Austen (books by the latter aren't classified as children's lit—but my teens loved 'em!)—but some other so-called classics left us flat.

We thought Heidi was a bit preachy. The attitude of The Swiss Family Robinson toward animals horrified us. We found Barie's Peter Pan odd, Travers' Mary Poppins unpleasant, and Verne's 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea slow. Do these truly hold their value for most modern children, as classics are supposed to, or do they stay on the list out of habit or even guilt? (I'm thinking some librarians somewhere have thought to themselves, “Well, it's not that accessible to modern kids, and certainly nobody reads it, but we OUGHT to love it and read it, so it stays on the list!”)

Obviously, I know that some people love each of the books that failed to thrill us—taste being personal and idiosyncratic—but I wonder if these books still have widespread and enthusiastic child readers.

I also wonder which of the books written recently—within the past decade, say—which of those that have been touted as “modern classics” will actually turn out to be classics? Certainly a well-written book can be called classic immediately, because one meaning of the word is “top-rate high quality,” but I wonder which of the current batch of children's books will garner truly enduring interest.

Any suggestions?

Journal Entry 4

Tuesday, September 25, 1987

Today I put my foot down and have all three kids sit down, at the table, for breakfast. Unfortunately, Camille pouts a bit (it's so much harder to know how to respond when it isn't your own kid, too!). However, even she eats a little bit.

All three help me clear off the table when they are done. We all troop to the bedrooms so that my girls can get dressed, and I see that Mindy has a surprise for me: she made her bed! Yeah!

While I do the dishes, I encourage the kids to play. Mindy makes a Colorform picture (I notice that she names the shapes correctly as she uses them), Camille listens to a tape on Talk'n'Play, and Lindsey pages through several different dinosaur books (making quite knowledgeable comments).

Lindsey asks if it is her turn with the Colorforms yet, but Mindy says, “No, I want to copy my picture.” She gets out crayons and a piece of paper and begins to copy each shape.

Lindsey says, “I want to sit down and watch you, okay, Mindy?”

Mindy's fine with it, and I feel great. The peace here is wonderful! I think that Camille's presence sometimes causes my two to behave better.

(Except when it doesn't.)

Lindsey is now doing Colorforms on one half of the board while Mindy copies her picture, which consists of a house, snowman, sun, snow, and grass. Lindsey goes for abstract art, with a picture that is randomly arranged shapes and colors. (Actually, it's pretty cool!)

The kids discover the masking-tape number line I had laid out on the floor near the piano. I suppose it is the proximity to the piano that inspires this, but Mindy starts to use it exactly as I had planned to use it, singing “Little Bird” by numbers as she steps on each number. We all join in.

After we're done with “Little Bird,” we sing-and-step to “Thumbkin” and then “Mr. Froggie.”

Camille asks if she can measure herself. She carefully lies down along the number line, her heels at 1 and her head at... Her head is between two numbers, so I discuss the concept of "half" in a measurement. Of course, Lindsey and Mindy want to measure themselves, too. We round everyone's height to the nearest half.

Next we decide to do standing broad jumps. As each girl jumps, I play the interval jumped on the piano (1 to 4, 1 to 5, 1 to 6), and of course the girls compare their jumps, using words like longer and longest and best. I'm ready to defend Lindsey as shorter and younger, if the girls get competitive, but each is more interested in figuring out her own best jump, instead.

I make up a song about their ages, using the tune of “Thumbkin,” and we sing and step and hop and play the piano:

“How old's Camille? How old's Camille?
She is five! She is five!
She is such a big girl! She is such a big girl!
Run, Camille, run! Run, Camille, run”

And so forth...

Finally done with the number line and the piano, I can hardly wait to see what's next. Mindy goes right back to copying her Colorforms picture. Lindsey gets out paper and crayons, too, and starts drawing; she is not copying her Colorforms abstract piece. Camille uses the Colorforms, too, this time. She arranges shapes while saying stuff like, “There are three balls. Guess which one is Mickey Mouse?”

Adventure

The girls are finally well enough to walk to the park. We take our plastic toy dinosaurs, some foil, and a camera with us. At the park, the girls use the wet sand to build volcanoes and swamps. They pick up leaves and twigs and plant these around lakes lined with foil (to hold water), and then they pose the dinosaurs in a scene, chatting about what to do and how to do it.

There are two other children at the park. Mindy says, “Make sure the other kids don't let the dinosaurs eat each other.”



Indeed, there seems to be no bloodshed at all in their play. Camille hides her dinosaurs from Tyrannosaurus Rex; no carnivorous eating allowed. The dinosaurs barely even growl and roar (although there is a little of that). Mostly, they just talk to each other.

Now the three girls have run off from their dino-land and are playing on the swings and slide. They are, of course, pretending to be some sort of characters—I can tell that they are changing identity every once in a while—but then they drop all of that as Mindy shows the others “a new trick.” Everyone happily copies the new trick.

Then Camille shows THREE new tricks. The others try to copy her but do not succeed. Camille does things that Mindy can't do (or won't do, from fear?), but Mindy seems a little more determined today and works really hard to travel across the bars. She succeeds with only a little help—she will probably soon be doing it herself.

Once again, I feel so glad that the kids aren't competing with each other. Nobody compares, nobody pokes fun.

I pick up a plastic dinosaur and start making footprints in the wet sand. Mindy notices and comes over to do the same thing with another dinosaur. Camille decides to make her own footprints in the sand.

But wait! She IS a dinosaur!

Soon we're all dinosaurs. The girls decide that we are a family of duckbill dinosaurs. We are peacefully eating when all of a sudden an invisible T-Rex shows up (so to speak). We all whack it with our tails until it leaves. (Strictly self-preservation!)

Home Again

Once we're home, we get cleaned up and then sit down to watch a Disney tape about health and nutrition. When that's done, it's lunchtime. The kids take turns “taking orders” from each other and me, then they carry those orders to the chef (also me) while they set the table. When the food is made, the kids serve the customers and then become customers (me, too!), and we all eat.

With our little outing taking the better part of the morning, and both breakfast and lunch enjoyed at the table, like proper meals, the food situation is working out much better today!

While I do the dishes and put away the food, the girls choose to play outside. Soon Lindsey is back inside and upset. She's being left out. The older girls are mean to her. I sympathize and then coax her into playing a tape on the Talk'n'Play.

I hurry to finish the dishes, but before I get done, Mindy and Camille are back inside, too, Mindy in tears. The girls tell me that they have hit each other with plastic bats!

Yikes.

The lovely peaceful home, gone, just like that.

I suggest to Mindy that she play Kermit's Electronic StoryMaker, and she agrees. Camille takes my suggestion to tape record a message and a song on the piano. Both girls get happy pretty quickly, and soon they trade off activities. When it's Mindy's turn with the recorder, she plays “Little Bird” on the piano, for the recorder, but then also expands on the tune with her own improvisation.

Mindy and Camille go back to the bedrooms to play together. After their altercation outside, I am hoping they play well together this time. I peek in and see that they are combing their little ponies' hair and putting clips into the manes and tails. I decide to try to keep Lindsey busy with me (especially since she is tired and crabby). She agrees to a story, and I pull her into my lap to read to her.

Camille uses her sixth sense, or something, to realize that SOMEBODY IS BEING READ TO—and she comes running in to hear, too.

It seems to me that it is hard for me to do ANYthing with Lindsey without accidentally interesting one of the two older girls, too.

(Oh, well, the next time Lindsey goes to Mommy and Me class with Camille's cousin and aunt, the older girls will get a chance to free play alone without the lure that Mommy is having special time with someone else!)

So we read and read. Fairy tales, The Puppy Who Wanted a Boy, Who Sank the Boat?, When It Rained Cats and Dogs. After a good long reading session, all three girls squeal their way through a game of Raining Cats and Dogs: they gather up all the soft toy cats and dogs they can hold, count to 3 and then throw them into the air. The stuffed animals come pelting down, of course, and the girls gather them up affectionately and come to me saying things like, “Look, I have two dogs and a cat!”

I say, “Where on earth did you find all these animals?”

The girls' answers vary from things like, “It was raining cats and dogs!” to the more practical, “They fell on my head!”

Of course, I'm just using a line from the book, but there really are an awful lot of stuffed cats and dogs in there. I ask the girls to count them, and they do. Twenty-seven.

Good grief, we have 27 stuffed cats and dogs?

We have even more bears and rabbits, and who knows what other sorts of soft-and-cuddly critters? Wow!

The kids proclaim that they are ready for a snack and ask me to read again. This time, I read Jack Prelutsky's Read Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young. The girls are excited that one of the rhymes is about a dinosaur.


Passport for more Adventure

Mindy has been wanting to play “passport” for a long time. Inspired by the passports given out at the Wild Animal Park (in San Diego), she puts all the stamp pads outside, in a line, and then puts one animal stamp next to each ink pad. Each of the girls has her own passport, and the three travel down the line together, carefully inking each stamp before pressing it onto their passports, and waiting “in line” patiently.

Obviously, at any time one or another of the girls could avoid the line and go to another stamp station, but doing this activity quickly is apparently NOT what it's about. They keep together the entire time.

When Maria comes to pick up Camille, we have another session at the piano to show her all our songs. So ends another day.

When Does Pretending Become Lying?

As I re-read my third journal entry, I notice that I entered into a pretend game that Mindy had started by leaving a note purportedly from an elf. And I “lied” about it: I said, “I didn't write it.”

Only thing is, I wasn't lying.

I was playing. I was pretending. The kids knew the note was really from me—I hadn't disguised my handwriting (or, rather, printing), and I even used the same pen I had been using all day writing in my journal.

So, that exonerates me, right?

This rhetorical (and rather silly) question touches on the subject of fantasy characters that our entire society seems to claim are real. Namely, the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, and Santa Claus.

Many of us feel pretty comfortable pretending these things for our kids. It's fun! Most of us had these characters in our own childhoods, and we often have fond memories surrounding their names. It's not lying...is it?

But when kids start to question these characters, it can be tricky. When do we continue the fantasy (that is, lie)? When do we answer truthfully? How far should we take such fun pretenses?

Some parents hate the idea of lying to their kids and always present these characters as fun fantasies. (Of course, non-Christian parents have an entirely different set of challenges regarding two out of three of these characters!)

I did do the tooth fairy thing. I also hid eggs. I ate cookies left for Santa and put presents in stockings. But, when I was doing all that fun stuff, I made sure there were PLENTY of clues that my kids could use to figure reality out, when they were ready to. For example, if Santa left a thank you note on top of the cookie crumbs, or left a gift with a gift tag, he used my writing. If he wrapped a gift, he used the same wrapping paper I used. It really wasn't too hard to figure out.

Mindy asked if Santa was real when she was about five years old. I asked, “Do you really want to know?”

She said yes, so I told her that her dad and I played Santa by putting presents in the stockings and under the tree. I said some mish-mash kind of stuff—you know, the idea of Santa (as a form of love or a spirit of giving) is real, stuff like that. Then I told her that she shouldn't ever ruin the pretend game about Santa for other kids—especially not younger kids. “Can you keep playing pretend about Santa?” I asked.

She solemnly agreed to do so and never, to my knowledge, broke that promise. She seemed really pleased to be in on a secret.

Wow, that went so well!

I vowed I would do the same thing with Lindsey – wait until she asked, check to be sure she really wanted to know, and then tell her truth.

Flash forward two + years. Lindsey was five or six and had reservations about the tooth fairy, who had supposedly made a visit to our house the night before.

“Mom, is the tooth fairy real, or do you put the money under the pillow?”
“Do you really want to know?” I asked.
“Yes!!!”
“Well, I put the money under the pillow. But it's fun to pretend about the tooth fairy, so we can keep pretending if you want.”
“Yes, I do!” Lindsey said. She's a smart cookie. Pretending would undoubtedly keep the money flowing.

A few minutes later, everybody else had gone on to other things. But Lindsey interrupted us, asking,

“What about the Easter bunny, Mom? Is that real?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes!”
“Well, your dad and I get the things for the Easter baskets and hide the eggs, too. But don't you find it fun to pretend?”

Lindsey seemed so pleased. I think she'd always been nervous that a real, large (some of the baskets were fairly large, so it stood to reason that the bunny carrying them would be jumbo-sized, too) rabbit sometimes roamed around the house. I was pretty sure that Lindsey was pleased that she'd figured all this stuff out, too. She agreed to keep on pretending about the Easter bunny.

A minute or two later, she asked the final question.

Notice, it was phrased a little differently:

“But Santa's real, right?”

The way she put it made me gulp a little. It sounded to me like Santa was in an ENTIRELY different category than those other two fantasy characters. But I was in truth-telling mode, so I asked, “Do you really want to know?”

At that point Lindsey did know, and she was really, really disappointed. I can't even remember what happened—what she said, what I said, whether or not she cried. I remember it was a painful moment for me, probably because it was a very painful moment for her.

It wasn't devastating or long-lasting, thank goodness, but I wondered what I had done wrong:

Was my mistake playing Santa (that is, lying to my kids) in the first place?
Was my mistake telling Lindsey the truth before she was really ready – and, believe me, I knew that she was going to be disappointed from the way she phrased the question!
Or did I honestly not make a mistake? Maybe things just played out the way they played out, end of story. We can't spare our kids every disappointment.

But...I'm not positive about any of this...