Journal Entry 10 - Earthquake!

Thursday, October 1, 1987

EARTHQUAKE!

I won't have time to write much today...

Okay, I have a few minutes to say that, this morning, while I was in the shower with shampoo well lathered in my hair, there was a pretty powerful earthquake. The kids are totally freaked, because things fell off shelves and, worst of all, the pipe from the hot water heater broke and shot water all over the garage.

I went outside, wet and shampoo-slick, in a robe, and I tried to shut off my water—and I couldn't get the darned valve to turn. A man from down the street saw me and ran over to help. He was able to shut off the water.

Thank you, neighbor-I've-never-noticed-before!

(By the way, I'm probably stuck with drying shampoo in my hair all day. Oh, well...)

The girls and I have talked about what causes an earthquake, what happens during an earthquake, and about earthquake safety. They've been able to practice getting under a sturdy table far from windows, glassware, and other breakable items, over and over, every time there is an aftershock.

I'm really worried. The shake seemed so big-time—where was the epicenter? If it felt that big here, what was it like wherever the epicenter was?

I will not be confiding my worries to Camille, Mindy and Lindsey! They are already so worried, they cannot play two feet away from me. We are acting like a little mob of people attached at the hip. We practically have to scuttle sideways, it's so important to them to be right at my side at all times.

Even when I need to go to the bathroom

There shall be no privacy today. Sigh.

We color in dinosaur coloring books, we sew dinosaur puppets (from a kit), we read books, we watch Dumbo. Finally, when the aftershocks get very few-and-far-between, the kids can stand to be a little bit farther from me. (I'm talking maybe four or five feet away, NOT in the next room!) So now they can run around and be active. They do gymnastics.

And after doing not a whole heck of a lot, the day is over.

P.S. Just wanted to say that it turns out that the epicenter was pretty close, in Rosemead. They're calling this the Whittier Narrows earthquake, and they've assigned it a magnitude of 5.9.

Journal Entry 9

Wednesday, September 30, 1987

Just a quick note to say that the girls loved our trip to the Los Angeles Natural History Museum.

The dinosaur-ish stuff they enjoyed seeing includes two complete skeletons fighting, a pliosaur, a stegosaur, duckbilled dinosaurs, the head of a triceratops, the foot and head of a tyrannosaur, and a dimetrodon.

The girls also enjoyed stamping their coloring books at various exhibits, for plant eater or meat eater, feeling the cast of dinosaur bones in the Discovery Center, and doing crayon rubbings of fossil shells, leaves, and so forth.

Of course we branched off from dinosaurs to enjoy the seashells, luminescent rocks, pelts, modern bones, X-rays, microscopes, and the dress up station.

This is what the girls dictated to me when we got home:

We like the Discovery Center. Our favorite parts were the Dress-Up Corner, the Crayon Rubbing Tables, and the rocks that glowed. We also liked the check-out box about sharks.

Journal Entry 8

Tuesday, September 29, 1987

First thing in the morning, today: Play Dough.

All three girls are making Play Dough dinosaurs, trees, and volcanoes. Camille is also making dinosaur bones, and then she branches out to make some items that seem to have no relation to dinosaurs or their world. Mindy makes yet another dinosaur and then a tree. After getting them just how she wants them, she surprises me by flattening them down. “These are cookies,” Mindy says.

So I guess she's kind of branching out, too.

After what seems like a long time (but isn't) the girls help me put away the Play Dough, get dressed, and stand still long enough for me to brush their hair. They eat their breakfast. And then they begin to play again. This time, with stuffed animals and dolls.

The first time I walk by the girls, they have out a bear family. Soon I hear Mindy say, “I got a new Lady Lovelylocks nightie. See, Camille?” Mindy starts to take out the Lady Lovelylocks dolls, but Camille grabs one of the baby dolls instead. Right away Lindsey and Mindy fall in with baby-doll play, and each is soon washing, dressing, and feeding a baby doll. We have quite a few dolls, so they each can make a choice between several dolls, but I hear them squabbling a bit about who gets which doll, anyway. I am on alert, ready to go over to them if they need me, but they come to a solution on their own.

I go out to the garage to put in a load of laundry, and when I come back I am surprised to hear the girls talking about space. I remember that Mindy has been angling to “study” space after we're “done” with dinosaurs, and I sit down to watch with some amusement to see if they have really integrated space exploration, or something like, into their baby-doll play.

Mindy has the book Cosmos out again, in her lap, and she is talking about Saturn. I soon realize that they are pretending to be traveling to Saturn, but I don't think they are daring astronauts. I watch a while longer. Sure enough, it turns out that they are just ordinary moms with their babies, just traveling to Saturn as per usual. Ho hum.

Suddenly they troop off to the kitchen/family room. I get up and start to move to the bathroom that most needs cleaning, but they are soon back, so I turn to see what is afoot now. The kids have the bag of play money, and Mindy says, “Who wants to make a restaurant in space?” Lindsey and Camille both say, “I do! I do!” (It sounds trite and unnatural--but those are their actual words.)

We are interrupted by the doorbell. It's Delia and Kiki, ready to whisk Lindsey off to Mommy and Me. Lindsey had been excited to go, earlier today, but now she says that she doesn't want to go, after all.

She makes an excuse: “I don't like that game, Delia,” she says. “I'll get tired...”

I study Lindsey carefully. She seems a bit congested, and she is even a little clingy, which is unusual for her. I decide not to send her. Delia tells me that she would like to borrow an old toy organ for some project her older son, Eric, is doing, so we go off to find that. Then Delia and Kiki leave, and (the restaurant in space apparently forgotten) Mindy asks if we can get out the Halloween decorations.  “Please?”

So we do.

Once the boxes are brought in from the garage, and the basics are put out on display (I'll do some more decorating later), Camille and Mindy remind me that it is time for “school.” Mindy finds the bell, and this time Camille rings it.

Since nobody has announced a letter for the day or any other content, I ask the three girls if they want to read the dinosaur books we'd checked out of the library. There is eager assent, and we read about pterosaurs, we look at a great pop-up dinosaur book, and we read about dinos in Spanish. At the end of the last book, Los Dinosaurios Gigantes, there is a map of where the dinosaurs lived. The older girls pore over this, and we discuss all the continents where dinosaurs once roamed: North America, South America, Europe and Asia (identified on the map as Eurasia), Africa, and Australia. In other words, pretty much everywhere! The girls ask if dinosaurs lived right where we live now, and so we identify our continent, country, state, and general area on the map and decide that they had lived here, once.

Planning for the Dinosaur Day party, the kids decide to make “exhibits” (their word) out of Legos. Camille takes a break to undress and re-dress her doll, then does some more Lego-building, then undresses and re-dresses the doll again.

For snack today, we cut apple slices into rough pterosaur shapes and also have toast, cream cheese, and hard boiled eggs. We clean up our snack, and Mindy asks to get out the Play Dough again. Camille asks to watch the Mr. Rogers dinosaur show. Lindsey asks if we can do both!

So we set up a little table near the TV, turn on Mr. Rogers, and the kids start sorta-kinda watching while sculpting. Camille rolls the dough into what she says are dinosaur eggs, Mindy cuts and pats the dough without labeling her products, and Lindsey makes what she identifies as cookies. Soon Mindy decides that Camille's eggs are cool, so she reforms her Play Dough into dinosaur eggs, too. Once Camille has amassed a whole lot of eggs, she tells me that some are chicken eggs, and some are dinosaur eggs. She counts (accurately) and informs me that there are 27 eggs. Mindy reminds me that ALL her eggs are dinosaur eggs.

Mr. Rogers is talking about being scared, which is something that Camille experiences a lot when she watches videos. Mr. Rogers puts a coat over his head and pretends to be a monster. Camille shakes a few times (this shaking-with-fright thing is something I've seen before) but doesn't show any other signs of being scared. There is a mystery having to do on the show, and when it is about to be solved, Camille tells us, “I'm getting scared.” Then she gets up, runs over to me, and clings to my leg. “I'm getting scared,” she says again. Of course, I comfort her, but also (of course) the mystery is resolved in a comforting way.

The video over and the TV off, the kids put away the Play Dough, and I put away the table and chairs. The girls notice that there is a new song on the piano, and they ask me to play it. Then Mindy and Camille each try to play the song, using the number-scale on the piano keyboard to help them remember which keys to play. (By the way, for the rest of the day, I notice them singing snatches of the song.)

After my short performance on the piano, I go back to the long-ago interrupted bathroom cleaning and am happy to have the girls' piano playing as an accompaniment to my task. However, after a short while I notice that the piano has fallen silent and the girls are pretty darned quiet, too. Then there's a scream!

I emerge from the bathroom to see that Mindy and Lindsey have gone into their father's closet and put some of his shirts over their heads and are now making growly-snarly sounds. “Are you monsters?” I ask, nervous about possible damage to the shirts--but especially worried that Camille will get frightened again.

“Yes!” roars Lindsey through her shirt. I then see Camille emerging around the corner, also with a shirt over her head, and also making fierce noises.

“Just a moment,” I say. I quickly explain that these are Daddy's nice shirts, and I put the three shirts away. “Mr. Rogers used a coat like this one,” I say as I get a trench-type rain coat out of the hall closet. Camille eagerly adopts that coat and puts it over her head. As she roars and growls and snarls, I find two more similar coats for Mindy and Lindsey. Just a few minutes later, as I'm back on bathroom-clean-up duty, I realize that nobody is making monster noises, anymore. I poke my head into a bedroom to see why and realize that the three girls are wearing the coats the regular way, cinched around their waists with the belt ties.

“Where'd the monsters go?” I ask, surprised that the play has turned so quickly to another scenario.

“We're detectives!” the girls inform me. They are looking for purses in the closet. I go back to my bathroom tasks. I notice, as they troop through the hallway, that they have the play money out again and are stuffing it into pockets and purses. They are talking about money going missing.

Soon the kids check in with me. I am almost done with the bathroom, and they ask if I have any mystery that needs solving. “Um...” I remember their talk about lost money, and I quickly say, “Yes, my dog is missing. Could you find my lost dog?”

Not a brilliant and exciting (or even realistic) problem for detectives to solve, but the girls seem happy enough as they dash off to solve The Problem of the Lost Dog.

Next thing I know, as I go into the kitchen/family room, Lindsey is sitting at the little table, using letter stamps and a stamp pad. She doesn't seem to be a detective anymore.

Camille announces she is going to make a “detective sign.” She sits down at the table, too, and reaches for some letter stamps and a piece of paper. Mindy sits on a third chair and says, “Me, too.” Mindy's sign is hand-lettered. Next to a picture of a man, she writes:

C M L L C [star shape] T T A

I K O K E B U

F B W [star shape] V X Y

S A M

Camille has stamped letters on her sign and now writes the same letters underneath.

C G Z T Y X X V

T T J A A K N F

B U F W X X Y Y

C A M I L L E M M Q Q F

A A K U V

M Z Y X Y X U A

O P W L Z T Q

Lindsey is no longer using the letter stamps. Instead she is drawing, and she explains her pictures. “This is Mommy very happy,” she says. “Mommy getting married.” And, “This is the whole family.”

I start to prepare some food for lunch: cutting up cantaloupe into cubes, cutting cucumbers into circles, and so forth. I get out the still-frozen peas, which are fun to eat like the sweet, frozen treats that they are.

After lunch, the restaurant idea from this morning finally resurrects itself, but it is no longer a “space restaurant.” Each girl takes turns taking orders from the other girls, writing down the orders on a notepad (not really, of course, but scribbling as if they are writing). They always ask a question or two such as, “And what would you like to drink?”

The restaurant game eventually segues into a re-enactment of the “make believe” section of the Mr. Rogers dinosaur show. Mindy is Lady Abilene, and Camille decides that she is also Lady Abilene. The girls get out some tapioca pudding to “feed” to some dinosaurs.

In the meantime, Lindsey is not interested in feeding dinosaurs tapioca pudding—and she doesn't even want to be a third Lady Abilene. Instead, she has plopped herself onto the floor with the magnetic letters and board, and she is using the magnetic letters to make “words.” She keeps asking me to read the words, and I do my best, usually inserting vowels to make the “words” pronounceable. “GNF” becomes “GANEF,” for example.

After a long time of this word-creation play, I suggest that Lindsey put all the letters into the holding tray in alphabetical order. (There is a letter-shaped hole for each letter, so it's a bit like doing a wooden shape-puzzle.) Lindsey likes the idea and works hard to do the task. Actually, it is more challenging than I thought it would be.

When Lindsey is done with the magnetic letters and joins the big girls in their game, the scenario changes again. I listen long enough to realize that all three girls have special powers when they press their fingers together in certain ways. I know they must've gotten the idea from that brand new TV show, Out of This World—they saw the last few minutes as we waited for The Bill Cosby Show to start. In Out of This World, the main character is a teenage girl who can freeze time by pressing her two index fingers together.

After a good, long play session, the girls seem a bit tired and crabby. I give them some water and juice, and then they spot the materials I'd put out on the table: paper, crayons, a bowl of water, watercolor paints, and paint brushes.

They immediately want to use the art materials. I show them a quick demo of “crayon resist” art, telling them that we can do crayon drawings first and then add watercolor paint—and that the paint will not cover the crayon drawing. The girls want to try the idea.

Mindy slowly and carefully begins to draw a dinosaur for our Dinosaur Day party with a crayon. Lindsey and Camille quickly cover their papers with large, swoopy crayon lines. Once most of their papers are covered with “scribbles,” Camille and Lindsey seem bummed. Camille asks me for another piece of paper and a stencil. Lindsey asks me for help to make a “good” dinosaur drawing.

I find the dinosaur stencils and let Camille choose one. Lindsey and Mindy both decide that they want to use stencils, too. 

The girls enjoy the satisfying moments of swooshing bright blue paint over their drawings and watching the crayon lines and figures pop out, waxy and colorful, from the watery background.

From one art project to the next: the girls decide to color in Color Me dinosaur pictures. Camille wants to color in a mermaid but gets frustrated and announces, “I'm going to go with the dinosaur picture.” The art session ends when Maria arrives to pick up Camille. Maria looks over all the stuff the kids are getting ready for Dinosaur Day, we discuss the details of the museum trip we are taking together tomorrow, and then they leave.

Moving to Learn

One of my kids was great at sitting at a table and working at a computer, or building with Legos, or making a drawing, or filling in a homemade worksheet she'd requested, or doing a jigsaw puzzles. She was great at curling up next to me on a sofa or bed and listening while I read or, later, reading while I listened.

But two of my kids weren't quite as good at sitting still.

They liked to be more active!

As I look back on these journal entries, I remember that Lindsey moved more than Mindy and Camille, as she went about her day, playing and learning. However, I can now see that my youngest (who wasn't even a glimmer in a gleam when I journaled our first days of homeschooling) needed to be in motion even more than Lindsey!

She did better at decoding words, when she'd asked for help learning to read, while standing on a ball and fighting to keep her balance, than she did when she was trying to sit still. While watching TV, she would pile up sofa cushions and try to jump over them rather than plopping down on the rocker. (This was very distracting for the rest of us!) She would rather dance around the room while listening to a great story than curl up next to me in bed. She sometimes drove me a little bit crazy!

But some kids just think better while on the move! They learn by doing, often. People say they're “good with their hands.” They are good at sports or dance or acting or drawing or mechanics—or all of the above!

If we adults can help these movement-oriented kids learn what they want and need to learn in the way that best suits them—in an active, hands-on way—they may well grow up to be accomplished movers and shakers in the world!

Pretty Food

Huh! Looking back at the last two journal entries (here and here), I am surprised by the snacks we ate. Peanut-butter/apple spiders? Veggie flowers? What gives with the “pretty” food? Trust me, that is not the direction my creativity usually takes me!

At the time of this journal, 1987, I was receiving Family Fun magazine, and it was probably Mindy or Lindsey who'd spotted the snack suggestions and were inspired to try them. I was, no doubt, just following their lead.

Which is great. Naturally, I'm all for making healthy food fun!

Having seen all sorts of parents raise all sorts of kids, I still am not sure what makes some people have a “sweet tooth” while other people crave salty snacks, or what makes some people truly excited about healthy food—the healthier, the better—and others super-picky veggie-haters. I suspect there is a lot of genetic input to these and other food-related-tendencies, but also inputs such as early feeding practices, exposure to foods in the home, adult modeling, and much more. (That's always the way of it, isn't it? It's always nature and nurture!)

One family I've known had five (count 'em, FIVE) kids, and all the kids ate nutritious foods of every variety without complaint. There were never any gooey, salty, sugary snacks or desserts hanging around the house, but instead high-quality snack foods like dry-roasted nuts and fresh fruits. Every meal had a variety of real foods—not pre-packaged, processed foods—and the expectation was that every kid would eat every food. And so they did!

Now, I know that parental expectations can only get us so far, so I would assume that none of these kids had a genetic disposition toward “pickiness,” but I also have to make it clear that this was a blended family. The kids didn't share the same two parents—and one kid was a relative who didn't have even one parent in common with the others. It's possible that good modeling, early exposure to a variety of quality foods, and high expectations would be a successful recipe for healthy eaters for most of us.

What do you think?

Play Is Serious

As I typed up the latest journal entry,  I was struck by how serious the kids were when they were playing. Looking back on memories of my kids playing, I picture them all-smiles, laughing and chatting. Of course, they did all of those things at times. But at other times, their faces were solemn, their attention was focused, their movements were deliberate.

Why should I be surprised? Look at adult gamers racking up points at Tetris or leveling up in World of Warcraft. They have that same intent, focused, serious look. Look at adults playing tennis or poker or bridge—of course they laugh and smile at times, but their faces are usually serious as they concentrate, develop strategy, and try to win.

Yeah, OF COURSE playing is serious stuff.

Not a smile in evidence on these guitar heroes!

Mindy, Lindsey and Camille were serious as they danced in the living room, and they were serious as they played school. They “knew” a book about modern animals that they'd snagged off our bookshelves wasn't “really” a school book about dinosaurs, but they were serious as they played/pretended that it was. Often their play on the computer was solemn stuff, a time for focus and attention and even (once in a while) competition.

One great thing about homeschooling is that I could take play as seriously as my kids did—as seriously as play should be taken!

A book that had a lot of impact on my when I was a young adult was TheThree Boxes of Life, by Richard N. Bolles, the What Color Is Your Parachute? guy. Bolles points out that a lot of people seem to find it reasonable to devote the first couple of decades of life to learning—kept strictly separate from “working,” and hopefully not too distracted by “playing.” The next four or so decades of life, these people seem to maintain, are of course dedicated to working. After a long, productive life, if we've made it that far, we are allowed to retire and devote whatever years or decades remaining to us to leisure. In other words, to playing.

But, Bolles argues, in reality we should be learning, working, and playing at all stages of our lives. We shouldn't even try to keep these things separate! Watch a toddler do all three things at once, as he or she plays with all sorts of objects, toys and non-toys alike, and learns through the play. This toddler is apt to have a serious, intent expression during a lot of this play/learning, and we can easily see that, for the toddler, playing around with stuff and learning from it is serious “work.” I can say the same thing about the play/learning/work as Camille danced at age five, and as Lindsey made mountains of drawings at age ten, and as Mindy created computer programs at age fourteen.

What a gift it is to get paid to learn/play/work, as many people who love their jobs or professions are! We could say that one major goal of homeschooling is the maintenance of learning, playing and working as one integrated whole. 

Journal Entry 7

Thursday, September 24, 1987

We haven't gotten dressed yet. We haven't eaten breakfast, even. But Camille is here, and the three girls are already playing.

This is what play looks like this morning: Leotards. Ballet shoes. The Nut-cracker Suite on the record player. Girls dancing with lovely curving arms, graceful-awkward leaps and turns, gently solemn faces.

They dance like this, with quiet, serious intensity, for a good long while, but eventually the girls submit to hair brushing and gobble up their breakfasts. Lindsey changes her clothes, because Delia and Kiki are coming to take her to Mommy and Me again.

Since Delia is running late, I read a book called The Get-Along Gang to the three girls. Then we get out some felt-tipped markers and paper and start to draw. When Delia arrives, Lindsey happily says good-bye and runs out the door, eager to see Kiki again.

Mindy and Camille say, “We're ready for school!” They inform me that the day's letter is “L,” and they busy themselves with their cubbies and pencils and paper. “Use the chalkboard,” Mindy directs me.

I write a large “L” on the board, and the girls copy it. So easy! They look as solemn as they play school as they did dancing ballet, so I decide to try for some smiles as I begin a guessing game. “Can you figure out what L-word I am drawing?” I begin to draw a lion – and before I even get to the mane (the most lion-y thing about a lion), Camille has guessed it. I write “lion” on the board as I congratulate her.

The girls are smiling now—but they put their serious scholastic faces on as they copy the word “lion” from the board. I'm thinking I'm going to do Round 2 of the guessing game, but they are now drawing on their papers. Mindy copies my lion face and then, she tells me, writes “lion” in “handwriting.” She means cursive writing, but she doesn't know how to do it, so she just makes some enormous loopy squiggles that she says means “lion.”

Camille draws a human figure and then does “cursive” in small, rounded script. She reads her message to me (which is lucky since it, too, is made up of squiggles). It's a pretty long sentence, and I don't catch it entirely—something about a woman from Mars doing strange things. (No connection to a lion, as far as I can tell.) I offer to print her sentence below her handwriting, but she says, “No. I'll read it to people.”

I'm figuring we are done with the letter “L,” but the kids ask for another guessing game L-word. I draw a lemon, and Mindy guesses. Again, both girls copy the word “lemon.” Actually, Mindy draws the lemon first, and then starts in on the word. She soon runs out of room and complains to me. I tell her about hyphens, and she ends up with:

Le-

mo-

n

Drawings and labels done, the girls ask me for “one more.” I draw lips, thinking maybe the kids will say “mouth,” but they chime in with “lips” right away. This time they don't bother to write and print and draw. I can see that they're done as they start fussing with their cubbies again, putting away their pencils and erasers.

I'm thinking the girls are going to run off and play, but Mindy remembers the wooden dinosaur skeleton model I'd said we could put together today. We open the package. All the “bones” are made of flat pieces of wood. The girls are excited and start sorting the bones. They make a pile of rib bones—I tell them the label “rib bones,” and they eagerly use the term—and then they figure out which bones belong in the neck and which in the tail.

Mindy sniffs one of the bones. “It doesn't smell like other dinosaur bones,” she tells me, “because they smell bloody.”

“These are just wooden pretend bones,” I say. “And they're a lot smaller than the real bones.”

Mindy nods.

The model bones are hard to put together, and I can see that I am going to have to sand some of the “bones” for the thing to work. I go off to the garage for some sandpaper, and I am soon busy sanding rough connections.

Mindy and Camille troop off and come back with two rather large books from our bookshelves. They are regular adult books, but the girls tell me that they are their “school books,” and they pretend that they are getting them out of their cubbies (even though the cubbies are a lot smaller than the books). They settle down in their chairs again, and each starts to turn the pages of her book.

“These school books are about dinosaurs,” Camille says. As she turns the pages, she starts to talk a little about dinosaurs, as if she were reading interesting bits to me. But soon she is distracted by the pictures of foxes, crows, and other modern animals, and she loses the dinosaur stuff in favor of narrating the mammals and birds in front of her.

When Camille is done “reading” to me, I ask Mindy about her book. “Is it about dinosaurs?” I ask.

Mindy has the book Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, so she answers, “This is my space book.” Then, as she turns the pages, she says, “Here is Jupiter...The moon...This is the sun...Wow! Space is beautiful!”

Camille agrees. We chat a bit about space, and Mindy says something she'd already mentioned—that she thinks our next subject, after dinosaurs, should be space. I ask Camille what she thinks of the idea, and she agrees again.

The kids are being awfully agreeable today!

The girls ask for time on the computer. They decide to play “Reader Rabbit” with the sorter game, choosing the letter “L.” (Yep, they are still holding onto their chosen letter-of-the-day!) Their game play is really improving, and after each girl has done three games, they seem ready to move on. Before I can suggest a change, Mindy says that she wants to play one more game and then switch to another computer game. She plays, does well, and turns the mouse over to Camille. Camille plays her last game—and has a perfect round! Reader Rabbit appears on the screen and dances in reward.

“I want to make it dance, too,” Mindy decides. So she plays “one more” and ALSO gets a perfect score, and a dance. Big, happy smiles!

The next game they choose is a picture match-up. I assume they will play separately, as they had the sorter game, but although they take turns with the keyboard and mouse, they work together the entire game, and they robustly cheer for themselves, too.

Halfway through the last game, Mindy mentions that she is hungry for snack. I ask if they want to take a break from the game, but she says she will wait for “snack time.”

Snack time, she had previously informed me, is 10:30.

At 10:30, the girls abandon the computer and move back to the wooden-bone-strewn table for their snack. I help them get out bagels, cream cheese, “Quacker Crackers,” and apple juice. They need a little help with the bagels, but they do the spreading and the pouring, and the eating and then the cleaning.

I sand wooden dinosaur bones!

Next, the girls inform me, it's time for recess. They start in with some dance moves again, with a few gymnastics stunts thrown in for good measure. After practicing more leaps, they ask for music. I put Grieg's “Peer Gynt: Morning” on the turntable and begin to dance with them.

“Let's line up,” Camille says, arranging us in the hallway. Then she leads us out of the hallway in a line. I continue to happily dance with them until Mindy says, “Mom, when can you leave? We need private time.”

Oh, well!

I go back to the mess of bones and sand paper and wood dust and begin to clean up. (Obviously, we aren't going to complete the model today!) I can see that the girls are now doing partner dances, each with a large stuffed animal as her partner. Eventually, I spot some wonderful action: as they dance, they throw their partners into the air and then catch them again!

The girls invite me back to recess to read a book to them. (Hmmm...read-aloud time during recess? It's pretty obvious these girls have never been to “real” school.) They choose a book called Messy, by Barbara Bottner, and the story includes a ballet class and dance recital. Camille assigns herself to be various characters in the book, as I read, and Mindy wants to be the main character, the star dancer who is (you guessed it!) messy.

Lindsey usually leaps and cavorts and capers and dances as I read aloud, but with her gone, I'm thinking we are going to have a more relaxing reading session, because Camille and Mindy are usually curl-up-with-the-adult cuddlers. But not today—during this special recess read-aloud, they are in constant motion.

When the book is finished, Mindy gets out the bell and rings it. “Recess is over,” she announces.

I offer to read a dinosaur book in Spanish to them. With the pictures as context, the kids do a great job of translating a lot of the Spanish. But they can't seem to hear what I can see: the similarities of scientific words such as “herbivore” and “herbivoro.”

While we are still enjoying studying the pictures and translating the Spanish words, Delia, Kiki, and Lindsey arrive back home. Camille and Mindy are ready to share some of their dancing with the younger kids. They beg me to put on the dance recital videotape, so I do. Delia and I watch as all the kids dance along. Soon the kids segue into another, related activity: they remove all the sofa cushions and pillows and arrange them on the floor. It's a lumpy, piecemeal gymnastics “mat,” and they do somersaults and gymnastics poses. “Remember to point your toes,” Camille reminds her cousin.

Delia eventually breaks up the dance/gymnastics party, saying that she and Kiki have to leave. And I say, “Let's make lunch.”

We'd already decided to make some special “pretty” food for lunch today, and Mindy had chosen a cucumber/carrot snack she'd seen in a magazine. Which is very surprising, since she hates cucumbers! But the veggies look like flowers, which Mindy loves, and she'd figured out a substitute.... I cut the carrots into “stems” and curling “leaves,” and each girl arranges one on her plate. Round slices of cucumber make Camille's and Lindsey's flower heads, and Camille removes the seeds from her flower center. Mindy gets a round of apple instead of cucumber—and of course I cut the core and seeds out. Although Camille likes her hole-flower-center, with the plate showing through, Mindy doesn't. I suggest a dollop of peanut butter as the center, and she enthusiastically endorses the idea.

To go with the food flowers, there's yogurt, cream cheese on bagels (again), tuna, apple juice, and a pear to share.

After lunch, energized by the addition of Lindsey to the group, the girls want to do more dancing, more gymnastics, more dance recital video, and (Mindy only) more Reader Rabbit on the computer. After seeing her big sister take a break from dancing to play on the computer, Lindsey decides she wants to play on the computer, too, so she does a quickie color-in activity. (I have to help her control the mouse.)

Soon all three girls are on the dance “stage” again. When I check in on their activity, I realize that this time, it's not just dancing. The girls are doing full-on pretend play, with characters and story lines.

I get a lot done in the afternoon!

Finally the girls are tired of playing. Camille asks me to read Messy, again, and the others choose two more books. After a very pleasant reading session, I ask the girls to help me clean up before Roz and Ginnie come for piano play. All the cushions and pillows, the stuffed animals and books, some other assorted toys and markers are restored to their rightful places. I glance at the clock. Hmm, we have some time to kill—but that means time to make another mess. “Let's do chalk on the driveway!” I suggest.

Today the girls draw pictures (rather than write words). Camille draws several vehicles and some stick figures. Mindy draws houses and people. Lindsey draws faces—lots and lots of smiling and grinning faces.

After that, it's Roz-and-Ginnie time, and piano time, and Maria-picking-up-Camille time. Over and out.

Mixing It Up

One of the big benefits of homeschooling is that the kids are in mixed-age groups. Within our household, everyone was a different age. Even adding a few kids of the same age (Camille being a mere day younger than Mindy, for example) didn't dilute the fact that the kids learned a bit more about patience and kindness from being in a mix of ages. And when it comes to kids “showing” what they can do, or trying new stuff, or learning-through-watching—having multiple ages as well as multiple interests and strengths is a big benefit.

Mindy was almost always one of the oldest kids in the group, even in our large homeschool group, because we started the group with our five-year-olds and their younger siblings. But even Mindy was often exposed to older learners, because we adults tend to learn a lot while homeschooling (especially unschooling). Whether we were touring a newspaper publishing plant, doing combustion experiments, or reading a historical novel set in Ancient Egypt, we parents learned along with the kids!

Being Left Out

Three can be a tricky number, when it comes to play groups, because two kids can “leave out” the third. In our teeny unschool group of Mindy, Lindsey, and Camille, the most likely kid to be left out was Lindsey, because she was younger.

I tried to keep an eye out for any mean behavior, including exile from the group, and of course I talked to the girls if I thought they were being mean. However, there are good reasons for kids to sometimes want to be by themselves or to play or talk with just one friend. There are times when kids want to be away from their siblings, as well.

Looking back, I'm glad that the teeny group wasn't just these three kids, all the time. I'm glad that Lindsey got a chance to go off with Delia and Kiki, in the most recent journal post, and that friends would come over and play sometimes. There can be all sorts of groupings in the ebb and flow of people coming and going.

Another thing I notice as I look back at the journal entry is that Camille felt hurt by being excluded but didn't especially notice that she was being excluded on ridiculous grounds (“no five year olds” when Mindy herself was five!). Also, she apparently wasn't that hurt—she just dove into doing her favorite activity with me. Later, Lindsey and Kiki were being left out in the most pointed way, with a sign specifying that people of their particular age weren't allowed, but they didn't even notice or, at least, mind. After all, they had each other. Finally, I noticed that the mean-seeming exclusionary sign was really (though we didn't know it) in preparation of a fun surprise; Mindy and Camille were excluding the younger kids so that they could set up a pretend store that the kids could play with them.