On to Ancient India and thoughts on 1st Grade

I'm so excited! In Story of The World, we've left Mesopotamia and have headed off to Ancient India. Cool-o. L and I read about Mohenjo-daro, the abandoned city of the Indus Valley and I found a great BBC site that is perfect for exploring this mystery. L really enjoyed doing that. I also ordered a bunch of story books & fables about ancient India from the New York Public Library system (this is such a great online resource). We've talked about making a cardboard model of Mohenjo-daro, so tomorrow we'll sit down and draw up a list of all the items we'll need to build it, stuff like cardboard, clay, paint, etc.

This new phase of "unstructuring" the learning is really going well. She still does math and phonics and reading every day, as I said last time. But I've stopped obsessively writing down what we're working on (which isn't good, actually, since if we do this next year I'll have to get back into the habit of keeping track as it will actually be officially required, as opposed to this year which doesn't count, as far as the Board of Ed is concerned). I've also started blowing off stuff when we are running too late or are tired or just bored. More isn't necessarily better, I'm learning. No shit, Sherlock, as I would have said in the 6th grade. Hey, it takes me a while, okay?

And First Grade. Yes, the problem of First Grade. I keep going back and forth, send her, don't send her. I recently had this surreal conversation with a parent rep at one of the local progressive schools that I had applied to as a back up for L, just in case we decided to send her back. This lady called me up about 2 months after I had sent in the form indicating my interest in applying to the school. She told me that the new Board of Ed-mandated application process was that, in August, I needed to go to the nearest Jobs Placement office and apply for a placement in a school in District 1. In August. Keep in mind that we're talking about going to school in September. And these are the same people who couldn't get acceptance letters in the mail by April for September placement last year. Forget even trying to figure out what the connection is between the Board of Ed and the Jobs Placement Office. I think this lady must be on crack. This just can't be right. There is no way in hell that could really be the new procedure, can it? Oh, and the kicker was when she told me not to put that school down a our first choice because there wasn't any room in 1st grade anyway.

I heard that b-s and it swung me back to keeping L home for another year. Why on earth would I want to put her into a system that is just so clearly broken? Especially when we're doing so well at home? But then.....but then...... As soon as I decide that, I just go back to thinking that maybe she's missing out on something. Late at night, when I'm obsessing about these things, I think: Surely it can't be good to just skip out on an experience that is so central to the lives of most of her fellow human beings? Would it rob her of some common vernacular that will doom L to forever being on the outside? and other melodramatic crap like that. And then what do I do about T, the little one? Can I handle two? It wouldn't be fair to keep L at home and send T to school. D is all for it. He thinks it's a great idea to keep them home. I wish I was as confident.

Jackson pollack day

Scaling back the schooling

Three months into this experiment, I'm realizing how comfortable we've gotten doing this. I only get stressed out when I think about what we're going to do for 1st grade. But that's a topic for another evening.

What I want to write about tonight is how, when we started out, I was so nervous and unsure about what teaching L meant that I created an elaborate schedule with many different courses and a strict curriculum. I was terrified of leaving anything out. We were doing science and history and art and math and phonics and literature and handwriting and piano and soccer...oy.

The evolution of our homeschooling (which is still unfolding) has led us to a much less structured place. I still try to come up with plan of action every week, but instead of filling in every slot with the pages or activities we should get through, I've started writing up goals for the week. Then as we accomplish them, I keep track of what we actually did. Anything we didn't get to gets transfered to the following week's goal list. And we've stopped trying to do everything. Now, instead of busy schedules with different classes every day, we do a couple of pages of math & phonics every single week day. She reads to me every day. We memorize a poem every week. This is what I'm focusing on. Reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic.

As for the rest, it's really ad hoc. I carry around a volume of the Great Books Read-Aloud series so that if we get stuck on the subway or have some time to kill I have something to read to her. I'll offer to read some Story of The World to her, or do a science experiment if we're home, and if we do it that's great, but if we don't, I don't sweat it. We take various short term classes: she's going to be taking one on exploring physics through the building of simple machines, also an art class and one on designing doll dresses using geometric shapes. We try to go to piano and soccer classes each week. As often as we can we go to the Metropolitan Museum and take an audio tour (I convinced her to do the Near Eastern collection last week to check out the Babylonian stuff, but she wants to go back to the Egyptian wing this week. Drats!).

This leaves us with more time to arrange play dates and just play things by ear. I'm not chasing a syllabus any more. And it feels great.

Code of The Family

As I was saying before, we've been studying Babylonia and the Sumerians. L found the Code of Hammurabi particularly interesting. So we sat down, and with L dictating & myself as the scribe, we came up with the following Code of The Family, or Life's Rules as L Sees it:

1. No shoes in the house.
2. You always have to try something before saying yuck.
3. If you have a Green Card, it’s means good, if you have a Yellow card it means warning, if you have an Orange Card it means time out, and if you have a Red Card it means no books.
4. No sticking fingers in birdy’s cage
5. Don’t touch computer screens
6. You have to go to bed at 8 o’clock.
7. You can only watch videos once in the morning and once at night.
8. You have to treat T nicely. And T has to treat me nicely.
9. No hitting allowed. If you hit, you get an Orange Card.
10. You have to respect people’s words. If you don’t, you’ll get a Yellow Card.
11. You have to listen to Mommy and Daddy.
12. If you make a big mess in the night, you have to clean it up in the morning or it will get thrown away. So beware.
13. You have to use your fork and spoon and you have to eat most of your food or you won’t get dessert.
14. After dinner you have to clear your place.
15. You always have to say thank you and please.
16. You always have to stay with a grown-up when you go outside.
17. You always have to ask before touching a doggy.
18. You always have to look both ways before crossing a street.
19. You always have to stop at the end of the sidewalk.
20. No drawing on the carpet or furniture.
21. You have to be nice to the webkinz and all of my other dolls.

Car Accident

I hadn't updated the blog in a while because we were busy for a couple of weeks and I kept thinking I'd get to it. But then we got into a terrible car crash last week that really derailed us. Luckily no one was seriously hurt, though our friend's minivan, which D was driving, was totalled and he broke his hand. I was in the front passenger seat and got my ribs badly bruised by the force of my body hitting the seat belt. The kids were scared silly but fine, and another friend who didn't believe in wearing seatbelts in the back seat, went flying but survived by some miracle with just a cut on the nose and some bruises.

The entire right front side of it (where I was sitting) was completely smashed in where we ran into an power line pole.

For the first week, we had daily help from our amazing babysitter. This week, I was on my own as we tried to get back into real life again. So far, every day it seems that another part of my body discovers a new hurt and instead of feeling better, it's just been getting worse. But I've been told that the first week is the worst part and it should start easing off soon. It better, because I'm well on the way to pill-popping junkie land.

Through this, we haven't gotten much work done, obviously. We were going through the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is fabulous. Gory, violent, full of passion. A real page turner.

Hammurabi and the Epic of Gilgamesh

I'm trying to distract L from the Egyptians by moving on to great old Hammurabi and the other Mesopotamians in The Story of The World. Sargon the Great of the Sumerians didn't do it. No shrivelled up dead bodies. The Ancient Jews didn't either. (Though she really loves the Children's Illustrated Jewish Bible -- all mention of smiting and "knowing" removed, which trims it down considerably) Hammurabi's Code, with its talk of cutting off hands and putting to death might just spark her rather gruesomely inclined interest, though.

So in this vein, I've been searching for some material on Babylonia, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. I found an interesting site on creation myths called the Big Myth. It has myths on the beginning of the world from various cultures around the world, narrated with some animation. Them Babylonians were a fierce bunch. They're all about wars and conflict and monsters. The Louvre website also has a pretty amazing display on the Code of Hammurabi.

Have I mentioned how great the New York Public Library system is? The website is incredible: I just requested five books on the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Babylonians. Should be enough blood and gore in that to keep L happy for a couple of weeks.

More Egypt at the Horus Cafe

Okay, I am now officially OVER Ancient Egypt already. But L's interest just isn't flagging. We spent a couple of hours in the library at Tompkins Square Park doing work, and I gave her some time at the end to pick out any books she wanted to borrow. Off she runs to the librarian, and after some whispered consultation, they disappear to some corner. A few minutes later, she's back with an arm full of more books on pyramids, mummies and pharoahs. I don't get it. They are all full of pretty much the same information -- dead kings, natron salt, canopic jars, drag the brain out through the nose and throw it away, yadda yadda yadda. She can't get enough! After the study session, we went to the Horus Cafe (get it? Horus, the son of Osiris and Isis?), and drank some mint tea and ate a grilled swiss cheese sandwich. Don't know how authentic that part of the experience was, but what the hell. She loved it.

The new Singapore Math is a huge improvement. She stills needs to be coerced and bribed to do math, but at least she's not rolling her eyes and heaving great sighs of disgust. We are now doing Number Bonds, which is the precursor to Addition.

Low expectations = poor results

The other day, I ordered some Singapore Math books because L was getting really bored by the math we were doing. We've been using Progress in Mathematics, a curriculum that's gotten some great reviews, but it just wasn't going anywhere. There was a lot of repetition, but there didn't seem to be any real progression in the way the facts were presented, in terms of facts building on other facts. There wasn't much depth, either. The stuff was really really dumb. Okay, okay. I know what you're thinking. It's KINDERGARTEN.

Yes, that's true. It's just kindergarten, and I'm not trying to push my child into being a prodigy or anything like that. But my philosophy is, if we have to spend any time on it at all, shouldn't it at least be teaching her something? And if she's not learning from it, shouldn't we be doing something else, like playing in the park? Or reading a book?

I went to the last pages of the book, where they have a cumulative review of what's been learnt through the year. I figured that that would give me the best view of what she should have been taught. First of all, they have a section on using a calculator. To do 2 + 2 + 2 = 6. That's just wrong. Kids just learning the concept of addition shouldn't be encouraged to get a machine to do the thinking for them. Secondly, this was what the cumulative questions were: A drawing of a steaming mug of coffee, and the choice of "hot" and "cold", the question being "Choose the temperature." Another item had 2 pictures, one of a woman cutting a watermelon and another of her cutting a banana. The question was "Which activity takes less time?". There was only one question that involved any calculating: 6 cents - 3 cents = ? cents (accompanied by a picture of six pennies with 3 crossed out.)

Turning to the Singapore Math books (which is the curriculum mandated by the Singapore goverment and gaining popularity over here), I flipped to the end of the books and saw that the kids were doing things like 3 + 4 = ? and simple fractions and word problems like"

I have $10.
I bought an ice-cream for $2.
I bought a chocolate bar for $2.
How much money do I have now?

In other words, real math.

I'm not advocating that we should be cramming our kids' brains with math, or claiming that knowing or not knowing fractions by the age of 5 is indicative of the way the rest of their lives are going to play out. Like I said before, I just feel that if we're going to be spending the time on any of this stuff, at least make it meaningful. Let them really learn something, rather than have the subject matter dumbed down to the level that no one can get an answer wrong and, heaven forbid, have their self-esteem hurt. We expect so little of our kids!

Another reason to homeschool

In one of the classes we've been taking, there is a little boy who makes me think, "Thank god this kid's being homeschooled." Because if he were in a regular classroom, he'd be the Bad Seed and put on drugs.

This boy, who is about L's age, I'd guess, couldn't sit still, blurted out answers to every question without raising his hand, made loud digressionary comments and jumped out of his chair every once in a while to run and look at something else. The teacher, to her credit, handled it really well, being firm but rewarding him when he did remember to raise his hand by recognizing his effort with a thank you.

I imagine that being taught at home gives him the focused attention he needs, allows the instruction to be tailored to work around whatever issues it is that he has, and saves him from the day-in-day-out wearing down of the spirit that would come with being treated as the class problem child. And frankly, having him all day in a classroom would probably be enormously draining for the teacher and incredibly distracting to the other kids. I don't know if this is why the mother chose to homeschool, but I applaud her decision. Christ, it must be hard, though.

Being frogs at Zoo School

This picture (again, terrible) is of the 2nd Central Park Zoo class. We almost didn't make it because it was such a crappy day and I was still under the weather with this stupid stomach bug I haven't been able to shake. But since it's only once a month, I felt obligated to go and managed to drag L out into the rain.

It was a great class. The zoo keeper had a large marine toad named Martha that she let the kids touch which was very exciting (it was huge!!! And it peed in her hand, which thrilled the kids even more). She talked about the concept of metamorphoses, going through the various stages of a frog's life to illustrate, and had the kids curled up and twitching as frog eggs, then wiggling on the carpet as tadpoles, and on up till they were hopping madly around the room. Very funny. Then they learned all about different kinds of habitats and what's necessary for life (food, water, shelter, space), and went to the penguin exhibit to look at their habitat. It was the first time I'd ever been in there where there wasn't anyone else but our small group. It was dark and quiet, and the children got to run back and forth in front of the long glass windows, chasing the penguins as they flashed through the water.

After the class, L wanted to take another walk through the rain forest exhibit. She remembered the names of more of the birds than I did (which isn't saying much since I can barely remember the names of my kids these days), and we happily followed the Victoria Crown Pigeon around for a while before heading home.

Bzzzz the hornet robot

This is a robot that L made in Robotics class today. It moves on six little buggy legs, has flashing red eyes and

Homeschool kids

Today was homeschool soccer day at Pier 40, over on the far west side. It's only our 2nd time there, but L barrelled in like she was born on astroturf. It helps that one of her favorite boys, Lu. from nursery school, is also there. They were tumbling around, dribbling soccer balls around, over, through the little traffic cones. As we were leaving, L said, very satisfied, "I like the soccer teacher. I don't know his name, but I like him." Coach Manny, for the record.

One thing I've noticed is that homeschool kids play differently than public-school kids. At least as far as I can tell from my limited experience. In the school playgrounds, there was always a big group of boys roughhousing, doing "boy" stuff and a big group of girls chasing each other and doing "girl" stuff. And these groups are further divided by ethnicity. And age. Very rarely do these groups interact.

The homeschool kids seem more fluid. Boys and girls. Black and white (I haven't met Asian homeschoolers yet, though I've heard rumours they exist). Age groups. The kids also seem much more at ease with adults. They actually initiate conversations! The boys are still rough and tumble, and the girls still play with dolls, but the groups seem to touch each other more frequently. It's kind of cool.

Robots and Mummies

Sorry, I've been offline for a few days as we move stuff into our new weekend place in New Paltz. Another point on the homeschooling side of the ledger: having the flexibility to leave the city as is convenient for us, rather than having to wait for the weekend or the school day is over, is really great.

As far as school goes, the past week has been sort of hit-and-miss. L had to take the New York City Gifted and Talented test on Monday. This was just in case we wanted to send her back to her school for first grade and also to maybe send her to one of the city G&T programs should she qualify (This is just to give us more options for next year). To do it, her school re-enrolled her for the day, which was really really great of them. Tuesday we made up for it by zooming through three times as many pages of math as normal, totally at L's own prompting. We also went to the library and read. Wednesday I went on a tour of the British International School, a new private school on the East River near the UN International School. I was very impressed, but don't think we'll be able to afford it.

After the tour, L and I went to the Met to see the Egyptian wing. Wow. It really was amazing to see how much L got out of the exhibits having spent the past 2 weeks reading about Egypt and mummies. We borrowed an audio guide and wandered around, looking at everything. She pointed things out: "Look, the white crown! The red crown! The double crown of Egypt!" She knew about the Upper and Lower Egypts, the pharoahs, King Narmer (who unified the two Egypts). We tried to decipher heiroglyphics. Seeing real sarcophaguses (sarcophagi?) and mummies made all the stuff we'd been reading about come to life. In fact, we spent so much time looking at the details that we didn't have time to finish and ended going back today and spending another 2 hours.

Today, L had her first basic robotics class. We unfortunately got stuck on a local bus for 1 hour and 20 minutes (!) going uptown and ended up being so late for it that we missed the robotics talk and only had 20 minutes to put the robot kit together. But it was still pretty cool. There were about 8 kids, ranging in age from 8 down to 5. The teacher provided the kits and screwdrivers and all she needed to do piece it together -- put the motor and circuit board into a shell, then connect all the wires the right way. The robot has a light sensor, which we talked about being like its eye, and when a light was shined on it, it beeped and moved. If you covered it or turned off the light, it stopped. So that was cool, but we'll try to make it on time next week. No more buses to 88th Street!

The Philosophies: Unschooling

There are a bunch of different philosophies regarding homeschooling. Obviously. Or as L has taken to saying (to my chagrin), "Duh." (A lovely little gift from a friend's school class.) I would describe what we're doing as eclectic, which really means in our case, "We haven't got the faintest idea." But really, the options are so varied, and in some cases so contradictory, that it's difficult to decide which direction to go in.

So I'm going to try writing about some of these different ideas, more for my own edification, really, over the next weeks. I'll start with one I've been reading a lot about recently.

Unschooling is a lovely idea. One of its major proponents, John Holt, was a school teacher-turned-educational-reformist who eventually decided that the educational system was unreformable. He decided that schooling as we define it was totally unnecessary, and that children could teach themselves and what parents should do is act as guides and facilitators, helping kids get the information they need to answer the questions they naturally have. Of course, it's a lot more complicated that and someone who is into unschooling would probably be horrified at my thumbnail, so check out the link above if you want more information on this. I totally am infatuated with this idea. I wish I could do it. But I just can't. I guess I don't have the faith that if, totally left to her own inititative, L is going to want to learn to read rather than have me read to her. Or that she's going to be interested in Algebra. Or want to learn to write in a way that's legible to other people. But maybe I just don't get it.

I've been reading this book, "And The Skylark Sings With Me", about a real life unschooling family where the daughters get obsessed with things like astronomy (and learn trigonometry) and wild life studies (and learn about genetics and probability theories), and opera, etc. etc. The kids sound amazing, yes they do, but so far away from my L & T, and me. Do I want to spend 2 hours in the supermarket giving a seminar on pesticides on produce and the different forms of credit available for payment and the meaning of the nutritional information on the packages? Because that's what this dad's been doing for his daughters, at the ages of something like 7 or 8. No wonder they're prodigies! I'm way too lazy to do that. And frankly, I think if I followed L's interests at the moment, we'd be spending a lot of time learning about what Dora does. Because this is what I don't get. What if your kid isn't interested in much? Not every kid is excited by classical music and the genetics of cross breeding corn snakes and telescopes, although I wish mine were.

Maybe I should do an experiment and just not do ANY schooling for the next month and just ask L every morning what she wants to do. I wonder what we'd end up doing? Maybe I'm underestimating my child. It's sort of like Communism, though. I suspect that the philosophy is much more appealing than the practice.

Bad Mothers

I think almost every single parent has experienced having someone judge their parenting and finding them lacking. It starts with the raised eyebrows and askance looks when you're in your third trimester and sipping the weekly glass of wine that your doctor prescribed. Or the little old ladies who scold you for walking too fast while holding your baby because you might "bounce her head off." The worst is, of course, when you actually aren't being that great a parent and someone catches you at it.

I had one of those experiences and I'm still boiling about it. I'm mad because the lady was in the right to say something, but at the same time so damn wrong. I was having a rough time with the kids, it was 5 pm, I didn't have the stroller for T, we were in Chinatown, I was carrying two bags, trying to drag two nudgy kids through one of those tight little revolving door turnstiles. Basically a horror scene. I finally burst through the entrance, the bags were falling everywhere, and for a second I got distracted trying to gather my wits along with all my crap. Suddenly, a woman behind me yelled--not sounding particularly concerned but in this nasty exasperated tone: "Lady, watch your kid." I turned around, and of course T was running for the platform. I managed to hook his collar while he was still a good 6 or 8 feet from the edge, but it was still scary and embarrassing. While I was wrangling him (and trying to keep an eye on L), the woman said something like,"You better do a better job watching those kids." I was so shaken and upset by then I just couldn't let this pass. I told her she didn't have to talk to me like that.

"I wouldn't need to say anything if you were a better mother," she snapped back.

I lost it. I told her to mind her own effing business (and yes, I think I actually used the term "effing" because I was trying so hard not to swear in front of the kids, not that I didn't slip in the next 5 sentences), and basically it went downhill from there. I couldn't believe it! I was literally having a screaming match with a strange woman in the Canal Street subway station in front of my two kids and dozens of strangers. It ended with me telling her, as I walked away, to raise her own fucking kids and her shouting at my back that she'd do a better job than I was doing.

The thing is, I wanted to be grateful to her for pointing out that T was in danger. I would have been grateful if she hadn't posed the whole thing as evidence of my bad mothering. I'm not a perfect mother. Hell, I'm not always even a good one. But I'm trying my best, which is all any of us can hope for. I was going to go on with some trite observation about making judgements, "walk a mile in someone else's shoes", blah blah, but you all know about that. We all know it, but there are times when it gets rubbed in your face. So stop pointing fingers at Britney, y'all. You never know when it's going to be you hiding in that bathroom waiting for the stormtroopers to break down the door.

Happy MLK Jr. Day!

We took the day off with all the other schoolers for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We've been reading some books about his life, and did a simple project this morning, cutting out hand shapes and writing in the names of all the people we love and connecting them into a wreath. A sort of loving and helping motif thing. But honestly, I don't think I've done much of a job getting L to understand the civil rights movement or racism. When I asked her what she remembered about MLK from our reading, she said that long ago, white people didn't like Asians. Close, I guess.

I've just read an interesting essay by a professor who is homeschooling his kids, in which he details why he's doing it, which I can really relate to.

Our Average Day

A lot of people have been asking me what our average day is like now. We haven't been doing this long, but this is what's going on right now:

Mondays, I work at the Sol Goldman Y in the morning and L goes to cooking class. (D takes T to nursery on Mondays and Wednesdays). I pick her up around lunchtime, and we go and eat somewhere together. Starting this week, a friend of L's will then be joining us at 12 to do the Story of the World reading and project for the week. At 3, I drop L off at afterschool and then go to the Writers Room to work till 5:30, when I pick L and T up from their various programs. We try to fit in at least a couple of pages of math or penmanship sometime during the day as well. At bedtime, L reads me an easy reader book, or a page from something harder. We do that every night.

Tuesdays, we focus more on work. We drop T off at nursery, and then go to a cafe for breakfast and school. We aim to do 4 pages of math, and 2 letters from her penmanship workbook. We also go to the library and read, and then L can borrow a DVD and any books she wants, while I look for books that are linked to whatever we're studying in Story of the World (right now, Egypt and mummies). At 3, I drop L off and go work.

Wednesdays is another fun day. L & I sleep in while D takes T to school. Then we go to
Homeschool Soccer class at Pier 40. For the next couple of months, we'll also go to the Central Park Zoo one Wednesday a month for zoo class. We pick T up at nursery at 3, then I do a crafts project at home with L, T and her best friend A. I try to fit in some math during the day and we do reading at night.

We drop T off at school in the morning on Thursdays. Starting next week, L will be doing a six-week robotics class in the morning uptown with a bunch of other homeschool kids. They'll be using Lego Simple Machines to make a basic robots each week. The rest of the day will be spent on doing the usual -- math, penmanship, reading. From 3 to 5:30, L is at afterschool and I get to spend time with T, who really is getting the short end of the stick when it comes to attention.

Friday is my day off. Our babysitter comes and takes L & T while I shop for groceries, go to appointments and try to fit in some work. She does a couple of pages of math with L.

Weekends, D does a chapter out of the Real-Science-4-Kids chemistry book with L. This is a really great science curriculum for little kids, written very simply but without it being patronizing or dull. There are fun experiments that walk kindergarteners through the process of scientific inquiry: observation, developing a theory, then testing. Yes, it is from a Christian publishing house but there is no prosletyzing and definitely no mention of creation or intelligent design at this level. Just atoms and molecules.

On Sunday night, I try to do a basic goal for the week, how many pages of math, reading, etc., I would like to get done and that's the bone structure of the week's work. Obviously, this is all sort of idealized. There are days when we just can't get it together to do the program, and then we let it go. Those times are balanced by days when L can't get enough of whatever we're working on and we zoom ahead. And we have the luxury of doing some work on the weekends or holidays if I feel we're way too far behind. I'm aiming to have all the work (in terms of the textbooks we've bought) done by the end of June.

Sounds simple, huh?

Mummies and Egypt

As I've mentioned before, one of the things I'm doing with L is a history of the world, starting with the Fertile Crescent and ancient Egyptians, using the textbook Story of the World. The chapter we're on is about Lower Egypt and Upper Egypt and how they were unified by the White Crown king Narmer. L wanted to make the Red Crown, so we made a very lame version out of red construction paper. We wanted to make the coil but didn't have a pipe cleaner or anything else that would hold its shape, so ended up skipping that. Maybe later I'll try again.

We also read about heiroglyphics and cuneiform. The project that I want to do next week is to get some clay and make a Sumerian clay tablet. I also went to the library and got about 8 books about Egypt and mummies. L is really into mummies and pored over the pictures. I wonder if this is too intense for her, because it led to a conversation about how bodies rot and whether she would rot when she died. I answered, "Yes, but rotting is a way for your body to become dirt and give your energy and nutrients to the earth and then become a part of trees and flowers and grass." I'm rather proud of that off the cuff response, because it seemed to satisfy her. L did stipulate that when she was dead she didn't want to be squished into a cemetery with lots of other dead bodies. She wanted to be buried in the woods where it was quiet and peaceful. It's fascinating the directions these conversations take.

We had a fairly intense school day today as we had pretty much skipped everything yesterday. So after the math and penmanship and reading and history, L and I just hung out for a bit to unwind and then I took her to afterschool where she got to play with her friends. Then I had T for the rest of the afternoon and I really tried to spend some focussed time on him, because I know he's getting so much less attention from me now that L is with me all day. I feel pretty guilty about that, but I don't know how to balance that other than keep him home too, and that's just not an option at the moment. Not till I really feel like I know what I'm doing.

Red crown of Egypt

Zoo School

This not too great photo is of L's first of three classes at the Central Park Zoo. It was kids only, so I don't know exactly what they did, but when she came out of it, L told me that she had petted a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach. "It was kind of cute," was the comment. Also that there was a snake who didn't like to be petted backwards, because "that's like having his hair brushed backwards. Snakes don't like that."

After the class, the kids were given a set of photos and ushered into the Rainforest exhibit for a scavenger hunt. We found Victoria Crown pigeons, Cotton Top tamarins, poison frogs, fruit bats, and many other cool birds and animals. Oh yeah, the mouse deer was really cute. Even though I thought he was more like a rat deer.

She must have learned something, because when I showed her a map of the different layers in a rainforest, she rolled her eyes and said, in her most bored, teenaged voice, "I already know all that, mom." Then she rolled off: "The emergent layer, the canopy, the understory and the forest floor." Brightening up, she added, "That's where the cockroaches live."