Mother's Day and MMD

It shouldn't be that hard to provide an ideal education to three kids, should it? The federal government, for example, has been on a quest to figure out the one ideal education that will work for all kids everywhere. So finding something that works for three should be a piece of cake, right? Right?

Hold on. I am not hearing the chorus of homeschooling mothers of three saying that it is no trick at all to meet the educational needs of three children. Certainly mothers of two have no trouble.

I'm getting silence here.

I suspect that even mothers of one find that what their child needs changes over time and what worked once suddenly doesn't.

So I have been reading Mel Levine's A Mind at a Time. Everyone's got a different mind, he says, with its own unique strengths and weaknesses. Mel Levine explains cognitive processes and breaks them down into component parts. Someone who has attention issues, he says, may have them for a variety of reasons. It could be a difficulty filtering distracting input. Or it could be a difficulty sustaining mental effort. The ways you would cope with those two problems would be very different: the first might call for a quiet, uncluttered place to work, the latter for work in short bursts, or keeping a diary to try to discover if there are patterns to when mental energy is high and when it is low. I have found the book very absorbing and informative.

Take this:

Does your child keep losing gloves, pens, sweaters, homework assignments, and lunch money? Does he forget to take the field trip permission slip to school? Are all the tattered pages falling out of his bulging loose-leaf binder? Does he have trouble finding a place to write his book report because of the heaps of socks and underwear occupying his desktop? Does he forget to remove one of his socks when he takes a bath? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then your son or daughter may be suffering from a material management dysfunction.

I read this not merely nodding my head, but with gooseflesh. It was downright uncanny. This perfectly describes...me. Right down to wearing a sock into the bath. I did that once. And then a few times more because I thought it was so funny the first time.

Mel Levine says he shares this dysfunction. "We materially disorganized martyrs spend much of each day in vain quests for lost objects." Where the heck are my keys anyway? And the library books? I am now a persona non grata at all library systems within a 25 mile radius of our home.

When I was a kid I had the messiest room in town bar none. Whenever my brother's room was messy my dad would ask if I'd helped him decorate.

I can't say that this is all owing to a glitch in the spatial ordering system of my brain. Probably part of it has to do with a deep-seated hatred of tidying. When my mother would tell me to clean my room I would throw myself on my bed and sob and fervently wish with all my heart that my room would clean itself and be again and again disappointed by the failure of magic. I tried it again yesterday and dammit, no luck.

I remember many years ago now I was listening to a Rick Roderick lecture on tape and he said that philosophy is like housework, you have to do it every day. And I thought please, no, I have no idea what that means, but tell me I'm not supposed to do housework every day.

I cope with this now by 1) having a housecleaner and 2) having a garage. A new friend once made my week by looking in my garage and saying, "Ha! I see you are not a perfect housekeeper!" It was the first time that anyone had ever, even for a moment, made that mistake.

But now I wonder if part of my hatred of cleaning isn't my underlying material management dysfunction. I just love how absurd that sounds, by the way. As I was telling a friend about my MMD I forgot the elaborate game of Greta's creation that she had pressed into my hands and let fall all its minuscule paper pieces. There goes my MMD acting up!

But back to the cleaning. When the kids come to me and say, "Where does this go?" I think, how should I know? Where do things go? I wonder where all my lost things have gone.  Is that where they are meant to be?  Are they enjoying a better life with someone who never forgets where they are?  So I say, "Just stick it over there." I end up, when the house needs to be tidy, sweeping whole tablesworth of stuff into crates and then shoving the crate in the closet or the garage.

I sometimes imagine a lone counting bear in one of those crates crying out, "Why have I been cruelly separated from my kin and consigned to this half life of disuse in a crate in the garage with one lego, one unifix cube, one wood block, one game token, one timer, one glo bone, one knex, one puzzle piece, two playing cards and a broken baby toy as my companions?"

My house is Dorian Grey and the garages and closets are its true portraits. It might look tidy, but scratch the surface and you will find instead of puzzle pieces and game pieces united in their native boxes, a useless diaspora of them evenly spread throughout.

Or that would have been the case up to a couple weeks ago.

You see, my mom had been visiting. And Clem wanted a vivarium. So I set her the task of getting rid of half her stuff. My mom dug into it with us. But that issue I was talking about, the random crates, reared its ugly head. We had collected dispirited clusters of counting bears and puzzle pieces still longing for the rest of their kin. The project spread to every room and closet in the house.   I remember the moment when we found an overlooked closet and I shouted Eureka!  The widgets!  We had four or five of them but up to then the great mass of their kin had been lost.

I call it the Great Sort. I should mention that my powerhouse mom was recovering from surgery.

Here are some before and after pics.  This is the sorting table. Look at it!  I could never have tackled this without help.  Dinosaur, game piece, parsley growing kit, bath toy, tops....

Now imagine an entire dining and living room filled with this chaos.

And here we have the reunited pieces.  Ah, order. Hello wasabi, what are you doing here?

A herd of horses....

Playmobil people united with their accessories, but

not necessarily their hair.

Glo bonz....and a sneaky stuffed rooster!  This was supposed to be an "after" shot!

Dragons.

A closet with two crates containing size 6-7 clothes and size 13 shoes.

More than 12 crates of sorted toys are in the garage awaiting donation.  And several more crates of clothes.  I couldn't bear to throw away toys missing parts knowing that one day I would find that missing arm or spring and then I'd regret that I'd consigned a hunk of plastic to the dump needlessly.

And here is the best part--we assigned places to the things we kept!  I no longer need to treat "where does this go?" as a mind-boggling existential question.

It was in this context that I opened A Mind at a Time and read this:

There's hope; parents can help a child organize a home office with labeled drawers, shelves and boxes. Sometimes parents need to take over entirely the chore of keeping a kid's workspace neat so he can acquire a taste for material order.

I feel so lucky to have a mom who is still willing to help me out with the chores that are overwhelming.  I have actually, over the years, acquired a taste for material order, without acquiring the skills to bring it about.  I may be 41 but when it comes to organizing I am still that kid sobbing into my pillow and wishing for magic.  This time my wish came true.  And thanks to my mom I now I have a whole lot less material to manage. 

Ok, now that the housework is done for good I can get back to finding that ideal education for my three kids.




P.S.  This is for Laura...hope that even if we can't keep all those damned playmobil people and their accessories together for long we can at least keep track of the car keys.

Once Upon Philadelphia

Our first day in Philadelphia did not wow the kids. We rolled in later than I had hoped, with not much of a plan. Everything was going to be closing soon.

So we did the closest thing: the Liberty Bell.

The kids were thrilled and moved by this symbol of freedom in America.

Mm hmm. Sure they were.

Being pesky little inquisitive things they kept asking why it was a symbol of liberty. The entire brand spanking new hall the bell is in is an elaborate self-justification, and yet even I came away thinking the bell story was cracked.

It was brought to Philadelphia in 1752 long before revolution was contemplated.

It is thought that it was rung (though no one knows for sure), along with all the other bells in Philadelphia, on July 8 when the Declaration of Independence was first read publicly.

Sure, it does say:
Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.

But really, its chief claim to being a symbol of liberty is that it has been used as a symbol of liberty. The only thing I like about the whole liberty bell thing is the crack.

The idea that freedom is fragile and we have to work to preserve it. The metaphor gets a little stretched here because really, wouldn't it have been better to just make the thing right in the first place?

Unimpressed, we hurried on to see Ben Franklin's house.
It is gone.

The white steel frame shows where the house stood.
Engraved stone circles mark his ice pit.

And privy pit.

Ok, I thought these were cool.

No one had complaints about dinner at City Tavern--one of those places where they serve you period food in period dress.

Ok, my mom was not thrilled with her pewter water cup.

But she was fine with her George Washington recipe porter.

Despite the good dinner, enthusiasm was low for our second day in Philadelphia. Clementine professed outright hatred for Philadelphia.

My mom had hopped a plane early in the morning so I'd be on my own with the dragging feet.
But there were too many things I wanted to see to cancel and go to the beach.

So we went. First stop, the Visitor's Center. You have to get there early to get tickets for Constitution Hall. We got there at 9:30am and got tickets for 1:30pm.

Then we dragged along to Ben Franklin's grave site. They were a bit interested in the graves.

Benjamin and Deborah Franklin's

As was I.

Imagine living to 74 and having 11 of your children die before you. That is a real nostalgia-for-colonial-days stopper.

But it was at Betsy Ross's house that the magic that brought the past to life really began.

Betsy was sitting out front, a stone's throw from her grave site. She was telling the kids about how she showed General Washington how easy it was to make the 5-pointed stars she thought would look good on the American flag. He'd had six-pointed stars in mind for the flag.

But with a few folds and one snip she made a perfect 5-pointed star.
Try it yourself. Betsy cut and handed out paper stars to all the children who wanted one. Greta wowed her with her Williamsburg curtsy and was rewarded with a small piece of Betsy's knitting that we hope to work into our quilt.

Inside Betsy's house we took the audio tour. Greta kept disappearing. I'd ask her to wait and she'd shout (because of the headphones), "But it told me to go down the stairs!"

Did you know Betsy Ross, when her upholstery business was suffering during the war, made musketballs in her basement?

But it was back out in the courtyard that we discovered something that would send us gleefully running back and forth across town all day.

A circular bench and this sign mark magic.
You just sit down and a fabulous actor tells you a story.
Don't get too comfortable because you'll be joining in.

You might steal stones from a construction site with Ben Franklin to construct a wharf at your favorite fishing pond.

Or you might be British navymen firing cannonballs at Captain Barry's ship (see the legs of his statue in the background). In that case you'll have to shout, "God save the king. KABOOM!"

Each kid gets a Betsy Ross flag. There are 13 story booths scattered around historic Philadelphia at various sights and monuments. After each story you get a foil star to put on your flag.

If you visit all 13 you get a free ice cream and carousel ride.
We only made it to ten.

But who cares? The real prize was the stories themselves, so well told, that instead of dragging feet, we had running feet all day.

They ran gleefully, knowing at the end there'd be a familiar circular bench waiting to rest on and a wonderful story to hear and participate in. These stories carried us to all the major sights and then helped us travel back in time to relive snippets of the lives of Patriots, Pirates, Heroes and Spies.

No Desk!

I've been the butt of a running joke on this trip. When we were preparing for the trip the kids and I watched a history channel series on the American Revolution loaned to us by my friend at West Vista Urban Farm. In one dramatic reenactment Thomas Jefferson is in Philadelphia, seated at a wooden desk, writing the Declaration of Independence. The voiceover says, In this room Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence.

"This is so exciting!" I say to the kids. "When we are in Philadelphia we might see that!"

"What?" Evelyn says, "The Declaration of Independence?"

"Well, no," I say, "That is in DC. I meant the desk."

"Ooooh! The desk! The desk!" Evelyn says. She then goes on to say things like, oh, maybe we'll see the pants he was wearing when he sat at the desk!

So imagine my surprise when, in perusing a DC visitor's guide, I discover that Thomas Jefferson's desk is in fact on display in DC in the Museum of American History. I was ready to go right away.

But there was the Museum of Natural History to visit, and an exhibit on the Unsettlement of the Contintent, about the settlement of Jamestown, Santa Fe and Quebec. Having just visited Jamestown I thought it would be fascinating to see the very different histories of the settlement of Santa Fe and Quebec. (It was.) And there were tours of the Library of Congress and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to make and monuments to see.

It didn't help that whenever anyone mentioned the desk Greta would lie down on the floor and kick and scream "No desk!" This trip has not been tailor made for a 4 year old.

So on our last day in DC we finally made it to the American Presidency exhibit of the Museum of American History. And there it was, in the center of the room, in glass.

The desk.

It looked nothing like the one in the dramatic reenactment. It was a small, portable desk of Jefferson's own design. I was snapping away, trying to hold still enough to get photos without flash in the dim light.

And Mike and Evelyn start cracking up.

They had been reading. The desk is flanked by two quotations. Jefferson, when he gave the desk to his granddaughter and her husband, attached this note inside the desk:

Politics as well as religion has its superstitions. These, gaining strength with time, may, one day, give imaginary value to this relic, for its great association with the birth of the Great Charter of our Independence.

And to his granddaughter, Eleanora Randolph Coolidge, he wrote in a letter:

Mr. Coolidge must do me the favor of accepting this. Its imaginary value will increase with years and if he lives to my age, or another half-century, he may see it carried in the procession of our nation's birthday, as the relics of the saints are in those of the Church.

What I did not suffer after having been made fun of by Jefferson himself. Evelyn said, "Can you see it? The desk has an aura of power and magic!" For the rest of the American Presidency exhibit Evelyn ran to me with, "Oooh! The wedge that Lincoln used to split wood!" and "Look! Look! Warren Harding's silk pajamas! He slept in those pajamas!"

The great irony is that after being so excited merely by the desk that the Great Charter of our Independence was written on I did not make it to see the charter itself. We kept passing the National Archives and deciding not to wait in the 45 minute line. We planned to go the last day after school groups had left for the day, but we arrived moments too late. It was closed. We did not see either the Declaration of Independence or The Constitution in person.

However, I, ahem, am no longer one to give too much importance to a relic. It is not the paper (or the desk) they are written on, but the words that matter.

Wild Magic

Someone found my blog by googling psilocybin. I'm scratching my head about it because I talk a lot about magic and about mushrooms, but I have never (up to now) talked about magic mushrooms.


On a recent camping trip the girls got to explore a wide area on their own. I love to see their growing independence. One morning when most of the adults were still asleep a group of kids walked up a mountain to see the sun rise.

They came down happy, covered in dew, having seen the fog nestled in valleys and ready for breakfast.

They enjoyed unhurried time with friends.

Back at home we've been trying to make some magic in our garden.
We planted sunflower and morning glory seeds in a big oval to make a sunflower house and have been faithfully watering it every day, but I think the birds got most of the sunflower seeds. See the ratio below: one sunflower per 10 morning glories!

While packing for our camping trip I came across a bag of xylophone tubes and keys. I had planned to make a kinetic sculpture with them one day. But a few branches lying about suggested a frame. Evelyn and I built one and found a nice spot for the xylophone.

We nailed the xylophone keys to the fence.

Clementine's sculpture inspired by Andy Goldsworthy graced the garden for a short time before Greta, tempted by the cracking clay around the stones, crumbled and peeled it. It was meant to be ephemeral, but not quite that ephemeral!

I'd like the garden to be a place with a surprise around every corner. These are smaller, more intimate surprises than fog in the valley or the sun peeking over the far mountain, but I hope they will give the sense of place there to explore.

The Magic Wood

Hikes at Sunol Regional Wilderness are always magical. But this time the kids discovered something outside the ordinary magic of scorpions and darkling beetles: A wizard tree!

A hollow tree trunk beckoned from the path. We have passed by many times without noticing it. The girls' friends wanted to investigate, so down they went through the stinging nettles and miner's lettuce and lurking poison oak.

Inside the tree was a box.

Inside the box was a booklet and a stamp.

This is a wizard tree the booklet said. And inside it those who had looked in the tree and found the box had written their names and the date they passed by. The oldest was from 2005. Ev's friend Sasha recorded our names and the dates.

We all ran on toward the cave rocks, even more under the spell of the woods than usual.

Soup, Salad, Sorbet Behind the Scenes

The Menu:
Butternut Squash Soup
Green Leaf and Cucumber Salad with Meyer Lemon Vinaigrette
Grapefruit and Honey Sorbet

J.G. Wilder asked me to describe how we do our cooking thing.

This project started out as a way to romance the kids into trying new food. But the best part about it is how nice it has been to cook with the kids. To see them enjoying and taking pride in their creations.

The witching hour when the kids are tired and hungry and run around fighting while I try to make dinner is largely a distant memory. We work together to put the meal on the table. Nibbling at the veggies as we chop takes the edge off our hunger.

Here's a list of what we do. We don't do all of these things all the time, in fact, some we have never yet done. But as many of these as make sense, we do.

1. Look through cookbooks together to figure out what we want to cook, keeping in mind what is in season. I look for dishes I think we could "bridge" to.
2. Make shopping lists together.
3. Shop together. The kids have their own lists and run off to find all the items on their lists.
4. They carry in all the groceries. :)
5. We figure out together what order to make everything, or who makes what.
6. They peel and chop, eating the raw veggies and fruits as they work.
7. They cook and stir and taste for seasoning.
8. They set the table, light candles if they want them.
9. They set out condiments, salt, pepper. We have a salt tray and fancy salts to sprinkle. Greta likes the pink salt.
10. We sit down all together and eat!
11. I don't force them to eat anything. I woo. I charm. But I don't cajole or force (at least, I really try not to).

Here is how we prepared this week's Soup, Salad and Sorbet.

I was at the store and thinking I had not talked to the kids about what kinds of soup, salad and sorbet they wanted to make. I decided to buy some butternut squash and a chicken and give them the choice of butternut squash soup or chicken soup. Butternut squash soup seemed reachable to me as Clem once had a passion for sweet potatoes and loves pumpkin pie, and Ev loves soup.

Greta had said that she wanted strawberry sorbet, so I picked up several baskets of strawberries.

I chose a head of green leaf lettuce and two cucumbers figuring that a salad lies mostly in the dressing, and that all of them eat plain raw cucumber.

We took the strawberries to a history fair, and I baked the chicken for dinner one night. So much for the chicken soup and strawberry sorbet, and for the kids' opportunity to choose!

I peeled one butternut squash. Clem cubed it, pausing to be Captain Squash. I boiled it in stock.

Meanwhile Clem had the idea of toasting the seeds. Why not? I thought garnishing the soup with toasted seeds would be a great way to entice Clem and Greta to try the soup.

I was too sick to finish making the soup in the evening and we bought a chicken pot pie for dinner.

Clem and Greta ate all the toasted seeds.

The next day I woke up feeling ok and pureed the squash and returned it to the pot.

I felt terrible all day but just before Mike got home from hiking with the kids I popped enough advil and tylenol to get my fever under control and thought it was time to have that soup, salad and sorbet. I cut open the second butternut squash and toasted the meager few seeds it contained.

Greta thought the two halves of the squash looked like "babies wrapped in blankets". She loved and rocked her sweaty babies.

Evelyn picked a meyer lemon from our tiny tree and zested and juiced it.

I peeled a cucumber and Clem sliced it. Mike washed the lettuce and Clem tore it into bite-sized pieces.

Clem and Evelyn finished making their own dressings. Ev has not found a dressing she likes and was trying to make one without vinegar. Clem enjoyed mixing seasoned rice wine and red wine vinegar into her lemon juice, shallots and olive oil.

Our strawberries were gone, but there were a number of grapefruits that had hardened skins in the fruit bowl. I cut them in half and lo! they were all good inside. Evelyn juiced them with Greta's help. Greta helped me dissolve sugar and honey in a little hot water and poured the syrup into the grapefruit juice.

I put the mixture in the freezer to chill. Mike set the timer so that we could check on it and catch it just as it was beginning to get skim ice.

I finished off the soup with a dash of pumpkin pie spice and some cream. Clem stamped her foot and said that this was not going to be her dinner because she does not like butternut squash soup or green leaf lettuce. See pout at right.

Ev got the soup bowls out. I filled water glasses.

Greta cleared her story tapes from the table. She has cassettes of all different colors and she has been making Dagwood sandwiches out of them. The yellow are the bread, the green, lettuce and red, tomatoes.

I put out plates and forks. Ev got the soup spoons. Everyone who helped set the table got to light a candle (everyone!).

I served the soup in the kitchen, Mike carried the bowls to the table. Clem carried the salad bowl to the table.

I put five little groups of four butternut squash seeds on a doll plate.

We sat. Phew.

And passed the little plate around. Everyone sprinkled 4 tiny seeds on her soup (doesn't that make more sense as we girls outnumber the boys 4 to 1).

The seeds worked their magic on Clem. She inhaled her soup. Then half of mine, then most of Greta's. And then her salad.

Greta ate cucumbers. And made pretty patterns with her cucumbers. She may have eaten a plain lettuce leaf.

Ev tried her salad, but did not like her dressing. She seemed to enjoy her bowl of soup.

Evelyn remembered the book Pumpkin Soup. I pulled it off the shelf. The cover page was exactly the color of our soup. My soup eaten, I read the book to Greta hoping to entice her to try her soup.

In the story the duck always adds the perfect amount of salt. But he left in a fit of pique and the cat and squirrel oversalted the soup in his absence. I asked Greta if her soup was oversalted. She looked at me and dipped the very tip of her finger into the little puddle of soup remaining in her bowl and licked it.

"Not too salty," she said.

That was all she had of the soup, but I call it a victory. She chose to try it.

After dinner the sorbet liquid had chilled enough. Greta poured it into the ice cream maker. Everyone ate the grapefruit honey sorbet, served in liqueur glasses. Although Greta said it tasted like "lemon grease". I thought it was effervescent and intense and refreshing and delicious. Next time I'll have it with champagne poured over it as suggested.

So this time we managed to do, or at least partly do, numbers 6, 7, 8, 10 and 11 on the list.

And I happily added Butternut Squash Soup to my list of dinners that 4/5 of us will eat.

Anyone have any tips to share? Points you would add to the list? I'm all ears.