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.

A Sprinkling

Of snow?!

It is an Indian Summer day, in the high 70s. We stroll in the muffled quiet of the Redwoods to Redwood Bowl and find it...covered in snow.

The ground, the trees, the picnic table. Why, there are even children sledding and having snowball fights! By what magic could this happen? The magic of Hollywood, of course.We were there when the director shouted, "Rolling!" and clapped his hands together as if they were one of those black and white stripey boards. Kids piled out of the Honda minivan like it was a clown car. The director shouted directions like: "You're having fun!"

The snow was very fine paper mache sprinkled (ok, blown out of a hose) onto the ground and trees.

At home the sprinkling continued.

Clementine made a gratin to go with our steak dinner. She doesn't need help with the assembly. She sprinkles cheese and herbs, pours on the cream or stock, layers the potatoes.

I forgot that when they cook with you not only do they eat the final product, but they eat the raw ingredients. Clem ate cheese and raw potatoes.Greta sprinkled salt and pepper on the steaks. She also snapped beans for a while. Snap one. Eat one. Snap one. Eat one. Clem finished the snapping with her grandma.

Greta ate the steak, all the little cubes I put on her plate. This is the first time she has been willing to try steak.

All the kids devoured the beans by the handful. Literally. And fought over them.

I barked at Clem about using her hands before I properly considered two things: 1) the kids were that enthusiastic about green beans and 2) I hadn't put a serving spoon in the bowl.

After dinner I returned to not challenging their palates. We made sugar cookies. I substituted whole wheat flour for 3/4 cup of white flour (token nod to whole grains) and threw in some, you guessed it, cinnamon. The kids sprinkled them with orange and purple and black sugar for Halloween. Happiness in a shake bottle.

Move over, Hollywood. Magic sprinkles are everywhere.

The Library is Fun Again

The year was 1998. It was July. I had a big belly. I had a hot mile-long walk. At the end was a library.

Heaven. It might as well be a spa.

Cool. Quiet. Welcoming. So much magic folded between enticingly dusty covers. Big soft chairs. Windows with a vista on a green hill.

And then, on August 4th, Evelyn was born. And libraries were no fun anymore.


Whether in sling or stroller, she did not like me to stop walking long enough to pick a book. The quiet was no longer peaceful and welcoming. It was demanding and judgmental. Flash forward a year and libraries were still no fun. For me.

Evelyn thought pulling the books off the shelves and climbing in and lying on the the empty shelf was great. Flash forward another year. Evelyn likes the library!

But Clementine, in the sling, does not want me to stop walking long enough to pick out books.

A year later Clem is pulling books off the shelf. Another year later she has honed her grab and run. Grab the book Evelyn is looking at and run! Oh the howling! At age 4 when Greta arrived Clem had just outgrown a love of running away and hiding.


But now we had a new baby.
Who didn't want me to stop walking long enough to pick out books.

Well, Greta is now four!

For 10 years I've been treating library trips as high-precision military strikes. Plan your targets: if possible reserve them so they are waiting for you on the hold shelf. Fly in, drop a few bombs in the form of overdue materials, take your hostages from the hold shelf, and get out of there.

And now, like magic, a trip to the library is a mini vacation. An oasis on a rainy day. A place to linger. And stop long enough to pick out books.

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.

Oh Coconut!

I have no doubt at all that one of these days I'll be telling Clem to put down the book for a while and go outside. But at almost nine she is not there yet.

When she was four we worked on letter sounds. I'd pick a sound and point it out as I read to her. After a while she would say the sound when I pointed to it.

When she was five we did Hooked on Phonics until she got the idea of blending sounds and could read Pop Fox and Rat Ran and had mastered 30 or so sight words like the, of, you. (I love the Hooked on Phonics books, though I don't love the program.)

When she was six we picked out easy readers at the library and she would read all the phonetically regular words. Or I'd pick a topic like ing or silent e, and have her read all the words that fit the description.

Each time we'd work for a few days or weeks to reach a milestone and then I'd back off and see what happened.

And her reading would improve a little. Now I find her reading while lying on "the warm" (the heater vent) from time to time.

She picked out the book Diary of a Monster's Son at the library and read it.

It has a lexile of 390, which corresponds to 2nd grade reading level. The lexile scale is a measure of text difficulty which takes into account sentence length and the difficulty of the vocabulary used.

I was surprised to find that books in a series can have widely varying lexile measures. Dinosaurs Before Dark in the Magic Tree House series has a lexile of 240 making it a 1st grade book. But Dragon of the Red Dawn, #37 in the series, has a lexile of 580, the expected reading level of a 3rd grader.

I find the lexile website useful in this way: I find the lexile of a book that Clem reads easily, and then I search for books in a 100 point range of that book that I think might interest her (keywords: dragon, magic, wizard). I leave the books lying around and cross my fingers.

I have always believed that spelling comes after reading. Read enough and spelling will come naturally. Clem writes very little and is not able to spell words that she reads easily. But what I wanted was spelling that would help her to read better. So I took out Reading Reflex: The Foolproof Phono-Graphix Method for Teaching Your Child to Read.


Reading Reflex is an excellent reading program with HORRIBLE stories and illustrations. I really wish the Reading Reflex people would get together with the Hooked On Phonics people and make, I know, crazy idea, a good program with good stories.

I used their tests to assess Clem's reading and found that she knew the basic code (consonant sounds and single vowel sounds) but that she was shaky on sounds represented by 2 or more letters. She could read these in context, often, but not in unfamiliar words. We started with the long o sound which can be written o (go, gold), oe (toe), o-e (note), oa (goal), ow (snow), ou (soul).

One day she sorted a list of words according to which way the o sound was spelled.

The next we did mad libs where all the words she wrote in the blanks had the long o sound. It was about a super hero who was a purple hoe who drove a car shaped like a gnome. Her sidekick was a bowl.

Finally she wanted to make Coconut Macaroons. I challenged her to find 10 items in our pantry with the long o sound and then we'd make macaroons.

Here she is pointing out and reading some of her finds:

And then making Coconut macaroons.

Consolidating her knowledge while they bake.
Oh, so good!

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.

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.