A B C D E F G,
Goat, girl, goo-goo goggles,
Do it by myself!
I just found a hair on my head that's brown from the root and then abrubtly turns white for the rest of it's length. So this hair turned white and then suddenly turned brown again about four months ago. I've never heard of such a thing. Am I getting younger? Has figuring out how to discipline the kids effectively and the resulting peaceful household turned my white hairs back to brown? In any case, I'll take it as a good sign.
I've been watching my neices yesterday and today (a joy! the girls all run off and play in involved pretend worlds for most of the day) and this morning I took Nadine with me on my morning walk in the woods. We saw at least 12 deer there. I'm not even exaggerating. A whole deer extended family. I've never seen more than five together there before. Must be getting together for the holidays.
Here's an old movie we found in our files and were delighted to see. It's from January, 2005, when Husayn, Suzanne, and Amia departed Urbana for Evanston. Without further ado-ado-ado:
I've been thinking lately about making some little home movie collections of the girls as babies to commemorate the end of the babyhoods in this household. Teresa is turning 2 in February, and she already seems like such a toddler, speaking in almost full sentences, climbing up and down from her stool at the table, feeding herself, always saying, 'I wanna do it self!' when I try to help her too much and insisting on putting on her own shoes, socks and pajamas (to varying degrees of success). She is the most patient little learner I've ever seen. She'll sit for half an hour trying to put on her pajama shirt and not get frustrated in the least that she never gets it on right. She just takes it off and tries again. She can get her head in just fine but the arms are a little elusive. But I digress. Before I can make these little movies, I feel like I need to finish the movie project that has been sitting unfinished for a year and a half in order to evade the enormous guilt I would feel putting my own project before Georgia's big movie.
You see, we love this video series called "Preschool Power" where they show these cute Montessori-trained children doing lots of useful and fun projects with minimal adult assistance. They've got a two year old folding his own little basket of clothes, a three year old making playdough from scratch, a four year old mixing different colored water to show color mixing, etc. etc. Fun, educational, empowering, very sweet. So Georgia was so empowered that she wanted to make her own movie like they did, call it 'Homeschool Power' and sell it to everyone she knew. I didn't know about the selling part, but I was happy to help her record all the neat things that she knows how to do. Maya got in on the action too with some things she could do. This all happened the summer before last and I never got around to editing it because there was a lot of footage and I didn't look forward to the large task of cutting it down to something interesting to watch. I mean, how long is it really interesting to watch someone sort silverware?
Anyways, I've finally tackled it and got it down to ten minutes so it will fit on YouTube. Actually, I got it down to seven, so I added a bunch of little home movie bits at the end that fit the music and/or showed the girls doing something impressive. The fact that it's called Homeschool Power and that it's from the time that we started homeschooling Georgia makes it kind of bittersweet for me. I'm proud of the work we did as a family trying to figure out what is important to us about education and all the work we've done learning about and trying homeschooling. I learned a lot from that year and I'm still very hopeful about homeschooling as a powerful learning environment and way of life and very active in founding a small homeschooling group based on Leadership Education. I have so much of myself and my time invested in my kids' education that it's hard for me to change course without a lot of upheaval and Georgia's decision to try public school has been a big change for all of us. She seems to be thriving though, academically and socially, and I fully support her, of course, and am very happy with all the progress she's made in the last few months in her reading skills, especially. For me and my continuing education, though, homeschooling is totally the way to go. Humbly admitting that I don't know everything about anything and will therefore always have more to learn instead of acting like a know-it-all expert, following my own interests and passions, finding great mentors, reading the classics in whatever field I'm interested in, being sure to relate new things I learn to old understandings- these are what have been missing from my own education thus far. And I aim to corrrect that. It remains to be seen whether homeschooling will be a good fit for any of my kids, but we'll see.
So, after a long-winded introduction, here it is. Homeschool Power.