Me: “How’s it going?”

8-year-old son: “Great! I have a bigger brain now!”*

*Said as he was playing Spore.

UPDATE: Second quote of the day: “Oh no, not another lover!”

Tags: Spore, big brain, evolution

I‘ve been so bloggedy-blog-blog busy that I haven’t had time to, um, blog in the past several weeks. How sad that it’s almost summer and I haven’t finished writing about spring. I’ll never get all the details down now, but trust me when I say we had a lot of fun this spring, what with the 5,000 field trips I registered us for and the general whoopin’ it up we do on a daily basis.

Okay, we don’t whoop all that much, but when we do, we really whoop like nobody’s business. In a nerdy sort of way.

Take, for instance, March 14, otherwise known as the day before the Ides of March or Pi Day (3.14 - get it?). Plus, it’s someone’s birthday. Of all people, Albert Einstein had the good sense to be born on Pi Day. How fortuitous for Albert and for me! I have kids, so I now have an excuse to celebrate Einstein’s birthday, which is something that never occurred to me to do when I was young. Can’t imagine why. Now, of course, I’m all for adding more birthday celebrations to our calendar, especially if they s-t-r-e-t-c-h out the time until my next birthday.

The Einstein birthday party was actually my daughter’s idea. She was mad that I didn’t tell her it was Einstein’s birthday until 9 o’clock that evening. “Now I missed it!” she complained. But I assured her that she could have an impromptu party the next day, and none of the kids on the block were likely to know or care that we were a day late. After all, she had no idea about Einstein’s birthday until I told her, right? So in the morning she created the invitations and helped me with the party activities. When one of her friends arrived for the party, we explained what the party was and what we’d be doing, to which he replied, “I thought this was going to be a normal party.”

Normal, schmormal. Some party highlights:

The Einstein Quiz
In which we asked truly trivial questions about Albert Einstein’s life that none of the kids could answer correctly. Can you believe none of them even knew he was German? Sheesh, take an educated guess, people! (NB: The oldest kid at the party was 10.)

If I Only Had a Brain
In which art imitated life. Look at the photo of Albert. Something’s missing — his brain! No wonder his hair is always a mess.

I bet he has a splitting headache.
(Note the awesomeness of my Photoshop skillz.)

Luckily, the kids stepped in and played Pin the Brain on Einstein, with one child actually sticking a brain in the hole in the astrophysicist’s head. Nice job!

I wish it were this easy for me to get another brain or two.

Let Them Eat Pi
In which a 9-year-old used a pie (and whipped cream) to explain pi. Pie humbly and doubly serves humanity by being both a math manipulative and a dessert, while pi serves as the shortest mathematical term with the longest value (more than a trillion digits and counting!).

Mathematically good!

Tags: Albert Einstein's birthday, Pi Day

Last weekend, my son’s UU religious education (RE) class learned about labyrinths, which many UUs and people of other belief systems use both metaphorically and as a spiritual practice. The assistant RE directed noted that another local church has two labyrinths in the woods on their retreat property, Rolling Ridge.

So we took a ride over there yesterday afternoon to walk the labyrinths and, perhaps, meditate while on our path. (Okay, with my kids, meditation — in the silent, pensive, inward-looking sense of the word — was but a pipe dream.)

It occurred to me only after I parked the car that it’s winter in New England. We still have snow on the ground. A labyrinth is, in fact, a path. On the ground. And therefore under the snow. Suddenly I was reminded of last winter when we (and when I say “we,” I mean “I”) decided it would be fun to finally try letterboxing with the kids. In the snow and 20-degree weather. It was not fun, nor, as you might expect, did we find the boxes. We did learn something that day, however: walking around in the woods, looking for something someone else has left there, on an Arctic-cold, overcast day does little to bring about family peace or unity.

See the curved path outlined by the rocks?

Given that I’ve made the same mistake two years in a row, I must be in some sort of deep, soul-level denial about winter. Either that, or I’m just incapable of learning from past experiences. The jury is still out.

Anyway, luckily, we don’t have all that much snow left, and the labyrinths were somewhat visible because they’re marked with logs and large stones. If you looked closely, you could see the curved patterns in the snow, but you couldn’t see for certain the specific path laid out. So we did the best we could to follow the intended labyrinth paths, but I’m sure we’ll have better luck once the snow melts.

Sometime in June.

Tags: labyrinth, Rolling Ridge,

We began President’s Day weekend with a flurry of activity out of the house, and then returned home to a cozier flurry of activity inside the house. Some of us chose to doodle, while others dabbled in 3D programming, while still others cooked and wrote and read.

Mr. Enigma sat down to draw in his sketch book. The Duke walked by on his way to do something else, noticed that Dad was drawing, peeked over his shoulder and asked, “What are you drawing?”

Monkey see, monkey do

They talked about the drawing for a moment while my husband kept working. Suddenly, The Duke grabbed a chair and pulled it up alongside Mr. Enigma’s recliner. Then he went into his room, grabbed his sketch book and pencil, and sat down next to his Dad and began drawing.

They worked that way for at least half an hour, and what a special, bonding time it was. Completely unplanned and uncoerced, creativity begot creativity.

While this side-by-side drawing was going on, my daughter was hogging my laptop, programming her first 3D animation in Alice. She took the tutorial and spent about an hour noodling around. Her finished piece was, as she put it, “A Shakespeare kind of thingy,” by which she meant a whole bunch of characters fought, declared their love for each other, and died, all in a 20-second animated movie.

What was I doing? Well, my daughter was using my computer, so I read, started getting dinner ready, and took pictures of my family just hanging out and doing stuff. It was a good day.

To see scenes from my daughter’s first movie, click the link below.

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What do homeschoolers do when they’re not busy winning spelling and geography bees? They make things. Give homeschoolers a simple tool, and look what they choose to do with a little free time. And a lot of snow.

Because, you know, it’s important wrap up your study of the Alaskan Inuit with a hands-on project. Or something like that.

The kids did have help from Dad to finish the igloo. Well, okay, they had a lot of help from Dad, especially when it came time to put the roof on. And then that night, it warmed up and rained. And rained. And rained. And by morning, the igloo was nothing but a mushy foundation.

No worries, no tears. Around here, we enjoy the process as much as the product. Or something like that.

But then, like a phoenix from the ashes, another igloo emerged from the snow, this time in the backyard.

Hey kids, you must really love igloo building, huh? Congratulations on some fine brickwork in that there v2.0 igloo. What? You didn’t build this one. Not a single snow brick? Dad made it all by himself? It took him all afternoon?!

He must be planning to show the kids the proper use of a keystone in an arch. No, wait: he wants to show them how the laws of thermodynamics apply to life in Alaska. Yeah, that’s it. Next, when we study ancient Greece, we’re going to build our own Trojan Horse and storm our next-door neighbor’s yard.

Because we homeschoolers really like to immerse ourselves in our learning.

Or something like that.

Tags: homeschoolers, igloos

My kids started swimming lessons at the town lake last week. The kids were in the water with the lifeguards/swim instructors, who were busy assessing each child’s swiming level and then sorting them into groups. After each child demonstrated his or her skill, the lead instructor called his/her name and the group number to which she was assigning the child. “Karen, group 2!”

As one of the youngest kids finished his demonstration, the teacher said, “Omar, group 1!”

And then I heard my five-year-old son, The Duke of Hazard™, who was swirling around nearby say, “Omar. Omar Khayyám.”

I stifled my laughter, confident that the average pre-kindergartner doesn’t know the names of 12th century Pesian poets. Of course, The Duke knows the name not because his parents read him the classics, but because he’d recently watched a Rocky & Bullwinkle episode, in which the daring duo found a Ruby Yacht and returned it to Omar Khayyám (under great duress, I might add).

Tags: ancient, poetry, swimming,

On our way to my son’s preschool one day last week, the boy asked me to turn some music on. So I punched the stereo power, and out blared the Richard Thompson CD I’d been listening to a day earlier, Action Packed: The Best of the Capitol Years. The song was “Cooksferry Queen,” an upbeat tune with a snare drum and bass line that drive the song’s rhythm. The song kicked in at about the middle, just before the musical break, during which my son shouted:

I knew exactly what he meant. Between the drum and bass, my crappy/buzzing minivan speakers, and the volume, my heart was dancing in my chest, too. At the preschool, we sat in the car and listened until the song’s abrupt downbeat end, at which point the poor kid groaned.

I’ve played the tune for him every day since then.

About a year ago, my daughter, then six, had a different response. I my sucked my daughter in the first time with “The Goldilocks song,” more appropriately known as “The Uninhabited Man.” The refrain:

Who’s been sleeping in my bed?
Who’s been sitting in my chair?
Who’s been sipping my bowl?

She liked it! Then we listened to more songs, and she ultimately came to favor “I Feel So Good,” a song about a recently released inmate who’s on the prowl.

Perhaps that’s not the most appropriate theme for a six-year-old, but sometimes you just have to live on the edge. Of course, living on the edge meant living in fear that she’d one day sing a verse along with Thompson:

Now I’ve got a suitcase full of fifty pound notes,
And a half-naked woman with her tongue down my throat.
I feeeeeel so good. I fee-eeeel so good.

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