DOMUS

Christmas 2011

Things have changed a lot in the Seiler household in the last few years. We are no longer homeschooling, Wolf and Odette are at the Columbia Jewish Day School, and we have a new corgi.

The children are doing well. Wolf has shown some delays and we are happy with his progress at the CJDS. He has a very small class where he is thriving and gets a lot of personal attention from his teacher. He is now in third grade. He is happiest playing outside in nature. We plan to start him on karate in the next month or so. Odette is doing very well in the three-year-old room. She is now three and a half, and is exceeding all milestones. Her favorite things are reading, writing (a lot), horses, and being deputy dog trainer to Wotan. Both children enjoy attending agility practice each week, playing outside, visiting the zoo and the museum, going for walks, and pretty much everything else.

We have a new Cardigan Welsh Corgi in the house. Wotan came to us at about 12 weeks old from Legacy kennels in Greer, SC. We had to make the very hard call to put Scout to sleep in Dec. 2010 because his back end had gone out of commission after 14 years and he just was not very happy any more. I knew I wanted another corgi, but I thought a Pembroke would invoke too many comparisons to a nearly perfect dog. So, I contacted Sharon Wilson at Legacy after seeing her CWCs on her website and told her we'd be looking for a male puppy in August, when we returned from Germany. She sent me pictures of two puppies. I asked her which she thought would best fit our household and aims and she selected Wotan. She turned out to be right.

As soon as he came to us, I began training him with an eye to eventually doing therapy work with him. This would involve taking him to hospitals, rest homes, and possibly visiting bereaved families; we are aiming for children with serious health conditions. At 5 months, Wotan passed (by a miracle because of his exuberance) his Canine Good Citizen test in October. This is the preliminary test for Therapy Dogs International, which is one of the two organizations I am looking at for his therapy dog certification.  He cannot test for it until he turns a year old in May, but until then we are working on agility and obedience. We are entered in an obedience trial in January 2012, where I am hoping to get our first two of three legs toward his CD (Companion Dog) title.

In December, he made his first visit to Odette's Anaf classroom, where he showed the children how he can sit, down, stay, and come. He heeled all around the room, using the children volunteers as "human posts". He almost sat still for petting.

Long Time, No Write

Whoops.
We've just been so busy. Who would've thought homeschooling would take up so much time?
We've settled on a sort of eclectic, non-established curriculum for the majority of our studies, with a little unschooling thrown in.
Huh?
Well, what that means is, I make up most of what we do from a huge variety of sources. A nice book called The Well-Trained Mind was suggested to me by a German woman who has been homeschooling her children for years: it's homeschooling on the classical model, which appeals to me. It's more structured than I had originally intended, but that seems to work well for Wolf. We do a little writing, spelling, reading and math each day, and I can see vast improvements there. Often writing and spelling are combined: for example, each few weeks we work on words made from Latin stems; this week's word is in (meaning in or not, depending) and we make flash cards with definitions. As you might expect, we have a very full board of cards. We also do history, Latin, and nature/science when we can fit it in, plus environmental education, which involves picking up trash as volunteers for Keep the Midlands Beautiful and learning about the three Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle).
Apart from our daily work, we also have gone lots of places: nature hikes every week, the zoo, various museums, and Washington DC. It has been a very busy summer of learning.
We have finally got word that our tandem has been set up so that Wolf can ride on the back, and we can pull Odette in the trailer (she went for her first ride last week, and she enjoyed it). I hope to pick it up today, but it's a bit of a logistical nightmare to get it on the car. I will try to get pictures as soon as I can.

School's Out!

It's funny, but ever since school let out, I've had no time to write anything! We've officially started our homeschooling journey, and it's been a wild ride so far.
I admit to inserting a bit of structure to our days, mostly for my own sanity, but for the most part, Wolf directs what we study. So, on Mondays we do our environmental work, collecting trash around the neighborhood and generally talking about ways to help out our planet: this week it was the 3 R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. On Tuesdays, we do a nature hike in various locations; we try to look out for a different animal each time, but generally find something entirely different: when we were looking for toads last week, we found turtle nests instead (below is one of the egg shells); this week, when we decided to look for turtles, we found butterflies and a ton of baby toads, fresh from life as tadpoles in a creek at our local park.
Tuesday nights are also SCA fight night, so we watched the men armor up, and Wolf tried to shoot his new bow and arrow (he's waiting breathlessly for the upcoming Try It Day, where we will spend an entire Saturday afternoon and evening being Medieval; my job is to find children's activities, and Lars mentioned this wonderful Breugel painting which shows children at play. Some of the activities I think we will avoid, such as stirring dung with a stick.
Wednesdays we try to make something to do with weaponry; Thursdays are for art 

and Fridays for history, but we generally jettison that if something more interesting comes along.
Since we've started this journey, Wolf has taken to reading and writing without complaint or even urging: he reads Odette's books to her and us in the car and writes out his animal fact sheets with interest. Miles away from the tears and struggles of his schoolwork. Here is the naturalist at work:

The baby comes along happily (for the most part). She is busy teething and learning to walk, which I think she may accomplish before she turns 11 months next week.

A homeschooling day...

Yesterday I was able to see what our days might be like homeschooling next year. A year which begins, I guess, now. We've begun.
We woke up relatively early and got breakfast.
In preparation for visiting Crafty Celts, Wolf looked at a YouTube video on bronze casting, in which a man who makes bronze fittings for wooden ships shows how to cast in bronze using a sand mold. Wolf took some notes with my help after we watched the video twice and talked about it.
We took a break to check on the garden. The sunflowers we planted in old nursery seedling flats are all growing apace.
Lunch, then a short nap for all before the hour drive to Batesburg-Leesville.
Once we arrived at CC, we were given an exhaustive lesson in the making of bronze jewelry using the lost wax method. (This I thought would help Wolf understand the making of things like swords and spear points) I was a bit distracted by Odette, who was on my back for the two hours we were there, but I think I absorbed most of what happened. The first step is to make a rubber (not a sand) mold for a piece. This involves the painstaking application of India rubber pads around a piece of jewelry one wishes to replicate. Then the rubber is melted around the piece and the mold is cut open and the piece is removed. The mold is then pressed together leaving a small opening for the melted wax to enter. The wax is injected (sort of) into the mold and cooled. The mold is opened, the wax is removed, and many other wax pieces are made using the same mold. These are placed with many others on a tree-like apparatus, which is then put in a machine into which a plaster-like concoction is poured. The plaster hardens around the wax pieces, which are then melted out. The molten bronze is then poured into the plaster, cooled, and then submerged in water. The plaster dissolves, leaving the bronze pieces attached to their tree. They are removed, checked for imperfections, and the result can be seen here.
Once home, we had time for a quick dinner and then off we went to fight night to watch the heavy fighters and talk a bit about the armor they wore.
Then it was bedtime!

Lesson for Mother's Day

As Mother's Day approaches, I have conflicting emotions.
First, I know it's an arbitrary holiday and the cynical part of me thinks it's all those card and gift companies looking to make a fast buck.
But that's just the cynical part.
The other parts of me make this day a bittersweet one: one of remembrance and one of joy. And one that brings important lessons I need to learn.
I think of my mother every day. I want to call her and tell her all about what the kids are doing, to find out what we were doing at the same ages, to see if my own hair behaved like Odette's when I was a baby, to ask about a sudden temperature spike in the baby, for reassurance and love. The lesson? Put the relationships in my life first. It's one I  struggle to relearn every day.

Now I am a mother twice over. I realize, in a way that's not even hypothetically possible before one has them, that my children are at the center of my existence.  My days revolve around them and their needs and wants. Activities that were formally central to my sense of self, the degrees, the research, the scholarship, are now something I fit in on the side, when I have a little down time. The sense of self I had before was incomplete, illusory, transitory, based on lessons learned in school, from books. This new one is concrete, breathing, always there.

The lesson? Put relationships first.

Backyard Wildlife Habitat

The Holistic Moms' monthly meeting on "Creating a Backyard Habitat" gave me some ideas about creating a habitat in our own yard. Some elements we have already; others we need to work on!

Sara Green (sara at scwf.org) from the SC Wildlife Federation led the meeting. She does green walks periodically, which some of our members have attended. She is planning more of those for the summer, including one with Rudy Mancke if she can book him, and she will keep us posted.

Sara gave out lots of great handouts and spoke for a bit about getting your yard certified as a wildlife habitat. This can be done online at their website and costs $15, which helps support the Wildlife Federation. Basically, our yard needs to have the following elements:

*Food -- Sara showed us a variety of foods attractive to birds and had an awesome activity in which the kids present could make a bird feeder: tie a piece of twine through a slice of bread, spread peanut butter on the bread, and then stick seeds and raisins in the peanut butter. Hang, and voila! A bird feeder. Some of the food was seeds; another was suet (hope this is correct), a ghastly sort of mixture of peanut butter, lard, and other things that woodpeckers like. Of course, one of the main reasons to have birds (and bats) in one's yard is to consume bugs like mosquitoes -- most of a bird's diet consists of bugs. You can also plant things that produce berries and seeds for your birds, nectar for bees and hummingbirds, etc. By the way, Sara also advised leaving the food dye out of the sugar water used in hummingbird feeders. We do well on the plantings, but not so well on the feeders, so this will be an area to work on.

*Cover -- This can be as simple as an overturned pot for a toad, leaf or wood piles for small animals to escape predators, water for frogs, a bat house to give bats a safe hangout during the day. Plantings can also provide necessary cover. We have abundant cover, so this area is well covered.

*Water -- for birds and amphibians. This can be bird baths or ponds or fountains. Whatever the water source, it should include cover to provide hiding places from predators. We do have a fountain, but need to set it up, so this will be an excellent excuse!

*Places to raise young -- these can be elaborate (Sara talked about the purple martin houses that I'm sure everyone has seen) or simple, e.g., the martins seem to prefer a large gourd with a hole cut in it to nest. Sara also pointed out that birdhouses are better placed on metal poles to deter climbing pests, like squirrels. One of the handouts advises coating the pole with vaseline and keeping the area around the base free from fire ants to prevent them from attacking the young birds. We do have birdhouses, but could use more. I like the gourd idea but am not sure I want to grow my own -- I've heard they take over.

I will try to keep documenting our progress...

Virtue is its own reward -- but money helps!

Who would have thought trash pick up would provide an opportunity to bond with your kids?

Wolf and Odette and I decided to help our local environmental group, Keep the Midlands Beautiful, by picking up trash (and recycling as much as possible) in our own neighborhood of Earlewood.
We did about an hour on Thurs. 4/23 and collected one full bag on Park St., plus an old broom and mop (we used the broom to sweep up broken glass in a couple spots). We just incorporated it into our household trash/recycling. The church on Park had cleaned up a bit apparently -- I was expecting a lot more trash there on some fenced property they have where we had previously spotted a lot of trash. The strip next to their fence was freshly mowed, however, and the trash mostly gone.
Today we thought we would expand our expedition to collect on Riverview Ct, Lindsay St, and a bit of Northwood. So we loaded up the wagon with trash bags and grabber, leashed up Scout, and off we went. Midway through our journey, I found a $5 bill. Virtue is its own reward -- but money certainly helps. 

Try and Stop That Learning...

Well, the decision has been made to pull Wolf out of public school.
I've joined the local homeschool association and we've begun some activities with them, even though he won't technically be out until summer. Over spring break, to give him a taste of what homeschooling would be like, we did an "unschooling" project (which most "real" unschoolers would say is not unschooling at all) in which Wolf decided what he might want to learn about when "official" school is over.
So, he picked armor and weapons, and we were off to the library to get books. We decided to start with the ancient world, particularly Greece and Rome (anyone who knows me will think I started this, but actually it came out of a game in the car called "Mama, tell me about the Romans...").
We read a fair bit and, for the first time, Wolf was actually excited to write -- because it was notes on his reading. Words like "sword, "shield", "catapult" and the like. From there it's been hard to keep up with all the ramifications of his interest: shooting a small plastic barrette with a rubber band to explore projectiles; formulating a plan to use painter's cloth (thanks, Eren!) to make his backyard fort into a castle, including adding another room below the platform (pictures to follow); making various types of weapons (the list changes every day); visiting the Society for Creative Anachronism's Tuesday fight night, where he quizzed one participant about his rapier equipment...
I keep having to tell Wolf, "We need to wait until 'offical school' is over so we have time..." Gah!
I never thought I'd hear myself say this about Wolf but... I can't make him want to stop learning!

We're on Baby Time.

Odette, examining the outside world. She has a selection process of her own making, but what she chooses to examine is examined very carefully, with no attention to the time it is taking. Truly interesting objects deserve to be tasted, the better to fully explore their attributes.
The lesson for the adult: to slow down and savor each moment of her own life, to allow nothing to rush her, to really examine things as if they were utterly new. Difficult to do for an impatient person like myself, who, although staying at home with the baby, nevertheless has some things she needs to be on time for: doctor's appointments, play groups, brunches, soccer games. Baby time doesn't work in the real world. Or does it? I have learned that the baby is a perfect excuse for being late. I don't even need to explain it: people just assume that we're on baby time. Sometimes, we are late because of the baby -- a last-minute diaper change or some other emergency. But just as often, I find myself not wanting to interrupt her explorations to bundle her into her hated car seat. Minutes will tick by unnoticed while she plays or nurses peacefully.  We're on baby time.

Summer Unschool

OK. We've officially signed up to do Summer Unschool with Vintage Chica. I'm very excited to finally commit to doing this, even though it's only a summer project. I haven't quite been able to bring myself to homeschool Wolf, mostly because I worry I would not be the right teacher for him. Funny, since I am a teacher by profession, but my patience and knowledge seems to only work at the high-school level. I am working on that, of course, and the more I find I have to spend teaching Wolf at home because he's not learning at school, the more patience I find in the process.
So, we're going to try unschooling. The idea is to let Wolf come up with something he wants to research a bit, and with me facilitating, he explores it himself. RIght now, as a result of our discussions of ancient Greece and Rome, Wolf is most interested in armor and weapons, so if that doesn't change, we'll do that.
I'm looking forward to that: many visits to the library in our future.