3 Sisters 7 Days

Despite my relatively frequent conversations with friends and family about the virtues (and some vices) of home-schooling versus traditional public schooling, I rarely actually think about public school culture. Today was one of those times.

Our brother Brian was in town, visiting from Colorado, so we took off most of the day to hang out with him. The morning was devoted to running errands, including haircuts for the boys and a trip to the local mall to have my eyebrows threaded (he enjoyed reclining while he waited, and looked after Olivia for me), take care of some exchanges, and take advantage of the FREE gift with purchase promotion at Macy’s Clinique counter; I got two, but that’s another story).

On the way out, we passed a crowd of girls, who looked 12 but must have been closer to 16 because one of them drove. It was about lunch time, so it’s likely they had off-campus passes. Every one of them was wearing tight jeans, fitted tee with a brand logo, and flats. Every one of them had long, straight hair parted off-center and falling in her eyes. I noticed, but didn’t say a thing…but Reiley did:

“Those girls look exactly alike.”

“Yeah,” Olivia added. “Maybe they’re twins.”

“That’s how it is in high school,” Quentin said. “All the girls like to dress the same.”

“See what you’re missing?” I said. (No, I couldn’t help myself at this point.)

“Well, I wouldn’t,” Reiley said. “I’d dress normal.”

We’ll see.

After we left the mall, we stopped at Target to get candy to fill Easter eggs (Brian had agreed to take the candy and plastic eggs with him to dinner with our Mother, this year’s Easter egg hunt organizer), picked up a pizza to take home, and headed up the hill and back to the house. As we turned into our community, the kids noticed that the local public school was surrounded by cars – a sure sign that school was nearly out. Yet some children were still out in the field playing. Parker, who has never attended “regular” school, asked his older siblings, both short-term public school vets, what they were doing.

“Oh, it’s PE; some of the kids, usually the upper grades, have PE last,” Quentin said.

“Or it could still be recess, the last one” Reiley said.

“That looks like fun,” Parker said, “Does everyone get to [have recess]?”

“No,” Quentin said, “Sometimes you have to sit out.”

“Huh?” Parker said. He was clearly alarmed.

“Yeah, like when you don’t finish your work,” Reiley said. “One time, I couldn’t think of what I wanted to be when I grow up, so I had to sit on the benches during recess. It was for our time capsule.”

I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, but that incident was among the ones that “pushed me over the edge” into homeschooling. Reiley was supposed to write a short essay about what she wanted to be when she grew up. After a full 45 minutes of consideration, the entire amount of time she had ever pondered this important question in all of her seven years of life to date, she hadn’t written a thing. Even though it’s perfectly natural not to know what you want to be – ever, let alone in second grade – and entirely understandable that a child will need more than 45 minutes to complete an essay, Reiley was punished by missing recess. She was devastated. I was outraged.

Now she has “study breaks” when she needs them, and her younger siblings don’t know what recess is…

In the brief amount of time it took me to reminisce, the kids were over it. By the time the children started filing out of their classrooms, we were at home, eating pizza.

Freckles are the stuff of terrific children’s literature -Freckle Juice and Freckled and Fourteen come to mind immediately – and generations of childhood angst, at least in our family. Yet my daughter Olivia remains oblivious to the literary merit of her speckled nose and my early trauma. Perhaps it’s because she knows where freckles come from: ice cream. (And who could bemoan freckles, if they’re really just an outward sign that you’re blessed with easy access to a cool, creamy treat?)

Although I initially thought that I had created a con artist, I’m now convinced I may be the mother of a scientific genius. Allow me to explain.

Olivia first articulated her theory when she was angling for a Dairy Queen (DQ) stop on our way to Colorado last week. I happened to notice that Olivia was sporting more freckles across her nose and forehead, and told her how cute I thought she looked. (Yeah, yeah, NOW I think they’re cute ON SOMEONE ELSE…) Her response?

“Well, Mom…you know I get freckles from eating ice cream…”

“Really,” I thought.

Then, on the way back home today, she observed that both my sister Terri and I have A LOT more freckles than she does because we eat CHOCOLATE ice cream, whereas she  prefers vanilla – with rainbow sprinkles. While there may be no clear biological basis for believing chocolate ice cream causes freckles, I think it’s pretty clever of Olivia to recognize that two of the most freckled people she knows also ingest unusually large amounts of chocolate ice cream, and relate that to her own ice cream consumption and flavor preference.

Don’t you?

I was fuming this morning! Be glad you weren’t around…

There are few end-of-term tasks more time-consuming and frustrating than assigning grades, especially when the class size hits triple digits. I woke up DURING SPRING BREAK to nearly 40 emails from students that reflected emotional states ranging from curious about “where” their grades were, to angry about the apparent “grade delay,” to frantic about the possible consequences of a grade that might be “too low.” The overall average was lower than I’d expected, but not unusually so. Still, in 12 years of university education, I NEVER once contacted a professor to ask when my grade would be posted, complain about the final grading process, or request a more advantageous curve.

I’d hoped to have grades computed and posted before leaving town for spring break, but with a class of nearly 300 predominantly freshman and sophomore students – an alarming number of whom possess marginal writing skills and/or needed to make-up exams – whose final grades, furthermore, depended on their Teaching Assistants’ own finals week schedules, it just didn’t happen. Half a week later, I was ready to post grades, but the online system for doing so was offline due to mandatory furlough-related campus closures during spring break. I posted an announcement to explain the situation and, within minutes, there were yet more email messages from my students – complaints,  yes, but also requests for final grade notification via email to include details of how the curve was generated.

I wanted to scream. I certainly scowled. I attempted to cheer myself up by “dressing up” Colorado style – jeans and a nicer than usual t-shirt.

In a perfect world, the one I actually used to inhabit, I wouldn’t worry overmuch about all of this student angst. Certainly, I care about my students’ psychological well-being, but my job has more to do with their education. Once upon a time, University of California professors like myself were encouraged to focus on just that…even if it meant that students received poor grades, and/or their evaluations of faculty declined. Not anymore. California’s current budget crisis combined with increased public interest in the “performance” of students who are now paying more than ever for their college education has generated a rationale for evaluating college and university faculty on the basis of  how well their students “like” them, rather than on their efforts to facilitate learning.

Although many students will, in time, appreciate their more challenging courses and instructors, few of them do so during finals week, when the weight of their academic futures are weighing upon them.

So…on Friday, in addition to feeling genuinely bad that there was literally nothing I could for my students, no way to transform “grade delay” into a (high) grade on their transcripts, yes, I worried about how their upset might affect my salary…

Thank God-Buddha-and all the Saints of teachers and other care-takers that my sister Terri returned from work determined to get in an afternoon run. Nothing like running (shoes) to cure the blues.

a nine-year-old boy…

Despite a “gimpy shoulder,” compliments of that chair lift fall, I swear that Parker has been having more fun than all of us combined on this trip. From the grin on his face, you’d never know that he couldn’t join us climbing, was only allowed to ride the slow, straight sled, and sat out the day we went snowboarding.

Experts might call this phenomenon “resilience.” According to Kristi Kwon, Ph.D., resilience enables us to survive strife, catastrophe and other difficult situations, including anything from “daily obstacles, to natural disasters, to the loss of a parent or friend.” Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein, authors of Nurturing Resilience in Our Children : Answers to the Most Important Parenting Questions explain that although there are no “resilience genes,” some children are simply born easier to comfort and are more likely to “bounce back” in the face of adversity.

Parker was easily one of those children.

That said, Brooks and Goldstein caution that biology is not destiny. We can teach our children to be more resilient by limiting our tendency to rescue them to issues of safety and security. In essence, the advice a fellow parent and colleague of mine once shared is spot on: “the best parenting is less parenting.”

For those who need a little more guidance with respect to restraining parenting in the interest of fostering resilient and generally more emotionally hardy children, Brooks and Goldstein suggest:

1.  Be empathetic. Seeing the world through your kids’ eyes can help you understand that they don’t need that much hand-holding.
2.  Communicate with respect. Assume children hate being talked down to as much as you would.
3.  Be flexible. Show, don’t tell, children how to rebound, change direction by responding appropriately to the calamities you face.
4.  Give kids your undivided attention. They really are interesting people.
5.  Accept your kids for who they are. Duh. Like dogs, children are likely to overextend and exhaust themselves to meet your expectations. It’s always better to help them achieve their own goals instead.
6.  Give kids a chance to contribute.  Communicate your faith in your children’s abilities and give them a sense of responsibility.
7.  Treat your own mistakes as learning experiences. Those who overreact and/or avoid risks tend to blame others for their mistakes, behavior we don’t want to pass on to our children.
8.  Stress your children’s strengths. Even though resilient kids aren’t deterred by failure, foster their successes. A sense of accomplishment is the basis for confidence to persevere when faced with a challenge.
9.   Let your kids solve problems and make decisions. Don’t rescue your child!
10. Teach discipline. Self-discipline enables children to act responsibly even when you aren’t around.

When the I-70 West of Vail, CO closed due to a snowstorm and weather-related accident, we detoured South and East on state highway 24, which would have added a couple of hours under the best of circumstances. But it just kept snowing. After seeing the minivan that passed us as warp speed roll over and finding ourselves alone on a deserted highway, we headed back into the last town we’d passed: historic Leadville, CO.

I guess there are worse places to be stuck overnight. A former mining town, Leadville's currently famed for being the “highest” incorporated city in the United States and home of extreme sports like snowboarding and ultra-marathons, including  theLeadville 100 featured in Chris McDougall’s Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen. Our bargain accommodations? Leadville’s own Super 8 motel, a modern-looking establishment located at the edge of town, which is otherwise characterized by fully restored Victorian era buildings.

I’d like to say that we will be staying in town long enough to check it out, but no…we want to be on the road and at our destination: Colorado Springs, CO before the next storm hits.

Californians to the core, my perennially shorts and tee clad children woke me this morning – at 4:30 AM! – to tell me it snowed. Imagine, snow in late winter in a place surrounded by 60 Wasatch Mountain peaks. What they found most remarkable is that our Yakima Skybox was also covered in snow.

Sometimes I find myself wondering where I missed that fork in the rode that would have landed me on Elfin Forest Rd. in elite Rancho Santa Fe, California. Now, I’m beginning to think it may not be me at all. I think I just may have chosen the “road less traveled”; it just took a while for everyone else to catch up.

Take eating locally, for instance. Suddenly, it seems, everyone’s kitchen is sporting a box of vegetables and other farm products, thanks to a boom in CSA memberships. CSA or Community Supported Agriculture has become a popular and increasingly convenient way for ordinary consumers to buy and eat local, seasonal produce. Consumers purchase a share/membership/subscription and receive a box/bag/basket of seasonal produce each week throughout the farming season. In addition to supporting local agriculture and eating “better,” both in terms of nutritional content and sustainability, share-holders/members/subscribers typically gain access to local farms via tours, opportunities to work, and/or ability simply to visit.

This is great. Really. I’ve been a mostly hard core advocate of “slow food” since before it was a movement. I whole-heartedly support CSA and all the nutritional and social benefits associated with it, and even belonged to the first CSA operation available in our community. I wasn’t trendy…no, just a really healthy “kook,” as far as friends and family were concerned.

Then there are the barefoot runners. Granted, I “fell” into this one because I’m one of the lucky few who naturally run “on their toes.” The growing popularity of forefoot, if not barefoot, running in the wake of Christopher McDougall’s best-selling  Born to Run simply makes me look like a pro at what others are struggling to learn how to do.

Former war correspondent turned barefoot running guru, McDougall argues that humans evolved for long-distance running - on bare or barely protected feet, which prompts a softer, forefoot form than contemporary running shoes permit. McDougall one of among many currently teaching runners how to run “naturally” – if not barefoot, then in Vibram Five Fingers or other minimalist shoes, including my own favorites: Nike Free and Newton. Their success has prompted me to consider modifying my teaching portfolio to include forefoot running clinics…

Or maybe “baby wearing” workshops would be more lucrative. Deborah Netburnrecently reported in the LA Times that moms are giving up new shoes in favor of filling their closets with baby carriers! Baby carriers support attachment parenting, a philosophy that promotes the psychological and physiological benefits of establishing and sustaining a close parent-child bond. I carried all four of my own children for the first three years of their lives for these benefits, in part, but also because it was simply easier and more convenient than the then-popular infant-seat/hand-carrier/stroller “transformer.” (While I can understand a stroller, I still do not “get” why anyone would willingly haul around a bulky plastic seat!).

Instead of kudos, I got stares…

Today, women are paying up to $120 each for carriers intended to suit their own and their child’s moment-to-moment attire and mood…and taking classes to learn how to wear their babies! Instruction typically covers how to select among the wide variety of predominantly cloth baby carriers currently on the market, how to adjust the carrier with baby on-board, and how to incorporate baby wearing into mom’s daily activities.

In contrast, I had to search for my first baby “sling,” via tiny ads in parenting magazines and the telephone – not for lack of Internet access, but rather due to the paucity of manufacturer URLs. It cost $40 and was designed by Ms. Sears – yes, the famed doctor’s wife. My choice consisted of roughly six different fabrics, and, when baby arrived, I just threw it over my shoulder, popped him in, and winged it from that point.

Again, it’s all good – but please…even baby-wearing in the modern age isn’t new.

That gives me an idea. My own mother – get this – simply carried all NINE of her children by shifting us from hip to hip throughout the day, adapting over the years to working with one hand at a time. She kept us close and became ambidexstrous. In this economy, I bet could make a fortune with “no prop” baby carrying!

Elfin Forest, here I come.

Although spring will not have officially “sprung” until next week, I am already noticing a marked uptick in the number of runners I pass during my morning runs. Apparently, it’s not just the season. Runner’s World’s Robert Sullivan reports that so many celebrities are running that the running in New York or Los Angeles is like participating in an episode of “Running with the Stars.” Baxter Holmes of the LA Times suggests that Angelinos are motivated less by an opportunity for their 15 minutes of fame than recession. Training for marathons, in particular, requires runners to set goals and develop the discipline necessary to achieve them – skills that the Southland’s many new job-seekers need. Whatever. I’m just happy to have a little more company running in the dark.

I always wondered how often people fall out of chair lifts. In fact, this question entered my mind practically every time I rode past a “Sit Back, Hold On, Be Safe” sign on my way up to snowboard. Now I know that chair lift falls are statistically  "rare" events … that, unfortunately, include my own eight-year-old son Parker.

When the chair lift I was riding yesterday afternoon stopped, I assumed someone had fallen disembarking from the lift. Then I heard people on the ground below say that someone – maybe even two people – had fallen out of a chair near the top of the lift. The woman in front of me said that someone two chairs of ahead of her saw a child fall. Just about then, I watched two of my children ride across the crest of the mountain from the lift to a moderate run. Although I knew that Parker was riding behind them, and ahead of me, it still didn’t occur to me that my child was the one who had purportedly fallen out of his chair.

We started moving again and I, along with just about everyone else on the lift, looked down. Within seconds, I could see who had fallen – Parker! He’d fallen over 10 feet – maybe 12-15 feet – into an un-groomed patch of snow just as a doctor on his day off boarded by, and stopped to help him up. I watched the EMTs assist Parker onto a snowmobile for a ride to meet me at the top of the lift. Parker was understandably shaken up, but appeared okay otherwise. We opted against an ambulance ride to the hospital in favor of a visit to our own urgent care; in addition to a headache and a sore shoulder, he fractured his clavical.

That makes him really lucky. The last person to fall of that lift in the same location broke both arms and fractured his skull! More generally, despite a recent spate of chair lift falls involving children, it’s typically young men who sustain serious injuries – from major fractures to pulmonary embolisms – but do not die. According to experts, the best way to avoid adding your own experience to these statistics is to position your buttocks ALL THE WAY BACK in the chair.

In case you’re wondering, Parker’s sweet cheeks were nowhere near the back of the chair when he fell; he had positioned himself to disembark early in an effort to beat his friend off the lift, lost his balance, and the rest is now Snow Valley lore.

Perhaps you really never are "too young to ski" but most ski instructors disagree, according to my recent research in preparation for Olivia’s first day on the slopes. Newspaper, magazine, and e-zine articles, as well as many winter sports resorts, and parent-oriented blogs converge on three years old as about the soonest you should expect the average child to ski with any success. By then, most children who want to ski are able to adjust to a ski school or other winter sports learning environment, and sustain interest for a at least a couple of hours – long enough to practice the basics and take a run down the bunny slope.

Bogus Basin ski school director Jamie Zolber also advises:

• Get your kids excited. Tell them what they’re going to be doing so they will be prepared for the snow and excitement of a ski area.
• Have them wear their snow and ski gear in advance. Let them play in the clothes, including mittens and hat or helmet, so it feels familiar.
• Make sure children are well rested and fed a good breakfast. If children start their day tired and hungry, their mood probably isn’t going to improve later.
• Dress them in ski clothes that are as warm as your own, if not warmer; avoid cotton to ensure they stay dry and choose mittens over gloves, preferably ones that attach to jacket sleeves or wrists.
• Buy a helmet that fits the child’s head (NOT big enough to grow into), and rent equipment until you’re sure he/she likes skiing and slows growing.
• Enroll your children in a lesson. Even if you don’t, keep ski trips short; take breaks; and focus on basic techniques.
• Remember, it’s not all about skiing. If a young child would rather eat snow, roll in it, or just play around, let them. The point is for them to have fun in the snow. The skiing can come later, don’t force it.