Walking Down the Street

Well, we found out last night that it wasn't the thermostat that was causing our Jeep Cherokee to overheat; it was the head gasket (I think?). Now, even though I religiously listen to Car Talk, I really don't know much about automobiles. Apparently, a broken head gasket is a Really Big Deal, and means pretty much the same thing as a broken engine. This, in turn, means that we will be vehicle-less for at least a week while the mechanics rebuild the top half of our Cherokee's engine. Hooray. So this morning, instead of doing a good hour or two of homeschooling and then zipping down the hill to pay rent and pick up some groceries before lunch, my son and I put on our walking shoes and embarked on a fun-, sweat- and errand-laden peregrination through our neighborhood.

Living on a small island is much akin to living in a small town: we were constantly stopping to socialize as we made our way through Cruz Bay. From the woman who owns the bakery (breakfast was our first priority this morning) to the two lovely librarians (our library books were of course due today) to the man who sells us our internet service (the internet was inexplicably down this morning) to the hardware store owners (suddenly Parker is fascinated by hooks, especially when attached to a string, so we stopped to get him one, which I tied to a piece of thread) to the Mail Center employees to the woman at the smoothie stand to the grocery clerk to the assorted friends and acquaintances we kept running into (thankfully not literally), my son had ample opportunity to practice his social skills today. To continue with the theme, we ate dinner at my husband's restaurant earlier this evening after returning my husband's partner's car, which I'd been able to borrow this afternoon to shop for enough food and water to hopefully last us until our Cherokee is fixed. (Have I mentioned that we live uphill from downtown? Carrying sacks of groceries, jugs of water and a 42-pound kid up the insanely steep hill atop which sits our island home is high on my list of activities to avoid.) Parker sat at the bar, ate his fish and fries and chatted with his favorite lady friend (blonde and gorgeous, naturally), several of the customers, the bartender and wait staff. My son and I will be fairly isolated--stuck without wheels at home--for a while starting tomorrow, so I figured a day of running around, out and about, would be good, for both of us.

Postscript: This repair on our Cherokee is going to cost us an arm and a leg. While we have our wallet figuratively open, I thought, "Hey, why not spend another arm or so on a printer?" Reading about all the homeschool materials I'll be needing to prepare in the coming months, I'd been realizing that a home printer would be incredibly handy to have. So I ordered one today. Of course, my husband-the-techie made me get a much fancier one than I'd at first selected ("But with this one we'll be able to print from our phones!"), but that's OK. I'll have fun watching him nearly levitate with glee the first time he presses "Print" on his iPhone.

The library books we borrowed today.

Parker's hook (which he's been merrily using to raise and lower a countless number of household items).

School Is Hard

Hi again. I'm sorry I've been away for so long. It's been hot, and Life's been hectic. And my son, while approaching angelic in most other ways, has been decidedly demonic about school (when we've had time to do it), so I haven't really had much to report. For the past week and a half, school has pretty much gone like this: I pull out the school shelves, Parker does some transferring or pouring or dusting, Parker announces he's all done with school, I encourage him to work with the graduated blocks or the scissors or what have you, Parker gives a (frankly) half-assed attempt at the activity then starts using the materials inappropriately (sliding blocks across the floor at breakneck speeds, trying to cut the tabletop), I step in and remind him of the objective of the activity, Parker walks away.

The thing is, we've been lately having a blast (and learning stuff!) outside of our school sessions. We've been building pulley systems, pretending to be macaroni penguins ("Let's go dive for some squid, Mommy Penguin!") and roadrunners ("It's hot in the desert, so I need some prickly pear juice, Mommy Roadrunner.") and talking about how our bodies work ("My intestines are full so I need to go poo.") And that "tyrannical threes" phase I told you about? The light at the of the tunnel is fast approaching. My son has been cooperating with me, listening more attentively and allowing me to help and/or guide him when necessary. We've had a bunch of ho-hum errands to do lately (bank boredom, DMV dreariness, trip planning tedium), and he's accompanied me throughout it all with minimal protest. Then the school bell rings, and I'm suddenly sitting next to the second coming of Mr. Hyde.

On a good day, I think, "It's just a(nother) phase. This too shall pass. I know I'm on the right course." On a so-so day, I start doubting, and run through the endless list of maybes: "Maybe it's too hot. Maybe he's too tired. Maybe the timing is wrong. Maybe he's bored. Maybe he's too stimulated. Maybe I shouldn't interfere so much. Maybe he needs more structure so I should interfere more. Maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe..." On a bad day, I find myself inevitably alternating between anger and dismay. One minute I'm biting my tongue so I won't shout at my son, and the next I'm struggling to swallow the lump in my throat, blinking fast to keep the tears at bay. My husband thinks I'm too invested. "You're taking it too seriously," he says to me as I sob into his shoulder, having greeted his arrival home from work with a full and complete meltdown. Of course I'm taking it seriously! It's our son! It's his education! Early childhood is one of the most vulnerable stages of life! This will effect him for the rest of his life! But I think what Mike means to say is, "You're too emotional about this," and there I'll agree. The evidence is undeniable: when we're playing together, my son not only gets along with me (relatively well--this is a three-year-old I'm talking about) but learns from me; my son fights me and refuses to let me guide (read: teach) him when we're doing school. The only difference between playtime and school time is me; or more to the point, my behavior. I often feel fraught with anxiety during school. ("Am I doing this right? Is he enjoying this? He's not cutting along the lines. Should I say something? Should I tell him to hold the scissors correctly? Oh no! I shouldn't have said anything! He feels discouraged, I can tell!") Kids are notoriously gifted at intuiting their parents' emotions. My son feels my anxiety and it makes him uncomfortable. How could it not? Have you ever been around an extremely anxious person? No fun, no fun at all. So he starts acting out and ultimately gives up in an unfocused but undeniable attempt to escape an agitated, irritating emotional environment.

I'm not sure what to do about this. Well, calm down, of course, but how? And, no, "Mother's Little Helper" is not an option for me. (Unless you're talking about the song. It's a good song, I like it. Though I'm not sure listening to it will help me in any tangible way.) Just keep swimming, I suppose. And step back a little for the next few weeks. Pull out the school shelves and sit down on the sofa and observe. Here's my question, though: Really? What if he doesn't put the materials back? Or mishandles them? Or or or...? Argh. School is hard.

Pulley fun

"I Love You" card for Kitty

Roll with It

TODAY'S ACTIVITIES:

• Graduated Blocks
• Mosquito Control

I was really excited about doing school today--more so than usual, I mean. In addition to having the materials for another new sensorial activity prepared and ready to present to Parker, I'd figured out a way around his resistance to being blindfolded. Yesterday, while doing the rough and smooth boards activity, I'd wanted to cover my son's eyes with a kitchen towel so that he would be forced to use his sense of touch to differentiate between the grades of sandpaper, instead of his sense of sight (annoyingly, the smoother grades were grey-ish, while the rougher grades were brown). He definitely had no desire to have a towel tied around his head--rendering him sightless--and refused to even experience the sensation of being blind, let alone attempt the activity that way. This morning I put all of the rough and smooth boards into a little sack (a purple, velvet Crown Royal sack yoinked from my husband's restaurant, to be specific). That way, I figured, Parker would still be effectively sightless, but only with regard to the sandpaper squares (which is all that really matters when it comes to this particular activity).

Well, we didn't get to put my sack idea into effect or even take a stab at the new activity today. After just a few minutes of working with the graduated blocks (experimenting to see how stable they are when stacked out of sequence--I dubbed the result "modern architecture"), our landlady/neighbor phoned to gently remind me that all the standing water left on our deck from the recent storms was going to give us millions of mosquito babies if I didn't quickly clean it up. (This is how awesome our landlady is: she didn't just call to say, "Hey, clean up that standing water!" she also volunteered to come over and help. She's very concerned about my propensity to be bitten by mosquitoes. She's given me four bottles of natural, DEET-free bug repellant in the 18 months we've lived here--which end up for the most part sitting unused in my medicine cabinet since I can't stand the smell of citronella.) Anyway, sometimes you just have to roll with it. Parker was patently overjoyed to stop school and start mopping. I, myself, couldn't muster up the same amount of enthusiasm, but I dutifully dragged my new best friend, the Shop-Vac, outside and started moving all the furniture and outdoor toys and useless crap (old litter box, empty--and now soggy!--cardboard boxes, potting soil, neglected jogging stroller) out of the way so that Katie, Parker and I could get all the muddy, leafy, buggy (have I told you about the termites that swarm during big storms?) rain water cleaned up. I'm actually really pleased with the result. Sprucing up our deck had been on my weekend to do list for over a month, but come Saturday and/or Sunday neither my husband nor I ever had any inclination to start scrubbing. Now it looks so nice, clean and pristine and neat and tidy. I'd better enjoy it while I can; it's only a matter of time before it starts getting grubby again.

FYI: I took this picture after about two hours' worth of cleaning.

Hurdles and Hassles

TODAY'S ACTIVITIES:

• Sewing Cards
• Dressing Busy Board
• Transferring
• Weaving Paper
• Cutting

This is my third attempt at blogging today. Our internet has been insanely slow for the past several days, such that blogger.com wouldn't even load the first two times I sat down to write this post. Now I'm sitting on the floor, Indian-style, with my laptop on the couch so that I can use our pathetically short ethernet cord to connect directly to the router, which sits on the window ledge behind the couch. So far bypassing the wifi is working marginally better; Safari connected to Blogger at least, though it took three minutes for the freaking "New Post" page to load. Sometimes I close my eyes and dream about the oh-so-wonderful super-fast wifi at my dad's house. What I would give to to have Safari pages load in literally the blink of an eye, to be able to watch videos on YouTube and Hulu, to download hour-long podcasts in less than five minutes! Someday, I will attain the Nirvana that is high-speed internet in my own home.

Stultifyingly slow internet wasn't the only hassle of the day. Though I really try to be patient and to keep the big picture in mind, sometimes it's hard not to focus on all the little hurdles Life throws in front of you throughout the course of any given day. This morning I wanted prepare the materials for another practical life activity my son and I had yet to try, weaving paper. (Since weaving paper involves an under-and-over action, the activity is supposed to be a good introduction to sewing. I suppose it could also serve as an introduction to making lattice tops for pies. And to making baskets or hats out of banana leaves, like people do here in the Caribbean.) You're supposed to use stiff paper, like poster board, to make the weaving materials, but I completely forgot to buy some yesterday so used construction paper instead. I was doing just fine, measuring out the 3/4" strips and using my Exacto knife to carefully cut them out, until drops of sweat started dripping down off my head onto the thin construction paper, rendering it unusable. Tarnation! I hadn't realized that wearing a sweat band is necessary if you want to do craftwork in the Caribbean.

After I finally finished preparing the weaving materials (it took awhile because I don't own a sweat band so I had to keep stopping to wipe my brow whenever I felt a sweat droplet start to roll down my face), I put together another set of school shelves. Because repetition is such an important part of learning--and centers prominently in the Montessori educational philosophy--it's important that my son have the chance to revisit any activity he chooses during each and every school session. The problem (hurdle? hassle?) is that we haven't even begun to do sensorial activities yet, and already we have too many school supplies to fit on one set of shelves. Space is obviously going to be an issue. Eventually, I'll be able to "retire" those materials that my son has outgrown, but for now he needs to have access to everything. It looks like we'll soon have to take another trip to good ol' Home Depot and buy some more shelves, though (as I've said before) our apartment is teeny-tiny, so where I will put another set of shelves is beyond me. The closet (where I store the (now two) sets of shelves when school's not in session) is full.

Parker is really digging the dressing busy board. He seems intent on figuring each component out, but in a slow and steady kind of way. On Monday, he focused on the buckle; on Tuesday, he focused on the zippers; today, he focused on the buttons. He'd attempted the buttons before and, frustrated, had quickly given up. Today, he stuck with them and eventually was able to say, "Look, Mommy! I can do buttons now!" It's really awesome to see your kid feeling proud of himself; way better than telling your kid how proud of him you are. The weaving activity wasn't a great success--Parker almost immediately got discouraged and accidentally ripped one of the strips of paper--but hopefully he'll feel like trying it again tomorrow or another day. Cutting is also a practical life activity. The aim is to try to cut long, straight lines, as close together as possible. Parker received a couple pairs of scissors this past Christmas and he LOVES using them. He has trouble holding them properly, though, and I'm not sure whether this is because his hands are too small or because he's a leftie (like his dad and his grandma before him). It's probably a combination of the two. Regardless, his solution to this problem is to have me hold the paper and then use two hands to work the scissors. I encouraged Parker to try holding the paper himself when he started cutting in school today, but he wasn't very jazzed about the idea. Oh well.

Postscript: Due to the aforementioned internet issues, I couldn't complete composing this blog before my son awoke from his nap. Therefore, I had to finish writing while my son was awake; in other words, while actively parenting. I apologize if it's seems disjointed. It's hard to complete a thought, let alone a paragraph, while interacting with a three-year-old.

The sweat stains.