Back on the Path

me and ro, yesterday. Taken by my momma.

It's really first thing in the morning for me now, here at almost 10:30. I haven't even made my first cup of tea. Therefore, my thoughts may appear to be random.

I got a new keyboard (well, new/old) and another one just in case I have a brain leak and bring anymore beverages by the computer. Looks like I'm all equipped for blogging now. I've had it for a few days, I just really haven't been doing too much online. I've been reading some articles on Buddhism, reacquainting myself with the Noble Eighfold Path and such-- to boost my moral. I'm really enjoying the chance to unschool myself! The Buddhist studies seem to keep me on track and help ease my shaky feelings on starting this new life.

Ro is suddenly quite obsessed with cleaning and organizing. Every day she wants me to keep her brother out of their room so that she can put everything away. She scrubbed the kitchen floor the other day, as well as being sneaky and cleaning the bathroom counter (she even wiped down the tub). I was wondering what she was doing in there for so long.

I've been a lot better about saying yes, trying to remember to come from a place of good intentions rather than a desire to control. We've only had a couple of hard spots. One of them involved nail polish-- I have nail polish issues. I simply hate it. It gives me a headache and she drips it all over the bathroom and it's so hard to clean up! I am not sure about her breathing all those fumes, either-- we usually do it outside but it's been too cold. I mean, when we paint her toenails at least I'm done pretty quick, but when she paints her own fingernails, it takes her ages. She picks a color and starts, then she calls for me two or three times to come get it off because she's changed her mind about the color. The nail polish remover is especially heinous. Even when you wash your hands really good you can still taste it when you eat anything with your hands. Gross. So I sort of just made a deal with her that she could take it over to my mom's house (where they do all manner of primping) and she's not too hurt by it. She noticed how bad the stuff tasted on her hands, and realized that it's not all dandy. It's fun sometimes but it's not a good idea for every day.

She's still loving the short hair, check her out:



also taken by my mom, Boo Bear in the background looking wild and blurry

And here's one of the blurry Boo Bear (he really is more in focus in real life, most of the time), just to share the whole set my mom sent me this morning.

I'm on hiatus.

The Boo Bear spilled coffee on my keyboard. It is now shot. It's really my fault for leaving it where he can get it anyway-- at least it wasn't hot. It's almost funny, because he did the same thing last month. I think he's trying to tell me something. "Hey Mom-- Crazy lady... can I have some love over here or something? What is so interesting about all of these 'blogs'?"

Last month when my other keyboard died Chad got me a new one for my birthday. I think I'm probably out of luck now. I'm using his computer which is rather unfortunate as he has extremely good eyesight and has the text size set to like, size 8. Anyway, I've sort of expressed my gratitude for the Boo Bear's ruining of my keyboard-- I am not joking when I say that my internet usage was becoming obsessive. I would sit there and click the refresh page half the day to see if I had any new email since about 15 seconds ago.

So I'm taking a blogging/computer hiatus. No worries. This is my third day of unschooling, and I just checked my email once yesterday. I am really living a full life here, without worrying if I've gotten a message in my Ravelry inbox yet.

Just to report, this week has been excellent so far. I have been happier with my kids the last few days than I could have ever imagined. Yesterday, Rowan brought me the box of Hooked-on-Phonics and said, "Hey, let's do this!" We started on it, and covered the kitchen table, and in a moment of panic I thought, "Oh my GOD! We're sitting around the kitchen table doing school!" But then I calmed down, when I remembered that she had initiated it. She did about 4 days worth of lessons without wanting to stop or getting frustrated. Learning to read is really important to her, and she's really interested in it. She gets bored easily when I try to give her little lessons, but I'm realizing that hey, that's okay. She is allowed to get bored. Then we just dig in our box o'art trash and find something to glue to something else. Hooray, boredom is chased away.

Another thing-- she started asking me this weekend to cut her hair. She really would not stop going on about it. "I want my hair short!" she kept saying. Like Sadie's. So I said... Well, let's sleep on that. The next day she was still going on and on about it without any reminders. Her hair was almost down to her butt at that point. I was really not wanting to cut it, but it's such an ordeal to brush it lately, she just cries and whines and screams.

So I cut it. A lot, lot shorter than I had meant to. And you know what? It's really effing cute. And she LOVES it. I think it has made her feel empowered to be able to have her hair the way she wanted. She asked me to cut it about a year ago and I said simply: No way. But it's HER HAIR. She is not an extension of my body, she's her own little person.

You should see her dance around. "I'm doing my I-Love-My-Short-Hair dance, Mom!" This feels sort of symbolic-- the first day of unschooling, we cut her hair the way she wanted. She's got a whole new look to compliment this whole new, exciting life!

She's been feeling a lot better now that she can go to bed when she is tired. It's been pretty late lately, around midnight-1AM, but I'm going to make more of an effort to start getting up earlier so that maybe she'll be waking up with me. (She has radar anyway, she wakes up at least a half hour after me.) She is going through some deschooling now, so I'm just going to let her be Ro.

I've learned a lot in the last two days, about saying yes, about limits, rules vs principles, etc. I learned that Rowan can go to sleep without me insisting on closing the door. She can just drop off in five minutes even when her baby brother is running in and out of the room babbling in his sweet little baby language.

It feels good to let go.

I'll be back soon enough-- especially if I have something to say.

I'm gonna jump!

...into unschooling, that is.

Ro went to school on Monday and Tuesday. Tuesday night, I was mentioned it was time to get ready for bed, and she had a complete meltdown. "I don't want to go," she sobbed. I talked to her about it. I told her that if she wants to go to school she needs to get rest. She insisted that she didn't want to go anymore. We've had this conversation a few times in the past-- she mostly just decides within a few minutes that she doesn't want to miss school the next day, and begrudgingly goes to bed.

This time, not so. She stayed home Wednesday, and it was a glorious day. Then she stayed home Thursday, and Friday. Every day I ask her if she is SURE she doesn't want to go anymore. She told me yesterday to quit asking. I also met with her dad last night and we talked it through. He agrees to not purchasing a curriculum in a box, no worksheets, that learning is done best through doing, etc. But he wants us to make sure that we make plenty of opportunities for learning and social interaction. He wants me to have a few hours a day where I am focused on Rowan. I agreed to that, of course. (As long as she doesn't get annoyed that I'm hovering!)

So Monday is our first official day of unschooling. I'm going to fill out the forms to remove her from the program. I'm really excited, a little scared, and also really proud of her for making such a big girl decision. I mean, she realizes that she won't be seeing her friends and teachers anymore. That was what kept her there. But she's willing to sacrifice that because she sees that she has more freedom this way.

She's only been in Head Start since August, but I still think we'll need a month or so to deschool. I think more than having to purge herself of the school, it will be purging of all the limits I've put on her in the past. I'll also need to deschool myself!

I'm excited.
I'm happy.
I'm scared.
But I'm jumping in.

I'm reading John Holt's book What Do I Do Monday?, which is quite the appropriate title. I'm asking myself that question a lot in the last couple of days.

For one, I'm definitely going to have a few hours at the start of every day where I do not do any of my own creative projects, I don't read my own books to myself, I don't get online, don't get so into a cleaning project that I can't stop my whirlwind. I'm thinking the first 4-5 hours of the day. Get up, make breakfast, then play with my babies, read to them, strew learning materials. I think after a few hours of this, maybe after lunch, they'll go off on their own and then I can email, blog, knit, read, etc. I mean, I'm sure as I'm typing this that it's a complete load, I just really need to find some way to stop my all-encompassing internet and knitting addictions. The chilluns need my attention, even if it just means to sit and watch a movie with them with nothing to occupy my hands.

meandering today

Rage, rage against the dying of the Light!

This is my new motto. I saw it in this article. These Danielle Conger articles are really great-- helping me with staying mindful, not expecting too much of myself, and such.

Even so, I fell back into the Old Pattern upon waking. At 1:00pm.

So many inner conflicting battles.

I must create. This is the greatest truth about me. Since I was a child, I have had a NEED to create. I see this in Rowan as well. It's like in the Alvin Maker series by Orson Scott Card... the Maker must create to keep the Unmaker at bay.

So I sort of feel like this need to create is almost a mental illness. An obsessive compulsive disorder or something-- although I don't really believe so much in psychology.

I'm not functioning properly with it lately, that's apparent.

Yesterday I went to my dad's house for about 6 hours. It was awesome. I was going to have Chad drive me to the store to get some yarn so I could start on a custom order-- but he was running about an hour late to the place he had to be and I didn't want to push. So this whole time, with just me and Boo Bear and my dad, I didn't have my knitting or my email. Or Ravelry. *gasp!*

But it was okay. Boo Bear just wanted to run around everywhere, and pull straw out of the bottom of the fake tree, and climb on the kitchen table, and throw things in the trash that belonged to my dad. I ran around like a mad crazy woman-- my dad's place is probably 3 times larger than mine so he had a lot more room to run. But by the time the night was over, all I wanted was to have some knitting between myself and the rest of the world, to give me that distance I so crave. (In fact, I didn't get this all night-- the baby was awake bouncing on my head until after I fell asleep. He awoke me by bouncing on my head today.)

Being there without anything to do with my hands also made me realize how often I tell my children to "Wait a minute..." while knitting, then zoning out and forgetting in a minute, on the average about 10 times an hour. (Okay.. so mabe I'm exaggerating. Maybe not-- I haven't started a graph or anything.) And I think... I've tried this before. Can I really balance my drive to create with keeping the house clean, the laundry monster back, and giving my kids the sometimes exhausting amount of attention that they need? There's an article by Ren Allen on just this topic called Unschooling with the Muse, which was exactly what I needed to read.

A few days ago I self-enforced a policy that I'm not allowed to do my own laundry until I get everyone else's clothes washed and put away. But this is just punishing myself, not nurturing myself. Really, how am I supposed to get motivated if I'm wearing a nothing but an oversized t-shirt and a pair of my holey knickers, with cold feet because I have no socks, all day? I thought FlyLady taught me better than that.

I need to nourish myself before I try to give something that I don't have.
It's just a bad cycle I'm in-- of giving myself the go-ahead to create-- letting everything around me fall to shambles-- then spending time doing nothing because I want nothing more than to get back to my very FOCUSED project, yet I'm feeling too guilty.

And I am quite hyper-focused on one project at a time. So much so that it's really difficult, actually painful, to step away from it long enough to even speak, much less get a child some glue or a cookie. This is why I say it's almost a mental illness.

I feel like I spend an inordinate amount of time fending off my children so that I can do art. Perhaps one day I'll be really lucky and make enough money selling my stuff that I could have a studio in my backyard where I can go a couple times a day. Alone.

But truthfully.... I'd rather find that place in me that can invite them to be part of the process, like Ren. I think about her sitting in her closet with a pen and notebook, hiding out with her muse. Of course, my kids are still itty bitty. They require almost constant supervision. Still, I can carve out places for me, to hide away, when appropriate.

This was one of those writings that shows my train of thought. I like that. Excuses melting into cutting myself some slack into giving myself some healing suggestions.