Zatera Ul

We’ve been thinking for a while now about moving to a new place–and kind of living paycheck-to-paycheck in terms of certainty about the future–but now circumstances have conspired to pick the date for us: by the end of February, we will be out of this particular beige shoebox-shaped living space. God only knows where we’re going. So we have a fun month ahead of us. I’ve done a lot of purging and finishing up little projects already these past few months.

I told MFH the other night that it seemed like things were starting to crystallize a little; a couple of little things suddenly came clear for me. Well, once crystallization starts, it can take off very rapidly.

One of those little seed crystals was that I made a more substantial writing journal–MFH long ago settled on one particular style of notebook that he always carries around, but I used random frugally-acquired notebooks, or loose paper. But somehow the cover from an old altered book I had started a long time ago, and old paper left over from my grandmother’s teaching days, came together in some quick-and-dirty bookbinding, and now I have a book-shaped journal, with lots of pages, and room to paste things in. And I think that it is a style that I will stick with.

TLG is now officially Done With Diapers. We don’t have much of a potty training system. Mostly we just wait until they are ready, and wildly applaud any successes.

My big book order arrived, and I have been reading, reading, reading. We’re all sick now, too.

Our car needed multiple repairs this month, and we’ve been very thankful that we live close to MFH’s work, so that he can get rides home and to the mechanic.

StrongBaby has been learning to walk, but also he has been growing fast. Last night he was able to chase his big brother across the kitchen. And so it begins.

“…is do my happy little taxes in peace.” –I may have discovered another sentence that has never before been uttered in English. Digging deep into the numbers has been one of my few joys lately; we are nearing another milestone for MFH’s amplifier kit sales, and so the forces of darkness have been pelting us with dung again.

For all the different social circles that we traverse around here, we know of only one other homeschooling family. So everyone assumes that OLC either is going, or will soon be going, to school, and this leads to occasional awkwardness.

I was thinking back on my own schooling; I went to public school and my parents were thoroughly uninvolved in my academic education. I did very well, and I’ve been able to hold my own academically ever since. But I do have a point of comparison for a could-have-been….

In my junior and senior years of high school, two homeschooled sisters joined my graduating class, so they could receive regular diplomas. Somehow the school rules must have been set up to keep them from taking the highest spots in the class ranking, because they both got straight A’s yet didn’t place. They were clear-thinking and highly articulate, and thoroughly poised and confident. It was glaringly obvious to all that they had had an education far superior to ours. The older sister was a brainy, outspoken type and would have done well even without homeschooling, but the younger one seemed to have blossomed, intellectually and personally, far beyond what she could ever have done within our class.

So, as good as my own schooling was, it wasn’t half what it could have been. And as good as our highly-ranked suburban school is, I’m certain that our children will learn just as much, or more, from home.

…I was thinking about these words from a Waterdeep song a lot (though I don’t actually know the song title or which album it is on):

Jesus, I’m a sucker
I wish I’d believed less of the lies
Did anything I thought I knew
Turn out to be true?
‘Cause baby boys and little toys are all that
I see anymore
And will somebody close the door
It’s cold outside
It’s cold outside

In physics, there is the Three Body Problem–trying to determine the motion of three objects that are exerting gravitational effects on each other. The “Two Body Problem” is the problem of finding jobs for both members of a physicist couple in the same geographical area. The Two Artists Problem is the problem of two creative people in a busy household trying to create at the same time.

It has been particularly exasperating this weekend. MFH has several projects that he would like to be working on all day long and half the night. I have been throwing off new ideas like sparks off a grindstone, and also wanting to dive very deeply into a couple of new subjects. Not being able to get very far with either, I end up in a very prickly mood.

I have been working on another book, though I was stuck for a while. When I am working on a project (any project, not just writing) I keep serendipitously finding all sorts of useful little tidbits for it. For book writing, I scribble them on scraps of paper, and then gradually assemble them into an outline in Freemind. But this one had a dry spell, which was finally broken by finding a little “bread crumb” of an idea in a diving magazine, of all places, over Thanksgiving. This morning I received a whole pile of bread crumbs, so I have a bunch of notes to sort through tomorrow.

I also have a long list of books that I want to read RIGHT NOW. One is the third book of Madeleine L’Engle’s Crosswicks Journals, The Irrational Season. Then I just learned that there is a fourth book in that series, Two-Part Invention.

The holiday busyness made me defer all my projects that I had been thinking about. So I have been working on a lot of things, the past couple of weeks.

First, I redid the lampshade for my floor lamp, which was starting to fall apart. I took off the trim and fabric, retaped the translucent plastic body to the wire frame, and then cut leaf shapes out of white woven fabric to glue onto it. For glue I used fabric stiffener, which seems to be about the same stuff as white glue or Mod Podge. I also sponged a light coat of this over the whole outside after I was done, and finished with a quick coat of spray acrylic. Then I glued on some new trim; dealing with the conical shape of the shade turned out to be the hardest part. It still looks a little rough; there was some glue left over from the original fabric that I couldn’t get off. The fabric leaves do have a nice texture that shows when the light is on.

I also made a leaf stencil from a plastic lid, and experimented with bleach stenciling my couch cover, which is a dyed canvas dropcloth. It was a partial success; the dye on the cover is so light that the bleached parts are barely visible. I am thinking of doing some spray paint stenciling on top of it later.

I also decided that the bathroom really, really needed a painting of a seashore in it. I found a beach picture in one of our books to use as a reference, a piece of scrap canvas from some rummage sale, and scrap plywood to stretch it on with a staple gun. I found some kind of a sling chair in the garbage, which supplied wood for the frame. I have a few basic acrylic paint colors from the art store. Then I spent most of my spare moments in the week painting, with cotton swabs, toothpicks, and the foam insert to some box. For a first attempt, it’s not too bad. I think I very much overworked it, but this also gives it some subtleties that I really like. As Alexandra Stoddard said, when you change one thing in a room, you more or less end up having to change everything…putting the painting in the bathroom meant that I had to screw two more bulbs into the light fixture to make the colors show up.

After all those things, the rest of the home wasn’t looking very well kept, so then I spent most of a day just scrubbing and purging and putting things away. And making good things to eat.

Today I installed MFH’s new keyed doorknob–finally solving the problem of keeping little children out of his office without making holes in anything. Also, I got out to a nearby consignment store that I had never been to before, and gave my eyes a feast.

The second sentence of this article is hilariously untrue:

In fact, the average cost of raising a child to age 17 is over $150,000 per year.

That cost is the total estimated birth-to-age-eighteen cost, probably from the USDA’s Cost of Raising a Child calculations, not the actual annual cost, thank goodness.

The rest of the article is better. The author rightly mentions the greatest cost of having children, which is opportunity cost–all the things that you give up having and doing in order to care for your children. And opportunity costs are indeed substantial, these days. As I sometimes say to myself, “We’re doing twice as much as those people, on half as much money, and in less than half as much living space.” So I don’t entirely agree with the article’s brief mention of productivity in the context of parenthood; productivity depends entirely on what metrics you are using.

On the other hand, raising children has never been easy, all the way back to Eve. I once read somewhere that the increased pain she was cursed with in childbearing would be more accurately translated as an increase in hard work. In my book, I mentioned my idea that this increased work in childbearing extends long past childbirth itself, and includes all the toil of bringing up small children. I keep seeing various solutions to the “mother is going crazy trying to care for family and home” problem, and none of them really seem to get to the root of it. “The only way out is through,” as far as I know.

These are my top recommendations for unusual, yet highly practical, baby shower gifts:

1. Earplugs. Even the happiest babies with the most loving parents are sometimes inconsolable. Mothers’ ears have so much to listen for, that sometimes the auditory processing part of the brain just gets tired.

2. Lobby broom and a standing dustpan. Once they start eating solid foods, babies generate astounding quantities of crumbs, but pulling out the vacuum every time is too much work. These can also be useful during pregnancy, when it gets difficult to reach the floor, and for stealth cleaning while the baby naps. A lobby broom is also a good size for a toddler to use.

3. Real locks. Babies quickly grow up, and the average childproofing device is far too easily defeated. Installing keyed locks on a couple of cupboards or closets will help protect both children and sanity.

Not a baby shower gift, but still very useful:

4. Slipcovers, preferably all-cotton and machine-washable. Upholstery is not easy to clean.

I came across this Pioneer Press article, about “managed instruction” in St. Paul schools, which nicely highlights many of the main points of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America (managed instruction basically means teaching straight from a script; St. Paul is trying to even out teaching levels across a huge school district):

“There was a sense the district was a confederation of schools as opposed to a school system,” said school board Vice Chairwoman Jean O’Connell. “There needed to be more central control in the delivery of instruction.”

DDoA points out how the socialists prefer top-down control by unelected bureaucrats, but St. Paul is largely dominated by liberals anyway.

The district also charged a task force of administrators, teachers and parents with fine-tuning the district’s managed instruction plan. Among its first orders of business this fall: scrapping the term “managed instruction.”

….the managed instruction team renamed itself the aligned learning task force….

DDoA mentions the rebranding of ill-favored educational fads for another go-around.

Richard Ingersoll, a nationally recognized expert on teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, said adopting scripted curriculums and rigid lesson formulas can prop up novice and struggling teachers. But it also demoralizes and drives out a district’s most creative educators.

“You can’t treat education like a supermarket,” he said. “Kids aren’t products. They are living, growing beings, and they vary.”

DDoA makes it clear that the conversion of human children into commodities (laborers) has been the actual aim of our educational system for many decades now, and that applying manufacturing methods and quality standards to this process has been going on for quite some time.

I’m tempted to call managed instruction “No Teacher Left Behind”–the rotten teachers get a great deal of handholding, all they have to do is hit their marks and say their lines, while the good and great teachers get shackled into a mind- and soul-numbing routine, with no freedom to exercise their gifts. St. Paul Public Schools certainly seems to be doing its best to make sure no one gets a really good education there. (Mitch has occasionally posted some first-hand experiences with St. Paul.)

MFH and I were discussing our public school educations. I could, off the top of my head, think of at least ten outstanding teachers that I had; he could only remember one or two. In my school system, even the bad teachers could teach, it was more their personalities or their teaching styles that I didn’t like.

Also, I recall my government teacher, by the sixth period of the day, delivering his lecture in all sorts of politically incorrect accents. Making him teach from someone else’s script instead of his own wouldn’t change that.