Schoolless

Loafing

I baked two loaves of bread today: one this morning, and another one for dinner.
No, I didn't spend a whole day in the kitchen. Each loaf took roughly five minutes. In fact, the second one went into the oven as kind of an afterthought, since it occurred to me, between handfuls of diced potatoes and sliced carrots going into the soup pot, that freshly baked bread might be a nice addition to the evening meal.
No, I do not have a bread machine.
And no, I've never baked bread before.
While I love the idea of losing yourself up to your elbows in a soft mound of dough, the trance-like condition that the rhythmic working of the dough with your hands is supposed to induce, and especially eating the heavenly results of these labors, I cannot see myself participating in this lengthy ritual on a regular basis.
Unless something revolutionary showed up, I was doomed forever to spending six bucks on a loaf of bakery bread at Whole Foods.
Something revolutionary did show up. It arrived in my mailbox inside one of the issues of Mother Earth Magazine. A ridiculously easy technique that, well, revolutionizes home baking: five minutes a day for fresh-baked bread. I know you don't believe it. I was a skeptic myself. In fact, I waited until the next issue of the magazine arrived to see what other readers thought of this technique, before I attempted it myself.
I donned a kitchen apron, something I've only done once before while canning peaches, and enlisted my daughter's help. Strictly following the recipe, I obtained a five-quart bowl, and proceeded to stir together water, yeast, salt and copious quantities of flour.



It looked bubbly, smelled yeasty and took about five minutes.
At the end of the stirring process, my five-quart bowl looked a little more than half-full. I eyed it dubiously, and, hoping for the best, covered it loosely with another inverted bowl. My daughter and I mosied over occasionally checking on the dough's progress. It continued its upward climb along the sides of the bowl. At last, the bowl could contain it no more:



The dough erupted from the cramped confines onto the kitchen counter. Clearly, larger quarters were called for. I plundered the forgotten corners of my kitchen cupboards searching for a suitable container, and came up with a stainless pot more than twice as large as my poor five-quart bowl.
As gingerly as I could, I dumped the monstrous heap of dough into its new home:



I worried that if I handled it too roughly, I would disturb the yeast and impair its growth. Unfortunately, moving the dough gently proved impossible.
I needn't have worried. The dough took readily to the new home, and continued to rise...

 
... and rise ...



... and rise ...



until at last it flattened a bit, and started to collapse in the middle. I put the whole thing in the fridge for a good night's rest.
Other than stirring the dough, moving it to a larger container and then spying on it from time to time (these last two steps uncalled for by the recipe, one added by necessity, the other by curiosity), I did nothing else to it. No intimate kneading, no punching it down, no folding in halves, no covering with a damp towel.
And this morning, I scooped up a stretchy hunk of dough, and, with floured hands, quickly folded it into a ball, set it aside to rest, and popped it in the oven. There it is: a thing of beauty; the taste of heaven.

Count your blessings, son.

Room service!
Instead of making him get up, make his bed, get dressed, brush teeth, stand up straight and shape up, I indulged him. After all, we don't have anywhere to be this morning.
Did the young man desire a bowl of cereal? Or perhaps some piping hot cream of wheat?

Scrambled eggs with cheese and an English muffin!

Oh yes, that'll do nicely, thank you. And give me my book.

I did draw the line at hot chocolate in bed, but only for the very prosaic reason of there being no place to put it next to Peter's captain-style bed. But the whole morning did make me marvel at the freedom we have to enjoy these unhurried, drawn out mornings, to read for hours at our leisure, to adjust the speed of our waking to the mood and the weather, and to decide together what we want to squeeze out of the day.

A smashing pumpkin

Among the ghosts, the black cats, the witches, and the bony skeletons rising out of the ground, this Halloween decoration made a different sort of statement.

The Barack Obama visage carved out of a pumpkin was surprisingly subtle and dignified, unlike certain VP candidates we can think of.

"I like the pumpkin" I said to the lady handing our treats to our kids.

"I just hope it doesn't get smashed..."

Me too.

I survived the Chicago Flood of 2008!

The other day, Peter and I were having a conversation about the actual feasibility of Noah's flood. Peter had his doubts. I conceded that the whole thing with the pairs animals on the boat did sound unrealistic. But Peter doubted the accumulation of water itself. Surely, it would run off somewhere? Wouldn't it?
Well, let me tell you, if the rain of the past three days lasted for another 37, I'd be building a boat, and making sure everyone on it has a friend (and a deck of cards).
Here's evidence from the vicinity of Pulaski and Foster in Chicago:

Teen Mom

No one ever told this teen mother not to nurse in public.

Right there, in front of our house, in broad daylight, tandem-nursing her little spotty-butted twins! I felt pretty silly about not having my camera. By the time I got it, the twins disappeared into the tall grass.

But this young mother is no shrinking violet. I first met her a few weeks ago on a Sunday morning on the new bike path that runs by our house. At first, I couldn't understand why a young doe kept walking back and forth across the busy section of the bike path. It was curious: she'd saunter slowly one way, turn her head back, and trot back vigorously. Over and over again. What the...?

As I got closer, I noticed in the thicket on the edge of the path, a small, no bigger than a beagle, wobbly-legged creature, far too timid to cross the road with its mother, what with the people, and dogs, and bikes and strollers everywhere. It occurred to me that she must have just given birth to it that morning, right there, behind Sauganash park, and now was trying to walk it to the relative safety of the woods.

Silly, young, inexperienced mother!

I later realized she had twins. I don't know how I recognize her; I just know it's the same doe. Very young, svelte, with a caramelly coat, big ears and gorgeous moist eyes. Well, it sounds like a lot of does, but this one is different. She hangs out on the edge of the woods, or right by the bike path, and her little ones have been seen wandering, seemingly unsupervised, down the neighborhoods street.

I know there are too many deer here. But I hope they make it, this charming little threesome.

Full Moon

I didn't know about the Full Moon Jam. When a friend called and invited us to come along, I thought is was just gonna be some kids gathering on the beach to watch the moon come out of the water. Which would have been cool too.
But this was a different and more tribal experience. It started innocently enough, with a few people trickling in a starting to settle in a loose circle around some musicians.

Pretty soon, drums were beating, and some kids and other adventurous souls were doing dance moves in the center. It was still fairly mellow. We were sitting around with some other unschoolers we ran into, ate pasta salad, and observed the kids take in the sounds, sights and smells:
"Mom, what smells like smoke?"
Hmmm. What indeed?
"Mom, this lady has earring, and her ears go around the earrings."
Uh-huh.
As the sun went down, more and more people came out of the woodwork. Some sporting festive attire.

Like Carlos. We know him from the bike shop: he's one of our oldest customers. What you can't see in the photo is that he's also wearing a bunny fur vest. There were a whole bunch of other people wearing bunny ears. But his were the longest. And orange.

Once it got completely dark, it got harder to people-watch, and the fire came out.

Fire spinners against the dusky skyline.

Man-turns-fireball.

They look like topiaries, don't they. Wonder if this is what Moses saw.

Goodnight, y'all. Don't play with fire.

Who's there?

The other day we decided to go and find the dang woodpeckers. For a few weeks now,the neighborhood has reverberated with their incessant t-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d! T-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d! In stereo!

It stops people in their tracks. They stand there, with their noses pointing up at the sky, searching. They get off their bikes and look up, hoping to glimpse the source of the noise. "I can sure hear'em, but I can't see'em."

It took some effort. Peter and I clambered over heaps of dead leaves and broken logs, being careful not to get swallowed by the bog that the recent thaw created on the edge of the woods. We craned our necks this way and that, we peered into the thicket of branches over our heads, and - lo and behold - there it was. Way above our heads, pecking furiously, pausing only to give my camera the evil eye...

On a nearby branch, we could also see the ample evidence of his labors.

The guy at the other end of the block wasn't such a good sport about being photographed, so this is the best I could do:

Even now, as I write this, I can hear them. While other birds sing their hearts out in search of love, the woodpeckers work away.

Confessions of a budding filmmaker

(A rough draft of this post, composed by Peter, and eventually typed by me.)

I became interested in making stop motion shorts, when I first asked my dad how to make a movie without showing my hand holding on to Luke Skywalker. And dad said to try taking a picture, then moving Luke Skywalker a little bit, taking a picture again, etc. etc. Kind of like a flip book.

On a scale of 1 to 10, dad helped me 1, and mom helped me 1/8 of one.Dad told me that to make an aircraft fly, you need some thread. You tie it around some kind of flying object and you hold the string. While your hand is out of the photo, you take your shot. Mom just told me where I can make my movies.
Basically, she got me started by helping me find a place that had instructions for making stop motion shorts. Mom also showed me iPhoto, iMovie and Photoshop Elements on our computer, but she really didn't know how to use them. So after that no one helped me. It was trial and error. But eventually, it was more like trial and success!

I can't wait to make more stop motion shorts! Usually, I can spend 30 minutes to a few hours making stop motion. With a couple of breaks, I can watch the day slip by.

Although in the early days I've made movies of dog-eating socks, and clay, and Badger muscle rub containers moving across the table, my all-time favorite actors are Lego Star Wars minifigures and vehicles.  I started with simple elements, such as clay for laser, or my hand holding a part of a ship that was  not in the photo, so that you couldn't see my hand. Later I experimented with new strategies, such as using Photoshop to add lasers, and using invisible string instead of my hand.

At first, I didn't know how much I had to move my Legos to get the effect of motion from one photo to another. But with practice I learned that you should move them about 4 millimeters to no more than an inch. When I first started to make stop motion, I didn't know that I had to keep the camera in one position. I moved it around, and when I put the photos together into a movie, the picture jiggled all over the screen like there was and earthquake, which would only be good if you wanted to make a movie of an earthquake. Another mistake I made was when I tried to make a droid explode. I used some red-and-orange clay, and connected a disassembled droid. It didn't look like and exploded droid; it looked like an exploded tomato!

I learned to add lasers using Photoshop Elements. I figured out that I had to open the photos in Photoshop, and then I could doctor them any way I wanted. I started by looking at the toolbar, and using trial and error. Then I tried reading the instructions, but I gave up and went back to trial and error until I got it. But I am still looking for the perfect way to add lasers. I've seen other stop motion with perfect laser-like things (it's a little long, but funny).

It took me a while to figure out how to add sound. It's a lot of fun. My favorite sound effect is what I like to call "gun shot". It's really the sound of a camera shutter, which makes the action seem funny, not violent.

A stop-motion short requires about a thousand photos, though a very short one can be made with about 30 photos. I've never made a movie-length stop-motion, like Wallace and Grommit, but I'll bet they have something like a million photos!

It may seem boring to an outsider but to me, making stop-motion is like playing an involved game. When someone interrupts me, it's like "let me finish this scene" or "QUIET!" And after three or four days, I get a pretty good movie.

From making stop-motion movies, I learned a lot about cameras, computers, patience, duration, ideas, endless possibilities... and, um, let's see, what else? You figure it out.

Sto Lat!

That means "a hundred years", as in "may you live", and it's a song Polish people sing on the occasion of someone's birthday.
Well, today we are celebrating two birthdays in this house.
Happy Birthday, Twinkies!

Dad is teaching

I consider myself very lucky, that our family's employment situation allows me to spend plenty of time not only with my children, but also with my husband.

In our nineteen years together, Chris and I have made many plans, and not all of them have worked out exactly as... well... planned. For example, when we decided to open our bike shop, our vision for the business was: "he'll fix'em, I'll sell'em". Two weeks into the enterprise we realized we'd need some reinforcements if we wanted to live to see our thirtieth birthdays (we were 29).

So, too, with homeschooling. Because we enjoy fantastically flexible schedules, and both have the ability to work at home, we planned to share the job of homeschooling pretty much equally.

What happened in reality, is that I spent months poring over homeschooling advice, analyzing homeschool methods, selecting and dismissing various curricula, lugging stacks of library books back and forth, buying books I couldn't find at the library, making detailed plans of activities for upcoming weeks, calling family meetings, creating color-block schedules for everyone to follow, corralling unruly children who had other things on their minds, threatening, cajoling, rejoicing at the freedom from school schedules, crying from frustration and disappointment, enthusing over stimulating organized activities, cursing having to drive all over the place all week, throwing stale ideas out the window, consulting more books, more blogs, more experienced friends, and gradually paving my own crazy stone pathway through the homeschooling wilderness.

Chris stood by. I'm not sure he ever cracked open a homeschooling book. He wouldn't know classical homeschooling from unit studies if it bit him on the nose. The name John Holt means nothing to him. He has watched me flail and flounder through the intricacies of seeing to our children's education at home, and did, well, not much.

Actually, I take that back.

He stepped in and saved many a day, when I withdrew, without a shred of dignity, to our bedroom and vowed to never to do anything with my kids again. His calm (though somewhat patronizing) manner, change of direction, perspective, even change of voice, helped to put things on track, and gave me enough time to compose myself, and try again, with another bit of experience under my belt.

He has taken over, with virtually no notice, when work duties pulled me out of the house for indefinite periods of time. When I returned, I usually found the tea ready and the household harmonious, though perhaps a bit more messy than when I left.

He has never complained about having to watch children, not only ours, but those visiting our house as well, sometimes numbering almost half a dozen. He's also a willing caterer and chauffeur, although he makes it widely known that he would rather be biking.

He has always allowed, indeed, encouraged, me to take time for myself. If I feel a nagging sense of guilt and check the clock while I'm away, that feeling comes from me alone. If I happen to call home and explain why I'm running late, the answer is always: take your time, we're fine.

He has undertaken projects with the kids that I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. Like the potato gun. We quickly learned that your plans to construct one wouldn't stay secret for long. The minute you walk into a hardware store and ask for 2" PVC and a gas grill sparker, they are on to you. I would go to twelve different hardware stores wearing a different disguise each time. Not Chris. He pursued the hardware store clerk with tenacity and philosophical calm, and completed the ballistics project with the kids. Salvos were fired from out front yard on New Years Eve.

He relentlessly teaches our children about self reliance and autonomy. While our neighbors shuttle their kids in cars regardless of distance and the weather Chris does his best to get everyone biking to nearby activities. When anyone is too lazy to bike, our daughter now says: come on, you don't want to be a Republican!

Even more relentlessly, he teaches our children to have an open mind, and analyze available information before forming their own views.

Over my feeble protests, he has build a vermicomposter (read: WORMS) in our basement, and offers lessons to anyone who cares to listen. He also maintains a traditional compost heap outside, and shares my love of gardening. He rescues spiders, moths, centipedes crickets, mice, and even an occasional chipmunk from our house, and, whenever possible, lets everyone take a good look at the creature being released.

He takes the kids for walks in the woods, exploring river banks, drainage pipes, spying on turtles, and occasionally acting as snake handler.

He has taught our son to be an accomplished skipper of stones. Our daughter won't be far behind.

Through his interactions with me, with our kids, and with our business accomplices, he's teaching them daily about communication, constructive debate, tolerance and conflict resolution. Also, about feelings, tempers, anger and forgiveness.

Most importantly, he has been my sounding board, allowing me to vent and bounce ideas, listening, asking questions. In our now almost two-decade long conversation, he has helped me solve many problems, sidestep others, and face head-on those I would not dare tackle alone.

I haven't stopped learning.