Haley's Journal

Hello. I'm writing here in order to keep in touch with my family and friends, to let you know what I'm thinking about currently, and to share news and pictures of Orrin Jack! Welcome!

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Boy Meets Rice Cereal!



Orrin turns six months old this week, and we celebrated by giving him his first taste of rice cereal (made up soupy with breast milk)!

It was amazing to watch the transformation of his face when he first got that spoon in his mouth. He responded to food by becoming more focused, intent, and animated than I’ve ever seen him. After seeing that, I now think that the introduction of solid food really goes hand-in-hand with motor development -- that each one enhances the other. It makes sense, from an evolutionary standpoint, that food would be a great motivator to refine our motor skills.

Feeding is mostly play and exploration at the moment -- if you saw him when we were done, you might wonder if I fed it to him or threw it at him. But we are both having a lot of fun and really engaging each other in a new way during these feedings. Solon hasn’t had a chance to feed Orrin yet; he’s been at work at Orrin’s mealtime since we started the rice cereal. I’m looking forward to the two of them doing the feedings, since I think it’ll give them a new, rewarding way to connect. Obviously, Solon has not had the opportunity to do the breastfeeding bonding that Orrin and I have.

In other news…

…I signed up for a class in the fall at GCC -- my first semester back since Orrin! I’ll be taking Sustainable Energy to fill part of my science requirement for the Liberal Arts degree. It’s a Monday-Wednesday afternoon class -- let me know if you are interested in helping us out with childcare on the weeks when Solon is working those days!

…Many posts back, I had mentioned that I was a bit disappointed with my baby-carrying devices. Well, I am happy to report that we’ve hit our stride with carriers. The favorites at the moment are a simple Gerry backpack that we picked up for $10 on Craigslist, and the Hotsling that we picked up for $10 on a mishmash clearance rack at Target. We use the Gerry pack for walks and when I’m working with my hands in front of me, like cooking or doing dishes, and we use the Hotsling in a hip carry for social situations. Orrin is also more happy to sit or lie on the floor and watch me do stuff these days. Overall, I’m quite happy in this department!

…We’ve been spending time with the other moms and babies we met in our birth class. It’s been really wonderful to connect with other first-time moms who have babies the same age as Orrin. Talking out the challenges with other moms who are going through it at the same time makes me feel like we are not doing so bad.

…Orrin is teething, and he wants you all to know that it really sucks (we still think that he is a wonderful, happy baby).

…Does anyone want to take the magazines that I have subscriptions to after I am done reading them? You’d be doing me a favor, as I don’t want to keep them around the house and I feel bad just putting them out by the curb. I’ve got Real Simple, Lucky, ReadyMade, and Glamour. Let me know!

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Developmental Milestone Alert!

Orrin is rolling over! The first roll happened while I was talking on the phone with Solon on Thursday, and he rolled over several times today! He's rolling from tummy to back, just like all of the books told us he would. It's funny to watch; a LOT of effort goes into it, with a lot of squeaky sound effects, and then finally flops onto his back and looks quite surprised to be there.

He'll be running all over the neighborhood in no time!

Friday, April 11, 2008

Schooling, Part 2

As promised, here is Part 2: my thoughts on my kids’ schooling! By the way, if you’re interested in this topic and you haven’t yet read all of the comments on Part 1, you should take a look. My mom weighed in with her perspective, and we touched on a lot of what I wanted to cover in this post.

It’s interesting, being a momma and thinking about the best path for my kids’ education. Although I am passionate about unschooling and hope that my children decide to shape their own education at some point, I am not certain that I want to have my kids at home right from the beginning. I feel this way for a couple of different reasons. Here they are:

-I am really glad that I experienced both the public school setting and the Montessori setting before I started unschooling. It gave me a base of experience to understand what the rest of the world was doing and what it was like. Once I started unschooling, I think that experience helped me to relate to my schooling peers in a natural, relaxed way, and I know that it prevented me from taking my unschooling privileges for granted. It made me really want to seize the day!

-As a homeschooler/unschooler, I met a lot of kids who had homeschooled/unschooled for their whole lives who were not very good at socializing, making friends, or having conversations. I think that they just hadn’t had much practice relating to people their own age aside from siblings. I could see these kids really struggling with loneliness and awkwardness. I want Orrin (and his sib(s)) to learn how to navigate social situations without me as a fallback!

-I don’t have any model of unschooling for younger kids. As I mentioned in Part 1, when I began unschooling, I already had a solid foundation in reading, writing, and mathematics. A few of the lifelong unschoolers I met as a teen had learned to read and write a lot later in life than their schooling counterparts (the ones I have in mind learned around age twelve or thirteen), and they experienced a great deal of shame when their illiteracy was revealed in the world outside their homes. These kids’ parents had good intentions -- they believed in the unschooly philosophy of not forcing kids to learn what they’re not interested in learning -- but I think they did their kids a real disservice. Who would wish shame and humiliation on their child? Those feelings have a way of sticking -- long after the cause has been cured.

I don’t mean to imply that every lifelong unschooler/homeschooler is socially awkward or illiterate -- that is certainly not true. I guess that the root of what I am trying to get at is that I think that it’s important for kids to get some hands-on, in-depth experience interacting with people outside of their families. As I see it, the most useful aspect of school is that it’s where children first begin to get an inkling that other families are different from theirs, and that other people function differently than their loved ones. The melting pot of school gives kids the opportunity to learn how to successfully deal with all kinds of different people and situations. There’s the useful lesson that school teaches -- not the academic stuff, which can be effectively learned at home!

Of course, every kid is different, and that weighs in heavily on the choice as well. I, for example, was a kid who was very intent on learning the rules. I knew the “right way” to play the game to get the A’s and the gold stars, and I was going to be very good at it. Because of that, my parents pulled me from public school after kindergarten and sent me to Montessori, a place where objective evaluations like A’s and gold stars didn’t exist. That was a really good choice for me (although I still struggle with cravings for outside feedback and evaluation).

This post is by no means an open-and-shut dismissal of homeschooling and unschooling for young children -- just a little exploration of some of my thoughts and feelings about it. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with my own kids’ education. What are your thoughts for your kids? Let’s start a dialogue!

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Schooling, Part 1


I’ve had a few requests for an entry about my education and my ideas about homeschooling. I think it’s going to take two entries to explain where I’m coming from and what I think about education for my children. Today, I’ll let you in on my personal path thus far. Here’s my schooling history in a nutshell:

-I went to public school kindergarten.

-After that year, my parents pulled me out and enrolled me in a private Montessori school.

-I attended that school from age six through ten, when I made the decision to go back to public school for fourth grade (I wanted to ride the school bus like other kids, and the Montessori community was beginning to seem a little too familiar, with the same small group of kids, year after year).

-I stayed in public school, earning excellent grades and a reputation as “the good student” until halfway through seventh grade, when I took my parents up on their standing offer to try homeschooling.

-During my first year of homeschooling, I just brought home the school textbooks and worked through all of them much faster than I could have at school.

-And then I read The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn and began unschooling in earnest. What’s unschooling? I’ll say more about that in a moment.

-When did I finish unschooling? I don’t know. I probably haven’t. I never earned a high school diploma or took the GED, yet I have been able to enroll in college and maintain a 4.0 GPA. Go figure.


Ah, unschooling. I can only paint a picture of my own unschooling education, but there are probably as many different brands of homeschooling and unschooling as there are homeschoolers and unschoolers. If you’re interested in sampling some of the myriad possibilities, The Teenage Liberation Handbook is a good place to start. In any case, here is what unschooling meant for me:

As an unschooler, my days were unregimented. There was no “classroom” in our house, and no school schedule. At the beginning of the traditional school year, I would submit a portfolio to the superintendent of the school district. The portfolio was created entirely by me (with my parents acting as editors and encouraging me toward well-roundedness) and consisted of my goals and plans for the year. At the end of the traditional school year, I would create another portfolio, trumpeting all of my accomplishments. Lest you get the wrong idea, my curriculum was not overseen by the superintendent. As far as I know, he/she never cracked the covers of all those portfolios, and I never received any feedback at all. I was pretty much off the grid.

Just a few of the things I talked about in those portfolios were…
…lengthy reading lists, and perhaps a few book reports.
…creating and running a cottage business with my sister, wholesaling homemade fairy crowns to children’s museums and toy stores.
…teaching music lessons to younger homeschoolers in the area, individually and in groups.
…apprenticing with a local artist (even tagging along when she was an artist-in-residence at local schools!)
…volunteering as a marine docent, teaching museum visitors about the marine ecosystem on the New Hampshire coast.
…touring the US and Europe with a world music ensemble.

I had a busy schedule of volunteer jobs, apprenticeships with experts in varying fields, music lessons, band rehearsals, field trips, and outdoor recreation. I was an avid correspondent, keeping in touch with over fifty pen-pals from around the world.

Most importantly, all of this was chosen and initiated by me. My parents and I believed that I already had the all of the foundation that I needed in order to continue my education on my own: excellent reading and writing skills, basic math, industriousness, and -- most importantly -- curiosity about the world. My parents had three basic rules about my education: 1) doing nothing was not an option; 2) that I keep an eye toward well-roundedness; and 3) that I create those portfolios to present to the school district twice a year. Other than that, I was free to do as I chose.

I wholeheartedly feel that unschooling saved my life and broadened my world. I have no regrets whatsoever about the unusual path that my education took. What are my thoughts and feelings about my kids’ education? Tune in next time!

Sunday, March 16, 2008