Build-Anything-But-A-Bear

Family rituals are one of my ways of keeping things fair. Five children deserve to know that they are equally loved. (They also deserve to know that they are uniquely loved, but that's another discussion.) Having rituals for celebrations such as birthdays allows the equality factor to be obvious and measurable. I think that that contributes to my children's security in our home.

One of my favorite rituals is Build-A-Bear Workshop. It started with our second born. She was turning three and this new mall had opened with this cute store where kids got to make their own stuffed animals and dress them up. I thought this would be a great way to spend her birthday. That first visit was magical. Rose took forever before deciding on a dalmation dog. Next were endless deliberations over what sound button to put inside her new friend. Stuffing is quite the ritual all in itself; the stuffer gives each child a fabric heart to kiss and then has them do a magic dance to bring the bear to life and then puts the heart in, stuffs the bear at a huge stuffing machine, and pulls the opening closed and ties it shut. Rose was in another world. After her dog was finished she gave it a "bath" in this cute tub that sprays air to remove loose threads and stray stuffing. She was so strongly under the magic of the experience that she chose the dog's name by randomly pointing at a list of names. She was sure that was the one. She then dressed her dog in a ballerina costume and printed out her new friend's birth certificate. We were agog. This experience was a repeater for sure.

We have repeated it--four times so far. Each birthday we return to the store where we purchase a new outfit for the bear. I say "bear" as a sort of species neutral way of referring to the stuffed animals, because none of my children have chosen a bear. We have a dog, a cat, a penguin and a frog, but not a single bear. I am pleased that my children chose a "something else" when they had their turn. I like the idea that they embrace different as a good. I am hopeful that they will be able to carry this perspective into their adulthood. They are also carrying forward their stuffed friends. Our pals go with us on all of our vacations and adventures, and they now have an extensive communal wardrobe collected over many years and many birthdays. Our youngest has a year and a half before he can choose his "bear" and speculation is already running high about what he will pick. Whatever he chooses he'll be participating in a family ritual that highlights his unique yet equal place in our family.

I hope you have developed little rituals that tie your family together. I'd love to hear about them and to poach the good ones!

Campaign Finance Requirements

Politics is an interest I like to deny having. I like to pretend I don't watch the Sunday morning shows whenever possible. I like to pretend that I buzz by C-Span like everybody else, but the truth is I don't. I get stuck, even when it's just a roll call. I grew up near the capitol and beltway gossip still appeals to me. I need to know what those politicoes are up to these days. Lately, campaign finance reform has captured my attention. "Money is speech" is a powerful argument, and I agree with it, but money is controlled by the few. Being rich shouldn't be a political amplifier if things were as they should be. Things being what they are, we need to look at the problem from a new angle. Rather than legislating the budget, we should legislate the campaign agenda. We should make required debates and appearances the bulk of the campaign season. Think of it like figure skating; there's the compulsory round and the free-style.

If I were drafting the legislation, I'd require the presidential candidates to appear at a televised interview or debate in each of the fifty states. I'd leave up to the states to determine how they would use this required time with the candidates. They could have a traditional presidential debate with questions of local interest and import or they could grill each candidate separately. They could have the governor do the questioning or a journalist or a random citizen chosen by lottery. They would be required to have the appearance broadcast to their entire population. Fifty days of the campaign, the agenda would be set, and the candidates would have to do a lot more to earn our vote than buy great ads and Hawaii would finally get to participate in the pre-election hoopla with at least a sample of the immediacy New Hampshire has created for itself. I think that this would go a long way to solving the campaign inequities of fundraising without limiting our power to express our preference with our money. Candidates may actually find fund-raising easier after touching base with supporters in every state.

Just two cents from this midwestern mom. Media is so widely available. Travel is so fast and easy. Why aren't we harnessing these resources to make candidates more immediately available to every citizen?

An Ode to the Dung Mill

Our family treats homeschooling as a joint expedition into the marvels of the life. One of our most successful experiments has been to base our science curriculum around a video course from The Teaching Company. We chose their course on human anatomy and physiology for this year. The course has been a blast. We try to watch the lecture for each week on Fridays as a family, and then the during school time I've been enriching the lecture with experiments and projects culled from resource books. I'll add a list with mini-reviews at the end of this. Currently we are studying the digestive track to the great embarrassment of my girly-girls. I'm afraid it's about to get worse today, I was inspired to write a "jingle" to help them remember the anatomy we are studying. The resultant masterpiece awaits you.

The Digestive Track, The Digestive Track
Food, hop in the mouth and don't come back
Grind it up teeth, swallow it tongue
It's on its way to becoming dung
Down the esophagus squeeze, squeeze, squeeze
Even swallowing upside down's a breeze
Dump it in the stomach to squish around
Add pepsinogen and acid from the pits we're in a rush
To get this chyme ready to go
Open the pyloric sphincter and let it roll
Liver and pancrease, send the bile down
Gall bladder stand by in case there is too much
On to the duodenum, last stop before the ride
Miles of intestine all coiled up inside
Nutrients absorbing all along the way
Villi keep it moving while they groove and sway
Dump it in the colon, pull the moisture out
It's headed for the rectum, make sure no one's about
Have a seat and push it through the anus, Man!
Take my advice and turn on the fan.

I'm sure that was wildly uplifting. We have three doctors in the family, if any of you are reading this, feel free to pass on corrections/additions.

Useful books if my art has inspired you:
Blood and Guts by Linda Allison
This has been one of my favorites since childhood. The presentation is excellent and the experiments are killer.
The Human Body for Every Kid by Janice Van Cleave
The experiments are good though the information has a random feeling to it and the author's voice is rather dogmatic.
Human Body by Martyn Page
I found this little book full of handy illustrations. The size makes it easy to carry around for on the spot information.
The Incredible Human Body by Esther Weiner
We like the terrific exercises and handouts. The game to illustrate blood circulation has been our favorite part of the whole course.
Health, Hygiene and Nutrition
This is a teacher's workbook with reproducible worksheets that I'm using to tie the information we are learning to personal hygiene and food choices. The format is most successful with the younger kids, but the older ones get the point.
The Human Anatomy Coloring Book by Margaret Matt
I love the way the book uses colored pencils to tie together the illustrations of an organ. When you are using light blue you are coloring the diaphraphm in several different pictures so you understand that this is a variety of perspectives, not a variety of organs. The kids just like to color. The text is a little over their heads, but the text isn't the point.

We also picked up some great visual aids and software, but these are harder to find. I recommend being flexible and exploring the options available at your local teacher store. Delta Education is a terrific source for these kinds of supplies and also for math manipulatives. I'm learning not to be a supply snob. Toys R Us had a nice model of the human body including a working stethoscope at a very reasonable price. Just keep your eyes open.

I hope I've inspired you. Even if you aren't interested in homeschooling, a family adventure of this kind could really perk up your summer.

for my brothers and sisters at Lent

Scentual Satisfaction

Throw open the spice cupboard
Indulge in gustatory gluttony
Follow your nose wherever it leads you


Savor the thought of well-cooked meat
Salivate with the embarrassing abundance barbecue inspires
Let the greed spread across your mind like a grin


Picture piles of produce fresh from the field
Revel in the color and the shapes
Finger the memories lovingly and with gratitude


A true connoisseur prefers simple food simply cooked
Just a bowl of rice perfectly steamed with a pinch of salt

Cup the bowl in your hands
Inhale a pure fragrance
Ahhhhh.

Did you catch it?
The scent of shepherd returned from the pasture
Satisfaction.

Spring

Many thanks to Michelle, Nanette, Valerie, and Jodi who inspired this poem.

Deep in the dark where the mushrooms grow
Where the earthworms wiggle and the snow can’t blow
Deep in the sacred heart of earth
Springs a seed to life of forgotten birth

Before you there was me, before me there was you
But look in the earth there grows something new
A something better than each alone
A fresh new self before unknown

Summer's Coming!

Have you started planning for the summer yet? I can't wait. Homeschooling is a commitment to year round learning, but summer is devoted to the fun stuff. This summer we'll be working on swimming, botany, state history, and creative writing. We live near a beach for the first time, and I have already started to stock up on such beach necessities as an umbrella and beach towels. The local arts council offers concerts all summer long, and we've discovered that we love flying kites. Last year we got into stunt kites, but I purchased a classic kite for the younger kids this year.

Last year, I was feeling good just to get us unpacked and out to the beach two or three times. We didn't do any classes or teams. Moving consumed the entire summer. This year I'm looking up swim classes, art classes, chess workshops, and I'm writing a curriculum for a neighborhood writing seminar. I didn't do a good job with the garden last year. We were just getting acquainted, our new yard and myself. This year I'm going to do better, and start adding my own touches. We need some herbs and some flowers for cutting. I'm poring through seed catalogs, though the time to dream is soon going to be over and I'll need to get my orders in. I really ought to do it today.

You probably think I'm a pretty sick puppy by now, but it doesn't stop with summer. I've started laying out next year's homeschooling curriculum. I've already purchased the foundation for our study of physics next year. The older my children get, the more I realize I'm in the summer of my life and there is not a moment to waste. I don't want to be an old woman wishing for days that can't come back. I want to be a busy grandma with great stories to tell.

The Red Cord

The face on Mars isn't really a face we are told. Our mind is simply programmed to see faces in everything. We look for faces and so we see them. This post started with a PBS documentary on the Revolutionary War that described the process of inoculating people against small pox in that period. Evidently they would run a needle and thread through an infected pustule and then run the same needle and thread through skin on a person's arm. How unpleasant an image is that, so, of course, it stayed with me. Later I was reading Rene Girard (you should read him too), and I came across the following passage in I See Satan Fall Like Lightening

Jesus makes allusion to this, I think. It is the deprivation of victim mechanisms and its terrible consequences that he talks about when he presents the future of the evangelized world in terms of conflict between persons who are closely related:

"Don't think that I am come to bring peace on the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. One's enemies will be those of his own household. (Matthew 10:34-36)"

In a world deprived of sacrificial safeguards mimetic rivalries are often physically less violent, but they insinuate themselves into the most intimate relationships. This is what the text I have just quoted specifies: the son at war with his father, the daughter against her mother, etc. The loss of sacrificial protection transforms the most intimate relationships into their exact opposites so that they become relationships of doubles, of enemy twins. This text enables us to identify the true origin of modern "psychology."

I then picked up what I thought to be unrelated reading--Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem and I was stunned by the following passage.

Of course the activists--not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic--had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing somthing important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society's atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. The are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.

Finally I spent several hours watching Hotel Rwanda and the documentaries attached to it. I was cut to the heart by Paul Rusesabagina's compassionate excuse making for the West. Here is a man who has every reason to be bitter and cynical about Western values and Western peoples, but he is explaining our failure to us in the kindest terms. He expresses hope that we will learn from it and that we will not fail again. Here is a portion of his remarks as I transcribed them. Please forgive any errors in my transcription.

I think the world turned its back on Rwanda because what happened in Somalia. You know America had had a very bad experience in Somalia and this experience was still very fresh in mind. That is why in the Security Council America opposed intervention on having its munitions in Rwanda. And also they had a bad experience of the ten soldiers who were murdered. That is one of the reasons they left us down. A second one is maybe because Rwanda is not worth too much because it doesn't have anything. Rwanda does not produce anything. It has got no diamonds. It has got no gold. It only survives on cofee and tea, the only product to be exported. So, that is maybe why Rwanda was left down. One, some of the reasons why Rwanda was left down, left on its own.

Where is the red cord in the window of the prostitute's house? I find myself desperately seeking it.