West Towards Home with Roger Williams, Baron von Steuben, and Shake Shack

How cute is this parking lot bunny? One the one hand, I felt like I should scare it so that it didn't think that it was okay to just sit there in a parking lot, but on the other hand... look at its sweet little ears!!!!!!!

Also, here's the iced coffee bar I've been telling you about! I really wanted to take a better picture, but I also felt like an asshole whipping out my phone and taking a picture in the crowded bagel shop, so this sneaky pic will have to do. You can't see the lovely creamers and add-ins, but you CAN see all the nice varieties of coffees, yum...

And here's what it looks like when you've made your own delicious iced coffee just the way you like it and you've bought yourself a couple of bagels and you're ready to drive from Falmouth to Philadelphia!

I wasn't in a hurry on this day, so I thought that I would 1) avoid the toll roads, 2) avoid New York City entirely, and 3) see how many national park sites I could fit in. I'd really wanted to visit the Thomas Edison National Historical Site, but I hadn't realized how quickly the house tour tickets would sell out, and I didn't want to see it without the house tour, dang it.

Oh, well--there's always the Roger Williams National Memorial, with free parking and free admission!

Despite being super small, this national memorial site has officially radicalized me on the topic of Roger Williams. Why is he not WAY more famous?!? He was awesome!

For the rest of the day, whenever I had to stop for gas or at another national park site, I proceeded to blow up the family group chat with yet more Roger Williams factoids. 

Did you know that although he immigrated as a Puritan, he wasn't a religious extremist like most of the other Puritans? He believed in the separation of religious and civic matters, and that religious wrongs shouldn't be punished by civic action.

He named one of his children Freeborn!

He lived in Plymouth Colony for a while and even preached there, but he got pissed at them because they'd settled on Native American land without permission and also refused to pay the Native Americans any recompense for taking their land, so he left. 

He wouldn't shut up about civil rights and fair treatment of Native Americans, though, so eventually the entire Massachusetts Bay Colony exiled him, and he escaped the sheriff by fleeing on foot during a blizzard! The Wampanoags hid him in their own settlements until Spring.

Later that year, he acquired property by properly negotiating with and compensating the native peoples who it belonged to, and he founded Providence Plantations as the first European settlement on the continent in which church and state were strictly separated, and government was by majority rule. 

It was said by all that he and the native peoples of the surrounding lands respected each other and negotiated together when they wanted different things, and he also learned a bunch of their languages. 

Eventually he managed to unify all the nearby European colonies, and then the whole area became a sanctuary state for people persecuted by the Puritans. And that's how Rhode Island has the country's oldest synagogue!

I'm sorry to say that he was a little iffy about slavery, particularly when they were Native Americans captured during wars with other peoples, but he did try really hard to legislate against importing African slaves, and against slavery for life and passing down the status of slave to one's children... he was outvoted, though.

So imagine how fun it would be to be in my family group chat and get frantic texts of Roger Williams factoids All. Damn. Day. 

Oh, and Roger Williams memes!

Anyway, the park itself was actually pretty small, although it does contain a spring that used to mark the center of Providence Plantations... and this guy's grave, I guess:

So on we go to Weir Farm National Historic Site, a place that I fully admit that I knew nothing about other than that it was roughly on my route and had a passport stamp I could collect. 

I've come to realize that it's never any use to go to a place just for a passport stamp and a quick poke around, because I will then ALWAYS be like, "Ugh, I've got to come back for a proper visit!" 

Weir Farm didn't really feel like a place you could buzz through and see all the sites and move on with your life, although they do have house and studio tours, etc. Instead, it felt like a place that you needed to bring a picnic and some art supplies and a nice, long book to in order to really appreciate it:

In this instance, the visitor center and museum was the least of the experience!

I especially want to come back with my especially artsy younger kid and watch her be inspired. I don't know how you could walk around the grounds and NOT decide to set up your canvas and acrylics and start your en plein air masterpiece right away.

And while she paints, I will lounge nearby on a quilt in the grass, nibble on brie and sourdough French bread, and read a very long and very fascinating novel.

I don't know if it was specifically because I told Google Maps to keep me off the toll roads or because I told it keep me well away from New York City, but the rest of my journey after I pulled out of the Weir Farm parking lot was BONKERS. I'm not sure if I drove on a single highway? I am VERY sure that I drove on many, many, many residential streets! It was a bleak afternoon, chilly and rainy, and I spent it on the kind of slick, windy, hilly, rural roads that would have had me as carsick as a dog if I hadn't been in the driver's seat.

OMG it was charming, though. So freaking beautiful. I kept driving down into these absolutely magical valleys with little towns in them, and every single little town was smack in the middle of some kind of little fall festival, with hay bales and pumpkins and scarecrow decorations and people walking around in flannels or puffer vests. At one point, driving into the most magical valley yet, I noticed an especially large amount of flannel- and puffer vest-clad people congregating at the median, and as I drove past I saw that everyone was visiting a giant statue of the Headless Horseman chasing Ichabod Crane!

The worst part of a solo road trip is that when you're hours behind schedule and the road and the weather are poor and you're worried about driving windy, hilly roads after dark, you have to be your own bad guy and not let yourself take an hours-long detour to find a pay parking lot in a crowded autumn tourist town and fight the crowds to pay your respects to all the finest literary spots that Sleepy Hollow has to offer. 

I'll visit properly when I come back to picnic at Weir Farm and take my tour of Thomas Edison's house!

As it was, I didn't find my hotel outside of Philadelphia until well into the night, and I fell asleep pretty much immediately after barricading the door to my room and wolfing down a peanut butter sandwich and some kettle chips.

Even though the kid's college was just a few minutes away, she was busy the next day learning until lunchtime, so I went back on my own to Valley Forge, because even though I'd been there twice already within the last few weeks, I had not yet paid homage to my own favorite hero of the American Revolution:

Baron von Steuben was a wonder, you guys. He was more or less openly gay, which they were not at all cool with back in Europe, but in the military and political world of brand-new America, everyone was seemingly cool with it, alluding to his relationships calmly and cheerfully in letters and such. I imagine this is entirely because he was an absolute beast of a war machine, and simultaneously a teacher so skilled that he could teach advanced drills and maneuvers without a shared language between him and his students. 

Although the scholarship is clear, some scholars still currently speculate about von Steuben's sexuality, but I think that's only because in our contemporary society, we still don't have a clear understanding of how the queer experience was expressed and acknowledged and understood by historical societies. There was clearly some capacity for non-heterosexual expression--remember that exhibit in the New Bedford Whaling Museum:

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But he certainly had male partners in life, and that was pretty well acknowledged and accepted by his social and career circles, as it should have been. And I just think it's low of places like Valley Forge to use some scholars' dithering as their excuse to completely erase a part of von Steuben's complete life, a part that was clearly very important to him, just to avoid having to deal with some visitors being pissed about it. Von Steuben was a hero and we would have lost the Revolutionary War without him, and if you're going to pitch a fit about him being queer then you're not as patriotic as you think you are.

Anyway, this is my mental note to bring him a Pride flag when I'm back at Valley Forge again later this year.

I love that his statue overlooks the place where he turned a bunch of guys into a functional army:

It's been naturalized back into an authentic prairie, but you can walk around and visualize what it might have looked like 248 years ago:

Tangent, but my younger kid will graduate in the year of the 250th anniversary of the Valley Forge overwintering. I wonder if the site will do any cool anniversary stuff that I'll get to come back and see?

Time will tell, but for now, it's time to go meet my kid for lunch!

My older kid thinks she's too grown now to have me look over her rough drafts, but I've gotta tell you that nothing makes me happier than when someone hands me a hard copy of their essay and asks me to give them some constructive criticism.

As you can see, I'm always happy to comply!

I don't know if it's a natural knack, the fact that they're both avid readers and have always been, or my painstaking, astute, and thorough instruction, but both of my kids are excellent writers. One prefers, and seems naturally better at, non-fiction, and the other prefers, and seems naturally better at, fiction, but I tell you what, there is nothing so able to give you a boost in life (other than money and influence, sigh) as the ability to clearly and effectively communicate, and I am thankful beyond my ability to write it that both of my kids have that ability.

This particular excellent writer and I only had time for a flying visit, as the responsibilities of a college freshman are many and varied, but after her last afternoon class we were able to spend a few hours together just catching up and gossiping. I bought her some sorely needed clothes (somehow both of my kids are underpackers), we poked around a bookstore and a record store, and then she kindly took the lead when I got overstimulated in the Shake Shack:

I don't think I can do Shake Shack. My food had too many sauces, and my mushroom patty fell apart, and I used a shocking number of napkins. 

The next morning's self-assembled hotel breakfast was MUCH better:

Even though it was too short, this was the best visit, because I got to see that my daughters? Friends, I am thrilled to report to you that they thrive. There are ups and downs, of course, stressful encounters and new situations, a Greek class and an ocean weather class that are each harder than they seem, but all in all this seems like it's turning out to be a special, perfect semester in which each kid is in exactly the best place for her to be, doing fulfilling activities and having meaningful experiences, building relationships, having adventures, and otherwise just enjoying their lives. 

It's kind of funny, because ever since I've come home from that trip I feel almost like the opposite for myself, and I'm pretty sure I'm starting my long-anticipated mid-life crisis. And I wonder if my mind was just waiting to make sure that my daughters didn't need me for any of their crises before I could start my own?

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P.P.S. I just learned that there's a graphic novel biography of Baron von Steuben entitled Washington's Gay General! I just requested it from my public library!

How to Dye Pasta to Make Sensory Materials

Pretty much the last family activity that we did before taking the kids to college was an evening of making sensory materials together.

You know, as you do!

I'd had the idea that my preschool niece might like some of the same homemade sensory materials that my own kids had enjoyed at her age. We made her slime (although my kids actually played with oobleck, not slime, throughout their preschool years, you might remember that my younger kid went through a BIG slime phase as a tween and still has the recipe memorized), play dough, sand dough, cloud dough, dyed Epsom salts, and a couple of colors of this dyed pasta.

Out of all of those options, the pasta is the easiest! It takes just a few minutes of hands-on time, spread out over the course of a full day. Here's how to make it:

Materials

To make this sensory material, you will need:

• dry pasta. The pasta that you use is limited only by your imagination, your budget, and the size of the jar you plan to use. Rotini and elbow macaroni were perennial favorites with my kids, but bowties and shells also turn out exceptionally cute. Star pasta is a splurge but would be adorable, and spaghetti would be cool-looking but unwieldy to dye and delicate when finished.
• liquid food coloring or liquid watercolors. I use the snot out of our liquid watercolors, and used them for this particular project, but before I knew such a thing existed I made many fine and colorful batches of dyed pasta with cheap liquid food coloring. 
• old jars. I've always used glass jars, as in old spaghetti sauce or salsa jars, and never plastic, but I don't see why plastic wouldn't work.
• rubbing alcohol. You need this because it's a non-water-based solvent that can distribute the dye without dissolving the pasta. Some of my hippier friends buy super-high-proof organic vodka to make their own disinfectants, though, so if you like, I bet you can use that!
• newspaper, brown paper bags, cardboard, etc. You want something to spread the pasta out on to dry, ideally something you can toss in the recycling bin when you're done.

How to Dye the Dried Pasta

Pour dried pasta into a jar, filling it no more than halfway. Check out this old photo I found of my adorable older darling completing this step. She looks like she might be five?

Five was a really great age for that kid. Actually, though, twenty is turning out to also be a great year for her!

Add enough rubbing alcohol to just cover the bottom of the jar, then add the dye. Put the lid on and shake it around until the dye is evenly distributed, then add more dye as desired until the pasta looks about as saturated as you want it to be.

Here's the part you have to remember: put the jars on a table or counter you frequently walk by, and then for the rest of the day, every time you pass the jars, agitate them and shake them around for a few seconds to further distribute the dye and unstick any pasta bits.

After a few hours of that, dump out the jas and spread the pasta out in an even layer on your blotting paper:

Leave the pasta to finish drying out at least overnight, or even as long as a full day:

Your blotting paper gets pretty messy, so that's why you want something you can toss!

When the pasta has finished drying, kids can play with it right away, or you can store it in deli containers at room temperature. Look how cute it looks combined with all the other sensory materials in my niece's present stash!

Kids can simply play with this pasta, of course, but it also makes a great addition to a play kitchen or mud kitchen, or to a pretend construction site. Dump trucks love to drive around pink elbow pasta! 

And, of course, you can do art with it, especially making mosaics with different types and colors of pastas. You know you want your own pasta mosaic masterpiece hung on your wall!

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Homeschool High School Chemistry: A Historical and Artistic Look at the Periodic Tables of the Elements

Twenty-ish years ago, when I was studying for my Master's in Library Science, I took a class entitled The Organization and Representation of Knowledge and Information.

It was... just as fussy and pedantic of a class as you'd imagine from the title. I thought my instructor was fussy and pedantic, I thought the structure of the assignments was fussy and pedantic, and after two or three years of English grad school by that time, I found the endless class debates over the philosophy of how to organize and represent some specific piece of knowledge or information to be just the worst kind of parody of grad school education.

I just looked, and the school DOES still offer that exact class, but the syllabus is completely different! It looks so practical now! I might have come out of that class with a genuinely marketable skill, dang it!

ANYWAY, I was not my best self in that class (actually, I might have been in the early stages of pregnancy in that class, now that I think if it. Wonder if that had anything to do with my mindset, ahem?), and the only thing that I really remember from it is that there are infinite ways to organize and represent knowledge and information. The trick is to figure out the best one!

So when my teenager and I took what I knew would be the last of our numerous pass-throughs of the Periodic Table of the Elements this past school year, I decided to shake up our usual look at the Table as an unquestioned artifact by instead exploring its history, and some of the MANY variations the structure has taken in the quest to find the absolutely most perfect iteration. 

This was a great topic to move into soon after our lesson on alchemy, because scientists have been trying to organize the elements since before the only elements were earth, air, water, and fire! Here's one of the beautiful tables that we looked at first:

Tria Prima image via Mark R. Leach

Most of our Periodic Tables were taken from the Internet Database of Periodic Tables run by Mark R. Leach. With every table that we looked at, it was interesting to discuss why that table was arranged the way it was--what organizational problems it tried to solve, what patterns it tried to create--as well as what organizational issues that table caused, leading to yet another iteration. And of course one mustn't neglect the artistic merits of each table!

The teenager and I are both hands-on learners, so, for instance, we both liked this table from 1814:

Wollaston's Physical Slide Rule of Chemical Equivalents image via Mark R. Leach

It's a Periodic Table because it's ordered based on the weights of the elements, but you can see why it would be somewhat impractical for many purposes. What schoolchild could afford it? Who could manage carrying it around for ready reference?

Emerson's Helix from 1911 is prettier, and much more practical to put one's hands on:

Emerson's Helix image via Mark R. Leach

But you can already see it's not going to work with as many elements as we have today.

THIS Periodic Table of the Elements, though--THIS one really gets into the meat of what personally interests me about how the elements are organized:

Rare Earth Pop Out Periodic Table image via Mark R. Leach

There is just not a practical way--one that also makes sense!--to get all those elements into one nice, neat, lined-up table. Something always wants to stick out!

I really like this 3D pyramid from 1983; it's organized so that each side represents one type of atomic orbital... mostly. 

Or you can organize the elements based on your own usage of them: this 3D cube has the elements sized "in approximate proportion to their importance in cement chemistry."

And to be honest, I can't work out how this table from 2008 even works, or how one is meant to read it:

Angular Form of the Periodic Table image via Mark R. Leach

It's VERY pretty, though! I would happily work it as a puzzle!

Since, alas, we do not have an Angular Form of the Periodic Table puzzle, we happily reworked our good old 1,000-piece PTOE puzzle that we've reworked many times before--

I had thought that it might interest the teenager to create an art piece organizing the elements in any unique way that she chose--a Minecraft creation, perhaps, or a menagerie. A PowerPoint organized by vibes. A series of ceramic vessels. She wasn't feeling inspired by the prompt, though--it's possible that I've brought up the PTOE maybe a couple of too many times over the past 12 years, ahem--and part of the fun of being a homeschooler who chooses your own adventures is also NOT choosing adventures, so an artistic, unique Periodic Table did not become part of her Art of Chemistry portfolio.

Instead, we colored ourselves anchor charts of the table that we've all agreed to know and love today, internalizing, as we did, how this particular knowledge and information is organized and represented:

While we worked we listened to The Disappearing Spoon on audiobook, because I'll be damned if I don't sneak in just a LITTLE more Periodic Table content before this last year of homeschooling ends!

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To Philadelphia and Back in 22 Hours

How are we already here again? Two years ago exactly, my older kid and I were on a whirlwind tour to see one last college before she made up her mind about where she was going to go to school. 

That feels so long ago, but also like it was yesterday, you know? That kid I took on her last college tour before Decision Day was still a kid. Just two years later she's still my baby, but she's no longer a child. She finished growing up there at college when I wasn't there to see it.

Now I'm supporting my younger kid as she makes the same kind of agonizing decision, and she's simultaneously the most grown-up, confident, sophisticated human I've ever had the privilege to know and also my precious four-year-old in a thrifted velvet dress, butterfly wings strapped to her back, mashing dandelion flowers into a pretend pie in her backyard mud kitchen.

How can I let that tiny little sprite out of my sight, much less drop her off and leave her at a college 700 miles away? Wasn't it just last week that she sat on Santa's lap and told him that she wanted a kitten for Christmas?

How about we just try not to think that far ahead for a bit. Let's just think about not forgetting where in this massive Economy Lot we're leaving the damn car:

Then we'll just think about the following:

• airport security
• napping during the flight
• finding the SEPTA station at the Philadelphia International Airport and buying rail tickets for later (the station in the college town apparently doesn't have its own ticket kiosk? Because... reasons?)
• booking and riding in my very first Lyft (super smooth process, but our driver did treat us to an anti-Philadelphia screed while also spurning the highway in favor of only surface streets, making the ride take so long that the Lyft app sent me a push notification asking if I was okay or was I in peril)
• getting dropped off at the campus gates and then immediately hoofing it to the nearest Starbucks for caffeine and a breakfast wrap
• taking one sip of my chocolate cream cold brew and realizing as soon as the stimulant hit my brain that we were about to be late for the Welcome event
• hoofing it back to campus at double-speed

And then, of course, exploring this beautiful college campus and learning about the school and meeting some students and staff and watching my kid make friends with the other kids on the tour. 

This school has a literal cloister why?

The kid is more of a sucker for the Collegiate Gothic architectural style than I am. Who wouldn't want to have class inside a castle?

Just between us, and knowing what y'all know about this kid, I'm pretty sure the fact that this school is basically a poorly-disguised cult for worshipping Athena is its biggest draw for her...

Statue of Athena, at which the students leave offerings. Tell me it's not a cult.

When we were given a little free time, the kid and I OBVIOUSLY beelined straight to the library. College libraries are some of my favorite campus buildings to explore!

Check out the original statue of Athena up high where students from the rival college can't reach her, and also plaster casts taken from the genuine Parthenon metopes on display at the British Museum. I'm just gonna leave this right here.

So envious that they have a whole room of puzzles! They also have a craft club with its own permanent, dedicated studio and an art club, also with its own permanent, dedicated studio. 

I read this book in grad school!

I'm telling you, the owl iconography is INTENSE. I kind of wanted to ask how this impacted their enrollment of students from certain Native American nations, but I'd already asked soooo many weird questions that I felt I should probably leave some weird questions for other people to ask.

Tell me that this is not a shocking number of owls, though?!?

I am SO glad that I'm not seventeen years old and trying to figure out where I want to go to college. The amazing choices that she has are a blessing, a luxury, and a direct result of the hard work this kid has done and the phenomenal person she is, but it's also an awful burden to have to decide.

Let's spend the next few hours not thinking about it, and instead thinking about how to navigate the SEPTA system, especially because Jefferson Station booted us out into a shopping mall with no discernible exit, and it took us at least 20 minutes to find our way out to the street. Also, while I was standing at one of the big maps and figuring out our route, a kind stranger came over to gently point out that I was tracing the trolley line and not the rail line. Because apparently Philadelphia also has trolleys!

I'd wanted to see Chinatown, browse a couple of bookstores, walk around the Independence sites, etc., and we had plenty of time to do that, but I'd neglected to take into account that by the time we got downtown we'd have been up and at 'em for approximately 14 hours, and shockingly for me when confronted with a tourist site, I was starting to fade.

Imagine! ME!!! Forgetting to so much as take a snapshot of the Chinatown Gate as we walked under it! Unwilling to walk a few extra blocks over to the bookstore I'd Pinned! Too tired to make the extra effort to take a close-up photo of Independence Hall!

Not even the facts of my own exhausted near-tears and the kid who dances on pointe six days a week admitting that her feet hurt could stop me from paying my respects to Ben, Deborah, and Francis Franklin, though:

That was the last tourist thing we did, though. After that we trudged straight back to Jefferson Station, caught the train back to the airport, did the whole security theatre dance number one more time, and collapsed at our gate, where the kid proceeded to sleep as soundly as if she'd been in her bed back home for the remaining two hours until our flight.

I, on the other hand, finished my book (Peter Darling), started another (Beartown), and discovered that, gasp, the Philadelphia International Airport only stocks Pepsi products?!? NOOO!!! Mama needs her Diet Sprite!

I reluctantly nursed my... Starry? WTF is a STARRY?!?... and made it last until we got back to our home airport, at which point I'd forgotten that I'd even taken a photo of our parking spot. Thank goodness for the teenager, who just flat-out remembered where we parked in her head, and who loudly sang our personal mash-up of "Party Rock Anthem," "California Girls," and the entire Percy Jackson musical with me to keep me awake for the drive home. 

I want her to go to absolutely the BEST college, y'all, and also I never want her to leave my side for a second. 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!