Goodbye?

Directly after posting this, my Matt will be reformatting my computer. He got the internet to work again after reinstalling the driver, changing the wi-fi to a different channel (he thinks), and reinstalling the software. After an entire day of sitting on his butt in front of my computer reading magazines while reinstalling all my software, we discovered that my photo editing software no longer recognizes my camera software, and my graphic design software won't correctly install at all. So Matt downloaded all the Windows updates (which he reinstalled Windows to get rid of yesterday, suspecting that might be why my internet wasn't working), futzed some more, and has decided that reformatting the computer is really the best idea.

Did any of you ever watch Home Improvement on cable? They should totally remake that show with a geek husband instead of a carpenter.

In other news (since I can't download to my computer or upload to you any photos of what I've been up to), I wish you would check out, if you're crafty-minded, the editorial I wrote for Crafting a Green World this morning about how one of the etsy teams I'm a member of, Team Craftivism, recently had itself declared by the leadership a left-wing political group. I'm a big nerd so I'm mostly concerned that the team name no longer accurately represents the team, but the debate over my post there has gotten, um, quite heated, and I'd love to hear your opinion of the whole business.

Reminds me of the wool versus acrylic incident that I started a few months ago.

I am possibly an "inciter."

Two Very Different Schools of Thought

So Matt says that he fixed my computer, but since he also said that three days ago after turning it off and back on again, and then again after rebooting the wi-fi router, and then again after running an anti-virus program, and then again after reinstalling Windows (causing me to have to reinstall all my programs), and then again after rebooting Windows to a previous installation, I'm trying to blog really, really quickly.

Which is ridiculous, since I have a LOT to say.

There was an interesting juxtaposition of activities this week--on the one hand, the spring Parents' Evening at Will's Montessori preschool, and on the other hand, a forum for parents of prospective kindergarteners at our local public elementary school.

I'll do Montessori first, because I think there are going to be some friends who are going to be unhappy with what I say about the public school, so I'll let you get your happy vibes on before that.

So you probably know by now that Montessori classrooms do not welcome parents in on a drop-in basis--the classroom is the child's space, with important work for the child to do, and parents basically just get in the way of all the happy little elf-work. But one night a semester, Will's school has a shortened session to which parents are invited.

This is the animal stamping work. You use the animal stamps to stamp the appropriate number of times under each number--this is one of the first works that the three-year-olds are taught, which is why there are boxes to show you how many goes where. Children are always welcome, however, to do any work that they've been taught whenever they want, and repetition of easier works is something that kids find comforting, and that gives them a sense of how far they've progressed, and helps them internalize certain concepts, sort of like muscle memory for the mind. Will still does this animal stamping work about once a week.
This is a work in which you scoop different objects out of the fishbowl, sort them into separate porcelain bowls, then dump them back in the bowl and sponge up the water. It's a sorting work and a motor skills work to practice the spoon grip.
One of the things that I've found really interesting this year is that in the fall semester Parents' Night, Willow was almost entirely interested in the works that practiced pretty abstract and sometimes complicated mental skills--arithmetic, literacy, a lot of handwriting practice, some geography, calendars, stuff like that. But lately she's been almost entirely interested in the motor skills works--dipping, gripping, squeezing stuff. I've actually noticed this at home, too, in that she's far less interested in thing like mazes and math worksheets and dinosaur identification and the art that she usually loves, and she's been happiest just running around and jumping and digging and messing stuff up and helping me do housework. It's a different stage of development that she's in at the moment, I guess, and I'm very pleased that her school also supports this type of development and allows her to practice satisfying works that challenge her motor skills as well as her academic skills.

In this work you use the tool to move the little balls from the bowl to the platter and then back again. It's terrific for the scissors grip, which lefties often find a lot more challenging to learn, only I've just noticed that my own little lefty is using her right hand here. Sigh.

One of my other many favorite things about the classroom environment is that there are no pictures of kittens hanging from tree limbs or motivational posters (have you seen the site where you can make your own de-motivational posters? Rawk), but there are, instead, hanging quilts on the walls and African drums and these really lovely Japanese prints:This one is a partner work. One child wears the blindfold, and the other child hands her two swatches of cloth--velvet, burlap, cotton, etc. The blindfolded child says if they're the same or different. I think that older children might do an ordering work with this, as well--Montessori young child work is very big on teaching them to order gradations of things, like sounds from highest pitch to lowest, textures from roughest to smoothest, colors from darkest tone to lightest tone. I don't remember the exact philosophy, but it's something about heightened sensory development and deep concentration, or something: This is another sorting work, and I think might be another three-year-old work, as well. It also involves categorization, since you put the insects together, and the plants together, and animals together. Everything you need for a particular work is all together on a little child-sized tray, remember, and you can get it off the shelf and put it back as you like. There are purposefully not enough tables in the room for every single child to do a table work, however, and purposefully not enough floor space for every child to do a floor work, either, because living in a community involves recognizing that the rights of other people are as important as yours and that prior involvement takes precedence. The new thing in the middle group is that you get your first work plan. It helps give the child a well-rounded experience by asking them to, at first, complete a small number of activities in various curriculum categories chosen by themselves and by the teacher. It lets a teacher unobtrusively set a child extra time with a skill with which they might be struggling, and lets children learn goal-setting and the feeling of accomplishment. Older children get increasingly more detailed work plans and are increasingly more in charge of creating and fulfilling them, until in just a couple of years a child's work plan becomes not just a goal chart, but a daily, often hourly, sometimes more frequently-updated record of exactly what that child is doing and what they are learning and have learned at any given time--this, by the way, is a far more complete and accurate record than standardized testing, although our Montessori still participates in some standardized testing, mostly so that the children are comfortable with it after they've left the program.Practical life is also big fun. The girls both have their own brooms and dustpans and spray bottles at home, but sweeping the classroom is still awesome, apparently. Although after Will swept some dirt into the dustpan, she forgot a step and just hung the dustpan up without emptying it, spilling all the dirt right back onto the floor. Oh, well--it's one way to ensure that 30 kids all have some dust to sweep up.You can pet the class gerbils whenever you want and feed them, too, if you see that they need it, but you must ask a teacher to supervise you.For the spring Parents' Night, the children do Speaker's Rug, which is something they do weekly. A small square of carpet is passed around the circle, and when it comes to you, you may stand on the carpet and say something, or you may pass it. Will is the only kid who ALWAYS passes, because she's very uncomfortable with situations in which she isn't sure exactly what the social script is, but she sits respectfully and listens to the other children speak, and she sees that all the other kids do, too, and Speaker's Rug happens every single week like clockwork so it's something that's inevitably going to become familiar and comfortable enough that one day she WILL feel the confidence to get up and speak to her schoolmates.

I love Willow's school. And I hope that will help you see why, exactly, I hated hated HATED the forum at our local elementary school. Mind you, it's supposed to be a good school, and I've thought about that forum, and I'm thinking that (hoping that) perhaps it was just the presentation that went really wrong. Perhaps the teachers and principal COULD have said some things that I would have really liked.

Only they didn't.

What they did do...they went on and on and on about the bus schedule, randomly, in my opinion, since I'm only a PROSPECTIVE parent, and I don't yet give a flip about the bus except to know that there is one and they haven't lost a kid yet. They briefly went over the daily schedule, but it was like "We walk the circle at 8:45, then at 9:00 we have open choice, then we meet in the circle, then we go to an activity, then recess, then lunch, then nap, then reading, then science, then home." Okay...

My friend Noel asked if the kindergarteners ever interacted with the older children (hoping that they DID, you know), and all the kindergarten teachers fell all over each other reassuring all the parents that they watched their kids so closely and they only had recess and lunch with older children but there were assigned seats at lunch and five teachers at recess, etc. etc.

I asked what the teaching philosophy was regarding media exposure, particularly computer and videos, and how did that translate into classroom practice, and one (older) teacher apologized before she said that she didn't approve of five-year-olds using the computer, and then when I assured her that I perfectly agreed, some other teacher jumped in to say that every teacher's classroom was different and that SHE taught her children to properly utilize the computer right from the beginning.

One teacher made a joke that a five-year-old's attention span is about five minutes long.

Another teacher made a joke that when a parent complained to her about all-day kindergarten, she said to that parent, "Well, you can see your kid at night."

You see what I'm getting at here? A lot of this stuff is just normal for teachers to think--hell, the things I think about my students quite often is not printable in a family blog--but very little of this is what, as a prospective parent, I needed to here about the program. I needed to hear what their teaching philosophies are, what their views are on student learning styles and ranges of development, how they handle discipline and teach the kids to handle conflict, how the children are encouraged to socialize and form a community, etc.

Except that then they cut off the presentation portion so that people could fill out forms. I did manage to commandeer one last teacher to ask one last question (No, there's no foreign language curriculum, but sometimes they have a club), but then I admit that I ditched before the school tour. I used to go there a lot for a preschool playgroup, so I've seen the place.

But seriously, it could have just been a bad presentation for a good school. For instance, one of the teachers talked about how at first, the kindergarteners would spend most of their time learning that they had to wait their turn and let 20 kids go ahead of them and that they had to sit quietly and not touch each other. I was telling Matt that this pissed me off, that I did NOT think it necessary that a five-year-old have to learn these particular lessons, but Matt was all, "Of course you do. They do that same stuff at Montessori, only they tell you that it teaches community-building and respect for all people and manners. It just sounds like junk here because they're doing that stuff just to keep order, but it's still the same stuff."

And there was also this really long speech in which this one teacher talked on and on and ON about how we were all going to be so mad at her for the first couple of weeks because she would not let "her kids" leave her from the front of the school at the end of the day until they'd given her a high five and she'd made eye contact with us, because they were "her kids" and she needed to say goodbye to them and we'd just have to wait. I actually replayed this speech in my head for her, something like, "I take my role in loco parentis very seriously. My students must learn that they cannot leave my side without my permission, even to go to another trusted adult. I teach them that they must high-five me before they go to you because this keeps them from running off without supervision and because it gives me time to see you and know that they are going to an appropriate caregiver." See? That sounds way better. And if you could refer to her as your "student" and not your "kid," I'd like that, too, thanks.

I wasn't disappointed in the school, though, really, because I clearly remember the time I've spent in public schools as a student and as a teacher, and so it was never my intent to enroll my girls--when we can no longer afford Montessori, I will joyfully transition the girls to homeschooling--but I was happy that Matt, who's more ambivalent about homeschooling and who has pleasant memories of public school, got to go to this meeting. It's not quite what he remembers, I think, and he knows that we can do better without it.

I'm lying, though, because really I am disappointed. Most people can't afford the money for a fancy-pants private school or the time for full-on homeschooling, and I don't like to think about how it would have felt to have gone to that meeting and come away thinking as negatively about it as I do now, but know that my kids were going to go there, anyway.

FRAK!!!

My computer is messed up. Another word for this is "suck," which rhymes with the word that I say when I can't get onto the internet for more than a minute at a time for the past three days.

And also? Matt almost died last night and I saved his life with the Heimlich Maneuver.

Frakking grapes.

Photos and a real post tomorrow? And internet and ebay and foobiverse and Gosselins without Pity and Crafting a Green World and answering students' emails and PMs on Craftster?

We'll see...

Digitally Crafty

In keeping with my personal theme of family-wide collaboration (and my personal goal of our girlies someday having two independently-employed stay-at-home parents), I've been thinking for quite a long while of ways to incorporate my Matt into some of my crafty work. I learned right away, at about 8 pm on the eve of my very first big craft show, that Matt, although full of big promises--"Sure, I'll help out!"--is completely mentally/emotionally unsuited for actual crafting, or preparing displays, or even helping to set up or boothsit at actual craft fairs, although I make him do those last two things anyway because he has muscles and a girl's gotta browse (and pee).

And while a ton of other ideas that I have (I always have a ton of ideas of varying degrees of impracticality), such as tutorial zines or patterns, could incorporate Matt, those aren't really creative uses for him, more just utilizing his graphic designer expertise in Adobe Illustrator CS4.

There are ways to do craft digitally, though. Not only are there some graphic designers who do handcraft, like the lastest EtsyBlogger featured blogger--

--but handcraft is one area that really appreciates good design, and I've noticed, especially lately, a lot of digital design being sold in the supply market. Shabby Princess, for example, sells (and gives away), these really elaborate digital scrapbooking kits with papers and fonts and realistic-looking embellishments and journal tags and stuff, all digital, and there are a lot of shops on etsy that have been selling digital collage sheets for printing and incorporating into physical craft work.

And that explains why Matt's working right now on a comic book-themed digital scrapbooking kit for my pumpkinbear etsy shop.

On account of we're still big dorks.

In other news, awesome Matt went out to run some errands on Friday night and came home with chocolate and . You might remember that I'm a big fan of the first books (though I'd rather just forget that the last book even happened; as far as I'm concerned, she wrote The Host instead, not along with), and I was really eager to see the movie, despite the mixed reviews.

My opinion? A mixed review.

Some of the negatives, mind you, are hard to remedy and are just really part of the product--for instance, I think it's a very rare child who can act, and therefore I accept the fact that unless a film is extremely carefully written and directed or unless an extremely gifted child actor is chosen, the young actor will just not be that great. And that's something you just have to accept. So it really didn't bother me that the kid who played Edward Cullen, or the kids who played all their friends, had pretty spotty performances. Seriously, Daniel Radcliffe can't do EVERY acting role available to young men, now can he?

I did think that the role for Bella was written in such a way that the actress could and did perform it well. Bella's supposed to be a loner at first, cautious at first, a little wary of showing emotion at first--this mostly requires that the actress look solemn and non-reactive, and she nailed it.

The various reveals of the various plot points were also a little spotty, as if the writer and director couldn't decide if they wanted you to have read the book first and therefore know what's going to happen or not. Again, part of the film-from-book product.

Okay, but the point is that I thought the movie was both terrible AND awesome. The cinematography was terrific--evocative of the mood of the film, and that and just everything else about the film was just so modern-day gothic that it was really, really gluttonously fun. So maybe you didn't have to take the GRE Literature and thus didn't read The Monk or the The Mysteries of Udolpho or any of that stuff, but as a former literary scholar I just ate it up! The music fit, the forest scenes REALLY fit, and hell, even the melodramatic acting really fit in with the overall theme.

And that's why every time Matt was groaning in disgust during this whole film, I was going "SQUEAAAL!"

Because I'm smarter than him.

My Pumpkinbear Etsy Shop is Presentable Again!

What with, you know, parenting and teaching freshman comp and cooking food and starting seeds and sewing presents for little-kid birthday parties and cleaning and writing my book proposal and making patterns for my book proposal and creating some Artist Trading Cards for my Craftster ATC WXY swap and blah blah blah, my pumpkinbear etsy shop was growing sadly neglected, and it was starting to make me feel antsy.

So off and on this weekend, in between the sewing and seed starting and stuff, I found some time to update. It didn't help that the weather turned (AGAIN!) and so all my photos are weirdly lit, but perfect lighting or not, they're up, and that's better than perfect lighting.

The fun thing is that I managed to update with a lot of really different stuff, some of which I've been sitting on for too long due to just doing other stuff. So I've got some vintage crafting stuff, like this crazy-awesome lap loom, with all its parts AND an instruction book, that I happened upon fortuitously one day:

Matt made his first digital collage sheet for me, just a simple one-inch set of the international breastfeeding symbol images that we use to make pinbacks, so that other crafty people with button machines can make their own fundraisers for their own natural birthing advocacy organizations: I sold off all my other comic book pinbacks and doily pinbacks, so I FINALLY relisted a set of each: I have to make some more of the black doily pinbacks before I can relist those, but I'm still on this random rainbow kick, and so I'm also absurdly stoked by my rainbow doily pinbacks.

And finally, now that I've gotten my T-shirt smock pattern all worked out to my satisfaction I'm thinking of changing it into a T-shirt apron for my book proposal (more gender neutral, don't you think maybe?), which pattern I'd also need to work out (pushing the proposal mailing back just a few more days, squidge squidge), but anyway, now that it's all worked out and happy I can enjoy sewing up some crazy-awesome fangeek T-shirt dresses out of my crazy-awesome fangeek T-shirt stash:

Captain America--such a nice guy. Too bad about Bucky.

P.S. Check out my expose on a big company that ripped off an indie crafter over at Crafting a Green World.

Because Everyone Needs a Dinosaur Dress

I've been working out this new pattern idea for making dresses/tops out T-shirts, sort of like the pillowcase dresses I make. Of course, figuring out a new pattern requires making up that pattern several times, and hence:

Velociraptor Dress

I think I'm actually liking this idea a lot more than the pillowcase dresses, because, duh, it's way more fangeek. It's tricky with the bias straps, though, because they ought to be all mitchy-matchy, but I hate to buy new fabric.

Fortunately, Mr. Velociraptor also has some pale green accents to complement the pale green fabric I used here:I'm making this pattern to include in my book proposal, but I'll also likely have a few of these dresses up on my pumpkinbear etsy shop this weekend after I'm satisfied with the way it's working, because it's a good way to use up my stash of awesome T-shirts.

Don't worry, though--I made the girl put on pants before I sent her to school:

Good Game Morning

With the rainy weather, the children didn't take to being booted outside first thing in the morning the way we'd been doing it earlier this week, so it was yet another indoor morning for us.


Prescription? Games, games, games.


I'm not at all into games--board games, card games, sports, about the only thing I will do is sit down for a good session of D&D if you've got a rockin' DungeonMaster--so the benefit when I do chill out with the girls and play a bunch of games with them is that, not only am I bored to tears inside my head, but I also get to feel like a REALLY good mother, you know, sacrificing my mental capacity and emotional well-being for my girls.


The girls are especially fond of Uncle Wiggily, a Goodwill score of a few months ago. Admittedly, it's a terrific game for their age range--you can use it to reinforce counting, number identification, basic arithmetic, as well as the usual turn-taking and sportsmanship and stuff:
When Sydney gets bored and wanders off to pretend that the toy dinosaurs are having conversations with each other, I liven the game up a little (and make it go a LOT faster) by playing Abacus Uncle Wiggily.

Do you guys have an abacus? They rock. Will can do all kind of crazy math using an abacus, and that's just the basic stuff that I know to teach her--if you really know, you can do all kinds of CRAZY stuff with an abacus.

Anyway, in Abacus Uncle Wiggily, you pull TWO cards (maybe even three, if you're brave) and add them together using the abacus: You get to hop forward your answer, of course. But if you're wrong...well, let's just say the consequences are dire.

After Uncle Wiggily, we played this ocean life card game that I bought the girls for Christmas. I don't know how you actually play, but sometimes we play a game using the front sides of the cards as flashcards--

And sometimes we use the trivia questions on the back. Okay, there is a game I do like: I LIKE trivia.

So a kid picks a card and brings it to me, and there are various permutations of which one or how many of the trivia questions on the back that I ask. If she answers the question(s) correctly, she adds the card to her collection. If she answers incorrectly, I add the card to my collection.

Because I was such a good mom, I gave myself permission to serve frozen pizza for lunch. With frozen spinach on top, though, so it's almost like a healthy lunch.

Sort of.