Love Chat

When I come home from an evening out, my girl holds my face in her warm little hands and says, "I'm happy to see you, mama." My two-year-old wiggle puppy says, "I love you, mama," and then, "I'm proud of you, mama." Her words are half purr, half coo. I reply in kind to each of her pronouncements, with a squeeze for emphasis, which makes my girl giggle and squeal with delight.

These little love fests are becoming more and more frequent lately. I'm basking in them.

And what cheers me most is realizing that my daughter is reflecting what I give her right back at me. She gets these phrases from me, and she might not even know what "I'm proud of you" means but she absorbs the feeling in the words and returns it to me a thousandfold.

How extraordinary to see myself reflected in a mirror like this. It makes me proud of my girl and even a little proud of me, too. Maybe I'm not half bad at this motherhood thing?

I might have another story to tell when Amelie hits her teen years. But for now, I'll gladly take what I have. And bask in it.

Postcards from Abroad

As soon as I pronounce to the world that I'm ready to blog again, wouldn't you know it, I get swamped with freelance work, so swamped that I work all weekend until my butt is sore and I'm practically cross-eyed. And I'm not even out of the hole yet. Still digging.

At least my work takes me to some nice places. I explored the colonial cities of Mexico on Saturday, haunted the luxury hotels of Europe on Sunday, and spent yesterday in exotic Asia. Have I mentioned that I'm an armchair travel writer? My job gives me wanderlust in the worst way.

I always take solace in the fact that if we go forward with our plan to homeschool Amelie we will be free to globe-trot. We can learn Spanish together as we hop from San Miguel de Allende to Guadalajara. We can show Amelie where millions of Monarch butterflies winter over each year in Michoacan. Then we'll backpack across China, walk the Great Wall from Jinshanling to Simatai, and come face to face with the Terra-Cotta Warriors of Xi'an.

Okay, I'm definitely past the backpacking stage of my life (so twenties!), but let me have my little dream. We all need our Walter Mitty moments, don't we?

I leave you with this happy snap of Amelie. It's time to get back to work. Sydney is on the itinerary. Bon voyage.

Alive and Kicking

I was planning on calling this post "Back from the Dead," but I thought that might be too much of a downer. And it wouldn't mesh well with this cheery pic of Amelie painting at her easel. It's a "glass half full or half empty" kind of thing. Half full, it seems, is our winner tonight.

This blog is once again a living, thriving, pixilated, virtual organism. I am breathing life back into it. Voila.

What happened? Like the rest of the world, I got busy over the holidays. And despite all the hoopla and rioting in the streets from my ardent fans, demanding that I resume blogging again, I resisted. I deferred. I demurred. Until now.

But really, I missed writing here. I missed having something that was mine in writing. I missed marking the time in my daughter's small life. Catching it, cupping it in my hands, honoring it.

Here is a conversation that Amelie and I had recently. Almost as it was happening, I thought, I must encase this in amber. Or at least blog it. So here goes. I should preface it by explaining that Amelie calls me "Deer" sometimes because of a character that I created in a bedtime story for her (a deer that she befriends and that takes her for rides on its back).

Amelie: Deer, can you fly?

Mama: No. Butterflies and birds can fly, but I can't. I don't have wings.

Amelie: I have wings to fly!

Mama: You do? Show me your wings.

(Amelie shoots her two little sausage arms into the air exuberantly.)

Mama: Those are great wings! Do you want to fly? Let's fly!

(Mama starts flapping her arms and running around the room. Sure, it looks ridiculous, but my girl is only two, right?)

Amelie (outraged): MAMA! YOU CAN'T FLY!

(Mama stops, listens.)

Amelie: You're too big!

Well, there you have it: "Playing Hooky" is alive and trying, perhaps futilely, to fly again. With any luck, this blog will grow its wings back.

Happy Hanukkah

Amelie is lucky. She gets two holidays, and that adds up to A LOT of presents. In my family, my brother and I were given a gift every night of the eight nights of Hanukkah. That's one big pile o' goods. After all, as Jewish kids we had Christmas to compete with, so we needed some good ammunition for our friends. ("Oh, yeah? Presents under the tree and in your socks? Well, we get a present every night for eight whole nights!")

When I told my husband about the eight gifts he was suitably horrified by the flagrant consumerism, but he was also a bit excited by prospect that we might just have to continue the excessive family tradition. So we're sort of going along with it. For now.

Here's Amelie wildly shaking pepper over play carrots at her new toy kitchen. She went crazy making eggs, pizza, and soup. It was all we could do to lure her to the table to eat some real dinner.

Only five more nights to go....

Reading to Flurry

I'm laid up in bed with a bad cold. Amelie loves coming to my bedside and unwrapping cough drops for me. She has unwrapped more cough drops than I could possibly consume in one day. Since I don't have the brain power or the wrist strength to type out a real blog post, I'm leaving you with a couple of photos of my girl "reading" to Flurry the therapy dog at our local library yesterday. (Thanks, Michael, for these snaps.) Doesn't the dog look like he's really listening?

Worry Less, Live More

My husband thinks I worry too much. Maybe he's right, although sometimes I'm just stating a fact ("Amelie is going to bed too late"), which my hubby quickly translates into worry-speak ("Amelie isn't getting enough sleep and will end up sick or slap-happy or the victim of some other terrible fate").

Who's the real worry wart?

Still, I think he's right that I, and probably the rest of the population of the free world, should worry less.

Last night we finished watching the documentary film Born into Brothels, about a photographer who travels to Calcutta, India, to chronicle the lives of prostitutes and ends up teaching photography to a rag-tag band of red-light-district children. It's an incredible story. I fell in love with these spunky kids, who discovered a new world through the camera lenses provided to them by the impassioned and protective British-American photographer Zana Briski. As she gets closer to the children and learns more about the bleak futures that await them, Briski devotes her boundless energy to getting these kids out of the brothels and into boarding schools, where they can get an education and a chance for a better life.

The photograph at top, taken by 14-year-old Suchitra, is one of my favorites. Sweet-faced Suchitra was not one of the lucky ones. Her mother would not allow her to leave the squalid brothel, where she is likely contributing to its income today.

Seeing this movie I am shamed by my silly little worries about Amelie watching too much television or not eating her veggies. And I am dazzled by the unaccountable flashes of joy and humor and even genius emitting from these scruffy kids as they struggle against enormous odds for a kinder future.

Today's mantra: Worry Less, Live More. Oh, and laugh more too.

Born into Brothels
worrying

Better Than School

Sometimes I wish I had kept my mouth shut about our intention to homeschool Amelie. After all, our girl is only two - which means that I have to listen to people's objections to this scheme for a good 3 or 4 years longer than necessary. Not everyone is unsupportive, of course, but some friends and relatives take every opportunity to tell me why they think homeschooling will turn my kid into a weirdo or a misfit with no friends and no chance of getting into a good university, blah blah blah.

It's always reassuring to learn that people with these ideas usually know very little about the reality of homeschooling.

Of course there's always the chance that a homeschooled kid will turn out to be socially awkward. Yet schooled kids can be pretty weird too. I remember some strange characters from my school days (a boy who ate a piece of the innards of a dissected frog comes to mind) - and in retrospect I believe that the contrived world of compulsory schooling made some kids this way.

But the pushback that I'm receiving from a few friends and family members is nothing compared to the tremendous pressure that trailblazing homeschoolers faced in the 1970s and 80s, when a homeschooling movement quietly started to unfold in this country. Nancy Wallace tells it like it was in her excellent 1983 book Better Than School. Wallace's seven-year-old son was miserable in school, but when his parents inquired into teaching him at home they had to face an unsympathetic and all-too-powerful school board. After a few tense meetings and a lot of paperwork the board reluctantly allowed the Wallaces to homeschool Ishmael. Yet the school officials plagued this poor family with disdain and intrusive surveillance along the way.

Wallace has a slice-of-homeschool-life style that I really enjoyed. We get to see Ishmael and his sister Vita find and explore their passions, from writing stories to working out Bach minuets on the piano. In the chapters on reading and music, Wallace looks so closely, so lovingly, at the way her children learn. She honors her kids' unique learning styles in a way that simply isn't possible for even the most well-meaning schoolteacher, who has 29 other pupils to look after. And when Wallace discovers that her kids have a gift for music she makes piano and violin a centerpiece of their education, creating a conservatory-like environment and filling their lives with musical opportunities.

These kids are lucky. Are they weird? Hell, yes. Who wouldn't call a nine-year-old who writes operettas weird? But what's wrong with that? Seems pretty great to me.

homeschooling
Better Than School

Happiness Is a Pot of Soup

It's getting cold up here in the Catskill foothills. The trees are stripping down to bare essentials, and the deer are wearing thicker coats. The black bear are preparing for their long sleep.

Even though I am from the Northeast, and even though I have Eastern European Jew babushka-wearing genes, I really feel that my soul (if not my body) is of Caribbean descent. This is not my season.

Yet on my way to teach yoga yesterday morning, I couldn't help but notice the delicate shimmer of frost on the grasses. I couldn't help but notice that so many yellow leaves had conspired to fall in one night, blanketing the hillside in gold. There is much beauty this time of year.

Here is my winter survival plan: Make soup. Drink tea. Keep flames dancing in the woodstove.

Yesterday we had one of those rare, lovely Sundays with no plans at all (aside from the morning yoga, which is a joy). I spent the afternoon cooking wholesome things for our little family. For lunch there was quinoa, braised greens from a New Paltz farm, and lemon-pepper tofu. Incredibly, Amelie ate the greens. Heartily. Then Michael made a house-warming fire in the woodstove and Amelie "read" books to Pooh bear (with amazing accuracy, I might add) while I got to work on a pot of soup. The recipe, courtesy of my mother-in-law, is fast becoming a family treasure.

Three Grain Soup

3 medium leeks, white parts only, chopped (I use a big onion when leeks are not available)
2 medium carrots sliced 1/2 inch thick
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon thyme
salt
14-ounce can crushed tomatoes
6 cups water
Head of garlic, peeled but not chopped
1/3 cup brown rice
1/3 cup lentils
1/3 cup wheat berries and/or barley
Big bunch of kale, chopped

Combine the leeks, carrots, oil, bay leaves, thyme, and salt. Cover and cook on low 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add tomatoes, water, and garlic and bring to a boil. Add grains and lentils. Cover and simmer until tender, about an hour. Add kale for the last 15 minutes. Cook to desired thickness, or add more water if necessary.

I always double the recipe, filling two quarts for the freezer for future meals.

Cornbread is a nice accompaniment. I made some yesterday and forgot the sugar. So we just drizzled each slice liberally with honey. It was a meal fit for Pooh bear, if not a king.

soup

Back to (Semi)Normal

Well, Amelie and I made it through Daddy's Longest Business Trip Ever. And we are just so glad that's behind us.

Eleven days on our own wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Amelie and I were a team, and that felt good. And we had a lot of help from my family. Here's Amelie with her grandpa, dancing on a chair in his greenhouse. She loves it in there, surrounded by colorful finches from South America, painted turtles, giant toads, noisy bullfrogs, well-fed koi fish, and even a water dragon.

We spent Halloween with her cousins in the trick-or-treat paradise known as Montclair, New Jersey. Amelie couldn't believe her luck when she knocked on the doors of complete strangers and they handed her candy. She couldn't understand why she wasn't allowed to tromp through their houses, though. Who would say no to a toddler in a ladybug costume?

The biz trip had its downside, of course. Keeping up with my freelance work was hard. Some mornings Amelie went to her favorite play space, the Sunshine Club, which is like a high-class daycare full of fabulous toys and just 4 or 5 kids on most days. And then there were the times when she just watched A LOT of videos while I tried to bang out a 400-word article or proofread a newsletter. She thought she had won the jackpot, but I wallowed in guilt about her television binge.

It was times like these when I began to doubt our ability to homeschool Amelie. Most homeschooling families have one stay-at-home parent who's completely dedicated to their children's education. Usually Michael and I will both be at home, but we'll be juggling work and homeschooling. Even now we have dedicated work shifts to keep our time structured and make a clear separation between work and childcare. Yet unforeseen trips like this one will inevitably come along and throw us into a tizzy again.

Should one of us quit working? With expenses like ours it doesn't seem possible right now. And since both of us are freelance we have no job security whatsoever. With both of us working, we at least have each other to fall back on if the work dries up.

Michael is back home now, so my confidence level is rising again. We have Amelie recovering from her TV addiction on a 12-step program. We are eating less Halloween candy and more home-cooked meals. Things are looking up.

homeschooling
working mom

An Award, Just When I Need It Most

My husband has never outgrown his childhood love for superheroes. A classic portrait of Superman hangs over his desk, and he never misses a film adaptation of his favorite comic book characters. He can tell you about Spiderman's childhood with a biographer's accuracy, and he knows all about obscure superheroes like The Sandman and Ghost Rider. Now I get to tell my husband that he is in fact married to a superhero, or more precisely, a superheroine, as Fourmother has honored me with a Wonder Woman award. Hence the nifty bouquet of roses and winged "W" insignia.

It couldn't have come at a better time. I could really use some super powers right now. Michael (the aforementioned hubby) is away on a business trip, a ridiculously LONG business trip, and I am now experiencing life as a Single Mother. Ahem. A Single Working Mother. And it is not easy.

I may not have an invisible jet or gold bracelets that can deflect bullets, but I do have a few other secret weapons. I have the Madeline videos that I rented from the library, which can buy me a little time to send work off to a client. I have a hidden stash of chocolate that can stop a tantrum in mid-screech. I can do a pretty good Cookie Monster imitation. And I have an iPhone now - yes, that exorbitantly priced little gadget - which lets me respond to work emails from the playground so no one has to know that I'm not at my desk. Linda Carter, eat your heart out!

But I could use more, many more super powers to get me through this week and all the way to Monday, when hubby will stumble off his red-eye flight and back into our lives. I could use super powers to fill the fridge with nourishing meals for the next few days. I could use super powers to scrub my daughter's potty, keep raccoons out of the garbage, and fold more goddamn laundry. I could use super powers to stay loving and kind toward my hubby despite his maddening absence.

On a happier note, I would like to pass the Wonder Woman award along to Colleen of The New Unschooler for her intrepid foray into unschooling with her 12-year-old son. She tells us in her blog that she just had a birthday, so I think roses are in order. Besides, her boy will be really impressed to hear that his mom is a superheroine.

superheroes
Wonder Woman

Happiness

From the Land of Make-Believe

We have arrived at the age of the Imagination. For the past month or so, we have seen our couch turn into a train, and we've had long conversations on the phone with Charlie Brown. We have strapped Winnie the Pooh into a toy stroller and taken him to the chocolate store. We have carefully wiped our teddy bears' bottoms, patted them dry, and wrapped them in real diapers that we ourselves do not wear anymore. We have eaten slice after slice of pretend pizza.

Come to think of it, I've watched Amelie's imagination slowly begin to bud and flower over the course of several months now. The more skillful my daughter becomes with the English language, the more intricate her world grows. The two forces - language and imagination- are expanding in tandem, as if sprouting from the same seed. And they are moving forward at a furious rate, like fast-growing vines destined to twist themselves around everything in sight.

I've said this many times during the course of Amelie's small life, but I'm saying it with even greater fervency now: I do not want to forget any of this. It's incredible to watch my child begin to make sense of her world by spinning stories around it. What a lush, crazy, wonderful garden the human mind is! We really are all innately creative beings. We begin as artists. Whether or not we are lucky enough to remain so throughout our lives is often another story.

My dream is to protect this fragile, golden kernel of creativity that lives within my daughter. Keeping Amelie out of school - all too often the land of conformity and lowest common denominators - might be one way to go about it. Is it naive to think this way? I wonder. It is certainly not conventional to think this way. And something tells me that's a good thing.

homeschooling
imagination
make-believe

She Eats Bananas, Eggs, and Yes, Chocolate

I'm singing the Picky Eater Blues lately. My girl is oh-so meticulous about what she chooses to put in her mouth. When it comes to dinner entrees we are down to three or four things. Pasta with butter, cheese, and broccoli that she picks out. Couscous with butter, cheese, and peas that she picks out. Scrambled eggs will do in a pinch. (And it's always a pinch. Perhaps I should start raising hens.)

Until very recently Amelie even rejected pizza. I was outraged. A child who won't eat pizza? So I went to work on this. (You would think that I'd choose a more valiant crusade, like kale or spinach. But no. I wanted a normal, pizza-eating child.) And wonder of wonders, she eats some pizza now. But only broccoli pizza. And she won't eat the bread. She carefully picks off the broccoli and cheese and eats those. Just to keep me on my toes, it seems. (Though I suppose I did choose the right crusade.)

I get such a high when Amelie eats something green. It's quite a feeling, like I've just won an all-expenses-paid vacation for two to sunny Jamaica. It's a level of euphoria that's entirely out of proportion to the situation.

Oh, and my girl has so many rules - ridiculous rules! Have you ever heard of a child who will only eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while she's riding in the car? I swear, if I put a pb&j on a plate in front of her at the table, she won't touch it. But I'll stick it in a baggie and five minutes later, as we're rolling down the block, she'll munch it happily en route to the store or playground. Same for baby carrots. She only eats them when she's in motion. When I put them on a plate, alas, they lose all their sex appeal.

The New York Times recently ran an article called Picky Eaters? They Get It from You. I read it with a guilty sense of recognition. Yes, I was the child who would eat only spaghetti with red sauce. Apparently this is an evolutionary response - a survival mechanism designed to prevent us from ingesting potentially dangerous things. So I suppose I should be more understanding of Amelie's finicky nature, and proud to have such a Darwinian masterpiece of a daughter.

An accompanying article called The Experts Suggest offers a few strategies for us meal-challenged parents. It seems I'm doing everything wrong: Making Amelie a separate dish instead of serving her what her parents eat, and resorting to bribery (if you eat some spinach I'll let you watch that video!).

Well, it's back to the cutting board tonight. Onward I go, clinging to the slender hope that my girl will eat something green, transporting me to a kind of bliss unknown even to the most deeply meditative and enlightened monks of the Himalayas....

picky eaters

3 a.m. Musings, and a Recipe

I can't sleep, so I have redesigned my blog. I've been meaning to do this for some time. It was just, well, too PINK.

What's with the pink, anyway? I never used to like the color particularly, but after I gave birth to a girl child, I started putting it everywhere. This is embarrassing but true. I fell into the pink trap. I latched onto the girlie-girl hue as a way of announcing to the world that yes, my nearly bald, androgynous infant had two X chromosomes, thank you very much. (Why is it so important to most of us parents that people recognize this? I suppose we want even passers-by in the street to know at least the bare basics about the amazing being that is our child.)

So, away with the pink. Except for that pink ribbon of sisterly support. THAT can stay.

Anyway, in the spirit of mommy bloggers always looking to share the latest domestic coup, I am going to offer one of my family's favorite new recipes now. (Yes, this is a complete non sequitur. I am writing this at 3 a.m., so you must forgive me. Try these muffins, and you will forgive me. They are delicious. And besides, I needed a reason to post the image at top of my domestic-goddess-in-training. You will notice that she is wearing a PINK top. Though I prefer now to think of it as a subdued salmon color.)

Carrot Cake Muffins

2 cups shredded carrots (approx. 6 carrots)*
1/2 cup raisins
2 1/2 cups whole-wheat pastry flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 1/4 tsp cinnamon
3/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cloves
2 coarsely mashed bananas
1/2 cup canola oil
1/2 cup orange juice
3 Tbsp honey and/or 2 Tbsp molasses
2 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 375. Line a 12-cup muffin tin with paper baking cups. Brush or spray with canola oil.

Mix the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, ginger, and cloves in one big bowl.

In another bowl, mix the banana, oil, orange juice, honey/molasses, and vanilla until well blended.

Gradually add the wet ingredients to the dry, blending well with each addition. Stir in the carrots and raisins.

Spoon into the muffin cups and bake 40-45 minutes, or until a tester inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean.

*Note: Use a food processor (not a hand grater) to shred the carrots or you will begin to despair, and to curse me for sharing this recipe with you. And I wouldn't want that to happen.

By the way, this is a modified version of a recipe from Healthy Cooking for Kids. Enjoy.

mommy bloggers
muffin recipe
pink

The Life of a Blog

Thanks to Fourmother for tagging me with the latest meme and inspiring a post today. For this meme I'm asked to choose 5 posts that show "The Evolution of My Blog." Why not?

Playing Hooky is still very young, barely out of diapers as far as blogs go. And I'm not nearly up to speed with my posting yet (though I strive to pick up the pace). But here goes.

1. When I launched this blog with my first post, Busting the Stereotypes, I hadn't yet decided whether or not I wanted to homeschool my daughter. (This photo of Amelie is one of my faves.)

2. Not long after, I wrote about making in-roads into the homeschooling culture in Finding Community. What a relief it was to connect with like-minded people who were really doing the homeschooling thing! Homeschooling was starting to sound not just doable but exciting to me.

3. I often agonize about decisions. But it didn't take me long to decide that homeschooling would really work for our family. School was starting to look less and less appealing as a choice for Amelie, while I could imagine our daughter really thriving under the loving guidance of her natural teachers: her parents. I announced my decision to homeschool in How Can We Not?

4. Big commitments often stir up the darker waters of Doubt. Although I was sure of my decision, I needed to write this post as a way of venting a few reservations I still had about homeschooling.

5. In A Freelance Student I embrace the homeschooling lifestyle as a perfect fit for an unconventional (and, I'd like to believe, free-spirited) family like mine.

And now I ask five bloggers to share the evolution of their blogs:
A Happy Childhood Lasts Forever
Freakmom's Space
Into the Studio
Have Fun * Do Good
Dispatches from the Final Frontier

homeschooling
meme

A Good Read

"Most parents feel fondness for those rare, odd moments when they have knelt close beside a son or daughter to transmit the mystery of some ancient, incidental craft: tying a bowline, weaving a pigtail, nipping the suckers from a tomato plant. These are now Hallmark, quality-time moments, exploited by advertisers and available on weekends--we want more of them, we long for that sort of warm proximity in which what we do is necessary, unforced, and precisely as it should be....

"In the end there are reasons beyond education (Can we really detach education from everything else?) to homeschool--a misnomer, in this context, for doing what human beings have always done in bringing up their children. There is a love to be cultivated, an instinct to be nurtured, a need to be satisfied at both ends."

--David Guterson, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense

It's been several weeks since I've finished reading Guterson's book, but passages like these have stayed with me. Written by a high school English teacher, novelist, and homeschooling father of four, Family Matters is a defense of homeschooling as a choice "neither extreme nor outlandish." The book is anything if not sharply intelligent and exhaustively comprehensive, looking at homeschooling from all angles, from legal to theoretical to financial. Guterson inserts just enough anecdote to keep it lively, though I did get a bit bogged down in the theory section. The final chapter puts an elegant cap on Guterson's ultimate message: that our culture tends to alienate parents from their kids, and that homeschooling is one way to restore a sense of connection that's often sadly imperiled these days.

Hear, hear.

homeschooling
David Guterson
Family Matters

A Freelance Student

I love working from home. I can show up at my desk in my pajamas if I feel like it. I can see deer and wild turkeys and sometimes even black bear out my window. I can put my laptop on the porch on a gorgeous September day. I can take a walk down our country road when I need a little break. Best of all, I can be here to mother my child and even to homeschool her when the time comes.

Working from home seemed like a far-fetched idea before I started doing it. But my husband insisted upon the freelance lifestyle for himself, being quite literally allergic to offices. (I have seen his reaction to cubicles, and folks, it isn't pretty. It involves quite a few trips to the men's room.) So I quit my brief New York City magazine career and joined him, living by my pen in the Hudson River Valley. We've each cobbled together something of a career and a better income than I ever thought possible out here in the wilds of New York state.

When we first started to consider homeschooling our daughter, I said to my husband, "Well, we're freelance writers. Why can't Amelie be a freelance student?" Like us she can cut herself loose from big institutions and impersonal environments. She can be her own boss and set her own schedule. She can use the toilet without a hall pass, for chrissake, or go into the kitchen and make herself a peanut butter and banana sandwich whenever she damn well feels like it.

It's a good life. It's a free life. Why should my daughter have anything less?

homeschooling

School A La Carte

I'm amazed at all the misconceptions floating around out there about homeschooling. People assume there's only one way to do it - a method akin to some half-baked attempt at "school at home," with the parent, having no formal training, taking on the stern role of teacher for everything from phonetics to pre-calculus.

No, thanks. That's not what I'm signing up for. I'd die of boredom and my kid would, too.

Instead my husband and I are attracted to more of a "school a la carte" method. We imagine our daughter taking a little bit of learning from here and a little bit from there, according to her tastes and to what is available in the world around us. As it turns out, there's quite a bit available out there.

I joined a local homeschoolers' Yahoo group this summer, and since September has rolled around the emails have been pouring in about all kinds of classes and programs in the area. Like this one:

Recycled music, Thursdays, 12-12:45 AM, ages 8-10
Want to put that old chip bag to use? Join Zoe Rowan in an introduction to lutherie (instrument building). The class will use cheap and recycled materials to build simple instruments such as drums, reed pipes, and a cigar box "guitar." Students will also listen to and discuss music from around the world. Final class will end in a group jam session. $50.00 + $10.00 materials fee.

How cool is that? Here's another:

Space! Thursdays, 10-10:45 AM ages 7-8
Nita is back! Join her for this fun class about the cosmos. Students will be using children's literature and activities to learn about outer space. Students will work on a lap book about the solar system and other topics. $50.00

Can adults come too?

Really, it's enough to make me wish my daughter were older and ready to homeschool RIGHT NOW. Then again, she's a super-cute two-year-old. There's no rush. But it sure is good to know what's out there waiting for us.

homeschooling

Dreams

In my last post I gave voice to a few doubts I have about homeschooling. To balance that out I'd like to venture in the opposite direction, into the realm of fantasy. Here are my dreams about how amazing homeschooling can be.

> Cutting ourselves loose from the school calendar, we'll be free to travel. In fact, we'll make travel a big part of our daughter's education. Perhaps we'll spend a year in Italy, delving into Renaissance art and architecture...tracing Amelie's paternal roots in Sicily...learning to speak Italian and make a killer pesto sauce.

> Goodbye stuffy school rooms, hello fresh air. When the weather allows, nature will be our daughter's classroom. How anti-life is it to lock kids away from the outdoors, which are more magical than ever when seen through a child's eyes?

> She'll have the time to follow her passions. Maybe our daughter will want to work with animals at the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. Or she'll become a pro-level mountain biker on the trails up here in the Catskill Mountains. Or she'll become a bad-ass mixed-media artist. My husband has mused that Amelie might want to take flying lessons. I'm not quite as excited about that one. But I'll let him have his little dream.

> We'll avoid most of that ugly teenager stuff. When I hit my teens I became a monster and was very combative, especially with my mother. I think the power of schools to alienate kids from their families has a lot to do with these Jekyll and Hyde post-puberty transformations. Homeschooling will help us stay healthily bonded.

> We'll work less, enjoy life more. Amelie will coax my husband and me away from our computers and all that important grown-up work, showing us what really matters. In fact, she's already doing it.

Aaah. That was nice. A bit of dreaming over a cup of Rooibos tea. Is any of that realistic? I suppose we're bound to find out.

homeschooling

Doubts

I should be sleeping right now. When I'm not sleeping, unwelcome visitors like Doubt show up. And when it comes to the subject of homeschooling, ornery old Doubt has a lot to say.

So I've decided to give Doubt a little time to vent on this subject of homeschooling. I'll just let him blather a bit, get it out of his system so he can leave me alone and let me get some sleep.

1. My daughter will feel that she is missing out. Of course Michael and I will know that she is not missing out on anything by being homeschooled. But maybe A. will feel, later, in retrospect, that she has been deprived of some crucial formative experience, like going to the prom. Maybe she will have bitter misgivings about the fact that her psycho vegetarian yogi parents (these are Doubt's words, not mine) kept her sealed away from some kind of picture-perfect American schooling experience, idealized in her mind because she will never know about its day-to-day drudgeries and demoralizations.

2. My daughter will be lonely. Despite the fact that I have been entertaining fantasies lately about having another child, chances are that Michael and I will stick to our original plan of having just one. And little A. with no schoolmates or siblings will yearn for companionship. Insert a few glycerin tears here.

3. We will make some terrible mistake in our homeschooling efforts. Maybe we'll take a classical approach when we should really be unschooling her. Or maybe Michael and I will forget to expose our girl to some important topic, like the periodic table or the names of the state capitals. Oh, the horror.

4. We will mess up our kid. Don't all parents, no matter how well meaning, mess up their kids? Don't all kids rebel as a protest to just how badly we've messed them up? A. will act out against our crunchy homeschooling lifestyle and she'll end up flipping burgers at McDonald's, or worse, voting Republican.

Okay, that's enough from you, Doubt. You've said your piece. Now scram. I'm off to bed.

homeschooling