You can find me over at Enjoy Life Unschooling today talking about World of Warcraft and my family.

I’m a Level 39 Gnome Warlock

Enjoy!

Oh look at the beautiful sunset honey. *sigh*

Wow, that cloud is changing shape rapidly. Let's take a closer look.

Dear lord! I think that may be a forest fire!

Yes, that *is* what a forest fire looks like from about 100 miles away (actually I think it’s closer to 40-50 miles upon closer inspection of the map.).  At least I *think* it’s 100 miles or so.  Apparently the Olympic Mountains are so vast that even Google maps can’t calculate the distance.

From what I read a small fire was started on August 5th by lightning.  Rain kept the fire small.  Yesterday, the hot, dry and windy(yes…  I said dry) conditions gave the fire a real boost, up to 120 acres or so.  Today it looks like this.  I’m unsure of the exact details as of this evening other than what I can see out my window.

Now that’s a real life education on fire!

News Story on the Fire

Info on Mt. Hopper

Everyone always asks us if it’s raining here.  As it turns out in the summer, it gets so incredibly dry here that there are burn bans everywhere!  Our grass is almost completely dead!  When the kids turn on the sprinkler, the bugs and the bees come out on full force looking for a drink!

An impromptu Unschooling blog carnival.  Please feel free to join.

I:

• read books to my almost 12 year old, because he loves fiction but doesn’t really like to read even though reads quite well.
• stay up past midnight with my 5 year old so he can finish his level in his video game.  He does in fact, get up in the morning.
• scoot down to the end of our bed in the middle of the night to make more room for two smallest children.  I did the same for my oldest, he doesn’t sleep in my bed at 12.
• let the kids stay up as late as they need and sleep in as late as they need and they almost always get enough sleep.
• cook cheeseburgers for breakfast and let them eat cupcakes for dinner.  They are healthy and physically fit.
• created a World of Warcraft account, even though I don’t like video games so I could be closer to my kids.  The jumped for joy when they found out.
• apologize when I am wrong and do not treat them the way they should be treated.  They know I am human.
• stay home, everyday with my children, never wishing they were in school or at daycare. I am more grateful for our relationships than I am of anything else in my entire life.
• I never wish my life was different.  Ever.  I’m not perfect.  Nothing is perfect, but that’s what makes it *my* perfection.  My life just is.

The blog that inspired the carnival

How this impromptu carnival got started

Here is THAT dad!

Oh and don’t forget this here other dad!

This mom let go of a lot of stuff.

This one likes her kids!  *gasp*

This mom know how to have a good time.

This bacon loving momma is at peace with life.

A joyful mom.

Radical Unschooling has hit the media in the worst of ways.  The media describes it as life without books, tests, or school, but they are just missing so much of it.  They are missing the family side of it.  The joy, connection, support, and the connected relationships.  Unschooling won’t work without it.

If you want to add to this list, leave your link in the comments!  Enjoy!

Mwah!

Happy, happy birthday Phoenix.

Yes, we will be celebrating with cupcakes.

I’m writing over at Enjoy Life Unschooling today. The title above is the actual title for the article. We seemed to have a little mix-up. Hopefully, it will be fixed soon. Otherwise, Enjoy Life is a fabulous resource for all things unschooling put together by my dear friend Faith.  I’ll be writing a monthly column.

I’m hoping to shift my blog back to a personal blog now that we are more settled and loving life here in Seattle.  But, I love writing!  So, if anyone would like anything written for their website or blog, you can contact me here.

Enjoy Life!

Sibling Issues: Why There Isn’t Always a Resolution for the Conflict

Remember our aquarium?   The kids got it for Christmas.  We put 5 or 6 fish and a shrimp in it.  Within a week we lost Shrimpy and Pinksicle (a neon tetra).  I haven’t cleaned the tank since we got it.  I thought they were all going to die anyway and frankly cleaning an aquarium is really hard to find the time to do.  The kids basically lost interest and it became my responsibility really fast.  Way to follow through Heather.

On Monday evening, I turned on the aquarium light to feed the fish, 2 mollies, an albino catfish of some sort, and a striped tetra.  From behind the treasure chest decoration I see this teeny, tiny little fish peeking out.  I moved suddenly and it hid.  I swear it was my imagination!  Then I stood there for awhile after feeding and 2 little, itty bitty fish came swimming out from behind the terasure chest.  Babies.  Babies?  Babies!!!

Skylar had expressed an interest at breeding fish at one point.  The project was sort of put off for awhile, but I guess his wish came true!  After some announcements on Facebook I learned that mollies are live-bearers, that they are pregnant for 40-70 days, and that they can actually *store* pregnancies for an opportune time.  Could you even imagine?  They also usually have upwards of 40 fry (babies) at a time so its likely that most were eaten or sucked up by the filter before they were even noticeable.  How these two survived in a dirty tank with a suction filter and 4 other fish that eat non-stop, I may never know.

Today, 2 days later, the fish are still with us.  I even cleaned the tank for them.  They even look bigger to me than they did before.  Our catfish is named Heego, our tetra is Taco E. Burrito, the black mollie is Shark, and the White mollie is Vice Admiral Jupiter Weinerface.  Although, it’s been brought to my attention that since she is a girl we should change it to  Vice Admiral Vaginaface instead, but I just don’t like the sounds of that as much.

Do you know what we should name our new babies?  If you have a clever set of names for our fish the please leave a comment.  After an undetermined amount of time Skylar and Milo will pick their favorite names.  The winner (or winners if they pick names from two different people) will win two buttons of their choice!  (The blue one says “schools are for fish”)

Good luck!  Happy naming!

We have now attended our very first ComiCon ever. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I love how we could all go and enjoy it for different reasons. TJ is the big overall geek in our family. He could stay at the booths with all the old comics and spend the entire weekend poring through them. I’m the art fan. I love looking at all the different style and interpretations of visual art.  Especially, since having children I’ve found it hard to draw.  Skylar liked recognizing his favorite characters and posing with the people in costume. He’s put in a “sweet costume” request for next year. Milo liked the toys and the Star Wars stuff. There you have it. A family activity! Even my brother came! So we met this guy in the elevator at the parking deck. I can’t remember who he is. I think he’s actually from a video game Skylar plays. He wasn’t hired for this. He even had his little son with him! People show up in costumes and just adore having their picture taken with other conference attendees. Milo’s not a big fan of being too close to them so we didn’t have any photos of him.

He’s not always a fan of having his picture taken. That’s why there are no photos of him with his hockey pads under his batman shirt, so he would “look buff”. The boys souls were fed this past weekend. They really loved the ComiCon. They even had an artist draw them each a sketch of Deadpool for 5 bucks each.  When we got home, we trimmed up the paper a bit and framed them.  Each sketch has their own names on it and are now hanging in their bedrooms.  That’s pretty special.

Looking at these photos of Skylar reminds me of how he has grown and changed; no longer a little boy.  I can see his personality and his happiness shining through.

Milo has been trying to flip on the trampoline for awhile.  He finally mastered his own version of flipping so I needed to share it.  Otherwise the photos are unrelated to the blog post.

We had a full day yesterday.  We are usually a pretty laid back family, so two events in one day is big!  We visited the King 5 news station in downtown Seattle.  It was surreal and amazing.  It’s funny how our perspectives from one person to the next are different.  Our tour guide, the tour guide for the last 40 years, didn’t get the 4 kids at all.  She was trying to shuffle them along, and would repeat herself if they chatted, and did not want them to touch anything, even though some of the engineers invited it.  She is clearly from an era that says children should be seen and not heard.  Even when I would chit chat with another mom, she would come over to us, look, and repeat herself!  A couple of the news casters never left that news caster persona.  They knew how to talk at you and sometimes a little condescendingly (I doubt they realized it), but not really *to* you.  Very strange indeed.  The kids probably didn’t notice ANY of that!  Skylar was in heaven with all the electronics and screens and cameras!  He asked so many questions, he held up the group and annoyed our tour guide.  He realized right away that asking her questions was useless and went straight to the source, the engineers and crew.  They seemed delighted by his interest and so was I.  It was truly an amazing experience for him.

Prior to the tour we went to the park for an unschool park day.  We were the only one’s who showed.  It was cold, and I half expected it.  I guess our Vermont bones were perfectly OK with 47 degree weather!  There was another family at the park.  The dad was walking around the park and a little girl was following him.  She was clearly not happy with the game.  I think he wasn’t doing it the way she wanted, and he wouldn’t slow down.  So she just kept chasing him and expressing her discontent.  A few minutes later, they reappeared on the playground near us and I overheard, “Now, what are the rules?  No whining or crying or we are leaving?  OK?”  “Yes daddy”.

First of all, I *hate* “OK?”.  I catch myself saying it sometimes, which would be fine if there were a choice.  Please stop hitting your brother, OK?  No, no, no!  It’s NOT OK.  Sheesh!  If the other person is not allowed to object, then why oh why would  you say, OK?  I think that’s something most of us say all the time without realizing what it actually implies.

When the father spoke, in my mind I heard something completely different.  I heard, “Do not feel your spontaneous and authentic emotions.  And certainly do not express discontent with what I am doing.”  Am I right?  That *is* what he was saying isn’t it?  Why do we get so annoyed when a child starts whining?  Why didn’t the dad just ask her what was wrong?  I know that when my children get “whiny” they are usually tired, hungry, upset, or possibly I’m just not listening to them.  All problems that I can easily tend to.  Sometimes, when they whine, I have a huge feeling of helplessness come over me if I can’t immediately fix the problem, but I can listen.  Listening helps them to know that their feelings are important to me, and they really are.

Why don’t people want children to feel?  It seems so important that they are in touch with their emotions.  While schools are turning out children with more and more cases of depression and other forms of mental anguish, it seems to me that we would want to allow our little ones to express themselves freely when they are sad or unhappy.  Of course we would never shut a child up who was expressing happiness on the playground would we?

I’m going to be very careful with my words.  I know someone who works for the TSA.  I need to make the disclaimer that I am in no way trying to offend or hassle this person.

With that said.  The TSA does absolutely nothing that makes me feel safer.  They make me feel violated and less than an American citizen.  When we check our bags in Cleveland on the way home from speaking at an Unschooling conference, they had us leave our bags and verified that we left them unlocked.  Dude!  That’s my stuff!  Airport screeners are allowed to go through your dirty laundry.  Literally!

Then off to airport security you go.  Leave your shoes, your jacket, all your liquids, and all metal in a bucket to they can x-ray it.  Baby has a bottle of milk?  Too bad, they need to screen it.  Little kids?  Too bad.  Make ‘em lose the sweatshirt and there Nintendo Ds’s.  Baby is sleeping in a sling with metal rings?  Too bad take him out and walk through the metal detector again or risk having an agent search you and your baby.  Actually, that wasn’t even presented to me as an option. They said, “we’ll get a female agent” and I said, “Can’t I just take it off and walk through again?” Fuck that man.  I HATE flying.  I don’t feel ANY safer than I did before 9/11.  In fact, I feel more violated, more untrusted, and less safe than EVER.

Someone please tell me, while I was waking the baby, or tending to my confused kids, or watching them take away the baby bottle…  how my husband was able to walk through the metal detector with this:

Make no mistake.  This is the sharpest friggin’ knife we own.  And we own a few.  This one will cut flesh and bone if needs to.  A quick google search for “TSA missed my knife” pulled up an awful lot of results like the three below.  How do you feel now?

TSA misses Swiss Army Knife but confiscates dangerous pudding.

TSA checks keyboard but misses large Swiss Army Knife

The TSA is a complete joke and not a funny one.

(BTW – I did not make up the titles)

In the end we were thankful they did not find it. First of all, it was a mistake. TJ always has the knife in his pocket along with some change and guitar picks. He’s had it since before we got together. He’d be awfully upset if it was taken from him. Not to mention the hassle that may have been brought about if further suspicions were put on him.

I’ve decided to migrate this winter.  Not only from Vermont to Washington, but from Blogspot to Wordpress.  I’ve been meaning to do this for quite some time but the very thought of it caused meltdowns of epic proportions a little stress.  I didn’t have the time or the brain capacity to handle all the work involved and I was really afraid I’d lose content.  Now that we are all settled into our new home I decided to just go for it.  With the help of my sexy, knife wielding, super hero of a husband, the blog migration was fairly painless.  If you were a follower at blogspot, I *think* you will have to resign-up for upates on the right, and please bear with me as we make improvements.  If you are a new reader then please use one of the options on the right to follow me.

So yeah, follow me.  Or else…