Dolly Days, part 2

A friend asked for a tutorial on how to make the sweet little dollies that we did.

I must admit it was definitely a learning curve - a.k.a. wonderful puzzle - that I enjoyed trying to figure out how to do.  And, to make it seem more "official," I took photos of the process, and so I'll be making a little tutorial on how we made ours (and how you can make one, too).  Look soon for that.

But there I go putting the cart before the horse.  First, I wanted to give you a little (almost) done peek at the dollies.  Granted, this is before they had faces or clothes, but you get the picture.  (note: Gramma, if you click on the picture, it should open in a new window and be a little easier to see!)
 

They still don't have clothes, but at least they can see now.  And smell and talk.  And of course, notice the little ears - that was Olivia's request, because everyone should have the opportunity to hear, if at all possible.

...

More soon, but I've got another post itching at my brain, and I need to type it out before it goes somewhere else and I forget altogether.

Dolly Days

Today, we decided to make some dollies.


Inspired by a friend's sweet dolly, courtesy of Warm Sugar on Etsy:

You can purchase these gorgeous little handmade dolls here.

We, however, wanted to do it ourselves, and make them just how we want them, and so we went to the fabric store to get some people colors.  Here's what we found:

Beige for mama, Caramel for Olivia, and Cocoa for Elsie

We made up a little pattern:

Head/torso, leg, & arm

We cut out our pieces:

 

And sewed and stuffed.

We aren't done yet, but my eyes and hands are tired.  Here's a little preview of what we've done so far (in the terrible overhead light):

 

Don't worry - tomorrow, with some more stuffing, finished faces, and better lighting, they'll look much more glamorous.

 

But for now, goodnite!

Sick Days

How anti-climactic can it get when - after months of preparation and planning - the first day of officially-structured "school" is a sick day?  And, in our case, more like a sick week.

After our long trip to Florida this past week over the Thanksgiving Break, I returned with a wonderful complete schedule for the next few weeks for the girls' homeschool.  Olivia returned with a cold.

And, owing to her loving nature, she has shared that cold with the rest of us.

So we have spent the last few days in the "sick bed" - which is really the girls on the couch-bed in the front room, resting, watching shows and drinking fluids, and me cleaning up after our trip.

(On a side note - how is it that, regardless of the spotless state of one's house before a long trip, during which NO ONE is in the house, the place looks a tornado ran through it after you get home?)

Anyhow, the girls are getting a little better, as evidenced by their rampage through the house this morning, and I'm in bed with a nasty headache.

Oh, well.

Today, I will finish the last bit of tidying (I trust), and preparing the house for winter.  Exciting, I know, but these little things make a big difference.

Look again next week to see how our schooling is going.  Today, I think that if I can finish the tidying early, we'll do a little sewing - it's time for warm pajamas and slippers!

Maybe something like this?

http://snickerdoodlesteph.blogspot.com/2010/01/cozy-slipper-tutorial-part-2-making.html

Yum!

Little House in the Hills

When I was little, I loved to read Laura Ingalls Wilder's books in the Little House series.  I loved hearing about her mother and father and sisters and the goings-on of every day life.  I even recall thinking that the best museums would have little interactive "vignettes," where the patron could see and feel and BE a part of the every day life of different cultures over time.

I suppose that's why I'm am anthropologist.

Anyhow, it wasn't until later that I learned all the rest of the story: that the Ingalls and other settlers weren't moving into uninhabited land; that the U.S. government broke every treaty it signed with the First Nations peoples of this continent; that there was a lot more going on than smoking meat and learning to sew.

However, none of that was suitable for children - which brings me to the present day and my very own children.  And how I'm raising them and teaching them about the world and their role in it.

And how - interestingly - we have moved from a big old city to a little (old) town in southern Indiana, and how I'm going to pretend to be a homesteader with a (real) cultural world-view and grow my own Swiss chard.  And my kids are going to learn about West African dance and Cherokee-style basket weaving and to speak Chinese and Spanish and about the native plants in Southern Indiana and the lives of Indiana farmers.

So from here, on, dear readers, we will begin the journey of a homeschooling mama and her two little kidlets.

***

It began when Nathan applied for graduate school.  Immediately, I was searching Craigslist for suitable housing in four different localities and had four plans of actions for every contingency.  Well, five, actually, including the possibility that we would stay where we were, but I didn't think that would happen, simply because this change of pace for him just seemed right.

When we found out that we would be moving to Indiana (Indiana?!), I started in on the schools.  Olivia had been in a wonderful Montessori school in Evanston - Chiaravalle - and under the wings of Molly and Kate she had really blossomed into an independent and articulate child.  Well, she may have already been articulate, but the independence espoused in the Montessori philosophy was wonderful.  So there was a high standard to be met by the schools in Bloomington.

I didn't even think that there would be any difficulty transferring her to the Montessori school here - my biggest concern was whether it would be as wonderful as Chiaravalle.  Well, I needn't have worried.  There wasn't even room in the Bloomington Montessori school for my sweet child.  Apparently, one may place his or her child on the waiting list at the moment s/he is born and there must have been a lot of children born in Olivia's year.  We received a package containing a note saying that we were on the waiting list and a copy of a book entitled How to Raise an Amazing Child the Montessori Way, which explained how to implement Maria Montessori's methods into the home.

It was at that moment that the idea entered my head that perhaps I could teach my own children at home, using the Montessori curriculum.  The idea was only the size of a tiny seed, but we all know what a seed can do.

I had already explored the other options available to us:  Harmony School (a democratic school), the Project School (a charter school) and of course the local public school.  Both Harmony and the Project School were full, and we didn't know much about Templeton, our local school, except that the building was brick and there weren't many windows.  I decided that I would move forward on the homeschooling idea, and so began to plan.

When I had just started, we moved.  And we moved in with my in-laws for the summer, meaning unlimited Ganni and Poppa time as well as unlimited cousin time (my sister-in-law lives right down the street).  So that was about two months of distractions.

Then I got sick.  Really sick with a nasty virus (read: no medication).

And then we moved again.  This time to Bloomington.  And I was still sick.

Then I had to unpack our house.  In a week and a half.

Then we had to go to IKEA.

Then Nathan started school.

Then - well, as you can see, things were a little distracting.  I was worried because I didn't have the materials set up for Olivia's school yet.  And it was school time.  Ack!

So - after a final plea to each of the schools on our list - and a final denial from each - Nathan and I decided on a whim to try Templeton.  I went in to see how things looked from the inside (my windowless impression had only been an outside one, you see).  There were still few windows, and when I explained to the very nice lady in the office that we had a daughter and asked what the school was like, I learned that it was a Title something-or-other school (Title 1?  I don't remember).  I suppose that was supposed to mean something to me, but it didn't.  I also learned that they had a multi-age classroom, which sounded promising.  Oh, but that was full.  If I enrolled Olivia she would be in a classroom with twenty-four other students and one teacher.  I said I would think about it.

I did, and Olivia was so excited about the possibility of school that I said we would try it.  She could go half-day and see what she thought.  She tried it and liked it enough to go back the second day.  But when the third day rolled around, she voiced her concern:  she couldn't go to recess.  She couldn't play with her classmates because she was a half-day student and left right before recess.  In fact, she got in line to go to recess every day but had to leave the line at the front office and wait for me, watching her could-be friends march outside to the playground.

I marched into that office and asked if she could stay for recess.  Could I pick her up a little later? No.  What if I picked her up and took her to the playground myself?  No.  She wouldn't be permitted on the school grounds if she wasn't in school.

What?  Is she a little criminal?  In jail?

Harumphed, I went home.  Nathan and I didn't want Olivia in school all day long - the school day was seven hours long and there was only one recess - and that was only 20 minutes long.  To add to all the numbers was my little five year-old.  Who really wanted to play.

So, we decided to try it.  The next week, she started as a full day-er.  The nice office lady almost squealed when I say she'd be in full-day.  Like that was some sort of prize.  Conspiracy?  I think so.

Anyhow, my radical thoughts notwithstanding, Olivia trooped out of bed at 7 every morning (against her usual 9ish time), got ready, walked to the bus stop, took the bus, and came home bedragled.  It was only the first day, so we tried again.  Again, a cranky and crotchety five-year-old was my prize at the end of a long day.  I thought that we should give it a week.  If she didn't spruce up, we'd try something else.

At the end of the school day at Chiaravalle, Olivia didn't want to leave.  She'd get in the car and say to me, "Mama!  Did you know that three tens is thirty?"  She would ask to go to school on Saturday.  This in sharp contrast to my Templeton Tiger, who was dragging in the morning, didn't want to talk about school, and brought home worksheets that asked her to sort items by color.  One day, when we were singing a little song about patience (it's hard to be patient when you're 2 or 5 or 31), she said, "Mom, I'm going to sing this song to the kids in my classroom at school, because they don't listen very well in line and are hitting each other."  Excuse me?  My five year-old has to enforce courtesy?  Where is the teacher?

The last straw came when we received a letter from the teacher.  It explained the curriculum for the year and introduced the teacher to us.  And it said that never in her 13 years teaching Kindergarten has she had such a work-based curriculum - she said that she would do her best to "work in" play time and other activities.  Essentially, reading between the lines, we saw that our child's teacher thought that the new standards were crap.

Enough was enough.  I just needed a reason to pull my baby out of that place, and this letter did it.  We left the school supplies of tissues and pencils and crayons and took that little girl home.

It was fun and exhilarating - I got to play my mama card.

But after that excitement wore off, I was left with the plain fact that I didn't know what to do next.  I hadn't done any preparation.  I had a few books and I had seen the Montessori classroom and materials.  None of which I had.  So I began to cast about for some sort of something to help me figure out this dilemma.

It finally came when I met a friend at the farmer's market.  We were waiting in line for bacon and eggs.  I don't know how we did it, but a conversation sprang up.  She was new to the area.  She had three girls (2, 4, and 7).  She was homeschooling.  Too.  For the first time.  Too.

We hung out.  We talked about curriculum.  About how homeschooling is not the same as school-schooling.  How we aren't trying to recreate the classroom, but to make the classroom the world.  How every day experiences are learning opportunities.  Things began to take shape.  My brain started to function again.  Ideas swirled around in my rather cavernous-feeling head and congealed into clouds.  Olivia and I had a little brainstorming session together to figure out what she wanted to learn.  I had begun to water that seed.

So that's where we are now.  My poor little homeschool seed is just beginning to peek its little shoot out of the ground.  But at least it's growing.  We've set up a daily schedule.  Olivia is taking piano lessons and we go to the library and WonderLab once a week.  We've instituted some home "school" rules and home "home" rules.  After the winter break, we will be starting up our official math again.

Looking back on the past three months, this first session was really about determining our assets and needs.  The whole time, I was lamenting not having a structure or a curriculum or a degree.  But my girls were learning about our new home, our environment, our town, and our food.  We took field trips to farms and met our farmers through our CSA shares.  We learned about bees and kettle corn at the farmer's market.  We practiced organization and discipline in setting up our new house and the girls' classroom.  And we discovered the seasons with our leaf collection, yard work, and preparing the house for winter.

Now, with winter coming, it's time to settle in.  We're snuggling down for the snow.  On the horizon are some exciting projects:  embroidery and sewing, knitting, reading and writing, counting and measuring, bread baking and cookie making.

Maybe we're not the Ingalls, but this Little House is ready for what's next!

The Family Bed

If you've been reading "regularly," and I use that term loosely, considering that I loosely post things here, you may have guessed that by now, we've moved.

We have, and are *almost* settled into our new little place in Bloomington, Indiana.  There are, of course, the little bits of things that still need sorting and put away, but they are becoming fewer and fewer.  Phew! (er)

When we moved, we pared down our things (you wouldn't have guessed it if you had helped us move), trying to streamline the amount of STUFF we owned, and trying to guess what we would need in the new house.  There was quite a bit moved along to new people, including our beloved bed.  We bought it when we had been married only a year and were moving out of our teeny-weeny apartment (in which you had to walk through the closet to get to the bathroom) (and which also came with its own bed - looking back on that - ick!) and into new digs, in which we needed our very own bed.  That comfy thing lasted us from IKEA through the rainy three-plus-hour drive home tied atop our little Kia Rio Cinco and for almost eight years (including two pregnant ones for me)!  You know it's comfy if a pregnant lady can sleep on it.  But, I digress.  The most comfortable bed in the world is now living at my in-laws (where we can visit it any time we want) and we bit the bullet and bought the ultimate: a king-size bed.

For a family of four living on a graduate student budget (read: enough actual income to pay the monthly rent and the rest loans/grants/family support), the king size bed was a big bullet to bite.  But we knew that with more space - including a room especially for the girls - we would need it.  Why?  Because, even though their Gramp built them a beautiful bunk bed - which, dad, if you're reading this, they love dearly and we WILL use it, I promise - our girls sleep with us.

Still.

They have since they were born - first Olivia, wrapped up like a baby burrito on her little crib mattress (on the floor) next to our mattress (on the floor).  I remember those first few nights, me rarely sleeping as she lay alone on her little bed, wondering if she was cold, if she was breathing, if she was lonely.  I know I was lonely, and, little by little, I moved her into our bed.

Nathan and I had made a conscious choice that we would be co-sleeping.  That's the official term for parents and children sleeping in the same room.  Some people buy special beds for their babies (we had one with Elsie - a co-sleeper from Arm's Reach) that can be attached right next to the big bed like a sidecar.  Others put the crib in the room of the parents, or, as we had, put their big mattress on the floor abutting a little mattress for the baby.  After a while, we found that the best way for us was to all be in the same bed - the family bed.

I loved the thrill of it - first of all, I had a big row with my mama about it, so I felt a little rush of adrenaline, knowing I was being disobedient.  But I also felt connected to mamas the world over who sleep with their babies in whatever bed they have - futons, straw mats, Serta sleepers, a blanket on the floor - whatever.  I remember nursing Olivia to sleep in our little place on Newgard Avenue, and drifting off, thinking that mamas the world over were nursing their babies at the same time - that I was participating in a timeless rite - a cultural tradition of the human experience.


By now, at least for some of you, I know that there must be alarm bells and whistles going off in your heads.  "No! No!" you might be thinking, "You'll roll over on the baby!  The baby will fall on the floor!  The baby will suffocate!  That's what cribs are for!"  Don't worry - these aren't new thoughts - all of these worries came through my head, too.  And, if you know me, you know that I'm a worrier, so all options needed to be examined before I could relax.  Of course, we had to be informed - one doesn't plop a baby in an adult bed and expect everything to work out beautifully.  We read bazillions of articles, we asked people who had co-slept, we looked at the statistics (a good article can be found here), heard arguments on both sides, and then - well, we did whatever we wanted.

The truth (at least for our family) is, bed-sharing was the easiest and best way for everyone to get enough sleep.  I couldn't imagine having to make up every two or three hours for those first few months (and during every growth spurt after that) to get up out of bed, walk into another room, take my crying baby out of her crib, nurse her, put her back in her crib, walk back to my own bed and try to go back to sleep.  No, thank you.  I took the straightest route from A to B, I suppose, and put that baby in my bed and let her nurse at her leisure (and my rest).

That, and the fact that we didn't have another room in which to put the baby.

A friend of mine (and Olivia's doula) related it to me in this way: when you sleep, you don't roll off the bed onto the floor - you are aware of where the edge is.  Now just imagine that you have a tiny little person next to you - how much MORE aware of her would you be than the edge of the bed, with your mama (or papa) spidey-senses all a-twitter?

Bedsharing got us through some nasty times - Olivia and her "colic," which turned out to be what I like to call womb-nostalgia*, my post-partum depression, as well as the usual kid illnesses (which can be harder for the parents than the baby sometimes, what with all the worrying).  It also got us through two one-bedroom apartments.

And now, here I am, up early after a well-rested sleep (mostly).  Olivia is curled up next to me with her teddy bear (Olivia Bear, of course), and Elsie is clinging to her daddy's armpits on the other side of the bed.  We all fit, too, in this big ol' bed.

I know my children won't always sleep with us.  I fear and relish that fact.  I look forward to the time when no one is kicking me in the face (that's why Elsie's next to Nathan) or rolling over on top of me (ha!  The tables have turned!).  The time when my husband sleeps next to me and not two people over.  But we are both aware that these are precious days.  Too soon will these little souls venture out into their own room and the wide wide world.  Then I will look back to these sweet snuggle times - when a sleeping Elsie reaches her chubby hand to find mine.  When Olivia - who is growing more and more into an independent big girl - wakes in the morning light, rolls over and says, "Mama, I'm glad we snuggled."






*womb-nostalgia is a very silly term for the very serious way that many babies miss the womb - some doctors call it colic, but Dr. Harvey Karp describes it as "the missing fourth trimester."  Bedsharing helped, but the real hole-in-one was wrapping the baby up like a little burrito, taking her into the bathroom, turning off the lights, turning on the shower and standing in the middle of the floor (not in the shower), holding her on her tummy, and swinging her side-to-side.  Worked every time.

Some Links on Co-Sleeping (for those of you who like to read more things):


"Cosleeping:  Real Men Sleep with Their Kids" - Mothering Magazine
"Sleep Environment Safety Checklist" (for both family beds and cribs) - Mothering Magazine
"The Latest Research on Co-Sleeping" - Ask Dr. Sears
"Seven Benefits to Sleeping with Your Baby" - Dr. William Sears
"Five Benefits to Cosleeping Past Infancy" - Natural Parent Network
"Fun with Analogies" - PhD in Parenting (this one's a little crass)