Summer

It's been a BEAUTIFUL summer! We've had so many sunny days, I just haven't been on the computer too much to have the time to blog.

Martin cleared our entire back yard, about 1/2 an acre total. He almost has my greenhouse completed too! I'm so excited! I will probably just do some tomatoes and lettuce since we are so late into the season. I'm just happy to be moving in the right direction. We have our garden plot ready for next year and it's pretty good size. We are preparing to flatten the front yard (there is a big berm in the middle of the circular drive) and get rid of the circular driveway so that the front is all lawn. Calista just wants a place to run in the sprinkler:) The rest of the backyard will have to wait for next year. Martin has plans back there:) He's putting in a T-box and putting green, a sand area for a fire pit, hammocks (I am going to try and put the hammocks in next week), and spool tables, and the rest will be lawn. A riding lawn mower is definitely in our future!

This last weekend Jared and Kev went up to Girdwood for the Forest Fair and camped out for the weekend. They went up there not really knowing where they were going to camp and I expected them to be back home that night. Kev called me very excited when they got there because a friend of a friend lives up there and invited them to camp out at his house. He has a rooftop deck that they pitched their tents on. We went up on Saturday, just for the day, and hung out. All of the following pictures are from the Forest Fair. Girdwood is about 70 miles south of us. It's a beautiful drive along the inlet and you can often see the Beluga Whales breeching, usually more in August and September.

We are enjoying Jared's company this summer! Thank you Ren for lending him to us:) I know his family is starting to really miss him and it makes me feel bad but I think he is having a really good time and we are trying to do as much as possible before he decides to go home. I want to take him white water rafting before the summer is up and I really hope we can fit it into the budget.

One of the music stages.

The kids getting ready to walk to the fair from their camping spot.


The kids pitch their tents on the rooftop deck of a friend of a friend:)

Pitching their tents.

Painting a spool table. We are going to try and get a hold of a few for our backyard.

The teens: Kev, Hope, Kevin, Stacy, and Tom. Not sure where Jared was when I took this picture. Must have been getting some food or something.

Hula Hooping.

Rylee (my niece,on right) and her friend Joslyn (sp?). It was Rylee's 8th birthday!

My friend, Debbie, and I.

Signs of Life

If there was one main thing that I took with me from the conference in May it was this: to be okay with the perfect imperfection and the messiness of life. I tend to be one that likes things organized and clean, which is fine to a certain point, but sometimes I just have to change my perception of all that mess. Earlier today I found myself starting to feel that anxiety around me and I stopped myself, looked around, and commented, "Look! We really know how to live!". Here are some signs of life in our house at this very moment:

ps Calista is going by Justine at the moment.

All the kids had a lego marathon today. Every single one of them (minus Kev because he was working) was out in the middle of this for most of the day today, from Rylee (8 years old) clear up to Jared (almost 16).

It looks like plain old mess but I promise it is a sign of creative kids.

Not too clear, but the sign says "closed". This was part of Justine's face painting business. I have a beautiful butterfly on my face at the moment:)

I think this is a very interesting video and worth taking the time to watch. He is talking about technology but I think it applies to all learning. Unschoolers already know these things because we have seen it happen with our own children- first hand. We know our kids learn when it is relevant to their life, when they are exposed to new experiences and ideas, and when the resources are made available to them

I think what this proves is that children do learn on their own but what they do need are resources. If they have the resources available to them they can learn anything, without teachers and without schools. I'm thankful that there are people who are doing the research and re-examining how we educate our children and how damaging imposed learning is.



I loved these following comments about the video:

"I too, am a home-educating/unschooling parent. I found HITW very fascinating, because that runs along the same theme as what we as parents do with our children. I've heard it being given the term "strewing". Leave something of interest around the house (say, a magazine) and eventually a kid picks it up and reads about it, leading to either discussion, further exploration, if the subject strikes their fancy. We see our role, as parents, as "facilitators", whose job it is to expose them to many things and then follow their leads with what they are interested in.

Nature itself shows the obvious, that we as human beings are naturally curious, and seek out what we are interested in and/or need to know. The wonderful talk by Sugata Mitra was a very informative answer to how children learn." ~Ariannah Armstrong
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" The takeaway is that children learn eagerly and effectively when the content is real and immediately relevant to them and when they have others actively and interactively helping them to master the content in real time according to their immediate needs. Throw into that mix adventure and social sharing and Sugata Mitra has shown us what happens when these things occur together. Additionally, those of the hands-on learning style and those who prefer to observe first are equally well served. Together these things produce a synergy that make the hole in the wall experiment an excellent success story." ~Reid Albecker
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"I would urge you (and all of us) to be more careful mistaking the word education and the word school/schooling. It may seem like semantics but I believe if we really made the internal mental shift to articulate the difference and were really good about calling things schooling when they are schooling and education when it is education I believe we would have a platform for making decisions about what to do next.

Education is a radically different thing from schooling. Education is something that comes from the inside - out. Like what you have shown here. What you have discovered in your research is that learning can and does happen without the need for schooling. As is mentioned in previous comments learning is a natural human trait and does not require schooling.

Schooling is schooling - which means that it is NOT education nor will it ever be education. Part of the reason I think this distinction is important is because many people involved in school reform make this mistake. Trying to force schooling to become education is where a lot of problems lie. Almost all of the frustrations that occur when attempting to do something cool with schooling is because of this distinction.

NOTE: It is possible that education might have some element of schooling as part of it but that would be a choice one would make once one understands the implications of that." ~Michael Kaufman

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"It is of an extreme value that we can interact with you here. Thank you for taking your time to chat with us!

I find your work very important. In my opinion it prooves that learning is a basic function of healthy child brain and it doesn't need any formal methods. It is just natural for a kid to explore and learn. So what we have to do is to provide a healthy and prosperous environment for them to learn. Formal education is full of data but often it is deatached from "real life" and does not give you the proper experience (as opposed to knowledge) to deal in real life and accademic situations. Self organised systems can do the opposite - they are not just the simulation of life (or science, technology...so on), they ARE life and science and technology. They already are what we have to learn as children. They are not just raw data to be memorized.

I hope I didn't go too far with this. Perhaps a well-ballanced mix of both is required, but we have to find such a ballance between formal ("data input") ways of educations and self-organized systems. I for one work as menthor of small workshops and I find your experience very valuable for my work, so thanks for sharing!" ~Marjan Krebelj

Conversation with my Daughter

This is how the conversation went:

Calista: She looks in the cupboard for something to eat. "Hmmm, cereal, milk, orange juice. That's a breakfast 'normal' people eat."

Me: "What's normal?"

Calista: "People who sit down at the table, with their family, and eat breakfast and dinner together; who go to school; and their parents work all day."

Me: Thinking- well, we are clearly not normal:)

Calista: "But we aren't like that. You guys let us choose what we do and eat. Sometimes we are doing more important things than sitting at the table and eating together. We are together all the time and sometimes we don't want to be together eating dinner. That's what's so cool about being unschooled"

Me: So what percentage of the population do you think falls under that 'normal' category?

Calista: A LOT!!


Well thank goodness that we aren't normal:)

Quite a few unschoolers have posted this on Facebook. I think it's worth the read.

Unconventional Wisdom: Why Passion Matters

We have this old barn/horse corral on our property that we have been going back and forth on what we were going to do with it- turn into yoga studio, guest house, green house, etc. A couple of weeks ago I finally decided that it just needed to come down. The roof had to be replaced anyway because there wasn't much left of it and it's just an eyesore on our property. We figured we could salvage most of the wood and build something else and maybe keep a portion of the building to turn into a greenhouse. I decided when the building came down that I would use the space for my garden plot.

We made the right decision because as soon as we started demolition it became clear how unstable the building was and there was lots of rotten wood and very dry, cracked wood. The demolition was a blast! And we were able to save part of the building that I will be working on this next couple of weeks to turn into a greenhouse....................after Martin re-builds the side wall to make it nice and stable.

First the roof comes off. Tristan and his friend's Tanner and Hunter took most of it off.

Then the siding and windows.

Tristan lives on the wild side..........as the building is swaying!

Then out comes the studs and posts.

And down she comes.

Crashing down!

And all that's left behind is my future greenhouse.

Trip to the Pacific Northwest

I can't even begin to put into words how much fun we had on our trip to Portland/Cannon Beach/Seaside/Manning/Vancouver. Robin, Rylee, Ren, Jared, Sierra, Jalen, our family + Kev's friend, Sara, all went. It was the first time we've all been together in four years.

The trip started in Portland with us and Robin and Rylee for three days. We explored the downtown area, went to Voodoo Doughnuts (several times), Saturday Market, Oregon Zoo, and lots of eating. The weather was in the 70's/low 80's the entire time so we got some sunbathing in down by the river also. Ren and three of her four children flew in on Sunday night, our third day there. On Monday morning we rented two vans and headed over to Tillamook Cheese Factory and then on to Cannon Beach, ending at Seaside.

We then went to Manning to visit Grandma Bidwell and my Aunt Carol and Uncle Ed. We celebrated Ren's 40th birthday there and explored Grandma's 45 acres and played with Carol and Ed's dogs. It was odd being there without Grandpa around anymore (he passed away a few months ago).

After Grandma's we headed up to Vancouver for the Life Is Good Unschooling Conference where we had the time of our lives. Ren and Kev both had talks there, Amy Steinberg did a concert, there was a barefoot boogie dance, and lots of other fun activities. We met lots of wonderful, joyful people!! 425 unschoolers!! It's always so refreshing to be around so many people who share the same philosophies and desire to live joyful, respectful, trusting relationships with their children. There was so much JOY just swirling around us for five days.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention......................When we were at Grandma's we were all sitting around talking and Jared says, "I wish I could go back to Alaska with you." And I replied, "You wanna?" The boy asks, "Really?" Next thing you know we are booking his ticket and he is now in Alaska with us! We get to have him for the entire summer, so exciting! Unfortunately, the last two days since we've been home it's been raining so we haven't gotten out to do anything yet but him and Tristan seem quite happy to be playing the XBox. We are going to take the motorhome up to Fairbanks in a couple weeks so that's something to look forward to. We have all kinds of things planned. I hope the weather cooperates:)

Here are some pictures of the highlights:

Creative marketing!

Tristan attempts the doughnut challenge- didn't quite make it but had fun trying.

Ren's 40th.

Family picture at Grandma's with my Aunt Carol and Uncle Ed. Jalen didn't want to be in the picture so we snapped him as he was walking away.....

He'd just had enough for the day.

My aunt and uncle's boston terriers got plenty of attention!

Hiking Gram's property.

Posing at the Tillamook Cheese Factory.

Cannon Beach.

Happy, lively, joyful people and energy at the Life is Good Unschooling Conference.

Amy Steinberg concert. This was the highlight of the trip for me!

Partying at the Amy Steinberg concert.

Amy cuddles. With Ren, Diana, and me!

Kev's talk at the conference. He did very well.

Ya think they are a little pooped out. 12 WONDERFUL days later!

Yesterday I was visiting with a friend about unschooling v. public school. This particular individual is extremely supportive of unschooling so we were just discussing pros and cons, the way the government thinks and designs, etc. Tristan was listening to the conversation so Sharon asked Tristan if he was going to join Kev at the highschool next year. Tristan responds with, "No thanks!! I can learn right here!!" As he proceeds to show me all these different kinds of spiders he was looking up.

I love unschooling!! But I also love that my kids are capable of making their own choices and that their choices are very different to fit the uniqueness of their lives. It would be torture for Tristan to be stuck in a classroom all day. This is a kid who thrives on being outdoors, building, working hard with his hands, rollerblading, hiking, biking, throwing a football. I can't imagine a worse scenario for him than public school.

Swine Flu Panic

"Using new and improved statistical models, CDC scientists estimate that an average of 36,000 people (up from 20,000 in previous estimates) die from influenza-related complications each year in the United States. In addition, about 11,000 people die per year from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a virus that causes upper and lower respiratory tract infections primarily in young children and older adults. "

And why are we freaking out over a handful of deaths from the swine flu? And the above stats are just for the US!

I think the media just loves to see everyone panic.

I know I'm having a terrible time lately keeping up with my blog, just been busy I guess, other priorities. So I'm sure you will all laugh when I say....................I'm going to try really hard to get my vegan blog back on regular postings. I posted today and will make an enormous effort to post something every week:) There is a new post today so for anyone interested in healthier, vegetarian fare come visit.

Everything I post are things that I make on a regular basis and most of the recipes are not complicated. I don't post recipes either unless MOST of my family rave about them. If you try any of them I would love your feedback about how you and/or your family enjoyed them.

http://veganforamonth-snavleys.blogspot.com/

The address comes from the fact that when I first started the blog I was trying one month of veganism. I went on a few months later to live six months being vegan. I now am back to lacto vegetarian- I only do eggs if they happen to be in a baked good and I try to limit my dairy so it's not every day. All of our dinner meals, for the most part, are vegan as I always seek to honor my children's choices (Kev is vegan).

Enjoy!

This week has been a very interesting week for me- a week of reflection and some deep digging from within. I was "caught in the act" of doing something that did not jive with the spirit of joy and cooperation that I have worked so hard to create with my children and in our home life. I am lucky to have people in my life that love me and walk beside me through our unschooling journey and who are honest enough to tell me when they see me reverting back to using old tools, tools that I thought I had long given up and replaced with better ones. My mothers voice was loud inside my head this week and I couldn't get it out until someone who knows that voice well (any guesses?) was able to snap me out of it. And I don't mean that as disrespectful to my mother- we had a wonderful relationship once I was an adult but we struggled often when I was growing up and she didn't always use tools that led to cooperation, joy, and a healthy self-esteem.

This "digging" has shown up in interesting ways in my yoga practice but that is a whole 'nother blog. It's just interesting that about the time I think I have it all figured out and my life is perfect the Universe lets me know I still have things to learn and there are still ways I can make my life better and more joyful. It's been a letting-go-of-ego week for me to say the least. But that's what my yoga practice is all about so it's all good:)

Because of all this schtuff I've been dealing with I've been getting online and reading more blogs and trudging back to the basics of unschooling and what brought me to this path in the first place. I just wanted to share these two things that I really enjoyed this week.

A little snipet from John Gatto at a blog I visit every now and then:

http://fourlittlebirds.blogsome.com/

And a piece of an interview that Sandra Dodd posted on her blog recently in regards to showing other parents how to unschool:

"What it takes is the parent has to change. The parent has to learn to see the learning in things. And that's hard. School trains that out of people. School tells you that you need teachers, and you need books, and you need someone to tell you what you need to know, and you need to have proof that you know it by taking a test. I don't think anyone has been to school and taken tests can remember......very little, of the actual facts. And a lot of the facts changed anyway. They changed their minds about this and that, scientifically, and words have changed, and Tanganyika and Soviet Union are no longer worried about.........."

Anyway, not that these things are necessarily directly related to my week of "digging" but connected, as all things are. Good reading though:)

Namaste'

This is a quote I came across in one of my yoga books, Meditations From the Mat:

The human individual is equipped to learn and go on learning prodigiously from birth to death, and this is precisely what sets him or her apart from all other known forms of life. Man has at various times been defined as a building animal, a working animal, and a fighting animal. but all of these definitions are incomplete and finally false. Man is a learning animal, and the essence of the species is encoded in that simple term. George Leonard

This is exactly what we, as unschoolers, deeply believe- that we were born with an inherent desire to learn about the world around us. We don't need force and coercion to learn the things we need to know to move us through this journey of life. The only thing that compulsory learning does for an individual is zap that natural curiosity right out of him. There are a few individuals who can survive it unscathed but not too many.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the high level of high school dropouts and how do we remedy that? More testing! Ludicrous! They are dropping out because they are bored to death and they are tired of people telling them how to live their lives, as if all the adults in their lives know better than they do what they need for their own, very personal journey.

The kids that drop out are actually the smarter kids! They know when they are being fed bullsh** and decide to run! Yay for them! The government has convinced everyone that if you don't have a high school diploma that you will never make anything of yourselves, yet look at the most successful (based on salary and money making businesses) people in this country and you will see that a LARGE amount of them are high school or college dropouts.

Some other crap that the government is trying to feed our kids is that they NEED college to have successful lives. We tell OUR children that if college will get them to where they want to go, great! Go to college. If there is a different or easier way to get them to where they want to go then do that. College does NOT guarantee a bigger salary and it does not guarantee success. What it does guarantee is a big fat student loan, unless you are lucky enough to have someone else pay for it, and even then they've spent how much? It's ridiculous. And what is success anyway? We measure success on how fulfilled and happy our children are with what they are doing. Unfortunately, most people measure success on how much money a person is making even though so many of those people are pathetically miserable in what they are doing.

My husband has almost always made a very large salary and he only did one semester of college. And beyond the salary, his happiest years were when he was doing something that wasn't making that big of a salary but was doing something he loved to do.

Anyway, just a little venting on my part. I wish the country would wake up and see what we are doing to our children. It makes me sad that from 5 years old most kids are spending their days doing things that they are barely tolerating, what an awful way to live your life. It brings me so much joy and satisfaction to see my own kids living the life I could only dream of at their age, to see them happy and fullfilled, full of zest for living, and so excited about learning new things! They are living the life that THEY are choosing to live, not what someone else is choosing for them. We are not perfect parents, nor do we live perfect lives but my measuring stick is "how happy and healthy are my kids? And how healthy is my relationship with them?" and the answer is almost always the same- they are healthy and happy, and we have a very good relationship with our kids (which always comes first by the way, regardless of what anything else looks like) what more could you ask?

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On another note today:

Have you all seen Yes Man yet? Great movie! I just love this whole idea of saying "yes" to everything! Of course there is a happy medium, which the character in the movie discovers. The whole lesson in the movie though is that most of us say "no" to life far to often and when we say "yes" to opportunities we really start living life.

I have found myself saying "no" to opportunities WAY too much so I've set an intention today to start saying "yes" to as much as I can! When I am inclined to say "no" I'm going to start saying "yes" just for the hell of it and see where it leads. I will post on those things as they present themselves.

One tiny example lately is our weekly homeschool swim session. Usually, I tread water for the entire hour so I can stay warm and still say I went swimming with the kids I guess. They usually don't really want me to do much because all of their friends are in the pool with them so I'm not particularly important at that point but they do like me to be there. Well, the other day Calista asked me to jump and dive with her off the side. Not really my thing, I think in some ways I've temporarily forgotten how to be a kid, I go through waves of that. But on Wednesday I was like "what the heck, sure I will jump and dive off the side with you" It was so much fun! Except for all the water in my ears, but no biggy. It felt good to just play. So my intention is to do more of those things!

So come join me and start saying "YES"!

It's been a crazy fun-filled week! We got to go to Fairbanks for a few days and stay with the Hajduk's and see all of our wonderful Fairbanks family members. I helped Sheli get some of her house painted and we did some yoga. It was full moon and shining right into her living room window where we were doing yoga so the living room is Heidi's Full Moon Yoga Studio:)

Martin's sister, Jenette, is up visiting. We haven't seen her much so hopefully this next week we will get to see more of her. Lois (Martin's mom) and her have been coming to my Saturday Hot Yoga class and we have had a couple of coffee dates. Everyone is coming over for dinner tomorrow night and we will celebrate my dad's 66th birthday, which is actually today.

We are still working on organizing and cleaning the house after pretty much finishing our remodel project. Martin put countertops and shelves in the home office, which allows him to be a little more efficient. He is working at home so the home office is pretty important.

We had a great Easter at my sister's with a treasure hunt AND an egg hunt and delicious food.

Have I mentioned lately that I love my life?!


And, as promised, pictures of the remodel. This room used to be Tristan's, it was red and now it is four different bright colors and is Calista's room.

And this is Tristan's new room. This used to be one half of a garage. The other half is Kevin's room but I didn't take any pictures as we are in the process of re-painting after adding a closet. We finished his room last year.

This area is in front of the boys room, was part of the original garage also. The back wall is open concrete block so I'm going to put some faux brick wallpaper up and let the kids grafitti all over it.

Dying easter eggs at my sister, Robin's, house.

Kevin displaying his first paycheck! He thought it so strange of me wanting a picture of this. Mommies are just strange that way:)

Betty and Veronica. They got three fun-filled days together but, of course, it's never enough time. Best friends since birth and it's so fun to watch them in action.

Those smiles are at me!! This is Porter who was born 7-8 weeks prematurely. This is my cousin, Jason's, little boy. They were in Anchorage at the Providence Hospital Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit for 54 days!! I got to visit him every week while he was there but now he is a totally different baby than the one that was in NICU two months ago. So fun to hold him, without all those wires and tubes, and to interact with him. He is just yummy!

I think I sat just like this for about two hours. I would have been quite happy to be there all day!