Laureen
Laureen is a writer, a professional editor, a scuba instructor, a beginning sailor, a traveller, and an obsessive researcher who's chiefly focused on, and delighted with, her husband Jason and her sons, Rowan and Kestrel, and her daughter, Aurora. She's a lifelong Californian, which lends a very distinctive spin to both her ideas and her politics, and she's discovered, in her peregrinations, that the world is far smaller yet far more fascinating than anyone gives it credit for being. She holds forth her opinions on that in her blog, The Elemental Mom.
My name is Laureen. I came kinda sideways to this Mama gig, and it's been quite the transformational experience....
We're playing with learning to read, but Rowan's not all that interested. He's far more fascinated with learning to write. So we're doing a lot of that ...
My husband (Jason) and my brother in law (Marc) both self-identify as "stupid". It's a long story. Anyway... in school, they were bad boys, dropouts, and allllll the other labels that tell kids that they're useless....
The Amazing California Health and Happiness (Homeschooling) Road Show
The title of this post is mostly lifted from the title of an album by the San Francisco-based surf band the Mermen....
Sometimes, it takes a crisis to see what people's true colors are.
Previously, I've posted about Digital Natives, (here and here) mostly in terms of how unschooling is pretty much the most ideal way to approach the sticky problem of trying to be an authority to someone who can look up your sources faster than you can....
A friend online recently pointed me to The Boys Project. And so I thought I'd share with you guys, yet another wonderful example of why parents of boys should keep them home....
The Natural Products of our Training
I'd like to direct your attention to this article in the Washington Post,Pearls Before Breakfast. That article illustrates to me that public school in America is absolutely successful at what it sets out to do, and that the vast majority of us are the natural products of our training.
As I mentioned in that post, I work for a technology company, in the general field of technical communications, catering to software developers. And lately, there's been a lot of buzz about "the new developer," the next generation of young computer professionals coming up through the ranks, graduating from college or not, doing brilliant things with technology....
If someone wanted to see what learning looks like in our family, I would have to take them to the farmers' market. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, they're smallish, "please pick me up a head of lettuce on the way home" kind of affairs. But the Saturday Berkeley Farmers' Market is a sight to behold....
Dear readers, I need to beg your indulgence right out here in front. Normally, I try very hard to make these posts thoughtful, considerate, even-handed, and philosophical. If you'd like to read any of that, please go to my page. This post, despite my best efforts to the contrary, is nothing more than a rant....
You Can't Teach A Four-Year-Old That!
"You can't teach a four-year-old that!"
It's a phrase I'm hearing more and more lately. And every time I hear it, just like a little bell ringing a la "It's A Wonderful Life", I know that unschooling is doing wonderful things....
What is Unschooling: It's About Trust
I always knew I wanted to have primary responsibility for my children's' education. If I have learned nothing else in my life, I have learned that in the end, even though you might try to hand responsibility off to those who are in culturally acceptable positions of authority (doctors, lawyers, teachers), ultimately, it's all down to you anyway, so you might as well roll your sleeves up and get to work, doing the very best you can....
When I became pregnant with my first child, I was absolutely ecstatic. And then, I realized that with the exception of a regular babysitting gig when I was 10, I had no idea how to raise a baby, or even really how to act around one. I am an only child of two only children; I was the only child on either side of the family until I was 16, when I acquired a cousin, but he lived nearly 400 miles away from me; not many opportunities for interaction there. My husband has a brother three years younger and a sister ten years younger, but wasn't particularly involved in the maintenance aspects of their raising. We were shooting from the hip where parenting was concerned....
I am a tea enthusiast. I treat myself to specialty teas, and set them up in sparkling glass canisters, so that when I open the cupboard doors, my eyes are treated to a spectrum of possibilities. Dragon phoenix pearl jasmine, red raspberry leaf, chamomile, assam, english breakfast. Whatever my mood, my taste, my intention, there’s a tea in the cupboard that matches it....
Unschooling and the Digital Native
My husband Jason is a major video game geek. We have boxes in the garage, full of all his old game systems, and the games he couldn't trade back in for credit on newer ones. The guys at the local GameCrazy don't know his name; they just call him “big spender.”...
The Strictly Sail Pacific boat show was this past week. Based on what we've learned about how our family best endures such events, we planned a very casual schedule over three days, that allowed for a lot of time to take seminars, explore boats, and browse vendor booths....
Reading to my sons is one of the chiefest delights I have always associated with mothering. Snuggling up with freshly-bathed and jammied babies, winding down from the day, reading about worlds of fantasy and imagination. It just doesn't get any better....
Before I had kids, I was absolutely sure that television was the very devil....
I’ll admit it straight out; I am a failure at arts and crafts. I always loathed that time in school when I was there, and I have lived my life from then until now pretty much craft-free. And happily so....
My husband and I met later in life, which is really the only way it could have happened. In school, he was a “bad boy”, and I was a “good girl”, and our personal compatibility would have been unable to overcome the borders school social structures impose. Luckily for us, life is not so rigid about who can, or should, or might, get along well....
Money. Finance. Cash flow....
Our family is in the process of fixing up our house, selling it, and moving permanently aboard a sailboat. A big part of this transition, naturally, is spending as much time as possible out on the water, to get the boys as comfortable as possible with sailing....
As all my nearest and dearest know, birth has been an obsessive topic of research of mine for ... well, since the people I paid to handle my first pregnancy and birth let me down, landing me with a cesarean (I refuse to capitalize it) for iatrogenic difficulties resulting from caregiver (ha!) impatience. They had the degrees, the training, the background, that I did not have. I trusted them, they let me down, and I have this scar on my belly to show for it....
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