Dropping off the Earth

Hi guys, our connection to the universe goes kaput sometime on the 31st and it may take as long as a week to get reconnected, according to the vague, incomprehensible, pimply glue sniffer we talked to.

That seems stupid to me, but I suppose it's possible. So speak now, or get your signal fire ready. If we don't respond to your emails, check the damn blog. Heh heh. If you never check the blog, we don't like you anymore anyway.

HW

Well, Lookie Who Just Blew into Town!

Looking forward to hanging with The Prodigal Wanderers this summer. All Taio groupies are welcome to hang at Humble's place and catch up. Bring that pomegranate (Punica Granatum) salad thing.

HW

Got Spine?

Dragging furniture around today, I blew out my back again.

My strong, well-tended back, which never gave me a moment's trouble until the morphine wore off after my first emergency C-section and I realized that whatever had happened to it in the preceding 32 hours was very serious indeed.

I keep forgetting they ruined my back. Today, as I lay alone on the floor, twitching and writhing like a roach that's crossed the Chinese chalk line, I cursed the fates, the faulty epidural and my own weakness.


Then I decided, ok, that's it. The yoga dudes say "You are as young as your spine."

Nothing could be more true.

In a recent post, I was moaning about interrupted sleep and no "me time."

After more weeks of mulling and pondering, culminating in the twitching and writhing, (see above) I have decided that all the bubble baths in the world are not going to fix the root problem, which is...

I should have spawned when I was young and strong, as nature intended. Had I done this at eighteen, I could have squatted behind a shrub, lashed the little squirt to my back with a banana leaf and gone right back to planting the fields.

So the solution is clear. A Time Machine.

I'm going back in time, at the cellular level.

With blog as my witness, I hereby commit to continuing the serious detoxification I've already begun. I will cleanse my liver, blood, and scrub my arteries. I will chelate my heavy metals, and have my remaining amalgam fillings removed.

I will suck back Green Dragons and raw, organic plant foods. I will take my Green's Plus and my flax oil. I will drop my caloric intake to purify the digestive system and slow oxidation.

I will tear down old muscles and rebuild them. I will fix my stupid back. It was fine before, it will be fine again. I will sleep.

As each old cell dies, each new, nutrient-dense replacement cell will gleam with perfection. My very sweat will make people glance around for the glorious roses they didn't see. Were I to die, my corpse would simply lie there smiling, inviolate, impervious to deterioration.

It is the only way.


HW

Another thing I'll miss...

I'll also take a last lingering look at our gorgeous, insanely huge pear tree. I snapped a photo of this astonishing tree in the winter.

I described it as forty feet tall, but have since been scoffed at and informed it's closer to sixty feet tall. Or a bunch of meters tall. Educated during the public school system's transition to the metric system, I really have no idea how big anything is just by looking at it. It's real big, eh?

In full bloom now, it's just spectacular, and we'll leave before the hundreds and hundreds of fat pears start raining down. We'll always have our memories of sitting out on the deck, drinking Guinness while wearing our bike helmets, of the time our dog ate so many pears he went into renal failure (recovered), and of the wasps nests and raccoon families that rendered our enormous urban backyard unusable for half the summer.

But still, my poet friend told me you can't live under a pear tree without having babies, and I hoped and hoped she was right. And she was. So the pear tree goes into the photo album, right before the ultrasound snaps.

HW

Saying Goodbye to our Favourite Places

With our trusty red wagon, we've tromped these forests and fields, having adventures and hanging out with our Great Wild Mother, who is so hard to find here in the city.

I can hear her under the endless paving though, and see her great roots twisting around and through the iron fences. I know she is there, waiting . . . but have missed her glorious, unmarked face terribly in this great stinking desert of skyscrapers, where the people seem concerned only with the Affairs of Men.



I have tried, in this difficult environment, to give my children to her, as I was given to her. To help them find -- or perhaps help them not to lose -- the beauty, mystery and majesty of the Earth. To have them truly belong to her, as is their birthright.









We were here the day this tree fell down. We've stopped each time to observe it decomposing. Today, as we said goodbye to "The Boom Tree" it had blossomed with several different kinds of neat fungi. We also played with some nice fat toads, which I couldn't photograph as I was covered in Toad Juice.


No journey to the bridge is complete without a game of Poohsticks.


Goodbye Beautiful Park. May you always be protected as ferociously, and treasured as deeply, as you are now.

HW

Call for Submissions to The Country Fair!

Oh, I suddenly feel pressed to the heaving bosom of the Free Thinking few. Looking for an alternative to the uptight Christian Carnival of Homeschooling? Just want to be able to use the word "damn" in your submission? No, I've never joined in on this sort of thing either, but now that I know about The Country Fair, I just might give it a shot.

HW

Baby Man in the Garden

But what is Baby Man up to? I hear you cry. Baby Man is all about the dandelions.


And the airplanes...



And the packing tape...

We are in the process of moving, and if you listen very carefully, you'll be able to hear Humble yelling...

"Who's got the packing tape now?!

Bring back the packing tape please!

Baby Man, do NOT tape yourself to things when you are naked, ok?

Baby Man, stop taping yourself to the picnic table!

Scooby tell your brother not to tape himself to the picnic table....

(Anguished screaming from picnic table area)

Ok, honey, I'm coming!"

HW

Creative Process

I've begun to notice that Scooby processes her experiences through her drawings shortly afterward. This (below) is a drawing of the day we visited the farm.

Close up of detail (above) shows Scooby wearing the sunglasses she wished she'd brought that day, the Chicken Pox she was pretending to have after touching a chicken, and the ice cream cone she wanted but didn't get because she'd already had a cupcake....

Notice the hairy pig - she was surprised to discover pigs are very hairy!

She also asked me for a pen, so she could draw the barn faintly, to indicate it was in the background, which I thought was rather interesting.



This is a picture Scooby drew of herself, giving me the beautiful rose she made for me.


It's getting to the point that we'll come home from an adventure and Scooby will run to her art supplies and start beavering away. She just has to get it all out!

HW

Bison Bones

More scientific illustration from the Scoob.

After visiting our small local park zoo a few weeks ago, she drew the bison, with visible skeletons. She also wrote the word "YAK" without asking me how to spell it, but assures me they are bison, not yaks. I foolishly asked, pointing to the larger mass in the abdomen of each, "Is this the stomach?"

She shook her head, smiling in her "Silly Mommy!" way, and answered, "No! That's the pelvis!"

"Are they sad?" I asked, noticing the big bison's expression.


"The mommy is sad."


"Why is she sad?"


"Because she's in the zoo, and she wants her baby to be free."


"The baby is happy?"


"The baby doesn't know any better. She was born in the zoo."


HW

Marionettes in the Museo de Cadiz

The Museo de Cadiz has a wonderful surprise, barely mentioned in the guidebooks. On the top floor of the museum is a fabulous collection of marionettes from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Puppetry was a highly developed art form in Spain as in many other European nations. The Spanish puppets not only entertained but often carried a satirical message. And watching them didn't make you stupid.

Taio








Museum of Cadiz
Plaza de Mina s/n, Cadiz Tel 956 212 281 Fax 956 226 215
Admission is free for EU citizens.
Outstanding exhibitions of Phoenician items and pictorial works.
Closed on Mondays.

P.S. If this made you go all itchy with the need to make a marionette, check out Diary of a Marionette Maker!

Do It Yourself Neat-O Toys!

This is cool! Check out this guy's brilliant little micro-business! Mr. McGroovy hawks plans and reusable rivets to hold together gigantic cardboard constructions for kids. You (avec Urchins) track down and steal the cardboard, build it and paint it. We are so doing this.

In My Mind and On My Car

Alrighty, when I first started this homeschool blogging thing, I noticed the sprinkling of folks who had "I'm Pro-Evolution!" things on their blogs, and I just shrugged. You may as well stick a "I'm Pro-Digestion!" or "I'm Pro-Oxygen!" sign up, I thought.

Now that I've been doing this a bit longer, I've discovered, to my amazement, that Fundamental Christianity is all the rage again, and in the United States, people are even successfully agitating to have Intelligent Design (Creationism, with Light Dressing) taught in public schools.

I've also discovered that most homeschoolers have a religious agenda. We've had such a difficult time finding other homeschooling blogs to read that are Pro-Digestion and Pro-Oxygen that I finally decided to slap up some stuff indicating we're cool with the idea Mama Earth is more than 5,000 years old - and I'm pretty surprised and saddened to have to do that.

HW

Earthworms & Mortality

Digging for earthworms one sunny spring day, Baby Man had a jolly time finding them, pulling them out of the ground and chatting with them.

I was thinking about Yellow House Homeschool's recent post about whether they would intervene if a bug was in Mortal Danger . . . and about the time I pointed out a beautiful fuzzy yellow caterpillar to a two year old Scooby, who gleefully stomped on it.

As I sat there, holding the worm bucket, I tried to remember being three. I dissected my fair share of hapless insects, and except for a few grown-up voices telling me "...not to squish that spider because it will rain!" there wasn't any sort of moral judgment made.

I'm quite confident I learned a lot about How Living Things Work, and a lot about Death, from messing about with bugs.

I suggest that Wee Urchins can't be expected to understand why they shouldn't squish a living creature, because they don't have any concept of mortality. How will they (gently) discover that living things are fragile and mortal, if they can't experience it first hand? My admonishments to be gentle are meaningless, if they don't know there are real, 'green juice all over your hands' consequences to not being gentle.

If I catch them trying to squish a rare, endangered Hairy Guatemalan Ice-Skating Bug or, you know, one of the last living bees (!) I'll step in.

Beyond that, I think I'll just sit back and keep my mouth shut while Baby Man rips the poor worms in half and yells "Look! I make TWO worms! WAKE UP WORM!"

HW

In Five Part Harmony Now!

This just in from Yorkshire in the UK! There are Free Range Kids all over this wide world people! Let me get my guitar...

"And friends, somewhere in Washington, enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints.

And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is 'cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation and IF you're in a similar situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are...just walk in and say "Shrink...I'm taking my kids out of the Conformity Factory!" And walk out.

You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both interior designers and they won't take either of them. And if three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in, singing "I'm taking my kids out of the Conformity Factory!" and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you imagine fifty people a day, I said FIFTY people a day, walking in, singing "I'm taking my kids out of the Conformity Factory!" and walking out. Friends, they may think it's a movement.

And that's what it is, the "I'm taking my kids out of the Conformity Factory Movement," and all you gotta do to join is sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar."

With apologies to Arlo Guthrie

Feria in Seville

We are fortunate to have Globe Trotters in the family who send us amazing pictures like this! Our kids enjoyed this batch so much I thought we'd share them. Thanks to Taio and crew for this guest post!

"Here are some pics from the Feria de Abril in Seville we went to last week. This started out as an agricultural fair at the beginning of the 19th century and is now, I think, the biggest party in Spain. The site must cover well over a square mile, it's like a small city.

There is a huge amusement area, bigger than any "Ex" in our world, but the real thing is the 'casetas' which means 'small house.' There are thousands of them, large tents, all decorated and furnished inside. Some belong to families, some to clubs and organizations, some to businesses. Inside they are set up like lovely restaurants with tables and chairs, and a dance area where the 'Sevilliano' is danced, very Spanish.

Hundreds of thousands of people, many in full traditional dress, throng the feria day and night for a week - and they keep going from about 10 AM to 5AM the next morning and keep doing that for a week. Tough people!

Every afternoon they parade around on horseback and in carriages in full traditional costume including little kids and babies.

There are hundreds of carriages. It is an absolutely amazing spectacle. The candy apples are the most beautiful we've ever seen, an art form.

The guy is lifting churros out of the hot fat. These are deep fried dough, a Spanish beaver tail. You eat them by dipping them in the very thick hot chocolate they have here. Decadent!"

Taio