Radical Unschooling Journey

^{Finally the weather has been nice enough for some good old fashioned playing outside. My 8 year old found one of those little plastic tooth boxes under the tree in the front yard. I taught her what I learned from a Mexican girl I used to work with. She said that in mexico when kids would lose a tooth they would bury it under a tree and sing soe kind of a song about the tree growing and their new tooth growing, too. I really don’t remember the words, although I could look it up. My kids just thought the story was neat. They thought it was interesting that there was no tooth fairy tradition in Mexico.}

^{So in my pre-unschooling
days, we used the “ Teach Your Child to Read in 100 easy lessons”
program. Lately my 5 year old has been sounding out words and
spelling things and writing things on her own. I got out the reading
program the other day to see where she’s at. By the end of the book,
it’s supposed to be a 2nd grade level. She knows all of her letter
sounds and really just needs to remember them, and learn to
distinguish between b’s and d’s and p’s sometimes. To make it
easier, I’m going to label a few things in the house like I did with
my older girls. Bed is a really good thing to label because it looks
like a bed, with the tall ends of the band the d as bedposts.}

^{So my 15 year old is supposed to be volunteering in a medical-related position. She has decided to stick with the Girl Scouts this year, and will be planning her Gold Project (like the Boy Scout’s Eagle Award) in the medical area. I’m not sure exactly what her project will be, but she has a few ideas. My 12 year old was also quite generous. We have a bunch of excess food, I was getting oatmeal for 50 cents a box, and Tostitos queso dip for 25 cents a jar and Skippy peanut butter, 8 jars for $2. She looks up at all the food in the cupboard and says “This is ridiculous, mom. Can’t we donate this somewhere” So I had her get online and find a local food bank. She bagged up about 10 boxes of oatmeal, 5 or 6 jars of the tostitos and about 10 jars of peanut butter. It felt nice to deliver it, even though I just sat in the car. She enjoyed delivering it, too. I sure love these girls and I’m so proud of who they’re growing up to be.}

^{I am so proud that she wants to aim high and be a pediatrician. I have this fear, though that the drug companies will brainwash her into being a shot-pushing jerk. Not my baby, I say on one hand. However, it’s their job./ maybe I can expose the pediatrics industry for what it is, and get a hold of those textbooks and PROVE that they’re written by drug companies. Maybe I can learn more about how pediatricians are trained. I hope they teach her about the importance of breast milk for babies. I heard once that newly graduating pediatricians weren’t required to take a class about that. Imagine. As long as she doesn’t become a sellout to the immunization cult, then I guess we’ll be OK.}

^{I keep thinking I want to go back to school. Our income was so abysmally low last year that I know I’d qualify for a grant on the FAFSA. Also, I just learned that there’s a $4000 a year grant for promising to teach in a low income school district for 2 years. I could totally do that. So free schooling, free books and $4,000 except I am not really sure I want a teaching degree. That only matters here in WA. If I were to get a degree in anything else, I can teach in California. I’d like to be a lawyer, and I also want to learn CSS. I think business law would be the most interesting. Also, my dad has a fantastic business as a commercial business broker, helping people buy and sell businesses and his wife works the residential end of the real estate. If I can learn business law or real estate law I could be an asset to them. Journalism is a love of mine, though. I just want a degree, it matters to me. I just don’t know what I want to be.}

^{Happy Valentine’s Day. Our local support group has a Valentine’s party every year. I really hate the stupid tradition of signing several random valentines with just your name and exchanging shallow love notes with perfect strangers. I wish we could get a list of all the names of all the kids that would be there, so that they can exchange truly personalized notes of gratitude or friendship with the other kids. The party is usually cute, though. Last year they had stations where kids decorated cookies, played a beanbag tossing game, decorated their little brown paper sack and all sorts of other activities. The room was really small, though. I think they’re having it in the same place this year. Last year I didn’t realize about the card exchange. Oops, they let my kids participate anyways. This year, we plan to be prepared with homemade notes.}

^{One thing I notice that I do with my girls, is talk a lot. Actually, they talk a lot. I listen. I think it’s important for kids to be listened to, and to know that their thoughts, feelings, ideas and opinions matter. We laugh, we tell stories, we discuss the psychology of everyone we know. They are such a joy to be around. My 12 year old has started doing some social experiments. Wherever she goes, she wears the opposite of what the other kids would wear. She goes to this church thing on Wednesdays, so she dresses Goth. She measures the other kids by whether or not they’re put off by her appearance. I love listening to her make fun of the ‘pink girls” who are scared of her. How can a 12 year old be so deep?}

So I am apparently an RU failure. I just can’t leave well enough alone. I’m pushing math again. I noticed something, a lot of RU families come from a background of authoritativeness. True, my father was bossy that way, a definite dictator type. My mother, however, was the exact opposite. She was a jellyfish. She never exerted her will or pushed us for anything. Remember what I said about college? Having grown up that way, I can feel perfectly happy and responsible for pushing my kids. And not in my dad’s “Only I know what’s best for you” kind of way, but in a more respectful way that says “I realize you hate math. However, it’s important.” Because it is. And I realize that totally means I’m kicked out of the RU circle. I’m OK with that today.

So it feels like we’re spending each and every day of our lives driving. Mondays are supposed to be our no driving days, but my oldest is in driver’s ed So we have to take her all the way into town so she can go to her class. And of course now that she has her permit, she wants to drive everywhere. The driving school is ½ hour from home, but the class is almost 3 hours long, so instead of sitting in the parking lot, we just drive all the way home. And then, about 2 hours later, we have to drive all the way back to pick her up. And that’s just Mondays. On Tuesdays, one of my girls has girl scouts. On Wednesdays it’s Science class, caravans and Driving School. On Thursday it’s art class, another girl scout troop for another daughter and driving school. On Fridays, it’s swing dancing and another girl scout troop. On Saturdays there’s always something social going on. On Sundays, we planned to start going to the UU church, but honestly I am not very good at being dressed by 10am.

So my daughter wants to be a pediatrician and I just don’t know how pushy I should be. I feel so new at this. I don’t want to do what my parents did, which was nothing. And I don’t want her to change her mind because I’m too freakin’ nuts about it all, but I like her idea and I want to help her make a workable plan. So we’ve been looking at the medical school requirements and planning to get her started at the community college, during high school, then into a premed program at a 4 year University, and then into medical school. She also needs to show that she’s volunteering and working in the medical field during that time. So we need to get her back into the hospital volunteering program that she applied for a while back, but didn’t follow through with because we thought we were moving. I think, as un-RU as it might be, that I’d rather be pushy with her than not pushy. I really don’t think that non-pushy people get what they want in life. I’m kind of losing my RU vibe lately.