Where free-range babies come from

Day two at Rethinking Education and I'm already overwhelmed with ideas. Cruelly, I was forced to choose between sex and drugs before lunch, as two appealing sessions ran concurrently: a marijuana information talk led by former drug cop Barry Cooper of Never Get Busted Again fame and an unschooler sex-education discussion led by unschooled young adults.

While I hated missing Cooper's talk, I had to go with the sexuality chat, which confirmed my hope that being open but not pushy with information is the way to go in terms of healthy, holistic development. The most telling moment of the session came when "purity pledges" came up, and most of those present either hadn't heard of them or thought they might be some sort of religious thing. That gives me hope for the future.

Apart from being open about the nuts-and-bolts aspect of sex, anatomy, and contraception, veteran parents and young adults emphasized talking with children about the emotional aspects of sexuality and the potential consequences of sex, like what's actually involved in pregnancy and childrearing, so that teens have a lot of information to draw on when making sex-related decisions.

The lightbulb moment for me came when a mother of grown unschoolers talked about her ongoing communication with the parents of her then-young children's friends to make sure everyone was on the same page with respect to values and knowing what their kids were doing. That's so different from the setup I had as a teen, where my boyfriends' parents didn't know mine, there was no communication among the "grownups" and therefore a lot of anxiety and a lot of freaking out when I broke curfew. It seems like a little more work all along to maintain that extra channel with other parents, but worth it when everyone's development is in the balance.

Gatto and open-source learning

I left Gatto's keynote speech last night with a renewed enthusiasm for free-range (or as he calls it, open-source) learning and ten handwritten pages of notes. As time allows, I'll write more in-depth, but other sessions beckon and the kids are agitating to get to the pool, I offer a few tidbits this morning.

Gatto's four main ideas in his 2.5-hour presentation were that institutional schooling is not about learning but about social engineering and has been since at least the time of Plato, as evidenced by writings of Plato, Calvin, Spinoza and others; that this method of schooling -- designed to produce docile, obedient laborers serving an elite class -- has outlived its usefulness as America's manufacturing base declines and new, more creative economic skills are needed; that the same schooling has produced a "broken citizenry" ignorant of its rights and/or too intimidated to insist upon them; and that as our national debt grows, our esteem in the eyes of the world plummets, and we rely increasingly on foreign money and goodwill, something must change here in order to keep the national enterprise afloat.

Oh, and there's the fifth point he made: that the answers to these problems are found within each individual; in personal curiosity, motivation and creativity; and are best nurtured outside a traditional school environment. It's something any truly creative or self-directed person who endured school could tell you, but there it is from a veteran teacher.

More on this later (and Gatto leads another talk this afternoon) but it's time to eat, exercise and play games until the unschooling sex-ed talk later this morning.

Back to unschool

I light out tomorrow for the annual Rethinking Education conference in Dallas. This is my second time attending RE and I could not be more stoked. Any educational conference with a recommended packing list that includes yoga mats, knitting supplies, and comfortable clothes for belly dancing is all right with me.

The family has already marked up the 37-page conference program and while two of the speakers I most enjoyed last year (Naomi Aldort and David Albert) won't be there this time, John Taylor Gatto will be. Gatto taught in New York public schools for a quarter-century before reconsidering the entire enterprise and writing books including Dumbing Us Down, The Exhausted School, A Different Kind of Teacher and The Underground History of American Education. If you ever need an explanation of why our electorate is so easily manipulated, Underground History will give you some pretty good clues.

Apart from the grownup ideas and discussions, I'm thrilled that there's a time and place for Rocketboy to help build a full-size yurt inside a hotel ballroom without static from The Man. There will even be a venue in which Hurricanehead may perform sanctioned, non-antibiotic weirdness on his hair.

I'll be blogging the conference all weekend, laptop willing.

Adios, Alberto

Does this mean we can focus on impeaching Cheney now that Gonzales is skulking away? Anyone care to bet on the next rat to jump the deck railing?

Make your momma proud

I went out for coffee with my knitting posse a few nights ago. After we got settled and found the light switch for our nook – thanks to a chatty, helpful older fellow -- Ms. G and I got to talking about raising boys and not having to deal with “girl issues.” Ms. G said she was glad; I worried that our culture will turn my sweet sons into sexist dolts, which ultimately is a girl issue.

Her opinion was that family dynamics are crucial to how boys view women. Agreed, but the culture at large tells boys they and their desires are the center of the universe and girls are just there to please them. Hell, I just reviewed, for a friend’s publication, a sex-ed video for boys as young as nine that assures the little dudes that women’s bodies are the “soil” in which Mr. Farmer plants his “seed.” (Guess how I reviewed that?) And that’s just one drop of the daily toxic sludge that corrodes women’s sense of self and men’s opinion of women.

I’m not worried about my kids being crazy woman-haters but I do fear they could be the sort of unaware guys who make women uncomfortable and demoralized because they think their own life experience is humanity’s default setting. Fighting the cultural status quo is hard. Just raising your own kids is hard. It’s tiring to even think about it. Ms. G and I agreed that as a mother you do the best you can and hope things turn out all right. Then she made a face and some furtive hand gestures.

“Porn,” she whispered.

“Huh?”

“Porn,” she hissed.

Yep, I thought, porn is part of the problem.

Then I understood. Mr. Light-switch was at a table next to us in the crowded café, checking out porn on his laptop.

Flipping bird

She lays eggs and the seeds of our destruction!

Wanda has established herself as a troublemaker and she's dragging the rest of us down with her. Perhaps in celebration of her new chickenwomanhood, Wanda's been exploring life as a single gal in the big city. That's the only reason I can think of why she would use her free-roaming time to fly over the fence four days in a row.

At first it was funny. I looked out the living-room window to find her bawking around in the shrub bed by the front porch. Hurricanehead accompanied me and my handful of breadcrumbs in order to lure her to safety. Wanda is wisely leery of Hurricanehead, who tends to sneak up behind her and pick her up, and his 'help' made it hard for me to catch her.

The postman discreetly avoided eye contact during his delivery as I crawled through the shrubs, cooing and clucking at Wanda. Finally she stuck her head in a low bush and seemed to think she'd disappeared. I scooped her up and, with what dignity I could summon, carried her through the front door and out back to the covered pen. Neutron, who'd been cowering in a brush pile while Wanda was AWOL, came boiling out upon seeing her. If you've never heard one chicken cuss out another, you're missing something.

Wanda's next escape was funny -- sort of -- because I'd assumed the first time was a fluke and because opening your front door to hear a clump of overgrown monkey grass clucking shamefully before a chicken head periscopes into view is de facto amusing. A fistful of crackers and she was back in her pen. It was cute and all, but traffic and stray pets are not her friends. I hoped that two days in a row of having her roaming time cut short would help her understand that the front yard is off-limits.

The third day was my wake-up call. My Sunday-afternoon nap was cut short by Rocketboy screaming for me to get downstairs right now. Something about Wanda and the street. I hustled downstairs to find Hombre, still in his church clothes, standing like a crowd-control cop between Wanda and the road. He had an irked look and it was clear he'd been trying to catch her for a while. A neighbor who had jokingly asked, "Is that dinner?" was now pointedly watering his lawn and not gawking. Hurricanehead sat on the front walk, bawling, his entire head shining with what looked like grease*. Rocketboy came outside behind me, yelling and waving a tin can full of scratch. I offered Wanda some crumbs and scooped her up. Rocketboy fed her from his hand, then screamed and swore when she pecked him.

When I lay down for my nap, we were a family of smart, literary people who love the life of the mind and a nice morning at hippie church, but I awoke to find myself in that family. You know who I'm talking about. The trashy, loud, out-of-control one. Us.

I don't know if Wanda took us there or if she revealed what already lurked within, but it didn't matter. For her safety and for family and neighborhood peace, it was time to clip her flight feathers. I did not want to do this. I'm a weenie about clipping things on critters. I used to cry whenever I clipped a claw too short on our surly, 4-foot long iguana, despite the fact that he never batted an eye. I took to the internet, because although I'd been shown how to clip flight feathers when we bought our parakeets I'd never done it. The phrase "blood feather" (the ones you're supposed to avoid on pain of bird death) makes the horizon pitch and roll a little.

Having snuggled Wanda close and very, very carefully examined each of the ten feathers I was about to clip, I went for it. I only clipped one wing, as that's supposed to be better for keeping them off balance. For good measure I did Neutron, too, because I already had the scissors out, and then I put them to bed.

You would think that would be the end of it, but today I watched Wanda and her punked wing get on top of the fence and bail over. She'd been out of her run all of five minutes. During the few moments it took me to go out front and round her up, Hurricanehead soaked the sandbox, a history book, his brother and Neutron with the garden hose and then began to cry because he was all wet.

I don't know what the next step is. Clipping the feathers shorter? Clipping the other side, too? A tiny ball and chain? A leash? More time in the pen? Outward Bound? It's not safe for her to wander the front yard, and although pet chickens are legal here, I suppose a neighbor could make a stink over it. Whatever the solution is, I hope it doesn't involve any more episodes starring my hollering, overdressed, greasy-headed, tin-can-waving family freaking out on the lawn.


* Hurricanehead claimed he'd used "hair gel," which was later revealed to be half a tube of Neosporin.

It's outta here

Note the clean, uncluttered lines of the Brazos River pedestrian bridge in Waco, Texas

I'm a chronic declutterer. I can't stand having things around that aren't being used -- I hate dusting them, navigating around them, thinking about them. But there's always a twinge of guilt and frustration involved in getting rid of things. If I take this stuff to Goodwill, will it go on the shelf or end up in the dumpster out back? Will someone who needs it actually find it? There's Freecycle, which I've been part of for several years now (I freecycled my wedding dress to celebrate my 10th anniversary); it's great when it works right but when people fail to show or change their pickup date multiple times it becomes a hassle.

Imagine my delight when Hombre brought me an old-fashioned paper copy of this: 100 Reasons to Get Rid of It from the March issue of Blueprint. If you've wondered how best to pass along your old luggage, digital camera, prom dress or car, the information is there.

Of course the real way to cut down on clutter is not to let it into your home in the first place. We're working on that. I'll have more to say on it later as I tackle the single largest source of mess and strife in my home: toys. Now to recycle that paper.

Friday cat blogging, Homeland-Security style

Featuring Michael Chertoff as Ceiling Cat

Spy satellites to keep an eye on the homeland?

Passports required on domestic flights starting next year?

Sure, it smells fascist. But on the upside, the next time a hurricane drowns a city or a neglected highway bridge breaks loose, they'll be able to notify the next of kin before the search even starts.

Mystery solved: The chicken came first

Bigger than a cherry tomato, fresher than the Empire State Building

Hombre and Hurricanehead brought in the first homegrown egg from our hens this afternoon. Based on cluck volume and frequency, I give Neutron credit for this one. The inaugural egg has already been folded into a skillet of scrambled eggs with sauteed homegrown onions and "Gypsy" orange sweet peppers, served with a side of cukes and "Cherokee purple" tomatoes from the garden and washed down with green tea.

Laying eggs is hard work. Time for a victory snorgle from Rocketboy.

This first egg was smallish, but my sources indicate that the eggs will get bigger as the gals get older. I'm surprised they started laying now while it's so hot (96 degrees at the moment) but I'm not going to try to talk them out of it.

Who's your candidate?

No surprise that when I took this issues-based presidential candidate-picker quiz, it aligned me with Dennis Kucinich, the Cheney-articles-of-impeachment demigod with the campaign momentum of a hellbound snowball.

What about you?


Via Philobiblon, which has in the comments a more detailed quiz as well.

Tomato-hickey villain identified

Nymph Leaffooted Bug, David Dickerson 2005, Wikimedia Commons

I learned two things about my tomato-sucking garden adversary over the weekend.

One, my chickens will not eat it. Not from the ground, not from my hand. After a few encouragements and some cooing on my part, Neutron closed the discussion by flopping down in the strawberry bed and giving herself a pointedly messy dust bath.

Two, it is not a stinkbug but a leaffooted bug. Howard Garrett has the lowdown. I blame the recent wet weather for the huge number of these critters, because we have just about all of the natural controls Garrett suggests but we're still overrun. Time to find the sprayer and the citrus oil.

Cheney in '94: Taking Iraq would lead to quagmire

What did Cheney know and when did he know it? According to this interview footage he knew toppling Saddam would be a special kind of Iraq-fragmenting, region-destabilizing, high-casualty disaster all the way back in 1994, after the first Gulf War:



So would this video make today's Cheney what? Absent-minded? A liar? A man who sold out his understanding of reality in the service of greed and a delusional loser's 'legacy'? A walking insult to our citizenry and troops? Impeachable? Or all of the above?

Via Pam at Pandagon -- she also links to a short E&P post on the video.

Booked

Hurricanehead sometimes paints on paper rather than the walls and his rear end.

Surely you’re taking advantage of the summer torpor to catch up on your reading. I have been, apart from that seven-day stretch last week when Hombre threw me to the wolves went out of town and I learned by doing that I would make the world’s worst single parent. (When was the last time you yelled at your kids to watch TV?)

But before my epic parenting failure, while I was on my mini-vacation, I finally got around to reading Prodigal Summer. I enjoyed it – Barbara Kingsolver’s books always make me fall a little more in love with the natural world -- but it’s not my favorite from her. It’s a beautifully described version of my sister-in-law’s mantra that hormones rule the world, but at times the dialog felt like it was coming straight from Kingsolver rather than the various characters who were explaining pheromones, predator/prey ratios and other natural wonders. And for a book that’s largely about sex, hormones, diversity and the web of life, it was conspicuously heteronormative. On the plus side, Kingsolver’s descriptions of place are, as always, keen and engaging. And I found the Unitarian humor pretty funny.

Right now I’m reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, and it’s stressing me out. Not because of the descriptions of how quickly our homes and cities and possessions would fall apart if we humans suddenly disappeared, but because ceramics apparently last damn near forever. This notion throbs in my head as I try to narrow the tile and fixture choices for the impending bathroom remodel. Someday, after all, all that’s known of humans to visiting space aliens could be the shower tile and sink they find on my old weedy piece of land. Add that to the pressure of knowing I'll have to live with my choices and I'm about to choke.

To de-stress I’m slowly reading The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty. I’m not that far into it but I love the economy of her style. Someday, if you remind me, I will tell you a story about the “lost” interview with Ms. Welty and why I hate TV news.

Next in line is The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I’ve been wanting to read this for a long time, and it’s sitting patiently by my nightstand, on top of the big honkin’ Treasury of Rowan Knits I found at a used-book store. I laugh at the inclusion of long-sleeved cable sweaters in the “summer” section of the book, but I drool over most of the designs.

What are you reading? What are you not reading?

Of course we love you. We just have a funny way of showing it

I've always thought one of the perks of having a religious ministry would be hurting people during their hour of need. Take this, for instance, from this morning's Statesman:

Church cancels memorial for gay Navy vet

By ANGELA K. BROWN
Associated Press Writer

ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) -- A megachurch canceled a memorial service for a Navy veteran 24 hours before it was to start because the deceased was gay.

The best part is you'd get to be all high-minded and passive-aggressive about it. Check this quote from the pastor:

"We did decline to host the service - not based on hatred, not based on discrimination, but based on principle[...] It's not that we didn't love the family."

Well, if it's principle rather than discrimination and hate then it's all right. I guess they nixed the funeral out of love, for the family's own good. Perhaps getting screwed with in their grief is just the logical consequence of caring about a gay man. That'll teach 'em. Of course if it were it my church I'd also lovingly whack each survivor on the hand with a ruler to make the lesson really stick.

Enough sarcasm now because this makes me sad. There's some we said/they said going on between the family and the church, but no one disputes the fact that the church agreed to host a memorial service and then reneged because the deceased, Cecil Howard Sinclair, was gay.

Backing out of hosting a funeral for any reason is disgraceful. It breaks one's word and dishonors the deceased, sure, but more importantly it injures the bereaved when they're fragile and hurting and trying to make sense of their loss. Not to mention the logistical nightmare created by canceling a day before the service. Grieving people don't need the stress.

But canceling the funeral because the man was gay? "Love one another" indeed. I think back to Baby D's memorial service, how desperately important it was to Hombre and me, and I imagine the rage I would have felt and the wound I would still carry if our then-church (which was kind and wonderful and compassionate) had made things difficult for us -- especially if it had done so as a judgment on the person we loved and lost. For a church whose mission is to "evangelize the world" you'd think these folks in Arlington could come up with a better way to win hearts and minds.

Hot, young chicks are waiting for you

to let them into the kitchen

I'm still getting the hang of my video file-converting and editing tools so I can bust out that chicken video. It would be easier if the boys weren't threatening to kill each other over pancakes, but then everything would be easier if they weren't always engaged in some sort of sibling challenge.

My weekend gardening project is to identify and banish the stinkbug-like creatures hanging around my tomato plants. They don't seem to bother the cherry tomatoes much, but they're hitting the Cherokees and Celebrities pretty hard. I don't mind the occassional bug hickey on my produce, but when you see a tomato completely covered with bugs, that's just gross.

Toxicology report

Let's get all of the icky, creepy and outrageous stuff over in one post so I can move on to my goal for the day: figuring out how to edit my chicken video into something even you might enjoy watching. (Yes, I used to be a video editor, but that was back when news photogs still shot Beta and we had one computer in the entire newsroom. This digital stuff is, sadly, new to me.)


More plastic, more problems

Tim sent me this follow-on from Treehugger about new bisphenol A research:

Bisphenol A (BPA) — a chemical commonly found in hard plastics — has for the first time been linked to female reproductive disorders in a strongly-worded statement released by 38 scientists and published online in the journal Reproductive Toxicology. The compound, which is used in a variety of consumer items such as polycarbonate plastic baby bottles, microwave oven dishes and sports bottles, often seeps from containers and enters the bodies of humans.

Reader resources for alternatives to BPA-laced food-storage are in the comments here.


Please don't eat the lead toys

MomsRising is petitioning Congress and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to finally make sure jewelry and trinkets for kids are lead-free. Incredible as it may seem, plenty of tchotchkes for children contain lead, and at least one child has died from swallowing one.


Impeach 'em all. Let God sort 'em out

My outrage meter is about raged out, but the bizarro turn of events last weekend on FISA and warrantless wiretapping expansion -- to be supervised by none other than Alberto "Pants on Fire" Gonzales -- caused my poor, tired needle to whack the redline once again. Dahlia Lithwick sums up the absurdity:

This past Sunday, a heap of Democrats voted to rush through changes to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law that governs electronic surveillance of anyone in this country. The new law expands the authority of the attorney general to approve the monitoring of phone calls and e-mails to suspected overseas terrorists from unknowing American citizens. Make no mistake about it. The vote to update FISA rewarded the AG for years of missteps and misstatements by giving him expanded authority to enforce the president's alarming constitutional vision. Sans oversight. Sans judicial approval.

There are a number of ways you can express your opinion to your putative employees in Washington. The American Freedom Campaign has a shame-on-you contact form; MoveOn wants Congress to reverse itself on FISA; and the People's Email Network is trying to kick-start impeachment proceedings for Gonzales, Cheney and Bush. Of course, it would be a hell of a lot easier to justify impeaching the AG if Congress hadn't just tacitly deemed him trustworthy to oversee the expanded wiretapping program.


Now take a deep, cleansing breath

And go play with the captions.

Consider yourself warned

Thanks to everyone who kicked in suggestions for non-plastic (and safer plastic) food-storage suggestions. I've found a local source for stainless-steel sports bottles and I plan to run down the rest of the tips as soon as my three-year-old allows. I don't expect that to happen soon.

Now that Hurricanehead is smack between three and four, I find myself repeating what I said when Rocketboy was this age: They make a big deal about two but they never warn you about three. I'm fixing that right now. The terrible twos are a pale foreshadowing of the real horror, my friends.

Three is when my kids look and sound like they might have the beginnings of a lick of sense but what they really have is a big-kid haircut and the skills to get into all the cabinets. Forethought never goes beyond the planning stage. This is why Hurricanehead doesn't understand that no matter how skilled he may be at gathering supplies, most of his plans are simply too dangerous to implement. I can't take a shower without the kid damn near burning the house down, and there's just no predicting what he'll try next.

To wit, he recently tried to "make a tornado" while I was cleaning up. I stepped out of the bathroom to find that he'd filched my hair dryer from a cabinet, set it up with the business end touching a cardboard box brought up from the garage, turned it on 'high,' left the whole schmear resting on the carpet and walked away. A very stern safety talk followed.

Yesterday I stepped out of the shower to find him trotting through my bedroom carrying a roll of duct tape and a gooseneck desk lamp. The plan, he explained, was to stick duct tape to the wall at the top of the stairs, then mash the lightbulb against the tape and turn it on.

"Why?" I asked.

"To start a fire," he said, as if it should have been obvious.

"That's dangerous!"

He'd clearly anticipated my objection.

"It's safety fire," he assured me. "For catching rats."

The gooseneck lamp now resides on a high shelf along with a timer, a flashlight, a metronome, and other innocent household items he's tried to corrupt. Meanwhile, I've learned to identify the sound of his kitchen chair being scraped along the floor to whatever cabinet/shelf/wall hanging he wants to ransack. It's one of a very few sounds that will cause me to drop whatever I'm doing to investigate.

One of the other code-red sounds is the fridge door opening, which is awful because it happens so often. That's how I caught him plotting to make a "shake" with these ingredients: milk, vanilla yogurt, cream cheese, and ranch-flavored sour cream dip. When I couldn't talk him out of it, I offered to make the thing for him to avoid slop on the floor. Reader, he drank it.

Hombre tells me Hurricanehead also did some sort of "experiment" while I was out that involved soaking my roasted pumpkin seed snacks in vinegar and tossing them out in the yard. He tries to build tiny doghouses on the floor from staples cribbed from the desk drawer. This morning he made himself a "gun" out of a rolled-up piece of construction paper and a drink lid. He offered to demonstrate it for me, and boy was I surprised when he flicked it and a screwdriver flew out of the tube.

He has his endearing moments, although endearing moments at three are different from other stages. At bedtime tonight he gave me the longest, tightest hug he'd ever given me. I thought it was awfully sweet after all the hell he'd raised today. Then he spoke.

"What's that kind of snake that goes around and around people and smashes them and makes them die?"

"A constrictor."

"That's the kind of snake I was being to you. Good night, Mommy."

Sleep well. And don't say you weren't warned.

Don't drink the plastic

I try not to get paranoid about the makeup of everyday objects, but Elizabeth Grossman's Salon article on bisphenol A*, a synthetic estrogen that turns up in all kinds of plastic, gave me pause. Bisphenol A is used in all kinds of food packaging and water bottles, while a growing body of research implicates it in obesity, some cancers and neurological and reproductive problems. As a bonus, scientists say it leaches out of plastic products, can cause problems in tiny amounts, and seems to do the most damage in developing fetuses. Naturally the chemical industry begs to differ.

My gestational days are over and my kids are mercifully beyond the fetal stage, but I wonder if reducing our exposure to plastic might be prudent anyway. My question is what the hell to replace it with? I s'pose I could shell out for those glass food-storage containers at IKEA to replace my motley tupperware collection, but what to do about sports bottles and go-cups? Is there a non-plastic alternative for those items? And what about freezer bags? We use them to pack lunches and snacks, and we even wash and re-use them, which might turn out to be a bad move if wear and tear contribute to leaching.

My knowledge of how people packed lunches before plastic and coolers is limited to vague memories of Laura in the Little House books carrying her lunch to school in a pail. I think there might have been paper wrapped around something, but who knows?

I've written before about the problems plastic poses when it gets into the ocean, photodegrading and sucking up toxic chemicals before it gets eaten by sea life. I'm sick of the proliferation of plastic shopping bags, and I'm damned tired of stepping on Legos around here. Safe to say, plastic is not on my happy list right now. So I'd really rather not drink it.

* Sit through the ad, it won't kill you.