It’s the night before we start our grand adventure.  Everyone has gone to bed anticipating a great day.  Annie and I have talked about our plans for the week, and she’s excited.  I’m somewhere between scared stiff and thrilled.  On the one hand, I think we’re ready.  I’ve been preparing for how to handle discipline and creating incentive plans for hard work and concentration.  I’ve tried to imagine ways to keep mother-daughter frustrations at bay while creating an atmosphere of respect during our “school” time.  Mostly, I’m worried now about what happens to the relationship between the two girls.

Since September, Annie left in the morning to go to her school and Pippi sometimes left in the morning to go to her own school or to play with a friend.  Before the end of the day, Pip couldn’t stand waiting any longer to pick Annie up from school.  Pippi practically burst up the stairs at “pick up” and would tackle her sister full of things to tell her, candy or treats that she saved for her, and eager to have any of her sister’s time and attention.  She asked all the time why she couldn’t see Annie at her own school and continually asked if they could be together more.  Annie, though a bit more reluctant to admit it, was often the same way.  She saved things for Pippi.  She drew pictures for her and even created a set of paper dolls for Pippi to play with during “center time.”  As the adage goes, though, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and familiarity breeds… well… in our case… fatigue.  Even after 3 solid weeks of playing practically solely with one another, the girls still get along.  However, there is more competition for attention than there had been.  Tempers are shorter, and the quick push or pull or tearing of dress up clothes sets in sooner and sooner each day.  So, I’m beginning to wonder how the homeschooling will affect sibling harmony.

I know that there are no quick or easy fixes for sibling harmony.  The girls need to work together on many things.  They have a joint sticker chart for cleaning up and following directions.  They can earn stickers independently or by working together.  Working together, however, yields quicker results and this has created moments of genuine teamwork and cooperation.  However, for sisters who sleep together in the same room, play together in the same play areas, and now learn together in the same play spaces… I’m worried that they need a few things that are just their own.

There are 2 areas I know where I can do this.  Firstly, Pippi loves gymnastics.  Both she and Annie started doing toddler tumbling when they were about 18 months.  Pippi, however, is a natural climber.  She has exhaustive amounts of energy and is constantly moving.  On Mondays, she goes to gymnastics with my mother, her Grandmom.  This is her special time during the week.  She also spends time with her friend Matthew on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  His mother and I swap children so that we can get an extra day’s worth of work in each week.  On Tuesdays, Pippi goes with Matthew and his mother on adventures ranging from visits to the farm to trips to the train store.  She looks forward to *every* Tuesday.  These are her special times, and I think it’s important that she maintain these as her very own.

I’m still finding my way with Annie.  She loves to perform.  Singing, dancing, and acting capture and hold her attention longer than any other activity.  A child who has never really played with toys other than those she can “make believe” with, Annie can occupy herself for hours by adopting ever-changing personas.  For years it was Cinderella or Snow White.  The roles have branched from the specific such as Fancy Nancy, Felicity, Orphan Annie, Clara from the Nutcracker, the Velveteen Rabbit to the less specific “an orphan,” “a saint,” “a dog,” “a mouse,” “a vet,” etc.  I would really like to find a class for her that would help her to explore her natural tendency to perform.  She would love to take a ballet class, as well, and I’d like to help her with that.  Finally, she has been involved in the church choir, and this activity has become very important to her.  So I’d like to preserve that as an important part of her own independent self.  The challenge, now, is for me to find a couple areas where she can grow and shine in her own way apart from her sister so that while they share and cooperate so frequently, she (and Pip) can have some activities all of their own.

Welcome back to the blog! We’ve had a long period of absence on the blog because, as I’ve discovered, the task of raising kids who are active, engaged learners leaves little down time! Combined with normal “life” activities, keeping up with my goals for fostering an atmosphere of creative exploration takes untold amounts of time and energy. So does writing about it. In the end, I spent more time doing and much less time reflecting and writing. However, life has changed significantly in the past six months. Annie began school at the beginning of the year, but before the winter break, we decided to pull her out of our neighborhood kindergarten and to begin homeschooling her. As I’ve considered how to homeschool, and more importantly how to do it thoughtfully and purposefully, I concluded that more reflection on our activities was necessary–by myself and by my daughters.

This is where the blog comes in. As I begin this journey as a homeschooling parent, I want to take time to reflect on what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and if it’s working for me and for my daughter.I’m not sure how long we’ll be working this way. When we decided to remove Annie from her school, we did so with the intention of placing her in a parochial school as soon as a space becomes available. That may be this year, but it may not happen until the next school year. I’ve been working on an explanation of how and why we made our decision, but that will probably appear later. It was not a sudden decision, but rather something we arrived at after months of trying to make something fit that simply wasn’t right for our child.

So, we’ve made a clean break. Annie is excited about what she calls “Mommy School.” She’s laid out a list of things she wants to study: the colonial period of American history (including Felicity, the American Girl stories about that time); Western expansion (in light of the Laura Ingalls Wilder series of novels, which she has listened to on CD); the lifecycle of various animals including frogs, butterflies, and penguins; and fitness and nutrition. When I asked her what she wanted to study, these were her answers, and given that they’re interesting, compelling areas, I’d like to honor those. We’ll add to that some of the other kinds of things we’ve been doing this year, revisiting field trips from the summer and from this past winter break. Annie and I have also become subscribers to Imagination Stage in Bethesda, where we’ve been following each of their plays and their respective books. Also, we’ve just returned from a trip to Philadelphia where we explored the Please Touch museum for the second time, the National Constitution Center and the Liberty Bell on Independence Mall, and Adventure Aquarium in Camden, NJ. I’d like to find a way to include all of these in her portfolio.

2009 was filled with adventure. We did manage to make it to almost every one of the items on our initial list. We’ll continue to make our way through that list and to add more as we go this year. I’m looking forward to our new challenge. As exhausting as it has sometimes been to take 2 or more children on day-long adventures so frequently, the energy expenditure pays in dividends. I’m looking forward to sharing more of those with my daughters and with you in 2010.

I wish you equally exciting challenges and adventures…

Today’s Washington Post features an op-ed piece on parenting advice, parenting  magazines, and the neverending, black hole of parenting publications.  I know.  Decry the massive amounts of publishing about parenting on the one hand, and add to the burgeoning masses of it that’s available and constantly growing on the other.  That irony hasn’t escaped me.

Nor should it escape the editors of The Washington Post.  I thought, as a follow-up to my open complaint about the parenting advice available in the Post, that I should also comment on Lenore Skenazy’s piece, “Parenting Advice?  That’s Just Quackery.” in which the author condemns the state of parenting publications and our complicity in its consumption. In broad strokes, Skenazy faults the masses of poor, hastily-written, and poorly-conceived articles offering effete advice to parents and blames parents’ collective loss of confidence in their own common sense on the proliferation of bad advice and trivial but frantic controversy. Essentially, she makes a good point.  Quoting an article in Parenting magazine that recommends that parents, for example, “Choose a sunny day when there’s no chance of lightning,” in order to take one’s child out kite flying, Skenazy points to example after example of lame advice that reinforces a reader’s inability to make simple decisions or observations for one’s self. Whether it is eating chocolate while pregnant or products that test bathwater temperature for your little bundle of joy, Skenazy explains that our willingness to read and to consume advice, regardless of its value, and our suspension of our own common sense in deference to the publishing industry’s frenzy to produce debates has collectively eroded parents’ sense of confidence in their own decision-making skills.  I think back on all the articles I’ve read recently in parent publications and wonder, is much of this really news to parents? No.  Not really.

Can parenting literature go beyond creating controversy?  Can we expect more from parenting magazines, advice columns, book publications, and blogs (admittedly, like this one)?  I think it (and we) can.  Parenting literature is best not only when it opens our eyes or alerts us to potential dangers, but more importantly when it shares genuinely useful knowledge and skills with parents.  Of course, this is hardly a solution for those interested in publishing volumes and volumes of literature, and requires that the authors, and more importantly the editors, of each publication understand its audience–and not simply consider them to be oversized lemmings.  Then again, that also requires us as readers to ignore banal articles and bad advice, but we’re so busy chasing the “Top Ten Ways to Solve Potty-training Woes” to notice that we’re falling off a proverbial cliff. And if we can’t keep straight whether we feel more or less like lemmings, keep in mind that neither can The Post.  In case, we start feeling confident in our parenting skills, don’t worry. I’m sure The Post (or any other publisher for that matter) will try to relieve us of that feeling by the next issue.