Hello all! I wanted to give you all a sort of short peek into some of the things we might do during the typical unschooling week. Maybe this will give you ideas about what you might do with your own kids whether they be unschoolers or traditionally schooled. Either way, these are activities that not only encourage educational learning but mental, emotional, and social skills, fine and gross motor skills, and life skills.
We built an easel that her aunt gave her for Christmas. It helped develop her fine motor skills, confidence and determination, and engineering. As we worked, I showed her the letter labeled pieces on the instructions and she learned the names of the hardware bits we used (nuts, bolts, etc.)!Art time getting to use the easel we built!Playing board games! This is the Paw Patrol Mighty Pups board game she got for Yule. It encourages turn taking and other social skills, fine motor skills, counting, following directions, and decision making. It was fun! 🙂 See my upcoming review of the game here soon!Rainy day play! It was warm out and had been pouring, leaving big puddles outside! We love rainy days because of this opportunity, at least as long as there’s no thunder or lightning. We go outside and I let her get as messy as she wants before we go in and have a nice hot bath. It encourages a lot of the sensory processing skills and experiences that so many of our kids are lacking nowadays. Little Maxwell has been treated in the past for sensory processing disorder so these outdoor messy play days are especially important for her. After we have them and she’s all clean, she’s calmer, happier, and far more easy to engage in other activities. She even sleeps better! Sensory experiences can make a huge difference for kids of all neurodiversities. And the best place to get those experiences is outdoors.Night time play! Another day where it was warm. Soaking up the opportunity, we took our dinner outside for a picnic under the stars and to watch the fanfare that was our neighbor’s Christmas light projectors. Little Maxwell was enraptured! She wanted to know how it worked and explore the play of light on the house next door. It was also an excellent opportunity to point out some constellations and talk about stars and planets!Exploring some resin bug gems with a magnifying glass so we could see all the different parts and pieces and how some of them are even shiny and different colors! Bugs collected ethically.Some evergreen seeds we planted sprouting up! These will eventually become giant spruce trees that will help provide oxygen to the world as well as a home and shelter for many other creatures, plants, and fungi. We named this seedling ‘Ever’. 🙂 Planting seeds of all different kinds, especially ones that kids can help harvest and eat or use is an excellent way to encourage sensory experience, science knowledge, life skills, and helps grow and understanding and love of our natural world and all of the processes and creatures that make it up. For those of you who may be wondering, the orange peels inside of the planter help keep our cat away! The other plants behind is a cutting from a succulent that was once my grandmothers, then my mothers, and now mine. And eventually, when she’s old enough to care for it on her own in a few years, Little Maxwell will get a cutting for her very own! A multi-generational succulent! How special! 🙂
These are all just a few things that we get up to during the week. Rain or shine they are opportunities to be found outside and inside. There important life skills That children can learn that they’ll use for the rest of their life. Just a few examples from these snapshots are reading instruction diagrams, learning how to use tools and other hardware pieces, confidence and taking on projects, independence, astronomy, reading and writing, math skills. Maybe more important than all of those, however, is a love and passion for learning and a curiosity. The confidence and self-determination to do and learn on her own, without someone having to cram that learning down her throat.
Kids don’t need to be forced or coerced into learning. If you just give them the tools and step out of their way, You will be amazed what you see them do, create, and pick up all on their own. Admittedly, it is a little bit of a leap of faith. It can be scary sometimes wondering if you’re doing the right thing but then, one day, you look over and realize that they’re reading the words in their books without every being taught. Or they are building these massive complicated structures, picking up a musical instrument that they saw on TV, maybe even learning something like how electrical currents work in a circuit or how to build a computer program, without any teacher assigning a single piece of homework.
They can do it. They are capable and they only need you to give them the chance to show it. All we have to do is get out of their way.
Libby is a companion app for the previously reviewed Overdrive library app, the both of which are put out by Overdrive Inc, a subsidiary of Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten. Overdrive Inc also developed a book and audio book app specifically for schools called Sora that I will also be reviewing here soon! The three apps are used to connect library accounts and read or listen to books and magazines, watch videos and checkout resources from libraries where you hold an account, completely on the go! The best part? No late fees! Materials are removed automatically from your account and you even have the option to renew materials from the app as well! I’m pretty interested in checking out Sora tomorrow!
For today, however, we go to Libby.
It’s cute. That seems to be the prevailing commentary about it. I’ve had a local librarian comment when asked about it that Libby was user friendly and it’s interface is more simple. That it was cute, and to their credit, it is cute. Regrettably, that’s about the extent of It’s noteworthiness. My experience was quite the opposite of user-friendly. I found it to be very buggy whether on my Chromebook or on mobile. I can’t speak to how the iOS version is, but the Android version that I used was glitchy and frustrating. Granted, this is what I have to say about it as far as the end of 2019. I am certainly open to re-reviewing it in the future should these issues be addressed.
This list of issues and my thoughts on the app I do plan to send to the development team and I have refrained from leaving a starred review in hopes that these bugs will be fixed and I can review it again in the future. I had high hopes for Libby because I love and use the Overdrive app so much.
There isn’t a single day that goes by that I’m not using it for personal reading/listening or using it for our homeschool. I love that I can link my library accounts for two different local libraries as well as the account we have with the San Bernardino public library in California. We can check out books from all three libraries on a single app and it’s wonderful! I only wish I could say the same for the Libby app.
Granted, the bugs one person faces may not necessarily be an issue for another. Some apps can face similar issues if internet connection is sketchy or if the app is behind on an update, etc. I will be going into my review of the Sora app with an open and optimistic mind and that’s exactly what I hope you will do with Libby! If you face a similar experience as I did then leave feedback! The developers for an app can only fix issues that their users know about after all!
At the Deathbed (1895) by Edvard Munch; photo by A.Davey
Let’s get one thing out of the way before we start. Everyone will die and no one likes talking about it. I get it. From king to street sweeper and all that. By the way, that’s a reference to the final words of executed murderer Robert Alton Harris.
‘From King to street sweeper, everyone dances with the grim reaper.’
Cheery, ain’t it?
Now that we’ve gotten started off with death and executions, today we’re talking about your advanced directive! That’s right my dearlings, it’s death talk day!
So what is an advanced directive? Some of you may not be familiar with the term and some of you, like me, who frequent hospitals and doctors offices may be sick of hearing about it.
Merriam-Webster defines an advanced directive as ‘a legal document (such as a living will) signed by a competent person to provide guidance for medical and health-care decisions (such as the termination of life support or organ donation) in the event the person becomes incompetent to make such decisions’. However, that is a very bare-bones definition of what an AD is in this modern age. Today’s ADs can and often do include things such as your preferred funeral plan, what you would like to be done as far as your wake, and what you want done with your meat sack once you’ve shuffled off of the proverbial coil.
Do you want to donate your body to a body farm? Put it in your advanced directive.
Want a Super Mario themed funeral? It’s possible! Put it in your advanced directive!
Do you want to leave your hot tub to John Oliver but everything else to your one-eyes doggo Beevis? You know, no judgements but, uh… Leave it in your AD because I’m not sure your sister doesn’t have her eye on that antique chinaware.
Don’t want your jerkoff cousin, Donald Dickwad, going and douching up your final goodbye? Stick it to him in your advanced directive!
Anything and everything you want your loved ones to know to do or be done to you goes in there. You’ll want to put social media passwords, locations of important documents, as well as about information too so your loved ones can close it any accounts like bank accounts, insurance, etc. You don’t want them to keep getting fees and such after your dead. Unless, you know… You do. In which case, maybe you should seek some family counseling before your timely demise, yeah?
Aside from giving directions on what to do with your body, an advanced directive can be worth thousands and thousands of dollars to your loved ones and that is no joke. Your AD is also where you can put information about if you already have payments made towards funeral costs, any sort of life insurance policies, etc. In their time of grief, the last thing we want our families to have to deal with is not just if they are honoring our wishes in death but how they can ever afford to do so. On that note, life insurance or one of those pay-ahead funeral plans can be such an incredible blessing during those times. I know that it was for my family when my grandmother passed away.
Do I have you convinced? Great! So let’s get started!
There are many websites out there that you can create your advanced directive on. The one that I use myself is called MyDirectives and it is very comprehensive. It even gives you the opportunity to leave messages behind for your loved ones to be given after you’ve gone in a special place at the end. It’s free and very secure! There is a share feature that enables you to send a copy to anyone that you may wish, including your doctors. In all honesty though, most doctors are going to prefer a hard copy to put in your records. You’ll want to print that sucker out for each specialist you have, just in case your cause of death pertains to your treatment or conditions that they oversee.
Finally, print out another copy to keep in an easy-to-find place in your home and label it so that it’s easy to see what it is on the outside. The best way to do this is to place it in a folder along with any other relevant death documents and then drop the whole folder into a sealed ziploc bag. The bundle goes into your freezer. Yep, the freezer. Why? Because it isn’t in the violent primordial chaos that is the back of your closet. It’s easily accessible to anyone who may need to get to it quickly.
Your advanced directive is likely going to take some time and some tears. It is a lot of information to put down, after all, and if you’re filling one out then it is time to have the death conversation with your loved ones about what your final wishes are exactly. So grab a bottle of wine or two, a box of tissues, and a whole playlist of happy cat videos because you’re in for a roller coaster of emotion.
It’s difficult. Don’t get me wrong. It is absolutely, one-hundred and ten percent, undeniably hard to have to think about what your family and friends are going to have to deal with after your death. In a weird, cathartic way, though, it’s sort of comforting to have a plan. To know that should you choke tomorrow on that tomatillo or trip over a chihuahua named Larry on the stairs, that your family will be taken care of. That makes it just a little easier in the end.
The Ask a Mortician Youtube channel and associated website The Order of the Good Death have amazing content on preparing your death plan, death doulas, and advanced directives to help you on your death-awareness journey so check them out!
Last night, for the first time in quite a while, Little Maxwell had a full blown meltdown. I’m talking top of the lungs shrieking, unable to even understand English, back arching, writhing meltdown at 1:30 in the morning. Very suddenly and for no discernable reason.
Now, she and I co-sleep but when Daddy Maxwell is home on his two nights off a week, she sleeps either in a palette on the floor at the end of the bed or in the living room. He was absolutely exhausted after our insanely busy day and the patience tide was out. The screaming and crying was just a bit much on him after being woken suddenly by it though I had still been awake. So when she wasn’t able to calm herself and couldn’t be soothed, I went to plan B.
I scooped her up in my arms while she flailed, screamed, and fought and carried her into the living room. I’ll admit, it was mildly aggravating at first. I’m no saint and I’m just as human as the next underslept stay at home mom. The shrieking was at a pitch that could shatter glass, grating and ceaseless. Her arms and legs flailed while her back bent like some sort of stunt double for the Exorcist movie and knocked me once or twice.
When she gets this way, inconsolable and so overwhelmed, overtired, and overstimulated that she can no longer handle the world, the best way to handle it is twofold.
Take her somewhere quiet, dim, and away from other people.
Get her arms and legs tucked or facing away from you and hold her arms down with the rest of her torso in a bear hug. Don’t squeeze the hell out of her. After all, you’re not trying to pin her for a ten count or suffocate the kid.
I held her like that until she calmed. Her arms stopped jerking and spine stopped bowing. Her cries trickled to silence. In fact, after a moment I realized that, just as she had woken up suddenly having already reached critical mass, she had fallen right back to sleep with her hands still covering her face.
My aggravation and frustration faded quickly, something that sort of surprised me. Honestly though? Her meltdown was more than a little justified. In fact, I would go as far as to say that we should have anticipated it.
The last four days had been a blur of errands, appointments, and pre-holiday obligatory nonsense. None of us had slept well all weekend. Two park visits, three shopping trips, five doctors appointments and a partridge in a freaking tree. It had been hellish even for a neurotypical adult.
Little Maxwell is none of those things.
She’s a three year old little girl with a sensory processing disorder that makes the world an overstimulating place to be at times. It means that things that others take for granted and don’t even think about because they’re so ordinary can be upsetting and even painful for her. Lights are brighter, sounds are louder, textures more distracting. Her body doesn’t move in the same way other kids’ do. She doesn’t bend over and sitting “criss-cross apple sauce” was a practiced skill that she was very proud of once achieved. The point being that I couldn’t exactly be angry at her for something that she had little to no control over. In fact, being sick for two of those days because of a pharmacy snafu, I could empathize.
So I held her and whispered love to her quietly, gently until she fell asleep.
Even then, I just held her there in my arms for some time, watching her sleep like I often did. It was something that I’d done every night when she was a baby and even as a rambunctious three year old, I still made sure to cover her up every night after she dozed off. I’d had this weird fixation on whether she was warm enough at night ever since she’d been born. Though admittedly every mother probably has their “thing” that they fixate on when it comes to their babies.
Watching her like this, it reminded me of how sweet she was. How crazy in love with her I was. Even during the moments that seemed so awful, so terrible while they held us in their sway, there was nothing in the world I loved more than this child in my arms. Sure, we all go through those days. The tantrums, the vomit, the “OMFG why in the seven hells are you still awake at midnight?! Go the Fuq to sleep!” nights. The pointing at obese women in the supermarket and loudly declaring that she was “fat” without the faintest idea of social propriety or appropriateness. We’ve all been there in the disputed blockades of parenthood but one thing stands true in the depths of the night as the sleep sweetly and soundly in our arms.
There isn’t a thing in the world we wouldn’t do, nothing we wouldn’t tear down, no dirty feet boo boo we wouldn’t kiss, and no meltdown we wouldn’t endure for our baby.
Happy December, friends! Tis officially the season for spiked eggnog with breakfast, elastic waistbands, Christmas tree cakes, and the tense hair-triggered anger that comes with an overload of holiday stress and seasonal depression.
Let’s not forget that age-old classic tradition, the Elf-On-A-Shelf.
Okay, so today I’m sharing my thoughts on this secret agent of Santa. I’ve shared these opinions before and they are never well received, or at least I get some really strange looks and one accusation of being “unAmerican”, whatever that means.
I am suggesting here today that the idea of the Elf-On-A-Shelf is actually detrimental to the long term positive behavior of our tiny overlords.
What the hell, right?
There is actually quite a lot of scientific data to back up this claim though, and it all has to do with what motivates our little bundles of booger-picking joy. So what is intrinsic and extrinsic motivation?
Intrinsic means that whatever motivates them, whether it be kindness, a sense of responsibility, or just not wanting to be a little bog-trog, comes from within themselves.
Conversely, extrinsic motivations, things like bribes (“If you stop screaming, I’ll buy you the toy, okay?”) and threats (“If you don’t stop that mess right this moment, I am going to spank you into next week!”) and emotional manipulation (“You are making mommy so so sad right now. You are breaking my heart!”), come from outside.
I encourage you to read more deeply into the psychological aspects of this in children in Rae Pica’s book ‘What If Everybody Understood Child Development? Straight Talk About Bettering Education and Children’s Lives’. The Parenting Junkie blog and Youtube also have great videos on the topic so go check them out! Especially know what is developmentally appropriate for your child at their age! What may look like your kid being a rude jerk to you may actually be them working through crucial developmental stages and teaching them different ways to assert themselves may be more appropriate and helpful in the long term than punishment.
Now let me put something out there before we go any further. While it is a post for another day, I am not against meting out discipline when it is appropriate. However, I am a big proponent of knowing the why behind what my child is doing. For example, Little Maxwell turns into a cranky monster at bedtime because at the time we are winding down for the night, she gets hungry and has this bizarre second wind that sends her bouncing off the walls into the next county.
Hungry+tired+hyperactivity at the end of the day= one crabby mommy and an even crabbier child.
The solution I found was to give her a nighttime snack just before bed to fill her belly, cut off screens at least an hour before we started getting ready for bed, and to have some snuggly, mommy-daughter connection time just before bed. Of course nothing is perfect and she is, after all, a three year old, but it helps. Oftentimes what we are quick to label as misbehavior is actually an unfulfilled need being expressed in the only way they are able. When they neither have the emotional intelligence or vocabulary to tell us what their needs are, those unexpressed physical and emotional needs bubble over in some pretty spectacular ways. Just like her epic middle of the night meltdown (see my post Nothing I Wouldn’t Do going live in a few days)!
That’s great and all, but what does all of that have to do with the Elf-On-The-Shelf?
Right. Got off on a bit of a tangent, huh? Okay, so the whole concept of the Elf-On-The-Shelf taps into those extrinsic motivations I mentioned. The elf’s entire bit is, “Hey! You had better behave because I’m always watching you, peeping-tom style to make sure you’re behaving with my weird dead eyes!”
Have I mentioned that they’re also a bit creepy? I mean, some freaky doll watching everything you do day in and day out? It’s just…Just no.
Bringing it down to basics, it’s this: If a child only behaves because they are going to get something out of it or avoid an unpleasant punishment (i.e. the threat of not getting gifts at Christmas), then they aren’t developing that intrinsic motivation. They aren’t behaving because it’s the right thing to do, the good thing to do. As soon as the external motivator goes away, then they won’t really have much incentive to behave, now will they? As for rewards, eventually you have to keep increasing the reward since getting the same one won’t keep them in line after a while. At some point, you have to ask yourself whether what you’re interested in is quick and dirty compliance or a long-term behavioral adjustment based on right and wrong.
I don’t push old ladies down on the subway because I’ll get arrested. I don’t do it because I don’t want to be an asshole. Because my intrinsic values tell me that is wrong. Our children don’t need threats or bribes to be good people. All they need is for us to lead them with a good example and to be given the opportunity.
Sometimes we may have to explain social niceties or societal norms to them like not asking why someone is fat loudly in a quiet store or, “Hey if we’re going to play at your friend’s house, you kinda need to put some clothes on”. They are, after all, coming into the world as a blank slate.
As a whole, our children are not inherently monsters, though sometimes it might feel that way. They don’t need a stalker to keep them in line.
So as for the Santa’s little conspirator, this year it will be the Elf-Not-On-Our-Shelf!
(Or you could just hide the thing each day and not use it as a bribe. Happy middle ground!)
Little Journeys Everywhere 