Tipi

In spite of all of my dreaming, sketching and planning for this project, our tipi turned out to be so easy to make.

Someone gave me some free bamboo.  (Most people who grow bamboo would like to give you some free bamboo.)  Okay, the sawing, transporting, drying and hacking off leaves with a machete were not so easy, but they were fun.  Hopefully, you can get your hands on some clean, dry bamboo.  I just started experimenting with it today, and this easy version worked perfectly: 

Use five tall poles (mine are 12'), some twine and several blankets and sheets.  Lay the bamboo in a pile on the ground and tie it tightly together about 2' from the top.  Then, stand it up and just start spreading out the base until it is stable and feels like the right size.  One person can manage this easily.  This probably works best on grass or sand, because the poles will not slide open.  If you look up from the middle, it should look like this:

Finally, take your sheets or blankets and start draping them around the frame.  To secure them, use clothespins or clamps or just tie them together.  This whole thing takes less than ten minutes to build, and less than five to put it away.

You can play there all day, and then eat dinner!

This was the first, but hopefully not the last time I could say, "Come on, everyone!  Sushi in the tipi!"

I'm making a 6' version for inside the house, but I love the giant one.  You can see the small one draped in grey on the left.  The kids attached it to the side of the big one so that there would be another 'room.'

Complicated Equations

Now, I'm not a homeschooler or an unschooler, or even a Waldorfist or Montessorian (I might be making up some of those words), but I love reading and thinking about all kinds of early childhood and elementary education.  I am crazy for Summerhill, and Reggio Emilia, and I am glad that I can pick and choose from all of these amazing systems for each of my own children.  I thought I was anti-homework until my kindergartener was in love with his, acting as if his teachers were giving him a new coloring book each week.  Go figure, and another great example of how frequently a know-it-all like me is turned into a know-it-nothing by my kids.

Our summer vacation is a big, long stretch of unstructured time.  There are no camps or classes of any sort, only the occasional "wanna go?" with destinations like library, park, hike, beach, airport, or museum.  I like giving the kids blank pieces of paper and all kinds of art materials like pens, paints, crayons, yarn, string, pencils, ink, glue, cardboard boxes and rubber bands.  Our house is full of beautiful little things for them to play with.  They invent games together and spend a couple of hours reading daily.

I saw my son's former kindergarten teacher yesterday, and I had to ask her for some suggestions about how to keep his excitement for math alive over the summer.  He keeps asking for "complicated equations," and I wondered if I needed to have more math materials on hand.  She said, "Draw boxes and have him fill in the numbers!  Just put some pluses and minuses and an equal sign in there and tell him to balance the equation.  The more open-ended, the better.  Better yet, let him fill in his own mathematical symbols, and you can just put the equal sign.  It will help him to recognize that there is never only one right answer."

How to Get to the Living Room Without Stepping on Burning Hot Lava

This works, too:

I wonder if this is one of those universal games, played by children in every culture.  We never mentioned it to our kids, but we both remember playing it ourselves.

Happy Birthday, Julio!

You amaze me, my little love!  So beautiful, the way you looked around, heard us sing your name and realized that this time it was for you.  When the song was over, you tried to blow out your candles before we could even show you what to do.

A Dinner with History

Many years ago in Cornwall, England, the wives and mothers of the local tin miners would wake up early to bake a special lunch for their husbands and sons to take down into the mines.  They would dice potatoes and onions, meat, carrots and rutabagas, or whatever they had on hand, pour it onto a rolled out round of pastry dough, fold it in half, crimp it and bake it in the oven.  They would often sculpt an initial out of dough and stick it on one corner of this pie so that the miner who was going to eat it would remember which one was his.  Sometimes they would put a sweet fruit filling in the corner under the initial, separated from the meat and potatoes by a little dough wall, so the miner would have both lunch and dessert in one tidy package.

It was cold down in the mines.  The miners would take their hot pies, called pasties, and put them inside their jackets to keep their bodies warm on the way down to work.  There was arsenic in these mines, and it would get all over the miners' hands.  To avoid poisoning themselves, they would only hold their pasties by the crust on the corner that had their initial on it.  They would start from the other end, eating first the savory and then the sweet until they got close to the handled corner.  This last bit of crust they would throw on the floor, to appease the gremlins or ghosts that they suspected were responsible for the many tragic accidents of the mines.

Pasties (pronounced pas-tees) date back to at least the 1100's.  They are mentioned as one of Robin Hood's foods in the ballads of the 1300's.  They came west with the Cornish miners who migrated to the United States to mine for copper in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where they are still a regional favorite.

My kids were so enchanted by this history, that we decided to make one for a special lunch for Papa to take to the mines (his real estate office).  His pasty had the classic filling, but I'm pretty sure you could put anything you like in there, although you might have to change its name to Samosa or Empanada.  They say the Devil himself avoided Cornwall because the women there had a reputation for putting anything and everything in their pasties, and he did not want to be baked in a pie.

Diego and I had a good laugh when he realized that the dough that separates the sweet side was not made of corn... he was expecting a "corn wall."

Papa did not save any of his crust for the gremlins.

Enough with the gloves, already!

Here are the gloves we gave to our little friend for her third birthday:

I wish I could tell you that a five-year-old did the stitching, but no... that was me.  The kids did help with the design, though, and we picked colors to match her cape.  She was very excited when she saw them, and said, "These could be my pirate gloves!"

Strange Rainbow

These rainbow fragments appeared over our house on Saturday evening:

What is going on here?  They were only there for a few minutes.  The upper arc was upside down (shaped like a smile), with the red on the bottom and the violet on the top, the lower arc appeared to be a fragment of a regular rainbow.  We live in southern California, almost 10 miles from the ocean, so I think that rules out circumzenithal arc or reflection rainbow.

Any meteorologists or shamans out there who can tell me what this means?