What Happens When...

You leave a jar of baby food at the edge of the table, and the baby is not in her high chair?

Give away

I thought these were fun.
http://belladia.typepad.com/crafty_crow/2009/02/giveaway-monday-book-of-days-subscription.html?cid=146936960#comments

How I wish I could manipulate time

While looking for pictures of interesting animals for our education blog, I found this website: http://www.uglorable.com/tag/uakari/ Love it!

Speaking of animals...
Chayce was giving me presents (anything I already own wrapped in a towel, for me to unwrap and act surprised about). She handed me one after the other, but then said, in a serious tone, "You can't open this one until tomorrow morning."

A few seconds later, she says, "Wait here."

In the next room I hear, "Cock-a-doodle-doo!!!!"
Then she runs back in and says, "OK, now you can open it, it's morning." Too cute.

Busy Mornings

Stephen's been posting more often than I, and there's a reason for that. My mornings have been very busy as I work at spending more time with the children. I was thinking that I was blogging more about my exceptional experiences with the kids, more often than I was having a lot of small good experiences with them. And, as we know, by small and simple means are great things brought to pass--so many small and simple experiences should surely bring to pass better relationships, no? So, I've been having good times with the kids, incorporating a little more 'school' into the day, and being about as goofy as you can imagine. I have still blogged, but the posts are short and sweet, after a day of experience, so that we can remember what we learned. You know, just in case some moron says my kindergartener isn't learning ANYTHING at home. Sorry, I should be nice.

Anyhow, if you want to follow what we've been up to, or if you've been wanting to homeschool, and would like a few ideas, feel free to hop on over to Adventures in Education .

See you there!

If a great musician plays great musics and no one hears...was he really great?

I recommend the following post on an interesting experiment. In, the world famous violinist Joshua Bell pretended to be a street musician. What do guess happened?

Nothing.

Josh received no more attention than any other street musician.

The article theorizes ad nauseumabout why this occurred. An interesting interpretation is given here, pointing out that no matter how much talent you have, working in certain contexts will support you. I think this idea is important and under utilized by high school guidance counselors, freshman advisers, and college career counselors. Students are typically told to pursue their dreams. This is stated with absolutely no context.

If your dream is to be a street musician, it doesn't matter how good your are or how much you practice, you won't succeed. But most people don't aspire to be a street musician, they aspire to have a contract with a major recording label. But what we forget is the performing arts is a winner-takes-all market.* Chances are, if you aspire to obtain a contract, you'll end up as a street musician. No matter how good you are.

The point is, that dreams and aspirations must be in context of what is feasible. We should encourage or children to aspire to a means of independence from a subset of feasible options. Because in the end, we all want independence doing something we love, not failure doing the thing we loved most. And do your best within this feasible subset.

Disclaimer: I don't mean to pick on musicians, but I was (am) one, so it becomes a convenient example.

Caveat I: The career trajectory for most people is nonlinear and career changes are frequent. We also need to prepare our children for this by helping them focus on a flexible set of skills rather than an over-attachment to a single, seemingly 'well defined' career.

Caveat II: Defining what a 'feasible subset' is can be very problematic. This is why career paths are nonlinear and change frequently. See caveat I.

*Blame written language for this. If you don't know why, maybe I'll explain it in a later post, though someone with more economic training than I would probably to a better job. In a nutshell, the easier it is to reproduce your work, the faster the (perceived) best-of-the-best capture (nearly) the entire market. For what you produce. With writing, you don't need a story teller for each village. With iTunes, you don't need a musician for each village.

Deep thought of the day...

I never imagined how difficult getting banana/snot mix out of eyelashes could be.

Faith in the Bible

Well, well, well. I found an entertaining way to read the Bible. Stephen says it's making him lose faith. He's kidding. What I found the funniest was this warning: The Bible contains material some may consider morally objectionable and/or inappropriate for children. These labels identify stories containing:

= nudity = sexual content = violence = cursing

Of course, the last time I checked, yellow legos weren't that big of a turn-on, so the nudity argument could be ummm, laughable. And transparent red bricks used as blood? Not so gory.
Enjoy!!
http://www.thebricktestament.com/