Flowers is an Herbivore

Elias feeding his stuffed animal 'Flowers' a carrot.

One of Elias' favorite books (There's an Alligator Under my Bed) stars an alligator that eats vegetables, candy and cookies. Elias has a giant stuffed alligator (actually, it's my alligator, but I am generous enough to lend it to him during his childhood. :)) that he has named "Flowers". This alligator is a more developed version of the alligator in the story, but he shares the story alligator's love of vegetables.

Whenever we juice carrots Elias rushes into his bedroom, pulls out Flowers, and requests a carrot for himself and his pet alligator. Apparently, that's a culinary favorite for alligators. He and Flowers then sit on the rug and each takes bites out of their carrots. I've never seen any vegetable matter go missing from Flower's carrot, but I do hear lots of chomping noises coming from that general area, so I'm pretty sure he's eating.

Elias carrying a bag full of alligator food down the hallway.

On many days, Flowers attends my son where ever he goes. Elias is a generous host and often lines the floor with fresh fruits and vegetables (in most cases, toy blocks) and calls it "food for Flowers". I'm very happy with the name Elias chose for his alligator. For a long time we would ask him what name this toy or that toy would have and he would tell us "Window", "Car", or "Rug". I know he chose "Flowers" because there was a bouquet of flowers on the table, but it's a pretty cool name for an alligator (especially a vegetarian one. :))

Homeschooling

My wife and I have known since very early on in our relationship that we were going to homeschool. She was homeschooled herself and knew many other families who were. I was public schooled but had a few close friends who were homeschooled.

The decision to homeschool should never be done on a whim. I'm going to try and outline here some of my thoughts on homeschooling and why I want it for my children.

The Whole Socialization Thing
This is the present most common fear I hear people express about homeschooling.

How will your kids learn to interact with other kids? How will they learn how to hold their own against bullies, and in the future, mean bosses? Homeschool kids are all socially awkward and weird, do you want that for your kids?

Weird kids are weird kids regardless of their method of schooling. I've known quite a few homeschoolers and they range the gambit from being totally comfortable in social situations to being quiet and reserved. None of them, however, are nearly as weird and awkward as the countless weird public schooled people I've met. And being a computer programmer, I've met a lot of weirdos. :)

The reason homeschool students have a reputation for being a little off is partly because weird parents have weird kids. And parents that homeschool are by nature a little different from the rest of society.

When it comes down to it, my kids are pretty much screwed as far as social development goes. Kristin and I are both on the fringe. We're vegetarian, we cloth diaper, make our own baby food, cosleep, don't own a TV, etc. Heck my entire family are on the fringe (sorry Mom and Dad, you have to be weird to have made my brother and I. :)). I'm not saying they're going to grow up friendless and alone because they can't cope with society, but their chances of growing up to be mall hopping pop culture enthusiasts is (I hope) slim.

Even though my kids will no doubt turn out odd, I don't see homeschooling as limiting their ability to interact with others. Tucson has a large homeschooling population that regularly gets together for shared activities. There are clubs, sports, and community groups all outside of school that we plan on making use of. There are plenty of volunteer activities where our children can interact, not just with kids their own age, but people of a wide variety of ages.

As for bullies, I think it's debatable whether bullies make you stronger. Some kids respond to hostile environments by toughening up, others by caving in and becoming less likely to interact. When it comes down to it, kids who have a strong sense of self will not cave under pressure, regardless of the source. The best thing you can do for your kids is to provide them support and confidence so they grow up strong. (Either that or let them loose in Compton and hope they can make it home. :) )

Educational Value of Homeschooling
I think of homeschooling as taking the momentum of learning that our kids have and not letting it stop. Elias learns new things every day. The number of things he learns in a day just keeps increasing. I can't imagine putting him into a school environment where he had to learn at the pace of the slowest student in the class. It's kind of snobbish, but he's my kid, and that's part of the whole wanting the best for your children thing.

I would hate to see my son enter school in a couple years already knowing how to read, only to be told to go over his alphabet and letters again because that's what the rest of the class is doing. I don't want my kids to stop that crazy learning roller coaster until the behavior is part of their nature. I want to keep that intensity and excitement for knowledge as long as possible. Preferably for the rest of their lives.

Opportunity
One of the nicest things about homeschooling is the sheer volume of opportunities available to you. When you homeschool you can take your kids to museums, to the zoo, on hiking trips, out to investigate riparian environments, to Europe, whatever you want. Money is the only real obstacle. You don't have to worry about permission slips, or managing 30 kids and buses and cafeterias. With homeschooling you can make any family vacation into a school project.

Every trip, whether it be a vacation or a trip to Grandma's, is a learning event. The whole premise of homeschooling is that you don't need a classroom to learn. Learning is part of everyday life. You should never stop just because the bell rings.

Miscellaneous Thoughts
Kristin and I have been discussing our strategies for homeschooling. We both are leaning towards unschooling. The basic premise of unschooling, as we want to apply it to our children, is that you don't teach your children, you encourage them to learn. No teacher can teach a subject to a student. Students, however, are perfectly capable of learning anything, and a teacher's job is to provide the resources for that learning. It's a subtle distinction, but that view on learning is what draws us to unschooling.

In unschooling, there is no separation between teaching and life. You learn by living. We want to incorporate learning into life rather than a stricter "here are your books, fill out these papers" approach, or even a "this is what we're working on today" approach. Ideally we can encourage our kids enthusiasm for learning enough that we won't have much structure at all. Really, when you get down to it, unschooling is what every human being does outside of a school environment (assuming you aren't busy watching UPN.

When I think back to my childhood, my brother and I were unschooling ourselves from an early age, except that school got in the way for 6 hours of the day. We both taught ourselves to program computers, built entire imaginary worlds, read loads of books and in general were always working on some project or another. Granted, we (OK me) also watched a lot of TV and played hordes of video games. Those things certainly have their value, but I think that needs to be moderated a little more in a homeschool environment.

This may seem like our children will never solve an equation or learn the periodic table of elements. This isn't true at all. Part of learning, even outside of school, is a certain degree of bookwork. Any task you want to accomplish is going to take some research. We plan on exposing Elias to as large a variety of subjects as possible, and anything you learn about can incorporate all subjects. Once you hit on an interest, you expand it and go into depth with both hands on projects and book learning.

Final Thoughts
I fully support all aspects of homeschooling, but I don't think public school is necessarily bad either. The most important part of a child's development is a supportive and loving home environment. This is why so many public school children excel regardless of bad teachers, standardized tests and strange social situations at school. But I don't think you can ever beat the one on one attention you can give your children when you homeschool. This is why I think it's a great idea if you can afford to do it (both financially and emotionally).

Finally, everything I've written above is from the perspective of a dude with a 3 year old and a 7 week old. I'm sure I'll look back on this 5 years from now and think "What the heck was I thinking? I didn't take into account this or this or this..." But that's one more benefit of homeschooling. You can change it to accommodate what works best for your family.

Company for Dinner

We had company over for dinner last night. One set of old friends and one set of new friends. The new friends, sadly, are moving away tomorrow, but I'm sure we'll make an effort to visit them in their new hometown of beautiful Flagstaff.

Kristin made a wonderful dinner with a Southwestern whole wheat pasta bake, bread and garlic butter with some tasty green stuff in it, our classic beet/orange/feta salad and a pan of brownies for dessert. The pasta bake was delicious. We borrowed ideas on the pasta bake from our old friends who were there, and added a little Southwestern flair with black beans, a little salsa and some diced vegetables. Mmmmm... I should have taken a picture!

After dinner we started a fire in our fire pit in the back yard. The kids all got together and roasted marshmallows. Elias sat on my lap and held the marshmallow stick over the flames. He didn't want to wait until they fully melted, preferring to just warm them up and consume them. He did really well at roasting them this time. He must have had enough practice to actually hold them steady
near the flames, instead of inside the flames. :)

After eating a few too many delicious sugary puffballs we all retired onto the lawn and chatted. Everyone at our house last night went to NAU and lived in Flagstaff for a good chunk of time, so we chatted a lot about the town.

I miss Flagstaff in some ways. The weather was always nice during the summer and the town had a rural feeling with a few modern amenities (like movie theaters and restaurants). I've thought about moving back, but I really like Tucson. I like the extreme heat on a long bike ride home. I love the torrential storms that sweep in at this time of year and deposit half an ocean on our town. There's also no comparing the job market here vs. Flagstaff. Tucson's job selection for Software Engineers makes me nervous sometimes, I can't even imagine living in Flag.

The kids all played well, although Elias is back to being touchy in the evenings. I don't know if he's not getting enough sleep or if life has just been less settled for him the past few days. Right after Eva was born he was amazingly touchy, but then as things settled down he really loosened up and became the loving, sweet, polite boy we know he is. :) Though even being touchy, I think he played well last night. He just had to be taken aside and calmed down every once in a while.

While all the adults were sitting on the lawn and the kids were piling gravel into Elias' recycling truck, I pulled out our camera and started messing around with shutter speeds and focusing. That's where the picture at the top of this entry came from. I really like the way night shots turn out when you get them right. I'm amazed that a camera can get so much color from the environment when there is no light, just by keeping the shutter open longer.

Unfortunately, our company had to eventually go home as their kids grew weary. Cinder-Sam, our non-teenager teenager picked up most of the house while I held Eva and Kristin put Elias to bed. He was exhausted by the time everyone left, and Eva was peaceful in my arms. I crawled into bed soon after hoping to get as much sleep as possible before the next day's early morning bike ride. It was a nice night.

Filled with rage!

I read my son a story a while back about two mice monks. They were strolling through the forest one day on their way to do whatever meditative rodents do and they came accross a princess crossing a river. She was yelling at her servants for not being fast enough and for having to get wet. The older wiser mouse picked up the princess, put her on his back and waded through the water. She didn't say thank you, and continued on her way, yelling at her servants. The younger mouse brooded all day and finally asked the older mouse how he could have carried the snobbish princess when she was so terrible to him and everyone around her. The older mouse answered "I put her down hours ago, how come you are still carrying her around?"

Now, I read this story to my son and it's always stuck in my mind. I understand the moral it is teaching, but I am the younger mouse. I don't want to be the older mouse. The older mouse should have dropped that bratty princess in the mud, kicked some sand in her eyes and went on his way. She was a complete schmutz! That princess still makes me mad.

This story is especially present in my mind today because of an encounter at the dentist office. I had to take Sam to get a tooth analyzed for a future cap. We arrived early and were waiting to use the sign in sheet, but our way was barred by a balding overweight gentlemen filling out insurance paperwork on the counter (the unflattering description is there to help the reader's imagination).

After a few moments he remarked to the receptionist "You guys should really fill these forms out for me." She laughed it off thinking he was joking, and he told her "I'm serious, I don't know my wife's social security number! I don't know anything about her plan!"

The receptionist informed the man that he could use the courtesy phone if he wanted to call his wife. He then tried to pull the I'm too important for this trick. He told the receptionist "I only have 5 minutes to see the doctor, you're telling me I can't see him if I don't put down my wife's social security number?" She replied, ever so cooly, "You can see the doctor but we would have to take payment from you today instead of billing your insurance company." Awesome! The man grumbled, walked away and took a seat.

Sam signed in and was called back to her appointment, but I stayed in the waiting room, err, waiting. Mr. Grumpy called his wife and asked about her social security number, all the while grumbling loudly on the phone about how "lazy" the employees of my dentist office were. After finishing filling out his forms he gave them to the receptionist. The exchange went something like this:

"Here are the forms."
"Thank you sir, you can take a seat until we call you."
"Were you talking to me?"
"Yes."
"How was I supposed to know you were talking to me when you weren't looking at me? You were looking at your computer."
The receptionist looks the man in the eye
"Thank you sir, you can take a seat until we call you."
"Say please." (I'm not kidding, he actually said this)
"Thank you sir, you can take a seat until we call you."

The man took a seat and grumbled "Well I know the kind of place this is!" Nice.

Now I'm a big nancy. I'm not one to take action against random strangers. It's not my place to say anything, even if the guy was being a complete prig, but I was fuming on the inside. What a complete jerk. I can't even imagine the sense of self importance and entitlement you have to have to treat a receptionist or anyone like that. It was pretty obvious from the exchange that the dude was powerless in life. He didn't speak harshly to his wife, so he certainly wasn't dominating at home. He no doubt takes any chance he can get to be "over" someone, whether it be receptionists or waitresses or whatever. I haven't wanted to walk over and smack someone so badly for a long time.

I suppose I'll be carrying him around on my back for a few days at least. :)

Monsoons are here!

A waterfall outside the front of my house. This always pours down like this when it rains in the summer.

My favorite part about Arizona, and Tucson especially, is the summer rains. I eagerly await 3 pm every day when the clouds roll in over the mountains and dump a lake full of water on our desert community. This year the weather has been teasing us with hints of rain, but our house has remained parched. This weekend we finally got our first real rainstorm. The rain came pounding down and flooded the streets and our yard. It was fantastic!

It rained last night, but only lightly enough to wet the roads. I rode my bike to work today and came away a little muddy, but not really wet. All day it was threatening to storm. At 2 pm Kris called me to tell me it was pouring at our house. I could hear the rain beating down through the phone it was so hard. Outside my office window the mountains were dark gray and the clouds were menacing, but we hadn't been hit by any real rain yet.

I was facing the age old bike commuter question. Is it raining enough to stop me from riding home? After doing a couple of multi-day bike tours my tolerance for riding in the rain has gone way up.

The ride home was awesome. I had to remove my sunglasses to be able to see (a weird concept in Tucson) because the splatter of raindrops and mist make it impossible otherwise. My shoes were soaked through within the first 5 minutes of the ride, but my core stayed reasonably dry. It never rained hard, just a drizzle.

My bike, shoes, gloves, and other gear completely soaked and covered in grime. Hopefully it'll dry by tomorrow so I can ride again!

The weather was blessedly cool and slightly breezy. I must have been a little tense during the ride, however, because for the last 4 miles my back started to ache and my neck was feeling a little stiff. I rode 36 miles yesterday with Sam, so it's possible I had residual soreness, but I don't think so.

I arrived home soggy and tired, but glad I rode. Elias met me outside where he and Kristin had been playing in the rain. there were two umbrellas leaning against the front porch that had obviously just been used. Elias was happy to see me. :)

My son can read!

My son loves letters. He's been able to point out any letter in the alphabet since he was 17 months old. I don't know where the fascination comes from. We read to him all the time and I'd love to take credit for his letter obsession, but really, I think it's all him. Frankly, as an engineer I'm just short of terrified that he'll become a poet or an English teacher. I mean, don't get me wrong, I want my kids to be able to choose the path in life that brings him the most happiness. To that end I encourage my kids to be any type of engineer they want, whether it be mechanical, civil, electrical or if they choose really wisely, software engineer. :)

Seriously though, his letter obsession has really gone nuts the last couple months. Whenever we drive anywhere in the car he's asking us "How do you spell 'truck'? How do you spell 'cloud'? How do you spell 'When we get home we're not taking a nap'?" He's been able to recognize simple words like Mom, Dad, dog and car for some time now and we've been helping him learn to sound out words. It suddenly clicked a few weeks ago and his word reading has exploded! He sounded out 'eraser' of all things! It's really neat to watch him read words.

This weekend I had an idea. A long time ago I wrote a letter program for Elias to play around with on the computer. Each time he would press a key it would put the letter up on the screen. I modified it recently to allow Elias to type out whole words, and clear the screen by hitting enter. It displays the letters in a large font and puts them in different colors. It's a neat program. But he's moved on from letters and it was time to revamp the program.

Sam has been wanting to learn to program, so I pulled her out of her weekend waking stupor and dragged her onto the computer. We went over some programming basics for review and started designing and coding up a word reading program. I'm a big fan of simple programs, and Sam is just beginning so we kept it small. It reads a set of words from a file and displays them on the screen in huge letters. When you click the Next button it picks a new word from the word library and displays it. Elias was thrilled!

We've been thinking of new words to put in it all weekend and we've even added a few simple sentences. This is so cool!

Mochas

In 2002 my wife Kristin and I made a bet. She bet that she could go longer without drinking coffee than I could without drinking soda. She hadn't actually had coffee for 3 months, but I had wanted to quit soda for some time, so we made the bet as a healthy competitive motivator for me quitting the drink. I gave up soda cold turkey. I listened to Quart in Session by NOFX a lot. I slowly eliminated my soda association for every little thing in my life (video games, pizza, movies, eating out) and switched to water and herbal ice tea.

Three years later, Kristin started to realize that giving up coffee permanently wasn't really something she was interested in. It didn't help that one of our good friends would order coffee anytime we would get a delicious chocolate dessert at a restaurant and waft the wonderful smell of coffee towards my wife. Eventually she cracked, and had a cup of coffee. I had a soda again a few weeks later, but never returned the level of consumption I had before.

Now that my wife drank coffee again we stopped occasionally at Starbucks to pick up a latte. Reluctant to be left out, I ordered the only thing a soda drinking anti-coffee guy like myself could respectfully get, a hot chocolate.

For Christmas, Kristin would always make homemade fudge to give away as gifts for our family. One type was dark chocolate and walnut, the other was Mexican fudge (dark chocolate, coffee and cinnamon). I always loved the coffee ones, even though I didn't particularly care for coffee. I really enjoy the combination of flavors that you get with coffee and dark chocolate.

One day at Starbucks, I had an idea. I ordered a Hot Chocolate and asked the barista to add in a shot of espresso. They thought it was strange, but complied. I loved it. This started a whole new obsession for me. Every time we went to Starbucks I couldn't get a regular hot chocolate anymore, I had to have that dash of coffee. It cut the sweetness just enough. It was fantastic.

I tried in vain to duplicate this flavor at home, but our espresso machine made the coffee to strong and the chocolate I had was too sweet. I failed over and over again.

One afternoon we were visiting my parents in the Verde Valley and my Dad was showing us his French press. I made up a quick attempt at a 'hot chocolate add a shot' and it was delicious!

For Christmas, my parents bought a small French Press for Kris. At the same time I switched form using Hershey's ice cream syrup (a suggestion from a Starbucks barista) to pure dutch processed cocoa powder.


After a small bit of experimentation I finally landed the perfect recipe:

- 1 1/4 cup of boiling milk
- 1/2 cup of coffee, made with french press
- 2 heaping tablespoons of dutch processed cocoa powder
- 2 heaping teaspoons of sugar
- A dash of vanilla

After drinking about, oh, one of these a day for 6 months they gradually became not coffee-ee enough for me. I know, I know, that's the sign of a coffee drinking. But alas, once you start you cannot go back.

I now have an improved recipe to take into account my new love of coffee (please bear in mind that this makes a bitter hot chocolate, not for those who aren't fans of bittersweet chocolate):

- 3/4 cup of boiled milk
- 1 cup of coffee, made with french press
- 2 heaping tablespoons of dutch processed cocoa powder
- 2 heaping teaspoons of sugar
- A dash of vanilla.

A few words of warning if you choose to embark down the path of making delicious mochas. These are about 400 calories each. The money savings you get from making them yourself, combined with the addictive delicious flavor make for quite a bit of weight gain. I ride my bike over 100 miles a week, go to the gym and lift weights 2-3 times a week and have a ridiculously fast metabolism. I now weigh 200 pounds instead of 180. I have kicked up my riding but to no avail. The weight has stopped at the 200 pound mark, so I think I have it stemmed off. This has made climbing up some of the mountains around Tucson on my bike a wee bit more difficult than before, but these mochas are worth it.

Cycling

Me riding away from my son during the Arizona Cross State tour. He wanted to go with me. :)

I bought a bike my first year of attending NAU. The last bike I owned was a Mongoose Freestyle BMX bike, and given that I was now a college student I felt I needed to upgrade to something more suitable, like a mountain bike. I walked away with a 450 dollar 19 inch mountain bike with cool front shocks. I'm 6'4" and the bike was designed for someone 5'6", but I didn't know that at the time and was very happy.

Fast forward 7 years to 2003 and I had stopped riding my bike, gained 60 pounds and been living the life of a true corporate commuter. I drove my car by myself to work every day and didn't really have any physical activity outside of the occasional night walk with the wife. This wasn't really any change from my childhood as I watched a lot of TV and played an amazing amount of video games.

I worked with a guy who commuted by bike every day, 10 miles each way, and another who commuted sporadically by bike 7 miles each way. My commute was 14 miles, but for some reason I had confidence that I could do it. I pulled out my mountain bike one morning, strapped a backpack full of clothes and food on, and rode to the office. My route to work is mostly downhill and in the morning it's cool and the air is still so I found it surprisingly easy, not to mention fun and refreshing. The traffic wasn't scary like I thought it would be and the endorphins from exercise must have been firing in my brain because I felt elated all day.

Then I tried to ride home. It was hot, windy, uphill and overall a much less pleasant experience. I went to bed very early that first night riding home. After experiencing the joys of riding my bike in the morning to work, however, I was hooked.

Me riding in the Mt Lemmon Time Trial for the second time. It was very hard, but very fun.

I gradually picked up my bike commuting until my other two biking cohorts asked me if I was interested in riding in the El Tour de Tucson. "What is that?" I asked. "It's a 100 mile bike ride around the perimeter of Tucson" they replied. "That's stupid, who would do that?", I believe was my answer.

Needless to say, that opinion didn't last long and we all began training for this Herculean cycling effort. After my first 40 mile training ride my knees started to ache acutely and I learned that my beloved mountain bike was 7 inches too small for me. I went to my now favorite bike shop, Performance Bike, to look for a road bike upgrade. They had two bikes in the 61 cm frame size I needed. One was solid steel and $550 dollars, the other was some elite super bike for $1200 dollars. I grabbed the cheap one and have been an avid road biker ever since.

I go back and forth from being a racer and being a commuter. I'm not quite fast enough or dedicated enough to truly be a bike racer, but I'm not quite weird enough to be a full time bike commuter. Perhaps I need to drop my need to categorize and just be a simple cyclist. :)

Introduction

Eva relaxing on my chest outside in my backyard. She can't move on her own yet, so this is pretty much all she does. :)

My wife Kristin and I have known each other since I was in high school and she was in college (she has a giant 3 years in seniority on me). I didn't really know her at the time, but she grew up with one of my close friends, so we knew all the same people.

We both coincidentally went to NAU for college. Me because you can fill out the application in pen, her because it was close to home but still far enough away to not be at home. We met outside of the Physics building one day, went on a date (I took her to pizza, not very original :)). For some reason she actually fell for me (or at least settled) and 3 years later we were graduated from college and married!

I didn't quite realize it at the time we met, but my wife is a fanatical hippy with all these wacky ideas about breast feeding, home birth, home school, cloth diapering, no TV, etc. I was a punk rocker, though not a very good one (not mean enough), so I was on the lookout for something that fit better. It turns out I'm actually an engineer with Luddite leanings so the whole living more naturally thing fit really well.

We both were weary of the cold weather of Flagstaff and longed for warmer climates. I found a job as a Software Engineer in Tucson, Arizona and we moved everything in our small one bedroom apartment to a more spacious Tucson home.

Three years after getting married and moving to Tucson we had our first son, Elias (02/04). He was born at home after 8 hours of the quietest labor in history (my wife is a birthing machine, she made not a single noise throughout the entire event). He's now 3 1/2 years old and walking, talking, reading, counting, playing, biking, running, screaming and all those other things that make kids so fun. Six weeks ago we had our daughter, Eva (06/07), also at home. This time the labor was a grueling 5 hours and much less quiet. We sat with a friend and chatted between contractions. :) Eva is still a little young to be running and playing, but she is distinguishing herself as the gruntiest baby ever to live. I also think she may have had mono for the first 4 weeks of her life, because she rarely ever awoke.

My goofball son after he ate a red candy sucker at a birthday party. He's great!

A year ago we were granted guardianship over a teenage girl who was a friend of the family. She has atrocious grammar and eats like a bird, but we love her. She has picked up on my cycling craziness and competed (we use the term loosely in our household) in a number of races. She hopes to work up to the 110 mile El Tour de Tucson cycling super ride this year, so I imagine our training sessions are going to get a might bit longer.

I hope to use this blog to record both the activities of our family's life as well as a sounding board for anything else I'd like to write about. I hope one day my children and grandchildren can look back on it and get a little insight into their family, as well as their wacky ancestors. Oh yeah, and I also want a place to show off all my favorite pictures. :)