My shameless self promotion of my Etsy shop

I've been promising for a while that I'd add stuff to my Etsy shop, so here it is. I decided not to put up my colored pencil stuff, and put up some hats. I love making hats and I've made a lot of hats over the last 2 years, but I tend to give them away. I decided to put the few I never gave away up in my shop! If you look in there, there is a hat entitled, the best hat in the world, and it is, in my very completely true and never wrong opinion!

I wouldn't have been able to do this without the fine camera work and editing by Chamille! It would've taken me more than twice the time that she took to do that stuff. I asked her and she graciously did it for me, so I'm giving her a portion of all my proceeds, if I sell anything!

Fright Town season is IN!

Yay! We just started in with Fright Town this year. It's fun to see all the same faces and know the same people from last year. Chamille and I have been tasked with several cool projects already. We are helping with some costumes and props this year as well as doing make-up and scaring people.

AND, the really best news... Chamille gets to do a mentoring thing. The woman who ran all the make-up stuff last year is a truly amazing and talented woman. She also happens to have her own studio and works on a lot of make-up projects for local films and such.

She is one of my favorite people at Fright Town, so when I saw her I ran over to chit chat. I had been wanting to ask her, and it had been in the back of my mind, about her being able to train Chamille in exchange for free help and such. So as we were chit chatting, she actually brought it up and offered. She does official internships as well, and thinks Chamille would be a great candidate for training since she's already showed some talent!

I'm super excited for Chamille, this is such a wonderful opportunity for her! What's more, is that her studio is on the max line, so Chamille can get herself there, all independent style!

What a great start to September, the same week that school starts here. Chamille will miss her friends, but she will get to do some fun stuff to ease her loneliness!

The World is Open

Bob Collier found this. He's good at finding stuff like this and he puts lots of those findings at his website and on his facebook, which is where I found this one.

The World is Open

Here are a few of my favorite excerpts from the article about the book...


"The primary thing to realize is that it is informal learning which is skyrocketing. Informal learning has rarely had credits attached to it. The main words with this openness are opportunities, choice, flexibility, empowerment, and, ultimately, freedom to learn."


"We need to stop thinking about what is not possible and replace such thinking with ideas and optimism of what is now possible!"


"Keep in mind that your original question, in many ways, assumes formal learning goals. My friend, Jay Cross, argues in his 2007 book, Informal Learning: Rediscovering Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance, that perhaps 80 percent of learning is informal."


"Academics need to step back when thinking about the open learning world and reflect on all their learning experiences and activities. Yes, they went through primary and secondary school, college, graduate school, and perhaps postdoctoral study. Those extended formal learning experiences color our perceptions of any new form of education that arises. Today we have the potential for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of new learners who might not be seeking a formally accredited degree. They can play in a global educational sandbox with anyone at any time. In fact, the premise of my World Is Open book is that with the emergence of the Web, anyone can now learn anything from anyone else at any time."


Unschoolers have been saying this for years... that learning is everywhere, access to information is right there at your fingertips, literally. Schools are like this big giant slow moving beast, eating up everything in it's path, eating up people and pooping them out. I guess while inside this beast students are expected to learn everything they need to "succeed" in life, but the reality is that most people are destined for mediocre. Schools succeed in mediocrity because they meet the needs of the middle, the boring, the average.

WOW, a nation and world of boring mediocrity... and yet, there are still pioneers in life exploring the possibilities of alternate ways of living and learning! There is hope, even if it takes 20 yrs or more into the future to get beauracracy on board with what will then be the past. Schools are still in the 1950's textbook style, rote memorization form of learning. How well has that served anyone?

Reading articles such as this really reaffirm my belief in unschooling! Stepping outside the box and learning because of intrinsic motivation to do so, not because someone tells you that you need to. The desire to learn what you need to learn, to do what you need to do, without someone else telling you what that is... that's so freeing and world opening!

Only LIFE

I really like Flight of the Chonchords right now and I'm watching them over and over when I get them from netflix.

Chamille is gearing up for Fright Town, and so am I.

Margaux is almost 8, and she's about to lose her first tooth.

John is focusing on his business.

I'm going to get a dummy head from the thrift store to take pictures of hats, they had styrofoam ones there last week.

Chamille is getting back into sewing and making clothing after a boyfriend diversion, even though he's still the boyfriend.

Margaux is really catching on to reading, she reads lots of things now.

John has been playing his big beautiful full sized keyboard that doesn't really belong to us, but that we are borrowing indefinitely.

I've been trying very hard to keep the kitchen clean, although I miss my friend Laura who made it easy to do the dishes while she chatted my ear off during her visit.

Chamille has been remaking stuffed animals and puppets, in her morbid way.

Margaux is online playing dressup games a lot lately.

John recently set up a Sponge Bob display in his office, mostly for Margaux's enjoyment.

All seems good with the world at our house. There is nothing huge to report. There is only life...

review of... Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love

I heard this interview thanks to Schuyler who pointed it out in a chat. After hearing the interview, I read the book. Just now when I tried to find the link for the radio program, I found this interview.

I'm curious what others think of these sorts of issues, so I read a large handful of the comments. I was surprised to find more than a few that shared the same thoughts as I had.

The interview had left me feeling like this mother hadn't really quite figured out what went wrong and how she could've prevented what happened. What happened was really horrible. I read the book, hoping it would delve into that aspect a bit more, but it didn't really. It ended with the mom regretting missing out on raising her 2 older daughters, and simultaneously proud of them for finally graduating from highschool and moving onward to fulfilling careers and motherhood.

The daughter that was gone the longest, lives on the other side of the US from her mother. It doesn't surprise me in the least. There was an irreconcilable divide that happened, in a large part because of the mother's inability to see outside of herself and to look deeply into her children.

I kept hoping for an answer, a real answer about how this family could have changed course, but it never came. It seems as if the mother still believes that the outcome couldn't have been prevented. It's terribly sad, almost more tragic than a mother's loss of teen daughters that ran away.

Every step this woman took was to exert control over her children, to get them to comply with her idea of what her family should look like and be like. All of it failed over and over again. She stopped seeing her children as they were and could only see them for what they were not. They were not compliant children who aspired to go to school and get good grades, they were bad children who misbehaved and didn't follow the rules.

Even if the mother couldn't see taking them out of school as an option, she could have done so much more for those girls than give them rules and try to make them comply. The girls sure saw not going to school as an option, and the very fact that their mother couldn't recognize that, shows a significant lack of understanding and communication on her part. I doubt very much that school or no school was the answer. Ditching school was more of a symptom of a larger problem, a problem that was created by the parents, their divorce, their move, their total lack of control over anything that was happening in their lives. School was just one more thing controlling them.

While I'm saddened by the loss of what they could have had, I also admire her kids for getting out there and doing what they wanted to do, despite the hardships they must have endured. To think that they all could have gotten what they wanted. The mom could have been sweeter and kinder and more adventerous, and the kids could have been able to explore the world in the way they needed to do and still have safety and comfort and home and a parent.

I'm still looking for decent mainstream parenting advice... I never seem to find any. I know I can do a google search on teens and ____________ (fill in the blank), and get advice after advice after advice, but it's almost entirely full of bad advice. And still people are surprised by life gone awry...

Trusting kids

I've been thinking about trusting kids and what that means.

I trust my kids absolutely. It doesn't matter what kind of choices they make, or whether or not they make mistakes, I will still trust them.

As Chamille has gotten older, I find the trust divide very big, between the way I trust her and the way other parents trust their teens. Here's the biggest difference, in the way I see it: I trust both of my kids to do what makes sense to them, to make choices that will benefit them with the best possible outcomes.

The way that I see other parents deal with trust, is that they want to trust that their kids will do what they, the parents, want them to do. They want to trust that their kids will make "right", as defined by the parents, choices. When the kids don't, the parents lose trust in their children.

There isn't an issue at all with discipline when you trust your kids absolutely. When they make choices that you don't like, it isn't because they are deliberately disobeying you or trying to make your life as a parent difficult, it's because they saw that they were making the best choice at the time. Since kids are still learning, they don't always predict all the outcomes that may arise from their choices, and sometimes they need to pick up pieces of the aftermath, but still, it was the best choice they could make at the time.

There is no need to discipline a kid if they are never put in a position where they must choose between what they feel is right and what they feel their parents think is right. When the outcome of denying their own intincts is to do something someone else wants or get into trouble for not, they are denied the chance to learn how to make good choices for themselves. My kids aren't punished or disciplined for their choices or their actions whether I like them or not. There are no hoops to jump to be in my good graces.

When I tell other parents that I trust Chamille to make good choices for herself, I think often the assumption is that she is making all good choices that I approve of based on a set of rules and guidelines and that I trust her to follow all those rules and guidelines. In the absence of those rules and guidelines, she is making choices that directly relate and impact her and others, and because of this, she makes good choices because she weighs carefully the real outcomes of those decisions and not whether or not she will get "caught" or get "in trouble" by doing or not doing certain things.

I absolutely trust my kids, even if they make choices I wouldn't! How wonderful and freeing that is! I don't have to be on constant vigilence to make sure that my kids are complying with rules and guidelines and applying consequences for not following those rules and guidelines. I love this so much and I wish so much that other parents would practice this too! It's so wonderful to have kids that I don't have to fight with, that want to hang out with me and who confide in me about all sorts of things that most kids would never confide in with their parents.

The older Chamille gets, the more value I see in this way of trusting my kids. I see a big and wonderful difference in how beneficial this is as opposed to the more tradional approach to parenting. I can see very clearly how rules and guidelines negatively impact relationships between parents and children. Unless a child agrees with all the rules and guidelines that the parent sets forth, there will be dischord. There is no way around it. Dischord isn't a great way to live and learn happily and easily.

I like happy and easy! Like the above diagram, I want my kids to believe in that fully!

I always appreciate...

...good dance music videos! It's the same song twice, but both are equally engaging for their dance qualities!

Margaux loves numbers!

Wait! I think I've told you this before!

But, yes, she does really love numbers...

Here's what she did yesterday:

She had a pile of pennies and was counting them. She brought them over to my desk and I assumed that she'd want me to count them for her since that is what she's always wanted when plopping down a pile of change. I start counting and she says loudly and firmly "NO! STOP! That's not how I'm counting them."

She takes all the pennies and puts them back into their little pile and starts pulling them out 2 by 2, counting in 2's as she goes. That's super cool! I told her how cool that was that she figured out this new way of counting and told her that some people call it counting by 2's.

Chamille never did that. I'm not even sure that she can count by 2's, not that it really matters much because she can count change really fast in her own way. She did that yesterday too. She had a pile of change. Okay, here I go again trying to count my children's change... and she says "NO! You are going to mess me up in my counting. I have my own way of counting." So, she quickly divides up the coins in neat little piles of $.25 and counts them really fast and is done before I even begin to count and add each coin individually!

Just in case anyone is wondering how many pennies can fit into a quart sized mason jar, I'll tell you... It's about $10, unless of course you sneak in a few silver colored ones or you overflow it a little. Last time we cashed in our penny jar, we got almost exactly $15 and we divided it 3 ways and played downtown.

Gotta love pocket change!

Something Joyce wrote about controlling kids...

**She said that she thinks this happens in most families at one time or another and that it’s either nipped in the bud quickly or it’s allowed to grow like in her case.**

I was leading up to something in reply to this but jumped up to the next point.

Some parents can use authoritarian parenting and their kids obey. Most assume it's because the parents have some special trick. Or assume their own kids are defective unlike the authoritarian parents' kids.

But whole humans don't like being told what to do. It just isn't in most of our natures. So when we see obedient children it's

1) part of their particular personality, which counters what I just said. ;-) But for some few children, it's just how they were born and not something the parents did (other than supply the genes ;-) It's not transferable through authoritarian parenting! (Some of us whole people are easy going and may even like others to make decisions. But that's not the same as liking someone else to assume control.)

2) part of how they relate to authority. It could be they're fearful (naturally or because of how they've been raised) and feel comfortable having someone else set the boundaries. Or rules feel like love to them.

3) they're good at acting. Most have probably known kids who are obedient around their parents and horrors behind their backs.

4) something else their parents are doing that counteracts the damages from authoritarian parenting. If kids feel like they're loved for who they are despite the rules and punishments, they're likely to react to rules differently than children who feel the punishments and corrections mean their parents don't like who they are and want to change them.

No matter how much a parent feels their actions are out of love, if the child isn't perceiving it that way, then the parent's intentions mean nothing. No matter how much we say we mean something different, if the child is feeling something different from our actions, the actions override the intent.

.....More from Joyce here

How kids in school really feel

i fucking hate school it feels like prison but we didn't do anything fucking wrong ugggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh i hate being forced to come here i hate being forced to do work i hate being forced to play football or soccer or baseball its all so fucking stupid life should be about fun not fucking learning a bunch of shit we'll never fucking use and then getting yelled at when its to stupid to remember and we fail a test or quiz. theres no point how many times in you life are you gonna be walking down the street and someones gonna walk up to you and start asking you questions about world war 2 and you'll have too sit there and answer them and if you get one wrong you get graded down 0 no not even once cause adults have freedom of speech but do kids not really they sit here teaching us that this country was founded on freedom you know what i say to that LIKE HELL IT IS if a kid wants to have sex its wrong even if you a as careful as can be if a kid want to drink beer its illegal if a kid wants to smoke its illegal but the thing that this stupid society doesn't fucking get is that the more they say no no no the kids or teens just say well fuck you ill go behinds your back cause if you can do it i should be able to too its just stupid this country was founded on freedom like i said before yet for almost 200 years we owned blacks they were property to people, same with woman but both f them had there day to free themselves from the hard ships men put upon them they had there day now when the fuck will parents stat to understand that. No i am not for smoking and drinking and you should all know i would never do any of that i just thought id make a point.




-Cyle


p.s. Sorry about all the spelling and grammar errors but it just proves what i learn in this stupid place.

and my reply...

I love your point! Minus spelling and grammar, it's very well thought! This is why I don't put my kids in school. Kids are the ultimate minorities! They only have the rights that parents extend to them, yet, here they are, when they reach teen years, capable of reproducing... HOW DOES THAT WORK?!!!! They don't get any say whatsoever, but yet could pop out a baby today if they chose to.

You'd like The Teenage Liberation Handbook, How To Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education, by Grace Llewellyn. I haven't mentioned it before now because I think your dad would really hate me for putting these ideas in your head, but damn it, they are already there, cuz you are a smart thinking individual!
~Jenny

and then the next reply...


i really would like to read that cause your right i do really think about it all already and i love hearing other peoples views that are similar to my own tis why i like talking to you about this subject.

.... I told Cyle I'd post a recent picture of him with this school rant, which he gave me permission to put up, even though he hesitated because of the grammar and spelling stuff.