Tag: imagination

Posted in sqt

small things that keep going even when the big things are broken and scary

Posted on by kristinabean

So, our country is going through some tough things right now, and my prayer is that greater equity and justice will come from it, that wrongs will be set right. It’s yet another evidence of the brokenness of our world, coming on the heels of a pandemic and mass unemployment. But for today, here, I’m going to focus instead on the small pieces of beauty and growth and happiness that are like gifts in each new day. And maybe God will give me meaningful words to address those bigger issues another day; right now, everything I try to say sounds so empty.

  1. Our corn is really taking off! This is my first time growing corn, so while I’ve seen it in fields before I’ve never really paid attention to all the stages of its growth. For instance, I’ve never before seen those tall, willowy flowers that bloom before the ears form, or gotten to watch the ears slowly grow plumper within their husks. They also make a good barrier to hide behind when having water gun battles with the kids…
  1. The bed that doesn’t contain any Three Sisters planting (corn, beans, and squash) was intended for tomatoes and peppers and potentially peanuts but has been completely taken over by volunteer sweet potatoes from last year! Last year’s harvest was disappointing, but I think I am better informed now so hopefully this crop does better.
  2. Even if the sweet potatoes themselves don’t fill out well, I’m going to try to make better use of the leaves this year. They have a very mild flavor – akin to spinach – and a slightly firmer texture. I think they’d be good in curry, to be honest, and Limerick invented an amazing green smoothie with them just the other day by combining them with frozen mango, frozen banana, and apple juice.
  3. Limerick also discovered fractals and tessellation in the past couple weeks, and has been trying to build models of them with all the various pattern/construction toys we have around. And then whenever possible he turns them into rocket launchers, with progressively larger fractal rockets 🙂
  1. He also got to help Paul change the oil in the family car, scooting under the engine block to see the oil cap and filter and looking in from the top to check the oil levels (and help identify a cracked part elsewhere on the engine…). He’s starting to show interest in learning practical skills by doing things together with us, which is just awesome for so many reasons (not least of which is the enjoyment of time spent together making something useful).
  1. Rondel, by contrast, has been so absorbed in the world of fantasy and imagination. He’s trying to build every Lego set we have so that he can set up a gigantic battle between them; he’s acting out stories with kings and queens and princesses and princes and good guys and bad guys and extremely dramatic climactic moments; all of his toys have some role to play in the ongoing narrative he creates. He begs me to read more and more of the chapter books we’ve been tearing through, so he can soak up the story, and his own reading ability has been increasing rapidly as well. It is so much fun to listen to all the adventures he comes up with!
  2. So, when we made bendy people earlier this week, it’s not surprising that the first one he requested was a king! (I later made a sword for him as well). Aubade asked for a princess (she is so obsessed with princesses right now), and I also made a grandma for her and an evil queen (not pictured) for Rondel since his king needed an antagonist. I used these instructions from The Enchanted Tree, although the beads I had available for the heads were quite a bit smaller than theirs. While they used embroidery floss for wrapping the dolls’ bodies, I found that yarn worked just as well, as did a strange metallic gold string I have around that is a complete disaster for just about anything else. My sister returned our bag of pipecleaners and my mom is bringing up her hoard of yarn remnants, so I’m expecting a new round of bendy people to join us soon!

Head over to This Ain’t the Lyceum today for the link up!

Posted in wwlw

what we’re learning wednesday: episode 4

Posted on by kristinabean

Rondel and Limerick are very different academic beings. Rondel’s first love is stories – he tells them, he listens to them, he invents them, he demands them, he constantly (since before he could talk) brings us books so he can hear their stories too. He soaks up facts about animals, and then populates his worlds with monsters generated from conglomerations of the different animals he loves. Limerick, on the other hand, has always been intrigued by symbols and patterns. He knew all (and could write most) of the letters and numbers by 18 months, spent a good 6 months nearly inseparable from a Duplo pattern board he created, and currently puts a lot of energy each day into creating symmetrical designs and exploring the world of numbers.

When we introduced Cuisenaire rods (a really great math manipulative, by the way – I grew up using these with the Miquon math curriculum and have always felt that they gave me a strong conceptual foundation in mathematics) for the first time this week in preparation for more kindergarten-type activities, this difference in their inclinations was immediately evident.

Limerick went through each color rod, noticing how long each one was as compared to the small white unit blocks. When he reached the longest rod, he began to line up the smaller rods next to it, to see how he could split it up. Ten is ten groups of one, he realized, and five groups of two, but when you try to split it into groups of three you end up with one empty space.

We made squares (one group of one, two groups of two, three groups of three, etc.) and talked about the difference between the perimeter of a shape (how long all the edges are, put together) and its area (how many white unit squares could fit inside it).

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Meanwhile, Rondel was using different sizes and color of blocks to retell the story of the Three Little Pigs with house-building fleas and a predatory lion (I think he chose fleas because they are too small to see, and he didn’t have any prey animal toys on hand to use with the lion figurine). He went through all the steps of the story with sound effects and drama, creating and destroying as necessary, completely immersed in his imagined world.

When the boys play together, I see these inherent differences leading to growth in each of them. Rondel’s love of imagination draws Limerick along with him into wildly creative and unrealistic pretend games, while Limerick’s fascination with numbers and patterns motivates Rondel to learn the vocabulary and concepts of math also. It makes me glad all over again that they have each other to grow up with.

So what are we learning, this Wednesday? We are learning about how numbers work together, how they split apart and recombine in consistent ways. We are learning about the trial and error it takes to finally build a house that can keep out a powerful lion. And we are learning about each other, and how we can help each other learn in grow in different ways.

Posted in family life, sqt

starting our summer strong

Posted on by kristinabean

Because Rondel was in zoo camp every morning this week (which, by the way, was a major success – he absolutely loved it), I got to spend some more focused time with Limerick and Aubade, and they got to spend more time playing together. Normally, Rondel does most of the talking and directing when the kids are playing, so I was curious what would happen in his absence; what happened was that Limerick filled in the gaps quite easily and just about talked non-stop, especially towards the beginning of the week. And it was nice to have the chance to listen to him without having to simultaneously try to listen to Rondel… it can be a bit much when they are both talking to me (and demanding a response!) at the same time.

  1. On the first day, we stayed at the zoo and watched the Andean bears for a long time. Limerick decided he would be an imaginary creature called a buck bear, and spent at least thirty minutes describing this animal and its habitat to me while Aubade slept. (It is very much an atypical bear, as it has sticky feet like geckos and gills like a fish! Rondel never lets him get away with such aberrations from reality 😛 ). He also was brave enough to sit right against the glass next to the baboon! He’d been watching Aubade interact with her for a while, and had clearly wanted to see the baboon up close himself, but had been too scared to do so. I was proud of him for getting closer even though he was nervous.IMG_3386
  2. On the second day, we came home and just hung out together. We cleaned, we read books, we played with stuffed animals – it was relaxed and fun. (Also, that night we received Rondel’s official diagnosis of autism, after several weeks of waiting.)
  3. On the third day we did more of the same, but stopped in Downtown Mesa on the way home to explore the musical instruments in front of the IDEA Museum. We used to visit there all the time when we lived within walking distance, when Rondel and Limerick were Aubade’s age, but she hasn’t gotten to experience it very much, and judging from her reactions she was very glad we went!

    Yes, I let her choose her own clothes and accessories… apparently oversized T-shirts pilfered from her brothers and metal chain VeggieTales necklaces are in fashion in the 18 month old set these day 🙂 She is so opinionated about what she wears – and always ridiculously cute in it, no matter how off-the-wall it may seem at first.

  4. On the fourth day of camp we rested in the morning but took Rondel with us down to IKEA in the afternoon! IKEA may be a store, but my children seem to think it is a giant playground. Every couch needs to be sat upon, every pillow smushed, every stuffed animal hugged, and every bed snuggled in. We were just there for some curtains, but we lingered everywhere (and let Aubade take a nice long nap in her carseat in the shopping cart en route!). Then I kept my momentum going long enough to hang and hem the curtains, and make a curtain and valance for the kitchen sink window with some fabric I found in my stash.IMG_3475Here they are all pulled back! Those are south-facing windows… and it’s summer in Arizona… so the curtains haven’t been spending too much time open like this. Even just the white fabric over the sink made a noticeable difference when I first hung it up. And I impressed myself (and probably my husband too) by managing to actually complete a project!
  5. The last day of zoo camp I missed out on drop off, pick up, and sweet time with the littles because it was my husband’s day off and my day to go in and work. Not quite as fun, or not fun in the same way, but I did get to consult with a colleague from a different core facility and develop a project and sample tracker for their instruments and workflows, which was both interesting and satisfying. Since I’ve started working such limited hours, and partly from home, my position has shifted a bit away from the biology lab work to the information systems behind the lab work, and I’m finding it really engaging.
  6. It feels like we began the summer at a sprint, and I think it is just going to keep on this way as we have swim lessons and a visit from my sister in June, and my parents are funding a second session of zoo camp for Rondel as a birthday present in July. But honestly the heat is so intense that having planned activities helps prevent me from doing nothing but lounging around the house eating ice cream! Not that ice cream is a bad thing, necessarily… I finally jumped on the nice cream train this summer, one night when Rondel was emotionally collapsing over the absence of ice cream in our house and I knew there were tons of frozen bananas just calling to me. The plain vanilla flavor isn’t my favorite, but the chocolate peanut butter version tastes like decadent chocolate ice cream, with the added bonus of being healthy enough that I can serve it to the kids for lunch and become the coolest mom ever. I don’t really have a recipe, but in essence I just blend up frozen banana chunks in the food processor, with a bit of milk if necessary, and then add in a huge scoop of peanut butter and a couple tablespoons of cocoa powder. We’ve made at least three batches in the past two weeks, and would have made more if we hadn’t run out of bananas and had to buy more, wait for them to get nice and overripe, and then wait for them to freeze! My skepticism regarding this whole concept has been removed by the goodness of nice cream.
  7. And zoo camp itself? Well, every morning Rondel cooperated with me to get dressed and eat his food, he ran ahead into the group to participate, and he greeted me back at the end with endless excitement, ready to tell me about everything he did. He got to pet, hold, and feed a huge variety of animals (from bunnies and boa constrictors to sting rays and giraffes); he drew pictures; he played games with other kids; he got to bring home a sting ray tooth that he sifted out of the sand in a pool; and he got to see so many animals that he loves. In short, he got to practice social skills and adaptability while also being in one of his favorite places in the world, getting to spend time focused on animals without any distractions. I just wish I had pictures!

What are your favorite ways to deal with the heat, especially with little kids? They don’t approve of me just lying in the sun soaking it up, but running around when it’s 100 degrees outside gets tiring fast! And do you have any awesome plans for the summer?

Linking up with Kelly at This Ain’t The Lyceum today!

Posted in family life

hiking South Mountain with littles

Posted on by kristinabean

Winter is one of the best times of year for hiking here in the desert! The skies are deep and clear, the air is cool and crisp, and the plants are somewhat green (depending on rainfall… spring will be better for plant life if the flowers bloom, though).

When climbing a mountain, it is always logical to become animals more suited for the task; the boys decided to be ibex and spent a large portion of the trek on all fours:

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They also spent time as mountain lions, and we discussed what the city would do if a large predator such as a mountain lion or a bear were actually living on a mountain so closely surrounded by homes (probably – hopefully! – relocation. Rondel seemed to think it would be more exciting to have it stay on the mountain and randomly pop out to eat people.)

Aubade mostly stayed in the backpack, bopping my head and laughing, because she walks quite slowly still, but she did get down a few times to stretch her legs and enjoy the desert firsthand:

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The most wonderful thing about a hike is that simply being outside, in the wild, is so freeing and refreshing an experience that even a complete meltdown for the entire return leg of the trip isn’t enough to prevent the boys from wanting to go again! Rondel keeps asking me when we can climb another mountain… I just think, hmm, I need to rebuild my emotional reserves here, that was rather exhausting for me. I am so glad that it didn’t give him a bad taste for hiking in general, though. I will just need to be more aware of his limitations as he often fails to notice his own fatigue until he is at the point of emotional and physical collapse (it’s a sensory processing thing – difficulty with interoception).

And it was a great reminder for me of why I have always loved hiking! There is something unbeatable about the path dropping away behind you and the sky stretching out wide above you and the mountain rising up before you and the wind lifting your wings as you walk over the dusty and rugged desert miles. They say exercise is good treatment for depression but really I believe that outdoor exercise is key – it is for me, at any rate 🙂

(If you’re wondering, we hiked part of Telegraph Pass Trail on South Mountain! The first part is paved which makes for an easy start and, more importantly, an easy finish for tired little feet. If you have more stamina than my boys did, you can make it all the way up to the top of the mountain where the signal towers are!)

Posted in musings

how does the soul survive?

Posted on by kristinabean

Modern fiction brings out the evil in domestic lives, ordinary relations, people like you and me […]

Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination.

– Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

It’s easy to see evil as something distant, or something belonging to people “not like me;” it’s been especially easy, I think, in a politically polarized era to attempt to push our perception of evil off onto politicians or political enemies, the political and cultural “others”, instead of recognizing the sin that cuts through each and every individual heart. We ignore accusations of immorality against those whose ideology aligns with ours, or who benefit us in some way, while jumping at every hint of wrongdoing in those who disagree with us.

But a good novel will show us the hidden depths of goodness and humanity in even the people we dislike and disagree with, while exposing the foolishness and flaws within the people we most admire and who are most like us. By drawing us in emotionally through the story, it relaxes our defenses and allows new, unpleasant, or inconvenient truths to seep in. Our empathy for the characters can engender empathy for real people whom we may have overlooked, avoided, or misunderstood – and the realities that we see more deeply and completely by the light of imagination can spur us to resist the daily evil and pour out the daily labor of love in our own mundane lives.

In other words: let us go read great books so that our hearts and minds can grow in love and understanding – and maybe, as a result, evil need not win each hourly battle in our thoughts and interactions.

Posted in fiction

Rondel’s imagination

Posted on by kristinabean

Here in Arizona, an intrepid zoologist has discovered a new species of bear: the Gong bear.

The Gong bear lives in rocky places, preferably on granite, and is purely vegetarian – in fact, this bear will stand up on two feet to eat the leaves off of trees! Its digestive system isn’t equipped to handle meat, so it is limited to plants.

In contrast to the Wood bear, which prefers to live in cold wooded places (and thus is only found in small numbers in Arizona, mostly in the northern parts of the state), the Gong bear can only be found in Arizona as it is a dedicated desert dweller. Interestingly, while one might expect this bear to be light brown to blend in with its environment, it is white. One can only surmise that this coloring is the most heat-resistant – and that the Gong bear, as a large animal with no natural predators and as an herbivore with no need to stalk prey, is not evolutionarily pressured towards camouflage.

The Gong bear is an elusive creature, which is probably why no one had previously discovered it, but it is a noble and friendly animal and I hope we continue to learn more about it!

Posted in book lists, family life, musings

Charlotte’s Web

Posted on by kristinabean

Fern loved Wilbur more than anything… Wilbur loved his milk, and he was never happier than when Fern was warming up a bottle for him. He would stand and gaze up at her with adoring eyes.

For the first few days of his life, Wilbur was allowed to live in a box near the stove in the pitch. Then, when Mrs. Arable complained, he was moved to a bigger box in the woodshed. At two weeks of age, he was moved outdoors. It was apple-blossom time, and the days were getting warmer. Mr. Arable fixed a small yard specially for Wilbur under an apple tree, and gave him a large wooden box full of straw, with a doorway cut in it so he could walk in and out as he pleased.

“Won’t he be cold at night?” asked Fern.

“No,” said her father. “You watch and see what he does.”

Carrying a bottle of milk, Fern sat down under the apple tree inside the yard. Wilbur ran to her and she held the bottle for him while he sucked. When he had finished the last drop, he grunted and walked sleepily into the box. Fern peered through the door. Wilbur was poking the straw with his snout. In a short time he had dug a tunnel in the straw. He crawled into the tunnel and disappeared from sight, completely covered with straw.

Rondel and I have begun reading Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White, together, our first attempt at a legitimate chapter book. We’re proceeding slowly, at about one chapter a day, but already the story has captured his imagination.

He has commandeered Aubade’s pack and play to be his own little pig pen, where he can be alone and covered up with a blanket like Wilbur covers himself up with straw, but where his adoring and beloved friends (Fern in the book; Limerick and Aubade in reality; a mommy and baby bear in Limerick’s pretending) can sit and watch him through the mesh on the sides. Like Wilbur, he announces that he loves the bears “so much” because they love him and come visit him in his pig pen.

He was captivated by the tender and beautiful illustrations, courtesy of the one and only Garth Williams, of Fern holding Wilbur and feeding him from a bottle, and of Fern pushing Wilbur in a baby stroller with her doll. Wilbur’s special place in Fern’s heart, and the great love she gives to him and inspires from him in return, seem to make up his major impression of the book so far.

And for two consecutive nights now he has asked for me to move the pack and play into his bedroom so that he can sleep in there instead of in his bed, because, as he says “you are a little pig and this is your pig pen!” He can’t even stretch out all the way in there, which should serve as some indication of how absorbed he is by Wilbur’s world.

When a child’s imagination is so easily caught by a simple, gentle, well-told story, there is no need to be so anxious (as I often am, and as parents in general often are) about that child’s education and ability to learn. His mind is open and eager to learn, explore, create, and imagine – and new worlds, new information, and new friends to explain the world through their lives and adventures are only as far away as the pages of a good book.

Posted in family life

blossoming creativity: Rondel at almost-four

Posted on by kristinabean

I have decided that Rondel’s current age (almost four) must be one of my favorites.

His energy levels are becoming more consistent even if he doesn’t nap; his clingy, angry, defiant moods are decreasing; his silliness is developing some sophistication; his conversation and presence are more often than not interesting and enjoyable; and, most of all, his imagination has exploded like a firework. This, I keep thinking, is how I imagined parenting a young child to be.

Pretty much anything can be a source of inspiration to him, but the books he reads have a large influence on his play. After reading The Magic School Bus In the Time of The Dinosaurs, he built a mother and baby Maiasaura (and deviated from the biological reality by having the baby nurse… what can I say, he’s used to mammalian norms 🙂 ). After reading The Magic School Bus Inside the Human Body, he invented a game (the Body Game) where we move through the house between spaces that represent different parts of the human body – a blood vessel underneath a red blanket on the bunk bed, for instance, or the stomach under another blanket on the floor so we can have it mush us up like food. Then, of course, because he’s a three-year-old, we always have to end up getting pooped out into a potty with all the pillows and stuffies that are the “actual” poop.

Play that began as constructing a slide down the stairs with all the pillows from the beds turns into slides that bury people and then become mountains to climb back up. What started as the realization that Aubade’s crocheted blanket could be hooked onto the handle of the armoire door becomes a blanket bridge stretching from the armoire door (behind which is Grandma’s house) to the bedroom door, across which a monster truck carries our family from our house to Grandma’s house and back again, and into which is randomly stuck a bright orange toothbrush. Cups stacked up in the sink are rearranged to spray the water out in jets at various angles and the whole thing is proclaimed a volcano. Rondel bursting forth from beneath a blanket (after much preliminary rolling around) is also deemed the eruption of a volcano.

And every time we read Where the Wild Things Are, he has to have a monster at hand ready to read the story with us. Not wanting to shut down his imagination despite the onset of bedtime a few nights ago, I allowed him to build his monster to his complete satisfaction, helping him scour the house for the parts he needed.

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The folded front of the box is its mouth, and the links are legs connecting the feet (my shoes) to the head (the box). You can’t see, but inside the box more links are holding up a Slinky which is the digestive system of said monster 🙂 He was so proud of himself for designing and building it all by himself!

I absolutely love this creativity.

Posted in family life

rondel the storyteller

Posted on by kristinabean

In the last few weeks Rondel’s imagination has really taken off, along with his storytelling ability, and all throughout each day I am treated to the most creative and hilarious stories about us, his toys, and characters from his favorite books.

At dinner, his broccoli becomes the apple tree from Harold and the Purple Crayon (by Crockett Johnson, 1955 – a book that deserves to be on our next favorite book list post), complete with a fierce dragon guarding it – but fortunately he eats it without waiting for the “apples” to turn red!

When “reading” one of his books, all the other literary figures he’s familiar with make their way into the current book to join the main character in his adventures, so that this afternoon If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (Laura Numeroff, 1985) became Tom and Pippo Eat Cookies and Chips with a Mouse, borrowing the delightful Tom and Pippo from Helen Oxenbury’s series and telling me on every page what they were doing with that incorrigible mouse.

His race cars crash and blow their tires and race like he’s seen in Pixar’s Cars movie, but they also take time to snuggle and nurse, and some special ones (his description) have extra seats to hold “big boys” and babies, along with the mommies and daddies needed to take care of them. Some of the race cars themselves are baby cars, who need extra help to do various stunts, while the big boy cars can do pretty much everything 😛

And the best part is the way he tells the stories! He typically starts off very serious and thoughtful, creating the scenario and carefully describing it – but as he picks up steam, he gets faster and faster and more and more ridiculous, until at the end we are both laughing hysterically together at the utterly nonsensical conclusion he’s reached. This is the creativity I’ve always assumed young children have, and which I’ve been waiting to see in my own kids, not being exactly sure at which age to expect it, and it is amazingly fun to watch it develop! I hope he is able to cultivate this ability to tell stories as he gets older, because one of my favorite childhood memories was listening to my dad tell stories (real and made-up) at the dinner table each night, and as I very painfully lack said talent myself it would be the next best thing to experience it again in this next generation.