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Oct. 25th, 2011 10:31 amSometimes I really feel like we are part of a local community in a way that makes me happy. It took a long time to reach this point because we don't live in a world where neighbors routinely talk to each other or it's simple to find every resource where you live. I remember the years when it was just the kids and I - even before the internet, with Ananda and Aaron - fondly, but this is a whole different kind of great, too.
Last Friday, I walked Elise the few blocks to her preschool in the morning. When I went to pick her up a couple of hours later, I brought Aaron with his bird on his shoulder. Not long after she got home, Elise was SO EXCITED because her teacher, who lives about a block from us, was outside our yard where they were all playing (she had come looking for her 10 year old son, who is a friend of Aaron's - and because there are similarly aged kids in three of the four homes at this intersection all the kids gather).
(they found a moth, that Aaron immediately went to his giant reference book of butterflies and moths to classify)
Then all the kids and I walked up to the trolley stop. I said hi to an artist from ArtSouth and a woman I used to go to church with, who were coming in and out of the community center where the trolley stop is. Then we rode it over to ArtSouth for the kids' music lessons - my friend Kristin was there picking up her kids and we stood around talking for a few minutes. She and her housemate Carina are throwing a Halloween party we're invited to. Ligia, Ananda's Girl Scout Troop leader, has kids in GMYS too and we stood around talking about curricula (she also homeschools). I think Jake is trying to chat up her youngest in the cutest possible way.
(who can resist a boy with a violin on his back?)
When music lessons were over, Aaron had to go one block over to where his acting group is meeting. Nearby on the sidewalk, a tourist asked which is THE BEST Mexican food and THE BEST antique shop, because that's what we have "downtown"...a lot of both of those things. So I pointed her towards Casita Tejas (where we eat) and Jacobsens (where we've bought half a dozen things for our house).
I love PATH and TLC and our pediatrician and so on, but all of those things are 30+ minutes north by highway. Sometimes it seems like a miracle to have discovered real resources HERE in my little town that exists as part of the worst area of suburban sprawl in the entire country. Like that I can get on my bike and ride a mile or so to my college classes, taught by good teachers at a big campus with funky architecture and lots of green space, is almost surreal. We ride our bikes to get our homeschool evaluations! The days where we go eat at Mama Mia's and walk to the grocery store can really be the best days. Sidenote for locals: I HIGHLY recommend both the bruschetta and the cappuccino at Mama Mia's.
Tangenitally, if you're local and reading this, the Sleeper family's bookstore (formerly Spellbound Books) has moved to a WAY superior location across from the old bowling alley in the strip mall, next to a karate studio. WORLDS apart from the crappy place they were in for awhile there.
The kids and I talked a lot last week about the Occupy______ movements, and the concept of the 99% (then we saw Occupy Miami tent campers in a park over the weekend, on the way to the Spooky Symphony). Describing those things to children of course requires a lot of talk about the economy, a review of basic economic principles, an overview of what the stock market is and what Wall St is (Aaron remembers seeing it when we were in New York), as well as talk of banks and lending standards, mortgages and foreclosures, student loans, health care, outsourcing, China, and euros challenging dollars as the Gold Standard. I always try to teach a very unbiased version of politics, for the record, though they generally know where I stand (as well as where others do, and why). Anyway, even though all five kids were there for these conversations as we sat down to lunch, I was mostly talking to Ananda and Aaron, since they were the ones interested in what I was blogging about and who I felt could most understand what I was saying.
Then yesterday, Isaac and Grant found a dollar in the road. Isaac was hoping there would be more, but it was just the one. He made some jokes about dollars blowing around in the wind because people were burying them to try to grow money trees, and then said how crazy it would be if he could really grow money trees. Then he floored Grant by adding, "but I guess then everyone would grow money trees, and there would be so much money that it would start to be worth less and that wouldn't work at all".
I thought it was amazing that Isaac not only understood my economics lesson well enough to absorb that but was also able to apply it in context that way!
I continue to believe that our long meandering discussions teach them far more than any book work does.
The Spooky Symphony was great :) I think it's exciting in a different way this year, since my kids are all in (or will be in) Greater Miami Youth Symphony themselves and so they know they could be up there alongside the Alhambra people in a few years if they excel.
(from the balcony of the Gusman Theater)
Last Friday, I walked Elise the few blocks to her preschool in the morning. When I went to pick her up a couple of hours later, I brought Aaron with his bird on his shoulder. Not long after she got home, Elise was SO EXCITED because her teacher, who lives about a block from us, was outside our yard where they were all playing (she had come looking for her 10 year old son, who is a friend of Aaron's - and because there are similarly aged kids in three of the four homes at this intersection all the kids gather).
(they found a moth, that Aaron immediately went to his giant reference book of butterflies and moths to classify)
Then all the kids and I walked up to the trolley stop. I said hi to an artist from ArtSouth and a woman I used to go to church with, who were coming in and out of the community center where the trolley stop is. Then we rode it over to ArtSouth for the kids' music lessons - my friend Kristin was there picking up her kids and we stood around talking for a few minutes. She and her housemate Carina are throwing a Halloween party we're invited to. Ligia, Ananda's Girl Scout Troop leader, has kids in GMYS too and we stood around talking about curricula (she also homeschools). I think Jake is trying to chat up her youngest in the cutest possible way.
(who can resist a boy with a violin on his back?)
When music lessons were over, Aaron had to go one block over to where his acting group is meeting. Nearby on the sidewalk, a tourist asked which is THE BEST Mexican food and THE BEST antique shop, because that's what we have "downtown"...a lot of both of those things. So I pointed her towards Casita Tejas (where we eat) and Jacobsens (where we've bought half a dozen things for our house).
I love PATH and TLC and our pediatrician and so on, but all of those things are 30+ minutes north by highway. Sometimes it seems like a miracle to have discovered real resources HERE in my little town that exists as part of the worst area of suburban sprawl in the entire country. Like that I can get on my bike and ride a mile or so to my college classes, taught by good teachers at a big campus with funky architecture and lots of green space, is almost surreal. We ride our bikes to get our homeschool evaluations! The days where we go eat at Mama Mia's and walk to the grocery store can really be the best days. Sidenote for locals: I HIGHLY recommend both the bruschetta and the cappuccino at Mama Mia's.
Tangenitally, if you're local and reading this, the Sleeper family's bookstore (formerly Spellbound Books) has moved to a WAY superior location across from the old bowling alley in the strip mall, next to a karate studio. WORLDS apart from the crappy place they were in for awhile there.
The kids and I talked a lot last week about the Occupy______ movements, and the concept of the 99% (then we saw Occupy Miami tent campers in a park over the weekend, on the way to the Spooky Symphony). Describing those things to children of course requires a lot of talk about the economy, a review of basic economic principles, an overview of what the stock market is and what Wall St is (Aaron remembers seeing it when we were in New York), as well as talk of banks and lending standards, mortgages and foreclosures, student loans, health care, outsourcing, China, and euros challenging dollars as the Gold Standard. I always try to teach a very unbiased version of politics, for the record, though they generally know where I stand (as well as where others do, and why). Anyway, even though all five kids were there for these conversations as we sat down to lunch, I was mostly talking to Ananda and Aaron, since they were the ones interested in what I was blogging about and who I felt could most understand what I was saying.
Then yesterday, Isaac and Grant found a dollar in the road. Isaac was hoping there would be more, but it was just the one. He made some jokes about dollars blowing around in the wind because people were burying them to try to grow money trees, and then said how crazy it would be if he could really grow money trees. Then he floored Grant by adding, "but I guess then everyone would grow money trees, and there would be so much money that it would start to be worth less and that wouldn't work at all".
I thought it was amazing that Isaac not only understood my economics lesson well enough to absorb that but was also able to apply it in context that way!
I continue to believe that our long meandering discussions teach them far more than any book work does.
The Spooky Symphony was great :) I think it's exciting in a different way this year, since my kids are all in (or will be in) Greater Miami Youth Symphony themselves and so they know they could be up there alongside the Alhambra people in a few years if they excel.
(from the balcony of the Gusman Theater)
