The Way From Here

There's a Somewhere Out There: The Making of a Wish Book

    There are few milestones in life more significant than graduating from high school. It’s right up there with getting married, with having a child. 
    Oh having a child.  My life would be immeasurably different without the raising of our four children.  Each baby gave birth to a new and different me.  A good me:  generous, playful, creative. A bad me:  impatient, overburdened, shrill.  An ugly me: vulnerability disguised in fury.  It’s all there untidily wrapped up in a package called mom.  That’s me.  I am somebody’s mom. Four somebody's:  Jenna, Ben, Daniel, and Nick.  And even though they have graduated from high school and are out on their own I am still, will forever be, Mom.
    As these breathless, radiant, incredibly special human beings approached 18, they managed to accumulate enough credits and good grades to graduate from high school.  I fretted with our first graduation.  What does a parent give to equip a budding adult?  Luggage?  She loved her battered back pack with the tears and stains of adventures like so many earned badges.  An airline ticket?  She had saved her money to travel, and her ticket had more sweat and dreams embedded in it than one her dad and I could give.  In the end her uncle made a mahogany chest we filled with the stuff of independence:  bedding, sharp cooking  knives, a frisbee, towels, phone cards--the kind of stuff that upon launching she would take or borrow from us anyway.  But the most important thing we placed in Jenna’s trunk proved more useful than luggage, more precious than travel.  It could not be borrowed.  She could not do it for herself.  Over the years Jenna has returned to it again and again, during good times as an affirmation, and bad times as a reminder of what could be.  It was a handmade book of memories and wishes from people who loved her, who knew her, who opened her vistas with their rich and singular perspectives.
    I began with a list of important people in her life:  grandparents, family, teachers, her horse trainer.  Children she had babysat for who adored her.  Neighbors, friends of mine who have known her from birth, friends of hers.  The girl is an extrovert and the list was long.  When I made her quieter, more self-contained brother’s book, the list was much shorter.  The key is not the length of the book, but the quality of relationship between the graduate and the wisher.
    I asked each person for a memory of Jenna, and a wish for her future.  It was a look to the past that helped shaped who she was, and a glimpse ahead, of what the future could hold.  This proved to be extraordinarily poignant for me as I transcribed them to the page.  Most folks had memories I had no recollection of, or they had a perspective of Jenna that was different from mine.  There were stories of  adventure and humor, of generosity and honesty.  And truth be told, I needed to be reminded of these traits before she left.  A  strong willed 18 year old, ready to get out of the house can make you lose perspective in a crazy way.  There were wishes I had forgotten to wish for her, that were useful and tender and considerate.
    Now, I am one of those people who love sinking my teeth into a project, and I made this one a little more complicated than pasting photos on a page of words (which can be every bit as meaningful).  I made a Poloroid image transfer of each person onto water color paper, and bound the book by hand.  This took a very long time.  Scotch drinking, bleary eyed, 2:00-in-the-morning-several-nights-in-a-row kind of time.  You don’t want to do that.  Give yourself a stretch of weeks to do it in. 
     Each book I gave our graduates had a title and a photo on the hard bound cover.  I placed a lacy liner paper between the cover and the title page,  I wrote a dedication.  I gave all rights to the graduate in writing on the last page in case they wanted to publish it and make a gazillion dollars one day.  I tied silver beads to the cord that bound Jenna’s book.         
    The process felt like labor, the end result as precious as a newborn--wrinkles, smudges, mistakes and all.   Just like life. Bumping and lurching along, spreading its wings,  standing on tip toes,  ready or not, here she comes. 

Art Smart: Encouraging Your Child's Creativity

    Some of the happiest kids I know stir up mud stew in old pots on summer days.  They paint sidewalks, make snakes from clay, and plant potatoes when given a chance.  These kids tape paper into chains,  draw gardens, and make pipe cleaner people who hang from trees and slide down stairs. Somewhere in these children’s lives there is room for their imaginations to stretch.  The kind of imagination with no apparent purpose.  It idles and hums along.  It swoops and swings, unfolding new ideas where it lands.  Our imaginations are a large part of who we are and where we are headed.  Our lives are bound by what we can envision, and the envisioning process begins in childhood.
    Consider the home the seed bed of creativity.  It is where we learn to imagine the possibilities and ways to make them happen.  One of the most important things parents can do to encourage this process is to cultivate a climate where creativity is welcome.  Creativity does not require huge amounts of money, a fancy easel, or a computer.  It does require a corner to create in with a few supplies, the time to make it happen, and a certain amount of surrender by parents to creative disorder.

Space and Supplies

    Let’s begin with the corner to create in.  Not a room (although that would be dreamy), a basement, or a studio.  Simply a space where creative resources are handy.  These resources can include a box of art supplies, a dress-up box, and my family’s favorite, and inventor’s box.  They are simple to put together.  The art box is the most used resource box in our home.  Include things normally reserved for adults:  good scissors, stapler, a paper punch.  Paper (tissue, construction, typing, graph, etc.), felt tips, glue sticks, stamps and ink pads,  clear tape, bingo markers, sharp pencils,  scratch-on letters, pipe cleaners, doilies, blank note cards, clay, colored paper clips, erasures, etc. 
    Whether you have boys or girls, toddlers or teens, a box filled with thrift shop treasures will last through years of plays, Halloween costumes, and games of pretend.  We have collected basketball uniforms, filmy peignoir sets, cowboy boots and gold slippers.  There are wigs and jewelry, glasses and hats in our box, along with hunter’s vests and bathrobes.  All found at thrift shops and garage sales for a few dollars.
    Our beloved inventor’s box is nothing more than a junk drawer’s contents in a box.  It holds rubber bands, scraps of wood, corks and wire.  There is an old transistor radio, a broken egg beater, tiny motors from electronic supply stores, and the batteries to run them.  There are bolts and nails and a big roll of duct tape.  Consider throwing in straws, small cans, and old game pieces. 
    The ideal place for your boxes is a room off the kitchen with a big old table (if I had my way, I would turn every formal dining room in America into an ART ROOM ).  Children seem to create best under our feet, near light and familiar domestic routines.  We are fooling ourselves to think kids will go down to a dark basement or an out of the way room to create (would you?).  They want  a corner where the project can sit undisturbed, where they can call out for us to come and see!  Pull out a card table and leave the boxes underneath it, within easy reach.  These boxes hold the wondrous ingredients to express imaginations, and will provide hours of self-directed fun.

Time

    Time is inextricably linked with creativity. You cannot use your imagination, or bring an idea to fruition without the time to do it in.  We unwittingly rob children of time in several ways--with television, and with an overabundance of activities where adults determine the rules, the process, and the product.  Classes in music, dance and belonging on a soccer team do not necessarily enrich children.  It often puts them on a fast track to burn out at tender ages.  The time spent on classes, practicing and performing can deplete a child’s creative energy--energy that could be spent claiming his or her imagination without an adult’s well intentioned interference.
    For most children, television eats up more time than anything else.  By simply turning off the TV set, you are adding hours of creative time to your child’s day.  It can be difficult in the beginning.  She will do everything in her power to convince you why she should watch cartoons, and fret and fume and stomp around.  These are good signs!  It means your child is grappling with boredom.  Think of boredom as an ally, for it leads to the place where ideas are born and carried out.  Boredom is a bog invitation to do anything to escape its clutches.  Imagining your way out of it breeds resourcefulness, a powerful skill to possess in life.

Tolerance

    Most kids are equipped to make things happen.  Most parents are not.  It can be a mess.  And we do not always have the time or the energy for the disorder.  Creativity is not always messy, but the best activities often are.  Think of it as a feast.  When we sit down to a delicious meal, someone had to chop, peel, bake and stir her way to the food before us.  There are pots and pans in the sink, and piles of dirty dishes.  Creativity is a feast, not a fast food.  Someone has to paint and poke and glue his way through it.  We need to be reminded to surrender to the disorder of undefined feasts, to give in to the mess in dirt and paint and scattered cushions on the floor.
    Surrendering to disorder does not mean your child rampages through the day mashing clay into the carpet, or moving restlessly from one activity to the next.  It is valuing the true creative drive in your child above your need to keep things in place.  It is saying yes to a highway of chalk on the driveway and helping to make a batch of cookies.  Yes to playing with Daddy’s shaving cream in the bathtub, and a tea party with graham crackers for all the dolls. This is the stuff of memories, of a childhood well lived.  Years from now no one will remember with fondness the clean house and scrubbed floors.  We remember the dandelion bouquets and the hand painted cards.  Surrendering to a child’s imagination is being aware that there is no mess in the world that cannot be cleaned up.  Not one.
    Creative kids tend to be happy kids.  They are the flexible thinkers, the dreamers and dawdlers.  These kids are not tethered to the probable, not always satisfied with mainstream answers to solving problems.  They take risks with new ideas, and then take the ideas further than most.  They grow into tomorrows Einstein, Picasso, and Spielberg.  Imagination informs their lives, and the future stretches before them as a horizon of possibilities.  It begins with a corner in a warm room.

The Wrong Side of Greener Grass

     Every once in a while I am hit with a longing for something I know I shouldn’t expect.  Things that I tell myself I am only buying into out of cultural pressure. Like children who dress neatly in good clothes, or for someone, say  my husband, to surprise me and whisk me away for a weekend.  Once many years ago, I was hit with an immediate and sudden need to be recognized, appreciated even, on a very specific day, for a very specific amount of time:  Mother’s Day .  Was it too much to ask for?
     Our children were at the ages of 9, 11, 13, and 15.  That little factoid right there should tell you something.  Add an absent husband, an overwhelming spring calendar of fund raisers, endless carpooling, multiple sporting events, and you have a recipe for one depleted mama.  Me.  I was exhausted and ready to be honored.  Ready for breakfast in bed and dishes done, for no bickering or slamming of doors.  I wanted to open my eyes in the morning to an appreciation reflected back from my precious offspring.  I wanted peace, and manners, and a kind of backseat Sunday where the kids automatically agreed to do whatever I wanted without complaint.   Okay.  I’ll just say it:  I longed for the perfect Mother’s Day.
     I figured I would kindly take the breakfast-in-bed part out of the equation and  set up instead a brunch at a swishy restaurant with my best friend Margo and her family.   Next, a hike in the Olympics, then dinner at home—cooked and cleaned up by the kids.  It sounded good. Everyone knew the plan.  I was hopeful.
     I opened my eyes to the alarm, not the kind gaze of children.  I poured a cup of coffee that I had made myself into a mug.  Somehow I had forgotten how hard it was to wake teenagers on Sunday mornings.  After several fruitless attempts I must admit that I ended up screaming at their sprawled bodies:   ‘It’s my day, get it?  GET it?!  MY DAY!  MOTHER’S DAY!! Get out of bed NOW.’  I slammed the door and spilled coffee down my bathrobe.  I opened the door again.  NOW! I screamed into the room and slammed the door again.  That should wake them up.
     It was not a good start.
     Their manners were terrible at the restaurant.  There was egg on faces and elbows on the table.  There was slurping and slumping and sighing.  I gave them my  fiercest look and hissed general commands in their direction.  My best friend’s two children were perfect.  I am not kidding.  Perfect.   Table manners, eye contact, everything.  “It’ll get better, Nanc,” Margo whispered as her Jesus children gathered to say good-bye to me and oh! Happy Mother’s Day!
   It got worse.  Everyone protested the very idea of the hike; they were sullen in the car and complained bitterly that someone’s elbow was digging into someone’s side.  I gripped the steering wheel and was silent.  Silence is my best weapon, mostly because I use it only in emergencies, when life is catastrophic, weirdly skewed.  Mother- silence is scary territory:   What is she thinking?.  How can I fix it?
      Not this time. 
     We lurched along the hike, cut it short and drove home.  The kids  stormed into the house, and asked what was for dinner.  I looked at them for a long time, turned and walked upstairs, gently shut my bedroom door, threw myself on the bed, and cried. 
     Mother-tears are right up there next to Mother-silence.  It rarely happens.  What to do?  What to DO?! I felt them think behind my closed door.
     One by one the kids tiptoed inside and gingerly sat on the edge of the bed.  They stared accusingly at each other and patted my back, murmuring of course they’ll make dinner.  It’s Mother’s Day!
     ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ our daughter said, ‘The boys can fix it.’ 
     She pulled me to my feet and we walked outside into a fine spring evening.  I could hear the boys industriously banging pans and rummaging through the refrigerator.  Jenna chatted hopefully as we walked and I gazed at our neighbors on their front porch.  Dave was busily barbecuing, Fran was sitting on the porch swing gently swaying with her daughter, sipping a glass of wine.  ‘Hello!  Happy Mother’s Day!’ they cheerily called out.  Ka-chink.  Fran and Dave toasted each other and their perfect daughters.  Their perfect lives.  I waved half heartedly back and stared glumly ahead.  I felt crippled.  Jenna and I walked on for a spell then turned back.  Everywhere I looked, neighbors were celebrating Mother’s day with laughter, animated conversations, and grilled meat.  I limped home.
     The kids tried, they really really tried to resurrect the day for me, but it was too late.  I smiled weakly at their efforts.  I told them it didn’t matter, we could celebrate Mother’s day any old day.  Like next Sunday when Dad is home from Alaska. 
    My children were relieved.   I went to bed.
     Months later I ran into Fran in the grocery store and confessed my terrible envy at her life that day.  Fran burst out laughing.
     “Oh Nancy!  I had just had a conflict with the girls and saw you walk by with Jenna and I thought to myself: I wish we were on a peaceful walk together like that. Then I looked over at the Johnston’s and there they were,  celebrating their Mom’s newly earned law degree, so happy and connected.  Laughing loudly, loving and working together on their outdoor dinner.  You all were having the perfect Mother’s Day, not me.”
     I have thought about that day often through the years.  Not just because, in the end, these children of ours turned out to be loving young adults who, since that time, have granted me many pretty-close-to-perfect Mother’s days, but because the yearning for appreciation runs deep and dies hard within all of us.  A friend once told me that the four A’s of healthy  relationships are appreciation, attention, acceptance, and affection.  I think those four words take us as close to love as we flawed humans can get.  We long for them all.  We need them all.  Wife to husband, true friend to true friend, parent to child.  When they are absent, we hunger for their return, when they are present, life feels pretty close to perfect.  Peachy  perfect.  Even if their timing doesn’t always fall on Mother’s day.

Imagine the Possibilities!

Thoughts on a Creative Home

     Some of the happiest kids I know paint rocks.  They turn somersaults in grass and swim through hula-hoops underwater.  These kids skip a lot and jump over sofa pillows; they drop from trees and chase dogs.  They tie knots, ride tricycles and pick weedy bouquets.  They tape paper into chains, make snakes from play dough, and plant potatoes when given the opportunity.  The happiest kids I know blow bubbles, whistle, and make mudpies. 
     Happy kids don't do every one of these goofy splendid things, but somewhere in their lives there is room for their imaginations to invent fun.  The kind of imagination with no apparent purpose or goal in mind.  It idles and hums along.  It swoops and swings and unfolds great ideas.  Our imagination may seem a small part of who we are, but there is little life beyond it.  If a thing cannot be imagined first---a cake, a relationship, a cure for AIDS--it cannot be.  We are bound by what we can envision.  And the envisioning process begins in childhood. 
     Consider home the seedbed of creativity.  It is where we learn to imagine possibilities and the ways to make them happen.  One of the most important things parents can do to encourage this process is to cultivate a climate where creativity is welcome.  Creativity does not require huge amounts of money, a fancy easel, or a computer.  It does require a corner in which to create with a few supplies, the time to make it happen, and a certain amount of surrender to creative disorder.
Tools
     Let's begin with the corner to create in.  Not a room, a basement, or a studio.  Simply a space where creative resources are handy.  These resources can include a box of art supplies, a dress up box, and my family's favorite--an inventor's box.  They are simple to put together.  The art box is the most used resource box in our home; I include things normally reserved for adults like a good pair of scissors, and a paper punch.  We have paper (construction, tissue, and typing), felt tips, tape, glue sticks, and bingo markers (bright nontoxic paints with a sponge applicator--available wherever bingo is played). 
     Whether you have boys or girls, toddlers or teenagers, a box filled with thrift shop treasures will last through years of plays, Halloween costumes and games of pretend.  We have collected basketball uniforms, filmy peignoirs, cowboy boots and gold slippers.  There are wigs and glasses, jewelry and hats in our box--all found at thrift shops and garage sales for a few dollars. 
     Our beloved inventor's box is nothing more than a junk drawer in cardboard.  It holds rubber bands, scraps of wood, corks and wire.  There is an old transistor radio, tiny motors from electronic supply stores and batteries to run them.  The difference between a junk drawer and an inventor's box is by name and attitude only.  These are supplies to invent with, not throw away! 
     The ideal place for your boxes is a room off the kitchen with a big old table.  All children seem to create best under our feet, near light and familiar domestic routines.  We are fooling ourselves to think kids will go down to a dark basement or an out of the way room to create.  They want a corner where the project can sit undisturbed, where they can call out for us to come and see!  In an accessible place, these boxes hold the wondrous ingredients of creation providing hours of self-directed fun. 

Time
     Time is inextricably linked with creativity.  You cannot use your imagination, or bring ideas to fruition without the time to do it in.  We unwittingly rob children of time in several ways--with television, and with an overabundance of activities where adults determine the rules, the process, and the product. 
     One summer afternoon years ago, I sat with a friend and watched my six year old fling herself into a swimming pool with boundless enthusiasm.  She jumped and dove and somersaulted and cart wheeled herself into the water with certain grace and confidence.  Jenna was unstoppable.  There was no trick she didn't want to try.  After an afternoon of watching this energy my friend urged me to sign Jenna up for dive lessons, pointing out that talent and attitude like that should not go to waste.  I thought about my friend's daughter sitting beside us watching Jenna also.  She was signed up for dive lessons.  This girl had talent and attitude too.  She spent several hours every week with an adult who told her to stand here, hold your arms this way, arch your back, lift your heels until there was nothing left to fling herself in the water with but an adult's idea of performance.
     Let your child take the time to explore her talents without a right and wrong way of doing it.  That one afternoon of being wide open and silly will encourage more risk taking and flexibility in life than months of lessons.  Classes in music, dance, and foreign languages will not necessarily enrich our young children.  It often puts them on a fast track to burnout at tender ages.  The time spent on classes, practicing and performing can deplete creative energy--energy that could be spent at home, but not in front of the television. 
     For most kids, television eats more time than anything else.  By simply turning off the TV you are adding hours of creative time to your child's day.  It can be difficult in the beginning.  A child will do everything in his power to convince you why he should watch cartoons.  He may squall and act fidgety.  He will ignore your suggestions for fun.  He may fret and fume and stomp around yelling there is nothing to do! 
     These are good signs!  It means your child is grappling with boredom.  Think of boredom as an ally, for it leads to the place where ideas are born and carried out.  Boredom is a big invitation to do anything to escape its clutches.  Imagining your way out of it breeds resourcefulness, a powerful skill to possess in life.  It is the skill that leads scientists, artists, and mathematicians to fool around with the ordinary and arrive at astonishing discoveries. 

Tolerance
     Most kids are equipped to make ideas happen.  Most parents are not.  It can be a mess.  And we don't always have the time or the energy to pick up after one more thing.  Creativity is not always messy, but the best activities often are.  Think of it as a feast.  When we sit down to a delicious meal, someone had to chop, peel, bake and stir their way to the food before us.  There are pots and pans in the sink, and piles of dirty dishes.  But you sat down to a feast, not boxed macaroni and cheese.  Creativity is a feast, not a fast food.  Someone has to paint and poke and glue his or her way through it.  We sometimes need to remind ourselves to surrender to the disorder of undefined feasts, to give in to the grass stained pants and wet shoes and pieces of paper under our feet--to the mess in dirt and paint and scattered cushions on the floor. 
     Surrendering to disorder does not mean your child rampages through the day mashing clay into the carpet or moving restlessly from one activity to the next.  Surrendering to the disorder is valuing the true creative drive in your child above your need to keep things collected and in place.  It is saying yes when a child wants to make a highway out of chalk on the driveway or help make a batch of cookies.  Yes to playing with Daddy's shaving cream in the bathtub and having a tea party with graham crackers and all the dolls invited. 
     This is the stuff of memories, of a childhood well lived.  Years from now no one will remember with fondness the clean house and scrubbed floors.  We remember the dandelion bouquets, and the hand painted cards.  Surrendering to a child's imagination is being aware that there is no mess in the world that cannot be cleaned up.  Not one. 
     Creative kids tend to be happy kids.  They are the flexible thinkers, the dreamers and dawdlers.  These kids are not tethered to the probable, not satisfied with mainstream solutions to solving problems.  They are the ones who take risks with new ideas, and then take the ideas further than most.  They can grow into tomorrow’s Einstein, Picasso, and Spielberg.  And even if our children do not become household names for their creative pursuits, they can rise up and into their own lives with the future stretching before them as a horizon of possibilities. 

A Measure of Work

     I've worked hard in my life.  I've been what you could call poor.  I never went hungry or without shoes, but I've been poor enough to consider a Barbie doll  an uncommonly generous gift, and a night at the movies a real splurge.  I'm not poor anymore, but those lean years have added something to my life that my children may never experience.      
     When I was a girl I saved every penny for a bike that became my transportation for many years.  I learned how to change the brakes, adjust the gears.  I kept it polished and oiled and ready to fly down the flat Idaho roads of my girlhood.  Years later I loaned it to my sister who needed something to get her around.  She eventually bought an old car and sold my bronze beauty for ten dollars.  I was unaccountably mad, even though I could now afford a new bike, a fancier one.  For a long time I hid my anger until it became the soft sadness of a declining thought.      
     I learned to work as a child. My brothers and sisters and I cleaned house, folded clothes, mowed the lawn, and in the summers I worked on my grandfather's ranch digging up waist-high plants he called Chick's weed.  Grandad said it would make the cattle sick if they ate it.  Chick was the trickster of his stories.  Chick was smart.  Evil.  Chick planted poison.  Made potholes in the road with his teeth. Chick gave you bad dreams and laughed. "There he is!" Grandad cried as we worked in the fields, "Oh, you missed him.  He's fast.  Ducked behind those weeds."  The mosquitoes hung in clouds while we worked. At the end of the day Grandad gave me a dollar. I rolled it up and put it under my pillow.  At night I dreamed of Chick stealing it away into the dark.     
     I was expected to work.  Expected to leave the house at eighteen.  Go to college if I could save enough money.  I never felt deprived or diminished.  I burned down to the edge of who I thought I was, and rose up again stronger for it.  My children are carefree, optimistic. I can tell by the way they fling themselves into new situations.  The way they sink into sleep at the end of the day. Oh, they have their grievances and fears. They howl about Saturday chores, mourn about not fitting in.  But sometimes I think life is too easy for them. I worry they will grow fat with a complacency that won't burn away.  I worry my children will never know the uncomplicated reward of earning a bike with counted hours of work.      
     Suffering does not make one wise.  Wisdom is cultivated when we learn to love and be loved.  My first covenant:  to love.  The next is to prepare my David children for a Goliath world. Earning the courage of true warriors is difficult.  They must fight many battles without me by their side. They must learn to meet resistance with perseverance and face this endless world with faith and passion.  If I have done my job right, my children will link their imaginations with work.  They will measure the labor that makes a dream come true.  They will flush Chick laughing in the weeds and catch him with their eyes.

Alaska Time

     It was a life of screen doors slamming, dogs barking, and ringing phones.  There were endless errands to run, car pools to drive and the appetites of four growing children to consider.  When I got the chance, I ran and gardened and fed the homeless on Thursday nights.  There were few moments in a day to hold close, empty of demands.  Like everyone I knew, I was busy.   Now, I made noise about changing this--to drop the obligations, say no to the uncountable claims on my time--but it took a sizable stumble and thump to change things.  It took the mythic dimensions of Alaska to stop me in my headlong tracks.       
     My husband Greg works the Bristol Bay salmon season every summer.  For years Greg had urged me to join him with the kids, and when our youngest turned three I said yes.  I imagined six weeks in a cozy cabin with a lush landscape outside our door.  The kids and I watched the movie ‘The Wilderness Family’, and saw a happy clan sawing logs and saving a baby cougar.  Adventure beckoned!  With anticipation we flew to King Salmon, Alaska.
      Greg arrived at the airport in a battered truck.  Wedged together in the cab, we bounced down the highway of potholes--formidable potholes-- that turned the drive into an endless polka of body sways and head thumps against the truck roof.  The tundra stretched before us flat and peculiar, the sky a vault of scattered clouds.  There were no discernible features to orient ourselves.  No rise of peaks, or spine of hills to navigate with.  My eyes slid uninterrupted to the wide horizon.  I drew a breath and looked away.        We pulled into a rutted drive and lurched to a stop before a structure that looked something like a trailer if you glanced at it sideways real fast.   
     “Here it is!” Greg said, “Here is home!  I have to get back to the boat, I’ll see you in the morning.”      He gave big hugs of encouragement, and extricated himself from our arms.   We stood in the dust with our bags and watched him drive away.     
     Home was a truck container.  Someone had cut windows from the sides, called it a trailer, and set it upon a scraped off patch of tundra.  We stepped gingerly up the plastic fish box that comprised the threshold to the door.   
     “This can’t be it!”  our nine year old daughter cried.  “I could never, EVER, live here!”  I felt a slow slide into an unnameable  place reserved for car accidents and broken bones.       It smelled like a swamp on a warm day. Greasy towels hung on a rack, the faded sofa was missing a leg .  The water ran tea colored from the faucet, and to our horror we discovered a strange trumpet-shaped lichen growing from the carpet of the bedroom.   Home.
     I rolled up my sleeves and went to work while the the kids threw themselves outdoors to dig rivers and channels in the dirt.        The days unfolded endlessly, unpunctuated by dark at this latitude.   The light did strange things to our appetites, to our sleeping habits.  Bedtime became a battle when the sun called my children out to play at midnight.  I lurched from one problem to another.  A water pipe burst from its joint under the trailer.  Squalls blew in and to the kids’ delight, filled their river world with currents of water--joining mud, skin, clothing and children in a happy marriage of mess.  The mosquitoes drove us like cattle from tundra to trailer to car.  In the evenings bears nosed around the margins of the trailer searching for garbage.  Twenty hours of available light to see what my Wilderness Family had come to:  a place of mud, mosquitoes, and bears;  to a dirty tribe of dislocated travelers.
     One sun filled night I hung clothes on a line strung between scrub alders, then sat down to watch the kids play baseball with neighboring children.  They moved the bases around in the dirt until they were satisfied.  The three year old was allowed 10 strikes, a girl declared, older boys could hit only within the base lines or they were O-U-T out.  She glanced over at me.  “You wanna play?”  she asked .  I shrugged thinking there was something else I should do, like pick the lichen that sprang daily from the bedroom. 
    “She’s a good player!”  my  son cried.  I smiled.  I hadn’t played since high school.   I hefted the bat and considered.  “Batter... UP!” the girls shouted.   I hit a home run deep into the tundra.  “NEW RULE!” a boy screamed, “Mothers can hit to base lines ONLY!”  I was in league with the big boys now.  We played for hours under that midnight sun, laughing and shrieking, changing rules, shaking the dust from our bodies in charged halos of light.  Suddenly I was a girl again, unfettered and breathless with the crazy fun of it all.  Something shifted inside.       
     I changed the rules:  The days would be governed by the urges and appetites of our bodies, not the clock.  We began to rise at whatever time we woke, eat when we were hungry, and sleep when we were tired, even if that meant dinner at ten and bedtime at two.  Problems that seemed overwhelming fell away, and the weeks stretched long, empty of duties.  We called it Alaska Time. 
     With Alaska Time I became an available lap, a willing ear for listening to worries and dreams.  I was idle arms for holding, for pouring plaster in bear tracks, for throwing a baseball.  I was newly opened eyes to see the treasures available to children:  Mud.  Boundless light.  Midnight drives to watch caribou graze and eagles wheel in the sky.         There was no turning back.  The journey to Bristol Bay offered a touchstone to measure our lives against.  Alaska Time.  In a walk after dinner; in dropping everything to play ping pong.  In watching a radiant sunset, and naming the stars that bloom in the sky.  It is Alaska Time when the rules change; the dishes wait; the phone goes unanswered.  Alaska Time in the words---Yes, I want to play.

In the Name of Science

     There were four glasses on the kitchen counter filled with mysterious looking liquids.  Chicken bones were brewing in vinegar, and horsey looking molars cadged from the dentist lay at the bottom of milk, soda pop, and fruit juice.  Our babysitter eyed them speculatively as I gave her instructions for the evening.  "Science or snacks?" she asked, "I can never tell at your house."     
     Science is not sacred around here.  It can be found nearly everywhere---during bath time under an upside down cup, in the delicate balance of a homemade balsa wood airplane, inside a bottle of soda pop, sometimes on the kitchen counter in weird stews.  I don't think our house is particularly different from anyone else's.  The only difference may lie in our noticing, then sharing, that the paper stays dry in the  upside down cup in the bath, that the shape of a wing makes a difference in flight, that the floor is noticeably colder than the ceiling above the top bunk in winter.  The sharing of that attentiveness, not necessarily the scientific explanation, is what brings science into our laps.      
     It wasn't always this way.  In the beginning my approach to science was slow, hesitant.  How could I, whose real science education ended in fifth grade, inform my children about anything  scientific?  Tentatively, I began to try a few experiments largely for myself.  I chose projects that looked interesting, that seemed safe.  Inch by inch, month by year, I grew more bold.       Today we'll try just about anything in the name of science.  We've thrown eggs wrapped and suspended in various materials from the second story window to see what worked best to keep them from cracking.  We've lit eighteen candles under a big jar even though the project called for one.  We've frozen teeth in blackberry pulp just because my five year old asked a very good question:  "If the stuff was freezing  would it change the tooth more?"      
     Sometimes our experiments fail.  There are times when the seeds won't grow, the balloons refuse to inflate, and the eggs break.  To tell you the truth, if the experiment seems worth it, we do one of two things:  actually follow the directions step-by-step---a tedious undertaking for a wide and speculative family like ours--or we'll backtrack and try a new approach (more fun.)  If the experiment doesn't seem worth the trouble, we drop it.  Simple as that.  With the burden of slogging determinedly for perfect results lifted, we feel more free to try  an experiment, any experiment.        
     My efforts to bring science home are rewarded in rich and subtle ways. "If water has more pressure the deeper it gets, would a blown up balloon explode under water if you got really really deep?"  This idea from our seven year old has all of us wondering.  I don't know the answer, but I love the question.  And that's what science is, no more than the shape of a question.  The answer can lead you to wondrous places. 

Five thoughts that help to keep science alive for our family:
1.  Work with one broad topic at a time---earth science, living things, matter and energy, astronomy, are just a few categories.  We usually try several experiments and projects within each subject.  Your local library is full of science books for children on each subject.

2.  Do not tell your child the outcome of the project.  Allow him his own discovery.  The results will have a much greater impact on his understanding.

3.  Allow your child the freedom to explore further with the materials of the project, even if it seems foolish or redundant to you.  This is the way of all scientific discoveries. 

4.  Try to do home experiments regularly.  Even if it is only once or twice a month--most experiments can be done in a matter of minutes--you will provide a powerful tool for learning more about the world around us.

5.  Don't be inhibited by your own lack of science. In many ways you are in a better position  than people with strong scientific backgrounds--for you are freer to learn like a child, to bump and roll along, make mistakes, ask questions.  You can be a powerful role model for demonstrating how learning never ends, that it's okay (and often appropiate) to fail, and that the world is an endless source of wonder at any age.                                      

Earth Science Experiments

Centrifugal Force in a Cup

     I remember the magic of this one from my own childhood (using a half-filled pail of water,) but never knew the scientific principles that governed it.  I do now, and so will you and your children! 

What you will need:
paper cup for each child
string
water     

     To make a string handle, poke a hole on opposite sides of the cup near the rim.   Measure approximately three feet of string.and thread through both holes, then knot the ends at the top.  Fill the cup halfway with water.  Now for the fun part!  Ask your children what will happen if you turn the cup upside down (I bet the breakfast dishes on this one!)  Then take the handle and spin the cup of water around in a big circle either above your head or at your side.       Centrifugal force keeps the water in the cup, defying the law of gravity.  By spinning the cup, you are placing a greater force on the water than the pull of gravity.  Tides are caused on one side of the world by the gravitational pull of the moon.  The other side of the earth has a tidal bulge too, stemming in part from the spin of the earth on its axis and on its journey around the sun.  Gravity prevents the oceans from spinning off into space, while centrifugal force contributes to the pull and draw of our tides. 

Inventive Water Filters

      I can tell you exactly, in measured layers, how to make an efficent water filter with the materials listed below, but allowing your child (and yourself!) the freedom of experimenting is a far more meaningful experience.  The basic principle behind this project is used the world over for making clean water. 

What you will need:
plastic soda pop bottle (liter size works best)
wide mouth quart Mason jar
cotton balls
old nylon stockings
clean sand (whatever is available: coarse, fine, medium, beach, etc.)
clean pea gravel
crumpled paper towells     

     To make the filter, cut the bottom off the soda bottle with scissors.  Next, gather the materials and put them in separate bowls on the table.  Then make a pitcher of muddy water, but not too muddy.  A couple spoonfuls of dirt in a pitcher of water with a few pine needles or small debris thrown in works fine (you may want to get more adventuresome with dirtier water later.)       You are ready to experiment!  Begin by stuffing the narrow opening of the bottle with cotton balls.  Then work in layers of the chosen materials, instead of little of this and that.  When you are satisfied with your combination, place the filter over the wide mouth jar and pour in the muddy water.  You should have dramatically cleaner water than what was poured in! 

Water Pressure Experiment     

This hands-on experiment demonstrates how water pressure increases the deeper you go. 

What you will need:
plastic soda pop bottle (liter size)
masking tape
nail
water
food coloring     

     Punch a line of holes down the plastic container with the nail, then tape each hole closed with a small piece of masking tape.  Fill the container with water, add food coloring, and ask your child which hole she thinks the water will spurt out of with the most force.  The answer may surprise her!  Then remove the pieces of tape.       The weight of water pressing down (whether it is in the ocean or a cup) increases the water pressure, and makes the bottom hole spurt out the furthest. 

Paper Clips and Poker Chips: Inventing with Kids

     There is an inventing box in our garage filled with the kind of junk that is given away for free at yard sales.  Two coffee cans, bicycle parts, an old egg beater, and a broken thermostat from the newly repaired furnace are the latest additions.  You may have similar odds and ends sitting around somewhere, but not collected together and called the 'Inventor's Box.'  That's the secret, removing the name of something so it can be reinvented into something new.      
         This is an interesting process Dr. Karl Dunker calls functional freedom.  Take a hand egg beater for an example.  Functional freedom occurs when you remove the egg beater's original function simply by putting it in the Inventor's  Box, then you are free to turn it upside down, and the beater becomes a helicopter, or it can be taken apart and the pieces redesigned into a toy power boat.   
     Functional fixedness, its opposite, is seeing an egg beater capable only of beating eggs.      Functional freedom suspends the obvious, and allows the development of unexplored ideas.  Children, with their unburdened perspective, are naturally equipped to discover new uses for familiar objects.  This is the glorious process of inventing, of 'thinking outside the box'.     
     Begin by cleaning out your junk drawers, the garage, kitchen cupboards.  Collect paper clips and rubber bands and corks.  Add broken wind-up alarm clocks, old telephones, wire, batteries, small 1.5 volt motors from Radio Shack, popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners.  Check out the 'free' boxes at rummage sales and garage sales.  Use your imagination!  Anything that is not dangerous can be used in an Inventor's Box.  Add real screw drivers, electrical and duct tape.  Our Inventor's Box grew over the years from a small bin to an Inventor's Room that took up half of the garage, but then I am a pushover for hare-brained ideas.  I even have a few myself now and again.       
     It is important to remember that the inventing from your box precludes instructions.  Instructions only lead one in linear fashion to a thing someone else created first.  Brainstorming, however,  is a different matter.  Brainstorming together invites speculation.  There is nothing like the impetus of a wild idea, refining itself through the process of brainstorming, leaving ever widening circles of 'why not?' in its wake, to make you feel alive.        
     After the brainstorming, step back.  Allow your child full rein with the materials without your input or feedback.  Research has shown that too much feedback is a creativity killer, even good feedback. Think of your own attempts at a new skill.  If someone was hovering over you while you were learning how to play pool for example, and giving you a constant river of cheery comments like:  ".....ooooooh goooooood effort!  Wow!  you are really trying hard!   That is really great!..."  even when you KNOW you are playing horribly and you just need more practice, odds are you'll find yourself shutting down on some level, giving up.  Let the kids fly with their imaginations, alone.     
     The development of creative thinking in children is an important issue for our society.  Creative children grow into creative adults, contributing new and transporting ideas for old problems.  By encouraging the native curiosity and inventiveness of our children, we, as parents, are also contributing richly to mankind's future.       There are many ways parents can enhance creativity in their children.  One of the most fundamental is to focus on the creative process itself, and not the product that results.  Unfortunately, it is natural for adults to eye the pretty product, the useful invention and give it full measure of recognition, but not for children.  Children are far more interested in how one arrives at the product, to the invention.  In other words, process is paramount to a child, and the product an expendible result.        
     This was graphically impressed upon me one winter during school vacation.  We were vacationing in a different time zone, and the children rose every morning at 5:00, their biological time.  We used those early morning hours to write travel journals, or 'articles', our kindergartner called them.  Ben wrote, with the help of his big sister, an elaborate column sentence on each page about splashing waves, wild cats, belly aches, and getting lost.  The articles were carefully illustrated, and soon he had a small book of beautiful pages:  a five year old's precious testimony of a family vacation.  Ben ended up leaving his book of articles on the plane home.  I was heartsick, Ben was indifferent.  Utterly indifferent.  It was the process  of creating it that was meaningful to him, not the product that resulted.
     Children create from the fund of knowledge they possess at the time, and the experiments, the manipulation of materials, the fooling around with the exciting question 'What-would-happen-if. . . ?', have lead our children over the years into ever widening circles of creative thought.  Even if that meant messes, failures, and predicaments to bear with.  For our family, it was a small price to pay in exchange for the adventure in inventing, the thrill of self-discovery.