The search for rental houses has shifted from amusing hobby to directed effort. Only a little bit of looking and my gosh, for the same price we pay to live in this apartment we can rent a house with more space plus a big fenced-in yard for growing boys to run around and play within. And we’d have no coke machine outside our door which I’m not sure if that’s a pro or a con. If it turned out to be a con, we could always have someone install a coke machine outside our front door just for our personal use, right?

I’m very excited. Poor Kevin. He really hates the actual moving part of moving.

That’s not why I’m posting. Why am I posting?

What in the.

Oh! Right. People often email to ask me for more details about our homeschooling curriculum, and several nice people have suggested that I put it all into nice PDFs for download. But the problem is that our curriculum changes, you know? It’s this great big constantly ever-flowing dynamic absorbitron.

So I think a better way to share the information might be through a wiki. I’d have a general philosophy and guidelines page and then have lesson pages broken down by topic/week of the school year. Each topic page would have all of our activities and notes, but then other people (that’s you) could freely contribute related ideas, books, activities, and so on.

The resulting lesson pages would all sortable (using some sort of magic) by age group, topic, and type of activity so that parents or teachers who aren’t necessarily following this exact approach could still find useful lesson plans to use themselves.

If we really wanted to be cool, we’d use even more magic to allow users to put everything into an easy-to-follow printable calendar for each week. I also like the idea of an iphone app that allows notes and attachments to document the school year… sort of a natural portfolio, but that’s all crazy futurist utopia talk; for now I just want a basic collaborative site for the Ard School of Arts and Sciences.

What do you think? Useful and amazing? Or a great big hassle of a tangled up mess? You won’t hurt my feelings. (I am words on a computer screen. I have no feelings. IT IS AWESOME.)

You know the classic old western scene where there’s a quiet dusty street and then two guys come crashing out of a saloon and roll around in the dirt and there’s glass and mud and beer everywhere? That’s what this weekend was like.

The boys were full on, not fighting exactly but in each other’s faces and wound up. Saturday afternoon I took them outside thinking that they’d run around and breathe in the perfect weather and get some of that crazy energy out. But once we were out there all they did was argue over metal cars and fall down and hurt themselves and need to go to the bathroom and mess with the courtyard fountain and end up on time out and ask to go in for a drink and cry and fight over nothing and whine because I didn’t bring extra pens outside so they could sit and draw. Sit and draw? GO PLAY. You are children! Children with feet! GO PLAY.

Nicolaus sat and drew pictures of space ships while Graham ran off and whacked his head on a big metal swing. He cried. When he cries because he’s hurt, the dog goes crazy barking which is heartwarming, it’s exactly like Lassie except that Lassie was trained to shut up once they were trying to get Timmie out of the well and DUDE really, I got it, thank you, stand down. Nicolaus said he wanted to go inside, so we gathered everything up. On the way in they fought over toy cars. Nicolaus cried because I took the cars away. Graham cried because I let Nicolaus do the security code to let us back into the building.

We came back inside with two howling boys. I sent them both to their beds for a five minute quiet rest, thinking it would help re-set their weird cranky little brains.

They both fell asleep. No! No no no no nononono no. Naps are bad. I don’t care what parenting books say; naps ruin everything.

They were so soundly asleep that I started to worry about that whack to the head. Did Graham have a concussion? Was it contagious and it spread to his brother? But no, it turned out they were just tired. We pulled them out of bed for dinner and then they stayed awake until 1:00 in the morning.

Then this morning they slept until… oh my gosh I don’t even know. Late enough that if they had wanted breakfast at any restaurant except for those breakfast-all-the-time places, they would have missed it. Late. And today was another round of super chatty kinetic messy, noisy, not-minding kids who thought they were hilarious. And maybe on some level they were hilarious but that’s not the point! I don’t remember the point, but that definitely wasn’t it.

I got them to sleep earlier tonight, so hopefully we’ll have it all evened out by the middle of the week.

This week we’re studying sort of Elizabethan-era explorers. Exploring for the fun of exploring! We are going to chart some places in our neighborhood and go to a state park or two. If you have any explorer lesson ideas or can recommend any good books, movies, artwork, or music we need to check out please say so. This is another topic that I know almost nothing about. Right now I have probably 30 tabs open in my browser where I’ve been reading about Sir Wizzywhatsit and Sir Brutal Imperialist and Sir Drake. But it’s always hard to learn all about it the night becfore and then distill things down to the level where it all makes sense on a kindergarten-first grade level. Especially! When our sleep schedule is all messy and we had a crazy weekend. Ha there. Knew I could tie it back around.

I don’t understand facebook. A few months ago I set up a page for my art stuff because the nice people in the etsy forums said that only a stupid idiot wouldn’t have a facebook page for their business. Well! I’m a lot of things but I’m not a stupid idiot. So I made one. Then I forgot about it. Because one of the things I am is forgetty. Remember that time I did Twitter for a week?

Then a couple of weeks ago someone on Reddit posted a link to something interesting. I clicked on the link but it said “To see this fascinating thing, log in to your facebook account.” Oh, okay. So I logged in. And right away, all these people I know from all over the internet started pinging me saying hey wow, you’re here! On facebook! Be my friend on face book! We’ll be friends on facebook!

It was the same way on LiveJournal back in the old-timey days. You had your list of friends. But friends is sort of a loaded word, right? It should just say person. Instead of “Martha Stewart has friended you” it should say “Martha Stewart has acknowledged your personhood.” Or oh! What about a sort of island metaphor? You could invite people onto your island, and it would have concentric zones that reflect how well you know someone.

Anyway. I always say that no good comes of Facebook. There’s drama and awkwardness and — not like a blog is any different but still. I’ve seen people crying because of facebook. I’ve seen people end relationships over it. I’ve seen people’s mother in laws make things mighty uncomfortable.

What is this social space exactly? I’ve been at home with internet friendships ever since there was such a thing, but something about this kind of social networking internetty net web 2.0 friends just seems like a bad idea in a oh no worlds are colliding kind of way. Do you tell your boss and your aunt and your babysitter and your friends all the same jokes? How honest can you be about what you did this weekend? Do you decide to get over embarrassment and say oh well this is the real me and lower their inhibitions about what they share? Or do you end up posting only the safest common denominator?

Right now I have a small pile of friend requests in my inbox. It’s a mix of internet friends, close family, not close family, real life people, business acquaintances. So if I accept them all then I’ll be sharing space with people I know well who’ve never met or people who have met but don’t like each other or people who respect my professional opinion and people who used to change my diapers.
It feels like I’d be putting them all in a room together.

How do you begin to decide whether to accept or ignore someone? And what happens if you never update because you suck at doing things? Do people get mad and make you not their friend anymore? And is it some kind of Facebook faux pas that my page is a weird businessy fan page? Having fans is even more disconcerting than having friends.

New little series in progress. These will be sold as a set of 5×7″ prints, matted and ready to pop into frames.

ps. Please let me know if you see any goofs in this before I have them printed!

I stop myself almost every time. That’s the hardest thing — watching them make a mistake and letting it happen.

But it isn’t really a science experiment if I lay everything out for them and give them steps. That would make it a demonstration or maybe a guided activity. Those are fun to do sometimes, and can be useful for showing a kid how something sciencey works, but following steps doesn’t do a lot to encourage scientific thinking.

Graham mixes up the words artist and scientist, and he often says experiment when he means art project. I don’t know why those two fields are so intertwined in his mind, but they definitely are. Without reading too much into the quirky thinking of a four year old, I’ve decided that it’s a sign that we are doing something exciting here at the Ard School.

Because — and I know this is a tangent but while we’re here I might as well — really, the process of making art requires application of the scientific method. Artists don’t usually think they’re any good at science, but then they’ll wonder if they can do something with this material and test it and refine their tests until they can consistently get the result they want. Then they put the work out there for public input and feed that back into the next cycle.

In high school and college I had friends who were all starry eyed for research science. Science! Then they got to the other side of their PhDs and found out that the actual job of research science isn’t nearly as jazzy as Bill Nye promised. It’s rewarding sometimes, but the rewards are spread out over decades sometimes. Bill Nye never did an episode about statistical analysis errors or how exciting it is to have to scrap three years worth of data because of a minor mistake that compounded over time. Or what it’s like to deal with a drunk lab manager who is sleeping with his post docs while you agonize over losing funding because it’s looking like this line of study might be nearing a dead end.

But! In an art studio, the experiments are faster and more colorful. Mistakes are usually easy to recover from. If not well, you melt the whole thing down in a cathartic lava experience and start over. Publishing isn’t easy but instead of writing up papers, you dress fancy and drink wine and answer intellectual questions about your inspiration. It’s much closer to what people envision a science lab to be like.

I’m finished with my tangent now. Thank you.

The boys are conducting ice experiments this week. I cleaned out the freezer and gave them almost unlimited access to the kitchen. The first day, they were like busy little ants going up and down chairs they’d dragged into the kitchen. Up to the sink down to the table, up to open the freezer, careful not to spill! Measure, stir, spill, wipe.

Graham’s first experiment surprised me. I figured he’d want to put toys in a cup of water or something to see what would happen, but no. He filled up a cup with just plain water and stuck it in the freezer. Then he filled another cup with water and put it out on the counter.

He wanted to find out whether water would eventually freeze if you leave it out long enough.

Okay. See where it’s hard to keep my mouth shut? But it doesn’t matter if the question is crazytown — this is a great question. Because we can test it and see.

Meanwhile Nicolaus started mixing all different things in different cups and bowls and things, generally having a great time making a huge huge mess. He’s older so I encouraged him to be a little more rigorous. Meaning, I made him pay attention to his measurments and ratios. A teaspoon of salt will make a much bigger difference in a cup of water than it will in a quart.

When they checked their results, they found that everything was frozen except for the water on the counter and the cup with salt in it. That one was slushy. Oh and! A glass jar cracked. Very exciting.

So today I kept subtly hinting and trying to guide Nicolaus to discover whether salt would melt ice that’s already frozen. He humored me with yeah, I will do that later… he even told me how to do that. In case you know, I wanted to do it myself. But he was focused on digging through the spice drawer, trying to read the labels. “What is curry powder? Is this other one pepper?”

Honestly, I thought he was just goofing off mixing stuff randomly for fun because woooo mixing is fun. Which is fine, I told myself. These are little kids, I must get a grip, there is plenty of time in their young lives to learn about true scientific inquiry.

He worked on it for a long time this afternoon until it occurred to me to ASK him why he was choosing these certain ingredients. He explained:
Well, salt stops water from freezing all the way. In a lot of cartoons they show spicy food to be actually HOT. So I’m wondering whether spicy things could actually heat the water up so it won’t freeze. Then over here I’m mixing different kinds of sugar together with water to see if that will freeze. Because whenever I’m eating food? I have noticed that sweet things are pretty different tasting than salt. So maybe something different will happen.”

My father in law was here and he started to explain why that won’t work, why it has nothing to do with the taste, facts and good points and all of that. I sidetracked him into another conversation. Didn’t want to be rude and tell him shhhh, but at the same time didn’t want to interrupt the fantastic line of questioning and reasoning that was going on in my kitchen.

Now one of the bowls of water won’t tell us anything. Nicolaus mixed all of his spicy ingredients in there, but then he also added a tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoon of salt. I started to lead him to maybe make different choices on that one but then realized that oh wait, shut up Tiffany. The real learning happens tomorrow, when he pulls it all out of the freezer and tried to figure out what it all means.

It’s late now. Everyone’s asleep and everything’s in the freezer waiting.