You may be thinking that I haven’t written here because I got busy with Thanksgiving, but you would be wrong. I haven’t written because I was attacked by the college application monster.

This is the first time this has happened to me. Back in the day, twenty-seven or so years ago, I applied to precisely one college. It was a simple check-the-boxes sort of affair, devoid of essays or any such matter, to a public university that lay within driving distance of my home. Two years later I filled out one more application, a transfer one this time, which may or may not have required an essay–I don’t remember–to a different public university at the other end of the state. I waited for a response and then packed my bags. That was it.

It’s a new millennium and my, oh my, how things have changed. The college application process has morphed into a monster. If you aren’t already acquainted with this particular beast, allow me to introduce you.

H is applying to four colleges. These days, that’s an unreasonably low number, according to H’s high school counselor and most other kids at his school. But this kid knows what he wants, and it’s a very particular sort of film production program. There are two schools which offer programs that thrill him, one that comes in a distant third, and another that fills the role, in application parlance, of “safety school”.

Four applications. Sounds manageable, doesn’t it?

Don’t be silly. Shall we begin with the essays?

You may have heard of something called the Common Application, which allows students to fill out a single application which can then be forwarded to several schools. This year’s essay options for the Common Application are as follows (Choose one, 250 words minimum):

• Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you. 
• Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you.  
• Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you, and describe that influence.  
• Describe a character in fiction, a historical figure, or a creative work (as in art, music, science, etc.) that has had an influence on you, and explain that influence. 
• A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you. 
• Topic of your choice. 

If one essay sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. Only two of the four schools H is applying to even use the Common Application. The other two schools have their own essay requirements. Which, of course, differ from each other. One school requires a response to one of these prompts (500-700 words):

• Write an essay about an event or experience that helped you learn what is important to you and why it is important.
• Tell us about a creative project, performance or other work of yours and how it reflects your vision or voice.
• Reflect on a challenge you overcame through persistence.

The other school requires a response to each of the following essays (1,000 words for both essays combined):

• Describe the world you come from — for example, your family, community or school — and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.
• Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?

And, lest you think that a single essay for those Common Application schools is all that’s required, let me tell you about the insufficiently named “school supplements”. These are extra applications for Common Application schools, unique to each school. Some of the “supplemental” questions H must answer are:

• If you had the opportunity to spend one day in New York City with a famous New Yorker, who would it be and what would you do?
• Write a haiku, limerick or short (eight lines or fewer) poem that best represents you.
• In the year 2050, a movie is being made of your life. Please tell us the name of your movie and briefly summarize the story line.
• Please tell us what led you to select your anticipated academic program and what interests you most about your intended discipline.
• Please tell us three specific features of our university that interest you.

Oh, and let’s not forget the short responses for the non-Common Application schools:

• Tell us about an activity that is important to you and why.
• Describe your academic interests and how you plan to pursue them at our university.
• Optional: Please provide any information that you believe is relevant to our consideration of you as an applicant, but not already discussed or explained in your application.

Then there are “quick-takes” which are one-line responses to silly questions like “favorite food”, “last book read” or “role model”. My kid loved these because he could fill in goofy answers just because the requests are so ridiculous and it’s fun to fill in those spaces with something temporary and completely inappropriate so your mother sitting beside you can freak out, panicking that the form will somehow submit itself with your “role model” response saying “Jack Black” or “Bob” or “You”.

Okay. That’s a lot of writing, but it seems manageable, no? Not so fast, my friend, we haven’t even begun with the film program requirements. One school requires this:

• The personal statement will be read by the Film & Television Production Admission Committee as a measure of creativity, self-awareness and vision. There is no standard format or correct answer. We are looking for a sense of you as a unique individual and how your distinctive experiences, characteristics, background, values and/or views of the world have shaped who you are and what you want to say as a creative filmmaker. Be specific, vivid and focused. (1,000 words or less)
• The Production Program is committed to providing students with a broad understanding of both fiction and nonfiction filmmaking, in cinema, television and new media, and in the major creative roles of writing, producing, directing, cinematography, editing and sound. Given what you know now (and without committing yourself in any way) tell us which of the above aspects of filmmaking seems of particular interest to you and why. (200 words or less)
• Writing Samples (choose one) 

1. An outline for a four-minute film that contains no dialogue. It can be fiction or non-fiction. The story has to be communicated visually. (no more than two pages)
2. A dialogue scene between two people. Provide a one-paragraph introduction describing the two characters in screenplay format. (no more than three pages)
3. Describe a concept for a feature-length movie, fiction or documentary, which you would like to develop. (No more than two pages) 

• Create a brief narrative video in which you had a major creative role. The video can be either live-action or animation, fiction or documentary, but it should reflect your aesthetic tastes and intellectual and emotional interests. (no more than five minutes)
• Portfolio List: The portfolio list is a written record of the applicant’s creative materials. It should include a concise description of each project, the month and year the project was completed, the applicant’s creative role and the purpose of the project.

Another film program requires this:

• A one-page resume that highlights creative work accomplished, activities and relevant employment.
• A film or video/ live action, animation or documentary.  Your submission should reflect storytelling skills that convey conflict, character as well as a beginning, middle and end. 
• Dramatic Essay  – Introduce yourself.  Describe an unforgettable event in your life and how it changed your perception of yourself or the view of someone close to you.  This event can be dramatic and/or comedic.  The assignment may be written as a short story in the first person or as an essay. (Up to four typed, double-spaced 8.5” x 11″ pages.)

And a third this:

• Essay one: Describe your dream job. (One page maximum.)
• Essay two: Create a self-introductory video no more than two minutes in length. Your video should visually highlight something about yourself, your personality, your interests, etc. that is not related to film. The only rule is you may NOT appear in the video in any way (including any photographs of yourself) so be creative. 
• Creative resume: Provide a one-page resume highlighting 5-7 pieces of what you consider to be your best creative work. 

Did you see that little video requirement? That meant H couldn’t use a film which he’s already made. He had to film a new one entirely.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, one of the schools H is applying to doesn’t accept film school applications until students are college juniors. So H didn’t have extra application work there. Phew.

Don’t breathe too easy yet though–there are also letters of recommendation needed. H required, I think, twelve different letters from five different people, and each request needed to be accompanied by a properly-addressed envelope, with postage applied. He also needed to arrange for transcripts and test scores to be sent to each school.

Oh, and about those transcripts? If your child has homeschooled for all or part of high school, you, as a homeschooling parent, get the glorified job of writing that transcript. I do not recommend waiting until your child is applying to college to write a transcript because you just might be busy helping that child with other things. Like his or her college applications.

Luckily for me, I’d already written a transcript for H’s homeschooled 9^th and 10^th grade years, when he applied to high school as a junior. I spent fathomless hours crafting that baby, and it’s a document of beauty, I tell you. That single part of the application process was easy: I just hit “print” and mailed copies.

And did I help H with the other parts of the applications? Do vegetarians like cheese? I’m a homeschooling mother–helping is my default mode. Yes, I helped. Kids who can corner this monster without the help of parents or school counselors deserve to get into every school they apply to. H is a smart kid, he’s a competent kid, but he couldn’t have done it on his own. I nagged and badgered about those essays, beginning last summer. (Did he listen then? No.) I helped him sort the deadlines and requirements for each school. I helped him brainstorm his essay drafts and I gave him feedback. I sat beside him and sighed and groaned and swore when online applications submitted with blank pages, or did not display necessary forms, or logged themselves out repeatedly because everyone under the sun was filling out the same application, two nights before the deadline.

(Note: Do not try to submit an online application the night before it’s due. The website’s servers will be busy. I just tried to pull up an application to copy questions for this post, and the application, which is due tonight, is inaccessible. And it’s too late for a snail mail postmark. Boy, do I feel sorry for all the kids trying to complete that application.)

Doesn’t this all sound insane? What if H had applied to as many schools as his counselor recommended?

The craziest part is that H is doing all this on top of seven classes-worth of coursework. You’d think his high school could make an elective class of the college application process, give credit for it. I mean, these kids are researching potential schools, they’re writing essays, they’re managing deadlines, they’re learning how to fill out forms, how to ask for letters of recommendation. A pretty educational process, don’t you think?

As of yesterday, H’s monster is three-quarters slain. The beast is hunkered down in his cave, gasping and dribbling green drool. In the last two weeks, three applications have been submitted, and H has one more to complete, due January 1^st.  Meanwhile, he has three weeks of messing around (with seven classes-worth of final papers and exams). Then, come Winter Break, he’ll finish that last application and kill the monster off for good.

Then we’ll have to wait and see what the monster hath wrought.

Structure. Now there’s another loaded word. Structure seems reinforced with negative connotations: rigidness, confinement, predictability.

I realize that I’ve written about this before. But it’s something that I think about often. And the more new homeschoolers I meet, the more I notice that many people still believe that there are two basic camps of homeschooling: unschooling and school-at-home. Sometimes new folks don’t realize that there’s a stunning variety of shades across that spectrum.

I know I’ve said this before too, but here’s a nutshell history: when we started homeschooling, we were fairly schoolish. It had only been a few years since I’d been a classroom teacher myself, and that was what I knew. Granted, I was a pretty creative teacher, and I had lots of neat projects in mind! But my oldest child quickly cured me of all My Good Ideas. “I don’t want to do that art project,” he’d say, or “I don’t want to read that book.” He asked questions like, “Why should I write down my thinking on that math problem when I can just tell you? You’re sitting right next to me!”

Good points. He was right. When I let him do projects that interested him, he was immersed. When I forced him to do work he didn’t want to do, he was angry and frustrated and didn’t learn much. I learned to stop doing that. (Well, I slowly learned to stop doing that. Sometimes I’m still learning.)

I got better and better at dropping the schoolish thinking that had me teaching him, and planning lessons for him. But we kept the habit of working together for a few hours most morning. We had fun reading together, making things together. Knowing we had a few open hours meant we could take on big projects, make big messes. Plus, it was the one time of day that the kids knew they had my full attention, that I wasn’t going to get lost on the computer, or start talking on the phone. Still, the fact that we did it every day, at a particular time, made it a structured activity. With all those negative connotations.

I finally came to terms with our homeschooling style a few years back when I read The Creative Habit, by choreographer Twyla Tharp. I read the book for help with my writing practice; only later did I realize its implications in our homeschooling life.

Tharp writes:

“There’s a paradox in the notion that creativity should be a habit. We think of creativity as a way of keeping everything fresh and new, while habit implies routine and repetition. That paradox intrigues me because it occupies the place where creativity and skill rub up against each other.”

And:

“I will keep stressing the point about creativity being augmented by routine and habit. Get used to it. In these pages a philosophical tug of war will periodically rear its head. It is the perennial debate, born in the Romantic era, between the beliefs that all creative acts are born of (a) some transcendent, inexplicable Dionysian act of inspiration, a kiss from God on your brow that allows you to give the world The Magic Flute, or (b) hard work. 

If it isn’t obvious already, I come down on the side of hard work. That’s why this book is called The Creative Habit. Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That’s it in a nutshell.”

Reading her book convinced me of what I’d already sensed: that scheduled practice doesn’t have to undermine creativity; rather, it can help it to thrive. I could see this with my writing. I don’t have the freedom at this point in my life to write whenever the muse strikes; instead I have to plan time for it. And I’ve done it for long enough now that my creative mind is conditioned to get right into the work, pretty quickly after I sit at my desk. I only have so much time, and I don’t want to waste it.

I think it’s the same for my kids. Gathering in the kitchen at 9:30 or 10:00 each morning for tea and a snack is their cue to start thinking, start bouncing ideas from their heads to the ceiling to the yellow counters and back again. I’ll often throw out a few suggestions, depending on what they’re working on, but more often than not, they have their own ideas. Today Lulu wanted some ideas for writing and I pulled out our copy of the utterly fabulous Don’t Forget to Write for her. Something there gave her the idea to make found phrases poems from the newspaper. Mr. T wanted to do more work on the game he’s designing. Would they have done these activities later in the day, on their own? Maybe. They do lots of interesting projects on their own, in the afternoon. But this morning, Mr. T needed my help to write his game rules, and Lulu wanted help brainstorming a project. And I was there to help them. Then they were on their way.

Sometimes I call what we do structured unschooling because the phrase is so laughably oxymoronic. But I think I’ll just strike the word structure from my vocabulary and use habit instead. A homeschooling habit. That’s what we have most mornings around here–complete with tea and snacks.

“Nah,” I said. I don’t think the likes of Annie Dillard, Adam Gopnik and Joan Didion bother poking around on piddly blogs like mine.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so sure. Remember how I posted this picture the other day, and praised Spunk and Bite? One guess as to what happened.

Go ahead and click on the photo, which will take you to my flickr page. Read the comment below the photo. But promise you’ll come back.

Isn’t that fun?

Isn’t that terrifying?

What if Pico Iyer shows up and sees how I’ve been ribbing him? (After a whole post of lavishing, mind you.) What if the guy from Dead or Alive drops by and reads the comments on the spinner post and discovers how I’ve compared him to the child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?

Oh dear. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m glad M.F.K. Fisher is dead. So I won’t gnaw my nails to the nubs as I write her essayist post in a few days.

I suppose there’s only one thing I can do if more famous folks mosey on over. I will simply take a deep breath and muster all my spunkiness.

We’re off for a few days of camping with our homeschooling buddies. Let me know if I should eat a s’more for you. See you next week.

And he said, “Well, you know…Pico Iyer.”

Yes, I know, I know. My little essay project is self-indulgent and academic. It probably scares off more readers than it interests.

So I started another post, which turned into an earnest, humorless treatise on homeschooling. 

No, no, no! I need something light and fun! With happy family pictures of an inspiring activity!

Don’t have it.

It’s time for the search engine post.

One of my favorite parts of blogging is getting to see on my Blog Stats just what search engine terms people use to get to my blog. It’s always entertaining–sometimes because I can’t believe people would type such phrases into a search engine, sometimes because I can’t believe that a particular phrase led to my blog. Consider:

2 big plants in ebb and flow. What does this mean? And why did it lead you to my blog?

how baby Pokemon are made. Well, you see, first you take a mommy Pokemon, and a then you take a daddy Pokemon…

Pokemon satin evil little children. Oh, this must have linked to my tutorial for stitching up evil little Pokemon children out of satin. Not. (And doesn’t this searcher seem a tad angry?)

scarry and bald. Eww. I will have you know that I’ve never written about anyone who was scarry and bald. I have written about Richard Scarry and my (now-grown) bald baby son, however. 

Where is Jon Bon Jovi’s house? First of all, let me offer a little search engine advice. You don’t type in questions as if Google is an all-knowing oracle. (Oh, no–now I’m going to end up on searches for Google and Oracle…) You type in phrases which are likely to appear on the document you’re looking for. And then there’s the Bon Jovi thing. Ever since I wrote that post about Mr. T loving Bon Jovi back in February, I’ve gotten a Bon Jovi hit to my blog almost daily. Those searchers must be mighty disappointed when they get here and find Pico Iyer. And no, I don’t know where Jon Bon Jovi’s house is.

Wow she stunning. Wow she stunning? Really? And this led you to my blog? Why, thank you. I think.

I don’t like Sandra Dodd. I’m sorry. Did typing that into a search engine make you feel better? I kinda like her, myself.

machine stitched purple guilt. This is one of my all-time favorites. It’s so poetic. Of course, H pretty much shot the beauty out of the thing when he pointed out that the blog searcher was probably trying to type “machine stitched purple quilt”.

Wii children playing too much waldorf. I get lots and lots of Waldorf hits, coming for the My Waldorf Guilt posts. But this one takes the cake. H and I like to picture little animated Wii miis on the TV, playing with wooden kitchens and toy trolls. It’s all about word order, folks.

Van Halen waldorf. I can’t imagine what this person was looking for. Did they think that Eddie Van Halen is a practitioner of Waldorf? Somehow, I just don’t see it.

I try inventing myself every day. Well, good for you. And I hope typing that into a search engine is empowering. But I have no idea how this led you to my blog.

How to cultivate genius kids. I guess I let this searcher down, big time. But I’d sure love to know what he or she found out.

So, dear readers, do any of you follow the searches to your blog? Got any good ones? (Hey, beats Pico Iyer! Poor Pico…)

Mr. T leaves crazy little play tableaus all over the house. Constantly. He immerses himself in an imaginary landscape and lingers there, and then eventually moves to another room, another game before I’ve noticed what’s happened.

There are Zoob creations on the couch. Zoob creations beside The Beatles.

The other day when I sat in my writing chair and tried to put my feet on the footrest, I discovered this:

There’s a Crazy Bone parade on top of the piano.

Not to mention the constant explosion of pens and pencils across the kitchen table. Sometimes he uses them as art supplies. Sometimes they’re yet more characters in his games.

Does he clean up one “mess” before starting another? Why, of course not!

This drives Chris absolutely crazy. He’s one of those rare husbands who is neater than his wife. (Which is wonderful in many ways–the man knows how to wield a vacuum–but it can also make me feel like I’m a slob. Which I don’t think I am. Usually.)

I understand the need to help Mr. T take responsibility and learn to clean up after himself. But I’m a sucker for creative messes. The “I’m still playing with that” excuse works on me every time. Because he really does flit back and forth between his games. I’m always willing to let an imaginary world live on a little longer, at the risk of a cluttered living room. 

I don’t do well with enforcing the old rule: You have to clean up one mess before you start another. 

Plus, I’m home with Mr. T all day. I appreciate the fact that I have a kid who is able to entertain himself for hours–even if it means that I can’t walk through the upstairs hallway. 

So I struggle with knowing when to insist on clean-up, and when to let the clutter lie. Yes, I want Mr. T to learn to clean up after himself. Yes, I want a neat house. Yes, I want to keep my husband sane.

But I also understand that when your kid snaps together a bunch of Zoobs and forms something he calls A Galaxy of Wonder, it’s, well, wondrous.

*my desk these days*

The workshop is called Nurturing Young Writers. I’ll be speaking for an hour-and-a half. Yikes. I’m sure my family can sympathize with anyone who has to listen to me ramble on for an hour-and-a-half.

Well. I do plan to open up the workshop in the last part, and have the group brainstorm writing ideas and audiences for their kids.

Anyway, getting ready for this workshop has been good for me. It’s forced me to look at my thoughts on how kids learn to write, to organize and outline them. And the exciting part? There are some ideas here that I haven’t seen elsewhere. That might even be original.

Everyone should have a brilliant friend, and I have a few. One of the shiniest is my old college friend Emily, who designs websites for writers. On Sunday we trawled the farmer’s market, following her adorable and likewise quite brilliant three-year-old and letting her eat too much ice cream so we could talk. I described my book idea to her, and she had some very interesting thoughts about how I might share portions of the book as I write it. To see how it goes, and, as they say in the industry, to create buzz. (I don’t really like that phrase–unless I think of it in terms of bees: working together, singing in a low hum.)

Which made me think of you, my faithful blog readers. If I were to share some ideas about writing with kids, I wonder if there are any that might be of particular interest to you. These are a few topics I’ll be exploring in my workshop:

• Transcribing kids’ writing–how it can be a powerful tool for helping kids develop their voices as writers, and how we can use it for years, until kids develop fluency at writing.
• How the main goals of a writing education should be helping our kids develop their writing voices, and helping them enjoy writing. And how to let kids lead their educations as writers.
• How the mechanics of writing–spelling, grammar, penmanship–should be of far less importance than developing a young writer’s voice. And how those mechanics can fall into place naturally through transcribing kids’ writing, and helping them enjoy writing.
• How creating a literate environment in your home can have a major impact on kids as writers. How kids can explore the craft of writing through casual, spontaneous conversations about the books you read together, and the films you watch.
• How to help kids find genres and styles of writing that interest them. How to make writing topics of any personal interest. How allowing kids to select their topics is much more powerful than assigning them.
• The importance of audience in motivating kids to write. And how to find audiences for homeschooled writers.

So, what do you think? Are there any topics here that hold some interest for you? I’d love your feedback.

“Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images.”

This line comes from a thoughtful essay by Pico Iyer called The Joy of Less.  It’s a wonderful essay on living simply, but it was the line above, which is rather tangential to the essay’s theme, that made me catch my breath, like something had appeared from nowhere around a corner.

Are words really coming to seem like accessories to images? The thought saddens and terrifies me, the same way yet another local indie bookstore closure does.

I’m constantly chiding myself, when posting to this blog, for being too long-winded. People want pretty pictures I tell myself. And they want just a little inspiring text to go with them, to take along after they click away. I read several blogs like that, and am often charmed by them. They read like poetry.

But as much as I love and admire and learn from poetry, I’m not a poet. I think of myself as an essayist. And essayists are wordy. They stalk their subjects, like Annie Dillard with her muskrats. They let paragraphs build with rhythm and surprise like Joan Didion. They circle around what’s transitory in life and try to trap it for a moment, like E.B. White.

But I worry, like Iyer, that we’re losing our patience for such carefully crafted writing. Or at least we’re setting it apart as something different, something to read in a book now and then. I worry about how the internet is changing writing. We can say so much to so many so easily. We don’t craft our words–we let them tumble out of us and then we hit publish.

The effect this is having, I fear, is that we’re becoming a society of skimmers. There’s so much blather out there that we don’t have time to linger over words. We tack across paragraphs looking for what matters and move on. And often it’s only the accompanying photograph that stops us and makes us pause. Precisely Iyer’s point.

And I’m like anyone else: I click on my blog list and I skim and I tack. I envy the blogs with pretty photos and pithy posts–and large readerships. And I kick myself for being wordy here and wish I wouldn’t care so much when the horizontal line on my blog stat graph looks more like foothills than Alps.

But then I look at the tagline at the top of my blog and I remember why I started writing here: where a mother tries to cultivate creativity and a sense of wonder in her kids–and does a whole lot of wondering herself in the process. A whole lot of wondering. That’s what I’d always planned. And wondering isn’t pithy and pretty: it’s a path with many forks and turns and a final destination not immediately visible. The hope, I suppose, is that I’ll find a few readers with the patience to wander that path with me. And those readers will talk with me as we wander, and make the trip entirely worth it.

So if you’re amongst the handful of readers who have made it down to the bottom of this post, I thank you humbly. If something stopped you from skimming and you went back and read paragraphs word-by-word, I wish I could give you a hug. There may not be many of you, but I’m deeply grateful for my little handful. And grateful that there are people in this world who think of words as more than mere accessories, more than dangly earrings or platform shoes for images.

P.S. I realize that the title of this post isn’t entirely accurate. This isn’t an image-less post, it’s a photo-less post. There are a few images here, but they’re rendered in grey font, and require the reader’s attention to animate them. If you saw them dear reader, once again, thank you.

About that title…

I had, cheekily, submitted the essay with the title “How to Homeschool” since the piece is written in the guise of a how-to-manual. There had been some emails back and forth with Mothering about changes to the essay; one of their suggestions was adding a subtitle to my title, something like One Mother’s Instruction Manual.

It wasn’t until I saw the published article–while shopping at Whole Foods with Mr. T–that I realized they’d changed the title altogether to “The-Never-At-Home Homeschoolers”. The title seemed a little odd to me, since never-being-at-home is only one small part of the essay. But I was too thrilled about seeing my writing in a magazine to fret about it. Plus there was another surprise: those charming illustrations, which I hadn’t known about either. Aren’t they fabulous? What amazes me is that they really look like our family, although the illustrator, Ben Hatke, had only the text of the essay to work from. (Do check out Ben’s website–his work is impressive, and his blog lets you into the intriguing life of an artist.)

The illustrations were my main reason for linking the essay as a PDF file. I’ll bet I don’t really have the rights to display the essay in this format, but I’ll give it a go. I’d like the essay to be accessible to folks who are considering homeschooling, so please feel free to pass the link along. Let me know if you have trouble opening the file.

* * *

In other news of things I’m doing that I really shouldn’t, one of my dear friends sent an email about the tadpole-collecting of my last post. She pointed out that collecting animals in California is illegal. Yikes. She also noted that if I was going to partake in illegal activities, I should probably not mention in the post the location of my illicitness. And also the concern that I might have inadvertently collected eggs of a protected species.

Oh dear. And here I was thinking it would be better to raise a local species that could be returned to the proper habitat.

Life seems so complicated these days. Oh, for the summer days of my childhood, when my brother and I could ride our bikes, unaccompanied, to the creek that ran at the edge of our housing tract and collect interesting creatures in jars without anyone caring. Kids these days seem to have fewer and fewer opportunities to interact with life as directly as we did. 

Sigh.

I helped a bunch of Lulu’s friends get our homeschool group’s first-ever yearbook off to the press. There was a fair amount of  last-minute photography and proofreading to do. Then I spent all weekend coordinating baked goods sales at Lulu’s ballet shows.

what dancers do backstage

Oh, and I had a kid turn seventeen. How could that possibly be?

We cooked dinner for a herd of hungry teenagers on Saturday. In between all those ballet shows.

I’m not the only one who’s been busy. There are approximately 10,000 girls in my front yard, working away. The ultimate cliched description of busy.

They’ve been here for three weeks now, and it’s been an adventure already. We’re using foundationless frames, which you can read more about here. Basically, rather than having the bees build on wax or plastic comb, you give them a little strip of something to start on. We’ve inserted paint stir sticks–which fit quite nicely into the frames–with a little beeswax painted on them. Here’s a video showing just how to do this. 

The frames are drying upside down in this photo.

The bees build smaller cells when left to build it on their own. Some think that this helps keep Varroa mite problems under control–although this is disputed by others. Some think bees prefer to make comb this way, so they build it faster. If nothing else, it keeps the comb free of the chemicals which are bound to be in wax foundation, and it makes for pretty easy harvest when using the crush and strain method. Check out this video to see that in action.

I’d like to raise these bees as unobtrusively as possible, so I thought I’d try it out.

When we opened the hive after the first week, we saw that the bees had started building comb alright. But in the wrong place. They’d built eight perfect rows of comb on a hive piece called the inner cover.

This was my mistake. I’d left some extra space in the hive by leaving a wooden shim between the hive body and that inner cover. The shim had been in there to accommodate a baggie filled with syrup, which is one way to feed the bees until they get their hive fully up and running. Trouble was, our baggie leaked because I’d done a few things wrong in that department too, so I’d gone back to feeding them via the can that came with the bees. In which case I should have removed that shim–if you leave any extra space in a hive, the bees will use it.

I went to the Beemaster Forum for help. The comb pieces were too small to tie into frames with string or rubber bands, which is what is typically done when repositioning comb. Someone who’d had a similar problem had cut the comb out with an uncapping knife and rewaxed it into the frame with some melted beeswax. We tried it.

It wasn’t easy. New comb is beautiful and white but very delicate and fragile. We had gloves on because the comb was covered with bees. The day was cold and I was just getting the flu. But we got some comb on every frame, and put them back in the hive.

It worked! When we checked last week, only one piece had fallen out; it was big enough to we rubber-band back in place. On every other frame, the bees had continued building gorgeous comb. We saw eggs, we saw larvae.

We saw Queen Bee-atrice!

See her there, a bit right of center, with the longer abdomen?

I did a quick check yesterday. Most of the frames were nearly filled out with comb, and there were lots and lots of larvae, plus much capped brood, which are larvae cells that the bees have capped so the larvae can develop into pupae. And Queen Bee-atrice was walking circles around the center of a frame again, just like she’s supposed to be doing.

Most of the frames were almost filled out this week.

Fun thing is, I’ve roped the whole family in. Chris got suckered in from the beginning, when I needed a partner out there, especially through the comb-transferring debacle. (Although he is not fond of wearing his geeky bee hat in the front yard.) H has become the beekeeping photographer, and he’s taken many great shots via telephoto. I can’t believe he got that shot of Queen Bee from the distance he did. Guess I should have realized his video-filming talents would transfer to the still camera. Lulu and Mr. T seem sufficiently fascinated by the whole endeavor, and my parents, who happened to be here on the last two Sundays when I opened the hive, are enjoying the ever-wacky antics of their daughter. Last night, when my dad asked my mom if she’d started the salad yet (they were making a birthday dinner for the family, at our house) my mom called back, “You do it. I’m watching Tricia and her bees.”

So hopefully the girls will stay busy, but I’m looking forward to life slowing down a little. Before my favorite month of May passes by.

So I have this crazy idea. I hesitate to write about it here for fear of jinxing it. But then I thought about my little essayist project, and how posting about it here each month has been such good incentive for me. I don’t think I would have kept up with reading these essayists if I hadn’t made the commitment on the blog. (And may I wax rhapsodic about Joan Didion once again? Have you read The Year of Magical Thinking? Wow.)

So this idea came suddenly, while I was running on a Saturday morning. It was the collision of a handful of things that had been simmering in my mind. 

The first was the fact that I’d been feeling down after receiving a couple more rejections to my essays. I’ve written about rejection before. Part of the trouble is that I’m writing what some people laughingly call creative nonfiction, some call literary nonfiction. Basically I’m writing personal essays about parenting which are too long and too writerly to find a home in mainstream magazines. Trouble is, you can count the markets for this type of writing on one hand. So the competition is devilish, and I keep coming this close to getting something published. (One editor likes my essay but the senior editor doesn’t, blah, blah, blah.) Anyway, I have three lovingly crafted essays that represent about two years of my writing life sitting on my computer doing nothing. Which stirred up a little cloud of self-pity. Poor me.

At the time of this pity-fest, I was also writing a proposal for a workshop I’d like to give at my local homeschool conference this summer. I gave a workshop on helping parents facilitate writing workshops last year, and I enjoyed it, so in addition to proposing that workshop again, I toyed around with the idea for a new one and came up with something called Nurturing Young Writers.

And guess where the idea for this workshop came from? Why from you, my wonderful handful of regular readers! I started thinking about a few posts I wrote here, on invented spelling and taking dictation. And I thought about all the insightful comments you left me, and it occurred to me that people are interested in small aspects of writing like this.

I have a lot of ideas about writing. Simple ideas which I sort of take for granted. Ideas which maybe germinated when I was a teacher, but really came to life when I started working with my kids and their original, opinionated minds. But I think what’s influenced my thinking most has been my own quest to try to learn to write. That sometimes pathetic, multi-year project which I refer to as homeschooling my MFA. I write and I think about writing and the writing process an awful lot. And I suppose that’s worked its way into the time I spend with my kids. 

I think there are many ways you can nurture writing in kids–oftentimes without them having to write at all. There’s dictation, which I’ve been pondering since that post, and I’m coming to believe is an even more powerful tool than I’d originally considered. There are conversations about writing that can happen organically as you and your kids read together, or listen to audiobooks. There are lots of little ideas like this, which cumulatively can help form a young writer–without curriculum, without assignments, without writing prompts.

And as I ran that Saturday morning, all these thoughts swirled together in the pot of vegetarian soup that is my brain and here’s the audacious idea that came to the surface: There might be a book here.

I know, I know, what do I know about writing a book? I can’t even get my danged essays published! And I’ve never been interested in writing how-to stuff anyway. How-to writing is dry. It’s boring. And how can I presume to tell someone how to do something, when I’m constantly discovering new ideas myself?

But I kept running, kept thinking. What if I presented a collection of ideas as just that: ideas? Not a curriculum, not a method. Just a collection of options which might get a parent thinking, which might work for a particular kid. 

And then–and here was the big epiphany moment for me–I started thinking about my favorite books on writing. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, of course. And Poemcrazy, by Susan Wooldridge. And all of Ralph Fletcher’s books, especially the ones written for kids about the craft of writing. All of those books actually read less like how-to books, and more like collections of personal essays. They not only offer fantastic ideas about writing, they model good writing.

This was when my simmering brain started boiling over.

What if, instead of using my writing time to write unpublishable essays, I spent that time writing personal essays that might actually help someone? 

Last year for my birthday, my parents gave me a lovely journal from Levenger, and it’s been sitting around waiting for the right project. It’s called a Circa journal, and what’s cool about it is that the pages are removable. You can pull them out, and move them around. It’s also nice and big, and it opens flat. So right after my run I started jotting down notes. I made a separate page for each “chapter” that had already come to mind, knowing I could just jot down ideas as they come, adding pages as necessary.

So yes, I think it would be a little audacious to say that I’m writing a book. But I’m excited about the notion, and at least I’m busy at work on a new essay. I worked on it four mornings last week and one evening, which felt great. That kept the work alive in my mind all day, and I jotted down some notes as I did other things–which is the only way to make progress with a piece of writing.

I worry about trying to balance a project like this with blogging. Writing posts and responding to other blogs can get time-consuming, as many of you know. On the other hand, I think my blog-writing led directly to this project, so I don’t want to give it up! But there may be more posts here about writing–both mine and the kids’. And more posts about the creative process, which is something I hope to make more time for in my days. A past interview on the Writers on Writing podcast with “creativity coach” Eric Maisel was inspiring…

Here’s hoping that this post serves as a commitment rather than a curse.