Find delight in small, everyday things. | ![]() |
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Find delight in small, everyday things. | ![]() |
![]() | Let new ideas and experiences astonish you. |
![]() | Learn to be content with your own puzzlement, and to nurture the puzzlement around you. It's okay not to have all the answers, but to let the questions confuse you for a while as you move in new directions. |
![]() | Every choice you make should be made consciously, thoughtfully, for real and good reasons. |
She was sad and said by the time she saw her grandson, he would be walking and she was missing all the baby days. We were nice with one another, and said bye, and I walked away.
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She got tears in her eyes and nodded and she hugged Kirby with her eyes closed and rocked him a little bit, kind of got the feel of him, and the smell of his head, which wouldn't have been as good as her own grandson's, but it was better than nothing.
When she handed him back she seemed much calmer and better. It was therapeutic for her. And I've always been glad that I thought of it before it was too late.
For the record, this happened in the stacks by the north wall of what was then called the Wyoming Branch library, behind Hoffmantown Center, in Albuquerque. It was surrounded by rose gardens. Now it has been renamed the Tony Hillerman Library, but in 1987, it wasn't called that.
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Focus on your kids. Learn about learning. | ![]() |
![]() | Respect and acceptance are more important than test scores and "performance." Understanding is more important than recitation. |
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It has half of its original candy. Reese's and Hershey's miniatures. Everyone here likes that stuff, but it could last a long time more, because nobody here is "needing" that stuff. Not craving it. It's just candy.
Don't aim for 50/50. If 50% is right, then 49% is wrong, and 65% would be something get angry about. If you both aim for more than half, you'll meet around the middle, around half the time. If you want the other person to stick around, "around" is the goal. | ![]() |
2020 update: Thirteen years later, Kirby is married, with three children, in a house in Albuquerque. They all get along sweetly.
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"If you are choosing to be a mother, move beyond playing at it, and *be* it." —Pam Laricchia | ![]() |
"The big thing is to remember that you don't need once-and-for-all solutions, just for-now solutions." —Meredith Novak | ![]() |
We recently took Fisher to a Blue Man Group concert—his first real "grown-up" show. Again, I could see all the connections being made—he watched how the instruments were being played, listened to how the sounds and the rhythms came together, jumped and bopped his head and let it all come together inside of him. His knowledge and awareness of music is growing deep and wide—it's not about "the basics," but about a gestalt, a holistic, systemic approach.
When you ask what component you are missing, this is what I keep coming up with. Are you looking in the wrong places? Are you looking for the basics when in fact, your son's knowledge and understanding is deep and wide and whole? What you see as "basic" are just a few Lego pieces that he'll fill in as he goes—but in looking for those, are you missing the incredibly large, whole creation that he's built up?
words by Sandra Dodd on Radical Unschooling Info, a facebook group
photo by Dylan Lewis, on a solo trip to Italy
Click the photo to read things by Deb Lewis, his mom.
"I want for my kids to grow up and hear that mommy voice in their head saying positive supportive things—not tearing them down, but encouraging them." —Pam Sorooshian | ![]() |
![]() | "I'm more interested in learning what they think of the world than in telling them about the world." —Linnea King |
![]() | "Being an unschooling parent means finding something you *can* like in what your kids do. It means finding a way to support them, lovingly. It's a shift away from 'eww' to 'ahh!'" —Robin Bentley |
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It's not like moving to another planet. You'll still have the same house, same car, same phone number, you'll still be sitting in the same chair. It will just be different. And everytime I've ever said that to anyone, they seemed somewhere between totally relieved and shocked. . . . .
They were flipping out. They were really spinning out, off the planet. Like, "Where will we be? What will happen? How will we ever get back?"
Back to where? You're in your own house.