Museum tea

Have you ever been "museum sick"? Sometimes a museum is so large and overwhelming that my thought is "Do they have a good cafeteria? A cafe?"

This teabag was at the Escher Museum, in The Hague, when Joyce and I went to speak in 2013, and Rippy took us touristing


Photos are good for memories and ideas.

I miss museums, and I miss being able to travel and meet up with unschoolers.

I hope everyone who reads this will still, someday, get a chance to see so much museum that all you can think about is sitting down with some tea or food.

Museum Sickness
photo by Sandra Dodd

Private ideas

I love museums. Museums of any sort are special to me, and sometimes I'm thinking about the building or whose idea it was or where the funding comes from to keep the lights and heat on, and to hire people to keep it all safe and clean.

What others are thinking in a museum, even if they're with me, could never be exactly the same. An object will, without fail, remind me of a personal experience, or of when or where I first learned of such things. If it's SO NEW to me that I'm surprised, I tend to think of which friend of mine, alive or dead, I would most like to share it with, or to ask about it. Sometimes that's my dad, especially if the object is an old truck, or a metal structure.

Sometimes I've been the person one of my kids shared something with. That's sweet, and I get to know a bit about what they're connecting to and with.

Long ago, I came to see the whole world as a museum. I love that, too.

SandraDodd.com/museum
photo by Rippy Dusseldorp

Shops, museums, and museum shops

Sometimes a shop can be like a museum.

Some museums have displays of shops (or things from shops, in the past).

Some museums have gift shops.

Even when you don't buy an object, you can still admire, inquire, or (maybe) photograph it to ask about or think about later.

Your House as a Museum
photo by Sandra Dodd

Messages from your stuff

My maiden name was Adams, and I remember being taunted by kids singing the theme song to The Addams Family TV show, but that line "Their house is a museum where people come to see 'em" stuck with me always. When I go to other people's houses I love to see what they have. The things they've chosen to keep, or collected over the years, teach me a good deal about those people themselves—their interests, their history, their sense of humor, and philosophy.

From Your House as a Museum,
written in 1999, before I so carefully avoided the word "teach."

Photo by Sandra Dodd, of a display
at the Bryn Athyn Church School; not my art;
not my "museum" sample, but it was fun to see.
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The Museum of Everything

When you're talking to young children who are figuring out their new language and their new world, avoid saying "always" or "never." Instead of making rules for him or dire predictions, explain your concerns and thoughts.  Give him some "why" to go with his "what" and "where" and "when." Even give him some "why" to go with his "who." Don't forget that he won't know what "aunt" and "cousin" mean. He won't automatically figure out "neighbor" or "co-worker."

You're like a docent in The Museum of Everything.


The quote is from page 63 (or 68) of The Big Book of Unschooling
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Museum of the Random

I love thrift shops, charity shops, yard sales, flea markets, car boot sales. In The Netherlands, on the King's birthday, people are allowed to put things out in front of their houses, to sell. Then they need to wait a year. Albuquerque has an ordinance that says a family can have a garage sale or yard sale twice a year. Most people never do, and some have one nearly every week, so it all evens out.


I have some wonderful things with good stories, bought off a little table at a casual local fair at a hill fort in Cambridgeshire in 1979. From a yard sale in Colorado Springs in 1970, I got a Chinese Checkers board made of wood, with a set of marbles I still have. But even the names of the places are exotic and collectible: Wandlebury. Colorado Springs (called more locally "C-Springs" or "the Springs").

When digital cameras came along, I bought fewer things and spent less money for other people's used treasures. As museums and ever-changing collections, they are wonderous. Unlike "real museums," if you love something, you might be able to buy it! But you can probably pick it up and examine it, even if you don't take it home.

SandraDodd.com/museum
photo by Sandra Dodd, at Family Thrift, not far from the house,
a shop to benefit programs for veterans of the Vietnam War

Everything in the Whole Wide World

There is a Sesame Street book called Grover and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum. There is a "things under the sea" room and "things in the sky" room, but still each room is just a room in a museum, no windows, everything out of context. Then he opens a big door marked "Everything Else" and...

The picture that follows is here, and more text, but what's outside the door of your own home is more important.

art by Joe Mathieu, early 1970's
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The Museum of Everything

When you're talking to young children who are figuring out their new language and their new world, avoid saying "always" or "never." Instead of making rules for him or dire predictions, explain your concerns and thoughts.  Give him some "why" to go with his "what" and "where" and "when." Even give him some "why" to go with his "who." Don't forget that he won't know what "aunt" and "cousin" mean. He won't automatically figure out "neighbor" or "co-worker."

You're like a docent in The Museum of Everything.


The quote is from page 63 (or 68) of The Big Book of Unschooling
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Creating history

Remember you don't need a museum to find things your kids will be fascinated by and learn from. You probably have things right in your home that would not only connect to history, but it might be their history. And will be from then on, anyway. Things we have from thrift stores aren't from my family, but for my grandchildren they will be from their family.

Marta Venturini shared that in 2014, from
Your House as a Museum (chat transcript)
and facebook shared it back to both of us this week.
photo by Sandra Dodd

Following different kinds of trails

I took this photo in a history museum called Archeon, in The Netherlands. They have sections portraying different historical periods, with full-size buildings, and with guides in costume, making things, playing instruments, cooking, training birds, and many other things. There are gardens growing. There are chickens.

When I decided to use the photo, I googled "Roman hopscotch" to see whether there was documentation for that, and found this quote: (source)

Hopscotch began in ancient Britain during the early Roman Empire. The original hopscotch courts were over 100 feet long and used for military training exercises. ... Roman children drew their own smaller courts in imitation of the soldiers, added a scoring system and "Hopscotch" spread throughout Europe.

This is a kind of history about which more is known as time passes, rather than less. More may yet be discovered. Whether the diagram in the photo is historical or not, maybe people at the museum know. Either way is fine.

Learn history lightly, because new things will be learned, a new focus will come, and if you live long enough, it will change again. Collect ideas and information so that connections will continue to form, your whole life long.

Many images of hopscotch layouts, and many lead to more info
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Your House as a Museum

There are stories behind the things you have. You're saving history, geography, social ties, mysteries. Share those stories with your children and your guests, if there's a lull, or a connection to be made.

SandraDodd.com/museum
photo by Sandra Dodd

Means, encouragement, time and space

If the child is allowed to sit with mom or walk across the room, read or not read without pressure or fanfare, walk or not walk as he wishes, if his environment is kept comfortable (taking his personality, fears, needs into account when arranging his comfort) and if he has the means and encouragement and time and space to explore his ever-expanding world, he will learn.

SandraDodd.com/labels
photo by Sandra Dodd, at a tile museum in Lisbon
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Which hat?

These hats are in a museum in Pennsylvania, in a reproduction milliner's shop.

Recently Just Add Light had a quote and link to something by Pam Sorooshian about whether one should be a child's friend, or parent. Pam knows one should be both, and explained that elegantly.

I was with a group of home ed families in France, some unschoolers, others in the various stages of consideration of unschooling, and someone asked to to tell how I am as a woman. Bea Mantovani was the translator, and said the question didn't really translate. The questioner tried to clarify. She said I had spoken of my husband, and of being a mother, but how was I as a woman, separate from that?

I remember my confusion better than my response. One thing I said was that I AM a mother.

I suspected, and it was later confirmed, that it was a socio-political question, a feminist concept about identity above and beyond motherhood. But the question sets motherhood in a low position, if only the brightest and the best exist apart from and outside of that, and if to have no answer made me unaware or less whole.

For one thing, though, I was in France speaking to people because I had been invited to do so. I've written thousands of thousands of words about parenting and how children can exist in a peaceful world of easy growth in all directions.

I'm a changing-the-world woman. But even that didn't answer the question, because it still was an extension of mothering, which I had explained had involved sharing and modeling since I nursed babies at La Leche League meetings.

I would most like to be known as a woman of integrity, and for that to be true, I can't deny or reject any aspect of my being. I can't divide myself into parts and still be one integral whole. Any hat I might put on is still on my own head.

SandraDodd.com/integrity

Affection and Esteem (from this blog, June 6, 2012)
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Things and places

I like museums, but if you can see the whole world as a museum, your life will light up!

If you can see art in normal, functional things, your life will lighten up!


SandraDodd.com/mystery
photo by Sandra Dodd, of a dam and some tumbleweeds
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Finding art

Be brave! Not all art is in museums. Not everything that's in a museum is timeless, glorious art. Find accidents, jokes, coincidences... Share them with your children, share them with your friends.


SandraDodd.com/art
photo by Sandra Dodd, and it's a link to where and what it is

Safety and welcome

This gate was made for an open-air museum in The Netherlands, in a style that's called "wattle," in England. I like it.

I love gates, especially when you can see through them, but they keep children, animals and gardens safe. Though they might keep strangers out, they can welcome friends in!

I hope you have a gate or two you use, or see, or like, in your life.

Other gates
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Something different

Things you are used to are exotic to others. There are things you see every day that some people might never, ever see in person.

Lightning storms. Snow. Kangaroos. Tumbleweeds. Tugboats. Mountains. Beaches. Cargo bikes. Lifts / elevators. Temples. Shave ice. Castles. Cactus. Alligators.

Inventory your special local treasures!

SandraDodd.com/museum
photo by Sandra Dodd
(click it for a video)
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Whole people, now

Your children are not works in progress. They are whole people, now and from the day they were born. If you can try to see that, rather than think people are not finished until they're finished, it might help you.

SandraDodd.com/respect
photo by Sandra Dodd, of Adam Daniel picking out a souvenir shirt
at the Rattlesnake Museum in Albuquerque
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Strewing, and teens

Someone asked about strewing for a teen. I wrote:

Your family needs to be interested and interesting. Go places. Bring things and people in. Visit friends of yours who have cool stuff or do interesting things. Ask him to go with you if you take the dog to the vet. Drive home different ways and take your time. Putz around. Go to the mall some morning when it's not at all full of teens, and windowshop.

If you can afford it, find something in another town like a play, concert, museum, event and take him there. Stay overnight.

Go touristing somewhere not too far from you. Like if you had out-of-town guests, but just go with your son.

There are other ideas, too, at SandraDodd.com/strew/teens
photo by Karen James
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Playing for real

Playing with words makes them come to life.

The history of England, of math, of writing, of counting... all clued above and in all the histories of words. Any portal into the universe is as real as any other. If an interest in language or butterflies or patterns or water creates connections for that person to anything else in the world, that can lead to EVERYTHING else in the world.

A parent cannot decipher the whole world for her child, but she can help him begin to decipher it.

SandraDodd.com/etymology
photo by Sandra Dodd, of a sign in The Mercer Museum
in Doylestown, Pennsylvania
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