What Else is Happening

As predicted, I am tripping over tomato and basil plants while we wait for weather warm enough for planting. I am trying peanuts this year; my first attempts at starting them inside resulted in rotting seeds that smelled awful. I was advised to try again, with charcoal in the soil to lighten it up. I had a spot in the warmer part of the garden where I had burned before, so I tried some outside with wall-o-water cylinders to warm the soil. No news on that, yet.

The potatoes are in, the peas are up, and we've been eating greens from the garden. I also tried dandelions from the yard this year. They were good, parboiled for a few minutes and then sauteed with a little garlic. You just need to clean them very well because the stray blade of grass is like trying to chew dental floss. Rhubarb is up and very vigorous. I've been selling a lot to passersby and to the Covered Wagon Farm for pies. Rhubarb traffic is a constant interruption, but rhubarb lovers are such nice people that I don't mind.

There is one more bake sale, this Saturday, in front of the Leland Mercantile, for the Odyssey of the Mind teams that are going to world competition. They have managed to raise over $1o,000 in a about six weeks, though bake sales, car washes, a movie premier, large and small donations, and grants from the Leland Educational Foundation and the Oleson Foundation.

I will be baking again for this sale, but I have to go to work earlier and attend a noon meeting so my output will be less than the 20 loaves I baked last time. Maybe some Rhubarb Crumb Cake would be in order.

All this happens, but we still stop to admire the orioles, indigo buntings, and hummingbirds. And to hunt for morels. I never find any, but all that hunting gives me opportunity to note the locations of raspberries and gooseberries so I can go back later in the summer. I came home from work late one night and found a Cool Whip container of morels on my kitchen table. It seems the neighbor was weed whacking when he found the mother lode of morels on the site where the former neighbor cut down an apple tree 12 years ago. Not many people will share morels, but I have wonderful neighbors.

Small Victories

That's Richard, with one of the biggest walleyes he has ever caught. He got up early this morning and went down to the dock as the sun was just rising. He nailed this one on the first cast, then struggled to land it as it was surely going to break the line if he tried to haul it up conventionally. It weighed in over 6 pounds and yielded some beautiful fillets.

I woke up early (by my standards, but hours after Richard) to drive Anna to her dog sitting job. I was able to snap that picture because over the weekend I took my old broken camera to work and spent my breaks disassembling it and trying to figure out why the batteries drained within ten seconds of turning it on. I was looking for bad contacts or a short, but once I took the case off and tested it, it started working almost fine again. I say almost fine because it makes a strange new noise when the lens extends. Before I took the case off, the lens was totally stuck and the camera was wasting all of the battery energy trying to move the lens. Once it started working, I put it all back together, testing it at each step, and now I have a working camera again.

The camera is going on four years old, which is ancient in the world of digital cameras. Richard has his eyes shut in the picture, just like he had his eyes shut in Shelagh's graduation picture. I'm still wishing I had a camera with a screen that I could see without my glasses. But my wishes and my budget just don't coincide. It's good to have any camera again.

I spent all Friday baking bread for a bake sale to help Leland's Odyssey of the Mind teams go to world competition. Anna didn't do OM this year, but her old team members still have their teeth sunk into structure problems. Her old teammates now are split among two bound-for-worlds teams, and it's going to take the whole community to raise enough money to get them there. I contributed 20 loaves of bread, one of many bakers, and I hear the Saturday morning bake sale raised over $600. Their next fundraiser is dinner at the Steak Haus by Sugarloaf on Thursday May 15th from 5-8 pm. . All tickets are $15.00. You have a choice of either a steak dinner, battered shrimp dinner or a veggie alfredo dinner. Team members are selling tickets and they are also available at Northwoods Kitchens.

I keep getting interrupted by people who saw the rhubarb sign. I take them out to cut some rhubarb, chat a little, and take their dollars. Eggs are selling, too, faster than my hens can lay. I've started giving away my tomato plants, using them to encourage the many people who are starting new gardens this year.

Odyssey of the Mind

My daughter Anna competed last year in Odyssey of the Mind, a creative problem solving competition for kids. I was dragged, kicking and screaming into the OM world. These posts tell the story:

I Still Don't Get OM March 12, 2005
More On OM March 17, 2005
On to OM Worlds April 25, 2005
Wild Goose Chase May 19, 2005

How Do the Geese Do It? May 20, 2005

Big Day at OM Worlds May 23, 2005

Laundry May 24, 2005

Home Again May 25, 2005

Home Again

Home from Boulder

In the end Leland's OM team placed 22nd in the Division 1 Crazy Columns. The kids were disappointed after the awards ceremony last night. 22nd in the world doesn't sound very impressive if you don't know how big the world is.

In the Minneapolis airport on the way there airport officials kept paging "Jason Kozlowski." Every time they paged him the kids would ask me "Who's Jason Kozlowski?" At first I thought that they just thought it was a funny name, but when they kept asking I realized that they expected me to know Jason Kozlowski and tell them where he lived or whose cousin he was or who he was married to. It hadn't dawned on them that there were people in the Minneapolis airport that I wasn't acquainted with.

So 22nd in the world seems way far back to them. On the way home a lady in Minneapolis saw their shirts and told them that she was from Traverse City and how proud she was that they had gone to worlds. She made them feel a little better.

The scores are online at this link. The first place team was a second team from Shanghai; their structure held 1270 lbs. Our team lost some ground on the spontaneous problem. Anna tells me that they misunderstood the nature of the problem (they thought it was a "verbal" and it was really a "verbal hands-on"). I'm not surprised, since they been too excited to listen most of the trip.

Anna fell asleep on the way home from the airport. She told me she liked Boulder because "you could walk everywhere." I remember Shelagh and Liz being excited when they were that age to go to Washington DC and ride the subway. To go somewhere without your mom driving you opens up so many more options....

Laundry

Putting Their Heads Together

Today is my day to be "support" person, taking the team's yellow Tshirts to the laundrymat, filling the rental car with gas, packing, and trying to anticipate what will need to be done before we leave at 4 am for our 7:30 flight home.

The laundrymat was in an older shopping center with a long room full of machines and a glass front that showcase the mountains as I stood in the back and waited for the dryer to finish. When I was in high school I had a social studies teacher that told us the only way to travel was to try to figure out what life was like for the people who lived in your destination. For this you have to go to a local grocery or park or something like that. The laundrymat is ideal because people talk to each other while they fold clothes.

The lady next to me was trying to figure out why her dryer was so noisy. It turns out her four year old's shorts had rocks in the pockets. She wanted to leave the rocks at the laundry, but he said that those rocks were "sorcerer's stones". She sounded like me on the way home from Lake Michigan, telling him "But we already have so many rocks at home!"

We are bringing rocks home from this trip. The mountain trail we took on Saturday was full of mica, rose quartz, and feldspar. Mica was the big attraction and we filled our pockets.

At Boulder Falls
Anna tells me that the spontaneous problem went well, but she won't say more than that since each team must promise not to say anything that might get leaked to a team that hasn't competed yet.


On the tram ride up the mountain

The Big Day at OM Worlds

Performing at Worlds

The kids performed their structure problem today. They did well, performing their play while the structure held 605 lbs.

It was a bit of a nailbiter, as their glue had burst in flight on the way here and the first batch of replacement glue failed to set up properly. Another kind of glue was procured and the structure was ready for weigh-in this morning, although they took a 10 point penalty for too much glue.

Richard and I watched the five teams before them perform. One team from Shanghai held 667 lbs and one after ours, also from Michigan, held over 800. In my opinion, our team outshone the others I saw for enthusiam and integrating their presentation with the structure testing.

They have a second task tomorrow, a "spontaneous" problem solving exercise where the team is given a task to perform and have to figure out what to do with no coaches present. Listening is the key, at least for this age.

After today's work, the team went limp in the heat. We had a brief thunderstorm but it is still in the 80's.

Yesterday we drove up into the mountains and took a tram ride up a mountain at Estes Park. The kids had fun feeding the ground squirrels out of their hands. Other teams are driving way up into the mountains to play in snow, but we've had it with that stuff.

How do the geese do it?

Seven kids and five adults start out at 5:30 am to travel 1500 miles on two flights through three airports. How long will it take?

We arrived in Boulder about 4 pm local time. It was about 90 degrees when we left the airport in Denver. On both flights our group had seats scattered through the plane, so we had pairs of kids sitting without adults. (On the second flight Anna and Autumn had window seats on opposite ends of the same row, but they negotiated with the other people in the row so that they could sit together. I was going to try to work it out for them but they handled it by themselves,)

Making our way through airports was challenging. There always seemed to be one or two kids who were so excited that they would get out well ahead of the group and end up taking the wrong turn, so we would have to retrieve them before we could head on in the proper direction. An "attractive V formation" would have been such an improvement.

Like most traveling it was hurry up and wait. Even when we got to Boulder we had another hour wait while Shannon went through the registration process. This time, though, there were other OM teams around and the bit of shade that our team had staked out turned out to be a prime piece of real estate for trading the souvenir pins that are a signature of OM events. The kids met other teams from Oregon, Singapore, Vermont, North Carolina, and Oklahoma, and traded pins with them.

Anna and Autumn just came back from a trip into the mountains and downtown to Pearl Street. Autumn says: "The were doing a trick on Pearl St. And Christian was part of the trick. He got to go up and help the guy who was performing. He threw stuff to him. The guy was on a soooo tall unicycle. We had to go 'One, two, three, JUGGLE!' Christian got all scared because he thought he had to catch the guy's flaming torches. But the guy blew them out and Christian caught them then."

Anna: "The mountains were just out of Boulder. They were so high we could hardly breathe. We went to a peak where we could climb on the rocks and it was fun and we watched the sunset. We saw five bikers. On the way down a biker passed us."

Wild Goose Chase

We're Off!
On a wild goose chase!
You may think it odd
That a squad
Such as ours
Can Perform
This role!

We leave in the morning for Odyssey of the Mind World Finals, but in my mind our theme song is the Wild Goose Chase from HONK! We will be in Boulder for five days. Our team's performance will be on live web cam, but I don't know the details yet. I will try to post while we're there.

The yard is scented with the very first lilac blossoms. Once again I feel like an idiot leaving town when the weather finally turned nice. The cool crops are in the garden and doing nicely. The rest will have to wait for my return.

The Petoskey News Review ran a nice editorial on school funding today. The seeds start to sprout.

While I'm gone I will check the Leland Report to see what I'm missing.

See you later!

On to OM Worlds

The OM team victorious at State Competition

The world is conspiring to drag me, kicking and screaming, into the realm of OM.

We had been planning that Richard would go with Anna to Boulder and I would stay home and work. As it turns out, someone else cancelled leaving an extra ticket and the itinerary only includes two of my work days so there is no reason to stay home. Except for the two teenagers, who are delighted to be left home alone. There are advantages to the old farm house on the busy corner in a nosy community; I don't worry about kids running amuck while I'm gone because they know everyone in town is watching.

I haven't been to Boulder since my brother Chris was in college there. I'm going to have to start hiking the hill behind the casino on my breaks so I don't get weak-kneed in Colorado.

Ever since the first OM competition I've been trying to get to the root of the state's school funding troubles and come up with some concrete actions that parents can take to help solve things. My search has has been confusing and pretty much fruitless. Lansing Has No Quick Fix for Schools tells the story as well as anyone. Big news is the lawsuit filed this week aginst the No Child Left Behind act , here is the editorial in the Detroit Free Press. On Thursday I will be attending a meeting about Proposal A and what should be done to make it work. Check back on Friday for the story.

One of the things I can do with the free sitemeter (that rainbow thingy in the corner of this site) is check and see how people found this site. In checking out blogs that link to this one I found found one called Yarn!, about knitting. Well, about knitting and other things; check out the entry called I Promised Timothy Leary, it was the funniest thing I read today. But that was before I saw the photo of the Raw Viking Chicken Hat.

More on OM

Saturday's post generated some comments. An old friend called me a "curmudgeon". From the net comes a comment:

As a parent (and team manager) of two kids involved in Destination Imagination - another creative problem solving program - I can tell you that for many, many kids, what they get out of CPS is the opportunity to do it their way. It sounds as though you give your kids plenty of CPS at home, but I've experienced a number of parents who absolutely *cannot* step away and give their kids the room to test out their ideas. CPS is a learning experience for the parents, too!

So let me clarify. I am not against OM. I am all for creative problem solving. There was a subtle moment in last Saturday’s performance where they kids were forced to adlib and prolong their play. One of the adlibbing kids had played chess last year and had been so afraid of making a wrong move that he seldom finished a game. It was wonderful to see him dare to think on his feet.

What I am objecting to is a sort of tunnel vision parenting where being a parent replaces both the rights and responsibilities of being an adult. What I am advocating is creative problem solving that is integrated into everyday life.

Many parents avoid integrating creative problem solving into their kids' lives because it is messy and time consuming. Life's first bout with creative problem solving is supposed to happen just after birth: How do I get the milk out of Mom? The process of breast feeding involves much trial and error on the part of both baby and Mom. As time goes on each gets more experienced at what works and the baby learns ways to latch on efficiently and stimulate the mother's milk producing reflexes. But, alas, many moms find themselves to be too busy to provide this experience. I suspect that there may be an underlying reluctance to relinquish control of the situation. Parents, who may have originally envisioned a baby as the perfect complement to their already storybook lives, are horrified that parenthood might actually refashion the parents. This conflict ignites what turns out to be a long battle with their kids for control. In its ultimate manifestation you see parents arguing with their kids over ridiculously trivial issues and jumping in to micromanage so rudely that the kid seems like Gandhi on a sit down strike.

Two axioms come to mind, one I've learned as a parent and one I've learned as a casino dealer and student of human nature.

The first axiom is that you are always parenting. Every moment you spend with your child you are parenting, whether you are consciously thinking about parenting or not. Every moment you are reinforcing some behavior or failing to reinforce another behavior, just by the set of your jaw or whether or not you make eye contact. (Our kids are training us, too, but that is a topic for another day.) The old snippet of sarcasm, “Do as I say, not as I do!” is still in effect. We are constantly acting as examples for our kids, examples that carry much more weight than what we say. One of the best things we can do to become better parents is to ask ourselves on a daily basis what kinds of behaviors we reinforced today and what kinds of examples we have set.

My second axiom is perhaps a little more controversial. Thirteen years of playing games with adults has convinced me that most of what people do can be reduced to trying to win one sort of game or another. Standing in line in the bank, we are constantly evaluating which line will be quicker, even if we aren’t actually in a hurry. Shopping is a competitive event for many people, there are even those who less motivated by acquiring goods that they are about bragging about the deal they got. And of course parking is for many people a competitive challenge. We try to park as close as possible, except for those who try to play the other game and park where they think they are less likely to get dinged.

That was the set-up, now for the collision. What are kids actually learning when we drop them off at a competition, tell them to play fair and make us proud, when we are cheating at the parking game even as we speak? We can offer justifications (“I’m running late.”) or pass the buck (“Someone should be directing traffic out here.”) but what we are really teaching is that breaking rules is OK if following them is too inconvenient.

Having two teenage drivers on the road, I can tell you that we all start teaching our kids to drive when they are about six years old, when they are able to read road signs and compare the speed limit to the speedometer. When they have seen us break the law for 10 years already, we haven’t got a snowball’s chance of convincing them to toe the line.

One more theme is rattling around my head, and was bouncing around as we wandered through OM competition. It’s the Newsweek article from a February 21, the Front page article about the new book Mommy Madness. The author Judith Warner describes professional women who are undone by the demands of mothering:

Once my daughters began school, I was surrounded, it seemed, by women who had surrendered their better selves--and their sanity--to motherhood. Women who pulled all-nighters hand-painting paper plates for a class party. Who obsessed over the most minute details of playground politics. Who--like myself--appeared to be sleep-walking through life in a state of quiet panic.

Although Warner describes the demands of motherhood to be out of control, it looks to me like the mothers themselves are out of control in their attempts to micromanage their children. Parenting itself may always have been something of a competitive event, but now it is an occasion to prove oneself as a shopper, tutor, logistics analyst, and to moan about how much we have done for our kids at every opportunity.

Kids thirst for control of their lives, yet competitive parenting demands a clean house, cute clothes, and an endless stream of activities to brag about. It demands that kids hurry up, not make messes, do things our way. It demands that kids sacrifice their childhood in the parents’ quest for a story book life.

Being kid-centered parents requires us to become better people, perhaps much better people that we think we are capable of being. Raising kids who can make their own choices requires us to let them fail, even if that failure embarrasses us as their parents. We have to be brave, and mindful, enough to consider not what people will say about us today but what life lessons our kids will glean from losing their homework, being too broke to buy a new prom dress, or spending the day in the principal’s office.

But, and this is the cool part, our love for our kids has the power to change us, bit by bit, into better, braver, wiser people. Remember the old Disney movie of Snow White? As kids, it seemed that Snow White was the one who was lucky at love. She found her Prince Charming and lived happily ever after. If you watch it again as an adult, you may see things differently. The seven dwarves are locked onto a ho-hum life. They slave in the mine. They sing the same songs every day. Even their personalities are one dimensional and so static that their personalities have become their names: Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey…

Then one day they come home and find a surprising, beautiful creature who needs their love and protection. Their lives are changed, in ways that they did not choose, cannot control, and in ways that force them to become more than what they thought they could be. They are truly the lucky ones. The seven dwarves are the ones who found the really precious sort of love, the sort of transforming love that our kids offer to us on a daily basis, if we will only stop, look into their eyes, and accept it.

I Still Don't Get OM

Last fall, Anna asked if she could be in "OM", Odyssey of the Mind, an "international educational program that provides creative problem-solving opportunities for students from kindergarten through college."

I didn't get it. I couldn't figure out why it was neccesary to provide creative problem solving opportunities for kids. I've been telling my kids to solve their own problems since kindergarten, even if it meant that they wore weird clothes in public and that they missed some things because they forgot to write them on the calendar.

I remember hovering behind the kitchen door as Anna (then four years old)dragged her tricycle to the top of her slide and considered riding it down. I was myself calculating exactly how long I could wait before dashing out to catch her. She eventually chose to push the trike down and then slide down after it, but she did solve her own problem.

My kids have spent the day in the principal's office because I won't come to their defense when they get in trouble. They have had multiple opportunities to spend all of their money and then be broke. I stopped buying clothes for my kids in junior high when they started earning babysitting money. My teenagers still try to make their problems into my problems ("But I need to use the car....) and I am still resolute in calculating how to stand ready to catch them while providing them with the chance to solve their own problems.

But Anna really wanted to "do OM". The coach, a good friend of mine, was anxious to have her on the team. Anna's sisters and I had a hurried meeting at school the day of signup during which they said I should let her be in OM, since a lot of their friends had "done OM" and enjoyed it. I allowed myself to be swayed, on the condition that Anna's schoolwork and piano practice not suffer.

Her team met once or twice a week through the winter. I was blissfully unaware of most of what went on. They wrote a play and then lost the script on the playground and then found it and made costumes. Anna glued some balsa wood together on the kitchen table and I gave her some clothespins to use for clamps. Her coach told me that they were "getting a lot done".

So it was that Richard and I ended up driving to Traverse City East Junior High School on Saturday morning to see the OM competition. It was snowy, and it had been pretty much a March white out as I drove home at 2 am the night before. We were crunched for time and worried that we would miss their 9:30 start time. The parking lot of the school was full. There were signs for overflow parking at the school next door, but there was a long line of people parking their vans and SUVs in the firelane or cruising the lot in case a space was vacated. We aren't the sort of people who park in fire lanes; Richard dropped me off and went to park next door. The school was one of those contemporary mouse maze designs with minimal signage and lots of circular hallways. The OM people had put up maps, but this was a younger generation of parents and the print was too small for my 47 year old eyes. I walked around the whole school and then circled the room twice before I found it. The team was in there, waiting for the judges to give them the go ahead. They waited a long time, long enough for Richard to make it back from parking the car.

The room was a half a a gym with bleachers pulled out and a loud ventilation system. Anna's team had chosen to solve the Crazy Columns problem, in which they presented a play that featured the testing and ultimate crushing of some balsa wood structures that they had built. They performed the play, they crushed their structure, the judges talked to them, Anna gave me a hug, and then the team left the room to go watch something else. Richard and I were kind of left there, wondering what to do next. We watched another team from our school, this time performing in a classroom where the parents stood at one end of the room and the judges sat at the other so we were watching the kids' backs. They did a play with a communications theme. Some of the more purposeful parents did an impromtu school cheer as the kids walked in. The kids ignored them.

Our kid was ignoring us, too. The school was crammed full of parents standing around while their kids ignored them. The parking lot was crammed full of illegally (and dangerously) parked cars, cars that had been parked by parents who were frantic to get to this venue where they were now being ignored by their kids. On the one hand this was good: kids were supposed to be doing their own stuff and not leaning on their parents. On the other hand I wondered what these parents were doing here. They needed to "get a life." This is the same generation of parents who forgot to stop the war, the same generation who are standing there with their thumbs in their ears as our public school system is being systematically dismantled, the same generation who can plow $30,000 into a "safe" car, but who can't hang up and drive the speed limit. Somehow being supportive parents was getting in the way of being responsible adults.

We left. On the way home we debated what to do about next year. Homework and piano practice has been suffering, but I'm not sure that they wouldn't have suffered even without OM.

Anna came home later; her team won 2nd place and is going to state final competition next month. Her idea of why they won was almost the opposite of her coach's story. Oh well. State finals is at Grand Valley State University; she is looking forward to staying in a motel with a pool. I will have to work so Richard will take her down. Maybe after that he can explain this OM stuff to me.