An interesting piece on the value of unstructured play...

A homeschooling friend noted this NPR story today, and I listened.

Once the surges of reactivity and parental guilt subsided ("oh, no, I buy Harry *toys*", "we've ruined their childhoods by not moving a remote log cabin in the mountains!" Where *do* these thoughts come from? Why can't I just pat myself on the back for not loading them up with structured activities?? Sigh...) and I got to the meat of the story, I found it very intriguing that independent, imaginative play is so directly linked with self-regulation skills.

And one flew away...

Morgan from the Humane Society called us this morning to say she was ready to release our bohemian waxwing, and when could we meet her? What a great soul to go out of her way for us like that. We called up our friends Jill and Addie, who joined us for the release. Morgan assured us that waxwings are very good at finding their flocks, like bats, and that they're not as rare here as our birdbook made them out to be; this is within their winter range.

Here's the patient, shortly before release (having eaten lots of frozen mixed berries)



















And here's Morgan and Harry, about to open the carrier (the box next to Morgan contains 9 of the 11 that didn't survive. We left them out in the field, near where I think a fox might den (based on how Sunny growled at the culvert one day as we hiked there), and we'll go back tomorrow with Jill, Addie and Luke to see if they were appreciated....























And here is a bird so happy to be free that all you see of it is its shadow as it flies off.... (if you click on the image a larger version is called up)
















We released it in a nearby preserve that has a couple of very old cherry trees in it, leftover from some farmer's orchard. We thought she might like a snack and she might find her flock as well...

An epiphany!

I don't know why it's taken me until 43 to figure this out, but there's a whole other world of games out there, not the ones on the shelves at ToysRUs, not the card games that I've played until I'm bored to death -- fun games, creative games, intelligent grown up board games! I'm so excited! I've always had this vision of being the family that plays games together, in the evenings, in bad weather, at holiday gatherings, but to be honest, there's only so many times I can play Uno and Skipbo and Kings in the Corners and, uggh, monopoly, before I get bored silly.

But this fun group of gamers have the coolest collection of really interesting games! Bohnanza and Werewolves and Alhambra are the three that I've played with them so far and they've all been fascinating and fun!

I want to play more and I'm delighted to find that there are whole new game realms to explore!

Doesn't this seem backwards?

I got an email from a homeschooling-and-UU-Church friend alerting me that her group of mostly UU Moms (MUUMs for short) who walk together were planning to walk around the playfields of our elementary school tomorrow. This a)thrilled me to know there were some like-minded families within a mile or two of us whom we could meet tomorrow and b) made me realize that Steve and I could be walking laps around the playing fields with a walkie-talkie and the kids could stay in the house, as is their wont this winter, with the other walkie, and see us out the windows.

So, when the kids said they wanted to keep doing what they were doing this morning, Steve and I said, fine, we'll take the dogs out to the playground. And it struck me, at Lap 5, that things were a bit backward. The kids were at home doing embroidery (Maddie -- thanks Aunt Diane for the birthday embroidery kit!) and sitting at the computer (Harry exploring Stormwind city in World of Warcraft) while the parents were out on the playground!

It's a cool and windy day, so I can't blame the kids for not wanting to march about in it. Hopefully it will be warmer tomorrow for the playdate. We're off shortly to a game-gathering, another wonderful find at our UU Church. A group, again, of mostly UUers who get together every Sunday afternoon to play board and card games. The kids and I are excited.

Steve, alas, has to go into work again today. He is redesigning his magazine this issue (which adds a great deal of extra work into the normal production cycle), and this past week was supposed to be the final deadline week for the Mar/April issue, but he got sick last weekend with something like the flu and missed 3 days of work this past week. So now he's working all weekend and having to push back printing deadlines to get everything done. Oy.

And lastly, a bird update. Steve looked up our waxwing in a birding book and found that it wasn't actually a cedar waxwing but a bohemian waxwing, a far northern bird that rarely strays this far south into the continental US. Once every decade or so, when food is scarce in its normal range of southern Canada and the Pacific Northwest, it will fly further south in search of fruit on trees (like our chokecherry tree out front.) And the flock is back in the yard today, eating from the chokecherry and trilling in our cottonwoods. I'm trying to figure out how to get large owl shaped cutouts pasted to our high window above the entryway....

Wildlife and wild death...

Well, we had a terrible bird accident at our house yesterday. I was sitting on the back porch enjoying the afternoon sun when I heard an odd whump, which reminded me of certain small earthquakes back in California, then a flock of birds zoomed past me and across the field. As I was sitting there wondering what it might have been, the kids raced to the back door to tell me that a bunch of birds had flown into our front windows and were lying on the sidewalk outside.
It was terrible. Twelve beautiful cedar waxwings were down in all, most already dead. We picked up the dying and held them to keep them warm. The one I was holding worked a chokecherry fruit out of its gizzard as it lay in my hand, and I gently removed it from its beak. After it died, I took Harry's from him and wrapped it in my shirt, holding it to my belly. I could feel life pulsing in it still. Maddie held hers close as well. After a while, I knew mine had died, but Maddie's actually had opened its eyes and was sitting, beak open, stunned. We set it up in a basked with a warmed rice bag under it and covered it with a towel to keep it quiet.
After an hour or so, I checked and it looked fairly alert, so I got online and asked on our local unschooling discussion board about bird rescue places. One of our friends told me of the humane society and when I called, they said, bring it in, we're open til 6:30. So the kids and I braved cross-town rush-hour traffic, bird-in-basket-in-lap. The wildlife rehab worker said it looked better than any cedar waxwing they'd gotten in recently and that we'd done a good job of keeping it warm. Apparently these birds are not building-savvy and fly into windows often, and in large flocks this time of year.
So we left our little survivor there, much to Harry's dismay. The wildlife worker said we could call today and see how it's doing and perhaps be there when they release it.
Here is a photo of some of the ones who didn't survive, as well as a few other, happier wildlife shots....























Deer like to browse through the field across the street from our schoolyard from time to time...




















And here's a shot of Sunny and Cherry the squirrel, experiencing a minor detente.




An update: the wildlife supervisor said our waxwing made it through the night, but is still not moving much and not eating, so they're not ready to release it yet. They gave it some homeopathics, interestingly enough, and he said it's not doing poorly, but it's obviously still injured. Sooo, I'm glad we took it in (I had the thought as we were driving off that maybe we should just leave it out to fly away, instead of trekking halfway to Loveland with it, but I guess it was more injured than I realized.)

Our favorite picture

The kids like to look through funny animal photos on the web, and we were at it again when we re-discovered this one, our all-time favorite now that we're living in squirrel territory...

New realms of geekdom

Say it loud, say it proud, I'm a weather geek!
Steve pronounced me thus, with some surprise, and he's right. For years, I've quietly been reading the NWS forecast discussions on-line, trying to parse out what the forecasters mean with their myriad abbreviations and arcane terminology. But yesterday, I went on a weather hike sponsored by the local Audubon chapter (good lord -- I just had a total brain fade and couldn't figure out to spell that word. Thank goodness for google. It's still looking alien to me) and led by a meteorologist.
I peppered the man with questions all the way up and down the side of Coyote Ridge. At the top, we could see Pikes Peak, a more than two-hour drive to the south. We could also see the rising ground south of Denver known as the Palmer Divide, which, along with the also-visible upwelling at the Wyoming border, creates a bowl that protects the Front Range from the extremes of weather in this part of the country.
I found out how weather forecasts are created (my god, what an expenditure of weather sampling equipment! Two balloons a day, every day of the year, from thousands upon thousands of sites around the globe, drift off, rarely to be found or returned). I could bore you with the physics behind the warm Chinook wind, the Snow Eater, that blows off the mountains in winter, mysteriously warming us 20 to 40 degrees in an hour or two. I grok the rain shadow effect now, and I understand why we often have a scrim of clouds on our eastern horizon that cuts the glory of sunrise short so many mornings.
Disappointingly, I also discovered that we haven't adapted amazingly well to this climate after all. I'd been thinking that the fact that weather in the 20s seemed comfortable to us was a sign we had acclimated. But apparently, the same phenomenon at work in dry desert climates ("oh, it's 90 but it's a dry heat!") works in the cold as well. So 40 degrees in a moist climate can feel as cold as 25 degrees in a dry climate like ours. As long as the wind's not blowing!
He was animatedly expounding to me his frustration with the popular reliance on relative humidity as a measure of comfort instead of dew point (which I confess, was starting to make my eyes glaze over) as the walk came to an end. I can't wait to go out again in April when he'll explain the spring weather phenomenon. And the summer walks ought to be really exciting!
Oh, and for some reason this book, the National Audubon Society's Field Guide to North American Weather, which he showed us, really cracks me up! Something about the way cloud formations are treated just like the bird species in their other books seems delightfully absurd.
I returned from the hike to a sumptuous breakfast of crepes and two kids who wanted to get online and get going with World of Warcraft! We bought the game Friday, discovered my laptop didn't have enough memory, asked Steve to pick some up on his way home ("Honey, we need more memory, a load of equanimity and some compassion if you can find it on sale!") Then came the 10 hours of downloading updates that put gaming off until the next day.
We did finally get online and played it until an act of god interrupted our cable internet service last night. I'm guessing I'll be playing it shortly, as soon as the kids get up.
At first I was resistant to the game, as much of the quests center around killing (albeit NPC or non-player characters -- the computer generated ones), but as we played yesterday, I began to notice the random acts of kindness. Other players occasionally ran past us and threw a spell on us to improve our armor or stamina. Players would start fighting alongside us as we killed NPCs to finish a quest (at first, paranoid soul that I am, I thought they were trying to steal the loot you get after your quest NPC dies, but the game ensures that only the person who starts killing gets the loot and in fact they were just helping us out).
So, I'm warming up to it and the kids seem to love it. I have to make sure to get plenty of exercise before I sit down at the computer though, since the sessions seem to go on and on!