a hippie with a minivan

I got Khéna weighed today…

Yesterday I ran into a nurse that I know at the grocery store… we talked a bit about my UC, birth, breastfeeding and babywearing which led to weight…. when I told her that we hadn’t had him weighed because we don’t agree with Well-baby visits she offered to weigh KhÃ©na if I wanted (she had a free time this afternoon) and I thought it would be fun even to just show him off to a few of the nurses that I know… so I went in today, put him down on the scale and got the numbers…

At a few days shy of 6 months (6 months on Monday) he is now 29 pounds and is about 29 1/2 inches long…!!!!!

He is wearing 24 months (in the pic he has a 24 month romper) and mostly 2 years clothes and is just a big boy overall…

stupid garage sale rules…

Such a frustrating day!

Our city allows garage sales 4 weekends a year… 3 are in May and one at the end of August… though the August one is free the others need a license and not only can they only be valid for one weekend, you cannot even get another one if things don’t go well, rain etc…

Anyway…

I saw that it would be nice this weekend so I decided that it was a good day for a garage sale… On friday I went and got change, got the license etc and then came home to get everything together with Simon… Early on Sat morning we got everything set up and then started the wait… Well… another thing about garage sales here is that you are not allowed to advertise… neither before or during the sale.. and of course, we live on a small side street… so we practically had no one come by… finally at the end of the day we made our first sale… then a second… paying at least our license.. then a third sale made our grand total of profit…

1$

I am never having another garage sale here… the laws really suck!!!

The only good thing was that it was a gorgeous day and I got some cute pics…

Melted Crayons…

I read about this on a message board so I decided to give it a try…

Started the oven at 300F and started filling 4 muffin cups with broken crayons… 10 minutes later the crayons were melted… we watched (or tried to watch) though the oven door to see the crayons melt and Xavier thought it was cool…

Then we took them out and looked at them a bit before we put them in the freezer to set…

They looked really cool but I am not really hapy with the way they turned out… I am not sure that it was because the broken crayons were cheap… or we did something wrong but they didn’t colour much…

It was still a cool experiment though… and I think that I will be trying again with some good old crayola’s…

Schools are for Fish…

Thanks Ania for the link to these!!

“Go to your local public school, walk down the hallways
and see what behaviors you would want your child to emulate.”
-Manfred B. Zysk

“By breaking up topics into age-appropriate subjects as schools do,
learning is divorced from real life, and therefore limited.”
-Sara McGrath

(and of course you can read Sara’s blog here)

I hope there are more of these…I love them!!

what they don’t know they know…

Every once in a while my mainstream schooling propaganda mind gets hold of me and I try “schooling” the kids by asking what certain numbers are etc… Xavier hates it with a passion and not only will he not tell me, he gets uninterested and almost gets upset and just says that he doesn’t know… I learned my lesson and don’t do it anymore, but then my brain starts asking if he is really learning…

then out of the blue he surprises me… he can do simple math… addition and subtraction… he knows that 2+1=3… though he doesn’t know that he knows it yet and would never admit it…

I got a game installed on the computer a few days ago that I didn’t know if it would interest him or not… it is an older game… I think 2001 but it is not really dated… “The Incredible Machine: Even More Contraptions”… pretty much the goal of the goal is to do “something”… it can be to get a mouse to his cheese or a bowling ball into a basket… to do what you have to do, you have to build a contraption… you use ropes and pulleys, springs and generators, gravity etc… it teaches you how gears work, how ropes and pulleys can work, how somethings are heavier than others…

logic…physics….

I started to play the game and naturally Xavier sat down next to me and watched… then while I was up and doing something he decided to play and was really good… we went back and started his own game and now he is advancing though the levels… today as Simon sat down next to him and he started a new level he pointed out how many of each thing that he had for that levels contraption… (eta… it is shown by having a small number next to each picture)
He is learning without knowing it and applying what he is learning seamlessly and unconsciously… this is the way that he learns best… It makes me proud that we can provide that environment for him…