There are stories of what kids did in order to achieve incredibly unlikely goals. Taylor Swift had her whole family relocate to Nashville. Gymnast Gabby Douglas left her Virginia family to go live with her Iowa coach. The pianist Conrad Tao‘s family moved from southern Illinois to northern Illinois for a piano teacher and then they relocated to New York City, where the grand piano took up the second bedroom in the apartment. Read more
My older son loves going to Cave of the Mounds. Maybe you would like it, too. It’s one of the largest caves in the United States, and geologists love it because it has one of the most diverse groupings of stone in the world. Or something like that. I don’t really know. I hate going there. It’s claustophobic and boring and I take a Xanax every time and then I am so out of it at the end of the tour that I always let the kids buy too much at the gift shop. Read more
I am great at work. I was born to dream up big ideas and then sell them. I love a meeting—as long as I’m talking the whole time. So, actually, I love a lecture. But the only time it’s socially acceptable to lecture is in the context of work. So I really love work. Read more
When I was growing up, my brother and I suffered from lots of different forms of abuse, but probably the biggest one was neglect. When I was in second grade and he was in kindergarten, we started waking ourselves up to go to school and we put ourselves to bed at night. There were days we didn’t see our parents. I still have burn marks on my leg from our babysitter, which is why we told our parents we just wanted to be alone. And they said okay. Read more
This is me, holding my niece, Eva. This is the first time since I had my own babies that holding a baby did not trigger my feelings of despair.
When I had babies I had no support system. My mom has borderline personality disorder, my dad has Aspergers, and my in-laws have (admittedly undiagnosed, but textbook) Aspergers, which explains why I was pretty much completely on my own the whole time I was taking care of babies even though I was living near the grandparents. At the time I was so overwhelmed that I didn’t even realize how absurd it was that I had no support system. Once I realized it, I got sad. Very sad. I felt sorry for myself. Read more
This is a picture of me and the boys at the music workshop we went to in Boston. You will notice that there are no instruments, and no teachers. This is because after two hours we left the camp and just did a trip to Boston.
In the past, this would have been a hard decision for me. We had been planning to do the workshop all summer. It was a week-long program that we flew half-way across the country for, and we were already in a hotel for a week whether we wanted to be or not. On top of that, it’s scary to quit stuff that everyone else is saying is great. Read more
I’m traveling with my son, which means I’m reading USA Today, which is distributed liberally throughout hotels in the US.
I usually love USA Today. It’s like eye candy with all the photos and it’s nice that I get the same paper no matter what city we’re visiting. My favorite spot in the paper is the upper right-hand corner because it’s got celebrity news. I must be typical of all women because today there’s a women can have it all article in that corner. Read more
This is a picture of the very famous Joshua Bell.
Here’s a story he tells:
His mom dropped him off every week at some university where he was supposed to practice violin. But the room he was supposed to practice in was right by the video game room, and he found himself going there a lot instead.
One day he was there and a kid came up to him and said, “Are you Josh Bell?” And Josh assumed the kid knew Josh was a violin prodigy, and they would talk about violin.
But the kid said, “You have the top score on all the video games here. So I wanted to see who you were.”
Josh says this is the moment he realized that he wasn’t practicing enough and he had better find more focus. Read more
I think by now that you know I think you should homeschool your kids. And I think you should not use curriculum. And I don’t care that I am the stereotype of the recent convert who is an intolerable zealot.
Because you know what? I think it’s okay to judge people. I don’t think everyone can just do what they want and it doesn’t matter. And I don’t think most of us believe this, fundamentally.
I think moms who say “let’s not judge each other” are the moms who are scared of being judged. But if you believe you’re doing a good job parenting, then you don’t need to worry about being judged. Maybe they don’t know what you know about your parenting. But frankly, that’s unlikely. And it’s likely that if most people think you are sub-par then you are sub-par. I learned this from my blog. People criticize me in the comments section, and in general, the majority opinion has value. They don’t know everything about me, that’s true. But no one is unique. We are all pretty average, which is, of course, the definition of average. Read more
I am trying to be more conscious of what is different about my life because I homeschool and what would I be dealing with anyway even if I didn’t homeschool.
For example, last week I was at cello camp with my son, and I noticed that the place was split between stay-at-home moms (lots of homeschoolers) and moms who work full-time who took a week off of work to do cello camp. We were all doing the same thing: eating terrible food, wondering how to get the kid to practice better at home, and furtively checking email during lessons. Read more