Checking in

Well, we arrived safely in the US, but no blogging due to various factors: An impossibly slow computer, three hyper kids, jet-lagged human alarm clocks that get us up every day at 5:30am and make it extremely difficult for me to be able to put a coherent blog post together when I actually do get a free moment...

I am doing some reading, when I can, and there are some books I want to mention on here when I get a chance, but that might not be for awhile. For now, just popping in to say we made it!

Stargazing report

So, has anyone actually been out stargazing? In the village I was able to on a couple of occasions last weekend and the weekend before, though it doesn't actually get dark until after 10pm this time of year. Anyway, I saw both of the Dippers and also Cassiopea. The weekend of the 13th I saw a ton of stars, and they seemed so close. I wish i could have identified more constellations, but I will consider it an asignatura pendiente.

Please take up the challenge and report back! I am curious about what people can identify, and where.

Slice of life, or pie

It occurred to me that it might be fun to post a picture of our kitchen message board, mostly used as a shopping list (by me) and a sketch pad for designing the kitchen layout in the house we are building in the village (by Santi). If you can read my handwriting (the chalk stub is pretty small and hard to work with, and I'm usually writing on the fly, with Dani in arms, or in some other way occupied), you may note that it is truly a bilingual list (and you may also note that beer is such a priority that it gets listed twice. Wouldn't want to be without a cold one to pop open now that the summer heat has arrived...)

And the pie!



Some people use their birthdays as a time to reflect, and some as a time to indulge. Taking advantage of the height of cherry season, you can guess which one I'm doing today... It was my first attempt at making crust, and I didn't really end up liking this recipe very much (too sweet.) And clearly while I like the idea of making my own crust out of butter instead of partially hydrogenated fats, I am really a slacker when it comes to baking, so when it wouldn't roll out perfectly I improvised and threw it into the oven-- thus the mutant octopus design. Oh well.

How many blogs does a person need, anyway?

True to my record of "new life-experience= new blog", I have started a fledgling blog about living with peanut allergy in Spain. Apparently I also have a bit of an evangelizing tendency, since I feel the need to share my hard-won wisdom with the world, be it about school in Spain or this more recent venture. While one of my goals in doing this (with both blogs) is not only to share information, but also to spark discussion or the exchange of ideas, I have to admit that with the school blog, I get a slow but steady stream of visitors, and hardly any comments. Not that I mind-- after all, I rarely post there anyway. And, it's true that I often-- very often--read blogs without commenting, either on a regular basis or because it happened to turn up as a search result for some particular topic I was looking into. So that's cool.

And when I was doing my teaching practice, I started a private blog just as a place to record observations and make notes. I made it private to avoid potential confidentiality issues since I talked about specific students (not by name, though) and also because it probably wouldn't have been of general interest anyway. Sort of an online journal, where I could keep it all in one place, with handy functions like a search bar and labels for the posts. And this morning I considered starting yet another blog, to be private or invitation-only. I wanted to write about an incident with one of the kids, and while it is in part a cute anecdote, it also seems that he is getting older and that it might be a violation of his privacy to share certain things with the wider world on this non-anonymous blog.

I don't really want to start yet another blog, yet old-fashioned pen-to-paper freewriting/journalling has somehow lost its appeal. I could just write it in a Word document, you say, and that way I would have a digital copy. True. But here's the terrible truth: after five years of blogging, I don't know how to write without an audience. I mean, what's the point of crafting a piece of writing, reflecting, capturing nuances and making connections-- if no one else is even going to read it??? Yes, I realize that those descriptions can hardly be applied to my blogging of late. There are plenty of bloggers out there who actually do all of those things, and do them well (I would link to more, but I don't have time right now.) But if even my off-the-top-of-my-head writing is for public consumption, than why should I ask any less of my more deliberate writing?

I'm not going to start another blog, and in fact probably won't even get around to writing about that incident today. My Math test is tomorrow, and the only thing I'm going to be reflecting on for the next several hours is the joy of teaching elementary mathematics from a Constructivist standpoint, or the intricacies of Set Theory. I think what I need to do is just bite the bullet and pull out a notebook and pen and just get going, and forget about who reads it. Just freewrite for myself. Even with that nagging voice of narcissism in the background.

Though if any of you have a place online that you save your writing (other than a blog), I'd be interested to hear about it-- maybe there is some middle ground out there after all.

I Double-Dare Ya!

So I signed up to participate in the Double-Daring Book for Girls book shower, first because I think Andi and Miriam rock, and I'd love to help get the word out about their book. But also because I never got around to purchasing The Daring Book for Girls (this being a household of boys, and boys who are still a bit young for these activities) but was curious. I did see the Spanish version last week in my local bookstore, and looked through it there-- very cool!

So anyway, this time around, the idea is not so much to do a book review (though you can do some of that, too) but instead to throw down a challenge to your readers based on one of the book's activities. I'll get to that in a moment, but first I want to say a bit about the book itself.

Since I hadn't seen the original, this was totally new to me. I love the old-fashioned feel to the layout-- the marbled endpapers, the fonts, the gorgeous watercolor illustrations. And then there is the meat of the book-- the activities and information. There's something for everyone here: quilling and caligraphy, car camping, making a rope ladder, playing the harmonica, card games, how to paint a room... Useful stuff, fun stuff, stuff that most people won't actually do but is fun to read about, etc. I would have loved to have a book like this when I was a kid.

(Oreneta, I'm thinking your adventurous girls would love it. In fact, I even thought of sending it to you, but I can't bear to part with it, and my book-buying budget has been severely eaten into lately by my new obsession with books and materials on peanut allergy. But if you can get ahold of a copy, definitely do!)

My first thought was that I could take advantage of this opportunity to learn how to hem some pants (p. 253), a service which is often needed in this house. However, I thought that might not set the right tone for the challenge, because, um, who actually wants to hem pants? Yes, it's useful, and the end result is much more aesthetically pleasing and secure than the old iron-on-adhesive method we tend to use, but somehow I doubt it would inspire any takers. And it really doesn't capture the daring spirit of the book.

No, instead I think I'll toss out a challenge from the very first activity in the book: stargazing. Fitting, because 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, and also because it's something I actually want to learn to do and teach the kids to do. At this point, all I can reliably identify is the Little Dipper and my favorite, Orion.

Unfortunately, Orion is a winter constellation, but according to this site, the Little Dipper can indeed be found now in the skies of North America and Europe, as can Libra, one of the constellations featured in the book.

So my challenge is this: find three constellations in the sky, then tell me what they are, where you are, and the date and time you saw them. Bonus points for more than three. This challenge depends on factors like having a clear sky, and being away from bright lights and preferably the moon, so I will keep it open all month. I am thinking I will have to wait until I can get to the village for it to be dark enough to see the stars well, but I am preparing by studying up on what to look for.

Do try this, and leave me a note in the comments.

So there you go-- I double-dare ya!

This time it's personal...

Throughout my online travels, I have occasionally come across references to the "peanut allergy debate", which apparently can be summed up as follows: How dare you feel entitled to put my child's life in danger just because little Suzy won't eat anything but peanut butter and jelly for lunch? and Oh yeah? Well, how dare you try to dictate what my child eats just because your child has an allergy? Or something like that.

I never really stopped to dwell on the issue. I empathize with parents who for whatever reason find it difficult or inconvenient to have to keep peanut products out of their school lunches due to another child's allergy. However, I've always thought (when I bothered to give any thought to it at all) that no matter what the situation, it can't be that difficult to save the peanut butter for before or after school. I mean, is it really a big deal that you have to have the peanut butter toast at 8am for breakfast or 3pm for an afterschool snack instead of the pb&j at noon for lunch? And I am not looking for debate here, because while I'm sure there are a few families for which this minor adjustment really is a major inconvenience, probably most of the flak is due to the principle of the thing. And I just do not want to go there.

But now I indeed will have to start "going there" because on Thursday Dani got ahold of some of his brothers' peanut butter, and had a reaction. It was mostly hives, no apparent breathing issues this time, but of course I took him straight to the ER, where they looked him over, gave him some allergy meds, and monitored him for awhile before letting him go home. The meds got rid of the hives fairly quickly and he was in good spirits, so "todo se quedó en un susto".

However, this is obviously a dramatic new development. At the follow-up appointment with the pediatrician, I had to ask for an EpiPen (she didn't hesitate to give me the Rx, but if I hadn't asked she wouldn't have.) Here in Spain most nut consumption is of almonds or hazelnuts, but for the moment all nuts are verboten for us. I've seen a lot of labels here over the past couple of years with "may contain traces of nuts" which I suppose is good to know just in case, but also means that now a lot of stuff is suddenly off limits.

Anyway, I know from my occasional glance at my tracking program that I have a lot of readers who never comment, and some of them live in Spain. If you are one of them (or one who does comment, for that matter) and have any peanut allergy information to share (especially if you live here in Spain), I would really appreciate hearing from you, either in the comments or via email (my address is in my profile.)

Thanks!

And more Dani...

I was thinking the other day about how quickly the time passes, and I can barely remember about when Elías was a toddler. So I wanted to immortalize a little bit of Dani's toddlerhood here or else I'll undoubtedly forget it. Thus, a couple of snippets:

One thing that is really cute is his sock obsession: how he loves to go through the laundry (and he isn't fussy about clean or dirty) to find socks. He will retrieve them from other places, too, like when I bring the kids' clothes downstairs so they can get dressed for school, and turn around to find Dani walking off with the socks. If there are none around, he can always take off one of his own! He likes to tote them around, clutching them like miniature security blankets. Or sometimes he'll go to the kitchen and put them into the washing machine.

Another thing he does is make special sounds while playing with toys. Of course he'll go "vroom vroom" (rendered more like a sound effect than a word) when he plays with cars, but when he's playing with figurines of people or animals, he will carry them around and make this sound like he's trying to talk with the back of his throat. I can't explain it really, but he doesn't do this when playing with blocks or stacking cubes, only with "characters."

Okay, one of these days I am going to sit down and write a real post. Really, I promise!