BeBa

Yesterday, I put a roast in the crockpot around 1 pm. Kind of late in the day to slow cook a tender roast, but I had *just* enough time. An hour later, I noticed that I’d forgotten to plug in the crockpot…

We had takeout for dinner last night while the roast continued to cook. But this morning, Mira requested that I make beef noodles with that roast. That sounded like an awesome idea to me!

I had a meeting at the office today, so Bailey and I decided to make homemade egg noodles in the morning before the meeting so that they would have plenty of time to dry. She has made lots of noodles with her dad and grandma, so she’s justifiably very proud of her ability to manage this task.

She got a day off from structured curriculum, but on the drive to and from the meeting, I witnessed how much learning energy she really has. The car is really such a fabulous place for good conversation with one’s children.

Bailey is doing a physics experiment about gravity with the physics workshop kit we ordered. She assembled the testing structure yesterday and this evening we’ll conduct the experiment as a family. Yesterday she also got a new pair of glasses. On the drive she was looking at herself in the vanity mirror and commenting that the glasses left an impression on her nose. She noticed that my glasses also left an impression, but not as much of one. How could I resist turning this into a discussion about gravity and why her heavier glasses would leave a deeper impression than my lighter ones.

The conversation about gravity segued into a discussion about the Earth’s atmosphere and the solar system which segued into a conversation about planets and stars and the sun and why is it that it’s a STAR, but it’s the “only one we can’t see at night.” So we talked about exactly why it is we can’t see the sun at night and how the moon is illuminated and on and on and on. Seriously, she was so curious and invested in the conversation. I’ve always known she has it in her, but it’s a spark that was definitely smothered by the school environment. Her curiosity and *attendance* to the conversations we’re having let me know that we are on the right track. She thought she hated science. And now I have a slew of new ideas about what is interesting to her that we can explore more indepth.

Oh another question she asked that I didn’t have the answer for off the top of my head, but that we’re going to study together: “Why isn’t water as warm as air?” She is bursting with questions. And she’s very proud of it, too. We also had a conversation about how curiosity is a key measure of smarts. A lot more so than how much information is in your brain at any point in time. She said, “I guess one reason you are so smart is because you have lots of questions and like looking up the answers.” Bingo.

So then on the way home, she observed that Scarlett O’Hara is a VERY complicated character… “she makes really horrible decisions, but she’s also very smart.” And here’s where my heart just melted with her sophisticated critical thinking: After enlarging on some of Scarlett’s bad decisions, and citing some examples of her good decisions, she says, “Margaret Mitchell was an amazing artist. Writing such a complicated character is very difficult.”

Brilliant!! She gets it. Was I even looking at literature with such a critical eye towards how it was written when I was 12? (For the most part, I gobbled the story down at face value and moved on.) How can she think she’s dumb?

I suggested that as a future assignment I could give her some guidelines for developing a character study and she could try HER hand at conceiving a well-rounded, complex character. She grew very excited at the thought of this challenge. A girl who two weeks ago told me she HATED writing and sucks at it and hates to have anything to do with it. (Note: Typing on the computer vs. writing in longhand seems to make ALL the difference in her desire to write.)

It’s stunning, really, how quickly and ferociously she responded to this change in learning environment.