Who Am I?

Our local homeschool group organizes a history fair every year.  The kids can present a person or event from history in any way they choose.  Many will wear costumes and tell the audience about the person, ending with, "Who am I?"  Others come with posters or food cooked from that era.  One creative brother/sister team even did a puppet show, complete with homemade puppets.  But first, its location was full of history in and of itself.

 

The Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village is a beautiful Victorian Gothic building constructed in 1875.  It was a civil courthouse, a prison, and a market.  What is now the Children's Room was originally the police court where prisoners would be brought.

Ella's friend Finn as Thomas Jefferson

Twenty kids presented, including Ella.  Holden, unsurprisingly, who is too shy to order his own meal from a waitress, wasn't going to get anywhere near the stage.

We were really proud of Ella who had spent the last two weeks researching and writing her first full report on Charles Darwin.  Anytime I can get science involved, whether it's history or math or composition, she's much more interested.

Ella stood in front of a room filled with about 60 parents and kids and read her first person narrative of Darwin and had the audience guess who she was.

She was presented with an award and a pocket microscope, very apropos.  For as shy as she comes across, she never shies away from participating in public speaking or performing, which I find so confusing.

We celebrated properly with ice cream sundaes and an afternoon exploring the Village.

And to continue with our history theme, we're off on a historical adventure to explore Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia (and everything in between) for the next week.  The kids have been studying slavery and the Civil War for the last few months and we're really excited to visit a plantation, Fort Sumter, and many Civil War sites over the Thanksgiving week.  I'll try to post while we're away.

Meanwhile, I hope you people have a happy and safe Thanksgiving yourselves.  Much love.  xoxo

That Time Salman Rushdie Read to Us

I'm going to leave that title hanging until the end of this post but let me tell you, that was a highlight in my three years in New York City...

Some fun things that happened this week...

 

The kids and I spontaneously popped into the Natural History Museum this week to check out their brand new exhibit on bacteria and microbiomes, The Secret World Inside You.  It's a really thorough exhibit that we'll need to return to a few times to really get it all, which is why having memberships to all of these museum is so great - you never feel guilty for just popping in for a 20 minutes here or there.

Ella is enthralled.  Her friend is unimpressed.

I also was introduced to a museum that I had never heard of before and am so glad to have discovered.  My friend Julie invited me to join her for a jewelry making workshop (specifically mala beads) at the Rubin Museum of Art.  It's a gorgeous museum in Chelsea that focuses on Hindu and Buddhist art from the Himalayas, India, and neighboring areas.  It was so, so nice to spend an afternoon focused on doing something that I wanted to do that didn't involve the kids and gave me some quality time with a good friend.

I actually got a lot of time this week to refill my own cup.  I went to see a great documentary all by myself on Friday while the kids were treated to a Cuban music and dance show with some other homeschoolers.  If you get the chance to see Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, see it.  It was part of the DOC NYC film festival going on now in the city.  Kevin and I are going again tonight to see a different documentary.

And on Wednesday while the kids were in science camp all day for Veterans Day, my friend Alina took me a Korean spa in the middle-of-nowhere-Queens that was so strange and surreal I couldn't even begin to describe it to you.  There were sleeping rooms filled with dozens of dozing adults at ten in the morning, strange pod-looking saunas, and hot tubs with jets so strong one almost knocked Alina out of the pool.  We had lots of good laughs and again, hours of uninterrupted girl talk.  Just what my empty cup needed.

With such an amazing week you'd be surprised to hear that I haven't even gotten to the highlight yet.  Salman Rushdie has been my very favorite author of all time since I first read Midnight's Children almost twenty years ago.  Since then I've read many more of his novels and even his autobiography about his time under Fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeni for writing The Satanic Verses.  I think his writing is so magical and lyrical.  You can't try to understand it sentence by sentence, but rather you have to give in to it and trust that it will all come together and create a story and picture as you go along. 

Well, as part of The Whitney Museum's retrospective on an artist named Frank Stella who among other works did a series based on Moby Dick, as well as the 164th anniversary of the publishing of the novel, the museum had a marathon reading of Herman Melville's novel over two days, inviting many authors to take turns reading aloud from the book.  Salman Rushdie was first up on Saturday morning and we were sitting front and center.

Practicing ahead of time.

People, my hands were shaking the entire time.

Nature, Food & Culture - What Else Do You Need?

Kevin just left this morning for a few days in Detroit, so I'm bracing myself for three days of non-stop kids.  I did have the foresight to sign the kids up for an all-day camp on Wednesday so I'd have some recovery time.

I made it to a favorite spot, Symphony Space, a couple times this week.  On Wednesday night a friend and I saw Brandon Stanton of Humans of New York speak.  Several actors (from shows like Orange is the New Black, The Americans, Sex and the City) read posts from his latest book.  In case you don't follow Humans of New York on Facebook, Brandon walks around the city everyday taking photos of New Yorkers.  What makes his work really great though is that he also talks to them for a little while and posts a quote from them, always very touching or funny or provoking.  He also recently spent a few weeks in Syria covering the refugee crisis.  I highly recommend following him.

 

Then I made it back to Symphony Space this weekend with the kids and Kevin to see Fantasia (the 1940 Disney movie set only to classical music) on the big screen.  For 30-plus years I thought I had seen the movie but it turns out that I had only seen the part with Mickey Mouse as sorcerer, which apparently is only a small portion of the entire film.  We were all really impressed and loved seeing it in a theater with loud surround sound.

 

After another great Friday night at the Met (Kevin and I sat in on an interview with designer Todd Oldham while the kids were in Mythology class), I was really feeling the weight of the city and needed a nature fix.  We didn't have time on Saturday to get all the way out of the city so we did the next best thing - found a big park.  We wanted to explore somewhere new so we took the subway up to the top of Manhattan to Fort Tryon Park, site of a big battle during the Revolutionary War.  We enjoyed a couple hours of hiking around and absorbing the last of autumn before heading back downtown to Holden's soccer game.  It doesn't take much effort to make you feel like you're out of the city.

That's the Hudson River to the left.

They never follow directions.

And finally, our fall CSA (farm box) started this week.  I think I may have bitten off more than we can chew :)

 

You may be surprised to hear that we actually just about made it through all of this amazing food from Lancaster Farm in Pennsylvania in one week.  I made squash soup, creamed spinach, smoothies, pasta with roasted cauliflower and broccoli, fresh scrambled eggs almost every morning with three different kinds of fresh cheeses, roasted potatoes, collard green chips (like kale chips) and many incredible salads (I even used the celery greens).  The kids loved having ants-on-a-log for the first time and the sourdough bread was gone in 24 hours.  Can't wait to see what we get today!

Age Doesn't Matter (Unless You're Cheese or Wine)

One of the things I love most about classes for homeschoolers is that they are almost always grouped by ability and interests, rarely by age.  The kids often take classes with other children a few years younger or a few years older than they are.  I think they learn a lot both by having older kids in their class to look up to and learn from as well as younger kids to model for.  Last year both kids took a computer coding class at a place meant for after-school kids.  They were the only homeschoolers.  It worked out fine and they spent a year learning Scratch, which they loved.  This year I tried to enroll them in the school's Python class, the next offering they have after Scratch.  Holden's registration was rejected because they said the class was for 9 and 10-year-olds only.  I explained that although he was only eight, he had spent a year there taking the prerequisite class and was ready for the next step.  They told me they had a strict age policy and that he could enroll next year.  I was lamenting about this to a fellow homeschool mom.  She said, "My fourteen-year-old taught himself to code.  What if we have him teach a weekly coding class for homeschoolers?"

Brilliant!  So now not only are they learning coding in a mixed-age group but they're also learning from a fellow homeschooler whom they can look up to.  Grouping students simply by their birthday is silly.

I'm sure you're all getting tired of my photos of our fall foliage but I'm not getting tired of photographing it, so bear with me.

Kids literally just playing with leaves.

The last picture makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.  Ella was playing with her friends when she came running up to me asking for my phone.  She ran off and I assumed she was going to take a selfie or play a game.  She came back a couple minutes later and handed me the phone and said, "I just wanted to take a picture of you sitting under the tree," and then ran off to rejoin her friends.

Photo Dump

Yikes.  After missing a post last week I have way too much to tell you people.  So I'm going to do one of my photo dumps and save you much reading time.  I hope you're able to get a picture of our dynamic week.

The kids wrapped up some classes this week.  Wayfinders in Central Park culminated in a final two-hour adventure game.  And their session on slavery in the U.S. at the New York Historical Society finished with the kids each making a quilt square (from collage) for an Underground Railroad quilt.

 

We watched the annual Pumpkin Flotilla down the street at the beautiful Harlem Meer.

We had this awesome wall unit installed and are so happy to finally feel organized.

Kevin and I tagged along on Ella's Greek and Roman mythology class at the Met this week, which was great because we realized that they aren't only looking at Greek art but looking at art from all around the world and relating it to Greek art and mythology.  This week they looked at several paintings and tapestries with the equivalent of a chorus and discussed the similarities with choruses in Greek theater.

We watched the Mets lose the World Series at our favorite beer garden.

After two years of an urban Halloween, we were happy to escape the city and go up to Maeve's new house in the suburbs and do a more traditional trick-or-treating, hitting their sweet downtown first for the business candy.

Maeve's new house

Roman soldier and Minerva (Roman version of Athena)

With our Halloween hangovers on Sunday, we spent the day enjoying my very favorite time of year in Central Park.  You can clearly see why.

Holden discovered a battle structure from the War of 1812 right in Central Park.

Though she be but little, she is fierce.

Ella's not taking any chances and clearly doesn't trust her housemates.

And after such a fun-filled week and weekend we still made it out last night for our season tickets to The New Victory Theater.  Last night's performance was of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but set as an opera by a troupe from South Africa (only in New York...).  Luckily we had reviewed the synopsis before we went because trying to follow Shakespearean English, sung in opera with a thick South African accent with the occasional word in Swahili thrown in...well, let's just say that none of us understood a word.  But the costumes, music, singing, and dancing were so beautiful, we didn't have to.