Open Studios this weekend – dig in!

Open Studios is starting this weekend, and it’s a wonderful event to take your kids to.

Many areas have Open Studios, but I doubt that so many have such a huge amount of high quality in one concentrated location. I once went to hear the late Spalding Gray speak at UCSC. He said that he had this sense that people come to Santa Cruz for healing. I think this is true, but I also think that people generally come here for the examined life.

For an area that, in total, has one-sixth the population of San Francisco (a very small city), we’re amazing. We have symphony, opera, too many theater troupes to mention, jazz, poetry, and art. And we have all this for kids, as well. Because when you’re not doing it, what do you do? You teach it.

Many of our Open Studios artists are regulars on the kids’ teaching circuit, but even if they aren’t, they are teachers just by what they do. A small percentage of our local artists make their money from art; the others make it some other way and practice art for the love of it. This is a lesson that is so important in our very money-focused time.

Artists also teach us persistence. The ones in Open Studios are generally not new at their craft. Often they started somewhere else, and came to their art through experimentation and curiosity.

One of the great innovations of this year’s Open Studios calendar is that it notes which artists plan to be doing demonstrations of their work. Demonstrations are key to helping kids enjoy Open Studios. Some things my kids have seen over the years are: glass blowing and fused glass, metal cut right in front of us so that it was still almost burning hot when the artist passed it to our preschooler son (oops!), encaustic created on the spot as we chatted with the artist, seeing a photographer’s set-up where he took the photograph we were buying, and then his photos (still on his computer) from the bizarre spider he’d had on his deck the day before, lithograph prints made on the spot by my children on the artist’s press… I could go on.

Some of our favorite artists are not in Open Studios this year, but I’ll mention a few that are. They are our favorites for a variety of reasons: They have great demos, they are friends of ours, we think their art is really cool, we think their studios are really cool. I mention them less than to say “go see them” than to show you what a wide variety is out there.

Daniella Woolf is an old friend I met when I was in the graphic design business. She and I went our separate paths, and when I resurfaced as Mommy she resurfaced as an encaustic artist. She does a demonstration of her art (gluing stuff to canvas with melted wax, basically speaking), and she always puts out a great spread of snacks. (With kids, this is an important note!!)

Andrea Rich is someone we return to year after year simply because of the amazing nature of her craft. She does woodcut prints of animals and nature scenes, and they are fantastic. She’s usually out back in her studio, and she’s happy to explain her craft to you. One of the cool things is that her art is an ephemeral one: as she cuts from the same block for each successive color, she destroys the block and is thus creating a limited set of prints that can never be recreated. (She often also has some birds from Native Animal Rescue in her enormous birdcage. Bonus for the kids!)

Susan Vaughan is a relative newcomer to Open Studios, and I have to admit that we haven’t visited her in Open Studios before. But we got to know her last year when our sons became friends, and she has recently moved into the new artist lofts at the Tannery. There are lots of artists there — when you’re toting kids around, more bang for the buck is a big consideration. We like to do as little driving as possible, so that the kids don’t get too fussy. Susan says she’s planning on doing demonstrations, so ask her!

(About this point, you’d better go get a snack at a great bakery or taqueria. We have so many. I won’t try to influence your decision!)

Talking about bang for your buck, you have to go to the Seventeenth Avenue Studios. One of the reasons is that the location is fabulous. It’s a bunch of dilapidated old commercial buildings, including an original Quanset hut. There are lots of dead cars and weird stuff to see. And then there is the largest bunch of artists, all of whom are doing such completely radically different stuff, you’re bound to find something you like. We particularly like the wonderfully named Jane Harlow. She’s not one of the artists who really interacts with her visitors, but the quality of the work is great.

Daniel S. Friedman is a buddy of my husband’s (Oh, OK, Danny, I sorta like you too) and he does something pretty unique in Santa Cruz’s Open Studios: abstract painting. Danny really gets into the canvas: he displays his large collection of paint-splattered shoes on the driveway, plus the tools he uses to dig in. Say I sent you so he gives us some free art!

We love our friend Donna Vandijk’s incredible inventiveness — she not only is the only practitioner of her artform that I know of, she’s its inventor.

Oh, I know I’ve missed some of our friends, and our favorites, who are all wondering, why not me, ME!! The fact is, that practicing an art is a great achievement. It’s especially great in these times, when so many people are consumers, but not practitioners of anything. When we take our kids to Open Studios, we hope they see, think, and enjoy.

Even when they want to go and see the work of the watercolorist who does portraits of her cute dog over and over, it’s a worthwhile trip. Because that’s her art, and she’s doing it, and that’s a lesson we want our kids to learn.

Click here for more tips on going to Open Studios with kids.

Click here for local artists’ advice on visiting Open Studios with kids.

Google me, baby!

It has come to the attention of my household financial manager (that would be me) that I don’t make enough money. Such is the state of my life. Highly educated but not so skilled in ways that make money.

So my friend Heddi of the Resource Center and I got inspired to Google AdSense our way into financial solubility. First on the agenda was revamping her wonderful Quilting with Children website. This is a website she did in the infancy of the Web, stuck up there, and left. When I got my hands on it, the website announced that she was pregnant with her second child.

Her third is now almost four.

This is the way mom ventures go. But the way the Web goes, you can’t beat good content. So even though the website was about as low-tech as one can get (if a website can be said to be low-tech!), it had great Google ratings and lots of other sites link to it. In the way of the Web, it was a highly educated website that didn’t make any money.

Sounds familiar. So I redesigned it (had to give it more modern clothes to face the world with) and added Google ads. Heddi is going to develop a technique to create more time in the day so that she can update some of the content, but even before that, it’s a wonderful, comprehensive website.

With ads. This is the irony of my doing things on the web for money: I hate advertising! I’m an advertiser’s nightmare. I never look at them. When occasionally I am attracted by a beautiful image, I never remember what company the ad was for. Back when I watched TV, I muted ads. Many years ago I bought a wonderful invention: a VCR that had a 30-second forward feature. Skip the ads!

But the reality of modern day, so the New Yorker tells me, is that people don’t want to pay for content. People who fifty years ago would have paid the equivalent of a pretty good meal for Heddi’s book on quilting now want that information for free. But they don’t mind that it’s now flanked with ads.

Once I was done with Heddi’s site, it was on to my blog. You will see, if you look to the left, I have now installed ads. I have sworn on the life of my next-born child that I won’t ever click on them. But you may. As they say, “Click early and click often!”

I was pretty impressed with the context-sensitive ads that came up on the quilting website. Not so sure about the ones for my blog. I might have to do some fine-tuning. Let me know if you see anything truly offensive!

I guess this is my sort of apology for moving into the crass world of making money. I’ve been having a lot of fun with this blog, enjoying the little bits of time when it turns into a dialogue rather than a monologue. (Hint, hint!)

So click if you feel inspired to; mute if you need to. But I hope you keep coming back!

Ohlone Day, a local treasure…once you find it!

I wasn’t sure what to expect of Ohlone Day. I’d heard lots of people say nice things about it, but the publicity for it was lackluster, and the event-day signage was non-existent. So there we were, eager six-year-old and I, trying to find the parking lot that the salesperson in the store at Henry Cowell State Park said we’d see before we found Ohlone Day.

Luckily, some newly made friends helped us find the way.

So much for the State Parks getting their act together in the “revenue generation” part of their job!

Nevertheless, we persevered, and finally did find Ohlone Day, down a path that looked like it was going into the woods, but ended up at a parking lot, as promised, behind which was Ohlone Day.

And as promised, it was fun!

The six-year-old has gotten into bows and arrows, and thus into Robin Hood (which Daddy is reading to her, excising the anti-Semitic parts, explaining the antiquated language, and cringing at the mindless violence). In turn, Robin Hood is feeding new interest into bows, arrows, shooting, and hitting. The killing part doesn’t seem to be a big part of the fascination. Just the shooting and hitting part.

The six-year-old’s arrows are made of flexible stems taken from my begonia flowers (I just realized that, and realized what damage is being done to my poor begonias while I have been inattentive!), with triangles of paper attached to the ends.

No one’s getting killed, but a few have been hit by her arrows, which she tosses off her bow with glee.

Frankly, the six-year-old would probably like any day that included the sorts of things that Ohlone Day included:

Mat making with real dried tule reeds

Ohlone mat

Fire-making taught by a real live fire maker (not Ohlone, but you can’t have everything, right?)

Ohlone fire making

And popsicles. Don’t forget the popsicles.

Advance notice being what it was, I brought our picnic, not knowing what Ohlone Day would entail. It does, in fact, include lunch: though the Day is free, the lunch is not. But we did get free malt-o-meal, prepared by an Ohlone Day participant (not Ohlone) in the almost traditional Ohlone way. Because they didn’t have any cooking vessels that didn’t burn, they devised a pretty nifty way of cooking: They heated up rocks then put them into a waterproof basket with water and whatever they were cooking. The heated up rocks heated the food.

Our non-Ohlone cooking instructor informed us that she uses Malt-o-meal because the traditional acorn flour is “pretty bitter” — “nothing you’d eat unless you had to.”

She compared it to poi, which is what you get at traditional Hawaiian festivals. People taste it, just to say they did. Modern Hawaiians have a few more choices.

The six-year-old also enjoyed the various Ohlone games that were being held. In one, a ring was rolled in front of the participant and she tried to throw a spear through the ring. In another, the participants were given spear-throwers and tried to hit straw bale targets. The kids fell far short of the targets, but a buff young man who had assisted with the fire-making threw his spears well pass the targets and then had to trot off into the woods to find them.

It was a fun day, and definitely worth the effort to find it. But I hope the organizers do a bit better at letting people know where it is. Though it was pretty crowded when we left, I was surprised that so many people had found it. Perhaps they, also, met friends in the woods to show them the way.

Learning through life

OK, I know that I haven’t made a convincing enough argument. All of you, my friends, who actually feel that I’m harming my child by homeschooling her, you are just holding your tongues so that we can maintain our friendship.

You think that by bringing up little criticisms, little questions, every day, you might make me see the irreparable harm I am causing to my child.

But now, I have finally happened upon the argument that will convince you, once and for all, that what I am doing is Just Fine. My daughter will not be irreparably harmed, and we can go back to talking about the last episode of Survivor rather than educational issues, which, I realize, bore you, though they fascinate me. That, however, is a different issue altogether.

The issue is homeschooling. Yes, it is true that I homeschool my daughter. And today I am going to present you with the argument that will finally silence all of your objections. And it will only take four words:

My daughter’s babies surf.

Surf babies

What? You’re not convinced yet? I’m going to have to explain things? OK, for you, I will do so. It’s a pity you weren’t homeschooled, because, you know, homeschooling can lead children to the ability to read minds. Well, maybe not so much. But they can be real smart.

Back to the surfing. Here is my proof:

You see, my daughter’s babies are surfing. Each one is surfing on a specially designed surfboard to fit her body shape, weight, and abilities. Simcha, you know, is an expert surfer. Cowbaby, well, we all know about Cowbaby.

What, you might ask, does this have to do with homeschooling? Well, I tell you, this is a perfect example of what I’ve been trying to explain to you all along! Homeschooling is not about standards; it’s not about worksheets or homework. It’s about learning through life. And here is homeschooling in a nutshell. Or at least in a boogie board.

Here you see three babies. Each one has a surfboard uniquely designed for his or her own body shape and weight.

Math! It is true that my daughter produced no worksheets to prove this, but I dare to submit that in order to design these surfboards, she had to use advanced mathematical skills. Addition: weight + height. Multiplication: wave height x gravity. Not to mention algebra: if baby A weighs 1 pound and baby B weighs 8 ounces, and weight times board length equals stability, which baby is more stable?

Physics! Well, just read the math paragraph above. What else do you need?

Social studies: Where should I start. First of all, notice that not all my daughter’s babies are caucasian. If she had been at school, wouldn’t she have learned that only pale-skinned people surf? A fallacy, we all know. But in homeschool, she is free to believe that we are all free to be you and me. In fact, we start every homeschool day by watching Free to be you and me.

History: Did you know that people didn’t always surf? My daughter does! She knows that yesterday, her babies didn’t surf, but today, they do. See? Everyday life just leads us to history, and a grasp of the infinite truth.

Language arts: It’s true that my daughter’s penmanship is atrocious. We’ve talked about it, and she’s thrown many a pencil at me to prove her points. You see, when she throws the pencil, she’s actually creating an essay in her head about why she shouldn’t have to practice penmanship. And in so doing, she’s actually doing Language Arts. She may not be writing it down, but I feel certain that if she were required to do so by Star Testing, she would be able to. It’s also pretty certain that she knows the difference between its and it’s, but since most teachers don’t, it’s good that she’s in homeschool so that she wouldn’t get too frustrated.

Socialization: Oh, here’s the big bugaboo, the great argument against homeschooling. How is my daughter going to become socialized if she doesn’t go to school every day with children the same age and follow the orders of one adult? How will she learn to work in a workplace with people of all different ages and people who can’t just tell her what to do and who never listen to her ideas?

Well, let’s just go back to those surfing babies. First of all, she doesn’t need to be a student with them: she’s their teacher. All babies can enroll in her surfing school at the age of 6 months, and she will be their teacher. She tells them what to do and doesn’t let them have original ideas. So she’s really past that school thing, right? She’s just gone straight to being a teacher! And isn’t that what everyone says about kids that are ahead of their class? They shouldn’t get to do work at their own level: they should be required to help the other kids and that will be all the learning they need. Why let them go ahead when they can stay behind with the six-month-olds, right?

So as far as socialization goes, I have proven to you, through my daughter’s surfing babies, that she can get along with people of different skin colors, that she can function well in a group of people of different ages, as she will have to do in the rest of her life, and that she is already so socially advanced that she is an actual surfing teacher at the age of six. I’m sure there’s nothing left for you to say here.

OK, now I need you to admit it once and for all: you’re OK with this homeschooling thing, right? Now you’re totally convinced that my daughter is learning, that she is blossoming under my tutelage. I realize that I don’t have a degree in teaching, but heck, I’ve been around this long, I might as well have a degree in life, right? And isn’t that what homeschool is all about? Learning through life.

I think I’m preparing my daughter pretty well. What do you think?

Oh, and by the way, let me know if you know of anyone who wants surfing lessons: I know a great teacher!

All's fair at the fair

I got a sneak preview of the county fair last weekend when I dropped off my kids’ science fair exhibits. The faces of the people working to ready the exhibits, food stands, performance areas, and everything else that makes up this yearly event were glowing with excitement and promise. It was a happy, well-directed chaos.

We got to visit the fair in full swing on Wednesday with my son’s class. I have to admit to being a big county fair fan. When I was a child, the fair was an event of greater importance to kids, because we didn’t have a Boardwalk, Aquarium, amusement parks, and all those other things that our kids take for granted. In the small town where I grew up, we had the woods, skating, bike riding, and rope swings! In fact, the tallest building in our town was, I think, three stories. I believe there were only a few elevators in the whole town. (Aside from the grain elevator, that is!)

So for us, the fair was a fantastic thing. I don’t really remember the animals, the agriculture, or any of the stuff that the fair was really about. I remember the ferris wheel, which took me higher than anything else in town. (We didn’t even have much in the way of hills!) So it was truly exciting to go up on the ferris wheel, then spin around in the teacups till we were sick.

Fast forward and turn everything backwards: I pretty much like everything at the Santa Cruz County Fair except the rides! And thus, I love the fair’s education days: they take place before the rides open at 1.

For this year’s education day, I took my daughter and chaperoned my son’s class. The class met at the entrance and split into three groups. The only three remaining girls in his class came with us, which was thrilling for my daughter, who loves to hang with the big girls. (His class lost three girls this year to the economy, which private schools are no more immune to than public schools, though in a different way.) My son and his bosom buddy were the boys to round out our group.

We started with the livestock. I was successful in making it a “learning experience” by having the kids ask a boy holding a chicken what the difference was between cock, hen, cockerel and pullet. He very kindly and patiently explained that cockerels are males younger than a year; pullets are hens younger than a year.

So much for “learning” — the rest of the time we just had fun. One of the girls didn’t care for pigs and cows, so her friends led her past the stalls while she kept her eyes closed. We all got to rub goats’ heads and marvel at the babies of every breed.

Next we went to the “cultural” attractions: the miniature railroad that they set up every year and that never fails to grab the attention of the kids, a building full of optical illusions and fun physics experiments. We were supposed to get to the museum in that time, too, but the kids went in one end of the model railroad building and took a very long time getting to the other end.

Finally we had a half an hour to do the entire other half of the fair. This is the part that I really love at this point in my life: the art, horticulture, hobbies, collections, and homemaking arts of all of our local friends. Many of the people whose names we read were actual friends. I was amazed at how many of our friends entered something – homeschooling and charter school friends, artists we know, moms and dads who do some wonderful thing just for the love of it. The unfamiliar names felt like friends – they are our fellow practitioners of the art of life on this wonderful coast.

The county fair is another one of those events where I feel I should just black out my calendar for days in order to enjoy it to its fullest. My kids and I stayed on for another couple of hours after education morning ended, but we still hadn’t had enough. We never made it into Yesterday’s Farm, one of my favorite areas of the fair. But our lives are too scheduled up to visit again.

So on Monday I’ll return to pick up my kids’ science fair exhibits and I’ll see the dismantling of what I saw being built last weekend. I’m guessing the faces will be tired, the packing up will perhaps be less directed and a bit more frenzied than the setting up was. But the thing about a fair is that all the hard work creates something. And while dismantling this year’s fair, I’m guessing many of the people will be looking ahead to next year. I certainly am. Look for our work in the vegetable animals display!

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