I hope you’ve had a good summer. We were in California for most of the season, and the weather where we were oscillated between lovely and too stinking hot. But! It was rejuvenating to be back and visit with friends and family.

Around the time we left Vancouver in June, our plans for the coming school year gelled. We are forming a Traveling School with five other families! We’ll move through a few countries, together with a teacher we’ve hired—a sort of mobile learning pod. All the children are between eight and twelve years old, and the teacher we’ve hired is experienced in teaching these grade levels in the US and at an international school in Indonesia.

J, the woman who pulled all this together, is a mom whose family participated in a similar traveling group last year. With that experience under her belt, she had a clear vision for the group she was putting together (which inspired our confidence). One parameter she set for our cohort was to include children only in the age range of 8 to 12 years old, so the teacher could target lesson plans to confident readers who were all at similar learning readiness.

J interviewed all the potential families and potential teachers, picked participants, and it’s her proposed itinerary we’ll be following—an itinerary that includes Italy, Morocco, Egypt, Israel, and Greece.

The school will be set up in some ways like a traditional school, running from 9 am to 3 pm, with a mix of classroom learning, outdoor play, and field trips. Teacher B will be looking for locally-based learning opportunities everywhere we go, including partnering with local NGOs so the children can learn and contribute as global citizens; in Essaouira, Morocco, for example, local children gather on Sundays to learn English in a little alleyway. We hope to have our kids attend while we are there, to make friends and converse in English with the local students. Us parents are also encouraged to contribute to the learning experience, such as chaperoning field trips or leading experiments. Taz and I look forward to actively participating.

Here’s the school schedule that B shared for this first leg in Italy. We will spend five weeks in Torino and five weeks down south in a small Campania seaside town:

Sample Daily Academic Schedule: (ideally 4 days/week with at least one full day excursion)

9:00-9:30 Community Circle

9:30-10:00 Let’s Speak Italian!

10:00-10:15 Snack Break 

10:15-12:00 Core Content:(Literacy/Math/Science/History)

12:00-1:00 Lunch

1:00-2:45 Explore (cooking, community exploration, project based learning, outdoor play, team builders, etc) 

2:45- 3:00 Closing Circle and Reflections

One of the questions B asked on a parent survey was, “ By the end of our time in Italy, I want my child…” Among other desires, Taz and I wrote that we’d like Beanie to gain an understanding of what the Roman Empire, Renaissance, and World War II meant for the people of Italy. That’s simple enough to cover in 10 weeks, right? OK, perhaps we are expecting too much…but I’m curious how B will incorporate our local cultural environments into her lessons. J has said that in picking our teacher, she was looking for not only great teaching skills but also someone who was an experienced traveler and highly adaptable. It takes a special kind of teacher to develop culturally relevant lesson plans on the fly, while working in a new “schoolhouse” every five weeks.

I wrote previously about how my secondary school learning of World War II was radically different from what’s taught in US high schools. In Singapore, we focused much more on the Asian theater than the European theater of war, and I learned little about the Holocaust or Nazism—just as US students learn almost nothing about Japanese atrocities in WWII. It only struck me as an adult how non-universal basic educational curricula are, beyond math and science. It’s made me wonder what other enormous swathes of important knowledge are missing, in different ways, from all our formal education systems. And how can we make a conscious effort to do better when it comes to our children’s educations?

While we were back in the Bay Area, the tenants in our family home moved out and new tenants moved in. In between tenants, we got to spend a few days in our own house. It was a nice reset, and made us appreciate all the benefits of being in our own space, including the treasures in our backyard.

When Beanie was two years old, she loved eating nectarines, so we planted a baby nectarine tree in our garden. Seven years later, the tree produces the most delicious and sweet nectarines. They are little bursts of flavor, and our tree produces prolifically considering how small it is.

Summer is nectarine season, but by the time we moved temporarily back into our home, there were no nectarines left on the tree…bar one. We were disappointed not to have a fruitful bounty, but happy the fruit had been picked and enjoyed rather than left to rot and be pecked at by birds. We were delighted by that one lovely tiny overlooked nectarine still hidden between branches, which we proceeded to split three ways. Each of us got a couple of juicy bites. Mmm…The next day, we went to Taz’s sister’s house. In her backyard was a nectarine tree, its branches so heavy with fruit our brother-in-law had jerry-rigged a branch support system using ropes. We picked a big bagful of nectarines to bring home and enjoy; like the ones from our tree, they were small but intensely sweet and flavorful.

Perhaps the universe surprised us with this abundance once we proved we would be sufficiently appreciative? Perhaps, ha.

This summer, Beanie has gotten to play with her cousins and friends in both California and Ontario. She reconnected with two friends from her public elementary school in Walnut Creek, whom she hadn’t played with in a long while. In each case, they picked up as if no time had passed. Though we haven’t been stationary for the past few years, we’ve made an effort to help Beanie keep in touch with her friends and family. Return visits have created constants and the opportunity for joyous reunions. We want to continue encouraging and facilitating these connections. As an adult, I appreciate the friendships I’ve had since childhood—now going on 30 or 40 years. Not cultivating these special longstanding relationships is the big downside to not staying in one school; if we can somehow help her strengthen the bonds she’s made, I’ll be very glad.

Beanie also enjoyed a bit of quality time with her swing at home, which she had missed. She still loves a nice, long swing while daydreaming and making up stories in her head. Her swing is looking a bit worse for the wear these days, but I hope it will hold up until we return and she can get another season of daydreams from it.

We left for Europe this past Tuesday and broke up our flights with a short stay in Dublin. Now we have landed in the northern Italian city of Torino, where we’ll start our first five-week school session. Have I mentioned that we’ve never met the other families whom we are traveling with? Not even over Zoom? It’s a bit of a leap of faith. We will see them for the first time this afternoon at a picnic in the park. I sure hope we all get along! We are technically (and financially) only committed for the first semester, so if it all goes sideways, perhaps we’ll be changing course midway.

Will we be gladdened to meet kindred spirits with a shared sense of purpose? Or will we regret hitching up with a group of strangers with whom we have almost nothing in common?

Stay tuned to find out…

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Pretty Good Things

Running errands with friends

While at home in Walnut Creek, a friend (hi Peggy!) and I met up to run errands together. We went to Target and Trader Joe’s, getting stuff done while we chatted. Such a nice, low-key, useful way to catch up with friends when you feel too busy, without having to make a big plan and carve out special time to meet. I really must remember to propose this with people I care about; I might get to see them more often.

Sorry it’s been quiet over here. After a year of weekly posts, I’ve taken a bit of an unplanned hiatus as we work through the uncertainty of our next steps and put in time to investigate our possible paths.

We’re heading back down to California and…we still have no set plans for the next school year.

We tossed a bunch of balls in the air earlier in the spring, and now we are watching them come down, trying to figure out which ones to catch. The uncertainty is a little unsettling, but it’s also invigorating to not know where we’ll be and what we’ll be working on in the fall. In the meantime, summer will be spent in California with friends and family.

What we do know is we won’t have our home back for another year. We listed our house for rent to test the waters, and were immediately contacted by a family who was looking for exactly what our place had to offer.

Circumstances were already nudging us toward not returning to the Bay Area for the next school year, so we took it as fate that this family found us. Within a week of listing the house, we’d finalized the lease. We will wander again!

A lesson I’ve learned through this peripatetic year is that what brings me sustained satisfaction is sometimes surprisingly mundane. I love beaches and being by water, and I had always believed I would be content as long as I could be near the ocean.

Instead, I’ve realized that (a) I’d actually choose lakes and creeks over the ocean; but (b) living above a mall with grocery store, butcher, bakery, and public library improve my life even more than being close to nature.

Alas, I’ve discovered I am not a soulful creative who looks out at the sea and thinks deep thoughts. I am a plebe whose heart is gladdened when I realize it’ll only take five minutes to pop downstairs and get the pancake mix I have forgotten during the regular shopping trip. In day-to-day living, with work to do and dinners to make and school lunches to pack, convenience makes a bigger impact on my quality of life than any beautiful surroundings.

It is truly game-changing to live so close to the stores! We’ve been able to do as the Europeans do and shop for the day instead of the week. Fewer things go bad in our fridge, since we don’t have to meal plan so far ahead. And being able to decide at the last minute what to make for dinner has significantly reduced my cognitive load, since planning and shopping for the week’s meals is one of my least favorite chores.

This has been a good reminder for me to not get caught up chasing a mirage of my ideal life would look like (i.e., in a beach house) and pinning my hopes on some distant fulfillment.

I often read about retirees who face disappointment when they are finally let loose to live out their freedom, and they find the dreams they nurtured for many years don’t actually make them happy. I’m seeing more and more media stories of people moving out of North America to cheaper countries after they retire, or so they can retire early. I belong in several Facebook groups with members who are looking to do just that, and the number one piece of advice veteran retirees give them is to make a long visit to their chosen country before they uproot their lives. Basing one’s retirement plan upon making a drastic change without lived experience is, perhaps, unwise.

We’ve been lucky to have this opportunity to test some scenarios and live them out temporarily. I’ve been trying to tune in more to what I really need versus what would be nice to have in the long-term. Apparently, what I really need in life is to get groceries close to my house.

Our time in Vancouver feels abbreviated. We’ve realized that the people hibernate here, just like the bears. The winter rains don’t completely stop them from coming out, but it does slow things down a lot. I didn’t know this until spring came along, the sun returned, and suddenly the streets were alive. I didn’t realize what we’d been missing until what was missing came around. It’s a different city altogether in sunshine. Since the sun has only been out for a few short weeks, it feels like we have only just gotten to see this “new” city and we have to leave already.

We’ve had a lot of good weather days lately. We are leaving before the official start of summer (June 21), so we will miss what I’ve been told is the best season here.

These past couple of weeks have also felt like a slow wind-down at forest school, with several field trips for Beanie and her classmates—to Vancouver Aquarium, to the beach, to an animal farm and a produce-producing farm.

A highlight of their last field trip to Cates Park was not the trip itself, but a trick that one of the boys decided to play on the teachers: he dressed up in other kids’ clothes and pretended to be a new student called Katy. When I’d picked Beanie up the previous day, she said she definitely had to go to school the next morning. I thought it was because of the fun field trip, but she was more excited about Katy. It seems like the whole class was buzzing about it, and when we met up with all of them at Cates Park that morning, someone immediately came up to Beanie and said, “Katy is here! Katy is here!” Sometimes it’s pretty fun to be a kid, and sometimes it’s pretty fun to be reminded by kids about all the ways life can be exciting.

(We heard later that Katy’s appearance was brief, as the boy-who-was-Katy got shy and didn’t want to be Katy in public for long. I’m quite sure no teacher was fooled, but no matter—the anticipation was the best part of the plan anyway.)

Beanie has also taken some sailing lessons recently with her classmates. Just a series of three lessons, to learn the basics on tiny sailboats. Each boat carries two kids: one to work the sail and one to steer. Beanie has mostly been working the sail and she enjoyed it until the last lesson, when winds were strong and her boat tilted nearly 90 degrees: “We almost capsized 50 times!”

She told us she cried for a while when this happened. I asked her if she was still able to do her job moving the sails; she said yes, because her job was mostly to cling on to the sail lines and not let go. She just cried concurrently, that’s all. We told her we were proud of her for forging on with her duties despite the challenges, and we asked her if she would like to sail again. No, she said. But she said it in a way that makes me think she might someday change her mind.

Can you believe we’d been here for six months and never ventured up the mountains? The mountains that are 15 minutes away from our place, and are in the background of every photo of Vancouver?

Last Sunday, we finally took a drive up to Cypress Lookout Point at sunset. The lookout point is high up enough that we went from wearing T-shirts at home to light down jackets on the mountain.

It was worth the arduous 15-minute drive.

What else did we not see during our stay, right there in our backyard??

Well. It’s all been very lovely, Vancouver, and I think we are not done with you yet. We will have to return and finish our unfinished business.

Until next time.

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Pretty Good Things

The moon

The moon was very nice the other night, outside our window. A big, low, orange moon.

One Strange Rock

This is one of Taz’s favorite shows, and most people seem not to have heard of it. One Strange Rock is a documentary series directed by Darren Aronofsky, and both the cinematography and storytelling are gorgeous. It’s about life on earth, told from the uniquely “outside” perspective of astronauts who have looked at our world from afar.

It’s great! You can watch it on Disney+ or on Youtube.

Mark Rober commencement speech

Mark Rober, former NASA engineer and science YouTuber extraordinaire, spoke at the MIT commencement ceremonies last weekend. He had some good advice for the recent grads and the rest of us. Taz wrote a good rundown in a LinkedIn post, so I’m just going to steal from him:

Anyone who is a parent likely knows Mark Rober and has seen his squirrel maze video 2351 times. Mark is simply awesome. There is no better way to get kids interested in science and engineering than to show them Mark’s YouTube videos in which he builds the most insane, over-the-top contraptions.

Over the weekend, we sat down as a family and watched his commencement speech at MIT. His words were helpful not only to the graduates about to enter the ‘real world’ but also to the rest of us who need these reminders just as much, if not more.

1. Embrace naive optimism. 🌞 Our minds are very good at trying to predict all the problems that will occur fifty steps ahead and this often prevents us from taking that first crucial step. Treat life like crossing a big, flowing river—focusing on one rock at a time. “If you truly understood what would be required, that discouragement might have prevented you from starting.” Just do it.

2. Treat life like a video game. 🕹️ In video games, you don’t panic every time you miss a jump or lose a life—you learn from that and try again. Sometimes it can take many attempts. That’s okay. You have to treat life the same way—learn from the experience, get back up, and try again.

3. Foster your relationships. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 “A sad truth about getting older is, life gets busier and busier and it gets harder and harder to make really close friends like you made here in school.” Ain’t that the truth. Especially after a pandemic where we all maxed out our hermit-ing skills, we need to devote real time and energy to the people we care about in our lives. Isn’t that what this human experience is all about?

I encourage you to watch the whole video and be inspired by Mark’s infectious child-like positivity and optimism.

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We have turned a corner into spring, and along with the sunshine have come the bears. I didn’t know the Vancouver area had so many bears, but here in North Vancouver, they are not rare. In fact, this winter has been very bear-y, with sightings even during the snowy days of December and January . The bears were not in deep hibernation, and some had stayed up through the entire winter. The North Shore Black Bear Society confirmed this was not normal.

“It’s not unusual for a bear to occasionally come out of the den for a little snack — it’s not often, but it does happen,” [Christine Miller] told CityNews. “But we have had a group of three that have been moving around east of the Seymour River in North Vancouver, where there didn’t seem to be any pause in sightings to indicate that they have hibernated. They just seem to be staying up.”

Why would a bear not hibernate? Possibly climate change. When winters are warmer, bears’ bodies don’t get the signal that they should go into a deep winter sleep. Also, changing weather patterns—extreme drought followed by extreme precipitation—can bring about bounties of bear foods like pine nuts, which makes the long sleep unnecessary because food sources are available even into the winter.

A few days ago a bear was seen wandering around the yards of East Vancouver, nowhere near the woods. It seems the urban-wildlife interface is more and more on the urban side. The interfacing here in the North Vancouver is livelier yet, surrounded as we are by forests that are home to many black bears.

Also during the past week, bears have been spotted around both of Beanie’s school locations, on at least three days. Once, the students watched from the windows of their cabin as a bear frolicked on the hill outside. On another morning after dropping Beanie off with her class, Taz saw a bear crossing the street next to the general store, End of the Line, where he had parked.

There’s a nice tradition at Beanie’s school: on Thursdays after school lets out, whichever students want to walk over from the forest to End of the Line together will do so in a group. There they spend a few minutes—or more than a few minutes—browsing the candies and toys, and buying themselves a treat to enjoy while they hang out together outside the store.

Beanie didn’t want to join the group at first, I think because purchasing something at a counter by herself was still a new and scary thing for her. Now she has tried it a couple of times, it’s not as intimidating anymore, especially since the payoff is a delicious ice cream or candy bar.

There’s a Japanese show called “Old Enough” that you can watch on Netflix. It follows tiny children, some as young as three years old, as they embark on their first solo errands outside of the house. They totter from village shop to village shop collecting items their mothers have requested, or cross busy city streets to buy ingredients for dinner.

It’s adorable, and whenever I tell (non-Japanese) people who have not watched this show, there are always gasps of surprise. No one, including me, here in North America would send their kids out at three years old to do anything alone. And if we did, someone would call Child Protective Services on us. It’s just a different world we live in.

“She’s now as capable as a Japanese three-year-old,” Taz joked after Beanie’s inaugural walk to the general store. (Though the three-year-olds are walking alone, something Beanie is not quite ready to do yet.)

Last Thursday, what with a bear roaming nearby, some parents escorted the kids to End of the Line to keep them safe. Beanie reports that the adults kept some distance and let them walk ahead. No bears were sighted on the walk.

As parents, sometimes it’s hard to discern which of our fears are legitimate and which are unfounded. It does feel quite reasonable to be afraid of bears. Because they are bears. On the other hand, despite the increased human encounters nowadays, black bears are not aggressive and attacks are very rare. Is it safe for the children to walk by themselves to the store? Probably, but I’m glad the adults were around.

We are bombarded in the media by stories of terrible things that can happen to children. With all the noise around us, many people believe children are much less safe than they were when we grew up decades ago. It’s true there are new dangers such as online predation, but child abductions have not increased in North America. The vast majority of abductions are not by strangers either; usually they are by non-custodial parents. The number of child pedestrians struck by cars in the US has also fallen 91% between 1975 and 2020.

But even knowing the statistics, even knowing that what we see out there in the news is distorted toward sensationalism, the rational side of my brain sometimes loses out to the protective parental side of my brain, and I want to make a fence around Beanie that will keep all the bad stuff out. I have to fight against that instinct, so she has space to flourish independently. I have to remind myself that the world out there is not all Danger.

When bears do attack people, the attackers are often mother bears who feel their cubs are being threatened and are trying to protect them. We walk with our children out in the wild, watching that they don’t come to harm, and so do the bears. We humans and bears eye one another warily as we traverse the urban-wildlife interface. Who should fear whom? It’s not totally clear. Best to stay a healthy distance apart; best not to make any mothers mad, because they’ll do whatever it takes to protect their young.

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Pretty Good Things

Japanese desserts

I have a bit of an obsession with Japanese anmitsu and parfait desserts. Vancouver has quite a few Japanese dessert cafes, and it delights me because I am simple. Having yummy things nearby makes my steps lighter. I’m mainly sharing this because I asked an artist to create the above illustration for me, and I want an excuse to post it here. But also, a recommendation if you come to the Vancouver area: Nana’s Green Tea, an outpost of the Japanese matcha dessert chain. Beanie and I share a parfait when we go, and we always get some extra shiratama mochi balls. Yum.

Slow travel

I say our family is “slow traveling,” but what does that mean? I’ve used this term in counterpoint to “fast traveling,” the exhausting nonstop movement that comes with packing multiple destinations into a two-week trip. For someone who travels mostly so I can do the same things I do at home—wander and grocery shop and sit in cafes—just in different locations, packed itineraries don’t allow for my favorite activities or for room to breathe.

Condé Nast Traveler has a collection of slow travel stories from all corners of the earth, as well as a piece that attempts to define “slow travel.”

Slow travel is a mindset: you don’t need three weeks of vacation to slow down. A day spent strolling through an unfamiliar neighborhood without a crammed to-do list or exploring a state park with nothing but a route map and a bag of snacks could fall under the umbrella of slow travel. It comes down to how you engage with the world as you move through it.  

—Sebastian Modak, in “What does the phrase “slow travel” actually mean?”

This is the HMCS Ottawa badge

It was just Fleet Weekend in North Vancouver. We were at the North Vancouver Shipyards on Sunday, and chanced upon the HMCS Ottawa and HMCS Nanaimo, two Royal Canadian Navy ships docked and open to the touring public. (HMCS stands for “Her Majesty’s Canadian Ship,” by the way.)

Look at this beaver on the HMCS Ottawa badge! We stared at it for a while. Is it a fierce beaver or an exhausted beaver? To me, it looks like a world-weary beaver who has seen too much. Regardless, this is a very Canadian thing to put on a ship badge. I love it.

Hello, friends.

Allie’s daughter, L, goes to nature school with Beanie. Through our chats, I’d gotten glimpses into Allie’s educational philosophy, and I knew it was carefully considered and unconventional.

Allie has always excelled academically at school, she holds a PhD, and she teaches architecture at a university. She is, by traditional metrics, a school system success story. Her old friends are surprised when they learn she homeschools her own children, but she has come to her philosophy after many years of learning and experience, as a mother and an educator. 

In addition to L, she has two teen sons, H and Z, who currently homeschool. The family moved here to Vancouver from Australia eight years ago so oldest son H, who is neurodivergent, could attend the Eaton Arrowsmith Center for Neuroeducation. 

H tried seven schools between kindergarten and Grade Three, both in Australia and Canada. Being on the autism spectrum, socializing was challenging. Some teachers treated him as if he was stupid because he was autistic, and school often made him uncomfortable, so he’d behave “weirdly,” crawling on the floor or hiding under a desk. 

Not finding good school options, Allie began homeschooling H with a curriculum book she bought at Costco, sitting next to him while he worked through exercises. H was bored and lonely, but Allie did realize while watching him go through his Grade Three math book that he was not “stupid” at all. 

“He would just fill in the page and turn it, fill it in, turn it, like nothing was challenging,” Allie says.

With H feeling lonely at home and Allie busy with work and study, they decided to try one more school, Madrona, for “kids exactly like him who are bright but quirky.” It went relatively well. H stayed at Madrona until Covid lockdown, when suddenly the whole family was at home.

The family’s neighbors were already homeschooling, so together they made a bubble and did a year of “Hogwarts school.” The kids thrived.

Before the lockdown, Z had been having issues at public school too.

“He had a couple of friends there, but he was always being teased for things. Kids would make fun of the fact he brought food from home for lunch. They would tease him about the fact he has long hair and the things he was wearing. It's this whole culture of disrespect and teasing that's just normalized,” Allie says.

Homeschooling was much less stressful for Allie too, not having to shuttle three kids to three different schools anymore. “We wake up when we want, we decide what we're doing. Each day we eat lunch together as a family at home. We never wanted to push the family back into the school routine again.”

What about the curriculum? Were you concerned about what they were learning academically?

No. I have a couple of issues with school curricula. Having moved countries, curricula are completely different in different countries. The curriculum is set by the government, and from our perspective, it's completely arbitrary as to what they're going to learn when. Also, because I teach at university, particularly teaching first-years, they have a massive disparity in what they've learned based on the countries they grew up in and what they've been exposed to. 

I feel schools are not preparing kids for life. Some of these first-years have no time management skills. Here I am looking at these kids who've graduated from school who can't cope with life. I think our students have such a huge amount of mental health problems. They're stressed. They're lacking in a lot of life skills. 

What life skills do they not have?

Time management, self-control, self-regulation, and intrinsic motivation. I think school focuses on external motivators to get kids to work. I don't think it serves them any purpose in life. Because when they get to university, my role is not to monitor them and say, “I'll give you a good grade if you do your assignment.” They either hand it in or they don't. If they don't hand it in, they get zero. I think the school doesn't help them with that at all. 

So we thought, well, if we focus our homeschool curriculum on life skills and mental wellbeing, social-emotional wellbeing…with the neighbors, we did a whole year of school at Hogwarts. Actually L got this out this morning, which was from the Charms class. [Allie shows me the workbook she put together, for learning cursive handwriting.]

That theme worked for everyone from H down to the little kids? 

They loved it. Actually I think we all felt that was the best year of homeschool we had. It was fun and relevant to something they're really interested in. 

Did you have to be very deliberate in the Hogwarts lessons and think about, “What do I want them all to be learning through this and how do I incorporate it?” Or did it organically just keep happening? 

 I'm definitely philosophically more in the unschool camp, where what they learn is less important than how they learn and having them know they can learn whatever they want to learn. Learning how to learn is what we've focused on more.

How did you teach your kids to learn how to learn? 

I don't think we put much faith in kids. We think they need to be taught, but I don't think they do. We don't give them time actually. What we did instead is give them unlimited time for exploring and learning.

It's a much slower process that doesn't have as much output, so it's hard for a school to do that because schools are required to report. How can they report if they don't have evidence? So kids have to work to make evidence simply to justify what they're doing. Whereas with, say, Hogwarts it was like this buffet of opportunities to explore. We let them go really deep in ways they enjoyed. 

What was the process of letting them just explore? How long did it take? How did they start exploring? 

Among unschoolers, there's a big variety: some people allow their kids to do anything, and others ask things of their kids. I'm somewhere in the middle. We set up a family routine: rather than a schedule where it's more rigid, each evening I would lay out on the dining table a morning activity. They'd have breakfast doing the activity. Each day of the week, we had a theme for the day. If we had magical creatures on Monday, that would be the focus, so I'd put something on the table that would have something to do with a magical creature.

Then we would read together for an hour. I would read from some books, and they would do their hands-on activity while I'm reading. For example, for L, it would be a dot-to-dot, or a coloring-in or sewing. 

It's always a hand-y kind of thing as you were reading to them?

Yeah, to keep their hands busy. We would do that for an hour and then my requirement was they had to do Arithmancy, which was math, but I called it Arithmancy and stuck a cover on the book so it looked like a Hogwarts book. They each had a little trunk, so we'd be like, “Get out your trunks and get out your Arithmancy.” And we did Charms, which is the cursive writing. 

The day would focus on the theme. We used Brave Learner a lot for how we set things up. It's by a Canadian homeschool mom who has all these tips and tricks for how to set up your day and your home for learning. 

My focus was to make sure they were doing math and writing. Everything else would come through our learning. They were done at about 11 o'clock every day. 

Was it hard to get them to do the exercises? 

It depended on the kid. L does not like writing, but because they were all doing it together and they knew once they're done at 11 o'clock, they're done. Then we would go do something with the family next door, go to the forest. We would do craft activities and things like dissecting owl pellets and baking.

[Here Z comes in to get some snacks. He, H, and two friends are taking a science class with a freelance science teacher who comes to their house.]

There are probably a lot of resources for homeschoolers like the freelance science teacher, right? 

Yes. Last year, we organized medieval swordplay classes; there are people who teach the most amazing things. The kids think they're just learning swordplay. But the teacher would be constantly talking about medieval history. 

The boys go rock-climbing one day a week with other homeschooled kids. There's often pool meetups or park meetups or special events, like they did an avalanche training course. 

The comments we get about our boys is that they're really happy to be themselves and look different and be different. They talk to adults in a way that others don't. Z doesn't wanna become like all the other high school kids where they have to become brutal to protect themselves. If you're not dishing out negative comments, you're going to be receiving negative comments. I feel like that's the choice high school kids have. 

But do you think that with the difficult situations at school, they're also learning things–dealing with people and people not always being like them or liking them?

It is a really interesting question. I think we push kids too young to try to cope on their own with social issues. So yes, I do think my kids will be delayed in being put in those situations, but I think they'll be more prepared for dealing with them. They also have exposure to much more diversity. Although at school they're exposed to diversity, I don't think they're exposed to how to be inclusive of diversity very well because it's too big.

There's so much the teachers don't notice. So much happens actually on purpose away from teachers. So the difference is, [at home] they're exposed to inclusion and support a lot more. They're mentored a lot more by the greater community, there's more adult presence; the homeschool families tend to be much more parentally involved.

But I do wonder what is the better learning–is it learning to cope with being bullied every day? Or is it learning that I don't have to keep going every day?

There could be a downside to being forced to keep going to school–in a work situation, if they're being bullied by a boss, do they just keep putting up with it?

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Do you feel that in homeschooling or unschooling they're not getting anything in terms of academics that they would be getting in school? 

Sure, they're not getting some academics, but I don't think it's as important. It is something that I waver on: should we push them more or should we let them explore more?

I'm the product of a school system and I won't put my kids through that. I feel like I lack in self-awareness, self-knowledge, self-confidence in knowing who I am, knowing what I want. I learned how to do what people expect me to do.

I feel so happy for our kids having a real childhood. When I was Grade Five I was doing two to three hours of homework a night. I'd be at school all day. I'd work all night. I didn't complain about it because that's what I was told to do and my parents thought there was no other way.

What do you feel like you lacked in that rigorous traditional schooling system? 

I think we lacked time to explore and make choices for ourselves. Like figuring out what hobbies do I actually like? As an adult it’s like, what do I like to do? I don't even know. Having real time and time to get bored. We try not to over-schedule or over-tell our kids to do things cuz that’s when they're bored and creative.

I think the future needs creative thinkers. We are hoping to foster that in them, so they learn how to self-entertain.

We're also very anti-screens. They get half an hour a week to play video games. We have the Nintendo DS, because it's social, there’s no first-person perspective, and it's pixelated graphics. We chose that specifically. They asked a few years ago if they could play video games, and we did a lot of research into which would be the least addictive.

We see kids who cannot get off their devices. Even while they're playing Dungeons and Dragons, one of their friends is on the screen the whole time. The other thing I read years ago was that the reason screens can be so addictive is that for teens especially, real life is so tedious. School is so boring, and they revert to screens to be entertained.

This research was saying that to avoid that, parents need to put in a lot of time and effort to fostering their teens’ hobbies, so we purposely make sure we help them get involved in hobbies. 

For instance, we got our eldest into farming when he was 10 and he still volunteers at a farm once a week. He does a lot of heavy work and he does planting and harvesting and weeding. Z has creative hobbies; he makes jewelry and sells it.

Besides the video games being addictive, are there other reasons why you limit screens so much? 

We saw with Z particularly that screens alter his behavior a lot. Time on a screen would be followed by difficult behavior. 

What was he doing on the screens? 

We tried Minecraft. 

Oh really? We haven't done it much, but that's supposed to be a productive thing. 

It's a really interesting debate of should we allow kids on screens if it's educational. There'll be people that say “That's a good thing because they're learning a lot of creative skills.” And there's others that would say, “But they could learn all those creative skills doing something off screen.” 

The screen is like this vortex that sucks them in, and they stop doing other things. When Z did the term at school, he was required to bring a device for school; he was on it all day and he stopped making jewelry completely. 

That's where you can see it—it's so obvious when you've tried things from another camp. We can see so clearly the change in him. When we tried Minecraft with the boys when they were younger, H said he couldn't stop thinking about it. It's so consuming. Recently, Z asked if he could start playing again. H did it once with him, and straight away was like, “I can't stop thinking about it. I just can't do this.” He recognized that.

Did you find any resistance to taking away their screens?

No. We had a family meeting and talked about all the things we've just said. I talked to them about the research paper. We asked them, “What does it feel like when you’re playing them? What does it feel like after you’re playing them?”

We invited them to share what they think: should we have limits? Should we stop altogether? We agreed that we would foster their hobbies, that this would be a trade-off. We would go out of our way to encourage their hobbies.

We’ve been told by teachers that we are really extreme. Z's teacher wanted them to do IXL math homework, and we said no because he doesn't do it on the screen. If she wants them to practice math, we can practice math.

Why do we have to gamify everything? Because then what happens is if something isn't gamified, kids don't wanna do it. They're so used to having everything being a fun game, but again, there's no intrinsic motivation. 

Do you feel as a professor there are things that you are doing with your kids at home that you're bringing into the classroom, or vice-versa?

I must be bringing it in because students tell me that I'm very different. The courses I teach are really different to others. I do a lot more real world experiential learning and I bring in guests to talk, and I value process and progress over the output. 

Also, I did my postdoc in the education faculty with a prof whose work is all about real world experiential transformative learning. I learned a lot there.

Your postdoc was in education?

Yes, but all in sustainability. My PhD was architecture and sustainability, my postdoc was education for sustainability–how we teach students to become sustainability leaders is to immerse them in the real world.

The more connected they are to the real world, the more they'll take leadership. That must also be why I'm really anti-screens. Because they're just not the real world. So if there's a real world alternative, then we always choose it in our homeschool. 

But it's also always evolving and changing. I can say right now this is what we're doing, but it doesn't mean that we'll keep doing it. 

Is there anything that you would've changed on this educational journey with your kids? 

I would've done this from the beginning. I feel really sorry for H. I think we pushed and pushed for him to fit into schools and it was a really negative experience.

He went to a school in kindergarten all day, came home, had to sit at the table and do homework. He was five. He had to do spelling tests. I've apologized to him so many times.

We did send L to public school for kindergarten and beginning of Grade One. But I told the teachers, we don't do homework. She won't do spelling tests. We won't do any of these things. The teachers were amazing. They supported our choice. They would keep telling me, “Just so you know, she's behind grade level,” but they were really supportive.

Did it make you anxious to hear that? 

No, because they were supportive. She had these two amazing teachers who could see that this isn't really necessary. There's a lot of teachers who agree, but their hands are tied. 

We didn't actively teach her to read. I had moments where I was like, “Ooh, is this the right thing?” She learned when she was nine and by the time she learned it was a very slow process. But once she learned, she could read novels. It's like this moment of, “hey, I've cracked it.” Now she reads nonstop.

Research shows that for a child growing up in a literary household, who doesn't have a learning difference that would stop them learning to read, they’ll naturally learn to read if we give them time.

I had a friend tell me that their little girl who's six years old is going to have to repeat Grade One. “We are drilling every single day because she's not learning to read. So we do phonics in the bath.” I had this vision of this little six-year-old struggling to learn to read.

What's she internalizing? She's internalizing “there's something wrong with me. I'm going to have to repeat Grade One because I can't read.” I worry about the damage all that internalizing has done. 

It seems like the social aspects for homeschooling have not been a problem, right? Because you've had communities?

Socializing is different for homeschoolers; they socialize much more mixed ages. That's actually a more natural social setting for humans, to be in mixed ages. They socialize with elders in the community and we try to find the mentor-type people, and they socialize with mixed aged kids.

There's a lot more gender fluidity in terms of social groups in the homeschool community as well. We find school groups are very gendered. The girls play with the girls, we found even at forest school. We find in the homeschool community, it's just not a thing. It doesn't even come up. And then there's a lot more opportunity for them to mentor younger kids because they're around younger kids, whereas at school they're typically not.

That's good for them as well. Z said once he has far more social time now because with school, it's this myth that they're socializing all day. They're dealing with social issues all day, but the chance to free socialize is really limited to lunchtime. 

That's true. It's a very regimented situation. 

Every now and then I'll wonder, what are they missing out on? There's definitely things that they are missing out on and I have to weigh it up versus the damaging effects of school.

We always end up going, well, I think the pros outweigh the cons. Every year we reassess. There's no perfect situation.

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Here are two resources Allie recommends:

Brave Learner

Allie set up her homeschool according to the Brave Learner book, following suggestions such as always having an art table open for children to create. She also used the Brave Writer method to teach her kids to write. Author Julie Bogart states, “The core difference between Brave Writer and other programs is that we teach writing much the way professional writers teach writing…Professional writing instruction usually starts with a person—what do you have to say?”

I agree with this approach! If a child learns to love reading and writing, I don’t believe there’s any need to learn how to diagram a sentence. All the writing skills will come naturally, with practice.

Unschooling to University

Unschooling to University follows the paths of 30 Canadian kids who were unschooled for all or part of their childhoods, and later went on to university. Allie lent me her copy and I am intrigued. I’ll report back after I read this book.

Unschooling integrates learning with context

Compartmentalized subject learning is disconnected learning. Classroom time is tight. So many subject outcomes are packed into the curriculum that learning must be carefully divided into scope and sequence…Unschooling doesn’t compartmentalize subject areas. All core subjects are related to everything else. In unschooling, a child can delve into a topic as deeply he wishes.

—Unschooling to University

Hello, friends. Vancouver spring appears to comprise rain-hail-sunshine, sometimes in the span of an hour. The upside is there are cherry blossoms everywhere. Above are some blossoms from our walk yesterday in the Kensington-Cedar Cottage area of Vancouver. Looking at those blue skies, you would never guess it had just been pouring.

The other highlight of our walk was stumbling upon BKH Singapore-style jerky. A whole shop dedicated to selling to the best style of jerky! I bought a packet and tried it. It was good.

Not much time to write this week, so I’ve let AI do some of the work. This first haiku is mine, straight from my noggin:

Busy in Springtime Haiku #1, by me

On a little break…

Spring is pretty but busy.

Tell me: how are you?

And here are two haiku from my friend ChatGPT:

Busy in Springtime Haiku #2, by ChatGPT 3.5

Days blur together,

Busy hands and racing mind.

Springtime demands much.

Busy in Springtime Haiku #3, by ChatGPT 3.5

Frenzied springtime rush,

Days bursting with tasks to do.

Busy as a bee.

All right, not too bad. Does it know how to write limericks too? Let’s test it by asking it to write limericks about Beanie.

Limerick #1 about Beanie

There was a young girl called Miss Beanie,

With a pink owl stuffie, oh so dreamy.

She loves pizza, it's true,

But celery, oh boo!

She'd rather have cake that is creamy.

Limerick #2 about Beanie

There was a young girl called Miss Beanie,

Who was always so bright and so keenie,

She studied all day,

In her own special way,

And became a world-famous linguist genie.

Limerick #3 about Beanie

There was a young girl called Miss Beanie,

Whose favorite pastime was reading, you see.

With her pink owl by her side,

In the woods she loved to hide,

Trampolining and giggling with glee!

These are not stellar. I had ChatGPT generate about a dozen, and these were the best ones. It kept trying to rhyme “Beanie” with “zany” until I told it that these two words do not rhyme and to stop (it apologized, so we are OK now and moving past this).

Have you gotten ChatGPT to write anything fun for you?

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Grief and saying goodbye

Isabel Stenzel Byrnes and her twin sister Ana were the subjects of a documentary called The Power of Two, about their battle with cystic fibrosis and their subsequent double lung transplants. I was at the movie premiere in 2011 and remember vividly how moving I found their story.

Sadly, Ana passed away in 2013. Isabel is a grief counselor and patient advocate who has personally dealt with grief for most of her life. She was on NPR’s Life Kit podcast recently—the link leads to the podcast but also a transcript of the show—discussing how to say goodbye. It’s worth a listen or a read.

Goodbyes are made harder by this human instinct to create expectations for ourselves. So I do believe that having unmet expectations is a huge source of grief. And so being able to kind of be open to whatever our lives unfold into - it can really actually help us not experience such intense grief. And also more importantly, the confidence in oneself that we as human beings, if we read about history, read about different groups of people in our country - wow. We have tremendous capacity to cope with tragedy and hardship and adversity. And you do too. And I do too. And we won't know it until we have to face it.

And we don't need to live in anxiety, worried about how am I going to deal with this or that loss, but really to trust that we will have the confidence to cope with whatever comes our way.

—Isabel Stenzel Byrnes on NPR’s Life Kit

We visited the Choice School for Gifted Children last week. We had spoken with the principal while we were in Costa Rica, but both parties agreed Beanie would benefit from a three-day trial before we could consider enrolling her at the school. Unlike forest schools, this was a new kind of environment and we didn’t know if it would be right for her.

Now that we are here in Vancouver, we thought it would be worth seeing the school in person and getting a better feel for whether it would be a good place for Beanie—if not now, then perhaps in the future.

Choice School is a nonprofit independent school, and the only school in British Columbia that is designated by the province as a Special Education School for the Gifted. The school has 47 students across the grades, from kindergarten through Grade 8 (expanding to Grade 9 and beyond as their oldest cohort ages). So, like many of the schools Beanie has attended, it is very small. We were told that mixed age classes are about 10 students each, and they would not exceed 15 students. Each class is taught by a teacher and an assistant, so the teacher-to-student ratio is excellent.

The principal, Sukhbir Bolina, kindly made time to chat and show us around. He took pains to point out that the school doesn’t simply focus on academics—it emphasizes holistic teaching, including lots of outdoor play time, music, art, and career exploration. I was impressed that they are well-equipped to offer these subjects, which most small schools aren’t able to do. They have a nice big gymnasium as well, for PE and games and general running around. And regular field trips to places like Science World and the Capilano Salmon Hatchery, “Choice Challenges” where students can explore interests such as woodworking or knitting, and Experiential Weeks where they dive into topics like Egyptology in-depth.

Some of the advantages that Choice School offers are common to other private schools we have encountered, such as wobbly stools, beanbags and fidget toys (which Acton Academy Concord also offers) that help kinesthetic learners— people who need to move as they learn—better absorb information. Choice School does go a step beyond, providing exercise bikes in some classrooms (which one student was using when we visited). We also saw a student wearing headphones in class because they helped him focus better.

The acknowledgment that everyone learns differently is wonderful.

While we were walking around, Principal Bolina mentioned several times that gifted children learn differently from their peers, and could face challenges in regular public classrooms with not having an optimal learning experience, and feeling isolated because they recognize they are not the same as others. He pointed out one student who had just won the province-wide spelling bee, and another who was a chess champion.

The goal at Choice School, the principal said, was to teach the students the skills to eventually transition back to “regular” schools seamlessly and thrive there with their gifts.

After seeing all the campus and curriculum offer, we went back to Principal Bolina’s office to conclude our chat. I wanted to know how Choice School determines which students are “gifted” and a good fit for the school.

The principal said Choice School makes determinations on fit based either on a psychologist’s assessment, if available, or after observing the child during the three-day trial.

Our experience with Beanie is that she is very bright. She might be especially gifted in specific areas that have yet to be discovered. Or she might not. The chess and spelling bee champions are certainly gifted, and a school like Choice are more clearly a good…choice for them. But what about a student like Beanie—does a school like Choice provide a good learning environment?

I asked Principal Bolina this. “What about students who are very smart but not necessarily a prodigy in a specific way?”

He responded, in essence, that the school was a good fit for any student who is way ahead of their classmates at regular school, finishing their work in 20 minutes when it takes others an hour, and then sitting around bored while they wait.

Taz and I were honest during our meeting about our hesitations—at one point, I bluntly said that we were not sure if we would like to label Beanie as “gifted” at a young age. Principal Bolina assured us that the school took pains not to label children, at which point I rather tactlessly pointed out that the label was in the name of the school.

He patiently explained that the school is careful to not make feel that being gifted is in any way a negative label. I see his point, and I appreciate it. Especially if a child already feels different, already knows they are different from their peers, being supported in their difference is powerful. For students who are prodigies in one area or more, this is clear and I’m happy there is a school where they can feel comfortable to be themselves.

I’m still uncertain if this could be the right school for Beanie. It would be worth doing the trial at some point to find out, but the timing doesn’t currently work. After our visit, my conclusion is that the school is solid. Choice School works hard to meet the students where they would learn best, supporting their whole growth and providing learning tools that not only cater to learners who need to fidget or move as they’re learning, but also signal to all learners that there are different ways people do things, and that’s all OK.

Some of the benefits that Choice School offers are advantages that come hand-in-hand with small class sizes, and aren’t limited to a school for gifted students. The specialized attention and learning at their own pace is a fortunate benefit of Beanie’s schools, where the teacher-to-student ratios have been close to 1:5. And as I mentioned above, fidget toys and that sort of thing are also used at Acton Academy and similar schools.

It’s really being around gifted peers that makes this school stand out from others. This is a school where students’ gifts are acknowledged and not considered strange, because everyone is gifted in some way. The question is whether, for Beanie, this would be a positive factor that would inspire her to work harder and find her passions, or a negative factor that would make her question why she might not be a prodigy like some of her classmates. And is it good to define a child by the label of “gifted” at such a young age?

An argument for labeling children who learn differently—whether their special need is being “gifted” or otherwise—is getting the support they need. If Beanie had been in public school with large classes this entire time, we probably would feel we needed more support to optimize her education. But she’s been given good support in her schools, and I don’t think she is lacking. On the other hand, perhaps I do not realize what we are missing because we’ve not experienced this gifted school community.

I’d love to hear from any of you who have had experiences either being part of a gifted school/program, or have children who’ve done so. Was it positive or negative overall?

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Maybe they’re just hungry? (and other parenting pearls)

I just read Ryan Holiday’s most recent newsletter, 15 questions that will make you a better parent (and person). It’s worth a read; my favorite parts are:

Am I Cherishing The Garbage Time?

…Special days? Nah. Every day, every minute, can be special. All time with your kids—all time with anyone you love—is created equal. Eating cereal together can be wonderful. Blowing off school for a fun day together can be wonderful—but so can the twenty-minute drive in traffic to school. So can taking out the garbage or waiting in the McDonald’s drive-through.

In my pocket, I carry a medallion that says Tempus Fugit (”time flies”) on the front and “all time is quality time” on the back, so I’m constantly reminding myself to cherish the “garbage time.” Because it’s the best kind of time there is.

This is something I believe and yet must remind myself of more.

and also:

What If We’re Actually Just Hungry?

…Moms have long carried snacks in their purses for a reason. Because it will solve most problems. Soothe most frayed nerves. Calm down most difficult situations.

Somebody always forgets to eat. So feed them. Ask them if they’re hungry. Remind them that they’re hungry. Keep a tight meal schedule. Watch what happens.

Oh, also, when you’re grouchy and frustrated and anxious and short with your spouse and your kids—you might be hangry yourself. In 2014, researchers from Ohio State University found that most fights between couples are because someone is hungry. So, like taking a walk or taking five deep breaths, grabbing something to eat will probably solve most of your adult problems too.

Another Canadian chip flavor

More interesting chip flavors! This time, deeply Canadian. We bought the bag to try and it was all right. It’s no ketchup chip. Probably will not buy again. But will finish this bag because of course I will.

Girl Guide cookies

They’re called Girl Guides in Canada, not Girl Scouts, and there are no Thin Mints or Samoas or Tagalongs here. Just good ole chocolate and vanilla, in one box, no choices, very straightforward, very egalitarian. The Girl Scouts of USA sell 13 flavors, so they have a bit of an edge. (But you know what? Free healthcare here, so it’s hard to say who comes out on top.)

The Girl Guides have been out on the streets selling the cookies lately, so we bought boxes on two different occasions and Beanie brought a box to school to share with her class. Cookies are delightful. The kids enjoyed them.

Spring posies and blooming blossoms

Spring is here, and the trees are in bloom. Beautiful, and we did not have to go all the way to Japan to see the lovely blossoms. Cherry and plum trees are all over Vancouver; these photos were taken in the Mount Pleasant area of the city.

I hope you are having a good spring, wherever you are.

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Hello, friends. This week we have a few positive things that’ll make life just a little bit nicer. I hope you are having a good day. Here we go!

Jodi Ettenberg’s gluten-free resources

I’ve recommended Jodi Ettenberg’s work before—she’s one of the OG travel bloggers, quitting a legal career to become a digital nomad long before “digital nomad” was ever a thing. In 2018, she suffered a cerebrospinal fluid leak that never healed; she has since stopped traveling and now writes about living with disability, and resilience after (repeated) setbacks.

Jodi has celiac disease and has created gluten-free guides to several destinations, as well as gluten-free digital translation cards (the guides are free, the cards are for sale). She’s just added a gluten-free guide to Egypt; these resources are thoughtfully put together, so I hope they are useful to those of you with gluten restrictions. There are guides to countries like Mexico, Japan and Malaysia, and a few specific cities and regions as well.

I’m also a subscriber to Jodi’s newsletter, in which she gathers her favorite stories from the month to share. The first three items below are my favorites of her favorites:

Baby Puffins

This Iceland town has a Puffling Patrol: a team of townsfolk young and old, dedicated to saving baby puffins that have been confused by the artificial lights of the town and gotten lost on the way to the sea. Wonderful. This is the kind of project that brings purpose and a sense of belonging to a community, and we need more of it.

Sea Survival

Worldschooling isn’t a new thing; it’s just been given a new name now that more and more people are joining the movement. But families have been doing it for eons. The Robertsons—parents and four children—set sail in their schooner in 1971 on an adventure across the seas. A year into their voyage, killer whales attacked and sunk the schooner, leaving them stranded in a raft drifting in the Pacific Ocean. For 37 days, they clung onto life in a raft and then a tiny dinghy, until a fishing boat finally rescued them. They all survived, and father Dougal Robertson later wrote a book about their experience.

The Marginalian has a piece about this ordeal, featuring Robertson’s book Sea Survival: A Manual, and how he was able to go on even when the situation seemed hopeless:

I have no words to offer which may comfort the reader who is also a castaway, except that rescue may come at any time but not necessarily when you expect it; and that even if you give up hope, you must never give up trying, for, as the result of your efforts, hope may well return and with justification.

Barnes and Noble is thriving

It’s a funny world when Barnes and Noble is now an underdog you root for, rather than the behemoth bad guy that was obliquely referenced in “You’ve Got Mail,” the movie starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks…a lifetime ago (i.e., 1998). I remember after Barnes and Noble closed its Walnut Creek store in 2016, it was quite missed because there weren’t many bookstores around anymore. I did think Barnes and Noble would soon shut down completely (who do you know with Nook?).

But last summer, they opened anew in downtown Walnut Creek, part of the company’s revival and expansion after years of barely hanging on. In 2019, they got a new CEO who has focused on making the stores more like independent local bookstores, with autonomy to cater to local interests. Now, even independent bookstores regard Barnes and Noble as on their team because they keep publishers invested in distributing physical books and keep the “discovery” of books alive:

Buying a book you’re looking for online is easy. You search. You click. You buy. What’s lost in that process are the accidental finds, the book you pick up in a store because of its cover, a paperback you see on a stroll through the thriller section.

No one has quite figured out how to replicate that kind of incidental discovery online. It makes bookstores hugely important not only for readers but also for all but the biggest-name writers, as well as for agents and publishers of all sizes.

—NY Times

The Painted Porch

Speaking of bookstores, writer/blogger/podcaster Ryan Holiday posted 29 lessons he learned from running The Painted Porch bookstore for two years (h/t to Taz for sending me the post). Taz has a dream to own a bookstore some day; I love bookstores but I’m not sure I’d like to have one. I wouldn’t mind sitting in a bookstore all day reading, drinking hot drinks, and occasionally finding a book for a customer, but I think owning a bookstore entails a little bit more than that. Actually, I know it entails more than that because I read Ryan Holiday’s post.

#4. Keep your eye on the prize. What is success to you? What metrics actually matter to you? Remembering why you did something and how you measure success helps you calibrate your decisions properly. I’m happy enough to be putting books out in the world, making this community better, having a physical space, challenging myself, etc…as long as I don’t lose lots of money, that’s a win.

—Ryan Holiday

This cool use for drones

Ex-NASA scientist and uber popular YouTuber Mark Rober, he of porch thief glitter bomb and squirrel maze fame, has this new video out (above) about American company Zipline’s medical drone delivery service in Rwanda. These drones send blood, plasma, and other medical needs across terrain that is difficult to drive through, and the delivery happens within minutes. Sometimes people can be so clever and innovative and helpful—it’s fantastic! Just watch the video—it’s worth your time.

Subpac devices

I heard Chris Martin of Coldplay talk about Subpac, a device that allows wearers to “feel” music through vibrations. On the Subpac website, the company promotes their product as a way for music lovers to have a more immersive experience, and for music producers and sound designers to use as a tool to replicate the club sound in studios. Coldplay has found a different way to use it: some people who attend their concerts are deaf or hard-of-hearing (“Our critics say that’s the best way to experience our concerts, is if you can’t hear the music,” Chris Martin joked…He knows what’s up. He knows what people say). For these concert-goers, Coldplay provides Subpacs and sign language interpreters so they can enjoy the experience with everyone else.

C’mon, Coldplay-haters. That’s pretty cool.

Lastly but not leastly

And lastly, this isn’t a specific recommendation, but something I have to tell myself frequently to do: When I’m feeling down and caught up in my own problems, I tend to move inward into my own mind. I have to work hard to turn outward. But I’ve found that when I do, when I push myself to get out and—for example—volunteer or help someone else with their project, I invariably feel better. This is just me here, reminding myself this is a technique that works to alleviate the doldrums, and I shouldn’t forget it.

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We had a very brief Bay Area visit this week, and while I was there, I drove past the Larkey Park Swim Center in Walnut Creek. This is where I learned to swim as a little kid—I still remember the time my swim instructor thought he had gotten the whole class out of the pool and left me doggy-paddling in a panic. This is also where I began to associate summers with the smell of chlorine and coconut-scented sunscreen.

Here’s what the swim center looks like now:

The pool was renovated a few years ago, and an elaborate splash pad added. The splash pad is extremely popular on hot days, or at least on the hot days when the water is turned on for kids to run through and play. Some years this doesn’t happen—they keep the water off because drought, drought, drought. Probably not this year though. The rain has been unrelenting.

I tried to find a historical photo of the swim center from the 1970s or 1980s, but no luck. In my memory, it looms murky greenish-brown in a very seventies way. That might not be exactly correct, but the exterior was definitely not the clean white that it is today.

In my memory too, this building was ugly. It was rough concrete brick and felt worn even 40 years ago when it was new. The floor was always sopping wet and sometimes sticky with spills. It was a noisy place full of kids; joyful but chaotic and unkempt.

Later, as an adult, I’d pass by it all the time and not give it a glance. Even after it was renovated in 2017 to its current form, it was still a relic of my childhood and not anything I paid attention to.

Yesterday when I drove by the Larkey Park Swim Center—perhaps because the day was drizzly and gray and so the building’s white stood out, or perhaps because my eyes are accustomed to the Edwardian and Craftsman houses near where we currently live—I noticed it. I saw it. A gentle surprise to realize that this relic is quite attractive. It is very California summer, very California casual, very much the benchmark for what I think a swim center should look like. Now that I’ve been around the swim center block a few times, I daresay this is the best-looking one I’ve ever been to.

When we returned from Canada in 2021, after being surrounded by a lot of dark red brick, I took some walks in the Rancho San Miguel enclave of Walnut Creek, famous for its Eichler homes. I’ve always admired the lines of an Eichler, but that year too, I appreciated anew the uniquely California architectural landscape that’s part of what draws people to come here and never leave.

Sometimes this is what I like about going away—that when you come back home, you get to see new things too.

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Adults have an ability kids do not—the ability to make anything into work.”

—Beanie.

Hello, friends.

When Taz was first diagnosed, I was anxious about health insurance and the expenses that would come with his end-stage kidney disease. At the time, the future was uncertain and we weren’t sure what his working life would look like. I asked a leader in the transplant recipient community, an older gentleman, for advice.

“Make sure he gets with a large company with good benefits and stays with them for a full career. That is my story and I retired after almost 40 years with the same company.”

When I received that reply, my heart sank a bit. Kind and helpful as he was with my other questions, this was no further conversation to be had here. His world was not our world, and it will certainly not be Beanie’s world. What company can you rely on that will keep you employed for 40 years and take care of you? Even in Japan, where this culture of mutual dedication is much stronger, circumstances have changed and more job transition is occurring.

With the days of doing the same job for 40 years pretty much gone, and the types of jobs in the future all but impossible to predict and prepare for, we can only try our best to arm our children with the skills that endure no matter what, the ones that equip them to deal with whatever comes their way.

What are these super-skills?

If you search online for skills to teach children to prepare for future jobs, the same sorts of lists keep popping up, and on the top of those lists is critical thinking. These days, every school claims to prioritize the teaching of critical thinking. Sure, everyone believes it is important to learn, but how do you actually learn it?

That got me wondering: how do you define critical thinking? I know it when I see it, but “What is critical thinking?” turns out not to be a simple question. Educators debate whether critical thinking is a generalized skill that can be transferable from subject to subject, or a specialized skill that is content-specific and must be learned in context. The definition of critical thinking is also contested, but I see it commonly defined as an ability to identify relevant information and valid sources, construct deductive arguments, connect ideas, and recognize reasoning fallacies.

People who espouse the generalist view believe that learning how to think critically in one context is transferable to other contexts. Those who believe these skills are subject-specific say that, for example, historians must analyze information in light of their sources and in historical context, while in science, the scientific method is more important than a document’s source (Willingham, 2019). These different types of critical thinking have to be learned separately.

It is no surprise then that programs in school meant to teach general critical thinking skills have had limited success. Such programs are usually curricular add-ons during which students engage in critical thinking activities for perhaps five hours each week over the course of a year or two. Unfortunately, the evaluations of these programs seldom offer a rigorous test of transfer. If the critical thinking training features logical and spatial puzzles, the measure of success tends to feature the same sort of puzzle. And if the critical thinking regimen entails argument and debate, the outcome measure is usually the ability to evaluate arguments or take both perspectives in debate. When investigators have tested for transfer in such curricular programs, positive results have been absent or modest and quick to fade.

—Willingham 2019*

Regardless of whether they think critical thinking needs to be taught via each discipline or as a standalone subject, everyone agrees that it must be taught explicitly. In a 2008 meta-analysis of 117 studies, Abrami et al.** concluded that when instructors were given training in teaching critical thinking skills, or when these skills were extensively integrated into the course, students’ critical thinking improved significantly. When critical thinking wasn’t an explicit goal and not deliberately weaved into lessons, gains were much smaller.

Professors of literature, science, psychology, economics and so on must reflect on how they think as scholars and researchers within their own disciplines — and then explicitly teach those cognitive processes to students. If there is one thing that we know for sure, it is that thinking skills, general or otherwise, can’t be learned if they’re not taught in as overt a manner as other content in college courses.

—Schlueter, 2016***

If there’s no consensus on the generalizability of acquiring critical thinking skills, how are we supposed to teach the next generation?

Since it’s known that there should be explicit instruction, and context-specific instruction does work, some experts suggest that educators in all disciplines should intentionally incorporate lessons on how the experts in their fields reason, analyze, and gain knowledge—and then give their students opportunities to practice these processes. In other words, it would benefit students to learn how to critically think, and be told “this is how you think critically” in every subject they learn, with all steps described. Their assignments would do the same, pointing out that the assignment is meant to give them practice in how experts approach and think through problems in that field.

Students ought to be explicitly exposed to how experts engage in critical thinking in each specific discipline, which should, in turn, expose them to the nature of knowledge in that discipline…Making the critical thinking process explicit to students, demonstrating how the process allows the students to learn or make discoveries, and having the students practice in a deliberate way with targeted feedback will help students understand the nature of scientific measurement and data uncertainty, and, in time, adopt the new ways of thinking.

—Holmes et al. 2015****

This is all good for me to know and look out for, as we assess future educational options. When schools and learning programs claim to teach critical thinking, what are they actually doing? Do they have lesson plans that delineate how one should think through problems in context? Do they empower students to practice these thinking processes, step by step, in realistic scenarios?

Or are they just using trendy buzzwords?

On these lists of crucial skills children should develop for the future, I was surprised that I rarely saw “imagination.” Isn’t imagination where the most creative innovations come from, and the biggest dreams for humanity?

Kids already have imagination built into them, and then along the way to grownup-hood, many of our imagination muscles atrophy from lack of use. Kids are fun to watch because they are still able to dream and be fanciful. With Plus-Plus blocks and Legos, Beanie builds crowns and swords, pet food and necklaces. Sometimes Plus-Pluses can be a bed for her stuffies, sometimes they can be the detritus from a pirate shipwreck.

I love building toys too, but my style is to faithfully follow the instructions to build the picture on the box. Beanie finds that utterly boring. When she gets Lego kits, I build them into what they are “supposed” to be, and she then takes them apart and makes them into what they have the potential to be. I’m not sure if this is a difference in personality, or if I am an adult who has had the imagination squashed out of me. Probably a bit of both.

When I spoke to Shannon Foley, the founder of the forest school Beanie used to attend, she said she’s seen how forest school helps children retain that sense of creative play.

The biggest thing that’s surprised me is when I look at a child who’s been through a forest school program, they hold on to play and play-based learning so much longer. Which is amazing. I would have days where the original crew [of RTH students] would come back, and I would pitch it to those kids as, “Now you’re a leader of the group. You’re going to help supervise and lead the group.” Those kids would slip back into play so quickly. It was really amazing to see and I think that’s really important too.

Even as adults, you still have to find your inner child and channel it, and those kids have that skill. They can just go back to the forest and find the fort they built—it’s still there and they’re so excited about it and trying to see if they still fit inside it. They don’t lose that spirit.

—Shannon Foley, founder of Red-tailed Hawk Forest School

I’m not sure how much of this ability to play imaginatively is attributable to forest school and being in nature, and how much simply has to do with the abundance of free play time these schools build into the day. Finland, where it’s not just forest schools but all public schools that have this outdoor free play ethos—and where children don’t start learning formal academic subjects until age seven—has some of the highest test scores in the world. Nurturing imagination doesn’t have to come at the expense of academic achievement.

I periodically search online for forest schools and other alternative schools around the world, to see what pioneers in that space are working on.

Forest schools have been popping up everywhere, including Singapore, where I grew up and where ‘forest’ is not the first or 10th word that comes to mind when describing its landscape—that’s fantastic! I hope that as the outdoor schools movement grows, the original philosophy of free play is preserved and forest school doesn’t become just another way to over-schedule children, outdoors instead of indoors. I suspect the free play element is essential to letting children’s creativity wander free and grow. A child’s free play time must be carefully protected!

Also, free play is fun. And childhood should be fun.

It’s so hard, as parents, to sift through all the noise: all the children’s classes and programs and all the articles and all the opinions. Are we giving Beanie the education she needs to succeed in life later? Are the schools she attends giving her opportunities to develop her critical thinking, her imagination, her adaptability, her communication skills, her moral compass, and everything else that will make her a productive and happy citizen of the world?

As she’s tried these different schools and learning methods, it has felt at times like we’ve been seeking the Platonic ideal of a “school-like institution.” Or at least, the Platonic ideal for Beanie, since every child’s needs are different. Some of the aspirations we had at the beginning of our journey have really borne fruit: Beanie has become more confident, more adaptable and flexible, better at making friends quickly, and more excited to live in new places.

Academically, she’s doing well. Whether she is working to her potential and absorbing the right lessons of critical thinking remain to be seen. I do like that at her current school, work is in the form of open-ended projects, such as the “sustainable city” diorama they built with recyclable objects, and the accompanying research they did to plan their ideal sustainable city. For math, they’ve been working on designing a house and calculating how much it would cost to build, based on the size and materials they chose. It would seem that these are good exercises for independent thinking, and the kids have really enjoyed dreaming up their designs and decor. I’m hopeful that, whether or not Beanie is learning critical thinking in the most “optimal” way, these positive experiences will lead her to stay curious and keep asking the questions that pave her way to a thoughtful future.

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*Willingham, D. 2019. How to teach critical thinking. In Education: Future Frontiers. NSW Department of Education.

**Abrami et al. 2008. Instructional interventions affecting critical thinking skills and dispositions: a Stage 1 meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research 78:1102-1134.

***Schlueter, J. 2016. Higher Ed’s biggest gamble. Can colleges truly teach critical-thinking skills? (essay)

****Holmes, N; Wieman, CE; Bonn, D. 2015. Teaching critical thinking. PNAS 112(36):11199-11204.

Pretty Good Things

One benefit of being on this worldschooling journey and writing this blog has been getting to know kindred spirits, such as the educators I’ve interviewed in the past, and education entrepreneur John Tan. He founded education startups Doyobi and Saturday Kids in Singapore, and writes weekly about the future of work and learning.

There are plenty of after-school activities available to Singaporean children, but not so many that are forward-thinking like Doyobi, which John founded with the aim to teach young Singaporeans those essential skills we’ve been talking about here, the ones that will serve them well no matter what the world looks like when they grow up. And Doyobi does it in a fun way through games and quests; poking around its website, I thought, “I would’ve loved to have done this as a kid.”

I subscribe to John’s newsletter, and I like that John tells it straight, like a few months ago when he lamented that parents were not buying into Doyobi even though they theoretically see its value:

After one year of marketing Doyobi to parents, it’s quite clear that parents don’t prioritise skills that robots cannot replace. It’s not that they don’t value these skills. Of course they want their kids to be critical thinkers and problem solvers. They just don’t want their kids to invest the time to develop these skills. Kind of like me saying I want six-pack abs but I’d rather be drinking with friends than hitting the gym. Because kids have more important things to do with their time. Things like math tuition, science tuition, english tuition. 

Because grades matter above all else.

It’s frustrating and not altogether surprising that this attitude dominates in the pressure-cooker educational ecosystem of Singapore, but it’s not just Singapore where people are unable to see beyond grades and exams. Not at all. (Have you ever seen the documentary “Try Harder!” about Lowell High School in San Francisco? It’s a good film, but it stressed me out…and I’m a good three decades beyond applying for college).

It’s not easy to break away from that mentality when it surrounds you. I admire John for forging this path; I hope Doyobi succeeds, especially in a place like Singapore. Students there need something other than tuition every afternoon, not only to broaden their minds and give them valuable tools, but also to remind them that learning can be very enjoyable and isn’t just an arduous task they must undertake while they swot for exams.

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I hope you are all well. Here’s a short note from me, during a busy week.

It’s been snowing a lot in North Vancouver.

Taz says it “feels more like Canada,” because to him, Canada winters are very cold and white, not sort-of-cold and wet. The air does have a dryness that it doesn’t usually, and it smells very clean, without even the mossy smells I sometimes get a whiff of around here. I like looking out our apartment window down onto the street, and watching the tiny tots in their pillowy snowsuits tromping around in powdery mounds almost as tall as they are.

I think Taz is enjoying this “real Canada.” Beanie is as well. Though now she’s complaining that it’s snowing too much, I can tell she likes it. Yesterday the schools had a snow day, and she went over to her friend Lulu’s house to play. They rolled down the hill, had snowball fights, and splashed in the creek by their house. Beanie’s snow pants and jacket were completely soaked by the end of the day. A good time was had by all.

These Vancouver winter days aren’t quite like the winter days of Ontario though—as the temperature hovers around freezing, some of the snow melts during the warmest part of the day. Our balcony railing had four-inch-tall snow piles after the first night; they dripped steadily into nothingness the next morning. From sunrise onward, big white balls thud to the ground intermittently from the branches of Douglas fir trees, until the trees are all green again by the afternoon. This cycle has happened every day since Saturday. This week, the first thing I’ve done after waking up is look out at the rows of fir trees to see if the night has brought more snow; when I see that it has, I get a little thrill.

The year we lived in Ontario, by March I was quite ready for the snow to go away. It had come in the autumn and settled in, blanketing everything around us—over and over—and I wanted to be done with it. Here in North Vancouver, I wake to see the results of our latest snowfall and I say to Taz excitedly, “It feels like Christmas!” And he agrees that it does feel like Christmas.

There’s one more snowfall forecasted tonight, and then the rains are moving in. By the end of the week, there will be nothing left of any of this. We will return to the wet and gray, and I’ll look back fondly to this snowy respite, recognizing it as beautiful because it was so brief.

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Pretty Good Things

Avoiding SAD

Winter is waning, but with this unusually cold weather in many parts, it doesn’t feel like it is so. Here is an article by a nutritional neuroscientist about seasonal affective disorder (or SAD), with some suggestions on how to avoid it. Most of it is common sense, though there are a few tips worth noting:

Try to get at least one hour of natural light during the early morning hours, preferably about one hour after your usual morning wake-up time when the circadian clock is most sensitive to light. This is true no matter what your wake-up time is, as long as it’s morning. For people living at northern latitudes where there’s very little sun in winter, light therapy boxes – which replicate outdoor light – can be effective.

Cave houses in China

I stumbled upon this Wikipedia page randomly—I had no idea that 40 million people in northern China live in cave houses, or yaodong. These dwellings have been around since the 2nd millennium BC, and they are naturally climate-controlled—cool in the summer and warm in the winter. 40 million people is a lot of people; how did I not know this? Amazing.

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Some of you know that Taz had a kidney transplant in 2013, a few months before Beanie was born. 2013 was a big year for us, with many, many visits to UCSF Medical Center. We rounded out the year with a NICU stay for Beanie after she was born prematurely, in December.

Fortunately, she’s been healthy since and Taz mostly has been too. After some quiet time at home with a recovering kidney transplant recipient and a tiny baby, we started traveling again in August 2014, and have been ever since. Taz has also traveled a lot for work. Over the years, he has figured out the practices he has to keep up with to maintain his health while on the road.

We travel slow because that’s how we like to travel, which is good since it’s the wise thing for us to do. A packed itinerary is not forgiving, and doesn’t leave room for down days and afternoon lie-downs. Slow travel is also a more enjoyable way to travel with little kids, since they are unpredictable and can be extremely uncooperative.

Slow travel, to me, means changing expectations to include rest and aimless wandering around. Full days are interspersed with days where the goal is no larger than exploring a few neighborhood blocks on foot. Slotting in slow days purposefully, rather than expecting to be on the go all the time and being forced to cancel when you can’t, keeps expectations at appropriate levels and makes the trip happier.

The side benefit to not having a big agenda is letting some serendipity in to your life, which doesn’t happen when you are on the clock or on someone else’s clock in a tour group. Strolling around the streets or grocery stores is most fun, and you notice strange and interesting things, like Lay’s chip flavors.

I asked Taz to give me his perspective on traveling with a chronic illness.

How has the way you travel changed since your transplant?

“I'm definitely more conscious of certain preparations we have to do. For instance, I have to make sure I have an adequate supply of medications before we travel (even though it's happened a couple of times where I didn’t and it was super annoying).”

What’s surprised you about healthcare in other countries?

“What has surprised me is my medications are expensive everywhere. I think there's this notion that things are much cheaper and better outside the US—which may be true if you're a resident and you're part of the national health system. But in our case, paying out of pocket was no cheaper in these other places than it was at home.”

Has the transplant changed how you feel about travel? Is there underlying stress that wasn’t there before?

“Not hugely—part of it is because I've been living with the transplant for a while now. In the early days of the transplant, especially when you're on high dosages of immunosuppressants, you live in a little bubble for a while…but over time you learn that you can live a pretty normal life and you just have to take certain precautions, like being very careful with hygiene—more so than you would be normally. I don't eat street food when we go to other countries. That's something that's probably changed about my travel habits, is I’m a little bit more conscientious about hygiene. So I'm not gonna go eat tacos off the street in Mexico City anymore, whereas I might have done previously.”

Besides slow travel, the other higher level suggestion I have is to do some research about the destination’s healthcare system beforehand. While we don’t restrict ourselves to only visiting developed countries with shiny and sleek hospitals, we do check the local standard of healthcare and whether the specialists Taz might need are available nearby. Before we moved to Costa Rica, I looked up where the nearest English-speaking nephrology department was, at a hospital an hour away.

So here are some of our tips for traveling well when you are not always feeling well:

• Hospitals: Note the closest hospitals with staff who speak your language(s), and the closest medical facilities with the specialties relevant to your condition. Note down how to call emergency services at your destination. It might also be helpful to learn the words relevant to your illness in the local language, though I admit we haven’t done this ourselves.

• Carry medications: Carry them in original packaging and in your carry-on luggage, preferably in a smaller backpack or bag, since occasionally on full flights airlines will force passengers to check in their carry-on suitcases.

• Extra medications: Travel with extra days of medication. Taz does, but there have still been occasions when he’s had to get refills—one time we trekked out to a residential area on the outskirts of Amsterdam to pick up medications after he unexpectedly ran out. It was a little bit stressful, but in the end it allowed us to see a part of Amsterdam that we otherwise wouldn’t have thought to explore.

• Check country’s medication policies: Some countries have restrictions on medications—e.g.,you can’t bring common over-the-counter medications such as Sudafed, which contains pseudoephedrine, into Japan at all. And you need import certification to bring in more than one month’s supply of prescription medicines to Japan. If you’re not familiar with a country’s medication policies, look them up.

• Getting larger medication supplies: For longer trips, if you live in the US, you may have to coordinate between your doctor, pharmacist, and insurance company to get more than a month’s supply of your medications. Taz calls getting these prescription exceptions the “song-and-dance” of “bugging all parties until they figure it out amongst themselves.” It takes patience, but he has successfully done it several times.

• Be flexible: Don’t jam-pack your days, and have a flexible attitude, even if you are not staying in your destination for long. To expect perfect healthy days every day is to set yourself up for disappointment—this goes even for usually healthy people. There are bound to be some off-days, if only because traveling is hard on the body—jet-lag, unfamiliar foods, trying to sleep upright in tiny chairs on the way there…who needs the anxiety of hitting every sight? That’s not what travel is for.

• Travel medical insurance: I didn’t pay attention to travel insurance until a few years ago. We used to have Blue Shield of California insurance that provided worldwide coverage also, and through that program, I’ve successfully been reimbursed for minor medical expenses I incurred in Turkey, Mexico, and Indonesia.

  Our current US health insurance doesn’t have the same global coverage included, so we have been buying travel medical insurance. We recently used it when Taz had Remdesivir treatments for Covid. We just received our big ole reimbursement check for these treatments; after submitting our receipts, we didn’t get any pushback from the insurance company, fortunately. Reimbursement took about a month.

  One challenge people with chronic illnesses face is finding travel insurance that covers preexisting conditions. Many policies do not, and you must read the fine print to make sure the one you purchase does. For shorter trips, I search on Squaremouth for a reasonable plan. For our months away, we’ve used Blue Cross Blue Shield Geoblue Voyager Choice, and that is what we have currently. This plan does cover preexisting conditions; it requires that you buy the plan before you leave the US, and that you have a separate US health plan (from any company) as well. This provider also offers a similar plan that doesn’t require you to have separate US health coverage, called Voyager Essential.

  The Voyager Choice plan description says it is for trips up to six months, but they allow one renewal of up to six months while you are traveling, which we did without problems while we were in Ontario.

• Splurge on hotel (maybe with points): Slow travel means more relaxation in your room, so it’s worth it to splurge a bit on your accommodations—or, like us, travel hack so you can stay in very nice hotels for cheap. If your symptoms act up, having a room with a good bed, nice sheets, and spacious bathroom makes the experience less awful. With some hotel groups like IHG and Marriott, every 4th or 5th night of your points stay is free—another incentive to not move around too quickly!

• Last Night Treat/Buffer Day: This is one that I think everyone could benefit from—planning a Last Night Treat and a Buffer Day. Save a special thing like a fancy dinner for the last night of your trip so you have something to look forward to at the end. And allow at least one day at home before you have to start work or school, so you have time to recover, rest up, and get everything in order before Real Life starts again.

Those are a few tips that have worked for us. If I think of more, I’ll update this list.

I remember those days more than a decade ago, when Taz was diagnosed with end-stage renal failure, as a blur of hospitals and creatinine measurements and acupuncture and recipes low in potassium, sodium, phosphorus, protein, and flavor. It was a long road from there to here, and we’re lucky that Taz’s traveling days were only paused and not permanently curtailed.

Traveling is a privilege in many ways, and I want to acknowledge that many people with chronic illnesses simply can’t travel. I want to also acknowledge that without Taz’s sister, who donated her kidney to him, Taz would also not be able to travel.

UCSF featured Taz and his sister in a short film about their kidney transplant experience. Here it is, with bonus footage of baby Beanie toward the end:

Us in Vancouver, us in Costa Rica, us in the many places we’ve been over the past nine years…all thanks to Taz’s sister and the Gift of Life.

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Pretty Good Things

Donate Life

This is a Pretty Good Thing that Taz would like to spread the word about: Register for organ donation. It is a profound gift to give someone. Without his sister’s selfless act, Taz might not be here and Beanie might not either.

Donate Life America now has a Living Donor Registry—you can sign up to be on the potential living donor list. Kidneys from living donors do significantly better after transplantation than kidneys from deceased donors. The recipient tends to have fewer complications, and the transplanted kidney usually lasts longer.

(Donating life is not just a Pretty Good Thing, it is a Very Good Thing.)

More travel tips

Here are a few more general travel tips, not only for those with chronic illnesses:

• This one I just learned from experience: If you’re flying from Vancouver to somewhere in the US, consider flying out of Seattle instead. Of course, this means you have to drive down to Seattle (about 2.5 hours) but for our family of three, it was worth it to save several hundred dollars. Same rule applies to flying out of Buffalo instead of Toronto.

• These laundry sheets pictured below are great. I use them even when not traveling, but I’ve found them very convenient when staying in places with washing machine access. They take up almost no room in your luggage and they won’t leak in your suitcase.

• I cannot pay for hotel room bottled water on principle. If your room doesn’t have complimentary water, bring your own bottle down to the gym because there’s usually a water cooler there.

• The Google Translate camera function is very useful. I spent a lot of time standing in front of the supermarket meat section in Costa Rica, pointing my phone at packages of meat and trying to figure out what each cut was, further complicated by my lack of general knowledge about cuts of meat (cuete de res? That’s a bottom round? What’s a bottom round though?)

• And this last tip is one that Taz lives by: clean the house before you go on vacation! Much nicer to come back to a tidy house than a dirty one.

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I thought this would be a good time to check in with Beanie and see how she’s feeling about her worldschooling adventures so far. She was excited to be interviewed, and unlike her usual “I don’t know” answers, she actually gave me some real insights.

I think I will interview her regularly, whether for publication or not, as a way to get to know her better. This was a fun talk!

Do you like moving to different countries and different schools?

It depends. I can't really say until after I've moved, but it mostly depends on how good the school is, like if the school is good and the place is good–or even if the place is a little bit bad but the school is good—then I like moving, but if the school is bad, then I hate moving.

So it mostly depends on the school?

Yeah. 

And so far has it been good? 

Yeah.

When we went to Ontario, it was good? And then when we went to Costa Rica, it was good?

Yeah, and then when we went here, it was also good. Well I can't say yet, but tomorrow… write this down!...Tomorrow for Valentine’s Day, we get to do a big dyeing project and we get to dye T-shirts and cloths and stuff. Don't ask me why we need the avocado pits [students were told to bring in avocado pits and yellow onion skins].

Well, I guess you're learning to use natural things to dye with, right? So you're excited about doing that at school? 

Yeah! 

What has been your best school experience so far and why?

I can tell you good things about each school. Forest school is fun because, well, it's obvious isn't it? You just get to play a lot in the forest. 

So this school and your Collingwood school are fun cuz you play in the forest?

Yeah. And Acton I liked because of the business fair and stuff. That was really fun. TIDE I liked because of the people and the setting.

What about the setting?

I just liked where it was, right near the beach and stuff. 

Oh yeah, it was near the beach.

And public school…I remember that there are more fun events when you go to public school. We didn't go on field trips, but there were Halloween parades and things like that. I liked kindergarten. We got lots of cookies and stuff. 

Do you wish we had stayed in Costa Rica?

For some reasons, yes. For some reasons, no. 

Okay. So what are the ‘yes’ and what are the ‘no’? 

I didn't like Spanish because we’d have to write like five pages.

But you're still taking Spanish with Miss Nicole [she still has private lessons with her TIDE Spanish teacher, over Zoom].

Yeah, but that’s like my extra Spanish [after school lessons], and I'm talking about the main Spanish classes at school that I had to do all the writing. Okay, that wasn't really a problem, but I still don't like writing.

And what makes you sad to have left TIDE? 

The people mostly.

Your friends or the teachers or both? 

Both.

Do you miss them? 

Yeah. 

Do you miss people back in Walnut Creek too, like Evie and Zoe?

Yeah.

Is it really hard to miss people?

What do you mean?

Moving around means that you're gonna always be missing some people. You're never going to be in a place where you have all your friends. 

I mean, not really, because I always make new friends.

That's true, isn't it. So is the upside of making new friends worth the downside of missing old friends?

Yeah, it is. I like that.

If we weren't going home, where would you want to try living?

Mmm…I'm not really sure. It mostly depends on the school, and I don't really know about schools. But are you asking me where do I wanna go, forgetting about the school?

Yes, but I guess what I'm hearing is that school is the most important part. So let's say we were able to find a good school, wherever it is, where would you wanna try living?

It would probably have to be a place that's not exactly a city, because I like nature too, but like Vancouver—it's near nature, but still has lots of cool stuff, like aquariums and science museums. I don’t know much about places. The downside of Vancouver is that it's really, really rainy and gloomy all the time. So maybe I’d try to find a place like Vancouver that maybe isn't so gloomy.

So you don't like the gloomy?

No. I don't like being outside in the rain and if there's nature then I don't really like exploring it while it's really wet.

So does that bother you a lot about nature school here? Because you're out in the rain quite a lot, right?

Not really, actually, because we have tarps and stuff.

But don't you still hike in the rain?

Not really. Like, yeah, in light rain. But if it's really big rain, then no.

Oh, does the tarp protect you? It keeps the rain away, or do you still get kind of wet?

It keeps the rain away. It's a bit squishy under there, but still.

So you guys put up one big tarp and you all squeeze under it.

Mm-hmm. And we eat lunch under there when we're hiking. We hike in the rain, but it's not usually raining when we hike for some reason. And usually it's a steep climb, so if it's a steep climb, it bothers you and it directs you away from the rain.

Because you're so concentrating on hiking, right?

Yes.

Now that you've done some traveling around and trying these new schools, would you want to keep doing that or would you prefer to stay in one school?

Travel, but eventually settle down somewhere.

Okay. So when is “eventually”?

I don't know, probably years. Maybe like late eleven [a.k.a., almost twelve years old].

You don't mind the traveling around right now?

No.

Do you miss home?

Yeah. I miss our house mostly, and my friends and family at home. I'm sure there's small things that I miss, but I can't think of them.

Do you miss your swing?

Of course! That's part of our house and that's the thing I miss most about our house.

Do you miss home more now or less now than when we first moved out this summer?

Less. Probably because now we're settled in here, so we think about it less.

Yeah, that's true, huh? You've got all these new things that you've experienced, so you think about home less. Has it been hard to make friends at the two schools you’ve been at this year? It seems like you've made friends pretty easily.

Yeah, like on the first day at TIDE, I made Jolynn as a friend, and then the next week I made Izzy as a friend. And here the first day or so I was friends with Lulu.

How did you make friends? Did they come up to you or did you go up to them? Did you say, “Can you play with me?”

No, like with Lulu, we just started talking and then we built a fort together.

What did you start talking about? I'm curious because adults have this whole “Oh hi, nice to meet you” ritual. And kids are like, “Oh, let's build something together.” So did you introduce yourself or did you just start talking about something?

We just started talking about mostly sicknesses because lots of people were sick, so we were talking about what we knew about Covid, and it didn’t really matter that I didn't introduce myself because every Monday morning we do circle and then we have to share our identity—our species teacher [their nature names—Beanie has carried over her old nature name of ‘Snowy Owl.’] and our pronouns, and then one more thing. Like today we had to do our internal weather, how we were feeling inside. I said I was humid.

What about the other kids, were they humid too?

One person was very specific. They said it was cloudy with a 50% chance of rain and three degrees Fahrenheit.

That's very funny.

Would you rather do school at home versus going to any of these schools?

Well, school at home would be cool, I guess. But you say I have to do social stuff.

Yeah, because you can't just be at home with us and not have any friends.

But it’s funner to do social stuff at school.

What if you did some sort of learning activity with other kids, to be social?

It’s not as good. Because in the school, you have free time and stuff like that, but in the class it's just class, so you don't really get to know each other that way.

That's a really good point. What's the hardest part of moving around?

Hmm. Having to go to a new school?

Are you nervous before you start a new school?

Yeah. After a while, I didn't get too nervous. Like for here, I didn't get too nervous because we already moved around a lot, so I wasn't too nervous, but I was still a little nervous.

It didn't seem like you were too nervous this time. I guess it's not just that we moved around, but that you've been to so many schools, even back in Walnut Creek, so maybe you know how to join new groups now?

Mmmhmm.

Can you think of any things you've learned this year from traveling or from your schools?

Well, I learn different things when I go to different schools. In my nature schools I learn a lot more about different types of birds, trees, and stuff. In TIDE I learned different things like the history of Costa Rica, and this wasn't part of school but I did research about sloths and monkeys.

That's true. You did learn that. And you probably would not have researched that on your own if we didn't live somewhere with sloths and monkeys. And you learned Spanish, although I don't know if you think that's a good thing or not.

It's not. It's not! Make a frown emoji. [OK. As requested, :( ]

Also in forest school, I learned that moose can swim. We were doing animal trivia and it was a true or false question. Someone said false and then Willow said it was true because she had seen a moose swimming.

What's been your favorite memory from this year and what's been your least favorite memory from this traveling year?

Oh, that's a hard one. My least favorite memory was maybe those days in my forest school camp, you know, the one in Ontario where we would have to take swim lessons even though it was really rainy.

Was that really terrible?

It wasn't really terrible, but who wants to swim in the cold?

What have been your favorite memories?

Hmm, maybe the fun things we did at TIDE, like the special events, the movie night and Spirit Week and stuff like that…I can’t think of many other memories.

What about your birthday swim party in Costa Rica? Was that a good memory?

Of course it was! Why, that is when I got dear Holly. [whispers] Take a picture of Holly and put it on there…wait, no, no. Don't take a picture of Holly. Look for the picture of when I got Holly on my birthday.

Thanks, Beanie. That was a very good interview.

Okay.

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Beanie Recommends

Here are some things Beanie likes and recommends for other kids her age:

Books

• The Magic Misfits series by Neil Patrick Harris: ”Good story and you can learn some real magic.”

• Aru Shah series by Roshani Chokshi: ”The characters are realistic and there’s Indian mythology.”

• The Last Fallen Star series by Graci Kim: ”You can learn some Korean culture and mythology, which is cool.”

• Story Thieves series by James Riley: ”It’s about a totally normal kid like everyone else but then his life gets really exciting and he goes into a world of magic. It’s a good lesson: it makes you believe anything is possible.”

Game

• Animal Crossing: ”It’s good if you don’t like violent games, and want to play as a character and not just click on buttons [to do a task] like in games that aren’t very immersive. My favorite part is swimming in the ocean and catching creatures—I like watching my character swimming around. You have to warn [readers] about the dumb jokes when their character catches creatures, or they’ll be unprepared.”

Shows

• Avatar the Last Airbender and Dragon Prince: ”Both of these are adventures and they’re funny too.” We enjoy these series as a family–they are entertaining for adults as well. Both shows are on Netflix.

• Ghostwriter: ”A good mix of fantasy and mystery, both which I like.” A group of kids solve literary-themed mysteries, with supernatural elements. The show is on AppleTV.

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We’re actually more than halfway through our year, as the plan is to go back to California by August.

We’ll be in North Vancouver for the next four months, closer to Beanie’s school campuses but no longer among the downtown throngs. We’re surrounded by greenery, looking out our windows onto the tops of tall fir trees. I like the building we live in, with two grocery stores (and a public library!) next door, and I like our apartment, with its views of the forest—always draped in mist, as a good Pacific Northwest forest should be.

Yesterday, after a morning of torrential rain, we saw a rainbow from our window.

But at this moment I’m a bit tired. We spent all of Sunday cleaning, moving, and settling in. And with the move came another kitchen to familiarize myself with, another set of quirks particular to this place that I have to work my way around. The apartment is pretty well-equipped, but it’s still not the same as our own kitchen and our own home. I’ve picked up a few things from Winners (love that Winners) to fill in the gaps, choosing the least expensive options since these are to make do for four months. The store had five or six types of salad spinners; the cheapest one, which I bought, was also clearly the flimsiest. At home I might spend a little more to buy quality and longevity. It’s harder to justify when we’re leaving so soon.

Another Winners purchase was an in-sink dish rack that’s barely long enough for our kitchen sink cutout, so that every time I touch it, it collapses into the basin.

I don’t want to buy another dish rack, but will this one drive me bananas after several months of this nonsense? (Probably.)

When you’re living in someone else’s space, especially a space that’s furnished for short-term rental, there’s a bit of improvisation to make your routines work where you are. There’s a cost-benefit analysis every time you buy an item for everyday living. Is it necessary? Is this wasteful? Can you be comfortable without it?

You end up buying less, which in my case is a good thing, but you also might just put up with micro-aggravations like a rack that falls down every day. Things you would fix or replace without a thought at home might not be worth paying for—a second time—when you’re away from home.

On the other hand, what price aggravation? If it stays, this rack might take up an outsized part of my mind. Steve Jobs famously wore the same style black turtleneck every day so he didn’t have to waste a single brain cell considering what to wear. Changing our surroundings frequently means we’re using considerable energy and brain cells to figure out things that are rote back home. It’s harder to relax completely.

Plus, unlike at home, we simply don’t have a lot of our stuff around to comfort us. Not our shelves of books, our window bird feeders, our good pillows. Not my well-worn cooking aprons, my cozy robe, and my Instant Pot.

And, of course, I still miss my Toto Washlet bidet.

On Monday morning, during a downpour, we forgot to bring Beanie’s rain pants to school. We were halfway to the nature reserve before I realized they were missing. Attending outdoor school in North Vancouver without rain pants is simply not workable, so we doubled back. Taking a second trip to school and back again would make me late for a work meeting, so I briefly considered having her stay at home, but in the end we hurried back out and she joined her class, almost half-hour late. I was late for my meeting too.

Yesterday morning, I saw she had her rain pants with her, but we were in the parking lot downstairs when I found she didn’t have her rain jacket. It was an improvement—we hadn’t left the building yet—but somehow we were still a bit tardy.

The school meets in different locations on Mondays and Tuesdays, so both those mornings saw me navigating unfamiliar roads in heavy rain. I was stressed and annoyed. Before this week, I’d been checking Beanie’s gear before we left the house to make sure she had everything. I’d asked her to take over responsibility, and we were 0 for 2 so far. It did not feel good, how these mornings unfolded.

I wrote the above paragraphs over the past two days—now it is Wednesday afternoon, and I’m feeling better. It’s not raining today, we didn’t forget any clothing on the way to school this morning, and I’m enjoying the espresso machine in our kitchen, which is one appliance we don’t have at home.

Frothing milk is fun!

I think I’m suited to being nomadic because I adapt pretty readily, and I don’t need my environment to be just-so to thrive. I like changes in scenery. I enjoy that feeling of discombobulation when I first arrive somewhere and don’t quite have my bearings yet. I like having new eyes—they observe more. I also enjoy the days following when, after just 24 or 48 hours, a place that was unknown becomes comfortable as I recognize landmarks and can find my way around. It’s surprising how quickly what was once strange becomes familiar—and then becomes too familiar and overlooked.

Still, sometimes not being settled is challenging. This week has been a bit challenging. But to me, the cognitive load that comes with learning a new environment is worth it for the shake up I get. Yes, it’s harder to relax, but it’s also harder to fossilize and get complacent. I see new views from my window and there are new trails around me to explore. I’m getting the hang of the school run. I’m not feeling as tired as I was earlier in the week. This is a good trajectory—I hope it continues.

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Muppets as Beastie Boys

Taz showed me this video yesterday, of this Muppets-Beastie Boys mashup. It was created in 2017 by Mylo the Cat and became a viral sensation then, but unlike the 3 million people who have watched it on Youtube, I missed it the first time around. I think this video is having a resurgence on Tiktok. If you like it, Mylo the Cat has many more cartoon-hiphop mashups on his Facebook page.

Lay’s flavors

We keep finding interesting flavors of Lay’s potato chips here. The latest one Taz spotted was Cucumber, which I wouldn’t have guessed in 1000 tries could be a chip flavor. Lay’s loves the strange—some that have existed around the world include Cappuccino, Blueberry, and Hot & Sour Fish Soup. But there have been some unusual flavors created for the US market too, like Southern Biscuits and Gravy, and New York Reuben.

It’s fascinating what different cultures want their salty crispy snacks to taste like, isn’t it? One man’s Reuben is another man’s Hot & Sour Fish Soup.

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When I dropped Beanie off at Camp Capilano for school, the white dusting on the tall Douglas firs and ferns made the old forest look even more otherworldly. If it weren’t for the shouts and footfalls of children playing, these woods would have had the tranquility and stillness that blankets forests in the winter. As it is, the noisy kids made it lovely in a different way.

Though we certainly got enough snow that year we were in Collingwood, Ontario, this little bit of snow in Vancouver is a different sort. Just a thin layer, and by Tuesday night much had melted away. I walked along the seawall in the afternoon and though the snow on the palm leaves was gone, there was still some on the ground. I took some pictures because…it’s not everyday you see snow and palm trees together, right?

Packing and unpacking and packing and unpacking

We’re about halfway through our nomadic year now. Though we haven’t made that many big moves, each location has included its own mini-moves. With another relocation imminent this weekend, we’ll soon have lived in five places over seven months, not including hotel stays and family visits. During the 2020-2021 school year in Collingwood, we moved houses five times too.

I do the packing for our family, so it feels like packing and unpacking loom large in my life these days. I can’t claim to be an expert, as I’m only marginally better than I was before; I’m still— somehow!—surprised at the end of every packing job about how much time the tail end takes. That last bit where I’m collecting uncharacterizable objects and wrapping bottles of sauces from the kitchen is the part that feels like it’ll never end.

Still, I now have a bit of experience packing for long trips. A friend (Hi Roberta!) asked me to give packing tips, so here are some things I’ve learned:

• Get a luggage scale—this is an obvious one, but a luggage scale is inexpensive and worth it to never experience repacking your suitcase in a panic at the luggage check-in counter.

• Use compression bags for bulky items like towels, sweaters, and winter jackets. They really work to save space.

• …but with a caveat: If your suitcase is up to 26“ in height (often labeled as “medium check-in” size), you can use compression bags and not worry too much about weight. Above that size, I’ve found weight to be more of a restriction than capacity. I place light items in our 29” suitcase and don’t use compression bags, in case I pack too much and go over the airline 50 lb baggage weight limit.

• Roll the clothes that won’t get super wrinkly, and divide types of clothing into different travel organizer cubes. I pack all of Beanie’s rolled clothes (which are much smaller than mine) into cubes, but only my innerwear goes in cubes—the cubes don’t fill a suitcase completely, so putting everything in them isn’t the most efficient use of space. YMMV.

• If you use glass toiletries, keep the original cardboard boxes they came in so you can pop them back in when you pack. I’m lazy and that’s the easiest thing to do. If you don’t have the boxes anymore, wrap the glass in your socks and seal them in a Ziploc bag.

• Take the cap off your shampoo bottle and other bottles that might leak, place a little cling wrap across the top, then replace the cap and pop the whole thing in a Ziploc bag.

• Bring extra Ziploc bags of different sizes. They serve all kinds of purposes, including storing small items that might otherwise get lost, like earrings or a kid’s newly-lost tooth.

A while back, I posted the list of things we bring with us on these long trips, including our own spatulas, bath towels, and Aeropress.

Of the myriad items on the list, the one that makes the biggest difference to our quality of day-to-day living is our knife set. We use these knives every day, several times a day. We've been lucky to have good landlords so far and stayed in some beautiful places. However, these beautiful places are often not kitted out for people to actually live in. Our current Airbnb has one knife, and it is this:

This Betty Crocker knife is very blunt. We tried it once but it was too dangerous to use.

If I could only bring one creature comfort from home, it would be our knife set—two chef’s knives, one paring knife, one meat/butcher knife, and one bread knife, all in an inexpensive knife roll bag I got off Amazon.

I didn’t spring for a knife bag in Collingwood and instead wrapped the knives with towels and rags every time we moved. I was being ridiculous. The knife bag saves me time and saves me from being cut. Wish I had bought it sooner. So:

• If you’re staying somewhere with a kitchen and plan to cook, bring a knife set in a knife bag. If you don’t want to bother bringing a whole set of knives like we do, the one item that is useful above all else is a good chef’s knife. Assuming you’re checking in your luggage, bring a chef’s knife and meal prep will be much more joyful.

• For most other things, the dollar store is your friend. For 50 bucks, you can get a lot of household basics. My favorite dollar store is the Japanese chain Daiso. When we moved in to our current downtown Vancouver apartment, it didn’t have enough drawers and almost no hangers, so I bought about 40 hangers and some of these storage bins for our clothes from Daiso:

• Discount stores like Ross and TJ Maxx (and up here in Canada, Winners!) are also great for quality kitchen and homeware for cheap—we’ve bought measuring cups, silicone spatulas, pots and pans, oven mitts, and more at these stores. Also, robes and fuzzy slippers for winter living. Sometimes they have good spice and snack aisles too.

• For those of you with little kids, these car safety restraints have been very useful in our travels. Beanie started using the RideSafer vest when she was not yet three years old, and she graduated to the mifold when she was about six. (RideSafer also has larger sizes, all the way up to 110 lbs/62 inches tall, but it’s considerably more expensive than a mifold so we didn’t buy another after Beanie outgrew the small one).

Those are the tips I can think of for now. I haven’t started packing yet for our move this weekend. As usual, I’m riding high on confidence that it won’t take me too long—let’s see if I’m singing a different tune on Saturday night, as I tackle that never-ending long tail of random stuff that goes wherever I go.

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Last week, I mentioned the Korean and Japanese homemaking videos I’ve watched for several years. They’re beautifully shot, relaxing, and I like putting them on in the background while I cook or clean (or pack!), as inspiring companions when I’m not feeling inspired to get through my chores.

Beware, though, that their houses look perfectly pristine even before they start sweeping and sponging. Not for them the sticky counters and streaky, cloudy shower glass that my home has before I wipe them down. It’s either the magic of pretend or these ladies’ houses just always sparkle because of the constant cleaning. I guess seeing enormous dustballs and loose Legos all over the floor would ruin the relaxing vibe for us viewers.

Another interesting feature of these videos is that you never see the vloggers’ faces. They’re anonymous, and their channels are about their surroundings and their food and sometimes their families, but not about them.

On long winter evenings during the pandemic, these quiet home-focused videos made me feel more content to be stuck inside as I tried to create my own hygge environment with candles and books. Since then, this genre of video has grown beyond Asia, and I follow a few YouTubers of this ilk who live in Europe too.

Some of my current favorites are:

haegreendal—I think of her as the OG Korean cozy-vlogger. I started watching her when her channel was much smaller; since then, she’s been featured in the New York Times and other major media outlets, and she has a huge following. She hasn’t posted on Youtube for a while (she’s more active on Instagram), but she’s still one of the best.

hamimommy—also a very popular vlogger from Korea.

nushitoneko—she escaped an abusive marriage and is starting over in Tokyo as a single working woman, with two cats. Her videos are mostly of the meals she cooks and of her sitting at her laptop working, but they are strangely captivating. Her food looks good!

nekoniwa3—she lives in the Japanese countryside and her videos are a wash of warm colors.

Cybele—A Filipina living in Oslo, Norway, and Kahvihuone8487, a Filipina living in Finland. Spare, white aesthetic.

Bayoona--a Turkish woman living in the UK. She makes delectable meals.

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Hello, friends.

When in Vancouver, do as Vancouverites do. Though part of the weekend was rainy, we didn’t let that stop us from going outdoors. I guess this is the secret to living in this rainy city—if the weather was to stop us from doing things in the winter, we’d be stuck indoors for months in misery, waiting for the sun to come back.

This weekend, we went out several times, including to a French-Canadian and Métis historical event called Vive Les Voyageurs Festival. The rain fell steadily all day, and we used our rain gear and big golf umbrella while tramping around the grounds. The festival was held at Fort Langley Historic Site, once a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post and built in 1827. The site is ringed by the buildings of the fort, including a blacksmith forge, and equipment such as a fur press, a lever-operated machine that compressed furs to be shipped to London.

(Hudson’s Bay Company, which now owns a bunch of retail companies like Saks Fifth Avenue, spent most of its existence as a fur trading business. It’s the oldest company in Canada, founded in 1670—about two hundred years older than Canada itself. Fun facts!)

Fort Langley was an important stop on the British Empire trading route, and saw robust trading with the local Indigenous communities starting in the late 18th century. Then came a gold rush in 1858, with 30,000 miners arriving to seek their fortunes. The British got nervous that the United States, sniffing riches, would come claiming this territory as their own, so the British quickly declared the land theirs and named it British Columbia. Thus was the colony established.

I love anything to do with the history of everyday lives, so this festival was my nerdy jam. We stopped and spent time at almost all the buildings at Fort Langley, interacting with the historical reenactors, who were excellent at giving us a flavor of working and living in those times.

We watched the blacksmith forging a Scottish kilt pin, which the fur traders repurposed for other uses like fastening bags. We saw a spoon and jig demonstration—playing the spoons, along with fiddle music, is a big part of Métis culture. And we participated in a French-Canadian folk music singalong about a lawyer who goes into a restaurant to eat a fish, chokes on the fishbones, and dies. It was not a subtle song, but it was fun.

After we finished looking through the buildings, we wanted to stop by the maple syrup candy stall near the exit, but it had closed. I think they didn’t have the traditional maple snow candy I wanted to try anyway. Otherwise known as maple taffy, it’s made by pouring hot maple syrup onto clean snow; once the maple syrup thickens and hardens, it’s lifted up with a wooden stick or something similar, and eaten like a popsicle. Yes, it is very Canadian.

Some highlights from Vive Les Voyageurs and the Fort Langley exhibitions:

• Beaver pelts were used as money during the early days of trading. It hadn’t occurred to me that in these situations, even not so long ago, there was no established currency and so everything had to be bartered or pegged to a valuable object (in this case beaver pelts). Do you see the lines on the blanket in the photo at the top of this article? Blankets were marked in this way to indicate how many beaver pelts they were worth. Red was a sought-after color, so this blanket would have traded for five beaver pelts in its time.

• The fur trapper gave a fascinating talk about traps commonly used for fur-bearing animals like beavers, muskrats, ermine, and even bears. Since fur was the goal, traps couldn’t have teeth or anything that would damage it. The designs trappers used were simple and clever, including the Figure 4 deadfall trap: trappers would make notches on sticks so the sticks could fit together in a figure 4 shape (see illustration below). They’d place a heavy object—like several branches lashed together or a big rock—on top of the figure 4, then bait the end of the horizontal stick under the heavy object. When the animal disturbed the bait, the whole contraption would come crashing down and pin it to the ground. With no harm to its beautiful fur coat.

• This was during Victorian times, with Victorian work practices, which means there was a lot of child labor. Six-year-old children—with their small and nimble hands—were given the job of plucking the coarse, long guard hairs from beaver pelts. When they were done, the pelts would have only short, fine, soft hairs good for making clothing and hats. These children could do one pelt per hour, and they were paid two pennies a week for their hard work, enough to buy a couple of loaves of bread for the family.

• I learned a bit about the Métis. Métis are a mixed race community rooted in the North American fur trade, formed when First Nations women and Euro-Canadian traders married. They, along with First Nations and Inuit, are recognized by the Canadian Constitution as Indigenous peoples. Métis have their own culture, language, and national anthem, distinct from First Nations or Europeans. They’re especially fascinating to me because I don’t know of any other mixed race groups in the world with such defined identities—are there others? Please comment if you know of any.

It was a good weekend. As we get to know local geography better, I feel more rooted. Being downtown, with the option to walk to many places, helps immensely. Fort Langley is far outside the city and we had to drive, but the next day we did walk to Chinatown for the Lunar New Year parade and celebrations. The long stroll allowed me to peek down alleys and in shop windows that usually blip by on my daily drives to Beanie’s school.

As I see parts of Vancouver up close, the city is feeling a bit more like home.

After we came back from Vive Les Voyageurs, as was her style, Beanie declared the visit “not fun.” But it should be noted that she nevertheless stood for 20 minutes without complaint at the beaver trapping talk, voluntarily watched a long video on Métis beading art, and when I had a question about what the blacksmith was making, she remembered and gave me the answer.

So despite her assessment of Not Fun, I hope the experience will nevertheless stick in her mind and kindle an interest in learning more about Canadian history, and history in general. That’s the goal of worldschooling, after all—not to simply observe one thing after another in different places, but to see in person the stories of the world, and engage more deeply with them. We’re lucky to have these opportunities, and I hope Beanie keeps reaping benefits from them far beyond this year.

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Métis culture

After our Fort Langley visit, I wanted to learn more about the Métis. I found a few short Youtube videos that were informative. Here is a general one on who the Métis people are.

And here is a video featuring Métis fiddle music.

Please tell me if you know of any good resources discussing the Métis, or especially well-written books and articles you’ve read about Indigenous peoples in North America. I’d like to know!

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Hello, friends.

We’re feeling a bit better here after our bout with Covid, and have eased back into normal life, including nature school trial visits for Beanie. So far, so good. Soaring Eagle Nature School has two indoor-outdoor days per week at a cabin campsite—on those days, the students can occasionally get out of the rain, their backpacks and lunches remain dry, and they have proper toilets to use.

The other two school days are completely outdoors, in a forested conservation reserve. And the kids “tree pee” when they need to go. It’s not what I would want out of my work day, but Beanie does not mind. The rain has not bothered her yet either. And it has been rainy this week!

What I learned from her forest school days in Ontario is that kids are perfectly happy playing in cold, snow, or rain for hours, as long as they’re bundled up. The snowier, the better. The muddier, the better. During fall season of that year, I was doing laundry practically every day because she came home from school slathered in mud. I anticipate more of the same here all winter.

Beanie seems to have gotten comfortable quite quickly with her new classmates. Many of the children in her cohort were unfortunately out sick this week, but the small number of kids attending—only 5 out of 14 came on Monday—has made integrating into the group easier for her.

More on Beanie’s experiences in the mystical, misty forests soon.

Though I’m mostly recovered from Covid and have tested negative, I’m still waking up a few times every night, so the tiredness lingers. I won’t write too much today; for now, let me just share some vignettes from our week.

Have a good week, and happy Lunar New Year to all who celebrate it! May this Year of the Rabbit bring you health, happiness, love, and peace.

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Pretty Good Things

I’ve watched Korean and Japanese homemaking/cozy living Youtube videos for years (more on that another day), and probably because of these viewing habits, Youtube recently recommended a video by Rajiv Surendra on the secret to getting your white laundry really white (the secret is bluing. I’m going to find a bottle of bluing liquid and try it soon). That video led me to others featuring Surendra, a man who celebrates handmade things and putting thoughtful care into everyday living.

Here is his video on how to make a bed perfectly. And here is one that introduces you to his apartment, which is populated by beautiful things. I don’t have the kind of personality that drives me to fold hospital corners into my top sheets, which is maybe why I find this sort of lifestyle and person especially fascinating.

(I guess Surendra, who’s also an actor, is best known for his role as Kevin G. the rapping Mathlete in the movie Mean Girls, but I didn’t recognize him because…I have to confess I’ve never seen the movie. I am one of the few Gen X/Millennials to have missed this phenomenon. I’m sorry.)

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Bah humbug, friends.

After three years of being lucky, I almost believed our family might never get Covid. Perhaps we had some sort of special anti-Covid shield around us? Alas, we do not. I got Covid last week, late to the trend, months after almost everyone I know had had it already. Just another case of fever, congestion, cough, and what-have-you. Even a clichéd loss of sense of smell. How basic.

A few days after I was felled by the virus, Taz also tested positive. Fortunately, we’d all just gotten our Covid boosters a couple of weeks ago while back home. Probably because of those boosters, our symptoms have been fairly mild.

I had a few at-home Covid tests with me when we arrived in Vancouver; once I tested positive, I asked Taz to get replenishments. He came back from the pharmacy to report that the tests could be found in bowls on the pharmacy counter, free for the taking. No forms to fill, not even anything to scan. Just pick a box of five tests up (one box for each adult in the household, honor system) and waltz out of the pharmacy with them. I marveled. Covid tests are free in the US too—if you have insurance. You have to fill out a form with all your insurance information before you can request up to eight tests per month. While I appreciate that we get any free tests at all, as with every other medical insurance-related matter in the US, they have to make it just a little bit of a pain in the ass before they’re satisfied.

We’ve been curious about how Canadian healthcare systems function in real life, and now Taz has had a real-life experience with it. Because of Taz’s health condition, antiviral treatments were advisable once he tested positive. We did a bit of research and found that British Columbia has a four-step protocol for determining if you qualify for, and then obtaining, antiviral treatments. Taz dutifully followed the steps. Not being a BC resident, he had some trepidation about how challenging it might be to navigate the system. The system was tested and the system passed—hurrah! After taking an online self-assessment, he called Service BC for an intake screening, and was then told a doctor would be in touch. The doctor called him back promptly, and Taz said she was very knowledgable and professional. It took a few more hours to arrange treatment, and later that night he was prescribed a series of Remdesivir infusions and told where to receive them.

For BC residents, this treatment is free. For Taz, the infusions cost CAD $900 (about USD $670) each, and he needed to have three. Hopefully some of that cost will be covered by our travel insurance. As I write this, Taz just walked in the door from his third and final infusion. Without his follow-up (which he often has to do to coordinate his medical care), the staff here has already sent Taz’s treatment report to his regular nephrologist at UCSF hospital. Taz gives this BC healthcare experience an A grade.

This week has been an odd one. We’re staying in downtown Vancouver, and our apartment is on the 32nd floor. It has an expansive, almost 180-degree view through floor-to-ceiling windows across two walls of the living room. From our windows, I see that the action down below is constant. Stuck inside for days, I watched the ferries crossing narrow False Creek to Granville Island, cars hurtling across Granville Bridge, the people in the apartment building next to ours doing exercises and conducting Zoom calls. Crows and seagulls fly up to our eye level all the time, and sometimes land to rest on our window ledge.

It’s been a while since I’ve spent much time looking out of a city skyscraper window. Being so high up and unable to join the throngs down below was a surreal and detached experience. Though Beanie was healthy, she couldn’t start her school trial visits because we were sick, so the three of us passed most of the previous few days together, up here in our glass holding pen, suspended somewhere outside of time and space. I’m looking forward to getting better, and the chance to more fully experience the fast stream of life below us.

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Pretty Good Things

Not having Covid

I was lucky to have a mild case, but I would still not recommend it. I’d say that given a choice between getting it or not getting it, you should definitely choose to not get it.

BC healthcare system

I know Canadian healthcare systems have their problems, but Taz’s recent interactions with BC healthcare have left him impressed so far.

Vancouver Public Library (and all public libraries)

I started feeling bad on the morning we were slated to move from our hotel to our rental apartment. In between check-out and check-in, there were a few hours during which we didn’t have a place to go—normally not a big deal, but when all you want to do is lie down, those few hours are interminable.

Thank goodness for the Vancouver Public Library, which is a short walk away from our apartment. As Beanie giggled her way through several Garfield comic books, I sat on the floor in a corner far away from anyone else, dozing in quiet and relative comfort. Thus we passed the time until we were able to check in to our new place.

When I was younger, I thought being a librarian was a marvelous job, with lots of time to read and direct people to the right reference materials, and to shelve books (which I find quite fun). I even volunteered at the public library while in high school, archiving local interest stories in a time when that involved cutting actual physical newspaper articles and filing them in actual physical files.

Now I know the job of a librarian is far more difficult and complicated than I’d imagined. It’s only gotten harder over the years, as an increasing number of homeless people while away their days in one of the few places that welcomes them, one of the few public spaces that doesn’t require money to access. Today’s librarians act as educators, mediators, and social workers when dealing with the clients who walk through their doors.

They get hit and kicked and spat upon. They have to deal with bodily fluids and overdoses and death threats. Libraries are so wonderful and valuable, and it’s awful that librarians are subjected to abuse.

Here are some ways we can support our local libraries.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world.

—Neil Gaiman

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Hello, friends.

We’ve been really lucky with the weather over the past two weeks. Everywhere we’ve gone, people have told us stories about the recent big storms, from the Bay Area on up the West Coast. Fierce storms are back in the Bay Area but we are now in (sunny!! what??) Vancouver. We saw only a little rain on the drive up too. I really hope we didn’t just use up our year’s allotment of good weather right at the start of 2023.

It was nourishing to see family and friends over the holidays. Besides the Bay Area and Rocklin, where we spent the weeks around Christmas, we also stayed overnight in Portland and in Seattle, where I met up with friends I hadn’t seen in years. As someone who is not always completely aware of when I am out of balance, sometimes I think I am toodling along just fine, and it’s only after I make a change that it dawns on me that things could have been better all along.

That’s how I often feel when I reconnect with old friends, and how I felt this week upon seeing my college and grad school friends after many years apart. These types of catch-ups are few and far between, even when we are at home, since meeting up means juggling everyone’s schedules (including the kids’…especially the kids’) and commutes. Though I recognize I’d like to rejuvenate old connections, I don’t always realize I miss them until we finally do connect and I think, “Well, that was very nice.”

Here in this post I’ve included some scenes from the past few days. The Pacific Northwest territory we passed through is beautiful and misty, as if out of a dream. And the time I spent on the way here, with people who have known me for a while, was very nice indeed.

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Pretty Good Things

Powell’s Books

Every time I’m in Portland, I go to the main Powell’s Books location at Burnside. So many lovely books to peruse at the “largest independent new and used bookstore in the world.” This was Beanie's first time there, and she was enamored by the vast selection in the children's section. We picked up a few books for her, including a fantasy novel by The Decemberists' Colin Meloy—Wildwood—appropriately set in the dark and mysterious forests of Portland.

Border Crossings

The cover of this illustrated travelogue caught my eye while I was at Powell’s. It follows author Emma Fick’s and her partner’s trip from Beijing to Moscow by way of Mongolia, on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Each page contains Fick’s written observations and colorful sketches, which make for a fun read whether you ever intend to make this long train journey or not.

Hello, friends.

It’s that time of year when we look back and we look ahead, and sometimes we look inside ourselves too. In that spirit, I am currently reading “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” by British author and columnist for The Guardian Oliver Burkeman, to learn how I can manage my remaining mortal time better.

4000 weeks is approximately the number of weeks you get on earth if you live to 80 years old. Numbered in weeks, it doesn’t sound like much time, does it? (And it puts me in mind of Tim Urban’s Wait but Why various visualizations of a human lifespan. The visualization that’s stayed with me since I first saw these graphics years ago is the last one, about the time Urban has left with his parents now he’s an adult. Seeing it laid out so starkly was sobering.)

The subtitle of the book—“Time Management for Mortals”—gives a clue as to the kind of time management we are talking about here: this is not another list of productivity hacks, but a guide to managing the time we have on earth optimally, for the things we actually care about.

But just identifying what is important to us doesn’t immediately realign our priorities. What we say is important to us is often not what we actually give most attention to, and it is what we give our attention to, day in and day out, that makes our priorities.

Even commentators who spend a lot of time fretting about the modern-day “crisis of distraction” rarely seem to grasp the full implications of this. For example, you hear it said that attention is a “finite resource”…to describe attention as a “resource” is to subtly misconstrue its centrality in our lives. Most other resources on which we rely as individuals—such as food, money, and electricity—are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life.

—Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

In real life, it is very hard to align what you say you prioritize with what your attention reveals you prioritize. The small and big hurdles in life get in the way, from scrambling to get winter gear ready for your daughter to start nature school (me, right now) to working long hours at a job you don’t like so you can give your family a nice middle-class lifestyle. Those are not the things you want to be doing, those are not the things you want to be paying attention to, but they end up easily taking over because they can. Because we let them.

This is a timely reminder for me. I derive a lot of satisfaction from crossing completed tasks off lists; it’s a good day when I plot an efficient route that hits all the errands I need to hit, and then it all goes according to plan. As I rush around during this holiday visit to finish everything on our to-do list, I endeavor to keep in mind that the things I can tick off the list (satisfying as that is) are not the big picture. The big picture is everything else, all the downtime that is spent less “productively”: having meals, opening presents, or even just puttering around doing nothing with family.

So in the new year, rather than improving my ability to do more of the things, and to do them better and faster, I aim to consciously decide what to give my attention to at all.

Our time at home is quickly coming to an end. We will soon move on, and up the rain-soaked Interstate-5 corridor. Some of our family and friends have promised to visit us up in Vancouver, and that will be a nice thing to look forward to. I’m striving not to look forward excessively though, as I tend to do, and focus more on the here and now. To pay attention to what I’m paying attention to. This is challenging for me. Maybe if I keep it simple and ask myself regularly, “What am I giving my attention to now? Does this match my top priorities?” I’ll be able to course correct before I go too far astray.

4000 weeks! There’s no time to waste. If I live until 80, I have fewer than 1800 weeks left in my life. I have to work on making them count more, paying better attention from moment to moment.

I hope you have a happy and attentive 2023, friends.

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Pretty Good Things

Wait but Why

After creating the sobering visualizations of lifespan in terms of time with loved ones, here are Tim Urban’s conclusions:

1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.

2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia.

3) Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.

—Wait but Why

Your word of the year

I subscribe to fellow Substack writer Sarah Styf’s newsletter, and I like her latest post about choosing a word to approach each new year, rather than making New Year’s resolutions. Her word for 2023 is “forward.” Given that I’d like to hone in on what matters to me, my word for the year is “focus.” What is yours?

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Greetings, friends, from California.

It’s been a hectic week, packing up our tropical lives and re-entering California atmosphere. After a few days of nonstop errands and medical appointments, Costa Rica is already a hazy, distant dream. I have quickly adapted once more to four-lane highways and traffic lights, and the crowded parking lot of Target. (Target! I have to admit I missed you.)

It’s been unusually cold along the West Coast; people around here are complaining, but I’m actually enjoying the novelty. The air is crisp, and I’m wearing proper shoes and socks, not the same pair of waterproof orange flip-flops every day. I’ll probably not be as appreciative after a few months of wet chill up in Vancouver, but for now I am feeling cozy.

This week’s post will be short one. I’ve been running around all day and will be again tomorrow. Any spare time I have should probably be spent clearing away the mess in my parents’ living room—the mess that we made when we took over and spread all our possessions around.

Have a happy holiday season with your loved ones! May your days be merry and bright, and may all your Christmases be white.

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