The elephant in the corner

... or why I'm not talking about homeschooling all the time.

Chez Deluxe has undergone massive transformation in the last six months. This time last year, I was working full time (and more) as an early elementary teacher at a small private independent school. I taught there for over six years, since right after I finished my MSEd. My children were both students there, and the vast majority of our family's social connections were through the school. It was a great place, fraught with certain problems like any organization, but on the whole, it worked and was a good place for my kids to go to school.

Also this time last year, my husband was working a part-time job, from home. This meant he made dinner every night, kept us stocked with fresh-baked bread, and did most of the laundry and general household management.

In September, the school opened as usual, but with many fewer kids and a sharply reduced faculty. Three weeks later, we closed. There followed a brief flirtation with opening a new school with a group of parents, and then an even briefer consideration of sending Big One to public school. And so we became homeschoolers.

Also in September, my husband got a full time+ job that actually appreciates his presence on-site. Every day.

I have spent exactly zero seconds trying to figure out what kind of homeschoolers we are. I knew I didn't need to buy any curricula. I knew we'd be working from the interests of the children, that I'd be addressing academic issues as they arose organically from the work the children are already doing. I knew we wouldn't be scheduling breaks or using worksheets. I knew we would continue to go to the library, talk about issues as they come up in the news and elsewhere, to research topics that the kids ask questions about, to go for walks, play music together, sing songs, do yoga.

For many homeschoolers, all this meets a definition of unschooling. For me, it is the logical extension of the kind of teaching I was doing in a classroom with lots of kids. The great compromise we are making without a school is that we don't have a community of kids with us on our walks and our yoga and our discussions. But it hasn't taken a whole lot of thought to get here. I already figured it out, years ago, as I grew into my role as a progressive teacher.

I have spent many many hours trying to figure out how to get a reasonable dinner on the table at a reasonable time, how to stay caught up with the laundry, and how to create a structure that will allow me to live in a reasonably tidy house without walking around behind the kids, picking up their stuff all day long. This has been a huge challenge for me. Here we are, four months in, and I still haven't completely figured it out yet.

So the knitting and the house projects were just hobbies before our world got rocked, and the work we did to pay the bills was explicitly outside the scope of this blog. Now that my "real" work is in the house, quite literally, I must admit that I struggle with my new role. Being a homeschooling mom is like being an ultra-mama, and that's a role I've never identified with.

Ironically, I became a teacher so that I would have a project of my own that I cared about, so that my children wouldn't become the center of my life.

I had no idea what I was doing.

living on the edge

So for about the last year, I've been knitting virtually nothing but socks. I wrote them all down recently, and it seems that I average a pair about every three weeks, since last Thanksgiving. My photography skills are not good enough to make a post of ALL THE SOCKS interesting, and besides, many of the socks have gone to live elsewhere. So, instead of socks, here's the pair of mittens I'm knitting. The light blue is a heavy and coarse unknown from the stash, and the cuffs are made from equally unknown leftovers. All wool.

The darker blue is a lighter weight yarn for a lining. If you've never done this, it's really very simple. After you knit the first mitten, you just pick up stitches along the cast on edge of the first one, and knit another mitten, checking along the way to see that the second mitten is slightly narrower and slightly shorter. I usually accomplish this by doing the same number of stitches in a skinnier yarn with smaller needles. Then when your second mitten is complete, you just tuck it inside.

The pattern on the cuffs is from Elizabeth Zimmerman's Knitting Around. There's a picture of an antique Norwegian mitten with an intriguing pattern on the wrist, but no chart for it. I worked out the pattern on graph paper several years ago, in order to use it for a sweater I made for Big One. This is the first time I've used it on an actual mitten.

See that ball of the light blue yarn? That's how much yarn I have left to finish the outer mitten. It's not enough. Living on the edge, indeed.

On my 40th birthday, almost a month ago, a friend of mine taught me how to spin. That is, she showed me how she does it, gave me a few pointers, and then gave me access to her excellent spinning wheel. It was bad going at first, but yesterday for the first time, I spun a more or less consistent piece of stuff for almost an hour. It was exhilarating. I don't know anything about the technical aspects of what I was doing, ratios and batts and so forth. I don't even remember what kind of sheep she has. But here is the so-called yarn I've spun so far. From left to right in that little arc is the first and worst to the most recent and best.

And here's the most recent pair of socks I've made. The yarn is leftover Sisu from a pair for my dad and a pair for Big One. There wasn't quite enough Sisu, so I used some Reynolds Swizzle for some of the parts. Many adults think these socks are quite charming. A certain five year old dislikes them, but is generous enough to wear them on occasion. His complaint is that they are different from each other. Socks are supposed to match, he thinks. I guess he has a point.

About Sisu: I really disliked this yarn at first. It seemed rough and splitty. I think I may have been responding to its price tag. It is relatively affordable, at about $6 for a 50 gram skein. Certainly the cheapest sock yarn I can find in a LYS. After the first pair, though, I really came to like it. It is consistent, and springy, and knit up into a great pair of totally washable socks for Big One. It may not be dryable, haven't tried.

As for the Swizzle, there's a nasty yarn. Rough, stiff, and ugly. Anybody want to take it off my hands? I have two red balls and two green balls, 100 grams each.

After I took photos of the socks the way I thought they should be photographed, with feet in them, much silliness ensued. It seems Little One has his own ideas about sock photography. First there was this:

And then this:

And finally this, exactly the way he wanted to show them:

And then he thought perhaps socks should hang from the ears:

Or maybe this:

Sweet silly boy.

As big as my head...

Although Joe disputes this. He thinks that because my head is taller, my head is bigger, but the ball is wider by far than my head, and I think that in matters round, width is the more salient characteristic.

This is an unknown, unlabeled wool that came to me through my mom. It was a huge skein, and I spent about an hour and a half yesterday winding it into this ball. It's going to be some sort of cabled cardigan for me. I was thinking traditional Aran, but now I'm thinking some kind of all-over cable design. Suggestions for patterns are welcome.

And in house news, Joe finished scraping the old
shellac off the landing last weekend, and I put the new shellac on. Very exciting stuff. We have had a piece of cardboard protecting the naked wood there as he meticulously scraped and scraped and scraped, every weekend, for months, and then I got to do the fun part and put the finish on. It looks good, if perhaps a little too bright and orangey, so maybe we'll put a little color on it eventually. It also seems possible that it will fade and darken with time.

Still lots to do in this area: paint on the walls, stringers, and risers. Significant prep and sanding still required, mostly on the stringers. We removed the old paint with a heat gun, and it took off paint in layers in all kinds of places where we would have rather kept the paint. Thick old paint, so I really need to spend some quality time with a sanding block to get it smoothed out enough to paint.

Other house projects: We have a couch in our living room that is extremely comfortable, but extremely ugly, so it has been begging me for a slipcover. I've gotten as far as choosing the fabric from my stash and bringing my sewing machine downstairs, but I've been stalled at that stage for about three weeks.

An exciting house project: moving bedrooms around. Little One has been in a tiny bedroom without a closet for about two years, ever since he stopped sleeping in our bed. We want him to have the bedroom we've been using, and we plan to move into the largest bedroom, which we've been using as an office and for book storage. Little one's current bedroom will become my office and sewing room. We are incrementally working our way toward this goal. Most of the books are in their new storage place (eventually to be housed in bookshelves downstairs that are waiting to be built) and most of the sewing machines have moved onto a shelf in their new home.

And then there are the usual house projects: front porch, back porch, bathroom tile, touch up exterior paint, repaint and putty windows, repoint chimney. Does everyone experience their houses this way? As a continuing string of never-ending projects? It's a lot like teaching school, and I'm wondering about that. Could it be that I seek out situations that are huge projects with many details that never end? Or is this what life is like for everyone? Maybe our next house will have vinyl siding, replacement windows, a fiberglass shower insert, and a tin roof. Would we still have lots of house projects? Probably.... maybe our next house will be a condominium. Sigh. That seems unlikely.

I'll leave you with a photo of Little One and me doing yard work in January. A few weeks ago, we had a fabulous thaw, with temperatures in the 60s for several days. It was glorious. We were outside every day and really enjoyed ourselves. It was good to get a respite. We're now back to our usual January weather.

Little One loves all kinds of gardening projects, and will follow me around outside for hours. Big One couldn't care less. I guess it just seems likes work to him.