Category: Family life
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Choral festival weekend
Voices West was fantastic, even for Fiona and me, who weren’t directly participating. Two hundred and eighty singers, a performance hall packed with a thousand people, meals and billets and sight-seeing and travelling and meeting new people and finally hearing Kokopelli and Coastal Sound sing live … it was a great weekend. We billeted four […]
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Front Room
Oh look. I did some things. The front bedroom was uninhabitable when we took possession of the Nelson house. Over the summer Noah, Sophie and friends stripped and then repainted the two gyproc walls, but the ceiling was flaky acoustic tile and two of the walls were this stuff: plaster and lath with a bit […]
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Unschooled adolescents
Fiona’s primary enrolment this year is with SelfDesign, an independent umbrella program that supports home-based learners from Kindergarten through Grade 9 and their families, including loads of unschoolers. The support is primarily moral support, though there’s a little money available that can be used to fund things like sports and music lessons. I love the […]
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House progress
I really love our Nelson house. When we bought it I was sold on it as an investment, a fixer-upper, but I think I’m falling in love now. It has a really nice feel to the living space. It’s open and light and airy during the day, and yet at night it feels cosy and […]
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The school year, times 4
For the first time all four of my kids are officially enrolled in school. Fiona (12) is enrolled one-quarter time, taking two courses at the local school. She’s doing math and science for two hours on each of Monday and Tuesday mornings. Age-wise she’s Grade 7 age, placement-wise she’s “in” Grade 9, course-wise she’s taking […]
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Summer, here and gone
It was an early summer. The trees were greening up a good 3-4 weeks earlier than usual, and the season continued to unfurl early. The lake got “warm” (as warm as it ever does) in June. The wildfires were burning by the end of June. The huckleberries peaked in mid July. The wildflowers up Idaho peak […]
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So this happened…
In an instant her summer changed. A tool in the shop, a long-handled thing with a blade on the end used for peeling logs, fell onto her bare foot. It landed on her first three toes, slicing through the extensor tendons and into the joints of two, and through the nail of the third. She […]
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The Other House
We took possession of the Nelson house about four weeks ago. Sophie and Noah are more or less living there for the summer. Sophie is working full-time at a café. Noah is (theoretically at least) working on the house, though he has spent a surprising amount of time being sick with a series of colds, and […]
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Parkour
Fiona and I recently completed a series of indoor introductory parkour classes at the local school. Fiona has spent most of the past few years tackling new physical challenges. My experience with physical challenge has been much more mundane for many years. I’ve challenged myself to endure, but I am a big chicken with new […]
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Letter from college
Normally it would be odd for a parent receive an unsolicited email from one of her now-adult children’s university professors. This is different though, because this prof has been Erin’s violin teacher for four years. That includes the very first year, when Erin was still a high schooler by age and enrolment, but moved to Montreal to […]
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Building Rat Park
At a recent unschooling workshop, the issue of technology use came up. Some parents expressed concern over the potential addictive nature of technology. With unschoolers having far more autonomy over their lives, the risk of excess use seems much higher, particularly without the natural time constraints of school attendance and homework. “Video games and social […]
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A foot in both places
Yesterday we went to court. Thankfully we ended up being spectators only. The occasion was the seeking of approval by a foreclosing banking institution for the sale of a real estate property to us. A property in Nelson, comprising an old home with four bedrooms and a bathroom, a lovely lawn, and a walkability score of […]
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Pergola completed
With lights and wattle railing panels installed.
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Pergola
Our “new” deck is almost five years old now. I always had bigger dreams for the square apron that extends towards the trees, but at the time we opted to put up a minimalist railing for safety reasons. Of course that had the effect of eliminating all the urgency of doing something else with the space. A couple […]
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Spring Forward
The time changed yesterday and today it felt like spring. Spring has been teasing us for at least a month. Yes, a month, since the beginning of February. We’ve had almost no winter this year and almost no snow since the week of Christmas. I’m grieving the missed skiing. But at some point you just […]