Corman Challenge

This is my entry in the #CormanChallenge.

It was an interesting undertaking. I'll make no secret of the fact that if this weren't a quarantine project, I'd have found someone else to play the dad.

Also, we brainstormed the name "Peggy" for the character here, then decided to keep the name. Make of that what you will.

Second thoughts on family channel

Having second thoughts on the YouTube channel we've been planning.

Weer back

We've never really kept up on this blog, and I'm hoping this return will be the one in which we start adding here regularly.

I skimmed over the previous posts to make a couple of necessary changes and realized how much didn't turn out as we planned or expected. Most obviously, Conan has mostly chosen to go to public school. I have continued my concerns, as voiced in earlier posts, however my commitment to student-driven education has made it hard not to follow her lead on this.

And the genders of my fellow crazee family members have all gone somewhere. Rae has stopped going by Kim or Kimberly and identifies as genderqueer (or non-binary) and Conan has come out as a transgender girl. I skimmed through the previous entries largely to update their names/pronouns and hope I succeeded at getting them all.

The most obvious change I've seen in both since their coming out is how obviously more comfortable and happy both of them are in their own skins since their respective acknowledgments. That's especially noticeable considering all the potential stress and difficulty we've hit.

In May, I left my job, so Rae could work full time at a job they were very excited to be starting. I was going to work on my creative endeavors as well as work toward beginning a homeschool program with Conan. It was only a very short time later that Rae had an accident on the bus home, breaking their arm, up near the shoulder. Not only that, but the pre-surgery scans revealed a cancerous tumor in the bone that was being operated on, complicating the surgery as well as raising our anxiety by a fair degree.

We have a GoFundMe set up around that, if anyone is interested in helping out. We have also set up a Patreon for this video series, if you'd like to be a part of that.

We are on our way to the other end. I'm back to work, Rae is recovering well and is looking to get back to work part time as well. Conan is ready to go back to school this year. She is nervous about coming out to her classmates, but is excited about the programs at her school, and we've been assured other students have previously made this transition there and they are prepared to work with her on any issues that due come up. We'll be watching it closely, especially me who is suspicious of schools to start with.

Not only that, Rae and I are working on a creative project together, as well as discussing the possibility of collaborating on later things, depending on how we feel.

So, while we are still recovering from recent events, we are feeling optimistic.

We are also working to start a series of videos of us a family. I thought we had enough eccentricities among us to make it possibly interesting and fun. I did this one above to sort of see if I could make anything out of my trip to the Museum of Flight with Conan. I kind of enjoyed the process and think it worked reasonably well with what I was working with. Admittedly, there will continue to be a fair amount of those issues, so long as we're assembling footage from our phones and such, which is what we're looking at, by both necessity and preference. I suspect I'll work out some tricks for my lack of coverage and inconsistent sound... It does make one see why Reality TV has so much nonsense.

I've started my own channel, Rise of the Flying Guillotine, along with an accompanying blog, also Rise of the Flying Guillotine. My intentions are more modest with that, just a place for serving real rant again, for whatever it might be worth.

I'm sure I've missed more than I've gotten, but I expect to be back to cover that later.

Scheduling homeschool

Well time has flown by and it has been a long time since we last posted. We have made some major life changes. We moved across the country to the Seattle area. We have experienced kindergarten in a public school and now are homeschooling for first grade and presumably for the rest of her academic years. We have speech therapy once a week with a one on one speech therapist(our child is autistic) and we attend a home school co op where she attends classes that she chose. We are very happy with the co-op and how she is learning.
We originally allowed her to attend public school at her request and stayed the year but our dislike of the public education system was only intensified by our first hand experience .
Don't get me wrong, I adored her teachers (class and resource room ) but the way things are handled and the lack of social skills that are taught furthered our desire to home school her.
We have been entertaining the idea of moving to a commune sometime in the near future and are currently on the hunt for the perfect fit.
Conan has recently discovered the awesomeness of "Minecraft" and we let her pay it offline. It is super awesome for home school learning and she enjoys it!
My current struggle is this game she has stumbled upon called "Roblox". She gets so frustrated and many a meltdown can be linked directly to her dying in the game. I am not sure if we will cutting this game out of our rotation of entertainment during freetime in our time.
ABCMouse has been a great help as well. We love ABCMouse and PBS Kids. My husband and I differ in some ways of parenting. She is more laid back and approaches things in an unschooling fashion. I am a follower of schedules and routines. We have discovered that our son is more of a schedule and routine person than not and so we schedule our day . I allow a good amount of freetime (he can do whatever , this includes video games and tv). We also have one day a week where she can "veg out".
Veg out day is just that , no schedule , just chill!
A sample schedule may look something like this (non co-op day)
900am -930 am :Breakfast
930am-10am:free time
10-1015:workbook
1015-1030:play dough
1030-1130:leggos
1130-1230:free time
1230-100:lunch
100-115:speech worksheets
115-215:playtime with mommy
215-315: read /no electronics
315-500:freetime
500-600 :dinner
600-800pm:movie time
800-900:bath,brush teeth ,read and bed
We attend co-op three days a week and speech for an hour once a week so this is how we roll two and a half days a week (One of the co op days is just an hour long class and of course one day a week is chill out day)
I wanna hear from other parents. How does your day look? Am I the only one that breaks it up this much? Id love to see other examples of homeschooling and unschooling !

Numbers and other things

I have been homeschooling Conan for around a year now and she is doing great. She can count to 100( of course she is convinced that the number 44 being right after 34 for some odd reason all though he totally knows otherwise). She knows her abcs, colors and shapes. This is all information she would be learning in Kindergarten but thanks to the magic of homeschooling he knows this now.
Before you start on this , yes she gets social time with other kids.
 We are part of a ton of homeschooling groups and she has a friend that lives near us that visits very often. I have sat in on a public preschool classroom and they do not encourage socialization. When the children attempt to be social with each other they are quickly "corrected" and told to sit in their seats.
Where did the idea of kids getting social skills from school become a thing? If I learned how to be social via school I would be raising my hand to ask the bus driver a question. I would be a million times more awkward then I already am and I attended public school.
In public school you learn how to isolate the kids that are different, form cliques and how to sleep with shades on. Period.
I am very happy with homeschooling as a whole right now and I recommend it to any and everyone. We recently made a life change and I quit working so that  I would have more energy and time to homeschool. This meant that we had to make some financial decisions (budget cuts if you were) and we are super happy with the results.

Thoughts on spanking and respect

The mother-in-law - Rae's former stepmother, who remains the major maternal figure in her life, for a variety of reasons - recently called her, offended that they'd posted "so many" anti-spanking memes or articles on her Facebook.

As far as we could tell, that was two of them, but that's us being pedantic.

She thought it reflected badly on her, which she found unfair as she'd never spanked Rae.  This is another demonstration of her world view that everything is about her.  Suffice to say, while the stories are not mine to tell, she did do things I consider worse than spanking - far, far worse, in fact - but it's worth crediting her for being right about that issue.

I have no patience with her, but that's my failing.  Not that she deserves a bit of my patience, but Rae deserves a lot more than I give too much of the time.

The point that the mother-in-law is missing is how often parents of a toddler has pro-spanking messages fed to them.  On social media or in the world.

I read Spanking Your Children is Hitting Your Children by Chuck Wendig to Rae today, a couple of days later. It's a very good article and my feelings on the issue match the ones expressed there, so I won't go into more detail than to highly recommend it.  I also read Spanking is Hitting, Part Two, which gives a more tempered argument that is also important to make.

In Honor thy father and thy mother, I discussed the question of people bending to nearly any length to justify their parents actions.  I think the dialog on corporal punishment largely comes to a standstill because of this one single, stupid problem.

Look at the dumb fucking meme that inspired the original Chuck Wendig post:

The entire thing is predicated on the notion of the person's parents being "right".

I think the implicit contempt expressed in the tone suggests more than a little that their psychological self-evaluation has failed on a massive scale.  Of course, the average person has little concept of what respect is.  It's a modestly complicated concept and most people were trained as children that respecting people was demonstrated by obeying them, which isn't a very good beginning to understanding it.

"Respect for Others" is taught by example.  Period.  There is no other way.

Spanking is not a very good way to demonstrate respect.  In fact, it actively demonstrates the opposite.  It's an act of profound disrespect.

Saying a person can't learn without violence being inflicted upon them is perhaps the ultimate in contemptuous statements.  It's certainly arguable in cases of Nazi Germany and rapists that without violence - or, at least, the threat of violence - one might not be able to stop them from their atrocious actions.  It happens I hold my child in much greater esteem than Nazis and rapists.

I don't remember either way if my parents did this to me, but I've always hated, even as a kid, watching people trying to teach their kids manners through humiliation.  "Hold on, what do you say?"

What a crock.  If you're polite and respectful to the people around you, your child will most likely grow up to be polite and respectful to the people around them.  That humiliation game is just intended to bolster your reputation as someone teaching their kids "manners".

But let's circle back to the world in which there's explicit and implicit messages pushing you to spank, outside of dumb as fuck Facebook memes.

Conan recently took up screaming.  Not screaming in pain or excitement.  Mostly randomly, although frequently it would seem in annoyance, as he'd often follow-up by saying "Annoying."

He'd do this in various public places, but especially on the bus.  I speculate he was annoyed about being in transit and a bit bored with the wait, but he wasn't able to communicate the more complicated point unfortunately.

Rae and I would do our best to gently shush him or tell him to stop in a more commanding tone.  Neither of them got us too far in those moments.

But at the worst it was intermittent, even when it was fairly often.

You could see people stare and glare and mutter that we should obviously be doing something more.  Most likely not everyone thought we should strike him, but you could tell we should be do something more and more aggressive to quell it.

I'm not sure what that would based on.  My experience, although admittedly anecdotal, in witnessing people who tried to physically punish or get into a screaming war with a toddler over making too much noise is that 100% of those escalate into something worse than intermittent screaming.

Now, he seems to be getting over that.  Not completely.  But largely.

And so goes life.

I promise, as soon as I stop seeing people arguing that I should spank my kid, I'll stop talking about why I'm not going to do that.

On the other hand, if you present an argument that isn't awful, I might treat it with respect.  As we can see above, that's not very likely.

And just to  hammer it home, here's Why Shouldn’t You Spank Your Kids? Here’s 9 Reasons.

Rage and imprisonment

I've mentioned The Evergreen School before.

I don't recall the details of why I started going there, but I remember liking the environment on my first visit. I remember all of the student books around the library. I remember the copy of Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella that I looked at often over my time there, but never got around to reading.

I mention this, because most of the things, positive and negative, that makes the things I read by Peter Gray resonate so thoroughly for me. I try to explain some to Rae and tend to say she should read his blog or his book, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, when we get it. Last night she expressed the concern that I was merely parroting back someone else's philosophy and I had to explain that the issue isn't me parroting back what he said, but that he so perfectly expresses the things I've felt for so long, and backs them up with such great evidence and examples.

I don't remember much about my days there. I couldn't tell you any which way what I studied. As adults, we joke merrily how we don't remember what we "learned" in school as if that was either our failing or an amusing piece of happenstance, rather a core flaw in how our schools work.

My parents paid a lot of money that they couldn't easily afford to send me to these schools.  I'm not certain I can find the same casual amusement in that as everyone else does.

I remember one teacher, Ron Cohen, who taught me about musical theater.  He also had a mock trial of Harry Truman for war crimes and crimes against humanity for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  I don't know that I gained what I was supposed to from it.

I did watch Give 'em Hell, Harry! in there and still think of Truman and the movie fondly.

I remember being frustrated that I didn't think that the jury fully understood their job and took too much of their initial beliefs into the jury box rather than what was argued.  I also don't recall there being clear definitions of the crimes for them to work from, just their loose understandings, same as when they came in.

His class was also where I wrote "The Case of the Playground Monitor", which I think was kind of the Quentin Tarantino of early '80s short stories by eleven-year-olds.  It was popular but divisive, excessively violent, featured stretches of profanity and jumped around through storytelling styles.

I might have oversold it, but luckily I don't have a copy around to disappoint you...  nor does the school.  The first time in the school time in the school's history they didn't maintain a copy to show off to new parents and students.  I took a fair amount of pride in that at the time.

Now, I just feel angry.

I was kind of off to go with the writing thing.  I was pretty proud of myself.

Now, I'd always been a socially awkward kid, or considered myself so.  I don't remember ever feeling comfortable around other people - being a confusing character like The Loud Extrovert and 30 years from beginning to understand it was a factor - and I'd long felt picked on and never took well to it.

But I'd become friends, for a time, with my one-time rival, and easily the coolest kid I knew in the whole 12 years I was confined to be educated.  His name was Quentin.

I don't remember the details of us moving from rivals to friends.  I know it happened on the playground, though.

We played Four Square and a team version of "Smear the Queer" that, as best I remember, we largely made up.

(I'll briefly jump in to say that Wikipedia article on Tag provides a variety of alternate names for this game, starting with the decidedly British "muckle" and the incredibly awkward "kill-the-guy-with-the-ball". It was the '80s and we were of the right pre-teen age that homophobic slurs did occur, but I can't remember any suggestion of the game's name being one of them.)

We weren't allowed to play the game.  Not because of the name, but because it involved tackling.  If someone was watching, we had to switch to two-hand touch, which frankly ruined the game completely.

We read Savage Sword of Conan and tried to draw like the artists in it.  We read the Robert E. Howard Conan stories and wrote our own pastiches, but both agreed that we avoided the ones by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter that were shoehorned into our beloved paperback books.

He was better at drawing than I was, although I couldn't trust my memory well enough to say it was good by a standard other than what an eleven-year-old does.  I also feel like I was better at writing, but I could be being kind to myself, as I hate to be so far behind Quentin on everything, but it is possible, as I suggested, he was really, really cool.

I had other issues going on in my life, including some turmoil and major changes in my home that had probably left me unsettled.

But there were some kids a year or two older than me who liked to flip me crap.

As when Quentin had flipped me crap a year or two previous, I tended to respond by getting into physical fights.  This had been a recurring issue in my life.

Somewhere between the increasing concerns about my fighting and the "disturbing" trends in my writing, I was made into the problem.  I'm sure no one involved told me that, and perhaps no one even really thought that, but that was the "lesson" I took away.

People fucking with you is something you're just supposed to expect and "ignore" when you're a kid.  As noted, here, that's because it's a prison.  In a prison that's a normal expected factor and you need to man-up and deal with it.

In all of this it was my anger that was considered a problem.

At least that's how I took all of it.

If I took action on my anger then I was misbehaving.  "In trouble", as the saying goes.  "Bad", as all kids inevitably when they are "in trouble".

No, I'm not really defending fighting as an expression of anger, however coming up with a way to express my anger productively was decidedly not on the table.  I was told to "ignore" it all, which is a load of horseshit.

When I tried to work it out, express it creatively, that, of course, added fuel to the fire of me being a "concern".

I learned, for a long time, not to express my anger at all...  or barely.  It all turned inward.  I've never really gotten past the tendency to turn all the anger I have, whether personal or toward the great injustices of the world, on myself eventually.  Nothing does more to set me into a bleak depression than getting mad, even if justifiably.

That's that legacy.

Somewhere in there I became scared of my voice as a writer and stopped writing with any regularity, despite always thinking of myself as a "writer" and "writing" being the thing I was going to do.  And occasionally I do.  I write all the crazy, bloody, fucked-up shit that got me "in trouble".  I've never seriously considered writing anything else.  Was that just who I was already by then or is that another legacy?

I've been reading Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, which an incredibly insightful book by Gerard Jones.  Jones has incredible insights on children dealing with violence through violent play and media, and I'd love to just be celebrating that someone is just saying these things, but I'm not.

I'm angry.  I'm angry at people for not saying these things more.  I'm angry at people for not saying these things all along.

And, of course, I'm angry at myself, because that's what happens to me when I get angry.

Parenting, debate and the hunger dogs

My son, cuddling a Red Dalek Talking Plush Toy. We got it last night and it is the first plush toy he took with him to bed to cuddle up with to sleep.

I think occasionally on why I don't post here that often. Part of it is just a basic matter of time, priorities and other such bits and pieces, I also think I'm stuck with an unusual lack of desire for debate on parenting.

Not too long ago, Kim posted a thought she'd had on our plans to homeschool on Facebook and this ended up with me getting into rather a row with a mutual "friend" of sorts, because I thought her comments were useless and condescending and she thought they weren't, I guess. Mind you, I think the spirit of them was deep, deep condescension, but condescending people always just think they're right and you're wrong and they're, as such being ever helpful in demonstrating that to us. That's what makes them so goddamn condescending.

What I did come to is this, though, I really don't give much of a fuck what other people think, at least in a debate sense.

This is a larger issue, mind you.  I think my other blog, The Bleeding Tree, suffers of late because I've grown less interested in debating the merits of movies.  I'm not uninterested in other opinions in themselves, but the give and take of debating has fallen by the wayside.  The specifics of that might be its own post over there some day.  Who knows?

It's not that I don't think debate can be a valuable tool and important for critical thinking, but so little of what I come around is valuable or done in the spirit of, or featuring, critical thinking.  I couldn't tell you the last time I was involved in a debate I didn't feel stupider for having gotten involved in.  Is that my age or is that the way people debate nowaday?  Is it laziness or wisdom?  Probably a bit from each cup, if I were to guess.

But Kim posted this article today, How Attachment Parenting Produces Independent Kids, and I felt compelled to share and add to it.

My brother Ian was six years old when he was adopted. He had spent a good deal of his formative years literally starving. For the rest of his childhood - and I believe as an adult he's had some success in curbing this - he was literally unable to control his compulsion to eat. He would eat meat down to the marrow. He would eat off other people's plates. And as frustrating as it could be to all of us, and we were certainly not always as understanding as we should have been or would have liked to have been.

When people suggest to me that the best way to make a child independent is to withhold some degree of attention/affection so they won't look to you, it sounds insane to me. It's a surprisingly popular theory, though. I'm incapable of making it make sense in my brain at all, though. If it works for you in your life, that's terrific for you and your child(ren).

As I said, I'm not terribly interested in debating these things and am no more interested in telling you what would or should work for you than I am in hearing you tell me what would or should work for me.
To me, I only see that if one deprives a child of their needs, they only need more.  A starving child learns to take all of the food they can get, when they can get it.  A child starving for attention/affection learns to take all of the attention/affection they can get, when they can get it.

I can't speak for everyone, but I know Conan is a pretty independent little kid for a two-year-old.  I believe that by never make her feel she needs to worry about where attention/affection will come from next, she's able to regulate his own needs.  At least he's developing that.

Sure, she gets tired and fussy sometimes and needs extra attention - hell, so do I - but generally she's happy to play on her own and solve her world with occasional breaks for cuddling and hearing a book. From my perspective, this not only is the only way that makes sense, it's the way that's working.

Like I said, if some other way works for you or those you know, I can't make sense of it, but I have no interest in debating you.  What I know is that with how well this is working for our family, I have no intention of changing it.  If anything, I only want to do a better job.