prairieplains

Spotted by hubby and me in the back yard last week:

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Up, up they went...

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Over the house,

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And into the sunset:

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What a nice mid-week surprise! This sight had the whole neighborhood outside, watching. It was really something. 

So, yesterday I mentioned that Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, had somewhat of a doom and gloom perspective on the state of America's relationship with the outdoors. It got a little heavy for me after a hundred pages or so, all of the discussion on childhood obesity, corporate greed, and kids who can identify Pokemon characters, but not the tree in their backyard. It became a little like the TV news saturation I have been trying avoid for the sake of my mental health. Enough already!

BUT...his research was fascinating. And I was at least glad that I picked up the new edition of the book, in which Louv seemingly responds to criticism of the book by adding an appendix of things we can do as families, educators, and groups to improve not only access to true greenspace, but also our children's "natural intelligence" quotient. I thought I'd share a handful of the ideas I really like, and that we're going to try:

1. Invite native flora and fauna into your life. Maintain a birdbath. Replace part of your lawn with native plants. Build a bat house...and lots of other "get in your backyard" ideas. I like this notion, and I'm proud to say we already experiment with things like this. I love critters. Although I've had a complicated relationship with the squirrels (did they have to dig up my hosta and toss it by the roots on the sidewalk?? Cheeky bastards.), I do think them funny and entertaining creatures. I love butterflies, chipmunks, birds, bunnies, pretty much any backyard critter, even when they challenge my gardening or dump my birdfeeders. Louv points out, and I couldn't agree more, that connecting with the wildlife or caring for plants connects us to the land in a very real way. It gives us, and by extension our children, a greater sense of stewardship. These things no longer become an abstraction for children, and they learn how we are connected to, and interdependent with everything in our surroundings.

I've been an avid birdfeeder for years, and Alexa's been observing and participating in my obsession with birds since she was barely a few years old. I didn't begin to feed birds to teach her anything (it was really more about me loving birds), but it's amazing how much she has learned. She can identify dozens of types of birds, and she can identify the calls of chickadees, cardinals, bluejays, hawks, and various others. She loves being on hawk and turkey vulture watch in the car, and can identify birds of prey in flight just by their markings. She worries if we let the feeders run low, especially in the winter, and reminds me to fill them up. I love this about her. It's knowing Alexa in a totally different way. She is astute, excitable and concerned when it comes to her backyard critters, and it's really wonderful to see her stimulated by something that has no material value. We've even participated in Cornell's FeederWatch, which is another suggestion of Louv's. During the winter months, you keep track of birds visiting your yards, and report them to Cornell, where they compile statistics on bird migration patterns. Alexa finds the idea of being a "bird scientist" very novel.

Our next project is going to be more investment in native plants for our yard, and more butterfly- and hummingbird-attracting plants.

2. Join the Invitation to a Healthy Yard from the National Wildlife Federation. Great suggestions on how to get started with attracting or providing shelter for wildlife, and ideas for planting a "healthy" yard. If you follow the set of guidelines, you can apply to become a "Wildlife Certified Habitat." How fun would that be to do with kids?

Come little critters!

3. Join the Great American Campout. All you have to do is register, and pitch a tent in the backyard with your kids. Have a campfire, eat some marshmellows, and snuggle up in the great outdoors. The website is great, too, because there's an interactive map showing registered campers in the U.S., and you can zoom in on your city or ZIP code to see other campers in your area. Many metroparks are even participating by hosting campouts in the park.

4. Greenhour.org  has lots of printables and activities for kids to do while hiking. There are printable nature journals, scavenger hunt sheets, and a great blog of daily nature adventures to try as a family.

Greenhour

There were many more suggestions, these were just a few that I found interesting. It seems that Louv's ideas are catchy...even our state developed a summer challenge, called "Explore the Outdoors Ohio." Louv is mentioned by name in the Governor's letter to citizens on the website and booklet, where the governor dares parents to reunite their children with "nature, improve their physical and emotional health, and discover the rewards of environmental stewardship." The first 100 kids to complete the 10-task challenge get a prize, and all kids can earn a stewardship patch if they complete the challenge.

Louv also wrote the forward in a book I just ordered from the library, which gives parents scads of better ideas to engage their children in the outdoors. I can't wait to read it:

I Love Dirt!: 52 Activities to Help You and Your Kids Discover the Wonders of Nature

Jennifer Ward

Suffice it to say, I think it will be a very outdoorsy summer :) I hope it will be the same for you!

I read two really interesting books in the last two weeks. Now, let me pause right there just for a second to say how nice it is to be able to read two books in barely two weeks time, after two long years of spending my "leisure" hours reading public policy texts. To be able to choose my own reading material...well, it's lovely. I'll just say that.

Anyway, the two books that I read seemed to have little in common, and were actually recommended by two different sources. Yet, their coincidental materialization at the top of my reading list seems almost too timely to be coincidental. It seemed almost fated that I read these two books at the same time. They both led me to a topic I find fascinating: the divine natural world.

The first book was:

Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder [LAST CHILD IN WOODS-UPDAT

Richard(Author) Louv

The last guest speaker for the Parent Advisory Board at Caroline's childcare center recommended this book as a way to reconnect children with the outdoor world. My initial reaction to the book description was well, we spend plenty of time outside. My interest was aroused nonetheless, so I ordered it from the library to see what Richard Louv had to say about the kids and the great outdoors. Louv's contention is that much of what's wrong with kids today (in the form of previously rarely diagnosed maladies affecting children like obesity, diabetes, ADHD, depression, anxiety) is due to the shift in culture away from an outside existence. The American lifestyle has become so incredibly plugged-in and shut-in, that nature, while formerly an escape and the world's biggest classroom, has become more of an abstraction for modern children.  

It goes something like this: Louv claims that the lack of commercial appeal of "true" greenspace (a la forests and foliage) has led to almost total destruction of these areas in favor of money-driven ventures like malls, housing, golf courses, etc. Even many parks are not true greenspace: manicured flower beds are flanked by playground equipment, with little area to explore and engage in truly creative play. I think we all know a little about the ugliness of urban crawl and what it's done to our neighborhoods, but Louv goes further and insists that the drying up of totally natural places for children to play and explore is directly linked to emotional and behavioral problems of children in the United States. He demonstrates that our genetic makeup as humans, formed through thousands of years of hunting and gathering and an agrarian lifestyle, still craves the sensory experience of the natural world. While the American lifestyle has become incredibly sedentary and chock full of modern convenience, our DNA has not caught up, and still needs the stimulation of the natural world for hapiness and contentment. The natural world has a physiologically calming effect on children and adults alike: being among the peace and natural setting of the outdoors, away from noise pollution, billboards, screaming telephones and chiming IM's, our heart rate and blood pressure decrease in what becomes an almost spiritual experience of reflection and calm. In children, this experience has an elevated level of importance. Not only does the natural world have a calming and educational effect on children, but it is one of the few self-directed activities proven to stimulate enormous creative potential within children. Louv notes that most activities in the life of an American child today are so over-monitored and overstructured with rules and regulations, that creative potential is utterly suffocated. A typical day looks like school, after school sports or lessons or tutoring, homework, TV time, computer or video game time, then bedtime routines. Each of these activities results in a prescribed way of life for children where no autonomy is truly learned, and no creativity blossoms. Louv asks us to imagine what this generation of children, who will have essentially never experienced creativity and judgment building activities through self-monitored play, will look like as adults. 

As I thought about it, I had to admit that even though we spend a lot of time outside and at the metroparks trail hiking as a family, Alexa's life looks very, very different from mine and hubby's upbringing. Both of us remember getting the boot outside at a young age by busy moms, dispatched to the backyard or local "woods" to play with our siblings and friends. We would spend literally all day (punctuated by routine check-in with mom) building forts, fishing critters out of the creek, catching lightning bugs and creating elaborate worlds of imaginative play. I can remember, with amazing clarity although it was over twenty years ago, climbing up the trees in our neigborhood "woods" and eating mulberries with my friends. I remember pitching old bed sheets over the clothesline in the back yard on breezy summer days, and laying on a blanket alone, reading books and eating popsicles. I remember the complex play lives my friends or my sister and I constructed in our back yard. I remember hiding under our deck in the backyard, ruminating on running away from home while picking roly-poly bugs from under the rocks. I would sit under the deck, peering through the slats and wondering how long it would take someone to notice that I was gone. It took a long time.

The weird thing is, I can safely say that if Alexa tried the same thing, we would notice her absence in minutes. There's hardly a minute of the day that her presence isn't accounted for between the two of us. We always know not just where she is, but exactly what she's doing. I didn't mean to be the kind of parent that is a little too overprotective, but I think that we are. She's ten now, and it's never occurred to me that we don't give her graduated degrees of freedom to explore. Nor would she want them. It's been a mutually reinforcing dynamic we've crafted in that hubby and I constantly watch over her, and any time we try to give her the boot to get outside, she inevitably winds up back on the step fifteen minutes later, complaining, "I'm bored." This is of course partially because she was an only child for so long, and really had nobody to play with. She's inhabited the adult realm for so long now, depending on us not just for parenting, but for companionship, that I hardly think about her any other way. The fact that she was sick for a while made it worse. But I also definitely think this is a symptom of parenting in my age. We are generally like most of our friends and neighbors as parents. All of us are much more protective as parents, and I don't know...supervisory maybe?  

I know that we could do better. We could not just spend a lot of time outside as a family, but I could encourage her to explore private worlds outside away from us. She could sorely use the alternative stimulation, and judgment skill-building that autonomous play and the wide open outdoors presents. Louv points out in the book, quite accurately I think, that the problem with many devices of entertainment for children today is that they are one-way. Emotion or reaction is dictated. There is a stimulus, with only one logical response. A sitcom is funny, so we laugh. A game asks Mario to jump for coins and slay the dragon, so we do. But in the natural world, there are an infinite number of responses. Should we climb the tree? Should we make a fort out of the tree? Should we build a birdhouse for the tree? Should we use the tree for shade and read or write or nap? Should we ditch the tree and go explore the creek? The possibilities are endless, and children have lots of choices (of the good kind) to make.  

Overall, I really enjoyed the different perspective offered by Louv on the connection between our health and happiness and the natural world. I liked the quasi-spiritual perspective he presented in relation to the natural world, because I have found the outdoors really has provided a lifetime of therapy and healing for me. I can think of little else as spiritual as the whisper of rustling leaves in the branches, the sound of gurgling water, the babbling of critters in the spring, the solitude and peace of being in a quiet, unfettered place. Further, I liked the challenge to my way of thinking about the outdoor world as far as children are concerned. I realized I could likely change some things to encourage Alexa to become more independent and creative. If any consider reading the book, I would caution that Louv is a bit heavy on the doom-and-gloom at times, with not enough attention to how to rectify a life too sedentary. The new edition did have some good suggestions on how to build more of the natural world into the family lifestyle, which was helpful. This post has gotten rather long (I seem to have a problem with that, hehe), so I will post some of the suggestions next time, along with a discussion from a most amazing book that I read that directly links the natural world with the divine. 

Until next time! 

I'm back up for air...

I just finished my thesis. Sixty pages of pure and utter hell and misery, DONE! Two years of sacrifice, boredom, intellectual and academic stimulation (*cough*), weekends of furious paper writing and snoring through public policy texts, two long years of suffering, over and done. I just want to keep saying it, over and over, until I actually believe it: done!

I can't properly describe how elated I feel at the moment. I will graduate on May 16th, with MPA in hand. Yay! 

Life, and blogging, may now resume.

:)

Every day that I'm at work, I share my work day with this pair of love birds:

HONK!

I snapped this on my way out of work yesterday, where they were "guarding" the parking lot, impishly honking at anybody who drove by. (Sorry for the crummy picture quality. Damn cell phones.) 

These little sentries have decided to set up shop right outside my office window, and so my days are now filled with a chorus of honking. I mean, like all day. They frequently leave their love nest to strut the Air Force base to annoy, threaten and otherwise harass other passersby, and one of their favorite daytime activities is to waddle into the middle of the road at their goosy breakneck pace of about 1 mph, and indignantly honk! at any driver who dares inch her way through the intersection and attempt to hurry their pace. After they've munched their way through the lawn and left their, um, deposits, all over the parking lot, though, they always come back to my window and honk away. At everything. At nothing. There's nothing better than having a serious discussion with the chair of the biology department over staffing issues, while the geese HONK! HONK! in the background, until my caller finally distractedly says, "what is that??" I explain that those are my workday chums, the Canada geese. Just having their own very important discussion.

The interesting thing is, even though it's been going on for a long time now, they don't really bother me. While everybody on base hates these creatures (especially on the days they get chased through the parking lot by a pissed off goose), I don't mind them. In fact, I kind of like them. They make me laugh. Which is interesting, because I am of the easily annoyed variety, in life in general. Which makes it all the more unusual that I kind of look forward to hearing them greet me in the morning. This might sound strange, but they kind of remind me of the bell of clarity I've read about in Buddhism before. You know, a noise (or honk, perhaps?) meant to center you and remind you that you are here, and nowhere else. You are in this moment, and not your past or future or any other place. Well, I have to admit, each time I hear the honk! honk!, it really does make me take pause, and take a break from furiously pounding on my keyboard and...just smile.

So really, I don't mind them at all.

Clearly, whoever cooked up daylight savings did not have an infant at home.

That's all I have to say this morning. My grey matter is on furlough thanks to a baby who knows when her schedule is being messed with, and repays me by waking up all night and fussing her way through an earlier than usual morning routine.

 *yawn*

Would it be completely inappropriate for me to crawl under my desk and sleep the afternooon away today?

You have four pounds of organic carrots. What do you do with them?

That's alotta carrots

Make baby food, of course!

Now, I know I wrote briefly about this before, but making baby's food at home has been one of the biggest money saving enterprises we've engaged in this year. The math works like this:

4 lbs organic carrots, steamed and pureed
$4.98 at the market
equals
75 servings (!) of carrots for babies.

Bebe's carrots

That breaks down to roughly 6.5 cents per serving, for organic carrots. And it goes without saying, I suppose, that fresh is a hands-down winner on all accounts when compared to jarred food.

I've been just astounded at how inexpensive it is to make food at home. And it's really not the timesuck I thought it would be either. I devote a Sunday afternoon to peeling, chopping and steaming all sorts of fruits and veggies, and then pureeing and freezing. The whole affair takes about 2-3 hours (to make 5 different varieties), and I've got enough food for two whole months!

The only thing that made me initially nervous was the safety aspect. To boil and sanitize or not to boil and sanitize? What were the best first fruits and veggies? How long to steam a veggie, so as not to lose nutrients? How long can something keep in the freezer? It so happened that my dad purchased the answers to these questions for me, in this book:

Cooking for baby