Insulators, and saplings, and pokemon, oh my!

Oh, hello blog. Nice to see you again.

Creative energy is still flowing chez Klavins, even if it has not been my own. The kids continue their prodigious efforts. I have some pictures to prove it!

First I need to provide a little back-story on D's latest area of interest. Last summer, when the boys (all 3) and I undertook to drive across the country before our month-long stint in Boston, D happened across some old electrical insulators in an antique store in Wyoming.

(What is an electrical insulator, you ask, if you are like me and not particularly electrically inclined?

An insulator is a glass or ceramic artifact that sits atop telegraph or electrical poles and separates and supports the wires. They come in a range of colors, shapes, and materials. Trust me, I think I know them all by now.)

Anyway, being in possession of a few dollars, D decides to pick them up. As it happens, they turned out to be the conversation piece of the trip. Have you any idea how many people out there know about insulators, their history and taxonomy? I do. I think I've met them all between Wyoming and the Atlantic ocean. D took them everywhere with him, and wherever we went, people would come up to him to talk shop about insulators. We stayed at a bed and breakfast in South Dakota. The owner? An avid insulator collector. We stop by a shop in Illinois. The owner insists on gifting D a box of insulators. We finally arrive in Massachusetts and take a weekend trip up to New Hampshire to see dear old friends. Of course, one of them turns out (surprise!) to collect insulators. E and I get so much mileage out of this. We tell D that back home in Seattle, he could strap that insulator to his forehead and walk around for a month, and no one would know it for what it was. We think, here in middle America, D has found his people.

Well, D has worked hard to keep the dream alive since his return. His insulator collecting continues apace. Long weekend hikes along deserted railroads have yielded a fair number of them; trips to antique stores with money in hand have too. A few weeks ago D disappeared into his workshop in the garage, complaining that he needed some good way to display his insulators. A few hours later, he was trudging up the stairs with this in his hand.

Yes, it is a model of an electrical pylon. He has displayed each insulator with information about it underneath, as a good collector should.

It's been fun to watch this curiosity about insulators broaden and shift. It has turned into a fascination with the history of the telegraph, and with railroads, because most old telegraph lines are found along railroad tracks. I love to watch him try to work through these areas of interest. This model pylon sits in his bedroom now alongside the other one. It is a work in progress:

The pylon is made of legos, but the telegraph line underneath is constructed of balsa wood, string, and small pebbles and bits of broken glass (which he has been collecting in the streets) that stand in for insulators.

In another corner of the room, he has begun work on a model railroad crossing using Wiki Stix to create crossing arms and semaphores. It is only a start and it turns out he took the semaphores to school with him today (which I'm sure his teacher loves!) so I will have to update with photos later when it's complete.

Hanna the cat approves.

When D is not working out his fascination with all things electrical and historical, he is hashing out his ideas for his new business with his friend M. Apparently they are determined to open their own tree nursery. Undaunted by the lack of open space to grow trees, he has come up with an innovative solution: Use the roof of your homemade fort for a plot!

Note the signage. A10K is his company name. Look for it in the future! :-)

Now, B's creativity runs along a more conventional track. B likes legos, but he likes to follow the kit instructions. He's an avid builder. Here's what he's done over the past month, since his birthday:

It's an entire Harry Potter city. He shows a degree of concentration while working through these kits that's not commensurate with his age (6). Several of these kits were designed for ages 14 and up.

When not building with legos or enjoying anything Harry Potter-related, B nurses an obsessive love for Pokemon cards. But collecting them is not satisfying his passion. He has been making his own, over the past week.

On the back of each card there is a message to his parents, who are apparently too quick to tidy up and often wind up discarding valuable pieces of art.

That's it for now. I have been toying with the idea of broadening the focus of this blog to be about creativity and family life generally, so I plan to be posting something else in the near future about ADULT creativity in this house, which too often gets neglected. How do you nurture your own creativity and manage work, home, and family? It's a balance I have not been able to achieve yet. Got any pointers? Feel free to stick 'em in the comments!

Back in action

There's nothing like a sick child to completely alter the trajectory of your week. I committed to showing up to my writing group Friday with some real work accomplished but when your kid needs you to play lego in order to distract him from his misery what are you going to do? This is my little B, and he knows he's got me wrapped around his little finger.

So... Drawings were drawn, coloring was colored, block towers were built, and lego guys met various dramatic and fiery ends. But no writing was written, no bills were paid, no shopping was done, and no garbage was taken out. This morning saw E running down the street behind the sanitation truck with the garbage can in hand. (If only I had a picture of that to share!) Nobody without kids can possibly understand how life can get THAT out of control. I certainly never did, B.C.*

So this morning, I took him back to school, and we have clearly backslid on the whole separating from mommy thing. D has his own struggles; this is B's, currrently. He will stand in the hall in front of his classroom in tears, bottom lip quivering, telling me "I just love you TOO MUCH." Or he tells me "I can't LIVE WITHOUT YOU!" And it's true, he is feeling the pain--it makes him miserable. Though I'm not above suggesting that he has inherited a little of my dramatic flair.

By the time I pick him up, of course, he is usually happily playing with his classmates--but some mornings I just can't take the drama.

B and I are so much alike that I can't help but see in him all my own weaknesses and fallibilities. I was equally bad at separating from parents at his age. I was equally shy and overstimulated by social situations. If I tell E I worry about B he rolls his eyes and tells me to take a freakin' pill, that he's totally fine, and E's right. But I see him holding back from the group in the kindergarten class,  not quite knowing how to be part of the gang, and I can feel exactly what he's feeling--it's like going through school myself all over again.

I also spent just as much time as he does hanging or swinging or jumping or dancing or otherwise aloft. He makes other adults nervous with the physical risks he takes but I don't want to hinder him. I want him to keep flying through the air, to keep challenging himself; it's when he looks most truly himself to me. I get such a thrill out of watching him. And I'm glad he's off the couch now and back in action.

I love the quote by Elizabeth Stone: "Making the decision to have a child--it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." Internet, meet the other half of my heart.

*before children

This week's projects...

Oh yes, I have some still life photos for you today. Here are a couple of recent things I've happened upon:

When B and I came home from his gymnastics class Monday night, it was to find D's project du jour in progress. He had been home from his own drumming class for a half hour and in that time had designed the following projector for use in a silhouette show he and B were going to perform later that evening.

This masterpiece consists of a traffic cone on a rolling dolly, connected to a tube with an LED flashlight inside. The rear is mounted on the wheel assembly of an old vaccuum cleaner and weighted with a unit block:

And here, a closeup of the projector and the projected:

So, that was Monday.

Tuesday, I went into my kitchen to make dinner and found the following hanging from my countertop:

You can see B in the corner, trying to get a closer look. Here D has turned a battery, a galvanized nail, some tape, aluminum foil, and a length of wire into an electromagnet. He then raided my stapler for staples to demonstrate the success of his enterprise.

This one is from a little while ago. For D, it's not enough to make music; he has to make musical instruments. This is one he calls a "Echo Box String":

It's like living in an ever changing art exhibit, you know? And it's only Wednesday.

This little sculpture is courtesy of B:

He says this is called "The Water Machine". Thank goodness my hand weights are of some use to somebody!!

Starting over....

Well, we're into month two of school year 2010-11, and in many respects it's a time of starting over. I'm starting to reaquaint myself with this blog (and writing in general; thanks, writing buddies!); I'm starting life without small children at home all day again for the first time in ten years. And as of this week we're starting over with the issue of D's medication. After banging our collective heads against the wall for a month, we have concluded that reverting to meds is the only way to survive this school year.

I'm hoping it's going to work. I'm already noticing that he's brought his homework home every day this week. I'm noticing that his mood has generally improved, whether due to the medication or due to the fact that he's having more successes on a daily basis, I'm not sure. I'm noticing he is not finishing his sandwiches at lunch. And I'm noticing that I am regularly going to bed at night while he is still up in his room, reading by flashlight. I hope that the good continues to outweigh the bad but I'm keeping a watchful eye on the whole thing as it develops.

For anyone reading this who doesn't know the back story, perhaps a little exposition:

D is in fifth grade now, and over the course of his short life has been in three different schools. In kindergarten, he went to his neighborhood school and actually had a lovely year--he had a wonderful teacher who understood him as well as anyone can, and liked him too. But we were not confident of this school's ability to meet his needs in the later grades. We pulled him out to put him in a school that had an advanced learning program, hoping that that would both meet his needs academically and give him a cohort of other kids like himself with whom to bond. But we had a horrible lapse in judgment when choosing the school. It was three years before we could get him out of there and into the school where he is now, which, while not perfect, is I think a better fit for him and for our family.

We knew D was "different" from a very young age. On the one hand he was extremely bright, creative, and verbally precocious, sounding like a little professor by age two or three. In preschool he learned how to make speakers from scratch (using paper, wires, and magnets) that would actually produce sound. He would build elaborate constructions with just about any kind of building material, combining things in new and interesting ways. He was uber-curious about the natural world and loved to go on hikes and find interesting flowers, mushrooms, and rocks; he liked to learn about them and teach others about them. At the same time he was socially inflexible and had odd deficits that were difficult to categorize. He refused to draw. He refused to do any kind of preschool project instigated by another person (peer or teacher). Whenever presented with a complex environment, social or sensory, he would retreat or act out. Hidden picture tasks gave him anxiety and he would refuse to look at them. He refused to read for us. He started kindergarten apparently "not reading" and within a month was reading complex chapter books.

His is a summer birthday and we debated red-shirting him from kindergarten, but we feared he would be bored if we held him back. So we put him in. We should have kept him out, but hindsight is 20/20, so they say.

We spent the next few years trying to figure out why our bright creative son was struggling so much socially, and why he was producing little to no work in the classroom. Friends seemed to move in and out of his life unpredictably; just when he thought things were going swimmingly something would happen (he could never tell what) that would leave him friendless, running circles around the playground at recess and stopping to peer out the cyclone fence at the world beyond. His chronic difficulties eventually spun us into Student Intervention Team meetings and hours and hours of diagnostic tests in the second grade, and eventually appointments with professional psychologists, where we finally began to get some answers. He was found to be "highly gifted", at the 99.99th percentile on academic achievement and IQ tests. He was also found to exhibit characteristics of ADHD and Aspergers. Further testing and evaluation revealed the ADHD diagnosis to be the correct one.

While D had a mostly miserable time at that second school, I will always be grateful to that team that helped us find the answers we were seeking. D had some real advocates among them. They suggested we get D into the local APP (Accelerated Progress Program) school, which they thought might alleviate the boredom that was leading to some of his output problems. They thought we might also be able to find a community of professionals accustomed to dealing with these kids (colloquially called "twice-exceptional", or 2E, by the community) and a community of the kids themselves that might make D feel at home.

I wish I could say this was the happy ending to the story, but of course like all things in life it is not that simple. D still struggles socially, and while he has his friendships they strike me as tenuous and vulnerable. When things go awry he has no confidence in his ability to fix them. While he is more interested in the material being presented in the classroom he still runs up against his ADHD limitations when it comes time to produce work. This is common to many 2E children, who require the stimulation of the advanced material to perform, but do not have the ability to keep up with the work expectations of these APP classrooms. He ends up feeling like the "dumb one" in his class of brainiacs. While medications undoubtedly make a difference in his ability to concentrate (and collaborate!) in school, we are always eventually driven off of them by the side effects (inability to sleep and eat) that make them eventually unworkable.

But we are trying again, a tiny tiny dose to give a little boost while minimizing the disabling side effects. We are meeting with people and trying to develop a support network to help us help him. We want him to succeed socially and academically while not compromising the things that make him the unique and amazing kid that he is.

And he is; he really, really is.

Oh, I get it...

When you have a blog, you're supposed to post! On a regular basis! Hmm.

We are closing in on the end of summer. I'd like to share with you this summer's pièce de résistance. Early in July E and I decided to nail together a 4'x5' frame in the backyard, and let the kids go crazy. Here it was on its first day:

And here it is today, nearly a month later. Still very much a work in progress.

Note the bucket pulley system that allows them to pull materials up to their tiled second floor.

For those of you who put out piles of building materials--say, for example, tiles--by the street in front of your house with a FREE sign, and wonder what happens to them: Here you go! Now you know.

I myself was thinking the tiles might be better used on the inside of the structure, considering D opted to turn the fort into a working shower. Note the external plumbing:

And the interior. The showerhead is in the top left corner. Cold showers only though! For those occasions when you're just too dirty to make it inside to the bathroom, I guess. Which does happen, when you're four and eight.

For those of you who are committed to letting the kids have the run of the backyard for the summer, I highly recommend this activity. They've both (mostly D, but B too, to some extent) been wholly engaged in this for a month. Today we've moved on to painting--I sent them out there with jars of washable tempera paint and a brush apiece. Now if I only had a Xanax to get me through it...

The Adventure Begins....

This morning, I shuffled E and the kids out the door for an ADVENTURE DAY (read: SANITY DAY FOR MOM). I stood amid the detritus of my house and realized that all along, the blogging 'hook' I'd been looking for had been staring me in the face. As I walked around I came face to face with the following art installations, all completed in the last 24 hours, give or take a few:

Remnants of last night's Earth Hour celebration, obviously.

And this:

This is my personal favorite:

I call it Two-Liter Bottle with Double-A Batteries and Rokenbok Balls Topped by Empty Yogurt Container Alongside Floral Kleenex Box.

And finally:

I particularly like the irony of D's inscription, "Wrapped Presents," on the box full of old moldy tubing and rusty valves. Which he assembled, by the way. They're his. Purchased with many a Home Depot gift card over the years. Actually this is probably his idea of the Perfect Gift, in all seriousness.

I realized I'm tired of spending all my time walking around and deconstructing art in the name of hygiene. Instead, I want to share it with you, my friends and family! It's the only way I can help you to truly understand the complexities of my daily life parenting the lovely, bright, messy, impossible, idiosyncratic, never-boring fruit of my loins.

Plus I get to share more pictures with you, and ensure I get some writing in on a regular basis. Everybody wins!!