bearing blog

Quiet reconstructions.

(This post was updated  at 5:10 pm to add links to the artwork mentioned)

 

Mark is off on his annual ski trip, leaving the children and me home for a rare weekend without him. We are quite used to being on our own on weekdays and weekday nights, because his job takes him out of town frequently, but weekend trips are unusual. We shook it up a little: I took the kids to Saturday evening Mass, so that there would not be a morning rush, and (here is a first for me) hired a babysitter for Sunday afternoon so I could slip out and get a little breathing space.

With no one to tell me to turn off the light, and no place to go early in the morning, I stayed up late Saturday reading. Long after the two-year-old had nursed to sleep, his jaws going slack and releasing me, I glanced at the clock and put my book aside, and then slid carefully out of bed, thirsty. The light from the bedroom cast my shadow on the stairwell wall as I descended to the kitchen in my pajamas and bare feet.

I had left a dim light on -- I always do when Mark is gone -- so I could see for the trip to the faucet with my glass. After I drank a long draught and set the empty glass on the counter, I paused to look around me. I had swept the kitchen thoroughly and wiped the counters before herding the children up to bed, and though the floor was probably not very clean, in the dim light no smudges were visible and the dark wood gleamed softly. The books were put away and the area rug was swept. The dishwasher hummed and swished. My rocking chair by the bookshelf looked suddenly inviting, and instead of climbing back up the stairs I went over and sat down, drawing my legs up under myself in the perch to which I, whose feet rarely extend to the floor from an easy chair, am accustomed.

Everyone else was asleep or absent. I looked around me and felt a sudden welling-up of pleasure in the ownership of my home. It is funny, of course I own this home with Mark -- we literally "made" this home together, designed it for our family. I rarely think of the "mine-ness" of it. Being home in it is so ordinary, and it is usually the source of so many things I must get and do and fix and clean and prepare -- I do not often stop and center myself in it. And yet, here it is, always all around me, sheltering us all together.

I kind of like it empty and clean-looking. I don't get to see it that way very often. That pleasure would not be so potent if I did not get to enjoy it noisy, full, and messy almost every day, I suppose.

I am not home now. I am at a local modern art museum (the Walker, for those who know Minneapolis). The kids are home with the babysitter. I will have to get up and go back in just a few minutes.

One of the exhibits that is here right now is called "Lifelike." It is a collection of pieces that look like ordinary objects, or really are ordinary objects. Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes are there, and Chuck Close's "Big Self-Portrait", as well as some photorealist paintings, and a charming painted wooden sculpture called "Weeds" of lifelike little plants that appear to be growing from the crack between wall and floor. There was a short film which at first glance appeared to be images of New York City street scenes, dumpsters and signage and the like, but on closer examination had been shot on a working sound stage that is used for city street scenes in movies. Things like that: either the truly ordinary brought into close focus, or illusions of ordinariness. One of the installations that attracted me most was "Bremen Towne," a room that had been carefully assembled to be an exact replica of the kitchen of the artist's midcentury childhood home. That artist, Keith Edmier, had obtained the correct model of refrigerator, vintage cabinetry, and so on. Where he could not obtain the right type of item, he had manufactured them: the linoleum tiles had been laser-etched using a single original tile as a pattern, and the dinette set had been sculpted.

I could not help but feel a certain link between the gleaming vintage kitchen and dinette, nostalgia for the past executed in Formica and harvest-gold Amana finish, and my feeling of nostalgia-for-the-present-moment of being in my own quiet kitchen late at night. The artist had created a clean, perfect kitchen after his own memories, and it was pleasant to stand in the cheery, midcentury (so retro!) space. His memories, though, must contain more noise and mess than this, just as my life usually does. At the same time, there is something real and really peaceful, not artificial, about the quiet of my late-night kitchen. The children are real, and really sleeping upstairs. Maybe it is just a little message to myself that I need to take the time to enjoy the space I live in on my own terms, a little more often than I do.

‎"For one thing, we have a newborn who keeps pulling them. It's become more hassle than it's worth."

The case against stretching earlobes.  

Agency and personhood, more.

I wrote in my post about babies and young children that before I lived with and loved babies of my own, I didn't really see them as full persons -- couldn't have, because I couldn't imagine that they had agency of their own.  But of course, they do; their world may be limited, there are tools yet to be acquired -- but they can use the tools they have to shape their environment as much as they can according to their needs to respond to it.  

(Even if that means building a toy double boiler to meet their need to imitate, all part of the drive to attach to a parent or other loving figure, itself a survival skill.)

I tossed off a little note at the end of that post about other "others" --

It's as if we are programmed to generalize about people, and not really to know in our depths the personhood -- the agency, the will, the decisionmaking capability -- of "that kind of people" when "that kind of people" is one we don't have direct experience with.

 I'm sure this goes beyond young children, to every other kind of "other" there can be.  Being surprised by people --  in the unpleasant sense, instead of the sense in which I discovered my own babies' innate abilities --sets this off vividly.  Whenever we can't understand, really cannot understand, why someone does the thing they do, or when they act in a way we could not predict, and we write it off as senseless instead of trying to see the sense -- that's when we ought to see that we weren't seeing them as whole and real persons, but instead a caricature, a simpler story to tell, like swaddled plastic on TV.

I know of at least three really good posts out there that attempt to explain certain kinds of "otherness" from the inside, to people who don't understand it because they haven't had to deal with it, to people who might blithely say, "Well, if I was in that situation, I'd..."

First off, the "spoons theory of illness."  A young woman living with lupus tries to explain to her friend what it's like to go through your day with a debilitating illness:

As I went to take some of my medicine with a snack as I usually did, she watched me with an awkward kind of stare, instead of continuing the conversation. She then asked me out of the blue what it felt like to have Lupus and be sick....

I quickly grabbed every spoon on the table; hell I grabbed spoons off of the other tables. I looked at her in the eyes and said “Here you go, you have Lupus”. She looked at me slightly confused, as anyone would when they are being handed a bouquet of spoons... 

I explained that the difference in being sick and being healthy is having to make choices or to consciously think about things when the rest of the world doesn’t have to. The healthy have the luxury of a life without choices, a gift most people take for granted....

I asked her to count her spoons. She asked why, and I explained that when you are healthy you expect to have a never-ending supply of “spoons”. But when you have to now plan your day, you need to know exactly how many “spoons” you are starting with. It doesn’t guarantee that you might not lose some along the way, but at least it helps to know where you are starting. She counted out 12 spoons. She laughed and said she wanted more. I said no, and I knew right away that this little game would work, when she looked disappointed, and we hadn’t even started yet. I’ve wanted more “spoons” for years and haven’t found a way yet to get more, why should she? 

...I asked her to list off the tasks of her day, including the most simple. As, she rattled off daily chores, or just fun things to do; I explained how each one would cost her a spoon. 

The name of the website that I found this on is "But You Don't Look Sick."  That's a great name for a general problem:  If you don't understand that people may have obstacles or ensnarements that aren't apparent to you, you're going to have trouble developing empathy (or sympathy) for anyone.  

"Be kind, for everyone is fighting a great battle."  

Next, Megan McArdle writes about poverty, and the folly of non-poor people saying, "If I was a poor kid" (actually in the piece she's responding to  it was "if I was a poor black kid") "...I'd do this and that..."  basically assuming that they could teleport themselves, with the skill set that they developed to adapt to middle- and upper-class society, into someone else's situation and use it to escape, so why doesn't everyone?  

 Yesterday, I was writing about an argument for an environmental intervention (more jobs) that was supposed to be a "silver bullet" for the problems of educating poor kids.  And when people have proposed such silver bullets for obesity (menu labeling, sugar/calorie taxes, restrictions on fast food restaurants), I've made approximately the same argument as I did yesterday: heavy people are choosing to eat because they want to, not because there aren't enough carrots available at McDonalds. 

But when people blithely say "They're fat because they're lazy/greedy/insert bad character trait here", I point out that the people making the accusation have a much easier time making "good choices".  Their bodies are not insistently demanding food in the same way that obese bodies are, so of course it's easier to pass up that big helping of pasta.

 

I'd say the same thing about people who are poor.  They could be middle class if they made a series of hard choices.   But those choices are really hard--much harder than they are for the people who are already there.  Chances are, you would also have a hard time making those choices.

 

 

Ms. McArdle then goes on to list 16 "constraints that strike [her] as powerful."  I would urge you to read the whole thing.  I think she argues very effectively that some of the "constraints" that keep people out of the middle class are difficult to root out not because of lack of values or poisoned culture, but because they are adaptations to life outside the middle class, or, ironically, because they come from strongly prized virtue (such as being unwilling to save money for college because of a felt need to be generous to others, or being unwilling to move away because of loyalty to friends and duty to family).  

Finally, Ta-Nehisi Coates (like Ms. McArdle, writing for the Atlantic's blog) responds to Megan's piece, adding some more points of comparison to the struggle against obesity, and finishes up:

 

Culture is a set of practices which people adopt to make sense of their environment. I was raised in a house where the memory of going hungry had not faded. I never went hungry, but I was raised around people who'd grown up with that. Moreover, all of my friends and relatives were raised the same way. Everyone I knew for the formative years of my life was raised in the culture of "Finish Your plate." And given the environment our parents had come up in, it made perfect sense. As Megan says, I didn't know anything different. Moreover my peer group didn't know anything different. I would actually go further then Megan and say that there wasn't even a sense that we were making "bad decisions"--even if objectively we were.

"Culture of Poverty" is a poisonous phrase, mostly because it's employed be people who are being glib and attempting to duck a difficult conversation. But, as I've maintained, surely there are practices which may save you on the block, but could also keep you from getting a job. And then there are practices which are, in fact, neither, which time and circumstance have rendered irrelevant.

The point here isn't that rich white people are culturally superior. It's that there was something in a particular set of practices which I found valuable. (I assure you that there are many elements in the culture I was raised which they would also find valuable.) And that value is not an Absolute Good. It's something that worked (and continues to work) for me in a specific context. It is not a Great Moral Truth. It is set of practices which yield great results in one context, but could yield disastrous ones in another. 

 

I find all of these points very thought-provoking.  I think it's important to note that the tendency to "If I were in your shoes, I'd..." is not endemic to one side of the political spectrum or the other. Some social conservatives might identify the failure to raise oneself out of poverty as a "values problem" and blame a bad culture of values, or blame individuals for being lazy or sexually promiscuous or otherwise morally shallow.  This is inadequate.  Is it a moral failure to have trouble saving because you're always spending your money helping out family members?  Is it a moral failure to choose caring for your own baby over using government child care so you can hold down a job that pays enough?   Is it a moral failure to buy a car you can afford, but that keeps breaking down and requires constant maintenance?  

 Some progressives might fall into an equally inadequate error on the other side, imagining that individuals are merely passive victims of their environment, or  assert that government intervention in the form of education is the ultimate solution such that, if it's not working well enough, what's needed is always more of it.

(As Ms. McArdle put it in her fourteenth point, "Not everyone likes school," 

 

...the mania to get more and more people into college is the brain child of people who think that school is fun, and that anyone who doesn't go is being deprived of something like a trip to Disneyland packaged with a job guarantee.  

Lots of people think school is rather miserable, and they wish to leave as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the "school is fun" crowd has made an education a virtual pre-requisite for a stable and well paying job in this century.  If you don't like school, and aren't good at it, what do you do?  Spend the rest of your life popping chicken tenders into the deep fry at Popeye's?  Or deal drugs?)

 

A better step towards dealing with poverty is to assume that people in general are, in most cases, acting in their own best interests given the situation that they live in and have lived in -- sometimes not only their own best interests, but the best interests of those around them.  That the "bizarre" or "anti-social" behaviors of people who live "somewhere else" are adaptations to an environment.  The occasional rare individual excepted, human beings neither pull themselves up by their own bootstraps nor submit passively to the culture around us.  Culture and environment shape us and we respond and shape it to the best of our ability.  

The obesity comparison rings true to me.  There is this constant false dichotomy between "dieting and exercise don't work, so don't bother, just learn to be happy with yourself as you are" and "why don't those greedy fat people just take a daily walk and lay off the chips."  The reality is that it's possible to permanently lose weight, but it's very, very difficult.  And there's also this weird assumption you find from time to time, that fat people are only fat because they don't know it's bad for their health or because they don't know that vegetables are good and cheeseburgers are bad (this is the "more education will solve everything" theory).  

If you really distill the "education solves everything" theory down, I fear you will find an assumption of "those people are different from me because they don't know as much as I do, and if they only knew more, they would choose to be more like me."

You don't honor a struggle by denying that it should be a struggle and suggesting that only moral failure keeps the strugglers from success.  Nor do you honor a struggle by denying that there's any point in struggling.   Reality is so much more complicated that I would even oversimplify by stating "Reality is somewhere in between those two extremes."  It's on a whole different plane.

But we are so addicted to simple stories we can tell about others.  

Pocket-sized religious art.

I like prayer cards, a.k.a. holy cards, especially as items for babies to play with during Mass, as reminders scattered throughout my house, or as a pocket-sized text of a prayer I'm  using for a season.

 Here is a confession:

...gosh darn it, I sometimes really hate the art that comes on them.  A lot of it is pretty schlocky, and when we know what a modern saint looked like from her photographs, the pictures are sometimes ridiculously unlike the real live person.

I mean, come on:  St. Thérèse of Lisieux looks like this:

 

 

not this:

 

 

Anyway, today I stumbled across a site that seems to produce a better sort of holy card:  CatholicPrayerCards.org.  For about a quarter apiece you can buy holy cards that look like, um, an actual work of art, like this:

... or something a little more Eastern (remember:  icons are the anti-Thomas Kinkade):

... or a photo of the saint in life, perhaps complete with leprosy sores:

The photographic ones are my favorites.  Take a look at these:

            

I think I'll go through my children's "decks" of cards in their Mass bags and perhaps replace some of the more egregious examples of bad art with these.  

Because, really, folks.  We have Michelangelo in our court.  And Caravaggio.  And Raphael Sanzio. If you want something populist, I suppose you could go with Millet or something.  There is no reason Catholics should have to put up with bad religious art.  

I don't wear makeup and I don't like makeup ads.

But this makeup ad campaign is pretty cool.  From Kara at Mama Sweat:

On a cold April morning I was in Central Park with about 10,000 other woman for the EIF Revlon Run Walk for Women and participated in the free makeover Revlon offered at the finish line. Who turns down a free makeover? I just filled out a short form about why I consider myself a role model, got my hair pouffed, then my photo taken.

After the primping I ran back to my hotel and thought noting of it until Revlon contacted me months later to say I had been chosen for an ad campaign that would run in People Magazine.

Click the link to Kara's website here to see the ad.

Internet contract for kids.

After I wrote the Internet safety lesson I described in a previous post, I learned that my good friend IRL The Road Scholar had put up a lot of good links related to Internet use in the homeschool.  This included a set of "10 digital commandments for kids" in the form of a contract for kids to go over with their parents and sign.  (The Road Scholar's commandments were, in turn, adapted from a set found at Komando.com.)

I thought the contract was a great idea.  And no, I don't think it's overkill.  Whenever there are complicated permission structures, where the rules are many and detailed, having "the rules" in a written form is good for everybody, so that we can refer back to it to remember exactly what we previously agreed upon.   Also, going over the rules carefully is a way to have a conversation about what the rules should be.  Parents do have authority over their kids, but sometimes kids have good ideas that should be incorporated into the agreement. 

It's particularly important in areas where kids and teens are learning to exercise freedom responsibly:  internet use, staying home alone, learning to drive a car. In situations like that, we want them to stretch a little bit, so that they can gain experience and (it's to be hoped) wisdom; but we do not want them to stretch dangerously beyond their capabilities faster than their maturity can keep up.   That is complicated and subjective, and in a bigger family it's hard to keep track of where everybody is at a given time.

Furthermore, I think it's important to include items that protect the child's interests as well.  At some point, I think a parent needs to demonstrate respect for a child's privacy by agreeing to limit blogging about them or writing about them on FB.  So note below that the contract includes language that could let my child ask me to remove or modify blog posts about him.  And I think it's so important that a child be honest about what he or she encounters online, that I think it's reasonable to agree up front that if the child tells us promptly about a potentially dangerous encounter, he will not be punished (though privileges might be reduced; changes in privileges should not be construed as punishments).

So I took the contract and adapted it for my own family, in which there is an almost-11-year-old boy who is just now getting expanded access to the Internet.  I thought I'd post the text of my adapted contract here.  Feel free to use it or adapt it for your own family.

Comments are welcome.  We haven't gone over the contract with him yet, so please tell me if you have any feedback or suggestions!  I can still make changes.

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Internet and Computer Contract for Kids Under 18

 
When I use computers, mobile devices, phones, and the Internet, I promise to follow these rules to keep my family, my friends and myself safe.   I will discuss these rules with my parents and initial each section as we discuss them.

--

1.  My parents will decide when I am allowed to use the computer, cell phone, Wii or other game system, and the Internet.

• I will only visit sites they say I can.
• I will only do things we agree are appropriate.
• I will log out when they ask me to log out.
• I will not allow my siblings to log in on my account or use my “time” without permission.
• I will respect the rules that my friends' parents set for them.  I will not help them break their parents' rules.
• If I use the Internet while I am away from my parents or at a friend's house, I will let my parents know that I did.  I will tell them about any new games I played.  
• If I or one of my friends brings a new game or video into the house, I will show it to my parents.
• I will tell my parents if I accidentally use a device, play a game, or  visit a site I  think they might not want me to use.  I know that my parents will not punish me for accidentally doing this as long as I tell them right away.

Initial here:   Kid _____     Parent _____

2.   I will never tell anyone secure information without getting my parent’s permission first.

• I will not say when I am alone or when the house is empty or tell my family's schedule.
• I will not tell my family's last name, address, workplaces, passwords, or phone numbers.  
• I will keep this information about my friends as private as I keep my own information.
• I will not use the Internet to show, spread, or tell anything private.
• If I am not sure whether something should be kept private, I will ask my parents.
• If I want help keeping something private, I can ask my parents.
• I know that if I ask my parents to keep private a story or a picture that features me, they will respect my wishes.  I can ask my parents to remove information that they have shared about me from social media.
• I know that it is very easy for secrets to spread once they are in electronic form.
• I know that any electronic message on the Internet could be read or seen by anyone, forever.
• If I accidentally reveal information, I will tell my parents the same day so they can act to protect our family.  I know my parents will not punish me if I tell them right away.

Initial here:   Kid _____     Parent _____

3.   I will not participate in mean, physically dangerous, or morally wrong activities online.

• If anyone does or says anything that bothers me, I will tell my parents.
• I will show my parents if I see material or play a game that 
  • is obscene 
  • depicts real and severe violence or simulates realistic and severe violence
  • shows nudity, meaning pictures of people who are naked or who are showing the parts of their bodies usually covered by bathing suits
  • is cruel
  • encourages people to do things that are wrong or illegal
  • frightens or disturbs me
  • tries to trick me into revealing personal information or do something wrong
  • seems to be a lie
• I know that my parents will not punish me for accidentally seeing such material if I tell my parents right away.
• I will not do, say, send, or show anything obscene, illegal, immoral, frightening, or cruel.
• I know that it is not lying if I use a fake name to protect my identity or if I refuse to tell information to a person who has no right to know it.  I know that it is always okay for a kid to refuse to tell any information over the Internet.
• I know that search engines and online information sources such as Wikipedia could lead me to sites that are obscene, cruel, dangerous, frightening, or tricky.
• I know that much of the information on the Internet is untrue or misleading.
• If I want to search for information on the Internet at home, I will let my parents know before I start.  I will always search on the computer in the living room where they can observe me and help me.
• If I want to use the computers in the library to search, I will use the computers set aside for kids in my age group (“kids” or “teens.”)

Initial here:   Kid _____     Parent _____

4.   I will never post or send pictures of myself, my family or friends without my parents' permission.

• If I set up a blog or online profile, I will tell my parents where it is and how they can read it.
• If I join a social network, mailing list, file or sharing site, or group of any kind, I will invite my parents to join.
• I will work with my parents to set privacy and sharing settings that satisfy them.

Initial here:   Kid _____     Parent _____

5.   I will never, ever meet with anyone I've talked with online without first talking to my parents.

Initial here:   Kid _____     Parent _____

6.   If my parents ask for my password, I will give it to them.

• I will never give out any passwords I know to any others, not even friends or siblings.
• If I find out a password that belongs to my parents, I will tell them that I know it.

Initial here:   Kid _____     Parent _____

7.   If I want to download anything, I will ask for permission FIRST.

• I know that some applications, games, music, movies, or programs are unsafe to download.
• I know that I must pay for these things and that the cost is sometimes hidden.
• I know that sometimes “free” content is really stolen.

Initial here:   Kid _____     Parent _____

8.  I will not try to win free things or buy things on a phone or on the Internet. 

• If I get a message that I have won something, I will show my parents.
• If I get an email asking me to enter a password or other information, I will tell my parents.
• I will not forward messages that tell me bad stuff will happen to me if I do not forward them.
• I will not click on any advertisements.  If I accidentally click on an advertisement, I will close any new windows that appear and go “back” to the last page I was viewing.

Initial here:   Kid _____     Parent _____

9.   I will not change settings, install software, or open my parents' files without permission.

•  If I think I might have accidentally done this, I will tell my parents right away so they can fix it.
• I know that my parents will not punish me for accidentally doing this as long as I tell my parents right away.

Initial here:   Kid _____     Parent _____

10.   I understand that my parents allow me to use the Internet, computers, and games on the condition that I do not hide from them what I do. 

• My parents may examine the computer, my phone or any other device that they or I own.
• They may see where I have gone on the Internet, what emails and text messages I’ve sent and received, the things I’ve downloaded, or what I do. 
• I will not erase my browsing history or record of sent messages without permission.
• I will BCC one of my parents on every email I send until they set different rules for me.
• I promise not to turn off or alter any parental-controls settings or software installed by my parents.
• I will not close a window when my parents come into the room to hide something I’m viewing.
• If I use code words or abbreviations, I will tell my parents what they mean.
• If I think I may have accidentally done something I am not supposed to, I will tell my parents right away.
• If I want to do something that I am not sure my parents would approve of, I will ask them first.

Initial here:   Kid _____     Parent _____

 

For the child:

• I have read the above, and I will follow these rules.     
• If I do not follow these rules, I understand that my parents might reduce my privileges or punish me.
• I understand that “reducing my privileges” is not necessarily a punishment.  My parents might reduce my privileges for any reason in order to keep our family safe.
• I also understand that even if my parents do not punish me, my actions on the Internet might have consequences from which my parents might not be able to protect me or from which they might choose not to protect me.

_____________________________________

Child's signature                                 Date

For the parents:

• I agree to let my child use electronic devices as long as they follow these rules.  
• I agree to answer any of my child's questions that will help him or her use the Internet safely and responsibly.   
• I agree to make changes to the rules clearly and in writing, and keep them with this contract, so that my child always knows what the rules are.
• I agree not to punish a child for accidentally breaking a rule, as explained above, as long as he promptly tells  a parent about it.
• I agree to discuss my child's ideas for safely increasing privileges as the child learns to use the Internet responsibly.

____________________________________

Parent's signature                               Date


_____________________________________

Parent's signature                                Date                 

 

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Why we don't do soccer.

Jamie needs an auxiliary brain:

A few years ago I remember thinking, "If I have three kids in Scouts and three in soccer my head is going to pop off." 

...My plan was to catch the last few minutes of Marty's game and warm him up with a cup of tea at the nearby Panera. Then I'd drop Joe off for his 11:30 game and let my husband take over, picking up Joe and getting Pete to his 2:00 game.

Except it didn't work out the way I planned. The 11yo's game was cut short on account of rain and humiliation (for the other team -- Marty's crew won 8-0). Instead of seeing the last few minutes of play I found Marty alone, soaked and tearful. (FAIL FAIL FAIL. I reminded him that he could ask another parent to call me if something like that happened again, but still: FAIL.) He perked right up with that cup of tea, though, and I was feeling like things were back on track when Joe said, "How's Pete going to get to his game?"

...I'd brought the wrong boy. The 11:30 game was Pete; the 2:00 game was Joe.

It's been a while since I stirred up the waters of controversy, but I want to throw something out there and see what bites.  It has to do with my theory about soccer.

See, soccer is a great sport for a kid.  The equipment is cheap; kids all over the world live and breathe the sport; you can play a pickup game on almost any flat surface of any size with a number of players ranging from four to 40.  Also, a kid who plays soccer runs.  A lot.  There's a good amount of physical activity in every soccer game for just about every player.

But based on everything I hear from parents of soccer players, however good soccer may be for a particular kid, I am convinced that soccer in its usual suburban-American form is a Very. Bad. Choice. for larger families.  If you have four kids in soccer, then every kid is on a different team (unless you have a set of quadruplets all the same gender).  That means every kid is on a different schedule.  Frequently it means different fields at different places in town.  I'm sorry, but that sounds like a logistical nightmare to me.  I do not want to spend my life in the car.

So far I have been plunking my kids in physical activities where two or three kids are doing the same thing at the same time in the same place.  Swimming lessons at the Y, for instance.  There's also a swim team at the Y where all ages practice and compete at the same times in the same place; I tried to get the kids interested in that but they didn't bite, but maybe the younger ones will go for it.  Martial arts:  the Aikido studio up the street has "youth classes" where all ages and belt levels under 17 practice at the same time in the same place.   

I know several larger families in which every child takes piano lessons.  This strikes me as the epitome of an activity that is well adapted for large homeschooling families, at least the ones who have a piano.  Especially if you can get the piano teacher to come to your house (which is, I hear, easier to do if your family is paying for a block of four or five lessons in a row).  Efficient.    Soccer strikes me as the polar opposite of this.

Am I right, or very, very wrong?  Set me straight if you will...

UPDATE - Jamie dusts off the brain and responds.  

Just asking.

In the comments to the last post, MrsDarwin mentioned the "Lord we just" phenomenon, which I have also noticed in ecumenical groups being led in prayer by a Protestant:

Someone once described the sort of spontaneous group prayers as the "We just" prayers: "Lord, we just come before you today, and we just give you thanks for..."

Curious,  I googled "Lord we just" and came up with this "How not to pray" page, presumably written by a Protestant:

For some inexplicable reason, the word JUST shows up a lot in prayer. "Just" is used for pausing, for filler, as an adverb, for rhythm, and, well, to underscore that this is just prayer and not talking in general. Since this is not normally the case in human dialog, it is hard to explain why. This is also known as the JUST'n MARTYR PRAYER.

"Lord, we JUST pray that you would JUST like, JUST really JUST totally..."

The comment that this is "to underscore that this is ... prayer and not talking in general" was interesting -- linguistically I mean -- is it serving as an interjection, a marker to denote "prayer-language?"  Maybe a cultural difference between Protestants and Catholics (or it could be a regional difference).  I have never heard a Catholic use gratuitous "justs" this way.

Here's another example from a news article profiling some Christian mixed martial arts fighters:

"Father, we just thank you for the opportunity to go out tonight and to train and compete," coach John Renken says. "Lord, we just pray that you protect our fighters, as well as the other guys. We pray that we will be a representation of you."

And the comments thread on this post also seems to indicate that it's mostly a Protestant thing. 

I wonder why that is?  Maybe the rote prayers lead us Catholics to expect a certain tone.  None of them have "just" in them.  We probably have a whole different set of verbal tics.

"Lord, teach us to pray."

" 'Another example of the slow decline of our once-educated society.' "

Farhad Manjoo takes to task the grumps who write letters complaining to NPR.

For all its faults, I admit it:  I listen to NPR, a lot, and am a member of Minnesota Public Radio.  I use it, the public budgets are going south, I can afford to donate, it's only just that I should voluntarily help pay for it.  

But even I am not immune to complaining.  The only time I thought about writing a gripey letter was once when ATC did a piece on Kipling and they... well, why not let Ethan Stock of Redwood City, California complain for me?

SIEGEL: Ethan Stock(ph) of Redwood City, California was unhappy with our story about plans for a Rudyard Kipling Museum in Mumbai, India.

BLOCK: I expect more from ATC and NPR, he writes. You contrasted the obvious enthusiasm of Indians for Kipling with an excerpt from the poem "White Man's Burden," strongly implying that the Indians are somehow misguided in their appreciation of a Nobel-winning author.

Contrary to your heavy-handed presentation, Kipling was nuanced and subtle observer and reporter of humanity of all shades, from lightest to darkest. Any but the most jaundice reading of "White Man's Burden" will see the heavy irony that lays over every line, including most particularly, "Savage Wars of Peace."

Yeah, what he said!  

(Seriously,  "jaundiced" doesn't even do it justice.  "The archaic sentiments of his poem "White Man's Burden" can be forgiven...."  You should hear the tone of voice in which they had the veddy-British-sounding reader enunciate the excerpt.  I was shrieking in my driver's seat, "What?!?  What?!?  It's BRILLIANTLY  IRONIC, you fools!"  Although apparently there are a lot of people who disagree with me about Kipling's intent, the least NPR could have done is mention that there's a variety of critical opinions on the work, and only some of them paint Kipling as an imperialist bastard who intended every word in the poem seriously.)

So, yeah, I could have written that letter.  Call me a grump if you like.  (But I'm not as grumpy as some.)

"Reading generously."

I love the turn of phrase as well as the principle, from PrawfsBlawg:

When I was a graduate student in comparative literature, I had the good fortune of having a popular, older professor in his last semester of teaching....

 This particular professor, himself no deconstructionist, took a moment at the end of his last class of his last semester of teaching, after a long and accomplished career, to urge us to do one thing as we went forward in our careers: read generously. We are taught from a very young age to read critically, of course, and he insisted that there is nothing wrong with this. But, he mourned, there is such a spirit of skepticism toward the text that now dominates our discourse. We are encouraged to take it to task, tear it apart, read it against the grain at every possible turn. There is a place for this, no doubt, he said, but don’t forget how to read with a spirit of generosity toward the text. Try to see what it is saying to you; accept it on its own terms, if only to strengthen your own critique. It is nearly impossible to learn anything from a text if you are not willing to read it in this spirit.

This has always stuck with me.... I think it not only makes us better critics and scholars to read generously – I would even venture to say that we owe it, almost as an ethical responsibility, to our colleagues and our readers. Is it possible not only to read critically but also, at the same time, to read generously?

We could listen generously too.  A commenter at that site adds:

I would think the norm (is?) should be a "principle of charity" as we say in philosophy (and rhetoric) prior to practice of any deconstructionist critique (I'm still not quite sure what that is) or a hermeneutic of suspicion. In philosophy at least, this can entail the reader's re-formulation of an argument in stronger terms than the original or in a way unanticipated by the author. One frequently finds, however, performance anxiety and unbridled ambition combining in a premature "critique" that ends up saying more about the critic than the work-at-hand. Of course some folks are just downright nasty or possessed of an irritable dispostion or bewitched by some belief or ideology that precludes the possibility of any charitable reading of a text (I've thought this applies to some extent, for example, to Frederick Crews' reading of Freud).

I would think the blogosphere could take a few lessons from the old prof or from the philosopher-commenter.

h/t Mr. Adler of the Volokh Conspiracy.