Mud Pies and Other Messes

"Can I make a Mississippi Mud Pie?" asked Tommy (10), inspired by the recipe in his Christmas gift, The Boys' Book of Greatness. Already in the kitchen chopping celery, carrots, and onion for a Bolognese sauce, I readily granted permission. So he began to cook alongside me, asking for my assistance in finding springform pans, getting chocolate from the garage, and melting the chocolate in the microwave. I multitasked in the absentminded manner I have when I'm both cooking dinner and calculating mentally exactly how much time I have left in my afternoon and which half of the things I originally planned on doing will actually fit in the next two hours.

With the sauce simmering, I started accompanying Karina on the piano as she practiced singing. Her voice inched higher in her warm up exercises and I congratulated myself that I had left enough time to practice with her before we left for ballroom dance. Then I heard a yell.

"Mom! The pan's leaking!"

I ran into the kitchen. Runny chocolate batter seeped from the pan onto the counter, dotted the oven floor, rack, and door, and trailed around the kitchen island in a nearly complete oval. I sighed as I stared at the mess. The destruction of my afternoon plans, my kitchen, and my equanimity must have shown on my face because Tommy asked, "Mom? Are you mad?'

"No. I'm just trying to decide what to do."

I have heard that all springform pans leak. This may be true, but mine has been bent out of shape enough that instead of a drip, it flowed freely.

"I'll move it to a new pan," I said, pouring the batter into a bowl and scraping the remnants of the graham cracker crust, now mixed with chocolate, into a tart pan, "you clean up the floor."

Life is messy. This has been on my mind recently, ever since I read The 10 Commitments: Parenting with Purpose by Chick Moorman. He outlines ten aspects of parenting, suggesting that parents congratulate themselves where they are already successful and improve in the areas where they are less than stellar. I knew I had found one of my weaknesses with the very first one: "I commit to remembering that experience can be messy."

He continues, "I accept that sand, mud, food, paint, cooking, eating, relationships, emotions, and social interactions can be messy. I allow my children to learn from making messes and the cleanup that follows. I recognize that experience can be messy."

"The cleanup that follows"--four words I cannot get out of my head. In my household, the making messes half of the commitment reigns. Crafts, books, food, clothes, papers, and toys get spread everywhere. I have failed to assist my children in developing the good habit of cleaning up after themselves, taking responsibility for the messes they make. They constantly walk away from messes, completely oblivious to the chaos trailing behind.

Establishing good habits, especially neatness and everyone cleaning up after themselves, is my main focus right now. Comparing habit to a train track that enables our life to run smoothly, the educator Charlotte Mason wrote, "it rests with parents and teachers to lay down lines of habit on which the life of the child may run henceforth with little jolting or miscarriage, and may advance in the right direction with the minimum of effort" (Mason, Home Education, 119).

How I would love to have a household where the trains of all our lives can progress steadily along the track of good habits! I suspect that the problem is my inconsistency in demanding cleanup after every mess. Charlotte Mason explained how the failure to be perfectly consistent is the major pitfall mothers have in helping their children develop good habits. She wrote that sometimes a mother thinks a child should be rewarded after forming a habit, so she gives him "a little relaxation" without continuing to enforce it, "and then go on again. But it is not going on; it is beginning again, and beginning in the face of obstacles. The 'little relaxation' she allowed her child meant the forming of another contrary habit, which must be overcome before the child gets back to where he was before" (Mason 121).

My greatest failing may be that I not only grant my children a little relaxation, but myself as well. I need to set the example of cleanliness I want my children to follow, and it will only happen if I make a continual effort. Suzuki said, "You don't have to practice every day--only on the days you eat." Cleaning up needs to be practiced every day until it is as habitual as eating.

In the Suzuki Method, students develop a repertoire as they continue to review old pieces even as new ones are learned. Through repetition, learning continues. I think this relates to everything we learn, so this year, I hope to teach my family and myself at least one new habit each month, and then maintain it the next month as we begin a new one. Even though I'm not sure how far we can take this or how many habits we can develop and keep up, I'll continue trying.

It's embarassing to admit my faults. I almost feel like I should title this entry, "Confessions of a Messy Housewife" because I do struggle with such basic, mundane things. My habits for January have been to wash every dirty dish in the house before going to bed at night and to do all the laundry on Monday and Thursday. My children are learning, too, as Tommy did when he mopped up the chocolate under my supervision while the Mississippi Mud Pie baked in a new, one-piece pan. Now on day 24, I have plugged away at the dishes every night, even when I didn't want to, because of my conviction that even one lapse could make the track of habit I am laying get derailed. However, I will keep in mind if I do miss a day that repairs are always possible, that laying new track may be a step back, but it works.

The Apostrophe and Me

Yesterday morning my daughters Karina (14) and Katie (12) met me on my bed with a pile of grammar and vocabulary books to call my nieces in Texas for grammar class. We selected this "classroom" because the bedrooms are the only rooms in my house separate enough from family life to have the possibility of being temporarily quiet. My sons Tommy (10) and Jack (7) were supposed to be doing math, but I suspected they were actually researching the care and keeping of a pet scorpion, which had been Tommy's obsession ever since he woke up. As we worked our way through first our vocabulary book, 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary, and then our grammar books, Our Mother Tongue by Nancy Wilson and Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss, my fifteen-month-old daughter Helena sat on my lap, whining every few minutes for a chance to play with the phone, paper, a pen, a book, or anything else I happened to be using at the moment. Her three-year-old brother Luke kept entering the room to ask, "Can I play Lego Star Wars with Tommy?" After I had said no nearly a dozen times, he started talking about pets. It wasn't until class was over that I discovered I had given the impression that we were buying a "fish that swims in the water" at the pet store right now. I'm not sure how I managed to discuss new vocabulary words, compound sentences, and the multitasking functions of the apostrophe with so many interruptions.

According to Lynn Truss, the "tractable" apostrophe happily complies with the strange assortment of functions we have given her, continually overworked and misunderstood. Today I feel like an apostrophe, a little curlicue that floats above a word, simultaneously being Karina's and Katie's and Tommy's and Jack's and Luke's and Helena's mother. At times like these it seems like the solution is to find a safe, soundproof area where Luke and Helena can play by themselves, ideally with a free nanny, while the rest of us get some real work done.
But then I remember:

• Luke proudly writing letters on the white board on Tuesday at Katie's piano lesson, making me guess what each one was before shouting out "right" or "wrong."
• Helena swaying in an infant dance while Tommy played "The Happy Farmer" at his cello lesson, her eye's meeting mine with a half smile.
• Luke selecting a white goldfish with orange spots and holding it carefully in the car on the way home after I asked myself, "Why not get a fish?" I couldn't come up with any good reasons.
• Helena using the piano keyboard as a ladder that enabled her to grab a pencil and scribble all over the music books while I helped her older brother practice, laughing right into my face every time I pulled her down.

Since I don't have spaces in my life when I am not otherwise occupied, these circles of interaction always occur in the middle of something, bringing me a moment of joy and peace in the midst of the hurry. Several years ago I read a book called Building Healthy Minds by Stanley Greenspan about the development of the intellect in early childhood. I have never forgotten his term, "circles of interaction," for these moments between a caregiver and child when communication flows back and forth, with or without words. He wrote that these circles of interaction are important for brain development.

The Suzuki Method is based on the concept that we are educating our children from the cradle. Grammar, Geometry, History and music practice may feel more rigorous, but the youngest minds in my family are developing the fastest. I believe they may have the most to gain if Eric, Amy, Karina, Katie, Tommy, and Jack all find space in our lives for circles of interaction with them.

Is Sentence Diagramming Necessary?

My mom currently homeschools two of my nieces in Houston who are the same ages as my two oldest daughters. We hold "class" over the phone several times a week, with my mom teaching Spanish and History while I cover English. One day in the middle of diagramming sentences with noun clauses, my niece asked, "When will I ever have to know this in real life?"

Her question caught me off guard. I find grammar and the diagramming of sentences to be a fascinating puzzle, almost fun. A couple of months ago, to my family's annoyance, I spent hours discussing the function of a word in a sentence. Was it part of the verb phrase, a predicate nominative, or an adverb? After discussing all the possibilities and reasons for them with first my daughter Karina and then my husband Eric, they both eventually responded, "Who cares?"

Should I care about grammar? Does anyone really need to know how to diagram sentences? What is the purpose of education anyway and where is the place for complicated grammar?

The diagramming of sentences seems to be a dying art. Neither in my home schooled or my public schooled years as a child did I learn the skill. It was not until I took Grammar in college that I first experienced it. I chose English as a major because of my love for literature and a desire to improve my writing. It wasn't until I took courses in grammar and the history of the English language that I realized that my interest in linguistics possibly surpassed my zeal for literature.

I am well aware that everyone does not share my fascination. Some people find grammar irrelevant and studying it to be either extremely difficult or as dry as I find the history of weaponry. Knowing extensive grammar may actually hurt them if it kills any desire to learn. Sentence diagramming is not necessary.

I do not agree with E. D. Hirsch, who in Cultural Literacy argued that there are certain facts everyone needs to know to be well-educated. For me, education doesn't consist of a list of things students know or do not know, where education ends once the checklist is completed. Instead, it is about how what they are learning develops them as human beings. Shinichi Suzuki put it eloquently in Nurtured by Love when he wrote, "For the sake of our children, let us educate them from the cradle to have a noble mind, a high sense of values, and splendid ability." As I teach, I need to keep in mind this goal.

If, in teaching grammar to my daughters and nieces, I fail to make it relevant, if I fail to make my fascination with the beauty and complexity of our language contagious, if I fail to make the meaning of sentences clear by analyzing them, then there is no purpose in diagramming sentences. It is a worthless enterprise that won't develop good character but may lead to a lifelong grammar aversion.

On the other hand, words do have power and magic. The gospel of John begins with the announcement, "in the beginning was the Word." As I contemplate the purpose of grammar and how it can enrich my niece's life, if I can help her see the miracle in the miniscule building blocks of language, if diagramming helps her understand a sentence better, if she can feel wonder and gratitude that we have the written and spoken word, it will meet the true purpose of education. I will be preparing a noble soul to serve the world in word and then in deed.