I just got paid $42 for walking on the beach and playing Eagle Eye for a couple hours! And I’m going to continue getting paid for that for pretty much as long as I want, up to 8 years. I landed a job as a tutor/mentor/nanny to a family with three kids. The two boys are 10 and 13 years old, the daughter is developmentally disabled and 20 years old. I was a little nervous about the disability part, but I was honest about that with the parents and they seem cool with me learning as I go. Today was a “getting-to-know-you” sort of a day. I just spent a couple hours with the kids while Jan (the mom) went for a long walk. They live in a nice house and their backyard is, quite literally, the Nisqually Delta. We spent some time down there on the beach, and then played Eagle Eye (a hide-n-seek type game) in their yard. I’m pretty stoked about it. I’ll start doing it consistently when summer camps are over, in about three weeks.

Click on the final image for a larger view.

This morning, Preston and I got up early and went surfing. It was a flat and somewhat disappointing day for him, but a good time for me. Except for that bit where I got caught between the rip and the longshore current, heading for the jetty; that part was a bit stressful, but I learned my lesson. We got back early enough for me to spend a couple hours in the yard, working on the next project. There’s a bed along the back edge of the house that looks like it was intended to be a shade garden at some point, but it was badly overgrown and the previous occupant had stacked some old stumps all over the top of it. I spent most of the day tearing out cleavers, cat’s ears, nipplewort, dandelions, and dead ferns. And I learned where all the slugs have been hanging out during the day. Here’s a before and after pic:

It’s more dramatic in person I think, but you get the idea. I’m not sure what I’m going to plant back here. The ferns will stay, and there are some itty-bitty vinca vines near the front that I’ll let go. In the next few days I’ll be getting another load of dirt, which I’ll use to fill up this bed, and then think about what to put here. I know we need to paint the house soon, so I’m thinking of putting pavers along the back edge of the bed so there’s a way to paint without smashing plants. Preston and Magoo both helped to supervise the whole process.

And here are some updates on the garden beds:

This is arugula, radishes gone to seed, lots of lettuce, little bits of spinach, and salad burnet. You can click on the picture for a bigger view. The arugula is mostly gone to seed now. I need to cut it down so that the next planting can get the full sun. The radishes never really bulbed up, they just made these beautiful lush tops, but no roots really. Not sure if I didn’t thin them well, or if I planted at the wrong phase of the moon, or what. But it’s okay because I remembered that Preston and I don’t really like radishes anyway. The lettuce is lasting way longer than I expected. I made a second planting a couple weeks ago, thinking that this stuff would start bolting soon, but it hasn’t. We’ve been eating our salads “on the graze” just picking them and eating them right out of the ground. Yum! The spinach was planted too late and hasn’t like the heat so far this summer. But it seems to be holding out for cooler temps so I’m hoping it will take off and give us a fall crop. The salad burnet was something I had never heard of
but planted because I had free seeds. It’s a nice additions to salad, kind of a nutty celery flavor but without all those annoying celery strings. There’s also some rad cabbage in behind the radishes, but the slugs seem to like them a lot, and between that and the hot weather, there’s not much happening with them. Also tucked in between the radishes and the arugula is a row of carrots, which the slugs seem to like very much. Maybe when i chop down the arugula and radishes, the carrots will have a better chance.

Click on the image for a larger one. That’s sweet corn, bush beans, cucumber, cantaloupe, broom corn, with chives and fennel along the back and marigolds along the front. The corn seems to be loving the heat.

The tomatoes are going to town! There’s also cilantro in there, as well as some cinnamon and lemon basil. The cilantro didn’t seem to like all the heat and went almost directly to seed. There’s also some kohlrabi survivors over there on the left, which I am watching curiously. And you can’t really see it in with the big tomatoes, but there’s a volunteer lamb’s quarters in there, which is considered a weed but is actually quite tasty.

Setting the Scene:

I have ten kids this week, ranging from 9 years to 12 years old. I don’t have an assistant, so I’m on my own. This makes it somewhat complicated to get bathroom breaks, but so far is working out just fine. Two of the kids are siblings, and another one is on adderal (used to treat ADD, ADHD, and depression, but I don’t know specifically what it’s for with this kid). They’re all good kids.

Onions:

The kids were all great. My only frustration was with the other instructors and assistants for the week. All of them are men except for one assistant and the director, and none of them seemed to understand why it was a problem that all of our stories for the week feature strong male protagonists and only men had told stories for the week. Even after we had an explicit conversation about this on Wednesday, Thursday morning came around and the men were all voting for a male instructor to tell the story of the Peacemaker, which is a great story, but includes only men with the exception of one woman who is an innkeeper and doesn’t do anything spectacular. I had to get kind of pushy in order to insist that we at least needed a woman to tell a story. We finally came around to both the female assistant and the director telling a personal story rather than one of our mythological ones. But still all the men seemed non-plussed about why I was getting so uppity about it. It’s definitley not universal, but I think the field of wilderness education tends to be a little behind the times in terms of female equality and awareness of male privilege.

Apples:

Definitely today was the biggest apple, though it started out looking like quite an onion. After our large group of 45 kids or so broke up into smaller clans to head out into the woods for the day, one of my kids stayed behind sitting in the big meadow while the rest of us headed out to get our water bottles refilled and collect our backpacks. This week’s camp director, Amara, stayed behind to find out what was up with him. He told her that he didn’t have any friends here and he was really sad because people weren’t being nice to him. She passed that on to me and suggested that she would simply move him to another group. He’s one of the younger ones in my group, so would possibly fit in better with the next younger clan. After spending three days with this group, I had seen that they were actually extraordinarily good at being supportive. While it does often happen that one kid gets ostracized from the group because the others decide they just don’t like him, I didn’t think that had happened in this case. The kid in question is a really quiet kid, tends to get lost in the excitement, and I was pretty sure that they had no idea he felt left out. I told Amara that I’d rather risk having a talk about it within my group. It’s a risk, there always being the possibility that the left out person feels even more left out after the conversation. I told Amara that I would ask the kid (I’ll call him J) if he felt up for having that conversation. He said he was, and I told him that was very brave. He asked for some tissue and a couple minutes to get himself together and then the rest of the group would come over and we would talk.

I spent a few minutes with the rest of the group. I didn’t tell them what the problem was, since I wanted J to have a chance to speak for himself. I just told them that one of our clan members wasn’t feeling very supported and he was taking a few minutes to decide what he wanted to say and then we were going to have a talk about it. When J was ready, we circled up and I asked J if he would say to the group what he had said to me. He said, “I don’t like the way you all treat me, and I think you should treat me better.” I asked him if he could give any specific examples and he said he couldn’t. I was worried that we might not be able to get anywhere with that, but one of the students starting asking really good questions. “Do you feel left out?” she asked, “Or do you feel like we are being mean to you?” She asked it completely matter-of-fact, not defensive at all. He explained that he just felt left out. And what followed just made my heart melt. First, I asked the whole group to just quickly do a show of hands if they had ever felt this way themselves. All of them raised their hands, and totally empathized right from the start. All the kids in the group were so amazingly good about verbalizing their thoughts about how J is totally part of the group (one girl said, “J you’re a really cool kid, you can participate in whatever we’re doing whenever you want.” and another said, “Of course you can do whatever we’re doing. We’re all on the same team.”) I pointed out to them that some people really need to be specifically invited in order to feel comfortable; I even explained that I’m one of those people. After a few minutes conversation, we all came to an agreement that the whole group would make it a point to invite J more often to participate in whatever they were doing, and J would try his best to let people know if he wanted to participate but wasn’t sure if he was invited. And then, even more amazing than the fact that this group of kids was able to have the conversation, they actually did it! Even the kid who is most focussed on his own agenda and talking over everyone else all the time made it a point to holler, “Come on J!” every time he went running off down the trail. All the kids made it a point to sit next to him at lunch, or to walk next to him across the field and ask about where he was going fishing after camp (which he was really excited about), and even created a special job for him when we were building a shelter and he hurt his knee and couldn’t run around to collect materials. It was awesome.

And there were so many times the rest of the day that I had to  hide my chuckles. J is obviously a kid who doesn’t get invited to play very much. He’s not particularly coordinated, doesn’t really get rough-housing, and doesn’t pick up on a lot of social protocol. So at some point, there were a group of kids and one of them had a ball, like a tennis ball or something. Somehow, they created some sort of keep-away game with the ball (I love how kids are always creating spontaneous games), so one kid had the ball and all the
others were chasing him and tackling him to try to get the ball. A kid standing next to J saw what was going on and took off across the field to joint the pursuit. “Come on J!” he hollered as he ran.  J took off running all knock-kneed and joyful across the field. When he caught up to the kid with the ball, already weighted down with three or four people trying to pry the ball away from him, J stops abruptly not quite knowing what to do. He understands the overall point of the game, which is just to tackle people and rough-house around. But he doesn’t quite get the pretend-point of the game, which is to get the ball. So he pauses for a second, and then just throws his arms around the person nearest him and starts wrestling them to the ground. Fortunately, in the melee, this didn’t really stand out to anyone involved as the whole tangled knot of 6 or 7 kids went down in a pile of flailing legs and laughter.

I’m reviving the “apples and onions” posts that I used to do for my Youth School internship because I can’t possibly keep up with posting about all the really cool (and occasional pretty devastating) things that happen in the course of a week of summer camp. Apples are a symbol of those moments that are just super sweet. Onions are things that have lots of layers and sometimes make you cry and maybe need a little processing before they’re really edible. I will probably post these “apples and onions” posts on Thursdays because I’ll drive home after work on Fridays and not feel like posting over the weekend.

So, for week one, it’s been a really amazing week. It feels really good for this to be my second year. I’m so much more laid-back about things. I know I’m good at this, so I don’t feel anxious all the time that I’m forgetting something important. Only about half the time. There have been at least eleventy-two really sweet moments this week. But the big picture one is that I have a kid in my group who I also had last year. (A little context: I have a group of 11 kids, ranging from 9 to 12 years old. 3 of them are girls, and all the oldest ones are boys. One of the boys has Asperger’s Syndrome. One is on medication for anxiety (and I would be anxious too, if I had his mother). They’re all good kids.) The kid that I know from last year has turned into a so much more pleasant human being. Last year, he was so annoying that we ended up having a group meeting (between the students) to talk about it. Things had deteriorated to the point of him being annoying, and all the other kids yelling at him to shut up. So we had a council about it and had to talk specifically about whether or not he wanted to change that behavior and whether or not the other students would be willing to help him with that change. It was pretty rough. This year, he totally rocks. His desire to be the center of attention has mellowed from the acting out of last year to a real talent for leadership. He has a way of being so engaged and excited about whatever he’s doing that the other kids just naturally want to do it too. It’s really cool to be able to see that progress. Usually, I just get to see them for one intense week and then I never know any more about them.

And a bonus apple moment: This was just one of those little moments. We were off trail, climbing on a fallen log. We were definitely pushing some boundaries for some of the kids, since they were pretty uncomfortable getting scratches on their legs and stuff. There was a certain amount of whining going on, which I was pretending not to hear. To get off the log, each kid had to jump-step down into a bit of a brush pile. 2 or 3 kids in front of me, I saw one of the girls jump down and lose her balance. She grabbed a nearby branch to try to balance herself, but that branch wasn’t really attached to anything. In slow motion, I watch her teeter backwards past the balance point and fall on her back in the brush pile, pulling the large branch over on top of herself. I hear her take a deep breath, and I brace myself for bad things to happen. “Oh my god!” she says. “This is SO COMFORTABLE!” And I just couldn’t help but laugh at her laying there on her backpack like a stuck turtle in this brushpile.

Onions: Well, it says a lot that I can’t really think of any off the top of my head. The Asperger’s kid is, predictably, somewhat hard to deal with. He likes to pretend that he doesn’t hear me, but is actually too smart for his own good. Fortunately, his mom is cool and we’ve come up with a system where I get to have some control over the number of minutes he is allowed to use his Gameboy after he gets home. As my mom says, it’s all about the leverage. So really, I can’t get that to count as an onion either. Hmm, I guess I don’t really have any onions this week. Like I said, it’s been a great week.

Now I just have to remember exactly how I made this one so that I can create a matching one. Which is a little too bad, because the foot part is a little too big for me, while the ankle part is quite a bit too big for Preston. I made it using a very cool pattern working from the toe-up, so that you can decide for yourself how many stitches and how many rows you want (instead of following a strict pattern). However, I didn’t really know how to fit it right so I made it a bit too big all over. And of course, I didn’t make a note of how many rows and stitches I used so I have no idea how to repeat the process. Silly me!

I’ve figured out the bus route to the park where I’m working for the summer, so that means about an hour of knitting time every work day, instead of 90 minutes of driving time. Hurray!