Da Keiki Blog

I never thought I’d be home schooling Leilani, but after 7 weeks at Island School I felt I had no choice. Unlike the teacher she had the last 2 months of the previous year Mrs Cristy was an excellent teacher, fair and attentive and definitely took her job seriously but… I felt Leilani was missing out on her childhood. 7 hours in school a day, plus about an hour’s worth of homework, add to that the getting ready and driving to and from school, for someone who sleeps close to 12 hours that leaves less than 2 hours for playing, bathing, dinner and bedtime routine. Leilani liked a lot about school, but by Thursday or Friday she was exhausted enough that we let her stay home. If we didn’t she had the school office call us to pick her up as she lay there “sick”.

Leilani had started to complain her skirts were too long and rolled them up at the waist to make them as short as dress code allowed it. Justin Bieber was big. If she sang it was “Baby, Baby, Baby…” and “Dynamite” in very inappropriate imitations of her stars. She did not go as far as her classmates who tried to ban their moms from attending the field trip as the moms would be “embarrassing”… I know eventually she will turn into a teen, but 6 seems a bit early for that. Now after 6 weeks away from school she has forgotten most of that stuff, and happily listens to the Wiggles and Austrian kids music again.

Another really big thing for me, I was not allowed in the classroom, they told me they didn’t want volunteers, although other moms (the classroom mom and her assistant…) were obviously more welcome.

It was a bit scary to make the decision to take her out, but now we are really glad about it. We were thinking about a home school study group, but after paying Island school about $7000 tuition for these 7 weeks (read the fine print when you sign up for tuition insurance…) it’s either public, charter or home school. Leilani really likes the idea of home schooling.

It is sometimes a bit difficult. I’m not very good at schedules, and as a teacher I am supposed to be a lot stricter than as a mom, and I’m not too good at that either. But Leilani is a great student and most the time it’s good. Some days all she wants to do is read, but we had days when she did 15 or more math sheets. In the beginning I fretted about that but now I think it evens out, just like sometimes she eats a lot and sometimes she doesn’t… We try to have 4 schooldays a week, 3-4 hours learning plus PE, cooking and art. We’ll try to add music to that soon, and make the PE a bit more organized and fun. I wish I had space for a garden. That would be another project. Everything here is so shady, and most of what I planted is not doing so well… frustrating enough for me, not good for sharing.

Leilani has great interest in surprising subjects (combustion engine, evolution, weather…) and I think it’s a lot better than re-doing the life-cycle of the butterfly or frog for the 4th time. And since she already knows more dinosaur names than I do, I now torture her a bit by making her memorize the layers of the atmosphere and such (Troposphere, Stratosphere, Mesosphere, Thermosphere and Exosphere in case you did not know…). Best of all, she reads about half of her science and history material herself.

Socially we do a lot. One potluck a week, one Art afternoon at our house and shortly one afternoon at a home schooling friend’s house makes for 3 multi-kid play dates and learning fun.

After months of talking about, worrying about, and wishing for a wiggley tooth, then several months of forgetting about it, Leilani got her first wiggley tooth last Thursday.

I don’t know if it was the stories of the tooth fairy or just her older friends loosing teeth, but for the longest time, Leilani wanted to start losing her baby teeth. She would feel all her teeth and talk about the subject all the time. I was actually afraid she’d push hard enough on her teeth to make them loose too soon.

But out of the blue last week, she felt it while eating and jumped up from the table to dance around. Sure enough, once we looked at it, we saw the bigger tooth coming under the gums below. I have never seen her so genuinely excited so I had to take a picture of that big smile, one of the last still full of baby teeth.

Leilani spent the weekend showing the wiggley tooth to her friends, over and over. I’m sure you’ll hear more about this tooth (and I wonder what the tooth fairy will give her).

Alissia is back from Europe, it stopped raining on the North Shore for two days, and so Leilani could go riding again.

She’s been anxious to go, especially because she received an early birthday present from Grandma and Grandpa: new riding boots and a pink riding helmet. Somehow, she managed to find purple, lilac, and/or pink clothes to match. You can’t see it in the photos, but like her old boots, these flash and sparkle with little light inside. I wonder what the horses think of these colors.

For some reason (I, Andy, wasn’t there) she rode on Bill today:

Leilani learned a new trick (I think Bill knows it already):

Here’s how you do it: first you show the horse where to put his feet, then he steps up, then you pet him.

The rest of the lesson:

The 99% on Kaua’i held a couple of demonstrations today in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement that is spreading across the country.

We went to the one on Kuhio Hwy, in front of Safeway in Kapa’a (there was another one later in Puhi, by the community college). There were about 150 people spread along the sidewalk on both sides of the road to show our support for the causes and protesters in New York City.

We made signs, Leilani even came up with her own slogans. After Andy explained the Occupy Wall Street protest to her in kids’ terms, she came up with “NO More Tricks, Occupy Wall $t” and painted the sign herself (hence the pink and turquoise, with a heart over the i). The other side of her side said “No more stealing the money”

The back of Andy’s sign says “Make Wall $t Pay for Toxic Greed,” in reference to the toxic derivatives and mortgage-backed securities that Wall Street cooked up and burned the economy with. But in the end, I like the “Green Not Greed” message much better.

And mine just said “Make Corporations Responsible”

“Get Up, Stand Up” refers to both the Bob Marley song (next verse is “Stand up for your rights”), and stand-up paddleboarding which has taken over the surfing world, at least here in Hawai’i.


Andy reused his sign from the No-Ferry protest and just added another layer of cardboard:

The Sleeping Giant is both the mountain near Kapa’a and the 99% in America. Hopefully, the Occupy Wall Street movement will lead to some real changes on Wall Street, but together we can move mountains.