Avant Parenting Archives
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Avant! Welcome to my parenting blog archives
As you can see by the dates below, this blog is no longer being updated. However, there’s lots of good stuff here, much of it as true now as when it was written. Please feel free to browse, or follow these links: One last piece of parenting advice: Enjoy today even if it’s a rough…
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Make way for unbridled creativity!
It’s something like non-stop creativity at my house. My daughter has a spot in our breakfast room, on the floor, where she pulls out her wares: bits of cloth, paper of various colors and textures, glue, beads, string, egg cartons, boxes we threw in the recycling and hoped would stay there, needles and thread, a…
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Who are you calling a stay-at-home mom?
In the case of most homeschooling moms I know (no matter what religious bent), staying at home with the kids is as rigorous as getting a PhD, as demanding as running a corporation, as creatively fulfilling as being the artistic director of a small theater group. The big difference is that you get to decide…
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Trusting the Process… where failure is success
Homeschoolers like to comfort each other with the wisdom that kids do learn, no matter what we do. When a parent at a homeschool support group says that they’re concerned that they’re not doing a good enough job, more often than not at least one other parent in a group — probably all of the…
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Other people's children
I’ve been working on editing the video of my daughter’s school play. In editing the video, I have to go back and forth through small parts of it to find the places to cut, merge, add subtitles, etc. It’s painstaking work, and should be boring, but I find it enjoyable. It’s a sort of meditation.…
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My pretend life
Round about 2 p.m. this afternoon, I’m coming back to my real life. For the last two days, I’ve just been pretending. Last June, my choral group sang at the yearly fundraiser for New Music Works, the Avant Garden Party. The AGP started in the yard of my former wonderful neighbor Lou Harrison, a composer…