Mid year check in

Now that June is here, I thought I'd pop in here and let you know that the last post is still true and I'm still blogging at www.kaypelham.com . Please do come over and visit us there. Lots of pictures and thoughts in these 4 months of our life and learning journey. See James narrate. See James swim. See James explore nature. See James say very sweet things to his mom. Oh, and Jack too! Come see us and please leave comments. We love to make connections with our readers. There's always room for new friends.

I Moved

In case anyone wanders in here and wonders what became of me, I moved to a website that my husband made for me.  You can find me at www.kaypelham.com    So far I've been more active there than I was in the 4 years here.  I'll come back here to visit from time to time.  Might even steal some posts from here and copy them over there.

Meet me over there if you like.  Thanks.

Father and son

Yesterday's math lesson turned into an extended life talk with Dad.  Mom went to Dad to seek help on finding out why James didn't get as many addition facts solved as she thought he should and to see what Dad thought about how much was a reasonable amount and what we could do to help James.  After Dad went through a series of addition facts with James, he began to talk to him about discipline and the mind.  And they made lots of life applications to this basic necessary life skill.  James was so pumped the rest of the day.

I thought about what had happened and how blessed James was to have such a dad.  And I thought about how so many men and women are "messed up" simply because they don't have a parent who will spend time with them talking about things on a high level.  I'm not sure that James' pumpitude through the remainder of the day was really about the exact thing they had discussed, but more about the fact that his Dad valued him enough to spend this time with him and to talk to him on such a high level.

James was having trouble going to sleep last night.  He came into our room and expressed concern about who would take care of him if something bad happened to us.  He says from time to time that he is amazed that, of all the parents in the world he could have been born to, that we would be the ones.  He is very grateful.  And I'm extremely grateful for him.

I love my husband and son very much.  I love my husband for his clear-mindedness and doing the right thing because it is the right thing.  I love him for having vision for the future and seeing the good and bad consequences of our every day choices and interactions.  I love that he is influenced by a drive for what is true.  I love that my son has such great values and wisdom at such a young age.  He also wants truth. And he takes nothing for granted.  He is a very grateful boy. 


"Correct your son, and he will give you peace;
          yes, he will bring delight to your soul." ~Proverb 29:17

All kinds of people...

One of the things that I'm grateful for about my life is that I have lived in several diverse regions of this country.  At this point, I've pretty much got the four corners of the continental US states covered, although I haven't been right up to the very edge of them, and I've lived in the midwest and the midsouth.   I've lived and taught among the urbanized of NYC and I've lived and taught among the rural people of a small TN town. 

I was raised in a northern state by parents who were raised on farms in TN.  I sorta felt like a girl without a country most of my life.  My "yankee" classmates would make fun of the food my family ate and call me KayBelle and it seemed my southern cousins didn't know much what to do with their northern kin.  And then the same for the southerners I studied beside in my college years.  

But I really love them all.  I love the fast pace and sharp edges of some people from the north.  I love the slow pace and cornbread and beans of some southerners.  I cringe when either side mocks the other.  I hate when the media mocks the Palin family for their backwoods hunting ways.  First of all, leave the family alone.  And second, just deal with her politics, please!  But politics is not what I want to discuss here.  I just wish people would stop mocking others because their way of life is different.  No one is better than anyone else because they choose to get their exercise from chopping wood instead of jogging around the country in a fancy running suit.

I caught myself the other day passing judgment on a woman and man who walked into the restaurant and sat down at a table across the room from us.  They were rugged outdoors looking --- but not flashy LL Bean types.  She had on big ol' glasses and I'll just stop there.  I scolded myself and confessed my "sin" to my husband.  I wondered what the uptown folk of NYC (and all those who mock the Palins' rootin' tootin' shootin' culture) would say about this couple.  And what a shame that would be.  And what a shame that I thought what I did.  There's no reason that this man and woman couldn't be the sharpest tools in the shed, love each other and be enjoying the life that they live.  Shame on me!

This is a big ol' country and I'm happy to have been a part of a lot of it.  Why can't we all just get along? 

Sunrise Sunset

I have become obsessed lately with capturing "my" sunrises and sunsets with my camera. (I was going to say "on film" and I'm not sure what expression we should use for digital.) I've always found delight in the rising and setting of the sun, but now I want to know more about it. I want to know why is the light pink some times and then an intense orange at other times and then sometimes it's just plain white light. I love the effects in the sky 90 degrees from where the sun is actually "setting." I love the shadows that it casts on the yards and houses on my street as it's "rising." It's frustrating that the camera can't capture perfectly what my eye is seeing. I would like to learn to paint these colors. I wonder if God on purpose made it that these colors would appear from time to time as my bit of the planet is turning toward and then away from the sun. Did he know that I would take such delight in it? It's a nice thought to think that this isn't just a natural outcome of the sun and atmosphere, but that the Creator knew it would be beautiful to my eye. Either which way, I thank you, Yahveh.

Excerpt from "Endangered Minds"

This is a very, very good book. If I recorded all the excerpts that I found interesting and helpful, I'd be copying practically the whole book (and probably get in some copyright trouble). Here's a sample from my reading this morning in which the author, Jane Healy, talks about how children learn problem-solving skills from the adults (hopefully, parents) in their life. Sadly, these adult-child activities, such as mealtime conversations, cooking together, relaxing, playing games, doing errands, working with tools, cleaning the house, are joining "the dinosaur category", as Dr. Healy puts it.
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Disadvantages in models of thinking are obviously not restricted to the children of the poor...I would like to stretch this point with one personal experience.

This year I spent a lovely fall afternoon with some friends who live in a modest house in a rural area that has recently become the setting for a number of large, expensive new homes. The husband, a math teacher, had confided to me that he was beginning to feel self-conscious because he suddenly realized, observing his new neighbors, that he couldn't afford to give his son many of the advantages of their children. He admitted to particularly uneasy feelings when he watched his son's new friends being trundled off to the expensive schools, camps, computer and music lessons, etc.

On the day I visited, this dad and his son were heavily engaged in a tactical war with the family dog, an accomplished escape artist who had systematically broken out of every pen every constructed for her. Armed with tool kit, boards, and wire mesh, they spent the entire afternoon contriving an escape-proof enclosure. As his wife and I sat in the yard, enjoying the autumn sun, I observed them reasoning together. "But Dad, if we...she might..." "What do you think will happen if...?" "Why don't we try... because..."

As an unregenerate speculator about growing brains, I found myself having visions of pathways being forged between the hemispheres as parent and child talked about and physically manipulated the three-dimensional problem at hand. Their efforts inevitably linked verbal and visual-spatial systems in the way the brain learns best - with a firsthand problem. When one solution didn't work, the son got frustrated and wanted to give up, but his father patiently suggested they try yet another approach, while I fancied prefrontal neurons joyously reaching out to each other to strengthen systems for planning, attention, and problem-solving.

Meanwhile, on the large grounds next door, another youngster of about the same age amused himself for the entire afternoon zooming at top speed - and top volume - around house, stable, and swimming pool on a four-wheeled motorized vehicle that he propelled by pushing a pedal.

"Yeah," said my friend's son with just a trace of envy in his voice. "He rides it all year-round. His mom's usually at a meeting or something, but sometimes his dad takes him out to play golf with him on the weekends. Their maid doesn't speak much English, so she never even makes him do his homework."

"It's really a shame," my friend remarked. "His parents are so worried about that child. He's quite intelligent but they found out he has a learning disability. They have to send him to a special school because he got such poor grades and couldn't concentrate long enough to do his assignments."

"Learning disadvantaged" children are found everywhere.

from "Endangered Minds: Why our children don't think", Jane M. Healy, PhD, p. 252, 253

Starting again --- maybe

I guess these blogs remain on here regardless of the inactivity.

I have found myself recently becoming a fairly active Facebooker and find myself using it sometimes as a blog of thoughts and things that concern me and things that make me laugh.

So I thought I'd turn again to this blog.

Today in History: April 5, 1950 --- my parents were married in Tompkinsville, KY. Fifty-nine years later they're still going at it. Dad is 91 and Mom is 76.

Well, that's it for now. Just thought I'd check in to see if this thing was still here.

Later....