Sandra Tayler

Patch’s High Intensity Schooling

By / October 22, 2013 / 7 Comments

I chose the school program that Patch is in with my eyes open. It is a gifted program, academically accelerated. Since it is an opt-in program the teachers ask a lot of parents in the way of support. In making the choice to put Patch and Gleek into the program two years ago, we weighed a lot of factors and ultimately decided that this was the best possible one. Even though it would sometimes be hard and other times it would be harder. So I choose this. I’m not sorry I did it. I know that it is still the right choice for our family. But I’m still going to complain a little.

Monday an explorer story was due. In order to write this story, Patch had to read a biography about the assigned person, include three try-fail cycles, have at least two characters, one character required to be native, and feature the major geographical landform for which the explorer was famous. Pretty exacting, but doable. Particularly since we’ve known about it all month. Patch was assigned Louis Hennepin, about whom no one has ever written a biography. Hennepin is usually a footnote or paragraph in books about La Salle. So we checked out an encyclopedia of explorers where Hennepin was mentioned more than once. Patch wrote a two page story.

Tomorrow the explorer game is due. This is a board game based on the story. It must have a map, the major landform, give information about the landform, and information about the explorer. Playable by 2-4 kids. Patch likes this sort of assignment, which means I did not have to do nearly as much work as I expected. Mostly I helped make sure all the information things went into the game.

Two projects in a month is fairly standard for this class. Usually there is a lighter one in the first half an a bigger one for the second.

Next week Booko is due. This is bingo filled out with books that Patch has read. Since he enjoys reading, all we have to do is make sure he can get five in a row. This month was Mystery, poetry, 900s book, Beehive award book, and Story collection. Then there is a book report on the genre of the month. These book reports can be anything from shooting a video commercial to bringing in treats based on the book. It isn’t hard, it is just a project we need to remember to get done.

Next week is also Halloween. The kids are requested to wear costumes based on characters from books. This is one way for the teacher to acknowledge that Halloween has become tricky ground for 5th graders and to give them all a socially acceptable excuse to still dress up. But, putting together a costume is an additional project.

Then there are the regular rounds of spelling, math, writing etc. Most of which Patch can accomplish in 20 minutes or less on a daily basis. If Patch pays attention to homework and projects for an hour per day, he can definitely keep up. No problem. In fact he has enough hours to spare that I sometimes feel guilty over the quantity of time he plays video games.

Guess who has to make sure that hour per day happens every single day? Most days I’m fine with that. All I have to do is nudge and Patch goes and gets his work done. The projects require more focused attention. Which is hard to come by on a day like today when I’ve spent all of my energy making sure all of my own projects are being moved forward. Add to that the impending end of term on Friday, which means making sure that Link and Gleek are on track. Which they are, but Link also has about an hour of homework each day and half the time he needs me to participate in some way. I suspect that I’ll be able to back off as the year progresses, but for now, this is how it is.

It is a lot, all of this school support. Yet when I think about what my kids get to do, I know I’ve chosen right. Patch got to make a game. He got to write a story. Later in the year he’ll participate in writing a declaration of independence, write and perform an opera, and a hundred other amazing things. Those things would not happen for him without this high intensity program. The idea of doing such things on our own is attractive, no grades, no pressure, but the truth is I would never get them done. I am far too pressed by projects to voluntarily pick up more. I have as evidence the past few summers when my children did almost nothing academic because I was too busy with business things and with being so very glad to rest a little bit.

So, the abundance of projects is driving me a little crazy this week. Next week will be better. By the week after that, many of the projects will have begun to clear. Just because something is hard, doesn’t mean it is the wrong choice.

Picking up the Pace on all the Projects

By / October 21, 2013

A few weeks ago I posted the first sketches from Strength of Wild Horses. Today I got to peek at the first finished pieces.

Isn’t it beautiful? Look at all the colors. Angela’s use of color astounds me every time. I’ve seen scans for about a third of the images. I am so happy to see each of these pictures and really excited to see the rest. The rest are coming soon. This means that tomorrow I have images to start putting on the Kickstarter page. Of course tomorrow I’m also making sure Kiki gets back on the bus to college, talking to insurance agents on the phone, working on LOTA, going my visiting teaching, helping kids with homework, and attending pack meeting. In fact all my days for the next few weeks are like a spinning plate act while I try to keep all of the projects on track so that they can hit their deadlines.

I don’t mind. All of the projects are happy ones, and Strength of Wild Horses is probably the happiest of all, because it is mine and Angela’s. Just look at the beautiful picture that Angela made. There are going to be thirty more like it. I am so excited to be putting this book out where other people can love it too.

Spending Saturday

By / October 19, 2013

Saturday evening with my four kids downstairs shouting and laughing over Super Smash Bros Brawl. Mid battle my two daughters start singing a song together, one with a familiar tune, but non-standard lyrics. It is a pretty good conclusion for a day which began with me getting up before dawn to find the Greyhound stop where Kiki would get off the bus. Our day has also included some design work for me, Art work for Kiki, homework for Link. We took a break to watch giant robots punching giant monsters and to marvel at the tactical idiocy which did not have humanity setting up a patrol to guard the sole entrance from the monster realm. I mean, why let the monsters get a mile from land before trying to destroy them? Granted, they would still have had problems, but lots less property damage and many lives saved. It is a good thing that the monsters and robots are so fun to watch. Anyway. We probably could have spent more time outside in the beautiful weather. So many of my neighbors spent the day clearing their yards an preparing for winter. That would have been a good use of time. Yet it has been a good day.

Thoughts on Self Promotion

By / October 18, 2013

As I’m contemplating making a promotional push for the upcoming Strength of Wild Horses Kickstarter, I’m also doing much thinking about self-promotion in general. Most people I know are not comfortable saying “Look at me! Buy my stuff!” I’m no exception to that rule. In order to get this project funded I’m going to have to do a lot of promotional activities on the internet, but I made a realization which makes all of that easier. I’m not promoting me. This isn’t about me, or my career, or making money. What I am promoting is Amy and her story in Strength of Wild Horses. Unless I promote it, that story will not have the chance to be released to the public. So in the next month or so I’m going to be reaching out to people and saying “Look at this project I love. I think it is amazing. If you think so too, please pass the word along so people can know about it.” I can do that, because I love Amy and her story. I love the pictures that Angela is creating to tell Amy’s story. I love when I hear from people who have the first book and they tell me that Amy’s story is loved by their kids. I won’t be doing self-promotion, I’ll be doing Amy-promotion.

Thoughts in My Brain During the Writer Hangout

By / October 17, 2013 / 5 Comments

I am sitting in a room with four other writers. We’re all typing away at our computers or sometimes just staring at them. Four people being together so we can ignore each other and vanish into the worlds inside our heads. Writers are strange people. This writer’s hang out is an experiment and part of my brain is distracted by evaluating it. Is it working? Do I like this room? What if three more people show up? We’ve only got two more chairs. These chairs aren’t very comfortable. I wonder if the Book Group room at Orem Library would be better. It has cushy chairs. I’m supposed to be relaxing and creating fiction, quieting my brain. Instead there is all this noise. Distractions. The others are all typing. I wonder if I’m the only one for whom the presence of other people tugs at my attention. Or perhaps I just need to adapt, try this again until it feels normal. One thing is certain, if I had not scheduled this Writer Hangout I would not write anything today. The press of other commitments would have taken all of the time.

…

And then I open my story, the one I haven’t looked at in months. I begin typing and my awareness of the others in the room fades. I write. For six hundred words I only hear my characters. Then the room comes back. These chairs really are not comfortable. The other thoughts return, but they are no longer hectic and tense, they flow. I am calmer for having been a writer for awhile. Yet time has come to go back to the other things.

News and Updates

By / October 16, 2013

Tomorrow (Thurs Oct 17) I’ll be hosting a Writer Hangout at the Provo Library from 11am – 1pm in study room #155. You’re welcome to join us. We’ll mostly be writing, but there will also be some visiting. Over the next weeks I plan to hold more of these in various locations until I find one that fits. If no one else shows, I’ll still be there, writing.

This morning we signed a lease on an office/warehouse space. It is a small space for a warehouse, but still bigger than what we’ve had before. I’m surprised how quickly and smoothly picking the right space went for us. I really expected to spend much longer looking around and feeling ambivalent. Instead I’ve got keys in my pocket and a whole new list of things to do. The landlord needs to do some cleaning and fixing, the biggest of which is to the heating system. Somehow our unit is connected to the furnace from the next unit over, which is not ideal. I have to acquire insurance for the location which covers liabilities and possible damages to inventories in case of unfortunate events. I’m also accumulating a list of things to acquire, like garbage cans. Then there will be all the moving in. It is interesting that I’m not feeling stressed by this list. Instead I feel happy, because I’m gaining more space for business and more space for family.

We’ll almost certainly be having some sort of a “help us move” event with food and merch for minion volunteers. If you’re a person with a strong back and think the idea of helping haul tons of books from a storage unit to a warehouse sounds like great fun, please email schlockmercenary@gmail.com to get onto the volunteer list. That way I can contact you when I know more details.

I’ve received word that the Tub of Happiness reprint has arrived in LA. Soon it will be on a truck bound for Utah. It will be the first thing delivered to our new location. So I’ll get to see how this works.

Angela is spending this week putting together the final art for Strength of Wild Horses. I expect to spend the lion’s share of next week putting together the Kickstarter page and generally preparing that project to launch. Once it launches I’ll need to do layout for the book and there will be lots of work to do to maintain and push the Kickstarter.

The Jay Wake Book has been sent off for what I believe will be the final test print. If this one looks good when it arrives, I’ll be making it available to the public.

I’m in the middle of layout for Longshoreman of the Apocalypse. I have the recolored strips from Travis and am in the process of cropping them and checking for errors. So fare I’ve gone through about a quarter of them and identified two fixes. Then I’ve got to put them all into place in the book. The bonus story is completely scripted and drawn. I believe it is in Travis’ hands being colored. Hopefully we’ll have the whole thing bundled up and sent off for print soon.

Howard is working on the 2014 Schlock calendar. It is about a quarter complete. I’ll have to take a pause from prepping LOTA and Kickstarter to make sure I’ve got all the calendar layout in good shape. I have to update the handy holiday list and the pages themselves. This one needs to get off to print soon so that people can have their calendars before Christmas.

We also have promised to put together the Unofficial Anecdotal History of Challenge Coins. Editorial work on that project has not begun, but needs to.

On the home front, Link and Patch are needing regular homework support. Fortunately they’re both good workers and we’ve found a rhythm that works. Gleek is enjoying her year of almost complete freedom from homework. Kiki will be coming home to visit this weekend once we figure out if she can catch a ride with friends or if she needs to ride the bus.

Wow. Lots to do. I’d better get back to it.

Getting a Warehouse for Schlock

By / October 14, 2013 / 2 Comments

At some point in the last month it became obvious to me that our business needs a home of its own. We’ve been making things work, reconfiguring rooms as necessary so that our family room is sometimes for play and other times a business space. I like the idea of multi-use spaces and we’ve been doing things this way for a long time because we had to. The trouble is that the highest stress work times are exactly when I would most benefit from having an organized home. Yet those same high stress work times invariably turn my home chaotic because we have boxes of inventory and shipping supplies stacked into most of the corners. My neighbors have almost never seen my front room without stacks of boxes in it. I try to comfort myself that they’re always different boxes. It is not that we’re sloppy, but the boxes are always there.

Not only are there boxes everywhere, but my shipping room is in the basement and our storage units are two miles away. This means I have to haul boxes of books from our storage unit downstairs where I rearrange books into customer packages and carry everything back up the stairs again. As systems go, it is far from efficient. We never have the space to set up a test booth so we can plan ahead. Add to all of this the fact that when Kiki comes home from college to live with us for a month in December and for the summer next year, she will be coming as an adult with an art business of her own. She simply doesn’t fit into the shared bedroom space that used to be hers. Not anymore. Which made me realize that maybe it is time for the business to grow up and move out of the house.

I began looking at office/warehouse spaces today. I expected to spend several weeks looking and thinking before finding one that would work. Instead I made an appointment with one guy who owned three units near each other. I walked into the second unit and realized that it is pretty much perfect for everything that we need, even in the right price range. Not only that but some of the left over furnishings from the prior tenant would come with it and be very useful. I looked around and knew that it would end up being the warehouse that all the other ones I looked at were compared to. I asked a lot of questions, didn’t sign anything, and came home to look at my accounts. There are so many reasons that getting a warehouse makes sense. Yet it is a scary step because it ties us to additional monthly bills and there have been times when money was very tight. We’ve put it off in order to maintain as much financial flexibility as possible.

For the last month, every time I’ve contemplated renting a warehouse I felt calm. All my contemplations on the subject both at church or at home have made me feel like this is the right choice for our family and our business at this time. I came home feeling like I ought to be scared of the financial commitment, but not actually feeling it. Howard and I talked about the space and about taking this step for the business. He felt good about it too. To be absolutely sure, I went and prayed. The answer I got was You know it’s fine. It’s what I’ve been telling you to do for weeks. So after letting all the thoughts simmer for a few more hours, I called the owner of the warehouse and left a message saying we want it. He’ll probably call me back in the morning. I’m still not scared. Well, maybe a little bit. I’ll probably have some scared when I actually sign paperwork because that is a normal pattern for me.

Once everything is squared away with the lease and the facility, we’ll have quite a bit of work to do getting tons of merchandise shifted from their current homes and into the new space. It’ll be a new phase of our business. The next adventure.

Vacation Planning

By / October 13, 2013 / 5 Comments

Staying in a condo feels like playing house. We still have to do things like cook and do dishes, but they’re different dishes and there aren’t that many of them. As with playing house, there are some inconveniences. We don’t have the cooking tools we’re accustomed to and there is always some item which we’ve forgotten at home or lost somewhere in transit. Yet somehow staying in a condo feels vacationy while doing the same things at home does not.

I’m pleased that we’ve arrived at a stage where vacation trips can actually be relaxing instead of differently stressful. Babies and toddlers are very expressive when their routines are disrupted and that usually manifests as meltdowns any time of day or as wakefulness when everyone else wants to be sleeping. Being away from home means that parents have left behind some of their usual coping strategies for managing their kids. I suppose that some young kids are easy travelers. Mine loved taking trips and going new places, but when we did I had to increase my level of parental oversight. New places meant new ideas in young heads and not all of those new ideas were safe. Heads full of new ideas did not go to sleep easily. New surroundings also meant that sibling frictions busted out in aggravating ways and required mediation. During most of my years of parenting “vacation” meant being short on sleep and exhausted from extra supervision. It also meant visiting with loved ones, interesting new experiences, and growing knowledge for my kids. (As an example: Why I Love Jellyfish.) The trips we took were worth it, but they were in no way relaxing.

Things are different now. Some of this is the result of my kids getting older, but much of it is us finally learning how to structure our vacations in ways that work for our family. Then we repeated that structure often enough that we all know what to expect. Instead of vacation being a disruption to all of our patterns, we just fall into our vacation patterns instead of our at home patterns. I suspect the same could be accomplished for younger children, but there is the added difficulty that babies and toddlers hit developmental milestones so very quickly. Trips taken six months apart will be different experiences because the child has changed so much.

We take our family trips to places we can reach by driving in five hours or less. At some point we may venture into family travel by air, but it is cost prohibitive for six people. Also, airports are inherently stressful. For us traveling to go stay with other people at their house is stressful, even when we love the people. Staying in a hotel room is similarly stressful because we’re all on top of each other constantly. Renting a condo or staying at a cabin has made it possible for vacation to be relaxing. So we pick a condo where we can go do interesting things for half or all of the days and where we can come back and relax in the evenings. I’ve learned that bringing along some of our usual things like mobile devices means that we are able to play familiar games along with new ones.

Someday we’ll be more adventuresome. We’ll pick a vacation trip that is less focused on optimizing relaxation and more focused on going new places and stretching ourselves. But right now what we need from our vacations is being together outside our regular round of things. Playing house in a condo accomplishes that nicely.

Fall Vacation

By / October 11, 2013

One of the advantages of being a younger sibling is that you get sneak previews into what is coming in future life stages. My younger three are getting a peek into college life this weekend. They’ve heard about dorms and colleges for most of their lives, but now they’ve walked around a campus, eaten in the student cafeteria, seen their older sister’s room, and heard stories about roommates. I keep hearing them say things that start “when I go to college…” Link in particular is looking around the school in picturing himself attending there. Which would be fine with me. I like this school, but we’ll make sure that when the time comes for him to pick a college that he doesn’t default to this one because it is the only campus that is familiar.

We rented a condo for this trip. I’ve discovered that a condo which sleeps six is more expensive than a hotel room, but less expensive than two hotel rooms. With the condo comes a sitting room, two bathrooms, and a full kitchen. Being able to cook our own food brings the cost of eating down. So far we’ve rented condos in both Moab and Cedar City. Both experiences have been good. We all love the Moab condo so much that we’ve gone back to the same one three years in a row. Having the condo space means that after we’ve been out together all day, we can spread out and have space from each other in the afternoon. Then we can gather and watch a movie together in the evening. It works out far better for us than trying to share a single hotel room.

I’ve had to learn not to attempt to script every single moment of a vacation. Sometimes vacation means going out and doing things. Other times it means hanging around the condo while the kids play on mobile devices and I sneak in an hour of working. Tomorrow is our last day here. Then we’ll bid Kiki farewell and drive home. That will be nice too.

School Culture Matters

By / October 11, 2013

“I really thought I would be bullied more.” Patch told me as we were curled up for his bedtime snuggle one night. “Being in the A.L.L. program for smart kids, I thought I would get bullied, but I haven’t. I wonder why that is.” Patch’s voice was mildly puzzled as he mused on this topic. I curled my arm around him a little tighter and thought how grateful I am that this has been his experience. I could have said that, and it would probably have been the end of the conversation, but I’ve been trying to do a better job of helping Patch pull his thoughts and emotions out where we can both see them, so instead I asked.
“What do you think it could be?”
“Well, It could be that my school is a good school and doesn’t have bullies. Or it could be that all the bullies have other people they pick on that are not me. Or maybe I just don’t act like a smart kid.” Patch paused a moment for thinking. “I think my school is a good one.”
I nodded my head in the dark. “I agree. What do you think makes your school be a good one?”
“I don’t know.” Patch answered.
It was important for Patch to see the whys of how his school has few troubles with bullying. It all has to do with the culture that has been consciously created at his school.

The importance of school culture became apparent to me when Patch and Gleek attended a previous school. It was a good school, close to home, and full of caring and attentive staff. Then the long-time principal left and took half a dozen of the best teachers with him. The new principal meant well, I could tell that he did, but over time it became apparent that he did not understand behavior modification and sociology. Every policy change and every letter sent home pounded out the importance of safety, rules, and good citizenship. He instituted reward programs for good behavior which then necessitated clearly defining “good behavior” in a series of rules lectures. His policies also emphasized the consequences for those who were not being good citizens of his school. The net effect was to teach the kids to police each other and to watch for infractions. All of this occurred at a time when Gleek was struggling with impulsive behaviors. She knew the rules, she wanted to follow the rules and be rewarded with good citizen slips, but in a fraction of a second she would choose wrong and suddenly discover that she was in trouble. As the new culture solidified, I could tell that it was increasingly hostile to Gleek.

Fortunately we had the option to test our kids for a gifted program, A.L.L, that would transfer them to a new school. Gifted programs have problems of their own. Many times the culture in such a program is one of high expectation and pressure to perform adequately. I approached cautiously, but then I did some research into the school where my kids would attend. I looked at a letter to parents from each of the principals. The old school principal’s letter outlined some new rules and clarified programs designed to manage problem behaviors. The letter from the new school talked about a reading program and was focused on learning. The new school hosted not just a gifted program, but also several classes for autistic kids. The “Life Skills” classes were as integrated into the school activities as possible. This meant that the teachers and staff were teaching tolerance of differences on a daily basis. Older classes had weekly reading buddy sessions with younger classes. We decided to make the switch, not realizing what a godsend it would prove to be.

In Gleek’s sixth grade year, anxiety overcame her. Her impulsive behavior turned inward, to be a constant fear she would do things wrong. It is probable that the high intensity of the academic program was a contributing factor, but the largest reason for it was the hormonal surges of puberty. She began having panic attacks at school, to the point where she would curl up into a non-responsive ball on her classroom floor. Sixth grade is a rough age, kids are changing and generally react by ridicule and avoidance of things that make them uncomfortable. But Gleek’s class was reading buddies with severely autistic kids. They had been taught how to understand and deal with odd behavior. I still remember walking with Gleek to her classroom after she had been out for several days due to anxiety. We were greeted, by kids, with smiles and statements like “we miss you Gleek, when will you be back?” Because of that accepting classroom full of peers, Gleek was able to come back instead of feeling like her anxiety had destroyed all hope of social connection.

The culture of a school matters. It permeates classrooms and the lives of children in them. We were very fortunate that we were able to switch from an (unintentionally) hostile atmosphere to one that was exactly what we needed. We survived the year before I was able to switch by paying close attention to what the school culture was teaching my kids and acting to alleviate it. I’m afraid we deliberately undermined the citizen slip program, teaching our kids that we cared about them being good people, not about them bringing home prizes. I made private deals with teachers about how to handle Gleek’s impulsive behaviors. Even in the much better culture of the second school, I still paid attention. Many of the lessons of public school are taught in the hallways, lunchrooms, and on the playgrounds. How the staff handles those situations makes a world of difference. Thus my panic attack girl was not ostracized, and my gifted program son has not experienced bullying in his elementary school. I wish more school administrators had a full comprehension of how to build such healthy school cultures.

(Also relevant to this post Strategies for dealing with a bully