Yo-Yo

I've been up since the buttcrack of dawn - 3:45 to be exact. Sleep has always been easy for me, but lately I've been waking up around 2am and struggling to get back to sleep. Even though we built Lu his own bedroom last year, he still often sleeps with us (more often than not actually). So, I just cuddle up to him and wait an hour or so for sleep to kick back in. But today it came a bit later - around 3am. I cuddled a bit, but it was useless, I was wide awake. Cha always wakes up at 4am, and was surprised to see me up and making coffee before him.

Being awake that early gives me this weird going-to-the-airport feeling, and on top of that, it's been drizzling for the last two hours. Dark and drizzly, and I'm just now seeing the first light. I'm pretty sure my new sleep pattern has a lot to do with the extra energy I have from quitting smoking (7 weeks now!), and from no longer dancing (bad knees as of last April) - not needing to sleep/rest as much as before.

Lu just woke up and already has the yo-yo action going on. It's been several weeks now of being glued to the thing. The other day I heard Cha saying something like - "Look how much you've progressed with that yo-yo. You see! Look how good you get when you focus on something."

In the homeschool circuit there's always somebody talking about finding passion. Now, I know all about passion. I had one since I can remember. My passion was dance, and that was that. Sure I liked other things, but nothing as much as dance - nothing enough to take my attention away from dance. For me, school was a 7 hour wait in hell that I had to endure 5 times a week, until that bell rang. Then I was free to run home, turn on the music and dance, or go to dance class. Not science, music, math, the books they gave me to read, nor dreaded P.E. were ever of any interest at all to me.

Lu, on the other hand, doesn't have that kind of one-tracked mind.
He has genuine interest in many things... so many things that it's not actually possible to do all of them each week, or even each month. Instead, Lu does one at a time, consistently and even compulsively, for a week or so. He then moves on to a million other things, in equally short and intense doses, eventually returning to each one after a few months.

This week it was the trumpet
(approx. one week per year over the last 5 years).

Last week it was the piano.
(approx. 8 weeks per year over the past 4 years)

There's also a guitar, several flutes and recorders, drums, and a harmonica. He knows how to play them all, a little bit. He has the general idea anyway, and can play at least one song on each instrument - pretty well.

Lu is consistent about dance, not only in his classes, but also in practicing or choreographing his own dances. Of course I love that he loves to dance, but I am thrilled that he doesn't ONLY love to dance, or any one thing for that matter. I love that he finds so many things interesting, and that he learns so much about each one in these natural spirals of dedication of his.

I realize that this wouldn't be possible if we were actually signing him up for classes, paying a registration fee, or membership somewhere. Instead, he learns from us, from our friends, from YouTube(rocks my world), from books, or on his own. It truly does just happen. Lately, I've been appreciating even more all the things that Lu learns outside of our homeschool classes. He's really been surprising me with all this knowledge and know-how that he's just picking up somehow.

His vocabulary is blowing my mind, and I'm not talking about the new words that we're learning in Vocabulary Class. They are words from shows, movies, music, conversations, books he's reading... and they are many, many more than the ones we learn in class.

I'm starting to wonder...
should we consider...
shhh....
(slightly cringing)a more unschooly approach

But why am I cringing???

Well, it scares the crap out of me to completely jump out of the box like that, even though I like to think of myself as a free and radical thinker. When it comes to my son's education, it's hard to be quite so radical. But who knows. Maybe I'll come around.