the caterpillar promptly quit eating fennel and attached his tail to a stem. we were fascinated to see it connected to said stem by two tiny fragile silken strands. if you blow on it, it sways...makes you wonder how they make it in a thunderstorm, in nature! then, today, it has begun to harden and transform. we will learn today *how* the change to its formerly soft body is happening, since the caterpillar itself is not spinning a cocoon per se--its body is simply changing before our very eyes into a solid green mass. muy, muy interesante!metaphorically minded as i am, i can't help but see this experience as a kind of natural snapshot of what we are doing. the most common criticism of homeschooling, after all, especially the way we want to do it--i.e., NOT signing our kids up for umpteen supplementary things and shuttling them all over, and instead making our life at home as edifying as possible, mostly--is that children are not properly socialized. we are in a cocoon of our own making, here at home, and i have to hope we have what we need within to make this turn out right. and folks like us don't see that as a bad thing, the beauty of a cocoon being that what any creature needs to grow does come mostly from within and from its immediate surroundings.
so there you have it--i've outed myself already, two days in, as a luddite (though this blog should allay that fear) or a conservative (i'm actually left of jesus, but very interested in doing the right thing) or anti-modernity (and one out of three isn't that bad, i guess). in reality, what spurs my desire to homeschool them like this, in our cocoon, is this: i know how brief the metamorphosis from baby to adult really is, watching my 15 year old struggle against anything, friend or foe, that seeks to limit his flight. like modest mouse says, we've got just one chance, one chance/to get everything right....and if we're lucky we might.
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