Turning Ten, a photo essay

To Calvin, on your tenth birthday

Ten! Double digits!

You are so, so big. Nearly five feet tall, thin and athletic. You eat like a horse, play like an otter, and work like a little bee, though only when it suits you! It has been a wonderful year in many ways, and there is so much to remember and share.

We continued with your homeschooling this year. You are a quick and bright learner, but increasingly reluctant to put effort into things you don’t immediately see a benefit in. You love learning new things, but despise practicing once you believe you’ve mastered them. As our school year draws to a close you are fully parsing sentences, analyzing poetry, writing five paragraph essays with relative ease (if not relative interest), and reading voraciously at a nearly adult level. You have completed Algebra I, science 3-5, and world history up to the mid-nineteenth century. When you take an interest in something you attack with vigor, but a tendency toward easy boredom and apathy are your biggest challenges, and mine. It is hard to get you to work when you do not see the point.

You continued with both choir and piano this year and, to our great pleasure, seem to enjoy both greatly. This was your first year in the Boychoir of Ann Arbor Performing choir, and the schedule was the most rigorous you’d encountered to date, with long rehearsals two nights a week and practice at home. This January you auditioned for Young People’s Theater winter show, and learned a whole new dedication. It was a whim at the time, your audition, and though YPT is a local children’s theater organization, it turned out to be more selective, more professional, and more intense than we had expected. Hours and hours of rehearsals every week for three months culminating in four shows—two evening, two matinee—that were nearly Broadway quality. You loved it and worked very hard, and we were very proud of you, not just for your impressive performance in the show’s dance and chorus group, but also for meeting such a challenge head on.

Your involvement in the YPT show was just part of your continued growing up and away. You are developing life of your own, on your own. For the first time this year you expressed an interest in shopping for your clothing, and selected a specific hair style to wear as well. You almost unerringly choose to spend your free time with friends regardless of what other options we offer you. The kids in the neighborhood form your most frequent play group and you are always together when home. You love our Friday afternoons with our homeschooling group, too, and would spend any other days with those kids that are offered up. It gives us a warm feeling to see you develop in this way, and it is also freeing, as dad and I enjoy quiet evenings and afternoons together knowing that you are happy and having fun on your own. 

This is just a first step, and still a small one, toward our inevitable separating, and it is immeasurably wonderful to see you so well adjusted and socially prepared (see me thumb my nose at the naysayers who cautioned against homeschooling for its inadequacies in social training). You are a sensitive and caring child. You are patient with your friends’ younger siblings, and usually with your friends. You remove all creatures from the house with a cup and a piece of paper. We took you to a parks fishing event last summer but after spearing one innocent worm and watching the hook removed from the poor fish’s mouth you declared you’d had enough of that. You coo at almost everything living and feel no prejudice about young vs. old, carnivore vs. herbivore, fur vs. scales. This egalitarian attitude of yours tries my courage at times, but tugs at my heartstrings continually.

What a beautiful life we have, what a beautiful year it has been. And now you are ten. You have a whole day of fun planned for us that begins with hiking, continues with miniature golf, cookie baking, and our traditional evening downtown, picking out your birthday books and eating your birthday dinner of crab legs and key lime pie. 

We enjoy you. We enjoy spending time with you. We are proud of you. We love you. 

Love,
mom (& dad)

CY365 in 2016, week 22

May 27: Cultivate
Calvin

Cortney
 

May 28: Out a window
Calvin

Cortney
 

May 29: Words
Calvin

Cortney

May 30: Motivational
Calvin

Cortney
 

May 31: Reminder
Calvin

Cortney
 

June 1: Written
Calvin

Cortney
 

June 2: On a building
Calvin

Cortney
 

Birding (plus) log, May 2016

May has come and gone, and with it the bulk of bird migrations. Most of our summer residents are settling in for their summer routines. The orioles are just about done using our feeders, the robin is back under our deck, and we've gained a song sparrow amongst our yard residents.

This year's migration month (or two) was an odd one. We had an early warming trend followed by the abrupt return of cold, and through it all a dearth of rain. The migration was slow and we never had birds arriving in the large masses that hobbyists call "bird falls". Instead they trickled in and we had to look harder and farther to find them. 

This is only the second year that Calvin and I Have followed the migration. We saw several birds that were completely new to us (a hobbyist would refer to these as life birds), and we experienced a welcoming into the local bird culture through the county Audubon Society (we attended their guided hikes and assisted with their annual spring migration count), and through strangers that became less strange and less aloof the more we saw them on regular trails throughout the month. It became normal to stop and visit with people whose names we did not know, but whose routes and methods had become familiar to us, like the gentleman with the enormous camera I coveted, the husband and wife team that aggressively shushed birds from the brush, and the young man who hiked every afternoon following school.

This new-found camaraderie was warm and welcoming and provided us with the education and tools to find some of the birds that were new to us, but it was also a competitive and overwhelming at times. For every then helpful birders there was at least one who was jealous and guarded, not willing to share sighting location for fear someone would rival their observation numbers. And then there was the day that, on our usual early morning science hike, we ran into a birder we'd seen regularly who pointed out a pair of Common Nighthawks resting on a tree out in the open, a rare easy sighting. We enjoyed them and went on our merry way. When we left the small park an hour later the usually quiet parking lot was so full we could barely move. He has posted the sighting on a group list and within the hour tens of rabid birders had swarmed the park to see the hawks. We were not unhappy to be leaving at that point.

And now the season has slowed to a crawl. The migrators are gone, and with the leaves out the birds are harder to see, but we plan to continue our birding through all seasons for the first time this year. 

Eastern Phoebe (summer resident)

Yellow-throated Vireo (summer resident)

Cooper's Hawk (resident)

Eastern Kingbird (summer resident)

Yellow Warbler (summer resident)

Painted Turtle

Blackburnian Warbler (migrator)

Blue-headed Vireo (migrator)

Magnolia Warbler (migrator)

Philadelphia Vireo (migrator)

Green Frog

Muskrat

Palm Warbler (migrator)

Cerulean Warbler (summer resident)

Blue-winged Warbler (summer resident)

Northern Parula (migrator)

Pine Warbler (migrator)

Carolina Wren (resident)

Northern Mockingbird (my first look, and not a great picture except for the doofy robin photobomb)

Chestnut-sided Warbler (migrator and sometimes summer resident)

Common Nighthawk (summer resident)

Eastern Wood-Pewee (summer resident)

Swainson's Thrush (migrator)

Ruby-throated Hummingbird (summer resident)

Warbling Vireo (summer resident)

Canada Goose (ubiquitous resident)

Wood Thrush (summer resident)

Turkey Vulture (ubiquitous resident)

Summer is here