We come to Sicily every summer to spend at least a month with my husband’s aging parents. It’s a wonderful experience for our daughters as they learn about tolerance, flexibility, where food comes from, hard work, taking it easy, swimming, the list goes on. Ella loves Sicily. She eats well here, she is physically active, and she makes friends easily. Our 14 year old neighbor next-door LOVES Ella. The other day Marie Chiara said, “Ella is so beautiful. I remember waking last summer to Ella singing a beautiful song. She is so fun.” Marie Chiara likes to practice her English with Ella.

Ella doesn’t like to practice her English. School starts in two weeks. While nibbling on a fried fiori di zucca at one of our long meals at the hotel, Ella said, “I like it here much better than school.” She, of course, doesn’t understand the difference between “working to live” and “living to work.” She is between two completely contradictory cultures – and life in school is especially hard for her.  Her parents live in America and therefore so does she. We believe that choice will pay off in the long-run. Ella can’t yet see that life here for many is half-empty. There are only so many peaches you can eat before lack of opportunity, money, education, and good government has its affect.

This afternoon was probably our last lesson here in Sicily before we leave. It’s packing and last minute visits till we board the airplane.  I’ve been trying to make things more game-like and less pressured. Plus in the last week I’ve had to contend with her little sister participating. That would be her 3.5 year old sister that writes her name, knows almost all the letters, and LOVES the idea of learning how to read – not helpful for Ella at all. Today we tried to play the board game with Papa and Gaia. Everyone was tired. It’s about 100 degrees here right now and hours of that wear us all down to an irritable nib. It didn’t go well. She was moaning and groaning and not paying attention. It was painful. So we stopped it. Ella and sister jumped on the bed for 30 minutes and then finally slept.  But here is the silver lining – the half-full part – for the game I recommended that Ella do the 3 letter ‘a’ words instead of the pile of sight words that we’ve recently been working on. It would be easier and she could show papa how much she has learned. She didn’t want to – “those are too easy,” she said, “ I know them all.”  So, this is amazing. Something has happened in her brain. There is change.

But she has the right to say no to a life of high-pressure, no fun, half-empty education. We must support her in that choice. We also have the responsibility of providing stimulating, creative and effective learning opportunities that help her appreciate the value of hard work. She will pursue what interests her – and that is a lot.  In Daniel Pennac’s Rights of the Reader, he begins with #1 - the reader has the right not to read. She will come to reading in her own time in her own way.

This almost daily ritual has also changed me. I have learned to stop the struggle earlier, to let her go, to let her jump on the bed instead. I must not pressure her. I must allow her to be who she is. I must allow her to struggle, to fail, to try, to feel frustrated, to lose control, to fly, to experience her life on her terms. After all, she is half-American and half-Sicilian. Both halves are full, complex, wonderful, and uncharted.

Distractions/Tangents:

• Agriturismo Bergi Hotel in Castelbuono, Sicily
• Studs Turkel’s book “Working” - Wikipedia description
• Daniel Pennac’s Rights Of The Reader Poster
• Sight word charts

August 4, 10:52 AMSeattle Spirituality Examiner

An interesting view about the work of motherhood by Hilary Hart.

“Women, particularly, who struggle to find their place in our worldly as well as spiritual systems often don’t realize that they are often struggling against their own nature – which is to value attachment, connection, and the primal instinct to hold others and life itself close.

Women are not just attached to caring, life is attached to women’s care.”

Disappointing lesson today. Ella was not able to focus, guessed a T goes between 7 and 9, and couldn’t remember the day of the week after 3 or 4 reminders. Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that she went to bed at midnight last night after an evening in town at a Sicilian blues festival and got up before 9 am. We struggled through a few activities, even tried to write a poem, but after splashing her face with cool water for the 3^rd time, she finally said, “I need a nap.” So, she finally took one. And it’s a good thing too – tonight she is off to a 10 pm concert by provocative piano player, Giovanni Allevi, at an outdoor theater set below the temples of Akragas.

Ella has always struggled with getting to sleep. When she was a baby it took hours of rocking, singing, bouncing and swaddling to get her to sleep. We used to sit on the edge of the bathtub with her on our softly bouncing lap, tummy side down, with the faucet running. As she got older, it took lots of reading, tossing and turning, story telling, audio books, etc. Even now, no matter how late, we must read. Some would say, we should have ‘put our foot down’ and not encouraged these lengthy bedtime rituals or we should have kicked her out of our bed much earlier. But they don’t know Ella. We never believed in letting a child cry themselves to sleep alone. I could go on and on about “sleep training” and children, but I’ll save that for another summer. The point here is to understand Ella’s need for engaging in the world and her difficulty in letting go.

Three to six year olds need ten to twelve hours of sleep per day. Both girls mostly get this. But not without a lot of nagging, and party-pooper activity by mom. This mother is usually seen here in Sicily as perpetually tired, uptight, unable to relax, and generally nervous. My inability to really talk to anyone about the things I’m interested in adds to my frustration and to this perception. However, I know what happens when Ella is tired. She can’t think; she is impulsive; she can be mean and rough; she is inflexible. She certainly can’t learn the things that are absolutely the most difficult for her. But after a good nap? She can be a different person, eager to learn, reaching for the stars, ready to hug the world around her.

Ella does have a deep sense that she can talk to us about things, that she is ultimately safe, that sleeping is rejuvenating, and waking up is a special moment that she shares with the three most important people in her life. She has this sense because we have worked really hard to make sure she feels this way. Even when she acts like an over-tired boxer, she usually comes around a few minutes after an outburst with an apology.

I truly believe that if we had pushed her to sleep more independently early on, coupled with the particularities of the brain she was born with, we would have damaged her. She would be more insecure and less able to overcome the challenges before her.

I vow to continue to fight the midnight bedtimes in Sicily. At least until Ella can read one complete paragraph on her own. Or unless there is a true moment of artistry to experience – and now she’s off to the concert!

Distractions/tangents:

• 10 Reasons not to let your child cry it out at bedtime
• A description of the quality of sleep in dyslexic children
• Giovanni Allevi

Today Jack died. Jack is Laura Ingall’s dog. We read one chapter from the Little House on the Prairie series EVERY bedtime. It’s impossible not to. Ella counts on it to let go of the day. The problem with tonight’s chapter was that I knew Jack was about to die, it was 11:30 pm, and Ella was REALLY tired. I knew she would fall apart. I knew this because Ella has been emotionally intelligent since birth. For example, since the first time she heard it, she cannot stand to hear us sing or hum “On Top of Spaghetti”. The original tune, “On Top of Old Smokey” is a lamenting American folk song about betrayal, lost love, and death probably originating from the Scottish and Irish settlers in the Ozarks or central Appalachian region. Ella is highly sensitive – to sound, to the emotional states of others, to animals, to smell, to details, to taste, to life in general.

Before bedtime, Ella sat near Nono and listened to him sing traditional Sicilian folk songs. She ended the evening with a big hug for Nono and a hearfelt, “Ti voglio bene.” He teared up and answered with “Come facciamo senza di te?” (What will we do without you?)

So, Jack dying during our nightly reading was the straw that unlocked the floodgates. She made the connection between the old Jack dog and the aging Nono. “I’m sad because Nono, will get old and disappear and die and won’t be with us anymore.” My weak attempt at comforting her was to say that there is a time to live and a time to die. However, our answers are more complicated without religion in our lives. If we could accept the Catholic answer, we could simply say that we’ll all die and go to heaven and heaven is better than life on earth and let’s just count the days till we get there - “Better days are coming,” As my 95 year old grandmother likes to say.

Anyway, to appreciate Ella’s sensitive outlook, to actually nurture it and help her leverage it as a competitive edge in a world of superficiality and insensitivity will be quite the challenge. The fact that she notices that my bathing suit strap is slightly twisted, but can’t tell the difference between a ‘b’ and ‘d’ is confusing. Today we played a memory game of letter cards with grid of 12 cards, 4 x 3. She did quite well. She remembers where the shapes are, she now recognizes almost all the letters, she can get almost up to 20 without a hitch, she can read almost all the 3 letter ‘a’ words I can throw at her. She is making progress – is it fast enough for a society that throws up oil into the eyes of dolphins, bombards children with images of anorexic Barbie dolls and gun-toting rap stars, and sends young men and women to fight until they end up dead, broken or crazy for sake of right wing propaganda? Don’t know. But we’ll do our best to keep our HSP AOK.

Distractions/Tangents:

• Wikipedia entry for Highly_sensitive_person
• On Top of Spaghetti
• On Top of Old Smokey
• The Highly Sensitive Child

By noon – one horse-shaped piñata made out of toilet paper tubes, six handmade envelopes for participants to put their candy into, four tiny prize ribbons, five necklaces with paper cut-out pendants of dogs and eyeballs. I asked her to stop working so that she could do a lesson and she said, “I’m not done yet, sometimes you don’t let me focus, it’s really annoying.”

She was in productivity mode and feeling good. She feels comfortable when she is engaged in creative production. I decided to challenge her a bit and I asked her to find the letters (from a pile of cards on the table) for two four-letter words (‘fast’ and ‘clap’). She did it! She sounded them out slowly and took her time and did it! She felt accomplished.

During our lessons, she is constantly optimizing whatever we are doing or adding a twist to the activity. For example, when asked to write a word she might draw the first letter of the word in a boxy style. Or, she will add a curly tail to an ‘a’. She prefers CAPS over lower-case letters and tries to sneak them in whenever she can. Sometimes she suggests new ways of doing an activity or complete substitutions.

She’s also very protective of her ideas and creations. Earlier this morning, Ella noticed a pile of watercolor paintings she had done a few days ago. She said, “You see these paintings right here? If you see any of these paintings don’t copy them (with the copy machine) and give them away. I want to keep them just for us.” So we discussed the concept of copyright.

I see invention in Ella’s future.

Seems the Sicilians own the copyright to the form of the sonnet (little song) - a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure. Shakespeare built a career on the sonnet. Ella has been reciting poems lately on the fly. She doesn’t repeat them, and they don’t necessarily rhyme but she says the words in a musical form. I keep meaning to write them down as she says them.

However artists have freely enjoyed the sonnet form without having to pay dues. Fashion industry giants, who are currently working hard to impose a new copyright law on fashion design, might need to be reminded of the fluidity with which the fashion artists invent WITHOUT the constraints of copyright. Either that or Dolce and Gabbana will have to retroactively pay all the Sicilian farmers, housewives, and fishermen for their inspiration.

Distractions/Tangents:

• http://creativecommons.org
• NPR news - Fashion Industry Copes with Designer Knockoffs
  
• Dolce and Gabbana website
• Johanna Blakley’s TED talk about fashion and Intellectual Property

Today after a walk on the beach, a good lunch, and some painting, Ella filled a page with lower case gs. Well, she didn’t exactly fill the page. She wrote 36 of them. 2 were upside down. She just couldn’t finish that last line. Repetition isn’t for everyone. Practicing a skill over and over again is not something our household is very good at. We like to take the uncharted path, constantly optimizing, always searching. Part of the challenge of these lessons is to come up with activities that are novel and interesting but still building the skills she needs to move on. Ella likes a healthy mix of the familiar alongside new information and it’s hard to know the recipe that will keep her engaged. Simply doing this practice every day (almost) is an amazing challenge for both of us. We are both hanging in there – some lessons are short but we show up every time.

Though our life in the suburbs of Boston tends to be quite steady and safe, Ella has grown to be very good at managing lots of different kinds of people. She is continuously exposed to the very young and the very old, different languages, different economic and social strata, different levels of hygiene, different political views, etc… For example, last night we had dinner at the olive yard farm house with a representatives from around the world. There was the couple from Germany and their local Italian friends (all met while both working in South Africa tweny years ago). There was my father in law’s longtime Moroccan (and devout Muslim) house-keeper and her cousin’s family visiting from Paris. The three kids didn’t speak a word of English or Italian but Ella played with them all night without a hitch. She was generous, helpful, flexible, and happy. There was also our British/German au pair alongside us – an Italian-American couple from the Boston area. All inside the walls of our Sicilian farmhouse eating arancini, cudduruni, watermelon, and beer.

Sicily has been a cross-roads for many races, cultures, and dominating classes forever, most notably African and Arab countries. In recent years, Arab and African immigrants have been pouring in on rickety wooden boats in the 1000s. It’s a humanitarian disaster as most don’t make the trip and Sicilian fishermen have been pulling up many kilos of human skeletons in their nets.

The mix of cultures is evidenced in the Sicilian dialect, the food, and the religious practice. My husband’s family name, Taibi, means ‘good’ in Arabic. There is cous cous in Trapani. The famous Sicilian cassata dessert is Arabic in origin. The patron Saint of nearby Agrigento, San Calogero, is black. Sicilians have to be tolerant to survive. Diversity is an artform here that is expressed in the food, the fabric of everyday life, and hardship of both citizens and non-citizens alike. There are many that could learn a lot about tolerance and diplomacy by spending a few weeks eating with Ella at our table.

Distractions/Tangents:

· Alex Linder wikipedia biobraphy - the owner and operator of the Vanguard News Network (VNN), an antisemitic, white supremacist website

· Cudduruni Recipe

· Photo of San Calogero

“A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die! And to be able to to live for ever you don’t need to have extraordinary gifts or be able to do miracles. Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Prospero? But they will live for ever because - living seeds - they had the luck to find a fruitful soil, an imagination which knew how to grow them and feed them, so that they will live for ever.” (Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921)

Today Ella wanted to start the lesson with her writing down all the words she knows. She wrote ‘Ella’ and ‘cat’. Then she asked how to spell my name, ‘Nita’. Then I suggested she pick another of the words we’ve been working on. She picked ‘pat’ then ‘tap’. Next she wanted to write ‘papa’ and asked how it was spelled – that was hard to explain because the ‘a’ in ‘papa’ is not like the ‘a’ in ‘cat’. She ended with ‘rat’. She drew the ‘R’ so that “the tail curls up and touches its nose”. She ended with a drawing of a cat. This process took 30 minutes in itself. 7 words. It was exciting that she was proactive in choosing an activity but it is very difficult for her to write letters, words and numbers. She must first think of the right letter. Then she slowly and painstakingly pushes the pencil in a shape that approximates the letter. She prefers capitals over lowercase. Her letters are big. She likes to add curly cues and flourishes to give the letters meaning she can hang onto, I think.

The interesting thing is that she loves to draw pictures and is amazingly inventive in designing and producing objects. Yesterday she made a “Felicity (a historical character from colonial Virginia) hat” out of paper with drawn flowers, bright color choices and ingenious chin strap – all by herself with no intervention. But write words? She’d rather eat onions.

Who needs to write anyway? I’ve never seen a word my grandfather wrote. I’m not sure he ever did. He managed to immigrate to the US from Sicily and carve out a life and a family during the depression and a few recessions. Pa in The Little House on the Prairie series doesn’t know how to write (we read the Little House books every bedtime) and he managed to survive the harshest of pioneer life rather well. I’m sure Ella would have even better examples of why she doesn’t need to learn how to write.

If she lived in Sicily year round she would be in good company. Education here is abysmal. 40% of Sicilians leave high school before graduation. Literacy is shockingly low and the results are felt in politics. The leaders that are voted in based on popularity and back door deals scandalize the region with the blessings of the populace. Bookstores are hard to find and the graffiti is often misspelled.

Yet writing is one of those miracles of the human mind that gives us love letters, signatures, grocery lists, and Luigi Pirandello’s novels. Pirandello was born just a few miles from where I write. Ella can do it. She needs more practice and her own laptop as soon as possible.

Distractions/Tangents:

• Pirandello’s biography on Italian Wikipedia
• PBS special  - Misunderstoodminds
• A compendium of world-wide writing systems from prehistory to today.
• Education in Sicily by Maria Luisa Romano

Today we played the sticker board game where we throw the dice, move a number of spots and read a 3-letter word. There are about 35 stickers on the board. Ella made the board during our first lesson by placing stickers of her choice following a curved line across a piece of paper that I drew. She didn’t want to work today and tried everything to get it done faster. One way to do this is to cheat. Our reading mentor and guide, the person that laid out our summer plans for us, says cheating is ok. Kids do that. Ella needs to feel accomplished, powerful and self-directed. She needs “constant, visible success.” Ok, so I let her win most of the time, and sometimes she gets to re-throw the dice to get to a spot that provides a short-cut to the end of the game (Ella’s idea). But it bothers me. It’s really hard for me to let her do this. As a person always concerned with fairness, justice and equity, it’s hard not to lecture her every time on the virtues of playing fair. But I’ve been letting it go and considering how happy it makes Ella to win I can see the results. And somehow it’s helping her handle losing better. It’s interesting in the same way that focusing on just ‘a’ words (cat, bat, sat, map, dad, etc) is helping Ella learn all her consonants really well so that she can move to other vowels more easily.

Ella is also concerned with equity and fairness – perhaps this is an obsession of all 6 year olds and siblings. She is constantly watching closely for how many gazes are directed at her sister’s blue eyes or if so and so get’s a present, why not her… However, yesterday she really did get hit with a shower of unfairness.

Two days ago, Signor Frenna brought Ella her fourth summer bunny. She loves the Frenna’s. They are farmers and wine makers, they all hold day jobs (most farmers here do), they work HARD, and they always smile. The bunny was quickly named Bella and Ella was a master in patiently waiting for the bunny to come out of its box slowly without scaring it. She prepared the food and made a little picture to go on the box. She was in love. Since last year’s too small baby bunny disappeared unexpectedly (we left her in the yard as cat food) we promised this year to keep the bunny locked in a room during the night. Alas, I couldn’t get that thing back in the box and thought one night would be fine. It’s bigger than last year’s bunny and still learning about its new vacation home.

This morning, Ella woke quickly and ran down to search for Bella, prepare her breakfast, and attempt a cuddle. No bunny. We searched behind every bush in the enclosed garden. NO bunny. Turns out Bella ended up in a dead heap next door. We have no idea what happened - maybe a cat, maybe it ate something. Ella thinks it escaped – that same fate as Zayda last year. She was crushed. She has a special ability to connect with animals and I believe she actually needs to be near them. All morning the tears came and the refrain, “it’s not fair, its not fair.”

How do I explain to her the unfairness that follows the North African beach seller who rests on the pavement outside our wall every mid-day to get out of the sun after spending hours walking up and down the beach to sell plastic trinkets for nothing. Or the unfairness that the hardworking, pretty, young housecleaner experiences when she has to go the church to pick up cheese and milk give-aways. Or the unfairness that this region’s economic desperation will lead it to being the only Italian community that has allowed a liquefied gas plant to be built along the once beautiful beach. Yet another environmental disaster to follow eventually. It’s not fair.

Distractions/Tangents:

• Bloomberg news about Porto Empedocle’s plans to build liquified gas plant at the port.
• Liquefied_natural_gas - Safety_and_accidents

It’s fascinating to watch Ella circle around the challenge before her. Rather than write the next letter, she will choose a complicated method of holding up the paper to the window with the letter card behind and attempt to trace it. Or she’ll decide the edge of the paper needs to be trimmed and then another piece of paper taped on in order to mark which activities we complete. The second piece of paper needs to be a copy of the pencil drawing of the dolphin she did earlier. Of course the copier is not plugged in so that is another several minutes of explaining why its not working and why we are not going to plug it in RIGHT NOW. And so on.

For me conversations in Sicily are like this about everything. About what to eat for dinner, when to eat, how many cherry tomatoes go in the salad, how should they be cut, when should we go to the pool, who is going, should we wait for so and so or go now. Everything is a complicated group discussion in a language I only partially understand.

Ella looked through a small, paperback Italian/English dictionary today and said, “This looks like scribbles.” Looking at that density of tiny letters must dizzying for her.

But you should see her dance.

Distractions/Tangents:

• Kinesthetic Intelligence

In 1933, Albert Einstein is quoted, “Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by power and by force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.”

It pains me to watch Ella desperately compare herself to others. Whether its around which silly bands she owns, how high she can (or can’t) climb a tree, or staring at the every move of the older kids as the ‘hang out’ on the street here in Sicily. She needs to connect to the world through external means as she does not feel an easy connection internally. I get it. I remember worrying about this myself when I was a kid. I was never naturally comfortable around too many people and always suffered at my slow and inaccurate memory of TV show theme songs or other trendy bits of knowledge. I felt the lack of my conformity to my peers.

However I came to revel in being a bit weird. I found my strength in that. I want Ella to celebrate her differences.

This morning she chose to buy a red dress just like mommy. There were other worthy choices available but she could not be swayed away from the red one. It’s a cute dress, just a bit too big. She remembered picking out my dress for me last year and wanted to pick this one for her. Bonding with mommy is not the same as conforming but it does trigger my worry for future peer pressure. In Sicily, few act alone. No one goes to the movies or a restaurant alone. It’s communal thinking all the time.  Vestiges of Fascism come out it many ways in Southern Italy. Folks are extremely judgemental, suspicious of liberal ideas, and, in general, afraid to rock the boat. In the US, too many years emphasizing standardized testing and rote memorization isn’t helping our personal mission. We will teach Ella to listen to herself and not follow the crowd. Let’s hope the American school system gets the memo on this matter asap.

Eventually we did get to our daily lesson today. It started off very rough. She was tired, thirsty and hungry. She couldn’t concentrate and couldn’t tell the difference between the J, U and Y in July. But I used our bonding experience of the morning to smooth over her mood. We took a picture of our matching dresses and talked about the new bicycle waiting for her downstairs if only she could get through a bit of work.

She did it. We only lasted 30 minutes but she did it. And she couldn’t help but turn the S into a Teddy Bear Fairy.I think she felt accomplished afterward. I was exhausted.

Distraction/Tangent:

• The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek