Deb's Blog - 2004

Hot tubs are great investments. Before we purchased ours, I did my homework. It's healthier, more economical, and better for the environment than most. But that's not what makes it a great investment. Ideas appear in my hot tub. Sometimes it's a manuscript, and once, it was an arts-based school. As ideas often do, that one evolved into something different than I envisioned, but something just as magical. The Cedar Program.

But hey, I just left us in the hot tub. After drying off, I called eight artists and educators here on Whidbey Island. They had all thought about an arts-based school. I left a message for my brother-in-law Vern (my picture book Dinosailors is dedicated to him and his "Shifty Sailors"). Vern was at a workshop when I called -- a workshop on funding for arts education.

A week later, eight of us "artsy educator types" met. I hated to leave the energy of that meeting, but my husband and I were committed to a dinner that night. We arrived at our dinner late and had to sit at opposite ends of a long table. I sat next to Bob Wiley. I knew he had been a principal, so our conversation eventually turned to the meeting I had that afternoon. Bob listened thoughtfully and said, "That's doable." I looked at him, and I guess my expression replaced the words that didn't come out. He smiled. "You don't know what I do, do you! Part of my job is to help schools get started." Bob was the director of WALA, the Washington Association for Learning Alternatives. He put me in touch with several folks, including Jeff Petty and others at the Center for Reinventing Public Education.

Jeff helped us design philosophy, study demographics, and practice articulating our mission. We read studies, surveyed successful schools across the nation, and attended conferences, including an arts-integration conference in Princeton. We came back from that conference knowing that we wanted student choice and service learning to be additional focal points for our school.

Many educators and parents joined our cause as we met during those first years. Eventually, a mutual friend put me in touch with David Pfeiffer, who had been an elementary principal. David was ready for a change from traditional settings and liked the approach we were suggesting. As other supporters of our project came and went, David and I continued to meet weekly, talking over ideas, writing plans, and dreaming. We'd alternate between pulling each other out of the box and pushing each other back in, as we'd be reminded that all organizations need structure. David and I don't always see things the same, but we've learned that when we work through our differences, the outcome is better than either of our original thoughts and ideas.

With a strong plan and a philosophy that put students first, we felt ready to make our dream a reality. The reality for us was that we knew Whidbey Island probably could not support another private school. We have several on the island, including a nationally-known Waldorf school. Eventually we settled on taking our proposal to the Coupeville school district. They didn't have a home school support program, and we knew Cedar's values and mission were shared by many of our local home school families. Becoming part of the public school system also meant we could meet another of our goals -- that our school would not be exclusive. Receiving state funding meant that anyone who was serious about teaching their children at home could benefit from the program no matter what income bracket they were in. After several meetings with the school board, we were given a thumbs-up. We were fortunate to have the support of Superintendent Bill Myhr. I met with Bill first thing in the morning on his first day of work in Coupeville.

The Cedar Program opened its doors two years ago this November. We started out at Au Sable Institute on Smith Prairie. This year we moved to Camp Casey, where prairie, woods, and seashore combine with renovated facilities and recreation opportunities to create a unique, energizing educational community.

We are a diverse group of learners at Cedar. Some of our families have extremely structured lives. They can tell you which days and times they study any subject. They see us as enhancement to their education experience. Others are "unschoolers" who believe life itself is learning. They put up with our structure and incorporate their home school lessons into their daily activities, often letting their children choose their Cedar classes.

No Cedar class is text-book driven. We use instructors who are passionate about their subject matter and who incorporate hands-on experiences into their classes. Science, writing, violin, piano, art, cooking, gymnastics, folk dance, math, drama, photography, nature studies, native American studies, astronomy, puppets and mask-making, choir, and several language classes are some of our current offerings. In addition to classes, we offer a resource center of materials our parents can check out. Parents may also request specific materials to be added to our collection.

Cedar is a living example of the saying that it takes a village to raise a child. We support each other through educational opportunities for parents, support meetings, and frequent consultations. Children of all ages interact in positive ways in and out of classes. We're like a big family, with all the ups and downs that are created by being such a diverse community. If you'd like to learn more about the Cedar program, contact us at (360)678-1388 or cedar@coup.wednet.edu. And if you'd like to learn more about which hot tub to buy, send me an email. It's a great investment in inspiration. Who knows what direction your life will take!

We're back home -- all five of us.

Sandra, 5, is our social director. She dances, sings, and bellows out orders like a sailor. When we say no, Sandra says "Oui!" The psych report had said "oppositional." We see a bright child with great survival skills. When asked by a translator what it was like before we arrived, she said, "Finally the waiting is over."

Jean, 2, was lethargic and unresponsive for the first several days. His last bite of food stayed in his mouth for hours after each meal. After being home for two weeks, you'd never know it was the same boy. Our birth son, Kaj, &, alternates between hugging his new siblings and asking us to send them back.

"What have we done!" enters our thoughts less often than it did the first few days. Intellectually, we know we know we've given tese two a chance at life, and that they are and will be giving us many unimagined gifts, but at first it's like having someone else's kids at your house indefinitely. Except these kids don't speak English, and our Creole is not stellar.

The trip to Haiti equals any birth story we've heard. In recalling the sites, sounds, and smells of our time there, we feel less anxious about asking these two children to give up everything they know.

Haiti has over 8 million people in a space as large as the state of Maryland, or the Olympic Peninsula for those of you in our neck of the woods. They have had 34 coups in their 200 year history. 70 % are unemployed. About 2% control most of the wealth. They live up in the mountains where their development contributes to the mudslides that bury the less fortunate below them.

Wherever you look in Port-au-Prince, the streets are packed with people. There is no social safety net, so they do what they can, often by selling what they can find. There just aren't enough buyers. A "taxi" driver shows us to the "fig" vendor. We purchase the bananas as he shows us his car. It has four mismatched tires, with snow tires on the front. "I'm just here," he says. "Some days someone needs a ride, some days I don't drive at all."

A man stands at the side of a road holding out a bent bicycle pump as cars drive by.
Several "auto parts stores" adorn the outsides of buildings -- some as long as our city blocks -- dispaying old tail lights, fenders, belts, hoses, all previously used. A mechanic's shop -- literally a hole in the wall, like a crumbling cave, is strewn with parts. Some hang above the mechanic, who sits on a wheel rim with one of his main tools, a sledgehammer.

In contrast, the United Nation's representatives, in their hope of gaining the trust of the Haitian people, travel around in SUV's. One native Haitian remarked about the air quality and Haiti's lack of plant life to absorb the emissions caused by these new arrivals. In Haiti we traveled in the back of a pick-up with a crowd of people. At home, Sandra and Jean are adjusting to the use of seatbelts in our three-vehicle family.

In Haiti, clothes cast off by us in the United States are draped over anything immobile, hung out for sale. Here at home, Sandra squeals as she pulls out clothes from her dresser. In Haiti, bananas, greens, canned goods, underwear, craft items, shoes, shampoo, or anything small enough to fit in a basket or box are transported on heads. At home, Sandra loads her dolls up in a cardboard box on top of her string-size braids. But baskets or not, Haitian heads are held high. They are a proud people who are not afraid to look you (or life) in the eye.

And so, that's what we're trying to do. Like the people sweeping the streets in Port-au-Prince each morning with brooms of bushes and shrubs, we take one step at a time, trying to eliminate the expectations of a perfect life, creating new memories and new ways of being a family.

A few weeks ago I was at Washington Elementary in Mt. Vernon, Washington. The students and I explored story structure by picking apart our favorite folktales, singing songs about characters and solutions, and creating our own stories using "magical threes."

My life is (not neatly) arranged in threes. Even though I duck in and out of family, writing, and teaching, the three are woven together in ways that can't be separated. Here's a glimpse of them in reverse order...

I co-direct the Cedar Program, a small school which has been located at Au Sable Institute (the old state game farm) on Whidbey Island. The Cedar Program is an arts-based home school support program affiliated with the Coupeville school district. Years ago, I invited several artists and educators to "dream a school" together. We surveyed dozens of schools across the country, attended conferences, read, researched, and wrote until we had a philosophy and mission we all agreed on. Part of that philosophy was that we didn't want the school to be an exclusive place, which is why we approached the Coupeville school board instead of starting a private school.

The Cedar Program opened a year ago last November. David Pfeiffer shares the director position with me, and we both teach in the program. It's the school I would have loved as a child -- a focus on family involvement, with classes in the arts, hands-on science, math classes based on problem-solving, writing workshops that incorporate student choice, and instructors who focus on developing a love for learning. We're looking forward to a new year on our new site on the beach at historic Fort Casey. My husband, Karl Olsen, teaches music, folkdance, and choir for us, and my son Kaj attends Cedar as a student.

If I'm feeling restless and out-of-sorts, it's often because I haven't been writing. I had always wanted to be a writer, but successfully avoided it for many years "because I didn't have time." Then, when our son Kaj was born (we were in our 40's), I realized I would never have time. That's when I really started writing. The first book I sold (and the most recent one published) is about Kaj's birth. The first one published (DINOSAILORS) was influenced by my brother-in-law's performing group, "The Shifty Sailors." Karl sings with them, and often held a young Kaj in his arms during their earlier years. This spring I signed up with agent Marcia Wernick at the Sheldon Fogelman Agency. Marcia is fun, warm, and hard-working. I'm looking forward to having someone advise me, celebrate with me, and nudge me when I need it.

Three weeks ago today I talked about threes with school kids. Two weeks from today I'll be in Haiti. We got our call. The two kids we're adopting, Sandra, age 5, and her brother Jean, age 2, are ready to come home. Ready to weave themselves through my threes. We had already booked the trip without knowing for sure that the timing would work. We'll be going down with eyes wide open. We know this is a journey that will change us forever. Our birth son will make the trip with us to pick up his new siblings, and we'll be home in early July with three kids. Our magical three.

TELL ME MY STORY, MAMA is being released today! The book is the story of our son's birth, and today is his daddy's birthday. Waiting and birth are such great symbols for us this spring...


Waiting Again

Waiting for a book to be published is like being pregnant. Or adopting. We're waiting for our children from Haiti -- Sandra, age 5, and her brother Jean, age 2. They're just outside Port-au-Prince, where a fifty-pound sack of rice is up to $35 and beans are $50. Powdered milk is an arm and a leg. The people caring for our children, including American ex-school bus driver Barbara Walker and her young friend Kindra who both stayed in Haiti despite State Department warnings, are doing their best. They wait for food, and we wait for the kids.

Our birth child, Kaj (rhymes with sky) kept us waiting, too. We had tried to have a baby for several years, but I didn't get pregnant until I was forty. Kaj was due on Christmas Day, but kept us waiting until the big snowstorm at the end of the year. I had been on the phone all night with nurses, the county road folks, and the highway patrol, wondering if and when we should venture out. When my sister-in-law checked on road conditions to determine whether it was possible to travel from Seattle to Whidbey Island to be at the birth of her brother and sister-in-law's child, the response she got was, "Is your sister-in-law Deb Lund?" But the children's version, coming out in a HarperCollins picture book, goes like this:

"And then there was a snowstorm!"

"And that's when you were ready to be born. We hiked down our steep driveway in two feet of snow to our neighbors' truck because there was too much snow to drive our own car! Daddy thought you'd have to be born in a snow bank, but we finally made it to the hospital."

Sandra and Jean have a different wait. There's no due date. Artificial ones come and go. We were told, "We hope to have them home for Christmas." It's no one's fault. They're stuck in the snow of bureaucracy and so are we. Waiting.

But Kaj's book? It's finally ready for its birth after a pregnancy that lasted several years. TELL ME MY STORY, MAMA is in the delivery room as I write this. Kaj knows it's his story, even if it pictures an adorable little girl. It's the historic northwest snowstorm, the ride to the hospital, the birth -- a C-section after a marathon labor ("The doctors helped you find your way out, and it took a very long time." And it's Sandra and Jean's story, too.

"We all looked at each other, and then we knew what we had all been waiting for."

"Just like we're waiting for the new baby now, right Mama?"

"Yes, but the new baby will have its own story,"

"And I'll have mine."

"You'll still have yours."

It was adoption I was writing about, even if the picture shows the little girl patting her Mama's tummy.

Instead of watching abandoned cars on television with bundled-up reporters offering tips on surviving winter weather, this waiting time has us watching the news for glimpses of Haiti. We check our email for messages from Kindra and Barbara at Reach Out to Haiti when they can get them out, or news from the State Department. We go about our life, teaching, singing, writing, playing with Kaj, grabbing any bits of hope that our children will be coming home soon. And we wait and wait.

We keep our ears tuned to news about Haiti, where the children we're adopting are waiting to come home to us. But as we wait for them, the rest of our lives move on. My husband, singer Karl Olsen, is working on a CD of his last concert. Kaj (rhymes with sky), age seven, practices his violin and looks forward to his days at "Cedar," the homeschool support program I co-direct. Today I receive a book offer from Harcourt for my story MONSTERS ON MACHINES. It's my third with them, starting with DINOSAILORS, which came out this fall. TELL ME MY STORY, MAMA comes out next month from HarperCollins. It has a starred review in Publishers' Weekly.

I recently visited Audubon Elementary in the Lake Washington School District. Librarian Lis Wicks was an incredible host as kindergarten, first and second graders filed in and out of her library for my presentations. This last Thursday I gave the closing address for the Young Authors' Conference at Langley Intermediate School.

The Whidbey Island Writers' Conference was March 5-7. Newbery award-winning author Karen Cushman graciously responded to more than an hour of my questions in front of an appreciative audience. Two children's "chat houses" this year provided participants a chance to mix with several authors, illustrators, and editor Michelle Poploff of Random House. I finished the conference facilitating a session about revision and critique groups. March 14 I'll be reading stories and speaking at the Puget Sound Baby and Children's Show.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

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