It Needs to Be Enough

I used to keep a collection of styrofoam around the place, but over the years I've disposed of it and not just because it takes up a lot of storage space. Sure it's fun to stick or hammer things into it, like golf tees, but that idea invariably and ultimately turns into a festival of breaking, then shredding, leaving those static electricity filled tiny toxic balls all over the place, which is a mess worse than glitter and not nearly as festive.

Still, when someone from our community purchases new electronics or something that comes with large pieces of the stuff, they often think of us. I don't even know where our most recent pieces came from, but I'd spotted them stashed where the kids couldn't reach them on the playground so decided to make use of them for a day.

My idea was to combine the styrofoam with pipe cleaners. It's not the first time we've done this and while there are usually a few kids who get into the process, it's not generally one of the most popular things we do at the art table. Last week, however, there were even fewer takers than normal. The parent-teacher assigned to the project did her best to role model playing with the things, but the station was evolving into a game in which kids were placing "orders" for things like pipe cleaner "bracelets," "flowers," "glasses," which the adults then manufactured for them. It's a fine activity, I suppose, and I guess the kids had found a way to make it fun so who am I to judge?

That's how things stood when my friend took a seat at one corner of the styrofoam and pulled a container of pipe cleaners toward himself. If he had taken note of what the others were doing, it wasn't apparent. He started by successfully sticking one end of a pipe cleaner into the styrofoam, then another, then another. As he worked, he began to twist the fuzzy wires, bending the pieces together, weaving them together, purposefully tangling them. He didn't say a thing as he worked, concentrating fully on his creation.

I was tempted to sit beside him, either to ask about what he was doing or to, as I often do, begin narrating his process in the hopes of attracting more kids to the project because everyone wants to be part of our classroom's ongoing stories, but I didn't. Instead, I left him to his solitary work, a man with a vision. I stopped by several times over the course of the next half hour as his magnificent tangle became increasingly complex. When he was finally finished a half hour later, he pushed himself away from the table and didn't look back.

I gave some 40 kids the opportunity to play with the styrofoam and pipe cleaners over the course of the day, most of whom declined the invitation and even those who accepted it tended to treat it like a kind of drive-by activity, something not worthy of their full engagement. But one boy did and that's enough for me to call it a success.

We carefully uprooted his sculpture from the styrofoam and put it in his cubby to take home. I'm sure from his mother's end, it just looked like he had simply crushed and twisted a collection of pipe cleaners in his fists, the work of a moment. Most preschool art goes home this way, a product that can't by itself tell the story of how it came to be. I've described the visible part of his process here. I can make guesses about what he learned. I could question him. I could even, I suppose, devise some sort of pre-test and post-test and compare the results to produce "data," but at the end of the day no one but this boy will ever know what questions he asked and answered while creating this purposeful tangle of pipe cleaners stuck into styrofoam. 

It needs to be enough for us to know that it engaged him until he was ready to walk away.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

All Learning Starts With a Sensory Experience

A single flax seed is a tiny golden fleck, so small that a single one is hardly noticeable to the human eye, so insubstantial that its fragrance is undetectable, so meager that one can barely feel it with a fingertip, so delicate that a single one on the tongue barely registers, so light that we don't hear when it falls onto the floor.

But if you fill a sensory table with 50 pounds of flax seed, you've created something irresistible to human senses. The earthy smell overwhelms the room. It's almost impossible to resist plunging your hand into them, feeling the silkiness as they slide across one another, almost like a liquid, but surprisingly crisp and dry. As you stir those seeds with your palms you become aware of a the shh shh sound they make as they interact with and against one another. When you pull your hands away, you notice that the seed oils remain, softening your skin and now they too smell of flax. And when you put a pinch of them on your tongue, you can finally taste their light nuttiness.

Some, both children and adults, find the experience of 50 pounds of flax seed in a sensory table so enveloping that they will remain there for an hour or more, swirling, scooping, and plunging their body parts into it. 

I know there are some who will be appalled by the "waste" of food that 50 pounds of flax seed in a sensory table represents. And while flax is consumed as a food, it is also used by humans to make fabric like damasks, lace, and bed sheets. It is used to make twine and rope. Some nations print their currency on paper made from flax. The oil, sometimes called linseed oil, is used in a wide variety of products, from nutritional supplements to wood-finishing products. There is literally no end to the gifts that flax and flax seeds offer to humans and I suspect we are not done receiving those gifts.

All learning starts as a sensory experience. Playing with flax seed, or anything, is how we begin to understand and appreciate it. The lessons we learn may not lead to new innovations or inventions, but the act of allowing the world to enter us through our senses, to process those sensations, to make connections between other sensations both past and in the future is where learning begins. Even dry lectures must enter our bodies through our ears and eyes. 

Neuroscientist Malcom MacIver believes that when fish began to adapt to life on land some 400 million years ago, they found themselves in a place where they could see over vast distances compared to life in water. This sensory discovery, he says, spurred the evolution of the ability to be proactive, to think ahead, to plan instead of simply react. As their environment expanded, so did their minds. This is what happens when we play with our world with our senses: it expands our minds.

There was never a single superpowered Homo sapiens who encountered flax then sat down and noodled out all the things it could be used for: the history of the relationship between flax and humans is one of playing together. Humans learned to make paper and fabric and food with flax by playing with it, which is to say exploring it with all of our senses, letting it enter into our bodies where our minds could begin guiding the process of experimenting, testing, inventing, and expanding our environment. Both humans and flax have thrived through playing together. And there are some, like historian Yuval Noah Harari, who assert that grains like flax domesticated us rather than the other way around.

When we plunge our hands into 50 pounds of flax seed, we are filling ourselves through our senses. We are activating our curiosity and playfulness. All learning starts with a sensory experience.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Radical Acts of Hope

In the past month, I've had the honor of keynoting two large early childhood gatherings -- the CAAEYC state "Cultivating Relationships" conference in Pasadena and the Alberta Family Childcare Association's "You Make a Difference" conference in Calgary. I relish the opportunity to be on the big stage where I hope to inspire early childhood educators, to make them laugh, cheer, and reflect on their vital work. But what makes these weekends special is the mingling, those moments in the hallways, over meals, and in the coffee lines, connecting over the thing that makes our work universal: the children.

I've had the privilege of doing this with ECEs from all over the world -- China, Greece, Vietnam, Australia, Kazakhstan, Iceland -- and everywhere I go, no matter the geography, culture or political system, I find myself swept up in the essential and eternal commitment, love, and unbridled optimism that characterizes the people who dedicate their lives to our youngest citizens. Perhaps our's is simply a profession that attracts these relentlessly hopeful people, but I think it just as likely that we are the product of working with young children.

Of course, we complain. Of course, we face challenges. Of course, we are bone tired at the end of the day. Of course, we despair over the state of education, of society, and of the world. That's only natural for anyone paying attention. But the blessing of working with young children is that they are a constant and profoundly persuasive reminder of the essential goodness and capacity of humanity. It makes us hopeful in a world that despairs. That is our superpower.

Every single day, we are witness to the kind of "progress" that contradicts the gloom of cynics. We are there as these young humans pick themselves up when they fall; do things that frustrated them only yesterday; show us how to take comfort and derive strength from one another; and find joy in the smallest of things. 

These women, and it's mostly women, know what it is to spend their days immersed in the only thing that really matters at the end of the day, making a difference and cultivating relationships. These gatherings always feel like celebrations of picking ourselves up, persevering, learning, and growing. We shake our fists together at the powers that be, at those who would rob children of their childhoods in the name of test scores, and who seem ignorant of what stands at the core of life itself.

As I mingle, I hear stories of courage and subversion (in the best sense of that word), about standing up to bureaucrats, pushing back against school boards, convincing policy makers, swaying elections, and challenging authority of all kinds. And just as often, there are stories of compassion, patience, and coming together, of dropping to our knees to wipe a runny nose or gather a child into the hug they need.

In a world that worships fame, power, and money, our very existence is revolutionary.

I am honored to be included in this sisterhood. I'm honored each time a child trusts me enough to allow me to pick them up when they're crying. I'm honored by the warmth of their tears on my shoulder. We know that the world simply could not function without us, even if the world itself is blithely unaware, or even dismissive.

Inspired by young children, we pick ourselves up, we persevere, and we do what's right even if it means breaking the rules. This is what unifies ECEs no matter where we are. These are the radical acts of hope that unite us across cultures and oceans.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

The Lefty Who Threw Me Curveball

Throughout my youth and into adulthood I played and coached baseball. 

Like about 90 percent of the other players, I am right handed, which meant I threw the ball right-handed and batted from the right side of the plate. When I was a young, adults often tried to "teach" natural lefties to be righties: the world was built around right-handedness and the goal was to change the children to fit the world. At Meadowfield Elementary School in Columbia, SC, third graders switched from sitting in chairs at small tables to chair-desks, most of which were designed for right-handers, but there were a couple in our classroom for the left-handers. This was the first time I'd ever seen an accommodation like this, although those poor kids still had to twist their bodies in order to make their cursive writing slant in the proper direction.

Lefties were considered oddballs, almost like special needs children . . . Except when it came to baseball. In baseball, the exoticness of being left-handed was an advantage. It probably didn't make a big difference when we were young, but generally speaking, left-handed batters tend to do better against right-handed pitchers, which most pitchers are. As I got older, the left-handed batting advantage became more pronounced, and since most pitcher were right-handers, left-handedness was at a premium. Today, my Seattle Mariners professional baseball team trots out seven left-handers to bat against right-handed pitching.

One summer during my years in middle school, my Boy's Club baseball team went up against a rival who had a left-handed pitcher. He had a reputation because he could throw a curveball. It has been half a century since I stood at the plate against that kid, but I can still clearly see that first curveball he threw to me. I see it coming toward me, high and outside, then suddenly changing course, dropping down and toward me for a strike. It was such a rare sight that it froze me completely. Theoretically, it should have been easier for me, as a right-hander, to hit, but the sheer impossibility of it stunned me.

I remember the kid. He was scrawny, with long, mousy hair. I didn't know much else about him other than that he had a reputation as a "Hood," which is what we called the kids who smoked cigarettes and skipped classes. At the time, I'd not really put it together, but these were the kids from the "wrong side of the tracks." I don't know about him specifically, but I knew other Hoods, many of whom dropped out of school, or were expelled, before graduating. The word we used for it back then, was "failed." Most of the Hoods from my middle school had simply "disappeared" by the time graduation rolled around. 

Today, of course, I know that these children didn't fail. School, society, and their families had failed them. It probably didn't help that this guy was a lefty, except when he played baseball. Then he was something special.

He had thrown the first left-handed curveball I'd ever seen. I never spoke with him. The only interaction that I can recall is that game and that curveball.

Memory experts tell us that we can do certain things to increase the odds of us remembering something, but enduring memories like this are complex. For whatever reason the conditions were just right for it to stick in my mind like a short video. They say that we tend to change our memories each time we recall them. Maybe this one has been altered beyond all recognition because I've recalled it often over the course of my life. Indeed, it flashes through my mind each time I see or even read about a left-handed pitcher. I see that ball doing something I'd previously thought impossible. I see that kid out there not rubbing it in, but rather looking confident as if fully in his element.

This boy didn't disappear. I know exactly what happened to him. Later that summer, he drowned in the Willamette River. It made the local newspaper. It was discussed on the local radio stations. He had been there with a group of other kids, probably Hoods. The rumor was that alcohol and marijuana were involved. I have no idea if this was true, but it circulated among the adults as a kind of cautionary tale.

Perhaps this memory became fixed for me after the fact. Maybe it's not a memory at all, but rather a kind of trauma response. I'd known old people who had died, but he was the first young person. It shocked me that he wasn't there any more, no longer throwing that curveball that turned so confoundedly toward me. I can't really see his face any more, but I can see his scrawny body, his long hair, and that curveball that did the unexpected.

This boys lives for me in a profound way. He was labeled odd, a lefty, a Hood, but he was extraordinary. I wonder if off the diamond he felt like a failure, but in my mind's eye, he is throwing that curveball, his curveball, in a world that tries to straighten everything out. 

Our job as educators, as adults, is not to make children fit the world, but rather to create a world that fits them. This is the only way we ever discover how extraordinary they are.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Learning to Make Decisions

His mother asked him, "Don't you want to go to school?"

He nodded that he did, still smiling. Indeed, he appeared relaxed, almost like he was just taking his time, breathing, pausing before launching into his morning.

"Then let's go," his mother urged, taking a step toward the door, but he still didn't move. She gave me an apologetic look, then turned back to her son, "Are you coming?"

He nodded that he was coming, still smiling, and still not moving toward the door.

"Well, I'm going inside," she said, "It's cold out here. You can come in when you're ready." She shrugged at me as she descended the stairs. The boy looked after her until she was out of his line of sight, then he began scanning the brick face of the building, taking it in as if he had never noticed it before. He looked straight up at the sky. 

There was no reason to rush. In fact, they were early, among the first to arrive. His mother lowered her voice, "I don't know what it is. He loves coming to school. It's all he talks about."

I answered, "It looks to me like maybe he's savoring the moment."

"Maybe that's it," she replied, "but if it is, he's the master of savoring moments. He does this all the time. He did the same thing at the grocery store yesterday. When I ask him what he's waiting for, he tells me he's waiting to know what to do."

I asked her, "Is he waiting for you to tell him what to do or something?"

"Obviously not," she laughed, "You heard me. It's like he's waiting for an inner voice."

By now others were arriving, stepping around him to get through the door. Still he stood, smiling, breathing, waiting for his inner voice.

After several minutes, his mother did what some parenting books suggest: she gave him a choice. "You can walk in by yourself or I can carry you."

In a flash, his sanguineness left him. His body visibly stiffened, his eyes rounded. Then he burst into tears.

Perhaps he had, all along, been submerging his real feelings behind smiling and stillness, but two-year-olds typically don't try to hide their feelings. More likely, it had been his mother's gentle insistence that he make a decision that had suddenly stressed him out.

I think, as adults, with all of our practice making decisions, we tend to forget how very stressful it can be to make decisions, even seemingly small ones. After all, only a few months ago he was a baby. We don't expect babies to make decisions. It's something we must learn how to do. 

And making decisions is stressful. The onus to choose among one or more courses of action is something we must practice. We talk about the impulsivity of young children. If we ask them why they did this or that, they usually can't tell us because there was no point at which they made a decision -- they just reacted according to instinct in the same way they instinctively react to a breast by suckling. But the uniqueness of humanity is that we have developed a kind of consciousness that is capable of ignoring our inner voice and choosing how to behave.

It must be incredibly confusing to be a very young child, stuck between the natural imperative of instincts and the learned social imperative to make decisions. 

In many ways, decision-making can be considered the essence of our lives. 

Of course, we all know the stress of making big decisions, like choosing a university, buying a home, or getting married. Making these decisions are often so stressful that it impacts our eating and sleeping.

On the other hand, most of us have figured out ways to reduce the stress of day-to-day decision-making. One strategy we all use at one time or another is to make a decision once, then stick to it as a way to avoid the stress of on-the-spot decision-making. We call these habits. It is stressful, however, when something happens to thwart us. We choose a brand at the supermarket and stick to it, but are thrown for a small loop when our favorite is out of stock. We make schedules, then get stressed out when something comes up. We're suddenly made anxious when our normal route to work is blocked by construction. Even our little decisions, and the gyrations we go through around them, shape our lives, often profoundly.

Young children have not learned the trick of habits and so are forever faced with decisions that we consider inconsequential. No wonder they cry.

There is only one way to learn to make decisions and that is through practice. This is why play is so important for young children. It is the mechanism by which children can grapple with the dilemma of decision-making. Through play, we learn, in a relatively safe way, about the consequences of our decisions, we learn how to consider others in our decision-making, we figure out those habits that make our lives less stressful, and also what to do when our expectations are thwarted. 

There is pain, fear, and loss: these are the stressors we share with all living things. But the stress of decision-making is ours alone. And it is our blessing and our curse.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

No One Has Ever Pulled Themselves Up By Their Own Bootstraps

Some 30 years ago my wife and I considered ourselves the kind of people who would have a wine cellar. We were motivated in no small part by the fact that we'd just purchased a home with your classic cool, dark basement, ignoring the fact that I don't drink wine and she sticks almost exclusively to a few brands of chardonnay. Since there were already shelves built into the space, I ran out and purchased a classic Ikea do-it-yourself "system," which we filled, over years, with bottles of wine people gave us as gifts and that we would likely never drink.

Fortunately, I work in a profession in which nothing need ever go to waste, so when we moved out of that house, the wine rack parts found their way to the preschool where they served as a building set.

The system is simple: hexagonal prisms that are about a foot long with each end drilled with four holes into which wooden pegs fit. They can be inserted by hand, but we like to use rubber mallets at the work bench. 

It's an imperfect system, especially when using the mallets. If you hit too hard, your entire structure might collapse like a house of cards. The same goes for if you don't brace the whole thing against the work bench, which makes it a perfect thing for tinkering around, especially with an adult there to lend a hand. This can be a frustrating system to work with, I know, I've cobbled them together before and repaired them frequently over the years. Few preschool-aged children are able to manage it without an adult hand here or there. In fact, I've come to realize that it's the kind of challenge that is almost rigged for young children to fail unless they have a helping hand.

I'm reminded of a piece by the author Alfie Kohn about the popular myth that children today are too coddled and that they "benefit from plenty of bracing experiences with frustration and failure." 

Research certainly doesn't support the idea that failure or disappointment is constructive in itself. A "BGUTI" (better get used to it) rationale -- the assumption that children are best prepared for unpleasant experiences that may come later by being exposed to a lot of unpleasantness while they're young -- makes no sense from a psychological perspective. We may want kids to rebound from failure, but that doesn't mean it's usually going to happen -- or that the experience of failure makes that desired outcome more likely . . . In fact, studies find that when kids fail, they tend to construct an image of themselves as incompetent and even helpless, which leads to more failure. (They also come to prefer easier tasks and lose interest in whatever they're doing.)

When children come to our workbench, indeed when they freely chose to approach any activity in our school, the emphasis is on "tinkering," not success or failure, not reward (good grade) or punishment (bad grade), not product but process. When a child is challenged by the process of fitting two pieces together, the adult's role isn't to keep their "eye on the prize," but rather to "notice" or narrate the process in which the child is engaging. The goal of struggle is not to overcome, but to gather data.

As pioneering psychologist Jerome Bruner put it, "We want students to "experience success and failure not as a reward and punishment but as information."

Most children get to a point when working with this impromptu building set where they need help to do what they want, an extra hand to hold something; a few words of strategic counsel. This isn't, of course, an invitation for the adult to take over, nor a sign of having been coddled, but rather a natural human response to a situation that is too many or too much for them. When a child asks for help with this building set, it's a request to provide support for their exploration. Often the request for help is very clear and specific, "Will you hold this for me?" an acknowledgment that they know exactly what they need to get to where they wants to go. Other times it's less clear, perhaps a groan of frustration or an "I can't do it!" In this case, we engage in a discussion about the nature of the challenge, my "help" coming in the form of helping the child simply formulate their request for help. Often that alone allows a child to see his way through to a solution. Sometimes I find I need to make suggestions (e.g., "If someone held that part, you might be able to do it.") or simply make statements of fact (e.g., "If you hit right here, the peg will go in the hole.")  

I have no formula to guide adults on when and how to provide help. It always comes down to the child, the situation, and your relationship with them. Sometimes, as my friend and parent educator Janet Lansbury suggests, it's totally appropriate to say, "I won't help you, but I won't let you get hurt," but learning how to ask for help, learning to know when to ask for help, is as vital to "success" (however you define it) as anything else one needs to learn.

Part of what Kohn is writing about in his piece is what I call "The Myth of Boot Straps." It's a common theme that runs throughout public debate these days, one that implies that everyone can just pull themselves up by their own boot straps if only they apply themselves, stick to it, work harder. It's part of the mythology of the "self made man"; that it's a sign of weakness or coddling to ask for help.

What people have forgotten in this neo-Calvinist ideology is that "to pull one's self up by one's bootstraps" is a metaphor for an impossible task. It's an absurdity. Everyone needs help. If you're stuck in the mud, no amount of pulling at your own bootstraps is going to get you out. Learning when and how to ask for help is a vital life skill, because mythology aside, no one does it on his own.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Brute Fact

On a regular cycle, the moon in various phases is visible in the morning. Each day, when I observe it upon waking, it is in a different place, then traces an arc across the sky until it disappears behind the horizon in the west.

It has been doing this for billions of years. Fungi, the first multicellular lifeforms began tracking lunar cycles, even synchronizing with them. Later, when plants began to populate the globe, they too took notice. And then, last of all, came we animals. When I take note of the morning moon for several days running, I feel myself connected to those earliest humans who wondered about the same moon, as it did the same things it does today. I imagine that I might have been one of those early humans who began keep some sort of record of its progress over days and years, perhaps using some sort of system of tally marks etched into limestone or something.

Living in today's world, I don't have that urge. I know the moon moves, in a dance with the Earth, according to a predictable cycle, one that can be predicted centuries in advance, but the calculations have already been done. If I really need or want to know how the moon will appear next Wednesday, it will only take a few seconds on the internet to have an answer. 

There is no more need to wonder about the moon: that wonder has been replaced by "brute fact."

I came across that phrase the other day -- "brute fact" -- when reading about the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. I like it. It gets at something that has long disturbed me about the way most schools approach education. I often refer to it here on the blog as an obsession with right and wrong answers. In Douglas Adams book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a massive computer is built for the explicit purpose of determining "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." After seven million years it spits out the "brute fact" that the answer is 42.

While 42 may indeed be the correct answer, it is not only meaningless without a full understanding of both its relationship to everything else, but even as a so-called "fact" it is shaped by the perspective of the observers . . . In this case the computer.

When we make the mistake of thinking that brute fact alone makes for an adequate education, we remove wonder, which is the source of the human motivation to learn anything at all. It really shouldn't surprise us that so many children are unmotivated by school, and it's why our school masters must then introduce the hollow external motivators of grades and test scores: replacing the sweet carrot with a harsh stick.

When we wonder, we play, which is the highest form of research. It's through play that we are free to examine the brute fact from every perspective available to us, and to at least hope to discover how it connects to ourselves and the rest of the world. This is where meaning comes from, not brute fact alone.

When I see the morning moon, the joy it brings me goes far beyond the brute fact of its predictability. It connects me, through wonder, through time, to everything that has ever existed on this planet, which itself is a vast system of connection. The brute fact may be 42, but this morning as I consider the moon, I'm brought closer to the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

Let's not rush our youngest children on to the brute fact. It will always be there as predictably as the phases of the moon. Let's let them play, at least for a few years, because that's the only way any of us have ever discovered meaning. And meaning is what we need most.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!