{photos by Kelsey and April Kennedy}
REMINDER: Kickback with a kickback! Need an excuse not to cook one night this month? Have lunch or dinner at California Pizza Kitchen on Wednesday (that’s tomorrow) and/or Thursday, January 28 and 29 and they will donate 20% of all sales right back to SLOCA! You can buy gift cards there too if you can't stay one of those nights for dinner.
Click here for the flier to bring in with you, and print extra for family and friends!
We are back with another post in our Day in the Life series, but this time it’s more like a couple of weeks in the life! And these were no ordinary weeks, either. SLOCA dad Kelsey Kennedy, his wife April, and their two sons Max (Intermediate) and Miles (Primary) are in their 5th year at SLO Classical Academy. They enjoyed a family vacation in Hawaii recently, and took school with them! Kelsey generously documented their adventures with homeschooling on holiday, and we will share them with you in three parts. Here’s the first installment!
Sat. Jan 3: Woke the family very early (5 AM) to get out of the San Jose hotel and onto the plane for Kauai. Clothes, brush teeth, bags, shuttle, a bit harried but smooth sailing all the way into our seats on the plane.
Mama sits with Miles and Daddy with Max. We get some math, history and literature reading out of the way before lego play and videos on the 5+ hr. flight. Mama and Miles get more work done than Max and I do.
The flight got underway a little late due to some ice on the wings. Still, it's a direct flight and we're on the ground in Lihue before noon local time. Yay! A quick stop at Costco to lay in supplies (and eat a cheap lunch) and we are on our way around the island to Hanalei.
Hanalei is gorgeous. Jagged peaks in every shade of green with thin silver ribbons of waterfall surround a lush valley. The vegetation is so dense that I imagine if people stopped cutting and mowing, it could erase all evidence of human habitation in a matter of months. This is the tropical jungle paradise of movies and dreams.
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After settling in at the rainbow house in Hanalei town, we take a walk down to the bay and around to the pier, soaking in the waves, sunshine and the view, ah, the views! Burgers back in town and, as tired as we are, late to bed and later to rise the next day.
Sun. Jan. 4: Late(ish) rise and down to the beach for a run around the bay. We do a couple of miles and the boys are pooped (me too). Back to the house to rinse off and a little bit of home school, mostly history and literature reading and some spelling. We are all loving The Arabian Nights.
A little pushback on the schoolwork, “But daaaaddy, we're on vacation! In Hawaii!” Don't I know it. About an hour or so of schoolwork, a bit of music practice and the boys are back to the beach with Mama while I stay at the house, play ukulele and prepare supper. Have I mentioned how beautiful Hanalei is?
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Mon. Jan. 5: Beach running again this morning. Three miles this time and we did part of it barefoot. Lunch was kahlua pork tacos at Pat's Taqueria, a trailer at the foot of Hanalei pier. Three of us ate five of them. Broke da mout'.
Boogie boards, sandcastles and playing in the surf. Did we do any school today?
Tue. Jan 6: Four miles up and down the beach surrounding Hanalei bay. All of it barefoot, in and out of the surf and glorious. I really don't like running. I do it out of habit. But here, I am learning to love it.
Home school on the couch and the big table. Arabian Nights, spelling, IEW outline… glossing over much of the intermediate math, we need a protractor. Can probably grab one at Walmart on our way back around the island on Saturday.
We found lots of lizards today. Tiny geckos in the house and slightly bigger ones everywhere outside. We assume they eat the tiny ants that are everywhere. We keep the bread in the microwave.
Sack lunch on the beach and boys frolicking in the surf. Clear skies and warm, light wind.
Went to the afternoon farmer's market at Waipa just past Hanalei and met Kavika who had invited us out to make poi when we were here last year.
Mama and boys back to the beach for boogie boarding and body surfing all the rest of the afternoon while I rest and write a bit at the house.
Arabian Nights bedtime stories.
Wed. Jan 7: We're starting to get into a groove. Up reasonably early, beach run in the AM followed by breakfast and homeschool with mountains and rainforest for a backdrop. Then beach, lunch and more beach.
On the run this morning, Miles and Mama find a big (8″?) black seahorse stranded on the beach. He is clearly still alive and they rescue him, getting him back into the water a bit past the shore break.
More boogie boarding on magnificent Hanalei bay.
Thu. Jan 8: While Mama takes a surf lesson, the boys and I head down the road to the 1600 acre Waipa ranch. Waipa is a non-profit education and cultural foundation. It is a land preservation and resource management project. They work to help create connections to the land for modern Hawaiians, to feed the community, to teach sustainability and stewardship.
Thursday at Waipa is Poi day. Poi remains a staple food on many Hawaiian tables especially among older folks and the people at Waipa prepare poi the way it was done around 70 or 80 years ago. Workers and (mostly) volunteers are up before 5:00 to build fires and set up to cook the taro collected from their own fields and those of other co-op farmers. We show up about 7:30 as the cooked taro is being cleaned and are greeted with a fist bump by Kavika. We quickly wash our hands and get to work helping scrape the rough skins from the taro in the outdoor kitchen.
Miles and Max can handle a little more than an hour of this work and begin to tire. Auntie Honey-Girl, who has been teaching and working with us, notices their minds wander and the attendant, ahem, lack of attention to detail. She tells them to go help with the washing of the taro. A bit later and breakfast, fried rice, is served. Some eat, others continue working. After breakfast, the boys help on and off a bit more, mostly playing around the work area with other kids until they are finally chased off by some elders to play elsewhere and explore the ranch.
After the taro is cooked, washed and goes through two stages of cleaning, it is chopped up and fed twice through a large grinder to make the sweet, mild, sticky, purple goo that is poi. The grinder runs almost continuously for hours while people work, laugh and talk. When all the taro is cooked, washed, cleaned and ground into poi, the work slows down a bit. There is still cleanup, weighing, and packaging for distribution.
Around 1:00 everyone, including a group of Michigan college students who ha
ve been clearing and planting in another part of the ranch, stops work and gathers for lunch. We join hands in a large circle and each of us introduces ourselves to the group. Stacy, a Waipa coordinator, leads us in a call and response blessing, sung in Hawaiian. The meal is amazing and a great opportunity to sit and talk.
Uncle Les, a retired appliance technician, has what must be a graduate level understanding of horticulture gained completely from his own research and his own hands in the dirt. He talks to us about different varieties of taro, the way it grows and is propagated; modern vs. ancient farming practices, agricultural legislation, weather, farming, and a dozen other things.
Uncle Charlie is 85 years old and as vital as anyone I've ever met. He has a thousand great stories and if you sit and watch him sew a fishing net like we did, you'll get to hear a handful of them. Charlie's father, a Portuguese fisherman, showed him how to sew a net when he was 12 years old. He's been doing it ever since. He sews Japanese/Hawaiian style throw nets out of monofilament (he used to use twine) using a homemade bamboo needle. A finished net is about 11' in diameter, has thousands of knots and takes about four weeks to make.
Every week Waipa produces ~1200 lbs. of poi for distribution around the island at far below market price with a mostly volunteer workforce. I thank Keoka, the cook of the marvelous meal we just had. He shares with me that a substantial portion of the poi also goes to the few hundred native Hawaiian residents of Niihau who live in the old ways, no electricity or modern conveniences. Their island has little fresh water or vegetation and they cannot grow their own taro.
We made good food. We ate good food. We learned about the land, farming, fishing, Hawaiian culture and history and more.
To be continued…
Kelsey Kennedy is a Track B SLOCA dad to two boys who suffers occasional bouts of logorrhea and writes his own “about the author” blurbs in the third person. He realizes that for a blog post ostensibly about home schooling, he probably mentions food more frequently than schoolwork. He likes food. Sue him.
PS: April says we actually did more schoolwork than I recorded. I guess I was just more focused on the other stuff. 
Thank you, Kelsey, for taking the time to write about your vacation and all the learning (SLOCA and otherwise) that took place for your family! We look forward to hearing more. Readers, be sure to come back on Thursday for the next installment!
