Tricotomania and more

I think the thing I find most upsetting in discussions with parents, is the extent to which they are disempowered. The extent to which parents rely on books of parenting advice in which experts tell us what is normal and how to ensure that our children progress normally through the stages of development. Or books that describe the particular abnormality of our child and tell us how to fix it or work around it or whatever.When Melissa talked about her struggle to get the professionals in the IEP meeting to see the difference between a generic "child with this level of need" and her particular child, many people could identify the problem and root for Melissa as she struggled to make the professionals see sense.And yet, I see mothers (and it is mostly mothers that take this level of interest in their children’s development and the practicalities of parenting them well) do this exact same thing themselves. And they do it with children who are not in any way identified as "special needs" as well as with children whose needs might well be identified as "special".

As a society, we are losing the ability to trust ourselves. We deify experts. Instead of going to experts for a different point of view, based on their knowledge of a wider range of chidren with similarities to the one we are dealing with,  and then taking that advice and considering it in the light of our own knowledge of our particular child, gleaned from hours and days and weeks and months of intimate contact, observation, and experiment, merging the two with perhaps other ideas from others in our life with yet different perspectives and weighing all of this and coming up with a decision ourselves, we go to experts for "THE answer". Like an oracle. Or a god.

To return to "gifted" children. These are children whose needs are not met by the school system. They get depressed or they act out. Sometimes in school. Sometimes only when they get home. There is clearly a problem that parents need to address. And expert diagnoses do help some of us affirm that there is indeed a genuine mismatch between our child’s "level of need" and what the school can provide. And this diagnosis does enable us to access services that are designed to address our child’s need and it helps us meet others whose children have similar needs. And all of these things are good things.

But the experts that have designed these programs and provided the diagnoses and determined how to address those needs have not done so in a vacuum. They have done so within the school system. Some of there advice is very good and useful. I am not advocating that we "leave it". But neither am I advocating that we "take it". I am trying to work out how we engage meaningfully with the evidence that underpins the expert diagnosis and recommendations; how we engage meaningfully with the context in which those recommendations are made; and how we work out how those relate to our own particular children and the particular context in which they find themselves.

I am aware that developmental psychology is the primary discipline informing these experts. I’m not a huge fan of developmental psychology as a discipline. In particular, the tendency of developmental psychology to abstract children from historical time and see them only in developmental time is a serious concern. In developmental psychology children are mainly understood in relation to what they will become. Who they are now is only a concern in as much as it is related to a point on the path to normal adulthood (or abnormal adulthood, as the case may be). As you may have noticed, I have a problem with the very idea of "normal adulthood". A clear path to achieving it is clearly not a big part of my worldview.

The school system is based on the same view of children as "becoming". It is organized as a set of sequential steps to acquiring the necessary knowledge and skills usually in a cumulative fashion. Thus one can only be at points along this line. If a child does not fit in the limited permitted deviation from the average for her age, then she is either developmentally delayed or gifted. Either way, the impulse is to assign work at the point along that line closest to where she sits.

But if you take away the line, then what do you do? What if you imagine the problem differently? How do you meet the intellectual needs of your child without reference to that line? How do you define "appropriate" activities when the interests of your child are similar to those of other children her age (perhaps) but her intellectual ability is different. How do you find a book with a 7 year old protagonist addressing 7 year old concerns written for a 7 year old child who reads at a more sophisticated level than most 7 year olds? Or, for some children, what materials are available for a child with unusual talents in mathematics who can’t do basic arithmetic? Assuming it has ever occurred to you that mathematics is not primarily about arithmetic. Does the fact that your 9 year old is passionate about history mean that she needs to be working at a Grade 7 level because that is the first time history is taught as a separate subject in schools? And if not, how do you work out how to do history at an appropriate level when no one else seems to think it is necessary?

All of this to say that what is making me uncomfortable is not the "gifted" label per se, but the assumptions underlying the special needs business. For homeschoolers, in particular, I challenge you to imagine other ways of thinking about your child’s needs. Are they really for acceleration along that narrowly defined path? Or are they served by stepping off that path and exploring other routes to adulthood? Routes that might be more concerned with the child in historical time — in this moment, in this historical period, in this cultural and social context.

What if you don’t have to learn arithmetic sequentially? And what if you don’t need to master arithmetic to tackle algebra, geometry, or other mathematical disciplines? What if your child’s gifts lie in areas usually considered extra-curricular? What if your child’s needs for intellectual stimulation are satisfied by staying with a topic longer and going into more depth but you cover fewer topics than "school" would in a given year? For example, why shouldn’t your children spend two years studying Greek myths if that is what satisfies their intellectual needs?

Well, one thing is that it is a lot scarier to get off the beaten path. Especially when so many experts are telling us the path is the only game in town. Once we step off the path, we have to trust ourselves to make good judgements. Or at least not to make harmful ones. What makes this easier for me, is the fact that it is pretty clear that even my bad decisions are likely to do no more harm than leaving Tigger in school would have done. I can screw up and it’s okay. I can try things and if they work it’s fantastic. If they don’t, it’s back to the drawing board.

The hardest things have been (with links to posts in a similar vein by other folks):

• learning that although she is very independent, it is important to do things together and this is a great opportunity for me to learn new things with her
• not requiring her to have a "product" to show; trusting that the learning is happening even if there is no lapbook, report, narration, or whatever
• accepting that she might run out of steam when I think we haven’t "finished", and it is okay to just drop that topic
• realizing that there is real value in reading things several times, that she gets different things out of a book each time she reads it, and that it doesn’t matter whether she gets the "right" things out of it the first time
• knowing when to push a bit and working out how to do that
• trusting that she can choose topics and I can support that while observing carefully so I can suggest things she might enjoy but not come to herself
• letting go of the idea that there are certain things everyone needs to know

There is no right way to raise a child, gifted or otherwise. There is no magic formula. As a former colleague of mine said, "Whatever you do, it’ll be wrong." Experts bring different knowledge and a different perspective to the process. We shouldn’t just dismiss them. But we shouldn’t overvalue their knowledge. And we certainly shouldn’t undervalue our own. And if certain labels bring us into community with people who provide interesting perspectives that enrich our lives, that’s great. But we need to be careful not to unnecessarily limit who we interact with and to guard against perspectives that make us feel inadequate to the task of parenting our "special" children (and each and every child is special).

I’ve been leaving long comments on other people’s posts and thought maybe I ought to actually put some of my incoherent thoughts on this subject in my own damn blog. Not that those people mind the long comments. Just that I obviously have some thoughts on this topic, however incoherent.

I’ve never had Tigger tested for giftedness. The English teacher she had in grade 2 (she did French immersion) suggested it. Many people have asked about it as part of their "why are you homeschooling" intervention. And recently I’ve hooked up with some online homeschoolers who have gifted kids and make that a focus of their blogging. Because I like some of these bloggers and am enjoying their blogs, I even joined the Homeschooling Gifted Nearcircle (over there in the sidebar).

But I’m uncomfortable with this label. First of all, "gifted" seems
to me to be a classic case of a "diagnosis" that had to be invented in
order to make sure that certain kids were better served by the
school system. Without a system of schooling that requires kids to
be in age specific groups and progress at approximately the same rate,
"gifted" wouldn’t really exist. This is not to say that some kids don’t
learn more quickly than others or exhibit certain characteristics in
their approach to learning that are only found in a minority of the
population. Nor that those same kids wouldn’t be referred to as
"bright" or "talented" or something in the normal course of things. But
rather, that "gifted" as a set of characteristics diagnosable by a
series of tests administered by an educational pscyhologist would not
exist.

In that sense, my problem with "gifted" is the same as my problem
with a whole range of diagnoses of learning disabilities. This is a
discussion we have with some regularity on the homeschooling creatively
yahoo group. Again, my point is not that ADHD, or Aspergers, or
whatever don’t exist but that some of these diagnoses are made way more
often than seems warranted and others are needed primarily to access services
or modes of learning that do not seem all that specialized. It is
interesting that many homeschooling moms find that the diagnosis is not
that important to them when they can spend time observing their child
closely and working out what works. As Melissa said recently

It took me months of hospital living to get
to a point where I could be "frank, firm, and persistent" with doctors.
I had to assimilate the knowledge that although they knew more about
fighting cancer than I did, I knew more about my child. I am the
authority on that subject.

Only giftedness, in my view, isn’t really the same as these other things. It is well within the normal range of learning behaviour and achievement. (Actually, I would be prepared to argue that Autistic Specrum Disorders and ADHD are, too.) The issue is that that normal range is really wide. Much wider than a school system based on "age appropriate" grades can cope with. It is hard enough to teach 20 or 30 kids at a time but when you start thinking about the real range of ability in a group of same age kids that size, the mind boggles. This is particularly true in the lower grades. The age at which children acquire the fine motor skills necessary to hold a pencil and control it in a way that will allow them to write varies considerably. Arbitrarily deciding that the average age at which children can do so is "normal" and that those who acquire the skill earlier are "accelerated" and those who have yet to do so are "delayed" is a discursive trick. An amazingly successful one. But it is no more "true" for that. (I’m not sure what the average age is for that skill, nor am I convinced the school standards are based on that kind of scientific evidence with or without evidence of the wide variation around the average. My point is, that even knowing that wouldn’t change the fact that "normal" covers a huge range.)

But what that means is that in the school system you have relatively limited options for your "gifted" child. Either you argue like a demon, get her tested, and have her put in a class with kids 2 years older so that she can work at a level that is more appropriate to her abilities. Or she is bored intellectually in a group of kids with whom she is more suited to spend time with socially and who are interested in the same kinds of topics and so on. Add to this the gradual colonization of children’s days by school, and you can’t even take the second option and supplement school with a whole range of "enrichment" activities because there just aren’t enough hours in the day and your kid would be exhausted.

Of course some school boards, like mine, have a separate program for "gifted" kids. I don’t know much about it, but it means more travel time for the kids in that program and only socializing with other kids who are similarly  "special". I mostly avoided it because I just didn’t want to spend lots of time and money arguing for something that might not work anyway.

So my solution was to skip the "gifted" route altogether and just try to work with the kid I have. I think that is why I am so drawn to Cindy’s approach. I’m more concerned with discovering and nurturing Tigger’s gifts than with her "giftedness". And as I move along this path, I find that I move farther and farther away from a model that looks like school. In particular, I don’t have a strong sense of "school" subjects and "extra-curricular" subjects. I am lucky and don’t have to report on progress or anything else. But even if I did, I think I would move towards a model where I kept track of what learning Tigger did and put it into a form that the authorities wanted rather than make her care about the form the authorities want. As I understand it, that’s what Melissa does, and why she keeps a separate "learning notes" blog and is so crazy about planners. (She doesn’t plan much, she uses them to record what gets done.)

To bring in the conversation I’ve been having with Patience, I’m happy to call that unschooling. Mainly because the logic of school does not fit with what I do. I participate actively in encouraging and supporting the learning that my child engages in. But I don’t school her. That’s why one of the other Nearcircle groups I’m on is the Unschooling one. I know that there are folks out there who will argue that there is a right way to unschool and if you’ve ever let a workbook into your home your not doing unschooling, etc. etc. But I really don’t care what those people think. I’ve found enough people who call themselves unschoolers who interpret it the way I do, more or less, and they have been an inspiration and a support. If I avoided associating with them because I didn’t like the unschooling label, my homeschooling journey wouldn’t be anywhere near as rewarding as it is.

And on the same principle, no matter how uncomfortable I feel with the "gifted" label, I am meeting people who are enriching my life. So I’ve joined the Nearcircle group and I’m figuring out a way to be with these folks, too.

I’m going to stop there but there is a whole other post about achievement orientation and productivism and how that impacts on "gifted" kids. I think there is probably more to say about experts and our confidence as parents, as well, but maybe we all just need to read that quote from Melissa and think about it the next time we are worried that maybe we can’t meet our kids needs. At least it gives us a better sense of the appropriate role of experts.

This will become clear later.

I meant to take a photo of Donner for you but she went out again before I had a chance and I probably won’t see her until breakfast time.

She is a very dominant cat. She’s in charge of the territory behind the house. And I’m pretty sure she patrols a rather large part of the immediate neighbourhood. She is also quite talkative with a wide range of different sounds. She greets us when she comes in and seems to say thank you after she eats.

And she is messing with our minds. Seriously.

When I first let her out, after she was spayed back in January, I bought her a collar with a little metal tag engraved with her name and phone number. She wore it for a while and then it got lost. My neighbour found it on the fence where she sneaks through to another yard. She wore it for a while and then it went missing again. I looked around and couldn’t find it. I figured it got stuck on a hedge or a fence somewhere in her vast territory. So I got her a new collar and a new engraved tag. This one was red with white paw prints and a little bell. It got lost within about 2 days. I figured she didn’t like the bell. Probably cramped her style.

But by this time she had been out a lot and she always came home so I was more comfortable with her being out without a collar and tag. I didn’t waste any more money on collars. I guess this was about April. All summer she has been out most of the time. She comes in to eat every morning and most evenings. She also catches small animals. I don’t know if she eats them or not.

Yesterday we went to stock up on cat food for when we are away. And I decided that maybe the friend who will be living here might be more comfortable if Donner had a collar and a name tag in case she got lost or hurt or something. So I bought a collar. The only one left in a style I like (a safety style) was in pastel colours but I bought it anyway. The engraving machine was being fixed so I got a cheap tag with a paper insert. Tigger duly filled in the information and put the collar on Donner last night before she went out.

This morning, Tigger was up first. She let Donner in. I was awake but not in the room but I could hear. Donner had a bell. Tigger looked at the collar as she was putting the food down. Red, with white paw prints, a bell, and an engraved tag with her name and phone number. WTF?

I can picture the Far Side cartoon. Donner has a stash of collars under the shed and she goes down there and changes into a new one muttering "This will really mess with their minds. Bwahaha."

I haven’t seen her this evening, though I heard a bell a little while ago. So heaven knows which collar she is wearing. And whether she has lent the bell collar to a friend to mess with our minds even further.

Edited to add another stunt. (3:16 p.m.)

I figured that Blitzen’s adjustment to the tripodal life would involve changing some of his habits. For example, Blitzen prefers to drink water out of the toilet. Even though there is a dish of water near his food, he eats and then goes in the bathroom for a drink. I know that a cat drinking out of a toilet sounds complicated and it requires a certain amount of skill and balance. But that’s what he likes.

I figured maybe with 3 legs, this wasn’t really going to work. I have even been trying to remember to put the lid down so he doesn’t try and end up going for a swim. But last night, when I woke up at 2:30 a.m. needing to pee, I came down and had to wait. Blitzen was having a drink. He didn’t fall in. And he didn’t have any problems getting down. He wasn’t wet, so I assume he didn’t have any problems getting up either.

This morning we couldn’t find him. We looked everywhere and he was nowhere to be found. Our house has sloped ceilings in the bedrooms and in my room the chests of drawers are set into the knee-wall. They aren’t really built in. There is an opening (with a supporting beam along the top) and they slide into the space. There are two chests of drawers with a set of shelves between. The cats have enjoyed jumping up on the shelves and then climbing onto the chest of drawers and dropping down behind them.

Tigger went upstairs to get dressed and heard a bump and a meow. She pulled out the shelves and, sure enough, Blitzen was behind there. The jump is higher getting back out. (The top shelf is lower than the top of the chest of drawers.) Glad someone heard him though I had suspected and might have pulled the shelves out to look at some point.

Later… we went out to run some errands and when we got back he seemed to be missing again. We heard an odd noise. Tigger investigated. It was a door banging. He had got himself down behind the dryer and there is a hole into the side of the cabinet the sink is in (between the dryer and the washer) so he’d gone through there and was trying to get out of the cabinet. (Is there an emoticon for rolling your eyes?)

I think this means he’s feeling lots better. He sure moves fast if I open the back door for any reason. But the stitches must come out. Then we’ll see.

I never had anything called "civics" when I went to school. I think it was just part of social studies. But then in the late seventies, when I was in high school, they introduced "Canadian Studies" options in high school. Anyway, it seems like a good title.

Today we had a civics class. Or maybe a field trip. It was kind of fun. Basically there is a provincial election going on. With a referendum on a new electoral system that would be somewhat more proportional. A leaflet explaining the referendum had been sitting on the table and Tigger asked about it, so I explained the options. And she seemed interested.

For anyone interested in learning more about proportional representation, there is a non-partisan organization that has useful information — Fair Vote Canada. The group that came up with the specific proposal on the ballot is the Ontario Citizens Assembly.

We will be away on voting day so I had to go to an advance poll. There is one at the returning office for our constituency, conveniently located right next door to where Tigger takes violin lessons. So I voted. And they weren’t busy so I asked if I could bring her in and have them explain how it worked. And they did. (And then they asked her to play them a tune. It was great fun.)

(By the way, any new readers should be aware that I post in fits and starts. This is my third post today so scroll down to see other new stuff.)

Every once in a while we come home and can’t find Blitzen anywhere.

Yesterday he was here. Tigger moved the basket into the middle of the room to take the photo but it was in a corner.

He seemed happy to be moved around in it, too.

I have also left the cat carrier in the kitchen after taking him to get his pain patch removed on Saturday. I think I have said that my cats are a bit odd. They seem to like the carrier (though not necessarily going anywhere in it). I had to remove Donner from it to take him on Saturday. And this morning, here he was.

We wonder if his tail had been left out to prevent anyone closing the door and taking him someplace.

Since no one will let him outside (he is rather cross about this, btw), he likes to sit on the windowsill and look outside. For the first few days he couldn’t get up there without assistance and there were some odd moments of cat hanging by his front paws. But today he jumped up on his own. Here is a photo of the windowsill in which you can see how far it is from the floor.

He fell off a couple of times today. I think this is related to some muscle spasms on the amputated side. What remains of the leg sometimes does odd things that send him off balance. These are clearly not intentional as he makes a noise that clearly indicates his distress at what is happening. I’m hoping these are associated with the nerves healing and will stop.

I’ve decided on some criteria for letting him go back outside. His stitches must be out. They come out on Saturday. And he must be able to climb the stairs reasonably well without getting too tired. Being able to get up onto the windowsill by himself seemed like an important step that got me thinking about this.

One of the vet techs suggested that other cats might pick on him so he should be pretty strong when he goes out. I’m not sure if his sister would protect him. I think so. Even though she is generally kind of dismissive of him (hissing at him and swatting at his nose on her way past, for example), I have seen then sharing the torture of small animals they have caught. I did wonder if she was teaching him how to kill. She is clearly in charge of the territory immediately behind the house. I’ve seen her see off another cat just by staring it down.

But there is a balance between his readiness and his clear frustration with being kept inside. As I type he is sitting by the back door meowing loudly to get someone to come and let him out. When we went up to read Tigger’s bedtime story we got him to walk up
himself. He is slow. I think it frustrates him that he has to do one
step at a time (front paws, then back paws on the same
step before front paws can go up another step). It was clearly hard
work but I think he might have significantly improved by the weekend.

For those who are interested, this is what he looks like from the right side. I think the weirdest part is being shaved and it will look much less disturbing once his fur has grown back.

My mail. At the back some Koigu for socks, some Zephyr laceweight in Ruby for the Hanami stole (HT to Sara S), and a bunch of Jameson and Smith jumper weight for a foray into stranded knitting. Two colours are backordered and I’m hoping they’ll come in before I go. I have found a Canadian supplier that I like — Four Season’s Knitting. Ted told me about them and I have had good service.

I’m going to knit some hats that Janine designed for a workshop. I’d love to go to one of her workshops, not least because she has the whole range of J&S colours and you can play with them in the workshop and get a feel for how to combine things. But she lives on the west coast which is a long way from here. So I invested in a shade card and made do with that. I’m reasonably happy with how it turned out.

This is Blitzen’s mail. He does love a box. I’ve taken a bunch of photos of him today but I’ll put them in a separate post.

(For those that don’t know, click on the photos to make them bigger.)

Maybe it’s me but when I see articles about people getting killed (any people, not just "our" people) in Iraq or Palestine or wherever, I don’t even read them. More of the same. Not news. And though I am outraged that it is happening, there isn’t much I can do about it and it has been going on for a while. I’m not sure how one more roadside bomb changes the situation for better or for worse.

But this week, when I was looking through the paper, I came across an article about a mainstream UK bank failing. (I’ll link to the most recent article so you can scroll through the list at the bottom of the page. Larry Elliot’s analysis is probably as decent a place as any to start. Or Will Hutton’s.) In my lifetime, I have never heard the phrase "run on the bank" used to describe a contemporary phenomenon. It has always been associated with the Great Depression of the ’30s. But that is what is happening.

As far as I can figure this is more fallout from the American sub-prime scandal. But it is not only that.

It is also about expecting the majority of households to own their own homes rather than rent. And having a policy climate that makes renting unattractive, insecure, and stigmatized.

It is about a society that expects all adults to be in debt. Not just for mortgages but for a whole lot more. And a banking system that is making money out of that debt and offering it to more and more people, allowing many to borrow several times their annual income for a mortgage along with higher and higher proportions of their income in other kinds of consumer debt.

And it is about governments pursuing economic policies that rely on consumer spending, and those high debt loads, to "keep the economy going".

At the same time, the big Canadian news is that the dollar is at par with the US dollar for the first time since the ’70s (that headline of Larry Elliot’s could run here with different content). And all the discussion is how bad the strong dollar is for our economy. Well, not all. I did hear one guy interviewed on the radio who runs a manufacturing business and talked about how with some of the difficulties a couple of years ago he looked at his business, improved the productivity, and started making sure that his customers came to him for the quality of his product and service. They even had a quote from a US customer of his that more or less said he’s pay anything for this guy’s machines.

But it makes me wonder what kind of an economy our government thinks it’s running if they want it to be based on a low dollar.

And the upshot of all of this for most of us in our daily lives either right now or at some point in the foreseeable future is much more scary than the implications of whatever warmongering those same governments are up to. (Though that war mongering is being done with our money. Money that could be better spent. In fact, spending it on almost anything would be better spent, but I digress.) And yet, that is not what I hear all the cool lefties talking about. There’s a lot about the war. Not so much about mortgage lending or consumer debt or any of that stuff.

And yet this economy, based on low dollars and massive consumer debt is completely unsustainable. In ways I can’t even begin to imagine. Scarily unsustainable. I might just go put my head back in the sand and go on my merry way.

I saw a bumper sticker the other day: "If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention." Trouble is, I don’t want to go around be outraged all the time. Impotent rage seems kind of counter-productive. Must think of small, productive things I can do.

I may have mentioned before that Tigger has written an article for New Moon. We heard from the editorial board last week and they are happy with it but would like her to write a bit more to introduce the piece. There are a few suggestions. So we went to the library and found a few things online. But I’ve been busy so nagging people to actually write, much less using some more effective method of supporting her and helping her actually get words on paper, hasn’t been happening.

Today I tried some suggestions and then an argument. I even said that she should stop moping around. I had work to do. She had work to do. That ended up with telling her to go skip for a while until her brain started working and then go sit in the living room and write things down. She did that. Well, except for much of the writing things down part. She decided she could only skip for so long and needed to think more before she could write.

So she decided to bake chocolate chip cookies.

In the realms of ways to procrastinate about writing, that has got to be in the top ten list. I think there might be extra points for the fact that it is an activity that everyone is likely to think twice about telling you not to do. Who doesn’t want cookies?

I still made her write. And when she said she didn’t know what to write (despite the fact that we had had a conversation while walking to the store to get milk, and cookie baking supplies) I told her I didn’t care. "Get a notebook and a pencil. Put the timer on. And write something" So she did. She won’t show me but I don’t care. I might make her do it again tomorrow (not the cookies, the writing). And then we can see where we are and maybe knock out a cracking introduction.

Lest you think it is all injured cats and work around here…

I thought I’d provide a recipe that we’re using to deal with the major glut of little tomatoes. There are a bunch of different varieties. Some are red. Some are yellow. Some are round. Some are pear shaped. Some we planted. Some planted themselves. I have no idea what the variety names are but I seem to have an awful lot of cherry tomatoes.

Warning, as some of you know, I’m not a big fan of the low fat diet. Particularly when it comes to olive oil. And if you want to use some cheaper oil or use less oil, the resulting flavour is at your own risk.

Roast Tomato Sauce

Wash and put in a single layer in a baking pan. Put a clove or two of garlic in there (no need to peel or chop). Some oregano (or whatever suitable herb you grow). Maybe some salt and pepper though I’ve been forgetting that. Pour a whole bunch of olive oil over it (enough to roast the tomatoes and provide some oil for the sauce). Stick it in a hot oven for about 30 minutes.

Once it is cooled down I squish it through one of those conical strainer things to get rid of all the skins and most of the seeds. It makes the sort of sauce that just coats your pasta. Very tasty. I bet it would be good on chicken or something, too.

We’ve been freezing this to use later. I’m pretty sure it isn’t acidic enough to can.

I thought about taking some photos but forgot. And then I figured it was more important to provide a recipe than a picture.