Bugs in the yard

Sunburst, bustling with excitement, pulled me outside yesterday to have a gander at this:



This is her bird's eye view from the wooden plank swing out back. Maybe I'm getting old-- I didn't see anything. She had to point it out to me.

It's RIGHT THERE!



Ew. Lovely.

What we have here is some kind of winged ant-like creature perched atop a white spider. Apparently Sunburst watched the entire battle scene with rapt fascination as the white spider fell. She thought maybe the victor would now proceed to dispatch a quarry of eggs in the spider's head... but it doesn't appear to be the case. We crouched there together and watched for a little bit as the victor worked at moving his victim ever so slowly along, and I was reminded of how much I take for granted. And how NOT at one with the universe I am these days.

But Sunburst? She noticed all this from the swing!

When she came in for lunch she began regaling me with tales of nature. How the mouse she found in the yard that morning was covered in maggots, and did I know that pirates used to eat maggots?

"We're eating lunch," I said.

"So were the pirates," she said.

And about that maggoty mouse in the yard? Without my knowledge Sunburst grabbed a plastic sack from the house, and used it to pick up and dispose of the mouse. AND she washed her hands.

Just when I thought I knew my kids... I think we've crossed some kind of threshold.

A Taste of Waldorf

You may say I'm a dreamer. But I'm not the only one.
~John Lennon

Remember that dream I was talking about? I heard from so many of you in the comments and through private emails echoing this dream. It seems that I'm not the only one. The people have spoken. They want a community-created platform that's inclusive of all Waldorf-inspired homeschoolers-- from those who homeschool using Waldorf exclusively to those who like to combine their Waldorf-inspiration with other things.

I love that this isn't just my dream anymore.


Over the last few days I combined all your brilliant ideas and created two things:

1. A Taste of Waldorf --a community Waldorf-inspired blog!
2. Waldorf-Inspired Homeschoolers Web Ring!
   

Go there. Join if you like. Let's see where our dreams can take us...

Buried treasure

In our first grade Language Arts block last year, I introduced the letter "X" through the story of Pirate Jack looking for buried treasure. We accompanied him on his journey-- pacing out the steps with him and pretending to dig alongside him for the bounty. It wasn't long before our mutual work uncovered a large treasure chest. Upon opening it, the pirate discovered more gold and precious jewels than any of us will ever see in our lifetime. He would be a rich man, indeed, if he were interested in all this "wealth." But he wasn't. He kept digging through that chest until he uncovered the real wealth. And old, dilapidated book of stories that belonged to his great, great grandpappy. The pages were loose, the spine ripped, the cover well-worn and askew... but Pirate Jack was beside himself with joy. He walked away from the gold and jewels clutching the old book to his chest and grinning madly.

I'm wont to agree with Pirate Jack.

Recently we have come into possession of a large lot of lovely, old books. We are a family passionate about reading. Addicted, one might say, to the pleasure of well-written, simple, pure-hearted books. Surely, we read a bit of candy here and there. But lovely old books are a staple of our literary diet. And nothing tickles me more.

I was fortunate enough to find a few of these gems sifting through stacks at the used bookstore and in library discard. Others were given to my children as gifts from an elderly neighbor who is cleaning out her attic. And the last one, The Wee Scotch Piper, I found in a Scottish shop while Einstein was trying to buy a new drone reed for his bagpipes. I thought it was a decorative display, but to my utter delight, it was for sale!

The one book of the lot that was the most surprising find of all is Our Singing World: Singing and Rhyming, a U.S. school song book copyright 1950 by Ginn and Company, republished in 1957. I picked it up at the used bookstore for a mere $2. It's chock full of songs that we have already come to know and love through various Waldorf resources and contains countless others that we WILL come to know and love. It's a real treasure.

As an added bonus, every song has musical notation. I plopped open the book and picked out a morning song aptly titled, "Morning Song." I started singing it, and before long the girls started singing along with me. Sunburst came over to where I was sitting and asked if she could have a turn looking at the words. I handed the book over to her, and next thing I knew she had hauled over the toy piano and began trying to plink out the notes. YES!

So what's a mom to do, but grab out a pentatonic flute and play along with her. She had to fudge it a bit since the toy piano doesn't give you a whole lot of scale to work with. I had to fudge it a little bit too, since the song has more notes than the pentatonic scale. We ended up having a little talk about "fudging" it, musically. I'm planning on sticking with this same song for a week or so to see where it takes us.

Morning Song (Swiss Folk Song translated by Margaretta Wassali)

The sun is shining brightly. Get up, Katerlin.
The birds are singing sweetly. Get up, Katerlin.

chorus
Hurry up, out of bed. Time for breakfast, sleepy head.
Ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling. Get up, sleepy head.

The rabbits jump and scamper. Get up, Katerlin.
The cows are in the pasture. Get up, Katerlin.

chorus

As if that wasn't joy enough, there's also a knitting song. A knitting song! And yes, I'll post it soon. Sunburst just cast-on for a new project, so I think we'll be singing this one next. But right now, I've got to go clear a shelf to hold all this glorious treasure.

So I have this idea...

For the last several months I've been dreaming about a way to connect all these lovely, inspirational homeschooling blogs. I originally posted this idea to Lucie on her (now defunct) Homeschool Diary blog. She had asked about visions for the direction of the (soon to be defunct) Wonder Homeschool site.-- Lucie is a genius. Her Science Smorgasboard page comes pretty close to what I envisioned, but it's only up for the next two weeks. After that, my like-minded and lovely homeschoolers, our blogs are pretty much free-floating entities.

Basically, my idea is very, very simple. I want to see what other similar-minded homeschoolers are doing. How the lessons are being applied and interpretted. How people are using ideas in their own home speaks volumes to me. I want to list them. Be able to sort through them. Archive them, if you will, even if only by links. I realize that links aren't the safest way to archive anything, but it's the easiest. And they take you directly into someone else's homeschooling world. I love that.

I think there has to be a better way to share what we're all doing. So many of you have the coolest ideas-- complete with pictures! I can bookmark them to death for my own use, but it gets unwieldy. I want to be able to say, ok, Grade 3... what's out there? How are other people handling Old Testament stories or housebuilding? --and be able to click on these things and really see how it works outside of a school classroom. So many of us are posting our ideas anyway. I just want to see them organized.

Is that too much to ask?

We're all one family here, scattered across the globe, trying to achieve the same thing-- a workable, inspired home education for our children. To the best of our abilities. Classroom teachers freely share their ideas. Why can't we?

I'd love to hear what you all think!

Dust and heels

Friday was the blessed day they came and hauled it all away.



Piece by piece. Bit by bit. Fifty years worth of dust. Gone!

I'm so elated! And those are just the air return ducts. The HVAC got cleaned out a bit as well... though exactly how well remains to be seen. I'm not running to turn the air on just yet.

In other news I went and had an MRI on my heel on Saturday. This also elates me because I'm hoping that someone will finally give me a real diagnosis on my heel pain. If we know what's wrong, then maybe we can fix it. Of course it has been almost six months since the car accident-- it would have made more sense to me to have done this sooner... but what do I know. I'm just the person attached to the heel.

Been there, done that

create your own visited states map

Forty-three states and counting. Though I've only actually lived in six of them for longer than two weeks. Einstein and I spent a long ago summer before kids driving around the country, pitching a tent, and seeing the sites. We went from the deep South up the coast to Maine, across to Washington State, and down the West coast. We hit all the major attractions-- Statue of Liberty, Ben & Jerry's, Acadia State Park, a Dead show in Albany, Niagra Falls, Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone, Powell's Bookstore, The Redwoods, Zion National Monument, and everything in between. Gas was 98 cents a gallon that summer!

Sunburst joined our traveling family eight years ago, and because we've since toted her along with us, she has seen her fair share of the country as well. She's been working on her own "been there" map of the states since just before our move from Texas. She works on it sporadically, maybe every couple of months she'll sew a new state on. Not because we travel every couple of months, but because her pile of "been there" states has not been exhausted yet. She hasn't even come close!

I caught her working on it again, the other day.

I copied the artful map from the very cute book The Scrambled States of America as a template. I cut the states out from wool felt, matching the colors from the book, and then handed Sunburst a needle and some embroidery thread. Her sewing skills have greatly improved from the first few attempts.

I've promised Moonshine that I would make her a map just like this one when she was old enough. We're slated to move again next summer. I think by then she'll be more than ready!

Ew, that smell!

Do you ever find that you wake up in the middle of the night scratching your eyes out and sneezing uncontrollably? Even in midwinter? Does your family seem plagued with months and months of colds and coughs and allergies? Does your house have an unmistakable funk that comes and goes, and yet after months of investigating you can't find the source?

Did you ever think in a million years that it was because you wash laundry?

Me neither.

We've had a funk in our house for awhile now. It mostly comes and goes, but the sneezing. The coughing. The itching and feeling miserable has lingered throughout. I finally gave up and thought maybe this is just what a house with a crawlspace smells like. Or we're allergic to the midwest. Since we moved here my otherwise healthy family has been sick, sick, sick. We finally bought a HEPA air filter for the bedroom, and that has helped, but the smell is back with a vengeance. Now that the weather has turned nice, we've had the air off, and a putrid funk has descended upon us like a moldy, disease-born fart through the cold air return in the top of our hallway. The utility room has it going on, too. One breath of that air leaves me nauseated, and FINALLY we have discovered the source!

For the last 18 months our washing machine has been draining into our HVAC system. This is the bottom of the HVAC unit and the well below. It's not supposed to be a cesspool.

Not a pretty sight is it?

By chance I happened to be running a load of wash when the fix-it guy came a couple of days ago. He opened my furnace and out poured a bubbling froth. Apparently our landlord ran a line from the AC to the sewer pipes to collect the condensation. I guess he didn't figure on the pressure exerted by the washing machine draining. The water flows where it can since the pipes in this house are old and small. With this new bit of line in, some of the the water gets pushed up and out into the well of my HVAC. Where it sits and gets warm and cold and grows stuff and slowly evaporates until the next time I wash a load.

So what's a little gray water, eh? I mean, could it actually hurt you to breathe the vapors off this for 18 months? Yes. Despite the fact that it's freaky, there are two things that concern me:

1. Mold spores. I'm no expert, but these filters looks pretty bad to me.

2. Human waste particles. Sewage. I have a baby in the house, and there's the issue of cloth diapers. Anybody who uses cloth diapers knows that a good dunk in the toilet doesn't wash it all off. Know what I mean?

So what's in the air YOU breathe?

May Day

And the May month
Flaps its glad green leaves
Like wings...
--Thomas Hardy


Yesterday we stumbled upon some May Faire fun. These lovely Morris Dancers put on a show and then orchestrated some fine Maypole dancing. The last time we did any sort of grand May Faire celebrating in public was five years ago! Since then, with a lack of community activities, we've been constructing a very low scale Maypole in our own yard and celebrating amongst ourselves. Which is fine, but this was a nice treat for us.

And here are those happy Morris Dancers!

Making Dolls

Over the last month or so we've been knee-deep in doll-making. While we were at The Gateway Arch bookstore over Spring Break, Sunburst and I honed in on a little booklet entitled Easy-to-Make Early American Folk Dolls. Sunburst has been wanting to sew stuff for a while now, and she was still looking for a project for our local homeschool History Fair, so it seemed like a perfect opportunity. And it was something that Moonshine could help with, too.

Tonight we fastened the dolls onto the presentation board with wire and schlepped it over to the library. I vastly underestimated what a load of work it was going to be. We made EIGHTEEN different dolls, including two that weren't in the book! The girls both did a fair share of that work, but of course I had to help a lot. And I don't mind that. We all had a load of fun! For Moonshine it was all about loving the dolls. Each new one was her "favorite," and she gave most of them names. Sunburst enjoyed the hand and machine sewing, but it was also a bit of a history lesson. She knows about early America-- the colonists, the revolution, and folks moving West-- all from reading American Girl and Little House books. So we took her prior knowledge and added some dolls and a timeline to it. It was great. Or at least, I thought it was great. The girls were really into it, and Sunburst really understood the ins and outs of each doll and why it fit the time period.

But then we got to the library and she gave her presentation. She stood with her back to the small group of parents and kids and numbly whispered. My extroverted, energetic, non-stop talking, forever fidgeting, bright-eyed, confident, sharp-as-a-tack daughter is suddenly a lot like her dear, old mom. Shy and totally freaked out to be in the spotlight. Now, I've long since grown out of that. I'm no longer a barnacle on my mom's leg... but Sunburst? How did this happen? And what can we do?

Luckily, Moonshine got up and chitter-chatted in her usual way. You almost have to gag her to get her to be quiet these days. She willingly told the names of all the dolls and the history of those names and so on and so forth. On the way home I overheard her offering to give Sunburst's next presentation for her, too. Free of charge.

Here are some close-ups of a few of the dolls (including the one made with homespun yarn.)

Busy, Busy Spring!

What can I say. It's Spring, and we've been busy!

We finished up our math block by building and exploring multiplication tables with the math board. We traced around our largest mixing bowl, hammered in ten nails, wrote in the numbers, and started wrapping out some number patterns with different colored yarns. Below is counting by 1's, 2's, and 3's. Math is a beautiful, magical thing!



And then we trucked right on into a Saint's and Heroes block. I'm pulling resources for this block from several places-- singular library books (for example The Man Who Loved Books, Brother Sun and Sister Moon, and some Tomie dePaola books,) collections (The Giant at the Ford, and The Lady of Ten Thousand Names) and a bit of curriculum-in-a-box (Christopherus Saints and Heroes.) So far, so good. Rather than just pull these stories out of the air, I decided to ground them with our story heroine Clara. These are the stories Clara treasures, and she wrote them all in a purple book which she carries in her satchel at all times. Right now she's sharing them with Beremiz, and hence, Sunburst as well.

Sunburst has been knee-deep in the embroidery zone since I picked up a charming Japanese book that I saw over at SouleMama's blog. Oh, how easily I can convince myself to spend money when I'm thinking in terms of homeschooling resources! Sunburst hungrily combined two designs from the book, and because she was so smitten with it, as a joke I suggested she embroider her entire Saints and Heroes block rather than making a book. She thought it was a great idea, but still wants to make a book, too. A purple one, of course, just like Clara's! So we're doing both.

Here's how we're doing the embroidery. I tell a story. She tells me what representational picture she would like to embroider. I cut the 6x6 square of linen and freehand the design for her with a #2 pencil. She sticks it in her tambour frame, selects her colors, and goes to work. So far she's just doing plain backstitch. Here are the representational images of St. Francis (the bird singing praises to God) and Elizabeth of the Roses:



I'm thinking at the end we'll sew them all together into a wall hanging. Perhaps a ready reminder of folks who chose a higher path isn't such a bad idea for wall art for a child dipping her feet in the waters of the nine-year-change.

In the last two weeks we've also been throwing belated birthday parties (check out Moonshine's cupcakes, both regular and gluten-free varieties, replete with faux sweetheart roses,) hiking/biking, letterboxing, and trying to suck up every ounce of sunlight we can-- weeding the yard and planting flowerbeds.



We've also been doing a ton of clay modeling and wet-on-wet painting now that I've FINALLY found a resource that speaks to me-- but that's worth another post on its own.

But for now, the vegetable garden needs planting, the grass needs mowing, and the children want to go outside! Ah, busy, busy Spring.

A big attitude and a little math (Part 2)

Our next math story juxtaposed the behavior of two eight-year-old girls named Clara. Our regular Clara, the one that Sunburst readily identifies with, played the compassionate helper. The other Clara was mouthy and rude, though she came around in the end. It was an interesting lesson to create because Sunburst's behavior has dipped into this other Clara category lately, and it was remarkable to watch her listening and sympathizing with both Claras. I think it helped.

In this story, the other Clara mouthed off to the King's son. Luckily, her punishment from the King was merely a challenge. She was to report to the royal palace for some sort of mathematics quiz. Unfortunately, the other Clara didn't really know much math, so we spent some time helping her prepare. -- A welcome chance for me to see exactly how much Sunburst has really retained.

First we timed ourselves using holey cards. This was great for Sunburst to practice her time-telling skills timing me. And I noticed that she uses her fingers more often when adding certain numbers, so I had her make a couple of flash cards with those problems. Next we played around with some Math Wrap-ups, printed out a couple of worksheets, and broached the subject of place value again, because you never know just what the King's quiz was going to entail.

Sunburst, being my bigger-faster-louder child, was thrilled with the prospect that the numbers could just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. We learn most things under the guise of "Clara's love of learning" so it was really great when Clara shouted from the rootops, "I can count to ONE BILLION!" It certainly got Sunburst's attention.



Then we had another day of gorgeous weather, and not sure what to do next, I ended up creating a game called "The Human Calculator." I gave her the sums, and Sunburst enjoyed jumping from number to number to create the problems. She even game me a turn on the calculator, though admittedly I'm far from being able to jump just yet. All in all it was great! She replayed the scenario for Einstein, her dad, when he came home.



As a last fun thing, I presented Sunburst with a computer game that Einstein came up with using NetLogo. It's actually an Ed/Psych experiment designed to explore learning patterns, but once I saw it I knew it was perfect for our story. He helped me create an interactive Clara at the bottom of the screen that flaps her arms up and down with every correct answer.



As the Royal Quiz approached, everyone in the kingdom fell ill with the same intestinal illness. Everyone except our Clara, that is. The royal well had been contaminated, and our Clara always carts along bottled water wherever she goes. So Clara, with her knowledge of herbs, became the caretaker to everyone in the kingdom, including the king himself. In order to take care of everyone she had to manage her time extremely well. In the end everyone was nursed back to health, including the other Clara. Both Claras were ordered to appear before the King. The other Clara gave a heartfelt, sincere apology and the royal quiz took place. For the quiz I used the Martha and John math story from Path of Discovery Grade 1, which I had meant to use last year but never quite got around to it. Great fun! Then both Claras stayed for the Royal Feast where the King thanked our Clara for her loving heart, hard work, and impeccable ability to manage her time well. As a token of appreciation Clara was given this:



It was a huge surprise for Sunburst, and she has been keeping us apprised of the time every few minutes ever since.

A big attitude and a little math (Part 1)

Do you ever get the urge to flush them down the toilet?*

Sunburst has been driving me crazy! There, I said it. It's true. She's been mouthy and rude and inattentive to oh, everything we say. Her nose is almost constantly plugged into a book. And when it's not she's inadvertently doing something to make Moonshine and Kitty Bill screech! Sunburst has hit this pinching, pushing, tripping, tricking, ignoring, goading, annoying stage... and oh! I'm just at a loss with her. It could be that she's eight, do you think?

With the weather so nice and warm a couple of weeks ago, I made an executive decision to drop our language arts block and forge ahead. I was hoping that giving her some "headier" work would give her that challenge she was constantly looking for. I got the feeling that she needed to control something. Own something. Feel bigger, in a sense. And I think it worked, sort of.

We returned to our math story I was telling back in November just before the car accident. Poor Clara! You see, we had abandoned her at an inn during a terrible storm, where she and Beremiz were playing dice games to pass the time. We revisited that lesson, and then moved on to another dice game they had played in our absence, The Matterhorn. (I love how these story people seem to go on without us sometimes.)

The Matterhorn is a great game for teaching number values. The jist of the game is to get up and down the mountain via rolling three dice. The mountain is comprised of two number lines, 1-12 (which is the peak) and then 12-1. You have to roll each value to climb and then decend the mountain, but luckily you can add the dice values. For example, if your first roll gives you the values 1, 2, and 2, you can make the sums 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Then you would roll again. It's supposed to be a contest between players, but we just played singularly with much shouting and cheering.



Then the weather got really warm. When it's so nice outside the kids are out the door before I've finished my morning coffee, so our next few lessons were totally off the cuff. Standing there on the back walk I eyed the sidewalk chalk and remembered how impressed Sunburst was that her friend The Artist has his own watch and is learning to tell time. Voila! A lesson was born.

I drew a huge circle on the back porch. That alone brought the kids running over with curiosity. As they walked around and around the circle I began the story.

It was finally time for Clara and Beremiz to leave the inn. He told Clara to meet him at 8:00 sharp the next morning so they could eat a quick breakfast and set off. But Clara had a problem. She didn't have a watch. Nor did she know how to tell time. Beremiz loaned her one, and we set to work on the "learning" portion.

First we added the numbers.
Next I handed Sunburst a kiddie-sized rake and set her to working the hour hand.




Once she had that down, then Sunburst set to work marking off the individual minutes.




Then, with a bamboo stake, she worked the minute hand.



The rain washed away our clock and Sunburst drew it back, every minute accounted for. At that point it was clear that Clara was ready to meet Beremiz on time, and we were off. Again. And though I didn't plan for it, a lesson emerged that touched on Sunburst's atrocious behavior. Clara and Beremiz met a bereaved mother on the side of the road. Her eight-year-old daughter had taken her own boasting and rudeness too far. She mouthed off to the King's son, and now the whole family was in hot water over it. Unless the girl would come forward and hear her punishment from the King, the family would lose its farm.

Tsk. Tsk.

Sunburst thought surely there must be something Clara could do to help.



*Larger than life toilet brought to you by Kid's Commons, a children's museum we recently visited. That's me living my dreams as I attempted to flush Sunburst down the toilet. The kids really DO love to climb down inside of it, spurred on by the actual flushing noise it makes, where they enter the bowels of a house and explore all the hidden staircases and so forth. Very cool.

Moonshine is FIVE!

Moonshine is five.
Hair to her knees.
Not really, but she begs it
Please!
Five today. Eyes alight.
She dreams of rescues by a knight
So shining. Shining!
It's such a shame that tomorrow
She'll be seventy-two.
Or Peter Pan.
She has it all memorized anyway.
Every word, every song.
She'll want you to sing along
And you will
drink the chocolate in her eyes
because she's so shining.



Moonshine, my life-is-about-the-details "middlest" child, turned five today. I was up all night sewing the dress just the way she wanted it. And of course the other dress for her doll Ella. It's a small thing, really, catering to her need for all the fancy details. She's still so incredibly dreamy and sweet I can't help myself.

So from sun-up to sundown it was a day fit for a fairy princess. Complete with waffles, wings, fairy books, flower garlands, and a cake that seemed to have grown right out of the ground! Imagine that!

Farewell Wonder Homeschool

Did you see? Have you heard? Did you know?

I just did my daily click over to Wonder Homeschool, and... I'm speechless. Almost everything is gone. Really gone! It's all going away... forever.

I don't know about you, but this shocking realization is like a kidney punch. It's like the abrupt loss of a dear friend that you see every day. Because really, I do go there every single day. Wonder Homeschool has been a huge source of inspiration for me, and I'm sure, countless many others. And now... well, it's going away.

I can't blame Lucie. I'm sure it was a ton of work. I don't know how she found the time and the resolve to keep on it for so many years. And for free, at that. But all the same... its absence will be noticed. In a huge way. Especially in this house.

Farewell Wonder Homeschool, my dear friend. And thank you Lucie. For everything!

The Uniform of Motherhood

Do you ever feel like between homeschooling and housework and trying to meet everyone's needs that you lose sight of your own needs or dreams or passions?

This past weekend I took some time off from all things motherly, housewifey, wifey, and teacherly to nurture myself. It wasn't a planned diversion from the day-to-day around here. First I had to reach my limit, feel overwhelmed and under-appreciated, and pitch a fit. Then, surprisingly, I got some time off. A mental health day, if you will.

First up I did some art journaling ala Visual Chronicles. Just one piece that totally summed up my emotional moment enough that the whole family actually understood. They got the picture way more than my beat-a-dead-horse thousand-word diatribe. I'll have to remember that for next time.

Next I surfed the web, ate chocolate and spent a couple of hours pushing fabric through my sewing machine. It was better than great! I fought the urge to do anything for anyone else. It's so easy to fall back into that sinkhole, made even harder by the fact that I have this huge pile of children's mending and good intentions sitting on my desk. Instead, I concentrated on me. Me. ME! And my needs.

Oh, the irony! I made myself an apron.

I've never owned an apron before. I don't even come from apron folk. But I picked through the mess of fabric in my closet and came out clutching an old bathroom curtain to my chest, completely re-smitten with its feminine flowers and sheer eyelety goodness.

At first glance this apron seems like a big joke. Einstein thought so, too. It's sheer, white fabric. Completely useless for wiping your hands on the edges with wild abandon or catching spills or doing the real work of life. Not exactly a workhorse. But look again, I say. I've been doing that work for years without any barrier whatsoever. Just me and the sludge of life ensconced together in this domesticated dance. Just me and the sludge.

Let's face it. As a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom with three kids, there's not much time for my needs. On good days I get my hair brushed and my clothes remain unscathed by the various body fluids emitted by small children. I'm not particularly resentful of the snot or its liquidy cousins, it's just something I've become accustomed to as an accesory to motherhood. I wear it. Or it wears me. At the end of the day I can't tell. The uniform of motherhood. Be one with the snot.

This apron, by contrast, is not a sludge-catcher. Oh no! It's counter to how I feel on a day-to-day basis. It's the Anti-snot. I tie it on and my whole mood changes. It wraps its little flowers around my aura and softens my edges. And when my edges are soft... well, that transfers to the entire household, you know?

Now I'm singing, "I feel pretty," while I sling mash and wipe butts. Who's the workhorse now?

Mama said there'd be days like this

© Schooling from the Heart

Treasure in the woods

Earlier this week, homeschooling took us on a whirlwind tour of a local park nature trail where we followed clues and found our very first letterbox! Go us!

We carved up our own stamps that morning, threw some books together and bound them with crochet cotton, and hit the trail. It was FABULOUS! I'm totally smitten with the idea of mixing artistry, cognition, nature, and mystery. Not only is it good for the brain, it's good for the soul.

I had Sunburst read the clue outloud, and she and Moonshine worked hard at sleuthing it out. We made wrong turns and back-tracked and read the clues again and again.

Sunburst: "You will come to a T intersection... Oh, look! This is sort of like a 'T.'"
Mom: "Here's a huge, fallen tree, but is it the right one?"
Moonshine: "I don't see a footbridge."
Sunburst: "The clue says, 'Don't blink or you'll miss it.'"
Moonshine: "I think we must have blinked."

We finally found the treasure, a small plastic container, hidden in the wet leaves under a footbridge. We had to really dig around for it, but there it was, as promised. We carried the box over to a fallen tree and sat there admiring the logbook entries and hand-carved stamp. We stamped the logbook, added a message, stamped our own books, and carefully sealed the box back up and placed it back into hiding. It felt grand and lovely and extremely satisfying, and the woods smelled so good.



Einstein caught up with us on our way back to the car, and to not leave him out of the fun, we turned around and did it all again, only letting him sleuth out the clues. The girls were very cute about it-- helping him make the same wrong turns we did. It was fun for the whole family! And we got outside, in the thick of nature, which doesn't happen as much as I'd like.

On the way home we started plotting to place our own letterboxes. There are only four in our county. Only four! In the spirit of the game, we've got to do our part. Einstein and I have been out scouting around for the perfect places and staying up late designing stamps. We crack ourselves up.

A huge part of the draw is the artistry of hand-carved stamps-- that personal touch. Leaving a hand-crafted treasure out in the woods speaks to me of trust, faith, and human connection. Someone made this, and in sharing the stamp, they are sharing a bit of themselves. With complete strangers. With all the crazy things that go on in our world, how cool is that? And how important! It speaks volumes. Not just to me, but to our children as well. It's a message I want them to hear loud and clear.

Initially, I thought this stamp carving business sounded crazy hard. But it's not. Hand-carved stamps are not hard to make. We're no experts, but here's what we did:

At the craft store I bought a small block of Mastercarve and an X-acto knife. I made a pencil image on paper and pressed the Mastercarve onto it to transfer the image. Then I carefully, gingerly cut out the white areas, about 1/16 - 1/8 inch deep with the X-acto knife. My depth wasn't precise or even, I just tried to mimic what most stamps look like. My first attempt was crude and fell into pieces after a few stampings. But I used the same drawing and more carefully tried again. This time it was better.



Originally, I read online that kids can make stamps with Artgum erasers and table knives. This did NOT work out for us. It was way too crumbly. Instead, they drew images and I cut them out from the Mastercarve. The more simple the images, the easier it is to cut them. And I love how they all have a different feel to them.

If it helps, Atlas-Quest has a simple stamp-carving tutorial.

Rather than purchase them, we made small logbooks for the trail with leftover cardstock scraps and acid-free copy paper. Our books measured 4 1/4" x 5 1/2". I used a tiny hole punch to make four holes along one side, about 1/4" from the edges. Then I had the girls sew them up using the Japanese stab binding technique. Again, here's another great tutorial.

For more information on letterboxing, be sure to check out:
The Letterboxer's Companion by Randy Hall
http://www.letterboxing.org/
http://www.letterboxing.org/kids/
http://www.letterboxing.info/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterboxing

M is for Michigan

M is for mango.
And Michigan, apparently.

Carschooling... who knew?