Strewsday Tuesday: Hunting for Heffalumps

My little people have been calling our canyon the Hundred Acre Wood. Ed and I find Winnie the Pooh awfully annoying, sorry Mr. Milne, but all three kids love the stories. (We found a whole bunch of vintage A.A. Milne in a free box once at a used book sale, before both of us had decided we're not big fans of The Bear.)

"Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?"
-Winnie the Pooh

Anyway, Isaiah discovered a canyon that connects to ours at a sharp angle, with a somewhat hidden entrance, which he christened Heffalump Hollow. He reeeeally wanted us all to take a visit, so we went early this morning.

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities."
-Theodore Geisel (Dr. Suess)

John Paul was really looking for elephants and vacillated between excitement and terror.

"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."
-George Smith Patton, War as I Knew It, 1947

When we found the Hollow, Isaiah proceeded to take us down a nearly sheer rock face and John Paul and I nearly tumbled to our deaths. I was already a bit cross and I really grumbled it up then. (Rock climbing in volcanic dirt is not the favorite activity of most 6-month-pregnant ladies.) We made it safely back up the rocks and I insisted Isaiah find a safer way in for us all.

"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."
-Mark Twain

It didn't exist.

"Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica."
-Stephen Leacock

So I sat in the shade on the edge while the three of them scrambled about. It was a beautiful hidden place, quite wet from a recent rain.

"Trust that little voice in your head that says "Wouldn't it be interesting if..." And then do it."
-Duane Michals, "More Joy of Photography"

Our little adventure segued into a botany lesson when I realized I was sitting near several green patches, any of which might have been poison ivy, only I couldn't quite recall what it looks like....

"Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."
-G.K. Chesterton

So the hunt was cut short and we booked it home. I stripped everyone and started the washer (extra soap, hot water!) and we all showered, in hot water, with plenty of lavender castile soap. Then we all looked on the computer and we decided not only did we see poison ivy on our hike, but actually our canyon has been full of it for weeks.

?

Maybe it's a good look-alike, but our pediatrician did warn us recently that our particular canyon tends to be full of it during the spring. Maybe we have a natural immunity or something! I know we do to poison sumac, which grew THICKly in our old yard. Our neighbors were deathly allergic but we found it excellent for crafts, all those nice bendable stalks!

"The hardest thing about reality is returning to it after an hour inside your child's mind."
-Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I think I'll let the children go back to lizard hunting and observation, which has been a favorite activity this week. Most are docile but their most recent catch was an angry biter. Both Rosie and Isaiah were covered with suction-bite marks (they don't actually have teeth) and they mostly deserved it! Better harmless lizard bites than a family outbreak of poison ivy, I'd say.

"I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally."
-Calvin Trillin

We're all designing some woodworking plans this week, which is great because it involves a lot of math. Isaiah really enjoys math when it results in tangible THINGS, like a new train table. Ours is decades old and has been repaired many times, but it's on its last leg. So when Ed found a bunch of nice waste pine at work, we decided that would be our next family wood project. (All three of our kids play with their wooden train set every day, hours if it is raining.)

"You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea."
-Pablo Picasso

Anyway, several hours have passed and no one is complaining of itchiness, so that's a positive. Hope you and your little people have a great week!

"Whoever wants to understand much must play much."
-Gottfried Benn

Strewsday Tuesday: Where Have You Been?

Between stress and the recurrence of morning sickness, it's been, may I say, a bad week.

I knew this would be a stressful month, and I thought bentos would be a nice distraction for me. However, instead I've been focusing very intently on my little people. And staying off the internet.

"When the student is ready, the master appears."
~Buddhist Proverb

Sometimes the internet is a helpful diversion and sometimetimes it feeds stress.

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
~Thomas Huxley

This week we've been back in the swing of making all our own bread. We don't eat a ton of bread, as I avoid wheat in our menu at both breakfast and dinner, but even so, it requires quite a bit of bread to get us through the week. The children LOVE making it. And there's a lot of math and science in breadbaking. Not to mention economics, as it saves us a pretty penny... since the only stuff I will buy costs between $3.50 and $4.50 a loaf. Ouch!

"I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught." ~Winston Churchill

More time in the the canyons and the parks. Rosie wants to learn the name of every flowering thing she sees, and Isaiah wants to learn the name of every rock and pebble. Need to aquire a few more nature guides!

"We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself."
~Lloyd Alexander

(Don't know Lloyd Alexander??? We adore him around here. Best read-alouds ever. And as a bonus, Dad or Mom will want just one more chapter, too.)

Isaiah continues his blog of drawings at www.isaiahsimages.blogspot.com. It's fun to see him so motivated. In addition, he's chosen to start a journal in which he writes every day. I find when projects like this are internally motivated, the outcome is far more exciting and 'educational' than when I plan and asign them. Sometimes it just takes a little person being ready, then finding the spark of inspiration. In this case, it was Eustace from Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

"The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions."
-Bishop Mandell Creighton

John Paul is into my belly- a lot. He talks to the baby and about the baby constantly. "Hold the baby. Kiss the baby. Come out baby." We have a particularly nice book of unborn baby photos we all look at frequently. Does that make it more real to him? Lots of age-appropriate discussion of human anatomy and how babies get born.

"I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly."
~Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

And, I think I have mastered my own granola recipe. It invovles soaking or sprouting several of the ingredients, then mixing, then almost dehydrating in the oven at 170 for 12 hours. Involved, yes, but SO worth it. I'm planning to post it, as well as our bread recipe and a couple other things I've been working on (while I was supposed to be making bento box lunches, right?). If cooking and nutrition were on the SAT, I teel ya' my kids would get full-rides to Yale and Harvard.

"We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time."
~Art Buchwald

And that is a little snippet of our week in review.

Strewsday Tuesdsay- Spring has Sprung

Supposedly every Tuesday I am doing this, though I forgot the last 2 Tuesdays in a row- woops.

Strewing is a term some homeschoolers use to describe what I call 'setting the feast' (being a foodie, I always have a food metaphor for everything). What we give our children to spark their imagination, their learning, their play, their hearts.

And it's nice to record it somewhere so you don't lie awake at night wondering 'are they really learning?' And believe me, if you've never done that, you just haven't been homeschooling long enough!

An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life.
-Author Unknown

My little people are spending most of these beautiful days in our canyon, rock climbing, observing scat (endlessly awesome to them), catching and observing lizards, setting rabbit traps (that don't catch anything), and trying to get close to deer (I SAID DON'T TRY TO PET THE DEER!). Since we will probably be moving back to the city in a few months, I am letting them free range in our 'wilderness' as much as possible... not to mention I get to sew bibs, baby hats, and cloth diapers while the play in the dirt, which is a pretty big bonus for me.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
-G.M. Trevelyan

We've been reading a lot of fairy tales from around the world every night. We really enjoyed the Italian Cinderella, Cenerentolla, last night, and we have actually worn to shreds this volume of Grimms' Fairy Tales, my favorite fairy tale collection of all times. So I just bought a new copy.

It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

Isaiah started his own blog:
www.isaiahsimages.blogspot.com
which healps me to reduce the paper clutter around here. Every week we are selecting and posting his favorite drawing of the week. Maybe other than myself as a child, I've never seen a kid spend so much intense time with a sketch book. It's good for him because he's an intense person and needs a serious outlet.

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.
-Robert Maynard Hutchins

Later today we are going to Albuquerque for my sonogram, plus a trip to Barnes & Noble, since there are no real book stores within an hour or two of our home. We spend hours in there every time we go- I'll never take a big ol' bookstore with comfy chairs for granted again. The little people are very excited to see the baby... oh, and to use our free muffin coupon in the cafe!

I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education.
-Tallulah Bankhead

I hope you all have a great week, full of good food, good books, and beautiful weather.

If you want to read more of my writing on education and mothering, check out Growing your Homeschool and The Catholic Nursing Mother's League blogs.

http://growingyourhomeschool.blogspot.com/2012/03/nourish-child-art.html
and
http://catholicbreastfeeding.blogspot.com/2012/03/mothers-list-of-clever-after-church.html#comment-form

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught."
-Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist," 1890