2014:  The Beginning of... the Rest of our Lives. 

     How did I know to write such a great segue post (below) almost two years ago?  I've decided to return to blogging to chronicle our newest educational experiment which began today.   After listening to a TED talk about unschooling last December, I got all excited about embracing the world of possibilities that opens up when you leave off workbook learning  and take advantage of all the opportunities that home-learning offers.--All the wonderful stuff about developing talents, keeping wonder alive, cultivating the joy of learning and riding pink unicorns in a fairy land of our own overstimulated imagination.   All the things that made me want to keep my kids at home in the first place that have ebbed away by the same degrees that we have added structured, prescriptive book learning.   So after carefully considering for about a 5 minute period, I burst into the living room and pitched the idea to the children:   "Let's ditch our school books and do stuff we want to do after Christmas!"   They were very enthusiastic and needed surprisingly little convincing.

   To be honest, our school life was going fine.   The kids dutifully checked off their subjects with less gnashing and spitting than in previous years and probably even learned useful things from time to time.   But I didn't make the fairly radical decision to keep my kids off the schoolbus  (Oh that sexy yellow truck that gives moms hours on end alone to pee uninterrupted and do whatever else it is that women do without any little people incessantly tugging their sleeves  asking for hamsters.)  and have them spend all their hours and days and weeks with me in our house just for things to be fine.  I missed the starry-eyed, younger, thinner, mother of toddlers that would  tell other people all about what education would look like in our home.  And it did look that way when my oldest was 4 and the rest of the kids were not born or were nappers.    We read Farmer Boy and my son would look up at me with those big, round swimming pool eyes and say things like:  "Can we dye cloth with roots and berries the way Almonzo's mother did?"  And I would smile broadly, tweak his little nose and say, "Of course we can Honey."   ...Fast forward 8 years and 4 non-napping children later.  If my youngest, now 4 years old,  would meet her sweet almond shaped eyes with mine and ask, "Mom can we make moccasins out of deerhide like Sam Gribley did?"  My unhesitating response would be:  "Are you even kidding me???  Ain't nobody got time for that!"    And that is because we are busy doing important things that are no fun for anyone.

     I will speak to the  truth that some things that kids find completely uninspiring are absolutely necessary if only to teach them perseverance through drudgery another day.   Now I want to get to our first day.   We did very little today.   Or did we?   I decided to start slow and build into our new mode of self -directed learning.  Here is an itemized list of what we learned today by intentionally pursuing curiosity:

• Googled why gigabyte cards only come in double numbers.  ie. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 GB
• Wrote a list of what we think our God-given talents are.
• Wrote a list of our interests
• Rocket science.   Isaac made several prototypes of a rocket he saw at Indigo last week.  This led to a discussion about how Thomas Edison made about a billion light bulbs before he made on that worked.
• Tobin researched the pros and cons of Android vs. Apple
• Anneke baked cookies.
• We read a chapter of The Railway Children.  (Yay!  More time for reading together.)
• Ruby got several stories.  (Yay!  The poor neglected youngest got some attention.)
• Anneke made a puzzle and then flipped it over and wrote the numbers 1-100 on the pieces.
• All the kids played ministicks.
• The boys slid all the way on icy sidewalks to piano lessons.
• We read a story  at the supper table about the battle between the Armenians and the Persians and had a discussion about how we can love people who believe in different things than we do.

I plan to make a list like this every evening just to reassure myself  that every conversation counts and learning happens all the time, especially if we focus on a home culture that encourages curiosity about God's world and our place in it..  The last thing I hope to accomplish by this practice is to make any reader shrink in defeat thinking that THAT family must have their crap together to do all those lovely, wonderful things.   Please, please be assured that I could make another list that involves pinching, pushing, yelling and wailing but I'm not going to itemize those in the same way unless  the resolution of these things brought about some lesson that will be surely forgotten tomorrow.

    I'm tired.  So I'll finish up with the highlight of my day.   My oldest, who has many talents, has not very much confidence.   He got a little twitchy when he had to make a list of his gifts and still had a blank page after several minutes and gave me a weak smile when I looked in his direction.  We had a great talk that he especially needed to hear about how you don't have to be the Olympic champion of a skill in order to consider it as something that you possess that can be used in this world.  We then listed ways in which the Force was strong in him and later discovered how they dovetailed in many ways with his interests.   For example, his "spidey-senses" or acute knack for noticing what others overlook would be very useful in birdwatching.   His genuine smile when he realized this connection  could power the lights in Times Square.  (All those lights! Way to go Thomas Edison.)