Fitness Fridays

    I don't think I'm the only one looking forward to enjoying being outside again and having regular exercise be easier to come by.  Until then, we have fitness Fridays.  We did our public swimming morning and 2 hours of shinny afternoon marathon again and now Tobin is at his hockey game.  They love it and I mostly do too. Except catching Ruby at the bottom of the water slide and getting a face full of water 57 times in a row.  But who's complaining.  This is how we know we love our children because we call things like this 'family fun'.
     Then, dripping wet, we put hockey gear on and the boys play their guts out for 2 and a half hours while the girls pretend to play arcade games without quarters.   Today I sat in the warm lookout spot and chatted with two moms with older kids that I don't know very well.  They talked about their experiences with sending their kids to highschool part time and how accommodating the schoolboard was about letting kids pick and choose any number of courses without enrolling full time.  Options for the future...When they started to talk about applying to top universities, and sharing struggles with children who only maintain a 92% average they lost me for a bit.  They both kind of cringed at the mention of going to, say, Windsor, or at the possibility that one of their kids might choose *gulp* community college.  I won't sell these women short, they're both wonderful people, but I just don't share their standards of what makes for a life worth living. Maybe they don't either, I hardly know them but many in our culture do still keep the condescending attitude that university is for smart, driven people and college is for the rest who can't hack it.
      I hope my kids go to community college.  Sure, if they had the makings of being a doctor, or an engineer or whatever I certainly wouldn't keep them from the path they would need to take to get there.  But so many people are saying now, that it is not necessary to dig yourself into an over your head hole of debt just to get a piece of paper that usually is just a ticket to further certification or more pricey education so that you can be one of thousands of other highly educated unemployed people that have no practical skills.  The world needs more bricklayers.  I think you can be a well rounded person with interests and ideas worth sharing and still know how to fix a furnace pipe.  And if in a few years you discover that you would like to try something new, the cost and time commitment of going back to school for a second career is much more doable than tossing a useless $60,000 degree and starting again.
      As for the benefits of a liberal arts education for broadening the mind, I kind of hope that this is what I am offering now with great literature shared together, freedom to experiment with science (Isaac is super excited to be starting his 20 days, 20 experiments challenge on Monday.  He's been using his newfound library ordering skills to stock up on lots of kid science books.  He's a hands-on guy.) getting out and enjoying and observing nature on a regular basis,  volunteering our time and money, listening to stories from history and playing, playing, playing.  My hope is that if I offer good, nourishing food for their minds and souls now while they are still young, that they will not settle for brain candy later in life.  Then it wouldn't matter what career path they chose, as long as they could be productive,  compassionate people who know how to enjoy the good gifts on this earth.  I hope I feel the same when my kids are actually at the point of choosing post-secondary education.
     As for the rest of the night, Isaac learned to use a compass at cadets and Anneke and I had two great discussions in the van.  One about car pollution, oil, tarsands, and electric cars and the other about what boys were made for.  "They're good at opening jars." 
    If you are reading this, weigh in with your thoughts below.   It's starting to creep me out seeing that people are reading and I don't know who they are...