Tea Time

Lately, I have been feeling so tired in the afternoons (Hello, 38 weeks of pregnancy!). It's also the slowest time of day; we are usually finished with "school" before lunch, and the girls spend the afternoon playing independently (since they are both apparently finished with naps). If I don't pass out on the couch (sometimes, I do), I usually need a little pick-me-up around 4 o'clock.

So lately, around 4 in the afternoon, I will brew some herbal tea (with milk and honey for Lucy, mostly all milk for Alice) and get out my fancy tea cups. We usually also have a special snack of some sort (Aldi usually has random European cookies or pastries on sale), and I read aloud from a chapter book.

Lately, we've been reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. 

Lucy LOVES it.

What started out as a way to make it through the afternoon without going comatose has become one of the best parts of our day. I wish I could take credit for this idea, but I stole it from some of my fellow (read: more experienced) home school moms. Many of them have older kids, and they use afternoon Tea Time as an opportunity for their kids to get their Keeping work done. Obviously, my girls are too young for Keeping notebooks (they have Nature Journals, but they usually make their entry during "school" hours), but I thought afternoon tea would be the perfect opportunity to read some of these beautiful chapter books. For months, I have been trying to read aloud to the girls in the evenings before bed, but evenings are so busy for us that we have not been consistent with this habit. I'm so happy to have found another time of day in which to incorporate this wonderful part of the Feast.

And, yummy treats are a welcome bonus! :)

Sun Printing

Today, since we had such beautiful weather, we tried out sun printing...

Lucy and Alice's collected subjects...

Sun print in progress...

... the finished product!

I treasure these slow, quiet days with my girls!

"In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother’s first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet and growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it for the most part spent out in the fresh air."   

 -  Charlotte Mason 

Pumpkins

Last week, we visited the pumpkin patch to pick out our jack-o-lantern pumpkin...

Lucy, of course, wanted to find the most deformed, wart-covered pumpkin in the patch, while Alice wanted a tiny, cute pumpkin that she could cradle in her arms like a baby. 

The hunt took a very long time, and we ended up with three different pumpkins to satisfy everyone involved. Never a dull moment with these two! 

Fall?

It is finally - FINALLY - starting to feel more like fall. The mornings have been cooler lately, and the trees are starting to change color. We have been collecting leaves around our neighborhood, and the girls have had such fun identifying them - oak, sweet gum, dogwood, magnolia. (It helps that we don't have that many different types of trees!)

Of course, the afternoons still feel like summer. But hopefully, fall is just around the corner!