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Tuesday, October 23, 2018

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! 

Wednesday, October 3, 2018

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!

Thursday, September 20, 2018

Nature Journaling

Part of our routine these days is to try to spend as much time outdoors as possible. This is certainly easier said than done. Between the heat and the bugs (not to mention that I am hugely pregnant), we would much rather sit inside in the air conditioning. But, I have found that going outside - even if it is just a little stroll through the woods in our backyard - is so good for our bodies and our attitudes. If we are having a hard day - complaining, whining, moodiness - some fresh air seems to be the magical cure.

As an added bonus, there is always something new to discover, wherever we happen to go. Lucy even started keeping a nature journal to record her observations.


{Lucy making a nature journal entry, after yesterday's Nature Walk.}

Charlotte Mason said, "It is infinitely well worth the mother's while to take some pains every day to secure, in the first place, that her children spend hours daily amongst rural and natural objects; and, in the second place, to infuse into them, or rather, to cherish in them, the love of investigation..." 

How right she was! It is infinitely well-worth enduring the heat and the bugs just to see their little faces light up over the discovery of a mushroom or a spider's web. Their wonder at an acorn or a wildflower gives me new eyes to see that which I foolishly considered ordinary. 

"We are all meant to be naturalists, each in his own degree, and it is inexcusable to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant and animal life and to care for none of these things."
- Charlotte Mason

A Little Getaway

This past weekend, we enjoyed a short getaway to Jekyll Island, off the Georgia coast. We almost canceled our trip due to the hurricane, but after tracking the storm obsessively for a few days, we decided it was safe. I'm so thankful we didn't cancel; the weather was absolutely beautiful!




The girls loved playing at the beach! Lucy has a boogie board and has gotten pretty good at surfing the waves. Alice is not such a fan of the water (yet), but she likes to chase seagulls and dig holes in the sand. 

Our trip was so refreshing. It was hard to say goodbye to the beach on Sunday and head back home for another busy week. We can't wait to go back!

Monday, August 20, 2018

Homeschooling Update

We have just begun our second week of homeschooling, so I wanted to share a little update on how things are going. Last week was very much about getting used to the new rhythm, and some things proved to be more challenging than expected. For one thing, the weather in Georgia has been extremely hot, and the mosquitoes have been even worse. This made spending time outdoors a bit of a challenge. We had to forego our forest exploration and head to our local park instead, where the mosquitoes were not quite so bad. Thankfully, today was cool and overcast, so we were able to take our first Nature Walk.

Lately, we have noticed these large web-like nests in the branches of our neighborhood trees. Today, we were finally able to get a closer look and learned that they are made by web worms, a type of caterpillar that builds its nest in late summer / early fall. Eventually, the web worms will emerge as a type of moth.


A close-up look at the web worm nests... I actually think they are kind of amazing.


Lucy has also been working on her reading. This is something that she initiated, and she has made some amazing progress. Last week, we started with reading the Mother Goose rhyme "I see the moon, and the moon sees me..." 


Today, Lucy was able to read the words even when they were out of order and all mixed up. She even put them back in the correct order. 


This month, we are reading books about the calendar, learning the seasons, holidays, days of the week, and months of the year. My favorite book that we read last week was Seasons by Blexbolex. 


The illustrations are really beautiful and simple, and many of the words are easy enough for Lucy to read herself. Highly recommend! 


Week 2, here we go!

27 Weeks

I'm about to enter my third trimester, and so far, I have taken one photo of myself this pregnancy. I guess it has been a busy summer!


Here is my bump, all dressed up to go to a wedding!


Things I want to remember about this pregnancy:

- Symptoms: Exhaustion and nausea tsunami waves in the first trimester; extreme hunger and occasional dizziness in the second trimester. Also, occasionally my ears get stopped up for no reason, like I'm riding on an airplane. I've heard your mucous membranes swell during pregnancy, so maybe it has to do with that?

- Cravings: Peanut butter and jelly

- Baby: Like I mentioned before, we are not going to find out the baby's sex until he or she is born. So I don't know very much about this little one, other than what the ultrasound image tells me. I think he (or she) looks a lot like Lucy. Their little profiles are very similar (see below). It will be fun to see if this baby is also born with a head full of black hair!


Look at those little lips and that chin!


We can't wait to meet you, little one!