A peek at the passing from dear mellow Autumn to snuggly, frosty Winter. Some cherished moments, memorable lesson snippets, our blustery old friend the wind, and the beautiful treat of a rare and beloved snow. Maps and trolls from The Hobbit Some sewing projects: teabags and cupcakes The beginnings of winter mornings and heater fans A very, very magical snow day
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Fall is finding us a little more each day. Back are the creeping mushroom towns, the wee little snowflake fairies (Woolly Aphids), crisp falling leaves, and our annual Harvest/Michaelmas festival with friends. Dragon Bread recipe
(Cheese Pretzel Recipe from Waldorf Book of Breads): Dissolve 1 T. yeast in 1 & 1/2 C. warm water. Stir in 1 tsp. salt and 1 tsp. sugar. Then add 3 C. whole wheat flour and 1 & 1/2 C. shredded cheddar cheese. Mix well then knead on floured surface until smooth. Shape as desired, brush with a beaten egg (we added more shredded cheese, everything-bagel seasoning, and peppercorns for eyes), and bake at 375 until done (about 10-15 minutes, a little longer for thicker bread). The last days of summer that toe the beginnings of fall are always a special time for us. Soon come the crisp, misty mornings, mushroom towns, visiting bird flocks, and rainbowed leaves that are our favorite. But, for now, there are soft, warm, bright, summery things that envelope our beginning-school days: grapes and sand and lake sparkles, sunny porch mornings, familiar-wet tree walks, and garden veggie-feast dinners. The muscadines aren't as plentiful this year, but we've been picking what's come in to snack on and freeze for later treats. And an occasional breakfast :) Lake sparkles and water striders at Green Mountain Sweet, old tunnel-tree friends at Halmony and Halabaji's house on a shimmery wet day. This was our daily wagon walk to the mailbox when they were babies. There's a little beach at Camp Honeycomb, nestled amid the gentle blue hills along Lake Guntersville where we spent a warm afternoon. The last time we were here we were saying farewell to dear friends. This time we shared a beautiful evening with visiting family, all of us two years older since we'd last been together. First time making jelly thumbprint cookies for afternoon tea. They're really good and cute! Here's the recipe: https://www.delish.com/cooking/recipe-ideas/recipes/a56358/easy-jam-thumbprint-cookies/ Feast of treasures from Halmony and Halabaji's garden. Some day I hope to cook like Umma :)
We like to start our new year the first full week of September, and it's become tradition to have a little celebration the Friday before. Down the rainbow path, back to school they go.... A collection of new supplies and books for the journey of the coming year waits at the end of the path, on the good old table that carries us through so many dear things. Some anticipated needs, a few requests, and some surprise treasures and treats. This year had a very magical touch :) Mr. Hufflepuff studying a new narration notebook. Miss Gryffindor skipping with a surprise bottle of more ink for the quills. New familiars are met and named. Adventures await! Spellbooks ... ...And wands (these came about a week ago, and we've been up to a lot of silly fun with them) The Marauder's Map We solemnly swear we are up to no good! And the traditional 'stack of this term's books' pic. ;)
We're looking forward to meeting all of these new friends, as well as continuing the journey with some of our old ones from last year. We splurged on a physical copy of Nil's and our first term's poetry this time, which is exciting because while we truly appreciate and enjoy ebooks, having the physical ones is always a treasure. We've also just begun to work through the Hobbit Literature Guide by Hearthmagic this past week to ease into our lessons, and I had to include it because not only is it lovely in appearance, it's a joy to do, and stir in. It's a perfect autumn tale and includes so many scrumptious-looking recipes! We spent the rest of the day eating cookies, doing spells, making mischief, and practicing with their new quills (which I didn't take any pictures of, because we were busy with the figuring out of strokes and ink and sealing stamps, but hope to show better in the future. We've fallen in love). *Links to the shops/sites of printables and things pictured. We're so grateful to them for adding that extra special to our day* Wands: https://www.etsy.com/shop/Here4ThePartyShop Harry Potter bookmarks: https://www.artsyfartsymama.com/2016/07/free-printable-harry-potter-bookmarks.html Marauder's map: https://www.deviantart.com/littlefallingstar/art/The-Marauders-Map-389921556 Hogwarts House notebook covers: https://www.polkadotchair.com/diy-hogwarts-house-notebooks-a-harry-potter-craft-idea/ pdfs of 'A Wizard's Guide to Spells' and 'Book of Potions' found on google and printed :) HearthMagic's Hobbit Guide: https://www.etsy.com/listing/497721189/the-hobbit-family-learning-adventure Quills were just from Amazon, here's the specific ones we ended up choosing, in case you're on the hunt ;) They are *lovely*! https://www.amazon.com/Quill-Pen-Feather-Calligraphy-Replacement/dp/B089GY5FJ2/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=quills&qid=1630771599&sr=8-3 It's hard to capture the magic of Taproot in a blog post. The feeling of support and connection, and dash of refreshment, that it brings. Being in the presence of friends and parents who all share this sweet and marvelous, and sometimes difficult, journey of teaching little and new, and growing and blooming, people at home, all coming together from around the world. It's always such a lovely weaving of shared struggles, worries, gifts, accomplishments, dreams. A needed mixture of smiles, music, laughter, mishaps, jokes, art, nature, play. For a brief yet beloved weekend, you set aside your teaching hat and wings and become once again the student, hopeful and eager to jump into that deeply nourishing and encouraging ring-game of how-tos in life, education, and parenting. We gather... Although the conference was zoomed again this year (no bunk-beds, campfires, room-filling circles, late night fireplace knitting and tea, morning bare feet in the lake, and wooded hikes to the dining hall), we had the gift of a dear friend's presence for the week. Jodie, our longtime music-fairy mentor, who I met on the way to Taproot years ago, and who brought the experience deeply home again this time. In a recreation of in-person camp, we played games, made music, ate pizza, and watched sunrises. Treasures from Miss Jodie! Not wood-fired, but there was pizza! It's been so long since we've been in front of the camera together. Thanks Jodie! :) Sunrise coffee and early morning bike rides as group nature walk substitutes (I can't wait to have those again) For a few beautiful days our home was also filled to the brim with music- the flow of piano keys, the strum of guitar and ukelele, the flutter of pennywhistle, the melody of voices. This is a piece of Taproot that once you've experienced, you never forget. At the in-person gathering, you rise and begin lessons, change classes, and hike to meals accompanied by song or flute. You sing and dance and make music amidst learning to draw, paint, create shadow theaters and table dolls, tell stories, play math games, perform history plays. skip rope, and place poetry to nature. Something I always look forward to each year are the new verses and rounds that I get to bring home and imbue our circle times with for a long time following. This time we had the chance to learn one together as a family, live. Maya, tucked into my shoulder for our gathering song, grew brave enough to spread her arms and join in, and Lucas has been humming it since. It's definitely found a home in our circles to come. Standing like a tree, with my roots dug down, my branches wide and open. Come down the rain, come down the sun, come down the fruit to the heart that is open to be... Another beloved aspect is the inner work. Candle-lit poetry, rhythm-mending, yearly planning. It was also such a treat to have the kids alongside for this process, too. The mystery of what Mom does when she's away was revealed, stepped into, and taken part in :) Found Poem, illustrated by Maya, and composed from 'When I am Among the Trees' by Mary Oliver Shine. Stay. Call. Be filled. Do this. Slowly. Hurry goodness. Almost. Flow. Trees stir, Have gladness, Which they say Into their leaves. You too have branches, Honey, hope, hints. Light. Almost. The world. Go, Off such light. Again. It's simple. Something else we created together: our family's rhythm wheel. With a little bit of each of us in, and using the watercolor blending and splatter techniques from class. Painting catches all of our hearts :) This is our year! Festivals, celebrations, birthdays, the times of schooling and breaks. On the night of the second day, Jodie and I slipped across town to finish the conference at a local hotel. There were lots of snacks, walks, and a brief but lovely dinner visit with a dear friend. This is another thing that Taproot so deeply offers, and can't really be recreated completely. But, we tried in our small, special way, and it was a perfect touch of renewal to nest the experience into. Sometimes a small step away from home serves as the perfect bookend for these cup-filling occasions. Saturday classes were on child development, the arts in education, and nature table creations. Here be our dragon and fairy made with collected nature bits the kids gifted us on our departure. And Taproot wouldn't be Taproot without time in nature. We rose early on Sunday to check out and pick up the kids for a morning hike. This is our favorite little place. As seen and photo'd by Jodie :) After that she was off, back to her own sweet family, leaving us with all the charming music and fairy dust. <3 We've been settling back into our own usual summer days, refreshed and ready for the next school year to start in a few weeks. Let me send you off with a beloved Taproot farewell song: Here it is taught by Jodie! Just click on the grey button link below :) May your journey be safe and your worries be few... We've discovered the world of Harry Potter this summer. I imagine the kids' back-to-school party will involve some very magical supplies and silly tasting things :) But for now, cauldron mugs and and lots of bubbles! One year ago, four months into quarantine, I wrote this post about our days. What a year it's been.
Life on a simmer As we continue our schooling journey in this time of same days, I notice the habits and rhythms of our earliest years reclaiming us. The framework of what kept us running- the times we ate and sang and played and cleaned, the activities and chores that made our days, our weeks, our months, in those early years, sneaking back in. Ways of doing things that once carried us so gently yet adequately, have been pulled back out of the linen cupboard like a beloved picnic blanket. Rediscovered, marveled at and aired, and draped softly across the grass to gather on. The fabric of forgotten elements that got tucked quietly away, as the kids grew and life sped up, once again spread out beneath us in soft, colorful familiarity. When children are little your days are logged in tiny moments- the number of giggles a funny face gets, the space between little breaths as sleep comes, the new and deep time-pausing wonder and revelation of small, simple things: sandy fingers, pickles, raindrops, bumblebees. When your time is measured in those increments, the days are long. But, you expect them to be. You anticipate them and live them with an expertise gained from navigating those slow, dear currents. You weave a raft of lullabies, easy meals, stories, and play. Simple, watertight, masterful. You row with oars of dressing games, couch forts, wagon rides, and catch smiles and spilled blocks, puddles and lovies, muddy feet and bubbles in your cast nets. Slow and steady. And then it changes. Time stretches to encompass larger and extended experiences: how many hours before you need to be out the door, which days you can stay home, how long until the gas tank needs refilled between activities, the span of a math curriculum, when a term of lessons needs to be finished… Longer intervals. Yet, oddly, lived quicker. You lose track of the unequaled length of those small, simple, quiet moments as the game changes to catching and finding and taking part in bigger things, more things, perhaps flashier things. Not completely. Not all of them are surrendered, of course. That beauty, once found, is never fully lost. But it's something you can, perhaps, forget to assign as much value as it was once given. There comes a point when you do stop squirreling them all, or, at least as many, away. And then when you get them, those moments, that necessity of cataloguing them, back so completely- when that time, that slowness, that space becomes once again your normal out of necessity...it rekindles a beauty you didn’t realize you forgot. And one that helps. It helps to remember, when you have to stay home, and hope, and love, and wait, that you were once a learned student in this endeavor, and just how nourishing it was. Like a pot of soup bubbling gently on the stove as you go about your day, begun in the morning to enjoy at dinner; the contents chosen and chopped and tossed in just when and just so, from memory, from practice, from realized mistakes, from love, there exists a simple, unrivaled experience. When life is put on a simmer, this becomes your magic again. Those tiny, minute, whispered ingredient-moments that make up your days. The ones you forgot that you missed chronicling and pouring over and tasting and smiling about: those short, repeated, ungrand yet all the more priceless for it, ones lost when you began moving a bit too fast to notice or remember to add them. The sounds of children waking, blankets tossed, cereal poured, comic book pages turned, toes against blinds, pet scurries. The smell of coffee and dewed-grass and laundry detergent, things that are once again the quick-but-long, necessary-but-sweet moments that make up the first hour of our same-days. The color of the tea mixed with cream and honey, set next to a stack of school books, toppled again by the lego bin as it’s pulled from beneath the couch (perhaps they need a new place), as we snuggle into morning lessons- a wiggled, giggled, upside down and galloped experience of listening and retelling (is there any other way to this? I hope we never find it). The dance of young fingers on penny whistle holes and piano keys, the cries of delight at mastery, the grumbles of misses, that finish our same-mornings. The feeling of sun and wind and cloud shadows, the sound of bugs as we munch on lazy-snack lunches in the yard, the chalk dust that coats skinny legs and faces as obstacle courses are drawn, stomped, rolled, tiptoed, beneath bird spectators and banter. The small broken sticks and seed pods that were a fairy house just same-yesterday, now used to rescue bugs from overnight puddles. That same-afternoon hour of lessons with more tea, Alexa’s jokes and mishaps trying to find specific songs, help with spelling, and geography, and pretending to speak cat and dog with us. The painting, modeling, baking, crafting and nature journaling that fall on the same days each week that they did when hands were littler, bellies rounder. Before first curls were cut, and summers of sunshine constellation freckles gained. The same-evenings of boardgames, movie nights, bowling (darling old wii), bike-riding, reading-hour that we began when tiny people made being out and about a little harder. That ancient once-a-week grocery and library run combo revisited and re-imagined with hot chocolate-browsing from the kitchen counter and exciting curbside pickup adventures (another person!) with heart-felt masked gratitude-waves… This is the new rhythm that has come to be our days, weeks, months. It is the framework we tuck our meals, our play, our lessons, our lives into. It is a slow, and simple, and expected experience, mostly. And...I forgot how beautiful, and worthy, that was. Sifting through those old notes, those old recipes, I’m finding that they’re still every bit as meaningful and useful as when they were tucked away. Unknowingly, those softly treaded learning years of snagging and living deeply those short, simple, unadorned moments, revisit and re-gift us. As summer comes to take its place with the early mornings and lingering days, we've been finding some new special things to tease treasured moments amidst the here-to-stay heat. A little book club magic in the way of Owl Crate Jr boxes (they are so much fun! It's hard being last in line to read! :), and a little branching out into the world again after such a long at-home year. Lucas has just begun joining Halabaji for some first ever golfing practice a couple times a week, and Maya, deciding that's not her thing in any measurable way :), has been hopeful about having a really fancy tea-party at a local fantasy cafe instead. Today was our first time, and we can't wait to go back!
Everyone needs a little pretty sometimes. Here are some pictures so you all can have this loveliness in your day, too! : Handwork this past week. A beloved project learned at Taproot Teacher Training years ago. These little finger puppets are made by wet felting a base around your finger and needle felting the shell, then attaching by felting to the base. This was my first -ever wet felted attempt years ago, and it was so much fun to share and do it with the kids. A little hint of spring, and a cute tie-in to their sharing page. We've been coming up with some ideas on how to organize and display things there, and will be working on getting it up and running soon. It's going to be a very stormy St. Patrick's Day tomorrow. As we tuck in we're hoping to celebrate in some small ways and work on it. See you all soon! :)
...We rise with the sun and welcome the day Today I thought I'd try to offer a glimpse at how our days and weeks turn- a small book of the hours we keep. We don't always wake quite early enough to watch the sun rising (especially not in winter), but we do try to catch those gentle sun streams that make tree shadows in the mornings before they disappear from the grass. At certain times of the year we can spend weeks awakening to the chorus of hungry birdlings nesting in the rafters of the front porch (it's almost that time). Over the winter, I've been making the bed to the songs Maya plays softly on the ukelele or pennywhistle upstairs, or the piano down the hall. It's a beautiful soundtrack for bumbling through the steps of waking and getting going. A wee, quick check from the porch each morning for any overnight fairy rings that may have popped up is often a necessity spring through fall. Coffee-making and breakfast generally follows, and then chores and lesson planning or tidying. It's the time of reading, pursuit of interests, music practice, and play indoors and out. At ten the tea or cocoa is made and poured, some snacks are found and we gather for morning lessons. Lately we've been beginning our day with circle and stories along with some handwork. and then moving onto our History/Geography loop, and afterwards our Natural History loop. What this looks like for the loops (some day we hope to be brave enough to film a lesson or two for you all ): on Mondays we might read a few pages of The Adventures of Nils and work on mapping. The following day we'd move onto the next thing we need to accomplish in that category-such as reading the Story of Britain. The next day, we dig into our local and state history resources (we're using a lot of virtual tours for this!), and so on. And then the same process with our Natural History loop resources. We have a time slot of about 20 minutes for each loop, and the same for our story and handwork in the beginning, too. Our timing isn't as precise as the timetables Charlotte Mason herself used, but we've found these time slots really works for us. The next hour is all about Dad. He's started taking his lunch break with the kids, and it's turned into such a cherished part of the day. They work on math and Korean as he makes a yummy lunch for us all. Cooking and math are totally his jam :) This would never have been possible before he started working from home, and we're so grateful for this opportunity, however long it lasts. Then, depending on the day, we either have Ukelele right after, (on Mondays from noon to 1) or a long break of play until French from 2-230 or so (Tuesdays and Thursdays). We end our lessons by coming together once more with tea and snacks for our afternoon loops of the arts and writing and some time dedicated to our nature calendar fun from 3-4ish. We've found over the years that this spreading of our lessons throughout the day offers us a more beloved experience. No rushed mornings, and plenty of time between gatherings to work on interests, play, and to have breathers as we need them. After school it's back on to hobbies, reading and play until dinner, followed by evening activities such as game night, pizza and movie night, book club night (this doesn't always happen, but we try). Fridays are our nature dedicated days, and we usually go out and hike or scooter at local parks, come back and have math and lunch with Dad, watch our nature class and do some journaling, and then get ready to head to Halmony and Halabaji's for dinner and a sleepover. This is another enchanting part of our week- the time that we get to spend with them is such a gift. Umma always has something marvelous to eat waiting, and Appa keeps the most beautiful garden, which the kids get to help out with. We spend the evening eating, catching up, and playing games like chess, baduk or five in a row over fruit and tea. On Saturday mornings Lucas and Maya have a special breakfast made by Appa, their Korean class with the local school (now zoomed), and lunch, then a fun activity like hiking before coming home. Weekends are our days of reading, resting, playing video games, riding bikes, having zoom meets with friends, and cleaning. And that's it. A week with us :) |
AuthorsHello! We're Maya, Lucas, and Miri. Welcome to Whimsywhispered, where we share our days as a Charlotte Mason and Waldorf inspired homeschooling family living and growing in Alabama. We hope you enjoy your visit and return as often as you like :) Archives
January 2022
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