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.
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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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