Cultivating Childhood

In our new "plan," there will now no longer be a blog post telling you what we plan to do.  There is no set plan any longer other than good quality outdoor time, reading time, and habit training every week.  Instead, my new goal is just to blog about what we did that week, and how that shaped our lives.  We may find that we incorporate some crafts (as we did this week) or did something a little more out of the ordinary, but mainly our focus will be enjoying one another and taking time to cherish these years before formal schooling begins. We were thrown off this week by both sicknesses and snow.  Before these things made their debut though, we were blessed to have a good friend visiting us from our college days. I plan to blog more about that on our family blog .  We did do a lot of parks though over the weekend, which was fun for all of us.  Here are a few pictures of our weekend.  Our friend, Lem, took a ton of pictures of us that are much better th...

It's been a while since I posted here.  I thought that changing up our routine would help my frustrations with how things have been going.  Maybe we were just doing too much so we cut back to doing "school" to just two days a week.  Well, we did "school" on Monday of last week with mixed success.  By the time we got to Thursday and Friday, it was so out of our routine, we didn't do it at all.  I just felt like giving up. Enjoying his egg carton caterpillar In my absence, I've done a lot of praying, thinking, and reading about my future in homeschooling my children.  Is this something that I'm actually called to do?  Am I just being too ambitious?  Is Buddy too young?  Is my philosophy of education needing to be reworked? Caterpillar banana snack One thing I discovered over the last week was the class descriptions for preschool and kindergarten respectively at a local Christian school.  I found that my curriculum resembled the school's ki...

Ok, so after what happened last week, we are going to make some changes.  The biggest change I want to make is the number of days we do this.  Apparently, trying to do something every day is just too much.  He gets bored with it too easily.  I think if he had friends to do it with in a traditional preschool setting, he would be more interested because he would see what his friends were doing. Yet as it is, if it doesn't engage him, he doesn't want to do it.  Understandable, but difficult to plan for. So, to keep things interesting.  We are only going to do preschool two days this week: Monday and either Thursday or Friday.  Mondays are usually our best day because we are coming off the weekend, and everything is different than it was the last few days.  Mommy also usually has more energy on Mondays.  By waiting until Thursday or Friday to do more stuff, we give ourselves more time to prep and have it feel "new" instead of "didn't we just do t...

This week was hard.  I think between the stresses of life and Little Buddy's lack of enthusiasm, I just felt like throwing in the towel.  That's one reason this blog post is late this week.  I'm just not sure I want to do this anymore.  The problem seems to stem from the fact that although Little Buddy  says  he wants to do whatever activity I've planned for him that day, he drags his feet and wants me to "help" him (i.e. do the entire thing for him).  My mentality from the start is that this should be fun.   If it isn't fun, then it's not worth doing.  There is a lot of planning that goes into each week, but if we get to the actual doing part and I have to nag him for the activity to happen, then I just want to give up.  Nagging isn't fun, and these activities are just for fun. I think that Little Buddy's enthusiasm for the activities may have waned because we've been doing something everyday.   He's come to expect that M...