Quote of the Week:
N: This is you, mom! (points at drawing)
Me: I'm a snail?
N: Yeah! But not for real life.
My favorite moment this week was undoubtedly when the boys decided to make a fort out of our pruned aspen tree branches. They ran in and out of the house excitedly like little mice collecting items for their den (in this case, Christmas ribbons to hang as decorations). They got this idea looking through pictures in 1000 Hours Outside, which is full of inspiration. They were originally not so thrilled about the prospect of spending 100 hours outside until they glanced over my shoulder and exclaimed, “I want to do THAT!” about every page. At one point, B paused his scurrying and declared, “I just got the BEST idea! We should pray the rosary in the FORT!” And so we did.
We had a pretty blustery week which was maybe not the best time to start this thousand hours project, but we made the best of it. The kids were pretty skeptical as the reluctantly followed me on a drizzly nature walk, but they cheered right up when I produced a picnic blanket and thermos full of hot chocolate. The kids did some nature journaling and gawked at the ducks swimming in the rain while I read Piglet’s adventures aloud to them.
We continued our journey with Faith + Family Collective’s Lenten activities by building a home altar complete with a prayer jar that we filled with prayer requests written on purple slips of paper. This turned out to be a sort of scavenger hunt, and the kids loved putting the requests in the jar.
We also made fake “snow” by mixing baking soda and shaving cream which was a very big and very messy hit, as was our night at the library and stop at the park before karate.
I will confess that having 4 kids 8 and under can be chaotic and noisy for most of our waking hours. I often wonder what I will find destroyed next, whether they will ever stop bickering, or if that vision of us all pursuing curiosity’s elusive wiles will ever come to pass.
But one of my most beloved and unexpected fruits of homeschooling is the relationships my children are building with one another (when not wrestling one another to the floor). All of the time spent together means that they fight (a lot), but it also means many more shared memories, traditions, and endless hours of imaginative play.
This week, C begged to be N’s preschool teacher to keep him occupied while I do table with B, and when I agreed, she giggled — giggled — with glee and began making checklists of all the activities, projects, and rewards she had in mind.
And so we might have to work all our read alouds around snack time and scrape pieces of crumbling toys into the dustbin and pause day to adjudicate sibling disputes for the 19th time that morning. Homeschooling with this many littles is not for the faint of heart (it might be better suited for the faint of hearing).
When the windowsill is covered in blue paint and the Barbie dream house is flooding from real water overflowing from the upstairs pool, I remind myself of one thing (thank you, Sarah Mackenzie):
“No one will ever say, no matter how good a parent he or she was, ‘I think I spent too much time with my children when they were young.’”
And that goes for how many shared memories they got to make with each other, also.