Tiny Grass

I’ve had no time to blog lately. We’ve been incredibly busy, which is nice. Spring seems finally to be just around the corner. Being so busy has helped give me more confidence homeschooling wise. I know - they are learning things even when they don’t seem to be doing anything. But still, seeing us all doing stuff gives me more tangible proof that we are all learning. It helps me feel productive. The boredom of winter was really getting on my nerves. Most of my interests entail being outside - nature, gardening, hiking, etc. For weeks at a time, it just wasn’t possible for me to spend much time outside. Since J is only 22 months and likes to rip off her gloves, I just couldn’t keep her outside in freezing weather for long periods of time.

Here are some of things that we’ve been doing lately:

• Yoga. M and I have been taking a parent-child yoga class through our library and it has been great! In preparation, I took a book out of our library called, Children’s Book of Yoga, by Thia Luby. It is really geared to connecting our bodies to the natural world, and M loved looking at it and doing some of the poses with me at home.
• Playing in the mud. The washing machine is still running. Enough said.
• Drawing in our family nature notebook. Arp hasn’t actually contributed to it yet, but M and I have both been drawing a lot, especially in the last week. While it was cold, I was drawing some of the things we’ve found outside while sitting at the dining-room table. It was just too cold outside to hold a pencil very long without gloves on. But in the last week I’ve been doing quite a bit of drawing outside. I’ve made it my business to document the return of Spring.
• Shopping for the ducks and endlessly planning their house. House building day is scheduled for the 18th, and the ducks around the 27th. I feel like I’m waiting for labor to begin. Was that a contraction?! (See, if I was really a dork, I would have said “conquacktion”. But I didn’t. See?)
• Reading up on weird waterfowl illnesses and trying to figure out if I have the guts to suture a duck on my own, or perform my own post-mortem. I’m pretty much viewing this project as halfway between livestock and pet. The question is, how much money am I willing to spend if my ducks get sick? (Obviously I would never leave an animal to suffer.) I’m not sure I know the answer to this yet since this is our first endeavor in a farm-ish sort of project. Time will tell.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 4:47 pm and is filed under homeschooling, raising ducks, the great outdoors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.