Natural 'Winter' Learning

What else did we study?

 Blankets

 Pregnancy

 Siblings

 Dogs

 Hair Styling

 Rockets

 Friends

 Trees

 Socks

 Phones

 Skate parks in snow pants

 Coins (ie: Presidents and states)

 Design and building

 working together

 Christmas Villages

 Pioneers

 Bring joy to others

 Yoga

 Rubix Cubes

 Joy

 Drama

 Variations on sleep

 Demolition

 Wallpaper history

 Happiness

 Food coloring

 Swing Sets

 Excavators

 Snow Drops

 Tree removal

 Dogs

 Framing

 Cardboard

 Digging

 Worms

 Hauling

 Twisting

 Writing

 Dogs

 Picnics

 Machinery

 Babies

 Super-peacemakers

 Food storage

 Color mixing

 Pluming

 Homemade bread

 Pavers

 Loaders

 Dogs

 Crocuses

 Sleep

 Make-believe

 Pine cones

 Buried artifacts

 Mustaches

 St. Patrick

 Tire Swings

 Following instructions

 Popcorn movie parties

 Tractors

 Forgiveness

 Hugs

 Tulips

 Tooth loss

 Bounce houses

 Cell phones (and Great-Grandmas)

 sharing

 Trailer hook-ups

 Balance

 Painting

 Art

 Dogs + Scissors  :(

Natural Learning

So what DID we study last year?

 Addition

 Building

 Sharing

 Climbing

 Riding Motorcycles

 Computers

Scissors and tape

 Building nests with leaves

 Costumes

 Doughnut eating contests

 Books anywhere

 Nuts/shells

 Sewing mummy costumes

 Driving

 Matching

 Writing

 Engineering

 mimicking older brothers

 Putting away silverware

 Scrubbing toilets

 Vacuuming

 Washing toilets

 Vacuums

 Serrano peppers

 Physics

 Magnetism

 Taking out garbages

 Being like Daddy

 Trucks

 Extended family

 SNOW!

 Friends

 Giving

 Receiving

 Exemplary cousins

 Architecture

and most importantly

JESUS  CHRIST

Free at Last

Sheesh! Had I known I would feel this great about homeschooling I would have done it full out without a glance back six weeks ago instead of trying the charter school!  But it sure has been a powerful learning experience.  And of course I did learn some great things and obtain some great resources from the charter school.  But WOW! Oh how I love KNOWING that what I am doing is right! I know this is the right choice for me right now. It is still taking time for a lot of the shackles on the mind to fall off and continue 'unschooling' or 'getting off the conveyor belt'. It has only been two weeks, after all, and no I don't have all the answers yet nor even any very specific plans.  But I can feel the hand of the Lord so strong.  Tiny little thoughts, little negative thoughts that used to eat at me, now just roll off my back and I just think "It's all going to be okay". It's okay if I'm not perfect.  It's okay if I'm not identical to 'that' mom.  Doing my personal best really is the best. It is so empowering to have the Lord on your side.

Something that I guess shouldn't surprise me, but that I wasn't really expecting, is how close Cowboy and I are already - how much this has strengthened our mother-son relationship.  Also how happy and comfortable he is with it all.  I mean that was a really great school he was in and he had made a lot of friends.  It really was a difficult choice for me and of course how he would feel about it all was my number one concern.  But I finally got to the point where I just couldn't deny any longer what I knew I had to do.  He felt that and he knows that and I was able to share that with him enough that he trusts me. I'm really grateful for that.

Why? Why did I pull my son out of a perfectly-great-hard-to-get-into-charter-Montessori school so that I could homeschool?  Well, I hope it is pretty clear already that it is because I FELT so strongly that I should that I couldn't deny it anymore.  Specifically, though, at the kindergarten orientation I prayed very hard that I would feel peace if this was the right option for him and us.  I did not. Frankly, I felt pretty sick.  I could not mentally figure out why this could possibly NOT be the right option, so I explained away that sick feeling as a few other things: sending a kid away for the first time, worry about hubby missing more work than we had planned that day to watch the younger kids, insecurity/not knowing what to do right then, etc. etc. And went ahead with his beginning at the school.  Unfortunately there was a six week waiting period until parents were allowed into the school to observe.  Not that it was necessarily the observation itself that caused me to change my mind.  On the contrary, the observation revealed nothing I disliked about the school, teacher, or classmates.  It simply led into the conversations with my mom and husband that eventually helped me (and them) realize how much I really did want to homeschool and how much I really KNEW that I should.  But maybe that six weeks wasn't so unfortunate.  Maybe I really just needed that time.  Maybe I really did need to feel that insecure and unsure for that period of time to have those feelings to contrast against how I am feeling now.  The longer experiences are the harder they are to forget sometimes.  It also seems like a bit more of an aware choice.  I know exactly what he is missing out on.  And I'm still okay with it.

And then of course there is all sorts of new philosophy and understanding and views I have now on education that have been part of this whole study journey of the last year or two.  Yes, even my homeschooling method is going to be pretty nonconventional.  I'm definitely going to be doing Thomas Jefferson Education (TJED), a.k.a. Leadership Education.  A few key points are: People educate themselves.  No one can educate someone else.  People often educate themselves when they are inspired by someone else to do so - someone else who is educating herself. CHILDREN need to focus the first years of their life on learning right and wrong, good and bad, true and false.  Anything else is simply a means of teaching those three ideas.  If focus is put in the wrong areas it becomes a distraction to that child developing their CORE values.  And learning is awesome! Seriously!  It should not be forced, treated as drudgery, contrived, ruined...

So, I'm just really happy.  Life is good.  I will hopefully be getting around to posting some more details and experiences and truth (because it really is helpful to me to put thoughts into written words), but I might just be pretty busy loving my kids and learning.

What are we aiming for?

I'm just going to accept the fact that my blog posts are never going to be like the organized, thought out, flowing and connected posts a lot of us are used to reading.  I hope you can accept that, too.  It will probably just be snippets here and there about some of the stuff I'm learning on my path to help my children gain their own educations.

Here is an interesting couple of lists.  Which one are you aiming for with your kids and what kind of educational atmosphere do they line up with for you?

Type A
rote thinking
conformity
fitting in
submissive obedience to superiors
memorized "correct" answers
clique socialization
employee mentality

Type B
great lessons of history
classics in all fields
abilities/skills of creativity
ingenuity
independent/analytical thinking
persuasive communication
artistic/technological innovation
entrepreneurial initiative
service and leadership

I hope I can create the best combination of homeschooling, charter schooling, public schooling, etc. to help each of my kids in their own individual way learn what, how and when they need to.

Homeschooling

I am going to home-school my kids.  I may or may not send my oldest Cowboy to a charter Montessori school this Fall in addition to homeschooling.  He will be old enough for kindergarten.  I had never considered any alternative forms of education such as charter schools or homeschooling until it came to sending my very own first child off to someone else's tutelage. I guess I thought about it because I am slowly learning to think about things before just jumping in and following what the crowd automatically does in most situations.  (See previous posts on birthing options).  Yes, it is sort of sad that it has taken me until well into my twenties to REALLY start thinking this way.  I guess I have always had a thread of non-conventionalism, but now it is becoming a little more research-based and prayerful. 
This is actually one of the reasons I am so passionately interested in home-schooling: I would like my own children to REALLY start thinking earlier than I did.  I find it a whole lot easier to obtain my own individualized, valuable education now that all that schooling is out of the way (high school diploma, bachelor's degree).  I feel so behind.  My mind is constantly blown lately with how much there is to learn out there.  I can't read enough books.  I feel like I am constantly starving for knowledge.  It is awesome!  Learning is the most amazing, powerful, singularly important thing in this life.
I am so, so grateful that in the frazzled search of "Which school can I send my innocent, amazing firstborn to?" where this whole thing all began, that someone happened to introduce me to a lady who home schools her children and she 'happened' to say one of the most powerful statements I have ever heard: "That book changed my life."  And she was willing to let me borrow that book.  What book?  "A Thomas Jefferson Education", by Oliver DeMille.

Much more to come.

After Thoughts Part 2

So I named the last post "after thought part 1", intending to write more later... I have been racking my brain trying to remember what it was I was planning to post.  This may be the first post where I am completely making it up as I go, with no real plan.  The one thing that has kept coming to my mind that I have been wanting to share is this:

 Yes, it hurt.  But that's OKAY! There are worse things in life than physical pain.

And, yes, I suppose there are worse things than putting your baby and yourself at risk of serious medical complications by simply (and naively) doing everything the doctors and nurses suggest.  That comment was more for me than you, by the way, as I really do need to keep telling myself it is okay that not everyone chooses natural birth.  It is kind of crazy how passionate I am about the whole thing.  How difficult it is for me to hear stories about c-sections and being induced.  How I literally feel sick to my stomach hearing about someone mention they got an epidural without even attempting it without.  I kind of wonder, like, why do I care so much?  I know I am being way too real now, but really, why does it bother me so much that some lady I don't even know got an epidural simply because she was bored and uncomfortable sitting in the hospital bed.  Why am I really, really hoping my dear friend in Payson can pull off a VBAC and not get a repeat cesarean and another one in SLC can get the home birth she wants.  I guess it would have to be one of two things.  Either I want everyone to attempt natural birth to prove me right and to be like me (although, of course, I have always been the type that rather likes being the one-of-a-kind oddball - and of course just because everyone does something does not make it right) OR because I really, really do feel like more women should be attempting natural birth, that women are much more capable than they realize and that women are robbing themselves of amazing, life-changing experiences.  In other words, I want to tell everyone what I wish someone would have told me before I had cowboy.  No, this whole thing is not about regret.  Cowboy's birth is over, he is four year's old now and perfectly healthy.  And it really doesn't even bother me a ton how his birth went (anymore).  But I guess it comes down to the choice between good and great, or between tolerable and empowering.

Back to the "what I wish someone would have told me":  I think if someone would have said "You should have a natural birth for the health of yourself and your baby"  I don't think it would have done a thing.  It wouldn't have been enough.  After all, I did walk into that hospital with baby number one intending to "try it without the epidural", but of course gave in after a few minutes of pain. Probably what I needed to hear was "You CAN have a natural birth and it will be the best thing for you and your baby".

So this is what I have been wanting to tell all of you: YOU CAN DO IT!  You can give it your whole-hearted best shot.  If in the end that turns out to be 16 hours of intense labor followed by an epidural, then good for you for that 16 hours, that is an amazing gift to your baby that you will be glad you gave him.  If it means waiting just one more day (or even two more weeks) as a humongous, horribly uncomfortable 9 months pregnant ornery mom until you go into labor naturally instead of getting induced, then that is exactly the time your baby needed to prepare for one of the hardest events of their life.  You are telling them "It's up to you, my child.  Your being fully ready is more important to me than my comfort or schedule".

So, read, study, research your options because it IS a big deal.  Your babies are a big deal and it is worth the effort - you need to know what you are really risking here.  Do the best you can... and then some, because the best you can is WAY more than you can imagine.