September Birthdays...

My birthday babies! Maura being born on Ben's 2nd birthday! They are pretty good at sharing birthday parties.

Maura decorating for family party.

This is Grace rescuing our cake disaster. I made 2 beautiful grain free cakes that we just love and the oven stuck on 500 and burnt the outsides. So she made cake balls!

They were delicious.

Happy Birthday!

They said they actually liked the cake balls better!

Ben fit all his gifts in his new backpack. Knife, tea mug, tea (he drinks a cuppa every morning), jeans and a first aid kit. He is our resident medic.

Tea party time!

Grace helped me throw this together for Maura. We were able to pick up some used china and it made it very pretty.

She had a few friends from church over. They had a great time.

Humility

–Humility does not think much or little of itself; it does not think of itself at all. C.M.

My Charlotte Mason book club just came to the close of 'Parents and Children'. We certainly ended with a bang, or rather Charlotte did. I think the above statement is a new rather big idea that she has given me. This is the third book I have been blessed to study through in the two years I have been a part of this book club. It is such a joy to read through Ms. Mason's series on education with others. I have found her books to be so much more than instruction on how to teach my children. It is a devotional, a guide to life, a character training for me and a philosophy of life.

It seems like once or twice a year, I trip across a BIG IDEA somewhere in her writing. Last year it was this:

We become aware of an altogether unnatural and irreligious classification into things sacred and things secular. We are not in all things at one with God. There are beautiful lives in which there is no trace of this separation, whose aims are confined to the things we call sacred. But many thoughtful, earnest persons feel sorely the need of a conception of the divine relation which shall embrace the whole of human life which shall make art, science, politics, all those cares and thoughts of men which are not rebellious, sacred also as being all engaged in the great evolution, the evolution of the Kingdom of God.  vol 2 pg 130

I believe for the next little while, I will be meditating on humility. On what it should be in myself and how I should guard it in my children. I'll leave you with some more thoughts from Charlotte....

  It is a negative rather than a positive quality, being an absence of self-consciousness rather than the presence of any distinctive virtue. The person who is unaware of himself is capable of all lowly service, of all suffering for others, of bright cheerfulness under all the small crosses and worries of everyday life. This is the quality that makes heroes, and this is the quality that makes saints. We are able to pray, but we are hardly able to worship or to praise, to say, 'My soul doth magnify the Lord' so long as in the innermost chamber of our hearts we are self-occupied. vol 2 pg 285

The note of childhood is, before all things, humility.  This, if we think of it, is the state natural to children. Every person and thing commands their interest; but the person or thing in action is deeply interesting.

I have really wanted to do a post about nature study for a long time. And this is really not one. It is one of my favorite aspects of this CM lifestyle. I think when it really became wonderful for us is when I stopped sending my children outside to do it and started taking them outside with me as I did it. I began keeping a nature journal. I don't record as often as I should, my hands after all are often full, but it is a treasure to me now.

I had a friend recently ask me how I knew the names of so many plants and things.(I really don't)  I explained that if you just learned one new species on each nature walk you took, think of what you would learn and know over a lifetime. That is my goal, for myself and my children, each walk to learn to identify something new. And when I really know it is when I have recorded it in my journal because the mind only can know what it tells itself. That's how we process. So that brush drawing or sketch is really my narration of what I've learned and then I never forget it.

On the Blueridge Parkway

One of my favorite nature study lessons. We were possum sitting for friends.

Narration after all is what we all do when we are excited about something, have had something big happen in our lives or we are upset. We "vent", "share" and "process" with others.

Sliding Rock. It is amazing how the river bed becomes just this rock. Only my brave children slid down!

Curtiss loved it.

I wish this wasn't blurry. Ladies Tresses. Isn't it neat?!

Here is a cicada Ben found right as he was ready to shed his skin.

Climbing out

Wings plumping as the blood gets flowing. It was truly amazing to sit and watch it all unfold.

Our goal is to be out in nature one half day and one long day each week. It's been a total fail lately. Or if we do get out, we don't journal. Ok, well a fail in the last couple weeks. We do have a 9 week old. I am learning instead of beating myself up for these "failures" to just keep plodding along or I just tend to want to give up. It's just too rich to give up on! So I will keep fighting the chaos that can ensue when you are trying to get nine people packed and out the door, I will keep guarding and carving out the time. Because the fruits of what we have succeeded in are just too rich to not continue to pursue.