04 | October | 2013 | Live. Learn. Love. Eat.

Our days have still been very full. I am enjoying the fullness of our days, these days when the girls are still young and in my care and I have this awesome responsibility of caring for them and guiding them through life. Both Autumn and Kesa started dance again this year. Autumn is in tap and jazz dance and Kesa is in ballet and tap.

Serafina was excited to try out Kesa’s tap shoes too when we got out their dance stuff from the basement. Now begins the walking to dance two days a week all through the cold weather. That is the only part I dread about putting them in dance lessons, but they love it so much and Autumn is so good at it, that we had to do it.

The days are growing colder and the leaves are a golden yellow now. Looking out my bedroom window, I can see pretty well through the trees now that so many of the leaves have fallen.

Fall is always so beautiful to me.

The girls still love to play outside (as always), even though it is colder out. Outside is always the best place for a child to be. Outside is where a child feels most at home.

I can’t believe how often the girls request to be outside, even after they have been out for much of the morning, they always want more. It is so nice to see them play all together and come up with all kinds of imaginative games. It reminds me of when I was a child and would practically live outside too. Sometimes I wonder how many children still have that connection to nature because it seems that not very many children are ever outside anymore.

I got out our fall clothes from the basement too, long-sleeved shirts and pants, jackets, mitts and hats. I had a giant pile of laundry to do and still I have not actually done the sorting of the clothes yet (taking out the summer stuff from their drawers and putting in the fall/winter stuff). Laundry is my least favorite thing to do, so we had a big pile of fresh laundry on the living room floor for a day.

Serafina loved to lay in it and play with the dryer sheets, throwing them up in the air and watching them float down to her face. That gave her quite a thrill.

Rather than letting that laundry pile bother me, I enjoyed watching her explore and play in the colorful sea of clothes, finding such thrill and fascination in a single dryer sheet.

It was quite a lesson in reverence for me.

This little girl is really beginning to amaze me!

Not that she hasn’t always, but she is turning into such a beautiful young woman, I just can’t believe it. In just 6 more days, she will turn nine years old. She is such a beautiful spirit and such a help to me around the house and with her sisters.

Her learning is going really well too. We have been learning so much together! I am so glad to have stumbled upon Charles Kovacs Waldorf resources.

We are learning Geology and Astronomy and also started Botany. These resources are just what I have been wanting for our homeschooling, as my husband and I are into Rudolf Steiner and I have always wanted to have a Waldorf approach to our homeschooling. The lessons and learning are fun and alive, not dead and boring.

I read the chapters to the girls and draw pictures to illustrate the point. Autumn then makes her own learning pages. This to me is so great because she is actively engaged in her learning and gets to use art and creativity along with her lessons. Each lesson is also expressed from a spiritual standpoint. Geology, the water cycle, the sun, the moon phases, the seasons, the plants, everything is viewed from a spiritual standpoint and in light of spiritual science, not just the physical/material. I have often felt pretty hopeless with how we were doing things before, but now I am so happy that I have found a breath of life for our learning and a way that I can feel interested in teaching. I never wanted our homeschooling to be just like school, with book work and tests etc. This approach is really engaging and enriching, just what I wanted for my girls and myself as a teacher.

The calendar of the year. Solstices and Equinoxes.

The anatomy of a plant.

The work of water,

The water cycle.

On Monday we dug up the rest of our potatoes and picked the rest of the corn from the garden.

They all loved digging in the earth in search of their treasure, potatoes. The potatoes from the garden are so fresh, alive and yummy! Definitely different than store-bought potatoes.