nature journals

The Nature Connection

Great nature book

May Baskets

Well I guess it's been a while LOL!  Trying to follow parts of the Reggio Emilia Approach and start documenting everything. So this is the first post hopefully that will keep coming. I'm not going to drive myself crazy thinking about grammar or content etc.. I'm hopefully going to post a lot of bad photos LOL I have to let go of the perfectionist in me if I'm going to do this.

 As far as how life is going... Well Isaac is doing great,loving college. Nadia is feeling a bit lost right now ,not sure what she wants to do.  So she is going to try taking some local classes at 4C and at a local art studio. Sebastian had his first "adult" bday. All of his presents save the video games were grown up ones. Francesca is still creating,creating,creating. Olli is out growing his baby stage... Last month he gave up his teddy after some boys picked on him. :( Chris is still working towards us moving to Australia. He had kind of a rough summer. He caught my mono. He seems to be getting back to himself thank goodness. He is such a trooper that I know now I have to watch out for him. We would not have even known he had mono if I hadn't insisted he go to the doctors. As for yours truly, I've been feeling more and more like myself. After they put me on that stretch of antibiotics 99% of the pain in my body has gone. I still get some in my neck which is where the pain originally started but even that seems to be slowly getting better. But more then the pain gone I am starting to feel like I did before I had Francesca. I still get tired easy but it feels like a natural tired that I just need to work on endurance. I don't know if I will ever get back to running 5 miles a day but it does seem like maybe I could walk five miles :) some day. The biggest clue is my hair is starting to get curly again(for those that have only known me recently my hair was naturally curly all my life up until I started feeling sick).  For so long there I was barely hanging on. It's so nice to feel like I can vs just surviving.
One thing I have learned through all of this is you have to watch your own health. My brother recently was going through something and I told him it sounds like kidney issues (which I've dealt with on and off) . The way he sounded so disoriented was a big clue for me. His doctor gave him the brush off big time and the next thing you know he's in the hospital and might have to be on digitalis for life. It makes me so angry when doctors ignore people or worse treat them like they are a hypochondriac.
 So there you have the latest and now I'll start with the documenting. Olli seems finally interested in more then just reading, so we're going to be digging a bit deeper with him. The cool thing about waiting till the kids are ready is they pick up so quickly and are at "grade" level so fast.  Waldorf schools which boast that 90% of their grads go on to higher learning say that often the students that started the slowest ,ended the strongest. Really a different mindset but you really have to dig into the why's and I can't explain it all here even if I wanted too. A great video to watch as to why they teaching reading later (reading proficiency is not expected until the third grade)  http://vimeo.com/9181078 and a good simple why article here http://www.greenermagazine.com/Waldorfeducation.html
Some  more pics from today I meant to take more of the actual work but forgot.... I"ll keep trying!

(Francesca delivering May baskets with flowers from our yard. She looks so big it's scary! I guess I haven't taken pictures in a while....)

 (We made some beanies today with rainbow thread. Then we had lots of fun doing hands on learning with them.)


Wow long start LOL probably be the longest for while though so bare with me.