I never thought I'd find an 85 degree day delightfully cool, but all things being relative that's exactly how I felt about today, and we spent it outside tending to the gardens, refinishing deck furniture, and playing in the water. Tomorrow being Monday, we'll have to be back in the actual swing of things. Yes there is life after vacation.
summer Nature Thursdays are back! Last year we spent every Thursday with one of the two fantastic wildlife interpreters from our County Parks & Rec commission, and yesterday marked the beginning of the same for this summer. The weekly programs are aimed at children, each with a theme bugs, or snakes, or flowers, etc. This week's session was about water-loving wildlife. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) Calvin and I were the only people who came, but we had a great time seeing our favorite Michigan wildlife specialist again, and Calvin got to touch green frogs, a crayfish, a snapping turtle, and even got to hold a painted turtle. We also went for a short hike to try netting smaller wildlife in the pond. Being just us of course meant that the program went at Calvin's pace, and because he was so obviously interested we were treated to extra discussion and netting time, which made it just that much more fun.
The program was at Independence Lake this time around, so we packed a picnic lunch and stayed to spend the afternoon, partly in learning to identify a few common Michigan plant and animal species (with only ourselves and a book as guides), and partly to play in the sand and water. Calvin is becoming a fish. He can now push off, arc into the water, and swim a ways with good kicks and a pretty good early crawl. And he loves to float around on his back. Back home in the late afternoon he spent another forty minutes in the bath. It's possible that he should have been included on the list of Michigan aquatic wildlife.
Playing the memory game, then sorting by salt vs. fresh water
Painted turtle
Painted turtle
Green frog
Trying to feed the turtles 
Swans on the pond
Looking for and discussing critters in the net
Bigfoot print or tree stump?
Splashing around after lunch
Swimming!
Floating!
Getting as sandy as humanly possible!
Nature Thursdays, summer, swimming, wildlife Calvin and I were sick all week with a terrible cold that knocked us flat. Lots of reading, lots of couch time, and we skipped out on all our outside activities, but summer had come again (still early this time, though not as early as when it was here two months ago) and the sunshine called us outside on Friday. The periodic unseasonal warmth has brought blooms much earlier, and weeds as well. Mostly gigantic weeds, in fact, but the chilly, gray weather, more characteristic of these months, and then this abhorrent cold, have kept me from keeping them under control. The gardens in the back were a sight to behold by this weekend, so that's where we spent the last three days, with sprinklers, shovels, gloves, and every ounce of energy we could muster. Calvin included. And the garden spent the weekend thanking us in the form of emerging blooms and returning creatures.
Iris in the front yard (after the sprinkler)
Toad in the front garden.
Poppy bud in the front garden.
Lazy hummingbird is sitting on the feeder to eat.
Blue flag iris in the back garden.
Bumble in the false indigo.
Fleabane? In the butterfly garden.
The first monarch ever in our butterfly garden!
Summer yarrow (which shouldn't be blooming yet) in the butterfly garden.
Oriole on the feeder out front (he's shy, so that's the best picture I've gotten yet)
And because I like before and after shots, here is a shot of the butterfly garden on Friday before the weeekend weeding, and then on Sunday when we were all done. It is still a work in progress, and there is a lot of space to fill in with beautiful Michigan wild-type flowers, but taking it one year at a time, we've come a long way.
bird watching, gardening, summer, wildlife Somewhere, between the late swarms of mosquitoes that sounds like summer and the early changing of the trees that looks like fall, is the essence of now. Somewhere, between my longing for an extension of hot summer days, to spend at the lake or the pool, and my desire for the golden weekends of fall, to spend tailgating or raking leaves, is my ability to just be in the present. There is nothing more valuable than this moment right now, which outside of the cliche is painfully obvious given the myriad of things that pull at my time and demand my attention at any given moment. Take this minute, for instance. I have two books I am longing to read, laundry that needs to be put away, a variety of odd household chores to be done, and some hefty decisions to make about the coming year.
I hate hefty decisions—they always make my thoughts difficult to balance.
What they boil down to, though, and really they're not as hefty as they seem, is an inability to define the homeschoolers we'll be. Having decided that I need more of a structure to get through a week I sat down to peruse the Currclick site tonight, looking for unit studies (which are mostly on sale) to help me make a fall plan. Since he's so intrigued by penguins right now I asked him if he'd like to study Antarctica this week, and then I downloaded a unit study on exactly that. Could I have made my own? Probably. Do I really want someone else to have written a plan for our exploration of that continent? Mmmm...maybe not.
And the doubt creeps in.
But I kept going. With Thanksgiving right around the corner (just ask the commercial sector, which is already stocking for it) I sought a set of studies on US history and geography and downloaded those as well. Then I started looking at the Five in a Row book units I typed up, while borrowing the book from the library last winter, and started distributing those books throughout the fall months, coupling them with the activities in the unit studies.
Midway through writing that calendar I hit the brakes and quit with a big sigh.
I haven't fully given up on my desire to unschool, to let go and follow. I feel safer—more grounded—when I have a plan, but when I look at the studies and my calendar I see exactly what we wanted to avoid with home learning—a plan leaving just one way of doing things. We had wanted to provide many ways to reach a goal. In my ensuing panic I realize that I'm right back at square one, which is the point at which I have to decide what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. Even leaving a door open, through which I can go to change my mind, I have to have a path to follow before I can even get started.
How much guidance to give? How much planning to do?
Of course I am the problem. Calvin is thriving in his learning environment, no matter what I throw at him, be it the FIAR book studies, an Itellego unit study, or a general freedom to seek answers on his own. Is a mixture okay? And where is the fine line between planting a seed of interest, nourishing it with information and encouragement, and letting it take root, and creating an interest that would not exist were it not for external pressures, i.e. planting a water lily in the desert and keeping it alive where it shouldn't be merely by excessive attentions? The answers have not been forthcoming, and lethargy (my own) is setting in.
Which is not to say that I am devoid of excitement about this process. Quite the opposite, really. I sent messages out today to two different local homeschooling groups and we will meet them at the end of this week and the beginning of the next. We've made a new nature table and study center upstairs in our office/learning room, we've re-organized and re-shelved the books, and I still have that calendar I started earlier today. Maybe, as the mosquitoes leave and the trees turn, I'll use it. Maybe I won't.
I can't close this one up neatly. I want to be honest in sharing about our journey, and right now my head is swimming and I feel a little unbalanced and lost, so all I can offer are my thoughts, without a logical conclusion. My guess is that, as much as I desire a plan and a clear, distinct goal, only time will really tell me how our path will go. We'll get there, though, even if we get a little lost along the way.
fall, homeschooling, summer 
