The garden is growing, the warm weather is here. Time to grill, to read, to soak up the sun, to explore to the heart's content. It's summer (or at least it feels like it).
summer Since moving into our house, when we started by regrading the lawn and putting in one small garden, we have spent most of our holiday weekends working up a sweat in the yard. The projects have varied in type and size over the years, but as long as we were in town on a long weekend, we were working in the yard, usually with help from extended family.
Over six years this has meant a lot of change. When we moved in we had exactly one tree and the only garden was the builder's landscaping in front—everything else was grass, grass, grass. Grass that you have to water, weed, and mow. Now the house is lined with plantings and the yard bordered in flower garden; we have a total of nine trees, three raised vegetable garden beds, and one very large native plant butterfly and hummingbird garden; there are two dry rock rivers to divert the sump pumps that drain in our yard and a fire pit; and now, after this Memorial Day weekend, we now have a patio. There is still a bit of finishing work to do around it, but now we have a great new place to sit and enjoy our gardens and
family, gardening, home projects, summer 
Life is punctuated by routine.
Invariably we start the day with breakfast and an adios to Jon on his way to work. Our morning is about table work—the school lessons that we actually sit down and do, like math, spelling, grammar, geography, etc. (and not all homeschoolers do this, by the way, but my kid happens to like the predictability of it). And we squeak in piano, and some time to read, or build, or play. Then there's lunch, and a chance to get outside if the weather is good, or play games, watch videos, read, sing, build, what have you, in the afternoon. Then Jon comes home and we soak up our time with him before going to bed and starting all over again the next day.
This is our routine. It is the punctuation that keeps us on track, and punctuation is good because it keeps you on track. It's also good because it helps you tell or read the story with enough predictability that you can enjoy the unpredictable—the story that happens in the spaces between, like a surprise afternoon in the middle of a work week when our whole family gets to drop what we're doing and head to the park to enjoy the weather together. We like together.
Life happens in the spaces between.
I let him loose in the driveway today.
Earlier in the day, in the car on our way home from nature camp, I asked him what he wanted to do with the afternoon.
"Math, spelling, and grammar," he said, "and then I want to experiment with water."
I asked him what kind of experiments he wanted to do.
"I want to find out what else fizzes like vinegar and baking soda."
Now, we've done the whole vinegar and baking soda thing a couple of times. We did it once when he was about four and totally obsessed with volcanoes so we did the obligatory conical explosion in the front yard. At the time it bothered me because vinegar and baking soda inside a plastic cone painted to look like a volcano have absolutely nothing to do with volcanoes, and volcanoes have no direct connection to the acid/base lesson that is the vinegar and baking soda reaction. So we followed the volcanic eruption in the front yard with a quick lesson on solutions and acids and bases a la The Young Scientist Club.
I'd like to say that I've relaxed a bit since that time when I was afraid to let him explode a volcano lest he mistake the kaboom of vinegar meeting baking soda for the nuts and bolts of a real, honest-to-goodness volcano. Sounds silly, doesn't it? Who was that mom anyhow? But actually, that kind of "science" still drives me nuts. The argument is moot, though. When I asked him if he knew why vinegar and baking soda reacted that way he remembered neither the volcano enactment nor the subsequent acids/bases exploration unit.
Not an entire loss, however, he did know that the reaction itself releases carbon dioxide gas, the culprit responsible for the fizzing. And, since everyone loves a good fizzy experiment, this afternoon he was off in search of more such explosive pairings.
And here's how I know—without a doubt—that I have relaxed in the past four years. When he asked for five glasses, five spoons, a measuring cup, water, vinegar, baking soda, salt, corn starch, and food coloring...I didn't bat an eye. I piled it all up on a tray, asked him to experiment in the driveway please, and delivered the goods. I watched for a while, and let him school me on his methods, but mostly I did laundry. And, when he used all the vinegar, salt, and corn starch in the house, I simply added those staples to the weekly shopping list.
It's a great big learning world out there.
homeschooling, science 
