Legos

I've heard that all parents are faced at one time or another with a very important decision. The decision between Legos and Playmobil. My understanding is that everyone has to plant themselves firmly in one camp or the other by the time their first born is five. For the past couple of years we've given Playmobil a try, and I find myself really liking the pieces—they're well made and almost realistic—but I also find them constraining in a way that Legos would never be. So we're putting one foot firmly in each camp.

And that's not really what this post is about. Calvin got his first Lego set, an electric truck, for St. Nicholas Day this year and it took him less than half an hour to assemble it by himself. I found great joy in watching him decipher the picture directions, making errors here and there then fixing them, asking for help only a handful of times when he couldn't get a piece to snap down. It was a great moment, and that's what this post is about.

I call a mulligan

Obviously time has gotten away from me. There have been so many things that I have wanted to write about here over the past few months and somehow either the time or the words have elluded. Since last I posted here we have continued to read and have begun a flirtation with the Five in a Row curriculum, Calvin and I have both started taking piano lessons, and the fresh season has brought with a myriad of learning opportunities, not the least of which has been planting and growing. I am calling a mulligan, a restart for this portion of the site, in hopes that a slight redirection or redefinition of the space will help me to keep up with content. From here on out I will probably be talking more about the books that we are reading at any given time since, as homeschoolers leaning towards unschooling with a splash of classical education, reading is one of our main and most favorite activities. There will be other topics as well, but the crafting posts were feeling a little bit contrived, if not all together hokie, to me, and I'm feeling the need to relax the schedule a bit more. We are, after all, mostly unschoolers for a reason.