Chatting, Camping, and Castles

 He stands on the chair because that means he can reach us and converse with us. He speaks another language, but we are catching on. He stands on the chair because he will be eye to eye with Amelia and  closer to the pop corn and crayons and salsa and glue sticks and math problems. If I turn away for an instant, he will climb on top and plop in the exact middle of it all. His curls dance around his head. It moves all day from here to there. He practices and plays and creates and converses. He matches and puzzles and chats and sings and dances with the thump of just one foot. He wakes up looking for his sister and then a chance to cuddle with daddy. A cuddle with William involves his body perpendicular to our necks as he stares towards the sky and chats away or rolls around a bit.
And he did quite a bit of rolling through the night on first William camping trip last weekend. It was camping at its finest. George Wilder is ready to set up the tent and Amelia built our fires. We found the perfect camping spot, which miraculously involved a bluegrass camp for the kids! 


A cowboy hat and a kilt. A spray bottle, some old chalk and some sea shells. An old Thanksgiving candle. A bouquet of yard flowers. A clump of rescued plants from the garden. Old bricks stacked into a two foot wall. An old piece of fencing. Two wooden chairs. 
A castle. 
A grand castle kept tidy and inviting. 
She doesn't stop caring for her space. It is just that, but it is hers and she has created it. I keep bringing her little pieces of this and that to give it some character, but her character is inviting enough. She journals about it. She has been dreaming about it. If we are not in the middle of a lesson or a meal or in out of the rain -- she is there. William toddles along behind her. He sits with her there and chats and throws the remnants of an old baseball Amelia found in the dirt right there in the castle! 
My garden is growing right beside the castle so I'll thin my lettuce and transplant the garlic and, of course, spray for bugs while she chats about her latest activities or invites me to have my hands painted with her new paint. 










Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Love Them. Feed Them. Talk To Them. The Rest Is Icing On The Cake.

Image
We've been homeschooling for ten years. At LEAST once a week I think that homeschooling is the worst possible thing on the planet. I look at my kids and think, "I've got nothin'!" It is scary. It is hard. How many hundreds of times have I called my extremely patient husband and yelled, literally screamed into the phone, "I CAN'T DO THIS!" There was a day, in the middle of a lesson that wasn't going well at all, that I walked out the back door, walked to the pool, jumped in fully clothed and yelled as loud as I could under the water. I got back out of the pool, calmly walked inside, changed my clothes and continued with the day feeling much relieved. George, my husband and biggest cheerleader - also a major part of our homeschooling life, is diligent to walk me off the cliff of homeschool despair. When I feel like I am failing our children, he offers me this morsel... Before I give you his advice, I would like to mention at this poi...
Read more

Child's Play

Image
Amelia wanted to have a coffee shop party for her friends to celebrate her birthday. We planned it all week. We named the coffee shop, "Amaruma Coffee." George Wilder says it means, "Good Coffee". We made the logo. Of course it included a tree (Amelia draws trees constantly) and coffee beans. We made decisions about what to serve and how to serve it.  Then Amelia decided to make a castle. She found some bricks in the yard and started making a wall/castle. George Wilder was responsible for making the mortar from ash and water and dirt. They worked on the wall/castle for days. The coffee shop became the side show and the castle would be the center of play. They walked through exactly how the day would go all afternoon Thursday. It was nearly impossible to do any school work Friday. They looked longingly toward the castle/wall. There was work to do. It had to be finished and decorated and set up for extensive castle visiting. There were problems to be sol...
Read more

Wilderness Whines

Image
When the "but I want . . . " sirens wail and "just one more time. . . " voices ring in chorus, and the "when will we be there?" interrogations press hard against ear drum, we stop and talk about the power of wishing for something that isn't ours to have and how it is debilitating and hard and caused an entire nation to get stuck in a desert for 40 years and if they would have just seen past the "when will we get there" they might have enjoyed the journey and found glory waiting without so much turmoil. We are cuddled and there are lots of tears as I explain the weeding of the whine and how it must happen now. And suddenly I realize that perhaps I've been wandering around. Yes, I have. I am in a desert of whine. It is bedtime and we turn off the lights and pray for grace for the next day. The next day arrives quickly. I lace up and head out the door for a morning run and prayer. It comes to me as I put one foot in front of the...
Read more