And then, Saturday afternoon, I stood on our front steps talking with our new neighbor and the subject of school start dates came up. Public school in NH doesn't start after Labor Day. It starts before. The Tuesday before. Suddenly I doubted myself, what was I doing? Was I lazy? Was I cheating my children of a whole week of school that they were entitled to? I wrote my intent to homeschool letter and dropped it off at the district office on Monday, an entirely anticlimatic meeting. I then went by Rigel's school from last year and gave them a copy. A nice conversation, and I found out that Rigel can go to a whole variety of afterschool programs at the school (Chess, Lego, Language and Drama...we'll see).
Anyway, Monday we enjoyed a family day at home with Darik and Tuesday we headed off to Ikea to purchase much needed desks for the adults and toy organizers for the kids. And then Wednesday. Darik was off to the first day of faculty meetings and I was home with the kids. And the doubts began. What was I doing? Why weren't we upstairs in our school room "doing" something? How could I have let the kids watch netflix in the morning if we were supposed to be moving towards a schooling rhythm of life? Why didn't I know exactly what that rhythm would be like? How could we still be inside at 11:30 in the morning on a beautiful late summer day? Shouldn't we go for a walk? Sure we read a story or two on the hammock, but that doesn't really "count" does it? How about I grab our new nature study book and we could do the first nature study of the year? That would "count" right?
And then I said forget it. I grabbed a few apples, a couple bags of carrots, and my water backpack and we headed out. And yes it was 12:10 and no, we hadn't eaten lunch. We walked through the woods for a while, then up the road towards the campus garden, which we've barely been to all summer as we'd been gone. On the way we found the campus chickens. We've been here for a year and never had seen them. The kids fed them grass and we peeked at their eggs. And then we went on and had an apple picnic at the side of the road. River discovered if you took multiple bites in a row, it looked like a caterpillar.
And Rigel decided to test gravity by balancing his apple on his head.
And yes the apple fell off several time and yes he ate it anyway!
Then we continued up the road and made it to the garden. What a bounty! We picked beautiful red tomatoes, an plum eggplant, admired a gorgeous pepper plant, pulled scarlet beets, picked green beans, and selected orange carrots...with Rigel more excited about feeding the carrot greens to the chickens then he was about anything else. What an exciting collection!
And then it was onto the chickens. We gathered 4 eggs and briefly discussed division.
And fed the chickens grass and carrot tops. Rigel declared we need to go back today to find out whether the chickens could really eat all that grass in just one day.
And then we walked home. We had a carrot picnic at the campus ampitheatre and Rigel climbed rocks. We scrambled the fresh eggs, I had my first tomato sandwich with mayo, and River ate tomato after tomato.
And then it dawned on me. I wasn't failing the kids. Homeschool has two parts to it.....home and school. We just moved. Darik has been away, and out house is largely still in boxes (although the ikea trip and Darik's assembly skills are greatly helping).
I could be pushing to start the beautiful curriculums I now have nicely placed on the bookshelf near my desk (I have a desk!) But we'll get there. For today, for this week, and possibly for parts of this month, I need to build a sense of home for my children and my family. And yes, we will start the beautiful books which their readers and manipulatives. We will listen to and read Story of the World, we will build aqueducts and mummify a chicken. But for now, this is OK. If it helps, I can call today our farm field trip, but really, no...we just went for a walk and discovered what we have in our own backyard. And that's enough.
