Have you hugged a tree today?

We have declared Sunday's in Spring as family hike days. Ryan and I usually hike once a week, but we do not go often as a family. In the above picture Ryan remembered that this was the tree we stood under to keep dry last fall when we were hiking at our favorite local mountain The Sleeping Giant. He decided to give it a hug and thank him for keeping us dry - so cute!

Woodworking

I took advantage of the warm weather yesterday to get the saw out. I made Ryan an iron - because of course every boy needs a wooden iron!!!! How else is he going to get the wrinkles out of his playsilks : )

Happy Easter and Welcome Lady Spring

We had a wonderful Easter/Spring celebration yesterday. The weather was beautiful and the Easter Bunny was able to hide the boys eggs outside this year. We started our morning with pancakes complete with local CT maple syrup. While everyone finished up their pancakes, I went and set up an Easter puppet show. The story was from Suzanne Down Juniper Tree Spring tales. I chose the story of Easteria - the Goddess of Spring. I tried to video tape it for the blog but it cut out half way and after reviewing it - it needs some work before it becomes public!

Ryan was up first to see the Easter Basket. He loves the lap harp and has been playing "beautiful music" on it. Sage received much needed hiking boots..


I loved the way Mother Earth and the black bear came out. I spent a lot of time on them and they are by far the best that I have needle felted so far. I am so excited. They look much better in person!
No more plastic eggs in our house! Well actually I used one plastic egg to wet felt the egg below. Then sewed it up so that it could be opened with out falling apart. Complete with a little bird sitting on M&M eggs and Ryan is a happy boy. He thought it was so funny that the little bird was sitting on m&m eggs. Sage just wants to chocolate bunny - no cute fancy stuff. That is what happens at 13! Plus the boys rarely get chocolate so they go right for it.
Tony delivered this letter from the easter bunny. I was surprised to see it in the morning. He did a great job on it. It is hard to read, but it says that the Easter bunny left eggs in the backyard and needs the boys help to collect them all. I love that he asks the boys to work together and keep what they collect and share with the family.

After all the eggs were collected...

We then played a couple of egg games. One is shown below where a bunch og eggs are set up with coins on top, then you roll down your egg from some sticks and try to knock off the coins. We then played a family egg relay race. That was fun and funny!
Of course Heidi had to get in on the fun. She kept taking the eggs and we would have to chase her around to get it back. It would not be wise for her to eat the egg with egg shells.


With it being such a beautiful day, it was a perfect time to go for a spring hike. I have seen a small area down the road from us for hiking that I have not yet explored so we went there. It was amazing - I had no idea it was there.



Ok I am a blog nerd - I had Tony take a picture of my new hiking fanny pack just to post. I love this pack, it takes alot of weight off my shoulders and I can carry water and snacks - a must!!
Ryan digging for worms

We had a wonderful day and were all exhausted by 6 - well at least Ryan and I. I think Sage was to because after our hike Sage played football and basket ball with the neighborhood kids. I even had a chance to clean out the shed.

HAPPY SPRING!!!!!

Happy Anniversary!

Tony and I celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary yesterday! We actually went out to dinner by ourselves and then to the coffee shop that by chance had a local band playing. The guitarist is a teacher so I got his card as a possibility for Ryan and Tony brought home ribs for Sage - our meat eater. Even out alone we still think about the kids! We had a great time and really enjoyed each others company.

p.s. that is little Sage at 2 years old being held by the best man Jason.

My sensitive guy

Ryan at times is all boy! no doubt about it. Loves his hot wheel cars, jams out to the Beatles, plays tackle with his older brother,, but at times (many times) can be a very sweet sensitive guy. He has a renewed love for George, his doll he received last Christmas. George has been coming with us lately when we go places and tonight Ryan tucked him into bed and read him a story. Too sweet.

Notice the haircut!! He decided to do that himself. He said his hair was in his eyes when he tried to do somersaults. He was so proud of himself, I did not have the heart to "fix"it. He looks like a little beatnik now.

Happy Spring !!

Happy Spring! We have been very happy here up north that spring is approaching. I have been telling Ryan the story of "Princess Spring" from our Enki curriculum. Is basically the story of Princess Spring returning to the world as she chases King Winter away.

The trees all call her the lady of the Willow
The birds all call her the lady of the Wing
The flowers all call her the lady of Colors
But her true name is Princess Spring

After reading this story and doing a puppet show, Ryan put our King Winter to bed. THe last couple of days here have been very windy and chilly as if King Winter is a very active 5 year old who is not ready to go to bed yet and wants to stay up talking!!

I am soo ready for Spring. I bought some orange tulips to "warm" up the house as well as some pussy willows. One of our songs we like to sing is about pussy willows:

I know a little pussy
her coat is silver grey
she lives down in the meadow
not to far away
she'll always be a pussy, she'll never be a cat.
For she's a pussy willow and what do you think of that.
Meow,meow, meow, meow, SCAT.



Here is our spring nature table. I feel like it is missing something, but I am not sure what it is. It just doesnt look complete - hummmm - oh hey Lady Spring is missing! I just realized that.
The wheat grass of our easter basket is growing nicely. We are ready to celebrate the awakening of the Earth.

Lesson Updates

I am a bit behind in posting our Lessons the last 2 weeks. So this will be an overview of what we have been doing. One of the reasons I love Waldorf Education is that the children are learning heart,head and soul. Stories and Songs bring so much meaning and richness to our lives. I love that when we sit to paint with watercolors, we set a mood and really absorb the colors and flow along with the paint brush. Ryan loves painting by candle light.


The other week our story was "The Singing Snake" . We made snakes from beeswax one day, on block crayon drawing day we practiced the letter S by drawing snakes in the main lesson book. One reason I love Waldorf Education is the Pedagogy of teaching the child head,heart and soul. Even when we model we organically learn through the beeswax. Watercolor painting is very therapeutic and there is a ritual we go through each time.



For our watercolor painting story below I was inspired by the approaching spring weather. We started with yellow to represent the sun warming the earth. Next came he blue fairies who danced in the warm sunshine and reached out to hug the sun. Everywhere the hugged the sun green grass and flowers grew. Ryan was very happy with his blue fairies dancing and was not interested in "hugging the sun". I love the happiness of this painting.

Here is my attempt at a blue fairy and some flowers growing around the sun to represent the spring season. I am not sure if I have ever mentioned this or not, but sometimes I feel like a Waldorf student progressing in my paintings. Where now I am able to make shapes appear.

We practiced the letter S in our main lesson book and wrote out snake and sun for letter practice. When we first started the letter S, Ryan was very discouraged and did not think he could make the letter at all/ But as you can see below he did a fantastic job.


Here we started working on writting numbers. I am learning a verse and telling it to Ryan as we go.


If you remember for a couple posts ago we made kites at our friends house in their playgroup we attended. THat inspired me to read the story of the "Spring Magic Kite" by Suzanne Down. It is a very cute story of a little boy named Misha who flies his red kite. Near by is a bunny watching - the easter bunny. When the Easter bunny realizes that Easter is the next day, the Spring wind helps him by blowing Misha's red kite up in the tree where the bunny hops aboard and flies around the world delivering Easter Eggs. At the end Misha wakes up the next morning and finds his easter basket and his red kite.


We made pom pom bunnies to go with the story. It was a fun projest, one that RYan helped me to complete from beg, to end!

Here is our puppet show of Misha flying his red kite and the Easter bunny watching him.


For our water color painting I tried something a little different with Ryan. We had all 3 colors and tried to paint a part of the story. Here is Ryan's painting of Misha with his red kite and a red tree. I like how much red he used in his painting.
My kite came out way too big

Happy St. Patrick's Day

This morning we awoke to find that those pesky leprechauns had played little tricks on us. They hid all of Ryan's sheets and blankets under his bed. They switched around Princess Spring and King Winter and many other things out of place around the house.

We gathered together all of our green gnomes/leprechauns and I told the story of Patrick O'Leary from the Suzanne Down Spring Tales. Then Ryan was inspired to go outside and look for any signs of leprechauns in the back yard. He said he saw a few but was not fast enough to catch them. As everyone knows, if you catch one of the wee little men in green, they have to tell you where the pot of gold is! But watch out they don't put a trickster spell on you like they did to Patrick O'Leary.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

Kites - Part 2

Ryan and Sage took out the kite he made today to test it out. WELL..... Heidi wanted to have some fun too and well, within 5 minutes she had torn it up. So back inside we made a new one and this time Sage kept an eye on Heidi while Ryan ran around the yard with the kite. It made it a few inches off the ground, just enough to make him happy!

Making a Kite

Our friend Wendy had invited us at to her house today to be a part of her once a month Fairy Glen Playgarden playgroup. We had so much fun. One other family was there with her son and small daughter. Lots of boy play. It was nice to see them all getting along and playing imaginatively. After a short circle (perfect for an active boys attention span) she led us to another room where she told a story as the kids drew. It is one story I like alot that I used to tell Ryan when he was younger. It is the story of how the wind and the sun both think they are stronger then the other. To see who is strongest they try to get a man walking with his coat on - to take it off. The wind blowing just makes him wrap his coat around him tighter but when it is the sun's turn he shines down on him as hot as he can and eventually the man takes off his coat.

When the coloring was down we made kites. The first windy day we get, Ryan and I are going to test it out that is if it lasts that long, right now Ryan is trying to fly it in the house as if it were a paper airplane. I guess we will test out its durability!




Hi Issac. It looks like Ryan took a picture of his friend.

Ryan's new pet

On Friday Ryan and I attended a nature class at the Ansonia Nature Center. Once a month they have classes for children and their parents so I thought we would check it out. It was alot of fun. We learned about WORMS - how cool is that! Especially for a boy who loves to dig in the mud. Each child was able to make a worm house to take home and given their very own worm.. Ryan was excitted about that. He named his Omy.


After they made the worm home, we all went outside to collect worm food. Honestly, I never knew what worms eat. Apparently they love dried leaves. Ryan made a friend there too. Actually, I have met this family before. I sold a couple of things to their mother a year ago for her online store. Funny, how we met up again at a class on worms. It turns out she and her sons love to hike as much as Ryan and I do, so we are going to get together sometimes and hike.


After the class we came home and it was such a beautiful day we stayed outside doing various projects. We hung up our birdfeeder that we made at our homeschool co-op. I sure hope it stays together!! their are lots of nails and glue just in case. We also planted our wheatgrass in our easter baskets and tapped our maple tree for sap. We checked the tree today and there seems to be some liquid in the container - however it looks a little brown - humm. Sugar sap is clear so I am not sure if this is going to work or not. I will check again later in the week.