birthdays, boots and blocks

::birthday table for a two-year-old::

Celebrating our little boy this week. Getting outside despite the rainy weather. Lots of creative play and construction.

Yes, lots. And getting ready to go on a long weekend adventure. Packing the rain gear and the woolly socks. And the board games.

Hope you have a cozy weekend friends!

weekend: celebrating

This weekend was spent celebrating this beautiful little boy of ours, and there will be more celebrating to come on his real birthday this week. Oh sweet sunshine, how can you be two already? We love you so.

autumnish

It has been beautifully autumnish these past few days. Though I must admit, these photos are from last week. This week, despite some lovely weather, I have been inside a lot. With the boys off on adventures with their grandparents every morning, I've been bustling about cleaning and sorting and organizing our little home. People talk about spring cleaning, but fall cleaning is where it's at as far as I'm concerned. There are many long indoor winter days ahead of us, and I feel much more able to welcome them when I can put my home in order a little first. Though I am getting rather tired of sorting papers and shuffling storage bins around. I think I will be out soaking up this golden autumn sun for the rest of the weekend.

I hope your weekend is bright and warm, friends.

apples apples applesauce

This season is the time of apples. Climbing trees and dropping down the fruit for little hands to collect, the steamy scent of apples cooking on the stove, stumbling over boxes and baskets of fruit in the front porch, the recipes we talk about- apple cake, apple pie, apple sauce, apple cider, baked apples, apple muffins, apple cobbler. We eat them raw, sliced, dunked in yogurt dip. They are snacked on whole, often forgotten and found half eaten and browning somewhere in the house. Apples are fun to play with , they roll and they sit upright, standing in for hay bales on a wooden tractor and apple soup in a little pot in the play kitchen. Apples are the perfect fruit- sweet, local, crisp, delicious. Apples are autumn.

walkin'

With Nana and a baby.
Happy tuesday!

scarves and stripes

I realized when looking back on this blog that is has been ages since I've written about craft projects, yet I've been making things at the same slow and steady pace I always do. I have not been taking pictures of projects much though, and just never seem to get to posting about them. But I do enjoy having this little record of what I've been making, so I will aim to slowly catch up some of the projects that have been keeping my hands busy over the past bunch of months. Above is the cut out pieces of a WIP for Dorian's upcoming birthday- waiting to be sewn into a warm winter scarf. And here are some woolly pants I made him from this thrifted sweater recently. These are made from the sleeves of the sweater, and I made a vest from the body for Ari, though I don't have a picture of the vest. I used this vest tutorial, which was great, but didn't choose a very good vest to trace from, so it doesn't fit very well. But I made them both in one evening and felt so pleased with myself to have a new garment laying out for each of them when they woke up in the morning!

I love these pants. They are so quick to make and I love turning old things into something new. They are the perfect thing over a cloth diaper and are so cozy and warm. I also love that they match our thermos! Not planned, but I couldn't resist snapping a couple pictures when I noticed.

I plan to make a few more of these for winter since since these are all Dori wears around home (when he is wearing pants at all!) and the ones I made him last year are starting to get a bit threadbare.
They look especially nice with Papa's shoes, no? Especially when the shoes are on the wrong feet! I'll keep digging up things crafty things to post about now and then when I think of it. There has been a lot of knitting going on around here, and I made my first quilt for my best friend's wedding this summer which I will post about sometime, after I remember to steal into her house with my camera to get a picture of it~

happy Wednesday!

ETA Thanks to my sister for pointing out that "scarfs" is not actually a word. Yes, it was a late night. ahem.

brothers

Something has shifted in the past month or so with these boys of mine. Dorian has been talking so much all of a sudden, and Ari has suddenly started viewing him as a kid and friend rather than just a baby that comes along for the ride (and gets into his stuff!) They have been playing together so much- sometimes I'll find myself working away on something and realize I have been getting so much done because they are off playing happily by themselves. This is nothing short of a miracle.

::the boys tend their "shop" together::

:: Ari helping his brother down the river path::


:: playing in the trees::

I have plenty of friends with kids who are close in age who assured me it wouldn't always be so crazy, that my boys would start to play together more as Dori neared two, but it was hard to believe. There just seemed to be such a gap in where each of them were at, and their needs seemed often to conflict. But now the day really has come and I feel like doing a happy dance. My boys! They are sweet brothers and friends!

::serving ice cream at the backyard ice cream stand::

:: hiding in the grass. Hmmm, where could they be?::

:: oh! There they are!::

:: Two big boys in a single chariot::

Of course with all the play comes plenty of conflict too. They are often vying for the same toy, and they frustrate each other on a regular basis. But Dorian is more able to understand now, and is learning to express himself more clearly (I've been teaching him to say "No Ari!" instead of just whining when Ari tries to pick him up and carry him etc.) I am regularly needing to keep my cool and practice my conflict resolution skills. But I see them learning so much about how to relate to each other, and how to communicate and how to work with other people. Siblings are good teachers of these important life lessons.

::playing with some gnomes in a cave::

And really, the fighting is pretty minor. Mostly they play. They are firefighters, and fairies, and sea otters, and foxes and noble knights. They fight battles and take care of their fairy babies. They build towers and drive trains and find ways to get across the shark infested living room together.
It seems like sometime this summer, when I wasn't looking, these sweet boys of mine became best friends. And that makes this mama-heart so very happy.

celebrating

We are celebrating our friends today, who have been far from home going through 9 months of intensive cancer treatment with their young daughter and are finally able to return home- little W's scans are showing no signs of cancer! Shedding lots of joyful tears. We are all so very excited to welcome them back home. Dori and Ari can hardly wait to play with their dear friends again soon.

beginning the journey

Last week was our first official week as a homeschooling family. Maybe official isn't the right word exactly, Ari is still young for Kindergarten, so this not a registered, reporting homeschooling sort of year, more of a year to get our feet wet and to tighten up our home rhythm and take the chance to slowly add in a few more structured activities to what we already do at home. I haven't even said the word Kindergarten to Ari, this is just a quiet slide into homeschooling. Next year will be the time to really celebrate him becoming a kindergartner, but for now, I don't think he has noticed much change. We cook, we play, we walk in the woods, we garden, we make stuff, we read stories. He doesn't need a name for this, this is just his life!

When we got back from my summer Enki courses I started reading the early childhood materials again and realized that we were ready to start in on a light Kindy year with Ari, with the plan to do another full year of kindy next year. I figured this would help to meet his need for more structure and focus and meet my need for, well, more structure and focus! I got excited about the Enki materials all over again during the planning process, reading through the Kindergarten stories and seeing how they really are so right on developmentally. I chose from the simplest folk tales to begin with as Ari is still very easily frightened, but there are so very many stories in the Kindergarten books, that I could easily pull out all the the ones that will suit him well now, and and still have enough to do another year or even another year and a half of Kindy after this.
::Our first kindy craft project:: ::autumn nature table::
:: our story time book::

Aside from stories, the biggest piece of the Enki early childhood curriculum is rhythm. There are other pieces as well, but this is the big one. A family rhythm is something I've been trying to hold together for the past few years, and I've had some amount of success with it- quiet time has become an integral un-missable part of our day, for instance- but there are lots of times where things just fall apart into chaos. And I see how much better both my kids do when the day moves along in a predictable (but not rigid, or stifling) rhythm. So I spent some time this summer thinking of what our ideal family rhythm would look like, and almost two weeks in, I can say it feel pretty great so far! The kids are more settled, I feel less frazzled, and we all are feeling pretty happy with our new rhythm. Though again, I don't talk about this with the kids. They just show me, that they are happy with how things are going.

Maybe I'll write a post about rhythm soon, it feels like a big one, but really the big changes are just tightening things up and adding in the weekly story and having a daily project- craft, painting, baking, nature walk. These are all things we sometimes do, but now they have a time each week that Ari can rely on.

:: free play- the most important school-work for a kindergartner::

I am excited to be embarking on this journey with my family and to join the ranks of all the wonderful homeschooling mamas out there. For a long time I imagined being involved with a small alternative school, but there is just nothing like that where we are, and the idea of starting one from the ground up is daunting to say the least. And the more we were reading, browsing the homeschooling forums, chatting with Enki parents, and meeting so many amazing homeschooling families and their incredible kids, the more we started realizing that homeschooling is where it is at for us. We are open to many future scenarios, but right now we are happy to be doing our learning in our own backyard!