A Three-Poem Day at the Park

Benjamin Franklin said to "either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." So today, I took the J-Rex to a new park. As soon as we left the house and began driving through a world in bloom to reach our destination, I knew we, too, would bloom with the season today.

Gorillas & Lessons in Unschooling

For most of our homeschool, I've wavered between attempting to meet the common core standards and letting the J-Rex explore knowledge based on her interests a'la unschooling. Recently, as I've been trying to prepare her for the rigours of 3rd grade in the public schools, I've been veering more and more toward a scheduled day focused on the standards.  Still, though, I try to work in at least 1/2 to 1 hour of interest-oriented learning per day.  Lately, I've been doing this by keeping a list of questions she asks at times when we don't have time to explore them so that, when planning for the week, I can write in 30 minutes of topic exploration to address these questions.

The other day, in the car and out of the blue, the J-Rex asked what kind of food gorillas eat.  I answered that I thought they ate mostly fruits and vegetables. The J-Rex followed up with, "So, they're herbivores, not omnivores?" I hesitated. I remember seeing images of gorillas picking bugs out of each other's fur and eating them...don't they eat other bugs, too? Does that make them omnivores? I shared my line of questioning and reasoning with the J-Rex and we agreed that some gorilla research needed to go on our unschool topic list asap.

Luckily, the next day was my planning day, so I wrote in a 30-min topic exploration (I try to leave the unschooling lesson open-ended, so I don't generally put more detail in my plans other than the title of the topic we are exploring) on gorillas, assuming we'd spend a little time looking up some facts about their eating habits online and then browsing pictures of gorillas eating. Afterwards, we were planning on doing Yoga for PE.  I thought I had a fun afternoon planned for the next day. I had no idea.

Not a Monster / Thoughts on Fear

Fear can really eat away at a person.  Most of my life, I have lived in a place of fear - fear of the what-ifs,

fear of the unknown, fear of the next shoe to drop, fear of myself, etc. and etc. For a long time, it took away my ability to succeed: I was so afraid of “failure” that I wouldn’t even try, regardless of whether that “trying” was for inner peace or for outward successes.  At times, my fear nearly destroyed me but, even still, this lifetime of a fearful outlook has taught me some things about this massive emotion:  

The universe doesn't set us up to fail. Neither, though, does the universe always provide us a safety net. Sometimes we have to just leap off the damn platform and pray we've learned how to fall well enough that we don't break our necks. And if we're terrified? That's ok! That adrenaline our fear produces can keep us going until we are on solid ground again. But. The adrenaline is draining. Use it, but take time to care for yourself and replenish your energy. Eat. Even if you don't feel like it. Sleep. Even if you think you can't. And trust that everything happens for a reason, if only that reason is to lead us to a place we might not have gone without the kick in the ass that destruction gives us.

Some Things Shouldn't Ever Go on a To-Do List

Gardening is no longer going to be put on my to-do list.  Neither is writing, whether it be blogging, journalling, or anything else that doesn't have a specific deadline.