Let the gardening commence

Calvin and I were sick all week with a terrible cold that knocked us flat. Lots of reading, lots of couch time, and we skipped out on all our outside activities, but summer had come again (still early this time, though not as early as when it was here two months ago) and the sunshine called us outside on Friday. The periodic unseasonal warmth has brought blooms much earlier, and weeds as well. Mostly gigantic weeds, in fact, but the chilly, gray weather, more characteristic of these months, and then this abhorrent cold, have kept me from keeping them under control. The gardens in the back were a sight to behold by this weekend, so that's where we spent the last three days, with sprinklers, shovels, gloves, and every ounce of energy we could muster. Calvin included. And the garden spent the weekend thanking us in the form of emerging blooms and returning creatures.

Iris in the front yard (after the sprinkler)

Toad in the front garden.

Poppy bud in the front garden.

Lazy hummingbird is sitting on the feeder to eat.

Blue flag iris in the back garden.

Bumble in the false indigo.

Fleabane? In the butterfly garden.

The first monarch ever in our butterfly garden!

Summer yarrow (which shouldn't be blooming yet) in the butterfly garden.

Oriole on the feeder out front (he's shy, so that's the best picture I've gotten yet)

And because I like before and after shots, here is a shot of the butterfly garden on Friday before the weeekend weeding, and then on Sunday when we were all done. It is still a work in progress, and there is a lot of space to fill in with beautiful Michigan wild-type flowers, but taking it one year at a time, we've come a long way.

No plan

Somewhere, between the late swarms of mosquitoes that sounds like summer and the early changing of the trees that looks like fall, is the essence of now. Somewhere, between my longing for an extension of hot summer days, to spend at the lake or the pool, and my desire for the golden weekends of fall, to spend tailgating or raking leaves, is my ability to just be in the present. There is nothing more valuable than this moment right now, which outside of the cliche is painfully obvious given the myriad of things that pull at my time and demand my attention at any given moment. Take this minute, for instance. I have two books I am longing to read, laundry that needs to be put away, a variety of odd household chores to be done, and some hefty decisions to make about the coming year.

I hate hefty decisions—they always make my thoughts difficult to balance.

What they boil down to, though, and really they're not as hefty as they seem, is an inability to define the homeschoolers we'll be. Having decided that I need more of a structure to get through a week I sat down to peruse the Currclick site tonight, looking for unit studies (which are mostly on sale) to help me make a fall plan. Since he's so intrigued by penguins right now I asked him if he'd like to study Antarctica this week, and then I downloaded a unit study on exactly that. Could I have made my own? Probably. Do I really want someone else to have written a plan for our exploration of that continent? Mmmm...maybe not.

And the doubt creeps in.

But I kept going. With Thanksgiving right around the corner (just ask the commercial sector, which is already stocking for it) I sought a set of studies on US history and geography and downloaded those as well. Then I started looking at the Five in a Row book units I typed up, while borrowing the book from the library last winter, and started distributing those books throughout the fall months, coupling them with the activities in the unit studies.

Midway through writing that calendar I hit the brakes and quit with a big sigh.

I haven't fully given up on my desire to unschool, to let go and follow. I feel safer—more grounded—when I have a plan, but when I look at the studies and my calendar I see exactly what we wanted to avoid with home learning—a plan leaving just one way of doing things. We had wanted to provide many ways to reach a goal. In my ensuing panic I realize that I'm right back at square one, which is the point at which I have to decide what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. Even leaving a door open, through which I can go to change my mind, I have to have a path to follow before I can even get started.

How much guidance to give? How much planning to do?

Of course I am the problem. Calvin is thriving in his learning environment, no matter what I throw at him, be it the FIAR book studies, an Itellego unit study, or a general freedom to seek answers on his own. Is a mixture okay? And where is the fine line between planting a seed of interest, nourishing it with information and encouragement, and letting it take root, and creating an interest that would not exist were it not for external pressures, i.e. planting a water lily in the desert and keeping it alive where it shouldn't be merely by excessive attentions? The answers have not been forthcoming, and lethargy (my own) is setting in.

Which is not to say that I am devoid of excitement about this process. Quite the opposite, really. I sent messages out today to two different local homeschooling groups and we will meet them at the end of this week and the beginning of the next. We've made a new nature table and study center upstairs in our office/learning room, we've re-organized and re-shelved the books, and I still have that calendar I started earlier today. Maybe, as the mosquitoes leave and the trees turn, I'll use it. Maybe I won't.

I can't close this one up neatly. I want to be honest in sharing about our journey, and right now my head is swimming and I feel a little unbalanced and lost, so all I can offer are my thoughts, without a logical conclusion. My guess is that, as much as I desire a plan and a clear, distinct goal, only time will really tell me how our path will go. We'll get there, though, even if we get a little lost along the way.

It's not as late as I think it is

Maybe it's the strange weather this year, or maybe it's that, in previous years, it always felt like summer went by in a blink, but this year I find myself surprised every time I look at the calendar. The grass outside is already dormant and brown, the flowers are past their prime, the heat is on, and the drought conditions, but it's not August yet.

During the peak of the heat wave we were lucky enough to be enjoying a previously planned week-long vacation, but while we were there are dogs were stuck in our house with the dog sitter, who had express permission to actually use our A/C, except that, one day after the hottest day thus far, it broke. We came home to a house that was 90 degrees and humid, and that makes a body sluggish. Plus any time we return from a vacation I find myself woefully unprepared for real life. So far I have yet to get up and run—it's been too hot even at 7am anyhow—and we're only just getting to the laundry today, five days after our return.

Some lazing is good. I'd call it summer hibernation, if we didn't have to save that term for our mid-winter ennui. And actually, it's different from that funk, because it's not a lack of interest, it's a lack of impetus. We're reading, we're dancing in the sprinklers, we're playing games, we're taking afternoon naps. I think, though, that it's time to pull our heads out of the sand—or towels, as the case may be—and get back to something, if I could just remember what that something is.

Falling in love with home again

Pure Michigan is a tourism ad campaign. I live here, so they don't need to sell it to me, but how often it is that we overlook our own homes when planning trips, as though we must go far to find things that are worthy of exploration and enjoyment. I have often taken our home state for granted. Jon and I have traveled much of our continental country together, and everywhere you look there are things to explore, things to love, the same being true close to home. We have often vacationed in northern lower Michigan, but this trip was about really falling in love with it again, not just calling it home. It was about revisiting old haunts and inviting Calvin to love them with us.

It doesn't take more than a moment relaxing on one of the sandy beaches in the breeze of the big lake, or traipsing through the dunes, or hiking through a woods along a crystal stream, to understand the meaning of the Pure Michigan ad campaign. All that water, the blue sky, the floating clouds, the deep green forests, the rolling farm lands with their road side stands and farmers markets bursting with colors, smells, and flavors. All that white sand molded into the art of the dunes, decorated with bright green beach grass. All that history.

This trip was definitely about falling in love with our home again, and it was an easy affair to rekindle. Tomorrow we return home, to higher temperatures and a traffic congested city in the days of the Art Fair, and really I'm looking forward to that also, because it is home as well.

More:

Pure Michigan

The Mackinac Bridge

Mackinaw City

Sturgeon Bay

All about weather

Calvin wanted not a day of vacation to go by without swimming, so with rain in the forecast we set out early this morning to the nearby state park shore on Little Traverse Bay. We'd already been to the even closer beach in Harbor Springs so we decided that the slightly longer drive was worth the chance for variety. That slightly longer drive meant that we were soaking up sand and the last few rays of sun on the innermost part of the bay when the storms started to make their way inshore.

Watching a storm roll in over the water is fantastic—seeing the clouds travel toward you and the curtain of rain slowly draw in and obscure the details across the water. We'd gotten in a good hour of swimming and digging in the sand, so as the sky darkened we packed up our things and decided to watch the progression from the car.

Just as the rains hit and the little town of Harbor Springs became hidden from view we left the park and drove around the bay, directly through the storm, arriving in Harbor in time to watch it head further inland, moving away from us now that we were on the other side of the bay.

And that was a moment of weather discovery made all the more enjoyable by the fact that we'd already done our swimming, and by the return of the sun not even an hour later.

More:

Petoskey State Park

Little Traverse Bay

Harbor Springs

Petoskey