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@Farmhouse_Schoolhouse

I’ve been keeping this years old picture tucked in my planner lately. Simply to remind myself that while he may be growing taller, jumping shoe sizes and moving on to more advanced math books, he is still young. He is still that boy longing to wander in a sea of tall grass armed with imagination and seeking out adventure. The boy who knows and understands that there is so much more to a forest than wood and soil and leaves and lichen. It’s breathtaking, this transition into manhood. Who knew it could be so delicate and fragile? I sure didn’t. These days I’m still fighting against the call to drown his schedule and dump loads of busy work on him because “it’s time for harder things.” He and I are in it together, rising to the challenge of hard things we can connect with and not just amass into a checklist of endless doing. That day will come for him, I know. Checklists are unavoidable. But not now. Not during this season of life. Now is the time to learn how to preserve the wonder of the boy playing in the forest while he learns to take on harder things with meaning and connection to a greater whole. It is time to preserve the wonder and learn how to carry it into the future. The hope is for the man to never lose sight of the boy in the woods. The boy will remember the whole, no matter how many checklists the man comes to have in his hands later on in life. But in order for that to happen, I need to not lose sight of the boy. I am glad to open my planner each day and have this reminder blanketing the day’s checklist.
🌿”Mom, aren’t you coming with us?” I smile, “No. There are some parts of boyhood where I just don’t belong. You need to go on your own. I’ll be here when you get back.” He hugs me tightly, then races out the door. “I’ll be back when I have a story to tell you!” 🌿 ✨✨Boyhood. ✨✨ what an honor it is to protect. We let them play. We shield their time. We don’t give in to the panic when our four year olds don’t know all their letters. We let them wonder. We say no to busyness so they can say yes to adventure. We let them spend hours in the mud and up trees and officiating last rites over dead baby birds fallen from nests. They come home with scraped knees and wounded hearts, then rest in the knowledge that they are safe and loved. They go out into the cruel beauty of a fallen world and make up stories and games and whole other worlds to interpret what they are experiencing. They keep growing. Legs grow leaner and longer, faces lengthen, possibility is everywhere. They want to test themselves in the face of danger. They want the chance to choose rightly. Perhaps even the chance to make the wrong choice, so they can come home and find out if they are still loved. Boyhood is wild and fragile and precious, but above all it is personal. It belongs to them. ❤️🌿🐾
“I wish they’d not call it homeschooling and just call it living.” -👦🏼no.2 Today’s realization: the longer we homeschool, the less we homeschool and the more we just LIVE. I don’t mean that we have less work to do or that we neglect our studies, I mean that separate contained “subjects” have dissolved along with slots of time designated for the receiving of one kind of information that must be broken down and digested in unrelated fragments. I think that after ten years of home education, we’re finally down to scrubbing the last bits of modern education off the dining room table. Our learning has gone from a picky toddler’s plate of food, where all food must be kept separate, not touching, to a kitchen sink gumbo, glorying in the harmonious WHOLE. This life of learning where we see day by day the connected relations between ourselves and the world and the God who reigns overall—it’s becoming clearer by the day. Getting to this point has not been easy for me. I was (and still am) unlearning as much I was (and am) learning. I know the years of traveling to get to this point were worth it. The years of box curriculums and school bells and public schooling around the kitchen table taught me some brutal but worthy lessons. All the philosophy of education books highlighted and read and reread. Phone calls made to friends asking “what on earth does Charlotte mean here?” The year of twenty different “do-overs” and the year when I finally (finally!) learned to love math. The God ordained meetings when He put just the right person in our path to have that hard conversation with. The GRACE He gave us over and over in the day to day stench of life with sinful humans, I chief among them. The process of getting here was necessary for the redeeming of my own education and the foundation of theirs. I still have such a long way to go. I still have so much to learn, but hallelujah is it ever an encouragement to hear a sun kissed boy say something like “just call it living” and realize that he’s claiming a life of learning for himself. Praise God- we are living together! 📸 👦🏻no3 taken at Crab Island, where we have witnessed a good deal of beauty, truth and goodness this winter.
Wrapping up a conversation with my boys the other day and this closing thought from one son summed up the general feeling quite well: “It seems to me that a boy can be in way more danger sitting on a cozy couch in an air conditioned room with nothing but the internet for company, than a boy out in a wild world full of snakes and crocodiles and mosquitoes and poison ivy. I’d take the alligator, which never pretends to be anything else, over a YouTube video pretending to be something it isn’t, which happens almost every single time. I mean, I like air conditioning, but we shouldn’t be in air conditioning all our life. I like meeting danger out in nature because then I can use my wits and my courage. I love getting to use those, it’s good practice.” 🐊✨🌿🦈🐍🕷🦂🐝
Son: “Mom, want to know something true about me?” Me: “Always” Son: “I can hear more wind and feel more sun and see more beauty, almost like my heart has a big magnet-fyer glass on it. You know why?” Me: “Why?” Son: “Because when the Doctor told you to kill me when I was safe in your belly home, you were more ferocious than a Tanzmanian devil and you said NO WAY and you saved me with your love. So that’s why I can see the world the way I do. Even though it’s evil, I can always find the love. I know what’s good and what’s beautiful because you fought me here with your love. Did you ever know that?” Me: “I know it now. I’m so glad God brought us through that time together. It wasn’t about me, it was about what He did through us. I love seeing how God is using you, even today. You don’t have to wait till you grow up, you are a mighty warrior even today.” Son: “Just like you! Mom, are you crying?” 😭😭😭 When he was born I was still suffering from PTSD and often felt like a terrible mother, like I had very little to give my kids. I often thought about the doctor’s words: “it’s going to be too hard to give them what they need. Terminate and try again later.” Turns out I had exactly what they needed. Life. Love. I gave them life and love. Back then they didn’t have the words to tell me what that life and love meant to them. I didn’t have that verbal affirmation from them when things were dark. I could only trust and rest in God’s faithfulness and in my identity as His child. But these days my boy can look me in the eyes and speak words that bring me to my knees in thankfulness. Protecting his life was a worthy battle. This mother was bloodied, bruised and nearly felled. But she lived— and so did he. Praise God. 🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🐓
Safety. From the moment they were born, safety was one of my main concerns as a mother. For years, I focused all of my energy on keeping tiny life after tiny life ALIVE and well. Some were more willing to cooperate with this plan than others. This week my “safety first” eldest child caught a venomous fish with a plastic toy net, plopped it into a container and proceeded to give a small seashore lecture about it to the little crowd gathered round him. It was a big moment for him. A defining moment. It was a taste of real danger and it was profound for him. A few days later on our way out of the art museum, my middle children began a conversation (with full on accents) discussing life as if they were Bilbo and Gandalf. They were tossing lines back and forth and giggling like mad. Eventually someone landed on this line, “shall we go on an adventure down the boulevard to middle earth Starbucks?” I laughed, “what on earth? Where did that come from?” They smiled slyly and no. 3 responded, “oh, you know. Middle earth always has such great adventures. Danger and evil and horrible stuff, sure. But adventure is there because of the danger. Because good must always fight evil. We are just making a joke about how when life gets too safe, the greatest adventure is Starbucks— which isn’t an adventure at all and then you don’t get the chance to live out what you read about in books. You don’t get the chance to fight evil because you get lazy in your safety.” Well. Well, well, well. THIS sparked quite the conversation about the difference between the beauty of a quiet life of service (which is a kind of bravery) and about sterilizing environments into a paralysis of safety that at best, keeps us from adventure or at worst, dulls our senses into thinking that the world is safe or that everyone else is far from peril. The boys are growing up. They are craving danger and adventure. They are longing to be brave, to love, to seek justice. How beautiful and terrifying to see that they are taking what has been read into their hearts and readying themselves to meet the very real dangers of this world, so they can fight evil with good. Stonefish are just the beginning. 📷by my mama.

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