{Originally posted on The Hip Mom’s Guide.}

When I was a girl, I used to spend a couple of weeks each summer with my grandparents. Most mornings, after making me breakfast, my grandmother sent me outside to play while she began her daily chores. It seemed like she was forever folding laundry and vacuuming her living room floor. There weren’t many other children in the village where she lived, so I spent long hours figuring out how to amuse myself. One of my favorite activities, on a hot summer afternoon, was to gather my books from the library and read in the shade beneath the giant oak tree at the entrance to her neighborhood. I loved to watch the cars go by; I remember wondering who all of those people were and where they were all going. Did they wonder about me, too? Thirty years later those memories are strong: I can still feel the cool grass under my bare little legs and see the sun peeking through the thick leaves above.

By the time my children came along, kids’ summers were filled with camps of every sort. Basketball camp, swim club camp, any-activity-you-can-name camp. What startled me about all of these choices wasn’t really that they existed, but how many children were enrolled in them from the youngest of ages. At first I resisted the peer pressure, partly because in addition to my three-year old, I also had an infant; partly because these camps cost a lot of money; and partly because it just didn’t seem right to book my three-year old son’s summer chock full of organized activities. Didn’t he get enough of that during the pre-school year?

But slowly, and surely, I started down the slippery slope of enrollment. “Oh, what’s one little camp,” I thought. “His friends are all doing it; he’ll love it.” And he did. But one camp turned to two, then two kids turned to three, and before I knew what hit me I found myself living out of a mini-van and shuttling three boys from ocean camp to soccer camp to crime-science investigation camp. A mini-van was most definitely not where I wanted to spend my summer.

And so I decided: our summers will be different. They will be slow. My children will be bored. They will have to learn to play b-o-r-e-d games with one another, even though the youngest can’t add yet and the oldest insists on proper rules. And I will have to practice patience, again and again, while explaining once more why they aren’t enrolled in the Greatest Camps on Earth. But the trade-off is that they get to enjoy summers like I did: figuring out fun for themselves. They get to take long walks in the woods, check out hundreds of books from the library, and gorge themselves on s’mores roasted over the firepit during our summertime outside movie extravaganza.

{Originally published at FIMBY- Fun In My Backyard}

I love the idea of Charlotte Mason nature study. No doubt other educators and naturalists advocate this approach but I hadn’t heard of it before investigating CM philosophy.

Picture this: a child in the woods, with a drawing pad and pencil. Diligently sketching a leaf, stone, tree, flower or butterfly. We actually tried this once or twice last year.

Our reality: three kiddos running through the woods, building forts and fairy houses, pretending to be drunken pirates (my son’s latest fascination). We are city folk so when my kids are in the woods I am less than inclined to require then to sit and sketch. In fact I WANT them to run around like crazies, minus the drunken sailor bit.

Don’t get the wrong idea, we are all over nature study at our house. It’s an everyday occurrence but it looks more like this:

- The kids find a couple pieces of brown felt and some fleece from the fabric bin. A copy of the ancient vintage sewing book “The Big Book of Soft Toys” by Mabs Tyler inspires an afternoon of tracing, measuring, cutting, stitching & stuffing. Behold, “Silent Sam” and “Cocoa” are born.

Laurent and Silent Sam