January

In the years before I had children, I dreaded January. It seemed like the most empty, sad, cold month of the entire year. Now I look forward to January with such great interest. January means rest. It means relaxation. It means organizing all of the little disorganized corners of my house. It means snuggling under warm blankets to read and fires crackling in the fireplace. It means a birthday party for my youngest son. Yes, I love January.

The only challenge is that January brings a move back into our everyday rhythm. No more holiday excitement. No more break from daily lessons. We are getting back into the swing of things. Today was our first day of homeschooling since mid-December. The kids were reluctant to begin, but enjoyed themselves once they surrendered to the reality of lesson time.

Clover wrote a letter to her pen pal Laurel, and worked on a story project that the two of them are writing together. She did some math, and helped with bread baking. Indigo & Willow drew rainbows into their main lesson books. We have been working on the number 7, so we were drawing the seven colors of the rainbow. Indigo was delighted to find out that his name was also a color name. Nova helped with drawing a rainbow in his book, and put together the lacing beads that Aunt Klue gave him for Christmas. All of the boys helped with bread baking, and Willow decided to make his dough ball into the shape of the letter L because that is our letter for this week. In celebration of the fact that the sun was finally starting to come out after days of cloudy, damp weather, I decided to read one of our favorite books - The Sun Egg by Elsa Beskow. This is a sweet little book about an elf who finds an orange in the woods, but mistakes it for a sun egg. When a mistle thrush informs all of the little woodland folk that the "egg" is really a juicy orange, they all try some of the juice by sucking it through a grass straw. The kids were inspired to try this, and I didn't object since we had a whole basketful of oranges courtesy of my Dad.
They found that sucking juice from an orange via a plastic straw was not the easiest thing to do. Everyone was getting discouraged, so I whipped out my little hand-held orange juicer and showed them the convenient way to extract juice from oranges. We spent over an hour rolling oranges, cutting them in half, and taking turns squeezing. This produced a little over a cup of juice!! The kids were delighted! They all drank some, and commented on how delicious it was. I know that I say this almost every single post, but the simple things in life really are the most wonderful! Children can feel that, and it is beautiful to watch their joy.