autumn....

dawn through the trees...Kerncliff

sure i'm a blog-slacker.....no excuses beyond a bit of can't-be-arsed and a lot of navel-gazing as of late...

moving onwards, however...

we had a gorgeous Thanksgiving weekend last weekend....back-to-back turkey fabulousness at Aunty S's and then Aunty B's.....

can we talk about how much i *heart* pumpkin pie? can we extol the virtues of this noble vegetable?  for years i shied away from the idea of a pie made out of pumpkin (ewwwww!) and then one day i was convinced to try a slice. i've been making up for lost time ever since.  i made the pie for my sister's dinner....and brought the leftovers home...and ate 'em for breakfast the next day.

~*~

at some point over the afternoon at Aunty S's, Sebastian picked up an etcha-sketch type doodle-board thingy (what are they called, anyway?) and proceeded to draw some rather spectacular pirates.  this is a child who rarely has shown interest in picking up a crayon and drawing and has caused more than a few faithless moments of doubt in this crazy unschooling path with his disinterest in all things writing-related.  sure, he paints from time to time but not really.... so here he is drawing rather amazing likenesses on this magnetic-filings-metal-tipped-pen thingamy.  which in and of itself was quite delightful. (naturally, i didn't have the camera on hand)

and being the klepto that he is...he needed to take aforementioned board home at the end of the visit.   once home, he wanted to write the letters of the alphabet. at his request i guided his hand for the upper case letters (i figured they'd be the easiest to start with) and of course there were dramatic interpretations a la "letter-yoga" for each one.

and THEN....to my amazement, not only did he start again on his own....forming perfect upper-case letters (no backwards d's or b's or s's)....he did all of the lower-case. perfectly. without us ever having done them before.

wtf?

seriously. all this from spending time going over this crazy alphabet poster he has where we act out a scene from Sesame Street where Prairie Dawn is trying to do the Letter of the Day and Cookie Monster keeps eating the letters (Cookie Monster played by yours truly).

amazing stuff, isn't it?

which of course prompted a vast amount of navel-gazing on this path we've chosen and how although we've made certain sacrifices in terms of income etc. -- this is some kind of amazing thing.....these great leaps of learning...of pursuing natural inclination and curiosity....this utterly innate ability to learn what we need to know  without having to be sat down and drilled and then assessed and measured on how well we know it.

it's so hard sometimes, to keep the faith in the face of so much criticism and disbelief -- usually from well-intentioned people...which makes all the concern and advice that much harder to dismiss.  because it's the lack of quantifiable proof (in the form of grades and test scores) that makes unschooling difficult to explain to people.  most don't do well with the 'just trust them' speech.  *sigh*

but when stuff like this happens....well....it totally rocks. :)

oh, and also...we made cookies.

lovin' this life...

truly.