Bursting at the Seams

These days have been chock-full. Harvesting, blanching, freezing, canning, cleaning, cooking, trying not to drown in laundry, and spending treasure troves of hours--wearying, delightful, and everything-in-between hours--with the three children I've loved more than any in my life (and I've loved a lot of children in my time). 

For a good four or five months I've been doing some informal pre-reading stuff with the kids, a hodge-podge of things I make up and find. Just three weeks ago, though, we started "preschool" that's intentional enough to actually get a name. Tadhg's been reading simple words for a little while now, so the formal part of it is mostly giving a rhythm to our days and adding in set time for Mama to not can, not cook, not clean. To just sit and be with the kids and let the other balls drop. It's been great fun for all of us. It's not been a sit-and-work sort of thing at all. It's the game-learning we'd already been doing plus even more books than usual and the quiet euphoria of cutting and gluing and baking and lots of art and sock puppets and tea parties (fancy dress and shoes required by Tadhg) and field guides and playing store through the screen door and pretending we're bears who do more foraging and hibernating in quick succession than any bear in his right mind would ever do and sewing on buttons and learning how to tie a tourniquet and making scarves for our stuffed animals and going on adventures out of the house every Friday.

Life is a funny thing. Motherhood is everything I thought it would be, both the good and the hard, but in a much higher concentration than I could've imagined. 

And so we learn every day. The lot of us.

And on a day like today, when we're exhausted from work and play and Mama doesn't have energy to make the supper she had planned, we roast hotdogs and marshmallows over a campfire that takes the edge off this first taste of cold autumn air and we go to bed glad in the God who gives such simple wealth to our days.

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Commence photo dump. Have a small taste of September. 

From tears to dimples in .2 seconds after being picked up.

I walked in to find that the boys had made her a book castle.

(Tadhg passed up all manner of vehicles and a tool set and little guns because he was captured by this little notebook that looks just like Daddy's Moleskine.)