Picking Blueberries

  We are lucky that only a short drive from the city is a wonderful U-Pick Blueberry Field.  The boys and I started picking berries in the wide and maintained areas of the patch and then headed deeper into the field where we had to duck and dodge stray blackberry vines but were able to find a plethora of delightful berries.  We had a wonderful time.  

Furthermore, since we started going years ago we have built a tradition that includes grandparents and family recipes.   A favorite book about berry picking is Blueberries for Sal.

Toddlers and Preschoolers

Today I assisted with two groups of youngsters leading a local Toddler Tales and Trails.  The first session was for 0-3 and the second session was for 4-5.   It was beneficial to observe the ways in which the different age children were able to engage in activities.

The youngest children just wanted to engage fully, tactically, and with their own choices guiding them in their experiences.  They were more impulsive but definitely enthusiastic.  They wanted lots of personal connection with the teacher and their parents.  They could engage in a short story, they enjoyed the counting rhyme but were mostly into exploration.

Several parents felt bad that their child wasn't able to stay focused, but this early age is not a time for focus.  It is a time to be generating a background landscape and just by walking in the woods they were creating a scaffold that will last them far into the future.


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Children and Gardens are Magical

Last weekend my boys accompanied me as I visited two of the urban garden's from the Seattle Tilth's annual Garden and Chicken Coop tour.  Last night a neighbor invited us to explore her yard.  Each of of these gardens were amazing.  Small pathways through the residential landscapes make marvelous places to explore.

The boys are careful as they have grown up planting their own little patches.  Even so- they skip with glee and leapfrog from stone to stone whenever they can.  It is clearly a wonderful experience to follow a path and see to what treasure it will emerge from raspberry patch to pea vine.

As I am researching for next week's Nature Playgroup with a focus on Seeds,  I found the Magnuson Garden's Website.  It sounds wonderful.  It is outside our typical radius, but I hope to visit it.  It is near one of the most magnificent community gardens ever! Just the description of it inspires me to add to our own family garden.

Dancing Beside the Street

Most recently I have been reading  Biophillic Design and The Theory, Science, and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life edited Stephen R. Kellert, Judith H. Heerwagen, and Marting L. Mador.
It is inspiring to think of how we can build communities with nature in mind.  It is also important to consider how we have community in mind.  I feel thankful to our neighborhood's efforts at both of these aspects of life.

Last night was Beatwalk.  This event began many years ago in hopes to revitalize the neighborhood businesses.  It had great success and we now have a thriving business area.  We also have great community.  As a child I have a strong memory of going to a street dance in a small South Dakota community.  It is one of my favorite childhood memories to remember seeing so many generations of people dancing in the street and the local bar. Yesterday, my neighborhood of Columbia City Seattle had the same event--only the music was different and the crowd not only diverse in ages but also culture.  My children and I danced alongside the street (as Rainier Avenue is busy).   We met up with neighbors.  We heard old school dj music along with marimba, folk and cajun.

Dancing and making  together seems to go hand in hand with hiking together.  There is room for both and in the city.  The challenge is finding the balance of each.

Naturalized Playspaces and Biophilic Design

Today the door is open.  My children are freely wandering inside and outside.  I can tell that they are having a good time by the melodic tones of their voices, even small arguments are resolved as they practicing the art of negotiation with one another.  I feel lucky that we have a yard, a haven for the boys to play and safely learn about the world.  

Mom come here "look at the pollen!" says S. I wander out and see T playing with a small figure, dancing her in the pollen of a newly opened flower.  The wildflower seeds we planted in late spring have just come into bloom.  The boys are enchanted; as am I.  Each time we walk outside we notice something new, something familiar and something of interest.

My most current reading has been a chapter called "Healthy Planet, Healthy Children: Designing Nature into the Daily Spaces of Childhood" by Robin C. Moore and Clare Cooper Marcus. It is part of a book called The Theory Science and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life: Biophilic Design by Stephen R Kellert, Judith Heerwagen, and Martin L Mador.  I am inspired to be reading about urban planning with a deep respect for children and nature.  This chapter gives great suggestions of how to get children exposed to nature in natural ways, especially by thinking about schoolyard designs and neighborhood parks.  I hope to share this resource with my own community as we go through the design process of re-imagining our own play-field.  It also reminds me that part of the reason behind our efforts of creating great playspaces for children is to create safe places for them to play independently.  It must be connected to larger efforts of improving the walkability of our neighborhoods so that children can get there on their own and have their own play.

Summer Solstice

It is not how much you do in a day, but how you savor it.  Today was a day full of rich moments.  We started the day looking out the window, noticing that there wasn't a lot of sunshine for this longest day of the year.  We sang the song Mr Sun and read the children's book  The Way to Start the Day by Byrd Baylor and illustrated by Peter Parnall. Then after a bit of playtime we went to a Fiddleheads program at the Arboretum.  As always it was a lovely walk filled with engaging activities for the boys.  They especially enjoyed becoming beavers and turtles and acting out their behaviors.  This activity really helped at a dinner time activity where the boys told Papa clues/ riddles of what animals we had learned about.  Dad had to guess.  "One of the animals had teeth." said T  "Cut down trees." Said S "Made dams."  Said T...."an Engineer?" said dad.

At dinner we also celebrated the solstice.  For the last several days I had asked the boys what they wanted to do to celebrate the solstice.  They had strong memories of lighting candles at the winter solstice and they suggest today that we light six candles.  I said "wow" that's interesting since it is the six month of the year and so we agreed to do it.  As we lit each candle we said what we remembered from each month of the year.  When Papa said January, Theo said, Cold.  We were off and the boys quickly came up with things for each month.  It isn't a traditional way to mark this day of the year, but it worked for our family especially since we enjoyed a summertime meal with corn on the cob.   We also know that it is now summer!

Last weekend  Grandpa Mac said it is certainly a good idea to live with the light and to pay attention to it.  We may not quite rise with the first rays and since the boys are only four and they definitely go to bed before the sun has set, however with our time spent outside the boys understand the passing of the year and even the hours of the day.  As we went to bed we noted that this morning we were dressed in winter clothes and by evening we were in summer clothes: such is summer in Seattle.

Developing a Sense of Place

Our closest natural urban park is Seward Park in Seattle.  The Audubon runs the Environmental Learning Center which offers a lovely Toddler Tales and Trails program.  It wasn't until I mentioned to my boys that the lead early education teacher Cadi was leaving that I realized what an influence this park program had had on my family.  Even though we did not attend weekly; we went regularly over the years.  They were sad about Cadi's departure and wanted to go to her last class and say goodbye even though they had aged out of the 0-3 year old Wednesday class.  I am glad we went.

There is something very special about having been to the same place for years, walking the same trails, and seeing the same people.   As soon as we got to the center the boys were ready to run up the stairs even while I paid the $2 per child fee.  There is a comfort in going to a class whose routine is the same: from opening to closing.  The boys knew what to expect, some songs, some stories, a bit of counting and a hike.  The class didn't let them down.  We even went home with a new song to sing about fish.  

The nature walk is where I am most thankful that we have gone to one place again and again.  The boys know where to look for the "squirrel log" with its telltale sign of douglas fir scales scattered about  and the lightening tree which although burned out is still hosting young branches of big leaf maple.  They hug their friend a newly planted Cedar tree and notice the differences a season makes along the trail.  T even picked up two Douglas Fir cones and noted, "mama look one is open and one is closed.  This one feels pointy."  Although T may not know it he is developing scientific reasoning and skills that will be a scaffold to future learning about cones.  

My children's deep understanding of this single path behind the education center gives my children confidence that they take with them when we go a little farther into the NW wilderness. When my boys feel the soft leaves of the thimbleberry plant or notice the pokey leaves of the oregon grape plant they feel a connection to home.  David Orr writes about Place and Pedagogy in the book Ecological Literacy:Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World.  He references the work of Paul Shepard who writes that writes about "terrain structure" and how it shapes how we learn and who we become.  I  am confident that by giving young children deep knowledge of place it offers grounding in a world that is often filled with dislocation.