I used to have a habit of putting my desire to have my children appear to have a full social and academic life before whether or not certain things would actually achieve any positive result.  My oldest had made this habit way too easy for me because he would agree to do everything without really thinking about if he really wanted to do it.  This type of living lead to busyness and looking like we had a full life, but did we really?  Does busyness mean that everyone is happy and experiencing everything they want to experience?  I quickly learned that evidence of my own impatience and any stress from the kids meant that we needed to stop saying yes to everything and really see if everyone really is excited about participating.

I have been able to stop myself every time I felt the urge to sign one of my kids up for a class or field trip and ask them they would enjoy it.  I have also made a point of having less structured time and more “open time” for the kids to pursue what they feel like doing.  Last summer, I heard “I’m bored.” so much more often.  This summer?   Hardly ever!

I was raised much like most of you where the quantifiable results that you can put down on paper meant more than what was actually learned.  This is a very bad habit of thinking to break.  Now I have gotten really good at seeing the worth of time spent doing something, even if it’s just for the enjoyment of it.  If I have no set agenda of what I want to teach the kids about something, they learn so much more and this comes through their own curiosity and my willingness to help them satisfy it.

Yesterday was a perfect example.  I had absolutely no set plans for the day apart from a couple of things on my personal to do list.  One of the boys had mentioned on our walk through the woods a couple of days ago that he wanted to come back with a pickax and get some of the snow quartz jutting out of some boulders we found.  Yesterday afternoon, the five of us set out with a small pickax and a bucket.  We ended up gathering some nice chunks of the quartz and seeing some other types of beautiful minerals in the boulders as well.  This lead to tons of questions the kids wanted answered that we are still working on!  One of the boulders we found has so much perfect snow quartz along the top of it that it lead to one of the kids asking how much we could get if we broke it off in one large chunk.

I know all too well that if I decided to make a parent-lead teaching session out of it, I would have made them wait to get their questions answered because of my own agenda.  Instead of me telling them all that I knew or researched then asking them questions about what I told them, I let THEM ask the questions.  If I don’t know all of the answers, I pull out my iPhone and look it up on the spot. 

Yesterday was a great example of how we live and learn the best!  It was easy, peaceful, unplanned and didn’t feel at all like a struggle.