a hippie with a minivan

the "I wish I had a girl" dress…

I just finished this last night (well… I still have the hem to do but otherwise it is finished)

I LOVE this dress… it took me about 6 hours in all over the span of about a week….

I wasn’t sure about how it looked when I just had it on the hanger but when I asked Colin to try it on I saw that it turned out better than I hoped… I will be putting it on my new website to sell, along with a new skirt that I made…

shirred back…

decorative topstitch…

yes… I used my son to model… lol

and the skirt… (again needs to be hemmed)

back with elastic and a tie…

eta… they have already been sold… and I have had requests for others!

more snow…

This morning we woke up to yet more of the white stuff…

I am really amazed at the mountain of snow that is in the front yard… Our lantern is long gone and I wonder how long it will take for this stuff to melt when spring comes…

When we woke this morning…

The boys playing…

the car was buried and it took more than an hour for Simon to dig it out…

and Khéna watched the boys play…

my little teapot…

One of my favourite things to do is to sit down and have a bit of tea. I love when people send me tea… especially tea that I can’t find here. Around the holidays four friends sent me tea… tea from the west coast, from the USofA and even from Australia… and I have loved each and every cup and I have thought of those friends each time.

I love tea so much that I have a different cup for different types of tea and for loose leaf teas my favourite way to savour them is by using my little teapot. My MIL (mother in law) bought me this little teapot about 6-7 years ago when a little tea shop opened near our home in Montreal. I had looked at the teapots there so many times and the one she chose was just perfect and I love using it…

Now, Xavier and Colin love to savour tea with me and love when I take the little teapot out… I really enjoy being able to share my love of tea with the boys…

I need more hours in a day…

A few years ago you would have never seen me up past 10pm… If I stayed up, I would fall asleep on the couch…

As the evening hours have become “me time” and a time that I enjoy and look forward to… I have been going to sleep later and later… in the last few weeks that time has been 1-2am… and often I have to force myself to fall asleep.

In the evenings, I have been trying to sew more (I finished a skirt that I would like to sell eventually, and I am working on a little patchwork dress), I am also trying to learn how to knit… I read online and check out a few forums and blogs, I work on my website that will eventually house some of the things that I want to sell, I might watch a bit of TV depending what is on and then when I get into bed I read… and at the moment what I am reading is too good to stop so I end up reading for longer than I should…

I really need to find a way to do more in the day… as Khéna grows a bit older I think it will be easier as he can play with his older brothers more… A few times last week I was able to go into the sewing room a few times while he played happily with his brothers in the playroom, coming to see me every few minutes while I cleaned my sewing space a bit for the next project. Hopefully I will be able to continue to do that and sew during the day while the kids play.

I really would love more hours in a day though… A few hours, when time stops and I can just do all of the things that I want to do and still go to bed at a reasonable hour…

where's your nose?

I was talking with a friend yesterday about unschooling and an analogy popped up in my head when she asked me…
“but how to kids learn if you are not actively teaching them”

First I explained that you are always teaching whether you want to or not, you teach by example all of the time and kids pick up things and learn a lot more than we sometimes want to teach them… They learn our good habits, our bad habits, they learn how we interact with others etc… and unschooling is just an extension of that in many ways…

An example that came into my head was the way that some parents seem to believe that you need to actively teach body parts…

Have you seen those parents that for 15 minutes say…

“where’s your nose?… oh look! I’m touching your nose!…. can you say nose?…. nose…. Nose…. NOSE….. say nose…. can you touch my nose? where’s my nose? can you find your nose? I got your nose!…. say nose…”

and on and on and on….

well…. guess what…

I don’t do that…

and guess what?

my kids know where their noses are…

Now… don’t get me wrong… I am not saying that it is wrong to do it of you enjoy it… or you are doing your kids a disservice by doing it… that’s not my point at all…

my point is that kids do learn and will learn without things being drilled in their heads.

They learn by listening to every day conversations… they learn by asking questions and by getting answers…

So as I explained this to this friend I think she understood what I mean by unschooling being learning without always actively teaching… and that kids will learn the thing that they need and want to learn.