Outside

Every year by February I'm convinced that I don't actually like the outdoors, which makes me feel guilty and slightly depressed.  But then every year,  the sun comes out and I find myself finding lots of reasons to step out my door to 'check' on something and I'm all of a sudden trying to move much of our day outside.  I sigh a sigh of relief, 'oh, I do like being outside when there is sun'.  Some year I'll remember this and not beat myself up about winter days spent huddled at the heater, but for now, I'm just enjoying being outside more and more each day.

Now don't read this wrong.  It is not overly warm here, but the sun has returned.  Our days are lengthening (note: we are at the same latitude as Juno, Alaska and have only a few hours of daylight midwinter) and during the day there is sunshine (for brief periods - but it is there!)

So today we took our history lesson outside and it was such fun.  I got the boys going and then stood there sipping my travel mug of coffee watching them.  And then, feeling very hopeful that spring is coming, I took this year's first ouside-drying load of laundry down from the line.

History Lesson Note: We read about the early civilizations in India today, but the largest part of the lesson was discussing why the first civilizations were built along rivers.  To emphasize how they traded I made a chalk river, three houses/cities and gave each house/city a harvest (beans, pasta, and marrow peas).  Jonah brought out our boats and the wooden figures traded goods up and down the river.

After all the shipping Jonah gathered the harvest up saying it was winter and they had used all their food.  So we then drew plowed fields and seeds to start another harvest.  This is when things got interesting for our poor ancients.  Jonah monster on his scooter and mummy and baby monster on the didicar then came pillaging their fields each night for seeds to eat... but hey, it was fun and I think he got the point.