Martinmas Lanterns

We recently joined a new Meetup group called Waldorf at Home. For those who may be unfamiliar with Waldorf you can read a bit about it here. I'd say my family is more waldorf-inspired than "waldorf"-- there is a distinction between the two. I like it for the focus on rhythm, celebration, creativity, being holistic, and in tune with nature. But it can, and does, go far deeper than that. Our little group meets every Monday. At yesterday's Meetup we made lanterns in honor of Martinmas.

On November 11^th, countries around the world will celebrate Martinmas, the holiday honoring St. Martin of Tours, a Roman soldier-turned monk. According to legend, St. Martin came upon a scantily clad beggar one night in the snow, and having nothing to offer, he took his sword and cut his cloak in half to share with the man. That night, St. Martin had a dream in which Christ was wearing half a cloak and said, “Here is Martin, the Roman soldier who is not baptized; he has clad me.” The next day, Martin ran to be baptized and became a Christian.

In European counties today, festivities range from children parading with paper lanterns behind a man dressed as St. Martin to families eating a feast featuring goose, but the heart of the story is selfless generosity.

Some of the kids colored and made paper lanterns while others wrapped wire around mason jars forming a handle then Modge Podged paper cutouts to the outside of it. In addition to lantern making we enjoyed a little bonfire in the fire pit, homemade soup and rolls, my daughter sang a little lantern song for everyone and the rest was just an afternoon of good running and playing with other kids and mother talk. Later that evening, back at home, the girls delighted in trying out their new candle lanterns! 

Gleaning for Turnips

We gleaned for the first time this past Saturday! Turnip gleaning. This experience was almost allowed to slip by me. I wasn't going to attend. I was coming off of a lousy week. You know that kind that makes you feel like your putting out a tremendous amount of effort but very little gets accomplished. Day after day of feeling like your running in place draining all motivation and life from you. I was hoping to use my weekend with only a 'light load' of three kids to take care of business around the house and get some preplanning done for the upcoming week in hopes to make it better than the last one. However, the thought of getting my hands dirty on a farm sounded quite therapeutic after such a rough couple of days--to just forget everything, get some fresh air and get dirty. Heck, why not?! Besides, I'm trying to put together my Portraits of Produce series for Art Charity and I needed one of those turnips to model for my drawing. What better, more intimate way, to get to know my food source from the local farmers than to go out and pull it from the earth myself!

 

As an added bonus, one of these 10 lb bags of turnips was going to be donated to Adam McArthur and his family. The rest would be distributed to various food pantries, ministries, shelters, and needy families. Such a cause is worthy of a day off of housework and lesson planning!

 

Marker-Miller Farm Winchester, VA.





The turnip field and gleaning volunteers.



The largest turnip came in at over 5 lbs!




My 4 year old daughter, Olivia, had a blast picking turnips. I swear
she has some 'farmer' in her blood. She picked for close to 2 hours
never stopping, never complaining, having the time of her life!
 

The day was really geared towards children. There was a free lunch, contests,
and prizes. Olivia was even named Turnip Queen!



A beautiful sight! A mountain of 10 lb bags of turnips!
 

All mine!

And so it ended up being a  wonderful day! So much better than staying home for a 'catch up day'. It was a special day for my three youngest daughters, especially my Olivia. We've caught the gleaning bug! I hear there are apple, green bean, peaches, and potato gleanings in our area to name a few.

 

You'll be seeing these lovely ladies to the right again. This is my stash for art and cooking--hand picked! From the field, to the studio, to the kitchen they go :)





School + Camping = Scamping

 

Nature.  Fresh air.  The smell of acorns and dried leaves. These things were calling to my soul—as they always do when I’ve been away too long. Being in a spiritual funk for a week or so now, I felt my girls and I needed to do something a little different to mix it up a bit. Some serious schooling, cleaning, preparing for a house appraisal, and just being plain tired (a habitual state for me) had us caged up in the house for a while like gerbils. We needed to break out and get into the great outdoors.

Glamping, heard of it? It’s the idea of Glamour Camping—camping with style. It's a MaryJane Farmgirl term. Well my girls and I decide we would do our own variety of camping—“scamping” (school +camping). We would school outdoors. So we loaded up our schoolbooks, packed snacks, water bottles, a lunch and some of the other comfort items we felt we might need for an extended stay outside and away from the house, and drove up the road to a nearby park. Granted this park was only minutes from my house. However, for our first test run in scamping it was ideal just in case, God fobid, things should go awry---li.e. tantrums started flaring or we should have forgotten some vital item like diapers or baby wipes! We found a lodge towards the back of the park that was vacant. It had its own small playground, perfect for allowing the little ones to play while still allowing me to be close enough that I could work with my older girls.

 

We set up shop, preparing our food station and pulling out our school work.

I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out. You never do with 5 kids! Even the best made plans with the sincerest of intentions can be turned upside down when dealing with fickle, little people.

It was phenomenal!

It was a special experience that made memories for my girls. Anna and Cailin were tickled pink with the idea that they were doing their learning outside at the park. All I kept hearing from them was, “This is the best school day ever!!” We had relay races on the playground. We enjoyed our little picnic basket lunch. Watching the leaves "rain" down from the trees, we decided, was heavenly.

This is an experience we will definitely be repeating. We have ideas for perfecting our scamping skills--like making a "Packing List" of all the items one would need for a day of scamping so as not to forget anything and make these outings easier to prepare for. Perhaps, keep some handy "extra" educational tools and camping items in the car in a Scamping Emergency Supply Kit  (i.e. an extra supply of pencils, bottles of water, a diaper or two, etc...). Our scamping day held out a beautiful temperature for us but with the weather on the brink of turning uncomfortably cold we decided our scamping season might be cut short--we needed to fit in as many as we could while we could! Before our season is through our goal is to scamp on Sky Line Drive. We have a season pass and it is only a short distance from where we live. Our dream is to take our scamping supplies and hit up one of the numerous yet gorgeous picnic posts along the route. How awesome would that be?

 

Staycation Day 3 ~ Skyline Drive

Our third day of staycationing was spent at the beautiful Skyline Drive. It's one of my family's favorite places to visit and come here frequently. It has some spectacular views!

I love, love, LOVE the Appalachian Trail. A portion of it runs through the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Shenandoah National Park.

I've always said, in another life time if I couldn't be a Trappist monk then I'd walk the entire length of the Appalachian Trail. I touched that dream briefly, when my family got out of the car and walked a very short portion of it (lots of small kids make for short hikes!).  Here's the sign of the trail!

Here I am touching my beloved trail :) Sorry, I have a bit of a sense of humor and we were having a good time! AT love <3

Anything for the trail.

We ate lunch at one the many picnic sites and took loads of pictures throughout the day, too many to bore you with here. We had a fantastic day and wonderful time together as a family out in nature. Another one of the Goad family's special days to remember always.

Staycation Day 2 ~ Visiting Civil War Battlefield Sites

The area we live in holds a lot of Civil War history. One of my family's growing interests is the war and the history that took place right here in our own backyard, so to speak. After all these years of living here it was only recently, on our second day of staycationing, that we got around to checking some the sites out. 

.

The Opequon Presbyterian Church, original structure circa 1736

Read it's history here.

 

The church's cemetery.

Having a passion for praying for souls, I took a moment to pray for the souls resting here.

The Kernstown Battles.

Info here.

One of the Kernstown battlefields.

It is mind boggling to imagine the battles actually taking place on this very field

 and men losing their lives.

You bet, I prayed for their soul too.

We tried to visit the historic Pritchard House across the way. Sadly we visited on a weekday and they are only open on weekends. More on them here. Supposedly they have a great self-guided field tour you can walk.

They have a gift shop, too, which I was looking forward to visiting.

 We'll have to save that for another time.

We stopped at some other roadside markers.

Packed with a cooler of water bottles and basket of snacks, we were good to go!

We stopped at a beautiful park spotted along the way.

We ate lunch, played with bubbles, and the kids stretched their legs on the playground equipment.

 It was short lived, however.

A summer thunderstorm rolled up on us quickly, sending us packing and running to the car.

We had a great time together as a family and learned a little something too.

That will go down in the book as another special day!!!

Spirit of Obedience: Binder of Special Days

My summer vacation got me thinking about the need to make--to create--special days for my children. Along with the idea of daily rhythm, that is one of the main aspects that draws me to my interest in a Waldorf -style education. They celebrate various holidays and special events. But I suppose holidays and rhythm go hand-in-hand when you stop to think about it. Waldorf practices daily, weekly, yearly rhythm-- and holidays are those days we celebrate repeated or rhythmically each year.

Wanting to give my children a bit more color, fun, celebration--whatever you want to call it--in their life I decided this school year to 'purpose' more special days into our school year and into our lives. I have wanted to do this for awhile but was never organized enough to implement it. It takes forethought and planning to some degree.

Two book I have found helpful in planning our special days are:

All Year Round by Ann Druitt, Christine Fynes-Clinton, and Marje Rowling

A Year With God: Celebrating the Liturgical Year

To keep the days organized I have created a binder. I have divider tabs to mark the months of the year (and seasons too--another biggy in Waldorf, observing and celebrating the seasons) and a printed calendar behind each to mark the holidays, events, birthdays, etc. we intend to celebrate. We may not get around to doing all of them, but perhaps three or four a month. Some special days may be more involved than others. For instance some may be all out with crafts and foods, while others may be a simple coloring page to commemorate a saints' feast day.

I intend this binder to be ongoing, to cycle through it repeatedly. So the calendars will remain in there year after year to keep me from having to research over and over again that month's holidays and feast days. I have also started to print copies of coloring pages and activity pages to keep in a page protector to xerox annually. The idea being to do the work once while being able to benefit from it over and over again. I also have a page for notes of activities for a particular day and resources of books or web pages where I found them. Doing similar activities and celebrations year after year instills a sense of tradition.

Something else I've come across and found useful is a "Get It Done" Project Planner sheet I printed out from my book, Educating the WholeHearted Child. Essentially it's just a simple form for helping you plan out projects, i.e. the date you need it by, what materials you need, resources to use, steps to take, etc. It's great for preplanning which was one of my pitfalls in trying to do this before. The day would arrive with little to no forethought. I'd have nothing planned out so I'd let it slide by saying to myself, "Well we'll catch the next special day." But the same thing would happen the next time. No celebrating was getting done.

And now that I have that fantastic, new camera of mine I'll be photographing our specials to record in our recently started The Goad Family's Book of Special Days scrap book I'm creating for my girls to cherish as the days pass and they grow older.

Staycation Day 1~ Exploring the Caverns

Vacation
An extended period of recreation, esp. one spent away from home or in traveling.

Staycation
A vacation spent in one's home country rather than abroad, or one spent at home and involving day trips to local attractions.

My family recently had a week of staycationing. My husband had a week of vacation time from work, but we really couldn't afford to get away for a true vacation right now. Instead we used that time to finally get around to crossing off our list some of the local attractions we're always talking wanting to do but have yet to do.

Our first day was spent at the Endless Caverns in New Market, VA:

According to the tour operators, the cave was discovered by two boys in October 1879, while hunting rabbits on the property of Ruben Zirkle. The boys cornered a rabbit behind an outcropping of limestone rocks, and began moving some of the loose stones to flush the rabbit from his hiding place. After doing this they discovered a hole in the ground and ran back to the house to grab some ropes and candles. After going into the hole the boys found that there were many chambers and rooms (Wikipedia). The caverns are called endless because explorers have yet to find the end to the many passages.


The scene from the parking lot. Gorgeous!

Just a few of the amazing things we saw: