As the school buses rolled past

this morning, to the elementary school down the block, the kids slept. By 8:30am they were up waiting for their friend Logan to come spend the day and night here. We sat out on the side porch and watched the hummingbirds in Gillen's garden. Yesterday, they woke up earlier and we heard the school loudspeakers playing the Star Spangled Banner. I stood and sang. It was fun to be singing it in pajamas while drinking coffee.

Today was a full, fun, free day. The kids brought out old games to play with Logan, and swam, and filled egg-cups with sweet foods for the fairies, and hid these cups from ants and monsters under the trees. They played a new knights game with foam swords on the trampoline and played a really challenging game cube game in which they all proudly succeeded in moving ahead. Gillen spent some of the day farming, got Nicolas' help to build his turkey fence and wrote out turkey business plans in a cool wooden book that he made at a book festival last year.





This is a cool game like Twister, but with countries, called Map Tangle.



Later in the day, on our way home from climbing trees and picking vegetables at the farm, we passed the long carpool line.

I feel so incredibly lucky today to be able to stay home with my kids. I'll reread this on those few days I don't! On those few really challenging days - the ones when one of us is really tired or sick or has just stepped in a big pile of dog poop (that would be me yesterday!) right after my guys have been seriously, with major commitment, whining at me about an injustice in life (one wanted to hear one more chapter of Harry Potter; the other, sadly for me, did not) I can hear the kids at recess and wonder... But on the other 360 days, as the school's routine sounds drift to us through the woods, I am reminded of our freedom, and feel glad. Not everyone gets this opportunity. Not everyone can leave their job. Not everyone can know how great freedom and learning, and mixing those two things together can be.

It was a good day.