expanding our rhythms

This is one of those posts where I ramble for a while, so I figured you might like to see some pics from this morning's walk, just to keep from getting too bored while reading. In this first one, J walks Cheer and Zoo Boy walks Joy (and Grace is with me, making picture taking a significant challenge...).

I'm making some changes to our morning rhythms, in response to a couple of things. First, as the kids get older and more responsible, they are increasingly a part of the general daily animal/farm care. Which means that they are spending more time doing chores. That works out well, because it means that we are leaving later for our walk, which will be nice as it starts getting colder, as it will give the sun a chance to climb higher in the sky and warm things up a bit more.


(Zoo Boy tagging along behind on the way home.)

Our walk is also taking longer, because we are walking further now that the kids' stamina can handle it, and because we are taking all three dogs with us. For some reason, the more dogs you add to a walking scenario, the more stopping here and there you do to check out sniffs and good places to pee. There's also dog-juggling to be taken into account -- swapping off dogs, or, if you are Zoo Boy, ditching dogs altogether in favor of hanging behind to contemplate life. All these things take time.



(J walks Cheer.)

Which all adds up to about an extra hour of time to be accounted for each morning. Which pushes snack time to before story work rather than after (which honestly, makes more sense to me anyway). It also gives our morning the feel of an overall slower start, which is also OK by me. This time of year taking our time to bask in what remains of the sunshine and nice weather feels like a natural thing to me.

(Joy and Grace, mugging for the camera.)

By the time we get home, get the dogs in their yards, get changed out of barn clothes, do our spin-and-fold sensory integration exercise, and eat some snack, we're looking at starting our story work around 11:00. Which means lunch isn't happening until around 1:00ish, by the time we're done with story work and an hour's worth of play, and rest time isn't starting until 1:30 or so, which also means that rest, with a reading of a chapter from our current chapter book at the start and some independent practice time at the end, doesn't wrap up until 3:00 or later.

That doesn't leave us a lot of time for afternoon adventures, especially considering that, once the clocks finally change, it'll be getting dark an hour earlier. Which leaves me in a bit of a quandry. If we're staying home and painting or something, then it's not a big deal. However, if we want to get out to a museum or somewhere, most of those places close at 5:00. And if we want to get together with friends, well, most of them are heading home to eat by 5ish.

I'm still working through what to do about that. For the rest of the fall, we're going heavy on the museum/nature center classes, since they cater towards school schedules and don't start until late afternoon, hence fitting in well with our schedules.

And I've been known to feed the kids in the car on our way to spend the afternoon out and about with friends. I just don't want to do that EVERY day. I feel like our rest time (including the reading before and the practice time after) are a very valuable part of our rhythms. But getting out with friends is valuable, too. So it's a balancing act. We've been pretty on-the-go all fall, I guess I feel like it's time to tip the scale back in the other direction a bit.