The Woes of Going Outdoors

When through the woods
And forest glades I wander
I hear the birds
Sing sweetly in the trees;
When I look down
From lofty mountain grandeur
And hear the brook
And feel the gentle breeze;
Then sings my soul,
My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art!
How great Thou art!
-Carl Boberg and Stuart K. Hine

It is not easy to get out of the house and go be in nature! Don't get me wrong, I love being outdoors. Before I had children, I was out hiking, climbing, cross-country skiing, biking, and camping in the mountains as much as was possible. I never stopped to question why I loved being out there so much, but I could have told you that I loved the calmness and beauty of being in nature.

Now that I have five little children, it is not as easy to just hop on a bike and go to the mountains. In fact, I haven't touched my bike in a few years! I do try to take them on hikes every so often and we like to go camping on occasion, but until recently I didn't realize how crucial it is for us to be outside quite often.

It would be well if we all persons in authority, parents and all who act for parents, could make up our minds that there is no sort of knowledge to be got in these early years so valuable to children as that which they get for themselves of the world they live in. Let them once get touch with Nature, and a habit is formed which will be a source of delight through life. We were all meant to be naturalists, each in his degree, and it is inexcusable to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant and animal life and to care for none of these things." -Charlotte Mason

Charlotte Mason's Original Home Schooling Series is quickly finding a place towards the top of my list of the best parenting books. It's one of those books that I can't be in the same room with people as I read it because I keep interrupting them to quote passage after passage.  It's all so good.  Charlotte has helped me decide to make the effort to get outdoors a lot more. So I'm mad at her. I was all good with raising my children to be bookworms (who could socialize with others and use that knowledge for good, of course), but now it turns out that they need to be naturalists as well!

What really struck me about what she said was that we get are used to getting our knowledge "second hand."  Someone digests it for us and we read their words.  For young chidren this is dry and boring and a waste of time because they don't care enough to retain it.  She used the term "scraps of knowlege":

"This horse-in-a-mill round of geography and French, history and sums, was no more than playing at education; for who remembers the scraps of knowledge he laboured over as a child? and would not the application of a few hours in later life effect more than a year's drudgery at any one subject in childhood? If education is to secure the step-by-step progress of the individual and the race, it must mean something over and above the daily plodding at small tasks which goes by the name."

This is the umbrella that Bazinks found and was willing

 to share with his sister when it started to rain.

Do you ever think about all of the time you wasted learning stuff as a child that you didn't care about and forgot as soon as the quiz on it was over?  I really think that all of the math I learned from 1st to 12th grade in school, I could have learned in 3-6 months of real study as a young adult or older teenager.  Think of all the wasted time!  So what do children really need?  Well, you'll have to read another long quote fro Charlotte to find out because I can't say things as well as she does. I thought about cutting more parts out of the quote so that it wouldn't be so long, but I couldn't do it, so just trust me, it is worth reading (as is the rest of her stuff):

"A great deal has been said lately about the danger of overpressure, of requiring too much mental work from a child of tender years. The danger exists; but lies, not in giving the child too much, but in giving him the wrong thing to do, the sort of work for which the present state of his mental development does not fit him. Who expects a boy in petticoats to lift half a hundredweight? But give the child work that Nature intended for him, and the quantity he can get through with ease is practically unlimited. Whoever saw a child tired of seeing, of examining in his own way, unfamiliar things? This is the sort of mental nourishment for which he has an unbounded appetite, because it is that food of the mind on which, for the present, he is meant to grow.

"We older people, partly because of our maturer intellect, partly because of our defective education, get most of our knowledge through the medium of words. We set the child to learn in the same way, and find him dull and slow. Why? Because it is only with a few words in common use that he associates a definite meaning; all the rest are no more to him than the vocables of a foreign tongue. But set him face to face with a thing, and he is twenty times as quick as you are in knowledge about it; knowledge of things flies to the mind of a child as steel filings to magnet. And, pari passu with his knowledge of things, his vocabulary grows; for it is a law of the mind that what we know, we struggle to express. This fact accounts for many of the apparently aimless questions of children; they are in quest, not of knowledge, but of words to express the knowledge they have. Now, consider what a culpable waste of intellectual energy it is to shut up a child, blessed with this inordinate capacity for seeing and knowing, within the four walls of a house, or the dreary streets of a town. Or suppose that he is let run loose in the country where there is plenty to see...

"The child who does not know the portly form and spotted breast of the thrush, the graceful flight of the swallow, the yellow bill of the blackbird, the gush of song which the skylark pours from above, is nearly as much to be pitied as those London children who 'had never seen a bee.' A pleasant acquaintance, easy to pick up, is the hairy caterpillar. The moment to seize him is when he is seen shuffling along the ground in a great hurry; he is on the look-out for quiet quarters in which to lie up: put him in a box, then, and cover the box with net, through which you may watch his operations. Food does not matter––he has other things to attend to. By-and-by he spins a sort of white tent or hammock, into which he retires; you may see through it and watch him, perhaps at the very moment when his skin splits asunder, leaving him, for months to come, an egg-shaped mass without any sign of life. At last the living thing within breaks out of this bundle, and there it is, the handsome tiger-moth, fluttering feeble wings against the net. Most children of six have had this taste of a naturalist's experience, and it is worth speaking of only because, instead of being merely a harmless amusement, it is a valuable piece of education, of more use to the child than the reading of a whole book of natural history, or much geography and Latin. For the evil is, that children get their knowledge of natural history, like all their knowledge, at second hand. They are so sated with wonders, that nothing surprises them; and they are so little used to see for themselves, that nothing interests them. The cure for this blasé condition is, to let them alone for a bit, and then begin on new lines. Poor children, it is no fault of theirs if they are not as they were meant to be––curious eager little souls, all agog to explore so much of this wonderful world as they can get at, as quite their first business in life."

Do you see my dilemma? I'm now supposed to find time to make sure that they are out in nature often AND I want to make sure they have adequate time to read great books. I also know how important it is for them to continue working in the mornings. It might not be so bad to go outdoors if we could manage to get in the car in a decent amount of time.

Here is how our day went last Thursday:
"Let's hurry and get our work done so we can go be in nature!"
We worked, and we were done at 12pm.  Not as fast as I would have liked, but pretty reasonable, so I tell the kids that as soon as baby wakes up, we can go.  So we eat lunch, baby wakes up, we clean up from lunch, a load of laundry I had forgotten is in the wash so I put it in the dryer.  Everyone does their going out lists.  A lot of playing takes place as the list gets done.  Laundy is done, I decide to fold it.  The kids are "ready", we put the piles of laundry away.  Someone can't find their water bottle, someone else needs help with his shoes (even though he can do it on his own), finally at 2:30 - we are in the car.   I think about not going because we took so long and I didn't practice piano and I didn't get everything done I wanted to finish that morning and it looks like it will rain soon.  However, we are in the car so we go somewhere close.

We arrive at a beautiful place.  Wildflowers are everywhere.  You can smell the lavender.  Spice points out a beautiful purple flower and goes back to the car to get the wildflower book so she can know it's name.  We find a little stream.  Bud makes a "whirlpool" with rocks.  Bazinks and Little Miss find some pretty rocks.  Ray is mesmerized with the colors.  I find a flower I want to try to draw.

I suddenly realize, all of the rushing and things left to do are forgotten and I feel whole.   I am living in the moment and loving it.  There is something about being in the middle of the beauty that God created for us that puts us in touch with His spirit and His joy.  That is what I've been trying to teach my children to look for.  That is what I have been focusing on in our home - surrounding ourselves with real beauty, real truth so that it becomes part of us and we no longer care for the fake, artificial stuff.  It's developing a spiritual sensitivity that you can't get when you are in the "thick of thin things".  It's a real education.

No doubt I'll be taking my kids out in nature much more often!  Maybe with some practice we'll be able to get out the door in a more timely manner...

"And behold, all things have their likeness, and all things are created and made to bear record of me, both things which are temporal, and things which are spiritual; things which are in the heavens above, and things which are on the earth, and things which are in the earth, and things which are under the earth, both above and beneath: all things bear record of me."- Moses 6:63

Yea, all things which come of the earth, in the season thereof, are made for the benefit and the use of man, both to please the eye and to gladden the heart;Yea, for food and for raiment, for taste and for smell, to strengthen the body and to enliven the soul." -D&C 59:18-19

Here are some more of our late "outdoor" adventures:

Rock did his first "century" ride on Saturday. It is a 100 mile bike ride. He did it in awful wind - and rain. It felt like January instead of June. I was so impressed that he kept at it despite the harsh conditions. Several members of his family participated in the "Tour de Cure". I was impressed with them all. I was ready to call it quits after the first 30 minutes of waiting at the finish line (we got there around the time we estimated he would finish, but with the terrible conditions, it took him a bit longer) and they were out there for 8 hours! Very impressive. Way to go hun!!

We went to a water park on Wednesday. It doesn't really count as being in nature, but we did get lots of sunshine and fresh air!

Spice and Bud liked going down the water slides.

Bazinks and Little Miss liked them as long as Rock

or I went down with them.  Since one of us also had

to take care of the baby, we had to take turns going

on slides while the other went to the kiddie pool.

Ray doesn't love water.  He screams when we try

to give him baths.  He wasn't exactly in his element

at the waterpark, but he was extremely cuddly.

I went on a waterslide with the older kids and when

I got back, I found Ray sleeping on his dad in the wave 

pool.  It was so precious that I had to snap a picture:

I did try going down one long slide on the tube with Ray

 on my lap.  He moaned a reluctant cry all the way down

so we decided that was probably enough torture for the little guy.  

We'll be going on another adventure this weekend.  I might not have time to blog this week as I get ready for it.  I, of course, despite my good intentions, have put it off until the last minute.  I'll let you know how it goes!