Our gently flowing days

Our Autumn days are passing quickly yet gently and quietly, mostly spent recuperating from colds which have thankfully passed now but seemed to drag on way too long and slowed us down from our otherwise very active days.

My baby belly is growing beautifully round and our babe is happily kicking about - 18 happy weeks now - the weeks certainly do flash by quickly and I am savouring each day of being pregnant although I find my favourite time to wonder and contemplate about this little babe is mostly in the early hours of the morning or late at night when all is quiet and peaceful. It is such a joy to feel those gentle, early kicks. I have started knitting more baby knits.

Sol and I are immersed in a language arts block. Inspired by Eric Fairman's 'Path of Discovery - Volume One: Grade One" Language Arts container story, I've created our own umbrella story through which to journey through the alphabet and weave together the fairy tales often used for introducing the Waldorf alphabet. This way works well for us, as the story is one I know speaks to and appeals and inspires Sol - lots of nature and wild foods and danger and adventuring and natural magic and wonder and activity and animals. Apart from drawing/painting the letter picture, telling the connected fairy tale, and using our senses to experience the letter, I try to find opportunities for us to 'live' our language journey if possible.

For instance, we covered 'V' for valley and 'H' for hut. In our story, the characters journey through a village in a valley and helped the villagers rebuild damaged houses. Their huts were made in a traditional house building method using sticks woven together and then insulated with a mixture of cow dung and clay - wattling and daubing . I was delighted to find a wonderful nature activities day hosted by forest wardens at a local nature reserve taking place at the same time we covered these letters! Some of the activities we did were wattling and daubing, grinding grain using stones and clay pot making. So, just like our characters in our story who assisted with wattling and daubing in the village in the valley, we wattled and daubed.

Here hazels sticks have been woven together and then covered with a clay mixture. Lots of messy fun - daubing.

For letter 'T' for trees, we used the Grimm's tale, 'Three Little Men in the Forest'. Our story had our characters journey through an ancient forest where they met three wise tree dwellers living in ancient trees who offered wise guidance to our travellers. We spent time learning about ancient trees and then revisited all the large trees on this farm to decide which must be the oldest (we have made friends with most!). Whilst there are no ancient trees here, we admired several of the oaks with hollows and wrinkly, gnarled trunks, but the tree we felt must be the oldest here is one of our favourites - a very large, beautiful beech tree.

Here is a picture of the beech tree taken back in February this year. This is a tree we visit frequently. From what I could discover the oldest recorded ancient tree in our area is a 600 year old sweet chestnut tree. We shall have to pay that tree a visit. (The most incredible trees I personally have loved and touched and admired are the precious, magical baobab trees growing in southern Africa and the beautiful ancient oaks in Nottingham Forest here in England.)

We have also been enjoying daily all that autumn brings in our natural surroundings. Deer bounding over open fields, beautiful, vibrant pheasants in the fields and woods. Lots of beautiful leaves falling, huge flocks of starling gathering and flitting noisily from tree over field to tree. We are living and loving Autumn.

Yew tree berries.

We have admired the berries of the yew tree and the beautiful berries of the spindle tree. The wood was traditionally used for the making of spindles for spinning wool; this use is the origin of the English names of these shrubs. Both yew and spindle berries are highly toxic.

Spindle tree berries. Pink with orange seed centre. Such colour!

So goes our days!