when the sun came out

Some kind of magic happened when I organized the bookcases and lost the wifi.

For the first time probably since five years ago when Youngest was a toddler, I feel like good work is being done in my home. Our schedule has had last minute changes, so we aren't getting the lists of bookwork done. But the boys have been hard at work on projects of their own devising.

Middle is actively working through problems of inking and coloration, realism vs grossness in his sketching. His drawings are suddenly eerily powerful, and he spends hours bent over the same one, going over the finest details with techniques he is inventing and refining.

Oldest has divided the bricks, technics (moving pieces) and specialty stuff out of the Lego and is very designing mechanical problems, then solving them. With the obsession that I have learned is quintessential him-ness, he goes to the Lego the moment he awakes, has to be forced to stop and eat and tricked into going to bed.

Even Youngest seems to have new memory abilities churning up in him. I have begun at the Big Bang with him and we journey across leaps of time on the big armchair each day. Each morning when we set forth again he works his little mind hard, retelling where we have been. His brain, previously, was made like a sieve.

I'm not teaching them, exactly, but I am so actively working to create and maintain the space that is ideal for their learning. I know that all the past five years I have been mindful of that, all this time I have been making them go through workbook pages and buying them educational tools. But now I see and feel myself creating a space that is really warming and sound with every other breath. Before I was teaching the boys at the kitchen table despite life working against it. Now I am demanding that life work for education, and in the good space that makes for us, the learning is happening without any teaching. It feels good and right again in a way I haven't felt in so very long.

It almost feels like I could blog it again, like I can observe this, I can look at it, dwell on it long enough to find things to say that are helpful, happy things.