Last week Gavin finished all of his classes and projects for 12th grade so we held a graduation ceremony in my parents backyard! We are so so proud of the amazing person he is and all of his hard work! We celebrated with a special vanilla cake with chocolate orange frosting and sprinkles to resemble the tassel on a cap, made by our baker, Lilah. Congratulations, Gavin! We love you so ..read more

We met some friends for sledding. It was hard packed but beautiful. We all had a good time. Lilah found a downed tree over the creek and made her way across it. I found some elk prints. We snowshoed on several recent warm winter days. We started reading Divergent together, to discuss and relate to. It’s fascinating to all of us so far. We’ve been visiting Grandma and Grandpa on Sundays to hang out and usually to play a board game. Lilah and I were doing silks classes but have stopped until it seems safer to be in a room with a bunch of people again. We’re trying to work on our spli ..read more

Sometimes it seems like time has been paused for a really long time. So many things have been paused while things keep moving along, full speed ahead. We’re still going on adventures, around the house, around the city and state. I haven’t updated in a long time. It’s been hard lately, worrying about getting sick, passing illness along to others, risks and responsibility. We’ve been doing some things and foregoing others as we think is right but it’s hard to be living under that cloud that covid has been hanging over our heads for so long now. Halloween came and went. We did some carving at ..read more

Lilah celebrated her birthday three times. Once with family while camping amid the fall leaves. Once with the four of us and the cats. Finally with her friends over for a playdate and sleepover with her bestie. We put some crepe paper up around the campsite and a happy birthday banner on the tent and my mom sprinkled rose petals around the benches after dinner. We ate red velvet cupcakes that Lilah had made and she opened some gifts. Then we roasted marshmallows and made s’mores. We spent her birthday morning at home, working on projects then she and I went on a wild walk hunting ge ..read more

We took a quick trip to the California coast, to MacKerricher beach near Fort Bragg. It was lovely. We had a series of unfortunate events at the beginning but nothing that lasted or caused big problems: our car was making weird noises before we left so we decided not to risk driving it so far and rented one for the trip, we couldn’t find the small propane tanks for our camp stove the first night and had to drive all over, asking, we forgot to close the stopper on the cooler so had a few damp items when we arrived. It was frustrating but we solved the issues and enjoyed our time there. We found ..read more

In the past little while we’ve started our school year again. We are doing Making Tracks again, a nature and survival skills class. Here Lilah is working on making cordage. And here Gavin is explaining to friends the steps to holding and twisting the material. Here’s some of the cordage we were working on up closer. We are reading books and discussing them with the help of Brave Writer. Lilah is doing art, on her own, with Makercrate and through classes on Skillshare.com. Gavin is working on improving his driving, engineering with Eurekacrate, his own projects and classes on Skillshare. We ..read more

We went to Alaska! It was something my parents had wanted to do with us for years and had been postponed due to my dad’s cancer and postponed due to covid travel restrictions and dangers so I sighed out a huge breath of relief and thankfulness when we stepped on board the ship. We traveled from Juneau to Sitka, stopping to kayak and hike and ride in zodiacs. We saw glaciers up close and calving. The colors of the ice were astonishing. The sound of the ice breaking and falling was amazing. We saw lots of wildlife: humpback whales and orcas, birds of many kinds, seals, sea lions, sea ..read more

We had a family celebration at our house, complete with a chocolate cake with raspberry and chocolate frosting made by Lilah, our household baker, decorations my sister helped me pick out and put up, and family fun out in the fresh air. We had his favorite, lasagna for dinner. He’s surpassed me in height just in the last month or so. He’s learning how to drive. He’s good at making hash browns. He has a laugh you can hear across a house. He’s practicing lego builds like the Lego Masters show. He’s playing Rainbow Six Siege, MineCraft Dungeons, Magic the Gathering, Beyond the Sun. He lo ..read more

Gavin’s been working in learning to drive! He took the written test at the DMV and got his learner permit and we have been practicing since then. He’s getting more comfortable with driving in town and is working up toward freeway driving. We started weaving some baskets with rope and hemp twine in our nature class. At the last class of the year we played capture the flag and the kids went through the creek and into the bushes and trees trying to sneak into bases and tag each other. It was a lot of fun. We’ve rebuilt our garden boxes so they are higher and filled them with dirt and got a new dr ..read more

The weather’s been all over the place the last few weeks as winter thinks about moving over for spring and then thinks again. Gavin’s been working on designing some Lego ships with moving parts. He spends time working on a concept, sifting through all of our loose bits to find the right pieces and fitting them together and reworking things when they don’t work the way he wanted the first time. He really wants to be able to write MineCraft mods and create texture packs so this week I challenged him to find a tutorial or class to learn about that. He found one and seems to be enjoying it so far ..read more