Join us on a remarkable fifteen-year journey where we seamlessly integrated chicken keeping and gardening into our homeschooling practices. From selecting the perfect chicken breeds for our environment to constructing a cozy chicken coop, we've encountered numerous challenges and reaped countless rewards along the way. Throughout this journey, we've learned invaluable lessons about sustainability, empathy, and responsibility.

As things speed up in the springtime, my urge to slow down and savor the moment increases …and then I remember that stepping in and spending time with children, walking in their way, is just the medicine I’m seeking.

After the obligatory Old Faithful viewing we visited Black Sand Basin. It was a relief just to get away from all the people. The air was cold and the humid, it felt so good on our parched Colorado skin. Microbial mats of color illuminated our senses and gave rise to our mystical imaginations. The deep gurgling from geysers rumbled through our heads and it felt like we were waking up. Waking up from the long drive and the 2020 pandemic isolation slumber.

I feel like I am watching my upcoming parenting-an-adolescent years in fast forward here on the banks of the North Platte. This mother Bald Eagle stepping back, ignoring the pleading cries of her oversized fledgling in favor of him learning to hunt for himself, but still watching. I literally observed her hiding being a rock and peering over the top at her fledgling. I wonder how long this dance has been happening; a month, weeks, days, just today? I mean, he sounds pretty hungry. Is this the time he is going to do it & get himself some food?

As I stated earlier, learning the history of the original inhabitants of this continent during a pandemic brings into focus one of the major struggles these cultures endured, or worse, did not survive: The realization that the lands Christopher Columbus 'discovered' were in a state of ruin when the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock because of the introduction of viruses and disease.

Here was a very different narrative than that I learned in school, which sheds light on the current culture clash in the Americas today.

I joke a lot, but it was both a fun & relaxing day. Being on the water as it gently lapped the boats is a therapeutic sort of calm. The kind of calm I wish more families were experiencing on this day; the first day of back-to-school in a pandemic during a major computer malfunction (zoom crashed). Not that I miss the crowded lake, it's just that I wish for families to feel relief from the current tension that is pervading our communities as kids go back-to-school this year.

In this picture my (then) six year old daughter, is beginning to read the story of history written in the rocks. She’s collecting information and organizing it, like a Geologist. And just like reading in a story in a book, first she learns the parts {letters, words, sentence, pauses, etc.} and then she learns to read.