Living Seasonally
It’s the very beginning of November, and we have been absolutely loving everything about Fall. Something about the changing season, the shift from summer lifestyle to fall lifestyle, has me really consciously enjoying it this year. I find myself pondering it a lot, just staring out a window or across the yard watching the beauty.
This is our second year participating in the 1,000 Hours Outside initiative, and we have spent even more hours outside this year than last year. This is actually shocking to me, because the first six weeks of 2022 I was finishing up an extremely difficult third trimester with Baby B. And then the six weeks after that, we were dealing with a myriad of feeding issues with that sweet boy…we were as close to nonfunctional as a household with three children can be. My mom basically lived with us, and with three grownups to three kids and my dad keeping us from starving to death, we managed to come out the other side. Baby B learned to nurse, we eased our way from triple feeding to full-time nursing, he finally got over horrendous jaundice and started gaining weight…and the kids got over a stomach virus AND croup that sent Mr. Middle to the ER when Baby B was about a month old. All in those first six weeks of his life! Suffice to say, outdoor time was not the priority. And still somehow, we are at just about 1,000 hours, and it’s only the beginning of November. MIND. BLOWN.
Challenging ourselves to spend 1,000 hours outside in 2021 and 2022 has really inspired some positive changes in our family’s lifestyle. We basically live outside when the weather permits…and we have a much broader and more flexible view of what constitutes acceptable weather in which to be outside. We eat outside, we read outside, we bike and scooter and walk constantly, the kids climb trees and rarely wear shoes (resulting in amazingly tough soles!), and we take indoor toys outdoors.
Another unexpected and lovely consequence of all these hours outside is that we are all more in tune with the changing seasons. All five of us have internalized the tiny and intimate details of our own backyard, as it cycles through each season. We are aware of every tiny change in flowers sprouting, growing, budding, and blossoming. We know when the monarchs and black swallowtails will arrive and when to look for chrysalises. We know which birds will stay all winter and when the migrating species will return in the spring. We are growing more familiar with where the sun sits in the sky and how it changes with the seasons.
Hubby is releasing one of the many black swallowtails we found on our dill this year!
I hadn’t thought about this when we started including more outdoor time in our life, but I love what it’s done for us. I am starting to feel passionately that humans *should* be so in tune with the earth and how she changes. We *should* be gifting our children a familiarity with and extensive knowledge of Mother Nature and all her interconnected processes. How else will they grow to love this earth, and how else will they learn to protect her? Like it or not, climate change is a very real problem; it’s of critical importance that we are raising a generation that will be active stewards of the earth.
Living seasonally is a great way to connect your child to the earth, and a beautiful way in which to educate them about a thousand different things. I have found that just about every “academic” subject we need to cover with our young children can be tied into some aspect of living seasonally.
Read on to see what I mean by “living seasonally” and how you can meet your child’s educational and developmental needs in this nature-loving way.
Gardening: We have always gardened as a family. We grow berries and a variety of vegetables, and we are in the process of making sure everything in the yard is a native species and as pollinator-friendly as possible. Gardening lends itself SO well to living seasonally. We look forward with great joy to spring, to watching the temperatures and dates closely to determine when we can plant things, and to watching the plants come up from the earliest bulbs to the latest-blooming summer perennials. Teaching our children which foods grow in which season in our area is extremely fun and fulfilling. They most enjoy watching the berries take turns: our yard transitions from strawberry season to black raspberry season to red raspberry season to blueberry season. It’s an excellent lesson in enjoying what’s there, but not being too sad when a season ends, because we know another beautiful (and tasty!) season is around the corner! Even if you have limited space, you can garden on a balcony or even in a window box, or you can put herbs in your kitchen window in an apartment!
Mr. Middle shows off a zucchini he helped to grow
Cooking and eating seasonally: This is related to gardening, but it definitely is possible even if you don’t garden. A few years ago, I began keeping a list of what meals I love to cook in each of the four seasons. (I actually started doing this by month, but it got a little ridiculous.) Now, I’ve got a solid list of what I like to cook and bake in each season. We look forward to the changing of the seasons, because we look forward to specific meals. This ties into knowing which foods grow seasonally and incorporating them into your meals! Even if you don’t garden, you can still discuss with your children “what grows when.” Cooking and baking is RICH with educational opportunities: math, science, and reading abound when you are cooking with littles, not to mention the life skills you can incorporate naturally.
In the early spring, we used dandelion and lilac petals to make shortbread cookies. The kids LOVED picking these right out of the yard and incorporating them into our baking!
Reading seasonally: I talked a bit in a previous blog about book rotation. This is one of our favorite ways to mark the seasons. The kids get SO excited (and so do I!) when the fall books come out, or when the winter holiday books or the spring books are newly displayed. I have book collections for holidays, but I also have collections that are seasonally appropriate and non-holiday-related. This is an excellent way to cover the earth science curriculum and environmental education. It is also a really enjoyable way to transition from season to season, and to look for things to love about the incoming season. Even when we are sad that the Christmas season is ending in our home, we look forward to getting out those January and snow-related books!
Breaking out the December books is always a Great Big Event!
Teaching seasonally: Use each unique season as inspiration for what you are teaching your children. You don’t have to have school-age kidlets or be following any curriculum to be teaching your children: if you are raising kids, whether or not you are a stay-at-home parent, or a homeschool parent or a full-time working parent, you are teaching children. We do a lot of math in the fall with apples and pumpkins. We build with cranberries and toothpicks (geometry!). We incorporate seasonal songs, learning rhyme and other language skills along with our music education. We use seasonal natural materials in our art and sensory play. We learn poems that incorporate elements of the seasons. As adults, we take for granted all of the content knowledge we possess regarding seasons, months, weather, holidays, and the general cycle of the year. But it’s SUCH a rich curriculum for young children who don’t yet possess that knowledge. There’s so much to learn and so much of it revolves around changing seasons!
Marking the equinoxes and solstices: This is something that is a relatively new tradition in our family, and we are really enjoying learning more about it. For example, at the winter solstice (the shortest day and the longest night of the year), we eat dinner and spend our evening by candlelight. This is a common winter solstice tradition that has to do with bringing back the light. Another often-observed tradition at winter solstice is eating a Yule log, a traditional Christmas cake. There are actually many different solstice traditions from all around the world. It would be a SUPER COOL educational experience to spend a few years trying out different traditions from different regions of the world to mark the change in seasons. It would transition beautifully to learning more about those regions, cultures, and people. Can you tell I am always on the lookout for opportunities to teach and learn?
Some of the candles that light the night on the winter solstice, bringing the light back
Mindfulness when outdoors: Pay attention to the view/sunset and how it changes, how the garden changes, and/or how the landscape changes. We lived in Savannah,GA for seven years and the changing of the seasons is obviously quite different in the Deep South. It was still quite possible to be tuned in to the seasons, just in a different way than it is here in the PA mountains. We spent far more time outside in the temperate winter when we lived in coastal GA than we did in the summer, when it was so blazing hot it could be dangerous.
Give yourself over to the seasons of parenting: This last one is a little different in meaning than my previous points about living seasonally, but it is arguably among the most important. This is one I’m working hard on. I’m already sad that Baby B is growing so fast, knowing he will be our last baby. I want to enjoy the season I’m in, without grieving the seasons past too much, and trust that the seasons to come will be just as beautiful (and maybe even more so!) than the one I’m living. For me, it’s hard to imagine enjoying a season of our little family more than the current season of very young children and babies. I am made for this season! However, I am consciously choosing to trust that future seasons will be just as incredible. Just like I look for signs of autumn at the end of summer, I’m trying to look for signs of what I will love about middle-childhood-life, and then I will look for signs of what to love about teenage years, etc. Just like the natural world, parenting is a seasonal process. The biggest and most poignant difference is that the seasons of parenting won’t repeat. Maybe someday we will enjoy grandbabies, but it won’t be the same season as parenting our own babies. And that’s okay, because I intend to be as present as possible and wring every tiny drop of joy out of this current season.
What about you? How do you mark the changing seasons? What do you enjoy about seasonal living?