Just North of Bridge Town

If I close my eyes, I can still feel the sand on my feet. For the past three weeks I woke with the waves, drinking my coffee, and giving thanks for the past year and the year to come. These month long trips, they do a life good. 

Barbados welcomed us with a beautiful beach. We stayed right on Brighton Beach where the sand is fine and the water is turquoise. This was the first year out of six (SIX?! Is this really the sixth year we've been able to do this?! Thanks mom and dad!) that we used the ocean more than the pool. Hours of floating in sea water going up and over the waves was time well spent, I promise.




With an area of 21 miles by 14 miles, the island is easy to explore. It was my first time driving in a country where the steering wheel and driving lanes are opposite of home, and I don't want to toot my own horn or anything, but I was a natural! Jes' Tours were in operation again (thinking back to my stint as acting as the Tourista in Nicaragua...). I chalk it up to my constant left/right confusion. Left and Right directions have never come instinctually to me, so maybe it was just easy to follow along with the rest of traffic?! Who knows, but we made it through the trip seeing all four coasts and not getting into an accident, so it's a win!

Hanging at the "Hot Pot." The water that is pushed out by the local power plant creates a hot spring that is enjoyed by all!

Brighton Beach is on the West coast with the other three coasts being full of cliffs and coral, so it's the only coast to be on if you want to do extensive swimming, and we did. We swam off our beach, off Carlisle Bay, and off Alleynes Bay. The kids wore their masks and snorkels religiously and were rewarded with a  couple of fish, and turtles! There are a couple of turtles that like to hang out 100 yards or so off the beach and the kids found and fell in love with them.

The one and only Mike and Nana team! The responsible party that has made the beach a second home to our boys.

Our trek North took us to the Animal Flower Cave. This was pretty cool and Austin could have stayed all day. The water is clear and the views are amazing, though I didn't bring a camera down there as I didn't know if I'd be able to use it. You are standing in the mouth of a cave that is about 10 feet above where the huge waves are crashing. As you stand on the lip, the water sounds as if it's going to roar in and grab you, but then you are just washed with some spray instead. Some days the water does rise and when it goes it leaves behind some nice swimming pools full of crabs, sea cucumbers, and sea anemones that open and give the cave it's name, "Animal Flower." After poking some anemones and banging some shins on the coral, it was time to go.

To the West we found great beaches like Crane Beach, Bath, and Bathsheba. They each offer a different view which keeps the car trip going. Crane Beach you could potentially swim in, or at least play in the huge waves that come rolling in. There is sand to stretch out on and a tree house that somebody put up in the woods. Bath has a long shallow beach that is full of coral. It offers a peaceful sound as the waves are just rippling over the surface for almost a quarter mile before coming ashore. In Bathsheba you will find the Soup Bowl, or the surf spot. The surfers first have to make it past the waves and then they can play in the break far off. On shore there is dramatic evidence of the relentless pounding of the waves. Driving home from the east, we cut across the island heading for our west coast. On the way we found a game of Cricket! We stopped and tried to figure out the rules of Barbados' National sport, but we ended up just enjoying it and looking it up later on YouTube.

Finally, our trip down South brought us to two great dining options that are completely opposite of one another! Our first night out we went to Tapas. YUM! Right on the beach, incredible menu, super friendly atmosphere, and tons of choices. The second night we went to Oistin's Fish Fry. YUM! This isn't a restaurant, as it is a lot of beach huts each frying fish out in the open and offering a couple of side options along picnic tables on the bustling streets of the town Oistin. We snuck in a third dining option for dessert after the fish fry at Surfer's Cafe. This little place is not to be missed. The food was amazing, meaning our ice cream cookies and brownie a la mode!

Cricket

Safari Park

Safari Park...some chain and board  has been entertaining children for years.

Bathsheba

Most of the above, besides the dining, can all be done for free. I think it was $5 to go into the Animal Flower Cave. We did do a couple of touristy things...We we went to Harrison's Cave and Welchman's Gully. These two places show how the island of Barbados was formed. It's the only non-volcanic island in the Caribbean as it was formed when the two tectonic plates collided and pushed the land up. During the hundreds of thousands of years that the land was colliding, natural animal debris and coral formed along the oceanic floor and by the time the land was pushed up and out of the water, it was mainly coral that was being exposed. This is all very interesting when you start to wonder how this tiny island is able to sustain fresh drinking water. It is due to the gullies that were formed when the land continued to move and fracture the coral that fresh water was able to be stored. Harrison's Cave allows you to see the inner workings of these gullies and cave systems that hold the fresh water and Welchman's Gully allows you to walk along a gully floor that has been exposed and see how people found the openings into the sides of the earth to find the water. The plant life in the gully is also much more lush than the surrounding lands in Barbados which tend to be dry in the middle of the island with palm and pine trees along it's shores. Due to the lush plant life, the monkey tribes like to live around there, and therefore we got to see a family of monkeys as the gully has taken it upon itself to provide food and keep the monkeys away from the surrounding farm lands where they are nuisances. 

Chris arrived and brought some new fun as we had left some things for him...like our trip up North and a day on a jet ski. Leaving that jet ski for when Chris got there was great in some regards, but according to Oliver it was almost torture.

Daily life brought sunsets worth capturing {I have only a couple hundred}, monkeys in the treetops, neighbors who run a resort in Vancouver who also happens to have a previous life as a chef who also wanted to cook for us, endless card games of hearts and spades, a puzzle that defeated us, books, school, and the gift of time. Time spent exploring together, walking together, talking together and living life, but in paradise. 

Homeschooling in the 'Hood

Field Trip

There is a pause when I announce, "Oh, we homeschool," to those who we are meeting around town. The pause is enough to let me know I'm being studied; the recipient of that startling news is trying to figure out if there is something wrong with my kids, or if I believe in public education, science, or sheltering my kids to the point they haven't seen the inner workings of a playground. Through baseball seasons and soccer seasons we are meeting more and more kids that are involved in our lives but don't necessarily know us, and therefore I find myself quickly filling the pause, "Wetraveledforayearandwhenwegotbackwerealizedhowmuchweliketheflexibilityinourschedule." Phew. Done. Explained in one sentence. Our entire educational plan summed up sounding like it's because we like to stay in our pajamas. But...not really.

Climb On 

We can't stay in our beloved jammies because there is a school to get to (on Mondays), science class to get to (on Tuesdays), art class to get to (on Wednesdays), and nature class to get to (on Thursdays). Our time is filled with sports and music classes and climbing. I find myself on Fridays trying to cram in some classes and wondering how anybody even has TIME for school as I line up the worksheets for us to start on.

Fall Fun

Shifting away from a nomadic living experience that allowed us to learn wherever we were and finding ourselves in a house with no intentions of moving anytime soon led me to buckle down on some serious curriculum. We have Moving Beyond the Page, Teaching Textbooks, Math U See, VocabLit, and Life of Fred. We have start times of 9, breaks at 11 and 1, and tracking of grades. We have structure. And all that structure led us right back to looking at schools. If we were going to re-create a school here in our house, it honestly felt a little lonely. It felt non-productive and had us all yawning before our first snack. What is going wrong? I wondered as I contacted the local public school to see about a tour. Fill out these worksheets I instructed as I realized we were about 6 lessons behind schedule. "All of them?!?" the kids asked as I handed a small textbook sized sheaf to each. "Yup, we've gotta get through them, look at the calendar."

Marimba!

Recorder Time

Each weekend was coming and going with me wanting to go hiking with the family, and each weekend was coming and going without us being able to. Baseball and soccer occupied each day, work, chores, or plans occupied the nights and all I wanted was to be out and hearing the crunch of leaves as the golden and red colors surrounded us. I called a park day on a Tuesday and the kids and I headed for the hills. We explored a new park, went out for coffee and cider, and headed home when we wanted to. We read for a long a time that afternoon and we all ended the day feeling productive and engaged and it clicked. We learn SO much more when we are engaged than when we are following a checklist. Language develops during those read-alouds and fluency during our curl-up-and-read-the-favorites time. By getting supplies and actually building the buildings we read about we cement the information into our minds. By exploring areas we are already interested in, we are continuing our thought process rather than just inserting pieces of information that we don't really care about. My job as a homeschool mom is to make sure they have the building blocks for learning (HOW to read, HOW to write, HOW to do math) but it's not really my job to tell them what subject to apply that knowledge. This freedom to move within our curriculum has provided the shift we needed for our love of home education. By the time we went on the tour of the local school we had already fallen back in love with what we are doing at home.

Mini DC

I am somewhat certain at some point our boys will find themselves in a school again. I have no idea when that will be. We are no longer the Roving Pirates (though we still try to search out the fun), but we are now The Village School. A play on words due to our neighborhood's name as well as the fact that our kids are growing up in the proverbial village. Their education is formed from our network of classes and relationships with teachers, coaches, and family. Their school walls are invisible and their learning time is endless. All of these things provide flexibility in life and mind, and in that case, I can stick to our elevator pitch of homeschooling.

Valmont Bike Day

Calendars flip so fast

Oli's Happy Walrus

On the road, if I didn't capture the memories right THEN we would have moved on and the place would have been in our rear view mirror holding all it's memories until we landed in the next place and the mirror would fill with another. I had to write it as all of that was a once in a life time situation...we would never be floating on Flathead Lake with our 6 and 7 year old again. But here, at home, things are still happening so fast, but I can pretend they aren't. I can think of these kiddos as still my little ones that I get to enjoy for years to come, but when our 6 year old is the average size of a 9.5 year old and is only 10 inches shorter than me, it hits that these littles are not so little. Though they are young, the years too will pass and the less they will occupy my lap, calling for my attention at every moment to watch, watch, WATCH what they are doing, and I will be left with only wondering how their time is being filled. And so, let's recap. Just for myself, when I am sitting here with an empty house, not fighting to find a quiet hour when I can, and I can point my screen to this little blog and remember the fun this time has been.

On a bike ride in Longmont

It is May. The end of May. That means we got home seven months ago, and yet we are still transitioning. We moved into my parents house in October. We moved to Gunbarrel in November. We spent Jan-Feb in Florida. We moved back to my parents house in April, and now we move home tomorrow, the first week in June. Since we have been home we have taken two trips to Arizona, one to California, and I've gone to Florida twice. We have visited friends, watched the Rockies train, sat in the ocean, and relaxed around pools. We have lost one of our dearest friends in the form of a big black dog. We still miss his "kissing spot" between his eyes and miss his smell, always of a puppy. Through all of this, we have had school. Each day that passes I am more in love with our decision to keep homeschooling, even last week, our last week of 1st and 2nd grade as the final lessons draaaggggeeeeed on for all of us because we'd much rather be doing something, ANYTHING than spelling words using these last "vowel teams" because in May, nobody cares if AW sounds like "aw" or "ow" and we certainly don't care if "aw" or "au" can be used at the end of a word.

Drop off at school

Living at my parents house is a little like living in the middle of a party. With my dad and Chris working from home and the boys and I schooling from home, the house rarely empties. There is always some kind of action going on in the kitchen or people coming up with ideas of what we should be doing. From backyard fires, to nerf gun fights, baseball games, bike rides, or just lots of chatter amongst ourselves, I am sure that moving out will feel a bit quiet, if not for us, certainly for my parents. Living a mile from our old house has given us plenty of time to catch up with our old neighbors which has been nice as it affirms our reasons for moving back into the house. The neighborhood is so small that the kids will now have the run of the place and there are plenty of friends to run into at the park for a game of soccer or a bike ride on the paths. Thinking of moving back in has the same sort of feel as landing after being swirled in a tornado. It is a safe landing pad that feels comfortable and stable after all of the moving we've been doing, and at the same time it feels like the end of an adventure.

Capture the Flag Pros

Through all of this, I have been continually amazed by the flexibility and adaptability of our boys! Some nights we have not known where they would be sleeping and by the time bedtime rolls around and we've found where they will be resting their heads, they are just as happy and able to sleep as if that was the norm. Through the trip Oliver would let us know "Well, this was a good day, but I still want to go home." That was about the extent of any unhappiness. Austin would choose to continue to live on the road and is always talking about the "next" time we do this road trip or different countries we think we need to explore.

My happy Oli

We started school in Montana, with Flathead lake as our backdrop. We took our back to school pictures around a picnic table as we cracked the books open and started doing work. Back then the boys were reading books such as Little Critter, concentrating on each letter as it formed with the next. Last night Austin was in the home stretch of finishing "Little House in the Big Woods". To witness this kind of growth, to see your kiddo self motivate and push themselves through lessons that they would rather not be doing, but come out the other side with greater abilities has been extraordinary. I can remember when the kids were babies and I would think about homeschooling. Or when the babies were nothing but fragments of my imagination and I would wonder about homeschooling. Or about when we were about to start down this road and I was nervous about homeschooling, and I wonder how that could be. How could I have thought about this NOT being a part of our lives? It feels so natural and fits in with who we are completely.

Enjoying Mt Falcon

This past weekend we drove to Morrison for a hike. We drove right to the area where I used to take the kiddos so often, Tiny Town. I started thinking about how often I used to drive those roads, the hour long commute, the picnic we would have at Bear Lake after, just the boys and I. I would see their sleeping heads buckled in their carseats as we headed home in the afternoons and how that was so "us" and as my heart seized up I wondered when did that not become our routine? One summer I probably just thought that the boys were too old to enjoy it and stopped going, and then they were out of carseats and booster seats and now the bike rack is always in our rear view mirror as we head out for the trails or parks and my heart loosened as realized I lost the routine with the babies, but we have kept "our" routine. These boys and I, we are still doing our thing through all of this adventuring and exploring and that feels right.

Favorite hiking buddy!

And so, it's off to the next adventure. As we ready ourselves for our next move, we are getting ready for our next routine. One of summer and pools and camping. Of friends and hikes and bikes. But we are also in the middle of supporting Chris, who is bringing our family on the next adventure of self employment. A dream he's had for years is now falling into place, if somewhat erratically due to Gary's health and the state of the properties. He has a challenge in front of him that will require us to support and help him along the way, but I know our team of four is good at adventures and support and challenges, so instead of it being "Chris' work" it feels a bit more like a family adventure. One that will have us saying, "where has the time gone?" in a year from now as our routine has once again shifted.

Fifth Anniversary

Five years ago we made the decision to travel for a month to Belize. Since then we have gone to Nicaragua, and twice to Dominican Republic for a month. This year, our fifth, we stayed state side and found ourselves on the remotest trip yet, in Southern Florida on a little island named North Captiva.

North Captiva Island is only accessible by ferry and no cars are allowed on the island, but everybody has a golf cart. There is mostly nothing to do unless you happen to love things such as kayaking, walking, running, or lying around, which we do. The first day there we looked out of our house to see an Osprey on the neighboring house and we all crowded the windows watching it preen, listening to it's surprisingly beautiful chirp, and then said goodbye as it flew away. Little did we know, the island was covered in Osprey who were all too proud to come fly right by and show us their catch of the day. It was on more than one occasion that we had to slow the golf cart down to let a crane take it's time crossing the little dirt road in front of us and the gopher tortoises always got us to stop and watch as they made their tracks in the sand back to their holes. The water always had a dolphin to spot and even a mama and baby manatee made it's way into the marina for us to check out. It is a small island, with nothing to do, except enjoy all the beauty that surrounds you.

 With such trips, life is lived at a bit slower pace. When a vacation is extended beyond a typical vacation time, there is little need to rush to get things done or experience everything there is right away, so the gift of time is enjoyed and filled with casual conversation, and in the case of this annual trek, Clue. I am not sure if there has ever in the history of a trip taken been more games of Clue played than on the one we just went on. Clue, if you did not know, can get competitive and when the action is tense, people make mistakes which cause uproarious fits of laughter which can only happen when the daily stresses of life is if one should go snuggle a baby or read a book.

The boys each had "driving lessons" where they would take the golf cart out and slowly slowly press the pedal until it felt like you were going to be thrown from potholes they'd hit at full speed. They would also do "commando" missions with my dad and their water pistols and learned how to jump off a moving cart, roll through the weeds, run through the woods and jump back on a moving cart. I'm not sure how to write that down in their school curriculum, but I'm sure it can be attributed to some kind of learned skill. Through these slow days it wouldn't be unusual for a person to say they were going running. My dad and Matt both run pretty consistently with my sister, Chris and I heading out a little more sporadically. I was coming back to the house one day when Austin passed me saying he was going for a run. I smiled and he let me know he was just doing a small loop. The roads on North Captiva are small dirt roads and I think around 60 homes where we were, couple that with Austin's mind that is made out of a Garmin Navigation system and I wasn't too worried. I figured he'd be back in about 5 minutes. I went into the house and told the room that Austin had decided to go on a solo run and Matt looked at me and said, "You know, I got lost for the second time today." The small dirt roads were not straight and many had dead ends. Back out the door I went driving the golf cart in search of my 8 year old solo runner. I found him 10 minutes later and mapped the run, a 1.1 mile run for this little blonde boy of mine who just isn't so little anymore. From then on Austin decided to run with a partner and even made it out on a 5.05 mile run with Chris, my dad, and I. My heart soared just a little.

While Austin was developing his stride, Oliver liked to work on his stroke. I'm sure he would have slept in the pool if he could and nobody liked a night swim more than that child. He can backflip underwater until I get dizzy watching, learned to dive...sort of, if only belly flops could be swan dives, and found great fun in making underwater videos with the GoPro. Hours would go by and the rest of us would find ourselves coming back for round two only to discover Oliver still had not finished his first swim.  

Matt and Jen decided to rent a speed boat for a day, so we all got to climb aboard (except Chris, poor guy, as he was on a business trip in Kansas). We headed out and found ourselves walking the beaches of Cayo Costa State Park. Our next stop was on Cabbage Key where we dined in the supposedly famous spot of Jimmy Buffet and his cheeseburger. After that we took a very windy and rough ride that was slightly stressful for the parents on board and much less so for the children yelling YEEEEHAWWWW into the wind, over to Captiva for some dessert in the Puddle Room before heading back along the dolphins to North Captiva.

Our house came with a pool and when the air temperature wasn't coming out of the 60's, we found the temperature gauge on the pool and turned it into our own little hot tub, justifying the energy usage as nobody was driving cars. We woke and went swimming no matter the temps as it felt soooo good to be submerged in warm water that you never had to get out of as you waited for the sun to hit.

A chilly day on a couple of wave runners won't be forgotten as four dolphins swam in front of us as we were drenched and spray and kept our teeth from chattering. Introducing little Ada to the wonders of the beach through long walks in the sand, dipping her toes in the ocean, and her first swim in a hot tub pool will be stories she grows up with. Visiting with Grandma over a deck of cards or a glass of wine, gorging ourselves on brownie sundaes, completing endless amounts of puzzles, playing baseball, and watching the Florida sunsets will capture this trip in our memories.

Every year I fret that this will have to be our last one. There are sports! And school! And camps, commitments, work, bills...and the list goes on. Every year I think, "Man, this is great, but this will probably be the last one," all while googling homes in warm places for next March...just in case.