unschooling

A whole lot of Holi

We celebrated the Indian holiday Holi with friends in the middle of the week at a park and then again this weekend at the Hindu temple nearby with thousands of people. Both were so much fun!

In preparation for the day with friends we tried making our own color powder and while it was interesting is was so time consuming I don’t know that we’ll try it again. It took hours to dry and then it wasn’t as colorful as we had hoped. Traditionally during Holi, a spring holiday, you throw colored powder at friends and family until everyone is very brightly colored. When you throw color at someone, it is seen as an act of love and blessing. It also symbolizes a victory of good over evil. The kids loved running around and getting messy and coloring each other.

Before the color throwing, the kids roamed the park, climbing trees and fighting with foam swords Gavin brought.

Gavin also got out his Magic The Gathering board game and happily played that with his friends for an hour or so.

There were a couple of huge hawks building nest right above us and we watched them fly overhead and bring sticks back to finish off their huge nest.

We also tried some Indian dessert recipes at home and made laddoo with chickpea flour, grain halwa with oat flour and carrot halwa. They were all quite delicious!

At the big temple, they had yummy Indian food to eat and music and dancing and a huge color throw on the hour each hour where so many people throw simultaneously that it creates a rainbow cloud for a few seconds. We try to go every year because we enjoy it so much. Lilah was thrilled that her favorite dessert, the halwa, was mango flavored this year!

 

We went home rainbow-colored and happy, twice.

 

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unschooling

Spring!

We’ve been biking,

visiting our new neighborhood library,

playing with friends,

baking pumpkin bread,

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experimenting in MineCraft with new buildings and animals and researching how to make machinery that functions in the game,

loving the kitten,

painting Lilah’s wolf mask from her Doodle Crate gift,

reading,

building with Legos (Gavin’s been doing a lot of research and then designing and building. Here he has built a house with a hinging wall that opens, and four poster bed, book shelf, lamp and dresser inside. The next day he added another level with a balcony.)

We’ve been puzzling,

spending more time with friends,

waiting in terribly long lines to participate in the caucuses in our state,

watching flowers begin to bloom in our neighborhood.

Lilah asked me about Hindi after we talked about languages other than English and how a language with different characters works and we’ve made a plan to do some learning in that area.

We went to a Hindu temple in our vicinity for a celebration of Holi, a Hindu spring festival which involves throwing and wiping colored powder on each other. It was so much fun and the kids loved it! I have fond memories of the Holi celebrations I took part in in India many years ago and it was so satisfying to share with my family. We’ll definitely go again!

At my parents house we dyed eggs and hunted eggs and enjoyed each others’ company on Easter.

We listened to Rolling Thunder In The Mountains by Scott O’Dell in the car and enjoyed that quite a bit and I’ve been reading The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle to them, a chapter here, a chapter there. It’s one that’s new to me as well as the kids, which is fun.

We went to the hot springs for a soak and a swim. It was rainy today and when we got into the pool it began to hail! We’d brought an umbrella and so we huddled under that in the warm water and enjoyed watching the hail stones plop and splash in the water and make bubbles. After the hail let up the kids went into the cooler pool and there was lots of splashing and chasing and floating on pool noodles.

The kids played with mixing up some gooey substances with their latest Tinker Crate.

Life and life learning is good.

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