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I have odd parents, and that is what I love about them.

My father was a Texan geologist turned yacht salesman, and also a professional classical musician. He was the type of man who told the same jokes over and over again, and no one seemed to get them. My mother I’ve given the nickname ‘posh Brit’ because that is exactly what she is: an English woman with a love of the designer clothing and jewelry, as well as great food. However eccentric they were when I was growing up, they still had facets of being very conservative. They were Catholic and my mom has a thing with being super, super clean. She can cook almost anything, and all of us delight in the feasts she spends hours preparing.

I, on the other hand, have never been conservative. I sleep in late, can’t clean to save my life, and never pictured myself being a parent. I had taken on my father’s love of the arts but didn’t want to have the rigidity that the school system pushed. I wanted freedom and choice. And for some reason, I believed that family was a ‘cop out’ and not something that interested me. Indeed, boarding school had made me believe that an academic career was the most important thing I could achieve.

Now that I am a mother, I look back on that image I had and feel saddened. I went off to school in the 8^th grade and basically grew up 24/7 with other kids, in a very strict academic world. We all felt suffocated and on top of each other, with no privacy. Kids were scared to emote for fear of being ridiculed. It had its perks, but the downside was very apparent.

I loved reading, and still do, but eventually that environment lead me to where I am today: an unschooling mother and family activist.

When I was just twenty and had moved to the States, I met my husband and was engaged by twenty one. This was something I had never envisioned, that I could have such intimacy and trust with someone so soon. I pictured myself as a rogue archaeologist, living in a tent somewhere. Instead, I had moved to LA and gotten married soon afterwards. It was the best surprise I could have asked for! We’re inspired by travel and living outside the box and yet we value the traditional family model, in the sense that family is first.

We don’t schedule it in, we schedule everything else around it.

Nowadays, to have such a view is indeed rogue. To not send one’s kids off to day care and then school and pursue a career is almost frowned upon.  Kids have become used to spending little time with mom and dad, and as one homeschooling  mum put it ‘ home is like a hotel, where kids check in and out’.

But things are changing.

Old school family values are becoming trendier (really!!) with mom blogs popping up all over the place, sharing their day to day routine with the world. One blog in particular infuses the radical notion of actually enjoying motherhood above all other pleasures, and it attracts readers who are not only single, but also hard core feminists who for one reason or another find themselves attracted to the image of a happy, smiling, and religious family.

Because of the internet, blogging, and social media, people can connect with eachother like never before, and learn from one another’s preferences. Magazines like Bust interview women who ( gasp) love their arranged marriage, despite catering to a feminist, women’s lib loving crowd. We are hungry to learn about other lifestyles, in order to properly discern what is right for our own, instead of shutting the door on anything outside of our comfort zone.

Nie Nie Dialogues is an inspirational read to check out, showing how a maman of 5 balances her desires and her family’s needs, as well as being an airplane crash survivor and burn victim. Her book Heaven Is Here is out of April 4^th and shows her heroic journey of recovery to physical and mental wellbeing, after having been in a coma for 3 months. I feel uplifted reading about her daily life and how she views the role of motherhood, and it certainly drives me to complain less about my own life and responsibilities.

The Wiegands is another motivational blog about a young artistic family of 4 living in Texas. Casey Leigh chronicles her life and the losses and hardships she has encountered on her journey in parenthood. Readers comment on how she makes the ups (her new pregnancy) and downs ( her miscarriage, her son’s asthma) so touching and real. Her writing is accessible and her story shows how we all struggle, but how we deal with it is what matters.

Are you unconventional yet drawn to the traditional? Where do those two ideas collide in your family and how do you make it work? Where do you find your inspiration?

This article was written by Elizabeth Kelsey: Wife to William, Mama to Kaya, currently writing from Phuket, Thailand where her family is living and learning together.

“How do you do it?”

It’s the most common question asked:

• By young mamas pregnant with their first, hoping hard that their days of adventure aren’t drawing to a close
• By new parents with dark circles under their eyes, taking their first flight to visit Grandma
• By a Dad whose toddler is bouncing through a quiet museum
• By families feeling locked into their school or work schedules with only two weeks off each year
• By folks with teenagers who feel time slipping through their fingers and long for one last hurrah
• By families engaged in international adoption
• And people who’ve lost sight of their dream

But what they really want to know is…

• How we travel as much as we do with newborns through teenagers
• How to manage the logistics of travel with kids
• How to keep a toddler happy on a long flight
• How we get our kids to eat fried grasshoppers or tongue meat tacos when they’re served
• How to talk their kid’s school into an extended field trip
• How to turn their kids into FUN travel companions
• How to unplug their kids from a gameboy and plug them into real life adventures
• How to inspire their teenagers to love family adventures
• How to take that kernel of a dream and turn it into reality

Everyone has a dream

Many parents share the dream of traveling with their children:

• Climbing around Etruscan ruins in the hill country of Italy
• Snorkeling with your five year old and listening to him yell, “Hi Nemo!!” through his snorkel
• Wandering the halls of Europe’s great museums over a long summer holiday
• Driving across your own continent and back with all seven of your children
• Touring with Daddy’s band and being his biggest fan at every concert
• Sampling sausage at German street fests and mustards in Dijon, France

Everyone has a dream with their children. Then, somewhere along the way they trade their dream for the “reality” of life with kids and before they know it, they’re filling out college applications and have missed it. Too many people miss it.

You don’t have to miss it.

You can live your dream!

How do we know?

Because we are!

Keri Wellman is exploring Europe with her four kids from their base in Germany. She’s a fiction writer, a marathon runner, a laughing mother and has the soul of an adventurer.

Jenn Miller is in the fourth year of an open-ended world tour with her four kids, across three continents and fifteen countries, so far! She writes for the travel and home education markets, bakes a lot of bread and loves to climb things with her kids. She’s a second generation Gypsy Mama.

We’re here to tell you that you can travel with your kids and love it!

We’ll show you how!

You’ll learn the secrets!

Bottles to Backpacks: The Gypsy Mama’s Guide to REAL Travel With Kids is a book you’ll return to again and again as your kids grow, the adventures change and the dreams just keep getting bigger!

You’ll learn:

• The 7 P’s
• The One Bag Rule (and exceptions!)
• How to prepare for health care & emergencies away from home
• How to deal with jet lag, temper tantrums, picky eaters and scheduling difficulties
• To navigate taxis, ferries, trains, buses, planes & long lines gracefully
• Games to play at home to prepare for airport scanners, third world bathrooms & more
• How to develop a safety plan
• To talk the educational powers that be into granting you a long term field trip
• To quantify the learning that takes place outside the box in a way that the schools will credit
• To inspire your teen to LOVE family travel and invest in it
• To work up the guts to let your teenager travel alone for the first time

And SO much more. It’s 140 pages of travel wisdom, resources and encouragement from those who’ve “been there, done that” with every age group.

If you dream of travel with your kids, you NEED this book!

Are you ready for adventure? Get the book!

Would you like to read what other traveling families are saying?

Hurry! Get the Launch Week Discount through December 3rd!

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Teaching Writing to Young Children

For many parents, simply that title is enough to strike fear into their hearts.

Writing:

• That hated high school subject.
• The chore most dreaded following Christmas (WRITING those thank you notes).
• The most nebulous portion of the SAT (how DO they actually grade those essays?).
• The college class we all put off until the last possible moment and yawned our way through.

Writing.

Some say it can be learned. Other’s say it’s a gift. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, although leaning strongly toward the “learned” camp.

In the new millennium, few people truly write.

• E-mail doesn’t count.
• Neither does your grocery list.
• Nor does that note to get your kid out of gym class… no matter how creative your explanation of his sprained ankle was.
• Most of us don’t even write letters, much less memoirs, or articles or books.
• Most of us sit down at a computer, or stare at a blank paper and ask the same question we asked in tenth grade: “What do I write?”
• Or, we know what we want to write, but are disappointed with the end product because we lack the mechanics as well as the art to really do our ideas justice.

It is difficult.

It is bad enough to struggle with one’s own writing. It is entirely another thing to, with great fear and trepidation, try to teach our children to write.

It is one of the most frequently asked questions. One of the greatest concerns of home educators: HOW can I teach my child to do this terribly difficult thing that I myself find mortally painful and am only marginally successful at?

The 3 R’s

The answer, is blessedly simple. I call it the three Rs (no, not those 3Rs)

They are as follows: Relax, Read, Respond. Of course, this is a highly simplified version, but it will carry you quite a long way.

RELAX!

The first, most necessary thing, is for parents to take a deep breath, and relax. If your children see that you are terrified of this and that you think it is the hardest thing ever, they will adopt your attitude and you’ll all be miserable.

• STOP looking at what curriculum everyone else is using.
• STOP freaking out about what kind of assignments your child is NOT completing.
• START engendering positive feelings about writing in yourself and working towards a “print rich environment,” as the professional educators among us would call it.

Attitude is everything. Relax. You can do this.

READ!

Next, read. Read, read, read, READ to your children. If you’re pregnant with #1 read to her. If you’ve got ten around the dinner table, read to them.

Whether they are toddlers and it’s picture books or they’re middle aged kids and it’s Ben-Hur and the Colonists (our two right now, though not in the same book, of course!) or whether they’re young adults and it’s the Wall Street journal for dinner time debate.

Read to one another.

This is perhaps the single biggest factor in teaching a child to write. Why? Because it is through reading that vocabulary is developed, that the differences in style between Mark Twain and E.B. White are appreciated, and that the flow of good language washes over the ears and into the hearts of young children.

Writing styles are not developed in a vacuum.

A teacher cannot expect a child to find his voice, literarily speaking, if he has not first listened to the voices of many others.

It is the same as teaching a toddler to speak. They listen for nearly two years before they find much to say for themselves. Why do we expect children who have not “listened” adequately to be able to “voice” themselves on paper?

Do not make the mistake of assuming that once your child is functionally literate and is reading “Captain Underpants” or some such pop-culture nonsense that your job as family reader is over. It is our job as parents not only to direct the literary diet that the child himself consumes, but to continue to spoon feed him (force feed if necessary!) the good stuff as long as he’s under our roof. Even adult children like to be read to… I know, I am one!

RESPOND!

The third R is Respond. Having been read to in a relaxed environment, the child should, after a period of time, be asked to respond.

This does NOT necessarily mean in writing.

• A four year old can respond to a paragraph long passage from Aesop’s Fables by retelling the moral of the story.
• A seven year old can retell a whole chapter.
• A nine year old a whole book… if you have enough time to listen!

The first response that ought to be required of a child is oral.

Have your little children narrate (re-tell) what they have heard you read. Then ask them what they liked best and why. In this way they will parrot the style of the author, use new vocabulary in context and form a personal connection with the literature. Make it relaxed, light hearted, and fun.

When children get a little older, say seven or eight, they can begin writing short paragraphs. It is at this point that most kids start to cry, and some mothers too. The child, if he has been read to enough, will have lots to say and an active imagination… but the mechanics of writing will still be difficult.

What’s a mom to do? Stand over the child and yell? Steal the joy of writing by making him rewrite fifteen times to dot all the Is and fix punctuation?

No! It’s so much simpler: have the child tell you what he wants to write, you faithfully transcribe his words, and then, he copies it neatly into his writing book.

In this way a child enjoys the creative aspect of writing. He learns proper form (by copying yours). And he has none of the negative reinforcement of that dreaded red pen that haunts you to this day. This approach should take you through the first several years. After fourth or fifth grade, the child will quite naturally start writing on his own, for fun, and at that point, you can begin a formal writing course, without fear.

Until then, Relax, Read and allow your child to Respond. Relax.

What has worked (or not) in your family to inspire your kids to love writing?

Angela & Jason and their son Bode make up the team behind the site Bode’s Well.

This intrepid little family is off an an open ended adventure pursuing health, education and the life of their dreams!

We caught up with them and asked them to tell us a little bit about their life on the road.
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Since our children were tiny it’s been important to us to impart to them a multi-generational vision for their lives and as members of our family, something greater than themselves.

There are lots of way to do this, of course from sharing mealtimes to living daily life with our kids in an integrated fashion instead of sending everyone off to do their own thing. One way that’s been meaningful came from my Dad.

For years he’s collected quotes and thoughts that were meaningful to him, some his own, some from others. Some he found, some that others have passed along to him over the years. He calls this collection “The Wisdom File.”  He gave a copy to my husband and my brother and a few others one Christmas and it was instantly a family treasure.

When Gabe turned 13 my Dad contributed selections from his Wisdom File to Gabe’s life book.

From time to time I get it out and thumb through it, finding there the essence of my Dad and his philosophy on life. It’s continually being added to, growing and changing, just like him, just like our family.

It occurred to me that, perhaps, other families would like the idea and so I’m sharing some of the quotes here, with you.

I’d be interested to know what you think, and if you have anything great that we could add.  (more…)