Into the Wild!

Well, it's official! The boys are registered for Forest School!  I wish I could say that it is for a full year of kindergarten starting in the fall, but one week of summer camp is the best we can do right now.  At the beginning of the summer we will be spending a week in New York so the boys can attend a session of forest school at the Saratoga Springs Waldorf School.  I am so excited I can barely contain myself!!  But I'm also a little bit fearful.  I'm fearful that one or both or three or all of us (most likely the latter) will fall head over heels in love and not want to come home.  Despite massive efforts to figure out some magical way for our family to spend all of next year in either New York or Washington so that the boys can experience a full year of forest kindergarten, we haven't been able to figure out a way to make that happen.  Part of me didn't even want to sign the boys up for this summer school session for fear of falling in love, but I figure they at least deserve to experience it if only for a few days.  Maybe it won't be all we've dreamed it would be.  Or maybe, when it is, a magical money tree will sprout in our backyard and allow us to start the boys' education in a manner that they so deeply need and deserve. 

For those of you who don't know what Forest Kindergarten is, I highly recommend this article from the New York Times that featured the Saratoga Springs Waldorf School's Forest Kindergarten program- the first of its kind in the United States.  Jon and I first read this back in 2009 when it was published and in the backs of our minds we always thought we would love to educate our boys this way.  And now here we are three and a half years later with two wildly intelligent boys, rapidly shifting views on the current state of education in this country, and a growing, sinking fear that our boys are not going to have the chance to be properly educated in our local public school system.  Forest Kindergarten just seems like it was made for us.  We can't wait to actually experience it!  I guess we'll have to trust that God will take it from there.