The outdoors have always called to me. Many times I feel I simply need to go outside and feel some sunshine on my face. During our normal homeschool days, we try to take a daily walk around our neighborhood. But after my husband almost lost his life in February, I’ve been rethinking, well, everything. I took an imaginary look forward into our future. In five years I will be 40 years old, our youngest (the twins) will be 7 or 8 and our oldest will be 14. I can’t imagine them being so big and independent since they insist on “Mommy!” for everything at present. That is a big change in such a short amount of time. It reminded me that I have a lot of groundwork to lay in these brief years. There are more vital things than schoolwork, though I do still want a high bar set for academics. Going through something traumatic will teach you that you can’t survive without a good framework and a good vision for your life. The unnecessary things seem to crumble away and leave the essential things more clear. I see now the need to change a lot of rhythms in my life, and being outside for my sake and my kids was something we all needed more than our current schedule allowed. Our curriculums have always encouraged a field trip day or something of the like on Fridays, and we did that plenty, but now we go outside for different reasons.

We go outside to heal.

With all our family has been through, I saw we needed a safe space. I certainly need time and space to heal from the hard things we’ve been through. Sometimes you can’t see the pressures that you shoulder at home until you step away. I do love our home, but you often love something more if you take a short break from it. Now, maybe loading up five kids (two 2-year-olds included) to go outside for the day doesn’t sound like a break to you. Well, it’s not. But it is different. Being outside melts a lot of worries away and helps us breathe easier. It’s God’s creation, not man’s. It only makes sense our souls find deeper peace surrounded by only His works. We make time to look up, to see all these beautiful things that are so beyond us, and I pray we look up and see God. In the hard things I’ve felt strong urges to run away, but instead of doing that I choose to run towards. I’m practicing running towards God, and a lot of times that looks like being outside. From what I've learned, you can't outrun trauma or hard things. It will catch up to you at some point. It's much better to run towards the storm and brace yourself for it than to be overtaken later. I'm trying to do this as we go outside each week. It's hard for me to just get the kids loaded up some days, but I never regret going. God always reaches me in His creation and I'm grateful to find He's running towards me as I stumble my way towards Him. I pray that in the next five years, I can teach our kids to do the same when hard things come. I pray we can make our nature days a safe place, so we can learn to run toward each other and toward God. I want to give them healthy habits for dealing with hard things.

We go outside to be, not merely do.

All of us have needed the stability of a day just to be and not merely do. I don’t want to look back and see that we were always doing, but rarely just being ourselves. Our nature days have no goal and are completely open-ended. The kids can do and pretend whatever they want…and they do. It’s so precious just to watch them flesh things out from their imaginations on our nature days. We need to learn to just be with God too. It’s one of the big things I’m learning these days. I’ve spent so much of my time serving and meeting needs for other people. To be honest, I’ve neglected and forgotten a lot of times what it is to simply be with God and not rush off to do something for Him. I need and want to do the same with my kids too. I want so much time to model being with them, not just doing things together.

We go outside to find deep enjoyment.

I won’t go into details, but homeschooling with five children is hard. We’ve found a decent daily rhythm but it takes a lot out of me. On Fridays, we interact with each other without the goal of school and learning consuming our connection. As Walt Whitman said, “We were together. I forget the rest.” There is no goal but to enjoy ourselves and each other. I don’t think God would have designed such a beautiful world if He didn’t intend for us to find joy in it. I find I love nature more because it is a viaduct, ushering me to know and delight in God all the more. (More on that is another post for another time.) I want to show my children a deep joy for life and the world around us. Joy can be found in such simple things. The way they see a single leaf, like my Genevieve does, is so beautiful. To her, it is a treasure. I want to see it all as a treasure, made by the God who loves me. I want to look closely and breathe deeply, knowing it’s all a good gift from His loving hand. I want to do it all with my children and find deeper joy in God as we go.

We go outside for motivation.

Our Friday nature days are a rhythm, but also a reward. To enable us to make a four-day school week work, we alternate double days on our core subjects. We do two days of language arts on Monday and Wednesday, and two days of math on Tuesday and Thursday. This puts us actually being ahead instead of behind in less time. This has worked incredibly well for our family thus far. I also remind the kids that they have Friday to look forward to as a motivation to be diligent in their studies Monday through Thursday. We do squeeze a lot in those four days, so it’s so nice to have a day off together. We all look forward to it so much and love choosing where we’ll go next. I don’t know how we’ll ever go back. It’s also a great lesson in time management and building an entrepreneurial spirit. You do not have to do things the way everyone else does! You can think outside the box! Having a day to think without school or events also opens up their creativity, and it’s been fun for me to watch what they come up with while we’re out. It’s also a great time to talk about and process what we’ve been learning and drop encouragement into their hearts. Our nature days also motivate me because I look at them and remember just how short these years are I have with them. I see it’s so worth it to pour into them much easier when I’m not schooling or picking up messes. I mostly just watch them.

And it changes me. I can’t image our life without Friday Nature Day anymore.