September 6, 2012

Day 2
Wanning Gibeous Moon
Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve

We had our first day on Tuesday with all the parents and what a beautiful day that was!  Jill, our Tuesday assistant, was there, the bright Sun shone it’s face upon us and we explored the woods of Denis Martin’s Creek with delight and curiosity.
Thank you parents for your radiance and involvement!

Now, our second day came, parents allowed their children to be in the loving arms of me and our Thursday assistant, Audrey.
She and the children wasted no time in getting to know each other and all seemed well on that front.  And, they and I continued our journey of getting to know each other more.  The Sun was still shining though, considering the day before which left us in question about this occurance and smiles were all around as our day began.

They all appeared to take to circle with ease and as if they had been doing this at Tender Tracks for quite sometime.  They are moving their hands to the songs and joining in with the rituals of hand washing, passing around snack, Fire Fairies ,Story of the Day and more.  Playing together seems to come with such ease for them and their love of the bus is quite delightful and more than the norm for Tender Trackers.

We brought out the sticks that you parents gathered from Tuesday in order to sort them into the sizes that are needed for the different stages of fire making.  We will need to use all of this wood come the cold and rainy days to come.   We then needed to find one long straight stick and they found several that we then had to choose from. Which we did.  We needed to find a feather too and quite rapidly Kaden found a beautiful crow feather not far from circle.  Yeah for that!  Now, all that needed to be done was for me to clean the stick up and use the string that we used to make our Naming Spider Web, to tie the feather on.   This stick will become our daily counting stick of our days together, counting the Moons fullness and Invisibility and our Weather/wind stick.
And so the year begins.

When we got to Rancho San Antonio they had no struggle with finding the landmarks of: bridge, sound of water, direction of water, Grandma Bay tree and a few others.  The Landmarks were used to aid them in finding our place of lunch and play for the rest of the day.  We took them to a great Bay grove that is like a wonderful house and world to play in.  Below is traditionally a creek, but this year, the first ever in my memory, there was no water at this time here.  No matter, games abounded along with much explorations of the area.

It was not long after we started to eat that Kaden noticed a Deer that stood up right across from where we were.  The deer had clearly been resting in a lay.  Evan went straight for it and it moved away but less quickly then I had expected.  It appeared that it was less inclined to dash away because soon after it moved a fawn came out too.  As the children walked more closely (they were on the otherside of the creek) the Deer and fawn made their way away.  The children were delighted by this experience and so were other people who were on the trail and came in to see this marvelous event.   I am gently bringing their observations into, “What do the animals do when you go straight towards them?”   There will be much more explorations with this theme throughout the year as they learn different ways to walk quietly and invisibly in order to see our animal friends more closely and without disruption of their world.

The boys seemed to rally together in games of swords and protection.  There appeared to be bad guys all about that we needed to be defended from so, off they went to defend our world!  Yeah for the heroic gestures and willingness to protect!
Emme and Alice were very involved with being Mom’s or sisters and creating house.  Alice at times brought Paul in to being Dad which he was more than willing to be.  Miu, Giselle and Aoife were apart of this too and all but Miu got quite involved in a story I told about the Gunny Wolf. Miu got a bit scared at the beginning of the story so she and Audrey went off on an adventure and played with rocks.  The Gunny Wolf story is about a little girl whose mother needed to go to town and told her daughter to stay in the house and the yard and not to go into the woods where the Gunny Wolf lived.   The little girl got carried away with gathering flowers for her mother and soon discovered that she was deep in the woods.  As she gathered flowers she was singing a sweet little song.  The Gunny wolf heard this and caught her saying” Little Girl, Little Girl, sing me that song.”  She sang him the song and he went fast asleep.  She then escaped.  This kept happening, he would catch her, have her sing, she would sing, he would fall asleep, she would escape until finally she did indeed make it home safe and sound.  The Gunny Wolf wanted her to come to his home and sing this song to his children and didn’t know how to ask sweetly and the girl never again went into the woods when her Mother asked her not to.  A beginning of the year cautionary tale to lay a ground work and was more inspired by their play that was taking place.

Alice REALLY liked this story as well as Kaden and they played this for quite a bit. She was the girl and he was the Gunny wolf. Then the boys got more involved in their protecting games and she got tired of the game and went off to play house with some of the girls.

I later brought 3/4 of them on a journey down the creek and through the bushes.  We then all found each other and played more with rocks and such.  Miu and Giselle were very involved in making a boat out of sticks and stones in the creek bed and Miu did not really want to leave this place due to this boat that she made and really liked.

We had fun throughout the day watching the ground squirrels run into  their holes, the bugs and banana slugs and the other creatures of the area.  Evan at times was  a bit nervous about his safety and wanted to know what animals here would hurt us.  There were none and it was he actually that wound up, unintentionally, hurting a Banana Slug.  We watched this dear creature in it’s suffering?( we didn’t know what kind of pain a Banana Slug truly feels as it squiggled around with a stick through it) but we gave it our love and it was clear that all the children watching and sending it love will be more careful with Banana Slugs and their habitat in the days to come.

We watched out for all the Poison Oak that was around us and discovered some Stinging Nettles which are GREAT and very medicinal plants yet not fun to touch.

Paul is just a delight to have back at Tender Tracks and see his maturity and it was a delight to see how well the three boys played with each other.   The girls are predominantly strong minded  and Aoife takes the crown for kind gentility.

A beautiful second day and beginning to our year.