Our first Nature Table...

It is no secret that I am NOT a Waldorf, Montessori homeschooling Mother.  My son goes to Public School, watches more TV than I care to admit to, and he eats his fair share of Chef Boyardee (I hear you Tisk, tisking me!).  But with my new involvement in Rhythm of the Home,  And with my research for the blog, I am learning.

A LOT.

I have realized that I am way more Waldorf than I had originally thought.

Getting outdoors..check.
Reading together...check.
Baking with my boy...check.
Nurturing the life of the soul...man, I hope so.

But there is one Waldorf thing that I have really wanted to give a try.

The Nature Table.  I had seen Erin's post on her table and it was just so darn springy...I needed one too!

We had a bird house which had no more inhabitants in it.  Fran had taken it down to empty and clean it so that another family would be able to use it.  Aside from the expected nest of pine needles and grasses, it was full of funny things....2 hunks of bread, some twine, a piece of rubber.... and one thing that we found particularly special.

A single infertile egg in the loveliest shade of turquoise.

The boys fell in absolute love.

They helped me to wind some leftover roving from the Christmas time around a plastic egg and felted it using Nicole's wonderful tutorial.  While we let the wool egg sit to dry,  I washed off the tiny egg.

Which prompted it to crack in my hands under the stream of water from the faucet.

Thank GOD that it was not fertilized.  I don't think that I could have handled it if it was.

They boys were pretty upset that I had cracked their sweet little egg and so I distracted them with finding things around the house to add to our Nature Table.  We found 2 of the tiny antique Beatrix Potter books in their bookshelf (the boys can fully relate to Tom Kitten, and I can FULLY relate to his poor mother!) and Eben remembered some cookie cutters from last Spring when we made cookies for the Easter Bunny.  We tied yarn ribbon around the little bunny and duck's necks and the boys promptly replaced the broken egg's spot in the nest with the new wool egg which was still not completely dry.

There, it's a start.

We gathered them all together and set them on our makeshift Nature Table....ie.)the coffee table.  Where they sat for all of 5 minutes before the boys swatted the nest onto my freshly swept floor.

A full FIVE minutes before the nature table became...nature windowsill.

Out of the boy's reach.

(Hey, I am new to this...cut me some slack.  The whole interactiveness of the nature table might have been a bit more doable for me and my neat-nick tendencies.... had I not had a nest of dirt and pine needles to deal with.)

And do you know what I realized at the end of our Nature table creating?

I learned that you don't have to be a die hard follower of any one philosophy or anthroposophy (or whatever you want to call it) to be a mother.  Motherhood is a blending of many theories, thoughts,  experience, and trial and error which leads us all to become who we are and who we raise.

All that you have to do is do what feels right for you and your kids and follow whatever winding path it is, that you are led on.

************************************************************

So now I want to lead you all over to the Rhythm of the Home blog where we are collecting links to your nature tables.