7 Quick Takes on the Northwest Charlotte Mason Educators Conference

:: 1 ::

You probably already heard this, but the Northwest Charlotte Mason Educators Conference was amazing. I had never been to a completely Charlotte Mason conference before, and it was such a delight. And beyond the conference, it was wonderful to meet so many people in person after years of connecting online. The biggest example is Mystie My Pretend Life Coach. She and I met eight or nine years ago in the comments on one of Cindy Rollins’ blog posts. We’ve chatted over Voxer and Google Hangouts — we’re definitely friends! — but we’d never seen each other in real life until now! It was so exciting! And now our husbands can finally stop calling us “fake internet friends.”

Another bit of excitement was, of course, meeting Kathy Wickward. I believe the conference was born somewhere inside her amazing brain. She was even more fantastic than I had expected.

And of course I met a bunch of you guys!

It was a little surreal — this colliding of worlds: local friends, So Cal friends, blog readers, AO friends, and new people, all mixed up together!

:: 2 ::

So first things first: the view from my room was amazing!!

It was overcast much of the time, but on Saturday afternoon, the sun came out. I could have handled a few more days of this, let me tell you!

:: 3 ::

One highlight was definitely taking a nature walk with Naomi. I say this even though my bit of the group got lost and didn’t finish with the rest of the group {oops}. At one point, it started to feel like one of those creepy movies where an innocent walk in the woods turns bad as people slowly disappear.

Ha.

I think I’ve finally realized that a good nature walk is only accomplished by the childlike of heart. At least, that is what Naomi modeled for us.

Also, in the nature study talk that Naomi gave later in the evening, I realized that it is more important to have questions than answers — and that she’s content going for a long while without answers, and that’s okay. So she’s out, and she finds something, and she tries to identify it, but if she can’t, she goes home and look for the answer, and if nothing turns up, she watches and waits. I think I always gave up in frustration when I couldn’t find something in my field guide. Naomi has given me a much longer view.

:: 4 ::

On the trail, there were many things to see, and I was fond of the wide assortment of mushrooms!

:: 5 ::

I loved, loved, loved Kathy Wickward’s talk on using the Charlotte Mason method with children who have learning disabilities. The gist was really that we adapt and adjust, but not that we use other methods. The method is sufficient, as long as we use it with wisdom. We went over time on it, and I think our group could have kept her talking on the subject for two more hours. I really appreciated her encouragement to us to do. the. work. She told us that it will be hard — and it will also be rewarding.

One quick thought: if you ever get a chance to hear someone like Kathy speak on learning disabilities, can I just encourage you to go — even if your children seem okay? There are so many children with disabilities these days that I bet you would get a chance to use that knowledge somehow.

:: 6 ::

I spoke a lot, as you know. I thought I’d be completely worn down when I got home, but the conference was so refreshing that I didn’t really feel that way. I mean, I’m tired from traveling, but I expected a dramatic crashing and burning when I got home — which didn’t happen, and for that I’m thankful.

I’m working on getting my talks up onto the blog. I put my first one up on Wednesday {it’s here, in case you missed it}. The second one, unfortunately, was when I forgot to push record. However, comma, this was the talk I really needed to record, because we were going to use it with our local group. So now we’re trying to decide whether I record on my own, or whether I wait and give the presentation to our group, and record it then. Either way, it’ll be re-recorded somehow, sometime very soon.

The third talk is more complicated because we have to combine the audio with the slides for it to make sense … but it was successfully recorded, and that is half the battle!

:: 7 ::

On Saturday evening, many women in the room received a text from their husbands, showing what he served for dinner. Perhaps this was just to prove they were actually feeding the children, but I consider this proof that if men stayed at home making food all day, they would totally be showing it off on Instagram and Pinterest and they can just stop. making. fun. of. women. Because hypocrisy.

My husband sent a photo that evoked the comment, “Hey, I thought your husband was a holistic nutritionist!” Um, yes. Please note that this does not mean that he actually knows how to Make Food. It does, however, mean that when he purchased the frozen food, he remembered to buy the gluten-free version for A-Age-10.

I also used Voxer to brag to my husband about my view:

As you can see, he returned the favor. That is, in fact, my dead backyard.