"The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom"-William Blake

This morning we were reading a spring issue of Click, a really nice theme-oriented kids' magazine for 3-6 year-olds.  There was a craft suggestion for making leaf rubbings.  Always on the look-out for a craft that won't necessitate expensive trips to several different art and craft stores to gather supplies that will then end up furry with dust on our supply shelf, I said, hey, that'd be fun, except there aren't any leaves on the trees yet.

Bridger said, "I'll go look for some leaves!", went outside, and came back in with a beautiful flower from our Norway maple.  Intrigued, we found photos online that someone had taken over a two-week period in April and May of a Norway maple tree's flower opening up into new leaves.  It helped us identify the baby leaves on our own sample and understand the tree's leafing cycle much better than I'd ever understood it before.  Here's the URL for that if you're interested:

http://www.lookoutnow.com/animal/n_maple.htm

At this point, the kids and I were still just exploring and appreciating.  I wasn't thinking "educational activity" yet or "scientific method."  We were simply seeing something small and beautiful that we'd never noticed before, and that was enough.

I got excited and said, hey, let's go look at the early flowers and leaves on other trees and see what we find.  I plucked off the long, dangly flower from the neighbor's birch tree and more flowers from the maple, feeling a little apologetic toward the leaves that wouldn't get a chance to grow and soak up sunlight for the tree.

I labeled my specimens with a date and put them in plastic bags, thinking we could collect a few samples over the next few days and watch how they changed.  By this time, Bridger and Cass had moved on to swinging off the various ropes and swings we have hanging off the maple tree.

We decided to head to the park.  Bridger hopped on his bike and I pushed Cass in her stroller.    

As I walked, I noticed all the different variations on flowers, leaves, and seeds that were emerging.  It was wonderfully eye-opening and exciting.  I chattered on, pointing out how one tree we passed had flowers that were very similar to a birch, and yet the bark was different.  

"Maybe they're related in some way," I speculated.  

"I'm riding away from you now!" Bridger declared.

"Am I talking too much?" I called after him teasingly.

"Yes!" he called back.  But nicely, very nicely.

I really think it wasn't so much that it was too much information, or that he wasn't interested on some level.  I just think he had noticed that I was no longer pointing things out solely out of interest or delight but with an ulterior motive:  to satisfy my desire to at least occasionally do something that qualifies as an academic subject.  Underneath my apparent joy and curiosity, there was a whiff of anxiety and striving and goal-orientation that felt, well, icky.  Bridger had the good instincts to put as many sidewalk squares between him and that icky feeling as he possibly could.  Bully for him, I say.

There's a homeschooler named Tammy Takahashi out in California who has a blog titled "Just Enough and Nothing More."  I still have trouble sometimes stopping at the "Just Enough." But I guess, as the poet William Blake put it, you never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.