The Family Dances

It makes a difference in our everyday moments how much love we feel from those around us. This is always true.

I play music when I’m setting up activities for our learning lab. I’m a dancer, and I love feeling like I’m about to be at a party.

I had a fresh thought come to me yesterday: We’re going to take a real winter break in our family learning lab process. I’m still unpacking what I mean by “break,” but I think I mean that we’re entering what will be a several months-long reset process.

I’m falling in love with reading. Real books made of paper and bound with spines, the body of their collective words actually experiencing the gravitational pull of the earth, an honest weight in my bag, pages making sounds as I turn them. Reading is now a blissful phenomenon, complete, fascinating, screen-free.

Today I take the munchkins up the street the big open field that I’ve claimed as our “outdoor” classroom. Conveniently just 5 blocks from home, it’s magically all I ever wanted it to be: accessible, safe, abundantly spacious, clean.

I believe in the mother village I am growing across my local and global communities. We are having really amazing conversations about the interdependent nature of everything that vitally impacts our children’s well-being, happiness, growth, creativity, and brilliance.

I love that my children are very close in age, and are learning alongside each other all the time. There is a constant interplay of roles exchanged, a fluid and unpredictable shapeshifting amongst themselves.

There is an essay, or series of essays, I want to pen called, Curating Freedom: Activating Liberated Play Spaces for Black Children. This writing is inspired from the intense study I am doing as a mother seeking to facilitate fun, accessible, dynamic, and meaningful play and learning moments for my children, and also for the children in our village.