Keeping the inner light

Have you ever thought about what is truly good and what is truly evil? And when you understand what that means to you, how do you teach your young children in a way that they can understand and discover for themselves what those words mean? Good. Evil. Light. Dark.
I believe that children are born innately good. There is a light that shines from within them that is a piece of heaven still remaining. And if we can nurture that light through imagination, stories, wonder, and magic then they will carry that light for the rest of their lives.
This week in our home we are preparing for the festival of Michaelmas. It is a particularly special festival for our family, and is the first that we will celebrate for our school year this year. We celebrate it with stories of Michael, stories of shooting stars and stories of apples. We seek to find balance with light and dark as is the reflection of the year and season around us. We learn to be grateful for the harvest time.
So in reflection to start the week, we went looking at all the harvests from the local farmers market. And there we found what mama was in search of. The berries...

(On a side note farmers market is a wonderful introduction place for our Little Bruns to learn about money and selection of produce. We love letting Little mr 6 and Little mr 4 pick out and pay for the food we purchase. They take much more pride and interest in the food and are even willing to try the unexpected occasionally...
"You want to try a pepper? Ok...
Wait you LIKE peppers?? Ok...
Wait you are going to eat the WHOLE pepper???
-and yes, that did actually happen... )

But back to those berries... Yes mama was on a mission because this week we are going to attempt to make blackberry cobbler for our baking day to go with our "light" version of the story of Michael and Lucifer. The story is that when Michael threw Lucifer from heaven he landed in a blackberry bush and he was so angry that he spit (or in some stories peed!) on the blackberries. Some even say he returns every year on the same day to do it again for he is still so angry at being defeated.
Because of this folklore, people would not eat blackberries after September 29th and would gather all the berries beforehand and make wonderful cobblers and pies and preserves...
We hope that if we give our very little ones nurturing ideas and stories then their inner light will shine with truth, and love for their whole lives.

What we learned today:

-To be grateful for harvest, (because berries taste SO yummy!!)

- That not all bills of money are the same number. Little Mr. 6 figured out very quickly that the $5 bill buys much more than the $1.

- That raspberries make your lips RED! 

May your day be filled with light and love.

~ The Little Bruns

Oroville on the map

During February of last year, the town we live in, Oroville, was evacuated along with many other surrounding towns. This event impacted Oroville in many ways, but one positive point was that it put Oroville on the map. What a jewel of a town it is. From the tallest dam in the U.S., to the hatchery and beautiful river, to the quaint boutiques and shops downtown, to the dirt bike trails, and the outdoor gun rage, the rc airport, the lake and afterbay, and so much more, we truly enjoy our town.
Something that is unique to Oroville is our river which attracts the ocean salmon (and fishermen) alike every year. Because of this Oroville has a salmon festival every year, to celebrate all the beautiful salmon journeying here.

 

Fishermen on the river

To learn more about our town this year we attended a field trip to the hatchery and learned about the life cycle of the salmon. We also attended the salmon festival, which since Oroville has been put on the map, was predicted to have over 30,000 people attending! (That's not too shabby for a small town). All in all it was educational and fun to learn more about where we live...

Some of the things we learned:

- Oroville Dam is the tallest dam in the U.S. (770ft)

- The salmon swim from the golden gate bay, up the Sacramento river, up the feather river, to the Oroville hatchery. (That's quite a journey upstream considering it takes us a solid 3 hours to drive to sf!)

- There are 5 types of salmon, (we positively identified both male and female Chinook in the viewing window!)

-Salmon need special spawning grounds to be able to lay their eggs, which is why earlier in the month we saw FULL size tractors IN the river fixing the spawning grounds... (it was SO fun to watch!)

May your day be full of courage and strength like the salmon who swim in the rivers!

~The Little Bruns



A New Season

It is a New season! Autumn is finally here. We have been anxiously awaiting the season change, and all of the festival's and holidays. And with it comes a new change for documenting our life a bit more...

We woke this morning to the tradition of looking for the children's "gnomies" who had gone missing. The children ran to the garden searching in the sunflower house, the tomatoes, strawberries... and finally found them sitting on their chairs in their forest fort with a small chocolate pumpkin as a fall treat...


Squeals of excitement and joy erupted from them! They squeezed their dolls tight and thanked them genuinely, which squeezed my heart, knowing that this magic is so real to them.
Seeing the imagination within your child, and knowing how evanescent it is, reminds me of a butterfly on a flower.
It is something that is beyond words because that moment is so fleeting, but when you have witnessed it your life is more beautiful because of it.



May your Autumn be blessed with beauty and magic!

~ The Little Bruns