and so the school year has officially begun ….

The internets was overflowing with them yesterday.

Cute back to school pictures.

Bus rides and classroom doors and lunch boxes and kitchen tables and posters announcing the grades.

Monday was our day to start up again too.

Four students attending Wildwood this year. Same number as last year. Riley exited stage right and Finnian entered stage left.

I like back to school just fine although I can’t seem to explain how summer leapt by this year and my mind still can’t believe one of my own graduated all officially and stuff.

This school year I’ve been more excited about beginning than usual though .

We are using the Prairie Primer this year as our primary curriculum. It’s a complete (ish) curriculum based solely on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books. I have such fond affection for the Little House on the Prairie books and for the Primer itself. Riley and I started her home school journey as a fifth grader with this program and it is a sweet memory. My own momma and daddy read the complete nine books out loud to us kids in the evening during the years after my dad threw our television away. (No moral high ground there. Just annoyed at its breaking during The Dukes of Hazzard and an unwillingness to spend money to replace it.)

Today our kick off was a more thematically planned day than, uh, I might normally create. And far more hands on than is my natural bent.

This teacher’s guide loves to suggest activities such as — play with a hog’s bladder, eat cracklings, visit a mining town, make butter.

We didn’t play catch with the bladder of a pig but we did follow one suggested activity on today’s list.

Corn husk dolls.

Actually, little Laura of the Big Woods played with a corn cob wrapped in a handkerchief and named Susan, but we decided today to try corn husk dolls instead. It seemed slightly more entertaining. (I wish you could have heard the chuckles when I read the line from the book about the corn cob wrapped in a handkerchief. The kids were so amused at the idea.)

Bergen was too busy laughing at his corn husk guy’s impossibly long legs to take anything seriously. Such as this picture.

It was a pretty great parenting moment that evening when Kevin and I served a Laura Ingalls style dinner like Pa talked about it in the very chapter we read that morning.

Venison stew. Corn on the cob. (We had to eat corn after procuring the husks. I saved the cobs for sad little dolls tomorrow.) Cornbread. Polenta. I know. I know. Heavy on the corn inclusion.

For fun and further awesomeness I whipped up this crazy tasty fancy pants dish called blueberry pavlova that I snagged from a very non-Laura cookbook by Gwyneth Paltrow.

Just in case you think it was all pioneer and impressive on our first day back to school, you should know a few things.

I had to break up an argument over corn husks (corn husks!) that stemmed from a broken corn husk alligator.

Ringo threw up the leftover venison stew he inhaled on the front porch.

Riley took down one hundred and fifty photos from her wall to take with her on her adventure.

My laundry is overflowing and the floors are dirty from spending all day teaching instead of cleaning.

Otto took a two hour bath and yet emerged with a dirty face.

However, I’d give the entire day a giant thumbs up.

It was a good day back at Wildwood.