Nurtured by Love

Blogging about music, family life, the outdoors, unschooling and everything else

for more than a quarter century

  • Raising teens in a digital world

    When it comes to teens’ use of technology, I feel strongly that we should listen to what the experts have to say. Recently I’ve waded into several threads on social media about youth and digital media. One was sparked by the sharing of the tweet shown on the left, which turns out to be not […]

  • End of Semester 1

    Fiona turned 14 last week and has just completed her first semester as a mainstream school student at a bricks-and-mortar high school in Nelson. How are things going in the world of school? Pretty well. She had three Grade 11 courses last semester (Honours Physics, Chemistry and Art) and earned straight A’s with a 97 […]

  • Zwifting on a Stac Zero

    Zwifting on a Stac Zero

    Yeah, a couple of years ago I wouldn’t have had any idea what the title of this post meant either. But for the past week, after more than a year of waiting, it’s become a part of my daily life. Well, at least part of my daily life in New Denver. There are two bits of magic […]

  • Post-asbestos progress

    Post-asbestos progress

    First the roof came off. Then it poured rain all weekend. Of course. There were tarps up, but they leaked. It could have been worse. We lost a light fixture. Some old drywall got wet in a few places and will eventually need to be replaced. The bathroom mats were sopping. The house survived. It […]

  • First school term

    Fiona has reached the end of the first term of the first semester of her first year fully enrolled in school. She has a part-time course load, with just three out of four time-slots filled. She is taking Art 11, Chemistry 11 and Honours Physics 11. By age she in an eighth-grader, by enrolment she’s […]

  • HazMat Adventures

    HazMat Adventures

    Our Nelson place is the eyesore on the block. We bought it because of that. It was affordable and well situated, and that created the possibility of bringing it up to neighbourhood standards and eventually reselling it for a price more in keeping with the rest of the strong housing market. The house has four bedrooms that […]

  • My friend in Nairobi

    Almost a year ago I attended a meeting of local New Denverites who were interested in the idea of sponsoring a refugee family. Out of that meeting, the Slocan Valley Refugee Coalition formed. We opened a bank account and started fund-raising and submitted our “we’re ready!” paperwork in January, requesting to be matched with a family. […]

  • Physics is hard

    Fiona has now been in high school for two weeks. It feels like a month! In both a bad way and a good way. Her life has been so crazy full that it feels like a month must have passed for all of that to have been packed in! But also … it has quickly started feeling normal […]

  • A new year: school

    It’s been not entirely smooth, Fiona’s entry into mainstream bricks-and-mortar schooling. For those who have been keeping track, Fiona got her first tastes of regular schooling at our tiny local K-12 school. By tiny, I mean tiny. The high school portion has fewer than forty students, and even if you’re a homeschooled kid who rarely […]

  • A New School Year

    First we drove Erin to Spokane. She flew out of the airport there with two giant suitcases (weighing 49.5 and 50.0 lbs respectively), her heavy messenger bag (carrying all the stuff that she unpacked from her suitcases to get them down to the 50-lb limit) and her violin. She flew into Boston to spend a few days […]

  • Licensed!

    Sophie did it, she powered through the “L” (learner’s) phase of getting a driver’s license, and got to the “N” (new driver) stage. As I wrote a year and a half ago, things are not exactly set up well, nor is motivation terribly high, for my kids to become licensed drivers. Neither Noah nor Erin have […]

  • Hughes Reunion

    We rented an island. We were looking for a cottage that slept at least 14 comfortably, somewhere within half a day’s drive of both Toronto and Ottawa. And the island was what we found. Actually, my mom rented it, as a gift to all of us. I had hoped “all of us” would include not […]

  • Atop Idaho Peak

    Atop Idaho Peak

    Idaho Peak is the mountain that overlooks our property. It’s unique in the area in that despite being one of the highest peaks around, it has well-serviced forestry roads that allow the trail to the peak to be accessible to anyone without major mobility challenges, requiring minimal levels of fitness and stamina. It’s also the […]

  • SVI 2016

    SVI has come and gone for another year. Registration filled extremely early this year (third week of March) and that allowed me to get a jump on the scheduling. We had most of the basics fleshed out by mid-April, which took some of the pressure off me in May-June, when things normally get fairly frantic […]

  • Distributed learning: the exit

    Fiona took some online Grade 10 courses this semester: PE and Personal & Career Planning. She took them partly because she wanted these required credits out of the way so that she can focus next year on the academic courses that she’s excited to dive into. But we also figured they would be a good introduction […]