My Girl Carrie

This is Carrie in her Robin Hood outfit. She likes "Much", Robin's side-kick from the BBC's version of Robin Hood. She made the mocassins herself from a kit and the bow from a twig and baler twine. It works. :)


This is Carrie tying 15 horse hairs together at a time while making her Sioux war bonnet.

When Carrie was born she was so sweet and dainty looking. As she grew, she wore braids every day in her white long hair and pink dresses. On Sunday's we would take the braids out and give her a fancy hair-do with the "POOF" left by the braids. Then one day she decided that her new name would be "Clevin the Clown" She wore a clown suit every day and would draw pictures of herself as "Clevin" and leave them on a tiny white board outside of her room with hearts. We would leave a message back to her. "I love you Clevin." Suddenly Clevin's name changed to "Cloven", then "Cloovin"... and then one day she told us that Clevin had died...the fad was over. Then came a pair of shorts...they were her favorite fashion statement for 2 summers. Her closet became emptier and emptier as she grew out of things but did not want me to buy her anything else... her shorts would do....even during the homeschooling winter. We started fiddle lessons in the city and her French Canadian teacher sported an engineer hat. She loved it so i got her one for 3$ in the city... That hat was snatched off of her head so many times over the course of 2 years by teasing cousins but she loved it... It was in 2 years worth of school pictures. The summer of '07, we threw a "Cowboy Camp" for all the cousins. We did hay rides, lantern making, we made herbal medicines over the fire. We went canoeing, had an archery competition, music nights... and even one scary moment when a villain on a dark horse, shooting wildly from his horse and yelling, kidnapped Grampsie from the campfire. ( Our niece Mollen still does not like Curt.) It was a lot of fun crammed into a few days. One of the things we had set up was Curt's outfitters tent with a huge cardboard poster listing Indian names that they could all choose from with their meanings. I didn't realize how much Carrie would fall in love with certain aspects of Native culture. She named each person in our house with a Cree name, telling them their meaning and still to this day refers to them by these names. (The other day, my 3 year old informed someone at church that her name was "Tatiopa" meaning "Happy Hostess"...They looked at me and said "What did she say!??") She signs her own Cree name everywhere. All this past summer she wore clothes she considered to be "Native", and wore huge turkey feathers in her hair that she found in the turkey pen. This fall, when i told the kids they would be doing a research report on Russia (which we were studying) all she wanted to write about was "The Blackfoot Indians"...I let her. She requested that we bring Curt's bear skin into her room. Every night after that we found her sleeping on the bearskin on her floor, no blankets. She told us we could take her bed out of her room as she didn't need it. If we wanted, we could set up a tipi instead! :) Today, as I was carefully mending a pair of pants that have been worn by Carrie for about 8 months straight now, i wondered if she would be the same person had we not chosen to home school... would she still feel free enough to wear the same clown suit, shorts, hat, brown outfit every day with turkey feathers in her hair? (probably not at school) Or would she feel drawn to common fads? Would she still be interested so deeply in certain topics so that she was motivated to read and study about them on her own... or would she be tired at the end of a long school day? The latest fad, mixed into the "everything Native" fad is now "Robin Hood". And time marches on!! What a great childhood! Homeschooling rocks. I didn't realize when i started how much of a difference it makes but I'm loving what it's bringing to our children, to our home, and to my experience as a Mama.