Into the Pennsylvania Woods

9 children, 3 moms, this is not a drill

You could go into the woods to find yourself. Or you could drive to the Pennsylvania woods to find your friends—at a designated location, of course.

The three of us live almost exactly six hours apart from each other. It’s hard for us to get together—and it’s even harder to get all of us together with the kids. So we decided a couple of months ago (to the tune of “you can just do things!”): why not just book an Airbnb sometime in the fall, gather during the week (because we all homeschool anyway), and catch up in person?

So we did.

A roughly middle point for gathering turned out to be in Pennsylvania, where we rented a lovely cabin with an eight acre yard, surrounded by gloriously colorful woods in peak foliage season. Going outside the first night, the stars were so clear—no light pollution here. One of the boys pulled up a sky app on his mom’s phone (the only device used that evening) and started pointing out the constellations to the rest. The next morning, sitting at a large table, facing the backyard, we saw one turkey run across the yard, then a second, then a bunch more. A full rafter!

As Nadya mused before the trip: nine kids and three moms is way better math than three kids and one mom.¹ This past week showed that this is indeed true. The older kids—five boys—roomed together, did a dramatic reading from Shakespeare (like this is a totally normal thing—which for them, I guess, it is), and played board games for hours on end.

Two girls, just entering middle childhood, played endless games of hide-and-seek, but only after declaring themselves “new best friends.” There were tears the first night when they learned they had to sleep with their moms and could not share a room. These tears, however, were dried while the girls read books together under the covers before separating for the night. The third girl, in between big and little, ran in and out—sometimes with the big boys, sometimes with the big girls, sometimes with the moms. And everyone went googly-eyed over the very cutest of babies.

One day, we found a public playground where the kids declared that “we don’t want to go to the other side of the park, it’s probably boring,” and then nevertheless went to the other side of the park and discovered a pair of amazing ziplines! Soon afterward, we were mistaken for a daycare, because why else would three adults and nine children be riding ziplines together in the middle of a random Wednesday? (Midday access to ziplines is one of the unsung joys of homeschooling.)

The kids definitively had fun. One of them declared it “some of the best days of my life!” Importantly, so did their moms. We talked about homeschooling, writing, and life in general. We discussed writing books! We saw the planned design for the new cover of Dixie’s first book, Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream (forthcoming from Eerdmans). We interrogated the writing process for Nadya’s current book, Christians Reading Classics: An Introduction to Greco-Roman Classics from Homer to Boethius, which will be released next week. We plotted about Ivana’s current book project on what happened when women joined the workforce in large numbers and left the work of the home … a long-running book project somewhat delayed by the two babies she’s had since she started it. Spoiler: many good things came from that; but also some still unappreciated downsides. We discussed a potential book collaboration between the three of us on homeschooling … an idea still in the baby stages. But be prepared: a Bad Moms Homeschool book is in the dreaming stage right now.

And here is part of the joy of getting together: creativity loves company (in our experience at least). We saw our kids become incredibly creative when left to their own devices — without electronic devices — together. They acted out what we will politely call an abridged version of Julius Caesar. They played fairies vs. Philistines (don’t ask). They came up with a new game, “Assassin,” which is sort of like Mafia, but with even more dead bodies and a toy dagger. They played outside in the yard for hours after dark with glow sticks. It was pitch black, because there were no street lights in this rural corner, and yet still the toddler insisted on going (the grownups could keep track of where she was by her light-up shoes).

We felt our own creativity spark, as we discussed big questions and little ones. Our ideas built on each other when we had the chance to drink coffee and eat pie in person— building ideas in much the same way this Substack is doing. People think of writing as a solo endeavor, but in our experience, it is so joyous when it can be a communal one. As homeschooling moms with a lot of kids, many of the traditional kinds of communal writing fora are shut to us. We can’t easily go to a month-long writing workshop, or depart the family for a writing residence program. Even making an evening writer’s group once a week would be difficult.

So we made our own writing retreat and brought the kids. To be clear, we were still cooking three meals a day, doling out innumerable snacks, making dozens and dozens of cups of hot chocolate and hot apple cider, sweeping the floor infinity times, and even did probably a dozen loads of laundry (there was a washer/dryer in the cabin!). But we also spent hours talking about writing, books, lighting the imagination on fire, book advertising, writing mechanics, and everything else that a great writing retreat involves. As we observed at the beginning, sometimes you can “just do things.”

Writing for homeschooling moms doesn’t look the same as for other writers, but that’s not only fine — it can be its own kind of beauty. If you have a creative idea that you’re itching to achieve, we encourage you to think about how you also can “just do things.” We gently suggest that it’ll be even better if you find some kindred spirits to do it with. As a homeschooling mom or dad, you are busy, but please don’t think the door is shut on your own creative and joyful life. Go into the woods yourself, if you want to. Bring a friend.

1. If you’re counting, yes, we actually have eleven kids between us, but Nadya’s grown son and Dixie’s high schooler had other things to do this week.