The Things I Want

I think what I'm feeling right now is a dramatic lack of community. 

Being an introvert, you know it's bad when I say I want to be around people.

We have Acorn in SpiralScouts, and in daycare, and in special ed preschool (or, as they call it, the Early Childhood Program).

Preschool and daycare are working on things like early writing skills and cutting and gluing and taking turns...and on language. We've seen dramatic improvements at daycare (he eats for them!) and we've seen some small things, like putting his coat on and taking it off, from school.

SpiralScouts as implemented here is fairly secular but eco-friendly....but it's a struggle for Acorn, partly because of where he (in terms of maturity and language skills) is, partly because the way our group operates isn't quite preschool and very young school-age kid friendly, and partly because SpiralScouts isn't really set up that well for the youngest kids. And it's hard for him to make friends and build a community when you can't actually engage him in the activities.

Leaf has nurses and therapists. They play with her. But as we found with Acorn, there will come a time where they need to do more than make faces at her and hand her toys, like coloring and singing the ABCs, and that was a struggle to get them to do. I don't know about the newest nurse who starts in a week, but all the rest of our nurses are Christian (all but one I'm sure is Catholic, in fact). So it's not like I will likely get them to read mythology to her, or sing Pagan chants.

I've been working on getting a Pagan playgroup going locally, because (a) I think it's important that they know other kids who are Pagan, and (b) it's hard enough to find people we have things in common with, so I might as well start with a pretty specific category of people. It's been slow going, finding a time more than 2 of us can gather, but eventually I think we'll figure it out.

But right now, really, I wish there was a really good daycare/preschool with a Pagan-oriented curriculum, or a Pagan kids group that we could participate in, or something along those lines. In what seems like another lifetime, we were involved in a failed attempt at creating a Pagan community center here, and I wish we'd been successful, because there would be a community already, instead of trying to build one from scratch right now.