Curiosity and a New Place to Go

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a curious woman.  I sure wish we could sit down to tea one day; I’m sure I could learn so much from her.  She and I have at least one thing in common:  Curiosity.  She said,

“I think, at a child’s birth,
if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift,
that gift would be curiosity.”

Lady Eleanor Roosevelt

I agree!  In homeschooling, we have a beautiful opportunity to allow our children to follow their curiosity.  We can’t know what God is leading their spirit to explore, so let’s let them explore!  The same with you.  Allow yourself to explore the things that are stirring up your heart and your mind. 

Mrs. Roosevelt said something else about curiosity that made me smile.  I can identify so much with this:

“I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on.
Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. 
One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.”

Lady Eleanor Roosevelt

I enjoy a fireside, especially with my hands busy with knitting or my mind busy with reading, but that’s not her point.  Her point, I think, is that we cannot allow ourselves to sit and say “I can’t” while we watch others live and do what we could also enjoy.   

This year I’m focusing on the positive, as I wrote a few days ago.  I’m also more free this year than I’ve been in 12 years of child-rearing.  Our littlest gal will be 5 years old next month, and although I’m so sorry to see the baby years behind us, I may as well dwell on the positive part of that instead of the negative, so I may as well get excited about all the free time I finally have! 

Time to follow my whims.  My interests.  My curiosity.  I can’t wait to follow my curiosity more, both with the children and without them.

I didn’t realize I was going to write about curiosity tonight. I was just thinking of Mrs. Roosevelt while working on my new site today.  What new site, you ask?

I have begun blogging at a new site where I can upload more photos (I love photography) and designs (I love art) and crafting excursions (I love … you know what I’m going to say!).  If I feel a lengthy “text” post coming on, I’ll probably post it on the blog I write weekly for Precious Moments (called Precious Moms), which will also get many reruns from the last several years that I’ve been blogging.  I will, of course, leave the archives open here.  Readers still somehow find them through Google searches. 

But, mostly, I will be in my own domain:  Just Pure Lovely.  Know why I named my new blog that?) 

And thank you so very, very much to HomeschoolBlogger for great years here and to the many readers I met through this blog. I hope all of you will come to my new site to visit!

by Lori Seaborg 2008

[update 2023: Just Pure Lovely was posted from 2008 to about 2018 or so. I took a hiatus from blogging after that for a while (regretfully) but did save the JPL posts and am republishing many of the posts here on this site. The JustPureLovely.com domain now points to this site.)