Hi, I’m Chelsea. I’m a momma raising two little women in Northern Virginia. I’m so excited to share snippets of our lives with you.

My daughter Amelia is three, and Charlotte is three months old. We started doing preschool at home in August, but to be honest, we’ve been homeschooling since the day our girls were born. Schooling at home, especially when they are small, is more of a lifestyle to us: snuggling up in a cozy chair and reading, talking about the weather while we drive in the car, baking muffins together, identifying leaves and flowers when we walk through the park.

Amelia loves crafts, so we’ve been doing a lot of art these days. Sometimes I’ll give her a paintbrush and let her paint rocks. We even have paint for the bathtub, so she can work on her art in the tub. She also loves to read, and we are working our way through our library’s “1,000 Books to Kindergarten” program, with the goal of reading a thousand books before starting kindergarten.

We helped start a preschool co-op with some good friends in the fall. We are using the Busy Toddler preschool curriculum, which is centered around play-based learning. I organize monthly preschool field trips that coordinate with our curriculum, and it’s been a really fun way to add an extra level of hands-on learning to our days.

I work from home as a copy editor for a local lifestyle magazine. I write articles covering food, farms, and local events, with a little bit of everything in between. For me, it’s deeply important to be involved in my community, and I love that the stories I write introduce me to community members and allow me to share their stories.

I have a passion for health and wellness, and spend my free time researching the way our ancestors lived, the herbs and foods they used for medicinal purposes, and the tinctures and oxymels they used to promote healing. I love learning how to live holistically and heal our bodies through the food we eat.

My husband Ryan is our superhero. He has two jobs: By day, he works at HSLDA, but by night, he works as a film composer and writes music for feature films, commercials, and podcasts. There is always music in our home, and we love to dance to it.

Amelia is our ray of sunshine, our wild child, and the source of my grey hairs. She prefers things to be “fancy” and makes sure we know if things are “too plain.” She informed me recently that the “fancy thing” to do is to keep your napkin on your lap when eating, so now she always eats with a napkin on her lap. No outfit is complete for her without a tiara and a necklace. She loves the color blue, wants to be a princess-ballerina-fairy, and says she will grow up and marry her prince (daddy). She thinks she knows everything and has an attitude to match Kay Thompson’s Eloise.

Charlotte loves to sleep and eat. She is very curious about the things Amelia is doing and can’t wait to be big enough to play with her.

As a family, our favorite things to do are spend Saturday mornings at the farmers market, can food we’ve picked, make our own bread, and participate in seasonal traditions, like eating blue crabs and picking blueberries in the summer.

For 2020, we have a goal to be outside more often, especially during the winter when we tend to stay indoors. I’m learning not to be afraid to bundle up and send my three-year-old into the backyard on cold days. She is loving it, and I love watching her play in the dirt and lay in the grass and explore the world in her own way.

My word for the year is “intention,” and my husband’s is “do.” Together we are planning to live this year to the fullest.

I can’t wait to show you how we fill our preschool days with intention.

—Chelsea

Follow along with our daily preschool activities on my Instagram @chelsearmoore.

Photo Credit: Photos courtesy of author.