Welcome to Boy’s Almanac– a boy’s year spent with Daniel Carter Beard’s The American Boy’s Handy Book.
Boy’s Almanac is lovingly crafted by us, Stephanie Sicore and Alis Whitman. We are two mothers constantly striving to maintain a wild, self-sufficient childhood for our boys and wanting to revive the old school methods of practical scouting, bypassing the modern organization and its discriminating baggage. We’re attempting this in the most common of modern contexts: following our gut, against the tide of electronic media, often while the fathers are at work and grandfathers are miles away, and in whatever spare time we can find.
As we attempt each project in the book, we seek to answer the question: How can we help our sons grow up industrious, autonomous, self-reliant and resourceful? Is it too late to help them reclaim a wild, natural childhood, and how can we inspire other parents to want the same? Looking to the past for answers, and scouring modern thought on parenting, we hope to find the essential toolkit for empowering yet liberating today’s pressured and overscheduled young man.
We will tackle tough projects for our politically-correct conscience: skinning, trapping and playing with fire, to name a few. But it is not without reverence; in fact, all the while holding the natural cycle dear to our hearts, we aim to seize back some heritage and take value of the simple lessons learned for satisfaction and survival.
Why boys? Why not girls? Because we don’t have girls, ourselves, and have no idea whether they’d like this kind of stuff anyway. Seriously. As far as we’re concerned, girls are wonderful and welcome here!
You can find a copy of The American Boy’s Handy Book for yourselves, and follow along. There’s a Flickr group, BoysAlmanac, where we encourage you to share your own experiences with the book’s projects, as well. You’re also encouraged to subscribe to Boy’s Almanac either in the form of email updates or RSS.
About the writers
Stephanie Sicore is an artist, photographer, blogger, wife and full-time mother of two young boys. For the past three years she has kept an online journal at Stephs. She lives on the fringe of Silicon Valley and enjoys minus tides, a full house and escaping on surfboard and bicycle.
Alis Whitman is an information designer, gardener, blogger and scout master’s daughter. You can visit Alis at Bellespring. She currently resides in the Santa Cruz Mountains and enjoys observation parenting, compost, paint and days spent out of doors.
Guest contributors include John Hall, affectionately known as “Scoutmaster John,” who became Eagle Scout in 1995. In the time since, he has worked as a residential landscape architect in Austin and had a son of his own. He shares his wisdom as our “pack leader” and hones this skill in preparation for his son’s scouting days, which should begin in about six years.
and follow the adventure:
this is wonderful. thank you so much.
Thank you, mothers, for loving your boys enough to help them become men!
I wish my Mom had had this blog and the Internet when she was raising me! This is *amazing* stuff, folks.
Great blog, spent much of the day reading it!
Greatt site…could you possibly enlarge the font? I am having a hard time reading it. Thanks!!
Thanks, Tanya, for the feedback. We’ll do some tweaking to make things easier to read.
Alis, I think this is a great project.
I’m glad to hear you say that girls are welcome too, because I know my 7 year old daughter would love a lot of these projects.
But I will say, one problem we have with books like the one you mention (and “The Dangerous Book for Boys”) is that, while little girls are definitely interested in the same kinds of projects as little boys, they DO NOT want to have anything to do with anything labeled “for boys.”
So The Dangerous Book for Boys remains on the shelf, virtually untouched.
And while there is a similar, girl-oriented book called “The Daring Book for Girls,” it’s full of stupid stuff, like learning to dance in high heels, how to serve tea, or how to sew a quilt. BORING.
So — I will read your blog! And I will rejoice in reading about your boys’ adventures. But when I bring the ideas home, I’ll be very careful not to mention the whole “boys” thing.
Yes this site is little boy centric. We agree that our content is not necessarily boy specific. However, little boys come with their own set of developmental issues that are commonly overlooked in conventional education. We both have boys so our observations are really about how to parent young boys. That said if we had little girls we would probably do the same projects, take the same hikes, and look at dead bugs. Stay tuned for our next backyard orienteering post featuring Teresa the hiker!
Teresa,
You Rock!
are you still taking comments here?
great stuff on birds and buildings. loved it.
we’ll always take more comments, Cyndi! Thanks for the kudos!
Thank you!
I have two sons, you have inspired me.
Love to you both, Andrew
Hi, I just discovered your blog and am very fascinated and interested. I love The American Boy’s Handy Book and just picked up the Field and Forest book. I think we have a lot in common. I’m raising my second boy now, (the older one is 22, then there is a college girl,) and understand boys so much better this time. It’s fun. Beth