Just Checking In . . .

The weather outside is . . . 
Momentarily improved. !!  This winter. Meh, not the best. At least for a mama who bought her girlie a set of cross country skis this year. I'm hopeful we'll get some snow yet but still . . . come on!  We did get a little bit just in time for Christmas.  Then it was cccoooolllddd for quite a while. Sub-zero. Then we got a decent amount but it melted by the weekend. Fortunately, as you saw, we were able to get out skiing before it melted.  Yesterday it rained and rained and rained. We had a river gushing out the culvert into our yard.  Today is a wee bit merrier with a light dusting.  Take it as it comes, I guess.

I'm listening to . . .
relative quiet.  Mace and Nutmeg are playing imaginatively together downstairs. Those two are such great playmates (usually!).  The boys are quiet.  Lately, they've been holing up in their room making "motion pictures."  They both have cameras now.  Sage got one from "Tall Grandma" for Christmas and Basil got my old one when I got a new one for Christmas.  So now they take hundreds of pictures of their Legos and then scroll through the pictures quickly to make a movie. It's pretty neat actually. I'll have to take a video of their pictures and share it sometime.

Around the house and in the garden . . . 
If you are not above praying for plants, you can pray for my baby garlic. I'm a little nervous that I didn't plant them early enough this fall. I'm not sure how things will pan out this summer. I would be sad for sure if they don't work out. In the house, Doug is getting around to putting a few decorative shelves in our bathroom. I've made my "honey do list" for the upcoming few months. Hopefully we can get a good start on things before summer.

Learning, learning, all the time. . . 
Overall things are clicking along at a decent pace. It has been a bit of slogging through some fraction work the past couple of weeks but we'll keep chipping away at it. There is always review.  Nutmeg is still my little math whiz. She's funny. Usually, she is impatient to listen to me explain the different methods for mental math.  She wants to do the teaching!  We are a bit behind in history; I just can't bring myself to hurry through these time periods. I guess no big deal though, it won't be the end of the world if we are reading U.S. history this summer. Right now we are in the midst of the American Revolution. We've been hitting a bit of a sweet spot with dinner table conversations over what we've learned throughout the day. It is enriches for the whole family in a multitude of ways. More on this later perhaps.

We are reading . . . 
Sage just recently finished the The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I'm not sure what he's found to read next. He mentioned the Father Brown Mysteries. For history, he is reading The Signers: 56 Stories Behind the Declaration of Independence. I should have checked in with the boys about what they are reading right now but I was in a hurry to get a post up that I didn't have a chance to get to that. I'm not sure what Basil is reading on his own, he picked up a number of Tolkien books but I'm not sure if he is reading one of those right now. He did just finish up The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis and enjoyed some great dinner table talk with Doug about it. Doug read the book first and then passed it on to Gabe. Basil is loving Rifles for Matie for literature/history as well.  Nutmeg and I are reading about Blessed Imelda Lambertini, patroness of First Communicants. We are also reading The Arabian Nights. I'm reading The Return of the King.  I'm joining the rest of my gang in loving this book. Such an extraordinary series. Wow! If you haven't read it, put it on your list! Don't be intimated by its length. I just check out one book at a time, so I don't have to hold the enormous triology all the same time. It's quite manageable that way.

In the kitchen . . .
Crockpot dinners, weeknight dinners, cooperative dinners with our family Bible study group at camp . . .  Here's today's homeschool lunch idea:

Salmon and veggie salad.

Chopped vegetables with canned salmon from Costco.  Sshh. Don't tell my family in Alaska. I know . . . its an abomination. CANNED PINK salmon. I have sunk low.  But hey, you got do what you gotta do to get those Omega 3 Fatty Acids on a budget. The veggies and salmon are tossed in olive oil, fresh lemon juice, salt and pepper. I had mine over a bed of lettuce. 3/4 out of 4 kids ate it. 2/4 kids said I should make it again. Half is good enough for me.

What else?
Sorry about the rush/sloppiness of this post. I'm running late for the afternoon but I so wanted to say 'hello' here for a few minutes. Here are a few pictures on a recent outing to Madison. We don't have our homeschool group in January, so we've been using those days as field trip days.  Last field trip coming up this week!

Last week we parked in downtown Madison. First we checked out the fantastic library there and then walked over to the capitol building. While in the capitol we noticed the governor's office. We walked over to peek around and the guard invited us in to check out the conference room. We love these days out and the adventures that they bring!

the children's section had some super creative "reading nooks" 

Homeschool Systems: Lunches, etc.

For me the difficulty in home educating is not so much in the choosing of courses of study. That's the fun part. I enjoy deciding what we will study, finding the resources that we will use, and laying out a map of how we will cover the material. 

The real challenge lies in balancing the rest of life. Between the all the books and the learning there is so much more. Laundry, all that eating these people do, all the clean-up from the eating/playing/studying, the parenting, the nursing, etc, etc. You get it. There's a lot more than just learning.  The juggling is what gets you. Plus, one has got to rest sometime too. Still haven't figured out that one yet. 

Anyhow, the homeschool systems. If I ever need advice or new ways to innovate, it isn't so much fancy curriculum that I'm looking for but how to make it all work together. Homeschool routines/systems .. . whatever you call it. Rubber meets the road.

I might share some of what has worked for us along the way. . .  what's working for us now. This stage, this moment.  Different routines work for different seasons. 

Food. Meals. I've mentioned this challenge before. Homeschool breakfasts and even more challenging . . . LUNCHES! I brought up this topic in a homeschool group on facebook and it was quite the active thread.

This year I have finally have hit on a AHA! DUH! revelation. Ready for it?? The more organized and prepared I am, the smoother things run.  Wow. Just amazing, huh? I stun myself with my brilliance. *eyeroll* Really. I know its a no-brainer but I supposed I felt like I organized enough and needed to wing SOMETHING.  Nope, nope, nope. There is enough in life that is fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants. Parenting brings plenty of spontaneity. If there is anything I can organize and plan now, DO IT. Do it now. Squeeze it in. 

I found a few more things that I could *try* and organize beforehand and even though it doesn't work all the time, it is helping. Less brain energy exerted later when the rubber is hitting the road hard. 

One thing I've done is more meal planning. Time consuming and nit picky but boy, is it helping. I always have planned our dinners but now I'm planning breakfasts and lunches as well. Super duper helpful. Maybe I can do snacks someday too. 

And kid involvement in those meals. I'm starting slowly. The boys are cooking breakfast one day a week.  And one kid is choosing a meal to make one day a week. We alternate weeks. Nutmeg cooked lunch the first week. Sage is cooking lunch this week. I've got Basil looking at cookbooks for next weeks. (he just wants to make nachos=lame!!)

Here are a few lunches that have worked well for us so far. 

Today:

Baked Potato Bar

The kids said this was the best idea EVER! I loved the fact that this basically

cleaned out the leftovers from the fridge. I cooked up the potatoes and then pretty much 

all our leftovers complemented the potatoes well. Insta-toppings! Score!

Five different ways:

Basil
(this is beef stew on the bottom, chicken on top: Mr. EverHungry)

Mace

Sage

Myself

A couple lunches from last week:

Nutmeg wanted to take a picture of her lunch on Make-Your-Own-Taco-Salad Day. 

This is a super simplified version of the cheese platters we like to make for
holidays. The kids loved this one. We'll have to repeat it. In the bowl is homemade baba ghanoush. 

Another newish homeschool system for us:  Fridge Organizing Central

We don't really have a name for this. I just made that up. This started at Christmas last year. I wrapped the fridge up like a Christmas gift and taped peoples' Christmas cards onto it. Then maybe you remember that we liked it so much that we sorta used that as a central place for our Lenten activities. We couldn't get enough of it, so we used it this summer for bucket list and calendars. We continue to love it, so here we are for the beginning-of-another-year/autumn theme. (Sage helped; he digs this!)

The paper is "home project paper" from JoAnn's. The top thingy a little white board from Walmart. We write our breakfast and lunch menu on there. The next three squares are our activity calendars for October-November. The next three are daily schedules. That's new this year too. Everyone has a schedule so they know exactly what they are supposed to be doing. Even me. I asked myself today, "what am I supposed to be doing after lunch?" The bottom is labeled "Autumn Memories." This is like a "finished" bucket list for autumn. We've got one or two that we already need to write down.

And finally Nutmeg wanted to take pictures of her table arrangement.