I'm Doing a Summer-Time Blog. . .

and you are welcome to visit me there, if you'd like:

My Summer Notebook

I've barely gotten started, but I'll be writing about a lot of different things: my life over the past two years, house, home, family, food, books, summer-time activities, God's goodness, nature, and all of those things that I love.

Blessings and Happy Summer!
Susan

And Another One Comes Into the World!.

Aimee's sweet new girl, Avery.
One day old.

(All grandchildren must be added to this blog!)

One-year-old. . .

Sweet Liya.

(It just doesn't seem right
not to have her on the old blog.
She's so much part of the family now.)

At the zoo.

Update. . .

I'm continually asked about my daughter's baby. Michelle had a truly beautiful baby girl on October 3. Liya is sweet-natured and about as smiley as a baby can be. Now, at eight months, she's a high-speed crawler who likes to be right in the mix of her brothers' play. And they adore her as much as she adores them.

I'm in a new place living a very different kind of life than the one I lived before (I just moved again last week), and I'm thankful for all that God has taught me and shown me about Himself in the past year. I am in awe of Him. He has guided and provided and opened doors and done miraculous things.

I Believe...

This can't really be much of a surprise, but because I've never directly said what I believe, I want to make a clear statement of it now in my last post. I believe the following with all of my heart and also with all of my mind. I don't want a crutch to lean on. I don't want religion. I'm not looking for something to make me feel good. I seek Truth. And I wholeheartedly believe this to be true.

My relationship with God has brought a great deal of peace and light and deep joy to my life in spite of many challenges, trials, losses, and hardships. The Bible says that God daily bears our burdens, and this has been so very true for me. I am loved and forgiven, blessed and kept by His hand. My hope remains in Him. I pray that you will have that hope, too.

I BELIEVE in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth:

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord: Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary: Suffered under Pontius Pilate, Was crucified, dead, and buried: He descended into hell; The third day he rose again from the dead: He ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty: From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.I believe in the Holy Ghost: The holy Catholic Church; The Communion of Saints: The Forgiveness of sins: The Resurrection of the body: And the Life everlasting. Amen.

~taken from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer

:~:~:~:~:

Thank you for your kindness and great warmth to me. Thank you for your prayers and blessings and encouragement. Thank you for appreciating the things I've shared about my life and family and home.

Gratefully,
Susan

A Very Quick Answer to Leigh's Question and Our Tasty Dinner...

Yet another post, and it's not even the last one! :-) I guess this is my final furious flurry.

In the comment box, Leigh asked this (don't feel selfish about asking, Leigh!):

"Speaking of "three little things" :), I remember you commenting on one of your posts that there were three things you wanted your kids to do each day. Would you mind sharing what they were? Actually, I guess it would be the two other things :), since you already mentioned writing."

I've long wanted to address this kind of thing because it's been asked more than once, and I've felt remiss in not responding. It's not that I haven't tried, though; it's that I get bogged down every time I try to write about this because there's a whole philosophy behind this, so it's not as cut and dried as my answers seem. (A good part of the philosophy behind this is in my learning posts, especially the ones on a learning atmosphere. I never did finish those and that pained me a great deal.)

This is not yet the answer to Leigh's question, but, just to let you know, the last three topics in my learning atmosphere notes were going to be:

1. The great importance and value of chores and doing good, hard, physical work and having real responsibilities.

2. Do real things. John Senior talks about this in his wonderful book The Restoration of Christian Culture. Read it if you can get your hands on it. :-)

3. Um, um, um... Oh, my goodness, I can't remember the other one, and all of my papers are packed! :-) It must not be important...

Anyway, a very quick, unwieldy (because I'm not taking the time to think and edit-- cringe-- but I have thought much about this over the years, and I have lived it with my kids), off the top of my head response to Leigh is this:

The three things I expected my kids to do daily besides living a full and intersting life of learning in our free time--

1. Reading

Whatever they wanted as long as it was quality, well-written stuff. And there's much of it out there for children (especially older books), so no one was ever-- or ever felt-- deprived! They were supposed to read every day, but it's almost a joke to list this because reading was their favorite thing to do. They loved books. They read alone. We read together. For hours. Sometimes I had to tell them to stop reading and do something else. The most common topic of conversation in our home was books. It's still that way.

2. Writing

Whatever they wanted. Anything. It was open-ended! Journals, essays, letters, copy-work, dictation. They created newsletters. They had their own little writing club. They made lists and plans and all sorts of things. I have boxes and boxes of journals the kids kept, and they did a prodigious amount of other writing. Andrew Pudewa says that reading (and memorizing) good poetry is one really great way to learn to write. I believe him. My kids did read and memorize poetry for fun and wrote and wrote. They wrote in their own way. I didn't correct it or grade it, but I did read it, and if I saw patterns of things they were doing wrong, I'd mention it to them. Honestly, most stuff self-corrects if they are reading well. Doing that and then writing, writing, writing, brought it all together nicely. All of them eventually really wanted to be good writers, so they took it upon themselves to work on it. We had loads of good handbooks and helps for writing on our shelves, and the kids used them often. I absolutely mean it when I say that all four of my kids are much better writers than me. I'm glad I didn't dumb them down by trying to teach them. :-)

3. Math

Making progress every day, at their own pace, which was most often fairly accelerated. We selected materials together. Different kids needed different programs. I wanted them to like and "click" with what they were using. From 4th grade on, the kids completely taught themselves math.

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These were our basic, everyday things. On top of this, we explored our natural world and appreciated the world of the arts with great enthusiasm. We delved into many hobbies and interests. We did real things. We tried to avoid things that kept us from the real things, the good things, a true education. The kids were enthusiastic doers, creators, thinkers. It was lovely watching them fill their days with learning and creating. Unless something else was on the agenda, the business of our days was to get an education. And we all took it seriously. It didn't fit within any particular hours. It went on from wake-time to bed-time and on the weekends. It was what we did, and it is what we still do. Even my college kids pursue their own life and education along with their school assignments. They get it.

I think this worked for us because of the kind of atmosphere and expectations we had in our home. We kept a lot of distractions out of our home environment, like media and too many activities, and not everyone will want to do this. That's okay. This is just what we did. We lived in the country where the kids roamed and played and explored. We read together and worked together and talked an awful lot. Learning was fun for us. And I think our enthusiasms rubbed off on each other.

Other kids and families played a part in our lives, too, and people were in and out of our home often, but we had an awful lot of long, quiet days at home to work and go about the business of learning. If one wants to create a learning lifestyle atmosphere, it takes a lot of work to do it. And, as we go along, we realize what works and what doesn't, and then we make a choice as to how we want to proceed because we have to work within the reality of our situations. If we are home educating, then education is not to be shrugged off. If a natural course of learning isn't working, and if we have tried to adjust our environment to make it work, and it's still not working, or if we are unwilling to make the necessary adjustments, then we need to reevaluate what we're doing. Not everyone's family will thrive in the same way, but, hopefully, we can all love to learn and make it a natural, everyday endeavor, not limited to certain hours or certain days or a certain part of our lives.

(Another home education book I really like is Educating Children at Home by Alan Thomas.)

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Okay, there. Now for dinner.

I didn't intend to post this (neither did I intend to answer any questions, but here I am), but it was so good that I had to write one last bit about food. Cooking is so relaxing and enjoyable for me. I'm trying to eat whatever meat is in the freezer and whatever food remains in cupboards this week. There's not much left, but this afternoon I did have a few Yukon potatoes, a couple onions, and four organic chicken thighs. There are always lemons and olive oil about the house, and there are currently lots of fresh herbs in the garden. Beautiful gobs of oregano and sage and tarragon, with other herbs coming on nicely. I chose to use oregano because it would work well in a Greek-flavored lemon-chicken-onion meal.

So, that's what I made-- a lemon-oregano potato, onion, and chicken dish that looked so pretty before putting into the oven that I was wishing badly I could photograph it. It looked just as pretty and tasty when it came out. And it tasted just wonderful. A dinner with my very favorite kinds of flavor. It makes me thankful for so much good food.

I turned the oven on to 375 degrees.

I sliced one yellow onion.

I cut three or four smallish-medium Yukon potatoes into big, bite-sized chunks.

I wish I had thought to add a whole bunch of whole cloves of garlic to this.

I chopped a whole bunch of fresh oregano.

I squeezed the juice from one small lemon.

I fried the chicken thighs, with skin on, in butter to brown well and begin the cooking process. I sprinkled the tops with salt.

When the thighs were nicely browned, I set them in a parchment lined baking dish.

When I finished frying the chicken thighs, I set them in a parchment lined baking dish. I placed the potatoes and onion into a bowl and tossed them with some sea salt, the lemon juice, most of the oregano, and some olive oil (a few tablespoons?). Then I placed this around the chicken pieces. (The size dish depends on how much you're making. You'll want the potatoes and onions to fit in, if not one layer, in close to it. You don't want a deep mound of vegetables or they won't get that nice roasty look and taste.) I sprinkled the rest of the oregano over the chicken and the potato mixture. I drizzled any juice that remained in the bowl over the chicken and then the potatoes and set it into the oven to bake. For how long, I'm not sure, but it was over an hour for sure. I just kept checking. When it looked done enough, I let it cook even longer. I wanted it to be really done! I let it go until the chicken skin was lovely crispy brown and the meat was fall-off-the-bone done and melt-in-your-mouth tender and the potatoes were nicely browned, too.

When it came out of the oven, Michelle and I oohed and ahhed, and when we ate it, we oohed and ahhed even more energetically. We loved this. I hope you will, too.

That's all for now, but I'll still try to respond to recent comments before I go to bed tonight. Last little post coming in the morning.

I'll leave comments open for about a week, and then I'll close them. I'll leave the blog open so people who want to catch up on older posts can. Eventually, but not right away, I'll "hide" the blog so that it can't be accessed. If you want to make copies of anything for your own use before that, you are welcome to. Please, though, do not republish anything I've written. While the blog is still open to the public, you are welcome to link to it. Thank you!

Three Little Things...

1. Why do kids find such delight in creating forts that are like little dens? As I sat at the table drinking my coffee this morning, Jayden and Roman made a fort underneath, by my feet. The opposite side of the table was enclosed by a chair, and the open side had unused moving boxes leaning up against it, so it did create an obvious fort, and if you're a little child you will notice these things. My own kids made forts under tables and behind furniture all the time. They'd drag out just the right things to turn these forts into little homes, and then they'd play happily there for hours.

It's the same kind of delight they got from books like Brambly Hedge or Beatrix Potter or The Rescuers or so many other books featuring anthropomorphized animals. I don't know that there's a connection between the forts and the stories except that the words "den" and "cosiness" tend to come to mind for both, and the imagination is delightfully engaged in both cases, too. My children still love Brambly Hedge-- the illustrations in particular, I think. My 23 year old son still enjoys occasionally perusing his volume of the entire collection of Brambly Hedge stories, and he's not embarrassed to say so!

2. In the midst of the moving and serious talk of changes and decluttering and simplicity, I've not dropped off shopping for thrift or vintage items altogether. It's just that now, the things I buy need to be needed. And I needed dish towels. I used to like Martha Stewart's K-Mart dish towels (the only thing I ever entered K-Mart for), but when I stopped by recently, they didn't have any. So, I looked at the antique store, and somehow, these really kitschy old linen souvenir and calendar dish towels caught my eye. They were all in great/perfect condition, well made, sort of fun and tacky, and cheap, so why not?!

So, I now have in my possession one really cute bright orange (and other early 70's colors) rooster calendar dish towel from 1971. I have a 1979 light blue and green and brown towel with an adorable picture of owls on it (the little boys particularly like this one). There are two linen souvenir towels from Australia-- one with koala bears and one with eucalyptus plans. There's a cool one from the Grand Canyon. And there is one that's clearly from the 1950's-- it's bright pink and lime green-yellowish and black, with a typical 50's design style, set in Paris. There are unifying-color-theme issues with this little set of towels, but that's okay. I like them.

3. And I am reading. The books I'm reading are mostly of the spiritually-oriented variety right now, but I'll pick up others again when I am settled. Currently, there are several in my stack, but two that I'm just starting to read are Esther de Waal's To Pause at the Threshold and Joan Chittister's The Gift of Years: Growing Old Gracefully. I know I'll really like the Threshold book (it's perfectly suited to my situation), and I'm loving what I'm reading in The Gift of Years. I haven't read it thoroughly yet, but I've browsed through it, and I'm pretty sure that when I'm finished I'll be highly recommending this. I might as well do that now, since I won't be blogging when I finish. There is a lot of wisdom and joy in this book. If you are middle aged or older, or you're just interested in thinking about what really matters, there is a lot of insight and inspiration to be gained from this book. It's light, but thoughtful and deep.

And now I'll carry on with my work. My last, short, post will be tomorrow. Nothing wordy or thoughtful on my part, but one little thing I want to say before I leave. Also, I'll try to get back to respond to recent comments later.