Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!

When Grandpa Pat and Grandma Suzie came to visit a few weeks ago, they brought a Big Surprise with them. Three new kitties have joined our household!

They are growing fast, and getting into everything!

Meet Charlemagne, the littlest kitty with the biggest name.

We mostly just call him Charlie.

This is his big brother, Moriarty. He is the biggest of the three, and the most mischievous.

We call him Mori, usually because he never sticks around long enough for us to get his whole name said.

And this is their sister Irene. She's just a bundle of cuteness.

(I'm looking forward to having fewer mice around here...)

The Two Become One. Kind of.

For years, I have maintained two very similar blogs. Both have been focused on our family, but one was private and one was public, and the public one was slightly more focused on housekeeping and living frugally. I'm finally admitting that it was too much. We got busy living life and I abandoned both of them for a very long time.

Until this weekend.

I spent some time yesterday cleaning up the private one in order to make it public, and changed the blog addresses to simplify things even further. The idea is that if I only have one blog to think about updating, I'll do it more often.

That's the plan, anyway.  In the meantime, please excuse the housekeeping dust!

Mt. Rainier

On Sunday, we went up to Mt. Rainier on a four mile hike.

And when I say "we",

I mean we ALL went.

See?

The hiking part was fun,

and the mountain was even more beautiful the closer we got,

but crossing the snow patches on the trail was the most fun.

(Especially when we got to slide down the snow-covered trail on the other side!)

We saw a buck, two does, a marmot, and a lot of wildflowers.

A lot of wildflowers.

(So many that I got overwhelmed trying to pick which pictures to post.

So you get to see two.

I'm sorry and you're welcome.)

Too much fun and way too beautiful to only go once...

For the Love of Eggs: Part 5

The chicken coop, as it was, wasn't quite how we imagined a chicken coop should look.

So after some research Mike built some nest boxes, (which we call the Chicken Hotel),

and he added a few places for the chickens to roost.

This week, after all the time and money we've spent caring for the chickens, they finally started earning their keep!

On Monday, we found three eggs.

Tuesday, we got one more.

So far today, we've found two.

And all but one of them have been found on a shelf in the barn on a pile of plastic bags.

 Silly chickens.

(Glass eggs to plant in the nesting boxes have been added to my shopping list...)

It Has Begun

It has begun.

This school year marks the beginning of my last 13 years of teaching.

Let's pause and let that sink in for a minute.

Yeah.

I only have 13 years left before I retire.

Amazing.

Anyway.  Moving on.

We started our new school year on Monday, and for the first time, all four kids are "officially" in school.

I have two 5th graders, a 4th grader, and a Kindergartner.

All of the books that are scheduled to be read in the first 12 weeks barely fit on the school shelves in the living room,

(although some of these books will carry through the whole year)

(The top two shelves are alphabetized by author, and the bottom row of over-sized books is too.)

and our school cupboard in the kitchen is full of the workbooks and notebooks we use (almost) every day.

(Workbooks are grouped by subject, and notebooks are color-coded according to each child's signature color...which also happen to be their favorite colors.)

Am I organized?  Why, yes, yes I am.

Maybe a little bit too organized?

Maybe.

But I'm OK with that, and so is my family.

It helps keep the chaos under control, and everyone knows where to find what they need.

And if they can't find what they're looking for, I know exactly where to tell them to look!

***

(Can anyone guess what song is now stuck in my head?)

Flag Football: First Practice

Isaak is playing 5/6 Year-old Flag Football this year for the first time, and the first practice was highly entertaining.

After the team finished their stretching, jumping jacks, and sprints (forward, backward, and sideways), which were all hysterical to watch, the coaches split them into two groups and worked on catching, throwing, and kicking the football.

Then they got out the belts and flags and the real entertainment began.

They told the ball carriers to run to the cone.

(Nothing was said about avoiding the the other kid or keeping their flags...)

The "defense" was told to chase the ball carrier to the cone.

(I think "and take his flags" might have been a good addition to the instructions!)

After a few run-throughs, they tried scrimmaging a few times...

I laughed so hard I couldn't get a video!

Can't wait to see what the next practice is like!

For the Love of Eggs: Part 1

Have I ever shown you the chicken coop that's on our property?

Well, here it is from the outside,

and this is the inside.

Exciting, isn't it?

Under the current management it has not seen much use, but that's about to change...

Feathered Friends

The sun was shining this morning, so I took my camera outside to get a few pictures.

It quickly became a bird-themed photo shoot.

...Wait a minute, what's that?!?

Sure look like chicks, don't they?

That's because they are!

We got 15 of them to start with...we'll see how many actually make it to adulthood!

8 Pens, 1 Notebook, and a Stack o' Books

When my favorite black pen died, I could have bought just one to replace it. Instead I bought the colorful 10-pack, even though I didn't need any of the colors for anything special.

The leather-bound notebook was a Christmas gift a few years ago. It was buried in a box because I could find no worthy purpose for it.

The stack of books I want to read soon...ah, the books! I never need a reason to buy another book.

(Disclaimer: It just so happens, however, that three of the books in this stack were purchased under the expenditure category of "preview for future school use". Just so you know.)

I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but those pens have finally found a use of their own and the notebook now has a purpose, all because of books like those.

I've started what some call a Commonplace Book, which is simply a collection of note-worthy quotes that I have copied from the books I read. I use a different color pen for each book, partly for easier reference, but mostly just because it's fun!

I've noticed two things about keeping a Commonplace Book. One is that I read more slowly and deliberately (a hard thing for a natural speed-reader!), and often re-read passages as well, because I don't want to miss anything worth writing down. I have also noticed that the books that I've chosen to read since I started my Commonplace Book have (for the most part) been more challenging and more thought-provoking than books I've chosen in the past.

Which leads me to make a confession: I have not made a lot of exceptional "literature" choices in the past few years. In fact, much of what I've read over the last decade can hardly be called literature at all! (I have called it many things: "fluff", "mindless", "just for fun", "a quick read"...and now, honest with myself at last, I'll call it "junk".)

But that's behind me now. I've turned over a new leaf...of notebook paper.

In the back of my Commonplace Book, I've started a list (color-coordinated to match my quotes from each book, of course!) of the books I have read in 2012. There's only one rule...no "junk" books allowed.

Some of them may be short and/or easy to read, some may be borrowed from the kids' bookshelves, and some may be challenging to read or perhaps simply thought-provoking, but I am determined that they will all, for whatever reason they are chosen, be worth reading.

A New Era

It's the beginning of a new era in this family.

Airplane ownership.

According to Isaak, we now have four pets: a dog, two cats, and an airplane.

It's a 1946 Piper Cub.

And I'm thinking about calling her Stella.

A German German Shepherd

Mike and I have always talked about getting a dog. Now that we live out in the country, we were thinking about getting a big one, like maybe a German Shepherd or something.

Maybe not a puppy though, we said. Too much work training and housebreaking a puppy.

Wouldn't it be neat, we said, if we could find a dog that was already trained, was great with kids, and just needed a new home.

Yeah, that'd be neat. We'll start looking soon, we said.

Instead, he found us.

Ruger is a three-year-old German Shepherd imported from Germany. He showed up at our house on Sunday afternoon, and after many phone calls I finally got ahold of his owner, who lives on a road not too far from our house.

His owner is currently traveling and the neighbor who was taking care of him had forgotten to secure him before she left the property, so he went exploring. His owner apologized for the hassle and gave me directions on how to find her house so we could take him back.

And then she mentioned that she was trying to find a new home for him because she travels so much and can't give him the attention he needs.

Um, yeah. He's getting lots of that at our house. Maybe instead of taking him back to an empty house, we could just keep him for her until she gets home. And then if everything works out, maybe not give him back at all.

Everyone thought that sounded like a great plan.

So Ruger is ours for the next few weeks...and could become ours to keep!

Log Houses

You know what I think is especially cool about these log houses?

They were built inside THIS log house:

which has this barn, round pen, and chicken coop next to it:

and this creek running behind it:

in the middle of 6+ acres of land:

and they're all ours!

My Favorite Things

Forget "raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens", these are a few of MY favorite things:

Exploring:

Watching:

Experiencing:

Experimenting:

Consonants Optional

This morning Isaak was sitting on my lap at the computer looking at pictures with me while I worked on organizing them.  "Mmmm!", he said, and lunged forward to point at the picture of boiled eggs that was on the screen.  "Those are EGGS."  I told him.  He scrunched up his face with the effort, "Ehhh."  He lunged forward again and pointed at a picture of himself.  "Iiaaa."  I wasn't sure I'd heard him right.  "WHO is that?"  He grinned.  "Mama!  Dada!  Bebe!"  

Fast forward about an hour to lunchtime, with all of us sitting around the table.  I asked if anyone wanted salt and pepper on their food.  Isaak raised his hand.  "Meee!  Iiaaa!"  We ALL heard it that time, and the quizzing began.  "Isaak, can you say Anya/Macey/Jaela?"  For the next ten minutes or so, Isaak was in the spotlight.  

He would look at each of his sisters in turn, screw up his little face in concentration and burst out with their name...but of course, consonants are optional when you're 21 months old.  Anya is now "Ahhyah", Jaela is "Yayyah", and Macey is "Maymee".  

I'm not sure who is the most proud, Isaak, Ahhyah, Yayyah, or Maymee.

The Adventure Begins

October 15, 2005  -- it was a warm, beautiful blue-skyed day, and it was awful!  We had gone out to eat the night before, and everyone but me got food poisoning.  Mike spent the whole night fighting nausea, while all three of the girls...well, they didn't fight it.  I got very little sleep that night, between cleaning up after the girls and finishing the packing Mike felt too sick to do himself.  In the morning, we took Mike to a gym on Fort Campbell, and the girls laid like rag- dolls on the grass outside while Mike finished all the final deployment paperwork.  We waited around for hours, first outside, then sitting on bleachers inside.  There were thousands of people milling around, and then finally the speeches started.  They went on and on and on...through lunch-time, then through nap-time...  Then there was the final formation, with Mike lost amid the thousands of soldiers all standing in long, neat lines and rows.  They filed onto buses as we watched, and then drove away.  By the time we got back to our car, I was crying so hard I couldn't see to put on the girls' seatbelts.  Yeah, it was horrible.

Before that first deployment, I was emotional for weeks in advance.  I had lists of all the things that had to be done before Mike left, and he had to teach me important things like how to work the lawn mower, how to use the gas grill, how to edge the lawn, when to change the air filters and how to start the gas fireplace.  I had to go to FRG (Family Readiness Group) meetings, and fill out (in triplicate!) a stack of paperwork which I affectionately call "Death paperwork".  (Form after form full of information on me, my mental and medical history, my closest friends and family, and who I'd want with me in an emergency...)  I was overwhelmed, and I cried a lot.

Fast forward three years to November 23, 2008.

We went to a different restaurant this time, and no one got sick.  I didn't make any lists, and Mike packed all of his own stuff.  He asked me if I plan to re-seed the lawn this spring, told me which tool to use when I'm ready to prep the bathtub to re-caulk it, and he wanted to teach me how to use his chop saw so I can cut up his pile of scrap wood, but I declined.  :)  I haven't been to an FRG meeting since 2005.  I'm kind of off the FRG radar, and happy to be!  (Mike has been borrowed and loaned back and forth so often these last few months between companies that I'm not on any company's FRG list.)  I didn't have to fill out any paperwork, either!

I never really had time or opportunity to count how many weeks or days were left before he left, either.  First they told us he would be leaving just before Christmas.  Then it was December 12.  No, wait, make that December 6.  The next day it changed to November 24.  A week later, it became November 21.  Until the Tuesday before, when it got switched to November 23.  We got the call in the afternoon of the 21st with the final drop-off time for Sunday...0130.  (For you non-military people, that's 1:30...in the morning.)  Never a dull moment in the Army!

Mike spent most of Saturday packing, and we put the kids to bed as usual, then woke everyone up after midnight and loaded up the van.  We got to the airfield half an hour early, but things were already in motion.  Mike dropped off his bags, and we found a parking space.  Everyone got out of the van (bundled up in our warmest jammies and a coat), we had someone take a picture of the six of us freezing together, then everyone gave Daddy a hug and got back in the nice warm van.  We said goodbye, and headed home!  No one even cried!  (Well, no one except for Isaak.  He didn't want to get back in his carseat quite yet.  He was ready to go exploring!)  That was it...short, simple and uncomplicated.  (Update:  Mike called this afternoon from Anchorage, AK.  There WAS a send-off ceremony after all...2 1/2 hours after we left!  Sure glad we didn't stick around for that!)

I've done a lot of thinking during these past few weeks about the differences I am seeing in myself and in our family this time around.  This community, being so close to an Army base, is extremely supportive of our soldiers and their families.  Our own community, by which I mean our neighbors, friends, and church family, is even more specific in their support of our soldier and our family.  It is wonderful to have their support, but we had their support during the last deployment too.  Nothing has changed there.  Mike went to Iraq last time and was assigned to a huge post, we emailed and IMed almost daily, and he came home early for training.  This time, he'll be in Afghanistan on a small airbase, we have no idea what the communication network will be like, and he will most likely be gone for just over a year.  Everything has changed this time.  Most importantly, my attitude has changed.

My Father is in charge.  It's that simple.  God IS in control!  There is nothing that I can change or prevent by worrying, or crying, or by making lists.  :)  We have known since Mike got home from Iraq that he would be leaving this winter for Afghanistan, so I have had over two years to work on changing my attitude.  Yesterday was the test.  I was completely taken by surprise by my emotional breakdown at the send-off last time, so I wondered all this week when the storm would hit.  At what point during this send-off would I break down and cry uncontrollably?  How badly was I about to embarrass myself?  :)  

The storm never broke.  I sent my husband, my best friend, off to war proudly and with a smile on my face, and with only a slight tremble in my voice.  :)  My Father IS in charge.  My heart IS at peace.  How simple!

She Can Read!

Oh my.  She's only four years old.  And she's beginning to read on her own.  She has some words she recognizes instantly (remember Made In China?) and the rest she sounds out.  She came into the office to read this page to me a few minutes ago, and prefaced it with, "Mommy, don't tell me what the words are, I want to read them myself."  And she did.

Oh my.  I'd better rethink her Kindergarten curriculum!

Beginning Narration

The concept of narration as a learning tool is not a new one, but as I learned today, it is a very effective one!  Charlotte Mason wrote that a pupil should learn to be able to "grasp the sense of a passage of some length at a single reading: and to narrate the substance of what they have read or heard." (from the appendix of School Education, Volume 3 of her series).  Narration is:   "Quite simply, it is the art of 'telling back' what you just read or heard from a book." -- from Lindafay at Higher Up and Further In (Which, by the way, is my favorite Charlotte Mason method homeschooling blog.)  :)

We do our Bible readings every morning before we do any of our other schoolwork.  It's the most important thing we learn, so we do it first to make sure it gets done!  :)  It takes so long for me to read it aloud, though, that I have started assigning chapters for Jaela and Macey to read on their own in their NIVs, while Anya reads a Bible storybook.  They read so quickly that when they told me they were done with their SIX chapters this morning, I asked them to narrate to me individually so I could make sure that they actually read it.  (My mom is thinking right about now that this sounds awfully familiar!)  :)

They read the first six chapters of Exodus today, so I told them to start from the beginning of the story, and pretend that I didn't know anything about Moses.  Macey went first, and it was like pulling teeth to get any details out of that child!  She had the storyline completely correct though, and told me everything in the right order, but it took a lot of prompting and patience on my part to get it all told.  Jaela, on the other hand, went into so much detail that I found myself thinking more than once, "I'd forgotten that!", and even "Did I ever know that?".  She too had the storyline in perfect chronological order, and they both proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they had read what they were supposed to!

I have to admit that the differences between their narrating styles really surprised me, although I WAS forewarned that there could be such differences.  Lindafay wrote about her own children on her blog in a post titled Detailed Narrations and The Summary:  "One of my children loves to give very detailed narrations.  She can remember details so well that when she narrates, she sounds like the author....However, she shows a weakness in her ability to summarize a passage so that just the most important people and events are mentioned.  My other daughter has the exact opposite strength and weakness.  She summarizes beautifully but doesn't pay attention to details as much as she should."  

I am so grateful (as a mom and as a teacher!) for Lindafay's insight!  While I might have considered one narrating style only a strength and the other only a weakness, Lindafay points out that BOTH styles have equal parts strength and weakness, and she lays out a method for me as the teacher to use to strengthen the weaknesses and teach the proper use of each style.  Not only that, but in her post she continues on the subject of narration, giving more ideas and backing them up with examples from her (and her children's) experiences.  I really, really like her blog (can y'tell?!?).  It's nice to have an example to follow as we're beginning this new method of homeschooling, and yet I don't feel compelled to do everything the "Lindafay way", either.

And, OH, this new method is fun!  :)

My Pet Project

These are the bookshelves in our schoolroom, and I think I am done loading them...at least for this school year!  

I have booklists for every year through Year 6 printed out, so I know what I'm looking for and can shop one "find" at a time.  I LOVE finding old books in used bookstores, but Clarksville (which, for those of you familiar with Oregon, is about the size of Salem) only has ONE used bookstore, and she deals only in paperback fluff.  Sad, isn't it?  Thankfully, I also LOVE a challenge!  :)  

Now, these are just the books we'll be using for school!  (Except, obviously, for the shelf of photo albums, the shelf of "free" reading, and the shelf of Isaak's books.)  The girls have a bookcase of kids books in their room, and Mike and I have three bookcases full of "big people books", too.

I'm going to need some more bookcases.  :)

Especially the Stories! (Part 2)

Have you ever worked really hard, thrown all your energy and efforts into something, and then when you were done (finally done!), scrapped it all and started over?  That's the story of my spring, summer and fall this year.  I began in early May; researching, reading reviews, pricing and choosing curricula, and then haunting ebay, amazon, and cbd (Christian Book Distributors) for the absolute best deals on the curricula I had chosen for 1st Grade and Kindergarden.  Once I had ordered everything, and it had all finally arrived, I spent most of the summer planning out lesson plans, projects, and worksheets for every subject.  Every day  -- at naptime, late into the night, and every spare minute I had during the day -- I worked on typing out 180 pages of daily lesson plans that combined the plans for each subject all onto one page per day.  When she visited in July, I enlisted mom's help so I could get them done before school started on August 11.  (She's a much faster typist than I am!)  Everything was finally finished, printed out, and ready to go with a week to spare.  Over three months of planning and prepping had gone into those lesson plans, and I was as prepared and organized as I was ever going to be.

Three weeks into our school year, I scrapped everything ... and started over.

Somewhere toward the beginning of my research, an article in a homeschooling magazine called, "What's So GREAT About Shakespeare?" by Linda Johnson, caught my attention.  I was so impressed with the article that I (somehow!) found and began to read her blog.  She talks a lot about Charlotte Mason (who is called the founder of the homeschooling movement) and the Charlotte Mason method of homeschooling.  She uses words  like "living books", "narration", and "copywork".  Her kids study nature, great composers and their works, master artists and their art.  They do math, copywork and dictation (handwriting, spelling and grammar), and make useful craft projects.  They (both the kids, and the whole family) read a LOT of books, and they compile very detailed notebooks of what they're learning in history, geography, literature, and poetry.   

Which is all very neat and exciting, I thought, and I would love to put some of those things into practice in our homeschool someday, but I was going to stick with what I had planned for this year, thank you very much, and then maybe, MAYBE I'd start incorporating some of those ideas into my lesson plans next year.  So, to prepare, I read her blog all summer and filed away a whole bunch of neat ideas and how-tos.  I read other people's articles online about different homeschool methods and programs.  I read Elisabeth Elliott books in my spare time, and I read my Bible.  And my thoughts kept returning to quotes I had read online from Charlotte Mason's books that intrigued me greatly, so I started reading Charlotte Mason's Original Homeschooling Series too, and at some point, without me realizing it, my thinking began to change.  

Where is it written that we should dread each school day?  WHY do we dread it?  Are the kids as bored as I am with what we're learning?  Who determines what and how I teach my children?  What SHOULD our homeschool be like?  As these thoughts and others chased each other around in my brain, I began to realize that although we had decided to homeschool for the right reasons, I, at least (I can't speak for Mike), had not yet determined how to best educate my children.

After only three weeks of school, we were all disenchanted with those oh-so-detailed lesson plans.  The girls fly through their weekly memory verse.  The Bible curriculum was dumbed-down, and left out important details.  The handwriting worksheets were tedious and boring.  The accelerated math program...well, let's just say we're backing up a little on that subject :).  Their phonics workbooks are so easy and quick they could probably do them in their sleep.  The science was a little above their comprehension level.  Reading and Spanish are just fun; new and exciting.  :)  Geography, history, literature, and poetry, on the other hand, were, and still are, greeted with excitement and eagerness, BECAUSE (drum roll, please!) we read books and stories, both fiction and non-fiction.  What child does not enjoy being read to (especially when the subject is something they are interested in) or even reading something themselves for the first time?  In the first six weeks of school, we've read about Creation, the Nile River, the Rosetta Stone, hieroglyphics, Egypt, birds, animals, maps, globes, hemispheres, oceans, and continents.  We've been introduced to Adam and Eve, Menes (the first Pharaoh), Leif Ericsson, Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, John Cabot, Captain John Smith, Jamestown, Pocahontas, and others.  We've read from Shakespeare, Aesop's Fables, the Bible, Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Rudyard Kipling, and James Herriot.  What's not to like?!?

That's the kind of thing that Charlotte Mason advocates; reading REAL books on all subjects, reading thought-provoking literature and poetry, and TALKING about what we're learning.  It is nothing but an exercise in futility for my children to trace out and copy letter after letter on a handwriting worksheet (which will eventually get thrown out), when as an alternative they could be practicing their handwriting skills as they copy a verse, a quote, or a line from a hymn into a special book (that they could keep forever if they want!), or maybe they could even write a letter!  Wouldn't it be wonderful, too, to read to my children from ACTUAL scripture instead of from an infantile Bible curriculum?

We still need the math program and the phonics practice workbooks, but I am determined to implement more and more of those lofty ideas of Charlotte Mason's into our school days.  In the last three weeks we have slowly added in more literature, poetry, and history readings than I had previously planned, and slowly phased out of most of the worksheets and fluff.  This new way of doing things has so far been so successful and satisfying that I have not looked back at those slaved-over and now-rejected lesson plans; instead, I keep discovering little assurances that this is the right choice for us and our homeschool right now.  

Take this morning, for instance.  Last night I came across a quote (Charlotte Mason, of course!) that I thought the girls would enjoy.  I paraphrased it (she wrote in the late 1800's - early 1900's, which is a little above the girls' reading level...for now!) and wrote it out on our whiteboard for them to see.  They didn't say anything about it, but when I came upstairs to start school, I found that Macey had copied it on a sheet of paper, illustrated it appropriately, and left it for me to find.  

THAT'S what I want our homeschool to be like.  I want them to enjoy what they do, see for themselves, take the initiative, understand, and to learn to LOVE to read, and listen to, books and stories! 

Especially the stories!  :)

First week of school

We finally finished our first week of school...on Saturday.  NOT how I had planned to begin our year, but circumstances being what they were (Jaela had some difficulty with her math one day, Macey had difficulty with her handwriting the next, and mommy had difficulty getting started on time EVERY day), I think we did pretty good.  I wondered aloud to Mike at one point if maybe I have over-estimated the girls' readiness for some subjects, but after I thought about it for a while I decided that no, it was not the girls that I have over-estimated, it was ME!  You'd think I would have learned by now that I am not as young as I once was, and I can NOT stay up as late as I want every night and not expect to pay the penalty the next day!  So, starting tonight, NO MORE OLYMPICS for me...and lo and behold I have gotten the kitchen clean, the laundry started, school prepped for tomorrow, this blog written, AND I will still get to bed at a decent hour!  Self-discipline really does pay off!

The irony of it all is that I am in the middle of reading Elisabeth Elliot's book "Discipline".  Maybe I should start over again from the beginning!  :)