Weekly Book Post: Zomo the Rabbit and Finding Nouf

Reading is getting pretty exciting around here, as my second "reluctant" or "late blooming" reader is finding her way into reading and loving it!

Both the kids discovered a fun book at the library this week, and have read it over and over again: Zomo the Rabbit by Gerald McDermott is a trickster tale with a twist.  My kids think I should tell it in church sometime in my role as storyteller.  They want me to recommend it to all of you.




Meanwhile, I read Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris last week.  It's an interesting mystery, set in Saudi Arabia.  When a rich sixteen year old girl goes missing and her family suspects she ran away into the desert, they hire their desert guide to search for her.  When she turns up dead, a conflicted mix of emotions drives him to keep investigating.  Along the way he is joined in the search by a female medical examiner, which challenges his traditional notions of women.

I read it because it was on a list of overlooked good books on NPR, and it was good.  It wasn't great ... there were some awkward scenes, a somewhat predictable and anticlimactic ending.  But ultimately, for a first novel this is solid and I would read more of her books if I have time in the future.

Making Use of the Blackberries

I may have missed the main blackberry harvest this year, but I still got a few.



We are trying to make wine.  It's something new, so we'll see how it goes!



And jam, of course.

No Apologies

I recently found myself trying to make conversation at a dinner party with someone I didn't know ... a relative of a friend of my husband's ... who asked me "what's new with you?"

I found myself floundering, saying something lame like "nothing really.  Between the kids, the house, and work, I don't have time for 'new' things."  The conversation then proceeded in a direction of this well-meaning lady telling me I needed to "get out more", put the kids in school, and basically "get a life".

It's not really her fault.  The way I presented my life, my inability to answer that simple small-talk question, did make it sound like I really don't have much of a life of my own.  By starting off from a position of apology - making excuses for why I couldn't think of anything "new" - I had already undermined my own life.

Thinking about it, I've come to a few realizations:

I don't need to have anything "New", when the everyday is just the way I want it.  

The whole question "What's New With You?" is really asking for you to give a highlight reel, preferably with some kind of major transition or adventure (travel!).  But people may just ask it because it's an easy conversation starter.

I am not really a collector of adventures.  I am more of a homebody.

I will not apologize for living the life I want to live.  


So I wish I had replied something like "Nothing 'new' really, since I'm so happy and content with my everyday life.  It is rich and full of things I enjoy like books to read, cooking and enjoying good food, homeschooling and getting to go on learning adventures with my kids, birdwatching from my window, taking care of my home and land, and trying out new homesteading projects like raising turkeys or making blackberry wine.  All of that keeps me busy and I love it."

We don't need to apologize for living the life we want to live.  Maybe it's not the way someone else would live - that's why it's your life and not theirs. Claim it proudly.  No apologies.

Most Essential Homeschool Supplies

It's back to school time (for a lot of us). Do you have everything set up the way you want it?  Do you have a lovely school room or area for your kids to use?

I don't.  I don't have everything set up the way I want it.  And I don't have a lovely school area for the kids.  But I have enough to get by; I have the essentials.

My "Essential Homechool Supplies" List:

1.  A large whiteboard.  This is our most used tool - I write schedules and lists on it, the kids like to draw on it or write out their math on it.  Ours is not fixed to a wall, so it can travel around the house and yard with us, going wherever we have decided to do school that day.

2.  Pencils.  Sharpened ones to be exact.  I don't know about your kids, but mine are the masters of breaking pencils in the middle of their work and then of losing pencils in between work.  I try to keep a supply of sharpened pencils standing by to swap out.




3.  Blank books.  Sketch books, journals, composition books, etc.  Before I really started giving them all the blank books they could want, they used scrap paper for their drawings, stories, and other paper creations.  We ended up with drawings and scribblings floating all over the house and getting lost or just cluttering up every surface.  Keeping them in a book is much better.  Combine some blank books with some pencil pouches full of pencils, both graphite and colored, and you are all set to wander about the world and observe it.

4.  Computer/Internet Access.  So much of what we do is on a computer now, and with internet access you will be able to find online educational programs, look things up, create, explore, communicate.  It does pose its problems as well, but the world is literally opened up to kids on a computer.

5.  A Library Account.  We use our library accounts to their max: books for me to read to them, books for them to read out loud or to themselves, books about subjects we are studying,  DVDs, audiobooks, bilingual books for learning spanish, craft books, cook books, how-to books. There is no way I could afford all the resources we use if I had to buy them, so thank goodness for libraries!

6.  Workbooks.  Yes, we use some workbooks.  They have their place, and are one of our tools.

7.  A World Map/Globe.  Just to be able to get an idea of where in the world things are as they are discussed is invaluable.  We consult the map in relation to history, to current events, to literature, and at other times as well.

8.  A Normal Kitchen plus a few "Extras" (balloons, batteries, duct tape, wire, yarn, cheesecloth, pipettes).  If you include the contents of the recycling bin as normal kitchen supplies, you are basically set for 70% of the home science experiments your kids might do.

9.  A Sliver of Natural Space.  Somewhere for the kids to observe nature and engage in nature study, which is really not a planned "school subject" but rather the habit of feeling connection with nature and noticing what is going on out in the non-human world.  You can add in nature journals and field guides, tools to extend our senses (magnifying glasses, binoculars), and ways to capture and hold samples and specimens, but the real essential is just a bit of nature.

10.  And the most important "supply"!  Time!  The kids just need time: time alone, time with an adult paying attention to them, time to explore, time to read, time to create, time to be silly, time to ask questions, time to think, unrushed and unscheduled time!

What would be on your list of essentials?

A new screen time management tool

It's one of those controversial subjects between parents - how much "screen time" do you allow your children?  Within my social circle, the answer ranges from "only one movie a week" to "I don't put limits on it at all".

The "experts" tell us to limit screen time to one hour a day, which I can see ... and yet it would not work for us.  No - we love our minecraft, wii, plants vs. zombies, youtube, netflix, and lego.com too much, and I am inclined toward the philosophy of letting them do what they love.

But letting them have as much screen time as they wanted wasn't working for us either.  The primary problem became that they both wanted access to the same devices at the same time, and ended up fighting over them all the time.  It was driving me crazy.

So I made up these "Screen Time Tickets".  The tickets can be used to purchase screen time on any of our devices that are available at the time.  The kids need to have a ticket if they want to do any "non-educational/creative" screen time on a school day, and they get a ticket for each chore they do, each school subject they complete, or for one hour of non-screen and no-fighting play with each other or one hour spent alone outside.  Yep, there is an element of bribery to this system, but getting them to do chores or schoolwork isn't the real point.

They aren't fighting over the computer anymore, and that is the real value here.  When someone had to "cash in a ticket" to get the device, and when there is a timer running for how long they will be on that device, the other one is more willing to wait.  Because they get about the same number of tickets each day, they know it's "fair".  And I know that there will be a balance between the screen and more active time.

The downside is that now I am constantly running a bank and operating timers.  But it's worth it.

Weekly Book Post: Flight Behavior and Cooked

Both Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Pollan are on my short list of favorite authors.  In fact, if I was going to have a fantasy dinner party, these two would be some of the guests.  (Who else?  Wendell Berry, Wangari Maathai, Desmond Tutu).  So taking these books on family vacation with me was an obvious choice.

Flight Behavior is Kingsolver's latest novel.  I was first introduced to Kingsolver with The Poisonwood Bible, and I still consider that her greatest work.  This latest book is not as good, but it's still a lovely and well-written book.  Set in the mountain country of Tennessee, this is a tale of global climate-change, told from the point of view of a compelling main-character who combines natural curiosity and intelligence with stifling poverty and lack-of-education.  Many parts of the novel seem to have been written as a thought experiment - a way to create a conversation between the rural "reds" and the urban educated "blues" of our increasingly polarized society - but even if the conversations seem contrived they are still really good.  So the work feels a bit like the story took back seat to the political agenda, but I still enjoyed it.

Cooked is Pollan's latest book about food.  Here, he delves deeply and romantically/sentimentally into four types of cooking: cooking meat on a fire, cooking slowly in water, baking bread, and fermenting things.  Along the way, he coaxes, exhorts, begs, cajoles, and generally just tries to convince us all that we should be doing more cooking from scratch and rely less on industrial-processed foods/food-like-substances.  Although I agree with his point, and I found many parts of the book excellent, I also found myself laughing at some of his hyperbole (particularly in the section about BBQ, which he compares to ancient animal sacrifice to the gods and goes on a very poetic bent about man's control of fire).  But really, some giggles and quibbles aside, Pollan has once again delivered an important piece of the argument about how we should eat, and what is wrong with our modern consumer society.  And the arguments that this book is anti-woman are ridiculous to me - he goes out of his way to point out that preparing food for us is a human task, not a woman's task, and that the industrial system dismantled home cooking, not the woman's movement.  But I have my issues with the whole domesticity/feminism dichotomy, anyway.

I'd recommend both books, while not claiming them to be the best works of either author.  But when you this awesome, even your lesser works are worthy of our time to read. :)

Things found in our garden this week

Our silkies are such good parents, and they've managed to hatch out 5 more chicks.  They are adorable, and the chickens and rooster are being really good and protective parents.




I missed the main blackberry harvest time this year, but there are still a lot out there.  I've been working to gather enough to try my hand at making blackberry wine.




We're harvesting and eating a few cabbages from the garden, as well.