Saturday morning

breakfast, this morning- before baking

Good links

This photo has nothing to do with this post but I'm posting it anyway.  Mark took it on Mother's Day.  I'm so grateful to get to be a mama to these five.

Good morning, all.   It's just after 8 and Ella is sitting next to me reading Return to Gone-Away by Elizabeth Enright. My Bible, journal and reading materials are all in my room (where Audra is still sleeping after crawling into bed with us early this morning), so I'm composing a post instead.  Adelia and the boys are playing in the boys' room.

Some links for you:

• I really liked this post on friendship.  Katy Rose writes of authenticity, spurring one another on and this:  "Relationships thrive when thoughts of care turn in to acts of care."  I want to be this kind of friend.
• I liked this post on homeschooling over at The Busy Mom blog, which reminds me of another post I read recently by this same author called Raising our Sons to Seek After God.
• This is my new favorite salad dressing.  NOTE: the original recipe listed makes something like a gallon of dressing, which is clearly more than you'll want to make.  Here is the scaled-down recipe:

Greek salad dressing
3/4 cup olive oil
1 cup red wine vinegar
1-2 cloves of garlic*
2 tsp oregano
2 tsp basil
1.5 tsp pepper
1.5 tsp salt
1.5 tsp onion powder
1.5 tsp Dijon mustard
(optional: add feta cheese to the dressing)

*the original recipe calls for garlic powder but I just ignored that and put the real stuff in.

I've been chopping up romaine, cucumbers, tomatoes, red onions, peppers and feta and adding some of that scrumptious dressing and eating it regularly for lunch.  YUM.

Blessings to you for a wonderful day!

~Stacy

True Story

I am 45 lessons behind in correcting Ella's math.

No, that is not a typo.  45.
As in: forty-five.


So, basically: I don't correct.  [Or rather I do, just only a few times per year, apparently.] 

Well.  Now you can all feel a whole lot better about your own correcting skills.

Carry on! 

Garden planting

Just over a week ago....  our garden space: 

then, freshly rototilled:

{ our chickens were happy! }

planting:

What Audra did while we planted:

This day she was collecting worm families, but she also collects caterpillars, roly-poly bugs and snails.  She names them, too.

See what I mean about my basil?  I always kill it! 

I began with six starts, and all but two have died.

So then I purchased the Trader Joe's variety- full, happy, healthy plants.

And now they're dying.

~sigh~

 I'm determined to get an herb garden started, though.  That's basil on the left.

I've been thinking lately about how I'm an unlikely gardener.  We never had a vegetable garden growing up.  My grandparents did, but my family never did.  And I hated to weed- sometimes mom had me weed her flower beds and I always dreaded that chore.  There were times we went out to weed my grandparents' garden and I just remember I would SO rather be playing with my cousins.

Then I married Mark.  As soon as we bought our house, he was so excited about planting a garden-- which was sort of odd to me.  Gardens meant work and not the kind of work I like.  It's taken me several years to get to the place where I truly do enjoy it.  I don't even mind the weeding anymore.  Some days I even like it.

{ cutting lilacs to bring into the house }

I'm thankful that even though most of the time I don't really know what I'm doing, gardening is a very forgiving hobby.  We rarely prune our lilac trees but we get lilacs every single year.  We forget to replant our tulip bulbs but they keep cheerily coming up each spring.  We forget to weed our raspberries but we'll get some anyway.  We plant seeds and vegetables grow- maybe not as many as we'd like- and our garden may not get the weeding it deserves, but we'll get vegetables. 

We've learned so much and we continue to learn, a little here, a little there.  I'm trying to remember to look things up: Why is my basil plant turning yellow and looking sad?  Why are the leaves on one of our blueberry bushes turning yellow?  How do I tie back our tall raspberry bushes?  When should we prune?  We forget things, every season, and still we get fruit and flowers.  I am thankful. 

On discipleship

Regarding the Great Commission, and how we are to disciple nations.  From Michael Farris:

God gave us an example in Scripture.  Abraham was expected to disciple Isaac.  Isaac was supposed to disciple Jacob.  Jacob, head of a large homeschooling family of 12 sons plus a number of daughters, was expected to disciple his children.  The 12 sons were to disciple their families and the discipled families were to be faithful tribes, and ultimately produce a discipled nation.

The family is God's intended principal method for discipleship.

The importance of all this becomes apparent when we consider the passage that contains the command that Jesus told us was the most important of all.

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.  These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts.  Impress them on your children.  Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.  (Deuteronomy 6:4-8)

We are to love God.  We are to teach our children to love God.  And we are to do this teaching as we go through the course of everyday life.

On a Monday morning

I'm just back from an early-morning walk with my mom and the sky is clear and blue.  And Mark has the day off.  I'm thankful.  I have a hunch we'll spend most of the day outside in the yard, "puttering", as Mark calls it.  Seeing what needs to be done and doing it, then moving on to something else that needs to be done.  The kids will play around, too- and usually we'll enlist the older kids to help with something, and they truly enjoy doing it.

Last night we heard the peeps of baby birds in Ella's birdhouse! 
 

 

Our rhubarb is flourishing and I'm trying to keep up with it. Yesterday I baked some Rhubarb Pound Cake- and it was delicious, as always.  Last week we made some rhubarb muffins using SouleMama's Leftover Oatmeal muffins recipe (tucked at the bottom of that post).  I just pulled a stalk, diced it and cooked it down a bit before using it in place of the "1/2 cup extra 'somethings'" part of the recipe.  They were yummy.  This week I plan to make some rhubarb crisp.  Mmm!

We lost a chicken a few days ago.  Summer.  We have no idea what happened~ just that we found her- dead, in the coop.  She had no wounds and there had been no signs of illness.  The kids were sad and we will all miss her.  She was a sweet hen.  Mark buried her in our back yard.

Ella took several close-up photos of Summer last week and now she's so glad she did.

Last week I was blessed by the prayer tagged onto the end of this: 

Our son had been rude and bully-ish to his little sister, so I had him copy a verse, 3x- that I'd written on the board: Let all that you do be done in love.  Then I asked him to write out a prayer with that verse in mind- about his relationship with his sister.  He wrote:

Der God, 

I pa that you wod help me be loven to Adelia and you wod hilp me hav self cincstl. 

In Jesus nam

Amin.

The teacher in me sees lots of room for growth, obviously- in his sounding out skills, spacing, grammar, and spelling.  But the mother in me is blessed by his heartfelt prayer, and the words he used in it.  And I trust in the God who sees this prayer and who has tucked this verse inside my son's heart.

I hope you have a wonderful day!

~Stacy

"Live at home"

"Learn to do common things uncommonly well; we must always keep in mind that anything that helps fill the dinner pail is valuable."  - George Washington Carver

During the night I dreamed about our vegetable garden.  That's probably because last night I was poring over our garden plans and reading up about each item in this book:

--which is a great resource and one I go back to, again and again.  I've added a few more things to our list: nasturtiums (did you know that the entire plant- flower and all- is edible?)  And they're pretty.  (those leaves!  and the colors!  love them.)

{photo from here}

I'm also considering garlic (is it too late to plant this?  Anyone know?  It's still relatively cold here.) and tomatillos.  (Apparently they're fairly prolific and grow well in cooler climates.)

I'm making note of what I hope to preserve this year, too.

For the freezer:
I'm hoping to make strawberry jam, strawberry-rhubarb jam, raspberry jam and blackberry jam.  Possibly blueberry jam, too.  I'm not a big fan but I'm sure some of the kids will eat it.  (I'm trying to remember how many batches of jam I made last year but I forget.  Somewhere around 10 batches, I think.  And we just pulled our last jar from the freezer.)  And applesauce.  I will likely can some applesauce, too.  We're planting sugar pumpkins for the purpose of making and freezing some pumpkin puree.

To can:
We always can beans- and we never can enough.  So we're planting both pole and bush beans this year in hopes for a large crop.  We also want to can dilly beans this year, too.  I want to can salsa- it's been a few years and I'd love to do it again.  And dill pickles. 

***

One of the biographies Mark read aloud this year was George Washington Carver.  Carver (1864-1943) was a brilliant scientist who defied people's expectations of him- because he was a black man.  He had been born into slavery and was not allowed to attend public school but he yearned for an education and had an insatiable appetite for learning.  Even as a young boy, his neighbors called him the Plant Doctor.  He knew plants.  Every morning by 4:00, he went for a walk in nature and to spend time with his Creator, and he studied whatever he saw.  He dug up plants and studied them and wondered at their purposes. He studied the soil.  If he came upon someone working at a skill that he was unfamiliar with, he asked if he could learn.  In 1896, Booker T. Washington invited Carver to come to the Tuskagee Institute and head up the Agricultural Department.  (By this time Carver had collected several thousands of specimens and understood soils, grafting, and cross-breeding.) 

Carver was devoted to his agricultural students, but he had great compassion for the poor black cotton farmers in the area.  He saw the miserable conditions in which these farmers lived- in broken-down shacks, with no nearby trees or flowers or anything planted nearby- other than cotton- and he wanted to reach out to them and help.  Their whole life was cotton, and yet he soil was poor.  Carver knew how to bring health back to the soil.  He came up with the idea to create an Agricultural Experiment Station at Tuskagee, in order to show the farmers what could be done on the worn-out soil.  He came up with ways to treat the soil that would be available to the farmers, he printed bulletins and recipes.  Then he realized that the farmers weren't going to be reading the materials, so he started a Farmer's Institute, where he invited the farmers and their wives to come- once a month- and SEE what they could do.  He told them in simple language how they could work their land more effectively. 

He happened upon an old black farmer one day- Henry Baker- and was invited in for a meal.   They ate a typical meal: side meat, corn bread and molasses.  Carver noted that there were no vegetables or proteins.  They ate the fat of the pork instead of real meat.  There were no eggs.  He began sharing with them how they could 'live at home'; that the growing season in the south was long, and they could plant a garden and have fresh vegetables, year round.  He offered to bring them some seeds.  He told them they could raise peaches and pears and cherries and persimmons, berry bushes and walnuts and pecans.  He told them to get some chickens.  He told them he'd bring them a coop himself and teach them what to do.  As he was leaving, Henry Baker said, "I want to thank you, Professor, for your kindness.  I is just one farmer, and you done took all that time telling me how I should live.  But Professor, I got neighbors that's worse off than I is.  I owns my land.  They just rents it.  If you tell me when you're going to bring them seeds and that chicken coop, I'll get my neighbors here.  And you can tell them all about how it ain't good for the land to grow just one thing all the time- and about 'live at home'."  Carver promised to come the following Saturday, and told Henry to invite the farmers' wives, too. 

Carver spent all that week cooking and showed up that Saturday with a big wooden box full of jams, eggs, cured meat, vegetables, and packets of seeds.  Twenty farmers and their wives were crammed into Henry Baker's cabin and they listened to Carver tell them about the land.  They sampled all he'd brought for them.  He showed them how to raise hens and told them about curing meat.  He taught them how to make things.  "'Live at home'", Carver told them, "Don't buy everything you need at the plantation owner's store.  Grow your own food.  A garden is the best doctor there is."  Then he gave each man some garden seeds and some flower seeds. 

There's much more to his life story, but we were inspired by his vision to 'live at home'.  On our little city lot there's only so much we can do, but we can use the land God has given us, and be good stewards of it.

After reading that biography, Mark and I encouraged each of our (older) kids to choose just one crop (from our yard and garden) this year to oversee: to read up about it, to study it, to plant it, tend it, weed and harvest it.  I told them that I would then buy from them what I would normally purchase from the store.  So as I plan for our garden this spring, they are busy plotting and planning, too.  Isaac intends to take over the cucumbers, and to plant dill and make dill pickles- and sell them to me.  Ella is researching carrots.  Isaias is still contemplating what he'll take on. 

We'll see how our little project turns out.  :)