Ordinary Time

Well, a sort of wordless Thursday. I'm pretty sure it is impossible for me not to add words to, well, anything. I'm in a much better place this evening, but feel a bit done in, so here's some pictures from today. This morning R. played with the slime I had made yesterday. She eventually became a little fascinated by it. It was a much better day for her, and thus me. Here is the photo of Java's stitches which I sent to the vet today. Isn't she healing nicely? I'll be taking those stitches out tomorrow. (Because I forgot to do it today.) Java was NOT nice for the farrier this morning, though. We ended up needing to put a chain on her halter. This would be the same horse that doesn't care someone it putting 50 stitches in her or is jabbing a syringe in her twice a day to flush a drain. I need to work on her feet more I think. And my tomato plants really, really need to go outside, but we are still a few days away from our last frost date. J. is maki...

The day started off well enough. Our two new bee packages (that's six pounds of bees, folks) arrived and B. put them in the hives. It wasn't the greatest weather with the heavy rain, so we're hoping they will be all right. People were generally happy, and I had plans for things to do. Since no one could play outside and I had just said no to a for an activity a certain child tends to fixate on, I thought I'd be the fun mom and make some slime. L. and G. (who particularly appreciated the slime) H. and Y. Y. decided that she did NOT like the feel of slime, and went back to playing with water in her tide pool. Y. and K.  K. made a taco and proceeded to pretend to eat it for the camera. The child for whom I had really made the slime decided that she was going to be unhappy no matter what I did. What ensued was a very unpleasant hour. A sad fact of life around here is that more often than I can do no right with this child. Her father is a slightly differ...

This time for the quarantine... O give me a home, where coyotes don't roam, And the poultry can all safely play. Where seldom is heard a bickering word, And the hot spots can last all the day. (Chorus:) O, shelter at home, No one leaves, no one comes through the day. Where Zoom meetings last 'till the time limit's past. Who knows how long we'll have to stay? But when we do leave, we must believe, That essential the errand must be. A mask we must wear, else others may stare, And away from us people may flee. (Chorus) The one thing we do, to help us get through, Is to bake all the good things to eat. Bread, cakes, and pies, it's a feast for the eyes, Every day it's a new type of treat. (Chorus) Some items are rare, hard find, few to share, As the weeks at home pass us all by. Trampolines, yeast,  TP, and elastic we need, Without them we may all just cry. (Chorus) We all want this to end, but do wonder when, The world returns to n...

 The menu is just for ten days this time. I went to the store early last week and bought $200 worth of groceries, but I'm not entirely sure what exactly I bought with all that money. That would have been a huge shopping trip under normal time, but a shopping trip where I'm just buying usual things and planning meals around it? It's crazy. To make it worse, I don't feel as though I did a terribly good job of buying the usual things because making the meal plan for even ten days proved a little challenging if we didn't want to eat the same food day after day. I cannot wait for the greens in the garden to get big enough to use. That will help a lot! Tuesday, April 28 Green chicken curry      This is one of our favorites which has lots of green beans Fresh noodles Baby bok choy      I froze some baby bok choy back in March, and this is what I have left. It will get boiled and then a sauce with garlic and hoisin sauce among other things goes over it...

I'm realizing that many children (and parents) are feeling a little bit house-bound at this point. With some of us looking at another four weeks of sheltering at home, I thought I would put together of list of things that you can do with your children to help pass the time and fill the days. Twenty-seven years of occupying children might as well be put to good use. I have done some brain-storming today as I sewed masks (they're not the most interesting or technical things to sew) to see how many different activities I could come up with. Here is my totally stream of consciousness list in no order what so ever. Not all activities will be good for every age, nor will every activity be useful for every family. Hopefully, you'll read through the list and it will trigger your own ideas, too. If that happens, feel free to add them in the comments to help out other families. Ready? Here we go! Make a blanket fort under a table Serve lunch Make more than one fort and have...

At least I think it's Friday, is it Friday? Some days I'm not entirely sure what day it is and have to stop and think for a moment. L. has continued working on her pull-up skills and is now able to do three pull-ups in a row. I had been asked about our geese, whether they are territorial or not. Our geese are African geese, and our friends bought them because they were loosing a lot of chickens to predators and this breed were supposed to be great watch dogs. (Watch geese?) They do seem to pay attention to their surroundings and will honk at anything, but I'm not sure they are terribly concerned about keeping the other birds safe. While they make a lot of noise, I find them to be pretty friendly. Some children seem to think they hiss a lot, but I've never had one hiss at me. My biggest beef with them is their mess. It is far greater than either the chickens or the ducks. Both J. and I are feeling a little done in this evening. R. was up at 2:30 last night, and whil...

It's been a week here for reasons other than viruses and quarantines. We've also been dealing with a whole lot of grief in some of the children. It's hard, hard stuff. It made me realize, as I rocked and held devastated children, that one area that is not often addressed in adoption training is dealing with the raw, stomach-churning grief that can sneak up on a child years later. Sure, we are pretty prepared for the immediate grief brought about by an adoption. It can be extremely difficult to move from one circumstance to an entirely new one, especially if the new parents are completely unknown. I'm afraid, though, that too many parents are under the impression that once you have navigated that and are years down the road, having built a healthy, attached relationship, that they are done. Done with all that hard stuff and can just be a normal family with normal issues. This child is theirs now and they are good and loving parents, their child seems happy and enjoys t...

I'm thinking I'm going to be writing a rather serious blog post tomorrow, so how about we stick with something lighter today? We finished our two-day art project this morning, and it was much more successful than I had hoped. I'll show you the finished projects and then I'll tell you about them. Top (l to r): G., H., Y. Bottom (l to r): L., R., K. These are our Stonehenge silhouettes. We moved from Egypt to Neolithic Britain and Stonehenge, since they were fairly concurrent. Having done our reading and documentary watching, it was time to do an art project. (This project I found, like most art activities we do, on Pinterest .) There were a couple of skills with this project. There were supposed to be done with black construction paper for the silhouettes (another concept we talked about), but I seemed to have used that up with a previous science project. I did have dark blue card stock, so we used that instead. I actually kind of like how the blue looks. (Nor...

Because I cannot think of anything else to write, I'll write a list of the things I spent time on today. 1. Did more online ordering. I suddenly had a craving for chicken mole (or any Mexican food, really), and  good friend of mine had shared with me what she uses. It's a sauce from Mexico that you can buy from Amazon. So I did. And since I was there, I decided that this would be a good time to finally buy the two items that had been in my cart for months. One of them was a manual grain mill. I've been meaning to buy one for ages, because it seemed like a good idea to have a way to grind all this wheat if the power went out. Perhaps it's my inner-prepper being let loose a bit. That doesn't explain the book for making the cutest little felt animals, though, does it? 2. Took care of the outside animals with G. I should have worn gloves. The weather looked beautiful with a lot of sun, but the wind was strong and biting and made the cold air feel even colder. 3. W...

Am I the only who is fascinated by the unintended results of telling people they need to stay at home? I think it is so interesting following the various domino effects. For instance, yeast. Evidently yeast has been in short supply on store shelves. (I buy instant yeast in bulk, so haven't tried to buy any in a store in forever.) I know people are doing a lot more baking in their free time. I've never seen quite so many pictures of baked goods in my Facebook feed. It seems that yeast manufacturers have never had quite the demand spike they are experiencing right now. While they can increase production, they run into their own difficulties with shortages. The material they use to package the yeast so that they can sell it to stores is hard to come by. It seems jars are made in India, but due to the worldwide quarantine the factories which make the jars are closed. If a product cannot be packaged, it is difficult to sell it. Meanwhile, fresh yeast, a type of yeast normally sold t...

Look what we brought home today. You are looking at a huge pile of bricks and pavers (same pile, two different views). It took two van trips with all the benches out to get them home. What I thought was going to be a simple hour or so job turned into a four hour, back breaking extravaganza of brick toting. And the best part? They were free! Now you're probably wondering what we are going to do with all of this. Well, for quite some time we have been thinking we wanted to build a brick patio in the former garbage dump that we inherited. It's a little hard to see, but it is the space directly between the shed and the trampoline where there is little grass. When we first moved in, this space was terribly overgrown with weedy trees and six foot tall weeds. Even better, there were paint and oil cans dumped there as well as random other garbage and debris. It's taken us this long just to clear it out. With the oil and paint that leaked, it is not a good gard...

I've been seeing more and more that frustrated and stressed parents trying to do remote schooling are throwing up their hands and saying that they are not cut out for homeschooling and this experience proves it. I'm not going to argue that homeschooling is for everyone, because I don't think it is. What I want to talk about is the mistaken notion that what is currently passing for traditional education at the moment is anything but homeschooling. Sure we are all stuck at home, but that is where the similarities end. So what are the differences between homeschooling and this crisis remote e-learning? 1. It's a matter of who makes the educational decisions. As a homeschooling parent, I am the one who decides what is appropriate for my child to work on and learn, as well as how we spend our time. If a child is having a hard day, I can decide that we will do something that won't over tax my child. When child wants to do two or three math lessons (hey, it happens som...

It's Friday again. Don't you feel as though Friday has lost a little something? You know, before, there would be a little feeling of anticipation when realizing it's Friday. Now, it's more like, oh Friday, just like any other day. Anyway... My plan to have everyone take charge of finishing their school work is working pretty well. Some people have been extremely diligent and are at least halfway done in just a few days, having done more math and grammar in one day than they've done in I don't know when. Other people, well, let's just say as May approaches there is going to be some unhappiness. Better to learn the disagreeableness of putting off work now. At least that is what I'm telling myself. I have been informed that The Swooping Eagle is now completed. I have also been warned that it is not a happy ending for all of the characters. When I expressed disappointment, I was told (with a somewhat long-suffering tone), that to make a happy ending for...

We now seem to have reached the point in the quarantine where I watch too many house hunting television shows, pie is allowed for breakfast, and I have unnecessary seconds for dinner. In my defense it was calzone and there was melted cheese, plus we are due to get possibly four inches of snow tomorrow. This was one of four. One wouldn't even begin to feed everyone. Something is going to need to change before I lose all touch with reality... either warm weather or activities starting again. I actually don't care which.

It's getting towards the end of the school year, which always feels as though it is a monumental effort to keep going, especially as the weather starts to warm up. You know, like is supposed to happen in spring instead of waking up to 28 degrees and quite a bit of snow on the ground. I feel as though perhaps we've entered a version of the movie, Groundhog Day, and we just get to repeat February and March over and over and over again. And then when you combine that with day 390,233 of staying at home.... Well, let's just say being super diligent with school is not really at the top of my list of things I feel up to doing. But maybe I should have prefaced this post by saying that I realize that my younger children, being grades 5-7, are probably ready to begin taking some ownership for their own learning. Middle school is about the time I start the process of off-loading developing responsibility for their own education. This seemed like a good thing to start. So, I went t...

This is what the loft in our house looks like more often than not. Blocks are constantly set up as houses and castles. Armies war against each other, usually of the intergalactic variety. And the children who build them have long, ongoing stories attached to each of them. I would say about half of many children's day is taken up with this long, involved imaginative play. I have written a lot about play over the years. At one point, I found the term ' master players ' in reference to children who had perfected the art of play. In my previous post about this (click the link), I noted that my master players were in the six year old age range, which was older than most sources assume when writing about children and play. It annoyed me, because six is still so very young and play is exactly what they should be doing. Here I am four years later. I have spent the afternoon listening to some very involved, complicated story lines from my much older master players. Th...

We had a lovely day yesterday, though it will rank as one of the most unusual Easters ever. The Easter table. I had warned people that it was not going to be an Easter with gifts. Everyone was okay with that. It tuns out that the low bar for Easter morning expectations is the wealth of jelly beans and chocolate eggs on the table. We "went" to church, in our family room. We hid and searched for eggs. The weather cooperated and it was lovely outside. We ate brunch. This was followed by quite a bit of game playing and baking followed by a Zoom meeting between us and Jud's siblings' families. It was fun to be able to see and talk with everyone, most of whom we would have shared Easter dinner with. We had a lovely dinner of lamb, scalloped potatoes, and asparagus, followed by three types of pie. It was a good day and a wonderful way to celebrate the Resurrection.