Ordinary Time

Especially when it is P. pulling in just in time to eat dinner with us! It's good to have her home. She rode a lot of horses, learned a lot of new things, and came home with more money than she left with. We're all curious to see what she is going to do next.  Now, she, TM, and D. are off to do some shopping and then will end up at A.'s. And I will sleep well.

It's felt like a very full week followed by a very full weekend. I took H. to get her first Covid vaccine today! This weekend is our Greek feast and play. L. is making sure that everyone is working on rehearsing whether they want to or not. Today, she made everyone help her make programs for it. Telling you that in the actor bios in the program Y. is recorded as saying, "I didn't want to be in this play, but I had to anyway," tells you everything you need to know about how the two narrators (Y. and L.) are getting along over this. The masks are all painted and they have been rehearsing with them all week. I promised Y. that I would not video the performance. Note that I have no control over what her older siblings choose to do with their phones. And tonight, I had a brief insight into what is going on with Y. and the world of theater. Tonight she told me that she wanted me to change one of the lines about her character because she didn't want anyone saying that ab...

R. started to plummet right around the end of dinner. I have no idea what flipped her switch, but it was flipped and she ended up lying down and screaming long, piercing screams. Fun times. This has never boded well for the rest of the night. At one point, she seemed to call my name after J. had left her room, so I headed in. (I'll take whatever small effort on her part to want me near, as this is still an issue. More often than not I cannot even kiss her good-night.) Here is when I decided to try an experiment and its success is why I'm able to sit down and write tonight. In my EFL class, we have been doing a lot of work with grounding exercises... purposefully breathing deeply while focusing on relaxing any tension in your body. This is because being in such a calm state communicates itself to the horses and encourages connection with them. I have certainly seen it work with Java because she is highly attuned to the state of people around her and mirrors them almost immediate...

I am back to wearing a wool cardigan over another sweater and my winter coat when outside, which I was a lot today. I am kind of done with the cold and the wind... particularly the wind. Last week, when the weather was a bit warmer, it crossed my mind that perhaps I would take my disgusting, barn-smelling winter coat and wash it. Like so much in my life, I never got around to it, and now I'm glad I didn't. Procrastination pays off again.  A book I have been reading had a chapter about saunas and the nordic countries seeming need for them. Now, I've never quite understood saunas. Why on earth would someone voluntarily sit in an uncomfortably hot and steamy room? It has never sounded appealing. At all. I actually cannot think of anything that sounds less appealing except perhaps a tropical rain forest where it is hot, humid, the bugs are the size of your head, and your skin grows fungus. Can you tell I'm just not a heat and humidity type of person? Then earlier this week,...

The end is in sight! Of school that is. Nearly everyone is done with their math books for the year. Normally, when someone has finished a math or grammar book, I just have them move on to the next one. But with the end for all of them coming so near to the end of the school year, we will just start fresh in the fall. We'd have to go back to refresh anyway, so it doesn't make sense to start new ones right now. We have four more chemistry lessons and then we are done with that study and Greece we finished a couple of weeks ago, though they are still rehearsing their play for Sunday. This means we are starting in on our architecture study, which will be nice because it is so different from what we are doing, and is more art-based which will be nice for the end of the school year.  To begin our architecture study, as a bridge to what we've already learned, we have started with the Seven Wonders of the World, both ancient and modern, then we will cover the highlights (it will be...

The theme for this week while I was planning was 'what is cheap to offset the cost of our Greek feast on Sunday?' It's fun to have a splurge once in a while food-wise, but I still like to keep the budget for the week in the same range. It makes splurges possible. Monday, April 12 Fish chowder      The more eagle eyed among you may notice that this is a meal from last week. I had to do some rearranging of dinners last week because getting ready for my next round of horse classes took far longer than I anticipated one day, so instead of cooking, we got cheap sub sandwiches from the grocery store and chips. This meal got pushed to this week. Sourdough bread Tuesday, April 13 Swedish meatballs      Really the only reason we're having this is because as I was looking through the pantry the other day, I discovered I have another jar of lignonberry sauce which made me want Swedish meatballs. Red potatoes      Writing this list out every week can be ...

Read this, it's a little long, but worth it, I think. "In observing his [Merlin, the author's highly traumatized and reactive stallion] behavior over time (well, really more like enduring and surviving his behavior over time), I found the trauma pattern to be 'consistently erratic.' Merlin seemed to try, sincerely, to keep it together. he was at times engaged and filled with promise, intelligent, and even enthusiastic about learning something new. Then suddenly, seemingly without warning, he'd trip off into a rage, whereupon he'd either lunge toward the handler, rearing and striking with teeth bared, or pull away and run so frantically he'd lose his balance and slide on his side, sometimes ten or fifteen feet across the arena into the fence, scraping his hide, lying there for ten minutes covered with sweat, staring blankly as if he'd given up the ghost while his pulse was racing frantically. These tantrums were heartbreaking to witness, and absolute...