First Loaf

I made regular bread for the first time ever without the help of a bread machine. 

It was incredible fun! 

My family rose and a blessed me with their mouths full of soft, warm bread and homemade beef stew.

I used Bernard Clayton's "first loaf" recipe. 

 

Another Semester Begins

 

Another semester of graduate school is well underway. I'm working towards a masters in Classical Liberal Arts Education through Belmont Abbey. We've already read, discussed, and written on Augustine's On Christian Doctrine. This week and next we are reading Beothius' The Consolation of Philosophy. This has been the most beautiful, challenging, soul-edifying education. 

Another Homeschool Year Begins

 

We've started another homeschool year. 

Avril is in 11th grade. 

Adele is in 8th. 

The girls started online classes last week. They both take art with Delightful Art Co. and Literature with House of Humane Letters, and Avril takes Speech and Debate with Kepler/ Colorado Christian College. 

This week is what I'm calling the "Pre-Week." We've started reading some of the texts we will be reading together aloud everyday like the Bible (chronologically) and Land of Hope (for American History) and The Roar on the Other Side (for Poetry), and the girls are doing some of the their independent work.  

Adele is reading The Phantom Tollbooth. Avril's started Chemistry, etc.  

Next week, we'll begin the complete schedule. We'll start reading everything we plan to read together every morning (including Shakespeare/ Plutarch), and the girls will start all their independent work like math, etc. 

It's been lovely having the freedom to ease into the school year adding a little more each week until we adjust to the full schedule. 

 

Greece Cont.

Next day, we got up early for breakfast and to meet our boat for a cruise of the Aegean. 

Our tour included the islands of Agristi, Metope, and Agina. We explored, shopped, and swam on the beach at Agristi and Agina. We didn't actually dock at Metope. We just anchored near it, jumped overboard, and swam in the deep water. Amazing! 

Cruising and swimming in the Aegean was a dream come true after reading the epics. 

Pistachio gelato

 That evening, we strolled through Monastraki on the way to dinner, where we discovered an old book and print shop. It was a dream of dreams to find and bring home a print of Parnassus. Climbing Parnassus is a symbol for getting a Classical Christian education, so Parnassus is an important symbol for me personally. 

After looking for a long time, I asked the man in charge of the shop if he had any prints of Parnassus. He made it his mission and after digging in the corners of his very cluttered, very dusty, very, very interesting shop, he brought out several prints. The one I liked best also happened to be the most affordable. So my dream of dreams came true, and I brought home my very own print of Parnassus from Athens! 

We had an authentic Greek dinner at the most wonderful restaurant- Mamma Callas. If I close my eyes, I can still feel, taste, hear, and smell this wonderful place and the meal from start to finish. Again, we could sit for hours and enjoy the music and the drinks and the food and one another. (We would go again two more times on other nights of our trip.) This place may live on in my memory as the best dining experience I've ever had. 

Homeschool Planning is Difficult and Time-Consuming But Invaluable

Arcus and I are spending a lot of time together in my homeschool classroom where his cage is, because I'm at the table, surrounded by books, working on a detailed plan for our next year of homeschooling. 

It's a lot of work to make my own plan! 

This will be our second year homeschooling without CC, but this is the first year I am making my plans with little to no reference to my old CC guides. 

I know many homeschool moms have been making their own plans from the beginning of their homeschool journey, so the work involved is no surprise to them. 

But for more than a decade, we got our homeschool plans from CC, and we were very happy do whatever we needed to do to follow their plans (as far as was humanly possible) to be a part of our beloved CC community.  

That worked for us and blessed us for many years, in fact. 

But even as a diligent CC parent and Challenge director, and I was very diligent, I often felt off balance and back on my heels, because I was always discovering what someone else had planned for me and my children.

As often as I read my guides and as carefully as I ever studied them, I was simply in the position of accommodating myself always to someone else's purpose and vision for every single assignment all year long. 

This was, in fact, exhausting and often exasperating. 

Now, even though it is difficult to make my own plans at the start, there are already some true advantages occurring to me as I work it all out for myself. 

First of all, I am moving forward into this homeschool year knowing exactly what I am doing and why and how.

I know the plan "like the back of my hand," down to the details and purpose of each assignment, and I am entering this year with a peace and a confidence that I didn't experience when I was getting my plans, as good as they were, premade.

Second, I would still consider our homeschool plans very challenging, even rigorous, but the amount of work will never venture into the impossible or the absurd.   

As a business, CC probably has no incentive to cut anything from their curriculum that may add to the value and appeal to their product, and they want to provide more than enough work for anyone/everyone in their programs, so one solution to the constant dilemma of too much work for many CC families was/is to "scale" or "taylor" and simply do less than what is assigned in the guides week to week. 

Now I can simply scale as I plan! 

My plans for this coming year are challenging. We'll have to be as disciplined and diligent as ever, and we will still need to stretch to accomplish it all. But my plans are much more humane to begin with, so we won't be demoralized by the amount of work, and we'll likely have the satisfaction of finishing our school work every week. 

The final and major positive to making my own plan is that we will finally be doing a lot of work together. 

When we were in CC and I was directing a Challenge level and the girls were in their age-assigned Challenge levels, we'd all be working in the same room, but we were each doing very separate work. 

I became more and more conscious of this fact and less and less comfortable with the reality of what CC was doing to our lives and even our homeschool. 

Much of the time, my daughters, who are best friends, were too busy doing their separate Challenge work to engage with each other over the ideas they were encountering during the school days for long. 

In fact, much of the time, I was too busy working for CC as a director or an SR to engage in my own homeschool for long before I had to get back to my CC work.  

So this year, we will read Scripture and Shakespeare together, study poetry together, and read American History together. 

The girls are in different levels of math and Latin, of course, so they will still have some independent work to do. 

But whatever we can do together, we will. 

I am certainly living with the consequences the choice to leave CC. 

Now I am forced into making plans to accommodate my own vision for our homeschool. 

So it is taking hours and hours of planning up front. 

But for once, I am actually giving myself entirely to the work of making a plan, and I will continue to be free to give myself entirely to our homeschool this year.      

In many ways, all this planning is proving an invaluable blessing. 

I have taken ownership of my homeschool, and I earnestly believe I will be leading my precious daughters in learning together better than ever before. 

Greece Cont.

 

We took a day trip from Athens to Delphi. Here is a picture of Mount Parnassus.  

We toured the museum briefly. I saw this statue of Socrates. 

We had a delicious, authentic lunch in the mountain village of Arachova where they served us labneh (beet and yogurt dip) with fresh bread. We also had greek salad, fried zucchini balls, roasted chicken, roasted pork, roasted vegetables... The houses in Arachova were perched on the sides of the cliffs. 

This is picture of the medieval clock tower on a cliff in Arachova. We did some shopping there. I purchased some olive oil lotion and a Turkish coffee pot. We found some homemade chewy candy (similar to loukomi/ Turkish delight) made with walnuts and covered in sesame seeds that we sampled, liked, and purchased to bring home to the girls. 

When we returned to Athens, we rested before heading out for dinner. We continued to explore the shops, hunting for one-of-a-kind earrings for each of our daughters. Dwayne found a pipe made of olive wood that he was able to enjoy on the deck of our apartment once he also found a tobacco store. We took the shop owner's recommendation for dinner, and enjoyed a late meal on a rooftop with a view of the Acropolis. One of the remarkable things about Greece is that they allow you to sit for hours at dinner and never rush you. Once you have your food, they won't even come to the table unless you wave your arm to let them know you need something. At first, the pace was too slow for us/ we were used to the pace of New England where even a leisurely dinner takes no more than one hour, but as the days went on, we started to relax and enjoy this slower pace a lot. 

We walked around after dinner and happened upon a gelato place. Wow! I feel as if I have never tasted ice cream until I tasted the gelato in Greece. This is cherry gelato. It was unbelievable. 

 

Greek Food

Since coming home from Greece, I've been making several of the dishes we ate there. 

Greece had delicious breads, so I have been making fresh bread every few days to serve warm with dinner or have delicious toast at breakfast. We haven't had to buy store bought bread, and we don't miss it. Fresh bread is delicious! 

On Sundays, I've been roasting a whole chicken and lemon potatoes and serving these with a fresh Greek salad made with Corinthian olive oil we brought home. Delicious! (And of course, I save the chicken bones and scraps to make broth.)

We picked up fresh eggplant, squash, and tomatoes from the farmer's market, so I made briam (roasted vegetables) to go with grilled Greek chicken tenderloins. 

I used leftover briam for breakfast, eating a fried egg with a soft yolk on top of the saucy vegetables with toast (from my homemade bread toasted to sop up all the yummy briam sauce and egg yolk.) Delicious! 

Today, I made a lemon chicken and potato soup using leftover broth saved from the lemon potatoes mentioned above.  I served it with warm, fresh bread. Delicious! 

All in all, the visit to Greece and eating meal after meal of delicious, wholesome, homemade foods inspired me to spend more time making better meals now that I'm home.