Catan Tournament

Dwayne and I participated in a Catan Tournament at a local board game store. We both won 2 out of 3 games. We earned $40 dollars that we put towards the price of a new expansion- Explorers and Pirates. 

One Room Homeschool

Adele will often go to Avril for help with Latin. She doesn't have to go to her sister. She could come to me. But she likes going to her sister. And it's fun for me to watch them together discussing, laughing, commiserating. This picture represents what I love about homeschooling. There's no competition or compulsion. Learning is something we do together as a way of life, and those of us who are further along are constantly helping those still coming along the way and gaining even more mastery as we help them. 

Eating At Home

I made "Lad's Prime Rib Recipe" from Pioneer Woman with the mashed potatoes and the au jus this week. I added green peas, because we needed a vegetable, and I love to have peas with mashed potatoes. It was delicious! And we had meals with the leftovers. 

Dwayne pointed out that this prime rib actually costs less than what our favorite fast food restaurant costs when we all go out and order a combo. That seems insane. But it's true. 

We haven't eaten at a restaurant in weeks. The biggest reason we stopped eating at restaurants is because Norah and I can't eat anything with gluten, dairy, or sugar while we are treating our Lyme and co-infections, so that really limits menu options. 

And even the best restaurants add a lot of extras to their food, and after one bite now, we can all tell, since we have all grown more sensitive to sugar, butter, etc. 

We all begin to hesitate to eat anything at restaurants. So most of the temptation we once felt to go out to eat is basically entirely gone. 

Given our situation, we find it is usually easier to make what we crave at home, and we try and often succeed to make it better and fresher with less junk in it. 

We're eating well- making prime rib, pulled pork, pho, French fries- all the things we might have gone out to get before, because we didn't' know how to make them or weren't comfortable trying. 

We're all growing brave, knowledgable, and skilled in the kitchen, cooking and baking more and more- even with the limitations to our diet. 

And when we want "a break" from cooking, we just make simpler meals at home- chicken salad, homemade soups, egg sandwiches, etc. 

Eating more at home means we are buying more groceries, of course. 

We're also buying different and better groceries, too, so that adds to the expense in some cases. 

So we spend more on groceries than before, but we're not spending anything on restaurants, so the costs work out. 

By eating at home and cooking most things from scratch, we're controlling what we eat, we know exactly what's in our food, we're eating better, wholer, more nutritious foods, even when what we make isn't considered healthy food. We're all definitely feeling better, healing, and in general, having far nicer meals than anything we can get from most restaurants anyway!

In almost every way, in almost every case, we find that eating at home is better than eating at restaurants. 

Let Them Bake Cake!

Adele's reading "A Gathering of Days" for our homeschool right now. She came across a cake recipe in the book that she wanted to try, so I let her.  We're able to do more of that sort of thing since we aren't working on a homeschool community schedule that demands we finish a certain amount of material in a given week. Now that we're homeschooling solo, we can set our own limits on the week doing more or less, depending on what we want. 

In general, I'm letting the girls do more cooking and baking now, but not only that, I'm also asking/ assigning them to cook or bake something consistently as part of of their chores or schoolwork, depending on how the recipe fits into our day.

Looking back on the years homeschooling their older sister, I wish I had allowed her to cook and bake more, but she had so much homeschool work to do in a certain amount of time to be ready for our homeschool community meeting once a week that I couldn't imagine adding cooking or baking to her schedule. It would have been cruel to add more. 

But she might have been more prepared for adult life with more consistent practice. Though she is cooking and baking well anyway. She made black bean soup and tomatillo salsa for the family just a few days ago. So, as it goes, one can always learn things later, of course. 

But I would have had more help with the cooking and baking once she had learned to cook. That's the thing about Mom insisting on doing it herself. Mom ends up being the only who can do stuff, and that's no good for Mom or anyone else. 

So that's been one of the greatest blessings of letting go and letting the younger girls get in there and cook and bake (and make messes) in the kitchen more- there are simply more cooks and more baked goods in the house! And the more often they do the same thing, the better they get at it, and the easier it is on me, because the messes usually get smaller and smaller as they become more experienced. 

Paint Your Way Through Biology

Avril's taking another semester of Paint Your Way through Biology with Delightful Art Co. 

She makes a beautiful page like this weekly, incorporating art with the biology she's studying this year. 

Biology is full of facts, but it's all so beautiful! 

It would wrong not to take time to notice that. 

So I'm glad her ability to see the beauty in Biology is being nurtured right along with learning all the content and facts. 

Note: She's working through Apologia's Biology, doing some labs, keeping a lab journal, writing a few, formal lab reports, and she's also reading the text/ watching the videos of Devotional Biology as well.

 

Grandma's Autoharp

Dwayne's mom (Grandma Karen) gave the kids her old (but like-new) autoharp. Avril's piano/ guitar teacher taught her how to tune it, and gave her a quick lesson on how to play it. She's been playing and singing with it consistently this week. Our house is filling up with instruments! But the Bible says a wise woman's house is filled with "rare and beautiful treasures" and musical instruments qualify as treasures in my book. 

On Good Tools

 "For it is impossible or not easy for someone without equipment to do what is noble." 

-Aristotle

Dwayne bought me a nice, new pot for Christmas. I call it my magic pot. That was only a few weeks ago, but this pot has already become a workhorse in my kitchen. It's indispensable, seemingly, but I vaguely remember twenty plus years of cooking meals without this particular pot, but how did I ever get by without it? 

I've been contemplating our need for stuff lately. Maybe it's because I'm reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics that speaks on the necessities for human happiness and virtue.

As a young wife, I know I coveted a kitchen update, marble counter-tops, and a deep, farm sink, but we were (and still are) on a budget that doesn't include a $30,000+ remodel. Back then, I thought I'd surely be a domestic goddess if I just had such a nicer kitchen, right?

Later, as a new mom, I desired a beautiful nursery with designer baby bedding and decor.  Surely my newborn daughters would feel loved and safe with the nursery of my dreams. And surely I woudn't mind getting up to nurse the baby again if I only had the perfect rocking chair to sit in. But we had to settle for a used crib in the living room of our one bedroom apartment, and I had to find the virtue to get up in the middle of the night without the rocking chair of my dreams. 

These false musings and the like were/ are the deceitfulness of wealth. We often think if we just had more we'd actually be more, but it just isn't so. No matter how much we have, we have to do the work of becoming virtuous by applying God's grace with the help of the Holy Spirit through the mortification of our own flesh and applied elbow grease.  

But, then again, I also remember ten years ago, after a decade or more of cooking, how much more healthily we ate after Dwayne gave me an authentic chef's knife for chopping vegetables. That was another Christmas. I still have that knife, use it several times a day, hand wash it, and sharpen it every year. Kitchen gifts for me end up being a gift to the entire family. But I digress. I remember that a whole world opened up to me once fresh vegetables were a joy to prep, and I was no longer trying to practically saw carrots with knives designed for cutting other things. 

We human beings really do need functional tools, working kitchens and safe, clean, cozy spaces where we can gently nurse our children. We are physical beings in a real world, so need stuff to do the good works we are called to. And usually, the better the tool, the easier the work, the more outstanding the result.  But look around. Most of us in America already have functional kitchens and safe, cozy, clean spaces, if we clean them. Looking back, I wonder why I ever felt any lack, because that fact is, I always had more than enough stuff to do what was right. Whether or not I always had the virtue I needed to do the right is another question with a different answer. 
 

But I can say with certainty that my magic pot arrived at just the right time in my life. I have enough self- knowledge now to know that if I had been given this amazing pot twenty years ago, I would not have had the knowledge or discipline to use it properly. I would have ruined it promptly. I never would have taken the time and effort to clean and store it correctly back then. After all, I had babies crying to nurse and laundry piling up. Nobody has time for hand-washing. 

But at this point in life, I already wash all my fancy clothes separately, hang my delicates to dry, care for my face every morning and evening. I even floss, whether or not I'm feeling it, so, in the truest sense, I know I received my magic pot when I finally deserve it, and that's the truth of it. 

Consider it proverb: The right tools find their way into capable hands. 

So take heart, young wives and new moms out there, because you may never have the budget for a kitchen remodel or the space for a designer nursery. Just keep doing what is right with the tools you happen to have now, and if you can ask for a nicer knife for Christmas, do it. But put all your time and energy into growing into the woman you dream of being with the tools you find in your hands, and in the doing right thing with what you've got, you'll be becoming the woman you dream of being so often that you'll be her before you notice. If your kitchen or your home never looks like the home or kitchen you dream about, it won't even matter, because you'll be the kind of person who makes her home and kitchen what it is. It never works the other way around. 

Masters in Classical Liberal Arts Education

My third course for my masters degree began this week- Great Books in Education. This eight-week term includes Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle and several, shorter works or excerpts by Aquinas, Augustine, Basil, Lewis, Montessori, Newman, and Dewey. 

Nehemiah

I'm co-teaching a Bible study on Nehemiah for this winter term for the weekly women's Bible study at my church.  I'm very excited to use my teaching gifts to teach Scripture, since I haven't done that since before my kids were born. 

Souper Excited

One of my favorite podcasts is "What Have You" with sisters Bekah Merkle and Rachel Jankovic. It's refreshing to listen to women who take homemaking seriously, yet also have rich intellectual lives and great senses of humor. I flatter myself that we could all be friends. They give tips on each show, stuff that has made their lives better and might make your life better, too. On one show, they recommended souper cubes. I make my own broth and have tried several different ways to store it. I've freeze it in plasticware, glassware, canned it. Turns out, souper cubes are the best way I've ever found to store my broth. I pour my finished broth into the silicone squares, cover them, place in my freezer for a day, and viola! Perfect cubes of broth to use in stews. In the photo above, I was making homemade pho. Once I realized I needed even more broth in the pot before boiling the noodles, all I had to do was pull another frozen cube out and add it to the soup. I'm souper excited about this new way to store my broth. 

For how to make your own rich beef bone broth, click here and here. 

Note: The same principles and practices can apply to chicken broth. Save your bones and scraps, freeze them, and use them to make chicken broth, too. 

Soup and Books

I'm going to start hosting a book club at my house. I'm calling it "Soup and Books." About a dozen moms from my homeschool group are interested in coming, so they're ordering the first book to read with me this month: Cindy Rollins's Mere Motherhood.  

We're meeting at the end of January, February, and March, reading one book each month together. Then I'm skipping four months, because the late spring- summer is impossibly busy for me, but we'll meet again for a few months in the fall as school starts up again before the holiday season starts again and we need another break. I think this schedule is brilliant, by the way. We'll start the new year and the new school year together, but then we'll give each other breaks when we start to need them. We're eating homemade soup and discussing one whole book each meeting. 

I've already read a little more than half this book, much of it on the plane and in the airport traveling to and from seeing my mom in SC. I was actually crying before I got off the first page of the author's note! It's so good! 

That said, five years ago, this book would have fallen totally flat for me. I was still much deluded back then about all the hard truths of which she speaks so wisely and gently. I was still in my "I can perform so well that it won't matter that I'm only human and a fallen being at that in a fallen world" and also my "I can mother so well it won't matter that my kids are sinners" phase. But after the past few years of life and motherhood and sickness and failure and disappointments and reality checks, I get what she's saying now. A sword has pierced my own soul, too. 

It's been a blessing to read someone else's story about the good, bad, true, ugly, sinful, and beautiful things about life and motherhood. I'm so excited that so many other friends want to do this, too! I have been praying about a book club for years, but the timing finally feels right. 

Visit To My Mom (And My Dad)

I went to visit my mom in SC for a few days. 

During my visit, she was dog/ house sitting for close friends of our family only a few minutes from her apartment, so during the days, I visited her and the dogs at our friends' house where she was working, but in the evenings and early mornings, I stayed in her small apartment and took care of her cats while she was away.

It worked out beautifully, since I needed to get a few hours of work done in the evenings and mornings and her empty apartment provided the quiet space I needed, and I was there to help the cats, who get anxious and needed some attention while she was away caring for our friends' dogs. 

I also got to see our old friends when they returned to town and visit with them, too- an unexpected blessing! 

 

While I was in town, I was able to help my mom set up and start learning to use her new cell phone, a hilarious and exhausting endeavor. 

Curse words were said in plenty; She almost threw the phone a few times. 

Above is the pic we used for her new contact card, taken at the senior center - beautiful! 

She's getting older, certainly- and it's something I never thought would happen to my mom, who was always incredibly strong, so I value the time visiting with her knowing from previous experience with my dad, it won't be forever. Yet. 

Early Sunday morning, I went to see my dad's grave. I hadn't seen his new headstone. 

We placed his grave in an open field with a wide view of the sky. 

I always feel like he'll get a great view of Christ's return from that particular place in the earth. 

But I guess every grave, no matter where on earth, even the deepest sea, will ultimately have the same perspective of Christ's return, since the dead in Christ will all equally rise in Him. 

I prayed about what I might take to place on my dad's headstone as a sign that I had been to visit. I know people often bring rocks, but I wasn't sure that was "right" for my dad. 

I ventured into a drug store to perhaps find flowers, but instead, I found the home improvement section and saw... a level... perfect! 

My dad was a craftsman, trained by his dad, and the art and skill and interest in working with wood was shared by at least some of my dad's brothers, too. 

I have a few things my dad built for me- tables, a rocking horse, birdhouses, etc., and I have a cross on the wall his brother made. I really cherish those items though they are simple, after all, and some are rough and obviously handmade out of wood. But they are some of my favorite things on earth. 

You should know that it is a cherished family memory/joke that my dad's level wasn't always correct, so some things he built were ever-so-slightly crooked. 

But, of course, in Heaven, everything Dad might make there is at perfect right angels; Heaven is the only place where perfect right angels actually exist. 

I've been reading the Bible and following Jesus since I was a teenager, but right now, I'm also studying Ancient Greek philosophy in graduate school, so placing a level on my dad's headstone was the perfect symbol for my dad, for me, for my family's running joke, indeed- for what any gift left on any headstone ever represents. 

I'm thankful for the way my soul felt like God was with me as moved in prayer that morning from my mom's apartment to the drugstore to the graveside. There has been and still is a lot of disorder, sin, and outright chaos in my family, but there are times in the midst of that chaos, when my soul can perceive that things are obviously being ordered, and the only explanation for that is that God is, and He is with us even in the chaos we create. 

I listened to the songs we played for my dad as he laid in hospice and those we had on the playlist as people came into his funeral service, hymns sung by Southern musicians, the style my dad liked best.    

While I sat and visited at my dad's grave and prayed, I played the song "I Come to the Garden," one of my dad's dad's favorites, if I remember the things my dad told me correctly. Though my dad or mom did not walk openly with God most of their adult life, his dad had been a preacher. So, when I came to faith in God apart from my parents' example, it was a sign to my dad that God had kept His promises through generations, and my dad admitted as much. 

My dad recognized my Christian faith as the same as his father's, and eventually, Dad would confess Christ as His Savior, too, but always only rarely, in certain moments, after talking for a long time out in the yard under the sky, or on hospital beds when reality of death closed in. 

I placed my cell phone on the headstone just as I had placed it near my dad's pillow while he laid between life and death in hospice. I still remember how he seemed to smile as the music played. 

As I listened to the song quietly at his graveside, I noticed seeds/ seed husks on the ground around me at his headstone. But once I actually noticed these seeds, they seemed to pour out of ground around me, because there were thousands of them! 

So, I dutifully picked several up and took them home in my pocket. They are with me here in CT now. I plan to grow them and just see what they might be. 

To me, every seed is a symbol of the Resurrection. When we die, our bodies are planted in the ground, but our bodies will rise again someday with Christ. 

I myself was the one who placed the remains of my dad's body in the ground at that exact spot several months ago, and I can still feel the memory of in my muscles, bending, placing, etc. 

So going home from my dad's grave with seeds in my pocket felt like a promise, like the Lord gave me back a symbol to carry home with me for the one I'd left. 

It was a few hours later that I also connected that fact that my mom likes to collect seeds. She'll dry anything and everything- flower, plant, vegetable- and collect seeds from them to grow again. As I moved around her tiny apartment, I even found some containers with seeds in them on this visit. 

It's an obsession. She'll find seeds and grow them just to see what they look like. It doesn't matter to her that the plant is actually ugly when it grows. She takes childlike wonder in the whole process, and it's a quiet habit she has had for as long as I can remember. 

So again, going home with seeds in my pocket now also seems like something my mother's daughter would do. It's fitting that I have my mother's instincts. I was Created from her seed, and it is likely something she may have passed on to me just as seeds always pass on what they are to the next generation. 

I plan to bring my mom whatever plant these seeds grow when I visit again in March, and I'll tell her this story then, if the Lord allows it. 

In her small apartment, Mom has a sunroom (of all things for any small apartment to have). It is filled with plants she grows from seeds. 

She doesn't have the heart to visit Dad's grave, and probably never will, but I know she'll love having a plant from his graveside. 

To us as we were looking for the right apartment for mom after dad died- it was another sign that God provided an apartment with a sun room. It was, to our hearts, proof that God sees her, knows her needs, knows our particular family intimately, and really takes care of us just like a master gardener, planting us each in just the right spaces so we can grow best.

Order in the midst of chaos, simple earthly things that reflects God's glory- This is my family's story.

 

New Year's Eve

I started the last day of the year with a hot cup of coffee and quiet reading. Later in the morning, we shared a huge breakfast of bacon, eggs, hashbrowns, bread of choice: toast/ bagels/ English muffins/ crumpets, and a pot of strong hot Earl Grey tea. While we ate, we started an even bigger game of Catan. It took 2+ hours for someone of us (Avril) to finally win! We were all so tired of playing, we were glad someone finally won. We're all quite good at Catan at this point, so it's really competitive and fun. 

We talked to my mom on the phone, and we sang her Happy Birthday. I'm going to see her in a few days for a few days before the next semester of grad school, homeschool, and co-op begin again. We also talked to Dwayne's sister today, and we are beginning to make various travel plans to see his family at different times this year. So now, we are starting to look forward to those trips and visits. 

It's a holiday break, so the girls enjoy much more screen time than they usually ever get. 

We had a nice visit with our neighbors today, too, and we exchanged gifts. They are always so generous to the girls. They gave the girls generous gift cards to Home Goods that the girls will be able to use more than once. The girls also had gift cards to Starbucks in their stockings from us and were given gift cards from church leaders for their volunteer work, so we took a brief trip to Starbucks first, then carried our delicious drinks into Home Goods to see what treasures we could find.  

For our holiday dinner, we had ribeye steaks, garlic creamed spinach, and corn on the cob. Then I did more cleaning and organizing and purging and donating, while Dwayne paid bills. Finally, we reviewed our finances for this last year and made some financial plans for next year. In all, it was an outstanding way/ day to end this year!