Overcoming obstacles...

For my new readers: This is my blog about home and hearth, where I discuss family, homeschooling, simple living, special needs, and anything else that pertains to my day to day life.

It has been SO long since I've posted on here.  Things have been nuts.  The good news is that maybe things will slowly start to settle down now that I have acknowledged the nuttiness.  But there are no guarantees!

I noticed over a month ago that the Chief has not been himself for a long time.  He so anxious about everything and it affects everything, even things that he should enjoy.  He gets so worked up over things that he gets into a panic.  So if he wants to play with his friends, in his mind ahead of time he starts making a plan so that he can have the optimum amount of fun.  Of course, when he gets together with them, things don't work out the way they played out in his head.  So he panics instead of enjoying things as they happen.  When we go in the car, he gets so worked up over going "somewhere fun" that even when we do go somewhere fun, he can't enjoy it because he's exhausted himself worrying over it.

A moment of Spring

I've been brainstorming these past few weeks to figure out what we can do to help this situation, and I've decided that the word of the summer around our home is going to be Nurturance.  We're going to take a step back, and focus on family, and togetherness, and security.  Rather than pushing rigid academics, we are going to back to doing some work with Five in a Row, revisiting some of the books we've enjoyed over the years.  I've always found that Five in a Row presents information in such a way that it sticks in the mind, yet it doesn't feel like work.  The Chief will be doing the activities in the manual as well as doing some extra work, in order to "beef" things up a bit.  He'll be doing a report every week on something inspired by that week's book.  We'll be reading extra books about the topics presented that week, and do some additional map work, science experiments, and cultural studies.

Another thing we'll be doing: an Adventure Box.  I'm not sure who first came up with this idea, but I heard of it from Heather W over at Blog She Wrote.  The Chief is fascinated with early New England life, especially with industry and mills.  So his adventure box is full of goodies we got from places like Old Sturbridge Village: different crafts and books and projects, a fife, and cut out models to make of early New England buildings.  This will be taken out during "exploration time" (which might be renamed "adventure time") after lunch.  We'll also be doing some more field trips pertaining to this adventure, to places like Lowell, Ma, and Pawtucket, RI to see old mills.  There is so much stuff around here, I'm sure we could do even a field trip every week and still not run out of things to see pertaining to textiles and early America.

Spinning wheel at Old Sturbridge Village

One more thing I am trying: during the day, I will be focusing more on "home" stuff, and less on writing stuff.  Then, at night after the Chief is in bed, I will do my writing.  I'm sure on the weekends, too, when my husband is home, I'll be able to have time as well.  I find that I am not very productive during the day on my stories anyway, and it just leads to frustration.  I can write more in a half hour at night than I can in two hours during the day.  The only sacrifice will be movie time with my husband, but I will figure out a way to have that a couple times a week, too.

Hopefully, I will be updating the blog weekly (I would say twice a week, but we all know how that works...).  Next week we will be "rowing" the book The Salamander Room by Anne Mazer, which has been one of the Chief's favorites since he was a toddler!

Let's see, where were we?

Husband and I have been going over our Master Plan slowly. We are trying to capture just what we hope to accomplish with our lives and our family. A mission statement, if you will. And since I am in the midst of reading The Letters of John and Abigail Adams, who happen to be personal heroes of mine, I'm sure you'll be seeing more quotes on here from them, such as this one:

Let us, therefore, my dear partner, from that affection which we feel for our lovely babes, apply ourselves, by every way we can, to the cultivation of our farm. Let frugality and industry be our virtues, if they are not of any others. And above all cares of this life, let our ardent anxiety be to mould the minds and manners of our children. Let us teach them not only to do virtuously, but to excel. To excel, they must be taught to be steady, active, and industrious.

--John Adams, 29 June 1774

I found that this quote captured much of what I wanted to say myself, so I stole it to put into our Master Plan.

We picked apples yesterday, and are going to be making apple sauce and apple butter, along with the requisite pies and bear claws and all those fun things. We'll be canning the sauce and butter, to go along with our raspberry and blackberry jams we've already made. Oh, and the canned peaches :). They are such a lovely color, we picked the white variety rather than the yellow. Husband made a peach blush pie, which is a peach pie with raspberry syrup inside.

The next couple of weeks will be filled with getting garden beds made, spreading compost, hopefully having a few trees taken down; basically getting ready for next spring. Since we did not plant this year, we've been going to farmers' markets around town. My favorite so far is the one on South Main in Worcester. We bought squashes and potatoes, scallions, little tomatoes, honey, beans, plums, pears...I know there was more. Oh, yes, HUGE cucumbers. I love knowing where my food comes from. I like shaking the hand of the guy who actually picked the potato I'm going to eat for dinner.