lessons from home school

First of all please try to trust me when I say YOU CAN DO THIS.  You can teach your kids from home.  

I promise. 

What you probably can't do is SCHOOL at home. Trying to copy the school day isn't going to work for you or your kids.... because you aren't at school. 

The first thing you do is take all your kids' school work and put it away.  While you are doing that put away the guilt about not doing it.

The next thing you do is find your supplies. 

Pull out all your art supplies, board games, dice, cards, magazines, newspapers (even the junk mailers), interesting books, legos, straws, flashlights, spare change, toothpicks, sewing stuff, broken stuff, and if you have one a junk drawer out on your kitchen table.

What you are looking for are things that might interest your kids. Let's say you find a bag of old gummy candy or marshmallows add the toothpicks and you have a stem project. 

Put scissors on a pile of magazines (you can even use old damaged books).  Make art, make poetry, make a vision board, signs, write notes, etc. 

Make your own board game.  Make it personal about your life.

Create a newspaper: write breaking stories about members of your house, ads, weather, etc.

Pull a recipe out double it (yeah math!). But no really bake something, bake lots of somethings. Make pizza from scratch. Play with dough. 

Make a comic book. Make a storybook. Make a wanted poster. 

Listen to stories on Youtube while you paint or draw together. 

Design a park, a dream house, a treasure map.

Look up science experiments you can do.

Look up math games! So many, so much fun!!!

Clean together- yeah, clean, organize, repair, paint, cook, etc.

Play some of those board games you own.  In fact, play all of them. Make a game and a chart (yeah math).  See how many days (or hours) it takes.  

Didn't like one of them- give it to someone else or make an art project out of it.

Assign each kid to find a strange fact to share with the family. 

Create a list of interview questions and interview each other.  Call family and friends and interview them.

Egg drop!!! Remember the egg drop challenge. Do that!!!! 

Make paper airplanes.

Make a diorama. Create a dance. Play super old music.  Write a play and act it out.  Better yet, write ads for things in your house. 

Memorize a piece of poetry.  I highly recommend Shel Silverstein! 

Watch classic movies together. But don't do it in a regular way.  Create movie tickets, get your snacks together, and REALLY watch the movie together. 

Read a book together. If this seems like the greatest idea you never want to have to actually do try it this way. Find a book like Charlie and the Cholocate Factory or Alice in Wonderland (a classic that everyone thinks they know) set a goal to read 1 chapter a day. And I don't care how old your kids are.

Learn sign language. 

Pick an animal/country/person to study.  Read, draw, paint, watch youtube about your interest.

Make a lego zoo.  Write little signs for the different sights around your zoo.

Go old school with the yard games.

Teach a mini-course of auto shop, map reading, geology.

You don't need me or this random list of ideas you have the internet but if you have a challenge or a subject you want ideas for please feel free to ask.   

The main idea is learning at school looks one way because traditional SCHOOL has brick walls.  

Teachers have limited space, lots of kids, and limited resources and freedom. They spend years learning the set of skills they use to teach the way they do. 

Why is your 1st grader's homework so hard to do? Because the materials are designed to be used within the system of SCHOOL.

Teaching your kids is something you have done their whole lives. Think about it. You are their first teacher. Think of all the things you have taught them!!! 

You can do this! We all can <3 

2020

My calendar stops on March 14th, the week before the State Meet. The reds blues, and greens mark my work schedule and Beach's work schedule, our appointments, Beach's gym schedule, MVP, social activities, bills due, chores, all of it frozen on a whiteboard.

Has it really been a full work week? A Monday to Monday of life altered? That was fast...

I can say that safely because no one can come close enough to me to punch me in the face.

But yes, we have had a lot going on.  I have friends on the frontline working to save as many people as they can.  And I have elderly parents sheltering in place.

I have a partner still working, trying to do it as safely as he can for everyone.  Trying to keep work going for the workers who rely on him to put food on their tables.

My oldest son is a plumber, and he is still working.

My oldest daughter has an underlying medical condition and is in quarantine, fearing for her health and her life.

 Our youngest son was sent home from college last week, but he got stir-crazy in the city so he returned to the organic farm he lives and works outside of Cedar City, Utah.

During this time, BC was forced to travel 2x.  While he was gone, we had an earthquake of 5.7.  The aftershocks are still rolling in. 

The gym sent a conditioning program to do at home for Beach.  She began running for cardio and seemed hooked.

Utah's social gathering number is 10.  As of yesterday, our death count is 1. We are the state with the highest hoarding rate in the nation.  Police are patrolling inside the stores.

We have had to shop (3x) mainly because the grown kids keep showing up (and for care packages and RX's for Alexis), and also for fresh produce.

We have socialized thoughtfully and carefully.  We have chosen our contact risks.  We have a small circle... but they also have small circles... and their small circles have small circles.  It causes a lot of jokes about Sally; if you sleep with Sally, you sleep with everyone Sally ever slept with.

When someone leaves the yard, we yell, "Remember, don't sleep with Sally!" The way I see it, it makes just as much sense as yelling "wash your hands" to someone getting in a car.

I have seen a lot of good.  I would almost say the world looks better this way.  It's slower; it's more thoughtful and more focused on what is real. Resources are respected. Errands consolidated.

I see families out on walks. I see happy dogs. I see friends and neighbors reaching out to each other. Love and caring and kites flying.

This is the slow life that I have been living behind the fast life of being a Gym Mom for nearly a decade.  We plant a big garden, we raise hens for eggs, we homeschool, we bake (a lot), and we live close to the land.  We have a freezer full of meat that BC hunted.

I feel safe in this slow world. When I look up and out over the rim of our little farmstead, I get sad.  I think about the long stretch of not having choices about living little and slow or living big and fast.

I wonder about the surrealness of an earthquake in the middle of a pandemic.  Unbelievable. (How much I would love to be able to laugh about this with Wendi; so many things she didn't live to see...)

Those who know me have been joking that I have been preparing for this my whole life.

When I was little, I had a dollhouse. Three stories high, my dad had made it for me.  The year before that, he made me a huge train track on a 4'x8' sheet of plywood and turned it into a table attached to a pulley system so I could raise it to lay flat against my bedroom wall. When the train table was down, it was level with the third floor of the tiny house.

I would set up the dolls. Tiny bottles, plates, toys, books, mini forks, tables, beds, and porcelain dolls. Then I would run the train full throttle at a blocked track calculated to derail it straight into the dollhouse and play out the disaster.

Sometimes, I would set the dollhouse up and just shake it and play an earthquake.  Or bunker the family in one room of the house and play out a blizzard.

The disaster wasn't the fun part it was the hunkering down and the gathering of resources that I liked.  I liked to feel safe by playing out survival. I am a planner, an organizer, and a caretaker.

In adulthood and in a world of real people, I know too much to be having fun. This isn't fun. But it is what I am good at.

Only in very small moments do I get scared.  Mostly, I am sad.  I'm sad for those suffering.  I'm sad about the loss of things we haven't lost yet but soon will.

The gymnastics community is my window to the wider world. It is unimaginable these young athletes are not in the gym training. The end of the Season without warning was shocking. 

I happen to have Beach's very last floor routine from her last night at practice. Right now, I am too sad to watch it. How they will pick up and go back, I don't know.  It will cost so many of them their futures in this sport.

I look at the kids, and I wonder what happens next for them. There are a lot of unknowns. What I hope for is that when we are called out from our hiding places, we come out with renewed hearts.

Life is beauty.  Good is winning. We just need to all hold on. Take turns breaking down and building back up. There are people among us who will not see the other side of this. It's important that we walk this path in a way we want to be remembered for.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. ~Robert Frost

Chewy Oatmeal Cookies

Chewy Oatmeal Cookies

Ingredients

1 cup light brown sugar packed
1 cup white sugar
½ cup butter, at room temperature
½ cup greek plain yogurt
2 large eggs
1/2 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
½ teaspoon cinnamon 
2 and 1/2 cups oats
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 cup white flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
¼ cup soybean flour
¼ cup coconut flour
2 cups. milk chocolate chips

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Line a large sheet pan with parchment paper.
In a large bowl, mix the brown sugar, white sugar, yogurt, and butter until creamy. The mixture should look like peanut butter.
Add the eggs, cinnamon, and vanilla extract. Beat until combined.
In a separate bowl, combine oats, baking powder, baking soda, sea salt, flour, and chocolate chips. Whisk until combined.
Add the dry to the wet and mix until just combined being careful to not overmix.
Roll out golf-ball sized dough balls and place 2 inches apart on the prepared baking sheet. Bake 6-8 minutes or until just lightly golden brown. Watch carefully to avoid over-baking; slightly under-baked oatmeal cookies make the best chewy cookies!

beautiful November

I remember the moment: the tip of his white tail flashing through the tall, still grass.  Behind me a small village of pine trees, before me a divided army of Aspens.  

My life is beautiful.

Standing miles away from where most of it is lived I could look back at it and smile.  

How dangerous to be this content, I thought.  How grateful to have this moment.  The edge of Autumn slipping into winter.  The mountains closing into white corners.  The valley about to be shushed. 

I had stolen the time from other places to be there.  To slip away one more time before the snow gate dropped just to see the dogs running free in the mountains.  To watch Juneau crisscrossing the trail.  No one telling him he's wrong.

The air and the ground were cold but the trees held the light so carefully.  I stood in the meadow breathing the smell of the woods.  I had everything I needed on my back. 

Yes, my life is beautiful.

November is calling.  The orange lights of Halloween have burned out. It is time to call all the children home.  

Time to set the table for the next season that is already falling around us.

Home-baked bread, board games, thick books, and piles of blankets. 

I love winter.  I love the snow. I miss nothing of summer and the way it suffocates the city.  

Spring; heavy with mud and false hope.  Autumn; short and sweet.  

Winter stretches long and quiet. 

Dark draws us all home down roads lit by street lights dancing with falling snow, headlights bursting in the slush, frost bleeding with the salt of dining room chandeliers left on.

Winter makes space.  It gives room for change to happen.

November is deep. 

It is sharp and blue and quite possibly the most beautiful part of the whole year. The best part is it starts now.

farm, Fall, and food

to have and to hold

On Sunday, standing in the grocery store checkout line I bought a copy of the SLC Tribune.  Beach returning from her ritual sweep along the row of gumball machines tipped her head with curiosity.

"What do you need a paper for?" She questioned.  Probably thinking something crafty lay ahead.  My answer, I want to hold it.

The newspaper.

A cup of coffee.

A book- but the right book. Thick vanilla pages in a soft waxy binding that bends in your hands without breaking the spine.

The edge of a blanket.

The hem of a hoodie.

The foot of a sleeping cat. Although that one doesn't ever last very long.  The cats aren't too tolerant of my thumb pushing between their toes for more than a minute.

A good deck of old playing cards.

Wooden scrabble tiles.

Cinnamon Bears.

Lake water on the side of the boat.

I am a "holder" a "keeper".  Like most moms, I am a vessel of memory. I hold hands, crayon drawings, tiny candy wrappers, places in line, sticky melting cups of forgotten ice cream, the seat of a wobbly bike, ticket stubs, the edge of clean sheets over the far corner of the bed, soggy stuffed animals, used tissues, plates of cookies, bowls of soup, bleeding noses, the leash of a dog, and a thousand doors- open and closed.

When people marry they take vows before witnesses.  Vows like to honor and cherish, to have and to hold...When a woman becomes a mother she makes no such promises.  Most don't have to. 

Being a holder or a keeper for your kids is not a chore or a sacrifice, some of the work is, but the calling itself is not. It grants you the power to stand in more than one world at a time. You live your life and you live in theirs too.  And if you do it right, into the lives of their children, and their children's children.

Mothering is not a war between your needs and theirs.  You aren't giving yourself up or away.  You are adding lives together, like marriage.   

Motherhood is a tree with roots and branches, leaves and fruit.  Bows break, leaves fall, fruit ripens.  The branches grow to the warmth of the light and the roots grow to the coolness of the water.  My kids are my roots as often as I am theirs.  We grow together.  We branch out.  We sway in the wind. 

A million things can happen to a tree over its lifetime.  It can be cut down or it can nurture life and grow a forest.

On Monday morning the newspaper sat on the sofa.  Beach picked it up asking, "How was your paper, mom?"  Her smile breaking into the corners of her eyes.

"Really good. Perhaps today I will even read it."

I hold blue covers, pencils, library books, science projects, the third strand of hair in a braid.  I hold car keys, the tops of cranky bathroom stall doors, flashlights, bottle caps, desert stones, and bleached out cow bones.  But the best thing I hold is the love I have for all of them.