I love flowers. I love herbs. And I love vegetables. I love trying to grow my own. Last fall, we had some dirt work done around the old guest house, which had hundreds of daffodils planted around it. As they were leveling the land around the house, we had them place a pile of dirt aside so that we […]
Celebrating Easter in One-and-a-Half Weeks
My husband works a rotational assignment as a supervisor on a drillship in another country. A drawback: He misses holidays, birthdays, and lots-of-other-days (including Easter). A benefit: We celebrate each holiday that he misses either multiple times or across many days… And so, our Easter celebration started on Palm Sunday when we colored Easter eggs with some very good friends of ours […]
Church Search: A Mom’s Grace Experience
Despite the fact that I have taught and directed children’s ministry, led middle school Bible classes, and taught adult Sunday School lessons, I have never experienced something more intimidating and exhausting than stepping foot into a new church. Even as an experienced church-goer and teacher, I still feel so much anxiety going to church now […]
Earth Day Earthworms: Natural Farmers
Today marked the day that we moved the firewood pile from beside the garage down to the barn. In doing so, we uncovered a habitat filled with all sorts of critters – several types of larvae, some roly-polies (or pill bugs), an orange salamander (I’m unsure but maybe it’s a red-spotted newt?), and earthworms galore, which […]
A Great Balancing Act
As I watched my son struggle, patiently steadying himself, starting out, wobbling a little, gaining speed, slowing down, wobbling again, toppling over, re-steadying himself, starting out once again, wobbling a little… I thought, My life is like that. How many times I set out to do something, I concentrate on steadying myself, I wobble a bit […]
ArtMaps
The students in our homeschool group are creating artistic representations of one week of our geography memory work for display during our awards ceremony. Stephen chose to paint a Monet-style watercolor of southeastern Asia because his daddy works in South Korea. Stephen drew his map free-hand, and it was a bit challenging because Guam […]
Shoestrings, or toad eggs?
During one of our in-search-of-spring walks out to Flat Rock, we came across this: WHAT IS THAT?!? At first glance, I thought it was a black string, but after finding more: and looking at it more closely, we realized that these WERE NOT strings. As if to confirm this, we came across this: And […]
Cardshark Math: Card Games for Math
Question: How can you make math fun? Answer: Introduce a deck of cards! I first started using card games to teach my students during my career as a high school and middle school math teacher. Though the games we play now are a little different than they once were, we are still practicing number sense and math operations (just […]
More Geologic Geometry
As we waded through the creek this weekend, we collected more rocks that were of various geometric shapes. The boys started singing our Geometry song: “Geometry, geometry, let’s learn some geometry. The area of a rectangle equals length times width. The area of a square equals length of its side squared. S squared! The area of a […]