One cricket at a Time

One cricket at a time – A change of perspective

So for most of my life I've been a city girl. And loved every moment of it. I love my Starbucks and my mall. I loved my faced paced job at an advertising agency. I loved the hustle and bustle.

But about a year and half ago I had an overwhelming feeling it was time to step away from the rat race. I felt pulled to be home with my children. I had homeschooled my oldest son off and on in the past and truly felt with all my heart that was what I was supposed to be doing with the children. So when I was laid off from my job it was a blessing and a challenge. I got my wish to be home but our income was cut in half. Yikes. But we knew it would be better in the long run.

At first I kept the children in school and daycare and just took some time to detox. Then I started an adventure in learning how to cook from scratch. Mostly out of necessity because our income no longer allowed us to buy packaged dinners. With each recipe I felt more pride in what I was doing. Not everything turned out, in fact more often than not the recipe didn't turn out well, but I was learning. Then, again out of necessity, I started making household cleaners. Thank you Pinterest. I was totally surprised how inexpensive it was to make my own cleaners and how much better they worked. One day it hit me, our grandmothers had it right. I used to think it was SO old fashioned to use homemade products. But there was so much pride in making my own cleaners and homemade foods. I felt better about what I was feeding my family and knew, should my wild boys get into my cleaners, they were going to be just fine.

The seed was planted.

I had been dreaming of a beautiful house in the suburbs and my husband always talked about a large piece of property with animals and our own garden. I scoffed at the idea, I’m sorry but no, a city girl like me out in the boonies? No thanks. But there I was making dinners from scratch, making my own cleaners and considering homeschooling all of our children, and constantly feeling like it was time to get back to basics. My husband’s idea was sounding less and less ridiculous.

A year ago I pulled my daughter out of school and began homeschooling my daughter and two boys in January of 2013. I was getting ready to homeschool our oldest again this fall but he got into an amazing program with the local community college so I will just homeschool the youngest three kids.

This last spring I asked for gardening supplies for our kids for Easter and we planted a small pallet garden behind our apartment. We failed epically. We were forever forgetting to water our plants. At first we enjoyed every moment of it, but as lives got busy and the interest waned, we forgot. Though I have to admit, it was a great trial run and I am determined to try again.

This fall I attempted canning for the first time. It was scary. I've always heard how much work it is. Now I am hooked. I want to can everything in sight and though our budget and apartment sized pantry (a small linen closet converted into a pantry) don’t allow us to can a significant amount of goods yet, again this is a total learning experience and a trial run at a more sustainable lifestyle. A life style I would have laughed at two years ago, actually I did.

Homeschooling, canning, homemade cleaners, growing a garden … so what is the next step for us? Well we have decided to prepare to buy a piece of property and build our own home. A home designed with a large kitchen so that I can prepare our food myself. A home with a root cellar to store the foods we grow. A home with a built-in classroom for homeschooling our kids. And a piece of land big enough to raise any animals we choose to in order to provide for our family.

And thus our journey begins. It is going to be a very long road. And we are at the very beginning. We've started looking for properties but will need to address getting loans and building a savings account. I am also starting to work on designing our home, some of it we can do ourselves. My family had a cabinet and countertop business for years, and my husband can do some of the frame work and drywalling, so I know a lot of it can be built with family assistance and hard work on our part.

I am looking forward to getting back to the way my grandparents did things. As I sit out on my back patio and listen to the frogs and crickets I get more and more antsy to get out of the city and on to our future farm, listening to one cricket at a time. 

Homeschool - One Step at a Time

Homeschooling is my passion! I have long felt called to be a homeschool mommy and am blessed to be married to a man who was homeschooled therefore he is incredibly supportive. I truly believe it is by design that more and more I get asked advice about homeschooling. I feel that others are guided to me that may have questions or are pondering homeschooling themselves. It seems like daily the subject will come up in conversation; the cashier at the store will ask about my kids and when I say, oh we homeschool, she responds "ya know, I've been thinking about doing that but..." and the conversation takes off.

Does that mean I am an expert with years and years of experience, umm NO!! In fact my homeschooling style would be considered eclectic at best and I have only been homeschooling full time for a year now. I homeschooled my oldest son off and on in the past, but I was always working at the time so I didn't feel I was dedicated and invested as much as I wanted to be, the seeds were definitely there though.

But I thought today I would tell you a little bit about our homeschool. We have 5 children. Unfortunately, we do not have contact with my oldest step-son, something I would LOVE to change over the next year. But the children who live with us are Brainiac, 16, Drama Queen, 11, then our wild boys we call Bo and Luke Duke, 5 and 4.

Brainiac has just enrolled in a program with the local community college where he will be finishing high school and simultaneously earning his Associates Degree in Computer Programming. Unlike some high schools where kids go to high school and earn college credits, he will be attending college full time and earning his high school credits. When this program first presented itself I was very hesitant. I felt like I was rushing him, I wasn't ready to have a 16 year old aged child, LET ALONE A COLLEGE STUDENT. But he is incredibly smart, was in gifted programs and is super mature for his age. As much as I may not be ready for this adventure, he is.

Drama Queen is our dreamer, she is SO much like her mother in that respect. She's sweet and generous and has a fondness for animals that leads me to believe that is a career path she's headed for in one form or another. She also has a BIT of an attitude sometimes. Terrible twos were unmentionable and as she approaches her teens I see the same traits coming back to. She is creative and artistic, loves music and art. But, school... not so much (sigh).

Then there is Bo and Luke Duke. What one doesn't think up, the other does. Luke is a dare devil: the higher, the faster the better. Bo, is the most genuinely happy child in the world, he just wants to play and laugh (although also really has an ear for music) and if it looks like fun he's right in the middle of it.

So in order to me to attempt to educate the three youngest children I've found that eclectic unschooling works THE BEST for us. But to be honest, I am NOT the best at remembering that what works for me doesn't always work for everyone, I'm a work in progress. But I digress. At the beginning of the year I do my planning and decide what I want my children to learn, and what my goal is for the year. This year I've felt a major prompting to study American history, specifically the Revolution. And not the dates and names, I don't believe that teaches anything. But learn about the men, and women. Who they were, their backgrounds so we can understand WHY they did what they did and when.

For basics; reading, writing and arithmetic, I also look at benchmarks. Where should the kids be, so I know where to aim. Bo, will be "starting kindergarten" this year and will be learning to read and do basic addition and subtraction. Luke, who can never hold still, will just be along for the ride. If he's interested I will work with him, but forcing him to sit down and study at age 4 I think is ridiculous.

BUT here's the interesting part, and here's why I believe unschooling really works. Bo really WANTS to learn, he will ask me to get out his workbooks and ask "can I please do school work?" Luke, is always watching and learning by osmosis. Here is a perfect example. As I mentioned, Bo is learning basic addition and subtraction. Well, Bo and Luke are responsible for setting the table for dinner. The other night I intentionally gave Luke the wrong number of glasses. Without missing a beat, Luke said to me "Mom, you gave me too many. There are 6 cups, I only need 5 so you need to put 1 back." Mommy win!

I do leave learning tools everywhere around the house. I put some sight word magnets on the freezer awhile ago and never made a huge deal out of them. Today Luke was incredibly fascinated with them and he and I spent a while working with them.

The library is my best friend and we have library day once a week. The kids check out at least one book, ANY BOOK, any topic. Drama Queen typically prefers to just pick up a teen magazine so I am constantly urging her to also choose other reading material, but hey she's reading. :) I'll pick my battles carefully. Bo chooses a wide variety of topics, Luke will look for ANYTHING with a dinosaur or a shark. Although this week he surprised me with a book about spiders. As much as it grossed me out, he was fascinated and that is all that matters.

My homeschooling style may seemed disorganized, chaotic and unplanned at times but I promise there really is an underlying goal that I am always working towards...

one step at a time.