Outside: March has begun – in like a lion over here.  It's been snowy but mixed with enough rain that we have to get RIGHT outside take best advantage. And that they do…

On my desk:  

Workking hard at my desk each morning.  A bit of reading, a private rosary, journal.  This is the third month of bullet journaling and it feels really good.  I think a habit is established. 

Lent so often involves a certain amount of picking one's heart up off the ground.  As in years past we choose big and little deprivations knowing the real penances will reveal themselves as we go.  This year is no different in that regard.  I have turned time and again to this verse:

 I am meditating heavily on that second part.  A peace which transcends ALL understanding.  Like, perhaps it is ok if it doesn't make sense, if it's bigger than my mind can possibly take in.  Some things are very hard to understand. They do not prevent us from having peace. Which begs the question if I am not at peace with my lack of understanding, is it due to circumstances or due to my unwillingness to give it all to God without fully working it all out in head?

From the learning rooms:

We are working on another art history unit and diligently moving through the math and language and a ton of library books. The steady rhythm of read alouds and prayers and practice in those core subjects daily can be so reassuring.  Whatever else life brings, we wake up, make coffee, and cover the table with a mountain of books by noon. Then the "whatever else" part can rush in.  Not before. 

Towards wellness:

Hasfit has become my all time favorite Youtube channel, my free personal trainers. Even though we belong to a gym and my family LOVES it, I prefer to retreat to my room for a while every weekday and work though one of these.  My weight has been pretty stable for many years so this has been more about strength, calm, and endurance.  

From the kitchen: 

Favortite paleo plate this week was the Kalua Pig here.  Salt the roast, wrap in foil, slow roast at 325 for 5 hours.  So easy and so good. Coleslaw and cauliflower-rice alongside. 

We also were happily surprised by these chicken veggie bites. Almond flour crunchy breadsticks here. 

And now I am off to pick up the odds and ends we missed at Costco yesterday.  It will snow again this evening.  There are 5k's and soccer games tomorrow if weather permits. There is a shower faucet to repair.  Flooring to work on.  First, we will pray the stations of the cross tonight with the dollar store candles. It's never too late for this one. 

That's what this weekend has been and for good reason.  We have had some fabulous travel opportunities this month.  Field trips, soccer tournaments, 7 on 7 football.  It was all trucking along incredibly well until I picked up what we think was either norovirus or food poisoning which flattened me for a few days. Now that I am back and on my feet again it felt really good to freshen up the house.  I had a good chance to do that while my guys were busy with football this weekend. I deep cleaned the master bedroom, did some food prep, watched some Downtown (yes I am so behind on anything screen related) and finally, snatched a little conference inspiration watching some of the recorded Refresh discussions.  It will probably take me all week to get to the end of them.  Well worth it!

Meantime, winter has returned and the snow finally arrived after a long dry stretch. We have been out taking pictures and pushing the sled down the little hill and getting very wet and silly.  The little girls have done some shopping with their nursing student sister helping her prepare for her first hospital job.  Our wonderful daughter in law flew to be with her momma after they lost their elderly grandfather/father last week.  Another adult child has been keeping us abreast of medical tests happening.  Life is quite different than it once was, with more than half of them grown and on their own now.   I'm grateful for their calls and updates even when they are brief.  My mind is littered with little mental post it notes tracking the big and little things they are all working through.  So many prayers, both of gratitude and intercession. 

So with that bit of an explanation as to where the past two weeks disappeared to, here is a peek at our tour of a local coffee roaster.  Such a great trip! The staff was so enthusiastic and informative.  I'd say energy was high, but well, duh, right?  Safe to say I have never seen people with higher job satisfaction.  God bless the magic coffee bean.  

After learning all about where and how coffee grows we got to see and feel the green beans.  Then watched a whole batch roast with a careful eye on them at all times.  We smelled the hot beans pour out and watched them weed out any over or under roasted beans.  Then we bagged our samples to take home.  This morning I ground the first bag and have to say that first sip blew me away.  Like the heavens opened for a moment and all my senses heightened while I scrambled to articulate the new tastes that hit me.  Up 'til now I thought we drank good coffee too.  Nothing compared with this.  

So, armed with extra incredible coffee and restored good health we are off to another full week with all the good ideas gleaned from the conference and nice tidy bedroom to start from each day.  Back on track.  

God bless all our people, and our ventures, both big and small.  Amen : ) 

Around the house today:

I made a new centerpiece for February with the lovely potted plant my husband brought home.  Since Ash Wednesday and Valentine's fell on the same day this year the girls worked yesterday to make up sweets for the neighbors while they could still eat the ones that didn't quite make the cut. This morning Abbie made the heart shaped rolls. Lent is off to a busy but beautiful start.  

I had another unit in the works when I pulled the biography off the shelf at the library.  It told the story of a new-to-me artist whose palette and subjects – pastel pies and candies and other familiar goodies – really intrigued me. What started with, "Hey everyone check this out!" turned into a full blown unit complete with video and hands-on work.  I've pulled together some of our favorites here:

This is the first book I grabbed.  It is a short-ish biography we mostly read aloud. It was very insightful in regards to both how his life experiences and relationships impacted his art and vice versa, as well as how he viewed his own work.  Spoiler: he did not consider himself to be a pop art painter.  

This next book was a children's board book which had clear illustrations of some of his more minimalist paintings.  They led to lots of discussion about shape, color, and use of shading.  The girls attempted some copies of these. 

The next was an oversized coffee table book which included his later landscape work which defies simple description.  Colin, our oldest, liked these the best when he was visiting and looking through. 

Given some of the debate and discussion in his heyday about pop art and who was and was not in the group, this video helped to show the similarities and differences among the big names of the era.  Spoiler number two: we explored the others in later units.  

My art lesson Pinterest board has a ton of links to children's projects.  Some of our favorites were:

Cupcakes

3D Cakes

and here 

Ice cream cones

Gumballs 

and more gumballs 

Some of our projects: 

It is my firm belief you do NOT need to possess exceptional fine motor skills to study art nor to participate in projects that highlight some of the concepts.  I have some naturally adept, artsy kids and some athletes and mathematicians who are far less comfortable holding a brush.  We find projects that can be adapted so each of our students can make art.  Below, the use of a template and straight edge guide enable a less confident freehand artist to make a very respectable reproduction. 

Some ways to spice up your work:

Try new media, such as wax pastels instead of crayons.  

Consider a base of colored or black cardstock instead of white.  It changes up the look and the skills involved to represent light and shadow. 

Outside:

It's dusk now as I sit in the kitchen and the sky is fiery.  Winter has been so mild.  It was 51 when I drove out today.  

Wearing:

Knit swing dress and scarf over leggings and boots.  Quite often.  I change up the scarves. 

Around the house:

We have a new water heater.  I will just let that sink in a moment.  It felt like a momentous announcement considering the way we discovered we needed a new water heater was finding its contents running over the laminate floor.  The floor we put in last winter.  And the winter before that.  (for real – our family is pretty remarkable in the bad luck odds department)   My husband was amazing however.  Like, he is approaching heroic levels of head of household-ing.  He sighed.  He mopped.  He demo'd the floor.  Again.  And then he said, "It could be worse."  And he is right.  Insert our motto – "It's not a bad way to suffer." 

Listening to:

…which made me tear up a bit remembering a boy who played an old upright piano right into the ground.  I saved the ornate facing of it when we finally replaced. It was stored for all the years we were in Europe.  It came out of hiding this week while moving things around. (see entry above) I am looking at a place to hang it.  

From the kitchen:

Busy cooks.  Their father and I are learning new skills and recipes along with them.  We have had a long stretch of very good eats and I will share more this week. 

From the learning room:

I love this job.  I truly do. And it is still very much my primary full time job. Retrospectively there was much scattering of my energy in earlier years. Trying to explore multiple outside projects.  "I could write, I could run a business, I could….."   Ironically now that the physical demands of parenting small children have lifted and my health is better than ever I feel less and less drive to add more.  This is enough.  It is tremendous in fact.  What a gift it is to have hours each day to read and listen to Robert Browning's own voice recite a poem and discuss the table of elements and to teach one young student the steps of multi-digit multiplicate.  Over and over and over.  (not kidding, it's taking an enormous amount of supervised repetition lol)  There are no angry customers to handle.  No unresonable bosses. It's a gift I am relishing even more today now that the lessons are very familiar and there is time to sit and chat and think deeply about them. 

Reading: 

Love Suffers Long – patience in education

What This is Us Teaches Us About Tragedy – and oh my word.  This series could fill up many posts.  

Flower Arranging.  I am not very good at this and am endeavoring to learn more 

From the learning room:

Wearing:

Listening to:

Creating (the 9yo, not me):

Book stack: 

Thinking about:

Dawn's reflections on an old and dear read about intentional living here. 

The purpose of our to do lists here. 

And that reminded me of the catchphrase I shared years ago –

 "The purpose of the task is to strengthen the relationship."  

Which only made this one a harder read.  

"As I grapped with some of the more difficult items on the to-do list though, I faced a discouraging number of "boomerang errands": errands that I thought I was getting rid of but came right back to me.  Eighteen months overdue, congratulating myself on crossing the task off the list I went to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned, only to discover I had decay under one filling. I had to return to the dentist's the next week.  Boomerang.  I asked the building super to fix our bedroom wall light, but it turned out he couldn't do it.  He gave me the number of an electrician. I called the electrician.  He came, he took the light off the wall, but he couldn't fix it.  He told me about a repair shop. I took the light to the repair shop.  A week later, I picked it up. Then the electrician had to come back to install it.  Then the light worked again.  Boomerang, boomerang, boomerang."

One of the most frustrating parts of working towards cheerful productivity is hitting checklist items that generate more checklist items.  I've felt tension creep in but hadn't really looked at it squarely until Gretchen Rubin articulated it so well above.  It can be tempting to put off an appointment, or delay making a call because you have good reason to suspect it will usher in additional 'to-do's.'  There is that tendency to let those sleeping dogs lie and tackle more straightforward tasks which provide a bit of instant gratification. 

My goal has been to incorporate these time-eaters into the schedule and slowly cross them off,  however many steps that requires. Less shirking, more facing and finishing.  My challenge has been to be as chill possible as those issues get untangled.  Sometimes that simply requires a quick pep talk to self.  Sometimes, like when the automated voice on the other end of my call to the insurance company informed me, "Your estimated hold time is now…. 47 minutes." I hang up, mutter a bit under my breath, and start in again fresh at a better time.  

A wonderful thing has unfolded over here recently.  My husband has taken up cooking.  Turns out he is good at it! He has much more interest in putzing around with recipes than I tend to and has made some great dinners.  Sunday dinner has been handed over.  He cooks and I play sous chef and clean as we go.  It has made for something of a weekly dinner date. 

A little backstory probably helps here.  About a dozen years ago, after many years of struggle, we left the military medical system and I was blessed to have a respected physician connect the dots of my medical history.  He ran tests and sent me to specialists and so many puzzles were straightened out.  He was a conventional physician who was also interested in complementary and alternative care options. Together we cobbled together a holistic approach to my healing which included a starch and later dairy free diet.  A dozen years ago this was a radical idea.  People were sometimes outright horrrified when it came up.   I kind of kept it low key to see how it played out. It played out really well. 

Turned out though I wasn't the only one getting better. Unbeknownst to me countless other people were also thriving on similar plans.  Books started to come out.  One after another.  Suddenly my diet is a familiar household term and resources abound which is definitely a happy surprise. 

For a long time I was making my own meals alongside my family's.  Although they were always real food and made from scratch the carbs were not without consequence.  My husband gave paleo a trial run for a month last year and lost 20lbs and felt great.  Then lapsed.  Before the new year he decided he was ready to make another go at it.  Same experience.  The weight is dropping off.  He is breathing easier.  His road race training is back on track. 

The nicest perk is that this woman who doesn't love to cook, is now making one kind of dinner each night. That has freed us up to try more complicated recipes and make up more interesting sauces and dressings.  My interest in and appreciation for food is returning, maybe for the first time, since food has always been a challenge for me – either making me sick or making extra work.  

Since this is not a renegade idea anymore and other families are making low carb, nutrient dense meals more often, I thought I'd share more of what we are enjoying. Tonight it was Reuben Pork Chops from Maria Emmerich's 30 Day Keto Cleanse.  We have been cooking through this book in January and now feel the need to buy everything she ever wrote.  SO good. I don't even like the separate components of this recipe but agreed to take one bite of the whole dish before eating my plain chop.  That was a good call.  Together it was delicious.  

This whole experiment has been delightful.  He is loving cooking.  I am loving him cooking.  Win win lol. It is so nice to have support in the kitchen and do some role reversal.  We are expanding our palates considerably in the process.