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:
and here
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.
It is our Moira's birthday today and two decades later the hours that led up to her birth are still vivid in my memory. We were living in base housing in San Antonio. It was our third home for that assignment and not the best of them. In fact the house was on the list to be condemned. We would be the last residents. We had two bathrooms but only one working due to crumbling clay pipes under the house. Large roaches occasionally migrated up through those drains so we tried to keep them covered.
We had good neighbors there. Friends who had been with us at our first duty station were nearby. We had homeschool friends. We loved Texas despite the housing. There were any number of people who could come hang out with the children until Miss Jen could drive over from the base on the other side of town. It was the ideal scenario for a military couple not living near family and a much better situation than when we had the previous baby soon after arriving in town.
This had not been an easy pregnancy. I struggled with irritable uterus and early labor with most of my babies. This time was no different in that regard other than that this baby had remained posterior for a good long time forming a letter B contoured belly versus a letter C curve. I remember we picked up some new things for this baby. Her Daddy had purchased a Jenny Lind cradle which we filled with a set of vintage style Winnie the Pooh linens.
Shortly after dinner on the 18th the telltale cramping began. It was sometime after six and sporadic. Who knows? It could be the real deal or could be a false alarm. We went back and forth with that speculation for a few hours until odds became increasingly in favor of real deal. Which got me thinking we ought to give a heads up to friends. Just in case.
We called the first set. No answer. Over and over. Then we tried the closest neighbor. No luck. The other neighbor also out. Remember this was a LONG time ago. Before cell phones. Before cell phones, you could leave a message on a cassette recorder answering machine but your party would not actually know about your message until they returned to their home. At nine o'clock that evening none of them had.
The other fun development was congestion. And a cough. And a bit of chills.
We waited. I took a shower. (remember the roaches – no bathtub option) We called Jen and apologized profusely but asked her to please head over. Quickly. Like, Godspeed please woman, because it was an up to 40 minutes drive depending on traffic. I'm not sure how many traffic rules she violated that night but there she was at the door in record time.
It wasn't cold when my husband dropped me off at the entrance doors. It was a mild January night and the brisk air was welcome in my congested and flustered state. He rushed to park and I began to make my way inside. The hallway was quiet and empty. Labor and Delivery was on the second floor. I have an extreme ridiculous lifelong aversion to elevators and it didn't seem like one flight of stairs would be THAT bad. It was slow going though. And part way there I met an acquaintance who stopped to chat. Trying to appear calm and normal was even more difficult than scaling the stairs.
When we got to the unit it was close to 11pm and I was in transition. That explained the trial with the steps and the chatting. We began the whole ordeal of paperwork and history and settling into rooms and yada, yada. It was a struggle to stay on top of the pain because my breathing was increasingly impeded. I was getting the flu bug going around. Right then. Did I want some decongestants in my IV? I specifically recall the young doctor explaining it would feel like the equivalent of "a one beer buzz." It's weird what you remember. A one beer buzz for a normal person was more like passing out for me. I needed all my wits about me, or whatever I had left, so I declined.
By midnight they had insisted upon oxygen mask which falls close behind elevator on my list of hateful things. Husband campaigned for alternatives but they wouldn't budge. My water broke during this debate. Intensity racketed up several points. At 12:15 I had had enough. I sat up in bed, swung my legs over the edge and took off my mask. The nurse looked with alarm from me to my husband and back again. "Ma'am? What are you doing?"
I believe what came out of my mouth at that moment was something like, "I've got to get out of here." That did not reassure her. My husband wasn't too concerned though and, while he stalled me, he suggested that someone check my status. Sure enough, it was show time. Fifteen minutes later a startlingly beautiful baby entered the world, our fifth child, our second daughter.
It was not a romantic story thereafter. I developed a full-on flu and fever set in which made for a complicated recovery. I wore a mask for some time after we came home because I was so fearful of infecting the baby. She was, and is, made of tough stuff however. She thrived. I healed.
She has done everything in life with gusto and determination. She became our farm girl, riding a naughty pony through the fields bareback and milking goats by my side. Later she traveled through Europe dancing her heart out and playing soccer. She has had incredible stamina as a distance runner, competing with her dad in the Bolder Boulder road race in grade school. Right now, she is several states away ending her work week and celebrating her birthday with her handsome husband, whom we have every confidence will spoil her to the best of his ability.
Snow is falling here meantime and I am thumbing through old pictures and marveling. We are so very proud of the hard working, faithful and grounded woman she has become. She has not ever pulled the easy ticket but has pushed and striven and shone brightly through every challenge. As the years have gone on a magical thing has happened. We have gradually stepped back from the teaching and directing role and just learn all we can from these incredible people our children have become. They are my treasure and it has been a gift to walk through life alongside of them.
Membership in "the littles" has varied through the years. The original "littles" got big a long time ago. For quite a while now it has been understood to be the youngest three. Who am I kidding? None of them is very little anymore and the last "little" boy has quietly slipped into his teens. His sister is still taking birthday cake requests. Nowadays those involve surfing through Pinterest for ideas to send to her. The one they agreed upon – a chocolate mint – was eaten after indoor soccer practice.
He is busy now. A gifted club soccer team member, a distance runner, a math whiz. He still sings to himself. All Day Long. Lucky for me he is pretty savvy about oldies lyrics.
The teen years are no joke. I don't necessarily dread them but I do approach them with a healthy trepidation these days. It's a big world and he will need more than us to navigate it. With that in mind I pray:
Holy Mother Mary,
Who by virtue of your divine motherhood,
Hast become mother of us all
I place the charge which God has given me,
under your loving protection.
Be a Protecting Mother to my children.
Guard their bodies and keep them
in health and strength.
Guard their minds and keep their thoughts ever holy
in the sight of their Creator and God.
Guard their hearts and keep them pure and strong
and happy in the love of God.
Guard always their souls and ever preserve in them,
faithfully, the glorious image of God
whom they received in Holy Baptism.
Always Mother, protect them and keep them
under your Mothering care.
Supply in your all-wise motherhood,
for my poor human deficiencies
and protect them from all evil.
Amen.
Queen of the Most Holy Family,
Pray for us.
As we pack up the Christmas decorations this Epiphany weekend we hang onto the cards sent to us. They go into a little drawer near where we pray in the evening. We pull out the first one and include their intentions in our prayers. The card goes to the bottom of the stack and we can draw the next one the following day and so on through the year. So easy. It's a good turn done for the thoughtfulness of sending good cheer.
God bless you in 2018
Our house has been wonderfully full and loud and busy over the Christmas holiday. The last "away" kids have returned to their homes and we are started a new year with gusto today. I finally sat down tonight and gathered up bits and pieces of our time together.
Alannah baked for us. I made one of the treats. That would be the Andes Candies Mint Cookies which are a little brown lol.
We learned how to make Finnish Stars.
And stockings. Many stockings.
There was untold joy when the big brothers and sisters began to arrive.
There was also snow. A bunch.
There were a lot of laughs over the grown up activity placemats. You may not get fancy food over here but we can guarantee a good time.
And board games. For hours.
Aidan got Bean Boozled. He said it was pretty yuck.
Not gonna lie. This was not my best year for gift acquisition and organization. Or cards.
Yeah.
But, this bunch couldn't be more laid back nor care much less about that part.
They laughed, they teased, they talked late into the night. It was good. So good.
The new year is already off to a running start. Projects completed, new ones started. Planners and lists galore. I love this time of year and can't wait to share.
I hope you've had a very Merry Christmas and have all the makings of a Happy New Year.
from our house to yours:
(and since the guys were willing to stand there for about two minutes tops, I took two pics to get the married's below instead of setting up the tripod)
Starry Sky Journal 