Here’s another latest episode of the Duggars. It was made when grandson Michael was 8 months old, so that must have been back in February, since he was born in June 2011. Anna shares that she does not have a baby on the way, but maybe that has changed since then. She says she is hoping to have twins next! She also talks about how happy she is to be stay-at-home mom. Jill and Joseph escort Grandma Duggar on a date to a widows’ banquet.
This is the most beautiful sight I’ve seen in a long time! Free mulch, all you can dig!
God has heard my prayers and answered them! This might sound silly, but I have been dreaming about mulch. For years now we have had these two flower beds out front that I have weeded with my children countless times every summer. After much blood, sweat and tears getting children to weed with me, I’ve thought, “If we could just throw down 10 layers of wood chips on this dirt, the weeds won’t grow back!” But we couldn’t afford to buy wood chips. At least the amount we needed. One year we got two or three bags, but that wasn’t nearly enough. It just gave a sad, sorry, sparse, thin layer and the weeds grew back.
So I have been praying and wishing that God would send some mulch or some kind of groundcover my way. I have been scouting the free section on ksl.com’s classified ads. I did find some groundcover rocks a family was giving away, but that would involve an hour trip one way.
Well, God heard my prayers and brought my attention to a flyer on the bulletin board in the public works building where my Eternal Warriors class meets every week. It said that the windstorm that knocked trees down last December has resulted in a huge pile of pine tree mulch. Free even, if you load it yourself. Oh yeah! I was totally onto this one! The best part is it’s only about ten minutes from my house.
When my eyes-hungry-for-landscaping-beauty saw this gorgeous pile of free wood chips I felt I had found nirvana. I felt like Hansel and Gretel must have felt when they were starving and then came across the house of candy in the woods. Let me at it! This pile of wood chips was like a mountain of chocolate for me!
The December 1, 2011 windstorm of Davis County has been the disaster that keeps on giving. At least for our family! Three of our biggest problems for our financially-challenged household have been solved by that storm. We got a new free roof, a new free fence, and now free weed blocker/ground cover/yard beautifier. I sure hope that the storm was not a huge problem for other people. For us, it has been a huge blessing. My husband even prayed last fall that a storm would to tear shingles off the roof so the insurance would replace it for free. Well, dear husband, who knew that your prayer would answer my prayer?
See how ugly our flower bed was? In desperation I settled on grass clippings to cover it, but that doesn’t work so hot. Especially when my lawn mower (11 year old son) keeps “forgetting” to put the clippings on the flower bed.
Of course the kids did a lot of playing on the mulch pile. I loaded up three bags with Venture, and then it started raining/sleeting/hailing in this psychotic Utah weather. Maybe it was the heavens weeping with me for joy! So we went home, and then we came back the next day with the little kids.
Maybe we will come back when it’s covered with snow!
The boys easily found some sticks. What is it with little boys and sticks?
This little girl is the biggest daredevil of them all. She slid and rolled and jumped off. Who needs Lagoon when Davis County has a mulch pile?
We got dirt in our hair and nose but it was so much fun!
Here’s how the flower beds look now…
Beautiful! I know it’s not going to last forever. But I am confident God will bring me more mulch when I need to apply more as this stuff decomposes.
We got tired out but are so happy to have received this blessing. Thank you God! I feel so humbled and blessed that He would answer my prayers for something so small and insignificant to most people. I have had so many hard challenges and disappointments this past year that this blessing really touches my heart. I wonder how He is going to bless me next. I wonder how He will bless you next. I am determined to look for the hand of God in my life more and share the blessings he brings to me in this blog. I encourage you to pray and record how He blesses you daily. God is really very good!
Please share this video with your friends. I totally agree. It’s given by a medical doctor in Illinois who is running for the state senate race. Her name is Dr. Barbara Bellar. Just ignore the Romney ad. Yes, Romney is LDS, but he thinks government is the answer to most if not all problems.
We had a big storm that came on and off on Saturday before Labor Day, waking me up at 5 AM with thunder, and then reappearing in the early evening. When it was all over, I was excited to go out with my youngest children to look for the rainbow. We’ve had the best summer ever! I love the freedom, the increased sunlight, and the easy yet intense energy of summer. I’ve had so many insights and much growth. This storm and rainbow are the perfect ending and transition into the new season of fall and the new school year. Seeing a real rainbow in the sky always gives me a feeling of peace. Perhaps it is because of the quote from Joseph Smith I learned about a few years ago:
I have asked of the Lord concerning His coming; and while asking the Lord, He gave a sign and said, “In the days of Noah I set a bow in the heavens as a sign and token that in any year that the bow should be seen the Lord would not come; but there should be seed time and harvest during that year: but whenever you see the bow withdrawn, it shall be a token that there shall be famine, pestilence, and great distress among the nations, and that the coming of the Messiah is not far distant. (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Section Six 1843-44, p.340)
So despite my fear of what is going to happen with the next presidential election, at least we will be having a normal seedtime and harvest.
I thought I would post some photos I haven’t used yet from summer along with musings and things I’ve learned that I haven’t shared yet.
Here’s a funny story. I was getting ready to help at an event. I wanted to do something different and fancy with my hair. I asked my 16 yo daughter to help me do the flat iron loose curl/beach wave thing. So she did and it looked really good. (It’s not the style pictured above, although she did style my hair in the picture above. I just didn’t happen to snag a picture of the beach waves.) Anyway, my husband saw my hair and said, “You look like a polygamist.” Hummf, I thought. Is he saying that I look frumpy? All the polygamists I have seen, like at the zoo, or in National Geographic, have the big pulled back bangs that look like a giant wave you could surf, and then braids in the back, and they wear clothes that hearken back to Little House books.OK, I just read that last sentence and it sounds rude. What I meant about the zoo is that I have seen polygamists attending the zoo, on free days at the zoo, because that is when bargain-seeking homeschoolers swarm such places, and many polygamists are homeschoolers. I didn’t mean I have seen polygamists in the zoo.
Back to the story, why would he say this to me? So I went to bed feeling rather mad at my husband. The next day at the event, this woman walked into the room and I immediately noticed how pretty she was and she had this adorable stylish jacket that I wished I had (with ruffles, I love ruffles!). I met her and talked to her and learned some things from her. I went home that night and my husband said, “Did you meet so-and-so?” I said yes, and it turned out she was the pretty woman I had noticed and the polygamist my husband said I looked like. So he was actually giving me a compliment! So I learned 2 things. First, that my husband can give compliments in a backhanded way, and that polygamists don’t all dress the same and can dress normally stylish. I also learned that you never know what someone’s background is. I met the second wife the next day and talked to her and she was dressed stylishly normal as well. This experience challenged my assumptions. I have learned that I can’t always tell a person’s whole story by the way they dress.
My daughter learned to float on her back with her cousin’s help.
I heard this story from my friend who lived in the same stake as Larry H. Miller. She said that Brother Miller gave her family a van! They were in great need of a new car several years ago. Brother Miller found out that they needed a car and asked her husband come to one of his car dealerships. The people there gave him the keys to a new van! I want to become rich enough that I can give cars to people in need.
For a long time I have wanted to organize our garage and get shelves. We had boxes and boxes of food for our year’s supply of food that were just stacked, rather helter skelter. I felt like my husband was not doing his part in organizing it. Three years ago my mother in law came up from Provo and as a gift for me in my pregnancy she organized it with my kids while my husband and I went on a date to the temple. But since then, with entropy and seven children who I have not trained very well I guess, it has fallen into chaos. I just felt like he should take charge of it without me asking. I am glad that we persist in having our weekly Family Executive Council. This is where we meet weekly to plan the week and talk about our children and their needs and the needs of the home and yard. As we got to talking about the garage I found out he was still waiting for me to get shelves. I had thought that the money we had saved for shelves got spent so I couldn’t get shelves any more. It was really good to talk to him and get on the same page and find out we still had the money. I was able to find 6 more sets of shelves, the exact amount I needed to fill in the perimeter of the garage with shelves, on ksl.com, for less than $60 total. I am hoping my husband spends the rest of the hundreds we had saved for shelves for whatever I want!
I also learned how it works for me to set a date far enough in advance when I know my husband can take work off, like Labor Day, and ask that he dedicate that day to the chore I want him to do, like cleaning out the garage. We labored hard on Labor Day organizing the garage and now we’ve got all the boxes of food on shelves and a lot of junk thrown away. Hooray!
I learned about the power of writing through my Eternal Warriors class, my 3 Key Elements class, and my homework for the Moms’ Retreat. All three of the classes coincidentally focuses on how to use writing as a way to let out negative emotions and connect with God by decreasing the power of the adversary. The devil does not have a body and can’t write. Whenever we write we are showing how we have more power than he does.
My daughter and some of her cousins! Beautiful girls! The poor baby is sad she’s been taken from her mother’s arms. I love attached babies!
My son got to be on a panel for the LDS Homeschool Conference. It was fun to see him interact with his friends and hear his account of growing up as a homeschooler. His afro is now gone as he had to get a missionary haircut for his mission application. We are now waiting to find out where he goes!
We had so much fun at the This is the Place State Park. I am excited to revisit when the fall colors come out.
I found out my nephew and my son are finally old enough to be buddies together. I have used this picture before, but it’s so cute and the only one I got of my son and his cousin, I am using it again.
I found out my niece can read really well, after just a year of kindergarten.
It was fun to see my husband’s cousin’s daughter and her new groom at their wedding reception, so in love.
I found out that my sister, who I always thought was only into mainstream medicine, actually goes to a chiropractor and agrees with me that medical doctor don’t always have all the answers. She brought a book to our family vacation called The Mood Cure. The recommendations in it of nutritional supplements have really helped her family and now mine. The author recommends 5HTP for anxiety. This past summer we have found out that one of my children has anxiety A LOT. The 5HTP is helping, along with other supplements. The same sister has watched all of the Duggar episodes. I am just getting into the Duggars so this gives something more to talk about.
Farewell, summer! I am excited to apply what I have learned this summer into fall and winter!
We visited Dr. Altman–chiropractor in downtown SLC at the Gateway, with the free first visit promo and it went great. (Thanks Anji–the WAPF Chapter Leader, who sent out a referral promo thing for free first visit and two adjustments.)
We’ve never seen a chiropractor and we consider ourselves very healthy with no “back problems.” But we went to see what chiropractic care could offer us, since we’re unfamiliar with it. And we enjoyed that he educated us and adjusted us, explaining what our body is feeling–tension-wise currently. He also identified problems we didn’t know we had, but now understand–like why my knee hurts when I run (or that my husband has neck trauma that when adjusted, allows him to better turn his head–and he never realized he didn’t have full range of motion). Overall, he found 7 problems in my back and explained that one of them: that I had a weak left ankle and that it was affecting my spine and causing it to twist and thereby affect my hip and opposite should as well–which I didn’t realize.
And though my husband was skeptical at first and didn’t have any “back” problems persay, he came away even more excited than me that Dr. Altman had identified things my husband had never known or felt that stem from mis-alignment of his spine. He came away walking straighter too (his right foot turns out a little, but didn’t after the adjustment–due to an injury he’d had back in his teenage years). Granted, these are temporary adjustments for now until your body gets back use to that–so they’ll take a few adjustments. But Dr. Altman is great in giving the first two free adjustments to see what works for you and decide if you want to continue or not, And he can refer good nutritional advice in conjuntion. (He seems to take many insurances for basic adjustment visits and such, which is nice) And if you decide it’s not for you, at least you’re educated about it.
If anyone wants to check out what chiropractic care can do, I’d go check out Dr. Altman–who believes in eating well and more of that holistic approach. In fact, he wrote two chapters in Anji’s new coconut oil book. And he’s got some good you tube testimonials too you can watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7-bVG_4VkI
His office is in the Gateway, suite 103–located right next to Forever21 on the second floor before you get to BArnes and Noble.
If you’ve always wanted to learn how to cook with sourdough, this is the best explanation I’ve found on how to begin by making your own starter. You just need a quart size Mason jar, flour, and water. A rubber scraper is handy to scrape down the sides after you mix the ingredients. I read through different recipes, and this video explains it the most simply! Just after a few days of culturing the sourdough starter you can make delicious whole wheat pancakes for your family that are digestible, since the phytic acid in whole wheat is neutralized by the sourdough leavening. You have to feed the starter twice a day, as if it were a dog, but it’s worth it. At first it was hard for me to remember that I had one other “mouth” to feed morning and night, but now I am glad I do, because I loving having some sourdough batter handy to make pancakes, crepes, and more. Any time the jar gets full, you take out half of it, and store it in a second quart size Mason jar. When this second jar gets full (about twice a week if you are being diligent in adding to the starter every day) you can make up something like pancakes using the recipes at the following link. If I remember right, the following recipes at the link in the next paragraph all use 1 cup of starter/natural yeast. I just quadruple the recipe to use 4 cups of starter, which is equal to a quart Mason jar full of starter. Then I start over refilling the second jar with the overflow from the mother starter.
Here are four no-wait sourdough recipes you can use with your sourdough starter: a main-dish pie, pancakes, waffles, and crepes. For traditional sourdough bread, you are going to have to wait, and let your starter mature after several weeks.
If you would like to come to a moms’ retreat at a really low price (how about $10?) now’s your chance! My friends Shauna, Rhonda, and LIz are organizing a retreat for moms, now officially called, Zion Women’s Weekend, at Liz’s home in Grantsville, UT. It’s going to be October 19-20, yes an overnighter!
and author of the book below, Healing Arts- a Gift from God. It’s about LDS insights on the light of Christ and energy medicine.
So we will be talking politics and government, how to follow the Holy Ghost, and how energy work fits in with the gospel of Jesus Christ. How juicy!
You are welcome to bring your nursing baby as long as you keep the baby quiet, not like my niece in the picture at the top. Really, we will understand if she cries, but please take any crying babies out of the room during the presentations. There will be a separate room for the moms and babies to sleep in.
Yesterday was the awesome Knights of Freedom Summit sponsored by Queen Emily and King Richard over at http://masteringknighthood.com. I know that word awesome is overused, but in this case, the word really fits. All the people who help put this event on really go all out to make it spectacular and inspiring. Thank you Summit helpers! This has become an annual family event for us. It involves two days of pure fantasy and pleasure for little boys and big boys alike. This is a place for boys to let out the wildness within them and be physical, while channeling it all to fight for the right. It is a simulation that puts the boys in a made-up land of “Terra Libre.” The boys pretend to be knights who are called upon to defend their liberty and homeland from the dark dastardly villain General Koldar and his followers.
The banners were so inspiring! I love that this one mentioned God.
Over a hundred boys participated. Have you ever seen so many little boys? They were divided up into “camps.” Each camp two groups, and each group had a dad who was the Camp Sargeant, a mom who was Camp Matron, an older boy who was a Master Knight. a young girl who was the Fair Maiden, and a young boy who was a Squire.
The boys participate in workshops to help them internalize the seven standards. One of them is missing, it is, “protect the defenseless.” The standards each got stolen. So each camp had to go on a quest to find one of them.
My husband got to be a camp sergeant.
My firstborn got to be a Master Knight. Here he is going off to the Final Battle.
That’s one of my sons on the very left, receiving last minute instructions for the Final Battle from a squire.
Here he is in the heat of the battle.
Here is General Koldar, the archvillian of Geld, retreating. Take that, you nasty brute!
My son, the blonde above, was in the Red Camp. Here he is in the final battle. I love the crusty look from his friend Spencer directed at the enemy.
Here’s my Master Knight defending a flag. Each camp had a flag to defend. If a player got to it he could turn it over to his team’s color, black for the bad guys and white for the good. The battle was over when all the flags were the same color. Inspiring epic battle music played from loudspeakers added to the drama.
The battle had sparring rules that determined when you had to kneel down or go out for five seconds, as if you had died.
Moms and siblings enjoyed the show.
The Fair Maidens got a little bored. I like that girls get to be involved and get the chance to express their creativity and beauty. My daughter had fun curling her hair up, as seen below.
I loved this Camp Matron’s fancy skirt. All the Matrons had spray bottles to spray down the boys.
This cute baby had the best seat in the place, although I kept wishing the mom had a sling.
Of course the boys won and we were able to retire to the Final Ceremony for awards and then a great feast!
It’s a huge honor to be a Master Knight. I am glad my son got to do it before he leaves on his LDS mission.
I didn’t catch a photo of the fabulous food. David and Tamra Hyde do such a great job of catering the food every year. Pulled pork, hot dogs, homemade French fries, salad, and dessert for everyone! I brought lentils for any vegetarians and it was gobbled up.
King Richard and Queen Emily reigned magnificently. They always do such a great job. Thank you for all your royal hard work! Huzzah! Huzzah means “to his honor.” As Queen Emily stated, “It’s to honor God who grants us all the blessings and miracles we see each year. That is why in my heart I keep saying, ‘Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!'”
Another one of my sons, the one yawning, was a villain. After all the festivities, he came home with his dad and went to a stake dance and stayed up late. I took this picture after church today because my kids looked so cute in their red, blue, and pink clothes. All this “recreating” is hard work! It took me awhile to round up all my kids at that huge park after the picnic was over. I saw Nicholeen Peck attending. She teaches classes on Teaching Self Government. I immediately recalled one of her lessons about how whenever you should go out as a family to any public place it’s really important to remind your children of the ground rules. I neglected that and paid for it, as some of my kids kept wandering away from me without asking permission. It was like herding cats at the end, looking for all of them. I would find one and then go look for another and then that one would disappear. So I was reminded of a lesson for motherhood about getting kids grounded before we leave the car. But we had a grand time and are already looking forward to next year!
I have decided to blog about we do for homeschool more often. I hesitate to commit to every day, because I probably won’t keep up that pace. I just started teaching piano lessons this week and am also mentoring a youth LEMI scholar project for the first time in my life, not to mention keeping up with my other blogging, being a wife, mother, homemaker, visiting teacher, etc. so I know I will not be blogging about what we learn every day. But the idea is to have a record of what we learn to “enlarge our memory.” In my studies this past summer I have learned so much about how important it is to write down what I learn and what my children learn, especially what is revealed to us through the Holy Ghost. I have struggled over the years to be consistent about recording what we learn and do each day. Sometimes simply getting through the day is we all can manage! I used to keep a notebook and for some time I recorded every day, but mostly it was every month or not at all!
But I love to blog because it’s fun to see the pictures of my kids on the screen so maybe that will motivate me to be consistent. Anyway, yesterday was our first official day “back to school,” since we went to the Brigham City temple open house on Tuesday (most of these pictures are from that time). I think it’s highly immoral to have any sort of structured school for little kids before Labor Day. Even when we start after Labor Day, I like to hold back on a ton of real academic work until we get what Diane Hopkins calls “pencil weather.” That’s where it’s cold enough outside that kids want to be indoors, and you have them captive long enough to entice them to do some 3 Rs. But we did practice some reading with my 6 and 8 year olds yesterday.
For these Indian summer days, we will be using the first part of school time to complete our harvest. It totally relieves my stress to know that I can use school time to work with my little children on housework, bringing in the harvest from our garden, and preserving it all. I don’t have to do it all myself! They can and should work with me! Thank you Oliver DeMille for giving parents permission to count working with your children as school. He calls it “core phase.” He says the curriculum for homeschool for the early years is to work and play with your children, teaching them the difference between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, and good and bad. This is the way children learned before our modern industrial culture decided that preschool was a good thing because there was a ton of moms working outside the home.
I have one child who seems so contrary and rebellious that I wonder if he will be in core phase forever. Every day he complains about chores and says that when he gets big he won’t ever have to do any chores. Does anybody else have a child like this? During our school time he usually says there’s nothing for him to do. So sometimes we start doing more chores, and do chores during school time every day for a long time, so he will be begging for some academic work for school.
My homeschooling time is far from being blissful. We had a lot of complaining and fighting yesterday as we went about our homeschool morning. I am the first to admit my kids are far from perfect and that I’m not a perfect mom.
On Labor Day, I was going through my files to dejunk and found all these cute papers I made with my two oldest kids to help them learn about good nutrition when they were 4 and 6 during our homeschool time. My husband, as husbands sometimes do, made the insensitive remark about how I don’t do things like with the little kids any more. I just unschool, he claims. He doesn’t realize how hard it is to homeschool for more than a decade with all the trials that accompany life even if you don’t homeschool. I am still figuring out how to homeschool at a sustainable pace and have the kids still like me and me like them. I have a friend who did the FACE curriculum with her 5 kids for a year in her homeschool, and after a year she was so burned out with preparing lesson plans the night before and getting her kids through the canned curriculum, that she put them all in public school the next year! Maybe I should remind dear husband of the time he watched the kids for three days while I staffed an event outside the home and he just let them play and didn’t even read to them during homeschool time!
For our homeschooling, it’s important for you to know that we follow the TJED philosophy for the for most part, although I do start requiring my kids to do math when they get to be around 8-10, somewhere in there. Some kids will never do math if you never make them. I want my kids to go to college, and to get into college, you have to know math. It’s that simple. I don’t want them to have to settle for a local community college, but to get into the college of their choice, and, on scholarship. To do that, one has to excel in math on the ACT or SAT. It’s really that simple. I have one friend who never required her daughter to do math because the daughter never wanted to do it in her homeschooling career. The daughter didn’t get to go to the college she wanted to and had to go to the local college, where they accept everyone, unless maybe you’re a convicted murderer. Her mother wishes she had “made” her daughter do math every day during their homeschooling years.
I also follow Mary Ann Johnson’s rules of engagement for homeschooling time you can find here if you subscribe to her site on the right hand side. Watch the video too. You will get her article about the rules if you subscribe. This is my closet and desk pictured above that I have set up for our homeschooling time. We also have a big table you can’t see across from the desk that we use to gather around. That’s a big necessity for any homeschooling mom, a table that is not the dining room table to use for homeschooling! That way you can leave things out. We are not, however, restricted to this area. Sometimes we go outside or to the kitchen or to the bedroom to dejunk or go on a field trip. The closet is really big and to the left of the desk. I got it at Shopko and my dear husband installed it when we first moved in almost 8 years ago. I really wanted a place to keep my homeschool stuff that wasn’t the kitchen table like I had in my old house! It’s really a wardrobe closet but of course I use it for school stuff and ignore the rods for hanging clothes. I got it even before I knew that “the closet” was an ingredient in a “Leadership Education.” (See the book below for a detailed description or Mary Ann’s site I linked above.)Mary Ann has great ideas on what to use for your “closet” even if you don’t have a real closet. Don’t let the lack of a real closet keep you from creating one. You can use shelves, cupboards, a suitcase, or even a pocket shoe organizer for the back of a door. Mary Ann is even calling the closet a “spark station” because that’s what it really is, a place to fan the sparks for learning that your children have. Fan the sparks and make the fire of love of learning burn!
It’s loaded with fun things. The kids uncle gave us a pencil sharpener one year for Christmas (not the only gift, he gave fun things too, don’t worry) and we mounted it on the closet. I love that it’s so handy. We also have an electric pencil sharpener that I like to keep hidden so little eyes don’t see it and investigate but someone had it out in plain view just the other day…
Anyway, here’s what we did for our first day of being together all morning at home, focusing on school. All summer I have had the kids work in the garden or weed with me after breakfast or fold clothes, and then they have been free to play (except for the 10 year old and ups, they have had math to do every day, as we don’t take a summer break for math, and their own projects). They’ve had a glorious summer playing indoors and out!
After the morning chores were done (breakfast cleanup and dishes which my 11 year old and younger do) we went out to the garden to see what was ripe. We found a few cherry tomatoes, a pointy tomato that has a funny shape, and a bell pepper that is a pretty purplish chocolate color. Then we put the basil leaves in the dehydrator to dry. Then we will store them in glass jars when they are nice and crispy. Whenever I want basil I will whiz some in my blender to have ground, organic, heirloom seed basil. Thank you to my friend Kimberly for giving me these basil plants!
Then we went downstairs to do more school. I opened up the homeschool closet. We did not have school with it all summer so I wondered what reactions I would get. Cowboy complained that there was nothing to do. But Princessa asked to play with the Inchimals, a math manipulative pictured above, and that engaged her for a good ten minutes, except for when she complained that the 3 year old, Bugsy, wanted the dry erase marker that she uses to write the answers in the book that comes with the set. So then we had to find something for him to do. I found him a wipe-off book pictured below to “practice writing” with a different marker and he did that for maybe 30 seconds. All my memories of frustration about what to do with the baby during homeschool time came flooding back to me. Except he’s not a baby any more but I am still getting used to not calling him that.
I wanted to find our copy of Make Way for Ducklings to test out the Google Lit Trips site but could not find it. So I grabbed our copy of the Usborne Microscope book and I sat down and oohed and aahed over the pictures just to get Cowboy’s attention. We looked at gross pages of what dust, bugs, and tastebuds look like magnified a million times. It worked. He came and looked at the pictures. I decided to just do a few pages to whet his appetite and maybe we will return to it another day.
Meanwhile Venture got out Trucky, which is another math manipulative/puzzle/game that teaches spatial arrangement. He was grumpy for some reason and refused to smile for me so I just took a picture of his head. I kept asking Cowboy what he would like me to read aloud to him but he couldn’t think of anything. So I decided we would practice his reading skills. I got out my trusty beginning reader that has a Godly focus, published by the Mennonites. First I practiced with Princessa and then Cowboy. I taught them to read last year. They know basic phonics decoding skills but they need a lot of practice to get fluent at it.
Cowboy insisted on refusing to use anything in the closet. I have lots of cool stuff: books, a puzzle atlas book, a science kit, Lego contraptions, art supplies, origami, erector set, play doh, moon dough, moon sand, and on and on, but he likes to be contrary.
We were having extreme grumpiness so I decided to do something to bring the Holy Ghost into the room. The Book of Mormon on Trial was handy on my desk so I grabbed it and started reading where we left off last spring. This book always puts in a great mood because of the truth it tells. I always feel a lot more cheerful and light when I read it. It tells a story with fun cartoon characters about putting the Book of Mormon trial with all the objections people have come up with through the years, and how the Book of Mormon withstands all of those objections. It is based on a true story which involves my girlfriend’s grandfather Jack West. During law school he was asked to come up with a mock trial. He decided to put the Book of Mormon on trial. His law professor said that in all his years of law he had never seen a case as nearly perfect as this one. See his story here.
We read almost a chapter and it worked. I felt the Spirit come into the room, softening our hearts. It helped me to focus more clearly on how I could meet my rebellious son’s desires to learn something he’s interested in and my desire to help him learn something meaningful without forcing him.
So I decided to ask him if he just wanted me to read Lord of the Rings to him aloud. But dear husband is reading that to the younger kids at night so we decided we didn’t want to infringe on his reading time. So then I decided to capitalize on the fact that J.R.R. Tolkien was Christian and influenced C.S. Lewis to be Christian by proposing to Cowboy that we learn about Tolkien’s life. We found and watched these two cool videos about Tolkien’s life.
We talked about the story of the god who dies and comes back to life and how cool that is and that it’s really true and that it is Jesus Christ.
Then we watched this video and I read the commentaries aloud to Cowboy. I explained to him about how Catholics believe in Jesus like we do, but we believe differently about what happened to the priesthood power after Jesus died. Cowboy knew almost all of the character’s names, even though he has not watched these movies, just from being read aloud the Hobbit and osmosis from his older brothers I guess.
So it does help to follow what you child is interested in, as they say in the TJED world, but I do believe in requiring math as the kids get older. That was our homeschool morning, then it was time for lunch and the rest of our busy day! I taught a piano lesson, then we went to Jerald Simon’s house to pick up piano books for my own budding pianist. He is a really nice guy and has a site here. My new student brought this book pictured below to her lesson and I decided I wanted it to study too so I could teach it to her and my kids so I asked for it and he gave me a discount. You can’t see it very well, but it’s Variations on Mary Had a Little Lamb. It teaches you to how to change a melody so it sounds like jazz, a swinging dance club, a western version, a funeral, and more. Fun!
Later that night we got a used guitar for the same child for his guitar class this year for only $40. We found it on ksl.com, one of my trusted sources for great deals. I am soooo excited about our new homeschooling year!
Tree of Life Mothering 