Weekly Wrap-Up: Indulging our Squirrel Complex and More

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In my life this week … 

We’ve been outside, gardening, doing yard work, and cleaning up the barn to hold a woodpile…for we’re going to try to heat our home with wood this winter.  We’ve never tried anything like that before.

We pickled cucumbers, lots of them, with grape leaves to make them crisp.  Apparently they’re not as good as usual; I was informed that they taste like store pickles.

When we came home from holidays, our radishes had gone to seed. I recalled that the chef at Dundurn castle  cooked with them, so I tried one.  They tasted crisp and ‘radishy’ but we definitely had too many to eat plain.  Instead we pickled some of them with the same brine we used for the cucumber pickles. 

One of our cherry plum bushes had 15 gallons, at least, of fruit.  Some of the branches broke under the weight, but most of them rebounded once we’d picked the fruit.  This is the first year we have a real crop, and wow, such a crop! The fruit is small with purple skins and green insides and has a pleasant tart taste.  We ate, froze, and sauced it.

Mr.16 harvested many quarts of honey…. More about that next week, Lord willing.

In our {summer} homeschool this week …

• Mr. 16: Apologia Chemistry, working on a website, honey-extracting, and being our family’s tech support person. 
• Miss 13: Apologia Physical Science; writing—mostly about Jane Austen—for her blog, Miss Georgiana Darcy; preparing an outline for her Canadian Geography course.
• The Little Misses: reading, origami, enjoying the puppies, and playing. 
• All: listened to me read aloud the unabridged Robinson Crusoe (very religious and contemplative but also very violent), gardened, made pickles, froze plums, and swam.
• Me:  trying to decide what we’ll do next year, and how.  I’m very much leaning toward Ambleside Online again, at least for the Little Misses….

Places we’re going and people we’re seeing … Friends visited, a neighbor came over and left with 3 gallons of plums, Miss 8 went to the library program and learned to make an origami boat, the bee man came and worked on honey extraction with Mr. 16, Miss 18 worked very long hours, Miss 13 went away for the weekend, I had a physical, and we found this stack of beautiful fabric for a song at a garage sale.

My favorite things this week were …

• Finding the goldfinch nest.
• Watching the honey extraction.
• Eating plums. Lots and lots and lots of plums!
• Playing monkey-in-the-middle and Marco Polo with the children in the pool.
• Seeing my GP’s joyful surprise at how healthy I am.
• Having friends and neighbors over.
• Being able to sit down and rest in the evenings after very busy days.
• Watching Emma with Miss 13 and Miss 11.

What’s working for us … Gardening for an hour or two in the morning and then jumping into the pool to cool off.  This way the work gets done and we have a lot of fun, too.

Questions/thoughts I have … An email newsletter asked the question:  “Why do you homeschool?”  I was about to get myself all tied up in knots about the question, so I asked my husband.  He dryly answered, “To keep the government out of our hair.”  When I urged him to be serious, he asked, “Do you really want the schools to stuff them full of foolishness?”  Of course, he knew that all I needed was a laugh to relax me enough to remember why we homeschool: to encourage and inspire our children to love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, and mind, and to love their neighbor as themselves.  Praise the Lord for my husband!

A photo, video, link, or quote to share … 

Our Cherry Plum

This post is linked to The Homeschool Mother’s Journal  and to Weekly Wrap Up at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.