Monday Meals - 7/24/17

Last Monday night, I made a really easy and yummy dish:  Garlic Salmon Linguine.  I found it on the internet.  Super simple and everybody liked it!  I already had a can of salmon, I had fresh parsley that I am trying to use up from the CSA, I had garlic, I had olive oil.   I had to buy the linguine and I didn't use chicken broth as I didn't have any made yet.  I've stopped buying it because I can make it so easily from left over roast chickens.  I did however have a box of vegetable broth (bought in pre-zero waste days).  So I used that.  I should start making veggie broth too.  Anyway, a really good, easy to make dinner.  A winner!

Stole this photo from the recipe site linked above.

Tuesday, I made chicken salad for Rick's and B's lunches.

On Wednesday I made chicken taco salad getting the last bit of meat off the bones.  I sautéed the chicken with garlic and some more of the veggie broth and added in some chili seasoning.  Then I layered the salad.  First layer was lettuce from the CSA, second layer was the chicken, 3rd layer was warmed up Amy's brand refried beans, 4th layer was a small can of corn with green chilis, 5th layer was a jar of salsa, and the final layer was lots of cheddar cheese.  I would have liked to added some guacamole and sour cream but I didn't have any on hand.  It was great and we had enough for lunch the next day.

Thursday Rick was home all day because he had to have a root canal in the morning, so we wound up going to the mall in the evening and eating there.

Friday we had a pasta, tomato and cheese dish and garlic bread.

Saturday we got take out again.

But Sunday I used the chicken broth I had made from the previous Sunday's roasted chickens to make vichyssoise!  So easy.  I kind of combined a couple of recipes together.  I had one smallish white onion, one medium size leek.  I chopped those up fine and softened slowly in butter.  Then I peeled and chopped up 4 pretty big russet potatoes.  I threw them into the pot with the onion and leek with about 5.5 or 6 cups of chicken broth (I just used up what I had made earlier in the week).  Then I added a bay leaf and sprinkled in lots of Mrs. Dash.  Cooked this up for about 30 or 40 minutes.  Let it cool a bit and then used the hand blender to puree it all.  I was too late making the soup in the day to truly chill it, like I think a nice summer soup should be.  But everyone else was fine with it being warm.  Becky was helping at this point so she stirred in a 1/4 cup of heavy cream slowly.    Everyone put their own salt and pepper on to taste.  Everyone went back for seconds!  And there is enough leftover for at least a couple of people to have some today for lunch.

So I feel I used those pastured chickens from a local farm well!  Even if they do come wrapped in plastic.  I got 3 dinners and at least two lunches out of them!

Curds and whey

The other thing I tried to do was make yogurt again.  FAIL!  But I wound up making yogurt cheese by accident!  The yogurt cooked too long on too hot a setting I guess.  My instant pot's yogurt button isn't very accurate it seems.  But a dear person on facebook told me I could just make cheese from the what-ought-to-be-yogurt.  So I happened to have a reusable cloth produce bag made from cheese cloth.  I put the big hunk of white curds in there and drained it for a couple of hours.  Now I have all this whey as well.  Apparently whey keeps for 6 months in the fridge and yogurt cheese keeps a month.  So my next thing is to find a recipe for yogurt cheese, and also for using whey.  Nourishing Traditions has lots of recipes that call for whey.  And since I have become such a fan of Off Grid with Doug and Stacy, I think I will try her recipe for homemade ketchup.  It seems pretty easy.  And I just found hot dogs you can buy without plastic!  So later this week we'll have those.  The ketchup has to sit for at least 2 days before it's ready.

I also made Haymakers Punch from Doug and Stacy.  It was DELICIOUS and so cooling and thirst-quenching.  Stacy is an excellent teacher.  I can't wait to see them in October.  I bought tickets to go to the Homesteaders Conference in Warrenton.  They are one of the featured speakers.

Photo Friday - Pretentious Houses of No. Va.

Because you can never have too many roof lines.

Population control and other rantings

So environmentalists have been coming out in full force with the necessity to control population.  And Melinda Gates wants to do it to apparently to keep women in Africa out of poverty.  This is disturbing to me because it really sounds like white, elite, rich people are telling poor, brown people they need to stop having so many children.  I am no expert, but here are some of things that bother me.  I need to read and research more for sure though.  So this is just a jumble of thoughts.  I reserve the right to change my mind on any of this, if I see evidence to the contrary.

1)  Isn't the population predicted to automatically start decreasing?  I've read this from secular sources.  Like this for instance.  So when Melinda Gates goes on and on about a population explosion, I just don't necessarily buy the assumption she is basing her quest on.

2)  Environmentalists are stupid.  I'm sorry but they are.  And I am somebody who loves planet Earth.  Maybe it is the media that does it.  It reports things badly and likes to emphasize the most extreme views for click bait.  But telling people not to have children is going to enrage so many huge swathes of people.  People you need to work with in order to reduce climate change.  DO NOT LEAD WITH THIS MESSAGE!  It will result in failure and the alienation of the good will of billions of people on the planet.  (And you know there are secular environmentalists out there who question this approach).  Instead:

3)  We should work on educating women.  That is the single greatest factor in reducing the number of births.  Not abortion or birth control but simply allowing a girl to grow into a well educated woman before she marries and possibly begins having children.

4)  Bring back chastity and celibacy!  Make these societal norms!  If people think of sex as a moral act, they are less likely to take it casually.  If we lived in a Catholic only world, a significant number of people wouldn't be sexually active, either because they had taken vows of celibacy or they were behaving in a chaste-like manner, waiting for the time that is right for them to become sexually active.  The advertisement driven uses of sex to sell everything plus the sexual revolution that changed sex from being relational to a form of self-expression is a very toxic combination.  We've warped our understanding of sexuality to an absurd degree.  And it hasn't led to much happiness or stability.

5)  Where did we get this idea that contraception is a human right?  I've heard this several places now.  What?  Do we have a right to have sex but not get pregnant?  I think that strains the idea of what a right is.  Do I have a right to eat as much chocolate cake as I like but not get fat?    I don't think so.  Don't want a baby, don't have sex when the woman is fertile.  We have the science now where we can figure out when ovulation occurs.  We don't have to use artificial methods that lead to the objectification of women.  BOTH sexes can learn self-control.  We need to bring back stoicism.  The idea that self-control is the highest form of autonomy, not getting to do whatever we want as part of our so called identity.

6)  There is a long history in environmentalism of this Malthusian world view.  Malthus thought there would be world wide famine back in the 1700s because of population.  Back in the 1970s the book The Population Bomb was completely wrong about what would happen when the population got too big.  To emphasize this is just poor strategy.  Also, progressives have this habit of fascism where they like to force others to do stuff like get abortions or pay for abortions or sterilize people unknowingly.  They love a top down, coercive approach.  Those socialist nordic countries love euthanasia and don't have enough babies to maintain themselves.  They are basically dying out.  Another example that comes to mind, drawn from the panoply of progressive causes:  PETA loves euthanizing animals.  These people are about CONTROL often.  They mean well, but their moral compass doesn't point to true north.  They get carried away and they always are alarmist when it comes to the future.  If only they could manage every little detail according to their worldview then we'd have utopia!!!!  But it doesn't work that way.  AT. ALL.   Because their worldview is very narrow and ideological and doesn't consider unintended consequences and never looks to the past to see what might be culled from the wisdom of our forefathers and mothers.

7)  A huge problem is the consumption on the part of the rich.  We need to change our habits.  We live high on the hog at the expense of others and the planet.  We are incredibly and unconscionably wasteful.  To live in the first world is to be born into a system of sin.  I am culpable.

8)  We need to change our food system.  We need to change the way we farm.  People are already realizing this, but it needs to grow in a sensible way. For instance we do need a lot fewer farm factories that mass produce beef, we shouldn't be consuming as much as we are.  However, we still need grazers on the land for both food consumption and to restore our grasslands and put carbon back into the soil.  We have to do things in smaller, smarter and more sustainable ways.

9)  We need to promote renewables realistically.  There has to be a bridge between coal and oil and gas which right now economically is filled by natural gas.  I am conflicted on this.  Natural gas is actually better for green house gases.  To me it could be an interim solution because we don't have the renewables available to really sustain us.  I mean it is complicated.  Somehow we have to ramp down our use of electricity and at the same time move to renewable sources.  But we are, it seems, hurtling to more and more technology and robotics for stuff that we don't need that will take our jobs away so we can't buy stuff anyway (half of which we don't need and degrades the planet) It doesn't make sense.  A lot of people are against pipelines (they scare me too!) and fracking (also scary!) but when weighing costs and benefits, it might be that this is actually a more sensible and environmentally friendly way to transition.  Rick was telling me how close they were to crisis in New England last winter.  There are all sorts of legal blocks to coal, oil, gas and natural gas in place because of a strong environmental movement there, and yet they do not have the renewables established.  As a result they hovered near crisis in terms of getting enough electricity to warm houses in the cold of winter.  A poor old person freezing to death because 1) the cruel utility company turned off the heat due to lack of payment or 2) the failure of the system to provide a stable energy source due to environmentalists who were not practical in application, still results in frozen dead people!  Rick also talked about how the industry was really into clean coal technology until natural gas got so cheap.  Then all that research stopped.  Also nuclear lost support and funding as a result.  So there are two other possibly cleaner (in terms of green house gases) sources of energy that got shut off by the emergence of natural gas as the cheapest resource in the market in right now.

10)  This is going to sound really anti feminist and I don't mean it that way, but when women went into the marketplace for jobs, that meant our economy had to provide that many more jobs.  This also meant that we had to focus on convenience because no one was at home baking the bread, cleaning the house, etc.  This made our society even more unsustainably consumeristic.  Women now equate self-worth with having a career.  But there are other types of capital besides money.   Women (now I think it could be either parent) were providing extremely valuable services to our communities.  With the job market shrinking, there just aren't enough jobs out there.  And yet we still are pushing this destructive idea that career and consumerism are the key to happiness.  For the successful, what happened was with 2 career families they had so much wealth that standards went up.  People buy these huge energy sucking homes.  They drive multiple cars, they have tons of electronics (I am describing my own family here!), etc, etc.  Because they had the disposable income, the standard of living becomes unsustainably high.  This created an underclass of people, the ones in the factories making all those convenient things for the consumers.  The food service workers feeding all the people who don't have time to cook at home.  The migrant workers picking the lettuce in a bag so you the consumers don't have to.  The undocumented worker mowing the lawn because we are too tired or busy to do it ourselves (plus we must keep up with the Joneses in terms of how our 'landscape' looks).  The illegal alien watching our children for pittance so we can fulfill ourselves with our careers which may or may not actually contribute to the common good.

Ok.  Glad I got all that off my chest!

Tuesday Topics - Zero Waste Shopping at Wegman's

There is a neat series going on where different bloggers are mapping how well they can go zero waste at different grocery chains around the U.S.A.  I am not part of that series!  But I did chance to visit Wegman's once again.  I really can't stand Wegman's to tell you the truth.  I know some people just love it.  I have problems with huge warehouse sized places.  I am not into going to the mall and I only lasted at Costco for a few months.  It just didn't work for me.  Too overwhelming to me.  I think I have a touch of agoraphobia or something.  But today I had to drop my daughter for a hour right across from a Wegman's so I thought what the heck, I've got an hour to kill, let me just do a little zero waste sleuthing.

Now, lately, Wegman's got some good coverage from Catholic press.  Apparently, the company really takes Catholic Social Teaching seriously.  Here's a quote from the article:

One of her best memories was working on Wegmans’ Organic Farm, getting firsthand experience on how the stores’ “farm-to-table” process worked. She said helping with the harvest gave her a new appreciation for Wegmans’ produce.
And as an intern, she and her team were asked to propose how Wegmans could improve food product “best by” dating. The company has been concerned about wasted food, especially when some people in the communities they serve are going hungry. Kenton said she and the other interns tackled the problem — and were asked to present their recommendations to Wegmans’ corporate leaders. Kenton said their response was “amazing.”

Now when I go into Wegman's I just see over the top excess!  I mean it is a huge store with everything you can possibly think of and more.  It makes me think of that scene in Moscow on the Hudson, you know where Robin Williams has just defected from the Soviet Union and he goes shopping for coffee for the first time in America?

Wegman's like 10x bigger than the store in the movie.  And of course 95% of everything is in plastic.  So discouraging.  You are walking through a veritable sea of stuff that will never go away and is at such a level of incredible excess.

BUT there is always hope!  I started zero waste hunting.  First, there's lots and lots of produce that isn't wrapped.  In the bakery you can get lots of different types of breads and pastries not wrapped in plastic.  They even provide what look like regular paper bags to put the bread in.  I did not check out their meat department.  Oops.  But I did wander near the cheese counter and wow!!!!  Excitement!  They will give you a hunk of cheese wrapped in compostable paper!!!!!  First I noticed how much of the cheese wasn't already pre-wrapped in shrink wrap.  So I ordered some.  When I saw the lady wrapping the cheese up in paper, I asked her if it was lined with silicone.  She didn't know.  So I said well do you know if is it recyclable or compostable?  Usually the folks behind the counter have no idea.  But she brightened up and said oh it's compostable because when we clean up they tell us to put it in the compost!

I had to buy some.  Cheese bought at the counter is always more expensive.

I also discovered bulk teas!  Now the deceptive-looking paper bag turned out to be lined in foil.  So the bag isn't compostable or recyclable.  However, you could bring your own container.  This is the first place I've seen around here with bulk tea.

I got Ceylon Breakfast tea  Hugely expensive though.  $16.99 a lb.  Of course, loose dry tea leaves are pretty light. 

Wegman's does have a pretty big bulk bin section of nuts, seeds, beans, some grain (no rice that I saw) and lots of dried fruit, including raisins which are hard to come by (the only place I've seen them sold around here in bulk is Whole Foods).

So I was cheered by some unexpected finds.  I know there is a movement to try to get grocery stores to have a packaging free aisle.  I wonder if Wegman's would be a good place for that, since they do seem somewhat committed to being environmentally friendly.  I mean they seem to be aware and have started to implement some practices.  It looks like they could be encouraged to go even bigger with it.

Zero Waste Homeschooling

Somewhere recently I saw a post that I cannot locate now (in my defense it was early morning and I hadn't had any coffee when I saw it!) where the person had gathered a list of what the top ten (or might have been 15, no coffee, no memory for me, apparently!) favorite school supplies were for homeschooling and everyone came up with lots of great items they felt were must haves in their homeschool.  However, I've been on this zero-waste journey since March and I notice a lot of them were pretty wasteful in terms of plastic packaging or just not being the least wasteful alternative to the particular item.  I noticed one person recommend an electric pencil sharpener.  Another recommended lots of little post it book marks in little plastic dispensers.  Another raved about her laminator.

Well, I got 'woke' last winter to how much damage we are doing to our children's future by being so careless about our wasteful lifestyles.   So here are my thoughts on this.

Some guiding principles for zero waste homeschooling:   reuse whatever you have.  I've found that people (including myself) have drawers full of stuff like pencils, pens, etc.  Go through it all, see what works and what doesn't.  Try to dispose of the stuff that doesn't work for you in the most earth-friendly way possible.  Will anyone take it off her your hands via free cycle?  Can someone reuse it or can you give away to a charity?  Try to search for other options rather than landfill.  Secondly, when buying, try to get the thing that costs the least amount of resources and pollution in production, is also recyclable or compostable and comes in eco-friendly packaging.  Plastic is problematic.  Only a very small percentage of it is actually downcycled.  Plastic can only be reused once and then it's in the in the landfill for forever.  Remember the earth can not digest plastic.  It never goes away!  Instead it photo-degrades into tiny pieces that are eaten by animals and become part of our food!  It is really is a global crisis right now. We need to do absolutely everything we can to refuse and reduce our intake of plastic.

So I came up with an alternative list that uses recycled materials in new products or items that use less packaging and plastic or ideas (which tend to overlap with people wanting to be frugal as well) for ways to homeschool with the least amount of waste.

1)  Decomposition notebooks - these spiral bound or sewn composition notebooks are sold in many places.  Before you go for new paper, try to buy this sort of thing.

2)  Sprout pencils - you need a writing implement for those notebooks!  Sprout pencils are a really cute idea.  And they are educational!  Your kid gets to plant seeds when the pencil gets too small.

3)  Eraser - Since seeds are on the end of the sprout pencils instead of erasers, you'll need an environmentally friendly eraser on hand.   I haven't tried these but here is a more eco-friendly option than your typical synthetic eraser, though I don't know how they come packaged:  Made by Humans Eco Eraser Sticks.

 4) Skip the electric pencil sharpener.  Go for the old fashioned wall mounted type.  Growing up we had one of these heavy duty babies attached to our back hall wall and we used it constantly.  It held up well over many, many years with tons of use.  You can even see if you can find one of these freecycled.

5)  If a pen is more your style,  you have some options.   Some people get fancy and go for an old fashioned fountain pen.  There are also some pens that claim to last seven years, which at least keeps them out of the landfill at a slower rate than your regular Bic you pick up at the drug store.  And finally there is the inkless pen.    Remember too, to use up whatever pens you have around the house first.

6)  Maybe you prefer binders rather than spiral notebooks.  First of all, do try to re-use as many binders as you can.  Check for binders being thrown out or free cycled.  Binders are made of plastic/vinyl which never decomposes.  So if you must have a new binder, go for this type.

7)  Get 100% recycled binder paper to put into that binder!  Question:  why can't binder paper be wrapped in paper (like printer paper is) instead of plastic wrap which is not recyclable???

8) Whiteboards are a handy and reusable item in the homeschool.   Get one made from sustainable bamboo!

9)  But what about the markers?  They are all disposable and made of plastic!  Some options here:  Refillable dry erase markers which supposedly reduce waste by letting you use the marker longer.  Here's another source for these.  Not sure about these dry erase crayons, but they seem like they'd be more earth friendly.

10) Are blackboards and chalk more environmentally friendly?    It seems chalk is better than markers but the different boards themselves are about the same in terms of eco-friendliness.  So if you don't have an issue with chalk dust, maybe get a blackboard instead of a whiteboard.

11)  Highlighters - forgo the plastic ones, and go for these.

12) Math tchotchkes - Buy second hand, re-use, free cycle or borrow things like rulers, protractors, compasses and calculators.  If you must buy new, look for ones made of wood and not plastic.  If you have to buy a new calculator, try to find one made of recycled plastic.

13)  Math manipulatives - You don't need to buy a set of little plastic teddy bears for your child to learn math!  Instead use manipulatives you already have around the house:  pennies, dried beans (get them bulk! Bring your own bag or container!), popcorn kernels or popped popcorn (also bought bulk), wooden craft sticks.

14)  Instead of buying a plastic teaching toy clock, use an old mechanical alarm clock.  You can still find these in stores.  Or better yet, get a used one.

15)  Don't buy glue in plastic sticks or containers.  Make your own!  You can turn this into a little science project.  Keep it stored in a glass jar like a little jelly jar.

16)  If you have little ones you need to occupy while teaching older ones, make a big batch of homemade play dough.  Don't buy the stuff in plastic containers.  You can store your homemade dough in old tupperware, or glass mason jars, or any airtight containers you might have around.

17)  You don't need a laminator!  I homeschooled for 22 years (and counting) and never used one.  And yet all my children are well educated!  Refuse stuff that isn't necessary.

18) Use earth friendly art supplies.  There are many companies out there selling what they term earth friendly, but you do have to use discernment when buying particular items.

Frugality rules!

19)  Instead of using single use, graded workbooks, go for resources that can be used by all the kids when they get to a point where they need it.  For instance you can reused something like Simply Grammar for all children instead of a grammar workbook or Phonics Pathways instead of a phonics workbook.

20)  See if you can't start a homeschool lending library out of the basement of a friendly church.  This way people can donate their unwanted homeschooling books, etc and others can use them.  This saves money and the earth!  If you can't start a library, then have a swap night where people bring their curricula to a gathering and people trade with each other for resources they want.

21)  If you can't borrow, whenever possible try to buy used instead.  Local homeschool groups often have used curricula sales or set up one of your own.  And there are lots of way to sell and buy used on line.  I would recommend steering clear of homeschool conventions frankly, unless you are very strong and will only buy exactly what you planned to. Make sure you visit the used book sale there as well.  Homeschooling ought not to be something that allows us to indulge in irresponsible impulse buying.  Homeschooling is not about consumerism, but about re-establishing the true purpose of education - to love wisdom and virtue.  (Sorry, couldn't resist the soapbox!)

22)  Use your local library!  There are so many books there for little ones (and big ones!) to learn about the alphabet, numbers, counting, basic math concepts, art, history, geography, science, etc.  If you just read aloud to your children and provide lots of opportunity for them to read independently, you have already accomplished much of what you've set out to do as a homeschooling parent.

23)  A lot of DIY projects are earth friendly, teach valuable concepts and skills and provide the child with a sense of accomplishment.  Teaching children how to make bread, yogurt, butter, ice cream, grow the family's food in a garden, sew, knit, crochet, work wood, etc is all very earth friendly and highly educational.

24)  Since most of us are connected to the internet, there are tons of free educational resources out there on the web.  Use these!

25)  If you have to print things out, try to use printer paper that has at least some recycled material in it.  Try to print on both sides when you can, and reuse that one sided printed paper for scrap paper, first drafts and paper crafts like making paper chains, dolls and snowflakes!

26)  Buy real quality metal paper hole punchers and staplers.  I use these items all the time in my homeschool.  Get ones that will last years.

27)  Try to reduce use of plastic tape.  Buy the heavy office tape dispenser and then buy the refill rolls.  This avoids buying lots of those cheap plastic dispensers.  Or you can experiment with cellulose tape instead.  What do you wind up using the tape for?  If it's to hang up things, consider using a bulletin board and thumb tacks or even a cardboard 3 sided science fair board where you can use staples or thumbtacks or something reusable to post visuals you want your child to see regularly.

28)  When getting audio books for your children, consider downloads instead of cds.  Or trade cds and dvds with other homeschooling moms.  Or use the library.

29)  When buying toys, less is more!  With the exception of legos (and why not buy them used or get them on free cycle!) most toys don't have to be plastic.  Try Waldorf and Montessori suppliers.  They tend to have alternatives to plastic.

30) Remember to ask companies that are shipping to you, if they can use eco-friendly packing.  You might not get bubble wrap to pop, but you can get tons of brown paper that can be used for all sorts of projects or those neat dissolvable packing peanuts that kids love to play with!

Photo Friday - 7/14/17

Took a walk behind St. Mark where they have a little cemetery.

The Good Shepherd

Little Dylan taking off without me.

Becky worked on a scout project for a friend.

They had to build a new floor for a shed used for a community Christmas display.

Becky making faces.  We ate at Teddy's in DC

Silhouette of Becky against the Potomac River at the Kennedy Center

Beloved husband of mine.

Monday Meals - 7/10/17

Lots of stuff from the CSA:  carrots, chard, cucumbers, weird kinds of squash I have no idea how to cook, freshly dug potatoes, three more pasture-raised chicken from local farm.

I'm going to cook up the chard today.  At some point this week, I'm making carrot slaw.  I think I'll roast some potatoes and weird nameless squash along with a chicken for dinner.   Right now I am out on my screen porch.  The temperature is lovely this morning.  Nice and cool.

B starts her camp today and I am not prepared to make her lunch.  I just didn't think ahead.  The weekend was very busy with AHG stuff and other things.  Must make amends now.

I think my hour of decluttering is going to be cleaning out my freezers.  Talk about wasting food and plastic.  My out door freezer is such a mess.  But I might as well bite the bullet and clean it out.  I need to defrost it too but since I have 5 chickens in there right now and no room to put them anywhere else, I'll have to postpone that.

Yesterday, we went to a pizza party for AHG and ate so much junk.  Junk, junk, junk.  Honestly we need a real change in our diet.  B eats so poorly and is always complaining about how lousy she feels.  She's put on weight and she's so moody.  She feels like crap.  I think it is the cumulative affect of eating so poorly.  How to change things for the better?  And now she is going to be at this theater camp for 2 weeks and the folks there live on candy.  I mean bags and bags of it.

B's birthday is Wednesday.  We are taking her to out to dinner (good restaurant) and then to the Kennedy Center to see The Sound of Music.  Weirdly, I think it is just going to be her, R and me.  A very quiet birthday.  But we owe her a whale watching trip!  We are going to try to plan ahead for a fun trip at some point in the next year; maybe New England, maybe California.  We need one more big family trip before she graduates high school.  Once they get to college age, it is much harder to get them to come to family vacations.

Anyway, I am just rambling.  Need to focus on meal planning for the week but that might not happen until tomorrow.

Life on a Virginia Farm - Book 21

I discovered this little treasure on the shelf of my local library.  It was published back in 1968 and it is the memoirs of a man born in Fauquier County in 1879.  It really seems like a collection of essays he wrote over the course of years and some letters too.

Robert Beverley Herbert loved his grandparents huge farm called Avenel.  He really doesn't talk much about his father and in fact he does not have his father's surname, which was Pinkney.  He did have a sister and a brother.  The sister died of diphtheria.  He does mention his younger brother occasionally.  His mother hardly gets a mention at all either.  She died before he was 13 and he and his brother were sent off to boarding school.  For Christmas and summers they came home to their grandparents farm.  Robert loved it with a love he had all his life.  He admired his grandfather and his grandmother immensely.  

The neat thing is that the book is full of local history.  Fauquier County is two counties away from the one I live in.  We used to go there near Marshall, near where this book is mainly set, to buy beef from a farmer there.  The countryside is beautiful but is now being built up and becoming an exburb.  Apparently where Avenel once stood there is a housing development named after it.  A really poignantly sad ending to this beloved place.    I especially was charmed by the book because when I did the National Novel Writing Month in November of 2014, I set it in that county around Warrenton back in the 1960s.  I was kind of thrilled when I happened to take this book off the shelf and realized what it was.

The book is a meandering, nostalgic look back at a different time, 'horse and buggy days', the author calls them.  He remembers the blind horse he and his brother rode, how poor and cold they were until their grandparents took them in, how much he loved the countryside and the people who lived near him.  Another really insightful element to the book is his fond remembrance of stories told about Robert E. Lee and Col. Mosby.  While the author acknowledges that slavery was wrong, most of his memories are of the stories told of great deeds of courage carried out by noble soldiers of the Confederacy.  He says when he was a boy everyone talked about the weather and the Civil War.  The whole mythology was already fully blown.  

If you know this area this book is really fun to read.  There is so much local history and lore, and explanations of flora and fauna in a very homey, genteel telling.  

I googled a map of this area and I found this one.  The author was related through his mother's side to many of the founding families of Virginia.  The big missing factor in this book is a harder look at slavery and prejudice.  However, to be fair, the author whitewashes his own history by avoiding what was too unpleasant or only giving it the slightest passing glance.  He wanted to talk about what he loves, not what he doesn't love about his beloved Fauquier County.

A charming walk down memory lane for Virginians.  

This book fills the square for my Local Author requirement in the 52 Books Bingo Challenge. 

For more book reviews, go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

Current Projects - July 2017

I feel the need to un-jumble all the stuff that is going around in my head.

In my head, summer didn't really start until S left for Boston for 5 weeks.  Now I need to get serious about things I wanted to get done this summer, balanced with ongoing stuff as well as planning for the fall.

Summer Projects:
1)  Decluttering the house - room by room, drawer by drawer, I hope to get a substantial amount of decluttering done this summer, starting today.  My goal is whenever I can Monday-Saturday to focus on decluttering from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. My reward will be to take a shower at 10:00!  If I am really getting into it, I'll have time later in the day to continue, if I feel like it.
2)  Reading Teaching from Rest with the Catholic Relaxed Homeschoolers facebook group.  This will start next week at some point.
3) Work on American Solidarity Party stuff - podcast, state chapter meetings, various events.
4)  Drive people places - S is away for now but I still need to take V and B places.  Hopefully, V will get her driver's license this summer and B is supposed to be working on it as well.  J says he'll teach V driving.  She actually already knows how, she just needs to pass the driving test.
5) I really wanted to learn to crochet this summer.

Ongoing Projects:
1)  Work on my zero waste efforts
2)  Moderate Catholics for Zero Waste facebook group
3)  Re-establish house cleaning schedule.
4)  Keep up on my Latin skills - they disappear if I don't do something with Latin a couple times a week at
5)  Finish reading City of God
6)  Our backyard fence is really falling apart.  We want a new one and to reconfigure the backyard.  R says maybe we need to do some leveling.  Might need a landscaper.
7)  Attend to Eileen's issues.


Planning for the Fall:
1) Aquinas Learning Planning - this could take up a huge chunk of time.  I am not sure at this point what classes I am teaching and I have no idea what syllabus to use.  Trying not to panic!
2)  American Heritage Girls planning.  My co-leader does most of this (I am more of an assistant), but I am going to lead the Cooking badge work.
3)  Planning a garden in the fall.  A)I want to put a sycamore tree where the silver maple use to be (had to cut it down because it was dying).  B) I also want to fill in empty spaces in garden by the house by getting rid of dying bushes (something is killing them slowly) and replacing with azaleas and ground cover like Silverpire.  Both are natives to this area and good for pollinators.  The sliver spire I am looking at the Henry's Garnet which has white bottle brush flowers in the spring and turns a beautiful bright red in the fall. C)  Prune cherry trees (late summer/early fall) D)  Plant more hydrangeas along the fence line.
4)  Plan Environmental Science and Ancient History for B.  Ancient History I pretty much know what we are doing.  We'll watch  the Western Civ Great Courses video lectures each week and then make a timeline of people/events he talks about.  Environmental Science seems more of a problem in terms of planning.  Don't want it to be boring textbook stuff, but more multimedia and hands on.

Photo Friday - 7/7/17

Just left for the airport. He'll be gone for 5 weeks at least, studying flute and all things music.

My Hypothetical School

For years now I've daydreamed of having my own little cottage school.  And one of the things I'd do in the school is have the kids cook their own lunch.  Apparently, the Japanese thought of this before I did!


I have it all planned out in my head.

8:30 to 9:00 would be Morning Sing.  The kids would gather for announcements and then we'd sing!  All kinds of songs of different types, maybe in different languages.  The kids would learn good posture and breath control, harmony and everything good that singing does for you.  St. John Bosco thought teaching kids to sing was important; it was an essential element in his schools.

9:00 - 10:00 would be Exploration and Discovery.  This would be set up sort of like a Montessori school with learning stations.  I'd make this partly democratic to a certain extent in that the students and parents could vote on the themes to be explored.  I think this would mostly be about science and math with some history, art and geography thrown in there as well, because you can't really separate out subjects.  Everything is interrelated.  There would be activities, experiments, demonstrations, things to read, things to write.  The older kids could help the younger kids.  And if a kid just wasn't that interested in whatever was being presented, they could go read their own book or play chess or something.  The themes would go on for a while. For instance maybe one month would focus on physics and simple machines.  The next month might focus on another aspect of physics.  That sort of idea.

10:00-11:00 This would be Read Aloud time and Recitation time.  Read alouds would be classic works, a la Charlotte Mason.  Probably the kids would be loosely divided by age; older kids in one group; younger kids in another.  This would also be the time when kids could recite anything they'd memorized:  poetry, speeches, math formulas, whatever.  We'd give the parents a list of suggested things to memorize at home.  That would probably be the only homework most of the time.  This is the one thing that I'd reward in some way to get the kids into maybe some gentle friendly competition, kind of like Anne of Green Gables and her school's recitation performance.  If the kids got fidgety during the reading/recitation, they could do things like finger knit or real knitting or sketching or any kind of quiet activity as long as it didn't distract anyone else and they could still listen.  We'd do the Charlotte Mason narration techniques too, to train the kids in really listening.

11:00-12:00 outside exercise/indoor play -  Kids need tons of physical exercise.  Whenever the weather was tolerable the kids would go out to walk, or jump rope, or play kick ball or hopscotch or whatever.  I believe as long as it isn't freezing or pouring rain, kids can dress for the weather and get outside.  Put some roses in their cheeks!  Maybe we'd have a garden on the property and kids can work there too.

12:00 -12:30 - Kids would alternate cooking duties for lunch.  So some would have to come in early from the 11:00 recess to help.  Parent volunteers or maybe we'd hire a cook to oversee things would help prepare simple but nutritious meals with the kids.  This all would have to planned out well and probably started earlier in the day.  We'd use real stainless steel cutlery and real plates and cups.  And there'd be another group of kids who'd be on wash up duty.  And everybody would be responsible for cleaning up their own tables.

12:30 - 2:30 - the afternoon would be a quiet time of independent or small group study.  We'd focus on the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic, and drawing.  And Latin too!  Short, pithy lessons.

2:30 - 3:30 - Free time/clean up time.  Kids can play games, work on learning musical instruments, read, etc.  The last 15 or 10 minutes would be tidy up time.

That all would be for Mondays through Thursdays.

Fridays would be different.  Fridays would be reserved for special P.E. stuff like ice skating, swimming and dance.  I got this idea because when we'd go to our homeschool ice skating on Friday mornings, the local Montessori school would be there too.  So you could do dance (Irish, tap, hip hop?) in the fall, skating in the winter and indoor swimming in the spring.  We'd also schedule field trips for Fridays or have special visitors or events at the school.  And perhaps we'd end each Friday with a meeting of the school where we'd figure out how things were going and get input from everyone.

Anxiety and Homeschooling

Homeschooling invites anxiety.  The parent feels they are taking on an enormous responsibility.  They are taking a different road and see themselves as only successful if in the eyes of the world if their children not only succeed but live up to very high expectations.  The parent must prove to everyone and herself that she has done the right thing, the best thing for her child.  There are standards to meet; there is the intimidating goal of getting that child into college.  And everyone is watching!

This can be an extremely overwhelming endeavor.  Many moms go through burn out.  Many give up.  They are always measuring themselves against some imaginary perfect standard and of course they always come up short.  The imaginary standard is of the world and not of God.  It is often one's own pride lurking under the veil of anxiety.  It is not a prideful pride but a fearful pride.  What if I don't measure up?  

I am responded to a particular mom's cry for help.  In her post she does what we've all done.  She compares herself to others and she comes up short.  She sees the system as stacked against her; an obstacle always looming in the distance.  She sees unschooling as what you call it when you can't get to formal academics.  She sells herself short by diminishing the huge fact that she works from home and has four children but she had trouble staying on top of things.

I am going to address each of these issues one by one.  However, first it is good to talk about assumptions.  A lot of times anxiety makes us work off assumptions that are faulty.  We become our own worst enemies because we jump to conclusions that cloud the clarity of our thought processes.  So for instance, the mom compared herself to her friends who are approaching homeschooling differently from her.  Remember the adage:  Comparison is the thief of joy!   I had trouble with this bad habit of comparing and always coming out feeling dissatisfied and defeated.  First of all, I bet the other family isn't doing as glowingly as you might think!  I mean they are a human family so the odds are they also have conflict and bad habits!  But even if they are going strong in their own groove (and that's wonderful) instead of comparing, wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to glean inspiration and perhaps ideas that fit into your homeschooling landscape?  If you can't get inspiration or ideas, realizing in your heart that you admire the way they can do things that way but it isn't your way, is a fine response.  Just resist that tendency to compare; it doesn't come from a good place!

One fear was the fact that the Department of Education is leaning towards everyone being enrolled.  First off all, the thing to do is to look up actual regulations that are in existence right now.  What exactly is required right now?  If the DoE is 'leaning' what does that mean?  It is easy to make this a looming fear that somehow the government is going to come and get you!  Don't think about 'leaning' which is vague, think about actual requirements.  Those actual requirements become part of your home learning landscape.  You operate within that landscape.  The second thing is that there are schools you can enroll in that unschool!  So maybe you can do both!  I don't know if the school has to be from the same country or not, but in the U.S.A. there is a long time school that children can enroll in and then are encouraged to learn from life and their passions.  This is called Clonlara.  There are others out there too.  You could explore this option.  I know way back in the day California outlawed homeschooling!  So people got around this and simple made their own particular home school a private school.  That might be another way around the issue.  There are ways around this, but again it is hard to fight something that is vague and imaginary.  You need the actual facts and then you can look for solutions.

Don't diminish how busy you are.  If you are working from home and have four children that is an extremely tall order to fill!  You have to be realistic in your assessment of what you can do.  Working at home can lend itself to a delusional idea that since you are home you ought to be able to keep it clean and tidy and pay lots of attention to the kids.  But in reality you are working and thus require dedicated time to do your work.  You really can't juggle all those balls in the air at the same time.  I have no idea how things work out for you, but maybe you get up early and while the kids eat breakfast and watch educational TV you crank out some work.  Then maybe you could stop that and focus on the kids:  cooking together, doing some chores, reading aloud, maybe working on project or going to the park or having a playdate.  Whatever.  Maybe in the afternoon the kids do quiet time and listen to audio books while you crank out some more work for a couple hours.  Then maybe in the evening when your husband comes home, you get to work for a solid chunk of time while he having his time with the kids.  That's just me imagining how someone might work that

Another comment was managing to squeeze in read aloud time.  What does that mean?  It sounds like maybe you are diminishing how much read aloud time there is?  Is there more time than you give yourself credit for?  Or are you truly struggling to get read alouds in?  If you are struggling, I would recommend:  1) keep the read aloud time but realize you can only do it for a short period and adjust for that 2) rely heavily on audio books 3) Have your husband do the read alouds 4) make sure your kids have plenty of time for independent reading.

Finally, unschooling is not what you do when you can't get to formal academics.  Often the conflict and problems associated with formal academics makes people consider unschooling, but unschooling isn't being passive or neglectful.  It isn't giving up.  Unschooling is placing priority on your child's projects, passions and talents by realizing they learn best this way.  Unschooling is about creating an encouraging atmosphere that allows the child to thrive.  Unschooling is rejecting (as much as is practically possible) the scope and sequence enforced from outside and letting him blossom in the way that is natural to him.  

Oh wait!  I have one more thought.  Sometimes when the house is just too much of a wreck and you can't concentrate on anything because of that, it is good to give yourself permission to stop thinking about academics for a while and just work on tidying up.  Tackle the things that bother you the most first.  That huge stack of papers that keeps threatening to avalanche?  That stubborn mountain of laundry that won't go away?  That kitchen floor that is so sticky you can't walk across it without making enormous sucking noises with  your shoes?  LOL.   Deal with the stuff that is super-bugging you.  You'll feel release!!!!

Monday Musings - The Paradigm Shift that Frees the Homeschool

Photo taken from http://www.childrenandnature.org/connect/

There are two maxims that I believe lead to freedom when it comes to home educating your child. Realizing these was a real paradigm shift for me.  The two maxims are:

1)  Your child was designed to learn.  This is how we have survived for millions of years.  Human children develop slowly but they are sharp as tacks when it comes to absorbing knowledge.  They are little sponges that are consciously and unconsciously soaking up everything around them.  You can see this as babies develop into toddlers and acquire language.  They begin to ask why about everything.  They learn through imitation, conversation and play.

2) The drive to grow into a competent adult is in every child.  Again, I look to our existence on this planet for millions of years.  The end goal of that slow development where so much time is spent absorbing enormous amounts of knowledge is to become a competent adult.  Competent enough to survive, mate and raise the next generation.  This is why we are still here on the planet!

These two things are inborn to human beings.

If you accept these two maxims as true, then it is quite freeing!  The burden is not so heavy on the home educating parent.  You really don't have to do much except give the child something to imitate, someone to talk to and lots of opportunity to play.  And as for the second maxim, as the child approaches adulthood, your job might be to guide the child in determining how to become a competent adult; we know he already wants it, but getting there might require some help.

The bad thing we can do is to diminish the insatiable curiosity and drive that children innately have.

One way to do this is to doubt that the child truly does have the wherewithal to learn.  We can see them as the proverbial empty bucket that needs filling (and if we don't fill it, we are failing, we think).

 We can force the child to develop in ways that are unnatural, for instance not letting them imitate, converse and play but forcing them to learn in ways that turn their natural excitement to learn about the world into a drab and onerous confinement.

We can panic about the child's possible slow development when compared to others and then we can try to push the child into keeping up with others, not honoring his innate, personal developmental arc.

 We can decide that sound sleep, nutritious food, lots of exercise, and creativity are all 'extras' that can be ignored or dealt with shabbily and that this somehow won't affect the child's maturity or stunt his natural drive to learn and to grow.

I love this painting.  I am sure Baby Jesus never ate dirt or bugs.

Since I am Catholic I see these innate drives as God designed.  God has a plan for each of us and his plan is reflected in how our children respond to the world we provide them.  We need to honor the innate drives God gave his children and then we need to let our children blossom in God's good time.  For many children the institutionalized scope and sequence is not reflective of God's timing.  It does violence to the basic drives and needs of these children.  It expects each child to follow some abstract average for things like learning to read that run contrary to the child's own personal developmental arc.  This damages the child's desire to learn and to become competent.

If we really accept that we are made in God's image, then we should respect God's design.  Let children learn through imitation, conversation and play and don't destroy that desire to grow into a competent adult by forcing arbitrary and unnatural practices on them that cause alienation from their healthy drives.

The hardest thing is to hold on to these two maxims as the children grow.  Raising children is a long term project and often times it is hard to see the forest for the trees.  Especially when we are constantly inundated with the idea that we must follow these abstract, institutionalize standards if we want to be good parents.  Our children must learn to read at 5 or 6 or they are 'late.'  All our children should be able to study calculus at age 17 or they won't get into college and will be failures as adults.  This is the brainwashing we must constantly be vigilant against.  It is an uphill battle that must be fought under constant scrutiny, judgment, and pressure.  We are under constant bombardment!  Our culture is toxic in so many profound ways.  Even the best intentioned persons often don't realize the faulty assumptions they are operating under.

Why isn't Joseph wearing his kippah?

There is release and joy in embracing these two maxims.  It is freeing, truly freeing, to be able to relax and know God is with us and if we trust in Him,  our children will be fine.  We need to love and care for them, rejoice in their being, marvel at how they unfold as they grow.  We need to nurture and guide them. We need to teach them to love love (and God is love).  We need to let them be free to do as God wills, for doing God's will is the only true freedom (since He is Love).

A lot of secular unschoolers use the phrase 'trust the child.'  But I prefer to think of it as trusting God.  I trust the inborn drive to learn and to become competent that He placed there, because He loves His own.