What we're reading: Lazy days edition

One of the best things about homeschooling, and our incredibly relaxed approach in particular, is that holidays are no longer the rush-rush-rush of getting as many projects done as possible.

We've been able to slow down and really enjoy our Thanksgiving celebrations and to start our Christmas preparations without worrying about what we're "accomplishing."

Even our reading has been low-key.

We finished Life of Fred: Goldfish and have moved on to Life of Fred: Honey.

Chris continues to read many Ruth Manning-Sanders fairy and folk tales to Sarah when he's home at bedtime; her favorite ones come from A Book of Ogres and Trolls.

And since Sarah's interest in her American Girl dolls continues, she decided she wanted to read the start of Kit's story, Meet Kit. Kit is 9 years old in 1934, so her story focuses on life during the Depression, which has been interesting as Sarah has started talking to my mom about her memories of growing up just a little bit later in the Depression.

Next, we're going to see what other books in Kit's series our library has to offer!

On the parental reading front, I'm reading a set of Christmas-themed romantic short stories (I told you - this is the lazy days edition!)

I just finished two incredibly interesting looks at other belief systems - Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Jantzen and Becoming Sister Wives: The Story of an Unconventional Marriage by Kody, Meri, Janelle, Christine and Robyn Brown.

I can't say that I read either of these books expecting to agree with the viewpoints inside - and in large part I didn't - but both were just incredibly interesting and helped me solidify some ideas in my own mind about my thoughts on marriage, family, faith and so on.

Chris, meanwhile, is reading Wired magazine at this exact moment. He also says he's been most actively reading A Diner's Dictionary: Food and Drink From A to Z in his before-bed browsing. (Let us just say it is a testament to our stomachs that we can both eat snacks while he describes uses of headcheese.)

What's your family reading? We call it the family reading roundup; maybe you call it something more formal; either way, the lovely ladies over at Christian Unschooling are doing a blog hop called "What We're Reading" each month that I'm proud to support!

So if you have a post about what you've been reading, please go share it!

Saying yes to multi-colored rice (and multicolored hair)

My daughter has blue hair, and I have 10 more pounds of multicolored rice.

Yep, it's another installment in a series of posts on how I'm "saying yes" to my daughter.

Last month, I agreed to watch The Avengers, and the month before that, Sarah got her own cell phone.

This week, Sarah got some blue and teal highlights at the hairdresser's. That's not something that's hard for me to say yes to; in fact, I'm only disappointed that they dont' stand out more!

As I said, this wasn't hard to give a "yes" to. Possibly because this was actually my head at a point in the not-too-far past:

That said, I did have a slightly harder time with something that was kind of silly in comparison.

We had made two sensory bins full of rainbow-colored rice back in March. We've messed around with them off and on since, but for the past month or two, they mostly sat untouched.

At the grocery store last week, Sarah saw the jumbo 10-pound bags of rice and said, "Can we make more rainbow rice, Mom?"

The thing is, in my head I'm going, "Why on earth would I buy 10 pounds of rice when we have perfectly good food-colored rice at home?" Which is, you know, kind of silly. Especially when I thought about how much fun Sarah had MAKING the rice the first time; that part was kind of the highlight for her!

So, you know, we bought 10 pounds of rice. And this week, we colored it, and made a NEW big tub and a NEW small tub full of rainbow rice. (The smaller one has red and green rice; we're going to do a Christmas theme!)

And it was fun - well worth the cost of some cheap rice.

Have you said "yes" this month? Link up if you're writing about it!

Keeping the spirit in the Christmas season

One thing I've always been proud of about Sarah is her giving spirit. She is the girl who loves saving money to donate to a cause she's passionate about and who reminds the rest of us about whatever food or mitten or coat drive is going on when we're at the store.

In the next couple of weeks, I'll be sharing more about how we keep the spirit of Christ in Christmas, but, you know, I want to get through Thanksgiving first!

In the meantime, though, see these bloggers?

We're all teaming up to be part of the iHomeschoolNetwork's "Christmas Stocking Stuffer" giveaway.

I firmly believe that we have the ability (and responsibility) as Christians to bless others around us, and that's what this contest is about. We all chipped in, and so did some generous sponsors, to provide $1,100 in prizes for one lucky reader of our blogs - including two $250 cash awards!

The winners have now been announced - check them out here! 

I'm thankful for you! The best prize for me comes when I get a kind comment. Your support is awesome!

Praise in the storm: Our day of thanks

When Meg at Homeschoolin' Mama asked me to be part of the "30 Days of Thanksgiving" series, where a different blogger shares daily what she's thankful for, I was so in.

I had big ideas. I'm the person who does "30 days of what I'm thankful for" on Facebook every day in November. I give a lot of lip service to the things I'm so happy about. I've participated in daily gratitude practice as part of the 29 Gifts movement. I liked to think of myself as some sort of big deal in the thankfulness game.

But.

It turns out I'm big into talking when things are good. But pride, in my case, doesn't just go before a fall, it takes a big, ugly, klutzy roll off a cliff.

See, I've been awfully proud of how "grateful" I am. And in the two weeks after I agreed to take part with Meg in her series, I had some SERIOUS foundation-shaking.

Stormy days

Our (only) car's transmission died.

Our washer malfunctioned in a grand way, flooding our basement...
... so our finished basement needed to be remediated and remodeled...
... and we needed to buy a new washer (since ours was kaput)...
... but then two days later, Hurricane Sandy hit.

Meanwhile, one of our cats, in a stunningly rare move, peed on our daughter's bed...
... and we COULD NOT get the smell out of her mattress...
... so we thought we'd need to buy a new mattress too...
... but before we could do so, we discovered the incident was caused by the cat having a serious bladder blockage that required him to be hospitalized for several days.

Boy, God has a sense of humor.

Unfortunately, sometimes, I do not. And I was getting petulant. Pouty. Ungrateful.

What a wake-up call

In the midst of all of this, as I sat in our new-to-us church one week, the pastor, during prayer, shared that he had a Word from the Lord for someone named Joanne or Joan.

Um.

If you don't know me personally, I have pretty much been a lifelong Methodist.

We're generally the reserved type. You don't get called out. And you CERTAINLY don't get called out by a man you've literally never been introduced to, let alone conversed with, claiming to have a message for you direct from God.

Um.

I'll probably never forget the pastor's exact words. There were a good many of them - and all what I needed to hear. The short version? "God is using you. You WILL find your direction and your purpose. And BIG THINGS are coming your way.

Um.

My husband - who is what I'd probably describe as a "warm agnostic" - unsure but generally leaning toward God - was actually the one to take the setup and totally knock it out of the park.

He rubbed my back, then leaned over to me and whispered softly, "See? Big things. Bigger than the basement. Bigger than the car. Bigger than your work. Bigger than any of that."

Talk. About. Shattering.

All my "Why me?" and "It figures!" talk went out the window. Nothing changed that afternoon - and yet everything did.

Came home, and the washer was still broken. Industrial dryers were still running in my basement. I still had the paperwork on my desk from financing our new transmission.

But my eyes were opened.

I'd been blessed BEYOND MEASURE just with that Word of encouragement and hope, and to be part of both a church family and a marriage that stretch me beyond my comfort zone and change my world!

I started to recognize all the little things I was taking for granted, too.

• I won a $10 gift certificate to our local pretzel shop. 
• I was able to participate in - and win medals at - a tae kwon do tournament. 
• A far-away family member who's like a sister to me came to visit unexpectedly, bringing her daughters, who have fast become friends of Sarah's. 
• We were able to go yesterday and see a friend "ring the bell" at a local hospital following his final radiation treatment for throat cancer. 
• I was able to attend another friend's graduation from paramedic school. 
• Hurricane Sandy did NO damage to our property or to our loved ones, despite wreaking havoc on many places we'd recently visited.

I can't even describe all the good I was overlooking because it wasn't "standard gratitude fare" of monetary prosperity and happy times.

I could talk about this all day. But I think I'll leave you with thoughts from two amazing blogger friends who are much more eloquent. Karen sums it up well when she says "Blessings. Everywhere I turn are blessings," and Jessica reminds me that of all these gifts, "they’ve been given by people, but God has done the blessing."

I needed both those reminders - and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity today to be forced outside my "Oh, I'm so glad I have a house and food and blah blah blah" comfort zone of pat answers and lip service.

I'm not perfect - and even at my most grateful, I can stand a reminder that life doesn't have to be all rainbows and flowers for me to be at peace.

And thank God for that!!

With faith like a child

They say that I can move the mountains, and send them falling to the sea...
They say that I can walk on water, if I would follow and believe...
With faith like a child.

- Jars of Clay, "Like a Child"

My daughter blows me away. She's smart - which is certainly great - but what floors me more than any fact she might know is that she has faith that I can't even touch.

She's Spirit-smart.

It's really thanks to her (and some lovingly persistent friends) that we've found a church that I think we'll be calling home. It's also thanks to Sarah that we remember to pray before meals, that we give most of our "Christmas gift budget" to Operation Christmas Child and the local S.P.C.A. and the city homeless shelter instead of to ourselves.

This Sunday, as we sat in church, preparing for Communion, Sarah seemed far away as our pastor spoke of the body of Christ, asking parents to be sure to help their children understand the significance of what we were about to do.

Sarah turned the communion wafer over and over in her hands while I tried to focus.

She tapped my arm, and showed me her wafer, which was split in half.

"It's OK," I whispered, thinking I wanted to avert a Great Communion Crisis. "Want to trade?"

"No," Sarah whispered insistently. "I broke it because that's what he said. The body is broken."

She pulled the pieces of her wafer apart.

"And because we believe, He becomes whole again. The more people believe, the more God's kingdom gets whole."

Then she pushed her wafer pieces back together, just in time to follow the pastor's leading to "take and eat together."

Maybe next month, he'll remind the kids to help their parents understand the meaning of what we're doing.

Cookies, cousins, crazy weather and hickory nuts: This month's snippets from unschooling

I love taking part in the "7 Snippets from Unschooling" blog hop via Christian Unschooling.

I have a tendency to get overwhelmed in "mega-posts." Do I have tons of photos? Do I have enough links? Did I make a nifty Pinterest graphic?

But that's not our whole life. In fact, the best parts are our in-betweens, the things that don't turn into major resources or treatises on educational philosophy.

Here's a look at some of those in-between moments since my last snippets post.

***

1. My husband and Sarah are a little excited about the announcement of Star Wars Episode 7. How excited?

This photo shoot ensued the night of the announcement.

Later, they used their mad photo-editing skills (and a font I'd found them some time ago) to create this masterpiece.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Nerdpire strikes back.

***

2. Meanwhile, we've been collecting hundreds of hickory nuts from our neighborhood.

Chris has been collecting them in baggies on his walks home from work, and Sarah then artfully pours them into Mason jars to sit around as a fall decoration.

 It was cool to be able to identify them as hickory nuts. It was NOT cool when we found them to be inhabited by hickory shuckworm larvae. (Though that did make for another identification project.)

Solution: I found a website that said roasting them in the oven at 350 degrees for a half-hour would kill anything inside. Since we didn't care to eat them, only decorate with them, that suited us fine!

***

3. We had a surprise visit from some of our favorite cousins, also fellow homeschoolers! Sarah loved having a house full of new friends, and the four of them went absolutely crazy and stayed up til 6 a.m.

Having family members who are also friends - and who GET you, and who think like you do, and who have the same faith and the same dreams - that's priceless.

***

4. I learned something new along with Sarah at our recent alpaca club meeting. We learned how to do needle-felting. (I didn't even know what that WAS until last week.)

You can see Sarah's pumpkin (she's working on his smile in this photo), and I made a smaller pumpkin with no face, but with vinelike green tendrils near his stem!

I don't normally consider myself crafty in a yarn-and-fabric sense, but this was kind of neat!

***

5. Many of you know that our town was RIGHT in the path of Hurricane Sandy as it passed through the Northeast over the weekend. We were incredibly blessed despite some rough parts, which I'll actually share next week, but the dog absolutely did not deal well with the barometric pressure changes.

So Sarah (wearing her new pajama pants, which she loves), decided to cuddle him and be kind of a "Thundershirt" for him.

Calmer dog, happy Sarah. Win!

***

6. Sarah decided to bake some sugar cookies and decorate them with a fall theme. We did the "regular" type, but then we had a bunch of dough left, and she was just adamant that she wanted to make one big cookie.

I figured, hey, what's the worst that can happen? (Lest you think I'm doing TOO good of a job in the homemaking department, it was only store-bought sugar cookie dough, so I figured if it didn't work out, no huge loss.)

Here they are, in all their fall glory.(And they tasted pretty OK, too!)

***

7. Sarah has - and I can barely believe this - started to DO MATH FOR FUN.

This is big news. In addition to absolutely loving Life of Fred, and begging to do the rows of practice and the "Your Turn to Play" sections, she plays a ton of Moshi Multiply on Moshi Monsters, one of her favorite online games.

It's basically a "times-tables drill," and it's scored based on how many problems you can get right in 30 seconds. Sarah has always struggled with timed tests (in a more complicated sense, that's part of what led us down the path toward an Asperger's diagnosis), so to see her able to get almost one per second right, well, that's honestly amazing.

To me, that's proof that our style of learning works. I love it.

***

So that's a look at seven snippets from our unschooling life lately. What's going on in your world?

Also linking up today to Moments to Remember and Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers Weekly Wrapup.