S rummaged in his pantry and came up with this

Lentils are fairly cheap if you buy them at an Indian or Asian grocery and even our little ones like these. We either serve them with rice or use them as a spread on bread, or a dip for vegetables.

I added a section for the blog posts I have in mind to write, as I often have ideas and then can’t remember them when the time comes to actually sit down and write!

Wednesday and Thursday will be our busy days this week. Chiropractor for me Wednesday morning, then our regular Open House Supper in the evening and on Thursday the commemorative evensong and Eucharist we’ve been planning for a while. The service is at 7 pm and the choir is to be there at 6 pm for a final rehearsal and warm-up. S is supposed to be making his amazing chocolate caramel tart for the reception afterwards and he will probably need to just meet us at church as he often doesn’t get home until about 6:30. And I’ll be grocery shopping /errand running that morning! Definitely a day for a crock-pot meal!

Now here’s the fun part! I found it really helpful last week to post my plans on Monday and report on what I actually accomplished on Saturday! So helpful in fact that I thought some of you might want to do that too.

So if you run a blog, do a post on your plans for the week and post a link to it here (in the comments as I haven’t got Link Tools up and running yet). If you don’t run a blog but still want to participate you can post on the Sticks, Stones and Chicken Bones Facebook page, either with a comment on what you’ll be doing or a photo of your list/plan!

Then on Saturday I’ll post what I managed to get done and you can too! Looking forward to seeing what you’re planning and encouraging one another to keep going on these busy summer days.

The plan for the week

And here’s how we did…..

Checked off plan

Of course a few of those things are continuing projects (School plans for example) but everything I crossed off at least had progress made on it so I feel like I accomplished something.

And I had a lot more motivation to get onto stuff knowing that I would be writing this post on Saturday! I even added in a few things that made sense (sorting through and pulling too small clothes!!! since I was behind on laundry anyway).

Got me thinking that what I should do is post my plan every week and invite you to link up as well. So here’s the plan: On Monday I’ll put up a post with my plan for the week and invite you to put yours up as well. If I can get a linky tool working I’ll use that and if not just put your link in the comments and I’ll make sure it posts!

Have fun!

Last weekend was the HEAV Convention which was great fun and very tiring as always. Thursday-Saturday spending time looking at materials, talking to vendors, talking to parents and doing special needs counseling is a lot of mental stimulation!

It was good and I have some projects coming out of it that I’ll be sharing with you as they develop. Still Sunday and Monday I needed to rest up and catch up with the mountain of laundry resulting from the combination of being out of the house for three days and the dryer quitting!

The rest of the week was occupied with finishing up math units before our summer break, going swimming with friends, writing lots of lesson plans!

I purchased some excellent materials at the convention and am looking forward to going through them with the children. As usual as I start to prepare lessons for them I find that I am going to be furthering my own education and I’m excited about that too.

I’ve also decided that I need to take more advantage of where we live and get us out of the house for more intentional study. With that in mind I’ve set up a regular visit to the cemetery/nature preserve in our neighborhood as part of our Tuesday morning Nature Study and a regular monthly visit to our local art museum to go along with our study of art history.

I’m hoping to also plan a regular visit to the Science Museum (since we have a membership) and other expeditions as they fit in with our studies. Jack is so easy going and the others have gotten big enough that going somewhere together is really pretty manageable especially if I’ve planned for it ahead of time.

In order to do that I’m cutting our “academic” days to three per week. On those days we’ll do Reading, Phonics and Math Then on Tuesdays we’ll do Nature and Unit Studies and leave Thursday as our flex day for errands, playdates, make-up days or whatever. I’m trying to consciously put time into the schedule to do things we find interesting but might not be able to plan ahead of time and for days to just relax and see what happens!

We’ll see what happens with all of this, I’m kind of feeling my way through it!

One more day today of looking at curricula, going to the Used Curriculum Sale, talking to parents of children with special needs, and learning.

Today S and Buggle are going with me. Buggle wants to drive a robot again (he did yesterday) and we may take Bull for a bit to see the robots as well.

I’ll have a full report of what I did, saw, bought etc. next week when my head stops spinning!

Hmm- longish list but doable.

That’s schoolwork happening there!

And sometimes it’s just the long hour and a half of quiet in the afternoons while the little boys nap.

Buggle is getting through books at the rate of one 200ish page book every couple of days. Mouse isn’t quite as fast a reader and she doesn’t like to be still and read for as long as he does, but she is still reading several chapter books a week, plus any number of picture books. Both of them will read to the little boys and Mouse is also very interested in going through the hymnals singing all the songs she knows.

Of course this means that I need to keep them supplied with good, appropriate reading material. That’s not so easy.

My inclination is to think “Oh they can read anything up to about a seventh grade level.” and technically that’s true. They have very little trouble with the mechanics of reading beyond needing help with the occasional word. Finding materials that are good for their emotional and spiritual maturity level is a little harder.

For one thing our local libraries have been going through their collections for years and weeding out books. There are many reasons for this and some at least of those reasons I agree with. There’s a great deal of older (pre-1950 say) children’s literature that is twaddle at best and some of it can be very racist, belittling and patronizing and I don’t want those kinds of influences in the children’s reading materials. The problem is that the books that have been replacing older materials are no better. Many of them are also twaddle, and quite a few ask children to deal with things that they don’t really have the maturity to deal with.

For instance: older books will rarely mention specific information about puberty and the onset of menarches. Current books (especially those written for girls) are often built around those bodily changes and can be quite graphic. Interestingly they don’t often teach girls to value their bodies but instead reinforce issues of weight, looks etc. and I don’t want my sons or my daughter being influenced by them.

In general our current body of children’s literature asks children to grow up too quickly. Instead of being a safe haven from problems in their world, current literature (in the name of realism) brings the troubles of childhood into the realm of their imaginations. Thus we have books about, divorce, abuse, boy/girl relationships at ever earlier ages, body image, and parents and children who cannot get along. Children do deal with these things every day, but by allowing them to be the focus of their imaginative life as well as their reality, we make them inescapable and we normalize the kinds of behaviors and relationships that lead to those unhappy situations.

So what do I do? The children need books to read, and I want them to learn discernment in their reading.

First of all, I pick their books at the library, for the most part. I definitely pick all the fiction and give non-fiction (yes, even science and engineering) a good look before they can read it.

Secondly I rely pretty heavily on Honey for a Child’s Heart, Books Children Love and similar lists for suggestions about what they can read.

Thirdly we discuss what they read. Not as part of school, but just casually. What did you like? What did you learn? How do you think so-and-so could have handled things differently? No preaching, no guidance per se, just modeling for them the concept that reading goes beyond absorbing the words. I hoping this will result in discernment as they grow and that by walking with them in their reading (and yes I read every book right now) they will learn to exercise and even indulge their love of knowledge and a “good story” with wisdom.

Finally I buy a lot of good used books, or trade for them on Paperback Swap. Most of my spending at the HEAv convention this year will be on reading material and I am forever rearranging the bookshelves to make room for more books. Some of what I buy will be fiction and some good non-fiction, some will be for reading aloud and some for them to pursue on their own. Little by little we are building a library that will serve to educate their minds and stimulate their imaginations as we work to help them develop into the people they have been called to be.

This is from last summer! The children have grown quite a bit…K

I said Part 1 because I am quite certain that yesterday was not the last time she will end up in the ER!

On the way home from church yesterday we stopped to chat with a neighbor. They were just heading down to the playground at the end of the neighborhood to turn on the fountain and play for a while. We really enjoyed the fountain last year and there was some time before lunch, so we hurried home to change and went down to join them.

Jack and S stayed home to make lunch, so I put Bull in the jogging stroller and away we went.

The fountain was lovely and we started a game of prisoner’s base (modified heavily). I was capturing the children and having them stand with their hands on the fountain until someone else came and free them. Good fun!

I captured Mouse and Buggle freed her! I captured Buggle and quickly grabbed Mouse too, but as I was taking her to the fountain she started to cry.

“I cut my foot!”

We moved out of the water and I looked. Yes, the crease between her big toe and the ball of her foot was bleeding and I could feel a piece of glass in it. Fun was over. The jogging stroller became an ambulance and we hurried home to S, who is the designated puller of objects in the skin!

He tried to pull the glass out but it was clearly in very deep and her foot needed to be numbed before digging around to find the glass. I put her in the car and off we went. First to urgent care but they sent us on to the Pediatric ER at the local hospital.

I cannot say enough good things about that ER. They had clearly thought about what would make their patients the most comfortable and reduce the scariness of the experience. They did a competent and sympathetic job of assessing the situation and pulling a chunk of glass about the size of one of Jack’s front teeth out of her foot!

Here’s the part I found most interesting though (especially in regards to Mouse’s stated desire to be a doctor); as soon as we were in what was clearly a medical environment she calmed down, and her curiosity came to the fore. She wanted to see her x-rays, she wanted to know exactly what the doctor and nurses were doing and why. She asked the purpose of everything she could see.

And she listened to what was going on in the next room and thought about what treatment the doctor would probably use on a little boy who had fallen and hit the edge of a table.

Today she has a bandaid and a sock on that foot but seems fine. Hopefully that will be our only ER visit this summer.

Mouse got the gene. She can spend hours looking at things and thinking about what she would buy, what she would use it for, who she would give it too etc.

At Target, “Look Mom, this little dress would probably fit N. ( a baby at our church who’s a month younger than Jack) Wouldn’t she be cute in it?”

“Oh Mom, we’re going to Kroger and they have dairy free yogurt that Bull likes we should get some.”

“Oh, Mom, I like that dress, you could make it wider so it would fit me!” and on and on…

I find this alternately amusing and exasperating. On the one hand I’m glad she has a good eye and thinks of others, on the other hand sometimes I think my brain will explode if another purchasing suggestion is injected into my brain!

Yesterday we were out and about and she saw a sign for a yard sale.

“Mom, what’s today?”

“May 31st, it’s the last day of May.”

“Oh good, that sign said ‘Yard-Sale June 1′! We can go to yard sales tomorrow.”

So we went to yard-sales. We scored a few really good deals, but mostly we shopped. Just the two of us. We looked at toys..

“Oh Bull, would love that forklift!” and he did.

Mats for the playroom,

“Oh Mom, just what you’ve been looking for!” and it was.

“Those pink shirts would fit you, Mom.” and they did.

In between stops she sang “How many yard-sales can there be in one day?” to a tune of her own making and ‘Jubilate Deo’.

Every time I was ready to go home.

“Look there’s another one! Let’s go look!”

We did find her a couple of pairs of seersucker shorts to wear under her dresses, but really she was just pleased to be out with me, shopping and looking at pretty things. I suspect there will be plenty more of these expeditions in our future. And who knows? Maybe I’ll even develop my own shopping gene!