Tag Archives: autumn

My apologies…

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I realize I have been neglecting this space, and as such, neglecting you as well, dear reader.

We have been plagued this last six weeks with various illnesses (bronchitis for me, strep and regular old colds for the rest) that always come with autumn allergies and the evil sugar season (Halloween through New Years!).

But the real reason I’ve been posting less is because I’ve been cheating on this blog – my online time has been dedicated to instagram a little, but mostly to Pinterest. Have you discovered Pinterest?

It. Is. Killing. Me.

It is similar to falling in love. Like when I met My Farmer. I just cannot get enough. Every time we are together, I am completely unaware of time or space, so intensely am I focused on the present moment. When we are apart, I am thinking about the next time we can be together, and as much as possible of what I’m doing is focused on this relationship. I can’t sleep for thinking about it. When I wake up, it’s the first thing on my mind.

Here are the things I’ve been doing in real life, all of which came directly from my sordid affair with Pinterest:

I made a chocolate cake in which the main ingredient is beans. The children loved it.

I did my hair with 40′s flair and 60s style.

I created a refreshing, antioxidant-packed beverage.

I properly applied “smoky” eye makeup.

I cleaned my jewelry.

I hard boiled eggs in the oven. (I know. Mind blowing.)

I made a headband around little cowgirls hair with a braid of her hair. SWANK!

I baked healthy cookies that included fresh ginger and a banana.

I drank seventeen-ish new smoothie recipes.

I renewed my desire to be a hoarder because of all the crafty crap people make by up-cycling things. (Philosophical Crisis!)

I made five minute bread that actually took about an hour because I measured something wrong.

I transformed dried beans into something amazing and wonderful via that magical kitchen device they call a crock-pot.

I went to the grocery store and didn’t have room in my cart for all the things I wanted to use for Pinteresty ideas and recipes on top of what we actually needed.

I told a friend of mine it’s like having access to every issue of every magazine you ever loved for all time. Let me know if you are on Pinterest and I’m not following you – I’d love to! I’m sure there is something awesome you are doing that I should be trying!

Otherwise, if you need me I’ll be on Pinterest or in the kitchen.

Autumn tradition

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We have a favorite pumpkin patch, and it’s become our tradition to visit it the day before (or the day of!) Halloween. We like to arrive first thing in the morning. It’s empty and clean, the morning is cool and crisp, and there are hours of fun to be had.

There is a playground AND a petting zoo!

Swings and pits…

With diggers!

A jumping pillow (this pic was on instagram, you can find me there as ‘closeenoughblog’) all to ourselves.

No lines at the zipline,

But just enough brothers to help.

The tallest slide you have ever seen,

water pump duck races,

Gourd guns, sling shots and pumpkin cannons!

A wonderful time was had by all.

What makes it *really* feel like November to you?

Pioneer Day, Part #2

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We spent a lot of our time traveling in our covered wagon when we began our pioneer day. We are fortunate to have acres of virgin pasture behind our home, so besides opening and closing a couple of gates (and the fact that our animal had a motor) it felt pretty authentic. I, for one, had a wonderful time except that I did not enjoy tramping through tall grasses in my pioneer dress. Those weed seeds are not comfortable when stuck to ones stockings.

We stopped at the old water pump next to the pond, and (pretended to) fill a bucket for the animals.

As I try to do as much as possible in our homeschool (despite my tendency toward being a control freak) I let the children choose the route, the activities and the timeline of our journey. I did, however, make it very clear that if they ran out of gas they were on their own in hauling a gas can down to the pasture. (They watched the tank pretty carefully after that declaration.)

It was a perfect, beautiful morning.

We drove – I mean traveled – all over the place, changing our route to get around ravines, muddy patches, thorns.

I was so glad to have saved this costume my mom (an incredible seamstress – she made my wedding dress as well) made for me to wear during a play in high school. Little Cowgirl and I sewed the rest of our costumes, which is saying A LOT considering the fact that I don’t really sew (mostly because I don’t really know how).

Shooter and Farmer Boy were much less into their costumes – but I know they felt very ‘pioneer.’

After an hour and change months of traveling, we reached the perfect place to homestead. We unloaded our wagon, built a temporary shelter out of our canvas (ahem, sheet) cover, and got to work.

The young men took turns plowing the field,

and raking up hay to feed the lawnmower and stick horses animals over the winter.

Little Cowgirl got to work on gathering burning materials for the fire and cleaning potatoes for lunch.

We boiled potatoes from our garden, then added chunks of ham and cracked in a few eggs.

We ate in the grass and wiped our plates in buckets of water drawn from the sink in the utility room well.

Then, we harvested our REAL LIFE patch of sweet potatoes so we would have some root vegetables to get us through the winter. Cowgirl clipped the vines for us.

As an aside, this is the third year I have attempted to grow sweet potatoes and the first year I’ve had any success at all. I think this year makes up for the two years of failures.

If I were a county fair sort of person, that purple ribbon would be mine, em effers. That is all.

After the harvest, mommy was pretty much D.O.N.E. with pioneer day, so she took a long, hot shower and sat down at her macbook. (insert contented sigh) My young pioneers, however, had so much fun they decided to sleep outside without a modern tent. The littler one made it until she could hear the coyotes. The biggest one came in when it started to thunder at around 3:00 am.

But the next morning, they were back outside immediately. Everyone wished pioneer day could last forever.

This is still not the end, one more installment of homeschool pioneer days is yet to come!

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Pioneer Day, Part #1

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To close out our study of westward expansion, we had a pioneer day last week.

For those of you unfamiliar with my specialized educational vocabulary, that means we pretended to be pioneers all day long.

This wasn’t a part of our planned curriculum, it was an idea that evolved on its own during our history studies.

We talked about having a pioneer day many times during our first weeks of school. It came up often during some of our ‘extracurricular’ studies about what pioneers ate, how they traveled, what they did each day. The children kept saying it would be fun to try some of these things. Because we are used to the flexibility homeschooling gives us, we never really picked specific day once we hatched our plan, we just kept preparing a few things here and there and once we had everything we wanted ready we checked the weather forecast and dropped our finger on the most beautiful day of the week.

Little Cowgirl is helping cut the pieces for her pioneer sun bonnet.

We made a pioneer dress and sunbonnet for Little Cowgirl (here is the bonnet pattern we used), the boys spent a lot of time deciding whether they were going as pioneers, mountain men or indians. In the end, they chose to be pioneers, which worked out well because they built us an awesome covered wagon.

The afternoon before pioneer day they disappeared outside. When I stepped out to check on them, I found they’d built a frame onto one of the lawn mower trailers. They even attached some baling twine ‘reigns’ to the back of the mower seat.

We planned what foods we would be eating and gathered up supplies.

Our supplies included great-grandmother’s egg basket, corn stalks for burning in a fire pit, and old pans for cooking over the fire.

Each child has suggestions for how our day would work. The boys were very focused on the mechanics of the day; what we would bring, what our route would be, what work each person would do. Cowgirl spent lots of time thinking about the story-telling end of our game; who her character was and how each thing that happened was going to effect the plot of her imaginary day. She asked to be an orphan we found along our journey, explaining that her family had died of illness (she said small pox) and that all she had were two pots. The boys thought it would be great to pretend our pots had fallen out of the wagon during a river crossing.

We rose with the sun to put on our attire, load our wagon and head off onto the great trail of history.

We adopted a girl who had been orphaned on her journey west, and were so thankful she had some pots.

We ate cold johnny cakes for breakfast and I followed the wagon as the boys steered it back into the pastures behind our house. We sang patriotic songs and hymns while we traveled and we talked about the months of journeying we had done to reach this point.

Our single-wagon train.

Stay tuned…more details (read as: pictures) from our pioneer day adventure still to come.

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Instant! Gram!

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That’s right. I’m joining up with all you instagram folks.

This is what farmers do on their Sunday afternoons ‘off.’ They drive around and scout their fields. (And look hot doing so.)

I really have no idea what I am doing, so please advise me. What happens next? How and why would I ‘follow’ others? Are there things I should be sure NOT to miss? Comment away, friends.

When forgetting is ok…

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I somehow didn’t get this photo added in yesterday’s post…

It’s no great sin to be forgetful. But I hope everyone is remembering today where they were eleven years ago. I was nursing my first baby in the blue rocking chair we bought specifically for that purpose. I had just woken up, and I was still groggy with first-baby-lack-of-sleep.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve been awake ever since that moment when I turned the television on and everything changed.

Life is like taking a trip with your family; we are all in this together. It’s especially important to remember that.

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Her First Date

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It was the middle of September.  Cowgirl’s birthday was fast approaching.  Grandma was in hospice, and Grandpa was not leaving her side.  Cowgirl asked if he had a gift for her, and they hatched a plan for an outing in Grandpa’s antique Model A for ice cream.  She told me she was going on a date with Grandpa for her birthday.  She waited patiently as her birthday, Grandma’s death, the funeral and visitors all came and went.

 

Then plans fell together, and here is the permanent record:

 

 

You will be glad to know that I’m planning to have these prominently displayed at her wedding (should that happen, one day, far far far in the future).

 

I lied to you but it was for your own good.

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Okay, that’s not true either, it was for my own good.  I have been out of town, visiting my family in the Vancouver, Canadaarea.  I know lots of public bloggers who go on vacation and talk about it for weeks leading up to it, post pictures while they are there and everything.  But I’m not one of those bloggers.  I have a friend who posted on Facebook that she was going to a neighboring town and when she got home she had been robbed.  Sooooo, I promise to tell you about all of my trips AFTER they are over and I’m back at my un-ransacked home.

I promise to post pictures of the trip as well.  Maybe tomorrow.  For now let me fast-forward to the beginning of our school year.  Here are pics of the first day (yesterday):

Cowgirl is not trying to flip off the Brits.  Just making a backwards k for kindergarten! (Still snickering, Becky!)

Farmer Boy starting 2nd grade.

Shooter in 4th.

And you know how homeschoolers seem to do so many things differently – my kids also insisted that I have a “first day of school” picture.  They each took one, this is the 4th grader’s version.  It’s not better than the other kid’s photos, but it’s the only one I’m not obviously talking in. 

You would be laughing about that if you knew me in real life. 

It was a little hard for the kids to get up early but we don’t bother to shift our schedules too much before we actually start.  Also, we get up pretty early in the summer anyway.  But it was still an hour earlier, which can make for a tiring day!  Something new we began – the kids have a list of chores to complete before breakfast which include making beds, getting dressed, combing hair, tidying rooms.  There are also two rotating household chores on the list (sweeping, swishing toilets, tidying bookshelves, helping empty or load the dishwasher).  Everyone thought it was really fun – we’ll see how long that lasts.  But they love checking off the boxes and carrying around their lists.

I was concerned about how much time it was going to add to have  Cowgirl in the mix this year.  Although it was a very involved day, I was still relieved that putting it all together did not change things as much as I was worried it might.  Cowgirl’s work is shorter and less involved, just as a kindergartener’s attention span is!  However, the literature is so appealing that the boys want to be included in her read alouds.  We started “The Boxcar Children” and a book of mother goose rhymes.

Farmer Boy actually did his math work independently today and did not complain when it was time for reading.  He also really enjoyed being included in our new kindergartener’s read alouds and helping her with her phonics work.  We started a new Language Arts program (Primary Lanuage Lessons) and Sequential Spelling, which I’m psyched about!  They are wonderful because I can use the same lesson for all three children, customized to their own level of best work.

For Shooter, instead of setting ahead of time how many pages he is to read a day, I asked him to figure that himself.  His first book this year is Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest, by Ann McGovern.  I chose it because it was on the list of “Books To Build On” by the authors of the “Core Knowlege” series of books, and because we are studying a lot of medieval history this year.  But I digress – so Shooter announced that the book had 10 chapters and he would need to finish two each day in order to be done on Friday. 

I was using this book as a test run, really.  Although it was short (128 pgs) and a good subject for Shooter, I wasn’t sure how he would do with comprehension, since some of the language is old-english-y.  On page six, Robin says “Mark well where I am going.  I’m off to the Fair to try my bow against such bold and ill-mannered knaves as thou.”

He read the entire book twice yesterday. 

I’m tired, but love getting back into the school swing of things.  The kids were in bed early that night, the house was clean, the clothes laid out for the next day, the meals planned and prepped ahead.  Ahhhh.  The chaos and relaxation of summer is wonderful, but I’m ready for the schedule and order of autumn.  I hope all of your families have a great back-to-school experience as well.

What I love about Autumn

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My kids were flying kites today. It was just a bit too windy, but they had the best time. My daughter threw her arm around me in a desire to share her euphoric feelings and burst into song “I love kites, they fly in the wind, I love trees, they have leaves that fall off, I love wind, I love you.”

Boo Ya!

This morning we had just finished reading out loud together “Mountain Born.” It has a sad ending (The main character’s beloved farm animal dies – sorry to anyone I gave this away for). I was so moved by my children’s responses it made me tear up. I love when life gives an opportunity for strong emotion, it can bring such peace afterwards.

We weren’t ready to move on with any other work, we were just sitting and letting the sadness of the story and the understanding of time passing settle around us. We were snuggled in the living room together, when we got to witness out the front window hundreds of blackbirds winging through the wheat field.

They moved like giant waves of feathers, hundreds at a time landing or taking off, then doing it again. Even from inside the house the noise was incredible, the squawking and the fluttering. It was misty, there are still some beautifully colored leaves hanging on the tree limbs of the hedges, the wheat is defiantly green sprouting in the field. It was one of those moments I will always remember, and I got to share with my children at the picture window.

We were all speechless for the five minutes we watched the birds go by.

That is why I love autumn. I love the smells, the colors, the bounty of harvest, putting the garden to bed for the winter, the holidays approaching, the crisp air and crisp vegetables. My memories of childhood autumns contain many similar moments to the kites and birds in the air I’ve described from today. I am so thankful to be living in a place and in a way that I can see my children making similar memories.