Our flower and vegetable gardens have taken quite a beating this year. I usually expect to lose some things due to rain, or due to lack of rain. I expect aphids and japanese beetles to decimate my roses before I can get them under control. I expect other insects to attack my vegetables. I try to garden without chemicals, including… Read More »Garden Pests?
I have always wanted to learn how to paint. My attempts as a child/teen were met with rather harsh criticism, and the option of taking art classes in school was frowned upon by my family. For a very long time I thought I just wasn’t very creative. But that desire to explore my creative side never went away. Several years… Read More »Two Years of Art Practice
I usually try to paint on Sunday evenings, but once I saw the pattern to make a little owl my hands itched to get to sewing. A rummage through my fabric scraps and I found a collection of black and white fabrics that I think were left over from when I made Zach’s quilt so many years ago. I had… Read More »First Little Owl
No, it’s not a recipe, even though it sounds like it should be. These beautiful flowers are growing in our garden, but I never planted them. They appeared as if by magic when we cleared the area for our garden near our house. When they first appeared, I decided to allow them to grow because the flowers were so pretty,… Read More »Poppy Surprise
Teaching children at home has become the new normal for many families this year as schools struggle with new guidelines and restrictions for classroom learning. For families like ours who’ve been homeschooling for years, it’s just another year. But for those who are wading through all the information and advice for the first time, it may be overwhelming. I… Read More »Homeschooling Helps: Use Living Books
We live near a farm that sells fresh, raw, unprocessed milk and we’ve been buying our milk there for several years. I used to skim the cream from the milk the day we brought it home and set it aside in the refrigerator for making butter, or whipping for desserts, or using in other cooking and baking, but then the… Read More »Making Homemade Raw Cream Butter
We had several oranges and a few grapefruits sitting on our counter. The kids weren’t eating them fast enough and I already had to toss a couple that were too far gone to do anything with. I had thought about making orange cake, but with one child needing dairy free, two children needing gluten free, one needing egg free, and… Read More »Jars of Sunshine
I ordered my seeds early this year, and I’m grateful for that, as I heard of so many seed shortages and shipping delays not long after my order was placed. I printed my seed starting chart based on a very conservative frost free date for my area, sorted the seed packets by type, and gathered all the containers that… Read More »Growing
So much of my life seems to run parallel to a children’s’ book. Today’s theme was much like “If You Give a Moose a Muffin” (I love that book!) That very modest looking mudroom storage unit was the event of the day. It all started with an earlier than normal wakening. For the Littles, not for me. As I stumbled… Read More »If the Children Need Their Gloves
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here (my apologies if I’ve mentioned it too often), but we have a few dancers in the family. Of my five children still at home, four of them take classes several times a week, and my youngest, Silas, takes classes a few times a month. Sophie, Emma, and Maddie have been dancing for… Read More »Beginning Nutcracker