Pajama Day

It’s a little grey today.  Which is fine.  It matches my mood.  We’ve got between five and ten weeks of school left, depending on the kid, and I’m feeling even more all over the place than usual.  I want to be outside, inside, crafting, cleaning, reading, gardening, cooking, organizing, and I want to be doing it all right now at the same moment.  So, a little grumpy weather boxes my options  and gives me some focus

Bedtime came early for me last night and I left the kitchen a mess even though I had offered to do after dinner clean up without assistance.  And now it is staring me in the face.   It would take me a half hour on a good day.  Today is not that day.  But at least I know where to start.  Hello, dishes!

Eh, I’ve got an easy life.

The sacrifices I’ve been called upon to make have been small ones – the barely mentionable variety.  I eat the broken cookie, sit in the wobbly chair, skip the last scoop of ice cream, I shave my legs and take the kids swimming when I’d rather stay home and read.

For  years, I’ve been denying myself good coffee because I just couldn’t justify the expense.  I love good coffee.  My favorite brand is Peet’s.  But Folger’s was good enough for my grandparents so…  *sigh*  But my husband went and bought decent coffee for me this week.  And he bought a bag of cheap stuff for himself.  Because husbands make sacrifices too.  I don’t know how to insert a heart icon here, but you get what I’m feeling, right?

Anyway, it feels like it might be a pajama day.  As cosy as those can be, I’m grateful that they have been so infrequent this year.  I’m pretty sure it means I’m feeling quite a bit better, emotionally.  Exercise really is good medicine.  Huh.  I think I just talked myself into putting on clothes and going for a walk.  Maybe.

Or maybe I’ll just work on this stupid sock.  It’s the mate to the one I finished three months ago.  I will not succumb to one sock syndrome.  Something happened when I started on this second sock – my purls got all awkward.  I’m still not sure why, but they’re just now settling down.  The sad part is that I’ve been denying myself access to other, more tempting crafts, because this one isn’t finished.

It’s almost school time here.  My middle child is struggling to learn to read.  He’s decoding, but it’s difficult and not fluent.  He WANTS to read and he works at it.  He asks, “Do you think I’ll be able to read [insert big chapter book] by the end of the year?”  I hope so, Baby.  So, we went to the bookstore and got him a few easy readers that appeal to him.  Star Wars, of course.

Pasta, Pope, Paint, Berries and Slaughter

Over dinner tonight my sister and I discussed whether or not we’d be comfortable serving puttanesca to the Pope.  She says she just wouldn’t feel right serving him anchovies.  His loss I say, it was delicious.

And while I lie here fiddling around on the computer she’s making homemade toaster pastries from this book.  Yay breakfast!  Who am I kidding?  Yay midnight snack!

So all this is to say that because my sister does the cooking fabulously well AND does dishes and because we are on a homeschool half schedule – which just means that we never did finish our math curricula and are using the summer to get them done – I have had time to do a few things around here.

This is how I know my kids are getting older:  after years of only being able to tolerate neutrals because anything else seemed too busy and I needed a place to rest my eyes, I am finally enjoying color again.  I was a little nervous so after I narrowed down my choices with the paint “chips” I bought two quarts and made big squarish swatches on the wall.  To my surprise the darker color won.  It just looked nicer with the white woodwork.  Kind of a big decision.  Anyone who says, “If you don’t like it, just paint over it” has never painted an old house with miles of window frames and door frames and baseboards to cut in around and probably has never had to deal with patching plaster walls.  I work slow, too – just a careful hour or two here and there.  The dining room has been off limits for about a week now and will be for probably a week longer.  My family has been very patient with me.

polka dots!

 

I’ve also been eating a lot of strawberries from our accidentally huge strawberry patch.  Last year I ordered 25 strawberry plants.  I thought.  But um, they were actually bare root strawberry plants packaged in lots of 10.  Wait.  Maybe I ordered 10 strawberry plants that turned out to be packaged in lots of 25.  Anyway, you get the idea.  I wound up with 25o strawberry plants.  I just shoved them all in the ground kind of haphazardly and hoped for the best.  This year we weeded, strawed, and netted.  And surprisingly – we got strawberries.  And let me tell you – a fresh, ripe strawberry warm and right out of your own dirt is something luxurious.  I sat in the sun in my camp chair with one leg thrown over the arm just savoring that first juicy jewel.  A queen should have it so good.

I just eat them fresh.

 

And finally, today was the first time I ever intentionally killed anything other than a bug.  My husband and I did two of our eight meat birds.  We followed these directions pretty closely.  I have to say the killing part was the easiest for me because I was able to practice it in my mind – I could see how it should be done.  The gutting not so much.  It was a little messy but not as bad as it could have been.  I did nick the crop and had to clean that up, and I did cut myself twice, but other than that no problems.  It took about an hour for the two of us to do two birds, which I guess is alright for first timers.  We’ll do two or four more tomorrow after church.

waiting for rigor mortis to pass

So that’s What I’m Doing on My Summer Vacation.  You?

Running a Household, Excuses, and an App

I didn’t blog yesterday.  I clipped, emptied, exercised, fed, ironed, prepared, prayed, taught, wiped, dusted, organized, straightened, changed, cleaned, cleared, photographed, planned, cooked, ate, washed, dried, and folded.  I disciplined, encouraged, read and cuddled.  I talked, laughed, yelled and repented.  And then I fell asleep.  But I didn’t blog.

For a few years now I’ve been using on and off, this household management calendar by Motivated Moms.  I switch things up every now and then to keep me interested – plain running to do lists in a cheap notebook are my second choice –  but usually I find this the most helpful.  It would have taken me years and my sanity to design a personalized control journal this well thought out.  Well, now you can get it as an app or the usual downloadable, printable pdf.  An app!  I’m not much of a technology person, but this is so fun.  Yes, I guess homemaking must be my calling if I think a chore planning system  is fun.

Anyway, it’s been a couple of months since I had any kind of structure to my cleaning routine and it walloped me to get back into the swing of things.  I did manage to sleep the well-deserved sleep of the hard-working.  Bonus, I’m exercising again because it’s on the list.  Bonus bonus, I’m up before the kids enjoying a quiet cup of coffee.  Bonus bonus bonus, my husband came home from work one night and said, “I see that you’ve really been keeping up with everything – I hope that’s because you’re feeling better.  Anyway, I just want you to know that I noticed and I appreciate it. ”  Awwww.

This is part of Jennifer Fulwiler’s 7 Posts in 7 Days insanity so you can check out the other participants and look forward to more of my blather this week.

Working with Children

We had some work done on the house recently and the men who did it are Amish.  Well, two men and a boy.  The boy was about twelve years old and he worked as hard as the men.  If he was sent to get something from the other side of the house, he went and got it and returned promptly without being distracted by butterflies or shiny objects.  I asked the men privately how they had taught the boy to work so well and they answered, “Teach them to work.”

Well, duh.   But how?  I got to thinking that the Amish are able to disciple their children so well because the men do not usually trudge off to a job everyday that has nothing to do with the rest of their lives.  Their work is part and parcel of everyday life, as are their children.  And their kids learn by watching and doing alongside of the adults.

What I like most about our new chore system  is not that the chores get done faster or better or that I get to sit around eating bon bons.  It’s not even that the kids are learning valuable skills and responsibility.  It’s that it is so much more friendly with two, and three, and four.  Working together with people you like is so much better than working alone, even if the work takes longer.  Gotta keep things in the right order.  It seems I’ve been told this a time or two, but it’s beginning to sink in:  Instructing the children is not a distraction from my real work, it IS my real work. 

When I learn a lesson, I really need to be beaten over the head with it.  Over the past few weeks, this theme has been repeated again and again.  On at least one of those occasions, my husband got to learn it with me.

old school

Yesterday I stopped to chat with my husband who was beginning to apply primer to our house.  He took a look at the hedge clippers under my arm and sighed, “What are we going to do about [insert son’s name here]?  I asked him to go cut  some brush with those clippers.”

I asked, ready to go into discipline mode, “And he said no?”

“Well, actually he said he’d rather do it with me.”

And there it is.

So, we got the kids to clean up whatever mess they were making and put on old clothes and they began learning to paint a house.

Wuddaya do for fun around here?