the best things in life are free

Happy Black Friday. Or Buy Nothing Day, if you prefer. It's just another day to me this year, which hopefully does end up being a happy one...we'll see how it unfolds.

The most amazing thing has happened for us this year. We have been assaulted with so few Black Friday advertisements I could count them on one hand. This is a stark contrast from years past, where the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving were filled with a growing frenzy of marketing so that as we got closer and closer to Thanksgiving we were Thankful, sure, but we were more aware of the deals to be had the next morning and more aware of the things we did not have than of the things we did. What a lovely way to undermine a holiday that - despite its sordid roots - should be a celebration of what we do have and the bountiful harvest that has been provided to us yet another year.

See, we ditched our TV when we moved here. I never realized just how much the TV was infiltrating our lives until we actually escaped the Black Friday assault without it. We also don't subscribe to the local paper, so we don't receive advertisements in the mail. And to top it off, we're in the middle of the country, and the nearest chain stores are 30+ miles away, so we don't even drive by a store nine days out of ten.

I can't explain how much happier this Thanksgiving has felt without knowing which widgets were on sale at which Super Widget Store. Last year at this time, I was almost 8 months pregnant, and I don't know about everyone else, but when I'm pregnant and I hear a terrible story about some other pregnant woman, it really sticks with me. Last year, I was horrified by the Wal-Mart trampling of 2008. One Wal-Mart worker died when shoppers busted down the doors at 4:55 a.m. The shoppers trampled the worker to death, and trampled a woman who was 8 months pregnant. Can you imagine? Can you even imagine wanting a widget at a Low Price so badly that you don't stop to help up a woman about to give birth?

The story got worse. Apparently, Wal-Mart locked the doors again while they waited for the police and a coroner to come, but they let the shoppers already inside finish their shopping, wait in line, and pay. Can you imagine being the cashier ringing these people out while your co-worker they just killed lays dead on the floor by the entrance?

Then, after the last shopper bought the last Low Low Price widget, they finally shut the store. For a couple hours. To clean up the blood. And they made the workers stand around waiting until they could open again.

I have never heard a more disgusting story of greed in my entire life. And the thing is, this greed? This greed was created. This frenzy was engineered, day by day, building, shoving anticipation higher higher until the tension was so tight, you could shove down glass doors with it.

It was then that I officially banned Wal-Mart, though I'd been unofficially banning them for years.

But without Wal-Mart, there's still Target, still Kohl's, still Macy's. There's lots of opportunities to bemoan our have-nots and forget our blessings. There's tons of chances to turn a day of thanksgiving into a day of preparation for getting more.

So as I was heading to sleep last night, I was thinking about the difference between this year and last year. And I then realized that the best things in life really are free. You don't have to stand in line for them, don't have to pay interest on them, and you don't have to put them under a tree to focus that holiday on buying too.

What are the best things in life?

A baby's first word - "Mama"



The growth that happens in 7 years of marriage, after the expensive wedding



Grandma's china set, just my style



Grandpa's hand-carved animals becoming the nativity scene
Mary and Baby Jesus in clothespins



Handmade ornaments, and the Mommy-Sassy time spent creating them



Daddy's handmade gnome house



An apron worn by a six year old whenever she makes cookies with Mommy



A handmade pie plate that "made me think of you"



Friends' heartily recommended movies lent, not rented



Pottery given by the potter himself



Art



Why are these things the best things in life? Besides the obvious, there's the fact that yes, they are free, but they can't be replaced. They can't be bought. You can buy all the Low Low Price widgets you want, but you can't buy a baby's fierce love for her mama and you can't buy a big girl's true smile when you ask her if she'd like to do a project together. You can't buy love, so they say, and you can't buy creativity or family or security or contentment.

But you can work for it. Not by letting more of the world - our profit-driven world - in, but by keeping more out.

a mother's intuition

When I was three years old, I almost drowned. My mother and I were in Hawaii, where she was visiting her sister whose Marine husband had been stationed there. My mom and dad were having marital problems at the time - they separated shortly after we returned - so my dad wasn't with us.

I don't remember a lot of what happened, though I remember more than I ever thought a three-year-old could recall. Most of the memories are surely memories of memories though, since I think of the incident several times a year.

We had all gone out for a boat ride off the coast of Oahu. My uncle drove the boat, along with my mom, me, my aunt, and my grandparents. When we came back, we had to walk several hundred feet down a small bridge about the width of a sidewalk from the boat to the pier. I was given the job of carrying towels back to the pier.

My mom went to use the restroom. I think she must have had reason to believe someone else was watching me at the time, while that other person probably had reason to believe my mom was watching me. I'm not sure.

I do remember walking back to the boat by myself at some point. I remember leaning over off the little bridge to try to see a shark in the water. I remember falling into the water and trying to breathe, looking around, and being scared a shark would get me.

As the story goes, my mom was in the bathroom when a little voice inside her head panicked and said, "Where's Julie?"

She hurried out of the bathroom and called for me. She started to get more frantic, and then someone...her? my uncle?...saw my bathing suit bobbing up and down in the water. My uncle pulled me out, and being a trained Marine, gave me resuscitation and, well, saved my life.

I heard this story many times growing up, and I mixed it around with what I remembered, and learned it as a fact. It's part of my history, part of my family's history, like a folk tale you'd tell round the campfire on a fall night. My mom had an actual moment of mother's intuition. Pretty cool.

But then when I became a mother myself, I started to logic that moment away. She didn't have an a-ha moment so much as she realized she hadn't seen me in awhile. Her internal alarm clock rang because she had taken too long in the bathroom without me.

This is what my left brain decided. Until yesterday.

I put Maggie down on the floor yesterday after her nap. I did a quick floor scan to be sure nothing chokable was lying in her reach, then I went to load the washing machine in the next room.

As I was loading in the clothes, a little voice in my head said, "She has one of Sassy's dollhouse bowls in her mouth." What a specific thought! I tried to chuck it up as OCD and told myself if I did not get this laundry in, I would never be caught up.

I continued to load and the little voice said, "Stop it. Forget the laundry. Go make sure she doesn't have a little bowl in her mouth."

Fine. I put down the laundry. I figured I'd get everything done more quickly if I put the OCD to rest first.

I walked over to her, squeezed her little cheeks to look in her mouth, and darn it if she wasn't sucking on a little dollhouse bowl. A little wooden bowl about the diameter of a dime, but three times as thick. A little wooden bowl just asking to be a choke hazard.

The little dollhouse bowls went with Sassy today to live out the rest of their lives at Nana's house. And I got my childhood folktale back.

Hawaii, 1976







Aunt Jo



Mama

scavenger hunt, a reading game

Sassy has officially learned her one-syllable, short vowel sound words. On our word list, these come first, so we've been working our way through them, and she has done quite well.

Sassy often enjoys working through the lists more than reading herself to gain information. In fact, she usually resists reading something -- even if she knows the words -- to find out something she wants to know. She prefers that I just tell her. I suppose it's much quicker that way. ;-)

So to celebrate her success, and to prove the usefulness of being able to read some words all by herself, I decided to set up a reading game in the form of a scavenger hunt -- complete with a prize at the end.

I sent her outside for 20 minutes while I set up. When she came in, she was met with an empty table containing a milk jug, and a sign instructing her to Put Back the Milk. Each action produced a new sign, all short-vowel, one-syllable words.

We had: Lift the Doll, Skip to the Bunk Beds, and Put the Cats [on our mousepad] in the Tub, among others.

It all culminated in Lift the Big Rug where she found the prize: a dry-erase book from our local Amish store on how to draw farm animals. 20 minutes set-up time for me, a fun game for us both, an hour of drawing time for her. Sweet!

clothespin dolls and handmade books

Sassy learns a lot - some might argue most - of her "schooling" during freeplay time. Freeplay is just as it sounds, free. She is free to use the materials at her disposal to create or imagine or build or just play.

This week she chose to make clothespin dolls after we made them as a group project with our homeschooling co-op. She also wrote a book. Thing is, she doesn't really write yet, not in her own sentences and paragraphs anyway, so she drew pictures and made lines for words. It was very cute. The best parts were her own binding (using pipe cleaners) and her author bio on the back.

Here are some pictures. Enjoy!

Sassy's Author Bio



Clothespin Dolls



What do you do when you have awkward garbage to drag 500 feet to the road, you already hear the garbage truck on its way, but you can't leave the baby?
Load Her Up

little farmers

I meet a lot of new people these days. It's the nature of new resident life, I suppose, and I count myself lucky that I can play extrovert as well as I do now. It really helps in establishing yourself and your family more quickly.

Usually the first question I get when I meet someone local is, "Where are you from originally?"

The next is, "And what brought you out this way?"

Legitimate questions, but without an easy, pat answer.

I'm from NKY, sure, but the lot that I just moved from that held my little suburban home was a very different lot from the one I roamed as a child.

When my mom was alive, we lived on a little suburban lot, too. I thought it was fine. I had a best friend across the street, and I had many privileges that my children (and most suburban children) no longer have. I was allowed to roller skate and ride my bike all over the neighborhood. There really was no definitive line that I wasn't allowed to cross. We just sort of naturally stayed within about a half-mile radius of our homes. This was with no parental supervision, no cell phones. It was old-fashioned trust, I guess, that we would come home when we needed to, safe and sound, and if anything happened on the way, someone would alert our parents.

I was an explorer by nature, so my favorite place to go was the undeveloped section of our neighborhood where the woods seemed to me as a child to go on forever.

When my mom died, I moved to my grandparents' house for the rest of my childhood. They lived on five acres, barely out of the city (the C-O-V for you locals). My grandpa had been raised on a farm about 7 miles from where I am sitting this instant, and my grandma had been raised on a farm an hour south of our old home.

They were both dirt poor growing up, and their parents had many children to support. Their families did things "the old way" out of necessity as much as the cultural habit of the time. Many of these things carried on into my childhood.

My grandpa raised all kinds of food to supplement their incomes, which were sizeable enough to support us without the garden. But I saw my first example then of the old adage:

"You can take the boy outta the farm, but you can't take the farm outta the boy."

You get used to it, that kind of life. You get used to picking strawberries right out of the patch, picking your corn and shucking it before dinner, stringing the beans, climbing the apple and pear trees and snacking once you get up there.

It was then that I learned tomatoes were best off the vine, standing in the garden, eaten whole like an apple. The crowd I run with now already knows this, of course. But not everyone does. I want to be sure my children do.

We would sit on the back porch on clear, hot summer nights. My grandpa might have a baseball game playing on the radio. Nobody yelled out the window to "turn it down!" or, more accurately, nobody called the police to file a noise complaint. We had lots of elbow room around us. Nobody griped because nobody heard except the nocturnal animals roaming the woods behind us.

Many nights there was no baseball, there was just hot sticky sweat and crickets, loud, screaming at us sometimes. Other times, in the background, singing with the frogs. My grandpa would point out the tree frogs. He would imitate them, and sing along with them.

He had an old sleeping bag he loved and an old tree he loved to put it under. He would lay there with his eyes closed, not asleep, just being. Sometimes he would call to the birds and they would answer.

My grandma canned the extra fruits and vegetables. In our basement, we had shelves and shelves lined with canned goods. Some were probably so old they would have flunked any food safety test out there, but she'd open them up, give them the smell test, heat and serve. I was rarely belly sick at all.

My summers had the constant accompaniment of droning fans inside. We didn't have an air conditioner until I was nearly grown. To this day, I still am comforted by white noise...the louder, the better.

But at 35 years old, I found myself in the suburbs with 20 feet on either side between my neighbors and us -- neighbors who didn't understand the meaning of "make do" but sure did understand the meaning of "consume." We didn't buy new cars, we didn't buy big TVs, we often didn't even have cable. But the kicker? We didn't care about our lawn. We just didn't care. And we still don't.

We were out of our element, and we both felt it. So we bought land, and we moved into our element. I've never regretted the decision and I cannot imagine moving back to the suburbs now.

"You can take the girl outta the farm, but you can't take the farm outta the girl."

I've never been so confident and naive as to call myself a farmer, but I totally get this sentiment. I am a food gardener, and I am a rural person by nature. This nature is only more evident as I get older. I enjoy my land and the possibilities it represents, I enjoy my woods and the hours of exploration they provide, and I really, really enjoy my elbow room.

I could have stayed in the little house with the little lot. I could have become a different person, and put hours upon hours of energy into flowers and pretty grass. But that food garden always stole my energy. Each year it grew until I realized I wanted more -- more for me and more for my kids.



It didn't feel right to me that they weren't allowed out of our fenced third-acre, nor did it feel right that we weren't shucking corn and stringing beans before dinner.

So, I am asked: what brought you all the way out here?

There are a handful of things that I consider top priority in what I impart to my children. One of those is a true relationship with and understanding of their food. Food does not just come from a grocery store shelf. Someone's sweat and worry and fear and joy and soul gave you that food. To cherish it for the nutrition it gives to your body is expected. To waste it is unacceptable, and not because "there are starving kids in Africa."

I've seen firsthand the deleterious health effects of treating food like any other consumable, just another item to water down with chemicals and price high to line corporate pockets. And the political effects of turning over to profit-driven companies the control of the very substances we need to live cannot be understated.

I want my children to have an innate sense of the importance of their food and the power it represents. I want them to feel it without having to think it.

I want the farm to always be in my girls.

number sets

One of the concepts I wanted to introduce to Sassy this month was the idea of number sets and counting by twos.

Last month, we experimented with the concept of odd and even by walking up our long, 500-foot driveway to get the mail together. After a long rain, our driveway is filled with puddles here and there all the way to the road. I quickly told her on the way up one day which numbers between 1 and 10 were odd. Then I explained which ones were even.

"Oh!" she said. "So it's like every other number?"

"Yes," I said. "It's exactly that."

I then called out different numbers on the way back. If it was an even number, she was to do nothing unusual. But if it was an odd number, she was to jump into the rain puddle as hard as she could making as big a splash as possible.

She loved this game and begged to play it whenever she saw puddles.

I'm wondering now if the odd/even concept instigated a natural tendency for her to count by two, because she aced the game I made for her that was supposed to teach her how to do this.

Last week, she spent the day in the city with her Nana, and I sent her homeschooling activities with her for the day. One activity was a game of counting using a Hi-Ho Cherry-O game board but changing the play altogether. Here's our counting-in-sets game:

You Need:
A Hi-Ho Cherry-O game board
At least 20 cherries -- 40 is ideal, but not necessary
Two players

Game Play:
The parent (or teacher) asks the child to cover their eyes while the parent puts some cherries on one of the trees.

When the parent is finished, the child must guess how many cherries are on the tree before doing any counting. The parent should only allow about 5 seconds for the guess.

After the child ventures their guess, both players count the cherries together to see if the guess is correct.

If the child guesses correctly, the child gets the cherries. If not, they have to give the parent that amount of cherries (or however many they have if they don't have enough cherries yet).

The game continues until the child "swipes" all the cherries from the parent.

Around Round 3, the parent should begin to count the cherries by twos as they count together to see if the guess was correct.

Purpose

Many children naturally start to count in sets if they are encouraged to "guess" before they count. Orally counting by twos reinforces what they are likely already doing internally.

So how did Sassy do?

Nana said she counted by twos all the way to ten by herself, without any mistakes. Sassy then started counting by threes, so Nana rolled with it and Sassy figured out 3, 6, 9, then wasn't ready to go further. They both reported having a good time.

If you had all 40 cherries that came with the game, you could tweak these instructions to start introducing sets of ten. If you filled two trees completely plus one tree with 7 cherries, that's a nice visual for the number 27.

Along with our game, we read the book "One Hundred Hungry Ants" in our number sets week. In the book, 100 Hungry Ants separate into more and more sets to reach the picnic faster. It was perfect for this first grader.

Finally, in our freeplay, she's been working on building this week. Freeplay is always that -- free -- but she can only choose from the materials on hand. In August, she made me very proud by agreeing to make our toy collection totally plastic-free. She even agreed to redistribute her My Little Ponies, Barbies & horses. I am so touched by her empathy for her little sister and her deep desire to protect her, as that's the only reason she gave up her favorite toys. She knows plastic is made of chemicals and she knows her sister chews on everything.

So her freeplay "setup," as she calls it, was especially lovely without all that plastic. She made a pizza shop, with a little patio outside, a chicken that had to stay out because it was sick, the owners' house up on a hill above the shop, and a road that led there. I adore this child's creativity.

Here's the long view:



Then we have the dining room outside the kitchen (the kitchen was the photo up top):



Here's the outside patio with the umbrella table:



I asked her if the apple was part of the setup or just a snack.

She replied: "Oh, that was just my snack. But I got so caught up in my setup I forgot to eat it! That rarely happens to me."

bloggy breaks begone

I really hate bloggy breaks. I prefer to be writing regularly; it makes me not disappear into people's neverland list of those-who-don't-update, and most importantly, it makes me happy. But I've been feeling wiped out recently, just as my Magpie has discovered new talents of scooting across the room (note I did not say "crawling"), leaving me with adaptations to make in an exhausted state of mind. This equals sporadic updates, and I'm sorry for that.

However...I am delivering pictures today to make up for the little break, and offering a few new anecdotes of our recent farm life. I'm also introducing a new little feature because I think it will be fun.

So, we almost lost another rooster. This made me really angry, sad, guilty, and about done with our younger dog. Apparently, Maple cannot resist the temptation to get into the chicken run, no matter how many times she's scolded for it. But it's not the chickens she's after. She's after their food. Seriously! Our dog can't keep her paws off the nuggets of processed corn, soy & whatever else that makes up our colorless, odorless chicken feed and she prefers it over the fresh feathered meat around it. That part is good, I suppose, except that our rooster doesn't particularly like dogs in His Run, making His Ladies scream and roost for cover.

Our poor rooster ended up with a wing completely torn off and a stump to show for it, while our dog licked the ground for soy nuggets. I found him shivering and bloody and I cried. I didn't want to lose this rooster. I love his call, I love his color, I love his determination, and I love that when it comes to humans, his fight turns to flight. That's a good rooster, and it's a rooster I intended to breed next Spring.

After crying, and calling a friend, and crying some more, I got myself together enough to call a local vet. Now thing is, around here, he's just a chicken. Just a dumb chicken. I knew the vet was probably going to laugh, and sure enough, they did. I explained that I knew it was just a chicken, but that we did like this rooster and would like to keep him if possible. We would just like his wing to be cleanly cut if needed, and the wound dressed. But even as I was talking, I was watching dollar signs ding! ding! ding! in my head, and I was glad when the vet referred me to another clinic that takes farm animals. I didn't call that clinic; instead, Jeff and I treated his wound that night and hoped for the best.

Well, I don't know if he's out of the woods yet, but it looks like he might be. He's been crowing his early morning call for the past 3 mornings in our back hallway. We had to separate him from the ladies since they wanted to peck his wound, so we've had him in the house. Around here, I think we'd be called something like "crazy." Ah, well.

After the whole experience with this rooster and the last one, I've realized that I can be whatever kind of farm mama I want to be. Historically, it seems if you live off the land, and especially off animals on your land in any way, you're expected to get pretty hard-hearted about them.

One friend told me after the Mr. Macho incident that I was "a real farm woman now."

Perhaps. I did perform a mercy killing, and mercy killing is part of farm work, unfortunately. But my heart's not hard yet. If anything, it's softer.

You know what? I love my chickens. I look at a couple of my expired layers and think, "Man, they're fat! They are eating up a big cut of that food bill!" And I know that when I need more lard, I'll take this one or that one to the poultry farm for "processing." But I won't do it myself, and I will put them gently into the crate for transportation, and give them a fine last meal of expensive mixed seeds and nuts. And that's okay. That's who I want to be, not my grandma, not the cattle farmer grandma who lives behind us. Not even Caroline Ingalls. (gasp!)

I want to be my own kind of farmer mama, the one who spent her pre-reproducing years as a vegetarian and a member of PETA. The one who chooses to eat meat now because her body demands it, but wants to have a hand or and eye into how that meat is raised. The one who nurses a beloved rooster back to health, elevates a very fat old hen to pet status, and won't kill her own animals. And who doesn't give a darn if that labels me crazy.

We're working toward a dairy goat now. Jeff fixed the chickens a new pen right off their coop! They love it, and so do I. Speckles (our rooster) hasn't been reintroduced into the flock yet because his injury is still too exposed. I can't wait to hear his call from this new run when he's back, though.

The old chicken run will now be a run for the dogs. They needed an upgrade anyhow. The old dog run, which is very close to our back door, will be the goat's pen for now. I have borrowed an electric collar for the dogs (big decision for a former PETA member :-), and I plan to start training them to stay away from the chickens, their coop, and their run altogether. Hopefully, that can start this week. For now, we will continue the routine of chickens out = dogs in and vice versa.

And now for the new feature....every so often, hopefully once a week or so, I want to tell you about some of our homeschooling activities from that week. I know some of my family members are curious what we do when we homeschool, so I thought it would be fun to document some of our activities. It will also make a neat keepsake for us from year to year.

I'm not going to do this today. You have to wait! But don't worry, the first post is already all planned out. You never know, it might even be already written just hanging out in my drafts. :-)

I also am often asked what curriculum we are using. Well, as usual, I'm doing things eclectically. (Have you seen my house?) We do mostly interest-based learning, but I also introduce new material and have her do things she might not like but that I feel are important. One of these is handwriting, for example. Another is reading, and another is basic math functions. So I don't think we fit the definition of "unschoolers" although I give Sassy a lot of choice in how she learns and practices these skills. Sometimes she plays Starfall and I count it as her entire reading lesson for the day. Other times we go through her words for the day together. Handwriting could take place as she writes a letter to someone or as she just practices the letter "Z." She has a choice in the how more than in the what.

But we are also not sitting at the kitchen table from 7:30 until 3:00. This is the most common misconception of homeschooling I hear. My grandma, for instance, can't understand how I can homeschool her with a baby and "everything else!" (her words) She's drawing on her 10+ years of experience as a kindergarten teacher, and doesn't realize that helping one child achieve specific goals takes far less time than helping a whole classroom. So much of a classroom teacher's time is spent in group management. I've done both classroom teaching and one-on-one teaching, and having one student is far more time-efficient, much like tutoring is.

So, I think it will be interesting for everyone to hear some of our sample activities so you can see that we are not doing school at home, but instead, continuing on the learning path that started the day she was born.

I have a beautiful, smart, well-spoken, and extremely sociable little girl, and as I watch her grow, I become even more certain that it's the right choice for us. And now I want to share our learning days with you.

Now, finally...the pictures.

The Birds
One morning back in September, Sassy came running into the living room talking about all these birds!
Sofie's barking at the birds!
I can't stay outside -- I'm afraid of the birds!

Ridiculous, I thought, until I went to look out the window, and here's what I saw....

All these vultures. They would land on a post, face the sun, and spread their wings out wide. It was foggy and chilly, but the morning sun was forcing its way through the fog to the East.





All I could figure was that maybe they were drying their wings? It was an awesome sight.

Our Only Garden Pumpkin



A Visit from Dear Friends



The New and Improved Chicken Run