Category Archives: Healthy Living

My opinions and recipes regarding a less toxic lifestyle.

Dude Perfect!

Posted in children, Experiments, Family, Field Trip, Food, Humor, Kids, parenting, Travel, Uncategorized by

If you aren’t familiar with DUDE PERFECT, a YouTube sensation that is marvelous according to my kiddos! then you might want to check them out!

As a parent I am happy DUDE PERFECT is who my kiddos choose to watch, because they are a group of friends having good clean fun! I haven’t heard any swearing, or anything inappropriate for that matter, and they are hilarious!

Well maybe one episode wasn’t super clean. 💩

Anyhow, when my son heard his scout troop was going to spend the night on the U.S.S. Midway he was thrilled, not because HOW COOL IS THAT, GET TO SPEND THE NIGHT ON AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER?!?!?!?!……nope, he’s thrilled because….

…. he would be staying in the same location as his favorite YouTubers have been!

(One of the trick shots is off the U.S.S. Midway)

He is happy to pose in some of the same poses as his favorite youtubers!

 

Here is Ty on the U.S.S. Midway

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Here is my son on the U.S.S. Midway

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Of course as a Boy Scout earning merit badges they had all kinds of fun activities, but the fact the DUDE PERFECT crew was in the same location made his trip complete! ❤️

 

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Now, his FIRST LEGO LEAGUE robotic team is going to the state championships soon and he is hoping they win, once again, not because that’s the point of competitions, but BECAUSE the national tournament is in TEXAS and “mom that’s where DUDE PERFECT lives, maybe we can go meet them!?!?” Uhhh not always that easy dear. Texas is a big state and it’s not polite to show up on someone’s doorstep unannounced, bit rude and stalkerish…plus DUDE PERFECT is a busy crew…but of course honey if you want to dream, dream the big dreams! ❤️ Maybe one day you and your sis will meet your favorite youtubers!!! But for now, please flip that water bottle OUTSIDE!!!

 

 

 

***ps I hope there aren’t any legal problems I’m unaware of with sharing DUDE PERFECT clips here? If there is, please tell me and I’ll pull them down!

Just everyday life…

Posted in Awards, children, Deschooling, Family, Food, Healthy Living, Homeschooling, Kids, Math, parenting, Relaxed schooling, School-at-home, Science, Uncategorized, Unschooling by

Recently I’ve been asked so many homeschool questions by both homeschooling mamas and schooling mamas thinking about homeschooling and mamas that can’t even fathom homeschooling. Seems like the universe is sending loads of questions my way. Maybe to remind me I have this severely neglected blog here.

Anyhow, here is a collection of recent pics and activities in our day. Which is what most people seem to want. A fly on the wall glimpse into our days.

Most of our days start off with groggy sleepy eyed kids waking up on their own terms. Typically my son is first, he will crawl into my bed, snuggle up and read the news on his iPad (News-o-Matic app for iPad, has current affairs in kid safe articles) while I check my email and surf the web. Eventually my super sleeper daughter will wake up, she loves her snooze time! And then the kids will often play games, Legos, or some other free choice activity while I feed the chickens, rabbits, water the garden, make breakfast, etc…

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Morning Lego time…I’m sometimes convinced they think they are clever and this is the perfect academic procrastination scheme, because as we get closer to anything resembling classroom activities, they get along super well, they start building amazing projects that a mother would never want to stop in exchange for book work! You’ve never seen such team work! ❤

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Right now Legos, robotics, digital design are all favorites. FYI – Lego digital design is a free download that my kids love! They can design ANYTHING using ALL Lego pieces on the computer, print off their designs and have step by step directions to build their projects. And in some cases give the directions to friends to see if their friends can build their designs.

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Some days the kiddos do their academics with ease, happy smiles, efficient flow, and all is blissful, but don’t be fooled. We have our moments when it comes to school like activities!

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Can you see her enthusiasm for today’s writing and math lessons. Haha!

We have been reading this book for a more interesting math experience in addition to our more classroom like math lessons.

A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe:

Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science
by Michael S. Schneider
Link: http://amzn.com/0060926716

You can see here, the kids were intrigued by a comment in the beginning of the book about triangle numbers, square numbers, rectangle numbers. Who teaches about shape numbers? What are shape numbers? Why are they mentioned? Well my kids played around with little disc markers, trying to find out what pattern was the book talking about.

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This is what they discovered:

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Seems like something simple now looking at it, but figuring it out on your own took MUCH MORE creative brain power then their classroom like math lessons.

Hands-on activities, project based learning is MUCH MORE PRODUCTIVE in our household, but it can also be more difficult to document in the event one must prove academic advancement. So to make that easy on my record keeping, my kiddos are subjected to boring old paperwork as well as hands-on projects and an overall educational lifestyle.

Here is a hands on activity that wasn’t planned SCHOOL, but was very educational. The kids and I watched a documentary on sugar and the western diet. (THAT SUGAR FILM on Netflix)

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This spurred a family attempt to document and cut out as much processed sugar as possible. Day one, we decided to go with ZERO processed sugar grams, as we already eat a fairly low sugar diet compared to many families. (Any often times pretty colorful) here are some example meals: lots of raw fruit n veg! My son is VERY PICKY when it comes to foods, but he will eat raw fruit n veg any day, so I don’t worry about his health, just crack up when people talk about cooking. Ask me what I’m making for dinner. Long ago, I stopped cooking and started serving food types instead! Haha!
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So back to sugar intake, day one, zero processed sugars is the goal. UPS shows up, dropping off belated EASTER BASKETS FROM GRANDMA FULL OF SUGARY GOODNESS! Soooo to not be a complete kill joy on such an exciting shipment. We decided to limit daily processed sugars which lent a hand to MORE MATH! 🙂

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The kids had a limit of 15 grams per day. They needed to figure out how many grams of sugar were in PEEPS and other candies. How many can they have each day? Do they want two peeps or half a peep and half a box of butter cookies? They worked out every item in their baskets and labeled them with post it notes. Made charts to document their daily sugar intake.

AND THEN CAME CONSUMPTION…

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We definitely count outside classes as part of school. And we are loaded up this year with extra classes! Jazz, Ballet, homeschool PE, drums, guitar, ukulele, keyboarding, yoga, horse riding, robotics, scouts, and more…

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Planning to reach Eagle Scout rank takes years of prep work and a lot of learning…I definitely count scouts as school work!
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Earning Merit Badges is often a lot like classroom work as well as combining some hands on activities. Here our son is learning/earning and environmental merit badge.

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And of course there is always time in the day to discover too many ashes in the mini BQQ that need to become ash bombs! Which are far more powerful and messy then a dirt clod! Aka BOY HEAVEN!

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I think our days are fairly average…some good….some not so good…but the best part about homeschooling is I get to experience so much of my kids lives with them. ❤

SnakeS!

Posted in children, Family, Healthy Living, Homeschooling, Kids, Science, Uncategorized, Unschooling by

Plural! As in TWO snakes caught in my garden net!

First off I planted a lovely garden which clearly the wildlife enjoyed too! Because one morning I came out to water a bunch of teensy green nubs of what used to be a lovely lush green garden!

After nursing what was left, and seeing some life come back into my garden, I decided I needed to net the garden to avoid the evil plotting of the local wild life on my garden!

The net worked well. After a couple of weeks, I decided to replant a few of the spots that were clearly not going reinvent their lives and make a come back.

As I walked out to my chicken coop to feed my flock, collect eggs and water my garden (doesn’t that sound so peaceful, can you hear the morning birds chirping?) I was startled by a flicking snake tail! Thank heavens it wasn’t a rattler!

Upon closer investigation I see that TWO gopher snakes…clearly on the hunt for a yummy gopher snack, were beyond tangled up in the left over netting from my netted garden.

See the tail –>image

 

And the head –>image

 

Side note: a lot of snakes die this way and so if you have spare netting lying around, please collect it and put it up high off the ground. Gopher snakes are good friends. They will scare the s h i t out of you, because they look and can act like a rattle snake, but they are a friend and will help with gopher over population!

 

(Rattle snakes are born with at least one button on their tail and will always have a rattle, gopher snakes do not have buttons or rattles)

Here is a link to tell the difference between gopher and rattle snakes.

http://www.pe.com/articles/hayes-762525-rattlesnakes-bites.html

Scroll down to rattle snake pictures and you will find it (last picture in the set)

 

Anyhow, back to the problem at hand…what is one to do here? My husband says kill the snakes. I say no…keep the good snakes alive so the bad snakes don’t take over!

(Another side note: King snakes will kill and eat rattle snakes)

Instead we cut them out and sent them off with our local animal rescue to the vet. The vet can take the tight netting off without cutting the snake and then give it a good exam and set it back into the wild.

 

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As the animal rescue woman was leaving our property another giant gopher snake was crossing our driveway…it’s amazing we still have any gophers!

And yet another side note: gopher snakes can climb trees! They will if required go looking for prey up in trees, we’ve had one flop out of a tree and land on the ground in front of my daughter…who is also an avid tree climber, so always keep a keen eye out when playing in nature, but remember gopher snakes are a friend.

alls well that ends well….two good snakes kept their lives for another day of gopher hunting.

Whale Watching Field Trip

Posted in Beach, children, Deschooling, Family, Field Trip, Healthy Living, Homeschooling, Kids, parenting, Relaxed schooling, School-at-home, Science, Travel, Unschooling by

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This week we decided to stock up on Dramamine and go whale watching! It was great fun! We watched a couple of whales for a while, traveling at roughly their same speed and expecting their spouts at the 4-6 minute mark. Very predictable, which was nice for the kids. However, the photos we captured look more like barnacle filled rocks with a poof of spray…as seen here:

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It was much more exciting in person! And my son got some fantastic glimpses using his binoculars!

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However, we did find (or maybe they found us?) a very playful and large pod of dolphins.

One of the dolphins my daughter named Hannah and said she could identify her by the rake marks on her back. When we got home she was thrilled to find out I captured Hannah on the camera twice!

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Hannah is now a favorite and she wishes she could track Hannah’s life. This moment has spurred a desire to learn more about wildlife/biology.

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We spied some lazy sea lions sleeping in the sun on a buoy.

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The most interesting and exciting part of whale watching for my kiddos were the dolphins, by far! There were mamas, babies, fast swimmers, jumpers and curious cruisers that would look up sideways at the boat trying to figure us out.

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If you are interested in learning more about whale watching (or dolphin watching haha) you can find a plethora of web sites on the web…here is a site to start with: http://www.whalewatching.com

Have fun!

Side notes: One question that came up on our drive home was how do barnacles reproduce if they are stuck on a whale or a rock? If you too were curious, here is the answer…Beware barnacles are apparently porn stars!

https://baynature.org/articles/how-do-barnacles-make-baby-barnacles/

And a great documentary to watch after a day of enjoying the beautiful ocean is: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2277946/

it is a good reminder of what we can do to keep our oceans healthy and let those barnacles continue on with their rock star parties!

New Goals and updates

Posted in Arts and crafts, children, Deschooling, Experiments, Family, Field Trip, Food, Healthy Living, Homeschooling, Kids, Math, parenting, Relaxed schooling, School-at-home, Science, Unschooling by

I have a few new goals this year.

We started a new routine to our day when we started back from the holidays. We are aiming to keep this routine for 100 days. So far we are forming new habits and it’s going well!

Now that is flowing I’m going to try a weekly post on this blog. I am telling myself there is no reason I can’t do this! I have a gap of time every Thursday, and if I make that gap of time blog time in my mind, it should work out.

As for a mini update, here are a few things we’ve been doing (or dealing with)

We hatched out 8 eggs (think I blogged about it in previous posts) well seven of the eight chicks were roosters! Yes I use “were” because a few of them became dinner.

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It it was difficult to watch. I don’t think I’ll be able to endure that again unless I saw something far swifter!

But once dead, I felt it was a waste if we didn’t eat them and honor their life in a way.  My daughter and I plucked them and discussed life and death. It was a nice opportunity to have a meaningful conversation on this topic.

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It was honestly THE BEST CHICKEN DINNER I’ve ever had!

A few lucky roosters have gotten to stay, because they were the least dominate and we weren’t interested in having a lot of cock fights or children being chased after.

Black beard and silver seven (grey one on the left, with his less dominant tail down) got to stay. The grey rooster with his tail up, Greyson, was given to a friend…his outcome is unknown and I don’t want to know because I have a feeling eventually he will be dinner.

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So far silver seven and  black beard are doing alright, but this spring we will need to get them some lucky ladies, as our current rooster Frosty is not sharing his flock what so ever! Not even one hen!

NEW DRUMS!

Another new addition to the family is my sons beloved drum set. He has put together his own “band” they are named “THE PIXELATORS” remember that name as one day he’s certain he will have a famous rock band!

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Best part of this electronic drum set is….drum roll please…you can play with headphones and it’s quiet! Haha! He can also play loud without the headphones, so best of both worlds!

Recently we had a band practice…it was priceless!!! The Pixelators Rock!

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Another fun adventure is seeing my children find their curiosity! I was worried it left the house, but recently while having free time, they are doing science experiments and art work again! Another good reminder not to worry too much,  life does truly come in waves.

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And of course we are still doing our school work…

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…nothing better than graphing CANDY!

we also attended an acrobat performance. The kids we’re very impressed with this man balancing on six chairs, on top of a stand…

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And this man riding a bicycle with eight passengers!

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This performance has encouraged a few acrobatic activities at home!

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Have a great week…hopefully my goals of working out 7 minutes a day (with the “SEVEN” app) and weekly blog writing will take place! Just a few goals at a time…once these are in place I will add more goals, or new habits!

Homeschool Mornings

Posted in children, Deschooling, Family, Healthy Living, Homeschooling, Kids, Language, parenting, Reading, Relaxed schooling, School-at-home, Spelling, Uncategorized, Unschooling, Writing by

Well we pulled out of traditional school four years ago and have been homeschooling since. I’m still amazed at how peaceful homeschool mornings are compared to the chaos we used to call “normal” back in our traditional school days.

On this particular morning, my son really wanted to start his lessons before anyone else was up, dressed, fed and ready for the day.

As I sip my morning tea (side note: my husband is awesome and brings me a cup of tea in bed every morning! Thanks honey!) my son brought his “explode the code” work book, the teacher’s guide and his pencil to my bedside. Who am I to stop educational pursuit! Haha!

There I was sipping my tea and giving language lessons from bed as he happily did his work.

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When his sister woke up, she thought life needs to be fair; therefore, she wanted her explode the code lessons on mama’s bed too!

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We knocked out language lessons in our jim jams on mama’s bed in such a loving and peaceful way, with none of the rush we felt on traditional school days.

Chilling with my kiddos, sipping tea, answering the occasional question, etc. Eventually, we did get up, but when we were good-n-ready.

Four years later and it still impresses me! And I wonder how and why parents still run around in that crazy rush hour morning mess, when life can be so peaceful…

Guinea Fowl Update

Posted in children, Deschooling, Experiments, Family, Healthy Living, Homeschooling, Kids, parenting, Relaxed schooling, School-at-home, Science, Uncategorized, Unschooling by

I decided to just go for it…put Shizzle and MaNizzle in the chicken coop and see what happened….

….in a nutshell they have been living together for a few days now. I wouldn’t say it is a lovely coexistence, but I do not have any complaints yet. So far the two species are sharing the same space. They contentedly ignore one another, they have a respectful fear of one another and they seem to allow one another access to all areas of the coop/run, so far…

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I say so far, because sometimes a few days isn’t enough time to really know if they are settled. We should know more in a week or so is my guess.

Last night was the first night the guinea fowl went into the coop with the chickens at night on their own. So that was hopeful. Today was the first day they free ranged together, so we shall see how bedtime goes later tonight.

In the very near future the chicks will be released from their smaller coop (triangles shaped coop within the big chicken run) and that will be another adventure in bird integration. Fingers crossed! Knocking on wood! Prayers said! Positive vibes sent out into the cosmos!…that all goes super de duper great!!!

Guinea Fowl Adventures

Posted in children, Deschooling, Family, Field Trip, Healthy Living, Homeschooling, Humor, Kids, parenting, Relaxed schooling, School-at-home, Science, Spiritual, Uncategorized, Unschooling by

Well a little over a week ago we had 17 guinea fowl.

We went on vacation and came home to 9 guinea fowl.

Woke up the next day and found we had 5 guinea fowl?

Woke up this morning to 2 guinea fowl!

Mind you these birds are virtually wild and free to roam on several acres of land.

Clearly we are feeding the predator population a free meal!

So today the kids and I went on a “save the last two guinea” hunt.

After a lot of herding, chasing, and failed attempts to capture, we caught one!

Then a neighbor joined in the efforts.

More herding, chasing, failed attempts to capture, then we caught the other one.

So what do you do with two guinea fowl that have no clear coop or home to go to that is safe? Clearly you put them in the spare bathroom shower…right? Isn’t that what anyone would do? Haha!

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After spending the day in the shower, they felt that was enough! I heard a horrific crash and went to see what took place in the bathroom…

…apparently they wanted a bit more space to roam!

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Which means I need to find a solution to these birds ASAP!

Now that the kids have named the last two survivors (Shizzle and MaNizzle) we obviously must make arrangements to have these two live in peace and happily ever after! (Fingers crossed, ideally they will get along with the chickens!)

Life Science

Posted in children, Experiments, Family, Food, Healthy Living, Homeschooling, Kids, parenting, Relaxed schooling, School-at-home, Science, Spiritual, Unschooling by

We recently had to rehome of our rooster “Storm” because he was a bit too good at being a rooster. He protected his ladies too well and attacked the kids when they were collecting eggs. We were very sad about this and tried to remedy to situation, but sadly we weren’t successful.

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We took Storm back to the breeder and swapped him for Frosty, our new rooster.

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Long story short, we wanted some of Storm’s babies, so into the incubator went some of the eggs fertilized by him.

21 days later we had the best science experiment ever…getting to see life emerge.

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These chicks were half blue orpington (Storm) and half Easter egger (Mama)

26 days later we opened up the unhatched eggs. Mostly we found icky yokes that never really took…

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…but then we discovered two chicks that were well on their way. It was sad for the kiddos and they wanted to bury the chicks.

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You can see one dyed before it’s yoke sack was absorbed into it’s abdominal cavity…but the other chick was ready to hatch and never pipped or unzipped for some unknown to us reason.

It was a good science lesson on how delicate life is.

The kids decided they needed to bury the chicks at the base of a tree, so they can climb up to the top and learn to fly. And because according to my daughter it takes a year to get to heaven and well the flight journey there is a long way. She’s pretty sure heaven is on a planet not discovered by humans yet.

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Each one decided to add some sort of token for their journey before we buried the little peepers.

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Then we came inside to celebrate the life of 8 baby chicks that did hatch.

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Could we be lucky enough to have 8 HENS??? Lol…against the odds, but we are hoping for all hens! Frosty (our roo) doesn’t need any competition. 🙂

It would be nice to add some more grey/blue to our colorful flock.

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Ideally I’d love for the flock to have a plethora of colors and variations. I think when we incubate some of Frosty’s offspring we will get to add even more variety. 🙂

Homeschool Science Rocks…it’s hands on thru the entire process!

Update On Us

Posted in children, Family, Healthy Living, Homeschooling, Kids, parenting, Uncategorized by

We homeschool year round, but I have the summer off to some degree. My kids have planned it all out and will be dictating their routines for the most part. A few things are mandatory they must stick in here and there, drum lessons, horse riding lessons, piano lessons, volunteer work, etc…and they have decided to have specific days. ie: Monday is math day, Tuesday is history day, and so on…they plan to make their tv shows, iPad apps, board games, outdoor play, kitchen experiments, etc revolve around the theme of the day. Example, today is spanish day, so they will switch the language to spanish on the DVDs they watch and instead of their go to Pig Latin kid talk, they will attempt to speak spanish when possible, etc…

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I do feel like I need to give an update since it’s been a LONG while since I’ve shared what were up to.

A while back I decided to do an experiment and give the kids what we called a “FREE WEEK”…

…in a nutshell, the kids were responsible for their sleeping times, eating times, food choices, entertainment and education. In a very free willy nilly sort of way. I was here to help them when they asked but overall they were in charge of themselves. I deleted everything from the calendar for a week. (Including canceling lessons they did not want to attend)

The point for me was to get a good idea of what they were capable of, how they handled their choices, where they still needed me to guide them, where they were more self sufficent, etc…

I do think much longer then a week is needed for a true assessment. Because a week does feel in some way like a holiday rather then a time to put on your boots and get to work.

I discovered (and more importantly THEY discovered) there were still many areas mom was very needed! Which is a good thing IMHO!

They were very curious why no friends came over to play. I asked them if they arranged any play dates. Hmmm might be the reason. Planning is needed to make things happen. Good lesson for them to learn.

Why they don’t have any clean pants. I asked if they did their laundry? Hmmmm must wash clothes in order to have clean clothes. Another good lesson…but mostly they just realized mom does the laundry and didn’t this week, so they opted to wear alternative outfits over the favorites until mom washed again. (Which spurred mom to buy separate laundry baskets for each child and unknown to them, they are slowly learning to take over their own laundry washing, drying, folding and putting away! Darn sneaky mom!)

Aside from a few really good learning opportunities/discussions. And great examples of what could be handled better, it was a blissful week for ALL of us.

We all were doing exactly what we wanted all day long for an entire week! Yes I did not hear one single bicker from the kids. They were so happy doing their own thing. I accomplished a ton because they didn’t demand as much of my attention as they normally do.

HOWEVER the amount of Minecraft they played was insane for my liking. (I fondly refer to Minecraft as Mindcrap, even though I know there are lots of great learning opportunities around the game…it’s the intensity of time suck I don’t like)

Since it was free week, I figured eventually my son would have his fill, get a neck cramp, something and stop playing…nope, he played the entire week nearly all day every day! My daughter would stop mid day and go do something else, but come back to it in the evening.

They did build some amazing structures, learned a bunch from tutorials online, took on challenges and played well in each others worlds. But like I said the intensity of the Minecraft take over was not a long term OK thing with me, so we had a little Minecraft detox the following week. We are now back on a healthy level of video games from mama’s perspective.

Aside from free week, we’ve had horse riding adventures, rock climbing adventures, and a bunch if fun with friends. Spring time always sheds away the winter chill and gets us outside and active.

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I think repelling is what they love the most!

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And shortly after this adventure they wanted to practice bouldering (no harness, height they are comfortable with jumping down from)

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Recently, my daughter took some of her girl friends on a trail ride (some of her friends had never been on a horse, so you can see trail walkers near each horse for the riders safety) my son played Mindcrap with his friends (the brothers of the horse riders) it was a perfect day for all involved. Haha!

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While school kids are finishing up their last few weeks of school, I hear my public school mama friends tell me about their busy end of school year calendar chaos. It reminds me how very blessed we are to be homeschooling. We are enjoying all this warm weather having fun with friends and not in a busy chaotic frenzy.