Wordless Wednesday

inspired by GailV’s series

A Quote and a Question

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“If we cannot conquer our personal fears, then a life of a thousand years is a tragedy.

If we can conquer them, then a life of a single day is a triumph.” Bruce Lee

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What’s the worst that can happen – and, really, aren’t you tougher than that?

Cocoa-Peanut Porridge

The other week, I invented a new way to eat porridge*, one so good I had to share it.  Problem is, I only remember after I’ve inhaled the stuff.  Even here, I took the picture after I’d eaten a good two-thirds.

I eat porridge every morning, usually with a banana cut into it after cooking for sweetness, but sometimes the bananas aren’t ripe or I want a different flavour, especially if I’m eating it as a comforting bedtime snack or as lunch on days when I have not got the energy for something more elaborate.  I’ve already shared my Perfect Purple Porridge recipe, and if I were going on a colour/alliteration theme, I’d be calling this Brilliant Brown in a Bowl.  But I’m not. It smells luscious, but looks a bit…um…swamp-inspired shall we say.

This is the recipe as it works for one person, just increase the amounts if, as happens  around here, your family decides that this makes a wonderful dessert.  Weight Watchers people, this is 3 Points if you use artificial sweetener. (Another reason it’s brilliant.)

Cocoa-Peanut Porridge

Combine in a pot and bring to a boil:

• 1c -1 1/2c water (depending on how thick you like it)
• a generous pinch of salt
• 1 tsp cocoa powder

Add and return to a boil, then simmer til the mixture is smooth and glossy (5 minutes or so) :

• 1/2 c oats (I use quick oats, not instant)

Pour into a bowl and add:

• 1/2 TB smooth all-natural peanut butter

Sometimes you need to let it sit for a moment or two, the heat helps the peanut butter melt in.

Add:

• a splash of vanilla
• sweetener, honey, or sugar to taste

Call me crazy, but I think this is a simple, cheap, comforting piece of heaven. And I think it would work beautifully as something to pack as a lunch, either in a Thermos or in a microwave safe dish.

The chocolate-orange lover in me wonders what would happen if you substituted a bit of orange zest for the peanut butter. Or what if I  used coconut extract instead of vanilla? Hmmm…further porridge experimentation may be in store for me.

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* Some of you may know porridge as oatmeal.  That people in some areas of the English-speaking world don’t know the word porridge startles me.  We were listening to a Jim Weiss retelling of Goldilocks and were baffled when he said, “…she tasted the porridge, which is sort of like oatmeal…” because in our experience it’s not sort of like it, it is it. Fascinating.

Nature walk

Setting:

• cloudy and dark
• ice fog
• river bend
• warm winter day

Sounds:

• dog sniffing
• whacking of wood on wood
• crunching  snow underfoot
• cars from nearby road

Colours:

• white
• grey
• ochre
• red
• brown

Discoveries:

• three black feathers
• three little mammal holes
• large hollows in the snow, grouped in threes or fours, on the deer trails.  Deer overnight?
• nature repairs moods
• nature repairs a strained relationship
• large cocoon
• small stars pretending to be seeds

I fought the urge to brighten these photos, for it was the urge to get out despite the heave skies, the delight in the colours found, the freedom within the grey that delighted me. With brightness, it would have been a lie, a fake experience that implied our real walk wasn’t good enough.  It was.  Dark despite the fact that it was 3:00, it still changed my mood and his.

He didn’t want to go.  “Nature walk?” he moaned.  “Just ten minutes?” I begged. “My soul is just yearning to get out of the city.”  “Oh, alright,” he said with heaving sighs.

Ten minutes multiplied.  Ten minutes would have been happily more than an hour if we had not had a time constraint.

“Now, consider what a culpable waste of intellectual energy it is to shut up a child, blessed with this inordinate capacity for seeing and knowing, within the four walls of a house, or the dreary streets of a town.” Charlotte Mason

Of course, I wonder why she wrote ‘child’ when ‘human’ would have been true.

Frozen moments

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Sandra, prompted by her grammar program to learn the workings of a dictionary, is inspired to look up the definition of ‘ecology’ in more than one source, type her findings, and bring them to her ecology teacher (my father). She is increasingly certain that she would like to be a scientist of some sort, with a strong leaning toward ecology as her favourite.

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Matthias on the rink in the yard for half the morning, throwing the shaft of the broken hoe into snowbanks. When I ask if there’s a story to his game, he replies, “I’m not sure. I don’t know if this is something I’ll do in the Olympics some day or if I’m fighting orcs.”

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A Quote and a Question

“Men become builders by building houses, harpers by playing the harp. Similarly, we become just by doing just acts, brave by doing brave acts.”   Aristotle

Is there some area in your life (or that of your children, homeschoolers) in which a focus on theory and study is keeping you in the stage of ‘thinking of’ rather than ‘becoming’?

Dreamer, keep dreaming

We knew we would be moving here at about the same time that we knew we would be a homeschooling family.  I had a clear vision, a prescient waking dream: we would walk to a fabulous tea shop that was a gleaming gem of a local treasure, pull out our various books, and settle in for a good read after ordering scones and tea as the white-haired ladies out for a chat with their friends looked on with admiring and approving nods.

First, the tea shop burned to the ground.

Then I came to accept the temperament of my son, which was such that even read alouds had to be accomplished while he was in the bath for his wiggly, kinetic, driven mode of interacting with all of reality made bookish moments rare and the prospect of  alteration seemed laughably distant. Perhaps his wife would read to him on the couch.

Then came years of struggle with Sandra and reading, to be followed by years of struggling with her eyes in eye therapy.

And, to put a cherry on the whipped cream on this layered sundae of doom, Matthias was also diagnosed with eye difficulties.

The tea shop may be a charred memory, the scones sadly nonexistent, the date may be years later than I could have imagined, but the moment, was nonetheless real. Unbelievably warm weather tempted us outside for a walk, I offered Rainer’s library as a destination for our group silent reading time (a new addition to our days this January), and the moment opened before me. What a brilliant thing that Project 365 has taught me to wander with my camera in my pocket.

A new season

It’s the season for oranges. The world is grey and white and blue, but the supermarket is full of heavy oranges, soft mangoes, ripe bananas. The warmest colours for this chill time.  I am surprised every year.  A season of contrasts.

Can’t migrate

Those who can’t migrate…stay insulated.

Letting it Work

Not making it work, just letting it work.

Those of you with children who mostly go along with your plans or who have no need to walk a road made bumpy by learning disorders, may not understand what I am saying. But homeschooling is finally working. I have new ideas this January, but I am not implementing them. I have goals, but I am not making the kids jump through hoops. I did not return to more formal learning this January with a blaze of hope and determination, only to crash several days in with fatigue. You see, it’s just happening. We’re just getting to it. They’re just walking the path.

It’s a whole different world. The way the golden glow of a setting sun suddenly washes over an August landscape scoured fresh by a thunderstorm. No wonder people seemed to be talking about a different life than mine when we were both talking about homeschooling. Sandra’s eyes are strong and all she needs is practice to read at grade level. She reads in the evening for fun; she is reading a book I have never read. That is a wonder. She is eager to work, or at least to be done, to move forward on her path. She likes the work she’s doing to move forward in her education. Tias’ eyes are stronger every week and I hope the vision therapist says soon that we are done and can skip the 5 hours of driving every other week that therapy requires. His force of nature personality is mellowing, the jagged bursts of energy and emotion smoothing out. He is not yet where Sandra is in terms of understanding that homeschooling is something that he does for his own benefit, but things are far more mellow.

Homeschooling is working.

So it was with great puzzlement and more than a little worry that I found myself drawn to a new organization system last week. After all, the problem with a new system is that you’ve still got to implement it; and there’s the fact that a system doesn’t change reality, no matter how much we may wish that it would. Planning has been dangerous for me. As a recovering perfectionist, someone who drives herself hard, someone who has felt her heart break year after year as none of the visions of homeschooling seemed to materialize, I have had to walk away from systems, goals, plans. I have focused on building rhythms so that Matthias is not surprised by what I expect of him. I have focused on building our relationships. I have focused on living richly so that our surroundings and habits might enrich the foundation so that when we were ready to build our skills the ground was fertile.

But I couldn’t stop returning to the file folder system once I had stumbled upon it. And when my friend Wanda said the exact same thing, we knew something was up. So we skated on my backyard rink with the kids after medieval history time and talked. And here’s what I realized: the system is structured, but what you put in it doesn’t have to be. Just because you’ve got weekly folders for the rest of the year doesn’t mean you’re writing lesson plans in ink for November and expecting life to follow through. The system is formal, but it’s just a place to put things.

Wanda and I, in what can only be described as one of the odder flights of fancy a pair of women can go on, were so jazzed by the idea that we bundled our kids into vehicles and went on a group expedition to the office supply store late on a Friday afternoon. Our kids were confused and bemused.

But the system offered simplicity. Clarity. A place to toss the phone numbers you get from the soccer team and the list of good books on gardening you’d like to remember come spring. An external brain. Knowing it’s there, you can toss things into a place and allow the part of your mind that’s worried you’ll forget them or lose track of them to rest.

So how is it set up? I’ve got hanging files for two months at a time, just as she suggests.  It is a very logical grouping.  July and August just belong together. I’m hoping that the two month span will prove to be a good unit study time frame – long enough to get into things, short enough that it stays fresh and interesting. I love unit studies, even ones so informal the kids don’t know we’re doing them.

Within the month groupings there are file folders for each week.  Then I have several extra hanging files: crafting, 101 Things list, household.  Those are to hold things that I want to know where they are, things like lists of projects I want to do, knitting patterns I want to knit in the next weeks but haven’t started, estimates for redoing the bathroom, favourite recipe lists so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time I need to make up our weekly plan,  lists of phone numbers from volunteer organizations I belong to, etc.

What goes in a weekly folder? Anything I’ve photocopied or printed out for that week – cursive worksheets for Sandra and me, colouring pages for medieval history, Tias’ weekly checklist.  I usually have a few weeks of such things hanging out in stacks, and it’s nice to have them sorted and put somewhere more tidy. I have my Weight Watchers’ meeting outlines in there, lovely since I always worry about losing them. I also threw a package of index cards and sticky notes into the crate.  Some are reusable reminder cards – library books due, for instance – that I can just move ahead a few weeks as I need to.  Others are ideas I don’t want to forget – hike this trail when the crocuses are blooming, don’t forget to plan Tias’ birthday party (which always surprises me in early September).  Having the index cards should (based on years of experience with my personality) be better for jotting down notions than making lists.  Lists have a kind of compulsion that leads to either overworking myself or heaping guilt on myself.

Within the two-month hanging files I also have some things that don’t belong to any particular week, things like index cards for lists of field trips that might be nifty or books I might want to read.  Right now those are blank.  But they’re there, reminding me in some way to think along those lines, just patiently waiting to be useful. There are also monthly calendars in there, with birthdays and races written down.

Wanda and I were having so much fun that she invited my crate  over for a playdate with her crate.  Our children may have been excited to play Mario Kart against each other on the Wii, too.  It was interesting to see what we had done differently. She has a 3 week rotation of recipes, for instance, and has all the recipes photocopied and tucked in there.  I hope she’ll blog a bit about what she’s done so that I can poke my nose in and maybe get a few more ideas.

As I said, it’s just a place.  A place to put things that I need to hang on to, a place to find things when I’m looking, a place with empty lists reminding me that a task or an area of life was something I wanted to pay attention to, and a place to put things like mail to remind me to deal with them more permenently.

Hopefully, a place that lets things work.