I'm back...kind of

I'm sure you've noticed I haven't been around (or maybe you haven't....my blog traffic is in the toilet this week). We lost my grandmother to Alzheimer's this week. Well, actually, we lost her to Alzheimer's in a sometimes slow and sometimes fast progression of symptoms over the last few years. It's an awful disease that steals first your judgment, then your memories, your daily life capabilities, and finally your physical functioning. It's difficult to explain to your 6 year old that has seen first hand what the disease does that we don't know what causes it and we don't have a way to fix it. Since she was perfectly healthy otherwise, we watched her succumb to every step of the Alzheimer's itself. My mother was her caretaker. She treated her with honor, with respect, and she did everything she could possibly think of to love her and comfort her right through the very end.

We drove the 2,000 miles here from Montana in the hopes of telling her we loved her one more time, but the end went too fast and we didn't make it in time. I'm sure somewhere behind the tangling brain plaques, she knew though.

I'll probably be back to blogging by the end of next week. I still have things from last week I've partially written and just haven't posted yet, and there will be quilt updates (I brought both quilts with me and just hand quilt both), not to mention "homeschooling on the go" posts. First, we have to figure out where we're going to be staying for the next 3 months or so and get all of that set up.

Hiatus

I'm taking a short hiatus while I travel back to Texas (because there was a death in the family and because I was already planning to go there to have the baby anyway). I do have a few half-written posts I might get up by the end of the week, so check back soon.

Day In The Life Week

It's Day In The Life Week on the Not-Back-To-School Blog Hop. This post is a little bit difficult for me to write because we're still working on finding out what will work best for us. We started out slow, only doing one or two subjects a day and have been adding in things as we go. I think that was one of the benefits of starting "early"--I don't feel like we're falling behind if we skip a day here, or put off a subject there. It's also hard for me to write because my favorite thing about homeschooling so far is the lack of schedule. I guess it's left over from my angst-ridden, "I want to be grown up and make the rules" youth, but I just can't fathom having my entire family beholden to a schedule created by someone else. Sure, we kind of do that with jobs, but we have the freedom to choose whether we are going to take a certain job or not and whether the scheduling and duties of a particular job are worth the money that it pays. But with the public schools, there's not really any choice in the matter and the buses start picking up at 7:10 (and if my research is correct, ALL students from K through 12 ride the same buses and some elementary kids even get dropped at one elementary school, then picked up by another bus and shuttled to a different elementary school...no thank you).

With all that said, we don't have a set time for everything and certainly not a schedule broken down by subject, but my kids (all kids?) do like routine, so we try to keep things pretty consistent. As I mentioned last week, I am not a morning person on the best of days and pregnancy doesn't help. I don't think my kids want to deal with me and my limited patience first thing in the morning either, so we get a slow start. They eat breakfast with daddy and then play by themselves while I get up, eat, check email and read a blog or two. I try to head up stairs for school time no later than 10am. I give Sierra her worksheets for the day to do independently and I sit down with Sedona to work on her things (typically phonics and her speech practice). When they are both done with those tasks, we switch. Sedona gets "worksheets" (which actually work on concepts like same/different and writing, but half the time she just grabs the box of crayons and colors all over them...whatever, she's 3), and I sit down with Sierra to go over things she missed and work on her math (which she almost always needs one-on-one attention for). We usually work until around noon, when daddy comes home for lunch. They show off their work to him and then we all sit down to eat. Right after lunch is nap-time for Sedona. Sierra and I sit down together and I read her a chapter out of a difficult book (we always start by talking about what we read the day before, then at the end, we review what we read that day). If we're behind on something else, we will do it then, but usually the rest of nap-time is quiet time for Sierra. She can read a book, watch a movie or play a game on her DS (she likes Big Brain Academy and Learn Math). Sometimes I even convince her to take a nap too. I sit down and rest, or catch up on chores. After daddy comes home and we eat dinner, sometimes all four of us will go back up stairs and do more school work if there is more to do or if the kids are driving us crazy to "go work" (yes, sometimes they out and out beg to do more schoolwork!). We will trade off which parents works with which kid, but they both get one-on-one time when we work in the evenings. Bedtime around here is 7:30 because we've tried later bedtimes and we get the same early wake up times regardless of bedtime, so they really don't get enough sleep if we let them stay up later.

The only thing different about speech therapy days is that Sierra's independent work is done at therapy. I explain any instructions I think might be confusing for her, pack the worksheets in a folder along with a pencil and any other supplies she might need, and she works by herself while I sit with Sedona during the therapy session.

I'd say there are a few planning things I've already had to re-think just in these early weeks. First of all, I was so concerned about getting the perfect curriculum (like most first time homeschoolers, I think), but I really should have been much more concerned with coming up with a viable plan to keep everyone happy. It has taken some trial and error to figure out how to get both kids to do something (even if it's "just" playing for Sedona) independently so I can work with the other one without ten million interruptions when I need to. I also knew I would need to do some prep work outside of our "school time", but I didn't really know how much. It's not overwhelming, but it can be time consuming. We still haven't started Spanish because I haven't previewed what the lessons are going to be like and gotten the materials set up yet. Same thing with history, I have ideas, but because of my lack of preparation, we haven't consistently added it to our schedule yet. We do have spelling, grammar, reading, geography, science and math in the regular rotation though, my goal is to get Spanish and history in there before the first of September!

Saving Summer

The time has come for us to spend a little time preserving a piece of summer. Peaches have been 78 cents per pound (as cheap as I think they'll get around here) at the grocery store and a local farmer has been selling fresh picked cherries for $2 per pound at the farmer's market.

We started out by making a few batches of peach leather:

Peaches washed and ready for processing To peel the peaches, we first cut an "x" on the bottom of the peach, then put them in boiling water for a short while (this depends on the peach, but somewhere from 30 seconds to a minute--the skin splits at the "x" when it's ready) They go straight from the boiling water into an ice water bath to cool them down quickly so they don't cook Ideally, the skin peels right off. If the peaches aren't quite ripe enough, the skin won't come off as easily. (Yes, that is baby #3 already getting involved in the food preservation).After carefully cutting around the circumference of the peach (peeled peaches are slippery), you can separate the halves, and cut whichever half has the pit in half again to get the pit out Our peaches all diced up We ran them through the food processor to make a puree and in the last batch we ran through, we also added lemon juice (2 tsp per 2 cups of peaches) and honey (just to taste, I think we did about 1/4 cup per 2 cups of peaches) Next, we put the puree in the dehydrator. In the past, we've just lined the trays with saran wrap for this step. It worked, but since it was impossible to pour a thick layer, the edges of our fruit leather would be dry and crispy. When we moved here, we quickly realized that food preservation is much more common in this area than it was in our old town. In addition to crates full of canning jars and replacement parts for pressure canners and anything else you could think of, the local hardware store also sells the fruit leather trays for the dehydrator. These are inserts that sit on top of the regular trays and give you a perfect surface for pouring a nice, uniform layer of fruit puree. For our dehydrator, each tray holds 2 cups of puree. The only "trick" is that the instructions for the tray recommend spraying it with non-stick spray before pouring on the fruit puree. We forgot the spray on the first tray and I can tell you it is definitely easier to peel the dried leather off if you use the spray. We only have 4 trays and we got 8 cups of puree before we ran out of peeled and diced peaches, so the left over peaches had a quick soak in lemon juice (1 part lemon juice to 4 parts water, to help them retain their color) and got thrown on another tray We set the dehydrator at 140 degrees (highly recommend a dehydrator with variable temperature settings if you're looking to buy one) and the next morning, we had peach leather! It's easier to package up while it's still warm, so I took one tray at a time, peeled the leather off the tray in one big sheet, then cut it into pieces before it could cool down. You could put your pieces on wax paper and roll them up while they're still warm, but we decided to just stack them and put them in a ziploc bag The result is a fruit leather without high fructose corn syrup, chemical preservatives or an expensive price tag (approximately $4 of peaches, plus 1/8 cup of lemon juice, plus 1 cup of honey--we got our's for free as a "welcome to town" gift from a local store--got us 32 fruit leathers). I couldn't buy an equivalent leather for much less than 50 cents each. The girls absolutely love it and think of it as a dessert.

Since these pictures were taken, we've made another 4 trays of peach leather and we have plans today to preserve more peaches and some cherries.