Back in 2005, I got into real estate. Big breath.
As I was joining the ranks of real estate agents, a friend told me, “Get into real estate and get right back out. The bubble is about to burst.” He was right, though it took him three years to be right. Continue reading
One of the objections people have to homeschooling is that they do not feel qualified to teach every subject or any subject at all. I understand. I had to wrestle with that issue and here’s what I came up with. Continue reading
“I don’t feel like doing math right now.” Has your child said that to you? Probably, in the beginning of your homeschool career, when the child was all new to the experience of homeschooling.
Surely, since then, your child has learned that we do our school work first, regardless of our feelings, and then we get to do what we feel like doing, within reason. If not, you have a long homeschooling life ahead. Continue reading
The Homemade Pantry by Alana Chernila is the latest addition to my cookbook collection. It’s a great book to read – it contains lots of stories from Alana’s life in the kitchen and around the house, besides the recipes. Alana says she is of Jewish descent, but her name sure sounds Romanian. She blogs at Eating From the Ground Up.
As a homeschooling mom, I really enjoy taking care of my children and providing the best educational experiences for them – including cooking experiments. Continue reading
Everywhere I turn these days, somebody mentions how summer means diving into books. Naturally, as a homeschooling mom, you will take your children to the library and sign them up for the summer reading program. I know because I will do that. I assume we match.
You might want to sign yourself up for some really cool reading, too – the kind that you never had time for through the school year. I know I will.
What kind of books sound good to you? Personally, I like nonfiction, biographies, inspirational, and the classics.
Speaking of classics, I’m at 7% through “Les Misérables” on my Kindle. I found it for free, in French, the complete saga, and could not resist. Now I must finish what I started – eek! Continue reading
My husband and I got married in our early 30s.
By then, we knew who we were, what we wanted out of life, and how to communicate it. As such, our marriage started out blissfully happy and it has only gotten better as time went by.
Time did go by. This week, we are celebrating our ninth anniversary.
One of our wedding pictures, in the doorway of the stone church where we got married
We have had some challenges along the way, of course. We are people, faulty and broken, surrounded by other people, faulty and broken. But, through the challenges, our love for each other has only gotten deeper and richer.
We remodeled a home and had great fun with it. Continue reading
How many hours a day do you spend outside? They have a saying in Sweden – I lived there for three years – “There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.”
It’s so easy to come up with excuses about not being outside: the mosquitoes, the wind, the rain, the snow, the cold, the heat, the gnats, the noise of the neighbor’s mower etc etc etc. The thing is, fresh air does so much for our minds and bodies, we should be thankful it’s freely available.
I love this blog that challenges families to spend 1,000 hours outside each year. I’ll spare you the math… That comes to two or three hours every day. What do you think? Is it doable? I think we were doing that already, but not consciously and, maybe, not every day.
Since we took the challenge, we have been outside even in the rain and even when I had a sore throat. The kids put on their rain boots and coats and ran around in the rain. I allowed them to play with umbrellas – which are usually off limits for them. I sat under the roof overhang, on a comfortable outdoor chair, with a wet cotton sock covered by a wool pashmina around my neck (natural remedy against sore throats). Continue reading
God is in the business of answering our prayers – even those we don’t have enough faith to pray. As I hosted the latest Raising Multilingual Children blog carnival, I felt pricked in my heart about French like never before. In our homeschool, I do read to my children in French and talk to them in French now and then, but it’s not enough.
They need conversation, preferably with small people like them. Immersion. I started dreaming about a French play group. If only there were francophone children in East Tennessee…
Wait a minute! What if? What if I could bring together a small group of homeschoolers and I taught them French as they played?
I went from “if only…” to “what if?” in a matter of days.
“If this is from You, Lord, please lead me to start a French play group. I don’t know how, where, when or with whom. I feel this calling. I will take it one step at a time and watch for Your guidance.”
I did not exactly say those words, but that was the spirit of my unspoken request.
I felt called and I took the first step. I made an announcement on our homeschool support group’s page on Facebook, asking if there was any interest in a French play group.
The first reply came from a French lady who lived 30 minutes away and had a son about my son’s age… We even had five mutual Facebook friends and had lived in this area for about the same time (nine years). What are the odds?
She was thrilled to have a French play group getting started. I was thrilled to find her.
Had I not asked, I would have never known. As I told my husband, he said, “Ask and ye shall receive…” Continue reading
First, an explanation: OPCs = Other People’s Children. Before deciding to homeschool, I thought I would go teach other people’s children for a living while my own are in their respective classrooms. I never followed through with that plan because I felt short-changed.
How could I be away from my children for seven hours a day? How could I step aside and allow another person to see the sparkle of “now I get it” in their eyes? Homeschooling became the only solution my heart could accept.
It’s one thing to leave your school-age children behind for the day. It’s another thing altogether to leave your baby behind. Thankfully, I did not have to do either.
Now, let’s take it to another level. If you have five minutes, grab a box of tissues and watch this clip from Paris je t’aime.
You don’t need to speak French to understand what is going on. There’s not much dialogue. Continue reading
Disappointment is part of life. It’s one of those emotions that one experiences daily in small doses. Sometimes the doses get really large, of course. Hopefully, not daily. So, in our homeschool, it’s not like we have to make a lesson plan about it. Opportunities for disappointment abound at any given point in the day.
My kids want to do something that should be done only after we finish school, for instance. The answer is, “Yes, we can do that, after you finish school.” If they ask why, I usually explain, “Devotional first, then school, then recess.” We try to make many things fun during our devotional and school times, but recess is fun by definition.
Disappointment hurts and one cannot prepare for the pain. But, one can learn (1) the steps out of it and (2) that there is life after disappointment. As Christians, we know that God’s answer to our prayers may be “No” or “Later” at times. As we trust Him, hope replaces disappointment. Continue reading