No Average Mom

Our summer is shaping up to be a very busy one. I am now looking at everything my older son wants to do and we might be busier than ever. He is attending a couple of summer camps, a stitching class, and also wants to take swimming lessons. We are fortunate to be able to have access to a pool on a regular basis and that makes it important for him to know how to swim. I keep telling him that he won’t always have pool floats to rely on to keep him afloat and that he needs to know how to save himself in an emergency. He seems to finally accept this idea and is ready to commit to learning to swim. I am really hoping that he gets a teacher who knows how to hold him to a high standard. He has taken lessons in the past and they ended up being more about goofing around in the water than learning how to swim. I like being able to enroll him in things that have something to offer besides just a social experience.

It is now almost the end of the day and it has been a good one. For some reason I found myself reflecting on the food my family consumed today. It occurred to me that each and every meal or snack that we ate was home made. This is my form of opting out of what we have all been trained is the way we should eat. We have been fed this line that convenience is good and time spent creating food is wasted time. I have been striving to make as much of our food ourselves and as organically as possible. Our meals consisted of homemade granola, yogurt, bread, cheese, nut butter, and more. It is pretty cool when you realize that you are saying “No” to big business and over processed foods. I am hoping that more people will join the slow food movement and realize that we have been literally fed a line of crap over decades about what good wholesome food really is. The only way we will ever achieve truly clean food is for people to opt out in mass.

In June we will be meeting with one of our state cyber charter schools to enroll our youngest son in their K4 program. It is not the same school as my older son attends but offers many of the same things. Our 4 year old will be issued his own laptop computer, printer, and set of text books. The school will provide him both online classes and a hands on curriculum. It never ceases to amaze me how far education has come since I was a child. The idea that my children can attend a great school right from our dining room is awesome. The curriculum challenges them and their is an amazing amount of support from the faculty. I think more people would take advantage of this great type of educational opportunity if they were able to see it first hand. I know my own family did not understand it until they were able to sit and watch my son attend one of his online classes and look through his texts. We couldn’t be happier and are thrilled to find a similar opportunity geared for our littlest learner.

We are an unusual family and we are “cool” with that. We like living “sustainably” and making stuff for ourselves. Our weekends involve gardening, metal detecting, camping, and geocaching. Homeschooling is the route we choose for educating our children. My children begged me to go somewhere today. When I asked them where they wanted to go they didn’t say a store or even to the playground. They both excitedly wanted to go to the library. How cool is that? So we went to the library as a family and checked out enough books to fill our earth friendly tote bag. Our local library, despite being very small, is awesome. There are tons of programs for the children and that staff is more than happy to help you find what you need or to order it. What a great way to spend the evening and my kids are now contently reading and I have a moment to myself.

Last night I had a long discussion with someone close to me about their current mental status. This person has been stuck in a very negative place for a while but doesn’t actually see this. I finally pointed out that this particular person has not had a positive thing to say in several days. It is really hard to know what to say when someone tells you the feel crummy and need to look into top fat burners and start exercising. It is also hard to know what to say when all you hear is what is negative about a person’s life. As hard as it was I finally just laid the facts, as I see them, out and called the situation for what it appears to be. I pointed out that it is pretty hard to feel good about yourself when you aren’t involved in the world or doing anything to stimulate your mind. If the only thing you have to say is something negative then maybe you need to do a reality check and look at your own life and outlook a little more closely. I don’t know if what I said had any impact at all but at least I put it out there. Hopefully, a little insight was gained from our discussion.

For a while I have working on how to do things in the kitchen in an “old school” way. I cook from scratch and try to make everything as naturally as possible. This means limiting processed foods. Essentially, I try to think of foods as only being food if they are something that my grandparents would recognize as actually being food. When you consider food that was available when my grandparents were my age it puts what we are offered by today’s stores into perspective. I am pretty sure that my Grandmother would have no idea what a chicken nugget or a protein bar was. If the ingredient list has things I can’t pronounce or seems endless I don’t want it in my body. Sure this way of cooking make things take longer but I don’t see it as more work. I see this as time I am not spending mindlessly staring at the television. It is time I spend connecting with my family and connecting them to the food we eat. I love that my children now say “can we make…” instead of “can we buy…”? They are now seeing food as something we control not as being controlled by some distant corporation or entity.

This week was our last formal week of school for the year. That is one of the things I love about home schooling or cyber schooling. We can work as fast as we want and enjoy the fact that we have earned a very long summer vacation. It is funny how the end of school year almost automatically brings out the boredom in our world. For some reason my children cannot manage to find a single thing to amuse themselves without me. I might just have to assign some reading if they persist in pestering me to find something for them to do. I am sure a few hours of reading diet pill reviews or audiology magazines would very quickly change their attitude about amusing themselves. At the end of the month I am having our satellite television discontinued. I have the sneaking suspicion that they will not appreciate this at all. My instinct is that all those toys just sitting in their closets will suddenly start to look more interesting when they can no longer sit in front of the television.

This week has just seemed to be a dark one. The darkness has been more than just the clouds that have filled our sky. This is the darkness that comes when the world seems to be over run by sadness. Between the evils being wrought in the news across our country and lesser evil that hits more close to home it has been hard to find the sunshine. Today, the sky is sunny and somehow I can see this past the worries of the world that have filled my sleepless night. I know that the plants will continue growing in the garden and the laughter of my own two beautiful children will echo in our house. I am blessed and know that the world will be okay despite sadness coming at us from every direction. I will smile and I will carry on because that is what needs to be done. I worry and I cry for the heartache of other people and for what might befall my own home one day but life must go on cheerfully and happily and today the sun is finally shining.