As we have been going through everything in the house with the goal of determining what to save and what not to save, we have inevitably come upon all the old kid drawings and stories and school assignments that have been crammed in drawers and boxes and files over the past twenty-ish years, and just moved from house to house to house.... to house. It has brought back lots of memories of our early days of homeschooling.
We started to homeschool 20 years ago last fall, with our then four and five year old daughters. At that point they would have had three younger brothers, one of whom had a lot of health issues and, as it would turn out, hearing issues we knew nothing about at the time but which made for some fairly challenging toddler years. If me-then had asked me-now for homeschooling advice me-now would have told me-then not to bother doing anything with kids so young and to just keep on playing and reading and having fun for a couple more years. But at the time I was a product of a culture that believed it was the natural law that formal schooling begin by five years old or the children would be doomed to a lifetime of ignorance. Luckily I also had a husband who had a fair amount of both educational philosophy and teaching experience behind him, and between us we came up with what was a pretty easy-going, very do-able, and still fun plan for school at home anyway. So despite the lack of advice from experienced homeschoolers (I knew none but my own sister who was only a couple years ahead of me on this journey), I think we got a decent start.
Back then I still thought of my kids as being in a grade level, that dependence on grade level disappeared very quickly, but to me this was Erin and Bayley's kindergarten year and it went like this:
Every day they did about 5 or 6 math problems which I hand wrote on the back of a piece of scratch paper for them. They learned that year to add, multiply, subtract and divide with one digit numbers. We had a large collection of wooden colored cubes that they used to figure their problems every day, physically manipulating each problem before writing the answers on their paper. A pile of 3 blocks combined with a pile of 4 blocks became 7 blocks. 3 piles of 2 blocks each became 6 blocks. A pile of 8 blocks with 3 taken way, 5. A pile of 9 divided into 3 stacks, 3 in each stack. Elementary math. I still think it was the best early math program we have ever used.
We went to the library every week and checked out books to read. I had no training whatsoever in teaching a child to read. I sat with them each on the couch with an easy to read book from the library and we sounded out words together. Some days we would make it through a page. Some days more. Some days I was sure I was doing something horribly wrong because after we had just painstakingly sounded out a certain word on the left hand page, we would turn to the right hand page and my darling little reader would have totally and completely forgotten what that very same word was! Sometimes I got horribly frustrated. Sometimes I was seriously impatient. But we stuck to it.
But what I am finding in the boxes and files mostly come from the last aspect of their early schooling. Their research topics. They picked anything they wanted to learn about, we read books together about those things and then they made projects and dictated reports to me. I have found reports on Cheetahs and Fireworks and Elephants and Sacajawea and Australia. They made posters and models and games and maps and books bound with masking tape.
I am sure I sometimes wondered if I was doing enough. After all, our 'school' hours each day were probably more appropriately measured in minutes and didn't even come close to approaching the half day of kindergarten that was even then falling out of favor in comparison to the full day kind. The rest of the day, my girls played crazy wild games in the yard with their brothers, wrote emails to their Daddy at work, listened to Kris and I read stories to them, helped bake cookies or make play dough, did little chores around the house, drew more pictures than I ever knew what to do with, made giant messes in the playroom and helped take care of the baby. Now though I know that we were definitely doing enough. That it was, in fact, pretty perfect. And don't worry, a few of those cute little reports and drawings survived the purge. Two boxes full actually.
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Friday, March 17, 2017
Eating all our food storage
Whenever we move, food storage is always a challenge. Because I store food. Lots of it. If I plan to make lasagna next week, I buy the ingredients for lasagna times three and store the extra in my basement. That way, in times of famine or when I really DO NOT want to go to the store, we can still have lasagna. We don't just have your basic overstocked kitchen pantry. We have a basement room full of food and an extra refrigerator. We have a garage with two huge chest freezers (one for fruit and bread and ice cream and a separate one for meat and fish and green chilies....duh). We store flour and sugar in six gallon tubs and own and USE a wheat grinder on a fairly regular basis. We even have over 100 gallons of water stored in the garage.
Or rather we DID own those extra freezers and fridge. I sold them. We DID have a basement room stocked with food, before we took all the shelving to our storage unit to better organize there. And the water storage drums were dumped out and sold too. And this all presents a unique problem. All that stored food must be consumed. Not just the freezer and refrigerator items, though those are more urgent for sure, but I'm not taking cans of tomato sauce on any oversea flights next fall and space is limited in the car during this summer's epic road trip too. So, ever since the house officially went on the market, we have been trying to make up our meals primarily from food storage items.
At first this was just fine, like I said, all the ingredients for lasagna times three were sitting on the shelves. And the boys didn't really mind helping me to rid the freezer of steaks and roasts. But now we are reaching weird levels. One day last week we had platters full of breaded and fried mahi mahi accompanied only by a berry smoothie. Who knew Ronan was such a fine fry-cook? We dipped our fish in honey. Not bad. We ate broccoli basically every other day for nearly three weeks until we finally ran out, next up: edamame. We have a lot of pasta to consume and so I let Fionnula make macaroni and cheese more often than can possibly be good for any of us. Tonight though I made black bean hummus for the first time. It was fabulous. Good thing cause there are six more cans of black beans to go through and we leave the house in less than two weeks.
Its not just food either. Basically, if its consumable, we have a back log of it: my favorite face wash, shampoo, toilet paper. School supplies too: pens, pencils, notebook paper, art supplies. So many art supplies. Up until now, in our ordinary life, this has been a good policy. We seldom run out of the things we need. Even the things we need to make silly putty and grow crystals. Well, we're making lots of silly putty now. And that vinegar and baking soda reaction never gets old, especially when you have eight or nine food coloring colors to choose from. It will be an adjustment learning to live without the fully stocked closets and cabinets and pantries and freezers. But for now, every time I squeeze the last bit from a shampoo bottle or finish off another jar of peanut butter, I have a tiny little celebration that one more thing is gone.
Or rather we DID own those extra freezers and fridge. I sold them. We DID have a basement room stocked with food, before we took all the shelving to our storage unit to better organize there. And the water storage drums were dumped out and sold too. And this all presents a unique problem. All that stored food must be consumed. Not just the freezer and refrigerator items, though those are more urgent for sure, but I'm not taking cans of tomato sauce on any oversea flights next fall and space is limited in the car during this summer's epic road trip too. So, ever since the house officially went on the market, we have been trying to make up our meals primarily from food storage items.
At first this was just fine, like I said, all the ingredients for lasagna times three were sitting on the shelves. And the boys didn't really mind helping me to rid the freezer of steaks and roasts. But now we are reaching weird levels. One day last week we had platters full of breaded and fried mahi mahi accompanied only by a berry smoothie. Who knew Ronan was such a fine fry-cook? We dipped our fish in honey. Not bad. We ate broccoli basically every other day for nearly three weeks until we finally ran out, next up: edamame. We have a lot of pasta to consume and so I let Fionnula make macaroni and cheese more often than can possibly be good for any of us. Tonight though I made black bean hummus for the first time. It was fabulous. Good thing cause there are six more cans of black beans to go through and we leave the house in less than two weeks.
Its not just food either. Basically, if its consumable, we have a back log of it: my favorite face wash, shampoo, toilet paper. School supplies too: pens, pencils, notebook paper, art supplies. So many art supplies. Up until now, in our ordinary life, this has been a good policy. We seldom run out of the things we need. Even the things we need to make silly putty and grow crystals. Well, we're making lots of silly putty now. And that vinegar and baking soda reaction never gets old, especially when you have eight or nine food coloring colors to choose from. It will be an adjustment learning to live without the fully stocked closets and cabinets and pantries and freezers. But for now, every time I squeeze the last bit from a shampoo bottle or finish off another jar of peanut butter, I have a tiny little celebration that one more thing is gone.
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
Craigslist and Me
I am a Craigslisting fool. Pretty sure I can make that a verb. Just about every piece of furniture in our house is listed on Craigslist. I field emails and texts from potential new owners of our stuff all day and well into the night. In fact Craigslist is apparently a popular pastime around 11 pm. Ideally it goes like this: I post a picture, a price, and a brief description on Craigslist; people email me through Craigslist and ask (almost every single time) "Do you still have this chair/shelf/bed?," I email back that yes I do (which is why it is still listed) and give them my cell number to text me if they want to see it, they text, I give them an address, they come and buy my stuff. Except the communication can break down at any time in that sequence. People who express an initial interest through email may not follow up with a text. Just because someone texted and seemed posed to be at my door that very evening, does not mean I will ever hear from them again, let alone actually succeed in selling them that chair/bed/shelf.
The garage is a constantly shifting stage. I wish I had thought to do pictures. As I list things on Craigslist, we move furniture from each room of the house to the garage, so that we don't need to lead strangers through the house to look at the things we hope they will buy. Our beds and dressers, bookshelves from every room in the house, the dining room table, couches, chairs, the basement fridge, each have taken their brief turn in the garage before they have been loaded into the pick up trucks of friends and strangers and taken away. Everyday we have fewer pieces of furniture in the house.
A sampling of my Craigslist experiences over the past two weeks:
The guy who decided against the used bed I was selling out of my garage because he "want(ed) something that would last a long time," and this one had some scratches in the paint job. Well, he was right, it did. It also was a fraction of the price of the same bed, unscratched, that he could probably find at a nice new furniture store, but this was a Craigslist sale, dude.
The guy who said he wanted my dresser, walked into my garage, handed me exactly what we had asked for it and promptly loaded said dresser into his truck. Easiest sale ever.
The couple who stood on my porch discussing at length the flaws of my bookshelf which "looked darker and more like oak" in the picture and wasn't solid wood but a veneer. He asked her multiple times "What do you think? It's for your office?" And she kept saying "Hmmmm, I don't know, hmmmm." Seriously, this same exchange at least three times before they decided against it.
The father and his young sons who bought a bunkbed and then proceeded to strap the various parts to the top of their very tiny car.
The elderly mother and daughter who came to buy a desk but also to chat at length about a variety of topics mostly irrelevant to the sale of said desk.
The little boy named Liam who came with his Dad to take apart and take away the play house and kept calling my Liam "Other Liam," and asking where Other Liam had gone and asking Other Liam to come find him. The play house was one of our "free if you dissassemble and cart away" items, both of which were extremely popular, so Liam was here to play for quite awhile while his daddy and uncle and my husband and sons labored to take apart and load up that play house.
Mostly this getting rid of stuff has been a very gratifying experience. It feels good to have less stuff. It does seem to me that up until now we have been focused on acquiring more and better things, and now we have suddenly about-faced and are focused instead on getting rid of all we have so carefully accumulated. And we probably had (until about 3 weeks ago) nicer "stuff" than we have ever had. The couch I sold yesterday was seriously a really great couch. But it was just a couch too. And, it is fun to meet the little boy who will play in the play house that my kids won't use anymore. It is fun to find a new home for our piano, which we did love, but which would do no one any good sitting in storage for one or two or ten years. And every item that goes to a new home gets us a little bit closer to being able to travel unencumbered by excessive stuff.
The garage is a constantly shifting stage. I wish I had thought to do pictures. As I list things on Craigslist, we move furniture from each room of the house to the garage, so that we don't need to lead strangers through the house to look at the things we hope they will buy. Our beds and dressers, bookshelves from every room in the house, the dining room table, couches, chairs, the basement fridge, each have taken their brief turn in the garage before they have been loaded into the pick up trucks of friends and strangers and taken away. Everyday we have fewer pieces of furniture in the house.
A sampling of my Craigslist experiences over the past two weeks:
The guy who decided against the used bed I was selling out of my garage because he "want(ed) something that would last a long time," and this one had some scratches in the paint job. Well, he was right, it did. It also was a fraction of the price of the same bed, unscratched, that he could probably find at a nice new furniture store, but this was a Craigslist sale, dude.
The guy who said he wanted my dresser, walked into my garage, handed me exactly what we had asked for it and promptly loaded said dresser into his truck. Easiest sale ever.
The couple who stood on my porch discussing at length the flaws of my bookshelf which "looked darker and more like oak" in the picture and wasn't solid wood but a veneer. He asked her multiple times "What do you think? It's for your office?" And she kept saying "Hmmmm, I don't know, hmmmm." Seriously, this same exchange at least three times before they decided against it.
The father and his young sons who bought a bunkbed and then proceeded to strap the various parts to the top of their very tiny car.
The elderly mother and daughter who came to buy a desk but also to chat at length about a variety of topics mostly irrelevant to the sale of said desk.
The little boy named Liam who came with his Dad to take apart and take away the play house and kept calling my Liam "Other Liam," and asking where Other Liam had gone and asking Other Liam to come find him. The play house was one of our "free if you dissassemble and cart away" items, both of which were extremely popular, so Liam was here to play for quite awhile while his daddy and uncle and my husband and sons labored to take apart and load up that play house.
Mostly this getting rid of stuff has been a very gratifying experience. It feels good to have less stuff. It does seem to me that up until now we have been focused on acquiring more and better things, and now we have suddenly about-faced and are focused instead on getting rid of all we have so carefully accumulated. And we probably had (until about 3 weeks ago) nicer "stuff" than we have ever had. The couch I sold yesterday was seriously a really great couch. But it was just a couch too. And, it is fun to meet the little boy who will play in the play house that my kids won't use anymore. It is fun to find a new home for our piano, which we did love, but which would do no one any good sitting in storage for one or two or ten years. And every item that goes to a new home gets us a little bit closer to being able to travel unencumbered by excessive stuff.
Saturday, March 4, 2017
Passports all Around
So, we sold the house, we got a storage unit, we are systematically (maybe it is more haphazard than systematic.... but we are doing it!) getting rid of excess stuff that inhabits every closet, cupboard, drawer and shelf in the house. It seemed like passports for the kids was a good next step to a travel based life. We couldn't all go together unless we went on a Saturday and since we were obtaining passports for minor children, both parents had to go. Never knew. In the entire city of over 400,000 people only one passport office is open on Saturdays. One. And apparently we picked the Saturday when a good portion of those 400,000 residents also wanted to get their passports. Actually, had that been the case, the 4 hours we spent there would have been more understandable. But it really wasn't all that crowded. It was just slow.
The passport office closed at 3:30. We picked up Noah from work and went straight there arriving at 2:18. Really. I know, because at 18 minutes past the hour I had to return to feed the one-hour-only parking meter three times!
At 2:30 a post office employee started working his way down the line passing out numbers. We got number 301 and were informed that we would be the last people to get passports processed that day. It was still almost an hour before they were supposed to close. Plainly he expected it to take at least that long to get to us.
Next they began setting up crowd control barriers around us with hand made signs proclaiming "NO MORE PASSPORTS WILL BE PROCESSED TODAY." But people did continue to show up (since they were still open after all) and since the post office employees had conveniently disappeared, those of us lucky enough to have received a number were left to explain--and apologize-- for them.
As we continued to wait in a line that seemed to barely move, outside a door that seemed to be staunchly closed against us, we began to look enviously at those who had thought to bring... or more likely had taken the time to run out and buy... snacks. Bugles and Sun Chips and whatever that koolaid like beverage that preschooler across the hall from me was drinking never looked so appetizing.
The children in line began to wander from their families. One young man began entertaining himself by playing a curling type game utilizing the long empty hallway and his sister's glasses. My children and their friends (because we blessedly ran into friends when we got there. They were kind enough to stick it out until the very end with us... ok, they're passport ordeal ended approximately 2 minutes before ours did) were definitely discussing if the smallest of them would fit into the big package drop off box. We discovered that one of the post office boxes had a small section crossed off enabling us to peer all the way through to the empty workroom. We also noticed that at least one sign on the wall was held there by velcro and could be peeled right off. We weighed water bottles, purses and phones on a scale that calculated the price to send them to any US zipcode or to Canada or Mexico. Liam made faces at the security cameras.
When we got towards the front of the line we realized that the door we were waiting outside of was labeled as only "Step One" in the passport process. This considerably dampened our enthusiasm about finally being admitted through that door. "Step one" turned out to be a post office employee looking at everything we brought with us to ensure that we had all the correct documentation. Probably it would have made the most sense for this to have happened a little less than 2 hours plus after we had arrived there. But I am not an expert in passport applications. Our documentation was deemed adequate and we were sent back out to wait in the official passport waiting room now. And continued to wait.
The waiting room had a "now serving" display, and every time a new number popped up there it was like someone had just won a grand prize. And when whoever was in charge of such things forgot to change the number on display when they took a new person back, it was an extreme exercise in patience not to totally freak out over the omission.
Eventually it was our turn. We signed papers. Four times we raised our hands and swore these photos were of each of our children and that all the information on their applications was accurate. The post office dude re wrote everything we had already written and did a lot of stapling and reorganizing of the various papers and then he typed it all again into his computer. Really it felt like it could have been more efficient, but by then we had been worn down, we didn't care, we just wanted to go home and eat some leftover pizza.
We may have panicked briefly when we discovered as we were leaving that the doors we had been using all afternoon were locked from the outside. We were trapped! And had already exhausted all forms of entertainment that the post office could offer us. But there were other doors. We made our escape.
Passports applications: check.
The passport office closed at 3:30. We picked up Noah from work and went straight there arriving at 2:18. Really. I know, because at 18 minutes past the hour I had to return to feed the one-hour-only parking meter three times!
At 2:30 a post office employee started working his way down the line passing out numbers. We got number 301 and were informed that we would be the last people to get passports processed that day. It was still almost an hour before they were supposed to close. Plainly he expected it to take at least that long to get to us.
Next they began setting up crowd control barriers around us with hand made signs proclaiming "NO MORE PASSPORTS WILL BE PROCESSED TODAY." But people did continue to show up (since they were still open after all) and since the post office employees had conveniently disappeared, those of us lucky enough to have received a number were left to explain--and apologize-- for them.
As we continued to wait in a line that seemed to barely move, outside a door that seemed to be staunchly closed against us, we began to look enviously at those who had thought to bring... or more likely had taken the time to run out and buy... snacks. Bugles and Sun Chips and whatever that koolaid like beverage that preschooler across the hall from me was drinking never looked so appetizing.
The children in line began to wander from their families. One young man began entertaining himself by playing a curling type game utilizing the long empty hallway and his sister's glasses. My children and their friends (because we blessedly ran into friends when we got there. They were kind enough to stick it out until the very end with us... ok, they're passport ordeal ended approximately 2 minutes before ours did) were definitely discussing if the smallest of them would fit into the big package drop off box. We discovered that one of the post office boxes had a small section crossed off enabling us to peer all the way through to the empty workroom. We also noticed that at least one sign on the wall was held there by velcro and could be peeled right off. We weighed water bottles, purses and phones on a scale that calculated the price to send them to any US zipcode or to Canada or Mexico. Liam made faces at the security cameras.
When we got towards the front of the line we realized that the door we were waiting outside of was labeled as only "Step One" in the passport process. This considerably dampened our enthusiasm about finally being admitted through that door. "Step one" turned out to be a post office employee looking at everything we brought with us to ensure that we had all the correct documentation. Probably it would have made the most sense for this to have happened a little less than 2 hours plus after we had arrived there. But I am not an expert in passport applications. Our documentation was deemed adequate and we were sent back out to wait in the official passport waiting room now. And continued to wait.
The waiting room had a "now serving" display, and every time a new number popped up there it was like someone had just won a grand prize. And when whoever was in charge of such things forgot to change the number on display when they took a new person back, it was an extreme exercise in patience not to totally freak out over the omission.
Eventually it was our turn. We signed papers. Four times we raised our hands and swore these photos were of each of our children and that all the information on their applications was accurate. The post office dude re wrote everything we had already written and did a lot of stapling and reorganizing of the various papers and then he typed it all again into his computer. Really it felt like it could have been more efficient, but by then we had been worn down, we didn't care, we just wanted to go home and eat some leftover pizza.
We may have panicked briefly when we discovered as we were leaving that the doors we had been using all afternoon were locked from the outside. We were trapped! And had already exhausted all forms of entertainment that the post office could offer us. But there were other doors. We made our escape.
Passports applications: check.
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