Do you know what the broken window theory is? It’s a theory that says “visible signs of disorder and misbehavior in an environment lead to further order and misbehavior and eventually to serious crimes.” I have a “broken window” in my daily routine. Guess what it is? Lunch. Yes, years of poor planning and eating […]
Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. Is it the most important? I don’t know, but it’s the coziest and it has the coffee. Hot, un-rushed family breakfasts are by far my favorite perk of a homeschooling day. I hope our family will always have warm memories of hearty pots of oatmeal and eggs […]
Welcome to my Christmas home tour! Even though I’m calling it a home tour, the only places that are really decorated are our living room, dining room, and entry. (Decorating isn’t cheap and it takes time to build a collection!) If you’re thinking my house looks exactly like it did last year, well, you’d be […]
The weekly re-set is one of my favorite Sunday rituals. After we go to the early service at church, we make a big brunch together as a family. (I can usually have it done and cleaned up by about 12:00 or so.) Then I’m ready to start my re-set once my son is down for […]
Throughout most of my time as a mother, laundry has always loomed in the background of my life. I dreaded gathering it from four corners of the house. I procrastinated sorting it. As for folding and putting it away, I chased the ever-elusive mirage of “catching up” on laundry. I just had in my head […]
This is a tour of my girls’ room and bath in our rental home in the Kansas City suburbs. There was a time when I decorated their rooms with many sweet and precious things like wooden dollhouses and vintage alphabet posters. (You can see some of that here.) Those were fun days. Now dolls and […]
Homeschooling is unique in that we don’t conduct learning in a separate, sterile environment. It happens in our homes, right in the middle of laundry piles, phone calls and babies who are not on our day time schedules yet. When you add in rabbit trails and sunny spring afternoons, a day could hold just about […]
While you’re doing your homeschool planning this year, may I recommend putting a dinner plan in there? Whatever style of homeschool you do, one thing is for sure: you will be feeding people all the day long. Let’s not pretend that food isn’t a significant part of our homeschooling day! Let’s go ahead and get […]
The first year that we started homeschool, I spent hour upon laborious and hour planning my year. I gathered books, researched websites and made checklists of my own checklists. Field trips, flash cards, cinnamon play dough and perfectly scheduled Christmas breaks had to fit in just so. I can’t blame myself! My eyes had just […]
What in the world is unschooling? For me it used to conjure up images of unruly minors being raised by wolves and iPads! Sounds rebellious doesn’t it? Well I’m sorry to disappoint all you rebels out there, but unschooling is actually just a fancy word for letting your child’s interests set the curriculum. It can […]