Just letting everyone know that our Happy to be at Home.net sit has crashed. We’re working on getting it up and running, but it may be a few days. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I completed my first de-cluttering today, and (ashamedly) it only took a measly 20 minutes—in other words I  can’t use the excuse that I haven’t had the time before. I really should have done this a long time ago.

But I tend toward laziness.

I can at least say that it’s done now, and I feel so much better about it.

My project was the area next to my bed, including the window seat, my night stand, and the floor.

As you can see in the picture, the laundry basket is full of clothes—clean clothes that were washed over a week ago—that have yet to be put away. The stack of books on the window seat is mostly library books with a few homeschool curriculum books and novels mixed in between. The window seat and night stand tend to be a catchall of receipts, papers, and other junk that should really just be thrown away.

When cleaning just about any area of my home, I like to follow the “Remove and Replace” approach, which is for me (psychologically anyway) the easiest way to get it done. Here’s how “Remove and Replace” works:

• REMOVE everything from the area needing to be cleaned, place it all in a basket, and remove it to an area with a large open space (like a living room floor)
• DUST AND VACUUM the area. It’s at this point that my mind says, “Ah, that looks so good!” giving me the motivation to finish since I can see how great it looks without all the clutter.
• SORT through the basket of stuff, dividing into different piles as necessary. Usually the largest pile ends up being the trash pile, but for this de-clutter I also had library bookshelf, kids bookshelf, homeschool bookshelf, desk drawer, first aid kit, and bathroom counter piles.
• REPLACE the items to the now-clean area.

Now on to project #2, the tops of my dressers!

My list of curriculum to use for the next school year has evolved slowly over the last couple months. But I think—and I mean, I think—that the following list is the plan we’re at least going to begin with next year, meaning August/September. As always, I reserve the right to change my mind about using a particular curriculum based on how the kids are responding to it.

This next school year I will have a sixth grade boy (Jaden), a fourth grade girl (Jerah), and a first grade girl (Joely). It will be the first time that I’ll have to deal with formally working with three students at the same time since we did Joely’s kindergarten year in a very laid back manner. This worked well for both her and me, and she still learned everything she needed to learn. But now that she’s in first grade, I’m going to be requiring a little more of her (and of myself).

Our school week consists of four days of full-blown “school” and one day (Wednesday) that is more laid back and mainly dedicated to courses outside the “core” of the three R’s such as music, art, logic, etc. The reason Wednesdays are that way for us is due to our spending Wednesday afternoons at homeschool club. Because of this already disrupted schedule, we just decided to make Wednesday mornings a little less structured as well. It also gives us a nice “break” in the middle of the week.

So here’s the plan. Curricula marked with a single * will be done by Jaden and Jerah together. Those items marked with a double ** will be done by all three children simultaneously. Although the list seems lengthy, we don’t necessarily work on each book/subject every single day.

Jaden, sixth grade boy:

• Math: My goal this year is to introduce some pre-Algebra and geometry concepts, and then do a lot of review and application of the concepts he already knows. He completed Saxon 76 last year (we went through it very quickly since most of the concepts he had already learned in the Key to… books), so there’s not a lot in the way of new concepts that he’s in need of for his sixth grade year. We’ll be drawing from several different resources for math. I’ll also be referring to Maximum Math, by Kathryn Stout, to help guide me in choosing concepts he needs to work on. Of course, we won’t be doing all the books at the same time; we’ll just be using them all as resources since we aren’t using a single pre-packaged graded curriculum.
  • Key to Algebra (Books 2-4)
  • Geometry (Straight Forward Math Series)
  • Word Problems (Instructional Fair)
  • Math Word Problems (Harnadek)
  • The Math Worksheet Site (various worksheets and drills)
• Language Arts:
  • Lightning Literature 7 (daily)
  • Rod & Staff English 6 (daily)
  • Wordly Wise 3000, Book 6 (4 days/week)—we also use this for spelling
  • Ridgewood Analogies, Book 3 (only 25 lessons)
  • Reading Detective, Level B1 (1 day/week)
  • Writing in various subject areas (history, science, personal journal, blogging, etc)
  • Ruth Beechick-style dictation/copywork/grammar/writing exercises
  • Independent reading (daily)
• Foreign Language: *Latina Christiana II (we finished level I last year)
• Science: We’ll (attempt to) go through each Apologia book in about 13 weeks. We’ll also go through next summer to finish them. I’d like to be able to finish all the Apologia books so Jaden can start a full-blown 7th grade science curriculum next year (2009-2010).
  • **Exploring Creation with Zoology 1, 2 & 3
  • **Exploring Creation with Astronomy
• Logic:
  • Building Thinking Skills Level 3 Figural (Jaden finished Building Thinking Skills Book 2 last year)
  • *Brain Games—we’ll be doing these on Wednesday, which is dubbed “Game Day” since we’ll be playing board games as a family for “school time.” Of course, the choice of the games will be mine, but they will be games in which the kids can practice various skills (like Boggle, Monopoly, Pictionary, Yahtzee, etc.)
• History/Social Studies/Geography:
  • **TruthQuest History, Ancient Egypt and Greece
  • **God’s World News—Covers current events and geography. Each child will have a magazine on their own reading level
  • **Ultimate Geography and Timeline Guide—we’ll use this as a reference for our own geography lessons
• Bible: *Bible Drill through our church
• Art & Music:
  • Guitar lessons with Dad
  • **Meet the Great Composers I (we started this last year, and the kids really enjoyed it)
  • **Drawing lessons with Mom (Wednesdays)
  • **Artist study with library books (Wednesdays)
• PE:
  • Daily walking for 30 minutes as a family during lunchtime
  • Semi-organized PE class every other week with our local homeschool club

Jerah, fourth grade girl:

• Math: Jerah has completed Saxon 5/4 and Math U See Delta. I’ve chosen to to use a graded curriculum this year, so we’re going to focus on specific topics and do a lot of review and reinforcement. I’ll be referring to Maximum Math for Jerah as well.
  • Key to Measurement, Decimals, Percents, and Fractions
  • The Math Worksheet Site (various worksheets and drills)
• Language Arts: Jerah has aspirations to be an author when she grows up, so I’m going to be exploiting this interest and we will focus a lot on writing.
  • Ruth Beechick-style dictation/copywork/grammar/writing exercises
  • Wordly Wise 3000, Book 5 (4 days/week)—we also use this for spelling
  • Ridgewood Analogies, Book 1 (only 25 lessons)
  • Reading Detective, Level Beginning (1 day/week)
  • A lot of writing in various subject areas (history, science, personal journal, blogging, etc)
  • Independent reading (daily)
• Foreign Language: *Latina Christiana II (we finished level I last year)
• Science: We’ll (attempt to) go through each Apologia book in about 13 weeks. We’ll also go through next summer to finish them. I’d like to be able to finish all the Apologia books so Jaden can start a full-blown 7th grade science curriculum next year (2009-2010).
  • **Exploring Creation with Zoology 1, 2 & 3
  • **Exploring Creation with Astronomy
• Logic:
  • Think-a-Minutes (Jerah finished Building Thinking Skills Book 1 last year)
  • *Brain Games
• History/Social Studies/Geography:
  • **TruthQuest History, Ancient Egypt and Greece
  • **God’s World News—Covers current events and geography. Each child will have a magazine on their own reading level
  • **Ultimate Geography and Timeline Guide—we’ll use this as a reference for our own geography lessons
• Bible: *Bible Drill through our church
• Art & Music:
  • Piano lessons with Mom
  • **Meet the Great Composers I (we started this last year, and the kids really enjoyed it)
  • **Drawing lessons with Mom (Wednesdays)
  • **Artist study with library books (Wednesdays)
• PE:
  • Daily walking for 30 minutes as a family during lunchtime
  • Semi-organized PE class every other week with our local homeschool club

Joely, first grade girl:

• Math: We’ll be doing a lot of hand-on activities. We used Math U See Primer last year, but I to do things on our own this upcoming year. I’ll be drawing from the following resources.
  • Maximum Math will help guide me in topics to cover.
  • The Math Worksheet Site to print off worksheets for Joely based on the subject we’re covering.
  • An Easy Start in Arithmetic by Ruth Beechick, again for guidance.
  • Board games dealing with counting and money
• Language Arts:
  • Explode the Code
  • Ruth Beechick-style dictation/copywork/grammar/writing exercises
  • Wordly Wise 3000, Book A (4 days/week)—we also use this for spelling
  • A Reason for Handwriting Book A (4 days/week)—Jaden and Jerah did cursive in this series this last year, and their penmanship greatly improved.
    
  • Daily writing in a personal journal (4 days/week)
  • Reading aloud with Mom for 30 minutes a day (with phonics lessons “on the fly”
• Science: We’ll (attempt to) go through each Apologia book in about 13 weeks. We’ll also go through next summer to finish them. I’d like to be able to finish all the Apologia books so Jaden can start a full-blown 7th grade science curriculum next year (2009-2010).
  • **Exploring Creation with Zoology 1, 2 & 3
  • **Exploring Creation with Astronomy
• History/Social Studies/Geography:
  • **TruthQuest History, Ancient Egypt and Greece
  • **God’s World News—Covers current events and geography. Each child will have a magazine on their own reading level
  • **Ultimate Geography and Timeline Guide—we’ll use this as a reference for our own geography lessons
• Art & Music:
  • **Meet the Great Composers I (we started this last year, and the kids really enjoyed it)
  • **Drawing lessons with Mom (Wednesdays)
  • **Artist study with library books (Wednesdays)
• PE:
  • Daily walking for 30 minutes as a family during lunchtime (although Joely will probably still be riding in the jogging stroller until she can keep up with us)
  • Semi-organized PE class every other week with our local homeschool club

I love cooking in my slow cooker, but I don’t like complicated recipes. I’ve found that with the slow cooker, I only need a couple of ingredients to make a delicious main dish. Here are some of my family’s favorites.

Slow Cooker Chicken with Variations

Directions

1. Place frozen (or thawed) boneless skinless chicken breasts at the bottom of the slow cooker. The actual number you use is up to you. I usually use 3-5 breasts.

2. Then cover the chicken with one of the following and cook on low for 4-6 hours or until chicken is no longer pink and juices run clear:

• BBQ Chicken: Two jars of barbecue sauce
• Creamy Chicken and Gravy: Two cans of cream of chicken soup
• Cheesy Chicken: One can of cream of chicken soup and one can of cheddar cheese soup
• Spicy Italian Chicken: 1 cup Italian dressing, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1/3 cup prepared spicy mustard

I often make potatoes to go along with these dishes and use the sauce in the slow cooker as gravy.

For more great 5-ingredients or Less Recipes, go to Shannon’s blog.

PROBLEM:

1. My kids were too short.
2. My kitchen cabinets were too tall.
3. And I was too lazy got tired of getting the dishes down for my kids all the time.

SOLUTION:

When I happened upon this two-door cabinet for $15 at a garage sale, I snatched it up and moved it into the kitchen.

Then I filled it with kid-safe plates, bowls, glasses, utensils, crackers, snack items, peanut butter, syrup, honey, and breakfast cereal.

Now the kids don’t have to bug me politely ask me to get the dishes down from the kitchen cabinets for them. Everything they need is now completely accessible to them—and we’re talking both for getting the dishes out and putting clean dishes away!

For more kitchen tips, visit Tammy’s Recipes.

We’re sitting here watching Nashville Star. Actually the rest of the family is—I’m blogging. Jaden, my 10 year old, was commenting on the singers he liked and the ones he didn’t particularly care for.

And then he made this comment about one of the earlier female singers he didn’t like at all, explaining exactly why he didn’t like her:

“All she did was come out and shake her bootie and her boobs!”

And we laughed and laughed and laughed.

And his face proceeded to turn a very bright shade of red.

I’ll admit it. Although I wouldn’t call myself a pack rat, I do tend toward clutter in my home. In fact, this tendency is why the bar in our kitchen is covered with picture frames—to prevent us from piling it high with papers, books, mail, etc.

But I’m not the only one with this predisposition for clutter. On our collaborative blog Happy to be at Home, Toni, Kate, and I have decided we need to do something about the clutter in our homes. And we’re challenging our readers to join us!

For the month of July, we’ll all be working on de-cluttering our homes. I, for one, have several areas I need to work on. Here are just a couple of my stubborn clutter spots in my home:

Behold my bedroom dressers! Those picture frames have been stacked there for months! (*blush*) Thank goodness the picture was taken from so far away, because otherwise you’d be able to see the thick layer of dust on the frames.

These are cabinets in my kitchen, but as you can see, they contain puzzles, not pots and pans. Unfortunately, I don’t have any idea where else to store the puzzles so they can still be accessed fairly easily. This is definitely a de-clutter project I’ll have to do some thinking about.

I’ll be posting updates about my Conquer the Clutter Challenge during the month of July. And of course, if you’d like to join me in this challenge, you can read details about the challenge here.

I had high expectations last week of making lunches since our dinners were taken care of due to evening VBS all week. But (*sigh*) as usual, it didn’t pan out. Other than a failed attempt at refried beans, the only thing I made successfully last week was pizza pockets, and I didn’t even get to that until Friday evening. But the pizza pockets—a new recipe for me—turned out really well. I made a single batch, and Jeff, Joely, Jerah, and I finished off the entire batch on our own! I’m now looking forward to tweaking the recipe a little bit, making them less “tomatoey,” since Jeff isn’t a fan of tomato sauce.

This week, since my schedule is much decreased and less demanding, I really hope to be able to cook a lot more. I haven’t sat down to make out my July menu yet, so this menu is just put together from the ingredients I have on hand. I’ll be going into town on Tuesday for a homeschool association board meeting, so I’ll be able to pick up some more food then, but for now, I’m planning to work mainly from my pantry. Here’s what we hope to have this week:

• Monday: Lasagna, homemade French Bread, Corn
• Tuesday: Barbecue Chicken, Creamed Corn Cornbread, Green Beans
• Thursday: Spaghetti Carbonara (thanks, Angela!), Peas, Devine Breadsticks
• Friday: Dinner with friends
• Saturday: Big Breakfast (biscuits, gravy, scrambled eggs)

Go here for more Menu Plan Mondays.

When there’s a fifth Sunday in a month, our church holds a Fifth Sunday Singin’ instead of our regular evening service. For a Fifth Sunday Singin’, anyone who wants to, can sign up to sing, and of course, both  my girls wanted to sing.

This is the second time Joely has sung in church and the third time for Jerah (outside of children’s musicals). Jerah sang a Superchick song called “We Live,” and although she memorized the words —that was a requirement we put on her if she wanted to sing it in church—and she practiced for several hours, she was still a little pitchy when she actually performed, as you can hear on the video. But for a nine year old, I think she did very well. We were—and are—very proud of her.

Joely sang a medley of “Jesus Paid It All” and “More Precious Than Silver.” Unfortunately, Jaden wasn’t able to record the first half of Joely’s song, so all that is on the video is “More Precious.”

Here’s Joely’s first time singing in church last year at age four (notice she’s wearing the same outfit as she did tonight!).

This last month has been so hectic. We officially ended school on May 30, expecting to be able to continue with some light school work over the summer—finishing up the last 12 chapters of our history book, completing a cooperative American history study with a friend, and doing some independent reading.

But then life happened.

You see, our church holds a morning music camp in early June, and as I have for the last several years, I helped teach music from 9 to noon all week. Well, I say all week, but I was notified mid-week that my mother was going to be having bypass surgery so I had to make quick plans to head up to Missouri to be with her. I left Thursday afternoon, leaving my fellow teachers to pick up my slack at music camp.

With me out of state, and my kids left without a teacher, the kids got some vacation time from schoolwork (and you won’t hear them complaining about it). I was gone until Wednesday, June 18, but I came back with a huge deadline looming. I’m the VBS director of my church and VBS began only 4 days later…and because of my detour to Missouri, I hadn’t finished preparations for it!

Add to my stress the fact that I also discovered I had no decorations for VBS. Zero. Zippo. None. We had expected to be able to get decorations from another church in town, but that fell through, and I didn’t know about it until just days before VBS was to begin.

So I went into survival mode. From the minute I stepped off the plane my mind was almost entirely focused on finishing up plans for VBS. And with the Lord’s help, I completed planning, purchased some decorations with some donated money, spent several hours up at the church decorating, and when Sunday came around, VBS actually went pretty smoothly. Well, there were a few more hiccups along the way, but nothing that couldn’t be resolved with a little creativity.

So I spent each evening this last week at VBS—managing.

Managing. Sounds like a tough job. But after all the planning is done, managing is downright B-O-R-I-N-G! This VBS was my fifth year as director, so I had everything down to a system by that point, which meant that VBS basically ran on its own the entire week. So as the “manager,” I got to sit in the workers lounge reading a book most of the week. (Unfortunately, I had to be available to field questions, so I couldn’t just go home.) Instead I just sat. And managed.

Counting the minutes until VBS was over.

Because once it was over, I was going to be done. And I mean really done. I resigned as director effective immediately following this year’s VBS.

It’s not that I don’t like VBS. In fact, I think it’s a wonderful tool to reach children for Christ. But there’s this little thing called Burn Out that I seem to be experiencing, and I’m really trying to treat this condition with a healthy dose of “No.”

And you know what? It’s working.

When someone asks me, “Will you volunteer for this?” or “Can you serve on this commitee?” or “Will you direct Vacation Bible School next year?” I simply say…”No.”

Of course I don’t say “no” to everything, but I definitely use the word a lot more than I used to. I can’t stand feeling the way I’ve felt over the last couple months, like I’m out of control and I have no time for me and what I feel is important right now. For quite a while now I’ve realized that I need to cut down on my commitments and activities.

But even with my increased use of “no,” I am still maintaining some outside responsibilities, like serving on our local homeschool association’s Board of Directors, editing and publishing the association newsletter monthly, managing our church’s Sunday morning children’s program, playing piano/keyboard in our church’s praise band, and teaching piano lessons from home. But I think that with VBS off my shoulders, and avoiding any further commitments outside my family, I just might be able to stay sane a little while longer—if I was ever sane in the first place, that is.

In fact, this Monday will be the first time in a month that I will have no piano lessons to teach, no planning to do for VBS or music camp, no hospital waiting room to wait in, and no deadline for the newsletter. I mean, I will actually be able to sleep in if I want—not that I will actually sleep in, as I have a sneaking suspicion that my body has decided it wants to make me a morning person—and I’ll be able to do what I want to do because it’s what I want to do.

I think I’ll finally feel like I have my life back—and that’ll be a great feeling!