Probably my favorite homeschooling habit has been the Morning Meeting. Here’s my personal schedule as I’ve entered it in my Homeschool Planet planner for the week, with a few things made up or left off for privacy:

For several years now, since I’ve had kids big enough to learn to show up for things on time, we’ve had a “schoolroom by 9 a.m.” rule. This was scandalous to one of our public schooled friends. “You’re home all day and you still have to get there on time?” Well, yes. Being a functioning human being includes knowing how to show up on time and ready for your task. My students are expected to have chores done, get dressed, and get into the schoolroom before I do. That’s not too much to ask, especially since I’m usually a little bit late getting there myself. My morning routine isn’t the same as theirs. After I make breakfast, I take time to work out and get ready while they eat and do their chores. So if I’m late, that’s fine, they can get started on the assignments from their printed lists.

At nine o’clock, or whenever I manage to get my Teacher Hat on, we’ll start off with prayer, Bible-reading, and whatever subjects can be taught to all ages simultaneously. Everybody does creative writing to his own level, we all study the same artist, portion of Plutarch, theology reading (currently reading parts of Calvin’s Institutes), music study, etc. It’s very much like a one-room schoolhouse would have been, I imagine.

After whatever we’re doing together is finished, I’ll ask individuals in their turn to narrate from their readings, turn in earlier work, and ask any questions they may have about their days’ schedules. Then I teach the smaller classes, like Charlotte Mason Practical Geometry for the youngest three, or Apologia Botany for my youngest two. Older children are dismissed to work on their independent work. I may need to schedule individual meetings some days. I did that for several years. But for the first few weeks this year, I’ll just take the kids as they come to me and see how that goes. I only have five kids left, so it doesn’t seem as important to schedule specific times for them this year.

If we get that first hour or two together, the rest of the day usually goes well. It gets me and everybody else centered, and we feel hopeful because we’ve already gotten so much done so early. Once we’ve done all this, I can go off and do household things or whatever else I need to do, and still be available for answering questions, solving the unexpected problems that always crop up, and hearing narrations.

We are usually finished with school things by lunchtime, though the high schoolers sometimes have more to do afterwards. In the afternoons, I still expect them to be productive, except for their allowed screen-times. This routine keeps us together as a family/school, as well as making sure everything gets checked off the individual lists.

I can’t stress enough how important it is that we start our day off with worship. I don’t even have that written on our lists, as if it were just a thing to check off with the rest of it. It’s not. Jesus will always be our One Thing, and our First Thing.

How about you? Do you have a version of a Morning Meeting? I’ve dreaded having fewer students as we get older, because I’m not sure the MM will work as well with fewer people. But for the last ten years, and for the next several, it will definitely continue to be our routine. Really soak up these years, parents. They are graduated and you’re “free” in the blink of an eye. These moments are too important not to schedule.

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I’m using Ambleside Online for our core. There is a lot of community there–more than I’ve taken advantage of, even. Just go poke around a while and see what you like.

To keep costs down, we buy most of our books used from Thriftbooks and Amazon. If you use AO’s schedule, I hope you’ll also click through their affiliate links in the booklists to help keep that vital site alive.

Simply Charlotte Mason has a lot of my favorite resources. If I were starting my homeschool from scratch, I think I’d just buy one of everything.

Instead of the AO artist schedule, I use Picture Study Portfolios from SCM, one new work of art per week. They have a nice book to read about the artist, so I break that up into a weekly reading of a few paragraphs until we’ve gotten through the portfolio. This term, we’re doing Hokusai, since it lines up with one of the children’s history readings.

Using Language Well, also from Simply Charlotte Mason, is our grammar, spelling, and dictation.

I’m also starting to use the Art of Composition books from SCM this year for my older students.

For handwriting, I use Handwriting Without Tears.

We’d always used Math-U-See and Saxon before, but this year I’m doing an entirely Life of Fred approach. I expect that to be a lot of fun.

For Latin, I’m still unsure which program we’ll start with. I have Wheelock’s Latin, as well as some other stuff. As a supplement to whatever we use, we’ll add analyses from Digital Monastery. There’s a book available now, Praying in Latin, that I’ll dip into for our morning meeting prayers. I’ll hopefully get time to review that soon.

Suggested reading for moms and dads:

Laying Down the Rails and The Lost Tools of Learning to help us think about this massive endeavor we’ve taken on.

Dumbing Us Down to put some steel in our spines for those days we’re tempted to put this difficult job off on the school system. And the Holy Bible, most importantly. You’re not gonna get anywhere without that.

All of this stuff gets organized in the Homeschool Planet Planner. I had been reluctant to pay for an app to organize things, having plenty of paper and pens at hand, and being kind of old and set in my ways. But my friend Alex sold me on it, and it has been a very pleasant way to plan and keep on track. In addition to scheduling and planning, there’s a transcript service and 4 year blueprint for keeping track of high school requirements. Worth every dime to me! I think there may be some features I’m not using to the fullest yet, but as far as I’ve explored, it’s been great!

Along the same lines, I’ve caught wind of this new app called SpeedyRecord. If it works the way I think it does, it could be super helpful for those of us who hate keeping records of what was done, grading, and making transcripts. I don’t know if I’ll implement it this year, but it’s on my “interesting” list.

That’s probably enough linkage for one day. I hope some of these links give you ideas for your own homeschool!

Some of these links are affiliate links, and some are not. Clicks through may earn the blog a few percents of your purchases. Thank you!

I think maybe, since homeschooling is, in fact, a hot mess right now, some newer homeschoolers might like a look at what this household is up to. Some homeschoolers might look at what I’m doing and shake their heads and silently walk away, perhaps throwing some paper flowers made of standardized tests on the casket of their hopes for instruction on “success” as they walk by. To each his own. While we are heavy on intellectual development here, we’re not traditional about it. People who seriously want their kids to be schooled will need to look elsewhere. We’re not quite unschoolers, but we’re not much interested in jumping through the hoops to prove ourselves, either.

There are more impressive people to follow. Believe me, I know. Not a single one of my kids has finished a course in Latin yet. A lot of new homeschoolers probably need permission to be ordinary, so I’m going to give out some permission slips for that today, free of charge.

When we first started out–lo, these 17 years ago!–we tried a lot of different approaches. We started out with Sonlight (just boring), then tried Tapestry of Grace for a year (too expensive, a little bit textbookish), and then I discovered Charlotte Mason through a blog by the late Wendi Capehart. While I wouldn’t consider myself the purest CM adherent, I do like the way of thinking about children, habits, and the living books approach. This method also appreciates that education consists of all kinds of work and play, all day long, and is not just about academics.

We really have been a hot mess, if you look at the whole timeline of Hillside Christian Academy. I’ve gone from Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons in the early days to McGuffey’s Readers now. While I vastly prefer the latter, the former did get my older kids reading, so I can’t really say I’m sorry. One of the hardest things for me as a mom of a wide range of ages is wishing I could go back and try a different approach with my older kids, just to see if they would have done better. Honestly, I don’t think it mattered which way I did it. Each child has needed different things, and we’ve adapted everything as we went along anyway.

When I finally found Ambleside Online, it clicked for me, but I’ve still changed all sorts of things as I found it didn’t suit us. We started out all wrong. Sonlight is absolutely fine! So is Tapestry of Grace! But not for us.

You’re going to choose a lot of suboptimal things (for you) at first, too, newbies, and that’s fine! Your kids will survive that. Do go out into the homeschooling community, whether online or IRL, and find somebody who has done this for a while–several somebodies–and see what they’re doing. But don’t get too attached, because they are not you. Their kids are not your kids. Their approach will not fit you perfectly. If inexperience is a disadvantage, it is also an advantage! People who have no idea what they’re doing often discover something nobody else ever would have considered, and that discovery is the thing that makes them successful in their own way!

So shake off your nerves–you don’t have anything to prove to anybody--and just start doing something. You’ll figure it out as you go, the same way I did.

If you’re thinking of using a Charlotte Mason approach, the first thing to do is read a living book about it! You can, of course, read Charlotte Mason herself, but I’ve found Laying Down the Rails, By Sonya Shafer, to be quicker for getting up to speed, especially establishing the habits that you’ll need to lay down, even if you’re not going full CM. If you don’t want to read a book, you can certainly go buy a pre-rolled curriculum, and there is nothing wrong with that, either. I’m am completely ecumenical about schooling styles. This might not work for you at all.

Here at the GAHousehold, our core curriculum has been drawn from Ambleside Online, but I substitute a lot of our own books, especially in the upper grades. For instance, I have yet to get a girl to like the book Robinson Crusoe, so even though it doesn’t quite fit the rest of the plan, I’m switching that book to something less repulsive to a nine year old girl.

I have a couple of children reading in the Civil War era this year. I learned with the first three kids (who have graduated now) that AO is lopsidely, maddeningly Yankee-centric. It is also fairly England-centric in the early years. I actually like that. But they’ve changed a bit over the years to make it a little more rounded, and it’s hardly noticeable at this point. I’ve added Lincoln Reconsidered and a few biographies of great Southern men, because the Narrative I want my kids to have wouldn’t be complete without those other points of view.

If you’re new to homeschooling, or AO, there’s no harm in going with the plan as written. But one thing homeschoolers are going to do, God bless us, is go off-plan. I’m just showing you a few of the ways I have done so. You don’t have to follow along.

AO doesn’t provide everything I need, of course. I’ve decided to kick traditional math texts to the curb after years of Saxon and Math-u-See, because all of my kids, even though they’re good at math (all but that one, anyway), hate math. That’s just not cool. So we’re doing Life of Fred exclusively this year, and quite looking forward to seeing how that goes. We’ve had the books on our shelves, but somehow never incorporated them. It might be great. Might be the worst idea I’ve ever had. I’ll definitely update you on that.

I’m getting back out a Latin curriculum for this year, and we’ll see if anybody of the right age likes it at all. If not, I’ll put it away again until the two youngest are old enough to try. We have a language requirement every year, and my second born is quite the linguist! I think he’s up to six languages he reads and understands now, though he has nobody to converse with. But he still didn’t want to do Latin. That’s where the un part of my schooling comes in. I don’t make people finish things they hate, nor are there any subjects so important that I won’t find a different way to fulfill the requirement if things aren’t looking good after a few months.

I have a lot of resources to talk about in a further post, and I hope you’ll have questions to drop on me, either in the comments here, or by email. Happy homeschooling, friends! It’s almost time to get started!

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In my post 17 Days, about Get Along Husband’s new-found relief from his chronic headaches, I wrote this:

Praise God for this blessing with me, friends!Also pray for us to submit to whatever God’s will is going forward. We could be in a very exciting new place. There are so many opportunities for growth peeking over the horizon!

Or, and I hope you don’t take this as an expression of wavering faith, we may just be getting a breather before heading back into the Valley of the Shadow. I simply have no idea what to expect. I gave up trying to figure out what God is doing a long time ago. We’ve never not trusted Him for healing, and yet, we have had seventeen years of this. We have approached this with the understanding that sometimes God puts us in uncomfortable places for His own reasons. We’ve trusted that all of this would somehow work out for our good and for His glory. Kingdom work is going on in these desert places.

Jesse’s continued headache-free days, his writing productivity, his ability to be with the family ended right about the first of March. So we had roughly four months of a good time as a family. I’m so grateful for that! During that short time, Jesse wrote a book you should definitely read, along with some short stories you might enjoy. He’s worked on a lot that we haven’t even seen yet.

We had a really nice anniversary trip to the beach before the headache came back. I am, today, simply grateful that we had what time we did. But man, it took me some time to get back to gratitude. I’m not so super-spiritual that I just praised the Lord with joy the day I realized that we were, indeed, going back into that old cycle of pain. In fact, I spent a few months really butthurt at God. I’ve been told it’s a sin to get mad at God, but my inner toddler got the better of me.

I sank into a depression for a few months. That’s why no summer blog updates, even though I had some interesting stuff to write about. It’s also why I keep abandoning some of my social media friends, very likely. I’m very sorry to disappear so much, but I kinda lost myself for a while there. It was all I could do to keep my face washed for the kids and try not to let my disappointment affect them too much.

I truly am grateful for the time we had. Nobody can take that away. We had that time! It was so good to have!

Positivity really can be toxic.

I recall, right before Helene hit, I posted a query to my Facebook friends: “Is anybody else a little bit scared of what might happen here? I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this before.” And the very first comment was a local friend practicing the toxic positivity that Christians can be so prone to:

“No fear! Not allowed to worry! Trust the Lord!”

Spoken like a person who hasn’t had a whole lot of pain in his life, I reckon. Now, I don’t know this gal really well, but I suspect she was just doing what AI does: saying the next expected words based on her training. Most people are AI. If she’d been capable of thinking for a split second before opening her yap, she’d have said “Yes, I’m nervous, too. Let’s hold on to Jesus and each other!” She couldn’t help it. It’s just how people are. But it still irritated me more than a little.

Friends, it’s OK to be disappointed. It’s OK to be scared. It’s even OK to get mad. It’s just not OK to give up!

I do trust the Lord. I also do not look forward to pain and suffering, and I know for a fact I’m going to have some of both in this world. If you’re really able to look at three feet of rain heading your way, and you live on the side of a mountain that can slide, and you don’t feel a little bit of fear, you are either completely without imagination, or something even worse is wrong with you. This lady would have been in the Garden of Gethsemane telling Jesus he wasn’t faithful enough.

Just look at all that distress! Blood in your sweat, dude? What’s wrong with your faith?

Yes, we will submit to our Father’s will. No, we will not like our suffering in the moment. And it can be especially difficult in the moments when we can see the suffering coming, but it hasn’t arrived yet.

Can I face what’s coming with joy now? If our life settles into another seventeen years of this before we find another magic pill, as I’m fairly sure it will?

Yes. I’m good now.

But I had to get through the “let this cup pass from me” stage first. Every emotion you are capable of feeling, Christian, is one that God Himself breathed into you as part of your soul. Don’t let toxic people who have no depth of understanding make you feel like less of a spiritual person just because you’re in a depression right now, or angry, or just not super-excited about whatever task you’ve been called to.

You might even feel like God has pulled a dirty trick on you. I sure did. I had really settled into that whole-family routine that included a husband at the dinner table and leading us into church on Sunday mornings.

My kids have occasionally gotten very angry at me when my parenting didn’t line up with what made them feel good right now. They truly could not fathom what I was up to, or how right I was. I never got mad at them for being mad at me. Of course not! Their perspective was too limited for them to be glad of what it felt like I was doing to them.

But I’ve been gratified as a parent to see that they obeyed, loved, and trusted me, regardless of their anger. I suspect that’s how our Heavenly Father sees our confused anger, as well. It doesn’t change what He’s doing, or His benevolence, just because we feel certain ways about it. We can trust His love!

You’re going to go through it, Christian. You can expect the joy of the Lord to be your strength, absolutely. But while you’re still living in a body, you’re still living on a timeline. You’re not going to have everything all at once. There’s no victory without a struggle first. There’s no relief without pain first. The waves are going to crash until the moment Jesus says “peace, be still”.

…weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

Don’t act like you’ve got the ending all figured out while you’re still in the middle of something. It’s fake faith to pretend that you’re emotionally unaffected by hardship, that it’s nothing but joy as you look into the mouth of a dark tunnel you’re going to have to go into. You’re probably stifling a lot of the lessons God has to teach you while you’re there if you refuse to feel certain ways.

Cowards are not allowed in Heaven! But it’s not cowardice to feel that dread, or our own Christ would not be allowed in Heaven. There’d be no victory over Self if emotions weren’t allowed. He dreaded that cross. But He didn’t shrink from it. He went ahead and did it anyway. Praise His Name!

This is a song that has spoken to me over the years, but especially now. Enjoy it, if you have a moment to listen:

I did pray “let this cup pass from me”, with tears, many times. But God in His wisdom has put us back in the desert valley for whatever length of time He ordains. I’ve learned how to live here, and I’m grateful for that! I’ve developed a camel hump that holds living water, and that will get me through. It will get the whole family through, by God’s grace!

I’ve cherished these times, up on the mountain.

But I can leave this place, because I know,

someday you’ll take me home to live forever,

up on the mountain.

I’m going to leave this post with a giveaway. If you read this far, you probably actually like reading, so I’m giving away three kindle editions of Jesse’s new book, Gradient. It’s also already free with KU! Just drop a comment on this post for a chance, and if I even have more than three readers anymore, I’ll use a random name picker to choose who gets the free books. It’s really a good read, and re-read, and I’d love it if more people got to experience it.

Print

Tiger Nut Flour Blueberry Muffins

A gluten free, optionally dairy-free breakfast muffin

Course Breakfast, Snack

Cuisine Keto

Keyword gluten-free, keto, low carb, sugar-free

Prep Time 10 minutes minutes

Cook Time 25 minutes minutes

Servings 12

Equipment

• 1 muffin pan
• 12` cupcake liners optional, easier to clean

Ingredients

• 2 cups Tiger nut flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoon Baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/3 cup Erythritol/Monkfruit blend sweetener or other sweetener
• 1/2 cup milk or other liquid (coconut milk, water, etc.)
• 1/2 cup butter melted
• 2 teaspoon vanilla extract lemon extract is also good for this recipe!
• 1 cup frozen blueberries

Instructions

• Heat oven to 350℉
• Line muffin pan with cupcake liners or grease each muffin cup with butter or avocado oil.
• In a large mixing bowl, sift together dry ingredients.
• Add frozen blueberries to dry ingredients and toss or gently mix to coat.
• In another mixing bowl, whisk together wet ingredients.
• Add wet ingredients to the dry, then stir until combined.
• Scoop by the 1/4 cup into prepared muffin pans.
• Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until muffins are browned and an inserted toothpick comes out clean (except for blueberry guts).

Notes

Depending on your brand of tiger nut flour, you may need another tablespoon or so of liquid to make it wet enough to make a batter. 

 

Lemme know if you try them!

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First link is to my own latest post: Is Homeschooling a Hot Mess? I think it ought to be!

From Postcards from the Age of Reason, my friend Tor thinks (and I’m always happy to think as he does, as he’s much smarter than me) that the AI bubble is the bubbliest of all bubbles. It is a vapor. Don’t give it a dollar.

Little guys are about to take an enforced haircut on this, (above images stolen from this link) and I am very sorry about that. I am really enjoying the linked Substack, called Gold and Geopolitics. Give it a look, if you like that sort of thing.

I’ve always cringed when people call Jesus “Yeshua”. It always felt to me like people who don’t really like Jesus as we’ve known him, and would really like to put a sheen of coolness over His image. I thought they just needed to grow up in the faith a little bit and get more comfortable with Christianity. Newcomers often start throwing elbows at the old guard when they convert. Happens with homeschooling, too. Turns out, it’s probably worse than that in this case, and a deliberate subversion. His name is powerful. Enemies are scared of it:

“Conspiracy” enthusiasts have always had a bee in their (our) bonnets about Nikola Tesla. Here’s an interesting video on his last interview.

Vox has a post quoting what I think is the most interesting part:

…in private letters to Arthur Matthews, Tesla described what he had found beneath Notre-Dame: copper grounding systems embedded directly into the cathedral’s foundation blocks — not modern restorations added during 19th-century repairs, but original construction. Deliberately insulated with natural resins. Geometrically arranged in radial patterns extending outward from the central nave. Still conductive after six centuries.

Tesla called them earth batteries — passive electrical storage systems using the compression of stone, the mineralization of groundwater, and the conductivity of copper to create standing charges that could be drawn upon without fuel, without generation, without metering.

I think I’m going to buy some of those copper pyramids for my asparagus beds now.

And finally, I wish I could remember where I saw this first so I could give credit where it’s due:

We examine how fertility expectations influence financial risk-taking using nationally representative data from three countries. Our results indicate that childless adults who do not expect children are 21-36% more likely to invest in stocks than those who expect children, controlling for personal characteristics. This effect persists also when medical infertility instruments expectations. We find no similar effects for other savings categories, nor differences in self-reported risk tolerance. Households expecting children report shorter financial planning horizons, which may explain their lower risk-taking. These results suggest declining fertility can increase young adults’ stock market participation through childbearing expectations.

No wonder they try to suppress birthrates. Messes with their net worth. And they try to suppress homeschooling because it doesn’t turn out cogs for their machine.

Besides investing their current funds in children during their growing years instead of the stock market, there’s not a hill of beans of difference between the financial behaviors of childless and child-oriented families. As I said before, in defense of our “irresponsible” choice to make people instead of money:

Of the large Christian families that I know personally, some are wealthy, and some are decidedly not. They are all, however, fed, clothed, and lacking nothing essential. Maybe they don’t have anything fancy, or their shoes are a bit scuffed, but they are taken care of. I also know families with two kids, or none, who are in dire financial straits.

I’ve been angry for some time at the idea that my children are everybody else’s retirement plan. While parents put their hard work and money and love into raising their children, the childless put theirs into betting that our children will be worth something. What if they’re not? You’re taking a big chance, Childless, letting everybody else determine what kind of people will be there when you get old. One of the biggest annoyances in my life right now, something I endure on almost a weekly basis, is a Boomer who is always “joking” about how my young people need to get good jobs so he can stay retired.

Enough of that talk, though. As I said before today, what can’t continue, won’t.

Don’t forget to check out my hubby’s book on Amazon. It’s really good.:

Leave your links in the comments, friends, and I’ll link to them next Friday, as long as they’re family-friendly and from real people. No spam, of course. 

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I recently stumbled across a substack post by someone I assume supports homeschooling called “Homeschooling is a Hot Mess”. Possibly to my detriment, I didn’t read much of it, nor am I conscientious enough go back and find out if my impressions of where it was going are fair or accurate. It probably went far better than I expected it to. No shade on the writer at all, I was just really busy that day, and now I’m on to something different. What that post did, though, was spur this sorry blogger on to consider a presumably different topic I’ve touched on over the years. I thought I’d piggyback on just the title, since it was such a banger.

Is homeschooling a hot mess? Are we failing before we even get started?

Our family held a graduation ceremony and party for our third-born child last weekend. It was a nice to-do (though I wish I’d done better with the brisket), and now I only have five students left. Having three more-or-less mature people to show for my efforts, and having hung out with many other homeschooling families these seventeen years or so, including the newest crop of public school refugees, I guess I’m at least somewhat qualified to talk about homeschooling’s current condition.

In an older post, Permission to Be Ordinary, I made a prediction:

The first generation of homeschoolers was almost certainly an unusual group of people. It seems to me that they required a unique set of characteristics–qualities that usually go hand-in-hand with high intelligence and academic achievement–to be able to boost the homeschooling movement from the gravitational pull  of traditional education. That first generation had, at the very least, enough imagination to dream it up, confidence to follow through, ingenuity to figure out how, resourcefulness to keep it going under pressure, and courage to fight the courts and social stigma.

As homeschooling becomes more mainstream, though, we are going to see some regression to the mean (though I doubt that we could ever regress to the abysmal performance of public schools). Because homeschooling really is a viable and superior alternative, and for reasons that have little to do with math, more and more parents who would never have considered such a thing before are going to jump on the bandwagon.

Those stellar statistics are going to level out, homeschoolers.  At some point, our neighbors are probably going to notice that some of us are pretty awful at math and science, and most of our children are going to trade schools or straight to the workforce instead of to Harvard. For that reason, it would be good if we kept our debating skills sharp, so that we can explain why homeschooling is well within our rights, regardless of our outcomes. If our best defense of home education is that other homeschoolers are really smart, we are sunk, because most of us are going to be graduating children who become ordinary people.

If you hadn’t heard it before, “regression to the mean” is a term (though I’m being flexible in my use of it) meaning that we can expect extraordinary data to smooth out as the thing that made them extraordinary mingles with the ordinary. What can’t last, won’t. Initial measurements contain different and fewer data points than later ones.

Early homeschoolers have less in common with later homeschoolers than later homeschoolers do with the public school population from which they are drawn.  

We will regress to our mean. I stand by that prediction. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening yet. Right now, most homeschoolers are not even homeschoolers. They’re public schoolers brought home. This is not where we’re going to settle. Right now I think what we see is more like a tidal wave sucking the water from a shore before crashing back in, or a pendulum swinging. Whatever metaphor you like best, what we’re seeing right now–everybody trying different things, infighting, chaos inside and out, and some parents doing a very poor job while others are crushing all expectations–is, indeed, a hot mess. It’s a mess caused by a whole bunch of new people jumping in to something they’ve yet to understand. They panicked. That is completely understandable, and now they are completely unprepared.

This was bound to happen, as people began to finally discover that public education is every bit as bad as the first generation of homeschoolers said it was. The pendulum is still swinging, or the tide is going to come back and cause some devastation, or the dust is going to take some time to settle, choking us for a while. Please forgive all my conflicting metaphors. My point is that we can’t really judge the thing right now. People need time to figure things out.

Whatever they do, they cannot do worse in the aggregate–individual results notwithstanding–than the public schools have.

Our nation has done a very bad job with its children for a very long time. There is no way to straighten this mess out without bringing it home first. Just let it be what it is and stop worrying. Homeschooling will have results and methods as widely varied as the families themselves are. We will not turn out a uniform product. We have no assembly line or precise formula. We’re turning out souls, not cogs. As in my previous posts on the subject, I call on homeschoolers to defend, not the process of homeschooling, nor their preferred method, nor their results, but the right and duty of parents to raise their children free of interference by the competing, coercive system of secular education.

God has ordained each parent to do this. We can do this.

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I’m not capable of an objective review, of course. I like the author a little too much for that. Jesse’s stories always stick with me emotionally for a bit. That is not just because I like him, I think. Probably gonna hit a lot of other people the same way.

If you want to try it before you buy it, you can read the first two chapters at his website.

It’s priced at $4.99, and well worth the thought-provoking read. Hope you enjoy it! Please leave a review on Amazon if you do!

Since summer break is here, and I’ve got the school life on easy mode, there will be a little more time for blogging. We’re having our third high school graduation this month! Three down, five to go!

I have topics planned out, and a few posts half-written. Health, food, fitness, homeschooling, headaches, large families, Jesus. All the things! But right now, I just need to publish something to get back into the habit of publishing something.

Do me a favor, friends? Leave me a comment, those few who are faithful enough to still be here after I’ve been so lax! Thank you for bearing with me.

I would love to know what kinds of things you’d like to read about. Any old topics I can resurrect for you? New things you’re learning about? What are your thoughts on just everything? It would be good to restart the conversation in a relevant place, but I don’t know exactly where anybody is right now. Any direction you want to go, I’m ready! Anything you’d like to tell me not to do? Saying so will likely make me do that very thing, but go ahead and let me know anyway.

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Keto Shortbread Cookies

An almond-flour alternative to a high-carb treat

Course Dessert

Keyword keto, low carb, sugar-free

Prep Time 10 minutes minutes

Cook Time 15 minutes minutes

Servings 12

Equipment

• 2 cookie sheets
• 2 sheets of parchment paper
• 1 large mixing bowl
• 1 1.5 ounce scoop

Ingredients

• 1.5 cups granulated sweetener such as a monkfruit/erythritol blend
• 1 stick (half cup) unsalted butter room temperature
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp butter extract optional
• 4 lg eggs
• 4 cups almond flour
• 2/3 tsp cream of tartar optional (makes a fluffier cookie)
• 1/3 tsp baking soda optional (makes a fluffier cookie)
• 1 pinch salt

Instructions

• Heat oven to 350℉
• Cream together the butter and sweetener. Use either a hand mixer or a rubber spatula. I find a spatula is better for this.
• Add vanilla, eggs, and extracts, and blend well with a hand mixer.
• In a separate bowl, sift together the almond flour, baking powder, and salt.
• Fold the dry mixture into the wet mixture.
• Using a 2 oz scoop, form a dozen cookies per sheet, flattening the cookies with the palm of the hand (food service gloves are helpful here) or the back of a spoon.
• If desired, top each cookie with a cherry (omit for keto, obviously), macadamia nut, or anything else you can think of!
• Bake for 15-18 minutes, until just the edges have begun to brown. The cookies will firm up a bit as they cool. Bake one pan at a time for best results.

Notes

You can use a teaspoon of baking powder instead of the cream of tartar and baking soda. Commercial baking powders tend to use cornstarch. I have found one that uses cassava flour, as well.

I’ve shown you our adorable Advent Calendar before, haven’t I?

It’s become an indispensable tradition in our family. Some people just do a piece of candy or a small gift every day, and I have done that in the distant past. But when you are a low-sugar family, and there are eight children, that way of doing things can get unhealthy or expensive in a hurry. So I usually do activities. There is a food thing here and there, and today it was cookies!

I was going to attempt to make these traditional St. Nicholas Speculaas Cookies with a gluten-free flour, but when I mentioned that to the children, they didn’t like the idea. I think it’s OK to deviate from the plan from time to time. I’ve seen so many people stress out about putting food in their mouth that wasn’t perfect. I don’t want to see my kids with that kind of relationship with food. I just want them to know they always have a choice, and that every choice they make leads to the next one. They’ve come to understand that some foods don’t make them feel as good, even if they do provide a very satisfying experience in the mouth.

Kids want to do the best thing for themselves, if you just teach them how to think about it!

So we went to our go-to keto shortbread cookie. It really is every bit as tasty as a sugar and wheat cookie, and without the blood sugar spike and crash later on. Adding the nutmeg and cinnamon would be a very good idea, but I didn’t think to do that.

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