All Things Hold Together

This week’s Carnival of Homeschooling can be found here at Mom Is Teaching. The theme is the back-to-school physical to make sure you are healthy.

What a coincidence; everyone around here is sick!

I was just looking at what Google searches lead people to this site, and I found that the majority recently were people looking for how to make homemade jam because of this post I did a couple of weeks ago.

I did not explain how to in that post, I just said that I made some, but here is how.

Buy a pack of pectin and read the directions. Seriously. It’s all in there. How to make every type of jam or jelly you could want to make. Even hot pepper jelly. Yuck. What is that used for?

According to the pectin I used, Sure-Jell, different brands require different recipes in order to achieve the best results. If that is true, you are best off buying the pectin and reading the recipes in there anyway.

I made black raspberry jam and it required 5 cups of crushed berries (2 full quarts of berries), 6 1/2 cups of sugar, and a box of pectin. I did not use the optional 1/2 teaspoon of butter or margarine to reduce foaming because, well, eew. That just sounded gross to me. But, then again, I am kind of crazy like that.

Actually, here is the recipe from the Sure-Jell website.

They have tons of tips and stuff on the site, too.

So, there you have it. Even though homemade jam is like the best tasting thing in the world, and making it yourself seems intimidating, it is really very, very simple, even for a first-timer, especially if you have cooking skills, or even crafting skills.

Go on, jump right in and have some fun.

And if you make the black raspberry, do try it on vanilla ice cream. It is awesome!

My jam

This week we are getting ready to take an anniversary weekend trip to the bed and breakfast that we stayed at for our honeymoon five years ago.

We are so excited to get away, kid-free, and have a little taste of luxury at the scenic Green River Bridge House.

We leave Friday morning to bring the kids down to Massachusetts to stay with my parents-in-law for the weekend, then the B&B is only 20 minutes from there in beautiful southern Vermont.

Bob and I on our honeymoon.

I know five years is really not that long, but given that we are more in love today than we were five years ago, and the fact that most marriages that end in divorce are already on the rocks at this point, I am feeling pretty good about this marriage thing.

The fact that our marriage is based on a commitment to each other and to God, not on how I feel at any given point in time probably helps, too.

I can’t believe that it has been so long since I posted on here!

Here is an update of what’s been going on with me.

Summer Kids Week is over, so I will be posting again. It was great fun. Throughout the week, 351 different kids came to learn about Jesus, and have a great time with music, dancing, crafts, drama, games, snacks, and more. Even though the kids and I were exhausted all week, it was an amazing experience.

Saturday morning, Big E and I spent an hour and a half trying to recover our garden from the foot-high weeds that were taking over. We did a fine job, too. We also brought home a bag of green beans, a bag of peas, a couple of carrots, a couple of peppers, and a ton of zucchini.

There is a head cold going around the house. It started with The D. He has been miserable. Now Bob is starting to show symptoms, and Big and Little E are both crabby, so I think they have it, too.

The podcast of my show with filmmaker Bill Simmon is up. If you want to hear a really ditzy sounding host interview a really intelligent sounding guest, who presents a fascinating perspective on the Democratization of Media and Technology and its implications, this is the podcast for you.

I must warn you, though, I say “um” about 50 times in 30 minutes, and “amazing” at least two dozen. (A new drinking game, perhaps?)

I hesitate to link it because I sound so bad, but Bill was just too amazing of a guest not to. I’m really not that much of an airhead. I just get really nervous on live TV.

That’s about it. The rest warrants full posts, so you will have to read about it later.

The Carnival of Homeschooling is up. Tami has 44 entries posted from all across the homeschool blog world.

I would have posted this sooner, but I was so tired after Summer Kids Week that I haven’t even been on the computer today. Today, I was working in the preschool group. Man, who would have thought that spending 4 hours with a group of preschoolers could be so tiring!

Well, now I have plenty to read after I recover this weekend.

Be sure to check it out.

This week, posting will probably be pretty light. I am volunteering at the Summer Kids Week at my church, so I will be gone every morning. And exhausted when I get home.

I’ve mentioned before that we started using natural cleaning products to reduce the pollutants that our bodies get exposed to. This was for health and wellness reasons. We use natural dish washing/dishwasher detergents, laundry soap, shampoo, deodorant, cosmetics, and household cleaners.

Well, several months ago, I got a free sample of Sunsilk shampoo and conditioner. And it was awesome. My hair was so soft and not frizzy. I loved it.

That’s a pretty big deal because I have spent most of my life hating my hair, especially in the summer when it is frizzy.

But then, I started breaking out along my hairline from, I assume, the chemicals and crap in the shampoo, so I went back to the natural shampoo, but I still used the Sunsilk De-Frizz 24/7 Creme.

It really helped control the frizz, but it bothered me to be using something that wasn’t natural. Plus, I still wasn’t totally happy with how it made my hair look.

So, the other day, I bought some Nature’s Gate Organics styling gel. When I tried it, I was amazed that I was actually very happy with how my hair looked - more so than with the Sunsilk.

It’s funny how that turned out.

On the one hand, I truly believe that using natural products is in the best interest of my health, but on the other hand, I thought that the only way I was going to get hair that looked good was to use a non-natural haircare product.

I was willing to sacrifice my long-term benefit for what was really a superficial gain, but I never really felt good about it.

It wasn’t until I did what I really should have been doing all along that I ended up happy.

I thought that made for an interesting metaphor for life.

Then again, maybe I think too much.

This evening, I did my monthly government access TV show and I had on as my guest a local filmmaker named Bill Simmon. He talked about the democratization of media and technology. It was really interesting. I am not going to even bother to try to reiterate anything he said; I’ll just post the link to the podcast when it is ready (probably Monday).

Normally, I think I do a pretty good job on the show, except I say “um” too much, but for some reason I was totally spacey tonight. Even in the opening, I stumbled over my words and I thought I sounded like a total ditz. I was pretty disappointed about it afterward.

I’ll still post the podcast, though.

Since I started blogging, I have always used StatCounter on all my blogs. I really like it. So, when I got an e-mail this morning saying that Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter’s founder, won Business Week’s Young Entrepreneur contest, I was not surprised.

It was a web vote and they had e-mailed all of their clients about the contest. If others are as happy with the service as I am, it is no wonder he got the votes.

What did surprise me was that this guy is such a go-getter. He started his first business at 12, typing resumes, and had a web design business by age 16, which is what gave him the idea to launch StatCounter.

Amazing!

Sometimes I feel like I am not a good homeschooler. I have a hard time keeping a schedule and completing our curriculum, despite spending hours planning out the school year. And re-planning. And re-planning.

Here is it the middle of July and we still have work to finish from this past “school year.”

I had a plan to get it done, which we were supposed to start today, but here we are not doing it for what is, of course, another good reason.

I always have a good reason for not doing what I had planned.

Don’t get me wrong, the kids have learned tons of stuff this year.

The D is a voracious reader. All I have to do is pick out a few non-fiction books at the library and, when he is done reading the books he picked out, usually within a day or two, he will inevitably pick the non-fiction books up to read when he gets bored between library trips. I am certain he learned lots this year about a variety of subjects.

Big E has learned lots, too. Between the books he read, the videos he watched, and what The D told him about the books he read - he loves to share what he learns - I am confident that Big E has learned a lot this year, too.

We have also done science experiments together, explored topics online, gone on field trips, and even though we didn’t finish the math curriculum we were working on, we do math problems together all of the time in practical, everyday settings.

I love math and never miss an opportunity to teach the boys about it. I’ve even gotten Bob into the habit. As I look over at the dry erase board now, I can see where he was showing the boys the night before last how to figure out the hypotenuse of a right triangle using the Pythagorean theorem.

My problem, I think, is that I don’t have a neat and tidy package of written work to send to the state to prove that they learned something.

I went through this last year, too.

That’s what frustrates me about the homeschooling laws here. I know that the kids have learned a lot of stuff, but I get really stressed out over the prospect of proving that to the pencil-pushers over at the state Department of Education.

It’s not that I am not a good homeschooler; it’s that I am not a homeschooler that looks good on paper to a bunch of educrats.

Now I just need to figure out if that realization is supposed to make me feel better or frustrate the dickens out of me.