What we did: We ate dinner

Almost every night, we ate dinner.  It was a real home-cooked meal, meaning it was made with real food, mostly from scratch, cooked that afternoon, and served to a hungry family around the table.  Sometimes, there were candles.

I mentioned in one of the previous food posts the connection between sauteeing onions and the theme song from All Things Considered.  One of my children told me a few years ago, that every time onions are being sauteed, they think of that song.  I'm quite sure it is because a great many of the meals I cook begin with the sauteeing of onions.  ATC came on at 5 when I would have been cooking, so naturally those two things would go together in that child's mind.

I've been thinking about how we just didn't eat fast food.  We ate slow food, real food, often local food - before that kind of eating had the cachet it does now.

But how did it all get planned?  That's really the hardest part, after all, isn't it?  I always hated those days when I got to 5:00 and wondered what we were going to eat for dinner and had no plan, no creativity, no energy, no inspiration.  How 'bout pancakes, everybody?  That choice was usually cheered, and the occasional dinner of pancakes isn't bad.  But as anyone with a big family knows, you can't carry on very long without a plan.

I tried lots of planning strategies.  I had notebooks, calendar pages, lists.  Sometimes I got out my ruler and paper and drew lovely charts (this was pre-excel spreadsheet, at least in my computer arsenal at the time and pre-downloadable meal planning pdf's).  I made elaborate and detailed monthly meal plans along with weekly shopping lists.  The were wonderful - but too complicated and too much work to plan.

The thing that eventually seemed to work the best for me arose from a serendipitous moment in the Stop 'n Shop parking lot. I was probably holding someone's hand, carrying someone, and telling the others not to run in front of the cars.  A little sentence floated over to me from the conversation of another mother and her (one) child.  She said simply, "It's Friday.  It's pizza night."

It was an epiphany.  Friday. Pizza night.  Why, every Friday could be pizza night!  What a concept!  Monday could be soup day, Tuesday pasta day, Wednesday curry day,  and so on.  I know, I know.  I'm slow.  But this idea just hadn't occurred to me.  I was trying to be creative in my meal planning.  But with six children, 12 and under, I was overdoing it.  I needed a meal strategy that gave me scope for creativity, but didn't require all that elaborate planning.

So, we moved to a simpler meal plan with good bones (i.e. structure), an ever increasing array of options, and plenty of scope for culinary creativity.  Over the years, I adopted a variety of favorites - curries, rice and bean dishes, soups, stews, pasta dishes - adding to the repertoire from time to time with additions out of cookbooks from the library and an occasional cookbook purchase.

I think it's so easy now, because you can browse so many recipe sources online and compile your own list of favorites without ever cracking open a cookbook.  You can also pin your recipes and meal plan via pinterest, like my friend, Kathie.  Easy, peasy.   I still love my cookbooks, though.

With this simple meal planning strategy, shopping got easier.  Keeping a well-stocked pantry, buying some items in bulk, working around the fresh produce that came from our CSA, and going to the grocery store once a week for the remaining produce we didn't get from the farm worked well for me.  Though I don't have a designated meal for each day any more, this kind of planning and cooking still suits me.

What about six little ones at the table?  How did that work?  Well, we had a few rules.  Don't eat before everyone is sitting down and we've prayed together.   Don't put too much on your plate and eat all you take.  Try everything.  No special orders - what I cook for the meal is what we eat.  If you don't want to eat it, see you at the next meal when you will likely be hungry enough to eat whatever is put in front of you.

My, does that sound harsh?  I don't think it was as harsh as that in practice.  It was just practical.  When you have a big family, you just can't satisfy everyone's whims when it comes to food.   Everyone learned to eat what was put in front of them with thanksgiving (mostly) and a minimum of fuss.  Besides, if the food is home-cooked from fresh ingredients, it is likely to taste good, unless, of course, you do what I did more than I care to admit, and burn the beans.  Oh, just add a bit more salsa and you'll never taste that charred flavor.  It also helps to be married to a man who always, graciously insists he likes the burned parts.

We had another rule - no singing at the table (unless the blessing was a sung blessing).  There is a famous story about this rule, well remembered by all in our family because it was once used as a sermon illustration.   One of the children, whose name was changed to George for sermon purposes to protect his or her innocence (or guilt, as it were) was asked to stop singing at the table.  "George" stopped singing and began to hum.  "Hmm, hm, hm, hm, hmmmmm. (Imagine here a young child's high pitched humming).  The father in the family said, "George, I asked you to stop singing."  Cherubic "George" replied sweetly, "I'm not singing, I'm humming."  I no longer remember what happened next.  "George" was probably told no humming either, at least until you finish your peas, and being the obedient, rule-conscious child that he/she was, that was that.  Or not.

I do remember that when the story was told in church, after the sermon was over, quite a few adults came up to George Erin and asked her which one of her brothers was George.  Not to worry, sweetie, that secret is safe ; )

A couple of other little rules we had:
: : If you don't like the food, eat it anyway and then tell the cook later that it's not one of your favorites. She, (meaning me) tried to honor genuine dislikes.  Some people just don't enjoy mushrooms.  That just means more for the ones who do.  It's no big deal if you really don't like it, but you never say anything rude at the table like "Yuck" or "What is THIS?"  Not acceptable.

: : When you're done, ask to be excused and thank the cook for the meal.  Our dear friends, the Duncans, taught their children to say, "I've had a gracious plenty.  May I please be excused?"  And they weren't even Southern.  Imagine!

: : Clear your place when you're done.  Put your dishes on the counter.

: : And then, of course, the normal table manners - elbows off the table, don't talk with food in your mouth, etc. etc.

Lit candles on the table help.  They add ambiance to a weeknight dinner and make everyone feel just a bit special.  Maybe, just maybe, they even help little children to mind their P's and Q's.  The only problem with candles, though, is that as soon as they are extinguished and your back is turned, six pairs of eager fingers are plunged into the hot wax and those lovely beeswax candles - well, they just don't look quite so lovely anymore.  I think hot wax is a universal, irresistible attraction for all small children.  At least it was for mine.  Somehow, I could get them to eat *tofu, bean burgers, and green vegetables of every sort, but I never could break them of the habit of playing in the hot wax.  Sometimes they didn't even wait til my back was turned.  You can't win 'em all.

That's about it, folks.  I probably haven't given you any real tips for meal time success with little people, but I suppose that's not really my aim here anyway.  I'm just remembering - and probably not doing that terribly well.  I know there were a few food battles, tears at the table, plenty of spills, and times when the noise was just below deafening.  But that's not what I remember.  When I think about dinner at our house, I remember the smell of fresh bread, the steam rising from a pot of soup in the cast iron Dutch oven (that I still use almost every day), holding hands to pray, and being thankful for a table full of little people, plenty of good, healthy food to feed them, and the incredible gift of eating together.

_______________________________________________________
*not meaning to malign tofu or bean burgers here.  It's just that a lot of people we knew thought those meal choices were a little, shall we say, unusual.  My kids loved them.

 As I mentioned in an earlier post, Leila has a series of posts on eating together.  She is so common sense and makes me laugh.

And finally, hope you enjoyed the flowers.  The garden's been awfully pretty this year.  

What we did: We ate healthy food ...

Let's talk about the food part today and later, we'll talk about the sitting around the table part.

When I started thinking about what we ate, I asked several of my children for some of their food memories.  Here are a few:

tabouli and homemade bread

Salmon patties and grits every Sunday night
Enchanted broccoli forest (a Mollie Katzen recipe from a cookbook with the same title)
Rice and beans
Rice and black-eyed peas
Chili and cornbread
Scones
Rhubarb dipped in sugar (we had a massive rhubarb plant in our back yard, they would sneak and dip stalks of it in the sugar bowl and eat it raw).
Greens
Sauteeing onions and the theme music from All Things Considered (I listened to the radio when I cooked!)
Butternut squash
Homemade bread
Biscuits
Waffles or pancakes on Saturday morning, cooked by Daddy

Pretty down home eating.  Not too fancy, on the low-end, budget wise.

sauteeing onions and beets for beet risotto

We did eat a lot of rice and beans.  Brown rice. All kinds of beans: pinto, black, small red, Great Northern, kidney, navy, garbanzo ... and there were also lentils and split peas.  Coty and I were mostly vegetarians (only a little fish back then) til our kids got older, so they were raised on a mostly meatless diet.  When I say meatless, I mean that we never ate chicken or beef, but occasionally, like on Sunday nights, we ate fish.

Dal (lentils), cauliflower curry, brown rice in the black pot, and raita

We had a garden and we belonged to a CSA farm.  That farm was wonderful.  We picked up our share every week and ate whatever the farm was producing - beets, turnips, carrots, greens of all kinds, different varieties of leaf lettuce,green beans, and in the summer, tomatoes, cucumbers, and all kinds of fresh herbs in abundance.  I loved the farm, loved going out to pick up my share each week, loved picking as many fresh herbs as I could use, loved feeding my family that fresh, organic, local produce.

One summer, the farm had a super crop of cucumbers - so many, they were starting to feed them to the cows.  Almost every week, I picked up a 5 gallon bucket of cucumbers and we made freezer pickles.

We lived near apple orchards and strawberry farms and would go pick, in season, and make applesauce, apple pie slices, and freezer jam.  I wasn't a canner, like my amazing daughter is now, but we made good use of the freezer.

We ate our share of spaghetti, but with home-doctored sauce (tofu and grated carrots added to Ragu!).  We ate macaroni and cheese, but never from a box.  We ate lots of soups and stews, but rarely from a can (with the exception of Campbells Tomato Soup with grilled cheese sandwiches.  That was a quick Sunday lunch meal when we weren't having company).

 Brussels sprouts, cooked the way my Daddy cooks 'em

 
We weren't sick too much and we didn't have food allergies - at least not that I was ever aware of or that ever kept us from eating certain things (like wheat or dairy).  We drank milk, but not too much, and we ate yogurt, sometimes made at home.  I think I was just blessed with children who had (have) healthy constitutions, so we didn't deal with many of the challenging food issues some families do.  

Way back before I had children, I bought a copy of Laurel's Kitchen.  I think my food ethos grew out of reading Laurel, Diet for a Small Planet, the old More with Less cookbook, and after kids started arriving, Mollie Katzen's cookbooks (Moosewood Cookbook and Enchanted Broccoli Forest), as well as the later Moosewood Collective cookbooks.  All of these books helped me toward a type of eating that was healthful and delicious, simple and satisfying.  We ate real food, as fresh as we could get it, cooked mostly from scratch and yes, that meant lots of hours in the kitchen.  And no, I don't regret all those hours cooking for my family.  As Erin says now, "Love is spelled F-O-O-D."  I think my kids knew that growing up.  I think they know it now.

raw kale salad

*All the photos are from more recent meals, but don't look too different from what we used to eat, except that raw kale salad is new to us in the last couple of years and I'm not sure I ever served Brussels sprouts to my kids when they were younger.

What we did: We ate healthy food at home around the table 3 times a day!

That's a mouthful of a title, isn't it.  But it does sum up what we did when the kids were growing up.  I want to back up just a little though, and start from the very beginning -  what we fed our babies.

I attended a banquet Tuesday night after my son, Andrew's Phi Beta Kappa induction.  There were a lot of smart people sitting around those tables and the banquet speaker, a pediatrician and community activist, shared his thoughts about how people can make a difference in their communities.  His first of five points was, "Learn the be the best parent you can."  Then he said, "Breastfeed."  I was rather taken aback.  Not that I disagreed with him, not at all.  I was just surprised to hear those words in that setting. The first thing he had to say about being a good parent was about the very first nutrition you provide for your child outside the womb.  He told those law school/med school/Harvard/Columbia/grad school bound students to breastfeed their babies. I wonder how many of them will take his advice.

I didn't learn about breastfeeding from a doctor at a college honors banquet.  Rather, it was the women in Kawangware and Kamweleni, Machakos and Mombasa that taught me.  In the two years before our first child was born, I taught nutrition to village health workers and spent hours and hours in the company of rural Kenyan women.  I observed babies carried in kangas on women's backs wherever they went - to the market, the fields, to our classes.  When the babies got hungry, they breastfed them, right then and there, no disappearing to a private place, no covering up, just feeding their babies, as though it was the most natural, normal thing to do.  Which it was ... and still is.

By their example, those women taught me well.  When Erin was born, I knew I'd breastfeed.  Like all new moms, the start was a little rocky, but we made it through the first few days, and tiny as she was (5 lbs. 6 ounces) at birth, she grew and thrived on mama's milk.  All of our subsequent children were breastfed and weaned themselves when they were ready. I think the longest any of the little ones breastfed was just over two years, the shortest, 15 months.  I am completely convinced that this is the very, very best way to feed your babies.  Easy, free, and the healthiest food you can give them.

Well, we're not to the "three meals a day around the table" yet, but it's time to turn the corner and put this series of posts on the back burner for a few days.

I want quiet tomorrow, Good Friday ... quiet and time to meditate on the cross of Jesus.  Then, I look forward to reflection and rejoicing in the resurrection of my Savior, the bread of life, the one who bore the sins of the world on the tree and rose to new life, conquering death, so that those who believe in him will live and not die and join him eternally at the greatest meal of all, the wedding supper of the Lamb.

Jesus has died.  Jesus has risen.  Jesus is coming again.  Alleluia.  Come, Lord Jesus.

Happy Easter, all.  I'll be back next week.

What we did: We foraged and grew our food

When you have a big family, people always want to know how you feed them.  Well, I was worried about that as the size of our family grew and especially with all those boys.  Oh, my goodness.  Their appetites were voracious.  They were bottomless pits.

But, I found easy and economical ways to fill those hungry bellies.  As you know from the previous post, we lived adjacent to the woods.  Like all frugal women, I used what was nearby and free.  In the spring, we foraged in the the woods and came home with bucket loads of fiddle head ferns.  They are a delicious, nutritious treat - they taste sort of like asparagus -  and we found all kinds of ways to use them; in salads, sauteed, stir-fried, fiddlehead quiche, fiddlehead lasagna, even fiddle head smoothies for breakfast.

Of course, those woods were full of stinging nettles, too, so we would regularly don our longest jeans and long sleeve shirts, put ski masks over our faces and go out into the woods to gather nettles.  There are also many, many ways to eat these nutritional goodies.  My favorite was nettle fricassee.  What a delicious dish!  Instead of chicken or pork, though, we used what we could find in the woods.  Remember that woodchuck from the last post?!  Well, you haven't lived til you've eaten a woodchuck nettle fricassee.  That dish, of course, hearkened back to my southern upbringing.  We usually had it with possum when I was younger, but woodchuck is a good substitute.

We had two rivers behind our house so we had a plentiful supply of fish and fresh water mussels.  When Andrew went to Brussels to study abroad last year and ate mussels again, he said it took him back to his childhood and fond memories of standing in the muck on the edge of the river, digging with his toes for the mussels.  The kids would gather them and bring them home in a bucket.  We'd scrub off the sand, steam them and eat them with a salad of dandelion greens, straight from the backyard.

About those dandelion greens - we never put weed killer or pesticides on our lawn, so we never worried about our kids getting toxic chemicals in their diet from the items we foraged from our lawn.  In addition to eating the dandelion greens, we would harvest the roots, dry them, grind them and use them for a coffee substitute.  Such a treat!  I think starting their mornings off with dandelion coffee is one of the reasons all of my children are so fond of hot beverages to this day.

One of our favorite delicacies was the snails from our garden.  My neighbors always had problems with snails eating their vegetables, but we solved that problem by having the kids go out at night with a flashlight and pick off the snails.  Can you imagine - escargot for a family of eight straight from our backyard.  What do you think that would have cost us in a restaurant ... and it was all free!  The French usually eat their escargot cooked in wine with garlic and butter, but I like different ethnic cuisines, so I usually cooked them the Maltese way, (scroll down in the article) simmered in ale with plenty of mint, basil, and marjoram from our garden.

Of course, I taught my kids how to distinguish between poisonous and non-poisonous mushrooms and a day or so after each rain, we would go to the spot in the woods where trees had fallen and begun to rot to find oodles of mushrooms sprouting in fairy rings.  There were so many, we would dry them for use in the winter when foraged food was harder to come by.

Now, you may be thinking that we only ate food we could find on the land.  I wish that were true because it certainly would have been healthier, but here is the more difficult part of our food story.  We didn't own a cow so we had to buy our milk.  The closest and cheapest place to get it was the Cumberland Farms convenience store just around the corner.  Because they didn't even have to cross any streets to get there, I could send even the youngest to the store for milk.  By the time they could walk, each one of them was itching to "run to Cumbies" for milk.  It was a rite of passage.

Little did I know, however, that on these errands for milk, my children were being exposed to the evils of processed food.  Those rows of candy and packaged pastries at toddler eye level were just too much, and by the time they were four or five, each of my children had discovered the delights of Twinkies, Ding-Dongs, Snickers bars and Skittles.  I never knew why they were so eager to run to Cumbies for me til the day I discovered the stash of discarded candy wrappers in the corner of Erin's closet.  Imagine my dismay.  All this time, I thought my children were eating the healthiest food on the planet, only to discover that they each had secret addictions to one form of junk food or another.

The only solution to that was to stop buying milk.  We would eliminate the trips to the convenience store by getting a cow.  But then we discovered that our neighborhood did not allow cattle to be pastured in back yards, so we had to opt for a goat.

Goat milk, goat cheese - oh, it was wonderful til the goat got out.  You know how easily they can leap over almost any fence.  Well, that darn goat, Mabel was her name, got out one night and in one fell swoop ate my entire vegetable garden.  That was the straw that broke the camel's back.  After that, I decided - no more milk.  We'll just have to be vegans.

So, we stopped drinking milk that comes from animals, planted the rest of our backyard in soybeans and made all our own soymilk.  I tell you, when it comes to food and eating healthy on a tight budget for a large family, where there's a will, there's a way!

We never had time for anything else besides food production and I regret to say that as they are growing into adults my children are rebelling.  They have opted for the fast food lifestyle and now spend most of their food budgets at places like Cookout and Burger King.

Well, I must quit.  Joel has a soccer game and I'm headed out the door.  I hope this little reflection on how we ate has encouraged you.  Even though my children all now eschew anything that is green or healthy, at least I know they had a good start in life!

; )

April Fool's!

What we did: We made our own fun

I've been thinking about schooling, household chores, and habits, but first, I want to talk about fun.  Maybe I am writing this tonight because my brain feels like mush right now and anything particularly orderly is beyond me at the moment.  Why, you might ask, is your brain mush?  Well, today I taught on heredity, genes, homozygous and heterozygous genotypes, alleles and Punnet Squares and tomorrow it's Social Welfare Policy, Social Security, TANF, Medicare, means tests, majoritarian and client politics, blah, blah, blah ...  Wouldn't your brain be fried?  So, let's talk about fun.

What did we do for fun?  How about a hodge podge of memories in no particular chronological order or order of importance. (Is there another way to say that without repeating the word order?  Sorry, just wondering ...)

First of all, we didn't have a television.  Not really.  We were given an old clunker of a TV when Erin was about 6, but we lived in a valley between mountains with little television reception and we didn't want cable so the TV was used for watching an occasional movie. We bought a VCR player and checked kids' movies out of the library from time to time - you know, those old goodies like Winnie the Pooh and Robin Hood.  But screen time was very limited.

Instead of watching television, we had good quality toys that prompted hours of creative play.  Thoughtful grandparents gifted our children with Brio trains and track, legos, playmobil sets, wooden blocks, and other toys that stood the test of time and numbers.  Six kids used most of those toys.  They had to be sturdy and they had to invite imaginative play.  I still have most of those toys and they are still being used by little people who visit our house.  Clara, our granddaughter, was introduced to the trains when she was here last October.  I'm sure they will last through another generation of children.

Clara and Aunt Kay playing with our old trains

Instead of watching television, we went outside.  We lived on a quiet little street off our town's Main Street.  Behind our house were acres and acres of woods, and cornfields, with two rivers and a swamp.  The town tennis court, which was rarely used (because the college courts in town were nicer) was just behind our house.  We built a tree fort and hung tire swings.  We had a huge sandbox.  We had a wagon, trikes, bikes, sleds, ice skates, and cross-country skis.  We had a basketball goal next to the street.  With so much to do outside, why in the world would a kid want to come inside to watch television???

One of the favorite summer activities of my kids was flooding the sandbox.  Our sandbox measured about 12 by 6 feet and when it was filled with water, the kids would spend hours building dams, houses, and towns.  It was a bit of a mess, but oh my, how much fun they had with all that sand and water!  Is there anything more fun for a five year old boy than that?

The kids explored the woods and to this day, laugh about "Camp Dink-a-wawa" and the time their friend, Jonny fell through the ice.  We remember the big snapping turtle and clay covered bodies at the riverside and catching a woodchuck in a trap.

One winter, it rained and rained and our backyard flooded.  Then the weather turned cold and it froze and we had an ice rink that stretched across three backyards.  When it snowed, we could step out our back door and strap on skis and ski right out the backyard through the woods and cornfields.

Coty used to play "sports" with the kids when they were little, mostly baseball in the back yard.  It was all the kids against him and he had to hit and run and post "ghost runners" on the bases when he was at bat; when he was in the field he had to pitch, field, and try to get runners out.  It was great exercise for him and tons of fun for the kids, especially as they got better and could really give their Daddy a run for his money.

When the weather was bad, we had a basement.  It was a great place to play, ride big wheels and even roller blade. We would often go to the appliance store in town and pick up washing machine or refrigerator boxes that became houses or spaceships down in the basement.  Oh, I loved that basement.  Kids could just play and play and play and it never mattered if it was a mess because we never did anything down there but store a few boxes and do laundry.

I wish I could really describe that basement.  It had a big step between the old and new parts of the house aboe and an opening wide enough to serve as a stage.  We hung a curtain across it, lined up chairs in the lower section, and the kids put on plays - The Nutcracker, Aida, and plays they wrote themselves.  It also became the set for movies they filmed when Grammie came with her video camera and cousins were there to collaborate.  The first movie the kids made, "The Jeweled Necklace" is a family classic!

I wish my kids were sitting here beside me to tell me things they remember, because I'm sure they have better memories and stories than me.  The point is, the kids didn't sit in front of screens very much, we didn't pay for entertainment, and we didn't have too many structured activities. They just played, really played, indoors and out.  Looking back on all that, I know that it was a rather idyllic place to grow up - that house, that basement, that yard, that street, those woods and rivers. They had access to so much but really, we spent so little money on "stuff."  We made our own fun in so many ways back then.

There's more to say about friends and hikes and neighbors and our 4th of July parade and parties in the backyard and the library and swimming in ponds ... but I'll save it for another day.

What we did: We stayed home

When my children were small, we stayed home.  Imagine that.  We woke up in the morning, ate breakfast together, and did our jobs and schoolwork.  We stopped mid-morning for tea and a read-aloud, worked some more and then ate lunch.  Next it was quiet hour and then a bit more schoolwork for the older ones and then the rest of the afternoon outside.  Dinner together and then baths and the nighttime reading and telling of stories and then to bed.

As our children got older, of course there were the usual offerings of music lessons and sports.  Erin joined choir, Jonathan took piano lessons, Thomas guitar lessons, Andrew cello.  Matthew and Joel were still too young for lessons.  The lovely thing about where we lived is that it was a small, really small town, but it had a great, really great college.  That meant excellent teachers for all kinds of things, five minutes from my house.  I was very spoiled.  I could leave a baby napping at home with an older child keeping watch, drop a child off to a lesson and be back in a flash.  Very little car time.  I loved it.

Sometimes, when the children wanted to be involved in activities, we had to say no ... or wait.  I did not want to sacrifice family and home time to an endless round of practices and games. I didn't want to spend the entire day at the soccer field or basketball court with a baby in tow, so that everyone could play.  So, we compromised.  This season it's your turn.  Next season, it's his.  Now we'll come watch you practice and play. Next season, we'll all watch him.  Or, we persuaded Youth Center organizers to let us have our kids on the same team.  That worked for the two that were only twenty months apart.   Perhaps they'll say they were scarred by the experience, denied the opportunity to shine on their own, but people, it was a survival tactic.  I knew that if I had to be gone from home all the time, running to and fro, I would be a crazy woman and not the kind of mom my kids needed.

Since we were the only homeschoolers in town for a few years, there were no options for group activities like co-ops.  As the number of families learning at home grew, we started getting together from time to time, but we had no formal classes or co-op.  When we got together, it was to play, or put on a play.  Our basement was the stage for numerous child written, directed, and acted plays; our backyard, the stadium for our own version of the Olympics.

Don't get the idea that we never went anywhere - that we were some kind of weirdo recluses.  We visited friends and went hiking and swimming in the river together.  We were regulars at library story hour.  We went to concerts and got to know a lot of college students.  We visited neighbors - more on that in another post.  We were out and about.  But mostly we were at home

When I moved from that small, rural New England town to the suburban outskirts of a big NC city, I made a startling discovery.  People spent a whole lot of time in their cars.  Even those moms of young children who said they were homeschooling were in their cars - a LOT!  They were going to art class, science class, drama class, PE class, soccer, baseball, gymnastics, and orchestra.  They weren't homeschooling.  They were carschooling.  This was a little shocking to me.  Whatever happened to tea time and read alouds, to playing by the creek and bike riding, family meals and walks in the woods?  Somehow, listening to teaching CD's while finishing your fast food on the way to the next activity didn't strike me as conducive to family cohesion and the kind of learning life I wanted. (Yes, I know CD's are outdated.  But that's what it used to be. Now everyone has their own iPod and earbuds.  Even less family communication/cohesion as everyone is plugged in to their own thing)

It is true that, if you are homeschooling, there is great benefit as your kids get older to outside classes and co-ops.  We've been involved in our share since our move as our kids got older.  But I've always had to ask myself if the benefit of the class or activity is worth the investment of time running to and fro.  Often it is, especially with older children.  But with little ones, there wasn't much that trumped quiet, calm, orderly, creative, focused, free, work and play, indoor and outdoor time at home.

 

My good friend, Mary (front and center in the photo) just emailed this picture to me yesterday.

These are our old buddies in a group photo after our Treegano Olympics.  (TREE was the acronym for our group).  This must have been in 1998, around the time of the Nagano Olympics.

Can you find the Pinckney kids in this photo?  They're all in there!

What we did: Introduction

Whenever I visit my daughter, Erin, I run into a couple of young moms that I've known from before we moved away from New England.  When I knew them back then, they were very young moms with first babes.  Now, they are more experienced and have more children, three and five, to be exact.  That's a lot of diapers, sleep deprivation, first baby steps and birthdays.  Their mom-lives are busy and full as they each raise precious families.  Whenever I see them, they ask questions along the lines of "What did you do?" and "How did you ever do it?"  When I'm not around, they sometimes ask Erin, "What did your mom do?"

Photos unrelated to this post from recent visit up north

Our family is sort of "known" back there as the big family that homeschooled  (we have six children). We lived in a small college town - a fishbowl kind of town - where plenty of people know you and know your business.  I never minded that because, well, I didn't have anything to hide.  I couldn't hide anyway. I had the only 15 passenger van in town and people knew where I was whenever I went anywhere.

It's sort of funny now when I go back, to hear people talking about us.  My son-in-law, who works in our old town, gets interesting comments when people who meet him for the first time find out he is married to our daughter.  Oooooh, you're married to a Pinckney.

Anyway, back to the two young moms.  I've thought a lot about their questions since returning from my recent trip.  I've been wondering ... how did I do it and what did I do?  Time fuzzes the edges and I expect my memories have softened a bit.  What probably felt really hard back then feels nostagic-ly sweet these days ...babies that smiled and toddlers that played cheerfully and children that did their chores and finished their schoolwork with plenty of time to play peacefully outside and then come in for their baths and dress for dinner. Oh, wait ... that's not real life.  That's a fairy tale.  

The true story is that there were plenty of bumps in the road, discipline issues, smart mouth children (well, one anyway ; ), mishaps, mess-ups, frustration, exhaustion, occasionally the desire to run away to someplace quiet.  My dentist says that's why I showed up in his office for dental work.  I could sit and read pretty magazines without interruption.

I have more uninterrupted time these days so I thought I'd use some of it to share some memories of what we did.  This is not an advice series nor an attempt to advocate any particular style of homeschooling or living.  It is simply a recollection.  If you're a young mom looking for guidance; if you want a "how to" on child raising, organizing, etc. etc., you should go somewhere else.  (I'll share a few links at the end of this post)  If you just want to read a bit about how one family did it, some of our Ebenezer stories, read along ...

Julie and Mary Beth, and Erin, too, thanks for the spark.

A very few links because honestly, I don't spend that much time reading blogs about children and homemaking and schooling and all that jazz any more.  You probably know more good ones than I do. When I sit down to read online, other than my family members' and friends' writings, I mostly read quilt blogs these days!  But here are a few.  Feel free to share your favorites in the comments if you wish.  As my friend, tonia, says, we're all big kids here, so if you don't agree with everything, that's ok.  Read and glean.

Auntie Leila is very funny and thoughtful.  Check out the categories in her sidebar and you're sure to find something helpful, well-written, and wise.
Michelle and Stacey write about how they get through the day.  They have 8 young children, between them
Ann, of course, has many lovely posts on learning at home.
Susan is not writing her blogs any longer, but if you search them, you'll find some goodies on the learning atmosphere and home life.