Happy 1st Birthday Serenity!!!

My sweet little baby is growing so fast! I love you so much Baby Spaceship! Enjoy the sun that seems to have come out especially for your big day.

A Bunny Runs Around the Tree and Other Skills for Unstable Times

I have spent the last couple years studying ways to become more self-reliant, so I found this article very interesting. http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4259/ I hadn't thought about the need to walk where we need to go. I would be in a lot of trouble if we couldn't drive, esp since every friend we have is at least 2 miles away (and many are more like 10+ miles away). I suppose public transit will still be around even if driving becomes too expensive, and we made sure that the house we bought is right off a main bus line (so we can still get to HR for Mass and homeschool get-togethers!). Then there is the whole thing about needing good walking shoes...I just got running shoes for Damien who is in CYO track this year, so he would be good, but the rest of us would be in trouble if we had to use our shoes instead of relying on the car!

I agree 100% with the need to revamp American industries (and home-making skills) necessary for survival such as farming, carpentry, cooking, food preservation, sewing and shoe-making. OK, so technically carpentry and shoe-making are not necessary for survival, but they are critical for sustaining anything close to our standard of living now. These kinds of skills are actually more important to me as homeschooling goals than many academic subjects, but I am a little odd in my homeschooling tactics. Something not mentioned in the article, but is just as important as the other skills is homeopathic medicine. It is really neat to be able to successfully relieve and treat things like sore throats, ear infections, bronchitis (mostly for my incredibly stubborn husband who hates going to the dr and waits until I drag him there), burns and sinus infections with things I have around the house and/or can grow (I don't mean ibprofen or acetaminophen either, though I have and use both when needed). A huge *nod* to God's wonderful design of the human body and its amazing ability to heal itself! I have been known to take my avoidance of the dr farther than most people...the last time Vivian fell and split open her ear I would have put the 3 stitches in myself if I had lidocaine to numb her (much better than the $525 ER visit!).

I think my favorite line in the article is when the little girl tells her mom “you are a living GPS!” after mom used a map to find where she needed to go. Yep, I may just be further along in my self-sufficiency goals than I thought.

The Grand Basement Plan

I have been working on transforming my basement into usable living space, so I figured it would be a fun project to put up here. I already have my parent's room set-up and the laundry area is in much better condition (I'll try to post before/after pics of those soon) thanks to my sister's help over the last few Sunday afternoons. My goal is to get a hang-out room set up for Ariana by Easter. It won't be a bedroom for her to sleep in (since there are no egress windows), but a place for her to put her clothes, have a lot of her art stuff including her paint supplies and easel and her special fragile things that her siblings are so good at breaking - plus a place for her to be away from siblings when her friends visit.

Here is what I am starting with:

This room has been a storage room with holiday decor, sorted baby and kids clothes for growing into, and a collection of things to "go through". Part of my goal is to go through all the bags and bins of clothes and get rid of everything that doesn't fit in the bins I already have. Some of the bins can be seen in the picture above. That way I will have enough clothes for kids to grow into without having so many clothes that I get overwhelmed and end up with none of the clothes getting worn. I have already moved the holiday decor into my parent's room since that room is so large.

The next step for the room is to put in a floor, finish the walls, paint, add outlets and put in a door. Then we get to move Ariana's things down.

I Like His Style

I really like the way Stephen Crowder gets his point across. His post on global warming is pretty good too.

I'm It

Darcee tagged me, so here I go a-rambling...

1. I like to wander. Many times when I am driving somewhere with no time pressure, I will take a different road just to see where it goes. I used to take special trips - esp out where there are few people - just be out and about before the kids had classes to get me out of the house. The flip-side of this is not being a very good housekeeper because I dislike being home (and all the stuff that comes with the house) so much.

2. The wandering trait runs in my family and usually presents itself first in the form of 2-3 year olds who can amaze Houdini at their ability to get out of secure locations just so that they can wander the neighborhood (so far I have had only 1 child like that, but also a nephew, brother, uncle, grandfather and grandmother who all did the same thing as toddlers).

3. I have strong opinions on a lot of things, but I can be made to change my mind, frequently even, with logical and/or reasonable arguements. The only exception being that I don't question the Church's stand on issues (however the Church's stand has always been based upon reasonable and/or logical arguements that are only further bolstered with secular research, in my opinion anyway). My changing opinions make Jeff crazy because he likes to settle an issue and be done with it, fighting to defend his position "to the death" (or until he doesn't care anymore - which is how I won the homeschool battle). This could cause a real clash, but fortunately Jeff also tends to not care about much, and we avoid the few issues we clash on.

4. I love to learn and I look for opportunities to pick up something new regularly - knitting being the latest trick. I also tend to "file data" I pick up through observing the world around me. I remember doing this as young as 6 or 7 and being frustrated that others didn't make connections like I did because they missed things that were in the backround or happened over time.

5. If I could, I would pack up the family and travel across the US, visiting as many states as possible before we got too homesick. It would take a larger vehicle and a nice chunk of change for things like gas, food, lodging and souvenirs, plus a lot of vacation time for Jeff to accompany us. At this point the larger vehicle and uncertain economic times are the only things holding me back. The sense of adventure traveling like that would offer makes me want to throw caution to the wind and head out even if Jeff had to stay and work and we were crowded in the little van. On the other hand, the kids and I had a hard time when we went camping 2 days without Daddy, so I'm not so sure it would work out well for us, plus what fun is a family trip if we cannot share it as a family?

6. I could easily live without a TV, but not so easily without a computer and high-speed internet. Jeff is almost the opposite (I think he is equally attached to both), so I try to avoid complaining about the TV and watch shows with my husband to be a good wife.

7. I'm not very good at following rules, so I am going to break rules 4-5, at least until I can find 6 people I know with blogs who haven't already been tagged.

Here are the rules:
Rule #1 ~ Link to the person that tagged you.
Rule #2 ~ Post the rules on your Blog.
Rule #3 ~ Write 6 random things about yourself.
Rule #4 ~ Tag 6 people at the end of your post.
Rule #5 ~ Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their Blog.
Rule #6 ~ Let the tagger know your entry is up.

When the wind blows...

We used to live next door to the family that had this happen. In fact the tree that you see was on the property we were renting. We were always a bit nervous having so many big trees around, but I wouldn't have had the heart to cut them down either. Kinda makes me glad we have smaller trees or trees that would be unlikely to hit structures (there is only an apartment parking lot the direction the wind would blow a tree down) now that we own our house.

I remember once when Ariana sat at the base of that now fallen tree to draw and she ended up with so much sap in her hair that I was afraid I would have to shave her head to get it out. That was when I discovered the peanut butter treatment. It took an afternoon of peanut butter treatment followed by shampooing then more peanut butter, but by the end of the day the sap was all gone. I'm pretty sure that will be a lesson Ariana and I remember forever.

I'll have to try and get pictures of some of the collapsed cyclone fences around my area with stumps nearby. It is a pretty common sight. I think there are 8-10 on the main roads within a couple miles of my house. I didn't pay that much attention to the news on how gusty the wind was, but it was likely in the 60mph range for about 4 days (with constant wind in the 30-45 range). All I know is when a gust blew by you had to turn and hudle up a little to keep from being blown over. Last winter (or was it the winter before?...) we had 65-75mph gusts that took off my chimney cap. We never found any evidence of where it went, it was just gone. That is the price we pay for living near the Columbia Gorge!

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

I couldn't have said it better myself.