Strewsday Tuesday: Where Have You Been?

Between stress and the recurrence of morning sickness, it's been, may I say, a bad week.

I knew this would be a stressful month, and I thought bentos would be a nice distraction for me. However, instead I've been focusing very intently on my little people. And staying off the internet.

"When the student is ready, the master appears."
~Buddhist Proverb

Sometimes the internet is a helpful diversion and sometimetimes it feeds stress.

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
~Thomas Huxley

This week we've been back in the swing of making all our own bread. We don't eat a ton of bread, as I avoid wheat in our menu at both breakfast and dinner, but even so, it requires quite a bit of bread to get us through the week. The children LOVE making it. And there's a lot of math and science in breadbaking. Not to mention economics, as it saves us a pretty penny... since the only stuff I will buy costs between $3.50 and $4.50 a loaf. Ouch!

"I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught." ~Winston Churchill

More time in the the canyons and the parks. Rosie wants to learn the name of every flowering thing she sees, and Isaiah wants to learn the name of every rock and pebble. Need to aquire a few more nature guides!

"We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself."
~Lloyd Alexander

(Don't know Lloyd Alexander??? We adore him around here. Best read-alouds ever. And as a bonus, Dad or Mom will want just one more chapter, too.)

Isaiah continues his blog of drawings at www.isaiahsimages.blogspot.com. It's fun to see him so motivated. In addition, he's chosen to start a journal in which he writes every day. I find when projects like this are internally motivated, the outcome is far more exciting and 'educational' than when I plan and asign them. Sometimes it just takes a little person being ready, then finding the spark of inspiration. In this case, it was Eustace from Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

"The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions."
-Bishop Mandell Creighton

John Paul is into my belly- a lot. He talks to the baby and about the baby constantly. "Hold the baby. Kiss the baby. Come out baby." We have a particularly nice book of unborn baby photos we all look at frequently. Does that make it more real to him? Lots of age-appropriate discussion of human anatomy and how babies get born.

"I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly."
~Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

And, I think I have mastered my own granola recipe. It invovles soaking or sprouting several of the ingredients, then mixing, then almost dehydrating in the oven at 170 for 12 hours. Involved, yes, but SO worth it. I'm planning to post it, as well as our bread recipe and a couple other things I've been working on (while I was supposed to be making bento box lunches, right?). If cooking and nutrition were on the SAT, I teel ya' my kids would get full-rides to Yale and Harvard.

"We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time."
~Art Buchwald

And that is a little snippet of our week in review.