Weekend Road Trip

We spent all day Friday and Sunday driving so we could be in Nampa, Idaho for my parents' 50th anniversary celebration on Saturday.

It took us just over 13 hours to get there. We averaged 66 mph with 5 stops on Friday, so it was a long day in the car. Lyle did all the driving. The girls were content with their earbuds in the back seat. The dog and the guinea pig went along, too, and rode in the back of our Jetta wagon. We put our car-top carrier on for luggage.

Laura and I entertained ourselves as we drove along by snapping pictures, posting them to Instagram and Facebook, and texting them to friends and family.

I love the scenery out west!

On Saturday we all gathered in my brother's yard for family pictures.

My sister is the "real" photographer in the family, and she took the portraits.

Me? I snapped a few shots of the men with their heads under the 1949 Chevy pickup...

...and one of the yard, just because I thought it was so pretty with the morning sunlight streaming through the trees.

 That afternoon we had a "party" with cake, family trivia games, and a slide-show of family pictures over the years. It was a fun day.

On Sunday morning we started home again.

We stopped to stretch our legs at Shoshone Falls in Twin Falls, Idaho...

...and then headed on down the road, through the salt flats of Utah...

...and through the mountains of western Colorado...

...and made it safely home again.

It was a good trip.

Summer Learning

As I've mentioned before, we cultivated a lifestyle of learning in our family. We were always eager to take a break from formal schooling for the summer, but the learning never stopped.

Summer days were definitely more relaxed and the kids had plenty of free time for playing outside and pursuing their individual interests. I think that's very important. I've noticed families who have practically every minute of the day scheduled for their kids year 'round... with sports, private lessons, and organized group activities. For my family, a little of that kind of thing went a long way. We found it worked better for us to keep our schedule flexible to allow for spontaneous activities.

When I was growing up my mother was very good to take us to the library weekly, especially through the summer. I remember devouring stacks of just-for-fun books. The library sponsored a summer reading program with a goal of a certain number of books to read by the end of the summer. I usually passed the goal within the first week or two, as I was a very avid reader. I continued that tradition with my own children. Sometimes we participated in library-sponsored events, and sometimes we just went to the library and checked out stacks of just-for-fun books.

 Mostly, though, our summer learning wasn't even that structured. My husband and I have made it a point to watch for and take advantage of teachable moments as we go about our normal lives.

Our family especially enjoys camping and travel. When we travel we find out where museums, national parks, and historical monuments are along our route, and we plan in extra time to stop and learn. My husband just automatically pulls over if we see a sign for “historical marker” along the way. Often we don’t even get out. We’ll just read the sign aloud, and talk about whatever historical event may have taken place at that spot, and then go on. Sometimes it doesn’t even take 5 minutes.

Here are a few of the educational benefits we have discovered while camping:

• Nature Studies 
• Survival Skills 
• Primitive Cooking 
• Physical Education (hiking, biking, pumping and carrying water...) 
• Exploration and Discovery 
• Socialization (They always meet any other kids whose families are camping at the same time!)
• Reading (A very relaxing way to spend a lazy afternoon at the campground, when electronics aren't an option!) 
•  Photography 
•  Astronomy 
•  Meteorology 

And that's not mention the great family relationships we are building in the process! What does your family like to do in the summer?

Enjoying the Journey

It's a family road-trip. The car is loaded and stocked. The kids are buckled in. And so... you start off. You're barely on the highway when the first kid asks:

"Are we there yet?" 

Patiently you explain how much further there is to go. It doesn't make much difference because a few minutes later:

"Are we there yet?"

And so it goes throughout the day, until you are ready to pull your hair out in frustration.

While I've seen this scenario in comedy movies, I'm happy to report that my children actually never did that much, though we have had our share of family road-trips. We cultivated the attitude that "getting there is half the fun."

If you've read my blog for very long you know that my family loves road-trips. We can easily spend 15 hours or more a day driving, and have very few complaints. We enjoy conversation, audio books, travel games, looking at the scenery, and stopping at points of interest. And yes, we do look forward to arriving at our destination.

Today's topic for the Sonlight Blog Party is to share the best homeschool advice I've been given, and it's very similar to "getting there is half the fun."

Rather than focusing on the daily ups and downs, 

enjoy the journey.

I remember the daily ups and downs. How excruciating it was to sit beside an emerging reader listening to her laboriously sound out the words in her first grade reader. Days when it seemed like we didn’t accomplish anything we meant to. Days when I wondered if the kids were really learning, or if they would be better served going off to public school.

"Are we there yet?"

Mixed in with regularity were the delightful days reading piles of wonderful stories… and laughing and learning together.

The years went by way faster than it seemed like they should, and before we knew it we had arrived at our destination. It was a wonderful journey!

Happy New Year!

The new year has arrived and as promised, I am sincerely going to try to blog more often. Obviously, it's not going to be daily, but maybe I could manage weekly... or at least, more often than quarterly. How 'bout that? Reckon that will keep my Fan Club* happy?

While I didn't maintain my blog as well as I would have liked in 2014, there are enough posts to give you a good idea of our Year in Review, so I'm not going to do that. However, we weren't able to be together with any of our extended family during the Christmas season, so I thought I'd share some of our recent activities.

We kicked off the festivities early in December with an interchurch Christmas brunch at Country Buffet. The highlight of the morning was the white elephant gift exchange.

The next week we were invited to an Ugly Christmas Sweater party. Rather than going out and buying ugly sweaters, we got creative and decorated some old sweaters we already had. Our family spent one whole evening working on our sweaters. I said, "After all this work, I hope somebody in our family will win one of the prizes!" And turns out... they did!

 Laura's "sweater" featured a stocking with a teddy bear tucked in it, a letter to Santa, sparkly pom-poms and jingle bells... and the pièce de résistance.. an obnoxious violin that played Christmas songs. She won the Ugly ribbon (3rd place.)

And then Lyle won the Ugliest ribbon (1st place) with his tableau of Frosty getting run over by an SUV! He and I had worked on his sweater design together. I thought he could have a scene of a car hauling a Christmas tree with a snowman as part of the scenery, but he decided that it needed a little more drama than that. I guess it paid off because everyone seemed to love the snowman parts flying everywhere!

The actual week of Christmas was pretty rough at our house, as both girls had a nasty round of the flu... Laura early in the week, and Rebecca on Christmas Day. Lyle and I were grateful to not catch it this time around!

 We had a nice day at home on Christmas Day. The day started off sunny and mild. Lyle built a fire in our backyard fireplace and smoked a turkey breast on the grill for dinner. He enjoyed watching the fire while he visited on the phone with his mother.

We didn't know how smoking the turkey on the grill would turn out. My dad has been smoking turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas for probably 30 years, so it's kind of a tradition in our family. This year between work, church, and friends, I ended up having three different Thanksgiving dinners... and not one of them served smoked turkey. We haven't been with my folks for the holidays for several years, and I just missed Dad's tasty smoked turkey! So I asked Lyle if he thought it would work to smoke a turkey breast on the grill (since we don't own a smoker). He did some research and said he thought it wouldn't be too hard. He has a little metal box in which to smolder wood chips for the smoke flavor. I soaked the turkey breast in my Dad's recipe for brine for 24 hours, and then added a pan of water for moisture. It worked perfectly! So now we know--a smoker is not necessary! I expect we'll be enjoying smoked turkey more in the future.

And then the snow arrived! The clouds rolled in and the wind kicked up on Christmas afternoon, and the snow started falling. It has been cold and snowed more several times since. But still, we have seen some sunshine in between. After all, this is Colorado!

Thus concludes the synopsis of our Christmas celebration. Looking forward to seeing what 2015 has in store!

*Charter members of my Fan Club include my parents, my husband, and my children... and a few others who have let me know that you miss my blog. I do appreciate your encouragement. It means a lot!

Helen Hunt Falls

We had company for the 4th of July weekend this year. Two of Lyle's brothers and their families were in the area. On Saturday we drove into the mountains outside of Colorado Springs to hike along Helen Hunt Falls.

Some of us only made it up to the bridge over the falls looking out over the parking lot.

 It was lovely shady place to sit on the rocks and enjoy the splashing stream tumbling over the rocks.

The men and kids hiked on up the mountain. I'm not sure where it took them and or what they saw, but I guess it was a pretty good hike.

They stopped at the bridge on the way back down.

No telling what the brothers were talking about... but they enjoyed being together. They don't get to see each other very often, since one lives in Kansas, one in Idaho, and one in Colorado.

We look forward to finding other pretty places to hike around here.

Celestial Seasonings Tea Factory

Our sight-seeing expedition on Saturday took us to Boulder to the Celestial Seasonings Tea factory. This is something I had wanted to do at various times we had been in or through Colorado on vacation. Since Boulder's a little off the beaten path we never had worked it in.

The tour starts in the "tasting room" where we were given our "tea kits" (tickets) in the form a 3-bag sampler pack of tea to take home, along with a little cup for sipping samples of various teas while we waited for the tour to start.

Photos weren't allowed inside the factory, so I have no pictures to show you. The first thing we noticed when we went in was the strong fragrance of tea and herbs. It was so interesting to see the huge bales of dried tea and other botanicals and see how it was processed. The Mint Room was the most impressive part of the tour. We came to a garage-style door painted with red-and-white stripes. The tour guide raised the door and invited us to step inside. There really wasn't much to see, but oh, the smell! Dozens of wrapped bales stacked high above our heads isolated into a vault-like room concentrated the fragrance of mint into an intense experience. The Mint Room is where they store peppermint, spearmint, and catnip.

 The tour guide told us that Celestial Seasonings' best-selling tea is Sleepytime. (So of course, one of their photo props was the Sleepytime bear.) Chamomile is the second best-selling, with peppermint being third. Peppermint has always been my favorite herbal tea, though I do enjoy others as well. We were also told that most of their peppermint comes from Washington and Oregon. There were peppermint fields near where we lived in Idaho, as well. I always enjoyed driving past them at harvest time. Mmmm!

 I think my family wasn't too sure about going on a tea factory tour when I first suggested it, but they admitted that it was more interesting than they expected it to be. And of course, we had to bring home a few "new" teas to try.

Spring Break Staycation

This past week was my dad's spring break (as a school bus driver) so he and Mother brought Rebecca home and spent the week with us. Regrettably, I had to work most of the time they were here so we didn't have time to do a lot of sight-seeing during the week. Mostly we just enjoyed visiting in the evenings. They headed back home on Friday morning.

As it turns out, Lyle and I both had Friday and Saturday off, and the weather was beautiful, so we decided to do a little sight-seeing with the kids. On Friday we decided to visit the Garden of the Gods outside Colorado Springs.

It was a beautiful, sunny day but the breeze was a little chilly so this turned out to be a good choice, as we could see a lot from the car.

We stopped at several pull-outs to take pictures.

We did go on one short hike. 

The rest of the family even climbed on some of the rocks for a better view. I was content to stay on the trail and snap pictures.

We are thoroughly enjoying exploring our new home area. We have a long list of things we'd still like to see and do, and as the weather warms up I'm sure we'll manage to fit in a few more.

Pumpkin Patch

 One of our favorite fall family activities is visiting the Green Bluff area near Spokane, and making a tour of the orchards and farms. We like to get pumpkins... and apples... and kettle corn... and cider... and harvest-y things like that.

 This past Saturday was the day we had decided to go. Turns out that was a good choice. The day was sunny and just cool enough to really feel like fall. The kind of weather you want for an outing in the country.

Mostly I had fun taking pictures of all the pumpkins. The ones in the pumpkin patch as well as the "sweet li'l punkins" that came along with us.

It was a good day!

Camping in the Fall

 Late summer and early fall seem to be when we get most of our weekend camping trips in. I love the weather this time of year. Sunny days with brilliant blue skies-- warm in the sunshine, but jacket-weather in the shade-- and crisp evenings once the sun goes down. Just perfect for enjoying a campfire.

 My favorite part about the campfire, though, is the man who does the cooking. Come to think of it, that's one of my favorite parts about camping. He just assumes he's in charge of cooking. Laura and I aren't stupid enough to try to convince him otherwise. We won't complain about relaxing by the fire watching him.

 For our family, camping is all about getting away for a day or two and just relaxing. And yes, the electronic devices usually come along. We realize we aren't truly "roughing it" but if we don't care, I expect no one else does either.

 Over the years, we've made a lot of great family memories on camping weekends, even when we don't do much but just sit around and look at the trees. It's a good opportunity to chat and laugh and read...

 ...and take pictures...

...and then come home and blog about it.