Butter and other things

I made butter today! I pretty much just followed these directions (except I used my food processor), and I have butter! AND it was made from raw cream from the dairy. Very neat. I think Evan was upset that I didn't have anything for supper that would call for butter. ha He really wanted to try it out! So tomorrow I've got to start my bread. I'm completely out, anyway.
I've been trying my hand at sourdough bread lately, but I haven't gotten used to it yet. The last loaf was pretty dense, and we left not too long after I made it, so it got very dry. I stuck it in the fridge to keep it from molding, and today I cut it into cubes and made croutons out of it. They smelled so good baking in the oven! At least I didn't feel like I was wasting! My sourdough pancakes and sourdough pizza crust turned out great, so I'm happy with that.
We are still trying to keep our 15 minutes of "school time" as part of our daily routine, and I think it's going well. I've had to make several changes (banging, stomping, etc. while counting; standing at the refrigerator to go over letters), but he's learning his memory verses and getting very excited about that! :-) I've been looking at some book lists online and checking out books from those lists; the only problem is that they are long books. My vocal chords are going to be calloused by the time he gets old enough to read on his comprehension level! I still haven't found the limit to his attention span when I'm reading to him. My throat starts hurting before he gets tired of being read to. I shouldn't complain, though, because it is honestly a wonderful problem to have. I'm just having to learn to lay down things that aren't so important and make time to read to him.

School?

So, I have begun. I got The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading and started going through that with Nathan. The first lessons are just teaching the sounds of the alphabet, so I'm going to go through those and see how I like them. Also, at the end I can decide if we should go on, take a break, or go back through the letters. Or we could scrap the book altogether and decide to try something else. :-) The lessons are very plain, but I think I like that. So far, our "school" consists of prayer for the lesson, memory verse, counting to 30, and the lesson. All of this is usually done in about 10 minutes, which is just about all Nathan can handle. :-) It's funny how he can sit an hour or so at a time to hear a good book, but getting him to ten minutes of school requires at least one "we're almost done, and we're going to finish." I go back and forth on what I think, but for now I think it's good to train him to do something a bit uncomfortable as long as it's short.
I've been battling a sore throat this whole week, and last night my ear started aching. Ugh. So I've been trying to deal with that without going to the doctor. However, if it's still hurting tomorrow I'm going to go in just to make sure I know what it is. I just want a nice weekend! I started taking olive leaf extract today per my MIL's instructions, and I also started putting ear drops in my ears. The ear drops seemed to help quite a bit today. It's amazing how a dull aching pain can really throw one's day off. Anyway.
I'm desperately trying to go through my freezers and make a master list of the things I have in them. I am very thankful for my chest freezer in my laundry room; but if I were to give my opinion to anyone, chest freezers are very hard to dig through, especially when one is short.
Noelle has been drinking about 4 ounces of goat milk a day for the last few days. After being exhausted then getting sick, I think my milk supply was really off in the evenings, which was causing Noelle to wake up more at night. I started giving her some milk in a sippy cup at supper (nursing her again before bed), and she's been sleeping at night! Yay! Sleep for her means sleep for me, which means more milk, too! ha I'm very happy that she's been taking the milk, though, because when I first bought the milk she didn't seem interested at all.
One more random fact for the night: Noelle got three mosquito bites on her back yesterday in the 20 or so minutes we were outside. I found them as I was bringing her inside, and I immediately went to the internet to see what natural remedies there were. I opted to cut a garlic clove in half and rub it on the bites. An hour or so later, all that was left was little pinprick marks! I was impressed, so I thought I would pass on the info. ;-)

Whoa...

So, my oldest child is now four. FOUR. That means I have to really start thinking about the reality of teaching my child to read. I actually look forward to homeschooling my children and am not daunted by huge book lists or the magnitude of material that needs to be learned. I am slightly daunted by teaching my child to read. The main reason for my anxiety is my current indecision on which method to follow in teaching him. I have read Charlotte Mason's method, and I know that method would not fly in our house, if for no other reason than Evan's strong belief in phonics. :-) I am now reading The Well-Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise and wondering how their method would work in our house. Of course, I can never just leave the decision at face value; I must try to find a reason why one of them should work and the other not work (although I know that both have worked with children). I have reduced the decision down to this question: Should one teach children phonics rules from the beginning or just teach children words and let them make their own generalizations about phonics rules? If I spoke German, I would have no difficulty making this decision; but I do not. ha
So this is where the rubber meets the road. Can someone come and clean my house while I'm trying to make these decisions and implement my plan of action??

Today

I spent $22 at garage sales today. This is what it got me:
-coat for Nathan
-2 pairs of pajamas for Nathan
-6 or so girl dresses
-one set of illustrated animal encyclopedias (18 books)
-a 2-foot stack of quilt squares
-five random books
-"When We Were Young" by A. A. Milne and an organic gardening book
-two nature videos
-one pillowcase (hmmmm, I really want to try a pillowcase dress like this)
-one Robin Hood hat.
I think that's all. :-) The quilt squares are in really great colors and prints, so I'm looking forward to playing around with those. Hannah and I are going to make quilt-type wall hangings, but we may have to add in some of these new colors that we found.
In reading news, I am currently reading Charlotte Mason's Formation of Character, and I really enjoy the problem/solution setup. It's amazing how I read a book about character and find myself thinking of myself and my own character flaws more than about my kiddos. I am also reading Don Quixote, but I don't think I'm going to have time to finish it before I have to turn it back in to the library. :-) It's much lighter reading than what I have been reading (Wild Swans and There's No Me Without You).

Vacation

Okay, so I'd really rather a vacation include my husband, BUT that does not always happen. I'm at my parents' house with my kiddos and cousin, and it's rather amazing how much sleep I'm getting. I think being away from my house where I am constantly seeing things that need to be done is especially helpful. This is the first time that I've actually been away from home and gotten more sleep instead of less. Noelle is actually sleeping here (a first), so that is very helpful. :-)
The Charlotte Mason seminar was interesting. I think my biggest interest is how a Charlotte Mason education looks in the first few years. I want to know how other moms do things, especially moms with younger children. Two things I want to implement as soon as possible are habit training and Scripture memorization. Susan Shafer has a very interesting method of memorizing and keeping the Scriptures fresh in your memory. The habit training idea was not new, but it gave me the extra push to get started. I just have to pick one and begin.
I need to go now. Someone needs to be put in bed!

Life

Today, as I was pulling away from a local farm, I stopped and said to Hannah, "Did I really just buy goat milk?" Yes, I did. Would you like to know why? Sure you would. If not, go read someone else's blog. ;-)
My daughter had her 9-month appointment last Friday. It seems that we are starting a trend of my children falling off growth charts after they start crawling. Of course, Noelle started out more toward the bottom of the growth chart than did Nathan, so she fell off quicker. ha She's in the third percentile. Not technically off I suppose. But close. My doctor was not pushy, but he wants to see her gain weight. Do I know how much milk she is getting?? No, God must not have been thinking when he created female bodies. They don't have milkometers on them. For shame. What about pumping? Yeah, when am I supposed to get some time to hide in a room away from my almost four year old to pump? So he suggested adding a formula feed in to her diet or trying to get something extra in her. I'm going with the something. I've been letting her go at her own pace with veggies and stuff; you know, letting her enjoy her food. But no more! Purees rule the roost from now on! Beef with liver! Peas! Beans! An egg yolk a day! And to top it all off, I'm going to try to add in a goat milk feed a day. I'm not sure how that will go, but I'll at least try. The problem at the moment is that, if I am nearby, she doesn't want the stupid goat milk. I mean, she'd much rather have me. (Sounds like a starving baby, huh?) Anyway. There's the rant. I would bemoan the fact that I have skinny children, but we're skinny people! What do they expect?!
I think the fact that I spent most of the post talking about my problem and not the goat milk shows how "normal" my weirdness has become. So I'll answer your questions.
Why goat milk? It's much closer to human milk than is cow milk.
Why not formula? Evan read on one of the cans' list of ingredients "corn syrup solids." Nope, not going there. Or, not until I try everything else! (I'm really going to try not to go on a rant about formula, really, because I could go on and on for days.)
What am I thinking? Well, at the moment, I'm thinking babies who are breastfed past six months should have their own chart made with statistics only from breatsfed babies. ;-)

Okay, on to a new topic.

We went to a farm this morning and picked blueberries with a couple of families from the Charlotte Mason group. The trip was almost called of on account of rain and several families didn't go because of the mud, but we went! And it was wonderful! It sprinkled on us a bit, but it was cloudy, cool (for this area), and great! Then, to top it all off, I got my four pounds of berries for free! Yay! (Plus, one of the ladies said that her baby had been in the negative on the growth chart, and he was just fine. That made me feel a little better.)
I'm also going to a Charlotte Mason seminar this weekend (Friday night and Saturday morning), and I'm getting so excited! Yay! Yay! Yay! ha ha

Interesting

So I found Honey for a Woman's Heart, requested it from my library, and picked it up on Thursday. I absolutely love our library system. I get online, request a book, pick the library where I want it to go for pick-up, and then pick it up at my weekly library run with Nathan! It's wonderful. Truly. I even do it with his books so I feel like I'm actually getting some books that I really want him to read rather than whatever (almost literally) falls off the shelf while I'm in the library with him and Noelle.
Back to what I was saying. Honey for a Woman's Heart just makes me want to read! ha I got Evan to take me to the downtown library that night to pick up several books that I wanted to read. One of the ones I picked was Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang. It's a biography by a woman about herself, her mother, and her grandmother. I am about half-way through it, and I am learning quite a bit about recent Chinese history through the eyes and experiences of someone who lived it. Very, very engaging.
So, now I'm loving the Charlotte Mason method of education even more. :-) I can see how much more one can learn by reading a biography than by reading a textbook full of the facts. Chang's story definitely draws you in and helps you understand a litte more why some of the events in Chinese history happened. I am actually about to let myself read for 10 minutes before the kiddos wake up. I'm hoping to finish by Thursday. :-)
On other fronts, I'm just chugging along. I am thankful that God's mercies are new every morning, especially in the child-rearing area. I am constantly brought to my knees by the whole experience, but I suppose I shouldn't complain about that. Maybe I should just learn to never get off my knees. :-) I am learning to let go of (or lay down) things that are not as important and focus on them, especially Nathan. I love having a clean house, complete menu plans, sewing projects, and so on. However, this is a time of intense growth for him, and I feel that I have to slow down and be there. Completely. Training, loving, talking, laughing, telling stories, reading books, looking at whatever in the world he thinks is important to look at, and just being with him. I feel like there are so many character traits that could go good or bad during this time, but I have to be watching and vigilent because the easiest path is not the best. And it's so hard. Because I like to do other things. Like write incomplete sentences. But I have to remember what is important and that raising a child is wonderful but a sacrifice.
How's that for a random post?