I Should Have Known

There's this site I like to go to that is so cool. It's done by a family in L.A. that turned their small city lot into a gardener's paradise. Seems like every square inch outside has been put to good use, whether it's for growing vegetables or goats.

This family has so many clever ideas, and I love reading about them. I've been popping by there for some time now, so one would think I would have figured out something about this free-spirited family that seemed very likely. But I had to stumble on to this page to learn what I should have figured out a lot sooner.....they were a homeschooling family! Duh.

It's Official: "The Imperfect Homeschooler's Guide to Homeschooling" is In Print

I can't believe it's been almost a week since I posted, but we've been a bit busy. On Tuesday the semi pulled up with our new books! The neighbors were probably trying to figure out what the heck was going on over here. You don't see many semi's in this neck of the woods :)

The books look beautiful! They also take up a lot of room, but we stored some of them in the garage and the rest were taken into the house so they could be packaged and shipped to everyone who ordered a copy via our pre-publication special. Thank you to all of you who ordered a copy of the book! It took three of us (dd16 was a big help) a couple of days to get all of the orders together (good thing no one was planning to take photos of our living room for Architectural Digest, as there were USPS containers all over the place for a while.) The good news is that we loaded up the van this morning and handed all of the boxes over to the good people at the U.S. Postal Service. So your books are on the way!

We were excited to learn that Eclectic Homeschool Online has already reviewed the book. If you haven't been to that site before, you're in for a treat. They offer anything a homeschooling parent could need to make her job easier. Thank you, EHO, for the lovely review :) Rumor has it that another review should be popping up before too long over at Homeschoolbuzz.com.

Now that the book is out, the hard part starts: marketing it! And of course, I can now finish the other book I was writing before I got distracted transforming this one from eBook to print. All of this takes a lot of time, and I can't work at it full-time thanks to that little thing called homeschooling that we still do every day. Still, homeschooling is my priority!

Our Entrepreneurial Homeschooler

Way back when I read the book that turned me on to homeschooling, Home Grown Kids by Dr. Raymond and Dorothy Moore, and then their subsequent books, one of the things the Moores described that fascinated me was the opportunity homeschooled children had for entrepreneurship. My older kids were babies then, but I could just picture them someday sitting behind their own little lemonade stand.

They did have lemonade stands when they got older, and I remember one summer when they made a killing by selling cold pop and homemade brownies to people attending one of our garage sales. One of our daughters also sold handmade cards door-to-door. I’m sure there were other entrepreneurial experiments that I’ve since forgotten.

They learned so much from those experiences, and lemonade stands were just the tip of the iceberg. Back when I first read that book, how could I (or the Moores) have foreseen the advent of the Internet and its usefulness for entrepreneurs of all ages? Indeed, I never would have imagined that I would someday be writing and selling my own homeschooling books via the Internet.

Well, homeschooled children have that same opportunity, and our dd16 has taken up the challenge. She’s gotten so many compliments on the funny stuffed fabric creatures she makes that she recently set up her own online shop to sell them. She’s still in the process of adding her products to her shop, but already has quite a few creatures online. You can see her shop here. Feel free to look around; she loves having visitors browse her shop :)

This has been a great exercise for her. She keeps track of all her expenses very carefully, including the time it takes her to make each creature (around two hours including design time). She’s careful to use her raw materials conservatively (no waste). It took her a while to figure out how to use etsy.com, and she discovered that the site offers very cleverly designed virtual forums where she can learn more about marketing her wares. All of this has taken a lot of time, but being homeschooled, she has more free time than she would if she were in high school all day.

She's in 11th grade, and we’ve been studying economics (Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell, excerpt here) since the fall. But I have to think that the things she’s learning right now by setting up her little business are at least as valuable, if not more so, than what she’s learning from Dr. Sowell’s book. Add in the dinner time discussions her dad and I have about our own businesses, and I have to think she’s fortunate to learn real-life economics in her daily life. That she has the time for all of this is yet another blessing of homeschooling.

Spring Break!

We're taking this week off of school for our spring break. The funny thing about doing so is that it doesn't seem much different than an ordinary day except that the kids were allowed to sleep late and we didn't do any bookwork.

Otherwise, dh and I have been busy working, dd16 is hard at work on her new etsy store (she sells adorably silly stuffed animals that she sews; I'll have a link soon) and novel #2, and dsds15 is enjoying the fact that he was able to watch "The Flintstones" in the morning instead of waiting until after we're done with his school work.

We did travel to see family over the weekend and just got back yesterday, but today it seems as though we never left. Just another day....time flies when you're having fun!

The View When We Do School

We "do school" in the dining room, and this is our view from the table. On the left is a clock my husband made recently. (The bridge in the background of the clock face is the one here in town.) On the right is a frame he made, and it holds a glass mosaic made by dd24. They are planning to sell both his clocks and their framed mosaics this summer (we live in a tourist area called Door County).

In the middle is our sign of spring: the first of the five pots of bulbs I planted last fall. I love to force bulbs. You just plant a few pots of them in the fall, keep them some place dark and very cold over the winter (we used the garage cupboards), water them once a week or so, and come early spring, you have flowers! This particular pot is full of daffodil bulbs. My favorites, however, are hyacinths. They smell heavenly!

And in the background you see snow, lots of it. I love snow, but even I'm starting to tire of it. We've had a total of five feet of snow this winter thus far. Sigh.

Homeschoolers in Country Woman magazine

Got the latest issue of Country Woman magazine today (August/September 2007) and was happy to see not one but two features about homeschoolers. The first is a profile of a large homeschooling, self-publishing family in Wisconsin, and the second reports on the accomplishments of several different homeschooling families who are CW readers.

If you've never seen a copy of Country Woman, you're in for a treat. There are no ads, no articles about celebrities, fashion or gynecological issues.....just articles about normal women, their crafts, their recipes and their families. My mother-in-law gave me a subscription many years ago and kept it going as an annual Christmas gift, and I sure appreciate it!

Thinking Bloggers

Jane over at Indiana Jane's Homeschool Notebook was kind enough to nominate me for a Thinking Blogger Award. It takes one to know one; it would be well worth your time to check out her blog.

Now I need to nominate five Thinking Bloggers. I must nominate Jane herself, as I enjoy her take on things, and particularly how she applies her way of looking at life to what she blogs about.

I hate to seem like I'm copying off of her, but one of Jane's nominees, Susan's Pendulum, is also one of mine. I enjoy her take on many different subjects, and I relate to her because, like me, she has young adult children.

Dana over at Principled Discovery is always presenting challenging questions and sharing well-thought-out answers. Don't go there if you're sleepy, though...you need to be sharp when you read Dana's posts.

Why Homeschool is a great place to drop by for information and issues. The Cates do such a good job with this blog, and are also to be commended for starting and running the wonderful Carnival of Homeschooling.

Finally, Herrick the Deliberate Agrarian can always be counted on for thoughtful posts about issues relating to both Christianity and agrarianism. I don't always like his photos, though...scroll cautiously if you have a weak stomach, because he has some visually instructive posts about things like preparing very fresh poultry that I can't handle :0

Those of you I've just tagged now need to write a post describing five bloggers who make you think; in that post, please include this link and, if you wish, the "Thinking Blogger Award" as you see it at the top of this post.

Fiddling While Rome Burns.....

There must not be anything important going on in this world when we reach the point where people consider the naming of their new baby a major source of stress.

When I read about people spending hundreds of dollars to hire so-called experts ("nameologists," and I am not making this up) and numerologists to help them choose a name for their child, I realize that the world really has gone mad.

Then there's the remorse of those foolish people who neglected to hire an "expert":

Karen Markovics, 36, who works for the planning department in Orange County, N.C., spent months reading baby books and scouring Web sites before settling on Nicole Josephine. But now, four years later, Mrs. Markovics says she wishes she'd chosen something less trendy -- and has even considered legally changing her daughter's name to Josephine Marie. "I'm having namer's remorse," she says.

I'd hate to be the poor four-year-old whose mom informs her that she's changing her name because she doesn't like it.

And how about this gal? I wouldn't put money on the future of her marriage:

Madeline Dziallo, 36, a beautician and mother of two in LaGrange, Ill., turned to a consultant when naming both of her children, Ross, 3, and Natalie, eight months. That consultant, Maryanna Korwitts, a self-described nameologist based in Downers Grove, Ill., charges up to $350 for a package including three half-hour phone calls and a personalized manual describing the name's history, linguistic origins and personality traits. "She was an objective person for me to obsess about it with rather than driving my husband crazy," says Mrs. Dziallo.

No, we wouldn't want to get the husband involved in naming his own child.

Despite my frustration at reading silly things like this, I'm thinking I might as well jump on the bandwagon here and set up an easy and profitable business for myself. I'll charge expectant parents $150 (a real bargain compared to the competition!) to email them the right name for their baby, and then, to save myself time, I'll just email them all the same name: Ditz Jr.

Calling P.T. Barnum, or whoever really said "There's a sucker born every minute." I think I might just be on to something.

How to Get Your School Day Started Early

We got an early start on school today. This is not normal for us. I used to get 'em up bright and early, but nowadays I take longer to ease into the day, and the kids don't mind waiting until I'm ready. But we had a house showing appointment scheduled for early morning, so we had to get it together earlier than usual.

Realtors aren't crazy about us being home when they show the house, but we just can't leave for every showing. My dh would never get any work done, and we wouldn't get much school done, either.

I always wonder what people think when they see us in the house on a weekday. I imagine we cause a lot of people to scratch their heads. There's Dad in his office, working on his computer. And over in the dining room are Mom and the kids, schoolbooks spread all over. Do visitors think we're weird? Judging from the questions I've had in the past, it's very likely that they wonder if we ever get tired of being home together every day (the answer is no, btw).

Do they wonder if we homeschool because we don't like the public schools? So far we haven't had any questions like that, but I'm sure somewhere along the line, someone's going to ask us why we homeschool. My answer would be that we were homeschoolers before we came here, and we'll be homeschoolers after we move. It's just what we do. If they're worried about the schools, they can go talk to my neighbor, whose six kids have attended local schools over the 19 years both our families have lived here. One of her sons just graduated from college as a music teacher, and another is about to finish medical school and start an optometry practice. They've done pretty well so far.

Being on the market when you're homeschooling and running two in-home businesses is no fun. You have to drop what you're doing to pick up the clutter and drag out the vacuum cleaner every time a realtor calls to show the house. It gets old real quick. But it's what we have to do so we can move on.