The kids are having a muffin tin lunch today. The first time we had one was almost 3 years ago when we were doing a unit about nutrition, and we found foods from each food group to put into our muffin tin. (The links in that previous blog post will now take you to choosemyplate.gov, because they use a plate now instead of a pyramid.)

We have had muffin tin lunches many times since then, and the kids really like this fun way of preparing and serving lunch. I have seen a lot of variations on different websites and blogs, including themed muffin tin lunches. Ours are usually just whatever we have on hand that will fit. I usually let the kids help think of things to put in, and we always have chocolate chips in one section for a treat! It is just a way to add some variety to lunch time. Here is a picture of our lunch today:

And yes, those are French Toast sticks leftover from JonDavid’s breakfast out with Daddy this morning.

If you have muffin tin lunches, feel free to share your ideas in the comments. If not, give them a try .

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Parenting is full of difficult decisions, some of which have to be made quickly. Many of those decisions relate to the discipline and training of our children. As we see their behavior, we have to decide how to react to it. Praise, rebuke, reward, punishment, teaching, explaining—all of these are things we do as we raise our children.

Sometimes I fall into a trap of just trying to get through the day. As long as no one is bleeding and the house is still standing, then we’re doing alright! But I realize that is not really parenting. There are a lot of people who can feed and dress a child, but that does not mean they are good parents!

Sometimes I need to step back and remind myself about the big picture, the long term goals I have as a parent. I have to focus on more than just the immediate situation and think about what I really need to be teaching my children. I am not just trying to survive—I want more than that! What qualities do I need to develop in my kids? A few that come to mind are self-control, responsibility, politeness, compassion…think the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23. These qualities should the basis for the small decisions I make throughout each day—I should be improving them in myself, and teaching them to my kids.

Just the other day, my 4-year-old picked up a box of Froot Loops, spilled some on the floor, set the box down (he just wanted to see the pictures on the back of the box), and left the room. Now, the quickest, easiest solution would be to just pick up the cereal and throw it away myself. I could clean up his mess and move on to other things. But, what would he learn from that? He certainly would not learn to clean up after himself and take responsibility for his own messes. So, I called him back to the kitchen and told him to pick up the cereal he spilled. It took him a few minutes, and I had to step over it a couple of times, but he got the job done. And I made a small step toward a long term goal of teaching my kids responsibility.

I remember one of my children asking me for something, and when I said “no” he began to cry and jump up and down. Well, that is about as far into a “tantrum” as any of our children gets, because we just don’t tolerate it. I could have just given in and changed my answer to keep him happy. I could have just left the room and let him throw his fit. But quite frankly, those are the easy ways out. Those solutions would not help me reach my long term goal of teaching my children to have self-control, to be obedient, and to act wisely. Throwing a fit is rebellious and foolish. “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; The rod of correction will drive it far from him” (Proverbs 22:15). Will spanking solve the problem of rebellion and foolishness in a child? Many people say it won’t, but the inspired wise man says it will. On this occasion, a few swats to the backside put a stop to the fit, and I made a small step toward my goal of teaching obedience and self-control.

Just a note about teaching self-control—this quality is fundamental to being righteous. When children are allowed to have their way, get everything they want, say whatever they want, and do whatever they want, they do not learn self-control. We must help our children learn to control their emotions (particularly anger), their words, and their actions.

When we make decisions about parenting and training our children, we need to think long term. The small battles are important, and they all build toward our main goals—to raise children who are independent, productive, responsible, respectful, and most of all, godly. I think about what I want my kids to be like when they grow up, and I base that on what I believe God wants them to be. Then I remind myself to look past the spilled Froot Loops and make decisions that will train my children.

I am adding a new section to the front page of  It’s All Homework called “Featured Site.” I will be linking to a blog or other website that I find interesting, helpful, or just enjoyable! I just put the first one on there, and plan to update it at least once per month. I hope this will be a way for us to explore new sites and support other bloggers!

Last New Year’s Day, I gave each of my children a new wall calendar. They hung them next to their beds, and they look at them almost every day. It has really helped them pay attention to what the day and date is, and when a new month begins. They also anticipate and count the days until special occasions, such as birthdays or the day we are leaving on a trip. It seems like a simple thing, but they have really enjoyed and benefited from them. We have always had a calendar hanging in our kitchen, but they really liked having their own. I am definitely planning to make a yearly tradition of giving each child a calendar on New Year’s Day!

By the way, the ones I bought last year were from the dollar section of Target!

(Please consider this in the lighthearted nature with which it is intended )

1. You don’t have to look for those lists of school supplies at the front of the store. You just use the cheapest folders and pencils Mom can find.

2. No back to school clothes required. After all, the other kids are wearing your hand-me-downs!

3. No lunch money or packing lunches. And you can count french fries as a vegetable if you want to. Of course, you may have to fix your own lunch since there are also no “lunch ladies” and your Mom is always trying to make you learn crazy things she calls “life skills.”

4. Choose your own curriculum. You don’t have to “see spot run” if you don’t want to! However, you do have to learn to read and do math.

5. No doctor excuses necessary for sick days. There is no need to bundle up, go out in the cold, drive to the doctor’s office, find out you have a virus, and get a paper that says you can stay home. You are already home–so just stay there.

6. No early morning bus rides. Enough said.

7. No bullies. Well, if there are bullies, Mom and Dad take care of it in a quick and effective way.

8. No permission slips to sign. The phrase “field trips” takes on a whole new meaning for homeschoolers. And sometimes your field trips are actually in a field–you just never know what Mom will come up with.

9. You will be finished with your school work long before the kids at the public schools go home–plenty of extra time for doing chores. I mean, plenty of extra time to play outside. And you can make people look at you funny by being the only 3rd grader in the grocery store in the middle of the day.

10. You can convince your parents to do almost anything in the name of homeschooling. Want to go outside in the morning? Ask to take a “nature walk.” Want to have some cookies? Ask for a “cooking lesson.” Want to dig in the mud or play with rocks? Ask for time to do some “geological exploration.” You get the idea.

There are a lot of perks to homeschooling. If it is what you want to do and what you believe in, don’t let anyone talk you out of it. They just don’t know what they are missing!

Last spring I attended a homeschool convention in Cincinnati, and one of my favorite speakers was Julie Bogart. The most striking “bottom line” that I took from her talks was to separate mechanics from expression when teaching early writing. She had so many good ideas and suggestions, and described problems that I could really identify with, that it didn’t take me long to decided to buy her book The Writer’s Jungle. It is a whole manual/guidebook that I think I will reference many times over the next several years.I like her whole approach to teaching writing, and her book has helped shape all of our language arts activities.

I am implementing copywork for my kids this year, and today we did our first “Friday Freewrite.” I will probably talk more about those things, as well as our reading lessons, in future posts.

For today, I mainly wanted to share this blog post from Julie that I thought some homeschooling moms out there would enjoy: Beating the Homeschooling Blues (Instead of Singing Them). She has some good things to think about as we start our school year, and maybe to read again when we are in those long winter months and the excitement of new things has worn off!

On Monday our family toured Cascade Cave, which is part of Carter Caves in Kentucky. It is a nice area that is fairly close to our house, but that is the first time we had been there. Our science curriculum for this year has been about earth science, and the last lesson was about caves. Obviously a visit to an actual cave was a great compliment to that study, so we took off to see some actual stalagmites and stalactites for ourselves!

Our kids had never been inside a cave before, and this was a good one to start with. The tour group was small, so it was easy to keep up and to hear what the guide said. As soon as we got inside, Jacob began to point out the formations that he had learned about and seen pictures of. The guide repeated most of what was in the science lesson that my husband had taught them that morning, so it was a wonderful way to reinforce the information, both by hearing it and seeing it. He also included a lot of things that were not in the lesson, like soda straws and cave diamonds. We even saw a few bats way up on the ceiling! There is also a small lake of water that is fed by underground springs. We experienced total darkness in one area (and no one cried).  At the end we went into a section where there is an underground waterfall. The tour lasted about one hour and 15 minutes, and we all really enjoyed it.

Since this was a “field trip” for science class, I gave Jacob an assignment to do the next day. I printed out a few of the pictures that my husband had taken, and had him label each one–stalagmites, stalactites, columns, flowstone, blue-tinted flowstone that has stopped forming, soda straws, the underground pool, and the bat. I will include the pages in his portfolio (which we compile to meet WV homeschooling requirements), as well as a few pictures of him in the cave.

I must say, I have missed blogging, so I am finally sitting down and getting back to it!

I have been working on another project that I want to share–a new website called “It’s All Homework.” I am hoping to fill this website with helpful and encouraging articles about homeschooling and homemaking. There are several articles on there now, as well as a page of “Frequently Asked Questions” about homeschooling.

I also have some pages for “Readers’ Tips” that I would love to fill with ideas from you, the readers! There are so many great homemakers and homeschooling parents out there, and this is a chance to share some of your best tips with all of us!

I would love for all of you to take some time to look around the website, set up an account, and submit some tips!

And hopefully, I’ll be back here a little more often now, too!

There has been a scary trend over the past few years. Inanimate objects are going on a rampage. Guns, knives, SUVs, and many other things are taking the lives of innocent people day after day. And now I have learned that there are murderous cribs about, seeking to kill and maim our children.

“There’s a great urgency here. We have to make sure that no parent is unaware that drop-side cribs could kill their children,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., said in an Associated Press interview.

So, in order to try to get control of these renegade cribs, there is a push to ban them. That’s right, we must outlaw them. Because, we all know that the government making an item against the law is the answer to everything.

Consumer Product Safety Commission Chairman Inez Tenenbaum has pledged to ban the manufacture and sale of the cribs by the end of the year with a new standard that would make fixed-side cribs mandatory.

According to the AP article from which I am quoting, at least 32 children have been strangled or suffocated in a drop-side crib since 2000. That is 32 over a period of about 10 years. I have done some other research, and I am convinced that we should not stop with banning these drop-side cribs. There are a lot of dangerous things out there. I mean, besides the obvious cars, airplanes, buses, motorcycles, and four-wheelers, there are other objects that kill people much more frequently than 32 in 10 years. Did you realize that just in the year 2000, there were 650 people who died in a fall involving a chair, bed, or other furniture? There were 341 who died in a bathtub, and 567 died in a pool. What is Congress thinking, allowing us to still have furniture and bathtubs in our homes? People are being killed by these things! We really must get this epidemic under control. These inanimate objects have to be stopped.

I hope you can detect the sarcasm in my comments, and I want to clarify that I certainly mean no disrespect to those who have lost their babies in these tragic accidents. It is so sad when any baby dies in any way, and I feel so sorry for every parent who has had to suffer that grief. But are we really going to be able to ban every item that could possibly lead to an injury or death?

I am all for having laws that govern safety to a certain extent, and I pay attention to safety recalls put out by companies. However, I believe that the biggest part of the answer lies in just that–manufacturing companies and the natural course of the free market system. If an item is really unsafe, people will stop buying it. Sales will decrease, and the company will stop producing it. Companies are often looking for ways to make products safer because they know it will increase their sales. It is impossible to ban everything that can cause a death, and even trying to do so is simply not the answer.

In addition, objects do not kill people on their own. There is usually human error involved somehow. Someone dies in an SUV accident? Guess what–it is the fault of a driver, either of that vehicle or another one. A child drowns in a bathtub? It is the fault of a parent who did not supervise the child correctly. Sometimes the fault may be on the manufacturing end; someone used faulty parts or did poor work in constructing something. Or, perhaps whoever assembled a crib or other piece of furniture did not put it together properly. But blame is really not the point of this discussion. The point is that the government cannot step in and ban every object that “kills” someone. I think they have enough other things they could be doing.

–quotes from “Senator Moves to Ban Drop-Side Cribs, Associated Press, May 23, 2010

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