Happy first day of summer!
School has been out for a week now (for my kids) and today is the last baseball game for my son. His team went to the championships, won, and then he got picked for the all-star team. I was shocked at that, but happy for him, and smiled through gritted teeth that our baseball season would continue for a while longer. ;) This season has dragged out with all the extra games. It's been a very crazy spring and I am seriously looking forward to the end of baseball with the all-star game today!
I am also looking forward to just hanging out with my kids and doing some normal summer stuff! We've already been to the library, lost our first library book ever, broken out the slip and slide, made a few summer drinks from Pinterest, and done a little bit of homesteading.
For those of you that haven't been with me for a while, I plan summer weeks by theme based on what my kids want to learn about. They weren't nearly as focused on what they wanted this year, but my oldest did mention that he wanted to learn how they used to do things back in the old days. That led us to a conversation about homesteading, old and modern, and that is going to cover a big chunk of our time this summer.
I am really focused on time with my kids this summer. I think it's because my youngest will start kindergarte in the fall. It's kind of the end of a phase of life here in the Christian household. I am looking forward to the freedom of grocery shopping without kids in the fall along with the time to work on my curriculum store, as well as spending a lot of extra current time cuddling with all 3 of my kids and actually connecting with them. It's a good balance. I feel at peace with my motherhood right now, even though it's a bittersweet time.
So here's what homesteading lessons will look like for us this summer. We'll be making several things from scratch that we normally don't. We normally make ranch from scratch, but this summer we'll also make other condiments. We've already made mayo, and it was great! I used this paleo recipe from The Clothes Make the Girl. I'll probably never spend the $ on jarred olive oil mayo again. This was fast (7 min start to finish for us), easy enough for my kids to do, cheaper, and way more healthy!
We will also be making cleaners. I've made a few before, but we'll be making a lot more. If you have any tried and true homemade cleaner recipes, please put them in the comment section!
The kids are helping me more in the garden this year as well as we discuss things like growing your own food, permacultre, compost, organic gardening, etc...
And finally, we'll be visiting a friend who has chickens. We'll be learning about the various ways they can be beneficial to a homestead and the work that goes into having them.
I'm continuing to work on my veggie cookbook this summer. Having the garden will hopefully help me create a bit more. ;)
I have to confess to an impulse buy recently. I picked this up at the local grocery store the other day. I never buy recipe magazines anymore because I have way to many cookbooks and recipe magazines and I'm trying to not spend money on that. But this one was just too hard to pass up. Or I'm just too weak for my own good. ;)
I marked all the recipes I wanted to try (that's how I roll). 68! Yikes! I considered cooking my way through it and blogging about it, but 68 recipes would take a little too much focus off my cookbook experimenting time right now. But I'm still tempted. What do you think? Besides the fact that I'm an addict.
Other summer plans include learning some more chores. I like to teach my kids to do these when I actually have time to teach them the way I want it done, and to monitor the first few times and make sure they have it down. School breaks are awesome for this. Right now they're learning to clean their own bathroom. The girls are also learning to fold and put away their own laundry this summer.
We're making a lot of fun summer drinks from Pinterest recipes. So far, they've all been good. We'll be geocaching and doing some craft projects as well.
I'm hoping to get in a trip up north see my parents. I'm waiting until my mom is done with chemo because I don't want us to get her sick while she has no immune system.
I'm a lot more focused on my garden than normal this summer. So much so that I'll be making seperate posts about that.
What about you? What are your summer intentions?
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