What Fun We Had!

In store for todays blog is a peak back over our summer. Starting in July and working straight through till August.

July started with a bang! My Brother in law and niece came for a visit for the first time in 8 years from Nebraska. Together we caravaned up the state to Eureka Ca to visit my husbands parents and have a family reunion. The first time my husbands siblings have all been home all at the same time in nearly 20 years!

The drive is always beautiful as we wined our way through the mountains going to the coast. Along the way we discovered bigfoot! He resides in a little town on Highway 299 in Northern California. He is very friendly as you can see.

Once we arrived in Eureka the gathering commenced. We took family portraits at a professional studio where lord help that lady there was 13 of us, 3 of which were grown men who behaved as if they were 3! We watched the fireworks from the front yard and promptly returned inside for hot cocoa with whipped cream on top.

We went and discovered the Loleta Cheese Factory where you can watch them making the cheese right there in the shop, as well as taste all the delicious fresh cheeses.

We wandered out into the garden at the cheese factory where we enjoyed the beautiful landscaping

I just loved these bottles nestled in between the plants

The gardens were such a delight, my beautiful daughter had to stop and smell the flowers.

The garden was filled with beautiful bright flowers.

We also explored the Gem & Mineral shop where the kids got grab bags of beautiful stones, and we enjoyed the museum.

These are stones made to look like food.

The vase is carved out of solid stone!

Beautiful gems inside the stone.

My youngsters looking over all the solid rocks that might contain their own gems.

We spent more time with family and then traveled home again, concluding our July trips. More adventures awaited us in August where we had a birthday to celebrate and a nature trip of grand proportions to enjoy. I will blog about those adventures tomorrow. For today I hope you enjoyed going back in time with me to relive the adventures of July.

The Garden

For those of you who were wondering how everything turned out there over the last few months here is your update!

In spite of our constantly forgetting to water things more then 2 or 3 times a week we have had an abundance of cucumbers even though all but one of my cucumber plants died off. The Watermelon took off as well, although we have not had a whole lot of fruit off the plants yet. I have a few cantaloupes that came up off the one plant that finally grew as well. The first box that contained lettuce, carrots, and bell peppers as well as a cherry tomato plant did well. We had a nice patch of carrots growing until a few weeks ago when some varmit decided to attack those delicious delicacies, pulling most of them out and eating them leaving the tops laying there, then chewing the tops off a few that it couldn't get out of the ground. My bell peppers never grew at all, I am not sure if the seeds were just old or if we never really got hot enough for peppers this year. We enjoyed many fresh salads and the children loved going out to the garden to pick the lettuce for our salads. The corn box did wonderfully well as well. We had at least 24 ears of corn on just 8 stalks of corn. We also have very large squash plants. They grew very large and we have had some wonderful large sized crook neck squash come out of the little box. The raspberries got forgotten a few times and we are hoping that they will be revived, but I am not so certain they will survive, the same for the blueberry plant.

I do not have any real recent pictures of the garden but here are a few of the ones I took just before we started to harvest stuff out of the garden. You can see the just how lush it is.

School Time

Since life got in the way we have not had a whole lot of school time. We have missed several park days, and the connection with others like us. Free thinkers are not so common but thankfully homeschoolers are becoming more frequent. Baby girl number 1 is on the mend and it looks like life may take on its normalcy soon enough. Being fall that means school time. As unschoolers this takes on a whole different vibe then most people who homeschool. I love that about our lives.

Unschooling is such a different experience for us. It took shape over a few years and many failed attempts at "traditional" school at home style homeschooling. We tried hard to make that school at home style work for us but it just didn't. None of us was satisfied, we all felt frustrated. In an attempt to find a way for us to all feel less frustrated we started exploring the world around us better. We all learned that we prefer to be out doors, off on a field trip or even building something with our own hands rather then sitting at a table and writing everything down to take note that the children were learning. My oldest loves to read but hates to be told what to read, my middle boy is a genius at building and figuring out how to make things, & my youngest two would rather explore everything around them then sit still long enough to learn from a book. This is how the journey started for us about 4 years ago.

Today I sit here pondering how this years adventure shall begin and what we will start with. Baby girl #1 is still in recovery mode and has not even cracked the books she so enthusiastically got at the library 3 weeks ago. My middle son has been doing co-op lessons the past few weeks via the phone and internet with a dear friend of ours. She seems to be able to get him to understand things better then I can at this point and I am so very grateful that she is in his life for this season. That leaves my youngest two who are ready to start their adventure. I see how they have grown and changed over the years and its hard to believe! They were so young just yesterday weren't they? Now they are ready for their very own learning adventures! I am not sure yet what their learning styles are and this will be the first step in figuring it all out.

So the new goal as of today... Figure out the youngest two's learning style! check in to find out what I have discovered and much more.

Life catches you by surprise

Sometimes when you have the best intentions of doing one thing life catches you by surprise! For example I was looking forward to creating this wonderful blog marking our progress in learning organically, my creativeness and the joys that are my daily life. Then life happened! We went out of town for the 4th of July for vacation, came home and my husband left for training with the Marines. I took the kids camping we had grand adventures and I came home fully prepared to blog fantastic pictures and detailed stories, most of which escape my mind now. While my oldest was away at the end of July visiting her grandparents she got seriously ill. They took her to the ER where the first Dr diagnosed her with an appendicitis. The second Dr wanted to run un-necessary tests and she refused only to have them send her home, less then 6 weeks later she was in the ICU with life threatening infections. She came home yesterday but it was certainly the most scary thing I have ever dealt with in my life. After this I expect daily life will seem rather dull and uneventful. I will take it!

My goals over the next few days in between taking care of my little girl is to get caught up on my blogging. I have tons of pictures to update the garden and its bounty! We are flushed with fresh veggies and some fruits. I hope to gain followers as this blog progresses and encourage those who are in this life with me.