7 Successful Quick Takes

Occasionally life ticks along In a regular way without crisis or incident and you find that some of the things you are trying to do are having the results you hoped they would have. This doesn't happen very often in the clutter of my mind. I try lots of stuff and find that only a small portion of it carries on in usefulness and satisfaction. This might be such a brief moment I should probably document it. So here are some quick takes about stuff that's sort of working.

One

Those hooks Mat hung for me a week or so ago are turning out to be a dream. Bizarrely, the children believed my little speech about This Being Your Towel and These Being Your Hooks. A week and half of not any towels lying around all over creation, the size of the laundry really halved, and my blood pressure feeling somehow much lower and healthier. I say Bizarrely because what are the chances of a child listening to something you say and then doing it? Maybe everybody else's children in the whole world are better than mine, but my success rate on being heard and remembered is something, or at least it feels like 30%.

Two

I have long had it in mind to quit buying reams of bread at the store and start baking again. I used to make all our bread when I was covered in vomit and infants and doing way more things than I really had time for. But I slowly fell off what with holidays and how easy it is to go buy a loaf of bread. But my children eat a whole loaf of bread every time they eat bread at all and the price of bread isn't exactly going down. And then one day I woke up feeling really sad and angry and attributed it to the fact that I don't make bread any more. It seemed as good an explanation as any other. So I started again in earnest and I think we're all much happier. For one thing it just tastes better. For another, I'm pretty sure it's cheeper. Time to go get a 25 pound bag of flour, since I've managed to do it for two whole weeks.

Three

I have successfully weaned the children off an Xbox day and reclaimed it for school. After a whole long time of schooling four days a week, I can now say for certain that we really do school five days a week. This may not seem like that big of a deal, but as the children have gotten older and gone up and up in grade and I've had to add more subjects to each one, my greatest and most pressing need as been Time. “I just need more time,” I have whined for months. Well, amazingly, it seems like I have gotten it. Through a mixture of careful planning, cajoling, long explanations to the children, and treats, I have accustomed them to the task of doing school on a day they believed to be their own. For this alone I'm sure I deserve some kind of commendation. Maybe I'll eat a piece of bread to celebrate.

Four

And you know what else, in terms of congratulations and laurel wreaths, having done all the laundry, it turns out I don't have to do laundry every day. Once it was All Done…I'll just let that sink in for a moment…I rustled up some fancy duck tape and put the children's names on the big hampers. I have two rolling laundry hamper things with three bags hanging on each one, an incredibly wonderful gift a few years ago. Instead of having the children “sort” laundry by color, which panned out to be them throwing all the laundry on the floor in a big pile and then stirring it around, I decided that maybe they could each just have a bin. “Put your own clothes in your own bin,” I said, not believing for a minute that they would understand what I was saying with my lips. I said it again slower and louder, like when I'm trying to speak French. “Put. Your. Own. Clothes. In. Your. Own. Bin.” My thought is that if they could put their own clothes in their own bin, than maybe someday they could do their own blankety blank laundry. Believe me, I'm not there yet by any means, but it's a dream I hold dear. So I did all the laundry last week. And then I gave myself a little holiday and didn't go down to do laundry until Wednesday of this week. I expected the usual horrifying pile of clothes and insanity. But, get this, they put their clothes in their own bins……for real…..I'm not even kidding. They literally, for real, like in the true sense of the word Literally, took their own clothes and instead of flinging them down on the floor in the usual “I hate my mother” gesture, put their own clothes in their own bins. I'm not kidding you, I almost started crying.

Five

Long have I struggled to do art in the course of our homeschool life. Not being an artist or knowing anything about anything, except that I miss the beautiful Botticelli calenders hanging in my longed for home in farthest Africa and look at them often in my mind's eye and weep internal homesick tears, I carefully scraped and budgeted my homeschool year to include this beautiful and life giving box.

I read about them ever so long and wondered if it would be a stupid idea and whether we would use them and maybe it would just be another thing that you buy but that you end up shoving in a cupboard and then finding and feeling guilty about. But I finally steeled myself and ordered them and they came, and they are so beautiful.

And then I carefully made this sort of makeshift display on my wall. A heavy white paper with little folded paper holders carefully tacked. And every week I take out a card and we look at it and read the back and talk about it and then I put it on the wall. And then every day I ask if everyone has looked at the picture and tried to copy it and by the end of the week usually everyone has. And then I take it down and put up another one.

This, of course, is the best picture in the box and the one that best illustrates my feelings on almost every subject under discussion in this post.

Six

Not being good at food planning, but wanting to get back into bread baking, it occurred to me that maybe I could be more ordered about all the rest of my cooking. I really can't bring myself to make an actual meal plan that I write down. I love going in the kitchen at the end of the day and just cooking something, whatever seems most interesting and delicious at that moment. But I've also been in a horrible rut, lasting like seven years or something, so I started reading cookbooks again, and started planning to make certain things I don't ever actually make. And that led to more careful shopping. And that in turn led to a great desire to ma'ke soup. And that in turn led back to a little trifle and the meat pie I spoke of earlier this week.

A little Culinary Renaissance, if you will. I've gotten into the way of making three pots of soup at once while I'm strewing flour into bread, and then doing the first part of some complicated other endeavor, like making custard, and then coming back later to finish something or other off. And all of it has been helped by making Elphine and Alouicious share kitchen cleaning. Not the whole burden on one child, but a more smoothly running system.

Seven

As if all of this wasn't enough, because it is, it's more than I could have possibly hoped for, my homeschool life has settled into something good and progressing, so much so that I've had an odd hour here and there to plunk myself down at my desk and write a little extra and read the occasional snatch of a book and not feel so behind all the time on everything that I think I ought to be doing. It is most extraordinary.

And Oh Look! It's Snowing! So I don't have be completely grateful. At least there's something to complain about, or I would feel like I was in the twilight zone.

Have a lovely weekend and go read This Ain't the Lyceum who is the new host of quick takes.