Thirty-Minute White Bread

I made the next recipe in Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads, the "Thirty-Minute White Bread." 

I think I've officially entered my bread-making era. 

I find bread-making delightful and satisfying. 

And, though it took me longer than thirty minutes to make this recipe... I'm just saying... it was still quite easy, and the time and effort is totally worth it. 

Deliciousness for days! 

Great Wolf Getaway

We took a quick trip to Great Wolf Lodge in Massachusetts. Our friends, the Catalanos, met up with us there. 

We left right after church Sunday, stopping at Nardelli's in Waterbury for lunch, a favorite back when we lived there. 

We arrived at Great Wolf in time to check in, get in our room, and meet up with the Catalanos to ride waterslides for an hour and a half before having joint dinner then going together to the ropes course, arcade, etc. 

I love the ropes course at the Fitzburg, Mass. location. I remembered it from years ago when we went. And this time, it was even better since they added a zip line that takes you back to the start of the course, so you can begin again from the start. 

We met up at the waterpark this morning, and we all played/ visited until early afternoon when our family left to head home. I wanted to get home for my graduate school class online. Dwayne needed to get back to work Tuesday, etc. The Catalanos stayed on for another night/ day. 

But before we left Great Wolf, we spent the rest of our credits in the arcade, quickly accumulating enough tickets to get to the girls some stuffed animals. Dwayne and I agreed we'd like a ski ball machine in the basement. I could play ski ball for hours.

We enjoyed Chickfila on the way home, indulging in limited-time pretzel breaded sandwiches and milk shakes or frosted coffees. Then we stopped again at Chesire Coffee and indulged again. The girls had delicious boba teas. Dwayne had a perfect capacchino. I had a maple salted latte with oat milk, which was divine, but it may also be why I am still wide awake this late... 

So it was the quickest of getaways- just enough time to make some great memories with friends! 

 

First Loaf

I made regular bread for the first time ever without the help of a bread machine. 

It was incredible fun! 

My family rose and a blessed me with their mouths full of soft, warm bread and homemade beef stew.

I used Bernard Clayton's "first loaf" recipe. 

 

Another Semester Begins

 

Another semester of graduate school is well underway. I'm working towards a masters in Classical Liberal Arts Education through Belmont Abbey. We've already read, discussed, and written on Augustine's On Christian Doctrine. This week and next we are reading Beothius' The Consolation of Philosophy. This has been the most beautiful, challenging, soul-edifying education. 

Another Homeschool Year Begins

 

We've started another homeschool year. 

Avril is in 11th grade. 

Adele is in 8th. 

The girls started online classes last week. They both take art with Delightful Art Co. and Literature with House of Humane Letters, and Avril takes Speech and Debate with Kepler/ Colorado Christian College. 

This week is what I'm calling the "Pre-Week." We've started reading some of the texts we will be reading together aloud everyday like the Bible (chronologically) and Land of Hope (for American History) and The Roar on the Other Side (for Poetry), and the girls are doing some of the their independent work.  

Adele is reading The Phantom Tollbooth. Avril's started Chemistry, etc.  

Next week, we'll begin the complete schedule. We'll start reading everything we plan to read together every morning (including Shakespeare/ Plutarch), and the girls will start all their independent work like math, etc. 

It's been lovely having the freedom to ease into the school year adding a little more each week until we adjust to the full schedule. 

 

Greece Cont.

Next day, we got up early for breakfast and to meet our boat for a cruise of the Aegean. 

Our tour included the islands of Agristi, Metope, and Agina. We explored, shopped, and swam on the beach at Agristi and Agina. We didn't actually dock at Metope. We just anchored near it, jumped overboard, and swam in the deep water. Amazing! 

Cruising and swimming in the Aegean was a dream come true after reading the epics. 

Pistachio gelato

 That evening, we strolled through Monastraki on the way to dinner, where we discovered an old book and print shop. It was a dream of dreams to find and bring home a print of Parnassus. Climbing Parnassus is a symbol for getting a Classical Christian education, so Parnassus is an important symbol for me personally. 

After looking for a long time, I asked the man in charge of the shop if he had any prints of Parnassus. He made it his mission and after digging in the corners of his very cluttered, very dusty, very, very interesting shop, he brought out several prints. The one I liked best also happened to be the most affordable. So my dream of dreams came true, and I brought home my very own print of Parnassus from Athens! 

We had an authentic Greek dinner at the most wonderful restaurant- Mamma Callas. If I close my eyes, I can still feel, taste, hear, and smell this wonderful place and the meal from start to finish. Again, we could sit for hours and enjoy the music and the drinks and the food and one another. (We would go again two more times on other nights of our trip.) This place may live on in my memory as the best dining experience I've ever had. 

Homeschool Planning is Difficult and Time-Consuming But Invaluable

Arcus and I are spending a lot of time together in my homeschool classroom where his cage is, because I'm at the table, surrounded by books, working on a detailed plan for our next year of homeschooling. 

It's a lot of work to make my own plan! 

This will be our second year homeschooling without CC, but this is the first year I am making my plans with little to no reference to my old CC guides. 

I know many homeschool moms have been making their own plans from the beginning of their homeschool journey, so the work involved is no surprise to them. 

But for more than a decade, we got our homeschool plans from CC, and we were very happy do whatever we needed to do to follow their plans (as far as was humanly possible) to be a part of our beloved CC community.  

That worked for us and blessed us for many years, in fact. 

But even as a diligent CC parent and Challenge director, and I was very diligent, I often felt off balance and back on my heels, because I was always discovering what someone else had planned for me and my children.

As often as I read my guides and as carefully as I ever studied them, I was simply in the position of accommodating myself always to someone else's purpose and vision for every single assignment all year long. 

This was, in fact, exhausting and often exasperating. 

Now, even though it is difficult to make my own plans at the start, there are already some true advantages occurring to me as I work it all out for myself. 

First of all, I am moving forward into this homeschool year knowing exactly what I am doing and why and how.

I know the plan "like the back of my hand," down to the details and purpose of each assignment, and I am entering this year with a peace and a confidence that I didn't experience when I was getting my plans, as good as they were, premade.

Second, I would still consider our homeschool plans very challenging, even rigorous, but the amount of work will never venture into the impossible or the absurd.   

As a business, CC probably has no incentive to cut anything from their curriculum that may add to the value and appeal to their product, and they want to provide more than enough work for anyone/everyone in their programs, so one solution to the constant dilemma of too much work for many CC families was/is to "scale" or "taylor" and simply do less than what is assigned in the guides week to week. 

Now I can simply scale as I plan! 

My plans for this coming year are challenging. We'll have to be as disciplined and diligent as ever, and we will still need to stretch to accomplish it all. But my plans are much more humane to begin with, so we won't be demoralized by the amount of work, and we'll likely have the satisfaction of finishing our school work every week. 

The final and major positive to making my own plan is that we will finally be doing a lot of work together. 

When we were in CC and I was directing a Challenge level and the girls were in their age-assigned Challenge levels, we'd all be working in the same room, but we were each doing very separate work. 

I became more and more conscious of this fact and less and less comfortable with the reality of what CC was doing to our lives and even our homeschool. 

Much of the time, my daughters, who are best friends, were too busy doing their separate Challenge work to engage with each other over the ideas they were encountering during the school days for long. 

In fact, much of the time, I was too busy working for CC as a director or an SR to engage in my own homeschool for long before I had to get back to my CC work.  

So this year, we will read Scripture and Shakespeare together, study poetry together, and read American History together. 

The girls are in different levels of math and Latin, of course, so they will still have some independent work to do. 

But whatever we can do together, we will. 

I am certainly living with the consequences the choice to leave CC. 

Now I am forced into making plans to accommodate my own vision for our homeschool. 

So it is taking hours and hours of planning up front. 

But for once, I am actually giving myself entirely to the work of making a plan, and I will continue to be free to give myself entirely to our homeschool this year.      

In many ways, all this planning is proving an invaluable blessing. 

I have taken ownership of my homeschool, and I earnestly believe I will be leading my precious daughters in learning together better than ever before.