Pumpkin Week was a total hit. I have to admit, this unit was somewhat easier to plan than others because there are so many ideas out there to be borrowed. A simple Pinterest search led me to something for every subject area – why reinvent the pumpkin? This is such a great, flexible topic because you can use it any time in October or November.

We kicked off the week with our pumpkin themed library selections. You can check them all out via my Instagram feed in the right-hand sidebar. Pumpkin Fiesta led to great multi-cultural conversations, and we enjoyed talking about building community in Too Many Pumpkins.

I wanted to try process art with the girls, so we planned to do some acorn painting. We have oodles of acorns in the yard, and I thought they’d make some great, wobbly lines across the paper. In reality, they were too light to roll, so we ended up switching to marbles partway through. I printed the pumpkin templates here, and taped them into the lid of a banker box, dabbing a blob of paint at various points around the edges. Swee and Beans each took a turn rolling the marble through the paint and over their pumpkin. The blogger whose idea I borrowed suggested we peel the tape while the paint is still wet so it doesn’t set, which was helpful. When they were dry, the girls cut their own pumpkins out (I helped Beans a little) and we hung them up. I think they turned out really neat, though we are now out of orange paint.

I’d also been wanting to do some upper and lower case letter matching, and had seen an idea to use a paper plate and clothespins, but didn’t want to write on the pins I use for laundry. Swee loves stickers, so I ordered these pumpkin stickers and wrote a lowercase letter on each of them to be matched up to their uppercase version in the pumpkin patch. We had a great time with this one, though I didn’t anticipate her insistence on making it look like the arbitrary vines I’d drawn were actually attached to the stems of the stickers. We ended up with what looks like floating pumpkin balloons, which is rather comical.

Daddy usually does science and math on Tuesdays while I’m working, though last week I took the day off to chaperone Beanie’s field trip to the pumpkin patch. We were able to bring home two small pumpkins to use for Pumpkin Science! Daddy walked them through the scientific method as they made observations and a hypothesis on whether the pumpkin would sink or float. The worksheet came from Natural Beach Living, and had some great ideas. Both girls really liked the activity, and I love when something I’ve planned works well for both Sweebee and Beans.

It was a fun week for us, and flowed really nicely – which I know won’t always be the case!

5C rhubarb; 20C shredded zucchini; 6 pints applesauce; 2gal cider; half a pig, including 12lbs bacon; 1 pint pesto; bags of carrots, kale, peaches, green beans, green peppers, roasted tomatoes, whole tomatoes, wild blackberries, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries

We have a chest freezer. It’s in the basement, next to the oil tank and the fuse box, and it’s big. It has a light inside, and two raised baskets for little stuff to float over the big stuff in the bottom. We’d been saving up for the purchase, tucking away birthday money and cash from odd jobs – and waffling back and forth between buying used and potentially losing thousands in food if the thing crapped out, and spending more to buy new while consuming all kinds of resources for the production of a new appliance. Ultimately, the risk of food waste combined with a great sale led us to purchase a brand new ice box with a good name (Also – I know that freezing food as a means of putting by is fraught with risk in terms of disaster preparedness, but believe it’s still a solid step in the right direction).

I spent the summer filling the freezer portion of our side-by-side kitchen refrigerator with all the odds and ends I could get my hands on. As things ripened, I’d use what we could, and then I’d chop and blanch and freeze whatever was left. When we picked 14lbs of strawberries this summer, I stuck several canning jars into the freezer, choosing the ripest ones that wouldn’t get eaten before going bad. The less firm blueberries met the same fate, tucked away for baking this winter. We supported our former neighbors who raised our pig and the local butcher who cut and wrapped each piece, and invested in more meat than I know how to prepare. I didn’t even plant zucchini this year and yet I have 20 cups shredded and frozen, thanks to neighbors, friends, and a mama at story hour who were all blessed with excess. This little bit of food security was a community effort, a tangible symbol of how friends and neighbors take care of one another in a way that is not always visible in every place.

It’s also a symbol of real privilege, of hard work and how far we’ve come over the past three years. As homemakers, we know that you pay less per unit when you buy in bulk – but the caveat is that your wallet still needs to have enough cash in it to cover the larger dollar amount required to choose that bulk package. It doesn’t matter if the roll of TP in the 24-pack is cheaper than the single roll if you can’t pay the higher dollar price of the big pack. That’s the reality for a lot of people, and it certainly was our reality for a long time, so it’s not lost on me that the ability to have a freezer (and with it, the ability to stock up on things when they’re at a good price) has a far deeper value than what you see physically sitting in our basement.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the definitions of success. And if you’ve been visiting me here for any length of time, you’ve probably established the sense that we don’t exactly ascribe to a consumerist philosophy.  While I haven’t laid it all out, we’ve been working hard to craft our own definition of success for ourselves and our family, sharing it here in bits and snatches, and (hopefully) modeling it – and the more confident I become in that definition, the further we go, the more strongly I believe in the importance of multiple definitions of success. The fancy car/corner office/5 bedroom/corporate ladder plan is not the only option for being successful. There is more out there that we can aspire to, with completely different benchmarks.

So in our case, right now, success looks a lot like a freezer, and the community that helped us fill it.

I’ve been asked several times now how I plan our homeschool schedule, and I have to admit, it’s not a very scientific or even a very informed process. I try to plan two to three weeks at a time, choosing a central theme for the week and then building around that topic – library selections, art projects, activities and worksheets, etc. Those themes have mostly been seasonal so far, observing what’s happening in our yard and in nature. However, like so many other school children, we focused on fire safety and prevention earlier this month. I clearly didn’t take very many pictures, but I think the girls learned quite a bit.

We kicked off the week with a visit to a local volunteer fire department. They were having an open firehouse day, so we went to see the ladder truck extend and look at the boots and helmets. I was hoping for more activities and hands-on stuff, so we will have to pick a day to visit another department, but it was still neat to get inside and say hello.

My usual plan of reserving library books backfired when I realized someone else had the same idea for this week so most of the appropriate titles were already checked out, but we were still able to grab a couple. My favorite was Gail Gibbons’ Fire! Fire! (affiliate link) because it talked about fire fighting in different settings: urban, rural and forest. Most other books I paged through focused on big city firehouses with professional firefighters, and that’s just not our reality so it was helpful to see something relatable. We also liked New York’s Bravest as we’d just finished listening to tall tales on CD in the car – Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, and so on – and so it was nice to tie that aspect into something we’d already talked about. I was able to pick up a couple more books during our regular weekly trip (they’d been returned – hooray!) and the girls enjoyed Stop, Drop and Roll, with Beanie demonstrating the proper technique she had learned from Firefighter Chris at nursery school the week before. Daddy lit a fire in our outdoor fire pit and demonstrated what a fire extinguisher does, and then took us inside to locate and test all of our smoke alarms.

The free printables I found on Pinterest were the real winners for us this week. We used a play phone to learn how to call 911, and reinforced the new skill with coloring pages that are now hanging next to the landline phone, just in case. Both girls liked the number game – rolling the die and coloring the number. I thought it would be over Beanie’s head, but she counted the dots on the die just fine, and only needed a little help identifying the corresponding number.

Since we heat with wood, fire is a very rational concern for us. We are going to extend these lessons and make an evacuation plan as a family, and J is looking into fire ladders for the second and third floors. We practiced all the information the girls would need to give to the dispatcher – street name and house number, mama and daddy’s real names and ages, etc.

Overall, a solid week of learning practical skills. We will certainly need to stay on top of refreshers, but I think they got the basics down. Now to hope they never need to use them.

We invited a slew of friends over at the beginning of the month to pick apples, hoping to share the bounty while spending time together. It was such a nice day, connecting with each other over potluck dishes in the early fall weather. Our neighbors brought two vehicles: a pickup with multiple plastic tubs in the bed came first, and then the tractor with an antique cider press in the bucket rolled in, and the party really got started. We put the kids to work filling the tubs with apples to be pressed, and everyone broke out their milk jugs and quart jars to take home fresh, raw apple cider. It might be the best cider I’ve ever tasted.

When I went out the next morning to clean up and collect anything left behind (only a blue soccer ball and a metal soup ladle, surprisingly), I was dismayed to realize the trees looked as if we’d hardly picked anything. We had pressed close to ten gallons of cider, and most families took at least one bag of apples home, and still we were swimming in fruit. It wasn’t until a newer mama friend brought her five kiddos over to pick that we actually made some headway. This crew came prepared with baskets and totes, and they meant business! My girls loved playing with them and helping them fill their bags, and I got to engage in some much-needed adult conversation. The icing on the cake was the selection of home-grown-and-preserved goodies they brought for us, along with a couple of acorn squash.

About a week later, we asked those gracious neighbors of ours if they’d be up for pressing again one afternoon if we picked the apples and carted them down the road. We were quite excited when they said yes, and so we hitched the wagon to the four-wheeler, and trundled down the dirt road with our apples. This time we took our turn at the crank, and helped strain the liquid while the girls ran around the garden. We left five gallons behind for wine making, and took another five or so home. I froze two gallons, canned one quart and a couple pint jars, gave a jug away and enjoyed the rest. It was just the kind of afternoon I had hoped for when we moved to the country – working together with neighbors and friends, each bringing something to the table that the other doesn’t have, and all leaving richer and happier for the joint effort. Really, really nice.

I think we may finally be coming to the end of what apples we can use. The drops need to be cleaned up still, though I’ve dropped two cases off at the sheep farm, and sent oodles home with a friend for her pigs. Making crockpot applesauce is still a near daily task, but we now need a ladder to pick what fruit is still good.

Because a lot of it isn’t good. A lot of it is bad, and for reasons mostly unbeknownst to us.

Last weekend we packed lunches and put ourselves in the truck for a drive back up to MOFGA for their Great Maine Apple Day. We had spent the day prior collecting a sample of all of our apples, one from each tree, and numbering them to match a crude orchard map Swee and I had drawn. We paid our $8 admission, and wandered through the hall, tasting fruits and checking out the different varieties. Tucked into a shoebox were our own apples, and I had a really nice conversation with an expert about what we might have on our hands (five Red Delicious trees among them, in his estimation), and then left our fruit and our email addresses with him. A whole team of people will sit down over the next few weeks and try to identify apples brought in from all over the state, and then let us know what they think. I’m excited to see the results.

What I was less excited by is the confirmation that we have several pests to deal with in the orchard: coddling moth, plum curculio, apple maggot, flyspeck, and potentially even a case of fire blight in the pear tree. Woof. It’s a daunting list, and we will need to sit down this winter and decide on our course of action. We know for sure that the trees all need to be heavily pruned, so that’s next on the list of skills to acquire.

Oh, we have so much to learn.

ps: All of this apple exposure has definitely filtered down into the pretend play around here. Just yesterday morning, the girls built their own cider press out of their workbench, complete with “cloth” for filtering. I love it.

 

A misty-morning leaf walk in our rubber rain boots. A reading of Leaf Man and then the chance to create our own leaf people. Studying the role of chlorophyll with Daddy through a science experiment. Poetry Teatime outside among the falling leaves. Leaf prints on the back porch (that one was messy). You can see our reading list on Instagram (would it be of interest for me to post our chosen books in this space?). Leaf week was a hit. We felt organized and prepared, and the girls enjoyed (or seemed to) the things we had planned.

And then we moved into week #3.

We had a heat wave, and the thermometer on the back porch registered somewhere over 100*F. I doubt it was actually that hot – I’d guess somewhere in the low 90s – but that’s still pretty hot for Maine, let alone in September, and we were miserable. We wound up throwing most of the plan out the window and just did what we could. That turned out to be finger painting and running through the sprinkler, going to the grocery store to enjoy their air conditioning, and jumping in the lake before soccer practice.

We regrouped later in the week when the heat broke, and managed to bake brownies for Poetry Teatime – and even learned fractions in the kitchen. We read some of our library books, and returned others untouched. And we flew by the seat of our space pants, staying up late three nights in a row to watch the International Space Station pass overhead, and doing a quick mini-unit on space travel and astronauts.

I think I’m probably learning just as much as Swee is at this point as I realize I can’t compare her progress to my own at age five. I went to kindergarten as a strong, independent reader, and she’s downright recalcitrant when I suggest sounding out words. It’s very hard to follow her lead and let her be herself, despite logically knowing that’s a major reason we chose this path – silly mama! That might be the bigger reason last week’s “lessons” fell apart so completely: I was feeling confident after the first two weeks, and tried to step it up, only to have the heat knock us flat on our bums.

We’re slowing back down this week. Sunflowers and vegetables. We read sunflower books yesterday morning and learned a little about van Gogh, finishing our day with watercolor renditions of our own homegrown sunflowers. I worked all day today, but had Swee do some sunflower-themed copy work on the chalkboard after breakfast, and heard Daddy return to the space station discussion later on, taking it a step further by playing videos on his phone. I’m guessing they did some math, though too quietly for me to eavesdrop from my desk. And they played outside all afternoon while Daddy worked on an overhang for the chicken run. Sounds like a pretty great kindergarten day to me.