Ahh, a few more days of summer...

The sky is brilliant blue, the breeze is warm, it is humid enough to make me feel like I had gone for a swim instead of for a walk down the road this morning.

Paul and I are working at the baseball game this afternoon. It's a gorgeous day for a game, too bad we are on the other side of the counter, and will be wearing hot polyester smocks and ugly black caps. We have to wear long black or khaki pants, or knee length shorts. I mostly wear gym shorts and mostly not in public:) So I will be hot.

The older kids are all at the youth conference, so we had to find someone to watch the four youngest. My brother and his wife, who have ten kids, will have them at their house for the afternoon. A few of their kids with some grandchildren will be there for my four to play with.

So this year we have a huge garden. It is Paul's garden. He loves being out there, walking in the dirt in barefeet. Me: not so much. I think it's easier to just buy some veggies at a local stand. Our garden has been yielding tomatoes. I ate a whole Heirloom tomato with my breakfast yesterday, a whole one the day before sliced with bacon bits. We chop them up and add chopped Vidalia onions, garlic, basil, and olive oil and have the yummiest bruschetta. We make salsa. Mirielle has made two batches of sauce, plus the most awesome fried green tomatoes...

Last evening Paul went out and picked tomatoes. We cored them, dunked them in boiling water, then in cold water, peeled off the skins, quartered them, and put them in gallon baggies to freeze. We filled three and a half. Two large bowls of tomatoes left, we decided to save them for another day. Then I realized we still had a huge bowl of them on the table. But Paul is still on Germany time, it was like the middle of the night to him, and he was getting tired.

He is mowing the lawn right now, and I do feel a teeny bit guilty sitting here like a lazy bum, but heck, when he turns off the mower I can get up and get busy quick...ha.

And it IS Sunday. The day of rest, right?

Homeschooling. Why did we finally decide to jump in? Well, Kathryn, who is 15, essentially decided for herself. She is a beautiful girl. She is sweet and pretty and smart and has different and radical tastes in music, she is a rebellious teenager only not really so much, she just likes to be herself, she refuses to be molded into anything. She works out every day and takes good care of herself. She is a gymnast, she can do the most incredible things. From what I gather, she is effortlessly popular in school, and the boys really like her. She just decided she doesn't want to deal with all of that stuff right now. She had some rough times last year, and to her right now, the most important is to live a Godly life. Sometimes one has to flee the things that would ensnare them. This is her decision, based on what she feels she needs to do, and we support her in it.

Jonathan is a totally different story. He is an expert right now on phones and tablets. He focuses on things and talks about almost nothing else. A while back it was Hess trucks, before that it was vehicles of all sorts. He is like a miniature adult, helping with smaller kids, but not exactly meshing with kids his own age. He would rather help out and do grown up things. School was hard for him, because he would usually catch on to the concepts quickly, then get totally bored when he had to do pages and pages of the same concept for homework. If he didn't complete the homework, he lost playtime. I tried to talk to his teacher about it, but she was frantic about the dreaded State Tests. Oh, the pressure! She would yell at the kids so much that Jon said it wasn't even worth trying to be good at school, you got yelled at anyway.

Jon's reading level at the end of third grade was the end of fifth grade, and he has always gotten math quickly. I am just really excited to teach Jon, explore things with him, things that interest him, not beating things with a dead horse like they do in school.

My little girls are fine with going to school, but down the road I am certainly open to homeschooling them too. Sam only has a half year to go, and Margaret, who is going into 11th grade, is in the top five in her class. She doesn't mind school at all. Evelyn is going into 8th and loves school. Suzanne is going into seventh, and Sonja into sixth. She is also fine with school for now. If Kathryn has a good year homeschooling, perhaps a few of the others will choose to do it too.