Heart to Heart with Diane

I love Italian food, and that delicious taste of garlic and basil is never better than in homemade pesto!  Pesto is super easy to make, tastes gourmet, and is nutritious. Grow lots of basil in your garden, and you can freeze this tasty topping for wintertime, garden fresh cooking.

Garden Fresh Pesto

2 cups fresh basil leaves and soft stems  (or 1 cup basil + 1 cup spinach leaves)

1/2 cup parmesan or romano cheese

1/2 cup olive oil

1/3 cup walnuts (use pine nuts to be authentic!)

3 medium garlic cloves, peeled

Put all ingredients into the blender and blend on high until smooth.  Serve with bagel chips, crackers, raw veggies, as a sauce instead of tomato sauce on pizza, or toss pasta in it.  Also great spread on sandwiches (panini-style).  Once you taste this, you won’t forget it, and you’ll find ways to cook with it:  salad dressing, topping for baked potatoes, on grilled chicken, etc.!

Stash your summer basil in the freezer to use all winter long.  Just omit the cheese when you make pesto, and freeze in plastic containers.  To use, thaw and stir in cheese.

Yummy!

Enjoy a garden fresh taste all year long!

I love America!

We are so unbelievably blessed to enjoy so much freedom, so many rights and to live in such unprecedented ease and comfort. Let us always remember that freedom requires constant vigilance and honoring the God who made us free.

Sincerely,

Diane

My daughter Louisa is my sugar-free buddy.  And now that it is summer, we are wishing, wishing for ice cream.  So Louisa has been creatively whipping up milkshakes.  Here’s her latest, and most delicious, sugar-free milkshake so far!  It is so delicious that I just had to write and tell you about it!

Louisa’s No-Sugar Strawberry Chocolate Milkshake

2 cups raw milk

Approx. 1  1/2 cups frozen strawberries (one 16 oz. container, washed, stems removed and frozen)

1 heaping tablespoon Chocolate Stevita Delight (pure chocolate + stevia) OR 2 level tablespoons cocoa powder and a dropperful of liquid clear stevia

Put milk and chocolate stevia or cocoa powder plus stevia in the blender, mixing well. Add frozen strawberries and blend.  Add more strawberries (or ice cubes) until the milkshake is the right thickness.

This is very delicious and healthy way to satisfy your desire for ice cream!

We wait so long for summer . . . for the freedom of long, lazy, sunny days with nowhere that we have to go!  Summer can somehow slip by so very quickly though, that when the cold weather comes again, sometimes we don’t feel like we’ve accomplished very much.  “Summer 4” to the rescue!

The “Summer 4” is an easy way to give a little structure to fun summer days without totally squelching the idea of summer vacation / free time that we all enjoy so much!  Here’s how we do it:  each morning we decide on at least one thing to do in each category of the Summer 4.  It isn’t too much. It is just 4 categories, after all.  And if they are all done when we go to bed that night, there is a great sense of achievement!

Here’s our Summer 4:

1) Work

2) Study

3) Service

4) Fun

I fold a small paper in fourths, and title each section with one of the Summer 4. Then we brainstorm how to fulfill it.

This is what my daughter Louisa’s “Summer 4” looked like on Monday:

Work

Dig thistles out of the orchard for 20 minutes

Study

Practice violin

Do a math lesson

Read

Service

Visit Mrs. Miller in the hospital

Fun

Sew peasant blouse with Mom (it turned out cute, huh?)

and yesterday’s . . .

Work

Plant melon seedlings in garden

Study

Practice violin

Read

Service

Mow lawn

Fun

Experiment with inventing a good recipe for peach milkshakes (yummy!)

Having the fun in there is pretty important, and we plan it for last. That way we have something to look forward to!  Putting service before self is always a good lesson to cure the “me first” attitude.

If you feel like your kids aren’t getting much done, try the Summer 4.  Works great!

Question:

I’m about to start homeschooling. This coming fall my oldest will be starting kindergarten at home. I know this is what is right for our family, but my son doesn’t want to homeschool. The first thing out of the mouths of 95% of the people who find out he’s five is, “Oh, then you’ll start school this year. Aren’t you SO excited?!?” Plus, all of his friends his age are going to school and everyone seems so excited that he feels like I’m cheating him out of a real treat.

He doesn’t want to homeschool. He wants to go to school like his friends. There’s only so much reasoning I can do with him . . . it’s depressing to see him so unhappy with this before we’ve even started!

Answer:

As parents, we rightfully, prayerfully make decisions for our family and hope/expect the children to march along happily. I think what we forget to ask is “cui bono?”, which is Latin for “who benefits?” And that is a crucially important question!

We, as parents, can see what will be beneficial for our family in the long-run, but children don’t see the long-run. Children live in the here and now, so it is our job to answer the “cui bono?” question with some real-time answers.

When people ask your son if he is starting school this year, give him something valid to reply. . . with enthusiasm! You are starting school at your house this fall. Does it look like it? Does he have a reason to believe that what you are doing is more exciting than what the school is doing? Who is benefiting by your decision to homeschool? Try to imagine yourself in your son’s shoes. What benefits is he seeing that public school would offer, versus homeschooling. Talk to him and write down what he says. Make a list of why school looks so appealing to him. Sometimes the reason is very simple and easily remedied. Once you have a list, you have your work cut out for you!

Do you have a school place in your home? A school room is ideal, but even a corner near the dining room table will do fine! Engage him in creating that school place. Hang a bulletin board, or just tape a big sheet of butcher paper on the wall, and use it for your school announcements: “Coming Sept. 1st . . . REPTILE EXPLORATIONS!” Have him help you decorate it. Cut out some pictures of lizards and snakes and stick them up. Make some green vines or leaves out of construction paper and make a border on it. Put up a calendar page that shows the months of summer, with a big red circle around your school start date and the “Reptile Field Trip” date. (Of course, if your son is interested in horses, or cars, or space, change the theme accordingly.) Post a daily schedule* that includes Recess and Snack Time. Some children really yearn to get out of the house into the bigger world, so plan field trips, time at the playground or park, nature walks, and library trips. Build some excitement for homeschooling!

A school name, school flag, school t-shirt or something like that will give him a name to reply to people with, and a sense that something wonderful is happening with his future school! Some children see the lunch pail or backpack, or new school clothes as a much desired benefit. When the back-to-school sales come around, and pencil boxes are 50 cents on sale, take him on a special shopping trip. He needs one new school shirt, a lunch pail or backpack (depending on what his friends are getting), and some fun school supplies. I take my kids shopping the sales, and let them pick out scissors, pencil sharpener, crayons, colored pencils. . . whatever is on sale. If you go to the back-to-school sales, you can invest $15 and get a huge return in enthusiasm!

Friends are the reason most kids want to go to school. If your son’s friends are going to school, then you have to find some new friends that homeschool. Otherwise your son is going to feel left out, isolated and lonely. Find a support group that meets at least weekly.  Go to the activities and help him get to know the other children, and hopefully click with at least one boy that he can invite over for a play date. Offer to set up a “Lego Club” or some other weekly get-together that will draw other homeschooling children. Homeschooling goes so much better when there is a friendship and support network that I don’t think I could homeschool without it. He cannot be expected to continue getting his social needs met solely with the boys in the neighborhood or church group, who are talking about what happened at school that day. That’s the recipe for failure.

If one of the things on your son’s list of going-to-school-benefits is “riding the bus”, it’s time to plan a trip! Anywhere on the local bus route will do: the pet shop, the museum, the ice cream parlor, the park. Have your son pack a backpack with lunch or snacks, and go stand at your local bus stop, even if you have to drive a ways to find one. Get on the bus and let’s go! This is pretty exciting if your son has never ridden on one before! When you get off the bus, ask for a transfer pass. As long as you get back on the bus within a certain time frame (usually 2 hours), it won’t cost you for another ride. I’ve done this with my kids and it made a distinct memory, and satisfied that bus ride need.

One of my friends was in your shoes, except she had already allowed her son to go to kindergarten, so persuading him to do 1st grade homeschool looked insurmountable. I remember the first Park Day she attended in my homeschool group—her son stayed in the hot van the entire 2 hours. It wasn’t too long until he made friends, and now attends the weekly Boy’s Club and Park Days that we hold. He is an integral part of our homeschool group. It took some transition time and offering the hope of benefits: fun, adventure and friends to persuade him.

When you want your child to be happy with the decision to do homeschooling, while the whole world seems to be promoting public school, ask yourself: “cui bono?” Make sure that your decision offers benefits for your son that far exceed his needs for friendship, adventure, fun and learning—and you’ll soon discover that your son is your biggest homeschooling fan!

*If you’d like some help creating a daily schedule, knowing what curriculum to use, how to set up your homeschooling adventure and what to do during homeschool for each grade from preschool up through high school, take a look at my Love to Learn Homeschool Handbook.

Buttercrunch lettuce

Last year, we tried something new with our family garden. We happened upon the method called The New Square Foot Gardening.   The Square Foot Gardening method has been around for years, but has now been completely revised and made 100% easier by creator Mel Bartholomew.  He makes gardening sounds so easy, so weed-free, so no-digging-needed, that we had to give it a try!  And it was very easy and rewarding!  For the first time, we were able to harvest produce that could never successfully grow—like good lettuce right into the summer, herbs, carrots, eggplants, and more.  If you would like to read about how we did it, here’s some of my previous posts about it:

A New Way to Garden

Carrots, Really?

Cilantro, the herb that makes salsa so delicious, thrives in the cool weather of spring

I thought you might like to see what’s happening this year, our second year of Square Foot Gardening. I got excited and had my husband build me 3 more boxes, so this year I have room to make one for flowers only, which is a fun luxury.  I planted pink cosmos, petunias, pink and purple bachelor’s buttons, snapdragons, zinnias, and purple morning glories to climb up the fence.  I can’t wait to see how stunning of a color spot it will be in the garden!

Our warm growing weather is just starting—in fact we had a freeze just a few days ago, but already I have enough in my garden beds for a big salad each day:  lettuce, cilantro, parsley, radishes, collards, kale and collards are all happy to grow, even in cool weather.  All is neatly growing in its designated square foot space and it looks quite tidy!

We followed the Square Foot Gardener’s recommendation to put our beds to sleep last winter by removing the plants that don’t overwinter, and covering the 4′ x 4′ beds with a blanket (we stocked up for cheap at yard sales). So, when we uncovered our garden boxes this spring, they had escaped the torrent of weed seeds blown in from winter storms, and there is hardly a weed in to be found.  We also stirred the surface of the soil, adding a little compost, so that probably helped with weeds not getting a footing.

Red Sails lettuce is so pretty in the salad bowl

One of the things that appeals to me about this new method of gardening is that I don’t have to dig or even use hand tools anymore!  The soil is so loose and lovely, I just use my hands to scoop a little hole to plant seedlings in, or to pull out radishes and carrots.  There is really no need for a shovel! Nor backbreaking digging work!

I am thrilled to have lots and lots of lettuce, as we use about a head a day at my house. And with parsely, cilantro, dill, collards, green onions and kale, my salad is super nutritious!

Radishes are not anyone’s favorite food, but it is hard not to like them when they pop right up just a few days after you plant them, and are ready to eat in a few weeks.  They are the perfect plant for little ones to start out with—they are so non-fussy about soil conditions or weather and so fast to grow!  And they are pretty and bright sliced into a salad. Instead of dedicating an entire square foot square to radishes, I just tuck them in every little nook and cranny—after all, they are not going to be permanent residents.  So there are radishes growing around my pepper plants and around my eggplants and other slower-growing large plants that occupy an entire square foot of room when full grown.

Easy-breezy radishes!

This is a fun hobby, a lovely and productive way to be outdoors, and a great way to have access to healthy, homegrown, fresh veggies.

If you want to try this method yourself, take a look at this fun-to-read, enthusiastic book that tells you just how to do it, right down to the details:  The New Square Foot Gardening.  Hope you have a great garden this summer!

My  goal is to make my own salad dressings. It is really not a big time investment. It only takes about 5 minutes to plop the ingredients together. I think we are so used to buying (and seeing) salad dressing in grocery store bottles, that we feel insecure about making our own.

The benefits of making your own salad dressing are many:

*save money—lots!

The average quality dressing may cost $2-4 per bottle, but the ingredients seldom cost you more than $1. Most people have about 6 salad dressing bottles in their fridge door at a time, right? So, if you make your own, and save an average of $3 per bottle (6 x $3 = $18) and repeat that every month, you’ll save over $200 a year. What would you like to spend your $200 on instead?

*enjoy the healthiest, freshest ingredients

. . . such as extra virgin olive oil, brown rice vinegar,  fresh garlic, and minced raw onion. We think of salad dressing as a high-calorie “extra”, but when using these type of ingredients, which are actually health foods that are medicinal in nature, putting them into salad dressing is a great way to get them into your diet.

* get out of the “Ranch Rut”

New salad dressings can add a lot of variety, new tastes, and enjoyment to your meals. And make your kids (and you) eat more salad!

If your kids are “hooked” on Ranch dressing (which has several undesirables), getting your family to adjust to homemade salad dressing might take a little creative packaging! Here’s what I do: I save bottles from store salad dressings, keeping the empty bottles in the fridge (no need to wash them out the first time you use them up, as they had plenty of preservatives in them, so what tiny amount that remains in the bottle isn’t going to hurt anything). When I make up a batch of homemade dressing, I use a funnel to pour it into one of these bottles. It helps if the label matches the type of dressing, but it is not necessary. It is just the comfort of that store-bought dressing bottle that makes everything familiar to the family!

Just for your information, here is the ingredient list from your favorite Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing:
Vegetable Oil (Canola Oil and/or Soybean Oil), Egg Yolk, Sugar, Salt, Cultured Nonfat Buttermilk, Natural Flavor, Spices, less than 1% of Garlic (Dried), Onion, Vinegar, Phosphoric Acid, Xanthan Gum, Modified Food Starch, Monosodium Glutamate, Artificial Flavors, Disodium Phosphate, Sorbic Acid and Calcium Disodium Edta As Preservatives, Disodium Inosinate and Disodium Guanylate.

Yum-yum. I just love that Disodium Guanylate . . .so appetizing!

Instead, try these delicious and healthy homemade dressings:

Tangy Catalina Dressing

a lovely orange color!

3/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup milk  (can use dry milk)
( 1  1/2 T. non-instant dry milk powder + 1/2 cup water OR 1  1/2 T. non-instant dry milk powder + 1/2 cup water)
1   1/8 cup olive oil
1 small can (6 oz) tomato paste
1 tablespoon raw honey (or 2 drops of liquid stevia)
1  1/2 teaspoons salt
freshly ground pepper
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/4 of a small onion (about 3 tablespoons finely diced) (or 2 tablespoons dried onions)
1 clove of fresh garlic (or 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder)

Put ingredients into a blender and blend on high until smooth and thick.

Authentic French Dressing

what they really use in France!

1/2 cup plus 1 teaspoon virgin olive oil
1/3  cup vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper

Put ingredients into a salad dressing bottle and shake well.

Creamy Italian Dressing

yum!

1/4 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup raw apple cider vinegar
1 clove garlic
1/8 of a medium onion (or 2 tablespoons dried onions)
1 tablespoon fresh parsley (or 1 teaspoon dried parsley)
1 teaspoon fresh basil (or 1/4 teaspoon dried basil)
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

Put in a blender and process until smooth.

“You made your letters so well BUT your “j” is backwards.”

“Wow! You cleaned up your room, BUT you forgot under the bed!”

“I really liked the casserole BUT it would be better if you cooked it a little longer.”

Compliments are so wonderful to receive!  Don’t they feel so good?  When praise comes your way, and you start to smile in response, it is amazing how fast your bubble can be burst when the word “but” comes along.  Doesn’t it just wreck things?

Homeschooling and/or parenting can make us feel responsible to make every moment a teaching moment.  However, praise and teaching really don’t belong in the same paragraph.  It works so much better to make a mental note of needed correction, and save it until a different time.  A more receptive time.  And particularly not in the same time frame as a compliment.  Who wants their party crashed with criticism tacked on the end?

If you have this tendency, how about taking the challenge I’m working on? Try just for today to ban the word “but” from your vocabulary.  Don’t say it!  Keep your compliments clean from correction. Just speak them, and let their sunshine make the recipient feel delighted!  And if you are worried you’ll forget to give some much needed instruction,  jot it down and save it for another day.  Don’t let your praise end with a “bee sting”.  Try it and see how much bigger your family’s smiles are!

Louisa and her two awards!

My daughter Louisa (aka Wheezie-Bob)  is 14 years old and today she is on top of the world!  Why?  She auditioned for the  Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra (highest level at the local high school) and made it in!  Then she was surprised and delighted by receiving two school awards:  the “Most Valuable Player in the Intermediate Orchestra”, and “Outstanding in Orchestra”.  This may be a normal event for musical families, but I struggle to stay on tune.  Music is not my forte.  But my daughter has grown beyond that.

Louisa started learning to play the violin on a whim last summer when a very generous mother in our homeschooling support group offered to teach a Strings Class to our kids for free.  My daughters Louisa and Emily, and I, rented violins and started our lessons eagerly. It is really fun to play the violin, but mothering duties distracted me. Emily had college, so she neglected to practice.  Ultimately the class ended, but Louisa kept on playing, and eventually took private lessons, and joined the local school orchestra, her only school class.  She loves the mellow sounds of the viola, so she borrowed her friend’s, and dove in full force.  I didn’t mention her unfinished math, as I could see far more important things were happening. After two days, she had taught herself to play the viola, and had also figured out how to play the viola part on her violin.  This was all her doing.  All I had to do was give her the encouragement and space to let her explore and learn.  So, to see her musical progress and to have this school year end in such a rewarding way is delightful!  And it taught me something important about following your dreams, how persistence pays off, and expecting the unexpected!

I watch my daughter Emily handle people especially well, setting boundaries and not letting people take advantage or pressure her into things.  She is pleasant, kind, and amiable. People often comment on her friendliness.  And she is non-yielding. She knows her own mind, knows right from wrong, and won’t cave in just to please others.  A good lesson for a mother who tends to always want to keep everyone happy. Even at the cost of her own happiness.

Ammon, my future botanist college-student son, wanted a job working with his beloved plants for the summer.  Jobs are scarce. We live in a rural area near a university town, where there are hundreds, or thousands, of applicants for each job, and the college students are willing to work cheap.  Plus, it is a recession.  Ammon kept printing off resumes, going from nursery to nursery to talk to the owners, asking for a job. He just kept at it for weeks, in spite of no response.  I tried to prep him for disappointment. Finally, a phone call came and he now enjoys his nursery job: watering petunias, planting raspberries, and helping customers find just the right plant.  To his great joy!  And to my instruction: always keep hope alive!

I’m a homeschool mom, but the teaching goes both ways.  I’m the student just as often as the teacher.