When Wee One #1 was still wee (he’s 12 now), I had big plans to homeschool him and any other children we’d have. I thought it was better than traditional school for so many reasons – I could tailor the lessons to make sure it sinks in, I could spend extra time on concepts that are harder than others, blah, blah, blah. So when school age started creeping up on us, I was voted down – overwhelmingly – by my husband and both our families. As the only one who thought this was a good idea, I wasn’t winning anyone over. Over the years, I got into the swing of school and though I always supplemented their educations with lessons to drive the point in at home, I started to agree with everyone that traditional school was better, at least for us.

Fast forward eight years from when our first child started kindergarten, we now have a 7th grader, a 2nd grader and our wee-est one is officially preschool age.

As anyone who reads this blog is painfully aware, we have all moved from Canada to the States and we did it 3/4 of the way through the school year (and the school year is different in these countries too). For reasons ranging from ease of transition for the kids, to initially thinking we were only going to be down here for 6 months, we decided to homeschool while in California and then put them back in their tiny rural school of 35 kids when we moved back to Canada. Now that we know we’re going to be here for a few years it would make sense to put them in school, right? Except the homeschooling experience has been so wonderful we have decided to keep it up the whole time we’re down here. And interestingly (oddly too, maybe) that my husband, and both our families are encouraging me to homeschooling. Telling me all the things I told them six years ago. Ha! Well, whatever the reason for the collective change of heart, I’m happy to have everyone on board with this.

Gym in the pool? Yes, please!

We are following Ontario curriculum even though we’re in California because technically we are here on a temporary Visa and we are permanent residences of Ontario, with permission from our local school board in Ontario to homeschool. The nice thing about that though is the flexibility it provides. We will keep French as our second language and keep Canadian geography and history, but we are also adding in some Spanish and American geography and history as well.

I think the best thing about this decision are all the options for styles of teaching and books to use and extra subjects to cover! Ontario curriculum lists learning sheet music, but the instrument you use is up to you, same goes for the core subjects. The kids will use math textbooks for learning math, but we will learn all of our science curriculum through experiments and field studying and I have added nutrition and environmental awareness to our list of subjects as well. The kids love all of it – they get to choose their books for free reading and pick from a list I chose for literature. Win-win!

Here are some of the books we are using this term, I don’t love classic textbooks for most subjects because they all assume that kids know nothing about the subject at all or that they need to be drilled the information in a way that most kids (at least my kids) find frustrating. I have no doubt we will be adding more to this collection, but these are the ones we are starting with. Some are general enough for both of our older kids, but most are for one or the other.

This is the year that Wee One #3 would be starting preschool, but it doesn’t make sense to me to put her in preschool here if the other two are at home anyway, so I’m going to ‘officially’ start her preschool at home this fall. Though honestly, we read and sing and count and color all the time anyway, the major difference with adding the word officially in there is that I’ll be deliberately teaching her specific things. Her books and her materials will be a lot different. I will be making homemade playdoh every other day like I did with Wee One #1 when he was little and now that I know how to make chalk and paint, there will be a whole lot of that going on too. I’m looking forward to documenting and blogging about it in the coming months as well!

		This last one is for me. 😉

As far as scheduling goes, when we first started I tried every subject, every day. It worked for a while but sometimes you just need more time for certain things. This term I’m breaking up the day into 45 minute blocks – with an hour long block for swimming in the middle of the day and the kids will start sports and formal lessons in whatever physical activity they choose at the YMCA this fall.

We have joined two homeschooling groups in LA, though we’ve only been out to meet up with one of them. They are the sweetest and most supportive group of moms I’ve been around in a very, very long time. A lot of them are from out of state also and they are all so welcoming. Most importantly, the kids have made friends which was my only real concern with homeschooling. With that out of the way, I’m hella excited about this year – especially field trips! Here is a list of the places we’ll be going on field trips this year, some we’ve already been to but it’s worth going back!

Aquarium of the Pacific
The La Brea Tar Pits
California Science Center
Museum of Natural History
The Santa Barbara Maritime Museum
Kidspace Museum
Skirball Cultural Center

Every Saturday and Tuesday from 8am-1pm, farmers from over 60 California farms (from Fresno to San Diego) come together in Charles Wilson park in Torrance!

In Canada, our favorite farmer’s market staples were strawberries, blueberries, butternut squash and apples. Here though? Here we were excited about (and not disappointed by) the local citrus fruit. The concept of ‘local citrus’ is totally insane in Ontario, so having local lemon slices in my water last night and this morning was beyond awesome. Better than that, I got to meet the lady who picked them – yesterday morning! How sweet is that?! Same goes for the oranges we got, picked yesterday. Wee One #1 loves oranges, so he was hyped when we had a sample wedge and bought a few pounds of them. We also picked up fresh herbs, peppers, strawberries, pumpkin seeds, a HUGE bag of kettle corn, raw sage honeycomb from Pacifica and vegan sun-dried tomato pesto and basil pesto from Bolani.

This week I’ll make some treats with the honey and the Bolani dips and post about them.

We ended our day by finally (!!) getting LA library cards and discovered there are a zillion different districts and a heap of branches in each district! So many libraries to check out!

The South Bay Homeschool Network meets up today and I am so so so glad we hooked up with them. The parents are all really friendly and nice and my oldest has made a friend with similar interests and that’s defo a win!

I did it!! Look! My sister won like 14, but whatever, I got one!

So with the Ravellenic Games behind me for another two years, the desire to knit my face off is still in full force. Thankfully my life is actually pretty conductive to that, so away I went casting on and finishing a pair of cute baby socks for my girl Sammie. Well, they’re for her baby duh, but that baby isn’t finished cooking yet. That gives me more time to knit other cute things for her!

But those socks are finished, May, where’s your work in progress?! These lovies were cast on shortly before the Games started and I set them aside to work on my puffs. The puffs are habit forming!! After I finished the pink baby socks, I immediately used the rest of the yarn to make puffs (I only got two out of what was left) and these socks are not even done yet and I’m already thinking about the puffs I will make with the leftover yarn. Here are Miss Wee One #3’s almost finished wee socks!

No lie, she is currently wearing the finished one. She wanted to wear the one that’s still on the needles, but eventually decided the one without the pokey things would be just fine for today. Don’t you eat cereal while watching My Little Pony on Netflix with one woolly sock on – in California in August?!

Sidebar: Our cousin’s girlfriend showed me Coursera a little while ago! Have you seen this?

I will be taking Networked Life, Model Thinking and Greek and Roman Mythology this term (they are all 10 weeks long) and then Nutrition for Health Promotion (6 weeks) in January. I’m excited that each of the courses I picked all award a certificate of completion if done well!

New readers of my blog may not know that my husband and I married (each other) twice. The first time we eloped at 19 & 21 with only by bestie and her boyfriend as witnesses, and then again 8 years later in the Greek Orthodox church I grew up in. I picked these photies from the second time we got married (in May 2008) for Flashback Friday today because since moving to Los Angeles I miss my sister, my girlfriends, my parents and my extended family and I miss my husband’s family too (who totally feel like my family after 12 years). This day was one of those magical days when almost everyone that matters is together!! Happy Friday!

Greeks don’t mess around when it’s time to make a big deal out of something.

Le sigh. I love this photie. (l-r back row; my adorable sister, Wee One #3’s Godmother, my daddy, my mom, me, Wee One #1’s Godmother and l-r front row; my original bestie circa 1984, Wee One #2’s Godmother and my long time dear, dear sister from another mister friend that I got all bent out of shape about and no longer talk to). Damn. Should I call her?

I love when my mom smiles like this! <3

As promised, here’s a little peek at some California adventures! Wee One #2’s Godparents were our first visitors since moving down here. They are some of our oldest friends but we’ve lived in different countries for the last nine years. They live on the west coast too and we are all so excited to be able to spend more time with each other! The La Brea Tar Pits was high in our list of places to see and our friends love, love, love museums so away we went. I learned so much!

Here’s a little background for you. The La Brea Tar Pits are a cluster of naturally occurring tar pits in the middle of Los Angeles. If you’ve heard of Hancock Park, that’s the park the city built around the tar pits. The tar here has been seeping up from the ground for tens of thousands of years. That itself is pretty amazing, and of course all the animals that have become trapped in the tar over all this time! The tar keeps the bones well preserved and I was really surprised at the kinds of animals found there like mammoths, wolves, horses, deer, llamas, camels (wait there were camels in LA at some point?!), bison, bears, ground sloths, even a woman (who has been dated at about 10,000 years!!) and of course the California state fossil, the saber toothed cat. Aside from things the general public would find interesting (there are also a lot of really beautiful gems found in the tar), there are all kinds of discoveries relevant to the scientific world like fossilized insects, plants and grains – not to mention 200-300 previously unknown species of bacteria!

All seven of us had a great afternoon wandering around Hancock Park and taking in the sites of all the different tar pits and the gardens surrounding them. We also spent hours inside the George C. Page Museum learning more about how the animals got trapped in the tar – and tested out an exhibit that gives you an idea of what it feels like to be trapped in it yourself!

I came across the first picture here this morning and had one of those ‘how do they get so big, so fast?!’ moments, and a couple other pictures of these two came to mind. It makes me all misty to see their little relationship growing over time! The first photo was taken the week Wee One #2 was born, the second one was taken shortly after Wee One #3 was born and the third one was taken last year, when we lived in a cottage by the lake. Be still my little heart.

Yesterday, the day ended with a puff count of 24/100 for Ravellenics 2012 – Modular Relay

2005

2009

2011

I know some people prefer a crunch with their cookies, and occasionally I’ll make a really crunchy cookie for the kids when they request it, but generally they love their cookies ultra soft. Ginger cookies, chocolate cookies, peanut butter cookies and yes, the beloved chocolate chip cookie are all served up really soft and moist around here (I love the wee bite marks the two littlest ones leave in them when they put them down for a drink). So I’ve been baking up different versions of all kinds of cookies for years to find exactly the right combination to get the right texture. I have succeeded with these babies right here. Normally, I like to know where a recipe came from before I post it on the blog, but in this case I think it was my granny. I found this recipe written on an index card in my kitchen when we unpacked a few months ago, which is really weird because I had to itemize every little thing we brought with us for the border patrol. So I thought I knew everything that was in the bins we brought over. Clearly then, this was the work of kitchen fairies. Let’s not question the kitchen fairies.

2 1/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cups granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 large eggs
2 cups chocolate chips

In typical cookie fashion, sift together the flour, baking soda and salt in one bowl and cream together the butter and sugars in another.
I cream the butter and sugars in the Kitchen Aid and them slowly pour the flour mixture into the butter mixture with the machine on low. Then I take the bowl off the stand and stir the chocolate chips in with a wooden spoon. The wooden spoon makes me feel old school and justifies my ridiculous (and by ridiculous I mean fabulous) apron. Then bake 375 for 9 minutes. The timing is the key to the softness of these guys. They’ll seem borderline mushy, don’t fret. Let them cool on the cookie sheet for a few minutes before you move them to a rack (or a plate) to cool off completely so they don’t stick together in the cookie jar!

I know Menu Monday is a concept meant to make dinners in busy households a little smoother, if only because you’re aware of what you’re doing before you open the pantry at 5 o’clock and I love that, I really do. I love only having to think about what I’m cooking once a week when I write the list and even then I just put together ideas and requests I’ve jotted down. While I do love serving something everyone loves (that hopefully looks pretty snazzy as well) to my fam every night, breakfast is my favorite meal to prepare for the Wee Ones.

I’m always up looong before them (occasionally, Wee One #3 will surprise all of us and get up when our alarms go off around 5am) so I have way more solo time to prep and set the table than I do in the evenings. Generally, they all wake up hungry. If they didn’t, they tend to develop an appetite when they smell whatever is going on that day. 🙂

To me, there are two important things about any meal but I try to be especially mindful of them at breakfast. It has to be packed with as many nutrients as possible and it has to be appealing enough for them to actually eat it. I mean, a bowl of Red River cereal is crazy good for you, it’s about as enticing to most people as a bowl of birdseed (my Daddy and one of my besties, Gill, however will happily sit down to a bowl of birdseed and go ‘mmmm, birdseed’). So, with that in mind, I set the table as pretty as I can with our hilarious extended vacation mismatched silverware and plates and fill their plates with fuel for the day. Kids need energy to squabble over board game rules and cover themselves head to toe in sidewalk chalk, dontchaknow!

As you know from last year, I’ve gotten sneaky with a lot of my cooking and baking so there are untraditional ingredients in a lot of their muffins and breads, but they all work in their favor and the kids either don’t know or don’t care so I keep at it. I generally serve it buffet-style. So I set out plates full of food and then each kid gets their own plate to pick and choose what they want. One of my kids will eat and eat and eat at each meal AND snack all day – my other two have supermodel appetites so they wont each as much at a meal, but they’ll come back half an hour later and ask for a snack so I just offer them breakfast again and again till lunch!

Breakfast this Week (July 16 – 22)

Sunday – Berry Smoothie (with spinach and parsley), Cinnamon Buns, Monkey Bread and maybe Apple Fritter Muffins

Last week I posted my first Flashback Friday and it was sweet and fun so I’m doing it again!

This photo is from August of 2001 of Wee One #1 and I at one of the family camps on my husband’s side. I hadn’t discovered those swimming diapers at this point and his little water-logged diaper looks totally ridic but he had a great time.

This Wee One will be 12 years old next week! What?!?

What a fun week!! It started out sadly though – my most treasured pie plate (and of course the only one I brought with me) smashed to the floor with a beautiful chicken pot pie in it. I am not a crier and I swear I almost shed a tear over this. It was about 40 years old, snagged from a friend who brought it to my house in Toronto about 5 years ago with a peanut butter cup cake in it. The nostalgic part of this story is that the cake she brought was her entry into our annual bake off for my sister’s birthday and she lost but about a year later we found out the entry that beat her was a store bought cheat!. I lifted my spirits with these cinnamon buns though. Then I made my very first Battenberg Cake for Daring Bakers, it was hard but totally worth it!

Also:

-We have a Stone Cold Creamery across the street and it’s become a weekly treat for the kids to get a small bowl and I am uber proud of myself that I haven’t caved in over a month!
-Strawberry cake makes me extremely happy and yes I snack on strawberries while I bake it!
-Nothing is more fun than a random tutu!
-We went to the pool every weekday this week and man were the kids happy about that (I’ve never been so tan in my whole life)
-Butter Tarts for Canada Day
-Canada Day dinner of Peameal Bacon on a Kaiser with Poutine and a Moosehead