Summer Happenings in June 2024

I'm porting over June 2024 social media posts to our family blog. If you're already "friends" with me on social media, you've probably seen all of this!

June 2024

Wood Chips Day!

We hadn't laid wood chips on our backyard's barren, cracked soil in three years, so today was the day and everyone had a job.

Dad: repeated trips to the hardware store to buy wood chips

John (17): unloading wood chips around the yard

Mary (15): doing the housework indoors since we were all outdoors

David (6): using scissors to open all the bags (he was so proud of himself to use scissors)

Margaret (13): emptying the bags on the ground

Mom: raking the wood chips around

Thomas (8): stuffing the wood chips plastic bags into a refuse bag

Dogs: Hanging out in the backyard with us for boosting morale

The yard is looking more decent already. We hadn't laid wood chips since Thomas was released from the hospital three years ago and we renovated the back yard to make it a place for him to play when he was still so very sick and debilitated. Turned out that for this Mama, laying wood chips was a pensive trip down memory lane today.

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I gasped aloud with excitement to see my first Eastern Monarch caterpillar on my Narrowleaf Milkweed. Monarch caterpillars’ only food is the milkweed plant, so if we don’t plant it in yards, the butterfly population will continue to diminish. 

Today marks four years since "Diagnosis Day"! 

Thomas is *nearly* nine years old and living his best life, forging ahead despite his post-cancer limitations, and showing no evidence of cancer. For those children newly diagnosed, there is HOPE!

Thank God for every day you have with your children.

Chris and I are so proud of our firstborn and his strong work ethic! John has been hired for a second job, this one in an office environment. He managed the entire process by himself: contacting the owner, communicating with him over a couple of months, setting the interview appointment, and presenting well at the interview, and now he's finished his first week of employment there. John continues to work at the ice cream shop where he's been employed for two years, so this summer he is going to be working about 40 hours per week. Our 17-year-old has keys to two businesses, is trusted to open and close, and we hear he is appreciated by his employers. We parents are pleased as punch!

Such a handsome boy! He lives for our daily session of fetch.

I had a delightful time hosting a garden party for the June social event of our homeschooling ministry. Thanks to all who came!

Having just finished reading "Hannah Coulter" last week (highly, highly recommend!), I'm trying to pick a new literature book for Mary (age 15-1/2) and I to read simultaneously, something we have fun doing. 

We were thinking of "Anna Karenina," but I keep reading reviews that it is really best read even beyond high-school. We're considering "Cry the Beloved Country" (which I've never read) or "Kristen Lavransdatter" (which I read probably ten years ago).

Thoughts? Recommendations?

Meanwhile, I continue puttering away at several other books . . .

"Credo: Compendium of the Catholic Faith" by Bishop Athanasius Schneider -- I am trying to re-establish a habit of holy reading early in the morning . . . while also trying to establish the habit of going to the gym to workout in the early morning, so we have a conflict, Houston.

"Joy in Suffering" by Rose Hu -- a story of Communism, always of interest to me

"The Rest of the Story: A Summary of the Life and Times of Archbishop Lefebvre" -- for my ladies' book club

"Anatomy and Physiology made Incredibly Easy" -- for continuing education

Cook's "The Science of Good Cooking" -- for continuing education

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Nicky lives for playing fetch  Tilly could not care less, so when I bring her outside for fetch, she typically finds a shady spot to nap or eat grass. This morning, she found a bench to rest on, like the lapdog breed that she is!

Today I tried my hand at making homemade "quick oatmeal packets."

I have never liked to buy instant oatmeal packets at the store, despite how much my kids like them: too much sugar, too much expense. Recently we had some in the house leftover from John's backpacking trip, so my younger boys were delighting in eating up the remainder.

I followed a recipe I found online (see in comments) to make my own packets.

Ingredients:

• Steel cut quick oats (the canister that says it cooks in 5 minutes)-- I much prefer steel cut oats for its nutrition over rolled oats!
• whole milk powder
• brown sugar
• Redmond real salt
• ground cinnamon
• ground flaxseed

The one-cup of oats serving size in the recipe is 400 calories, so I bagged mine as half-cup servings of 210 calories (25% higher than Quaker instant oatmeal).

• Fat 6 g (300% higher)
• Sodium 126 mg (33% lower)
• Carb 33 g (equal)
• Fiber 5 g (25% higher)
• Sugar 4 g (66% lower)
• Protein 8 g (200% more)

My cost is 29 cents per serving, compared to 50 cents for Quaker brand or 25 cents for generic.

My boys read about the game of ringers (old-fashioned marbles) and have been playing it most of the day now. I love it!

Nine days after the six munching caterpillars vanished from my milkweed, I’ve spotted my first Eastern Monarch butterfly, emerged and safe! We are excited and hope to see more.

Thomas is followed by 13 doctors and for the last year or so had 30 regular clinic appointments per year. Lately he is stable enough that now he is down to 26 visits per year! Reason to celebrate! He gets blood labs at 13 of those appointments. He has 11 prescriptions at five dosing times per day in order to be growing and meeting his nutritional absorption needs. I praise God for Western medicine and brilliant, dedicated doctors, nurses, medical staff, and researchers who make this possible.

Look who learned how to swim this summer! Go, Thomas, go!

Hot Wheels Legends Tour (car show)

June 15, 2024

Very fun!

We’ve been enjoying visits from an Eastern box turtle to our back yard. I let the boys leave him lettuce and such, but they leave him alone and let him travel on his way.

Mary has been a busy bee wrapping up her music season. Her last performance with the Preparatory Orchestra was May 6. Her end-of-year piano recital was May 19. She participated in an organ master class on June 17 as part of Bach Week events here in Charlotte. Her violin recital was June 23. Finally, her Stigall organ recital is upcoming on June 30. Then she takes a deep breath before starting all her new musical material for the 2024-25 year!

MEAL PLANNING

I'm enjoying the slower pace of summer and getting to focus anew on cooking everything homemade that I can. I'm making a project to look through our meals and find elements to make myself (e.g., making homemade tomato sauce instead of opening a jar). 

Last Week's Meal Plan:

Monday: 

Homemade pizza (dough from deli) cooked in cast iron skillet plus salad with various veggies

Taco Tuesday: 

ground beef (93/7), all the things, heavy on the sauteed veggies . . . still purchasing tortillas because I'm not THAT cool to make my own!

Wednesday: 

Spaghetti night (Good Wheat high-fiber), homemade tomato sauce, homemade meatballs (sausage + ground beef), roasted broccoli

Thursday: 

Baked chicken, brown rice, lentils, sauteed squash and zucchini

Friday night while preparing to host a garage sale: 

I confess it, I ordered delivery pizza and salad for everyone else! (But I ate leftover lentils and brown rice. 🙂

Saturday night: 

A French restaurant with friends where I enjoyed a lovely salad and ratatouille

Sunday: 

Sandwich Night using my homemade bread + homemade apple crisp

The Current Week:

Monday: 

Philly cheesesteak sandwiches made with flank steak, tons of sauteed veggies, homemade provolone sauce, homemade baked French fries, and (cooking for some picky people) boxed Annie's mac and cheese

Tuesday: 

Kielbasa sausage (lower fat turkey); rotini pasta (Good Wheat high fiber); a casserole of wild rice/brown rice mix + goat cheese + low-sugar dried cranberries; roasted beets with goat cheese over arugula

Wednesday: 

Spaghetti (Good Wheat high-fiber), homemade tomato+meat sauce, roasted Brussels Sprouts and red onions with balsamic vinegar

Thursday's planned picnic at a POPS concert: 

Italian bread, deli egg salad, turkey, ham, sandwich makings, popcorn, and (I hope) homemade cookies

Friday: 

TBD . . . maybe chickpea curry for the adventurous among us and something simple for the others?

I sure enjoyed taking my boys to see the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra and fireworks at Pineville Lake Park. The event was entirely free and we met up with another Catholic family. 

Chris was out of state slaying dragons and my three teens each expressed desire to do something else, so they didn’t come. Boo hoo for this mama!

Half a bushel of farm fresh peaches is going to keep me busy this weekend!

Our summer has much less formal summer school than the boys need after last year—okay, zero—but everyone is having a wholesome good time. 

Today I baked four loaves of bread and started processing farm fresh peaches for freezing. Plus cleaned the house, like I’m doing every other second of my life. Tomorrow I hope to bake with some peaches and make a vat of homemade tomato sauce. 

The boys run around getting dirty, playing with neighborhood boys, swimming in our pool, and inventing stuff. Today they built The Beast out of a cardboard box. A boy sits inside perched on a booster seat atop a skateboard. He waves baseball bats as arms, blows orange-dyed water out the mouth, shoots a Nerf bullet out the nose, and glows red lights out of the eyes. The boys spent hours and hours on it!

Congratulations to Margaret (age 13) for participating in an audition-only, two-week workshop with OperaCarolina! She grew as a performer through the experience and performed in front of about 100 people at a recital tonight. Click here to see her performance of "Per la Gloria"! 

While I planted my plants for butterflies, I am pleased to see all pollinator friends, including bees and wasps!

Mary performed at her first-ever Stigall Scholars organ recital. She said goodbye to her wonderful teacher Jacob Temple, who is moving away, and she will continue her organ studies with a new teacher this coming year.

May 2024 Happenings

I'm porting over May 2024 social media posts to our family blog. If you're already "friends" with me on social media, you've probably seen all of this!

May 2024

Dogs on a Sunday morning

Today school consisted (solely) of the boys dissecting owl pellets while I drove everywhere on earth today, made phone calls, was helping teens prepare for finals and theater Tech Week, and grocery shopping. I absolutely adore how David (6) organized his animal bones into categories (“mom, write MYSTERY”).

Mary had the loveliest evening attending a Civil War ball this past week. The next one is a Western Formal! I simply love our homeschool community.

Tonight, our beautiful Mary performed in her final performance at the Preparatory Orchestra level before rising next year to YOC!

I’d like to recommend Riley’s delectable homemade fudge. She offers numerous flavors and it is packaged beautifully. I bought six flavors for my family and cut the fudge into dice-sized pieces to enjoy in a civilized fashion with hot tea and a good read-aloud. Now if I can just keep the stash of fudge hidden from said family, this will last us for three or four more afternoon family tea gatherings!

Our bright and energetic Joseph (11) is coming up with science experiments all day long. This was his latest. Our school room is full of science supplies open to the kids for experimentation.

Last night, Margaret and I attended "Les Mis" by Eagles Eagles' Wings Studio and were incredibly impressed. Chris, Mary, and I get to attend again today, and, frankly, I wish I had bought tickets to the third performance, too! 

I have loved "Les Mis" all my adult life, I have every song memorized, I have watched all the movies. Only after watching this production last night did I really come to understand more about the revolution plot line, which was one aspect that had previously not captured my interest. These actors were able to present it to me in a richer way after my having loved this musical for 25 years. 

Facebook isn't the place for a long-enough review, but I just spent about an hour commenting through scene by scene to John. The casting, the costuming, the sets, the acting, specific nuances and choices, the singing . . . so many amazing moments. This is a theater group made up entirely or almost so of Christians, and it shows in how they do everything for the glory of God, and, in this specific musical, highlighting the mercy of God toward man.

I can’t wait to watch it again at today’s performance!

Thanks to my family for giving me such a special Mother’s Day! They feted me a day early—due to various scheduling conflicts—with a restaurant breakfast, flowers, gifts, and the most thoughtful cards.

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Every ten days, I change Thomas’s continuous glucose monitor. I announce, “It’s Dexcom day!”

For the first time today, little brother David (6 years old) heard me and, next thing I knew, he had gathered up all the supplies and laid them out for me. It was the cutest thing. 

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I put in my butterfly garden about a month ago and today spotted my first butterfly friend! 😍

The three boys and I had a great time at Patterson Farm’s homeschool day this past Thursday!

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"Eight Below" was a good family movie that all ages enjoyed, which is very rare to find. Beware that some of the sweet dogs die, so tender young hearts might find that difficult!

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Our family was honored to attend the Fraternus Accolade ceremony on Monday evening. Joseph finished 5th grade and his first year with Fraternus, so he was given a rosary. John finished 11th grade and chose to complete the rigorous Knighthood program this year. Chris and I are so proud of him!

In the spirit of a confraternity, Fraternus Knights commit to the follow "rule of life."

Fraternus Knights Pray their Rosary Daily

Fraternus Knights Confess Their Sins and Attend Mass Regularly

Fraternus Knights Treasure the Sacred Scriptures 

Fraternus Knights Mortify the Flesh and Offer Acts of Reparation 

Fraternus Knights Live their Fraternity 

Fraternus Knights Lead in their Vocations

I want to recommend Clear Play to any of my friends, whether you have minor kids or not. If you're not familiar with it, Clear Play is a filtering product to use with movies. It is now so convenient: We have Amazon Prime streaming, and we can rent the movie through Clear Play from our own Amazon account with just one click.

Even we adults enjoy using Clear Play to clean up movies to remove gross scenes or language that bother us. I've included some screen shots of the filtering selections. When we rent a movie, we can go ahead and accept all the filtering. Or we can go through and block or unblock specific scenes and words to our preferences. It is so strict that one can even block a scene of a person drinking a glass of wine at a restaurant (say, if you're a Mormon who is offended by that).

(Note: The one gap is if you have closed captioning turned on to hear/see the dialog better. If words are snipped from the audio, they will still show up in the closed captioning.)

We have cut almost all subscriptions from our budget, but having Clear Play at $7.99/month is well worth it to our family because we've gone from almost no Hollywood movies being acceptable to us as produced to a goodly percentage being watchable and enjoyable!

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Our family was *so blessed* to spend the week on Hilton Head Island. What a respite! I was anxious about preparing for a vacation so close upon the heels of the school year ending, but the benefit was that after a crazy-busy May, relaxing for a whole week was healing. We actually showed up to John and Joseph's Fraternus Accolade ceremony packed and ready to go, and departed from church, arriving on the island at 1:00 a.m. Then we are returning only a few hours before we are due to attend the homeschool graduation ceremony of our friends.

We intentionally stayed close to the condo this week and did not drive around doing touristy activities. Our days were filled with drinking coffee on the porch, taking repeated daily walks on the beach, building sand castles, reading novels, swimming at the condo complex pool, and watching a few movies. Our condo looked across the channel toward Daufuskie Island, and our beach was chock full of animals: jelly fish, horseshoe crabs, tiny crabs, minuscule frogs, many birds, dolphins many times daily, sharks (!), deer, and even a puffer fish.

One evening, we attended the Gregg Russell concert, which turned out to be his very first night of the summer season! What old-fashioned fun! Thomas got called up on stage not once, but TWICE. This kid loves talking to adults and does not lack confidence.

We also rented bicycles one morning, the three teens going off on their own while Joseph (11) and I rode 9 miles around the island. Joseph kept telling me as we rode that "this is one of the best days of my life." MELT THIS MAMA'S HEART. The days are long, but the years are so short. Chris had charge of the two youngest boys and, purely by chance, arrived by car at Harbor Town when we arrived there by bicycle, so he took all the boys to the top of the lighthouse.

I have learned how to be a better homemaker of a large family on vacation, and it took me too many years. This time around, I planned all our meals--breakfast, lunch, dinner, and desserts--keeping them simple and easy. I brought up groceries for coffee and breakfast the first morning at the condo. In advance, I placed a grocery order for the week's food to pick up mid-morning of the first day. It was so much more relaxing to stay home and cook meals than to be hauling the family to restaurants constantly! We thank Pop-Pops for treating us to a restaurant outing for some authentic sea food: Thomas is now asking me to grill salmon for him!

Now we are ready to go home, start some summer school basics, get into some summer time exercise and sports (casual at home, not on teams), and go on a bunch of easy, inexpensive adventures around Charlotte in the next few months (like local baseball games and summer POPs concerts!).

Thanks for Frances L. for organizing this class on mycology led by Kenny Rupert of Fun Guy Foraging. I really had little interest in mushrooms, but it turned out to be incredibly interesting and I now know how much I don't know. Mr. Rupert got his degree in finance at UNC Charlotte, continued his finance studies at Oxford, England, and worked in the banking industry before falling in love with mushrooms, which he's been studying for the 20 years since.

After the class and nature walk, we all ate lunch and played at the playground.

Roses from my garden

Some dogs like to be on their backs or cradled like a baby, while some dogs do not. Tilly is definitely a dog who likes to chill out on her back. We wuv her.