The spoon is finished. Mostly. I realized on the second day that the quality of the wood wasn’t very good. I would never want to use the spoon on food, so I finished the project without doing a final sanding and oiling. This is the finished project.

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Today, I decided to make a spoon. I have zero experience carving wood, and I don’t really know what tools I should use, but I figured I could wing it. I started by choosing an old log from our pile of fire wood. I think it’s oak. I dug through our tool chest and found some tools that looked like they’d be useful. Once I chose a log that looked like it could be a spoon and found a tool that looked like it could make a spoon, I began chiseling it into what I felt would be a more manageable shape.

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Now that I’ve mostly recovered from what felt like an abysmal failure in my ceramics class last semester, I’m feeling slightly creative again. But as usual, I’m not sure where to direct this energy. I think I feel like knitting. I’ve been wanting to tackle knitting a pair of socks for a while now. If I started now, I could have them finished by winter.

I really want to give handmade gifts for Christmas this year. The idea has always appealed to me, but somehow I never find enough ideas for everyone. Maybe knitted socks is a good place to start. I think even my dad (the world’s most difficult person to buy for) could appreciate socks. Our family in Florida might not have much use for socks though.

I’ve never tried carving wood. I would love to make myself a set of wooden spoons. I think a set of handcrafted wooden spoons would be a great gift. I’m not sure everyone in my family would agree. I suppose I should figure out how to make them before I settle on spoons as a gift idea.

I’ve also been wanting to work with polymer clay. I just don’t have a specific project. I think that’s the problem with most of my ideas. I know the medium I want to try, but I rarely have a specific project in mind. But right now, I’m thinking spoons and socks. Yep.

Four kids birthday parties in four weeks. That brings us up to five for the year. A new record for us. And my boys are homeschooled.

Let’s talk about child abuse, shall we? One of my favorite homeschooling blogs I read regularly featured a story about a woman who was considering reporting a family to social services for the way they homeschool. She believes “this is a form of child abuse.”

If someone disagrees with the way I homeschool my kids and believes it is a form of child abuse, I suggest there are numerous other things that should be examined for child abuse. (I want to be very clear. This list is for the sake of argument only and should not be taken as my definition of child abuse.)

Child Abuse?
- Soda pop.
- Trans fat.
- White flour and sugar.
- Fast food.
- Too much television.
- Living in an unsafe city.
- Two-income families.
- Divorce and single parenting.
- Certain religious beliefs.
- Owning a gun.
- Second hand smoke.
- Daycare.
- Infant formula.
- Fertility treatments.
- The Ferber method.
- Sun exposure.

Ridiculous, isn’t it?

My decision to homeschool my kids was not made for my benefit. It is neither financially beneficial nor convenient for our family. We sacrifice many luxuries for the benefit of our kids. We do what we do because we genuinely believe we are giving them the highest quality education possible. How is that child abuse?

My list, however, is filled with choices parents make that are not made for the sole benefit of their kids. If my right to educate my kids the way I feel is best is being called into question, perhaps some of your parenting choices will be questioned next.

(The original article was from the “Dear Ellie” section of the Chicago Sun-Times.)

Janice and I met during my freshman year of high school. She was a year ahead of me, so we had no classes together. Our only connection was through the drama club. I don’t recall exactly how we became friends, but I guess it was through a series of events in which we found ourselves constantly in each other’s company. We just sort of hit it off right away.

It’s hard for me to believe we were only friends for about three years or so. Those three years were so memorable and filled with so much laughter and fun. We had one of those relationships where we always knew what the other person was thinking, and we could finish each other’s sentences. Spending time with Janice was some of the best fun I’ve ever had. But then she graduated and I was left alone for my senior year. During that summer, I messed things up. In what I like to think was a rare moment of teenage brattiness on my part, I picked a fight with her and we fell out of touch.

Nineteen years later, we’re talking again. And already I’ve learned we still have so much in common.

We’ve had our cow share for two weeks, and already we’ve had to purchase a second share. I’m curious how long we’ll last on two gallons of milk per week. I made two loaves of whole wheat bread today, and a small amount of homemade butter. Yummy! Tomorrow, I’m going to attempt to make yogurt. I haven’t gotten ambitious enough to try to make cheese yet.

I’ve been taking the cream from the top of our milk and using it for ice cream, butter, and to flavor our coffee. It works well, but it leaves us with less milk to drink. The farm has recently started offering individual containers of cream. It’s thick, like paste. I may try a pint of it just to see what kind of results I get with my butter.

I’m having some computer issues this week. It started several weeks ago with my computer shutting off without warning. Since it only happened once, I figured I must have bumped the power cord or something. Last week, it started shutting off again more frequently. Its fan had been running hard, so I blamed it on the heat. On Monday, I couldn’t keep it running for more than a few minutes at a time. I took it to the Apple Store on Tuesday, and they replaced my power supply. When I brought it home that afternoon, it wouldn’t turn on at all. I returned to the Apple Store yesterday, and it worked just fine, but it now had a kind of burn mark on the screen. Now, I’m waiting for that to be replaced. The good news is that Apple rocks, and I’m getting my service and parts free of charge. (I have an extended warranty, but it does not cover accidental damage.) The bad news is that I suspect an electric problem in my house may have caused the damage. Though it’s more of an inconvenience having an electrical issue, it’ll probably end up costing us less money than it would have been to repair the computer.

Rob and I watched the movie “Accepted” last night, and I couldn’t help but notice it had a very unschooling feel to it. One of my favorite scenes is when a former college professor is impersonating the dean of a nonexistant college as he tries to explain his philosophy about our country’s education system to some parents. He explains that kids only go to college for one reason: to get an entry level job paying a good salary. The former professor meant that as a negative thing, but the parents thought it was a worthwhile pursuit. It was the parents perspective that made me understand why so many people don’t understand our approach to homeschooling/unschooling.

My boys don’t read at their “level” yet, but I’m not too concerned. I know they’ll read when they’re ready to read. When the boys were four years old, they got their first real bicycles with training wheels. Our neighbor’s daughter (also four years old) got her bike the same year. The mom had her daughter out on her bike practicing without training wheels every day. Before she turned five, she was zooming around the neighborhood on two wheels. My boys, however, were allowed to learn to ride their bikes when they were ready. It wasn’t until just after their eighth birthday that they decided to ride without the training wheels. Overnight, they were zooming around the neighborhood on two wheels. Today, there is no difference between their skills on a bike and the skills of the girl who learned early.

Many people are hung up on the idea that a good education requires learning a specified list of things within a specified amount of time. We marvel at kids who can name all the state capitals at an early age, and we laugh at adults who can’t name our first President. In eighth grade, I was required to memorize the periodic table. I haven’t once used this information beyond eighth grade. I don’t feel my child’s education should force him to acquire skills that have no use to him beyond becoming a parlor trick or a Jeopardy contestant.

I have very few close friends. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say I have no close friends. I had a best friend or two in high school, and sometimes I miss having a best friend as an adult. Sure, I have Rob and my sister, but I’m really talking more about a best friend who isn’t family.

A friend of mine has been appearing in a lot of my dreams lately. I think it means I wish we were closer. Even awake, I wish we were closer, though I don’t think we could be best friends. I searched classmates.com for some of my old high school classmates. Nobody ever writes their life bio there, so I went ahead and wrote mine hoping it would encourage some of them to do the same. It ended up being a weird mix of what I like to think is the real me (that is, happy and optimistic), and a hint of this moodiness I’ve been experiencing lately. I don’t really know what to expect, but I’m hoping for some sort of update from someone.