I’m not politically “green,” but I care about the environment because I enjoy nature, good food and being able to breathe. Of course, taking care of the land and the animals is part of being a Christian good steward of what God has given to us.

Here’s how a composting cycle can easily work on a farm, or even in a large suburban backyard. It’s rather simple, although a little hard to follow in outline form:

1. The WORMS in the worm-bed help create the compost for the garden. Worms are an important part in the cycle, but one that not many people think of. (They’re also used for fishing, if you have a stocked pond.)

2. The enriched compost (goat poop, horse poop, rabbit poop, old hay, kitchen scraps…..you get the idea…all processed by worms) goes into the GARDEN and ORCHARD, along with a few worms. Results: better vegetable & fruit crops.

Excess manure is also drug over the fields for grass fertilizer.

3. The better VEGETABLES from the garden goes to feed the humans in the household (most of us don’t have the time or machinery to raise our own corn for animal feed), and the humans spend some of their “grocery” money to buy animal feed.

Any leftover fresh vegetables, over-ripe fruit, etc. can go to the animals. As small treats to the rabbits or goats, or en mass to the chickens. Of course, chickens can eat most cooked vegetables….I haven’t found many things that a chicken CAN’T eat.

4. Animal feed = rabbit meat, fresh eggs, chicken meat, or even beef, mutton or cabritto if you have the space. The feed also means baby rabbits or other animals to sell, and the money goes back into the system.

Rabbits are great for meat. They take up little room and frequently produce large litters of kits. The meat is low in fat and high in protein.

Chickens are great, too, even if you don’t harvest them for meat. Chickens can and will eat almost anything and will reward you with delicious fresh eggs. If you have enough room for free-range chickens, kitchen scraps, and no predators, then you won’t have to feed you chickens much chicken-feed. I feed very little chicken feed. Our chickens clean up feed from other animals, free-range around, and eat scraps and I get about 6 eggs a day from our motley flock. Even 2 or 3 good hens might supply you with all the eggs you need.

5. Any “waste” animal feed, feed that gets wet, spills on the ground or feed “sweepings” from the feed room can go to the worms. They’ll love it.

Feed bags make good garbage sacks. They’re also good to put down on the paths in your garden and, covered with mulch, are attractive and efficient weed barriers. In some places, you can even reuse your feed sacks.

I know that since I’ve started avoiding sugar (corn syrup, honey, etc.), I’ve discovered that there’s sugar in all kinds of foods that don’t need sugar. All this sugar is for is to get people addicted to the food so that they will eat more of it. Since I’ve been avoiding sugar, wheat and MSG, my pain level has decreased dramatically, although I still have “bad” days.

Stephen and I have now been on the South Beach diet since December, and he’s doing really well. He’s lost over 20 lbs. and his cholesterol levels are good….in spite of eating bacon & eggs for breakfast, meat for lunch and often a steak and veggies for supper. For us, at least, “fat does NOT make you fat. Sugar, other high-glycemic index foods and processed flour make you fat.” I don’t know how much I’ve lost, but I can now wear my size 12 jeans again. We’re both still losing weight.

On this diet we’ve switched to fewer (almost NO) processed foods. We eat “home cooking” with meat and “good” vegetables (very few potatoes or carrots). I miss my homemade bread, and occasionally I let myself have a fresh roll, but I usually pay for it the next day.

With the high cost of fruits and vegetables, we’re trying to raise all we can. Yesterday we put out more plants in the garden; we already had some radishes and lettuce beginning to grow. We put out some tomatoes, more lettuce and brussels sprouts. I’ve covered these with clear plastic to help keep them a little warmer, but these are already sturdy plants.

We’re again doing wide-bed, deep bed gardening this year. Every year, the beds get a little deeper as I pile more and more compost on them. They aren’t really that “deep” yet, but give me a few more years (or a few more times of cleaning out the goat barn) and they will be. I also need to invest in some landscaping timbers or something even taller for the “walls.” The walkways between the beds are covered with feed sacks covered with mulch. I think eventually this will be very attractive and it’s already suppressing weeds.

Gardening helps keep you healthy in 2 ways: 1) you get lots of exercise! 2) you get fresh veggies to eat.

Other than that, we’re busy doing the normal farm chores. I sheared all but two of the sheep, and I’ve sheared one of the Angoras. I can’t shear the way they do in New Zealand, picking the sheep up and turning it every which way.

Instead, I snub the sheep up to the fence and tie it tightly. The rams are easiest because I can rope their horns to the fence and keep them still. Then I usually start by cutting a swath down the backbone (often not good wool anyway). Then I shear down the body, getting the best wool off the sides and shoulders. I put this away. Then I shear the less valuable wool off the haunches, chest, belly, etc. Some of this gets turned into mulch for the garden. Some of it can be used for rough yarn.

The goats have all kidded and the sheep have lambed. We have 3 bottle baby goats in the house right down, but they’re growing well and the little boy should soon be off the bottle.

Our neighbor saw the first cottonmouth snake of the season a few days ago and he shot it. We’ve warned Sarah not to play near the pond.

Yesterday we took Puck, the paint mini-pony, out for a drive in the cart. He’s a natural trotter, but he hasn’t been used for a while and he’s a little head-strong. We’re going to have to get him used to pulling, and minding, again. He’s small, but very strong, and if Sarah is ever going to be able to drive him, he’s going to need some firm handling.

All of this keeps us busy and out of trouble.

I pay better than that for someone to clean out the goat barn…it’s contract labor, but I pay better. And I can’t find anyone willing to do it.

We find very few people willing to really work: build fences, scoop poop, dig trenches, fill holes. It’s even hard to find someone who’ll really get down and clean the house.

It’s like very few people want to really work. And I don’t want to hear any nonsense. If I, with a master’s degree, can get out there and de-worm goats and scoop poop, then anyone can.

I have a strange position on the immigration question. As far as I can see, immigrants are some of the few people in this country who’ll do the dirty work that HAS to be done. I say open up border gates to healthy immigrant families, issue them temporary social security numbers and put them to work! Companies would be lining up to employ them. Let those people come in, work and pay taxes like everyone else.

If you want to talk about a drain on society, it’s not the immigrants. It’s the people in the super max prisons that are costing Americans $$$$$$ every year to feed, clothe and house them. Now there’s a group that needs to be deported.

During the intervening years, I tried lots of different medicines and remedies, conventional and otherwise. Over time some of my symptoms got better, but the fibro was still very bad and affected every aspect of my life.

Doctors prescribed pain killers and told me to exercise. I tried Neurontin, Lyrica, Cymbalta and others, including antidepressants.
Herbal enthusiasts recommended supplements.
Alternative medicine practitioners tried acupuncture and massage.

Things seemed to help a little, but nothing made a major improvement.

I was denied insurance and experienced the disdain of doctors who either “didn’t believe in fibro” or who tried to counsel me that I was having panic attacks. My “panic attack” happened when I came out of a Pizza Hut after eating a thick crust pizza and a soda. Hint, Hint.

Then, in Dec. 2009, my husband and I began the South Beach Diet, a low-carb (not the Atkins no-carb) diet and so we had to get off carbs, sugar, fruit, etc. for a two-week crash course. Instead, we ate our own natural beef, other lean meats, and veggies.

I found out about the MSG after a couple of visits to a Chinese restaurant. It was pretty clear SOMETHING was wrong and yet all I’d eaten was some meat with sauce. Twelve hours later I was on the couch, wondering what was wrong. Then I had some sausage with MSG (I didn’t know it until after the fact) and ended up on the couch in PAIN. My muscles and joints were burning.

Check off MSG. Now I just check everything for MSG, even my spices. I can eat Chinese food as long as I ask for no MSG.

Now for the wheat. I don’t have a wheat allergy, it just makes me feel strange for some reason. I feel rather dizzy and light-headed, and my sinuses feel like they’re closing up, and I have a deep ache in my muscles that may last for hours or even over a day. That was the “panic attack” I had coming out of Pizza Hut. Right now I’m experimenting with different flours and grains to see what I can and can’t eat.

I’ve always know that I can’t eat a lot of sugar…my whole family has problems with low blood sugar and I’ve made myself very sick before eating a donut on an empty stomach. Getting rid of the sugar has helped a LOT to get rid of my anxiety, weakness, light-headedness, and frantic “I need to eat RIGHT NOW” feeling that I used to have very frequently.

I know that everyone’s fibromyalgia is different. Lots of times it’s connects to Lupus or some other chronic condition. I just wonder how many other people are like me, though. A few changes in their diet might not eliminate fibro, but it might help.

Since I’ve learned this, I’ve run into so many women that tell me that eating wheat or MSG or something makes them feel bad. Now, these aren’t people with food allergies that make their throats close up….eating these food just makes them feel bad so they quietly avoid them.

It makes me wonder WHY so many women have these problems.
Do men have them, too?
Is this something new, caused perhaps by a change in our foods, pesticides, etc?
Why don’t more doctors know about and tell their patients about it?

Changing my diet has helped me more than all the pills and other advice I’ve ever tried, and I feel that it’s getting to the root of the problem rather than just attacking the symptoms.

What I don’t see many educators talking about is the importance of vocabulary in reading. Maybe this is because it’s such a basic concept that it doesn’t need repetition. A child who grows up hearing a high level of vocabulary learns so many words just by hearing them….and that makes reading so much easier!

The goal of reading is comprehension. If a child is learning by the look-say method, then when he’s introduced to a word, he already has an idea what that word means. He doesn’t have to look it up in the dictionary. If he’s learning by phonics, he can say, “Oh, I recognize that word! So this is how it’s spelled.”

What’s sad is that so many children grow up in environments where they’re more likely to hear cursing and crude slang rather than good English. This puts the children at a disadvantage from the very start.

After glancing through the 4th reader, I’m almost convinced that 19th century English will be as incomprehensible as Old English in a few decades….except perhaps among the homeschoolers who grow up on these relics. It’s just amazing to me how quickly our language has changed…perhaps degenerated is a better word. Simplification is not necessarily a bad thing, but I wonder if our ability to express ourselves has diminished.

Certainly our vocabulary has.

I hv to wndr how lng it wl b bfr we all rt lk ths? Lts of kds alrdy do.

In our home-school, we’re pretty challenged by math. I was never a math whiz, but I understood it enough to make an A in calculus and then I waved “good-bye” to the math department for the much more hospitable climes of history.

I DID think that I could help a child understand 2 + 2, though. It’s simple, you just get out some toy animals or blocks and voila! The child understands.

Well, maybe not. Or maybe they understand today and forget it tomorrow.

I started out with some real misconceptions. Not all home-schoolteachers and kids face these challenges. But when you run upon them, they really bring you to a screeching halt.

Before I go into these, let me explain that, if you met my 7 y.o. daughter, you’d probably come away with the impression that she was very intelligent. She came to us from Russia when she was 2 1/2, and although she was late in speaking, she learned English VERY quickly. She is very extroverted and has a wonderful vocabulary for her age. Her manual skills have always been advanced, and she readily builds things. She has also demonstrated that she can spell words backwards as easily as forwards, although she also sometimes READS them backwards as well. She loves wolves and wild canines and says she wants to be forest ranger.

Yet she has lots of trouble with math. But perhaps our trials and errors will help someone else.

Misconception #1: COUNTING ON FINGERS I thought that all children instinctively knew how to count on their fingers. They DON’T. Not even in second grade. At our house we still can’t seem to just “look” at our hands and tell how many fingers we’re holding up without counting them. This may be a coordination or vision issue.

Misconception #2: LESS AND GREATER, BEFORE AND AFTER. I thought all children could grasp instinctively the fact that because 4 comes after 3, 4 is “1″ bigger than 3, or simply the fact that 4 is just bigger or greater than 3. NO. This sometimes causes great confusion. We’ve had to do LOTS of work with less and greater, and also before and after. I also had to clear up the idea that when I said “bigger” or “greater”, she thought I meant the font-size of the number. Thus a 30 pt. 3 was “bigger” than a 14 pt. 100.

The concept of “before and after” may also have been another issue, as our little girl likes to “rotate” images in her mind, so the concept of “before” or “after” was hard for her to grasp. Now she understands that she can’t “turn things around” in her mind.

Misconception #3. ADDITION AND SUBTRACTION ARE EASY A child, after some play with blocks, etc. should understand that when you add two numbers you get a BIGGER number, right? When you subtract, you get a smaller number. That makes sense to us, but not to all children. We still have problems grasping this simple concept. We often have to “prove” that two numbers equal another number with blocks. (I often get asked, “But HOW do numbers X + Y equal N?” or “But I thought Z + Z = N; how can X + Y = N, also?” We still have to do a lot of work with blocks. Not all kids are ready for abstract concepts at an early age.

Misconception #4: ADDING 1 IS EASY This seemed like a no-brainer. I though that children should be able to easily understand that if you add 1 to a number, you get the “next” number. No, this sometimes takes a lot of work. We’ve found the concept of stairs to work better than a regular number line. Once again, I think it’s a pattern-recognition problem.

Misconception #5: DIFFERENT USES OF NUMBERS
Most adults easily understand the difference between different uses of numbers, such as “1″ the numeral when counting vs. “1st” the ordinal number vs. “1″ as an amount. Not all kids grasp this quickly. (The idea that there was “1″ space between 3 and 4 caused us WORLDS of grief. She was confused because there’s no “1″ between 3 and 4, After all, “1″ comes before “2″. It was hard to help her understand that there are different uses for the concept “1.”

Misconception #6: COUNTING Any child can count, and a child who can count should be able to count starting at any number (i.e. 5, 6, 7) and count backwards easily. NADA. This sometimes takes LOTS of practice. The change from one ten family to another sometimes takes LOTS of work (39, 40…..49, 50….etc.)

Misconception #7: THE PATTERN 1,2,3,4… I thought a child should instinctively understand that the pattern 1,2,3,4……. is repeated over and over in math: 21, 22, 23, 24……. and 10, 20, 30, 40. But you can’t take that for granted.

Misconception #8: Children can understand mental gymnastics such as Math-U-See’s “9 wants to be a 10″ (and thus takes “1″ away from the other addend.) Not all kids can do the multiple steps required by concepts like this. The “Doubles + 1″ concept is similar. It involves understanding some slightly complex ideas about numbers and putting them to work all together. We’re still working on understanding that the sum of 6 + 7 is greater than the sum of 6 + 6. Once again, these concepts seem easy to adults, but can be hard for kids who still need concrete operations.

NOW FOR THE SUGGESTIONS & THE GOOD NEWS

Our daughter can now (2nd grade) count fairly well into the 100s. Sometimes we still have trouble with “before” or “after” numbers, though. It takes thought to remember which comes before or after. We know lots of math addition facts, although a few still elude us. We’re working hard on subtraction. It simply takes a lot of time and patience.

Multiplication, for some reason, is coming to her much more easily. I don’t understand it and I don’t even try.

HELPS
We’ve tried lots of things, so I thought I’d share some of our ideas with you. Some work and some don’t for us, but each child is different.

A) Regular workbook-repetition of Math facts. She can write math facts all day (if there are too many of them) and still not learn anything. When presented with a “math test” she would also just sit and cry because she couldn’t remember how to figure out a problem (although we learned how to figure out sums by drawing circles, counting on her fingers, number line, etc.) The abacus helped here, because it did empower her a little.

B) Flash Cards (regular & “triangle” style)- These helped us when used with just a few problems at a time.

C)Abacus- this helped. It’s small and portable and helps kids who have trouble memorizing the facts AND can’t seem to remember how to work them out any other way.

D) Math U See or Toys- Great help, although the series lost her pretty quickly. We’ve also used toy animals, blocks, cars and anything we can lay hands on for addition/subtraction. The toy animals are great for multiplication. You simply build Z number of corrals or pens, then put Y number of animals in each pen. Then show that Z X Y would equal the same thing as Y X Z. With division, you give the child a handful of animals and Z number of pens and tell the child to divide them equally so that the animals get the same amount of feed. It’s fun and it’s actually worked…..although it didn’t seem to help with addition and subtraction.

E) Math Stories. These were fun, but she couldn’t seem to transfer the knowledge to help her on her math pages. If you want a copy of my math fact stories, email me. I hope one day to get them on the website.

F. Doing math facts while exercising or doing hopscotch. This has not worked well for us. I know it has helped other children.

G. Doing addition & subtraction using a number line or an illustration of stairs or steps. The number-line confused her for some reason. The “stairs” worked better, because they showed that some numbers represent larger quantities than others. We sometimes build “stairs” with Math U See blocks.

H. Math songs – we made up LOTS Of these and even made some Power Point presentations with animation for them. But they didn’t seem to help us learn our math facts. Once again, transferring knowledge from songs to the math pages didn’t happen.

I. Touch-Math. I invented doing this myself in school; they didn’t have a name for it then. It’s a way of count-adding and is, I know, sort of a last-ditch desperate attempt. I felt that I HAD to find a way to help her solve math problems that she didn’t know, and this worked (up to 5, anyway.) You simply imagine that every number from 1 to 5 has dots on it: 1 has 1 dot; 2 has 2 dots on the front points; 3 has 3 on the points, etc. Then, let’s say the problem is 7 + 3. The child touches the 7 with her pencil and says “7″ then touches the dots on the 3: 8, 9, 10, and gets the answer. It helps the child remember to start counting at the next number.

What’s worked best for learning facts? There hasn’t been a magic-fairy solution. We take a max of 3 math facts per day and work on them intensively. After a few days’ practice, we have a quiz. If those facts aren’t learned, then no cartoons. We have to write the facts we don’t know 5 times. (This gives incentive to learn.)

The next quiz a few days later involves those math facts and NEW ones.

Math Fact Families
In our house, just because we understand that 3 + 4 = 7. doesn’t mean we can always remember that 7 – 4 = 3. The light hasn’t gone on about this yet, although we’ve demonstrated how it works what seems like hundreds of times. We work all math fact families using both addition and subtraction, but I focus on learning the addition problems FIRST.

I pray that this information helps someone out there who is struggling to help their child. I’m NOT a mathematician. I don’t know mathematical concepts or advanced jargon. My husband IS, but because he’s so naturally good at math, he doesn’t even know where to begin to help someone to whom math isn’t instinctive.

Oh well.

We’ve been studying clocks now since Kindergarten, all right? You’d think we’d have gotten tell time sort-of-down by now. Nope. Have you ever tried to explain the concept of a.m. and p.m. to a child? Really, military time DOES make better sense. And why do clocks NOT have numbers for the minutes (other than them being so small.) ?

There’s another thing few people tell you. Just because you diligently teach a child something one day doesn’t mean that he or she will remember it tomorrow, or next month or next year. Even if you review it, they may still forget.

What’s worse is when they look at you with a blank stare, like you’re speaking Greek.

I think that’s why I have trouble with a lot of the great-looking, in-depth, intensive “lesson plans” I see posted on the internet for elementary school-children. Any teacher can probably tell that just because she teaches or lectures to children about a subject doesn’t mean that they really UNDERSTAND or LEARN the subject. It just doesn’t work that way. I know from my personal experience that sometimes you have to present a subject in many different ways and then review it over and over and over for even a single child to really comprehend it. Development, interest and even health have a lot to do with learning ability.

Except for swear-words. Someone should do a scientific study on that. We can work for months on math facts and pronouns and still draw a blank stare, but let a child hear a swear-word ONE TIME and it’s in his brain FOREVER.

It’s a mystery, I guess.

Our pond froze for the first time. I won’t say you could ice-skate on it (Sarah tried, but that’s another story.) but even the big Great Pyr dogs could walk across it. The ducks and cats had a WONDERFUL time and I got to see an impromptu production of “Goats on Ice.” (Which is REALLY funny by the way.)

I think the low here was somewhere in the upper teens, but that doesn’t include the wind-chill. I know that it was cold enough to convince me even further that I don’t want to live ANY further north. Even Sarah, our little Russian Devooshka, says it’s too cold to go outside.

Sarah’s been doing her normal schoolwork, plus sewing a little on an 18th century costume for one of her dolls. She likes to sew on the machine, but of course I have to be right there with her. We’re just starting in the Revolutionary Period in history and we’re reading some of the American Girl Felicity books. In math, she started learning about Roman Numerals today, and we’re still studying pronouns in English.

Today Sarah also had a lot of questions about twins, so I tried to find answers for her.

We’ve just started fostering a King Charles Spaniel (a mix, I think). He’s doing very well and Sarah loves him. He’s very playful, unlike Mr. Claus, who prefers to be outside with the Pyrs. The Danes, of course, would rather sleep.

That’s it. No new goat kids yet, but some are certainly on the way. Poor Nina looks like she might have quads again; the poor thing looks like she swallowed a watermelon.

That’s all for now.