The Homemaking Diva

I told you about my struggles in learning how to manage a household since I quit my job, but it hasn't all been doom and gloom despite my frustrations.  I really have spent time learning new tasks and recipes and they haven't all been failures. So, without further ado, I give you all the things I was doing while I disappeared off the blog for two months.

I cut out three Halloween costumes without a pattern with Kyra's long distance help.

 Grandma and the girls sewed them up, but hey, *I* cut them out!

I made pumpkin chocolate chip muffins for children to eat for breakfast.

For All Souls Day, I made Soul Cakes. Well, actually, it wasn't All Souls Day. It was later in the week, but it counts.

I made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for a church bake sale and learned how to cream butter and sugar when an electric mixer is not to be had. I think Rebecca was the one handing out pointers this time.

 

I made Emily Stimpson's polenta one night. 

 I got very adventurous one night and made paella with Amy's help. This little foray took an absurd amount of time. I think we finally sat down to eat at about 8pm, but everyone loved it and Olivia even requested it for her birthday meal.

We sauteed pumpkin seeds.

 And then I roasted pumkins to make puree to freeze for later.

I cleaned out the closet under the stairs, which took an insane amount of time and ended with Dave and the children eating at Wendy's. I ate supper at some point. They brought me a chicken sandwich.

Crazy befores: 

During:

Mercy.

The moment it can get better:

The glorious afters:

I sorted through the two year old girl clothes. We could clothe triplets if needs be.

But just one is here:

In a fit of I-don't-know-what, I decided to make turkey stock with the Thanksgiving turkey leftovers at my mother's house. I even left it to bubble overnight. That was stressful. I just knew the house was going to burn down or, worse, the stock would be ruined. But all was well. 

And if that wasn't enough, I came home and made ham stock. This only simmered all day because cat. I have heard you are supposed to make some kind of ham and bean soup with this concoction. Someone needs to tell me more about that. 

I finally started on a project that has haunted me since before Marian was born: the horrible corner in my room. The spot where the keyboard is buried.

Awful before:

During:

I finally got Olivia's Kindergarten folder finished. Yes, she is in second grade now.

Here is the after for now. I still have more work to do, but Christmas was coming which pulled me out of this project and I haven't gotten back to it yet. That table actually belongs in the living room, but it had to be moved to make room for the tree.

I made homemade turkey noodle soup from my stock and chopped turkey.

Did you know that the leftovers from homemade soup congeals into not-soup? I certainly did not. So I made a casserole thing with the soup leftovers. What do you do with soup that turns into not-soup?

As Christmas neared, I decided to try my hand at fruitcake. It was a three day process, mostly because I couldn't do it all at once, but I think it turned out okay.

Fruit and liquor. A lot of liquor.

And the finished product:

Tasty. I don't think I've had fruitcake before.

It finally got cold and I made chili. Hurrah.

So there it is. All The Things I've been doing. With my ever-present helper.

Worth Doing Badly

As part of her grammar curriculum, Grace has to define a highlighted word everyday. Normally she will look it up in her dictionary and write down the definition. The other day she was feeling lazy and asked me to define her word for her. I told her I would tell her, but she would also need to look it up as well to verify. She agreed. The word was despair. I gave her a quick off-the-cuff definition complete with dramatic rendering. Her laughing response was, "If that's despair, you despair a lot."

Back all those years ago, before we knew it would be a terrible idea, when we decided that I would be the breadwinner because I wasn't that great at being a homemaker, we weren't wrong about my abilities. I am not skilled at running a household. The art of homemaking is anticipating a need and meeting it in a timely manner before it becomes a crisis. This is not my forte. I know it is a skillset to be learned, but it isn't a skillset that plays to my strengths. 

The succession of tasks overwhelms me much of the time. I am pelted by requests and demands from the moment I wake up until ninety blessed minutes of naptime in mid-afternoon. I am paralyzed by my attempts to prioritize the next best thing to do. My desire for efficiency leaves me running in several directions with a series of half done jobs. I feel as if I have been dropped into the deep end of a pool: sink or swim. Some days sinking is a very viable option.

I am the newlywed who struggles to get dinner on the table at something approaching a dinner hour.

I am the first time homeowner who struggles to arrange her eclectic collection of possessions into a neat, orderly, and cozy home.

I am a new parent who struggles to figure out what to do with a toddler all day, day-in and day-out.

I am a first year homeschooler who struggles to educate two or three children at the same time.

There is nothing routine about our routines. There is no solid ground here. Everything is always in flux as I thrash about putting out fires.

If I could concentrate on any one of these areas, I don't think I would be so out of my league. If all I had to worry about was getting food on the table, I could manage. On a day when I have to make supper, it isn't unusual for me to spend four or five hours in the kitchen from starting to the end of the cleaning. That's a lot of kitchen time, but doable if that's all I had to do.

If all I had to worry about was cleaning and organizing my house, I could work for hours decluttering and rearranging.

If all I had to worry about was entertaining the toddler, I'd be fine. We'd sit in the floor and play games in our secure, toddler-proof rooms.

If all I had to worry about was schooling the girls, there would be no freak outs here.

Honestly, the homeschooling is the easy part. It is the tether of sanity in my day. I know how to solve math problems, diagram parts of speech, and sound out words. It is my reassurance that I am, in fact, not totally incompetent at life.

The double whammy that torpedoes my days is the clutter combined with food. Food. It has always been about the food. Food and the process of preparing food overwhelms me. I need to be able to see all the ingredients out, pick them up, put them down, and not have to shuffle and sort to find what I am looking for. I need the dishes to be laid out and not stacked while putting food on them. My "big" countertop is 28 linear inches wide. There isn't room for multiple plates and multiple ingredients even at the best of times. My most viable work area is the kitchen table. It is discombobulating to have to make continual trips back and forth to get everything set up on the table. The same table where children or husbands are working and is within easy grabbing distance of a two year old.

My kitchen is in a state of change. I am slowly, slowly, slowly cleaning, purging, and rearranging. The slow speed of this transformation is very frustrating for me because first, I just want it done already, but second, I don't really have room for all these items to be floating without homes. Everyday, we must climb over and around items that can't be gotten rid of yet because they are waiting to be moved into a spot that has not yet been cleaned out. But that has to wait until I can find another stretch of time to undertake another multi-hour project. I'm hard pressed to find it.

In the midst of all of this, I read Emily's housekeeping post a few months ago. I know she got raked over the coals for it, but I don't really disagree with much of what she said. It's just so out of reach for me right now.

I'd love to have the kids clean up their toys every night, but first I have to create a place for them to put them. I'd love to purge all the stuff we don't need, but it is slow and hard work, and they are constantly acquiring more stuff from people who are not me. I'd love to make my bed before I leave my room everyday, but Marian yelling for me is usually my alarm clock. (An aside, it takes me more like ten minutes to make my bed because I am thorough, a perfectionist, and mostly incompetent.) I'd love the state of my house to be such that a quick walk-through in the evening would allow me to put an item or two away that is still out of place instead inducing insomniac despair at all the things left to do.

Despair. There's that word again. The truth is that I am struggling in this life I was so desperate to begin. The learning curve is steep and I am not very patient with myself. I long to hit pause so I can find a comfortable spot with at least the house, but that isn't reasonable. People live here, learn here, and work here, and they all can't disappear for a month while I figure out how to function as an adult. I am building several different skillsets at once and there is no easy way to do it. I just have to persevere and keep my eye on the long term. I need to remind myself that even if I never gain as much competence as I'd like, there is value in the process of struggling, and homemaking, even by the imperfect me, is worth doing badly.

The Pantry, Part I

That fine day arrived, the children were safely shipped to Grandma's, and I approached the chore I have spent three months hiding from: Cleaning the pantry.

Let us review the before pictures:

This pantry has suffered years of neglect and shoving. Now it's true, there is a general scheme of where things are supposed to be and, if you are the official loader of the pantry, you generally know where you put the things you just bought. However, for those of us who only open these doors as a last resort because the official pantry loader is at work, this pantry has been an ongoing source of despair.

I began by taking everything out of the pantry. This took much longer than I anticipated. I started by stacking everything on the table.

I quickly ran out of room and trailed over into the living room.

Along the way, I filled two entire garbage bags with trash, expired food, and items that just needed to leave my sight.

Why yes, those are eight empty oatmeal containers that were floating in the closet.

As everything spilled into the living room, I decided to begin to sort as I went otherwise I might never finish. After everything was pulled out of the pantry, I discovered that we had accumulated twenty-six pounds of pasta.

If you come to my house, you are probably eating pasta.

So finally at long last, the pantry was empty. Also it was supper time. I called Dave and told him to pick up the children and take them somewhere, but to not come home for as long as possible.

It had to get worse before it was better, and we were right at worse. I neared despair as I wondered what I had done and if it were possible to fix it again.

Now the children were home. Dave smuggled them upstairs through the disaster as quickly as possible. Marian paced the living room exclaiming, "What in the world?!" over and over and over.


I got soap and water and scrubbed nearly ten years worth of muck out of the closet. Then I made a bleach solution and wiped everything down. This pantry was as clean as I could get it.


I began the task of getting things back in the closet. I couldn't take too long in the decision-making process because a) it was late b) the children were going to be home all day the next day, and c) we had out of town company coming. Before the evening was finished, everything I wanted back in the pantry found a home.

The Amazon box up there is full of spices that I want to move into a cabinet. I have to clean out the cabinet first. It's a never-ending cycle of shuffle the stuff around. Look at our pasta corner. Twenty-six pounds, y'all.

I know where everything is now! I can find food in the pantry! Opening the door doesn't induce weeping anymore!

We have some ongoing issues. First, what to do with the cans. Right now they are stacked in an apple box on the floor. That's not a great organizational system. What do you do with your cans?

Second, is how many containers should I get to store baking goods. On the shelf to the left, you can see ten open bags of various products stored inside plastic freezer bags. Should I get a permanent container for all ten of them? I have a few I can use, but decisions have to be made about what to keep and what to buy.

Once I figure out what to do with the cans and baked goods, I will have to pull out the pantry again and reorganize it, but it should not be nearly so painful the next go around.

The biggest issue with the kitchen right now is what I did not put back in the pantry, but do not necessarily want to get rid of. We have floating items that need a home, but I need another day to clean out another cabinet. Floating homeless clutter drives me a little crazy, but we have had illness and company and now school starting up again. I will have to purposely carve out time to work on this project.

My hope is that by the end of this adventure everything in the kitchen will be useful, organized, and have permanent locations. I hope that the trash will leave and our overstock will move on to new homes.


So there's the pantry clean out, part 1! Part 2 coming soon, I hope.

Homeschooling Toddlers

I want to give you an update on the kitchen project, but first we started back to school yesterday. I do not want to jump to conclusions because I am sick and my head feels like it is at the bottom of a swimming pool, however what do you do with toddlers? We have had a successful two days with the actual students, but the two year old is driving me mad. Whenever my attention is required by school, Marian either plants herself in the middle of it, grabbing the books, rolling on laps, and climbing all over us or, alternatively, she drags a stool all over the downstairs in order to climb into the pantry, the fridge, the countertops, the kitchen table...

Quietly playing near us does not seem to be an option in her book right now. She either demands attention or is bent on destruction, which I realize is a demand for attention in disguise. When I am not directing my attention specifically at a child, she will play to her heart's content, but when she sees me paying attention to a child who is not her, she jumps at the opportunity. I understand this is probably sibling rivalry at a base level. But what do you do waiting for this phase to pass?

Okay, So Pictures Might Help

Yesterday I was lazy and didn't upload any pictures to accompany my bleg for help. By popular demand, some pictures of my sad, dysfunctional kitchen. Lemme tell you, getting pictures off a tablet and uploaded into Blogger is a pain in the rear.

NB: I didn't pick up before taking these pictures. Yes, I know I have too much stuff out. Yes, we need to purge. I'm trying to figure out how to get there from here.

First a little spin around the kitchen while standing in the middle of it. I stood in one spot and just took pictures in a clockwise circle.

Here are two pictures from either end. One is taken standing right in front of the garage door and the other is my regular view from the supper table.

Here's where it starts getting real. This is what the inside of our pantry looks like. For real.

Kroger had a fantastic sale on Delallo products, as you can see.


The top of the fridge is just piled. Something could be done up there, but what?

The inside of the only cabinet that isn't just dishes and glasses. Honestly, we have too many cups and mugs and plates, but I don't know how many to keep. What if you need it, ya know?

This cabinet is where I want to mount a solid magazine rack for storing devices. However the rack would need to be eleven inches wide at maximum (unavailable at Target). The bookshelf under this spot sits on top of a vent so we have to be careful what we place here. Also that wallspace there is less than two feet wide.

This is the only spot I can figure to add a magnet for knives, and it is only fourteen inches wide. This is over the drying rack.

This is another possibility for mounting something, but there is a lot going on in this spot. It is the main place for unloading the fridge and pouring drinks and where the toaster is. So I don't know.

Here is where I want to put a hook for Dave's cast iron egg pan. It get used every single day so doesn't really need put away, but it would be good to have a place to stick it that isn't on the stove or the countertops because it gets in the way when trying to cook other things.

Here is the other cabinet on the other side of the sink. It's full of mugs. I'm not sure what can be done with it.

The other side of the mug cabinet is the busiest spot in the house so I don't want to add anything that might further frustrate traffic there.

Another spot that could be arranged differently if I can find another spot in the house to put this table. Finding another spot for the table is questionable without getting rid of furniture, but I don't want to discount the possibility. This is the back corner in the kitchen behind the table. It is not very accessible and tends to get piled, as you can see.

So there it is. That's our kitchen. What do you think? Throw out your ideas.

The Kitchen Organization

Dave did not buy me a Christmas present this year. In the days leading up to Christmas, he was unusually cranky and busy with work. I won't lie and say I didn't notice that nothing with my name on it was being wrapped. I was curious about what was going on, but decided to take a wait and see stance. Finally Christmas arrived and he sheepishly handed me a card. He thought this card was insufficient and his distaste for it was the cause for his days of crankiness.  However he was wrong about the insufficiency of the card.  Inside the card was a note explaining his Christmas gift to me was to give me the freedom to buy whatever I need to organize the kitchen to my liking. This kind of gift is right up my alley.

The kitchen in our house is a sad afterthought of a hallway added by the builder because you obviously can't sell a house without a kitchen, but likely they expected nobody would ever eat here. But we do.

My question for you is what should I buy? How do you make your kitchen functional?

My ideas include:

•  a hook that will hold our most used iron skillet on the side of a cabinet
• an electrical outlet with both plugs and USB charging outlets
• a solid magazine rack on the side of a cabinet to contain our various devices. This has to be smaller than 11 inches wide though.
• a knife magnet. But again, I only have about a 14 inch spot in which to mount it so it has to be smaller than that.
• Some large bulk storage containers. Something like this. How many? And for what?
• I have one set of these canisters. Is one set enough? What do you put in them?

Some areas that needs solutions are:

• cans
• potatoes, onions, garlic
• baggies, foil, wraps
• anything else I haven't thought about

We do have a couple of lazy Susans we use for spices. A pot rack mounted from the ceiling is completely out. It just wouldn't work in here.

So help me brainstorm and figure out what we need!

Homeschooling: The First Semester

Our first semester of homeschooling came to an end this morning amongst the cries of the fifth-grader railing against the injustice of having more work to do than the second-grader and, "They had better not be allowed to go outside until I am finished!!!!!"

We have had quite a ride this semester. Our lives have flipped upside down since August. We've had missteps and successes and are slowly finding our way around our new normal. Honestly I still have weekends where I am flabbergasted I don't have to go to work on Monday.

What has gone well:

The girls love having checklists to work from. They know what is expected at the beginning of the week and they work down their lists everyday. If they know they want to have extra time one day, they can work ahead. If there is something they want to push to later in the week, they can switch it around and do something else first. The goal is to do the basics everyday and have the entire list finished by Friday. Checklists are winning.

I love the schedule. I also am struggling with the schedule. But mostly, I love not having to roll out of bed at o'dark thirty. You may think this has more to do with me not driving into work, but if Grace had to catch the bus, it comes by our house at 6am.

Olivia does her table work first thing in the morning. She is usually finished before I even have my first cup of coffee. I just have to check it. The only subject that suffers a bit for her promptness is the cursive practice.

The general camaraderie developing among the children. They still argue and fight like most siblings do, but they are also playing together and creating their own games and stories and inside jokes. I love this very much. 

What was a plain mistake:

I absolutely should not have started school before I could really start school. I was off of work for our first week of school and it went wonderfully. They were excited. They paid attention. THEY DID WHAT I ASKED THEM TO DO.

Then I went back to work for a month. I spent that month flapping my wings in their general direction imploring them to do some work while I was never home. Then I was home and decided not to immediately force the issue while we found our footing again. More ineffective flapping in their direction. Another month passed. Then we buckled down to get to work.

Their attitude had changed from diligence to reluctance. Reluctance, not necessarily in doing the work that looked the most like what they are accustomed to doing, workbooks and such, but reluctance in that they realized there was no outside authority figure enforcing a standard. There was just me, their mother, whom they are well practiced in ignoring when desired.

I knew we would have this battle eventually, but it was disheartening to have to wrestle with it right off the bat when that first week, two months prior, had gone so well. They learned immediately that they could goof off and the adults in charge would call it school. It is a well known discipline technique to start strict and then give some slack. We did the exact opposite, not that we have ever made it to level strict.

I know that I was afraid of them getting too far behind. Not really. That's not it. I was afraid that since everyone was in school, they would feel behind by not doing anything. And that the other adults in their life would worry we weren't starting school. And that I'd have to answer too many questions. It was easier to do "school." This was a mistake. I should have just baldly stated that we weren't starting school until mid-October. The End. Well, I didn't know.

The area where this reluctance shows itself the most is in writing. In August I could ask Grace to write something and she would write a full page or more. Now I am lucky to get four sentences out of her. It isn't that she is incapable. She just doesn't want to do it.

What we are working on:

We are still working on the schedule. I am still trying to figure out what to do when and how. Who gets my attention first? There is only one of me and two of them with another one being added next semester. They all want my attention first in order to be finished first. I can help one to the wails of the other one. Nobody likes going second, ever.

Another schedule issue is that while Olivia works fairly promptly, Grace can drag her work out all day long. Given that she objectively has more work to do than Olivia since she is in the fifth grade, it is frustrating indeed for me when she drags her feet. We experimented with a few different techniques, but I have found, sadly, the best way is to stand over her until she is finished which might be as late as 4pm. If I have other people or tasks pulling my attention away, she also wanders away. It drags on and on. By the time she's done, my enthusiasm for doing anything else is about gone too.

I think she gets a bit distracted by the other kids in the house and works better after two them go outside and Marian takes a nap. It is quiet then and she focuses, but then she is also angry because *she* is not outside. I am not sure how to get her to focus while the circus swirls around her and I am not sure how to improve her mood when she has to stay behind to finish her work.

I also want to expand our readalouds. The first problem we are running into with the readalouds is the other homeschooling families on the street. I want to get the written work done before settling down to read, but then it's lunch--how I am detesting lunch these days--and then we read. Inevitably by this point in the day, either my kids are busting to go play or other kids are out on the street.

Once the friends outside have been sighted, my kids are D-O-N-E. They half-heartedly listen as they listlessly stare out the window like caged animals. There isn't much joy in reading to children who are itching to leave. I've tried closing the curtains. If we do the readalouds first and the written work second, they aren't as sharp for their work and the same problem emerges of having to enforce while they wish they were anywhere else. I want them to enjoy learning, but it's hard when friends are frolicking nearby. Having so many homeschooling families here is a double-edged sword. Nobody thinks you are weird, but it isn't unusual to have a neighbor child knocking on your door at 11am.

The second problem with the readalouds is that I have no endurance for it. We read a chapter out of a novel at a time and I am dying by the end of it. I try to squeeze in another short story after the chapter, but then I am pretty much finished. My voice starts to hurt and I am ready to quit. I don't know why I have so much trouble reading out loud. It's not like I don't talk a lot regularly. I do. But regular talking doesn't seem to wear my voice out the way reading does. Obviously I am doing something wrong. Pentimento, I'm in need of a voice lesson. :)

I want to add more history and science and the easiest way is to add them to do more readalouds, but see voice problem above. The girls are also campaigning for more hands-on science learning which makes me a little twitchy. I keep putting them off by saying we will do more next semester, but now next semester is staring at me. I want to get the area where I keep these kinds of supplies organized before we started getting into science, but that hasn't happened yet. Digging through unorganized boxes of stuff with children clamoring about is not my idea of a good time.

Writing is also something that needs more attention from me. Like I said before, at the beginning of the semester, they would write extensively for me and now not so much. I am not intent on them writing reams, but I want them to produce something every week. Up to now, I have had an open-ended weekly deadline for them to write a bit about anything they have read or listened to over the past week. The open-ended nature of the assignment led them to pretty regularly blow it off.

What is challenging but exciting:

One of my main motivations in homeschooling, besides the schedule and the family time and the ability to shape the influences on my children, is to protect them from the spoon-feeding ways of the school system. They are accustomed to having everything thoroughly explained by a teacher before attempting to do any of the work. Because they catch-on quickly, they rarely experience frustration with having to figure something out on their own. It's all already been explained.

That's all well and good until you are in integral calculus at university, thought you understood the lecture, took sketchy notes, are trying to complete the homework, and, holy crap, you realize you have no idea what you are doing or even how to begin to figure it out. Isn't that a fine kick in the pants? Not that that ever happened for real. Cough.


Anyway, I want them to learn how to figure it out and struggle with concepts without being given explanations that others might need, but they do not. It isn't that I object to teaching and explanations. Not at all. It's just that if they can figure it out on their own, I want them to have that experience, but it is hard to come by in a school setting.

Over the past few weeks, Grace has declared more than once that she is bad at math. She is not bad at math. In fact, I gave her the Saxon placement test to see where she is and she is a year ahead of her grade level. Math is now the subject where they are most exposed to concepts before getting explanations from me. This is frustrating for Grace. She is accustomed to having the concept and explanation in hand and now she doesn't. This frustration is making Grace think she is doing poorly in math. She isn't doing poorly at all.

On one hand, it's great news she is frustrated. This is exactly what I wanted. Heh. On the other hand, I do not want her to get discouraged. I need to figure out how to allow her to struggle and also reinforce to her that she is doing just fine. I am wondering if I should start giving her math tests. We haven't done any testing because I know what they are doing and how well they are understanding and I adjust on the fly. But a function of testing I hadn't considered is that it lets the student know where she stands. While I am getting feedback on her progress, Grace is left floundering from one concept to the next. As soon as she understands, we move on, but I don't think that she *knows* that she understands. Does that make sense? Are occasional tests the answer?
 
What comes next?

Next semester we will add Sam to this mix. I don't even know. Letters and sounds and numbers and counting. Is that it?

We will add more science and history to the reading, but I'm not sure I can bear experiments yet.

I will be more consistent with writing deadlines so they actually write. I am not terribly concerned with quantity, but I do not want them to fall completely out of the habit of putting original thoughts on paper.

Hopefully the schedule will continue to normalize as we find a rhythm that works for us.

And there it is. We survived the semester. Hooray! I think we have all learned and grown from our experiences, but I am ready to take a few weeks off. All in all, I think we are doing well.