Enjoying Our Summer While Slowly Getting Ready for a New Homeschool Year

[Music] We are fully enjoying our summer, but it has been busy for us with all the produce coming in from our garden that we need to preserve. Even so, I have been spending a little bit of time preparing for next homeschool year. I have a new resource on the blog that I'm excited to share with you, the Burgess Birdbook Nature Study Cards. [Music] Good morning. We're off to another busy day here on our homestead. I just put a load of laundry in the wash. I try to get a load of laundry going at least every day. The kids have finished their morning chores. We have, you can see behind me, we have a whole bunch of cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, green beans that we picked last night. So, those are going to need to be processed. We recently did I did a caner full of pickles yesterday. So, that's seven quarts. Then, I already had done another seven quarts. We're going to have to do another caner full today. We're at that time in the season where we're just it's it's adding up. Everything's coming in from the garden. There's just a lot of work that needs to be done. This morning was William's turn to do the animals and because he's one of the younger kids, I try to help him. Right now on our homestead, we have our four pigs. Two of them are for us, two of them we exchanged for beef with a friend. And then we also have our laying hens. But the the bulk of the work right now is really our broiler hens. We have 80 that are out on grass and they're about ready to be processed in the next couple days. And then this is the time of year when we overlap a little bit. So we already have our next batch of broiler hens uh the chicks out in the garage. So it's a total of 160 broiler hens and chicks that are here right now. So it's just a lot of works. The chicks are fragile when they're little obviously, so just having to keep watch on them. And then the broiler hens are in three chicken tractors around our property. So just getting water out to all of them. They're kind of spread apart on our property and food. It just takes a lot more time. The broiler chickens are the ones that take the most work and that's what we're in the thick of right now. And then of course our garden is just bringing in so much every day. Our kids are helping with all of it. It's just a family operation here. Everybody chips in and it's just a little bit more. It's ramped up a little bit more this time of year. So, whenever you're managing a lot, we have a lot of animals here right now. We have 10 children living here. Whenever you're managing a lot, keeping your systems going is so important. And I feel like this is something we're always improving on. Um, a couple years ago I was frustrated because I like the broiler hens to be moved every day to fresh grass and that just getting that system going just seemed like it took a little while and I feel like we've been doing a lot better at that. But then of course there are other systems, other areas that get behind. Whenever you're managing a lot, a lot of children, a big household, a lot of animals, there are just some things that can slowly slip through the cracks and it's it's something you just need to always be on top of and keep your systems going. So, that's just what we're working on this summer as always. And I do think that we're improving every year. Um, our kids are just getting better. I've noticed already this year they just go and do their chores. I don't have to check up on them as much or if I check up on them, they're just doing a really good job. I do think that um taking care of our animals every year has gotten a lot easier with time and as we've all adjusted to what's expected and needed each year. So, just like one example is we would have little things like someone would leave the water on and the water would be running. Just remembering to turn all the water hoses off, remembering to close the top of the chicken tractor, remembering to put the lids back on our feed boxes, remembering to put the scoops back in there so that the next person doesn't have trouble finding it. All those little things are things we've just gotten better at over time, but it just it takes time. It it takes it's a process. So, today we're probably going to be working mostly on getting these cucumbers pickled and on getting the green beans washed, cut. I blanch them, put them in the freezer, and then bring them out and put them into bags. Sometimes I can them, but freezing is much faster. So, I think that's probably what we're going to do today. And then maybe on a day when I'm not canning pickles, we'll try and can some green beans as well. I don't know how it is with your kids, but my kids typically will get really into one thing. Today it was puzzles. Sometimes it's a game of Monopoly. Sometimes it's building a fort. Actually, that's what they're doing today in the basement. But they'll just get really into one thing and spend hours doing that one thing or they'll just keep coming back to it throughout the day. Another thing the kids got into this week was these little army men. I don't even know where they found them cuz I have not seen them around, but they were just into these for a couple days. We had just a snack lunch. I got out some vegetables and dip. We had some fruit. We've been having a lot more of snack type lunches. I don't feel like we're as hungry in the summer. I think some of it is just that it's been so hot. But these are the army set that the kids found. And they played with this for so many days that if you look really closely, the floor started getting filthy and I couldn't vacuum it. But they didn't want me to mess up the little game they were playing. So finally at one point I was like, "Guys, we've got to put this away. I've got to be able to vacuum the living room floor again." So they've been playing pretty well for the most part. In fact, I I've noticed that if my kids get enough of a break during the summer and if we have enough of a relaxed approach to school during the school year, I start hearing them asking me when we're going to start back to school again. In fact, surprisingly, it was my teenagers. Two of our teenagers said that they're actually looking forward to starting school again. Just looking forward to that routine. So that makes me happy to hear them say that we have a lot of green beans that are coming in right now. We planted I think 12 rows of green beans. We planted them successively. So just a couple rows and then two weeks later a couple more rows. And we just kept adding like that so that they don't all come in at the same time. >> Invented. [Applause] >> He did like this. Oh yeah, that's how you do that. >> What do you do? Oh yeah. >> Wait. I know. >> You're doing it like this. >> We try to do our green beans quickly after we pick them. It doesn't always work out that way. I think this night our beans had sat one night on the counter. And sometimes if we really can't get to it, we'll just put them in the fridge until we can get to them. But we usually bring them inside and it's just a job that's easier for everyone to do at one time. If one person is trying to do all these beans, it takes forever. Many hands really do make light work. The kids cut off the ends and then cut them in half. I boil them on the stove top for about 1 minute. So, I blanch them. Then, I put them in some cold water. This helps to cool them off quickly so they don't keep cooking. And then I just let them sit usually in some kind of pan out in the open air to cool down. Once they're nice and cool, I will put them in freezer bags and they go in our freezer. I have also canned green beans, but that's just a little bit more of a process because they need to be pressure canned. It just takes a little bit more time. So, it depends on what we have going on that day whether we freeze them or can them. I was also just doing a couple other things while we were doing the beans. I was making some chicken corn soup, which really this day was super hot. It was not the ideal meal for a hot summer day. But we're trying to empty out our freezers. And I had some chicken that I needed to cook up and make into broth. Um, just so we could empty our freezers and get ready for our broiler hens that are going to be processed soon. So, I went ahead and made this soup. And um the kids didn't complain too much, but it was a hot day to be having soup. We put these freezer bags in here. And hopefully this shelf will fill up. Hopefully, we'll have a couple of shelves fill up with green beans for the winter. One great thing about putting up so much food is that we always have leftover produce to feed the pigs. the ends of cucumbers, watermelon rind, green beans, strawberries, corn. It's really great. Our kids have been raising these monarch butterflies and also some swallowtail butterflies and they just emerge from their chrysalis. It has been so fun to watch them. They love doing this every year. We find them on the milkweed that we have a patch of in our yard. >> They're so pretty. Mommy, >> one of those was mine. >> So cool. >> Look at half of his wings and the other half of it. >> It's like different. >> Yeah. What? [Music] We've been spending a lot of our afternoons swimming as well. And I just think this wears kids out in a good way. We'll swim for an hour, hour and a half, have some friends over, and then everybody is ready for a nice quiet afternoon. While we have been busy this summer with the farmwork, with all the various activities, family gettogethers during the summer, I have started thinking a little bit about school for next year. And one thing I'm excited about is a new resource that I'm going to be using next year with my kids. Some of you that watched maybe my videos back in the spring, I've been going through the Burgess Bird book with my younger kids. So, this would be my upand cominging third grader and second grader. And our four-year-old daughter also sits in on it. And I I've done the Burgess Bird book several times. I did it with my oldest kids, my middle kids. Now I'm kind of down near some of the younger ones. And for the first time, I have a new resource. You can find it on the blog rlifeomeschooling.com that I'm really excited about. These are Burgess bird book nature study cards. I have cards that go with each bird in the Burgess bird book and they are sequential. So you can just go through and show these cards with each new chapter. And I think in the Burgess bird book there are like two or three birds per chapter. So you would use about two or three cards with each chapter. There are so many cool ways to use this. Um, you can see here, like on this sheet, it has the name of the bird at the bottom, but then I also have a second set that has um the cards without the name. So, you can print duplicates of these pages and do like a memory game or there's just a lot of ways that you can use it. Um, but these are just so beautiful and I am really excited to use them this year with the Burgess Bird Book. We've got through about half of the birds we're going to do and so we'll probably start working on the second half of the book, but for the second half I'm going to have these great cards which will be really nice. So, I have been working on printing these out and cutting them out and getting them ready to use for next year. If you're interested in this, it's on the blog. I will leave the link for you below. Other than that, uh we have all of the morning time work that we're going to be working on next year. That's in our simple morning time notebook. So, the the next thing I'll probably think about will be ordering some books that I need. Um I'm going to we use consumable math books. We do Singapore. So, I will have to at some point see where the kids are and what they need for next year. I'll have to order that. And then um and if you have watched some of my videos, you know that we stop where we are and just pick up. So we don't necessarily finish math, the math book by the end of the year. We just stop wherever we are. So for a lot of them, they're they can start school without me buying them new books. But I do like at the beginning of the year to just look ahead and see what we need. So I'll need to do that. And then a big thing would be um sitting down with my kids and getting their checklist together. And I usually do that individually with with each of them. We'll sit down and figure out what they want to work on. And so that will probably be the next thing I'll be looking at. As well as I have a lot of books that I want to order. It's books that we have had. But in our family with so many kids that are doing school all the time, books just get ruined so quickly cuz my kids love to read. We're a reading family. And so just some of our picture books are they're not usable anymore. I need to throw them away. And I just I would like to replace them because they're stories we all know and love. So I'll probably get a list of books that I'll be putting in my cart and ordering. We're excited for next year, but definitely still in summer mode. Enjoying soaking up the last couple weeks of summer. After I get these all cut out, I'm hoping to laminate them. I think that will really help with getting them to last a little bit longer, especially in our house where things just get used so often. Whenever all the kids are home and we have a nice quiet afternoon, I'm still reading The Endless Step to Them and we are all loving this book. If you enjoyed this content, you may like watching the video I did last week where I talked about summer life skills, learning that happens without a curriculum. Thanks for watching. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'll see you next week.