Charlene Teglia

I harvested the first salad from the garden this morning; spinach, mesclun mix and radishes. The greens are washed and draining, the radishes scrubbed and trimmed, ready to slice and toss. The sight and texture and taste of real food, there is nothing like it.

The garden is a shaken fist of rebellion against supermarkets full of fake food. Mushy fruits, tasteless vegetables, rows of cereal boxes that don't contain any whole grains but have plenty of high fructose corn syrup. If you wonder why America is out of shape, all you have to do is enter a grocery store and try to find real food. You have to go out of your way to shop farmer's markets, buy direct from local farmers and ranchers, buy organic. The quarter beef we bought from a local rancher has hamburger so lean it doesn't need draining. You can't buy that in a store.

In our hunger for real food, we find only cheap substitutes that don't satisfy. And it spreads from there. Houses built with shoddy construction techniques that look sad after five years, when a well-built home from fifty years ago looks sturdy even under peeling paint. Cheap, badly made furniture that breaks after a couple of years of use. Disposable everything, from cars to pens. It's all engineered to break so we'll have to replace it and keep buying more of the same empty consumerism.

How do you get the real thing? You plant a garden. You find local farmers and buy from them. You make and build your own. You find quality manufacturing where you can, and you repair and maintain it. And you turn your back on entertainment that's the equivalent of high fructose corn syrup with all the same ingredients as every other item next to it on the shelf and seek something you can sink the teeth of your imagination into. Maybe you write it yourself.

I think the worst thing we've been sold by the marketers of the world is the idea that we can't do it ourselves, that we don't have the time, the tools, or the expertise. But really, it doesn't take that much time to tend a garden, saw wood and screw wood to build your own bookcase, write a few pages of a novel. All it takes is turning off the TV that's broadcasting advertising telling us we can't, and investing those hours in producing and experiencing something real instead.

1. Celebrated birthdays, mine, my dad's and my daughter's. All in a row!

2. The garden. Still with the crabgrass. Also, deer ate tops off my sunflowers and cucumbers, so we're trying sterner measures of deer deterrent. Husband found something called a Scarecrow sprinkler that's a motion-detector. Detects and squirts deer. We'll see if that works better than Liquid Fence, which they are holding their noses and ignoring.

3. Organizing. We never actually finished unpacking, so we've been working on organizing basement, garage, office, getting books unpacked, etc. These things take time.

4. Summer schooling; doing review of what kids know before starting the next year, seeing where gaps are, where they need more practice. Also setting up for the coming school year with organization for books and materials.

5. Went to see Knight and Day. Tom Cruise played to his strengths by playing an "am I crazy?" character and it really worked. I pretty much hate romantic comedies because they're not funny or romantic, but this movie made me laugh many times and I believed the romance, too. Plus lots of action and adventure. Will be getting this one on Blu Ray.

Aside from that, the husband is gearing up to build furniture for kids that's sturdier than what they have and I'll paint it (yes, like free painting, flowers and fun designs, colorful and bright) so we'll have many ongoing projects inside and out. I might even get around to my mosaic-tile table top project at last.

I love this day. Five years ago today, my first book in print hit shelves and I was in labor. And did I mention it's my birthday? It's a great day for a birthday, the official beginning of summer.

To celebrate, I have Hello Kitty cupcakes because I'm mature like that.

Hello summer, hello cupcakes, hello birthday.

I'm not sure I've ever before in my life experienced quiet mind, despite yoga, meditation, and myriad attempts to slow the mental galloping or at least channel it into a novel. I blame the double dose of gemini in my birth chart for giving my grey matter rocket fuel, but quiet mind has been an impossible mission. Even when my body was at rest, my brain was orbiting the planet.

Until now.

I sit and look outside at the trees and watch birds at the feeder and my mind is quiet. I go out and work in the garden, and beyond the occasional "is my lower back going to survive this?" thought, my mind is quiet. After a lifetime of mental racing, the quiet is unbelievably restful. When my brain starts going into overdrive again, I just look out a window, or go sit out on the deck, or on a garden bench, or in the gazebo, and quiet returns. I'm in the moment, not years in the past or future or trying to figure out how to solve next month's problem this minute. When my mind is quiet, there's room for solutions to come.

If your mind won't quiet indoors, try getting outdoors. Take your notebook and pen with you. Do enough physical activity to tire you out a little, and focus your mind on your task so it isn't running away with you, and find quiet. Along with it, you might find the plot solution you need, the idea you were missing to make some task easier, or the answer to a personal dilemma. A quiet mind is like a weeded garden.

I'm battling crabgrass. It wants to take over the garden. I object. I've dragooned my husband to fight with me, wielding hoes. We dig it out on one end. It spreads from the opposite corner. Crabgrass is persistent stuff. Last night we had a massive storm, which did not, sadly, set the crabgrass on fire with lightning or drown it in a flash flood. So today I dug more of it out, battling it down past the watermelon and cantaloupe, pursuing it up the row of sunflowers.

The next book I write needs an antagonist as determined and evil and pervasive as crabgrass. It's not easy to beat.

The book I'm working on doesn't have an antagonist yet, so this is something to ponder. I have a protagonist with a problem, but the rest is undefined. This is kind of the best part of building a story, collecting the pieces and letting them come together. The perfect puzzle to turn around in my head while I dig out another patch of crabgrass, may it wither and die.

1.Want to make your own mandala? Here's a great resource. One of the interesting things I read by an artist who teaches mandala workshops is that people have a hard time finding the center when they begin. The center of the mandala represents your heart, so it's interesting that so many people are out of touch with their hearts. It's all about feeling instead of thinking. Good creative exercise for those of us who tend to overthink.

2. The Naked Scientists on hobbits. Go
listen.

3. Make a hammock! Instructions and a list of materials on Mother Earth News, along with guide to knot-making.

4. Build a
pallet playhouse. 

5. Make a water garden.

Learning and doing are great ways to get new ideas, relax, keep your hands busy, and let the brain work on creative developments.

When I was a kid, we had an encyclopedia set that included the volume, "Things to Make and Do". It was magical. You could open it up and find instructions on anything and everything a kid might possibly be able to tackle. Today, of course, we have
Instructables, the website that gives instructions on anything you might possibly want to tackle at any age.

We've been discussing vacation plans and realized that what we really want is a make and do break. The husband wants to build adirondack chairs. I want to paint a mandala and make a hammock. We need to build the kids' playset. So we're going to take some time off for creative projects, the kind of thing we don't usually have time to do between work and chores. 

What do you want to make or do?

1. Mixing cayenne pepper with hot water really does get rid of ants. Win!

2. Likewise, spraying 5 parts water/1 part baby shampoo/10 drops of eucalyptus oil does make wasps bug off. Power-washing gets rid of nests and keeps wasps and yellow jackets from establishing themselves, and following up with the spray in problem areas keeps them from coming back.

3. A nice natural alternative to bug spray; dilute Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Castille Soap (liquid) and coat exposed skin to protect against ticks and mosquitoes. Careful not to get it into your eyes.

4. Comet watch: Comet McNaught is visible early in the morning. If you're away from city lights and don't have cloud cover, see if you can spot it!

5. Watching lightning bugs is a lovely way to spend an evening. Watching the sun rise or set or the birds, you name it. I may not go back inside until the snow falls again. (Laptop plus outdoor power source means I might get away with it, too)

The school year is over and thus ends our experimental year of kid in public school. Technically last year was a hybrid as she did virtual public school at home.

School at home: She could work at her own pace, the younger kid worked with her and learned more than I thought possible, she could take advantage of good days and take it easy on bad ones, and we could modify lessons to suit her learning style, such as the game of kinetic math where she jumped up and down a chalk number line to add or subtract and land on the right answer. At the end of the year she'd finished all her courses so she got to do extra studies on whatever she wanted to. We did dinosaurs and marine biology, with accompanying field trips. It was fun, and she learned a lot. She was able to do her best academically with an environment that suited her and with the work slanted to suit her style.

Public school: She didn't advance academically at all, and we're doing refresher study to get her back up to where she used to be. The environment was overwhelming, which is probably why she didn't learn anything, and with public school classes it's really not possible to individualize the studies for learning style or to take advantage of good days to get ahead. She did, however, come home with marker tattooes drawn on her, the idea that she should be thinner and stopped eating, and one of her friends taught her to make devil horns and draw skulls. While I understand the appeal of goth and she's always going to have a flare for the dramatic, I think age 6 is too young for makeup, tattooes or anorexia. And we saw her lose the social skills she'd built.

This is the thing people always scream about with home schooling; "they won't get any socializing". Not true; our home school experience included monthly group field trips and live lessons with the other students in her grade once a week. But beyond that, it's not like home school students never leave the house. They interact with neighbors, extended family, church, go along on errands and shopping, visit the library, etc. All of which is real-world social experience. The big difference is that they do their school work at home, in quiet, uninterrupted, which is why they can learn more and get it done faster and then have more time to explore areas of interest.

So for academics and social skills, homeschooling wins. There's the added factor of special needs, and here is where I think homeschooling is really the best choice for autism spectrum for the ability to work in a supportive environment and work at their own pace. Advanced learners aren't held back and the home school environment can be structured to support their needs in ways public schools simply can't match.

What are we doing next year? Calvert school, which has terrific curriculum and provides everything you need, including teacher support if you want to sign up for it. (I think that's worthwhile for older students, but probably not essential for elementary grades.) We're also doing outside classes once a week to provide elective courses beyond Calvert. (You can sign your kid up for dance, gymnastics, art or music lessons, whatever suits the interest level, and is available in your local area. That provides extra social time and gets specialized instruction in areas you maybe can't match. For instance, I can't teach gymnastics but my kids are interested.)

Cost: Public school is free, but Calvert is reasonably priced. You can also do a virtual public school for free for the hybrid option. Check your state availability for K12 or Connections Academy as a public school option (K12 and Connections are both available as a private option for a reasonable cost, also.) For local classes to add on, prices will vary wildly but you can often find lessons in everything from painting to karate through Community Education at a very reduced cost. You might also be able to team up with other homeschoolers to teach your specialities. For instance, I'm highly qualified to teach creative writing. Experts exist in every community.

Why Calvert; it's what the public virtual school used and we couldn't find anything better. The curriculum is integrated so that you reinforce the lessons in one course in another. We saw how rapidly our kids learned with Calvert and we're sticking with what works.

Posting this now, because now is when decisions need to be made and enrollment is open. In September your choices may be a lot more limited. Also I've spent the last month going over pros and cons and comparing programs so I might as well get a blog post out of it.

1. The lawn mower choked again, causing the husband to say "You have failed me for the last time." (If this happens to you, Home Depot delivers. Although you may have to wait a couple of days.)

2. Visited the farmer's market and acquired hand-made soap, Amish baked goods and jam, local lettuce. Winter is a wasteland without farmer's markets.

3. Introduced kids to joys of picking strawberries in a field. Child A was very serious about filling her basket. Child B ran all over enthusing about everything and also managed to fill her basket. There are now many pounds of strawberries in the kitchen. How many will end up in freezer and how many will end up in kids first is anybody's guess.

4. Went to see the new Karate Kid. Kids loved it, and so did we. Very well done, from the story to the martial arts to the performances. The world may never see Jackie Chan that serious again.

5. I'm reading War for the Oaks. My brain can't help noting all the things Emma Bull would undoubtedly be told to change if she submitted the story today as a new author. Urban fantasy has grown up but I think it's lost some substance in the process. War for the Oaks has substance and the magic of the story stands the test of time. It will be interesting to see how many of the follow-ons that proves true of.