My family has had quite a bit of healing since our move to our new home. The change has been therapeutic for everyone. The boys have been able to attend a traditional-looking school and progress by leaps and bounds. Kevin commutes much further to work but is now an early bird and seems more relaxed during his time at home. And I, well, I'm beginning to do things I have not enjoyed for a very long time.
One of those things is preparing food for my family. Sure, my family ate before. I did not starve them but I had not prepared meals for them in the way I used to - with love, thoughtfulness, and just a bit of passion.
What I want to share here is what makes me excited and lights up my eyes a little - creating. I'm an artist at heart and I must create. I see just about everything I love as art. Creating good food is something in which I can increase my skills, display and give others to enjoy, and I can feel proud of my accomplishments in food creation.
As a regular part of this blog, I'd like to share food - making, baking, cooking, growing, preserving, raising, etc. So, here goes...
I have a weakness for Slurpees from 7-eleven and Slushees from Foster's Freeze. It's a 20 minute drive to town and I've made excuses many a time to go into town on an "errand" just so I can buy these sweet, fruity, frozen treats. However, ultimately, I'm cheap. If I can make it, and make it better, I want to so, I did. Here is a super easy recipe for perfectly thick snow cone (or slushee) syrup that you can have on hand for making these yummy treats on a whim.
Snow Cone Syrup
2 cups granulated sugar
1 cup water
1 packet unsweetened Kool-aid
Combine sugar and water in a saucepan over medium high heat. Stir to dissolve and bring syrup to a boil. Boil one minute then remove from heat. Add unsweetened Kool-aid and stir until completely dissolved. Cool completely and serve over shaved ice for snow cones or mix syrup and ice in blender for slushees.
Now, I like cooking and such but I LOVE efficiency because it means less work. So...I decided to triple this recipe and can it so we can have it year round. I did this 3x with our three favorite Kool-aid flavors. All I did was, instead of cooling the syrup after dissolving the Kool-aid flavoring, I pored the hot syrup into hot 1/2 pint canning jars, afixed the warm lids and bands properly and set them in a water bath canner for 10 minutes.
Ha! Canned Snow cones. I know, not really but, at least we have the fixings for them year round. I do keep a bag of ice in the deep freeze for such purposes.
In speaking of his father’s strategy for raising him well and upright, Elder Loren C. Dunn shared the following:
“While we were growing up in a small community, my father saw the need for my brother and me to learn the principle of work. As a result, he put us to work on a small farm on the edge of town where he had been raised. He ran the local newspaper, so he could not spend much time with us. … And sometimes we made mistakes.
“Our small farm was surrounded by other farms, and one of the farmers went in to see my father one day to tell him the things he thought we were doing wrong. My father listened to him carefully and then said, ‘Jim, you don’t understand. You see, I’m raising boys and not cows’ ”.
The blessings of work is the building of character in us and a bond with those with which we work hard. We truly believed that when we moved into our new home out in the country, our boys would benefit from the many opportunities they would have to work.
This year has brought us many wonderful things including the blessing of better behaved, more rounded, more confident boys. Some of their chores include:
- Taking out the chicken bucket (filled with kitchen scraps) daily.
- Collecting eggs (it’s Easter everyday!)
- Feeding and watering the poultry, rabbits, and dairy goats.
- hunting squirrels and/or maintaining the squirrel trap
- homework
- taking out trash and recycling daily, taking out trash and recycling cans to curb about 1/8 mile down the driveway and back weekly
- cleaning rooms in the house with me (and sometimes without me)
- doing their own laundry
- help make dinner or dessert (at least twice a week)
- clean the rabbitry, rake out the goat pen, let poultry out in the mornings and put them away in the evening
-fill the wood box and make fires in the winter
And because hard work should be balanced with relaxation and play, the boys also:
- Hunt ground squirrels
- Go hiking on the ranch trials
- Camp out in the orchard, tell ghost stories, and make S’mores over the campfire.
- Climb trees, hunt for fossils and cool rocks, let their imaginations go wild in creating make believe games together
- Get lost in books for hours/weeks
- Take a short ride on the neighbors horse
- Create and play with Legos (LOVE Legos!), wooden railroad tracks, and Lincoln logs.
- Play computer games (yes, my boys are somewhat normal)
The boys may need (lots of) reminders and direction in doing their chores; they may not do a perfect job and they certainly make mistakes; I may do their jobs differently than they if their jobs were mine but, I am happy to say I am finally learning to let them, allow them to work, make mistakes, build character. I am finally learning how to grow boys.
For those of my friends who have followed me thus far into the beginning of my blog, I understand you may have wondered if I've just given up or went on to something else of interest to me. The answer is neither. The raising of my boys thus far has been like plodding away to reach the mountain top in the midst of an avalanche with brief moments of relief and sometimes joy. It has taken its toll on my emotional and spiritual strength, to say nothing of my physical and mental health. The avoidance of reliving that past, in type, is as natural as instinctual self-preservation. In other words, I've dreaded facing the writing of part 2. But, here goes...
We were struggling. Struggling to deal with the day to day, hour to hour fights, frustrations, inexplicable and unsocial reactions by our children to those around them. Struggling with, and growing to hate, the unwanted advice and judgmental, spiteful comments of complete strangers and acquaintances alike. I had heard one too many times by passersby with raised brow, as my children played in the front yard - not bothering anyone, "Did you know your child is not wearing any shoes?". Feeling cynical and spiteful myself, I held back the urge to respond with shock and drama. *gasps* "No! I had NO idea!" (as I sat there watching my children play in the soft grass) "What ever will happen to my poor babies with nooo shoes on?!" *rolls eyes*
We found the culture in the Silicon Valley to be odd. Parents would schedule play time for their children, keep them indoors unless it's for a scheduled, organized, activity run by one or more adults such as sports, dance, art class, music lesson, or creative movement class (where they teach children how to roll as if they needed help with that). The children did not step outside their homes to play- even in their own front yard. We had no idea that there were any other children living on our street until we had lived there for just over two years! Turns out our next door neighbors had a young child the same age as one of mine. We had wondered who was playing concert quality piano in that house.
Parents apologized for not trusting their children to be children by buying them game systems, cell phones, ipods, and Blackberries to keep them in the house and occupied (reads babysat). They buy and feed them a steady diet of junk food in oversized portions. Children staying indoors, sitting for hours on end and mindlessly stuffing their faces is just not natural for children. When city people see children being children, it seems foreign to them even in the most appropriate context. Example: My 2 1/2 yr old about to go down a slide at the park. Stranger says to me, with concern, "Your child is at the top of the slide." My response "Well, he can't slide down it if he's at the bottom". o.O
I felt suffocated and as if I was living in a fish bowl. I felt like that fellow on Planet of the Apes at the realization that everything he knew of his own world was turned upside down - backwards. I needed to get me and my family out of that place.
I remembered that I had once watched a television show about a family that just up and left everything they had known to buy a cattle ranch, something they knew nothing about running, just so they could raise their boys in a better place and in an environment more centered on family; a place where they could just be boys, work hard, play in the dirt, and sweat. I wished I had the guts to do that. I wanted to do that. I wanted to chuck everything for the sake of my boys. I wanted them to feel carefree and safe; safe to be themselves without harsh looks or words from strangers. I wanted them to play in the dirt and make mudpies like I did as a kid. I wanted them to grow up with cherished memories of an unstifled and adventurous childhood. I wanted to grow my boys in dirt; let them be children; let them be boys!
In times of great stress, I turned to the internet. Yep, I got hooked on real estate websites. I'd use them to take me away from where I was. To dream. I'd talk to my husband about what I wanted. He's a high-tech fellow by trade. Sensing I was really serious about leaving it all, he looked into where he might be able to find work in his field that had some rural land within a 45 minute drive. The choices were few but I looked and looked. For 2 yrs I looked. Everything that gave us a little space was way too expensive. Far beyond what we could reasonably afford.
On a day I thought I could no longer take the stress of raising my unpredictable boys, it happened. I had had a particularly bad day and called my husband to come home to relieve me. I, alone in my room, resting but unable to sleep, again turned to the internet. But this time, I tried something different.
Not two months before, my husband suggested I stop looking for a place to buy. He said "If we're serious about getting out of here we should just look for places to rent around here. It will happen sooner that way". I asked him "What would we do with our home?", we owned it. He said "We'll worry about that later". I think that at that moment, I may have never loved him more. I had not felt more supported or more loved by him in many years.
Back to "the day". I tried something else. Instead of going to my favorite real estate websites, I opened up a window to Craigslist. I did a quick search, expecting to find nothing as usual but, there it was. A newly renovated, 100 yr old, beautiful two story, 3 - 5 bedroom, out in the country with room to breathe. And the pictures...green grass and trees forever. I called Kevin into the room and told him "We're going to see this one....today". Not long after I got in touch with the landlord, and recieived directions, we were in the car and headed for the possibility of a new beginning.
What a drive. We knew the location of the home was quite a distance away, in a town that we considered the "boonies". We had never actually been there and, honestly, I wondered why anyone would live in such an out of the way town anyways when all the jobs were in the Silicon Valley. lol But we went and it was a nice drive I must admit. The town was quaint; tiny. It had a old fashioned main street that took about 5 minutes to drive down to get to the other end of town. It was kinda cute. Actually it was exactly how I pictured my dream town in which to raise my children. I just didn't know anything like this still existed. I didn't know there were any more towns like the Greenfield, MA or Bloomington, OH that I had lived in for brief spells as a child. Those places made me feel safe and carefree as a child - as if the whole world was good and decent.
After the initial shock of driving past town and into "the wilderness" and realizing we still had 10 more miles to drive (an 1 1/2 from Kevin's work place) we resolved to keep going since "we've already come this far" and knew our potential new landlord was graciously awaiting for our arrival after agreeing to show us the house on such short notice.
LOVE. Wow, this house brought me back to some of the happiest times of my childhood. The house was old, it was beautiful, lived in, had a history... It had built-ins! Two fireplaces and....a library with shelves to the ceiling! I almost cried when I saw the library. A pantry - a walk-in pantry. A space for an office, a large, old fashioned looking kitchen with decorative tin covered cabinets and old, slightly uneven wood floors, antique light fixtures, even a few original mirrors - cloudy and speckle with black. Vaulted ceilings. Real bead and board. And SPACE! Space for the boys to run; trees to climb. And no neighbors to tell my children to stop climbing our own trees. No neighbors to peer into your window, just a few yards away from theirs, as they washed their dishes. Haha! I was thrilled. We all were thrilled.
But the one great worry that lurked in the minds of my husband and I was the....school. We just can't up and leave for the benefit of our family if our main concern was to find a school that my children could go to. One of my boys could not even get himself to walk into a class room of 30 children because, to him, there were "too many people". Another was left grades behind his classmates because he was "only" one of 35 students. His teachers would not give him the help he needed so they just passed him onto the next grade's teacher whether he earned it or not. Yet another had been bullied so by the other students at the encouragement of the teacher that he could not step foot into a classroom without having a violent breakdown. I had turned to home school for two of my most volatile children and my preschooler but I just was not able to emotionally handle continuing it for another year. What were the chances that we'd find the local school to be just what my young family needed?
I tell you it was a spiritual moment, one of my husband and I being able to see God's hand at work in our lives when we learned of the school. It. Was. Perfect. A "one-room" school house it was, with a total of 35 students in the entire K-8 school. Three teachers, one secretary, a whole lot of sense of community. It was a rural school house that was it's own district all by itself. It was year round. Our children would begin in one month from the day we first saw the house. The philosophy of the teachers was more like a home school program where each child works at their own pace, gets specific help where they need it, and could advance as fast as they liked and were able. And the lower grade teacher was experienced in helping with the certain challenges that my most difficult child was facing. This was nothing short of a miracle and it was clear in my mind that the Lord had not been able to give us this blessing until that very moment as he was working to make so many variables fall into place just so in order to make this happen for us.
We made an agreement to rent the house. We moved in one month later. It felt like a dream. The irony was not lost on us that we were moving into the old school teacher's house that had taught at that little one-room schoolhouse for years and had a bench with a placard in her honor under an oak tree over looking the play ground at the school. For my children, for which school had been hell and darkness, they finally found a place where they could be helped, given respite, see some light, and just...be...boys...in the old school teacher's house.
Yes, I think we had finally found the perfect medium in which to grow our boys upright and strong.
Lemon Lime and Berry Blue snow cone syrup