Large Family Homeschool Life – Week 15 of 2025

The children are outside playing with the neighbor kids, whooping and laughing and having a good time, probably playing football as usual. We are blessed to have a family with 5 kids, 3 of which are homeschooled, living across the street from us.

They brought their puppy over and tied her to the tree in our front yard. She is related to our dog, Kip, and looks just like him! Gorgeous!

This morning, I checked the asparagus in our backyard and found that 4 shoots had grown up beyond picking, so I’ll let them go to seed, but I also saw one small one poking out from the soil, so hopefully, we will have a few asparagus to eat soon!

I also checked the black raspberry bushes. I lost several of them a couple of years ago, so they will hopefully propagate better this year.

This week was our grandson’s 2nd birthday. He’s such a silly and rambunctious little guy! He is coming over to Gigi & Grandad’s house tonight to celebrate. We’ll have meatloaf, salad, and baked potatoes and his mama made sugar cookies with royal frosting to bring as well. She even made one to resemble Winston, our mini-poodle, who loves to play ball with him.

In school this week, we are coming near the close of our study of Ancient Rome with the early church and Paul’s missionary travels. We are reading from several sources:

The Story of the Romans

Story of the World, vol 1

Foxe’s Book of Martyrs

and Trial & Triumph

We watched a video on how to play Knucklebones and a quick tour of the catacombs. We will also watch Ben Hur this week and our current read-aloud is The Silver Branch.

(NOTE: The Silver Branch has proven to be a challenging read-aloud. I’ve done my best to make it interesting to all ages, but it is quite advanced in the sentence structures and vocabulary.)

On Wednesday, the boys went with Ty to the city where he works to spend the day with old friends. They played airsoft, spent hours working on a card game they are making original art for, and played at the park.

While they were away, the little girls and I went to a thrift store in a neighboring town, made mac & cheese for lunch, and made magnets at the library crafting hour.

Our 20 year old daughter is spending the week with Ty’s aunt and uncle to help them Spring Clean. I wish a week of work would knock out that task here, but there are so many other things vying for my time! I may have to go back to doing Zone Cleaning using FLYlady to get my deeper cleaning done.

For meals this week, we had meatloaf and baked potatoes (as mentioned earlier for little grandson’s birthday), leftover chicken corn chowder and my favorite biscuit recipe, BBQ Pork Nachos, Poor Man’s Steak, and Chipped Beef over Tater Tots and homemade bread. I also made Peanut Butter Pie and Chocolate Chip Bar Cookies for weekend desserts.

This week, I finished reading Parker Pyne Investigates, a compilation of Agatha Christie’s Parker Pyne short stories. They are quite delightful!

Now, I’m reading The Best of the Amish Cook (volume 2) that spans from 1997-2001. I bought this book off of Thriftbooks because that’s about how long I have been enjoying The Amish Cook column. My mom used to cut them from the newspaper to send to me when I was newly married (1996) and now I read them via email. You can also read them via Lovina Eicher’s website.

Ty and I had a lovely Date Night in a nearby town Friday night. This small historical town has become quite a tourist attraction with quaint little shops and plenty of great places to eat. We ate at a BBQ restaurant we’ve never been to and ended up sitting at a long “family table” with several other people. The food was wonderful! I had pork nachos and Ty had brisket, hand-cut fries, and broccoli salad. We also tried their pimento and cheese with hot links as an appetizer and shared a chocolate pecan pie tart for dessert. All delicious!

Then, we walked around town and read many of the historical markers scattered throughout the streets.

Speaking of date night things…Ty brought me home some of the most beautiful flowers I’ve had in a long time! I arranged them in a small vase and they are gracing my breakfast table in the kitchen where I see them and enjoy them several times a day.

It was nice to have Ty home for the weekend. He is often away and I miss having coffee on the deck with him. Saturday was beautiful here with a high of about 70, so everyone spent a lot of time outside.

I did a lot of my baking on Saturday before the grandkids came over for a few hours while their mama and daddy went fishing with friends and out to eat. When they got back, they put together the rocking chair we bought George for his 2nd birthday before heading home for showers and then back to our house for dinner. This is the rocker we bought, and Ty and I wrote on the bottom of the seat a little happy birthday message.

Saturday is also my laundry day (plus towels and bedding), so I did a load of our laundry and then ran our new Kantha bedspread through the washer on delicate before hanging it out to dry on the line on our back deck.

I have a friend who loves kantha throws made from Indian saris, and I thought this might be a good option for the summer months as a lighter weight bedspread. This is the one I chose, and we LOVE it!

(This photo really doesn’t do it justice, but it was late at night when I snapped this photo.)

On Saturday, I also groomed my mom’s cat, Molly, and washed and groomed my mini-poodle, Winston. He desperately needed a summer haircut, and it took me 2 hours to get it all done from start to finish! This photo shows how both of us felt afterward!