daffodil lane

A new endeavor...

 

I am very excited to announce that I have become affiliated with AdvoCare! I'll let the company speak for itself, so please look around their website if you'd like to know more.

Why did I decide to get involved? I love the energy drink they offer - Spark, the first energy drink I have ever tried. It's comprised of vitamins (and caffeine equivalent to one cup of coffee), no yucky high fructose corn syrup or anything like that. I didn't plan to like the Spark, but I sure did! I kept going back to get more from a close friend, until I soon decided I wanted to be a part of the company. I was no longer ready for a nap in the afternoon, I had energy to do things with my kids, all vitamin-powered, and it felt great! AdvoCare offers several other products, nutrition supplements and health being their focus.

In a few weeks I am going to start their 24 Day Challenge after watching several close friends do it, all losing 10 pounds or more, and gaining a renewed energy and fitness level. The 24 Day Challenge is a kit containing an herbal cleanse, quality vitamins, Spark energy packets, and more. I can't wait. If you want to do it along with me, I plan to start on July 25, but you could start anytime that is convenient to you. I plan to blog about my journey through that in a spin-off of this main blog.

I decided it's finally time to look after my own health, and put my own oxygen mask on first, so to speak. In the end, it makes me a better wife and mom.

On that note, blog construction will be underway for a bit, bear with me. :)

3 Things:

 
1). Inspire me with your summer goals! Giveaway ends Friday night. You know you want me to buy you a Vanilla Bean Frap or an Iced Caramel Macchiato. :)

2). I have a little announcement to make tomorrow. (Nope, definitely no bun in my oven!) But still very exciting!

3). I am savoring summer with Renee at Fimby again today. I am savoring the ability to take ten steps off my back deck and pick our dinner salads! Those grubs put up a brawny fight, but I think I have finally conquered!  Dill, lemon thyme, romaine, flat-leaf parsley, mesclun, radishes... even a strawberry beginning to blush.  What are you savoring this summer? 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Savoring Summer with FIMBY

 
I'm joining up with Renee at Fimby (excellent blog and great inspiration for healthy living, by the way!) in taking a moment to savor the bits of summer. For us, having access to an outdoor pool, overlooking the ocean no less, has been a huge blessing!

If you want to see other savory things or link up, check out this post at Fimby.  Fimby is a happy little acronym for Fun In My Back Yard, and Renee is totally clever, and seems to have an awesomely fun backyard. :) Happy Summer!

10 goals for summer:

 
{Keston planting red onions}

 

1. Become more organized in my home-making planning. Domestic engineer planning? For this I need a shiny new home management binder.

2. Prep and plan for our new homeschool year in a way that actually makes sense and isn't a waste of time! I think I may have this one in the bag for once.

3. Lose 10 lbs. at least. I think I have this one in the bag too! Finally. I am tired of buying clothes based on their ability to make me look not pregnant. That is kind of exhausting.

4. Improve my health overall, and get more energy. Finally take the Zumba class I am scared of!

5. Make my house a place we love. Paint color picked and projects underway.

6. No complaining about migraines or any other similar dumb ailments. It doesn't make them any better anyway. If I forget, slap me.

7. Stay on top of housework so I can spend every free minute at the pool or hiking with my kids. This means preparing dinner in the mornings too.

8. Make double the amount of jam that I made last year, preferably raspberry. (Anyone know a way with less sugar than the pink-box that is "so-called" less sugar? Please, please tell me.)

9. Grow something in my garden other than grubs and onions. (Did you know grubs will destroy everything in their path except onions?) I should try making low-sugar onion jam. Yum...

10. Blog more! To all 4 readers that are left, what are your summer goals? Please tell me. A $5 Starbucks card to whoever lists the most summer goals of your own in the comments by July 1. :)

A dyslexia "Re-Post"

 
{Just this weekend, two different parents have asked me more about dyslexia. It is so common and so often misdaignosed or not diagnosed at all. I'm re-posting this in case it might be helpful to someone. Catching this can make such a big impact on your child's education, esteem, and future! It's still wordy, but there is a lot to it, so I left it in its entirety.}

...I had made this huge discovery... one of my kids has dyslexia.

Never one to sit around when it comes to this kind of thing with my children, (speech, bullying, health, and the like), I got right to work. I was really eager to learn as much as I could and figure out what to do with it all.

It is funny though, I have since researched and learned a lot... yet when I have shared with people, I sometimes get responses like "You diagnosed it yourself? Hmmm" in a disbelieving way. So be prepared for that. It's akin to "Oh, you homeschool your kids?" all over again. Only doubly so. But hold strong! You're just ahead of the game on this, I think it'll get its spotlight soon enough. It affects 20% of people! Dyslexia is just patiently waiting its turn behind gluten right now, ha ha.

I asked my son before writing about this publicly, and he is good with it. When I figured it out, I was so ecstatic, he really has no clue it is anything someone might feel badly about. I intend to keep it that way for him! People with dyslexia are almost always strongly gifted in another right-brained area, and have amazing IQs. For him, he's gifted with construction/engineering/spatial reasoning. (The Lego creations that come out of his room area all starting to make sense!) A few days ago I heard Keston lamenting "I want to be dyslexia too... I want a special gift." I corrected her verb useage and told her she was indeed special. :)

When you are a homeschool parent, it can be frustrating to feel like whatever you are doing isn't really working or sticking. I got really frustrated because Jenson was having trouble just repeating some words back to me (metamorphic and sedimentary, for the record). Talking louder and slower wasn't helping, go figure. While I really regret now that I got angry at him about it, it was what lead to me thinking maybe there was something more going on. The next day I had my answer, and due apologies were given.

Side note: Jenson was in public school until third grade, and was in a writing class with a credentialed teacher last year. If he were in public school, it wouldn't have been picked up any earlier. I truly don't place blame on anyone, but it isn't being diagnosed in public school as far as I can see, so even if your child is in school, don't let that stop you from looking into it if you have suspicion. My son was in 'literacy support' for over two years, where you might have thought it would be picked up. Sometimes it just doesn't become clear until around age 10 or so anyway, as kids are able to continue making progress until around then.

As a parent, you can diagnose your child, you do not need a formal diagnosis! I did talk with several professionals, including a doctor of child behavior psychology and several teachers, to make sure I was on the right track. They all backed me. A formal diagnosis might be needed in some instances, but in our case, nope.

How I went about diagnosing:

We happen to have duplicate copies of many books around here, because I often follow along with Jenson as he reads in order to help him with words. One day recently, I grabbed a pencil and wrote out in my copy every mistake he was making, so I could later look at it more closely. At that point dyslexia hadn't even crossed my mind. I thought dyslexia meant that people just transposed letters. For whatever reason, I had a hunch to begin some research. I compared samples of his writings, and notes from the book I had penciled in. It was like a light bulb went off. No wonder so many things were difficult for him, yet he is so advanced and amazing in other areas!

Keep in mind I am in no way an expert, take it for what it's worth and do your own research if you see any of these symptoms in your own child. (But as I said before, after asking professionals, I strongly feel the source of my information is accurate and credible.) There are roughly 35-40 different symtpoms, and to have dyslexia you only need to possess three of those symptoms. Jenson had well over 15.

Here's an abbreviated symptoms list, taken from the Bright Solutions website and also paraphrased from me:

• Speech delay as a toddler, even if they went on to speak fine, but started after age 2 in speaking.
• Stuttering or speech difficulties (I didn't find any specific info. about articulation disorder, not sure about that one)
• Slow to learn to read or overall reading difficulty
• Poor spelling, even with lots of help and practice. They may do fine on weekly tests because they learn to memorize the words, but then they do not translate this into their writing later. For example, on a spelling test, they'll write "could" perfectly fine, but in a story they will write "cold" or some other variation.
• Many other spelling related symptoms, including transposing letters, but that isn't the only one, and even if they don't transpose, other symptoms could be present.
• Dominant hand not chosen early, or may be able to write with right hand and cut with left or vice versa (like me!) or kicks with opposite of dominant hand, etc.
• Extremely gifted in a right brained area such as sports, building, mechanics, art, music, etc.
• They read better with books that have larger fonts. Tiny fonts and crammed sentences pose extra difficulty. Italics are the worst!
• Trouble remembering punctuation and capitalization, even though you've reminded them hourly! (I paraphrased that one especially!)
• Disregard for margins on the paper, may space things weird when writing.
• When copying from a white board, they need to look up a hundred times to write one or two sentences, and still it may come out wrong.
• They are very bright, you know they are smart.
• Dsylexia is hereditary. Any poor spellers in your family that instantly come to mind?
• Lack of confidence and possible self-esteem issues.
• Good at math but much difficulty with word problems and/or memorizing times tables
• Confusion of left/right, it's not an automatic.

There are many more symptoms, these are just a few. If any sound familiar, you may want to check out the link at the bottom of this post or do your own research. It is well explained and worth your time if you even just barely suspect your child may have dyslexia after looking over the lists. And what was very helpful for me was giving him that challenging book*, and discreetly writing down all the mistakes he made, as well as going over his wiritng samples. It couldn't have been any clearer to me!

I hope this will help someone, and I plan to share more about the tips and tricks, and the method I use to teach him from here on out. I certainly do not view it as a "disability", just something that needs addressed differently in how I teach him. I have confidence he will succeed at anything he wants to do in life! (Because his right brain is 10% bigger, ha ha!)

*For Jenson, a 'challenging book' doesn't necessarily mean a higher RL, but longer sentences, finer print, and longer words, such as in Harry Potter. His favorite Beverly Clearly books are in the same RL range, but have nice large font. It made a big difference in his case. You might try comparing different books for your sample.

To find the video I mentioned: (the links do not seem to work after many attempts) -Google "Susan Barton Dyslexia Bright Solutions" and the top result will be what you want. On the main page, the free video I referred to is called "Symptoms and Solutions".

A list of symptoms: HERE.

Reasons I love my library: (updated a little)

 
1. I can request books I want any time of day, and they get delivered to my little neighborhood branch. For free!

2. They usually have most of the books I want. It's true, if you go to the actual library to find books, the good ones won't be on the shelves. That's why # 1 is so important. Sometimes when I am waiting at the airport, I make lists of all the books that I'd love to read, because the airport book shops only keep the best-sellers and new ones. Then I take my list home and request them all. For free! Sometimes I do the same thing at Barnes and Noble.

3. I could probably homeschool my kids entirely using only library books and the internet. Seriously I could.

4. My library people are very nice. That's why I smile cheerfully every time I pay my bill. It turns out the library is only free if you bring your books back on time.

5. I can renew online. (But I rarely do, which is why I smile cheerfully at the librarians so often.)

6. They have summer reading programs for adults! You just write simple reviews of books or music you've checked out, and they draw winners each week. I have won certificates to Village Books, Katie's Cupcakes and Rocket Donuts. What's not to love about that?!

7. Summer reading program for kids too, of course, teens too. (Along with the other usuals that my kids do - Barnes and Noble, Borders, Village Books (my favorite of all the challenges), and Launching Success. The C Shop offers free snow cones on Wednesday afternoons if you show them a library book you are reading - we heart this one too. :) During the school year we do Pizza Hut's Book It too, for free pizzas each month.

8. I love that I can get cookbooks from the library to try new recipes without the clutter/commitment of buying one. Again, requesting is the best way to go about this to get the good ones.

9. The librarians have been really helpful in helping me find suitable books for Jenson (dyslexic) that have crisp font, and they have tons of audio books which are great for Jenson too.

10. They have great kits - for starting your own book club and kit boxes for preschool kids. They also have Tumblebooks to download and e-books. (Right now they work for Nooks, but soon kindles will also be compatible).

* And I just have to say... see this photo above? Those top two books in the stack are incredible! Chris Cleave is an amazing writer. I highly recommend! There is a movie version of Incendiary too (Netflix instant), but watch it only after you read the book, you'll be surprised at how it differs from the book. Great summer reading books!

Added -- I should clarify the Little Bee and Incendiary books both have some graphic/adult content, as does the movie, definitely an R rating. I didn't find it all to be totally gratuitous in the books, and really overall enjoyed the unraveling of the stories in both books. That's all, just don't want to offend anyone by mistake, I should have mentioned that right away, sorry!

 

We're about to start Mr. Popper's Penguins, just in time to see the movie after. My kids' all-time favorite read alouds are the Little House books. I agree with them! Do you read to your kids? What are your favorite read-alouds?

Happy Summer Reading! 

My cute little buns...

 
Elsie Bun Buns is a mama! She and her husband Beau were (are) the proud parents of three (two) sweet little kits.
This little one was less than 24 hours old. I brought it in and warmed on my chest after it got out of its nest box.  Those cute little wrinkles! Elsie has rocked being a mother - she's done all the instinctual things she should, and did not eat her babies, which we were especially happy about.

 
Elsie did her part so well, but then I failed miserably... one little guy got tipped out of the nest and wound up falling through the front of the cage, which I never thought to baby-proof. I think it survived the fall and crawled away, but I unknowingly put the dog out that morning and he found the little toy. I don't think he was very rough, it was still living, but was very cold and had a puncture that it couldn't recover from. I was so sad! I grabbed a little cloth and wrapped it up, trying to suffocate it gently so it wouldn't continue to suffer. Traumatizing! I would never make it as a farmer. My kids however, will either make great farmers or perhaps serial killers. They were quite excited to dig a hole and bury it. Very odd kids, I should be concerned.

 
Now our two survivors are ten days old and just about ready to open their eyes. Adorable aren't they? They are purebred Jersey Woollies if you need a new pet, and will be very used to being handled. :) 

 
Oh goodness, since Elsie didn't eat them I might just gobble them up! Pretty much the cutest little things ever.

Seeds and Beads

 

A few weeks ago (actually it was April, I'm such a slow blogger lately!)* Keston and I found ourselves with some nice bonding time while Jenson was away for three days at Mountain School with our homescool group.  I had found Action Pack  just a few days before, and fell in love with it! For those three days, Keston and I kept busy with the many awesome activities!

Oh my goodness - we love, love, loved it! For homeschoolers it is amazing, and even includes science and some quick history too, drawing lessons, and recipes. I think it would be fun for summer break too, even if you don't homeschool! The e-magazine has already put out 4 issues. I have all but the #3, the Tea and Sewing issue. I might just get that one in the fall too. They are so cheap for all you get in them! The best $5 I have spent lately, actually! We didn't even get close to completing all the fun things yet.

 
Keston started with making Salad Seed Sprinkle... it was delicious. I hadn't thought of using seeds in place of croutons. Much healthier, but still crunchy yumminess!

She also made some Dukka - that was really good too, and included a little bit of story behind it.
We moved past the edibles and made treats for birds...
and some seed bombs for guerilla gardening, (though we learned the hard way - use your bombs within a few days, otherwise the seeds will sprout from the moisture and then die if they aren't near soil. Mine all sprouted in a little wicker basket...).

 
 
But our favorite of all were the beaded dragonflies. We managed to give them all away before I took photos though, so you'll just have to trust me. :)

Super cool little magazine! We have all the supplies ready for the Paper and Beeswax issue (homemade lotion and lip balm? Yes please!) and the newest is a nature theme that is right up our alley and perfect for summer. Thank you Action Pack! Such a great concept!

{*Yes, I've been a slow blogger lately, but I am catching up right now, just 3 hours after getting home from a minor surgery. Surely that should earn me some points, huh?}

 
I've been a little bogged down with life's activities lately (aka: being a taxi driver), thus blogging has been severely neglected. And that makes me sad, because when I look back at my old blog and posts from this blog, so much of it is the little details of life I'd otherwise have forgotten.

So... coming soon, a little blogging! Back to homeschool, dyslexia, gardening, cooking, crafts and family! See you soon. Pinky swear.