Spring Pots Bring Entertainment/Pocket Money

Hello again to all of my “stay at home” fellows!  It is day umpteen of this quarantine and I’m wondering what you are all finding to do.  Thankfully there is various sources of media that we are all able to use for communication and news gathering but the lack of face to face contact is driving the extroverts in my house crazy.  Those of us that are introverts are feeling the change but not so strongly as our extroverted house mates.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, gardening is high on my list of to do’s now that I’m home more and I’ve been out weeding and readying my garden space for new plants.  In most places in the Northwestern United States this is a good time to plant things such as lettuce, beets, carrots, cabbage, kale, broccoli and such.  It is also a great time to prune out the old raspberry canes and transplant strawberries, raspberries and other perennials.

With this in mind, one of the things I’ve been doing to occupy myself and bring in a little extra money, during this season of no income, is to put some of the extra perennials into my recycled pots to sell!  I enjoy growing food producing plants and my hope is that other people are also interested in starting some of these in their yards!  I have an abundance of pots from past years, I can’t bear to throw things away that are still usable, and they are coming in handy for potting strawberries, raspberries, lemon balm, cat nip, walking onions, etc. I have also been having some success with the local advertising I’ve done on social media.  Gaining some pocket change makes this little project even more fun for me!

Today I received news from the school principal that school may continue online for the rest of this school year,  I also saw that the CDC is predicting this week the US will face it’s “Pearl Harbor moment” due to a surge in deaths from the coronavirus.  With these things in mind, I am reminded that my finding things to do is a minor side issue of these times we live in.  While I will continue to do what I can to be productive and joyful in the situation I find myself in, I will also look for ways that I can be of help to my neighbors as they wait, hopefully in health, for this to pass.

I pray that you and yours are safe, healthy and provided for as we go through this storm!  “These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace.  In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” John 16:32  “Have I not commanded you?  Be strong and of good courage; do not be afraid, nor be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”  Joshua 1:9

10 Things I Learned From Living In An RV

Tiny houses, remodeled buses and other small space living have become popular these days.  We lived in an RV before it was a millenial thing to do.  With husband, three children ages 4-11, two dogs and bravery we didn’t know we’d need we embarked on the journey.  We had purchased property, sold our home and moved most of our belongings into a storage unit when we took the final plunge and moved into a twenty three foot pull behind trailer.  It didn’t take long at all to realize that we had not planned well for this and it took us only five days to decide to trade in the RV for a newer bigger model.  We ended up living in the RV for a year and a half before we were able to get moved into our new home so it was well worth the money it cost to make the trade!  Here are a few things I learned about living in an RV from that experience.

1.  Planning ahead is essential if you want to be comfortable.  We did do some planning ahead.  We found an RV park that would let us camp there for a few months which turned out to be a great decision.  I have know several other families who lived in RV’s while building houses and several of them were parked in the mud and dust and not only did they have a hard time staying clean, they ended up ruining the RV in the process.  When we had a pole building built on our new property we moved our RV into it and that gave us a place to be that was clean and where we could have bicycles and tools etc. in out of the weather.
2.  You don’t need as much stuff to survive as you think you do.  As we were storing things away in a storage unit I put things in the RV that I thought I would need.  It turned out that with all the things I thought I needed to live there wasn’t room left for the people in the RV.  I had to pare down most of the things I had put in the RV and take them to the storage unit as well.  Think camping and you will be more likely to have the right amount of stuff.  We tend to have a lot more things in our homes than we really need.  In fact, as I unpacked the storage unit a couple of years later, I realized that I didn’t want or need many of the things that I had thought so essential when I packed them away.
3.   It’s not easy to home school in such a small space but it can be done.  I was home schooling two of my three children while we lived in the RV.  We had to take a lot more field trips to keep our sanity in tact and we had to have a very organized space to keep our supplies so that they didn’t take up all of the space we had but we did manage and don’t seem any worse for the experience.
4.   If you’re going to live in an RV, take a good look at the kitchen first.  When we got the new RV we didn’t really think a lot about the kitchen.  The selling factors to us for that particular RV were the triple bunks and the slide out.  Both things we hadn’t had in the older RV.  There is quite a difference in the kitchens that are available in different RVs, however.  Since that time we have looked at a lot of different units and some are definitely just weekend warriors while others have quite a lot of counter space available for actually preparing meals.  As we lived in our RV we began to really wish we had thought of that before we bought it.
5.   Related to the kitchen… Special diets are hard to keep up when you don’t have a good kitchen and don’t have much freezer space.  I have been a vegetarian most of my life and I try to feed my family wholesome home cooked foods, made from scratch, on a regular basis.  This became a lot harder while making due with the small kitchen.  I admit to eating a lot more frozen pizzas and pastas while we lived in the tight quarters of the RV.  It was a bit difficult to get back to “normal” when we moved out of it as well after forming some not so healthy habits.
6.   If you must live in an RV, make sure everyone has their own bed.  This need was made evident to us right away after moving into the older RV.  Our older one had bunks for two children but the third one had to sleep on the table turned into a bed at night.  It is not fun to put the table up and down every day to make it into a bed.  It’s easy, when living in these tight spaces, to make the table into a kind of office space and in our case school too.  What to do with the things that have taken up residence there while someone needs it as a bed at night is a dilemma that quickly gets old.  We were much more comfortable once we had the triple bunk where each child had their own space where bedding and toys could stay day and night.
7.   Slide outs are a life saver.  Living in a small space always takes extra patience whether you live with one or more people in it.  In our case there were five of us and we became firm believers in slide outs to add additional room for passing each other rather than just having a one butt hallway to get from one end of the RV to the other.  It also makes the entire area look more inviting and homey to be able to spread out a little.
8.   It’s no fun to go to town to dump so get a septic system as soon as possible.  After three months of living in an RV park we moved our operation to our property and tried out one month parking in the mud.  When the shop was finished we moved into it and that was so much better!  One of the main annoyances of that time was dumping the RV every few days.  It gets tiring to pack your things up so that you can move your home and then reorganize each time it comes back to it’s resting place.  We did find out that it’s possible to dump gray water down the toilet though.  As soon as we had a toilet and septic plumbed in we did do that regularly since we didn’t yet have running water hooked up from the well.  This made life a tiny bit easier and made a few less trips to town necessary for dumping.
9.   Water is ESSENTIAL!  For nearly a year we hauled our water in five gallon buckets from a kind friends home and syphoned it into our trailer in between town dump and refill runs.  It was easier to have it in the water tanks of the RV so that we could use it in the accustomed ways such as washing dishes and showering, etc.  It was soooo nice when we finally had running water coming to a sink right in our home!
10. . You can live in small spaces with minor inconveniences and still be happy!  When you are following your dreams and seeing them being fulfilled as you go, the small inconveniences of life become stepping stones to your success.  They can be annoying and can cause fights between the best of friends if you let them but it doesn’t have to end that way.  Many times, when we were tired and feeling a bit discouraged, my husband and I would look back on our project and say things like, “Just think! last year this time we didn’t even have a toilet!  Keep track of your progress, of  where you’ve been and where you’re going, it helps make it possible to enjoy the little successes along the way and keep going toward the goals you’ve set.

Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me.  Phil. 3:12 NKJV

Cookie Cutter School Rant Beware…

Reader beware!  I must warn you from the start that this is me emptying some rant off of my chest!  Don’t read if you don’t want to see that…

For those of you who missed my previous posts about home schooling (“End of a Homeschooling Era” & “Of Homeschooling and Graduating), I have been, for the last twenty or so years, home schooling my children.  This year I have four of my children going to school full time in private schools.  The two oldest have graduated and are on to other things and the youngest from the first set is a sophomore in high school and would have been the last one to be at home so he decided to go off to school.  Three additional children joined our family a couple years ago and they have always gone to school.  They don’t know what they’re missing!!!

What has gotten under my skin, so to speak, about this new arrangement in schooling, is that “the school” thinks that they “own” my children!  The school not only takes up all of the children’s time from 7:30-4 (counting driving time) every week day but they also take up their evenings and weekends to a large extent.  They don’t seem to have enough time to teach them what they need to know during the school day.  They have to do hours worth of homework in the evenings, leaving them no time to do anything that they may imagine or dream up.  They want to force them into imagining things such as a coat of arms for British Literature class or drawing the leaves of trees that they’re learning about in Biology class, but they don’t give them any down time to do the imagining.  They are just supposed to come up with it on the fly.

I’m all for art projects and writing projects but I have found the children to be a lot better at imagining and creating when they are given time to think and time to exercise and get fresh air by running around outside and playing with animals and bicycles.  The second set of three children that have joined us are so used to this dictated imagination that they are not sure of what to do with themselves when they don’t have homework to do, which makes me just as irritated as the overwhelmed spirit of my home schooled child who is already tired of school half way through his first year there.

One of the children is an ASB officer so has to stay after school often which makes the rest do the same since we live twenty minutes, one way, away from the school.  Also, evening programs and of course Christmas programs, which I would expect, but no less than four Christmas programs are on our calendar just for the two schools the children attend!  Really?  Couldn’t they get their Christmas programs into one for each school?  They are not, by the way, the only folks who want things on our calendar or yours!  When is a family to have time to plan their own outings or invite guests to Christmas gatherings?