Unschooling to charter high school

My middle daughter,Sarajane, has started her second year of a new charter school, and we just went to a parent-teacher conference. The teacher/crew leader is a brand new teacher and we were talking about how I had homeschooled (unschooling) and told him some of the things we had done through the years. He was really surprised as he was impressed with how well my daughter has been doing in school. I told him how her first year had gone, that she had a difficult time adjusting to a totally new routine having never gone to school before: getting up early, going class to class, etc. and that by the end of the year she was tutoring the other students. I felt the same confidence that I did when this same daughter at five years old, brought out a paper where she had copied the alphabet off of an alphabet poster we had on our wall - having never having talked about writing, maybe we talked about the pictures, but she did it on her own. My oldest daughter had gone to most of kindergarten so this was my first experience with one learning the alphabet on her own. It really does work!

"My friend Mohammed"

This post came on my local homeschool list and I asked for permission to share it. I thought it was wonderful!
" My homeschooled daughter made a decision to go to public school in the tenth grade.
She made many good friends including one of her best friends Mohammed.
The following year the school brought in a Muslim group that's focus is to educate about the difference between Muslims and Jihadists terrorists.
When the presenter asked the audience what is their first thought when they hear Muslim, kids shouted out "9-11" "Al Qaida" "terrorist".
My daughter stood up in front of 800 students and teachers and shouted out " my friend Mohammed!!!!"

“Achilles”

One Friday afternoon in the spring, around 3PM, my daughter Marie called me at work. She said she found one of her ewes, Chortle (who has markings that looks like she is chortling) hanging around close to the lean-to instead of out with the flock grazing. Then she looked around for Chortle’s ram lamb. When she found him, he was not able to walk due to his front leg being either broken or pulled out of joint for some unknown reason. Chortle was staying near her baby, being a good mother. Marie asked me what she should do, and I told her to call ARC, the local vet clinic, and see if we could bring him in. They said no because he wasn’t a dog or cat, but that they would have the vet call her when she could.
When I got home, I told her we would go see if the emergency room doctor for the local hospital, who lives around the corner was home. We talked with his wife, who told us he had already gone to work, and we didn’t think he would appreciate us bringing a lamb to the emergency room. We then went to the emergency room nurse who lives two doors down, and she wasn’t home either. So, we went back to our house. By that time, Marie said that she thought maybe she could fix it herself, but that we had to buy a piece of PVC pipe because she had read about how to do it on the internet. As we were in the driveway, the vet called, so Marie talked with her. The vet asked her if she wanted advice or for her to come out, and Marie said she guessed she wanted advice. So the vet told her what she needed to do and what to watch for in the ram lamb (temperature of lamb, temperature of leg, not too tight or loose wrapping.)
We then went to Stover Lumber and asked for a short piece of PVC pipe. We took one piece out to the car to see if it was wide enough for the lamb’s leg. It wasn’t, so we found another piece that was the right diameter and ended up even being the right length. It cost 69 cents. We then went to our next door neighbor Tom, who has every tool you can think of, and asked him if he could cut the pipe lengthwise for us. Then we would have a “U” shaped piece of PVC to lay the lamb’s leg in which we would wrap. He got out a hand saw and started to cut only one side. I realized he didn’t quite understand what I had asked for and told him he needed to cut both sides. He said that would make it easier, and cut it in half.
We took the cut PVC pipe home, and prepared for the procedure. Rosemary, my youngest daughter, got a towel to wrap around the lamb’s back legs. She held the back end, while Sarajane, my middle daughter, held his head still and I held the top of the lamb’s broken/disjointed leg. Marie started to pull on his leg gently and said that she was afraid she might pull too hard. As she was pulling, she said “I won’t pull too hard” - it was a lot harder than she thought. The lamb lay perfectly still and didn’t even make a peep. Marie said if it had been a goat, he would have been screaming. We all heard and felt a “snap” when the leg went back into place. Then Marie laid a piece of thick cotton cloth inside the PVC pipe, and laid the lamb’s leg in it and wrapped it with pink vet wrap up and down his leg. We took him back to his mom, and he didn’t use his leg for a few days. After a while, he used the PVC pipe as a crutch to move around so he didn’t look like he was limping so badly. By the end of three weeks, Marie decided to take his cast off and see how it looked and acted. When she first took it off, he wouldn’t use his leg, but she was able to bend it a little and felt it would be all right. After a day or so, he started using it a little more. A week later, Marie came and told me that you couldn’t even tell he had been injured and that he was walking normal. I told her she should call him Achilles, after the Greek god, as his weakness is his leg, though Achilles weakness was his heel.

Arabella

One spring day, as I was taking water out to the animals, I thought I saw a new lamb in the pasture, so I went out to see. What I found was not one new lamb, not two, but three new lambs with three different mothers. They all looked healthy so I left them alone for the time being. After I called my daughter, Marie at her friend’s house to tell her I was coming to get her, we went out to the pasture together, and she weighed the new lambs and checked them over. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a ewe that seemed to be in labor, and she said it looked like she had been in labor a while. After checking the three lambs, a watchful eye on the other ewe, whose lip was curling, she decided that we needed to catch her and see what was going on. We managed to catch her and I held her neck, while Marie put her fingers in her uterus to see if she could figure out if the lamb was in the right position. The ewe’s vagina was very tight and Marie could only get two fingers in to start with. Eventually, she was able to get more of her fingers in, but still couldn’t figure out what position the lamb was in. The ewe was pushing on and off during that time and making Marie’s fingers numb, so she would have to take that hand out and use the other hand. She did this numerous times; all the while I am holding the ewe’s neck. We discussed at this point that we were sure we were going to pull out a dead lamb. It was a warm day, and the sun was beating down on us. After what seemed like an hour (maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t) Marie was able to grab the lamb’s neck and pull the lamb out. It was a ram lamb, and he was definitely dead. The ewe, Arabella, was able to lick him off and have closure, which is something Marie had learned is important. Later that day, I went to check on Arabella, and her head was right to the ground in grief and pain, walking with her back legs almost crossed. I told Marie she should give her antibiotics and she said she would get painkiller for her as well. Every day her head would lift a little more, and her walk would be a little less sore looking. She is a special ewe, as she has a rare coloring found in the Jacob breed. I am glad my daughter knew how to help her, because I sure didn’t!

Cuban Black Beans

From Betty Crocker's Slow Cooker Cookbook.

Hide and Seek

April 1^st, 2010

On a warm spring morning, I hitched up our two dogs to go check on the new lambs and goat kids in the barn born the day before. I hadn’t seen them yet, so was curious as to what they looked like. Our sheep are Jacobs which are spotted black and white and all different, and the goats are unique too. When I went out to the barn with the dogs, I found the goat doe and her buckling kid. I took a couple of pictures of him, while looking into the next pen and asking the ewe where her baby, who weighed about five pounds, was. I started to get a little worried, looking around. I let the dogs go and was hoping they would help look but they didn’t, they just sniffed everything in sight. I started looking even farther away from the ewe, didn’t find her baby in with the other animals, who either had older babies or needed extra food. Looked all around and no lamb! I went back to the house, and knocked on the window of my daughter’s bedroom and hollered that I couldn’t find the new lamb. She said, “Well it was there the night before. “ I went back to the barn with the dogs, looked all over again, looking a little more thoroughly, but still no lamb. I went back to the house and my daughter got up sleepily, and came out with me to look. We started to move things, looking inside the tipped wheelbarrow, under a pallet, behind a board, in a couple of buckets on their side, but still no lamb. By this point, we were sure we were going to find a dead lamb somewhere. I asked Marie is she could have gotten out that little tiny place that was about two inches wide where the sun was shining into, and she said no. After looking another couple of minutes, I said to myself that that lamb is not in here, that I was going to go walk around the outside of the barn, just to make sure she wasn’t out there. As I went around the front side of the barn, where the sun was shining so nicely, there she was, basking in the sun, perfectly content, not knowing we had been frantically looking for her. She was playing hide and seek and she won!

Electra electrified!

So, I go out to feed and water the chickens in the coop this morning, and I see a ewe in the electric fence. I run over to the battery and unplug the charger, and run over to look at the ewe. Her eyes look really gross, like she had been dead for a long time or something and she didn't move. I ran inside to wake my 11 year old daughter and said a ewe was in the fence dead and I wasn't sure who it was. Rosemary came out and went over to her and then yelled back at me (trying again to do the chickens) and said "It's Electra and she moved!" so I ran back over, and she said that this ewe is very skittish and she usually is afraid of us. So we tried to untangle her (4) horns out of the fence. We struggled for a little bit, though Electra did not struggle as I think they can sense when they are being helped. I didn't think I was going to be able to do it so I told Rosemary to go in and get Marie (my oldest, who owns the sheep) so they came out. By then I had her out and she was just sitting on her legs, but holding her head up OK. I hollered for the girls to get Rescue Remedy and we sprayed some in her nose (Rosie couldn't find the liquid kind.) Marie also expressed some of her milk (she has a pretty young lamb that was near by when I first went out) and rubbed it in her eyes - because we have pink eye going thru the flock - which is why her eyes looked so awful when I first saw her! We then led her to the water because she can't see with the pink eye, which is also most likely why she "walked" into the fence and then tried to win the fight! Whew, from a "dead" ewe to a live one was a much better start of the day!