Category Archives: Home & Family

Homemaking, parenting and special needs

Why Steal Tide?

Posted on by
6

So the laundry detergent Tide has become a popular target for thieves. Who knew? Seems to me that Tide’s neon orange bottle would be hard to hide, but apparently people are making Tide disappear quite easily, even stealing multiple bottles at a time.

My favorite part of the article describing this trend is the quote from the manufacturer:

“We don’t have any insight as to why the phenomenon is happening, but it is certainly unfortunate,” said Sarah Pasquinucci, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble.

Guess I’ll have to clue P&G in so they can solve this mystery: You charge too much for Tide! No one likes spending $10 or more on a bottle of laundry detergent. Hence the increase in theft and the use of Tide as payment for drugs and other illegal activities.

Those of us who aren’t inclined to steal have a different reaction to the ever-increasing price of detergent: we’re making our own. And it turns out that it not only saves us a bundle, but it’s healthier for our families because it doesn’t have all those unpronounceable chemicals in it.

A quick search for “homemade laundry detergent” will net you an amazing number of results on the search engine of your choice. I like this one.

I’ve been making my own liquid laundry detergent for a few years now and love it. Recently I began making powdered detergent in my food processor and I like that, too: now I use liquid for cold water loads and powder for warm/hot water loads. My current homemade powdered detergent is lavender-scented. It makes me smile every time I use it. And now that it’s warm enough to hang out the wash, my laundry joy is complete. Take that, Procter & Gamble!

Survival Skills for Kids: Cooking and Gardening

Posted on by
3

In her book The Prosperous Heart, Julia Cameron shares the story of Richard, an independent graphic designer who blamed his uneven income for causing him to have too much credit card debt. However, an assessment of his situation revealed that the bulk of his debt was due to his daily habit of eating dinner in restaurants:

“I couldn’t believe it was so simple,” he said. “If I ate out only twice a week, I could be out of credit card debt in a year. What I needed were groceries. The price of a salmon fillet at the supermarket was a third of what I had been paying in a restaurant.”

It’s easy for us to react to Richard’s epiphany with “Well, duh!” But the fact is that there’s an entire generation of young people raised on fast food and restaurant meals that don’t have a clue when it comes to preparing food for themselves.

This wouldn’t be such a problem if our economy was booming, and if earning an income high enough to support daily restaurant meals was easy. But the combination of inflation, shrinking incomes and high unemployment has made times difficult for Americans of all ages and especially young people, many of whom give into the ever-present drumbeat of “College! College!” and graduate with considerable student loan debt, along with a college degree that’s not always the golden ticket to jobs it was advertised to be.

When we fail to equip our young people to live self-sufficiently, we handicap them in the best of times, much less the worst. Right now in Greece, highly educated young people are leaving large cities because they can’t find work; instead, they’re trying to eke out an agricultural living in the country on land their grandparents abandoned years ago. Their desperation comes out of necessity, but at least they’re trying. Surely the task is easier for those who were taught to garden and cook.

We could learn from that example and teach our children such survival skills, but U.S. children continue to be fed a diet of useless social experiments masquerading as curriculum. The closest they get to cucumbers is being taught to put condoms on them in Sex Ed. Seems like teaching them to make a fresh cucumber, tomato and onion salad would be a little more appropriate given our dicey economic future.

However, homeschooled children have the opportunity to be taught how to cook and garden by their parents as part of their daily education. These learning activities already occur naturally in the lives of many homeschooled children, and provide them with enough knowledge and experience that they emerge as young adults who can take care of themselves in hard times as well as good times. A bonus is the closeness that develops between parent and child. The lost art of preparing meals together is what once kept families close, and homeschooling families can easily prove it still works.

As for gardening, even modern children (once pulled away from their phones and iPods) enjoy the sight of the seeds they planted later popping up from the soil and quickly morphing into green plants. Once they taste their first fresh tomatoes and green beans, they’re usually hooked on gardening. For many of them, gardening will become a lifelong pleasure as well as a survival skill.

When I homeschooled my children, I could see that including cooking and gardening in our homeschool was fun and educational for them. It was well worth the effort. Remember, the time you spend teaching your children to garden and cook now will eventually result in that many fewer young people trying to feed themselves armed only with maxed-out credit cards later on.

It’s a Scam, But Not the One I Was Expecting!

Posted on by
2

Shortly after moving here six months ago, I received an offer in the mail for a year of Woman’s Day and a year of Country Living for the ridiculously low price of $10…for both!

This was too much temptation for me. Even though I long ago pruned down my magazine intake, I decided it wouldn’t hurt for a year. And if by some chance it was a scam, I’d only be out $10, right?

Well, it wasn’t a scam, at least not in the way I was thinking. Though it took a good two months for the issues to show up, they are showing up. And they’re ok, I guess. It’s been years since I “took a magazine,” as my grandma used to say, and I didn’t realize how full of ads they are now. In the case of Woman’s Day, they also have pretty much the same content they always did: recipes, diets and crafts. I’m flipping through them pretty quickly as there’s not much that catches my eye; Country Living is a little better than Woman’s Day, though.

But that’s not the problem. The problem is that I now know how and why they can offer these magazines so cheaply: they must have sold my name and address to everyone and his brother! I’m being inundated with catalogs, flyers and life insurance offers. I’m getting mail from companies I didn’t know still existed; apparently they spend their marketing dollars on direct mail instead of Internet ads or television commercials. Some days almost all the mail is addressed to me in the exact same way as the labels on the magazines; that’s how I know my name was sold by the Woman’s Day people.

Ergh. One of the blessings of a new address is that you start fresh and many of the companies that used to send you junk mail lose track of you. But after this move, it seems I’ve jumped from the frying pan into the fire. So beware of magazine publishers with irresistible offers! (On the other hand, I guess I’ve helped keep the Postal Service alive for a while longer.)

Great (Homeschool) Expectations

Posted on by
8

Over Christmas I heard from several longtime friends who, like me, are homeschool moms. In fact, I’m the only one who’s “retired” from homeschooling. The rest are still at it with one or more younger children, but they also have adult children that they homeschooled all the way through high school.

I love talking with these women. We share a common history that most people can’t understand, and of course, that’s the main topic of conversation (besides our children, of course).

However, I have to admit that, despite being homeschooled, some of our now-adult children have disappointed us in different ways. (I can’t share too many details here, because I want to respect the privacy of these young adults.) In most cases, they’re doing great making their way in the world, but some have made sinful choices in their personal lives that have upset their parents. In one extreme case, someone chose a lifestyle that nearly killed them; sadly, they’re not out of the woods yet, after more than a year. (It really grieved me to hear about that person).

We moms openly share our disappointments with each other knowing that we can relate to each other so very well. We all had such great expectations, and some of them have been dashed.

I know this is common for parents. But I think it’s especially painful for homeschooling parents because we devoted our daily lives to raising our children, not because we had nothing better to do, but in part because we expected that our efforts would reap benefits for our children. And while the adult children I know have clearly reaped educational benefits from homeschooling, some of their lifestyle choices make it clear that not everything we taught them stuck.

I should point out that some of our expectations were created by the books we read and the speakers we listened to back when we were new homeschoolers. Even now, you’ll find some saying that homeschooling creates strong Christians, good citizens, yada yada. In fact, some people have made lucrative careers out of saying those things. It’s what everyone wants to hear. After all, why should we go through all this work if it’s not going to pay off?

But the fact is that there are no guarantees. And to those who point fingers and say, “Well, if you just do it right, your kids will turn out right,” I say “Beans!” I realize there’s no question that my husband and I made mistakes. All parents do. But when I think of how the Israelites treated God (see Exodus), why did I expect that none of my children would rebel or go in a different direction from the way we pointed them? Clearly each person must make their own way in life (and hopefully toward God). Not even the love of a homeschooling parent can overcome the effects of sin in the world.

But of course we had to try, and those of us specifically called to homeschool our children can’t regret it. (My mom friends and I talked about that a lot over Christmas!) We tried our best, but we’re learning that ultimately, our adult children’s lives are between them and God.

As for the verse in Proverbs that homeschoolers quote so often, “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it,” I’ve written before that it’s a principle, not a promise, and also that we can’t ignore that phrase “when he is old.” Homeschooling doesn’t turn out perfectly formed adults at age 18. Each person is a lifelong project of God’s. We homeschooling parents were deeply involved in the first stage, but God will use all sorts of people and events to shape our children over the course of their lives. Hopefully there’s still time for each one of them to come to the personal realization that living God’s way is the only way to live.  (We talked a lot about that, too.)

If newer homeschoolers could have heard our conversations over Christmas, it might have frightened them. That vision of homeschool success is what kept us going during the most difficult times, and I hate to pop that bubble for anyone.

That said, I suspect that even if every homeschooling parent could be convinced that homeschooling is good but doesn’t create perfect adults, they’ll still be disappointed someday if their adult child makes poor choices. It’s what happens when you love someone so much. And since it’s this painful for us, imagine how God, the only perfect parent, feels when He sees us making similar poor choices.