A Mother’s Journal

Clever it should be, never enough thyme, but I know I cannot say “gotcha” with any of you!  You know us here too well!  You know our love of herbs and creatures and all things garden, so you must also know, just by reading today’s post title, that we took a little time to process and package up some dried herbs that were gifted to us this past week!

Michaela and John help me strip thyme leaves from the dried stems.  The smell was slightly lemony and oh so heavenly!

It was fun to do this, I must say, and I reminded the kids that this is what families used to do daily, just as part of their work and survival, and yet we read in old books and hear in stories from our great-grandparents that it was a bonding time, a pleasurable thing.

“What in the world did they talk about?” asked John.

“Well, they talked about life,” I said, “including their plans for how they’d manage in winter and what they would eat, how their animals were doing and just life.”

John changed the subject to 401K’s and I couldn’t help but laugh, thinking that my children had no idea what it was to sit and talk about helping livestock give birth or storing food through winter, and I am sure that Laura Ingalls did not talk about a 401K while helping Ma in the kitchen.  Sigh.  I think, though, that my kids probably have more knowledge than they realize about “the old ways.”  Their own Pa always provided enough venison to last through the winter, and their Ma sure loved gardening and taking care of rabbits and storing herbs.

Three pretty bottles with three pretty homemade labels now sit in the spice rack.  Isn’t it sweet to have things around us that are not just pretty (though pretty they are!) but remind us of sweet friends?

Thyme is a lovely herb, if you have not grown it.  It used to thrive in The Wild Little Garden where I had several kinds of thyme.  It ran away from where it was planted (exactly what I wanted) and danced between the stepping stones, giving off its delightful scent whenever I’d walk through.

In closing, I wanted to share something that I’ve learned from homeschooling.  It is so very easy to get caught in a trap of thinking things must be perfectly staged.  You know — like the homeschool magazine covers that showcase “perfection”:  10 children, posed pyramid style, all in homemade clothes with a featured clip of them singing perfect harmony the most recent song they wrote, and mom and dad telling of their most recent addition to the farm and how dad makes all of their furniture from wood off their land and mom makes all their food from scratch and sews all of their clothes from thread she made from plants and animals around their home.

Let me say right now, no offense intended.  The point is absolutely, totally not to bash that lifestyle!  I would love to have it myself!  The point is just that some of us (picture me raising my hand) can get caught up in thinking that if it cannot look like that, then I cannot do it at all.  But folks, life happens.  Life is sometimes in T-shirts and messy hair.  Life is sometimes throwing out a sock after a year because you never did find the matching sock.  And then finding it the next day.  Life is busy.  Life is just what we squeeze out of it.  Sometimes we can carve out perfect moments, even if the scene does not look perfect!  And that’s one of the things I learned to do.

So it was that I pulled out the card table (because the kitchen table is currently the victim of a standing and staring spell) and “last minute” called John and Michaela to “please help me for 5 minutes” with something.  Nothing staged.  Nothing fancy.  Nothing that will make a magazine cover.  And yet, it will live in my mind as one of our perfect moments together.

In your homeschooling, look for the perfect little do-able moments that you can carve out of what may seem like a big, jumbled up, busy mess!

Enjoy this day!