Why haven't I been doing this my whole life?

This weekend I made barbecued pulled pork for the first time ever. Although I am a serious bacon enthusiast, I never liked pork roast and I figured the folks who made the barbecued pork I loved had some secret method I could probably never master at home.

But after having some at a birthday party a couple of weeks ago, my youngest asked me if I couldn't make it for her, so I said I would try. I asked one of my friends for instructions, bought a good sized pork butt, some onions and barbecue sauce, set my slow cooker and went to bed.

I woke up hungry the next day, after smelling that delicious pork cooking all night long. By lunch time, I could barely stand it. We had plenty of food for our family, my parents, and lots of leftovers, and all for less than we would have spent on pizzas.

Sometimes you have a moment when you can't help but wonder, why, oh why haven't I been doing this my whole life?

It occurred to me later that homeschooling is sort of like that for a lot of people. You see other people doing it, it looks good, you're kids want you to try it, but you figure that's not something you could ever master at home. Those other families must have some secret method you could never learn.

But the truth is, like barbecue, there are a million paths to homeschooling, and each one can turn out wonderfully in its own way.

What's the best way to learn how to homeschool? Ask around. Homeschoolers are eager to share their secrets, and happy to encourage you along the way to success.

When it comes to trying something new, too often we let our fear of failure keep us from experiencing something truly amazing.

I didn't know if I could homeschool, either, until I tried it. And although getting started wasn't quite as easy as making some phenomenal pulled pork, it was every bit as satisfying. By the time my first year as a homeschooler was over, I had to ask myself, why hadn't I been doing that from the beginning?

When did all my friends become homeschoolers?

I first noticed it when a few of the moms in my homeschool group started hosting parties for things like Usborne Books, Thirty-One Gifts and Mary Kay. Several offered me a chance to host my own party, at home or online, and earn free gifts. But nearly all the people I might invite to a party had already been invited, because we were all in the same circle. All my friends were homeschoolers!

Had I managed to sleep through a social revolution, whereby homeschoolers had taken over the planet? Sadly, no, but just think about how much fun that would be. Alas, I knew that homeschoolers were still a small but growing minority in our society, so I had to ask myself, when did all my friends, at least the ones I see on a regular basis, become homeschoolers?

  

The ever changing friends list

If you are like me, you've probably noticed that your friendships have changed as your life has evolved. In college, your friends seemed like they'd be a part of your life forever. But graduation came, you got jobs, everyone moved off in different directions. I still have a few close friends from college who I really love, but it's hard to stay close when you're literally hundreds of miles apart.

Sometimes it's hard to stay close even when you're living right in the same small town. But as marriage, parenthood, work and other commitments take up time, you end up choosing who you'll spend your time with, often based on how much you have in common.

Homeschooling is a major lifestyle choice. It tends to put families on a different schedule than their public schooling peers. It shines a light on those who are critical and disapproving of your choices, and challenges those who feel threatened or judged by the fact that you chose something different for your children than they chose for theirs.

As shallow friendships fall to the wayside, the door is opened to new friendships, often with other homeschoolers who share much in common with you. You may miss the friends who've gone their own way, or you may even be relieved to be rid of some of them, because you've changed so much you just aren't compatible with one another anymore.

The change is gradual, but one day you look around and notice, like me, that you are surrounded by other homeschoolers... and you like it!

Everyone Matters: Mourning the loss of an online friend

Last week, I found out I'd lost a dear friend who I never had the chance to meet in person. Melissa Matters had started writing a few years ago on the now defunct Yahoo! Contributor Network the same time I did, and we both became friends with the same bunch of writers, eventually engaging in a supportive community on Facebook where we read each other's work every week and encouraged one another.

When Yahoo! decided to shut down this branch of their business, dozens of active writers held onto the ties we'd made and encouraged each other as we built blogs, like the one you are reading and like Melissa's blog, "Wading through Motherhood."Each of us followed our individual interests, and though our blogs were diverse, we continued to stay in touch, reading the work produced by the friends we'd made in our months or years writing together.

Then, one morning, messages on Facebook, tagged with Melissa's name, gave the indication something was terribly wrong. Looking a little deeper, it was clear. My friend had died, suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving behind her husband, her two small children, her parents, and many, many other family and friends who loved her dearly.

I didn't know any of them. I'd read about Melissa's family in her own words, and I knew how much she adored her husband and her children. She loved being a mother more than anything. But even though I had shared many chats and messages with her, I'd never written a word to her husband or anyone else she knew in person. I had to reach out to a stranger, a friend of hers who had posted a sorrowful goodbye and seemed to have known her for many years, to even find out how she died.

And I cried. And the other writers who knew Melissa cried. We mourned, and we felt helpless and sad, whether we lived nearby or half a world away. We'd known her, we'd loved her for her sweet and generous heart, and now we'd lost her.

So long, monarch butterflies

It's been about a month since we first found our monarch caterpillars in the back yard, and a couple of weeks since we released the butterflies back into the wild. 

What an exciting experience it was to watch the caterpillars eat voraciously as they prepared to enter their pupa stage and then observe each day as we waited for them to emerge from their chrysalis.

As the first caterpillar's chrysalis began to turn transparent, and we could see the markings of the butterfly inside, we put a couple of zinnia blossoms from my mother's garden inside the terrarium.

After the butterfly emerged, late in the evening while we were out of the house, we gave it time to rest in the terrarium overnight.

The next day, we carefully transferred the butterfly to a portable carrier, being as gentle as possible so we wouldn't harm it or disturb the other caterpillar, still in its chrysalis in the terrarium.

Then we took the butterfly to my parents' house so that when it was released, it would be in the middle of a flower garden with lots of blooms, a perfect place to prepare for its long journey south.

The second butterfly emerged a couple of days later, apparently in the wee hours of the night. We went to bed and awoke the next morning to find it hanging from its chrysalis, gently turning back and forth.

We didn't disturb it for several hours, giving it plenty of time for its wings to dry before moving it to the carrier so we could release it in the garden. It flew up into a tree and sat there in the afternoon sun, fanning its wings.

We were able to tell by the markings that both of the monarch butterflies we raised were male. You can read more about determining the sex of a monarch butterfly here.

By now, I am sure our butterflies are well on their way to their southern destination. We hope that their journeys are safe and that their offspring return to our area for many years to come.

Don't skip the word problems

I recently read a post from a new homeschooler, who said that her daughter liked math, but hated doing word problems to the point that it was often a battle just to get her to do them. She asked whether word problems are really necessary, or if her child could skip them, since she knew how to do the math anyway.

I say, emphatically, don't skip the word problems!

I know, your kids may hate word problems, and you might be wondering why they really matter, especially if you are confident that your children already knows how to do the math required to solve them. But here's the thing. Word problems require different skills than simple equations, and your students need to master both types of skills for a few good reasons.

Preparation for real life scenarios

Word problems require students to first determine from the information provided what math is required in order to find a solution. This is a completely different skill than being able to complete math problems laid out as simple equations.

In real life, we're seldom presented with problems that are already laid out in an equation. Instead, we find ourselves answering questions like, how many pizzas do we need to feed our son's hungry baseball team if each of the nine boys can eat three slices of pizza and the pizzas are cut into eight slices.

We need added skills in order to parse out the information provided by a scenario like this and then determine how to come to a solution. That's the main reason why word problems are so important, they prepare you for real life math.

Preparation for exams

You'll want to pay special attention to word problems, especially if your child is college bound, because exams like the SAT, ACT and PSAT all have them. And if your child is not adept at solving word problems, their scores will suffer.

There may be no worse feeling for a student than freezing up on an exam question, knowing that the timer is ticking and the problem doesn't make any sense. Precious moments tick away, as you sit there, confused and frustrated.

Being unprepared for tricky word problems may cause your child to not only lose points on those questions, but also other math problems that they are unable to complete because they've run out of time.

Scholarship money is at play

I've told my own kids, who dislike word problems as much as any average middle schoolers, that these types of problems really are what separate the good math students from the great, especially with respect to scholarship contenders. Everyone competing for scholarships will have learned the basic math required to do well on the tests. But that added skill, of being able to read a complicated word problem and deduce what solution is required, is what will set the best scorers apart.

If you've neglected word problems, it's not too late. You can always start building your child's problem solving skills. Start with word problems that require math your child is already proficient at doing, so they can become confident at looking at math outside of neat little equations. Help them learn to think like a detective, and hunt for clues within the word problem that will tell them what question is being asked and how they'll go about solving it.

As the word problems get easier for your child, move along to more complicated math. Your goal is to help them learn to solve word problems confidently and in a timely manner, without confusion and frustration standing in their way.

Very hungry caterpillars head toward the pupa stage

The two large monarch caterpillars we found earlier this week are doing well. We couldn't spot the tiny one today, but we hope it is just hiding and growing. I wanted to post an update on the larger two, though, because things are definitely moving along quickly.

It has been two days since we brought the caterpillars inside and put them in the terrarium. The bigger caterpillar has entered the J stage of development, attaching itself to a stem in preparation for forming its chrysalis.

The smaller caterpillar is still a virtual eating machine. Overnight, it had devoured most of its leaves, so we added fresh leaves from the plant in the back yard. If it has not entered its J stage tomorrow, we'll have to hunt in nearby fields for fresh milkweed, because almost all the leaves from the original vine are now gone.

In the meantime, you can see how much the hungry caterpillar munched out of this new leaf in just a minute or so after we replenished its supply.

Here's a link to another blog, the Texas Butterfly Ranch by Monika Maeckle, and her post all about raising monarch butterflies. She has some gorgeous photos and lots of helpful advice. I love that there are so many great resources where knowledgeable folks have shared their experience and families like ours can not only get a great homeschool science lesson, but also learn what we need to know to successfully help a few more monarch butterflies survive.

What kind of caterpillar is that?

Tonight, just before the sun went down, my younger daughter made a fantastic find in our back yard. She spotted a large caterpillar on a vine that was wrapped in and around the hibiscus that stands at the corner of the house. 

Thankfully, I hadn't been very good about weeding our flower beds this year, because if I had, that vine would have been removed early in the summer, and the monarch butterfly that laid her eggs its leaves would have had to search for someplace else to reproduce.

If you look closely at the leaf my daughters brought inside the house, you'll notice that not only was there a large monarch butterfly caterpillar, there was a tiny baby caterpillar as well!

The girls were so excited to discover that they'd found monarch caterpillars, we decided to see if we could gather some more leaves and let the caterpillars grow safely inside the terrarium we'd used earlier this summer to keep Jackie Chan, the ninja-like tree frog we'd raised from a tadpole. We had released Jackie Chan in a tree outdoors a few weeks after he completed his metamorphosis, so the terrarium was ready for a new inhabitant.

We found more of the same type of leaves, from a vine in the milkweed family, and on them we found another monarch caterpillar and a whole bunch more caterpillars we couldn't identify.

"What kind of caterpillar is that?" asked my daughters? "Will they hurt us?"

I didn't know, but the fuzzy creatures in striking black and orange, with funny white tufts sticking out here and there certainly looked alarming to me. "Don't touch," I answered. "Let's look them up."

Using the same research skills we practiced when we identified the strange fungus growing on our walnut tree this spring, we looked for information online that would help us identify the unknown caterpillar in the back yard.

We found a caterpillar identification tool that let us check distinguishing characteristics to help identify our species, and discovered in just a few clicks that the caterpillar sharing the vine with our monarchs was none other than the milkweed tussock moth, which is commonly found eating the same vegetation as monarchs.

We left these caterpillars alone, and took the other monarch inside, along with several fresh leaves, so they would have plenty to eat. Then we set about researching monarch butterflies, how to raise them, and how they live in the wild.

We can't wait to see our caterpillars change and grow into beautiful monarch butterflies, and release them to help maintain their population. And you can bet we won't be removing their vine of choice next summer. In fact, we might even give it a little trellis beside the hibiscus, so the butterflies will have a place to lay their eggs next year.