What's Up?

First and Foremost it is Ramadan! It is only day two but things are going well. God willing we will finish as strong as this start. My favorite part of the last two days is the children and I reading the Holy Quran in the morning and taking notes in our journals then sharing what we wrote at dinner. Great conversation and love to hear their take on what they are reading.

Faith and the drill. Huge Smile on my face. It cracks me up how I usually have an agenda on how the day should go but then they have theirs too.

Laundry detergent. I tried something a little different and I do believe I like it even more.

Overgrown mint. Peace needs to harvest her mint. But then again... the bees are loving it. This picture does not capture all the bees that it attracts.

Peace is designing shirts right now.

This picture bout sums up what is happening in the garden. Praise God things are growing.

This is Peace reluctantly allowing me to take her picture with her potato (left hand). She and I attempted to grow potatoes in compost inside of boxes. Things were going well (so it seemed) until an overgrown tomato plant basically fell on it. My brain began to function again and propped the plant up but we decided to harvest the potatoes. She found a few, but did not do a thorough job and we found a bunch more. Hence the experiment worked. Now we are planning to try to grow some in buckets. Why?  For the fun of it.

A clean coop. And ALL 3 groups of chickens are integrated. Praise God. Nadia refers to them as the old ones, the middle age and the teens. The 3 in the picture above are the youngest. Although they are not laying they are checking out the nesting box...together.

I think this is enough for now, although there is a lot more to tell.

Preppin

Greetings! I really should use this time to continue to prepare for the upcoming school year but NO... I would rather blog about it. Past history shows that I will not start that until at least 11. Although I am aiming for earlier tonight.

Doing Work even w/ company. He Got to join in on the fun.

How I even got on preparing for upcoming year was rather funny this go round. A few things had come up in my life that left me focused/figuring out other things; not to mention that we were behind on completing this year's goals. For all those who do not know me, I don't believe in social promotion so no need to prepare for next year if not finished with this one.
Moving on...

Around the end of May, I believe, I began getting calls from Unschoolers asking me about the upcoming school year. The first call I was shocked but dismissed it. But after the third call I was wondering what was up. Basically, they all said the same thing, that I usually have a rough plan of upcoming year. So after the third call and life continuing to stay busy and with a few dates up in the air I carved out a schedule to have us complete the existing goals. And lo and behold, after two weeks, though we were not complete I could see completion near and my mind instantly went into gear preppin for the upcoming year.

Although the schedule (in a London accent) is not set in stone it feels really great to have a skeleton of the plan ahead. I am also really grateful to those that called because with all that we plan to accomplish in the first semester alone it is going to require a good amount of prep work.
Now I'm off to pre-read, develop discussion questions and activities.

Oh, you may be wondering why so much prep work. It all depends on the subject but reality is I don't want my children fed the same lies that were fed to me. And if they are they need to know how to deconstruct them. So I do not use regular history books and if I do I still feel the need to create my own questions which means I have to read the material to figure out what exactly is covered; and/or to know what else has to be covered.
The most prep time is spent in Islamic Studies, History, and Lang. Arts.

Its almost 9pm

Greetings and Peace, I am here wanting to blog but not sure which topic to focus on. Part of me says do it another day and another part says provide some kind of update.
(sigh)
Oh this is an easy one but I have been really bad with taking pictures.
I wanted to do a blog on zucchini. What do you do when you harvest 21.5 lbs of zucchini in one day?

I wanted to have pictures of the products but hey.

• You gift some
• you make a zucchini corn saute to bring to a big gathering
• you make zucchini enchiladas
• you make zucchini bread (solar oven and reg oven)
• and you shred the remainder and freeze it for future zucchini bread

As we were eating dinner tonight I was thinking my children are going to start thinking of vegetables in terms of seasons. You know like when summer is here and you think of peaches, watermelons, plums, etc. Well I do believe zucchini and green beans are going to be planted in their minds when it comes to summer.