Public schooled children are not mindless robots.

A homeschooling mom in a local "natural mom" group of which I am a member sent out this cartoon to the entire group this morning.

Hmmm. I don't personally know any parents who send their children to school with the assumption that the children are learning about "life". School should not be the be all and end all of "learning" or "life lessons", and thoughtful, caring parents of traditionally-schooled children realize this. Have we become so polarized as a people that we are incapable of seeing at least some value in the "other side", no matter what subject is being discussed?

My husband and I teach our children about life. As a family we discuss personal finances, such as how much to put toward spending, saving, and giving and recognizing needs vs wants. We work to instill the value of people and experiences rather than materialism. We use the public library at least once, sometimes twice a week. We read to our children and have them read to us. They see us reading and hear us discuss what we've read. We make up stories together. We're history buffs and science geeks. We visit museums and aquariums and historic sites. When they have questions and we don't know the answers, we turn to books or Google. We have access to interesting documentaries and Liberty's Kids and Bill Nye the Science guy. We're remodeling our entire home on our own, and our children help in age appropriate ways. We garden together and cook together and sit down at the table to eat together, and if the heat isn't too brutal we take an evening walk or bike ride together. We do woodworking and sewing and knitting and photography and most of our own vehicle maintenance and repair. We take nature walks and do beach explores and intend to take our children on vacations so they can see the entire United States and hopefully some foreign countries, just as my parents did for my brothers and me.

So, you see, my children are home-educated. They also just so happen to attend public school, where they learn the core/foundation for academics. As parents, we help build upon that core knowledge as needed.

The idealist in me loves the idea of homeschooling. I have several friends who homeschool their children, and their passion is infectious! But the realist in me knows it's not right for my family, even after spending summer researching various homeschooling methods and curricula, reading Gatto and Holt and the NEHRI website and following homeschooling blogs.

As for the "traditional school trains children to do busy work so they can become lowly desk jockeys and get paid crappy salaries to do busy work" thinking, realize that few people who start out as "desk jockeys" maintain that status. Careers evolve or people change career paths completely.

Yes, the public school system has many faults and we public school parents are painfully aware of them. But PLEASE stop acting as though our children are destined to be mindless zombies because they attend public school. You as homeschoolers have our full support. It would be nice if we had allies on your side, too.

- Kristen, who is apparently lucky to be able to form a complete sentence and *gasp* write it after attending traditional school as a child.

My first roller derby bout (with photos)!

On Saturday I attended my first roller derby bout, "The Mother Of All Bouts", featuring our local team, The Lowcountry Highrollers. A friend of mine is on the team and a group of us went out to cheer her on. I took my 6 year old daughter, who is obsessed with learning to roller skate herself, and we had a blast.

When I was in high school I was a photographer on the school newspaper and yearbook staff and I covered lots of school athletic events. I enjoyed photographing sports events in high school, but only because I was obsessed with getting that awesome action shot that the athlete would love seeing in print. That's the only thing I enjoyed about sports; I didn't care about the game at all. I assumed it would be the same for the roller derby. Yes, it would be fun to see all the derby girls in their sassy, bad-ass "uniforms", and it would be great to practice taking action shots since I hadn't taken any in years, but would I really care about the sport itself? You know what? I did. I will definitely be going back. And my daughter and I will wear our LCHR shirts and cheer the team on. Well, when I'm not snapping away with my camera, anyway.

Garden macro photography

I'm kind of in love with plants and gardening. I'm still in my first year of working with and learning about plants and landscaping, but it has completely sucked me in (and every now and then empties my wallet). I find pleasure in pulling rogue grasses from my flower and vegetable beds and in spreading compost and mulch. Instead of being grossed out by the dirt under my fingernails, I feel a sense of pride, accomplishment. When it rains I imagine my tomato plants drinking it up and I can hardly wait to see how much water it leaves in my rain barrel.

I've been having a wonderful time going out first thing in the morning to check on my precious plants, and I take my camera and macro lens with me. It's fascinating to watch them at all stages of development.

From top to bottom: Sweet alyssum; 'Emerald' southern high bush blueberries; Scarlet bottlebrush; 'Powwow Wild Berry' coneflower; 'Powwow Wild Berry' coneflower; 'Powwow Wild Berry' coneflower; 'Bolivian Rainbow' hot pepper plant blossom; 'Lady in Red' hydrangea bud

WFD: Chili-Lime Quinoa and Black Bean Salad

I love quinoa. I can - and do - eat it morning, noon and night. Not every day, mind you, but I certainly could if I wanted to because it is so versatile.

This recipe was inspired by a chili-lime pasta salad I had recently. It's super easy, flavorful, and packs plenty of protein and healthy carbs to make it a meal in itself if that's how you roll. I only use two peppers if I'm serving it to company and I don't know how well they like spicy food. If I'm cooking for myself and no one else, I use 3 or 4 peppers, sometimes hotter varieties. It's also good with extra veggies, like sweet peppers, carrots, cukes, celery, and even wilted greens. Modify it and make it your own!

Chili-Lime Quinoa and Black Bean Salad

For the salad:

• 3 cups cooked quinoa
• 15 oz can of black beans, rinsed and drained
• 1/2 cup fresh or frozen (thawed) corn kernels
• 1 jalapeno pepper, finely chopped or sliced
• 1 red chili pepper, finely chopped or sliced

For the dressing:

• 4 tbsp freshly squeezed lime juice
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 tsp raw agave nectar
• 1/8 tsp fresh lime zest
• 1 garlic clove
• 1 tsp sea salt (or to taste)

To garnish:

• fresh cilantro

1. Cook the quinoa as directed. Allow to cool to room temperature. Rinse the black beans and add them to the quinoa along with the corn kernels.
2. Finely chop the jalapeno pepper, the red chili pepper and the scallions. Add to quinoa mixture.
3. Take the juice of two limes, vegetable oil, the zest of one lime, agave nectar, sea salt and the garlic clove and process in food processor or blender until smooth.
4. Pour over quinoa mixture and allow to marinate for at least 20-30 minutes.
5. Garnish with fresh cilantro. Serve at room temperature or chilled.

Serves 6-ish as a side, 3 or 4 as a main dish.

Small steps toward simplicity

So much for the post-every-other-day-in-May challenge, eh? This upper respiratory infection is kicking my ass. I've been in such a brain fog the last several days that I could barely carry on a conversation beyond, "yeah... no... I don't know", much less write a blog post or two. Today was much better, though.

Lately I'm a bit obsessed with the minimalist and voluntary simplicity movements. Actually, it started a couple of years ago around mid-November when every store I had ever purchased anything from started sending out their Christmas catalogs. I started keeping track of them and by mid-December I had acquired 86 catalogs. A few were duplicates and several stores send 2 or more "different" holiday catalogs; either way, that's still a ridiculous number of catalogs. From there my desire to consume less from major corporations was born.

Though I began relying more on local shops, thrift stores, swaps and artisans, I was still consuming far more than my family needed; I was afflicted with "stuffitis". My children had overflowing toy boxes and bins and the toy room runneth over. Our book collections were too big for our bookshelves and ended up in cabinets, closets, and corners of our bedrooms. We had a closet shelf full of DVDs we never watched. We all had too many clothes to fit neatly into the drawer and closet spaces. And my craft supplies... well, let's just say I am not allowing myself to go into yarn or fabric stores until I use up most of what I already have.

I began to resent my stuff. I hated looking at it. I hated cleaning it. I hated how much space all of it took up in our house. The house I'd worked so hard to make into a home - a calming, comforting, nurturing environment - felt chaotic to me because of all the stuff.

I tried "organizing" all the stuff - putting it all neatly into bins and boxes and arranging it in attractive ways - but quickly learned that "organization" doesn't last long if one keeps bringing more and more stuff into the house without first getting rid of anything.

A few short months ago it became obvious to me what I had to do: get rid of stuff and stop buying stuff. So I read The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide: How to Declutter, Organize, and Simplify Your Life by Francine Jay and started following a few voluntary simplicity and minimalism blogs, and then I actually started getting rid of stuff.

The first purge was actually a yard sale last month. We sold several big-ticket items and lots of kitchen and baby stuff and a few odds-and-ends and came away with about $600. What didn't sell was immediately taken to Goodwill. I refused to hang onto any of the stuff any longer, because even if someone on Craigslist would have paid $10 for that bread machine, I did not want it back in my home for a single second. That was the changing moment for me, when I realized that whatever small monetary value any of our items held was far less than my desire to see things gone from our house.

After the yard sale I took a few weeks off from purging. We've been busy with family outings and gardening and family visits, but things are settling down again temporarily so this week I decided to tackle the media situation. I decided that we would only keep as many books, DVDs and video games as could fit on the two bookcases my husband made last year.

The kids had been using a bookshelf my grandfather built for me when I was a girl. It's a very nice bookshelf, but I decided we don't need it, so I think I'm going to pass it on to someone who does need one. It's somewhat difficult to let go of it, but I'm fine once I remind myself that the bookshelf is not my grandpa, and that I am keeping the toy box he made for my mother when she was a girl. So I went through all of the childrens' books and made a "keep" pile and a "donate" pile and within 20 minutes half of the childrens' books were in my trunk to be taken to Goodwill.

I then went through all of my cookbooks, craft books, history books, sociology books, novels, etc., and loaded up the van with more books to donate. And now we have only as many books - including children's books - as our bookcases can hold, and I love it. New Rule: When one comes in, one goes out.