Homeschooling and spices

I've always known I would homeschool my kids, even years before they were born. I'm thankful to have found a husband who encouraged that. Back then, I had this ridiculously idealistic picture in my mind of how it would look. The kids would be sitting at the perfectly clean kitchen table, freshly bathed and dressed, hanging on my every word, quietly doing their work. How naive I was!

In reality, the picture is more like this. If they're sitting at the table at all, it's sticky and has crumbs on it. They're wearing nothing but underwear and not paying a bit of attention to me, because they're too busy bickering.

Today I thought I had a great idea for a project and was sure we were going to have a Norman Rockwell morning. My spices needed reorganizing, and I was going to make it a school project. When we moved here six years ago, my mom arranged my spices alphabetically (her OCD comes in handy sometimes). Entropy has gradually taken over, and now I can't find anything. I decided to have the kids take out all the spices and organize them while I was making soup. It would keep them busy while giving them practice recognizing letters, reading, grouping, alphabetizing, and working together. It was brilliant! What could go wrong?

It took me a few years to learn that my enthusiasm level influences my kids' attitudes. Loud music also helps. So I cranked up a CD, mustered up all my enthusiasm, and announced, "Hey kids! We're going to organize the spice cabinet!" Sarah frowned and said, "I don't want to." I bounded into the kitchen and said in my best Pollyanna voice, "It'll be FUN!"

The first problem was that they can't reach the spice cabinet, even standing on a chair. So I stood on the chair and passed the spices down to them, and they carried them to the table. Noah took a step and promptly splatted on his back on the floor. There was salt all over the floor. Apparently the lid wasn't on tight. Instead of starting on the soup, I spent a lot of time sweeping up salt, and I'm sure I didn't get it all.

Then came the bickering and bossiness, as the two leaders had opposite ideas of how to get started. I turned the music up louder and started chopping vegetables. After a few minutes, Noah said, "There sure are a lot of G's!" There was a huge pile of spices that the kids had determined started with the letter G. I knew there couldn't be that many, so I looked closer: ground cumin, ground mustard, ground allspice, ground nutmeg, ground cinnamon, etc. I explained that they should ignore the word "ground" and start again.

In the end, they did get everything alphabetized, and I was able to eliminate some things to make more room in my spice cabinet (why on earth do I have two jars of bay leaves?!). One thing I found was an old fashioned metal can of caraway seeds, still full. I remembered that my mom had taken my grandma's spices when she died (almost 30 years ago!) and that she had given me the caraway seeds when I moved into my own house (14 years ago!). I moved them with me from house to house, never using them until a few months ago. I used them in a recipe, and they were hideous. So I finally threw them away today. How liberating! I probably should have sold them at an antique store.