babies and pregnancy

I'm waiting for a baby. Been waiting for awhile now. My daughter is expecting a baby any day now and is showing lots of signs that it's nearly time, but God's timing is perfect and ours is not. So we wait and pray and hope that today's the day.

I made marvelous bread yesterday. What a delight to learn a new skill which allows me to reproduce quality bread at home in just a few minutes. I highly recommend "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day" by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois.

I intend to fully enjoy this week of vacation. The family is home today and housebound by the heavy rain. It will be a great day to get some lesson planning done for upcoming weeks. Tomorrow I'm on a trek to the North Coast to visit my granddaughter and break up my daughter's last week of pregnancy. Next weekend, if all goes well, we'll work on our square foot garden boxes and perhaps add to our flock of chickens.

I hope everyone(and both of my readers) enjoys the week, sunny weather or wet.

Seriously?

I just mixed together the dough for the basic bread recipe in "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" and my first thought is, "Seriously? This is going to work?" It sits for two hours at room temp now and then goes in the fridge. It really can't be this easy, can it?

My second thought is that I need Twitter, for dumb little comments like this.

Rain, rain, come again today

We've finally had RAIN. Here in California we've been holding our breath for rain and waiting for water restrictions to kick in if the rain didn't come. With the amount of rain we've had all over the state this week I'm "cautiously optimistic" that our water supplies will be reasonably replenished this year. The best news is the large amount of snowfall, which provides the runoff for water supplies later in the year.

I would love to think of a way that this connects to homeschooling, but it's Saturday morning at the beginning of a week long break from school and I just can't seem to go there. My head is full of bread recipes and chicken questions-it's time to add to our flock-so I'm off to do Saturday things.

And now for my high wire act

Today is the day. I am going to try one of those famous no-knead bread recipes that are floating around on the web, at the local bookstore and in the newspaper. These recipes promise to help you easily fit bread baking into your routine while giving you the most incredible bread you've ever tasted. Hmm...not bad hype. There may be more of a knack to it than that, considering all of the sites devoted to the intricacies of no-knead bread making I've seen. But I'm willing to give it a try since I'm a pretty good baker and bread baking has taken up plenty of my time lately. Once I've taken the plunge I'll report the results here.

I think to myself, "I just want to write." But I wouldn't mind getting paid for it, thank you very much. That's where Writer Mama by Christina Katz comes in. I stumbled on this book at my local independent bookstore early last year. Despite the excitement I felt reading the book, I was still reluctant to consider some of Ms. Katz' advice at the time, even though she made free lancing sound so possible. According to"Writer Mama," much of the work of a free lance writer involves researching markets and promoting yourself. In short, being a free lance writer sounds an awful lot like being an independent business woman, a role I never envisioned for myself.

I picked the book up again just the other day and realized that I'm ready to take Ms. Katz' advice much more seriously now. What has changed? The economy, for one thing, has changed significantly and supplementing our income would be welcome. Another thing that's changed is that I have gained some personal confidence while teaching English to 8th graders at my sons' coop school.

Additionally, I have become an avid blog reader. Reading blogs of women like me who are raising a family, homeschooling, and writing has been pretty inspiring. The message these women c0nvey echoes Christina Katz' in "Writer Mama." A woman who decides to work at the craft of writing, and promote her writing with dedication, can and will be published and in many cases will be paid for her work. Is it time for me to be one of those women?

We had the most beautiful, windy, chilly day yesterday. It was one of those days when the sun contends with clouds until it bursts into shafts of pale golden light which highlight the landscape. It was really my favorite kind of day.

We had a productive homeschool day. While I baked bread(incessantly, it seemed) the boys worked on homework. My seventh grade son took many backyard breaks to discover, invent and bang on the house(?) while my 10th grader slogged through a number of assignments, in between important phone communication. As I said, we're relaxed in our approach. But in the end, all our work was completed, four lovely loaves of bread were baked and all of my class prep was finished. A good day.