The Ways of Her Home

Embracing the homeward call

Looking Back: Fall 2019

Hello, friends! This week I'm going to play a little catch up here on the blog. I'd like to begin with some highlights of our past school year, but even just the highlights would be too much for one post, so I'm going to do this in three posts: fall, winter, and spring. Today I'll share FALL 2019! We started our twelfth year of homeschooling in late August 2019. The chalkboard below was our photo prop for first-day-of-school pictures. One of our favorite ways to end the summer season and start a new school year is with an outdoor performance by our city’s symphony! My oldest daughter and her friend invited some of their college friends who were new to the area as a way of ... Read more

Papa Melvin’s Workshop

It's really hard to know where to start a post when a loved has passed from this earth to go home to heaven. I could brush over it and keep posting about cooking, cleaning, and other aspects of daily life. However, I would be remiss to not stop and pay tribute to a truly great man. My father-in-law was hardworking, honest, and devoted. He lived a life committed to the Lord through years of providing for his family, adoring his wife, raising his kids, and serving his church and community. Later in life he enjoyed the fruit of his labor with a retirement that offered almost a decade of cruise vacations with his bride and woodworking in the shop just behind their house. Melvin was quite ... Read more

A Very Random Tuesday Hello

I’ve not posted much in the last few months so I just want to pop in and say HELLO! We’ve been busy finishing the school year and that has needed to come first. I love homeschooling and I don’t want to let my kids down by putting other things ahead of their education. This is our first full week of summer break, yippee! Now, we do keep up some very light schooling throughout the summer months just to keep our minds sharp, but it’s at a very, verrrry leisurely pace. And we give ourselves at least one or two full weeks off just to unwind and decompress first! The photo above is from a walk my younger two kids and I took this morning at our neighborhood pond. After walking a while, we ... Read more

Easter Eats 2020

Hello again! I'm back today with the Easter menu I prepared this year. So, from breakfast to dessert, here goes! I'd been saving this recipe for Strawberry Bread since last spring and decided to make it for breakfast. Definitely making this again! It was so good and moist, and more like a poundcake than a bread. I put out a bowl of chocolate eggs to go with it. After breakfast we had a meaningful time of worship and then finished up lunch preparations.***** Easter Menu Brown Sugar Glazed Ham (recipe below) Cheesiest Mac and Cheese Bacon and Pea Summer Salad (With one change: I cooked and crumbled the bacon because I didn’t have packaged bacon ... Read more

Birds and Bunnies Easter Table

Easter this year was definitely different from our norm, wasn't it? Considering there would be no new Easter outfits, no neighborhood egg hunts, no gatherings with extended family, and no full pews at the church building for Easter service, I delighted in all the encouraging posts and messages about the TRUE meaning of Easter NOT changing. JESUS IS RISEN! In that regard, our Easter was very much the same and just as meaningful as always! Everything else is just fluff. Speaking of fluff, I did still try to fluff up our table for Easter lunch! It wasn't at all what I'd planned earlier on with ideas of fresh flowers and pretty pastels. As for the fresh flowers, this past year we ... Read more

Family Bible Celebration

Bible study is important to our family, both individually and collectively. We each use our early morning quiet time for personal Bible reading, and then in the evenings we have family Bible time. Some years we’ve read through the Bible, taking a chapter a night to read and discuss (this takes a couple of years). Other years we’ve worked through a topical study together. We’ve done this since our girls were little, not perfectly, but somewhat consistently enough that we’ve read through the Old and New Testaments together a few times. Sometimes when we’ve completed a particular study, or accomplished a big Bible memory goal as a family, we’ve had a small celebration with a special dessert or ... Read more

Mama Poole and the Crooked Christmas Stocking

Happy Holidays! This post is just a quick little tribute to the precious lady who was my sweet and feisty great grandmother. My Mama Poole. As I'm starting to pack away Christmas decorations, I thought it would be fun to tell you all about my Mama Poole and the stocking she made for me when I was a little girl. There were five children in our family, and one year my mom asked Mama Poole to crochet some stockings for us kids, knowing what treasured keepsakes they would be for us after Mama Poole left this earth. I hang mine from my banister each year in her memory. You might notice that it is crooked in its construction and wonder how skilled she really was with her hands. Well, although she ... Read more