Joyful Scribblings of a Bookish Wanderer

We started school again on Monday. This year holds a first for me - I am schooling FIVE kids in FIVE different grades. Unlike what my preference would be - I wasn't able to send my little blessings off to school for another year of peaceful growth.  Yes, you read that right. I am not not one of the homeschool moms that loves homeschool. It is brutal and excruciating, and I only do it because I feel like it's right for our kids, not because I WANT to.  I am glad there are some mothers out there who like homeschooling. We need those women, but we also need you to try and understand where we are coming from. And those who dislike homeschooling might feel validated and seen by this post. :)  It's humbling to admit that I'm at the breaking point every single day.  It's humiliating to admit that a week of homeschooling has so thoroughly kicked my butt that I'm unable to go to church on Sunday.  It's excruciating to admit that I am so exhausted after merely five da...

Scrappy little painting I slung together this afternoon that pretty much sums up the emotions of the last two months of my life. I was wondering yesterday what is wrong with me and why am I so snappy and angry. Its grief. Still grief. It hangs on the edges of my consciousness and digs slowly into my heart, until I finally acknowledge it and allow tears to cleanse the frisures. 💔

I've been in a bit of a haze the last three weeks. My Grandpa left us to be with Jesus on April 9th.  I have not been allowing myself enough moments to process and grieve, and as a result, the fog thickens.   I am hoping that allowing myself to crawl back into my memories for a little while will help to dispel some of the fog.  I've had multiple best friends through the years... my childhood best friend, my cousin best friend, my adult best friend, my soulmate best friend. But the one person that was my best friend through all of the years of best friends - was my Grandpa. As a little girl, I remember taking Grandpas big hand, and leading him along, jabbering about my toy horses and telling him all about my cats and fussing about my brothers. He mostly listened. He had the most gentle. husky voice and his laugh is forever burned into my memory. He had a little raspy chuckle he would do in response to my chattering, and that chuckle always told me that he was listenin...

Another morning dawned in our Anniversary trip.  We once more were up at 3am (time change messed us up) and we headed out early.  We took yet another road from Angels Camp across the Sierra Nevada mountains. We decided to take the Tioga Road in Yosemite, since we visited the valley area of the park the day before.  We decided this was our favorite place of the park yet! There were some amazing overlooks, and it was just fantastic to be able to see so far out over Yosemite valley!  But before we got to the views, we stopped to see the Hetch Hetchy reserve, and it wasn't quite as amazing as we had hoped, but it was ok.  We continued driving and soon arrived at Tuolumne Meadows. It was gorgeous - fantastic - surreal. Everything of my dreams and fantasies! We were able to walk out to the river, and explored a section of the meadows that was large boulders scattered in picturesque way over the meadow. I will just let the photos below speak for themselves!  We co...

      You may not have been following along on previous posts of this journey, so I will summarize here. My husband and I took a cross country flight from North Carolina to San Francisco, CA.  I chronicled the journey, because it was my first flight, and our first week long vacation together in 10 years!  So, in my previous post, we touched down in San Francisco, and then came the wait to get off the plane.  Finally we were out, and we made our way to the car rental station. Ok, I followed along behind my husband obliviously while he guided us there.      We rented a nice little hybrid SUV that ended up having a mind of its own, and fussing at my husband every time he happened to do something it didn't like.  But it was a nice little car.  Before we left the city, we drove to the closest beach and took a few minutes to walk out on the brown sand.  The wind. The pounding waves. The rocks. It was so different from any of the east...

     Being in the air was less scary than I imagined. Before we had taken flight, I dealt with my claustrophobia and anxiety, and thankfully I didn't have another battle with either when we were in the air.  (Partially due to my hefty supply of gummy bear candy). I loved watching the clouds. I had only ever been able to imagine what it was like to look down on the tops of the clouds, with only one little pane of glass between me and them.  It was better than the movies show.      There was a little map on the back of the seat in front of me, that had our plane location.  I loved looking down on the earth, my imagination taking flight as I tried to imagine what the people in each state were up to.  We flew across so many states, I'm not even sure which ones they were. But the variety was amazing! It seemed like there was always something different to see.  When we flew over deserts, the landscape was either brown with crop circles o...