The Homeschool Blog Awards

Winner Wednesday: Large Family Logistics

Written by Miss Jocelyn on May 15, 2008 – 8:30 pm -

Today I’m interviewing Mrs. Kim Brenneman at Large Family Logistics. She won Best Homemaking or Recipes Blog in the Homeschool Blog Awards back in 2006. Mrs. Brenneman is widely known for her Home Management for large families. She also has a yahoo group that you can join, which sends daily to weekly to monthly reminders to get mothers on a scheduel to help keep the home running smoothly. Kim is a mother nine beautiful children ages 16, 14, 12, 9, 7, 6, 4, 2, and Baby.

1. Please tell us about your family and your home-life.

We are a family of eleven now with little Baby Matthew being quite an exclamation point. He was born at 26 weeks gestation, spent 3 months in the NICU, and turned our lives upside down and inside out. God used that trial to teach our family many things.
The Authoress

My husband Matt is plant operations manager for a seed corn business, farms 300 acres of rotating corn and soybeans, and 50 beef cows. He’s a busy man but has always included our children in his farm work. That has translated into our oldest sons being very involved and capable of doing nearly all the farm work at 14 and 16. This year they will be renting ground and getting their own start with the use of their dad’s equipment. Our oldest girls are 12 and 9 and wonderful right arms for me. They can soothe a baby, make Asian Chicken Wraps for lunch, put Beef Pot Roast in the crockpot for supper, sew a skirt in an afternoon on a treadle machine, and are more domestically capable than I was at 20. Growing up on a farm has also made them great helpers for their Dad. They milk a goat twice daily, and currently bottle feed a baby goat, lamb, and calf. We don’t work all the time, it seems that every time I turn around I’m pulling someone out of a book. The next two children are peas in a pod, they are 18 months apart and the children that everyone asked of, “Are they twins?” They are 7 and 6, can unload the dishwasher in less than 5 minutes, are reading everything in sight, and can’t wait for the weather to warm up so they can catch frogs. Our 4 year old is a little mommy to Baby Matthew and her dolls while singing and humming continuously. The two year old is starting to talk quite a bit and her antics amuse us all day long. She can throw a fit to put most two year olds to shame–we’re working on that!

2. How and where did you grow up? What did you aspire to be when you “grew up” as a child?

I grew up on a farm 1 1/2 miles south of where we live and my husband grew up on a farm 2 miles east of us. Our children are so blessed to have close grandparents! Our families are Christian so we have that blessing also, but we grew up in the school system and will always carry those scars. It seems that driving hedonism, humanism, and relativism out of ourselves is rather difficult! My mother is a nurse but stayed at home until I was twelve. When I was little I wanted to be like her a mom and a nurse. Then she went back to work and I missed her. I decided I would NOT be a nurse because I didn’t like the hours. I was going to be a school teacher and a mom so that I would be home when my children were. That was my goal until had my first baby in the midst of my college education. My husband and I were very committed to me being a stay at home mom. His mom stayed home and between the two of us we were very familiar with the stability and comfort of a home with a mother in it.

3. What is an average homeschool day for you and your family? Can you show us a picture of your sweet kids?

At this moment in time the older children are gathered around the dining room table folding laundry, soon they will be leaving for piano lessons, the nine year old is on to make lunch when they get home, then reading this afternoon, chores, and the 12 year old has supper duty tonight. Most mornings the children sit around the dining room table doing their “book work”. We always start with Bible.

4. When did you decide that homeschooling was for your family and what method did you use?

When our oldest was a baby I gleaned a lot of baby wisdom from another mom at church who had five children. Her children were sweet, pleasant, well mannered, intelligent and homeschooled. We watched and admired those children. As the years went by they had more babies and we had more babies. My questions to this mom changed to stubborn toddler questions and then school began to loom on the horizon. I could not bear the thought of putting my sweet tender boy on the school bus to learn what he already knew. We live far enough from town that it would be an hour ride both ways. Two hours on the school bus! I remember the school bus all too well. I started asking my mentor questions about homeschooling and she started handing me materials. It didn’t take long for us to decide to homeschool due to several philosophical reasons beyond avoiding two hours a day of the school bus.

My homeschooling mentor used a boxed curriculum but I leaned to the more creative and eclectic. There were several years that we tended to be Classical with Charlotte Mason thrown in a bit. We are all about reading classic books and going with the interests of each child. Next year we are going to do something completely different with the 13 and under crowd. It has been several years since we read the Little House books aloud and so we’re going to do that and the Prairie Primer unit study. We’re going to set up our family room as an old fashioned one-room school and use reprints of the classic curriculum: Ray’s Arithmetic, Webster’s Blue Back Speller, The New England Primer, McGuffey’s Readers, Nature Readers, Anna Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study, old history reprints and more. If they all enjoy this, we might do it for the following year and work through the unit study for Anne of Green Gables. The beauty of homeschooling is that we can do different things as the dynamics of our families change. The period that we did Classical was when my oldest boys were in elementary and junior high. I am so glad that God led us down that path for that period. Now that they are young adult men they are so busy with entrepreneurial pursuits, working here on the farm and working for others that I can hardly keep them inside to do schoolwork. When they are here, they work diligently on math, science, and writing. They know to put their head down and work. I think that we spent enough time on history for them to be well versed in all time periods. I have said when our oldest was 14 that he knew more history than I did when I graduated from high school. Of course I would like them to know more and I often use reading a Christian living or history book as an incentive to do something. I.E. They want to go to the Teen Pact national convention and in order to do that I have books lined up to read before hand, they are driving there and I will send along educational audios that they are expected to listen to and report to me on. The next three children are girls that love to read and do activities. I think a couple of years of old fashioned school, The Prairie Primer, and Where the Brook Meets the River (Anne of Green Gables) will be appropriate. I really think it is important that we be sensitive to the educational needs and interests of each child.

All of that said, the most important lessons to be learned are when we walk with our children and proactively teach them how God wants us to live. I think it is a very common error to fall into a method or curriculum as the “be all, end all”. A method is a means to an end, it is not the end. Our goal as Christians is Godly seed for future generations it’s not simply to save our child a bus trip and have fun with them.

5. What does your homeschool/work space look like? Can you show us a picture?

That would be a picture of my whole house and farm. All of life is learning and that is homeschooling. I formulate my thoughts for writing all throughout the day. My mind constantly churns ideas. When I can grab a minute or hour I sit down and the words pour out. Editing and organizing my writing is what I have trouble getting around to. Editing takes more concerted thought and it’s hard to do that with the noise level here.

6. How long have you been blogging?

I started blogging in December of 2004 at the prompting of my friend Samantha Blythe. I had put together a yahoo group for email reminders of things to do during the homeschool day. If a mom needs reminded of what to do next, the email reminder message tells her what that next thing is. We can get so busy and overwhelmed with the tyranny of the urgent that we don’t know what to do. The email reminder group can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LargeFamilyLogistics/. Samantha encouraged me to blog about the details of how to do the next thing and that’s what started the blog. I started to compile it all into book form and that slowed down my blogging time, then last June we had Baby Matthew and the only blogging I’ve done since then have been updates on life with him. Now life is normalizing, the Large Family Logistics book is nearing completion and I plan to blog more regularly in the future. We are planning a large garden, gardening year round, and blogging about that also.

7. What do you like to blog about the most?
I really like to teach what I’ve learned or am learning. I also write to encourage people. Since starting to blog I have received hundreds of emails from desperate moms. There are a couple of generations not taught how to care for their homes or how to live at home. They were trained for careers not babies, homekeeping, and homeschooling. I want to encourage these moms that they can do what God has called them to and the instructions are found in the Bible. Not how to vacuum a room, how to clean cupboards, or make a good broth but the instructions for how to handle the overwhelming feelings of discouragement are found in God’s Word. These moms don’t need “me time” like the world purports but time with Jesus.

8. What are some hobbies you enjoy?
I love all the things to do with home and family, sewing, gardening, cooking, photographing memories and scrapbooking them. I also enjoy being outdoors hiking, canoeing, sight seeing. I love to read and write. I like to watch the sky.

9. What encourages you when you’re feeling out of sorts?
When I’m feeling out of sorts it has always been because my eyes aren’t on Jesus and doing His will but instead caught up in myself and how things weren’t going my way. I have learned to recognize that and check myself. If I don’t check myself I end up lashing out at someone, the nearest person usually, and making my problem all their fault. What a horrible thing to do! I am a sinner saved by grace. I don’t deserve God’s grace, I can’t earn it by trying to do the right thing all the time, I have to come to Jesus daily, repent, and study His word. Scriptures I have learned over the years, conversing with God throughout the day and talking to my children about God’s goodness make those “out of sort” times become times for further sanctification. God wants us to know our need for Him and to come to Him for encouragement. “Check yourself before you wreck yourself.”

10. What is your favoutire Scripture?
I don’t really have a favorite. I love the Psalms for their encouragement and the way that they describe God and His attributes. I love Proverbs for their practical advice. I love to read about Jesus in the gospels. The epistles are convicting and instructive. Studying a person of the Bible is always interesting and full of lessons. I grew up Christian but there was a period of time when I lived very self centered. I hardened my heart to God but He did not let me go. He always brought me to a passage in Ephesians 4.

17 Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. 18 They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. 19 They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. 20 But that is not the way you learned Christ!— 21 assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, 22 to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, 23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24 and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

If you keep reading there is further instructions on living as renewed Christians. Those words that God has used over and over to bring me out of selfish living have guided my life. We need to rely on the Holy Spirit in our daily lives to guide us each step.

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Galatians 2:20

Thank you Mrs. Brenneman so much for taking the time out of your busy homeschool schedule to answer my questions. I hope this gave you, the readers, an insight on Mrs. Brenneman’s life. You can stop over to her site for more large family encouragement!

Posted in Winner Wednesday | 1 Comment »

Written by Sisterlisa on May 12, 2008 – 11:55 pm -

This week we’ve been on vacation with my In-Laws, who are always so happy to be a part of our homeschool adventures! They’re retired and live on the road in their motorhome and travel throughout this beautiful country of ours. This month we’re staying at my Mother-in-law’s sister’s home. Aunt Susan is vacationing in Cypress and we get to stay in her home in Southern California. In between our days at Disneyland, we have been spending some time in the garden. Aunt Susan will come back and find a lovely display of colorful flowers planted in pretty clay pots that are placed sporatically around her patio which over looks a calm and beautfiul lake.

Since gardening has been on my mind I thought I’d take you on a tour of some of our fellow garden-schooling families here in the blogosphere.

We begin enjoying Nature Day With Kim at ‘In The Potter’s Hand’, as shares about Making Bird Feeders with her family. When gardening, it’s so nice to hear the birds twittering and tweeting as they fly about your yard. Even Michele at Simple Living has shared how she makes her yard an oasis for birds to gather in her midst.

Once you have your yard full of feathered friends, you can join Harmony Art Mom and read about her Nature Study of Flower Parts then begin your adventure with your own flower study.

For some extra fun, for those little guys who aren’t interested in flowery gardens and feathered friends, you can visit Nature Momma as they hunt for Frog Eggs! And if that isn’t fun enough, head on over and find out what happened to Sarah Joy’s children when they encountered a squirrel. Although their face to foot confrontation is a serious situation, I couldn’t help but share it with my family tonight. I think about how comical it could be if told from her son’s point of view.

Garden-schooling can be so much fun, for any age! Here are some tips I’d like to share with you.

Decorate your area- Where ever you decide to set up your very own gardening station, make it unique by adding your own special flare.

Care For Your Tools- Take the extra time to clean all your tools once you’re done with your day. Even if you’ll be back out tomorrow, it’s worth it to have everything clean and ready to go.

Water Pots- You can make water pots out of many things, even old tea kettles. So keep an eye out at yard sales to find unique old cans to be used in your garden. I hope you have enjoyed this edition of our Tuesday Tour. Have a great day!