Unschooling in a Jumble

Unschooling in a jumble of circumstances, when other things are going on, when my mind is elsewhere and I am not truly present ..Yes, unschooling can work even then.

So, among today's jumble, what have we done so far?

Mass, in the Extraordinary Form.

Errands. Friend over for awhile.

Maths, Italian, Chinese, French, Latin...not everyone does everything but each one studies something. Kumon and budget stuff and parish stuff and a Cindy Crawford workout for me...

Computer games. Of course. Trampolining. Blogging. Facebook. Internet searches. Guitar. Reading.

Thomas felt like cooking so made some yummy Snickers Muffins, from How To Be A Domestic Goddess. A domestic goddess he is not but the muffins were nutty, chewy, moist and not overly sweet. Amazingly.

I put some soup in the crockpot for dinner, Spicy Indian Soup, from Twelve Months of Monastery Soups. Sharing quotes and vignettes from lives of the Saints, from this book, as I went.

And my surreptious strewing worked for me. My mind might be a jumble of thoughts but my dining table centrepiece, for the Year of the Priest, meant that Thomas picked up one of the items, a magazine called The Priest and read some articles while eating. Voracious readers can't help themselves. Leave some reading material around and it is bound to be read by someone!

I've read the articles myself and there are some great quotes ~

Even what he cannot understand he can believe to be true; and he believes it to be true because he believes in the Church. Ven. John Henry Cardinal Newman in An Essay in Aid of A Grammar Of Assent.

The sacrament of priestly ordination by virtue of its very nature and of everything that it produces in our life and activity, serves to make the faithful aware of their common priesthood and to activate it...Pope John Paul II, Holy Thursday Letter to Priests, 1979.

So, we jumble along ( I feel like a Womble!), unschooling and learning in spite of and alongside the jumble.

Snickers Muffins

250g SR flour ; 6 tablespoons raw sugar; 6 tablespoons crunchy peanut butter; 60g butter melted; 1 large egg beaten; 175ml milk; 3 x 65g Snickers bars chopped

Preheat oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Mix all ingredients gently. Dollop into greased muffin cases. Bake 20 - 25 minutes.

Spicy Indian Soup

1/3 cup olive oil; 2 onions chopped; 2 garlic cloves minced; 2 1/2 cups lentils; 8 cups water; 2 carrots sliced; 2 celery sticks sliced; optional 1 cup rice cooked; 1 teaspoon ground coriander, cumin, paprika, curry powder; 3 tablespoons lemon juice; salt, pepper to taste.

Saute onion and garlic in oil, add spices. Put in crockpot with all ingredients except for lemon juice and salt/pepper. Cook in crockpot on low ( all day) or high ( the afternoon). Before serving, stir, add lemon juice and seasoning.