Welcome to my blog. This blog pretty much reflects me, and I am one eclectic person. I have restaurant reviews, shop reviews, posts about human trafficking, poems (written by me or just appreciated by me), reflections from sermons, events, old mission trip newsletters – and much more. There’s a whole category of posts on the wedding planning and I am now homeschooling our two kiddos, so there’s a smattering of info about that as well.
If you are lost, don’t feel bad. I’m still glad you’re here.
You can easily navigate the blog by scrolling down and checking out the topics on the right hand side. I also have links to some fab other blogs and sites which I love. I hope you’ll share the love and go see them as well. You can subscribe here (also on the right-hand side) or just push through.
I have written quite a few poems over the years about the moon. I have loved it for a very long time. I like that it has a very set schedule, but it doesn’t follow the rules of daytime/nighttime. It pops up in the middle of the day sometimes. And then there’s the whole following you through the sky while driving.
It’s not a surprise, then, that the moon features in a ton of picture books!
You may find a free printable of my list of 35 books on – again for FREE. 🙂
If you want to skip the download, you can find the list on both or
One of my poems, The Moon-Cloud, was written back in 2010. Another, The Heavy Moon, was in 2006, while I was in my last year of college. And here is one of my first moon poems, written back in 2003, it was published in one of those National Poets Society books where they graciously offer you to pay to put it in (haha!):
Nighttime
Have you ever tried to chase the moon? As its soft yellow crescent rocks down to the horizon?
While the stars dance around it and drip light through the seas that darken its surface.
Have you seen it grow as it dips beneath the skyline and peeks through the trees that toss it back and forth, and forth and back?
What wonderful magic the dark sky plays on the watchful eyes of a child, sitting and connecting the stars into heroes and villains and damsels.
While grass collects the dew between his fingers and sticks to the toes of a girl as she chases the lightning bugs that bring the stars so much closer to us.
Sarah Martin, 2003
There are a lot of fun activities you can do when studying the moon. One would be to make a soft dough in a round pan and drop different kinds of pebbles onto the surface, noting the formation of craters. You can learn the phases of the moon with chocolate sandwich cookies by scraping away parts of the cream and their names – gibbous is such a fun word!
I hope you find lots of ways to learn about the moon and I hope these books help!
Disclaimer:This site uses some affiliate links. This costs you nothing, but helps supplement our homeschooling costs. Thank you for your support!
One of the best parts of Autumn is all the beautiful colors that spread out across the trees. It is fascinating how each tree has its own coloration and how it closely matches the colors of the leaves when they first emerge in the spring.
You may find a free printable of my list of 25 books on – again for FREE. 🙂
If you want to skip the download, you can find the list on both or
I do have a love/hate relationship with trees. I love seeing the new leaves in the Spring, but my allergies go crazy at the same time. And then when the leaves are falling, my ragweed allergy is off the chart (along with other end-of-season pollen). But, I still enjoy looking at and learning about all the trees and my latest fascination has been the mutualism between the trees and the plethora of creatures depending on them. Birds, insects, mammals, and even the fungi and worms and other plants are so interconnected that it makes me want to plant my whole yard with native tree species (actually, I grew pawpaw trees this year from seed and am just about ready to put three into the ground. Zebra swallowtails, here we come!)
Some great activities we’ve done with the kids is to go on a scavenger hunt to identify trees, categorizing them into native, non-native, and invasive. You can collect leaves, where allowed, press them and seal them in a journal with wax paper, or make rubbings or illustrations of the trees and leaves with notes about the types – probably for older elementary and up.
I hope you get out and enjoy the changing leaves and learn more about the trees around you! And go read some great books!
Disclaimer:This site uses some affiliate links. This costs you nothing, but helps supplement our homeschooling costs. Thank you for your support!
I do love how being out of doors with the kids makes us notice things more – we notice small things and surprising things and peculiar things. Fungi definitely fits that bill – popping up in a nook of a tree trunk or peeking through the tall grass after a couple rainy days and in such a range of colors and shapes!
You may find a free printable of my list of 9 books on – again for FREE. 🙂
If you want to skip the download, you can find the list on both or
We are not a foraging type family – although I will partake in some mulberries and wild blackberries if we find them. But mushrooms and other fungi are much too risky in my mind. I enjoy watching the videos from the Black Forager on the socials and I take very seriously the “Don’t Die” part of her catch phrase. I also know that I am wrong about 50% of the time when she issues challenges of “Poison or Snack” and I don’t like those odds at all!
However, I really enjoy learning about them and finding them and then using Seek to try and identify them. Learning how certain types will grow in certain conditions is fascinating! And to know all that they can do – like the decomp is amazing, but that they can act as a fiber optic system for trees and other plants to communicate with each other! Phenomenal! To know just how interdependent our world is brings me to a state of awe and wonder, and humility as I think of how much I depend on others in our communities.
Fungi are AMAZING!
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Disclaimer:This site uses some affiliate links. This costs you nothing, but helps supplement our homeschooling costs. Thank you for your support!
