Summer Home Life Family of 12 | An Unusual Lesson | Getting Pigs

[Music] summer for our family of 12 is just brimming with activity from our regular household chores to some little hobbies that the kids are picking up to Growing our own food on our Homestead in our garden we have some meat birds some laying hands and this week we got some pigs we also had an unusual lesson that I'm going to tell you about later all in the video today we are enjoying the beauty of Summer and this week we finally got the rest of our garden in the ground which feels really good now it's just a matter of going out and watering those seeds every day and pulling weeds trying to stay on top of that we're still trying to just make a habit every day of going outside and spending a little time in the garden or just around the house either pulling weeds or watering plants just being out there every day taking care of it I just find that this little bit of consistency really makes a big difference when it comes to Growing food we also have some new meat chicks that we got and these are only a couple days old and it was time for us to separate them um there was just they're getting a little too big for one br so we have two brers we're going to have them in these for probably another week and then they're going to be out on Fresh grass in a chicken tractor and they'll be moved to Fresh grass every day so all these things are just um projects things that need to be done around here every day and it keeps us busy keeps our kids busy gives us just a lot of um exciting things to watch grow and um it's really fun for Benjamin this is his first year we love watching the baby just experience all of this for the first time if this is your first time on my channel my name is Sher I'm a homeschooling mom to 10 kids um our oldest is graduated we have seven in school and two preschoolers I love encouraging other moms here on my YouTube channel we homeschool on paper we homeschool from August through May but realistically our whole lifestyle is one of learning so it's it's kind of hard to put into a box and um we're learning all year round whether it's book learning Hands-On learning on our Homestead with all the work we do around here learning is always happening we've been having such a great week with our family our oldest son Ty is home from college for a couple weeks we get to enjoy him before he goes back again for the summer and we've just been having some great basketball games in the barn we we went to see a performance of Fiddler on the Roof just enjoying some wonderful family time together [Music] [Music] [Music] William has been asking me to help if he can help in the kitchen a lot and so I thought this was a good opportunity to let him help me make some bread this is sour dough bread that I make usually once a week um my girls also make it um for a while they were each making their own bread one was doing a white sourdough another one was doing a whole wheat and then Aton was doing our honey yeast bread um so they still kind of do that but if it's not if they're not doing it and we need some sometimes I'll make a loaf we do make a lot of our own bread um it's really just kind of become a habit for us and it takes time but it's just one more thing that gives our kids something to do it's something to learn and they've seen this process happen when you do something over and over again every week it just becomes kind of normal for them and they it's familiar I've been wearing Benjamin in my Ergo a lot lately um I feel like babies go through different phases when they're first little babies and even 6 months 9 months old I wear them a lot in a wrap or in my carrier but then once they start walking the world's so interesting they want to be down and um so they kind of forget about that and then they get to this spot usually around like 16 18 months where they get kind of whiny and needy again and just want to be held and sometimes I forget that the easiest thing to do is to put them on my back um but I've learned over time that around this age they just my babies love going back on me and just being worn a lot so I just do this until he wants to get down again and wants to explore so that just kind of helps with some of that that whiny when they they get to this age and they seem like they can't satisfy themselves the kids have been sleeping in a little bit later recently which has been kind of nice because I've had a lot of mornings with Benjamin with me um just the two of us up early in the morning and he's been helping me with my chores um You probably saw him out there with me catching chickens I've when I go out to feed the chickens every morning we have four or five chickens that keep getting out and it's so frustrating I'm usually sending some kids out go catch the chickens put them back in the fence we find one spot that we think maybe they're getting out we try to plug it up better and then they are getting out again so we maybe find another spot and then we thought oh maybe they're flying over so we clipped their wings and I don't know whatever we're doing is not working we still have a couple chickens that keep getting out so I just feel like when you have animals this is the kind of unexpected things that happen and you just you have to take care of it I'm making oatmeal this morning for my kids and when I make oatmeal it's usually oats I cut in some apples put some raisins in there we have it with milk if I want to give them a little bit more protein I'll add an egg or two and it'll be more like a custard oatmeal the kids really like that lately um but our go-to for breakfast is usually toast we have a lot of toast in the morning but I do try to mix it up sometimes we'll have oatmeal sometimes we'll have eggs pancakes my girls often will get up early and make pancakes for everybody they just really like to do that I've had a few people ask me what type of school things we still do in summer if we take a complete break or if there's a couple things that we still do I still do a few things but um I hold it really Loosely I'm really laidback about it I do Bible reading with our kids and memory verses pretty much with our 99-year-old and down and oh I wanted to show you these adorable baskets the girls are making every week they're into some new thing last week it was BB guns this week they're into knitting these baskets for their succulent plants that they have and they're so adorable I was having so much fun watching them and this took up a lot of their time I I love that they get into different things so in summer I read the Bible and we do memory verses and then sometimes we'll do world watch and this is when we're having just a relaxed morning nothing going on if we have other things things going on it's not a big deal we just don't do that that morning and there's the finished basket so adorable um another thing that I do is in the afternoon I'll read aloud to them I found that it's it's harder the older my kids get to gather everyone so if everybody is looking for something to do I'll gather them and I'll read the chapter book that we're reading but um if everybody's playing and it's just you know they'd have to stop for me to read to them then I don't and it's not a big deal it's there if we need it and if not then they can just play I told you I was going to tell you about an unusual school lesson that we had and that happened on this morning years ago when I was young I have an unusual hobby I got interested in learning the Russian language it's something that fascinated me I studied it in high School studied it after high school um and then I wanted to pass it on to my kids I don't know a whole lot but what I do know I wanted to pass on to them and I worked a lot with my oldest three kids um and then I kind of got just buried in housework babies just that stage where they're all little it was hard and so I kind of it was on a back burner but it's always been something that I come back to that I really love doing my old kids aren't really that interested in it but I have two kids that have shown a lot of interest in it lately and I haven't taught them nearly as much as I did my older ones just because again I just kind of got busy with other things but they've been asking me if I can sit down and do some Russian lessons with them and I'm usually too busy during the school year we just have too much going on so I told them this Summer that if they really wanted wanted to do this that if we had a slow morning I would sit down with them and I would do some lessons with them so that is something that happened this morning and I know this is a really unusual hobby um not many people would have an interest in something like this but I wanted to share this with you because I I've noticed that if you develop Hobbies if you have interest if you're an interesting person if you're always learning that is going to pass on to your kids so it may not be learning a foreign language like it has been for my kids it may be something completely different but if you are always learning and growing your kids are going to pick up on that and actually I started this lesson with them they got so into it that it drew some other kids over um my kids have learned how to read Russian most of them can read and write it um something that slowly happened with one or two of them and then the other ones learned from that first one so they all came and sat down and you know when they're interested in learning something they learned more in that 20 minute lesson than in other times when I was trying to teach them something that they were not interested in at all so there's two things that I kind of draw from that the first is that there's something to to Mother culture mother culture is just taking the time to stop and do things that you love doing that fill you up that um some kind of hobby some interest that is apart from mothering apart from homeschooling it's so so important your kids see that they see you enjoying taking Delight in something and it makes them want to do the same thing the second is that when kids are interested in learning something they learn um an incredible amount of information in a quick period of time like when they're into something then that is the time to just let them pursue their interests because they're going to just soak in and absorb everything I had this really sweet moment um Benjamin has been letting me snuggle with him and he's been so sweet letting me rock to sleep and then on this day I did read in the afternoon I started reading The Magician's Nephew to Julia William and Holland I invited some of my other kids to read it with me but they all said oh we read that already and um I feel like some of the older ones don't want me to read to them which is an unusual thing for me I feel like usually my kids have been they always want me to read to them so I don't know if that's something that's changing or a phase the exciting exting thing that we had happened this week was that we got our pigs we raise four pigs every year two of them are for us the other two we raise in exchange for beef with a friend of mine she has several cows that she has on her property and she gives us beef we give her pork it's an awesome exchange so today the day we got the pigs and this was really late this is the latest we've ever gotten them usually we have them I think like I don't know beginning mid April um but we just haven't been able to get a hold of the guy that we buy them from and so they're kind of late we bought them we bought some older ones this time than we usually buy um sometimes we we'll get them a little bit younger the kids really do enjoy having pigs every summer pigs are smart they're interesting um and we weren't sure how this was going to go getting them off the trailer because usually we get them when they're a lot smaller um but surprisingly it went really well we were all kind of shocked how easy it was to get them to just walk back to their pen let's go come on piggy onig who that was easier than I thought is thaty there you go that's not wow no problem wow W no we had them in the barn for just a little bit then we opened the door and let them out on Fresh grass and they were loving it the guy we bought them from had them inside in the barn so they loved going right out to the grass and this was Benjamin's first time seeing pigs so it's just always fun to watch the kids when it's their first everything you know watching their very first so now our Homestead is in full swing we have our pigs we have our Broiler hens that we're raising for meat we have our laying hens um and our garden so just lots of responsibilities and we all work together at it um all of us the the idea is we all work together to take care of the animals and the garden to meet the needs of the family our mulberry tree is just loaded and the kids have been out there and this is the next thing that's going to just attract everyone's attention they're probably going to be collecting lots of mulberries thanks for watching this week I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms [Music]