(started this post on Saturday, but got caught up in offline things and never got back to it.  This first bit is from Saturday's perspective)

Yesterday Sarah and I did a Big Onion walking tour -- Immigrant NY. I really enjoyed it -- informative, engaging, and Sarah did a fabulous job of keeping up with the adults, in both mileage and focus. She had a great time, too, although she was just about done an hour and a half into the 2 hour walk. I think we'll be doing a few more of them, this summer, but I'll look to see if there are any that are slightly shorter, to start with... Next month I think she's going to do the food tour with Joe (it's not worth it for me, as I suspect I won't be able to eat about half the things on the tour).

Today I did some more yardwork -- planting seeds, working on my bag-garden. I love the clover so much, finding myself sitting out on the front stoop on quiet afternoons, watching the bumblebees drift from flower to flower. On Tuesday my mom brought some rose a sharon from Grandma and Grandpa's backyard -- I need to get them into the ground this weekend. Maybe tomorrow.

I don't know what my garden's going to do, this year. I got a lot of things in the ground later than I'd planned to, but decided to muddle along anyway, instead of doing what I usually do -- deciding it's too late, skipping it entirely, and hoping to do better next year.

We had some conflict this week about homeschooling, and came to the conclusion that, once we're done with our current book, we're going to do a project-based approach for the rest of the summer. I'm really looking forward to it, although I'm a little bummed we won't be continuing with our Ancient Civ work right now. Probably in the fall, although who knows? But I'm so happy to see us inching closer to my homeschool dream -- the two of us working side by side every morning, each focused on our own projects.

Now we're all puttering, waiting for the beans to be done for dinner, and the thunderstorms to start. It feels like summer -- makes me wish I had "meatball" subs or bean burgers ready to go, with potato salad and stringbeans on the side. Wow that sounds good. Although tonight's dinner's not half bad -- black beans, fresh tomatoes, guacamole on my flatbread/tortilla hybrids, with our vanilla "soda". Probably with a splash of rum for mom and dad. ;)

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Now we're at Monday night/very early Tuesday.  The homeschooling conflict I refer to above had to do with the fact that Sarah says she wants to keep playing school every morning, but when it comes down to it she often doesn't want to play school on that particular day.  I'm okay with finding a different approach to our days (I need a structure to our days, but I don't need it to be any particular structure), and I'm okay with sticking with our old approach, but I'm really not okay with doing the prep work for  our old approach and then having it wind up being a waste of my time and energy.  We discussed several different possible solutions, including the possibility that we would agree to play school every weekday morning whether we felt like it or not, as part of building the habit of doing it.  She's watched me building a lot of habits, recently, and she seriously considered taking that approach.  I do hope we eventually find our way back to our old structure, or something like it, because we'd lined up a bunch of neat looking resources that both Sarah and I were excited about, but for right now a more spontaneous project-based approach seems to be the best fit for what Sarah's looking for. 

I suspect several of those projects are going to involve more pop-up restaurants, and probably some sort of floating bake shop as well. I'm pretty excited about all the projects on both our lists.

Today we did a lot of cooking for the week -- oat bran muffins, scones, glazed carrots, hummus, hard boiled eggs, black beans, flatbread dough...  We got halfway through the zucchini bread prep when I just couldn't face another hour of having the oven on, and we put off making the iced tea and lentil soup until tomorrow.  I spent some time in the garden, and some time companionably with my little family.

I'm feeling simultaneously phenomenally productive and frustratingly thwarted (not so much because of the cooking we put off as because of all the other areas of life where things are proceeding more slowly than I'd hoped).  I contemplate the idea of letting go of goals, or experimenting with another period of no goals; I also consider that maybe I just need to keep my head down and keep trudging along, or perhaps marry goals with mindfulness -- pointing myself in a particular direction but then focusing on being present in the journey.