Jay has attempted to write on this topic, but he said it was too hard. I thought I’d give it a go, but it means admitting a few painful things, so bear with me.

Reasons we like to travel (or, why we sold a house and bought a boat):

• The freedom and independence
• Openness to new experiences, people, and places
• The simplicity of traveling with a family inside your home
• It’s fun, beautiful, and satisfying
• We learn new things
• It’s less expensive than life on shore or connected to a dock
• Love of Change

Why we like living in a marina (or, why it’s so hard to leave the dock):

• Comfort: nice laundry room, hot showers, convenience of a car
• Good friends on shore
• We like the town we’re in
• Sometimes we need a place to “sit tight” so we can work uninterruptedly
• Illusion of safety from bad weather or mishap
• The boat needs fixing, and is never “ready”
• Aversion to Change

So what’s wrong with us?

A guy stopped by in his dinghy one day and commented on our boat. He had been cruising with his family and thought we had a good thing going, but couldn’t figure out why we were sitting at a marina when we could, ostensibly, be cruising in the Caribbean somewhere. We ourselves feel frustrated that it has taken so long to do the things for which we bought the boat in the first place. Sometimes we don’t travel because our original goals were unrealistic—whether it’s because we still need to be working, or because the boat needs more than we thought it would, or because we have more children than we ever dreamed we’d travel with. Other times, we just get stuck (call it inertia). Like after Rachel was born; we just grew comfortable and could not get ourselves to untie the boat, even though we were physically ready to leave and had places we wanted to go. It may be due to circumstances beyond our control. We’ve been trying to leave Ft. Pierce to go to the Keys for a few weeks now. We’ve done all our last-minute projects, provisioned the boat, done the last load of laundry, checked the systems, waited for weather, and said good-bye to our friends. But at the last moment, we decided to call ahead and found out that there’s no mooring ball available right now. And sometimes, it’s just plain hard because we choose not to do things the easy way. Making something as simple as, say, a PBJ, involves grinding grain to make bread, pureéing peanuts for peanut butter, and picking berries to make jam. Trip planning takes on a whole new dimension for people like us.

We always feel a sense of elation when we break loose, but it comes with a simultaneous feeling of fear and pressure. When we try to leave and have to rethink, postpone, or abort, Jay and I respond differently. Jay feels a sense of relief, because living in a familiar place feels safe and comfortable, whereas sailing in the ocean leaves one feeling out of control and vulnerable. I, however, feel an overwhelming sense of disappointment which dredges up feelings of failure that come from some primal place which defies logic. He heaves a sigh and I start crying. I immediately feel like we’re never leaving, like the whole point of living on a boat is to go somewhere, and like all my preparation has been for naught. He argues logically (thank God) that we are already successful, that we’re raising our family the way we always wanted to, and that the travel is a bonus. Plus, he reminds me, we like it here; that’s why we’ve stayed so long. Of course, he’s right, and it takes me less time to realize it each time, but I still can’t seem to control my immediate emotional response, and it brings him down.  It’s totally ridiculous—I really wish we could just have a good laugh about it and say, “Oh, well, we’ll try again later.” It makes me wonder if maybe we don’t have what it takes to cross oceans. That’s the sort of thing you don’t find out until you’re in the middle of it. Or maybe we still are learning how to work as a team, how to be patient, and how to “go with the flow.” In any case, the other thing about us is that we’re damned stubborn, so we won’t be giving up on Take Two or the traveling life anytime soon.

“In his heart, a man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.” –-King Solomon

If forty is over the hill, then today marks the metaphorical summit of my life. I find that thought both comforting and terrifying. How happy I am to have awakened this beautiful morning to sunshine and calm breezes over blue water, to pelicans diving for fish right outside my bedroom window, to a sweet little girl who came blanky-in-hand to snuggle, to children who were sweeping the main cabin clean as a special surprise for me, and to a husband who makes a great cup of coffee (to make up for the pelicans and toddler waking me way too early). Some good friends made dinner and a birthday treat for me last night, and I struggled to think of a wish as I blew out my candles. Sure, there are things on my “bucket list,” goals I have not yet accomplished, places I still want to go, but, on the whole, I have everything I have ever wanted and I am so thankful for each of my thirty nine years.

At the same time, there is no guarantee that I will get to slide down the other side of the hill—and what a slide it will be, especially if the illusion of time passing faster and faster proves true (where
did all those years go?)  The terrifying part of staring down at the slope ahead is that have no idea what the terrain looks like. I had the sense of making a controlled ascent, though I now see very clearly that much of the good in my life is serendipity and not according to my plan. In fact, the older I get, the more I realize that I have no idea what is good for me, that even my desires change, and that trying to control things is what limits joy and contentment. I can honestly say that if today were the last day of my life, I would look back without regret, but what I want more than anything else is to keep learning new things, to live more fearlessly, and to plumb the depths of love, so that whatever the years ahead hold I will be able to say the same thing at the bottom that I say here at the top: life is sweet and God is good.

We are feeling left out of the annual migration of boats. We watched in October as the long lazy Florida summer ended with the first cool, dry days, and on the north wind the snowbirds began to blow in. We are on the east coast, along the Intracoastal waterway, connecting the frozen north to the balmy south, and in one of the last civilized stops before long passages to the islands and their turquoise waters. In previous years we have joined other boats as they crossed the Gulf Stream, but we never fly in formation, so we’re not really part of the flock. We’ve often commented that we sometimes feel alone—the rare family in a sea of child-free couples, but we’re also alone because we don’t do what everybody else is doing.

This is not necessarily by choice, really, because who wouldn’t want to head off into the sunrise for tropical adventures as the temperatures begin to drop? But the stage of life in which we find ourselves dictates when and where we travel, and whom we seek for company. That, and we own a twenty-plus-year-old boat that we are still refurbishing.

We live at a popular marina, and see lots of boats coming and going. We often see familiar boat names, ones we’ve heard on the VHF in the Bahamas or seen in Boot Key Harbor. And the ports of call look familiar too: Ontario, Quebec, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia are common. The Chesapeake-to-Bahamas migration is a popular one, with the same folks traveling the same routes, sometimes for a dozen years or more.

Sometimes a friend unexpectedly comes into the marina, like Bob on Pandora, whom we met last year in the Abacos with his wife Brenda. We ran out onto the dock waving and shouting, and got to spend some time with him while he was here. Not unlike birds, cruisers form a small and close-knit community, and you never know when or where you’re going to meet up again with an old friend, but you inevitably will.

Other times, we watch as boats come in battered by wind and waves and bad weather, like broken-winged birds, jibs shredded, engines dead, pumps running. This is always a heart-rending sight, regardless of the circumstances, and a lesson to never let your guard down where the sea is concerned.

November has passed and it’s past time to be heading south. I’ve seen all the tee-shirts on the docks displaying the places boats have been on their migrations: St. Maarten, Abaco, Barbados, Grenada. Places to which I wouldn’t mind being en route. Sometimes I long to be free to fly with the others, but staying longer has offered other opportunities, like deeper friendships with locals, social activities with other children, overland expeditions, ease of finding food and boat parts, a place to work and to work on the boat. This is the trade-off: we don’t sail on a schedule, so we’re free to stay as long as we’d like and to go only when we’re ready, but sometimes we are left behind when the flock moves on.

“The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control…” –from the Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Galatians

Our travels over the last month took us hundreds of miles both north and south, east and west. We are home now, back to abnormal life, and I have had some time to think about the lovely and generous people we stayed with and visited while the boat was hauled out. I am finding it hard to write about the supportive and loving people in my life, because there aren’t enough of the right kinds of words. If only I could get these beautiful friends all in the same room—what fun! But part of my joy is getting to visit one everywhere I go. Who gets to have a close friend in every city? Why am I so fortunate? It is a gift for which I struggle to express thanks.

In listing their names and why I love them (for thank-you notes that may not actually make it into the mail…sorry), I realized that their attributes taken together mirror the above quote. As friends feed the spirit, it makes sense that they would embody these words. At the risk of sounding like an academy award-winner, I would like to thank the following girlfriends by name, in the order in which I met them on our trip, for teaching me important life lessons and for showing me depth in each of these areas:

My sister-in-law, Robin—courage and hope
My aunt, Barbara—hospitality and faithfulness
My cousin, Heidi—perseverance and faith
Ellen—kindness and faithfulness
Julie B.—gentleness and peace
Amy—love, joy and teamwork
Sadie—selfless love and thoughtfulness
Marina—goodness, faith, and perseverance
Kim—love to the nth degree, joy
Tracy—faithfulness and self-control, the pursuit of excellence
Tarin—prayerfulness, goodness, and joy
Julie Z.—love of life, optimism, and spontaneity
Kristin—enthusiasm and perseverance
Josie—patience and hopefulness

There are others, of course, too many to name here. Becca, for example, supported me on the phone in an anxious moment and told me to keep driving west (to California) so she could give me a hug. That’s love. Sometimes we have to settle for compassion and prayer, but that goes a long way. Some of these friends I have known my whole adult life, others I have just met. But they (and their precious families) walk with me through all the trials and triumphs of married life and motherhood. Thank God for friends!

The weary travelers are home from their wanderings. The stories are too many to tell, but could I write them all, they would involve things like circus bears, midnight lobstering, a baby sloth, a daring rescue, a daughter's tea party, a last-minute phone call that saved the day, wine and chocolate,  new boat friends we met while neither family was on their boat, running out of gas, and late-night attempts to solve all the world's problems. I am so incredibly grateful to the loving people in our lives who made us feel welcome in their homes that I will have to write about that later when my heart is less full and I can get my head around it. I feel simultaneously elated at being back on the water and awed by all there is to do on the boat, but, really, there is no place like home.  

This message was brought to you by Starbuck's Coffee, with additional thanks to the author's father-in-law for a certain Starbuck's gift card, for their part in keeping the author alive on Florida's highways and making it possible for her to function after late-night talks and long nights in strange beds.

One of the realities of a haul-out is the mess—inside and out—that comes from dismantling things and emptying storage areas and bringing in parts and tools for the work that needs to be done. Also there’s the dirt that comes in from the boat-yard itself, which is an alarming mix of paint dust, dangerous chemical residues, salt, and dirt. Even if they let us live aboard while the boat is in the yard, I would not want to.

I normally think of our home as being a cozy, self-contained, orderly kind of place—even if everything isn’t in its place, everything has a place and a purpose. If we have not achieved the simplicity we idealized in our youth, we’ve come awfully close. And one of the things that makes life simple is that we travel in our home. Everything we need for a fulfilling life fits in or on our 48 x 26-foot vessel. The line between “house” and “boat” is indistinguishably thin. Because the engines aren’t separate from the living space, the current project makes the boat uninhabitable and her crew vagabonds.

I peek in every now and then to see the progress, but to be truthful, I feel a little overwhelmed when I climb up the ladder to the transom and step inside. I take a deep breath and tell myself that all this detritus will be re-stowed or removed, the boat-yard dust will be scrubbed away, our boat will go back in the water, a faster, more reliable version of her former self, and our home will go back to containing the organized chaos that is our life aboard. Though I know that this is just a temporary state, at the moment, I wish I had a pair of ruby slippers so I could just go home.

The kids and I have just completed the first of our haul-out road trips this year. It’s starting to feel like an annual tradition: the homeless wanderers enjoying the hospitality and generosity of friends and family.

First stop: Atlanta, Georgia, where Jay’s brother, Jeff, and his wife, Robin, live with their two boys, William and Cash, and their dog, Gidget. William, who is just a little older than Sam, had treatments for cancer when he was four, but to see him now, running around on the soccer field, happy and healthy, is simply amazing, an answer to all of our prayers. He and Sam enjoyed being roomies by night and fellow soldiers by day. A pine-cone war of epic proportions was waged in the back yard, and light-saber sword fights and nerf-gun battles raged indoors. We climbed Stone Mountain with all the kids one afternoon, and later, the big boys skate-boarded down the steep driveway, inspiring the cousins, no doubt, to acts of bravery and foolishness for years to come. As the grand finale, Uncle Jeff turned an ordinary watermelon into a cool smoothie with nothing more than a drill and bent coat hanger.

We then drove up to north Georgia to spend a few days with my Aunt Barbara and Uncle Ivan and drove to Chickamauga see my cousin Heidi and her two boys, also home-schooled. They live on a small farm, and Sarah got to ride Beauty, Heidi’s horse, something she loves to do any chance she gets. We also spent a day driving in the mountains, hiking in Fort Mountain State Park and picking apples in an orchard in Ellijay. We had cinnamon apples on homemade waffles the next morning (yum!) and apple crisp for dessert one night.

We enjoyed the end of the week at our good friends Steve and Ellen’s house in Mableton, to the west of Atlanta. Jay and I have known them since we were first married, and always enjoy their company. Our kids love their four boys and all the kids disappeared into their cavernous basement for hours to play Legos, Ping-Pong and air hockey. Ellen and I enjoyed catching up, lamenting that we see each other so seldom, but celebrating a friendship that exists outside of time and despite distance.

Our last stop before heading back to Florida was the Georgia Aquarium, the world’s largest aquarium, and home to whale sharks and beluga whales. The kids had a great time, as they have a real appreciation for sea creatures. I always feel a little sad in zoos and aquariums—I love to see rare animals, especially ones I am unlikely to see in their natural habitats, but hate to see them enclosed, or worse, put on display in shows to entertain humans. I know they have a place in conservation and education—people will not fight to save that which they do not love, but my freedom-loving self feels sympathy for any animal in a cage, no matter how large and comfortable.

Jay, having flown up for the day to surprise Aaron for his early-birthday outing, helped me drive back to Ft. Pierce, cutting at least two hours off of what was, on the way up, a twelve-hour day. As much as I love road trips with the kids, 8-10 hours in a car with multiple stops at restaurants and gas stations and public bathrooms, stretches my patience and endurance. I won’t be ranging that far from home again on my own for a long while.

We’ve just returned from a two-month trip through the Exumas and Abacos, where we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and soaked up some beautiful scenery.  I’ve written previously about our love for kayaking, and a great way to explore the Bahamas is in a shallow-draft boat that can slip silently through mangrove tunnels or over blue holes. By shallow-draft, of course, I mean a few inches—one criterion for a good kayaking trip is that it’s too shallow for the dinghy. Here are my recommendations for great kayaking adventures in the Bahamas:

1. Shroud Cay. Hands down my favorite place to kayak on planet Earth (so far). This is a deserted, pristine island with lots of trails, beautiful white sandy beaches, and perfect swimming holes. As part of the Exuma Land and Sea Park, the island is uninhabited and protected. The combination of crystal-clear water mazes, lush green mangroves and white-sand beaches makes it irresistibly beautiful. With three trails (at least) that you can kayak, you could spend a week here happily paddling, hiking and swimming. The southern trail, my favorite, takes about an hour’s paddling to get from the anchorage to the ocean beach, and at high tide, the water flows all the way through. It is supposed to be closed to dinghy traffic, but sometimes people don’t know, or don’t follow, that rule. The middle trail is a lot longer, and at low tide it dries up long before you get to the ocean side, requiring a hike through mud flats if you want to see “what’s on the other side.” This is a shallow trail inaccessible to dinghies. The northern trail has a great swimming hole on the ocean side, but it is open to dinghy traffic, so a peaceful trip may be interrupted from time to time by the sound and wake of an outboard motor. While kayaking Shroud, we saw sharks and turtles, tropical fish along rocky ledges, conch, coral heads and lots of wading birds.

2. The Bight of Old Robinson. We returned to an old favorite just northwest of Little Harbor, Great Abaco Island. If anchored at Lynyard Cay, it would be a good idea to move for the day to the anchorage behind Tom Curry Point to explore by dinghy or kayak, but it’s also pretty easy to take a mooring ball in Little Harbor and tow a kayak or two behind a substantial dinghy (we have a 12-foot hard-bottom inflatable with a 25hp outboard) and head to the Bight for the day. There are more than a dozen blue holes, though I’ve only actually kayaked over two of them. Just to the northwest of the Riding Cays there is an entrance to a great kayaking trail, though timing is tricky, as it is very hard to navigate at low water or on an out-going tide. The entrance itself is beautiful, with coral heads in shallow water, upside-down jellyfish and huge, red-orange cushion stars. Once inside, the water is calm and the blue holes are easy to spot, but you have to know where to look. An easy one to find is just to the south of the entrance to the trail, and it is marked on shore with a plaque dedicated to some young people who died scuba-diving in the underwater passages. This discovery may put a damper on the trip, but it is still exciting to paddle around in a foot or two of water and then see the bottom drop away. Another hole lies to the west behind some rocky islets, but there’s no marker, so you have to search. It helps to look at a satellite picture and mark the approximate locations of the blue holes on the chart before you go exploring. The Bight is where we first saw the dark shapes zipping across the sandy patches near Man of War Bush which we would later come to call “Turbo Turtles.”

3. Snake Cay to Armstrong Cay. We anchored in Buckaroon Bay just north of Armstrong Cay, where there is a little lagoon perfect for a quick kayaking trip. At high tide, you can go into the mangrove trail to the southeast. Even better is a day trip behind the rocky islands south of Snake Cay. Tow the kayak behind the dinghy and have someone drop you off in the channel just past the ruins of the old mill. Heading south, you can meander for hours behind Deep Sea Cay, Mocking Bird Cay, and Iron Cay. The landscape here is decidedly different from anything you’ll see elsewhere because of the pine forest on the Abaco side, and the lush vegetation on the rocky islands. The water is a beautiful, clear green over a mottled bottom with rocks, coral, sand and turtle grass. If you’ve ever wondered where sea turtles go between the time when they hatch from their tiny eggs and crawl down the beach and when you see them huge, surfacing on the ocean like a submarine, I know where at least some of them spend their adolescence. The Abacos are just plumb full of mid-size turtles, and if you’re careful, you can sneak up on one and watch it zip away, faster than you ever thought a turtle could move.

4. No Name Cay. Southeast of Green Turtle Cay is a beautiful little anchorage on the Sea of Abaco behind No Name Cay.  We anchored outside the entrance to the lagoon and took the kayaks in for a quick explore. We found mangroves to the north and a small, sandy beach to the south. We pulled the kayak up on the sand to see if we could get through the brush to see the ocean side of the island. What we found was a rough trail to a small, shallow, enclosed bay perfect for finding treasures like sea glass and shells. Back in the lagoon, we enjoyed drifting across the still water as the tide carried us toward the exit. It was perfectly quiet except for distant ocean breakers and bird calls.

5. Double Breasted Cay. I’ve saved the best for last. Many people traveling across the Banks stop at Great Sale Cay and miss one of the treasures of the northern Bahamas. Following the chain to the northeast of Green Turtle, past Manjack, Spanish, and Powell Cays, the islands grow smaller, more remote and less protected. About 45 nautical miles from the Crab Cay waypoint on Little Abaco Island you arrive at Double Breasted Cay, a gathering of small, narrow, uninhabited rocky islands. The current is tricky, so we entered and exited the anchorage at slack high water, but if you can get in behind Sand Cay, it’s worth it. This is kayaking at its best. The sandy flats around Sand Cay are known for shark sightings, and I saw several large sharks patrolling around dusk one evening. In the open water between the islands, there are lots of coral heads, easily visible from the water’s surface on a calm day. In the mangrove trail to the north, we saw more turbo turtles and wading birds. The stillness was only broken by the liquid warble of Red-winged Blackbirds. This is my new favorite place in the Bahamas, one I hope we’ll return to on a future trip.

One of our favorite places in the Abacos is Little Harbor, a sweet spot at the southern end of the Sea of Abaco. We’ve stopped there both coming and going—it’s either our first stop after crossing Northeast Providence Channel from Eleuthera and the Exumas or our last taste of Abaco before heading south. The area has a lot going for it—caves with stalactites, stalagmites, and bats, a beautiful protected cove filled with sea turtles, a nice hilly hike, an ocean beach with dramatic views and good waves, a bight with good snorkeling and excellent kayaking, blue holes, and, of course, Pete’s Pub and Foundry.

Pete Johnston came to the Bahamas on a boat with his parents in the 1950s. His father was a sculptor skilled in the art of lost-wax casting, and he built the foundry that is there to this day, open for tours daily. The last time we visited, Eli got an early Christmas present in the gallery: a bronze shark belt buckle on a leather belt made by none-other-than Pete himself. He even measured Eli and punched the holes. He does beautiful work, and also happens to run our favorite restaurant.

Pete’s Pub is the ultimate low-key beach bar. The food is always fabulous, with the fish and conch on the menu usually caught and cleaned that day. The burgers are a bit pricey, but better than you’ll find anywhere else in the Abacos, where good meat appears to be scarce. The sides are always a spicy version of the Bahamian standard, peas-n-rice, and a to-die-for pineapple cole slaw. We’ve never been disappointed. The atmosphere is special, too, with the picnic tables in the sand, little shady places to sit, a “porch” near the bar with Adirondack chairs to sink into with your cold Kalik or their famed fruity rum drink, “the Blaster” (why walk when you can crawl?). The whole place is lit with small lanterns and Christmas lights and festooned with tee-shirts donated and signed by past visitors. Add some good music and a hook-and-ring bar game and you have the perfect place to relax at the end of a long sail.

We like to head over in the dinghy around 6-ish, when the red-yellow-green traffic light on the beach comes on. You can go up on the rooftop balcony to see a great view of the sunset or the breakers on the ocean side. The kids bring things to play with (army guys, buckets and shovels, dominoes, coloring books, etc.) and we spend the whole evening enjoying a meal or drinks, meeting other boaters and talking to locals. It’s the sort of place that seems outside of time, unchanging, like the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

We often have a hankering for Pete’s Pub, but part of its charm may be that it’s so hard to get to. When we arrive, it is usually with weariness and joy in equal measures. Little Harbor is an easy place to pass up, with the washing-machine surge against Tom Curry Point and its shallow entrance, but once inside, it is a little slice of paradise, remote but not isolated, secluded yet welcoming. It’ll be awhile before we get back there, but, eventually, when the craving hits, we’ll untie the dock-lines and brave the ocean waves again, knowing that there’s a bright spot at the end of every journey.

I have written elsewhere about our homeschool, or rather, boatschool practices (see FAQ: Do You Homeschool the Children?), but from time to time I like to post an update about what we’re learning on Take Two. Now that we are traveling, formal schooling has taken a back seat to fun and exploration. Instead of doing the “Daily Dozen” (see footnote), we’re down to three: Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmatic. The children are still responsible for a page in their math workbooks, an entry in their journals, and a chapter in the book we are currently reading (we just finished the WWI autobiography Seargent York and the Great War and have moved on to Karen Hess’s Out of the Dust), but these tasks are usually done before noon. When the school-work and chores are done, the kids are free to pursue their own interests, and I am pleased to report that the choices they make for free time are both diverse and fascinating. Our key mission is to inspire our children to be life-long learners—after all, life is school—and we are beginning to see them independently take on challenging books and projects (yay!). Aside from the history and science they pick up as we travel, they are each exploring new areas on their own.

Eli, 11, is learning Small Basic. Jay set him up on an old computer and gave him a tutorial and a book, which he is working through as if it were a game instead of a new language. (I wish he felt that way about Spanish!) Earlier this year, Jay gave a mini-lesson on a base-two number system, and Eli took an interest and wrote a coded letter to a friend in binary. While we lived in Marathon, he picked up a new sport: tennis. He and I spent many a happy afternoon hitting and chasing little green balls. He reads like a fiend when given the chance, and is currently reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Aaron, 10, is our most mechanically-inclined child so far, and is teaching himself electronics. It started with a set of Snap Circuits he got for Christmas one year, but has quickly morphed into projects from Charles Platt’s Make: Electronics using chips, wires, a soldering gun, capacitors, resistors, LEDs, and some tiny little color-coded wires. Don’t even ask me what he’s doing, because I don’t understand it. He also got a neat Lego motorized loader/bulldozer set for his birthday last year and has been using gears from that set to build gear boxes that have six speeds and actually shift. While his brother was enjoying tennis, he was practicing the half-pipe on his skateboard and discovering a love for basketball. His favorite book is David Macaulay’s The New Way Things Work.

Sarah, 9, is a little like Ginger Rogers, who could do everything Fred Astaire could do, only backwards and in high heels. She’s working on her online test to get a Florida Boating Safety Education I.D. card so she can captain the dinghy and also doing some computer programming and electronic experiments in her spare time. She prefers learning French to Spanish, paints with acrylics, and writes stories for fun. She is always working on a new knitting project, and is also currently sewing her sister a nine-patch quilt. She’s taken to gardening, and even though we are short on space, she has a pot of carrots growing on deck and an assortment of herbs on my galley window sill. Given some alone time in her room, you can hear her playing her keyboard and it actually sounds like music. She’s always reading at least three books simultaneously, but loves Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series of books on her Kindle.

Sam, 6, is still learning to read, but seems to have a gift for numbers. He has excellent mental math for someone so young and seems to absorb math facts just by being in the same room as the older kids. He is learning to draw airplanes and WWII battle scenes, can play a mean game of chess, put together a 1000-piece puzzle, do complex dot-to-dots with hundreds of dots and really likes stories by Dr. Seuss. He has joined the bigger boys on their flight simulator and enjoys dogfights in his Spitfire.

Rachel, 2, is the smartest toddler we’ve ever produced, a fact I credit with the time Sarah spends reading to her and teaching her every day. She talks in complete sentences, is potty-trained, sings nursery rhymes, counts to ten, and surprises us with her accuracy when naming shapes, colors, and even some numbers and letters. She can dress and undress herself, brush her own teeth, and blow her own nose. She has impeccable manners and loves to have stories read to her. She’s learning to swim, but I’d like to see that skill really solidify this summer, as it will increase her joy and our peace of mind.

Jay and I don’t seem to find a lot of “spare” or “free” time, but when we do find those moments, we love to read. Jay is experimenting with Arduino microcontrollers, and is rereading the Hornblower series by C.S. Forrester for pleasure. He just finished a WWII memoir, With the Old Breed: at Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge. As an English major, I read lots of dead white guys in college, but missed a lot of the American authors, so I’m trying to cover some lost ground. I started with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and enjoyed it more than I expected to. I took a break and read James Mitchener’s Chesapeake, which led logically into a reading of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

While Jay fiddles with electronics projects with Aaron, Sarah and I experiment with new recipes. We made a skillet coffee cake from Robbie Johnson’s Gourmet Underway. I love it when learning becomes a whole-family venture, and one of my favorite things about homeschooling is that everything at home becomes an opportunity to learn, whether it’s peaceful conflict resolution or how to mix a Goombay Smash for sunset visitors.

Note: The Daily Dozen replaces a project-based curriculum while we have a toddler on the loose. It’s an experiment to see if we can do school in five-minute increments between potty-training and temper-tantrums. The dozen mini-lessons cover these areas: Bible/Family Devotions, Music, Math, Science/Nature, Spanish/French, Vocabulary/Grammar, Geography, Logic/Brain Teasers, Art History, Navigation/Seamanship, Poetry, and History/Literature.