I stumbled upon his site a while back and had forgotten about it. It gives the history of many common nursery rhymes and they are pretty interesting. Check it out!

Homemade Potpourri

Here is a project I have been considering for years - homemade potpourri. I have long had a fascination with this. During the before children season of my life, I read all sorts of books about herbs and potpourri and had dreams of owning my own herb/flower farm.

Skip ahead many years...When we moved onto our 4 acres here, dh and I really thought we might utilize our land to become "flower farmers." We planted several large test gardens and I worked my tail off that first year. Through that, I learned some important lessons. First, that dh liked the idea of this but was TOTALLY uninterested in committing to the WORK involved. Second, as a mother of young children (only two at that time), I couldn't do it all myself. So, I let the weeds and pasture grass that I had been waging war against take over and in the blink of an eye, my gardens were literally gone.

Fast forward again. Now, I am a homeschooling mother of four children, but my oldest ones are to a point of being able to do some actual work. My second daughter has always had a total fascination with flowers and potpourri and I have often thought I should share some of what I learned way back when about growing and making the stuff. Recently, as I was unpacking some books I lingered a bit over my herb books and an old flyer from the San Francisco Herb Co. dropped out. It is filled with wonderful sounding raw potpourri ingredients as well as the recipes and directions on how to put them to use. I had always wanted to try this but, being pretty poor in our early years of marriage, never actually did it. This morning, I thought of this again and googled the company and found they have a really nice website. Not only do they still have recipes, you can order them ready to assemble yourself. I am thinking that this could be a great project to do with my daughter. We could discuss the different ingredients: where they come from, how they grow and what they are used for.

If this is something that you are interested in, you can go to the link above and click on "Potpourri-Recipes" to see all the variations they offer and the prices.

Audio Books

Audio Books! I cannot say enough good about them. I have been seeking out good quality audio books for my children for years. This quest began because I had a struggling reader who LOVES books. There are only so many hours in a day and I felt I was unable to read aloud enough to meet her desire for books. We began checking out audio books from the library. She was soon bored with little book and cassette sets, so we ventured into the books on tape section. These were unabridged children's chapter books read aloud. She was instantly hooked! We have since began our own collection of audio books. Although they aren't word for word readings, some of our favorites are the Focus on the Family Radio Theatre CDs which include dramatizations of all 6 books in the Chronicles of Narnia as well as Anne of Green Gables, A Christmas Carol, Squanto, The Secret Garden, and more.

It was only natural that my second daughter would become hooked on these as well. Even my 4 year old bounced between listening to stories or his Thomas the Tank Engine music at bedtime. In our home, just after bedtime, you can usually hear at least two or three different stories being read because each of our children picks one to listen to as they go to sleep.

I cannot even because to tell you how much my children have gotten out of the simple act of listening to good quality audio books. Often they will quote historical facts that even I don't know and when I question them, they claim they learned it from a particular book on tape. The Your Story Hour historical series has been especially great for that. I can say that they have more good literature under their belt than I did at their ages! I have to request that we listen to some of these books in the car so I get a chance to experience them, too.

Anyway, this subject came up because my SIL sent me a link to a site (click on the image above to go there) that looks like a great source. These are classic stories told by professional storyteller, Jim Weiss. They sound fantastic! I can't wait until I can work some funds into the budget so we can add a few to our own audio library!