Summer Life Lessons in Bartering, Auto Shop, and Goats

Summer is my favorite time for home schooling. All the book work is finished for the year and we wake up every morning asking, “What shall we do today?” There are a lot of cleaning and organizing chores to catch up on, but not before we have a little fun. I love looking for opportunities to teach my boys about the really important things in life, like how to live it well; so this summer, we started with a trade for an old Mustang convertible to tinker on in the garage. It was good for the boys to watch their dad barter for it and now they will get to fix it up.

 

Also, I found that there are more goat people out there than I imagined, and they all need tomato plants! So I traded some of my plants for a few quarts of goat milk (which for me translates to "liquid gold"). Raw, local, and I’m not allergic to it! I also got a hold of some kefir grains so we are having a lot of fun in the kitchen. 

 

The goat milk made me think of “Heidi”, so I dug out our copy for some summer reading. There is just something wise about an animal as small as a dog, who can find its food scaling rocky mountain ledges in the wilderness to come home and give nurturing milk and companionship.

So, we are a few weeks into summer now and I’m really looking forward to the rest of it. Who knows what kinds of opportunities will come our way?