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Well, its been a few days that I’ve been trying to process something that happened to me. You’ve heard the saying, “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” Well, I’m hear to tell you that’s just stupid. I’m guessing that we can all relive exact words spoken to us that just broke our souls. I know I can. I can remember the smells, the sounds, how I felt and the exact words that were spoken to me that crushed my spirit. I’m going to try to explain what happened the other day without using the language that’s currently running through my mind.
I was working in the office at our campground. It was a beautiful day. I was in an exceptionally good mood until it happened. A couple came into the office to check in. I made small talk like I do with all the guests. “How are you? Did you have a long drive today?” They proceeded to tell me that they’ve been traveling for weeks and couldn’t wait to get home to Canada. “Oh, I can’t wait to visit Canada,” I said. She proceeded to ask if we travel full time and I told her yes! She looked at me confused. “You don’t have a home?” I tell her about how we sold our home and we travel full time now with our 4 kids. Her confused look turned to complete horror and said, “Well, why are the kids not in school?” I told her that I homeschool the kids. Then the bombardment of questions took place.
What curriculum do you use? Who published it? Where was it published? How do you know how well they’re doing? Did you go to college? Do you have a degree? What kind of an education is that for kids? What does your husband do? How do you homeschool them if you’re working?
I am still shaking with anger and frustration at the way she spoke to me. It was so degrading. So mean how she just tore into me, especially when I couldn't tell her who and where our curriculum was published. And you should have seen the look on her face when she found out I don’t have a college degree. The questions just kept coming.
What is your plan for them for education past high school? How will colleges look at what you’re doing?
I told her, I could care less if they went to college! You would have thought I shot her in the head. She was appalled at my response. I wasn’t even allowed to finish what I wanted to say. I would have liked to tell her how we hope to inspire our kids to be entrepreneurs and think creatively and make a living doing something they love. If they choose to go to college that’s fine but it is definitely not a requirement for our kids.
Finally, her husband got her to stop with all the questions and they were off to find their campsite. I was shaking and sweating so bad. Mostly because I was mad and partly because...‘what if she’s right.’
I know, I don’t have a college degree. Sometimes I really do feel like I’m not qualified to teach our kids. But you know what? We didn’t choose to homeschool because we thought we knew more than others, or could teach better than the teachers at traditional school. There are so many reasons why we chose this for our kids. Reasons like...
We want to spend as much time as we can with our kids. We want them to be able to learn about things that interest them. If they’re stuck on something, we can spend more time helping them figure it out. We want the options to travel more. We don’t believe in the way the school system works. The list goes on, and on, and on.
But my point is, her words were so degrading and spoken with such hatred that I still get shaken up when I relive that moment in my head. I couldn’t even sleep that night. I woke up so much with her words ringing in my head. It really got to me.
It made me question EVERYTHING. Am I doing enough? Are they on track? Am I messing them up? Are they going to grow up and resent their childhood?
The truth is, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not sure any homeschool mom feels like they got it all under control. But you know what? This is what works for us right now. Our kids are happy. They’re learning about the places we are. They’re doing great with their school work. They love to read and learn new things. Adali can identify so many birds and tell you all about them. They love to go to the library and get new books. I can’t keep up with all the books they’ve been reading. We’d have to be at the library every 3 days to keep up with Jett these days.
Right now, my main goal is to teach them how to learn and how fun is is to learn something new. My plan is to not make school work stressful. I hear so often of kids having anxiety about going to school for different reasons. Maybe the bullies in their class, maybe they don’t understand what’s being taught but there’s no time to have it explained differently. Maybe they’re worried about their grades. Maybe they’re tired of being yelled at because they hate to sit in a chair for 8 hours a day. Maybe it’s because they are away from home all day and they have to come home and do more school work. Maybe they miss their family.
Guys, I know it’s not for everyone. But homeschool is something that works for us. We love having our kids with us all day every day. We love watching them discover new things and come up with creative ideas on their own. We get to experience so many things with them while we’re traveling. They get to see things that most kids will never get to see. They get to sled down sand dunes, and swim in different oceans. They get to hike mountains and learn how to adjust to new environments. How can you say that what we’re teaching our kids isn’t good? An education isn’t just learning what’s written in books. It’s learning how to do life, and I think they’re doing pretty well.
One of the most important things we should teach our kids is respect. I want them to know that when they say mean things to someone, it can really hurt. I want them to think about what they are going to say before they blurt it out. Can we all agree that teaching our kids to be decent, respectful human beings is top on our list? Can we teach them that being kind to others, despite our differences, is what this world needs? I want them to understand the powerful effect their words have on others, and even on themselves.
Recently Jett has been struggling in math. He would just give up and say he’s stupid and can’t memorize things. We started a little tradition with him that seems to be helping. We have him repeat after us... “My name is Jett. I am smart. I am funny. I can memorize things. I can do hard things. I will not give up because I am awesome.” It’s a little different every time we have him say it, but we can see his spirit light up again. Words are powerful.
I’m trying really hard to learn to not take in every negative word spoken to me. Some things people say are not worth holding on to. I won’t let them get me down. I won’t let them ruin my week again. I won’t let her words define who I am as a mother, a teacher and as a human being. I may not have a degree but I know how to treat others with respect and that may be worth more than a piece of paper.
I walked home after work, still shaken. I had my hands full and was carrying home 2 of my homemade muffins that were left over from the day. And guess who was walking along my path. The same lady. I wanted to turn around and pretend I left something at the office and wait until she was gone. But I kept walking. Our eyes met and I smiled and asked her if she would like the left over banana muffins. She politely declined. I said, “Are you sure? I just made them this morning.” Her face changed from sour to curious as if she didn’t believe that I could make muffins. She then said, “Okay, that’s very sweet of you.” I started to walk off and she said, “Can I give you a hug?” I agreed, and at that moment (though I wasn’t ready to forgive her for how she made me feel) I knew that maybe, just maybe she knew she had really offended me and that she was sorry. That, or maybe she was just hungry for muffins.
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Fellow bloggers, I know many of you swim in the vast sea that is WordPress. It’s free, easy to get setup and has lots of automatic fixes in the form of plugins. As far as blogging engines go it’s pretty nice.
Today I’m going go make a case or three for why you may not want to use WordPress for your site, though. And tell you why we moved from WordPress to ExpressionEngine and finally to Craft CMS. Ready? Here it goes.
WordPress Weirdness
When we started this blog (formerly Last Night Ago), I was busy, didn’t want to pay for software and thought I’d give WordPress a shot. For my clients at FortySeven Media I have historically always built ExpressionEngine sites, so this was hard for me to deal with at first. But I wanted to give WP it’s fair shake.
It lasted about 8 months. During that time I ended up fighting with the system for so many little things that I couldn’t believe how many people used WordPress on a regular basis. Did you know that WordPress doesn’t store it’s paragraphs in the database with <p> tags around them? True story. Here’s a few of my issues (keep in mind this was about 3 years ago so things may have changed):
- Images uploaded from our phones weren’t rotated properly. Had to add a plugin to make that work, but it didn’t fix things retroactively so I had to re-upload a bunch of images.
- Image management in general was abysmal. The interface is confusing and weird. You only get 3 options for resizing, and WP stores all those versions in the same folder as your main images. So if you happen to change one of those other sizes you just bloat that images folder - and because the image linking is done through the text editor field and not the templates, it’s hard to change the sizes of your images site wide (like you would during a redesign). I’ll explain how images are handled so much more elegantly in other systems later.
- Every plugin we added bloated our pages in ridiculous ways. I’m mean we were looking at 20 javascript files and 20 css files that were adding very little value, but slowing our pages down massively. This is my biggest gripe with WordPress - how it injects a bunch of code you don’t know about into the front end of your site.
- While the publishing area has come a long way, I still don’t agree with how images are inserted into content, custom fields feel like they’re hacked on and most importantly Ashley found the whole thing pretty confusing. She hated it.
Security
The last straw for me after fighting with all these little things was the security issues that WordPress has. If you don’t upgrade immediately you’re going to get hacked. The problem is upgrading all the time causes potential incompatibilities with plugins. And you need a lot of plugins to make stuff work right. During one of those in-between times, our site was indeed hacked. After that I just blew it up and re-built in ExpressionEngine. That worked fine for another year or so. But EE has it’s own set of problems. While it’s more secure and doesn’t need constant updating, you have to throw about $800 - $1,000 worth of licensing and add-ons to get a good publishing experience. And even with that we were flying blind publishing without built-in live previewing.
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Hey Longneckers! How’s the healthy eating going?
Well, I’m glad you asked! We have made one little change to our plan. While I would love to be able to say that we eat perfectly all the time, that just isn’t going to happen. When we are traveling to amazing places, you better believe we will be trying the local cuisine. So, we need a plan that is going to allow for us to not beat ourselves up if we want to eat our weight in tacos when we make it to Mexico!
We have decided that every 10 days we are going to allow ourselves some slack. A cheat day, if you will. A day where we don’t have to think about the fact that we really want to have a slice of bread with our zoodles (zucchini noodles). A day where if it’s hot out and the kids want to grab an icee, I get to say OK! A day where we don’t beat ourselves up for giving in to that piece of chocolate that has been in the freezer all alone for 16 days without any attention! I’m talking about balance y’all. I NEED BALANCE! A whole month of eating very strict just isn’t going to work long term for me. I need a system. So, every 10 days we are allowed to eat that bowl of cereal or go out to eat if we feel like it.
We had our first cheat day last Sunday. To say we went overboard would be an understatement. I found myself drooling over recipes to make donuts for breakfast, and what could I make as a special desert for the night? It was ridiculous guys! We jumped in that pool of gluttony and we hit rock bottom. We ended the night playing UNO for M&Ms but instead of the usual 6 M&Ms, they may have been dumped on the bed and it became a free-for-all.
We went to bed laughing and having a good ol’ time from our sugar high. But then we we were awakened with the most God awful sound at 12:45am. Jax comes running to us, “Ada’s puking in her bed!” I’m pretty sure I will not be able to eat M&Ms for a very, very long time. It was the worst puking episode we have ever had. Usually the kids are able to get up in time and we get them to the toilet or grab them a puke bucket. Not this time. I ended up throwing out her sheet and was doing loads of laundry until 2am. NEVER AGAIN!
From now on, it will not be a whole day of eating terrible. We will choose only a couple things to splurge on and that’s it.
So, what I hope that we are creating is truly a lifestyle. Not a diet. I can already tell a big difference in the way my clothes are fitting so that’s encouraging. I am hoping that the cravings will start to go away soon. It’s bad that all day I think about food. It’s really sad, and I know it’s not healthy. I’m working through it but dang, what I wouldn’t give for some homemade bread right now.
Our next cheat day is Wednesday and we have already planned what we are going to do. We’re going to pack up the bikes, and surprise the kids with a trip to Boise! It also happens to be the location of the closest Chick-fil-A! The kids are going to flip out.
So, if you have any good recipes that don’t have grains or sugar in them, feel free to share below. We like simple things that don’t take forever to make.
So long friends, drink a MexiCoke for me :)
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It’s been almost a month, but I couldn’t forget to tell you about Jett’s birthday weekend. Last year we went a little overboard and let the kids pick their own birthday adventure and let’s just say it was a bit expensive. They all had amazing days that they chose, but this year we wanted to get back to simplicity. And back to nature. So, we will (hopefully) be taking a tent camping trip for each of their birthdays this year.
For Jett, we picked out 2 awesome nearby campgrounds and let him chose which one he would want to go to. He ended up choosing Wallowa Lake State Park. We booked it online and assumed it would be great weather since the last 2 weeks here in La Grande were absolutely beautiful. Well, we checked the weather and it didn’t look good. How in the world would it go from sunny and 80s to 50s and raining? And that was during the day! We were not going to let the weather ruin a birthday so, we kept on with the plan.
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When we set out on our adventure (tomorrow will be 14 months) we really thought that it would be much easier to stay active and eat healthy. While we were more active for the first year our eating habits didn't change much. Not that we eat horribly, but we could be doing better. I have this unhealthy love of MexiCoke and I know it's horrible for me but sometimes you just got to have one. Well, last night I drank my last one. Not my last one forever, but my last one for awhile. I'm finding out that sometimes you have to say goodbye. Not for forever, but for awhile. Sometimes you have to say no in order to say yes to something better.
I'm ready. I'm ready to get active. We have been a bit lazy since we've taken this work camp job here in La Grande, OR. It's just a season but I'm ready to get back to regular hiking, biking, exploring. Guys, I have SO MUCH weight to drop. It's hard to write the number but I have 80 pounds that need to go. That's like carrying Adali around all day! Ridiculous. I don't want to do it anymore. It needs to go! So, in effort to get this ball rolling, I just had to get that out there. To be held accountable I'm going to be posting what we are eating. I'm not sure how yet, it may be a short video every day on Instagram or I may do a quick post each week but, it starts now. I know what needs to be done, but now I just have to do it...and stick with it. Jonathan is on board and they kids are mentally prepared for no more sugar.
During the month of July we are cutting out all wheat, refined sugar and processed food. I went to the store last night and bought all produce and meat! I didn't even go down another isle. It's true, all the real food is found on the outskirts of the store. Plus, my shopping went so much faster when I was mainly just in the produce section! Win/Win!
In August we will be getting a bit more strict but for now, this is a good start!
So, if you'd like some good healthy eating ideas, follow us on Instagram at @bareneckers and let's get healthier together!
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Ashley Longnecker / August 12, 2016
Jonathan Longnecker / August 04, 2016
We’re Jonathan & Ashley Longnecker. We love weird ideas, great food, travel, drawing, music, homeschool, tattoos, dreads, woodworking, design and our 4 amazing kids.