family

Halloweening, Familia Style

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

When I was a kid, there was a minister who lived next door to us. He refused to pass out candy to trick-or-treaters. Instead, they got little Christian tracts on how evil and satanic the holiday was. At the time, I just thought he was weird. But I could do without Halloween now.

In fact, not seeing spider webs, creepy masks, and gravestones all over people’s yards and store windows every October was one of the things I loved about living abroad. Not to mention the fact that I didn’t have to either let my kids gorge themselves on candy for the entire first week of November or be the “mean” mom who takes it all away.… Read more

City of Angels

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Thursday Grammy was kind enough to babysit the children while Tony and I drove the two hours to the Los Angeles Temple. While the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has thousands of church buildings and congregations around the world, temples are still rare, relatively speaking. There are 135 temples currently operating, spread over every inhabited continent. Tony and I are kind of temple junkies. We have a page on our family website to keep track of the temples we’ve visited around the world. We were delighted to be in Italy last year when ground was broken for the new Rome Temple.… Read more

Homeschool Performance Review

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers

I realize that this first term of full-time homeschooling has prompted more than the usual number of posts about homeschooling. Fortunately, you’re all just dying to hear every infinitesimal detail about our homeschooling life. Right?

The other day I was reminiscing elsewhere about what it was like back in the good old days when homeschooling was weird and subversive, not hip and progressive. You know, the days when nobody had heard of it, and for a lot of people homeschooling=educational neglect=child abuse. I can still remember the first time I was in the park, and some random adult starting quizzing me on the multiplication tables.… Read more

Fall at the Pumpkin Patch

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Last Friday we drove an hour up into the hills to pick fall apples. We filled three buckets with Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Empire, and Rome apples, enough to grandly fulfill Grammy’s dehydrator ambitions, eat all the sweet, crunchy apples we could want, and have apple crisp with vanilla ice cream for family home evening treat tonight.

On the way home, we decided to stop by the pumpkin patch.

We only intended to stay an hour or two, but Murray Family Farms is no ordinary pumpkin patch. It’s a 360-acre autumn extravaganza. After eating our picnic lunch on a shady table outside, we let the children play in a sandbox thing full of field corn.… Read more

Conference Weekend

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

It’s been rather startling during the past couple of weeks to have so many people I hadn’t seen in years tell me face to face that they’ve been avidly following my blog (not to mention chide me for not posting much lately). Sometimes I forget that this blog is a fairly public personal journal. Also, sometimes when I tell a funny story as I’m catching up with old friends, I realize I’ve told it before, just not in person. Ah, well.

We had a lovely Conference Weekend. One of the nice things about being back in the States is that we can watch Conference in real-time and it’s not the middle of the night.… Read more

Travel Update #3: Not with a bang but a whimper

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

You know what? I don’t think I have 22 hours worth of memories from our last 22 hours of traveling. I know I wasn’t sleeping for most of it (sadly), so I must just have selective amnesia. Or maybe nothing really happened.

Here’s the little I remember:  We ate guacamole in the Chicago airport. It was as good as I remembered it. (Also, I made a bowl of guacamole yesterday at my mother-in-law’s house, and ate the whole thing myself. I might do that again today.)

Airport security is as paranoid as ever in the U.S.A. At least we were only flying the week of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and not the actual day.… Read more

The Dog That Walks By Himself

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Perhaps we are in need of a dog after all. Before last week we had no one to steal our socks, lick up spills from the floor, or cover our hands with warm kisses.

I guess we can consider him an “oops baby” of sorts. After further grilling of all our neighbors, we were able to uncover the story of how a little black puppy came to be all alone yelping in the street outside our house. Apparently, the nice old man who lives across the street and spends hours every day sitting outside on his front porch was sitting there as usual two Fridays ago at 7:00 in the morning.… Read more

How Much is that Doggie in the Window?

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

We are not a family in need of a dog. Yes, it’s true that we’ve always kind of wanted one, but we are certainly not at the point of going out and buying a puppy. In fact, we exercised remarkable restraint a few months ago when the half wild dogs on the beach had six cute little roly-poly puppies, and Rambo kept asking us if we wanted one.

Yesterday, though, as we were heading off for our morning time at the beach, we walked out our front gate to so much yelping I thought there must be a dog fight. It turned out to be just one dog, and not a very big one, at that.… Read more

My Son, the Inventor

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

On one of my bad days a few months ago, I was reading an article about the benefits to children of living overseas (you know, just to help me feel better about traumatizing them by dragging them around the world). It mentioned a study in which children who had spent significant time in a country not their own demonstrated more creative problem solving skills. I believe it. Constant exposure to alien ways of thinking, unfamiliar expectations, and situations out of your comfort zone does tend to kick the problem solving machine into high gear. I’ve experienced this myself. For instance, since I’m the designated family chef/epicure, I’ve taught myself things like how to cook with local ingredients, and get by with severely limited kitchen utensils.… Read more

Long Distance Grandparenting 2.0

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Shortly after we moved overseas, we started using google chat (and sometimes Skype) to video chat with the grandparents. At first, it was a little weird and awkward. Video chat is somewhere in between talking on the phone (which can be difficult for toddlers to conceptualize and enjoy) and being there in person. Sometimes it’s hard to think of good conversation topics. But they eventually got the hang of it, and soon they were taking advantage of the video component by showing drawings and special toys to the grandmas, singing them songs, or even playing games like peek-a-boo and hide-and-seek after they figured out exactly where the webcam was located.… Read more