When Shawn and I got married in 1995, my sweet friend Mary Velgos gave me a recipe titled Simon and Garfunkel Chicken—a name inspired by the singing duo’s 1966 album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. (Even if you’ve never heard the lyrics to the song Scarborough Fair, I’ll bet you can guess at least four of the ingredients in this recipe!) At the time, we had no idea that it would become the go-to special-occasion dish for our family. But that’s exactly what it is. So it wasn’t a surprise when I asked Shawn what we should have for Christmas dinner and he requested Simon and Garfunkel Chicken.

While I have been able to alter the recipe to make it gluten-free, dairy-free and egg-free for Kellen, I haven’t yet made it using pastured chicken. That’s because I’d have to separate and debone the breasts from whole chickens myself, and I haven’t yet tackled that task—although I hope to someday. The other main ingredients—homemade mozzarella cheese, pastured eggs, bread crumbs from a sprouted-grain loaf or batch of tortillas—have been easy to fit within real-food parameters. I typically serve Simon and Garfunkel Chicken alongside corn (organic frozen kernels, in this case) and garlic mashed potatoes.

Our Christmas dessert was a real treat (though decidedly not a real-food one!) that the kids and I put together on Christmas Eve. Using a gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free recipe for sugar cookies and a set of star-shaped cookie cutters in five sizes, we baked about 50 stars and then stacked them into five Christmas-tree towers using green-tinted royal icing as our “glue” and multicolored sprinkles as “lights.” To make each tree, we used two stars in each of the five sizes. We iced each cookie individually and added it to the stack, varying the position of the points and sprinkling the edges with every layer. They were fun to make—and even more fun to eat!

This post is part of the Tuesday Twister blog carnival hosted by www.gnowfglins.com. To link to today’s Tuesday Twister on that site, click here.

It’s all in the way you look at it. You see, for us, home is school. So I guess you could call the one day a week that my two oldest children spend in a traditional classroom setting “school away from school.”

Brotherly love: Pals Kellen and Kerrick prepare for a day of “school away from school.”

We have always homeschooled our children, beginning when our oldest son, Kellen, was about 3. At that point we knew, given his lengthy list of food allergies and the severity of his symptoms, that it would be all but impossible to keep him safe in a regular school environment. Instead we flung ourselves headlong down the homeschooling path—an adventure I certainly hadn’t anticipated—and we’ve never looked back. (Though food allergies served as our original impetus, many other factors continue to sustain and motivate us—such as the opportunity to provide the kind of individualized, one-on-one instruction that fosters a love of learning, as well as the gift of time to create strong family bonds and instill important character qualities through life lessons.)

One of the best books I ever read when I initially began researching the idea of educating our children at home was Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Works, by David Guterson. Written almost two decades ago (and several years before then-public high school English teacher/homeschooling dad Guterson made it big with his novel-turned-movie Snow Falling on Cedars), the book so intelligently and eloquently supports the notion of parents teaching their own children as a natural course of action—especially in the face of an overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction with the state of public education. The fact that Guterson himself was, at the time, a part of that system lends both irony and credibility to his writing. (Which, by the way, is just beautiful: I remember being moved almost to tears by one passage in the book that describes the subtle but incredibly meaningful transference of knowledge from a grandfather to his grandson.) And although Guterson distinctly made the case that institutionalized education is errant, he also laid out a vision toward the end of the book for a mutually beneficial partnership between homeschooling families and local public schools, decrying the notion that such a relationship need be adversarial. I remember thinking his idea was a nice one, but that it was probably a bit too pie-in-the-sky to ever really work.

Then, just before Kellen reached kindergarten age, I discovered that such a program actually existed right in the city where we live. Created by homeschooling parents with the cooperation of a local school district, C.A.S.A. Vida (the acronym stands for Community Assisted Schooling Alternatives, but is pronounced like the Spanish word for “house,” followed by the Spanish word for “life”) provides a way for homeschooled children from kindertgarten through sixth grade to attend one full day a week of extracurricular classes (art, music, P.E., technology, Spanish and some science) together in a classroom setting at a local public school. No standardization, no assessment or grading. Simply enrichment on top of the heavy lifting handled by homeschooling parents (who prefer to provide their own instruction in major subjects like reading, writing, mathematics, history and more science). The students learn alongside other homeschoolers of multiple ages under the direction of teachers who have come out of retirement to participate in the program (and who love that they can do what they do best—teach!—without the incredible pressure of preparing students for standardized testing).

It’s all about the backpacks: Pirates of the Caribbean for Kellen, and Power Rangers for Kerrick.

Kellen is now beginning his fifth year in the program, and Kerrick is starting his third. We’ve experienced incredible support and understanding from both the staff and other students with regard to Kellen’s food allergies, and he has never had a reaction while in attendance. (Of course, he takes his own lunch, and I’m on campus keeping an eye on things occasionally, too). Their one day away from home each week gives both me and the boys a bit of a break from the 24/7 homeschooling routine. They get to experience a small taste of what traditional school is like, and I get a minute to breathe and regroup. We miss each other during the day, and we come together at the end of it eager to share what went on while we were apart, as well as refreshed and energized to start our schedule again.

We catch a bit of flak sometimes from other homeschoolers who frown on any interaction with the public-education system. But that’s OK. It would be difficult for me, I think, to adopt a completely separatist stance on the issue considering my admiration for the gifted professional educators in our extended family—all of whom, by the way, are in complete support of our homeschooling efforts. They say (and I agree!) that we really have the best of both worlds. Homeschool parents opposed to such a program also express their fears that it might cause homeschooled children to resent being taught at home and could create in them a desire to attend traditional school. All I can say is that that hasn’t ever yet been the case for us. In fact, I vividly remember Kellen saying sometime during the second year that he attended C.A.S.A. Vida as I picked him up one afternoon, “Mom, one day a week is enough.” I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve been thinking over the past several weeks about how to start this blog, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve thought about it way too much and that it’s just time to write already! Probably because I am a writer and editor, I’ve put a lot of unnecessary pressure on myself to put together the perfect first post. Part of that pressure comes from questions I have asked myself as I have delved into the process of getting set up—which, by the way, involved a serious learning curve and an incredible expansion of my high-tech vocabulary. Questions such as, “Does the world really need another blog?” “Do I have anything to say that somebody else isn’t already saying?” and “Do I have the energy, creativity and time to keep it going?” My answers? “Probably not.” “I doubt it.” and “I can’t believe you can ask yourself that question with a straight face.” Still, I find myself unable to resist a forum such as this—a place where I can share ideas and experiences with people I know well and people I don’t know at all—yet. And I’m drawn, too, by the knowledge that I’ll be forced to exercise my writing and editing muscles, which often lay dormant too long between free-lance assignments.

So what will I write about, exactly? Well, I plan to follow the old rule, “Write what you know.” Which, for me, means writing about my family and my place in it; the things we strive toward and thrive because of (or in spite of); our life experiences; and our hopes, dreams and heart’s desires—from the minuscule to the grandiose. Topics at the top of my list include homeschooling (which is a huge part of our lifestyle), healthy eating (both for optimal nutrition and to accommodate our family’s food allergies) and hobbies (from digital scrapbooking to urban farming).

The Hemmings Half Dozen includes my husband, Shawn, and I, and our four children: Kellen, 9; Kerrick, almost 7; Kennah, 3 1/2 (don’t forget the 1/2); and Keillor, 20 months. We live in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, in a mid-size home that often feels crowded and chaotic. And we love it—most of the time. If you find us here, I hope you’ll contribute to the conversation where you can, and that you’ll extend a bit of grace my way as I continue to navigate this uncharted (for me) territory. In fact, for this first post (and maybe beyond,too), I’ve decided to adopt as my motto the following quotation from Dr. Seuss: “Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”