Welcome!

Hello there, friend! Grab a tea and get cozy… here’s what we are chatting about in this little space.

Where we chat the things we need to keep close: our faith, our own learning, and how to find beauty in the ordinary.

Find it all intermingled– keeping, learning, and living– just like our life. (And yours.)

Your space to grab resources, encouragement, and ideas in your homelearning journey.

Where you’ll find stuff I love to read, use, buy, and give.

The place where I share how stories & speech communication shape the lives of children & parents alike.

Where you’ll find our family in our groove: living, learning, reading, making food…

“What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measurement of importance? What if instead we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?”

Greg McKeown

About Me

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Essential Resources

Essential Keeping

Being a mom should change you. Not erase you.

I’ll be honest; there have been times that I have no longer recognized myself. The work of Motherhood had– and still sometimes does– completely taken over, and I was forgetting what I loved.

I got lost in the grind of motherhood, instead of seeing the joy it offered me.

I couldn’t find time for me, or God, or any of the habits I used to have or the creative outlets that energized me.

All work and no play makes Momma a dull woman. And a sad one. And a cranky one.

We say we would sacrifice everything for our kids, and we do. But in the process, what message do we send them? What message do we send to our little girls that all a wife and mom does is clean and run errands and not have time to stop and enjoy even the little things? What message do we send our boys? That women are meant to be in the home and cook and clean and nothing else? And while we can learn to embrace those necessities of homemaking and still be happy— it’s important for our children to learn that our value isn’t in what we do. It is who we are…

And Whose we are.

I’m on a path to remember who I was and find who I am now– with the improvements of the heart and character that the sanctification that homemaking and motherhood is working in me. I want to be the best version of who I can be to accomplish what God wants from MY life and in the lives of the people that live under this roof with me.

We are essential, fellow momma. YOU are essential.

YOU are worth keeping, just as much as your house. Don’t get lost in your list and your laundry.

Our calling is so much higher than clean clothes.

We are the keeper of His testimonies, in our hearts, and in our homes. 💛

Check out my
Must-Read
Booklist
Listen to my
“Victory” playlist
on Amazon Music.

Essential Keeping Posts

Essential Learning

“The word school is derived from the Greek word schole, meaning ‘leisure.’ Yet our modern school system, born in the Industrial Revolution, has removed the leisure—and much of the pleasure—out of learning.”  Greg McKeown

Learning NEEDS leisure. We input input input… and our brain needs time to process and meditate and GROW and ferment what we put in there. The leisure allows the percolation of CREATIVITY, and we are thankful for the communication of it in our home and world– through music, art, speech, innovation, story and more!

A large part of my Instagram feed is about how we “schole” with our eclectic version of a literature-rich, Charlotte Mason-inspired home learning life. I would love for you to explore my posts as well as my Insta profile to check out my Home Learning highlights! (They give you more of a day-to-day!)

Essential Learning Posts

Home Learning Ideas

Home Learning Life

We were gifted free tickets to the zoo today. (Silly us thought we would be some of the only ones there. Several school buses of children all field tripping simultaneously would prove us wrong.) The crowds didn’t keep us from having a wonderful time and learning a lot. Trust the process, mommas. Find a gentle approach, and have faith that slow, steady, and stress-free really does win the race. 🐢> 🐇 New blogpost is up with lots of fun freebies and ideas about the tall tale of Buffalo Bill! Spending some time outside on the patio, working on a rag rug. I am a storyteller. As the weeks go on, we are learning new life skills right alongside our journey with Laura in Plum Creek. This week, we talked about how Nellie’s favorite punctuation was the exclamation mark 😂, and made some old fashioned lemonade, like they served at the Town party. The song I’m starting my day with today. When the hardest part about pretending to be the piece in our art study is… trying to grab your own elbow. 😂 “She who opens her eyes and her heart nature-ward even once a week finds nature study in the schoolroom a delight and an abiding joy… She finds, first of all, companionship with her children; and second, she finds that without planning or going on a far voyage, she has found health and strength.“

Free Downloads

Click here to check out our educational freebies!

Journals, Narrating Notebooks, & Print-at-home Helps

Our Current Curriculum: A Gentle Feast

Click on the picture to go to A Gentle Feast and learn more.

(I have a post coming soon on why it is such a great fit for our family.)

Essential Speaking:
Communication Classes & Coaching


Before I was a homeschool momma, I got a couple of degrees in speech, traveled nationally as a debate judge and coach, and taught collegiate communication courses.

I keep my foot in my communication background by teaching speech and debate once a week to homeschooled high schoolers in my community, and have recently started to branch out a little more online.

If you are interested in seeing what is currently being offered, feel free to click on the pictures below to learn more about course offerings and our online coaching club or drop me a question in the contact form below!

Essential Speaking

I’m in the process of moving things over from another website that I’ve been using for my speech, communication, and debate resources and announcements…

In the meantime, if you are in the Upstate of SC and are interested in my speech + debate class offerings in the area for Fall 2023, please fill out the contact form so I can get the information directly to you when the dates and location are nailed down.

Thanks!

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Buffalo Bill and the Wild West (free journaling sheets + learning enrichments)

There are two things that I simply have adored throughout this academic year: the concentration and literature suggestions from A Gentle Feast for learning about the 1800s… and my time sharing some of those enchanting stories with our dear co-op, EspritGVL. I’ve had the delight of teaching Language Arts for both primary (1st-2nd) and lower …

Continue reading “Buffalo Bill and the Wild West (free journaling sheets + learning enrichments)”