Crying into my coffee. Also: baby ducks.

The reason I'm crying into my coffee this morning?  After homeschooling my three kids their whole lives (the oldest is almost 15), my husband and I dropped them off at public school this morning for their first-ever day of school.

By no means am I an overprotective helicopter parent, but it's completely surreal to have my kids gone from me.  After raising and educating my kids being my sole purpose for one and a half decades, handing them off to teachers that I don't know feels strange, and a little bit wrong, but also right in many ways.

Because it's time.

All three of them requested to go to public school.  I wrote about it here, in case you are wondering what's up with that.

So anyway.  Here I am, back at home, with lots of plans of what I have to accomplish today.  The garlic has to be harvested, yogurt needs to be made with the goat milk, the garden has to be watered, not to mention laundry and food prep.

But the tears keep flowing, and the house and yard are entirely too quiet without any kids biking, playing and making messes.

My cure for grief is this: watching our baby ducks.  Let me show you.  Our Mama duck hatched these cuties a couple of weeks ago, and here they are.  The first few pictures are of them being only one day old.

Okay, looking at the baby ducks helped.  Now I need to go hug a baby goat.  Or my dogs, since I won't be able to hug my kids til 4pm.  

They will be on the school bus for two and a half hours each school day, leaving at 6:30 am and coming home just before 4 pm.  Can you tell I'm freaking out?  This is hard.  I won't go on and on about how strange this all is, otherwise you'll get annoyed with me.

This empty house will be our new normal from now on, and I better get used to it.  If you know me, you realize that my time will get filled up with all kinds of projects.  I will tell you about an exciting thing I'm working on soon.

In the meantime, check out this Back to Basics summit I'm part of.  It's FREE, and I'm one of the presenters.  I'll tell you more about it soon, but you should register for free now to learn all kinds of skills I know you want to learn!

Let me show you pictures of the past days.  There was an eclipse, of course, which we watched with our special eclipse glasses in our backyard.  We only had 90 percent totality, so it didn't get completely dark, but it got much colder, and the shadows on the ground very gorgeously patterned.

As always, our lives revolve around food.  We gathered Oregon grapes for making wine (I will write a tutorial for this soon), fed the chickens whey from cheese making, harvested onions and potoatoes, canned apple sauce, fig jam and dilly beans, and made amazing food straight from the garden and chicken coop.

Also, watch for my tutorial on making fig jam soon.

Now let me go pet the dogs.  I bet they miss the children, too.

PS: Don't forget to register for the FREE Back to Basics summit by clicking here <----