Making things is very calming to me, I really need to make more time to do it. Today I realized that Savannah Lynn doesn't own anything orange....and tomorrow is orange day at preschool! I took the opportunity to make her an outfit by stitch-witchery-ing (yeah, because that's a word) on a square of fabric with a picture and then making a tulle and ribbon skirt and matching hair bow. I might still put the bow onto a headband, we'll see.
I think it's pretty cute for about an hour and $16 in fabric!! (We already had the white t-shirt, which was a free hand-me-down from a friend!)
This leads me for a moment to Halloween. We celebrate Halloween. In fact, we have a huge party for our kids' friends, too. We don't really do the whole "ooooh, scary death" thing, it's more fun dress-up, candy. I've never felt a conviction to not do Halloween. I have many Christian friends that do, and many in our CC group find it offensive (although many of them love it and also enjoy celebrating). For me, it's no different than people who celebrate Christmas and aren't Christian. For them, the day may have started out as a (pagan festival the church wanted to compete with, ahem) celebration of Christ, but they're ignoring that and doing Santa, presents, and a day off work. For me, Halloween may have started out as Samahein or be important to various cultish sects, but for us, it's not about Satan or evil or the "thin veil between the living and the dead". It's about little kids dressing up and having fun. I don't think the people celebrating secular Christmas are being "deceived into celebrating Christ" nor do I feel us having fun with Halloween makes us "deceived into the devil's holiday". So that's what it is. If at some point God convicts me otherwise, we'll change that. Just an aside.
I've been very stressed lately- there's a lot up in the air about our lives right now and I've struggled with anxiety and depression for a few years and it's particularly bad right now. Austin's work schedule (constant) and the kids' sports and activities (many) along with the house being a mess during construction actually landed me in the closet crying a few days this past week. It's been a tough few days.
Making something tonight made me feel so much more relaxed.....
This post made no sense at all, did it? I guess there's something to be said for a picture and some rambling, right?
While I'm here writing, this week's menu:
Monday- Vegetarian Lasagne with salad and garlic bread (scouts)
Tuesday- Tofu, Cauliflower, and Bell Pepper Tikka Masala with naan (CC craft day)
Wednesday- Split pea soup with carrots, beer batter bread (art class, football)
Thursday- leftovers (CC day)
Friday- Party! (Football)
Saturday- Party! (At someone else's house!!) (Hockey, Church)
Sunday- Baked potatoes with broccoli and cheese, baked chicken (hockey, football)
In a heavy saucepan, combine the butter, brown sugar, corn syrup, salt and milk; bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Cook and stir until a candy thermometer reads 248 degrees (firm ball stage) about 30-40 minutes and for a softer caramel cook just to a few less degrees. Remove from heat; stir in vanilla.
Notes- don't double in a larger pan, make 2 pans. When I say Butter I mean Butter. Don't try margarine or soy substitute, because it will fail miserably. Very Salty peanuts make a great addition to the outside of the apples, and will make sure the apples don't stick to your (very well buttered) wax paper.
In the spirit of feeding my family better, I've been cutting back on the couponing and cooking more.
This week:
-Roasted turkey tenderloins with stuffing, peas, and baked acorn squash. Apple Cranberry Crisp
-Fatteh with chickpeas and onions, yogurt garlic sauce, roasted eggplant, tabbouleh
-Turkey Pot Pie (homemade with biscuit topping), applesauce (homemade!)
-Leftovers
-Hawaiian Pizza
Next week:
-Eggplant noodle-less lasagne, garlic bread, salad
-Ham steaks with sweet potatoes and green beans
-Split Pea Soup with Carrots and beer bread
-Macaroni-less Mac and Cheese (using spaghetti squash) with broccoli
-Vegetable Pad Thai with Green Papaya salad
This week we've also processed more of the apples we picked making apple muffins, apple oatmeal cookies, applesauce, apple crisp and (today, hopefully) caramel apples with homemade caramel. I found a recipe that uses sweetened condensed milk as a base, which I'm hoping will work out better than other caramels I have tried :) We picked a bunch of 2-3 inch apples that were fully ripe, thinking they'd be the perfect apple-caramel ratio since most kids only eat the bites that touch the sweet stuff anyway :)
Oh Kitchen. I have such plans for you. Plans to turn you from yellow and blue into tuscan oranges and browns and blues...plans for a backsplash...plans to sew seat cushions for the chairs....
But let's be honest....you're not really a kitchen anymore.
It's CC Week 7, which our community takes off. We'll be on Week 7 work next week, but it'll be Week 8 of homeschooling. That means we review. I finally bought our giant white board and mounted it on the other side of the window-
We're doing fairly well on our memory work- we're erasing lines as we all know them perfectly. Riley struggles with generating the years for history sentences and getting the route memorization of other subjects in the correct order. Logan struggles with focusing when I'm testing his knowledge straight through. Savannah is a rockstar for a 3 year old. :)
I finally organized my Baker's Rack in a way that makes some form of sense as far as usage. If you ever come to my house and open the bottom cabinets, though, I will cut you. As my friend Gaby would say, I know Mexican Judo.
And since I was spending money today.....I also bought a magnetic white board for Riley's All About Spelling components. I am so happy I won't have to dig these out of bags anymore for every lesson!! Happy Day :)
Tonight we're having soup and French Orchard sandwiches (which I am totally stealing from a local sandwich shop!) They're nice white bread (no Wonder, please) with ham, brie, green apple, apricot jam, and some greens. Yum! I was giving my mom ideas and mentioned this one and then promptly decided I had to run to the store, too.
I love my children- but I know better than to run to the store before dinner. So embarassing when they're running around like crazy and I can't contain them because I didn't get a cart since "We're just getting ONE thing!"
Sigh. One day I'll be good at being a mom. Probably when I have great-great-great-grandchildren.
Caitie said I needed to have a list of acronyms since I'm throwing them around like they're going out of style.
Here's what I'm talking about
IEW- Institute for Excellence in Writing. We're using this. It's K-2. (Smart!) and included All About Spelling (Smarter!)
CC- Classical Conversations. We build out our curriculum around this. We also meet once a week with our local CC community.
Singapore- Singapore Math. Whooo Asians! We lovethis even though it's confusing to Riley when people have names like Wu-Tang. Logan is doing Earlybird Kindergarten A and Riley is doing 1B (because PWCS don't teach multiplication, division, or fractions in first grade). Riley will finish 1B by the 2nd week of October, though, and will move to 2A. Logan will finish Kindergarten A by December and move to Kindergarten B by January. We love the easy readers that go along with the Kindergarten lessons!
Oh my gosh! We've made it 6 weeks! I was worried about my sanity, but I am really enjoying homeschooling and feel like God is really working on my heart and my patience for the process. We're settling into a routine with our school that has allowed me to add in extra activities for each of the kids. This was a process, and kind of an explosive one, since Austin's chief concern is the kids getting "socialized" enough and my chief concern is me not having a nervous breakdown. He's been working pretty much non-stop for the last month and a half, including long nights (well past midnight) and weekends, so it's been all-mama-all-the-time. I know my military friends do this for months on end, but I didn't sign up for single parenting because I know my limits :)
Anyhow, as I'm becoming more confident with our schedule we've added in Football and Art and Scouts (for Riley), Ice Hockey (for Logan, who will start a kid's science class this week and is asking for art lessons also), and Gymnastics and Preschool (for Savannah Lynn). The picture below is one of Riley's pictures from art class. I've included the "before" the lesson picture, too. His art teacher is an awesome Christian lady and she does fantastic work. I know it's hard setting up a business in this economy, but I hope she succeeds because we love her!
This week we really enjoyed our lessons- I think we've finally got the hang of the memory work. Leigh Bortins says you have to "train to retain" and I think it's finally taking for everyone. One change that I made this week that finally made Latin click was that I added in the (real) sign language for the Bible Memory verses (John 1:1-7).
You wouldn't think that making something MORE complicated would make it easier- but this really did. Since our Latin words are all being learned with the intention of translating John 1:1-7 into Latin from English, learning the sign for each word has helped with cuing the kids, and for some reason, helped them realize the connection, even though I'd told it to them 100 times.
For our history this week, we've been working on the Louisiana Purchase. In addition to reading from our What Your Child Needs to Know books, we also used several websites, including this one which has an interactive trail map with excerpts of journals from Lewis and Clark and this one which has a kind of "follow the adventure" game. We also got to go meet up with some of our Classical Conversations friends for a history craft day. We made trail journals by coloring a picture of Lewis and Clark (actually Sacagewea and Charbonneau with Lewis and Clark in the background) and then bound several pieces of paper inside with string. Most of the kids were much younger than Riley, but he loves to draw and we added some difficulty to the activity together by having him copy pictures of actual discoveries Lewis and Clark made along their trek rather than just drawing random objects like the younger kids were doing. We found a great list on Wikipedia here.
Math is still skip counting for CC, we're on 11 and 12 and Riley is kicking butt at it, finally! In our Singapore math, Riley blew through intro fractions and intro time (he's done them before with me) and did a review chapter today, which he was great at. His approach to some word problems cracks me up because he sets them up like algebra problems __ +9 = 15 and then fills in the blank. Logan is still struggling with ordering numbers in sequences that don't start with 1. Counting should start with 1. It's just that he needs the natural order of things to be followed. We're getting there.
For English we're trucking along with our Insitute for Writing Excellence, Teach Your Child to Read, and All About Spelling. Riley has finally hit a point in his reading where he's excited to do it. Yesterday we ended a chapter of his current Magic Treehouse book in a particularly exciting place and he looked ahead at how many pages the next chapter was- it was 8- and trucked ahead anyway. Usually 8 pages would elicit a groan, but he was finally hitting a good stride and was too excited to see what happened to care about the length of the page. He also read a book to me about the growth of apples since we're going to pick apples on Friday after preschool. I couldn't let fall go by without some of my favorites. Also, Logan has some great, meticulous handwriting going. It's very exciting since Riley writes like a doctor.
Science this week was the digestive system. We enjoyed a Bill Nye as well as using this website. Logan drew a most excellent picture of the digestive system, including a butt. I am so scared to leave him alone in his class tomorrow for fear he'll end his memory work "small intestine, large intestine AND THEN YOU POOP!!!!!!!"
Sigh. He can't be the only one with a mastery of that component of digestion, right?
Geography was more states and capitals. We're to the middle of the US now, which is exciting!
I think that's it...oh, we finally got our history timeline cards. For next week I'm going to get some banner paper and make a giant timeline on our wall for us to add events to as we've memorized them in order. They've got the first 16 down cold, and the 8 we're on this week. The middle, well, it's a little fuzzy- they can do it with the pictures on the cards, but not just from memory. I blame that on my inability to get the flashcards in until now.
I also splurged and purchased the rest of History of the World on CD. We still love it and the kids love finding the week's history (and then the timeline history) on the CDs during lunch. They're retaining the information and I get to STOP TALKING for half an hour....well worth every penny.
Oh look, I have a plan. And I'm writing again, good for me!
So, here's an overview of the last two days:
Monday (History!)
Memory work, Reading, Math (Logan- order of numbers and generating written numbers from memory, Riley- finishing multiplication), History (listen to Story of the World, Coloring projects on the great seal and the flag), Writing (Katie Marie joined us!), Football
Tuesday (Science!)
Memory work, Reading, Math (Logan- popsicle stick number line, copying numbers, Riley, intro to division), Science (Smell/Taste experiment- which foods can we smell and identify, which can we taste (hold your nose!) and identify when we're blindfolded), Impromptu science because I taught them about the glass armonica.....every wine glass in my house is full of varying levels of water. Riley's recording water levels he's tried on a stick. It's cute.
