Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Two for Tuesday: Egg and Cheese Bake

Shhhhh.....I have a secret to share.

This was a recipe I originally found on allrecipes as Easy Quiche. But, the Jedi says he hates quiche, and would never have touched dinner if I had said I made a quiche. Voila, the birth of...

Egg and Cheese Bake

Ingredients

  • 2 cups milk
  • 4 eggs
  • 3/4 cup biscuit baking mix (ie--Bisquick)
  • 1/4 cup butter, softened
  • 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
  • 1/2 cup cooked  and crumbled bacon
  • 1 to 1 1/2 cup shredded cheese mix (the kind I used is called "Fiesta Blend" at Walmart)
Directions
  1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Lightly grease a deep dish pie pan.
  2. In a large bowl, beat together milk, eggs, baking mix, butter and parmesan cheese. Batter will be lumpy.
  3. Pour into prepared dish. Dump a ton of cheese on top. Dump all the crumbled bacon pieces you have on top of that. (I think I put about 1/2 a cup of bacon on mine, but I would have added more if I had it.)
  4. Bake in preheated oven for 50 minutes, until eggs are set and top is golden brown.
  5. Allow to cool for five to ten minutes before slicing and serving. And of course, don't mention that the original recipe was called a quiche.
 My family loved it. It was easy, filling, and went great with the homemade wheat bread and homemade apple butter that Sweetling had made that afternoon for her cooking project. I fried up some potatoes as a side dish as well. (The secret is to microwave them first, then let them cool before cutting them in chunks and frying them. That is how I finally defeated my whole potato-curse thing.)

The other thing I made last week that was TO DIE FOR was a flourless chocolate cake. You can find the original recipe here on Gluten-Free-Easily. Do not change a thing. Follow her instructions to the letter because really, why would anyone mess with PERFECTION?

Monday, August 29, 2011

Food Pantry List

Here's the challenge.
  • The church food pantry would like to provide a week's worth of groceries/meals to a family whenever needed.
  • The groceries should include everything the family needs for meals, with few, if any, other ingredients needed.
  • The pantry cannot give out perishable foods, both because we don't have any refrigeration/freezer units and because we never know when a family will need the pantry's services, so we can't keep foods with a limited shelf life on stock. (Sometimes we'll supply groceries to three families in one week, and sometimes two weeks will go by before the pantry is needed.)
  • In good conscience, I can't give out food which I wouldn't be comfortable feeding my own family, which means I'm trying to limit the amount of processed food we give out and I'm trying to ensure the meals are balanced and healthy.
Got that? Five to seven meals, plus some breakfast, lunch, and snack items. No extra ingredients. No perishables or short shelf life foods. Healthy, balanced, limited processed foods.

Yeah, it strikes me as quite a puzzler too.


Oh, and I don't want the recipes to be too involved, too time consuming, or too labor intensive. Or have too many special ingredients, since I'm depending on donations to put the bags together.


Fun mix, all of that.


That being said, I am going to keep two of the staple meals in that I'm using right now.
  1. Tuna Helper. Easy, quick, and the congregation is great at keeping me supplied with the tuna and the tuna helper boxes.
  2. Pasta and spaghetti sauce. Same reasons.
Which means I need three to five other meals.

Rice and Beans. Simple. Few ingredients. Few processed foods. 

Ramen Casserole. The kids and I eat a variation of this at least once a week at lunch time.

Tomato Macaroni and Cheese. Right now I'm giving out boxes of mac n cheese, but I feel bad about this since the box mix calls for milk and butter to complete. Here's a nice alternative to that.

I'm considering the Turkey and Dressing, but am not completely sold on it yet.

What I'd really love are a few other ideas. Anyone have a good suggestion?

(We do also put several cans of soup in each bag for a couple lunches.)

((And somehow, this sat unpublished for two months. Why or how, I don't know.))

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Two for Tuesday: Lemon Bars

Let me start off by saying that I don't like lemon bars. I don't like key lime pie either. Lemon/lime desserts just don't do it for me.

And yet, these...THESE....are DELICIOUS.

Sweelting made these. She got the recipe from Teens Cook Dessert, which she found and checked out from the library a couple of weeks ago.

Have I mentioned the deliciousness factor? Cause they were. Delicious.

Lemon Bars

Ingredients

CRUST
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1/2 cup powdered sugar
  • 1 cup butter
FILING
  • 4 eggs
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 1/4 cup flour
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1/4 cup lemon juice
GLAZE
  • 1 cup powdered sugar
  • 3 Tbs lemon juice
 Directions


To prepare the crust:
  1. Preheat oven to 350.
  2. Mix flour, powdered sugar, and butter in large bowl with electric mixer on low speed for 2 minutes, or until crumbly.
  3. Press mixture into bottom of an ungreased 9x13 pan and bake for 20 to 30 minutes, or until lightly brown.
  4. Remove from oven, but leave oven at 350.
To prepare the filling:

  1. Stir eggs, sugar, flour, and baking powder in a medium bowl until completely combined.
  2. Add lemon juice and stir until completely smooth.
  3. Pour the mixture over the warm crust and bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until the top is golden brown.
  4. Let cool completely.
To prepare the glaze:

  1. Stir powdered sugar and lemon juice in a small bowl until smooth.
  2. Smooth the glaze over the bars, let set for 30 minutes.
  3. Cut into 2 inch squares. 
 And, because some crazy woman decided to call this "TWO" for Tuesday....I'm looking for a recipe that I'm thinking of trying. Now, for the past couple weeks, I've posted things that I never thought I'd like, until I tried them. Here's a recipe with lots of great things that I love, in a combination that perhaps should never, ever, have been brought together. And yet, I'm considering it.

Buffalo Chicken Lasagna.

Do I dare?

Monday, August 22, 2011

Things I Need to Do

I don't know why I think making a list will make me more likely or motivated to get any of these done. Maybe making a list will entice some magic list fairy into coming over and magically accomplishing one of the items. Sort of like The Elves and the Shoemaker, without all the hard work the shoemaker puts in every day.

Anyway
  • Revamp/ revise what goes in our food pantry bags. Search for some internet recipes that are still cheap and easy, use only non-perishable foods, and avoid unhealthy or overprocessed food. See why my to do list never gets done?
  • Develop a sign up sheet for the list of items the food pantry will need each month so that families can sign up to commit to bringing a few specific items each month
  • Put together a weekly lunch menu for the kids and me. Again, quick, cheap, and healthy are the must haves.
  • Clean out and organize the 6 big plastic drawers and three skinny plastic drawers of school and craft supplies downstairs.
  • Put together a 'price book' for grocery shopping.
  • Find some online directions for bridge building for Toa's history project this week.
  • Schedule an outing with Aunt Smurf. Preferably one that involves a penguin parade at Newport on the Levee.
  • Trim and hang some 'post cards from America' calendar pages as a border for our 'art door' in the hallway.
  • Schedule some outings for the new LITE Lab in the Cincinnati Museum Center.
On a side note, someone got chocolate smudges on the pages of Sweetling's Geometry book today. I'm blaming the accident on the indescribable joys of indirect proofs. 

Friday, August 19, 2011

Weekly Wrap Up.....School With a Side of Summer

Once again, the weather was beautiful outside, while, theoretically, we were supposed to be doing school inside.

Here's how our Monday went....



Now, before anyone is tempted to call the school board, we got all our school done that morning before we took off to play hookey ;)

That evening, we had hamburgers for dinner, and ate on TV trays in the living room so that we could watch the Civil War episode of America: The Story of Us.

Let me tell you, warn you, that Civil War battlefields do NOT make for good dinner time viewing. Even if you fast forward through the "field amputation" segment.

And I would say that maybe the loss of good dinner ambiance would be worth it, if both children had come away with a good understanding of the Civil War in a nutshell. But, at the end of the hour long video, Toa asked, "So.....who won?"

Other than that small disappointment, I've continued to love all of our curriculum. Here are some of our highlights from this week:

History:

Toa and I loved this awesome book, A Street through Time. We sat on the couch together reading the book and searching the large, two page illustrations for examples of the various technologies and changes. It was an activity unto itself.




Science:


Sweetling finished her cool car this week. She had it tied off to a cup which was weighted down by her Bible and the little guy was just zooming around in circles on our kitchen floor. I took a video of that, but I'm not techno-cool enough to be able to share that.










Having conquered that project, she went on to begin building a balsa wood glider with a wingspan of 33 inches. She is still searching for the perfect name for it.





Toa's science lesson this week was on gravity. He got to use the car he built last week to experiment with different steepnesses of inclined planes. I have no pictures of this process, because I got kicked out of the room while it was going on. There are some things, apparently, which are just between a boy and his car.

Health and Safety

Every year, the Jedi's company sponsors a safety poster contest for children of employees. (This is cool for me, because participating often covers my state requirement for safety.) This year, the theme is safety in the workplace (including overall health and wellness.) Here is Sweelting's finished poster. Because I'm not so good with the camera, the lettering is difficult to read in the photo. It reads, "Protect Your Hearing: 85 db and over is the danger zone!"

Toa's poster is on Healthy Eating habits, but isn't quite finished yet. I'll post up a picture of it next week.

Reading:

Yay! I finally got my copy of The Book Whisperer from the library! I've been on the hold wait list since early July. I only have read the first chapter, but I'm really looking forward to gleaning some insight from it. Toa considers himself too old for children's picture books, but he isn't quite ready for the traditional chapter books either. And many of the "I can read" chapter type books are just not that engaging or just not that hot when it comes to children's literature. I'm sure there are a few exceptions to that, but I'm having a bear of a time finding them!




Meanwhile, we've started keeping a literature log. And when I say "we" I mean, I'm making him write a couple of sentences about a book when he finishes it. I know, the cold depths of cruelty I am capable of is just astounding. This week, we finished Bunnicula and Friends: Hot Fudge. Last week we read Sam and the Firefly. Toa reads almost every day. He loves our reading time together, cause we sprawl out on the waterbed while he reads aloud to me. We pause and talk about the book and make predictions and discuss the character's choices. But, the reason Toa loves reading is that reading is always followed by a short tickle time.

James and the Giant Peach is our current read aloud. I love James and the Giant Peach. I read aloud to Toa in the evenings. Sadly, I don't get to it every evening, because our evenings are pretty crowded, but we do get to it fairly regularly, and he really enjoys the stories we read together.

Writing:

Sweetling finished her first chapter in Writing the Breakout Novel. I, of course, am not allowed to peak in her writing idea notebook, but I was pleased to see that she had it out while she was reading. Now I just have to pinch the Breakout Novel text back from her so that I can read chapter two :) There are twelve chapters in the book, so I think we can finish the text before NaNo, and then begin the workbook in January. This time when I say "we" I mean "me too!!!"

Cooking:

Friday afternoon is our time for cooking projects. Toa made Cuppa Cuppa Cake.

Sweetling made the world's best lemon bars from scratch and then went on to make delicious fish tacos for dinner.

Finally, having started our week out with an awesome outdoor fun time, we were blessed to be able to finish it off with a fantastic pool party. Our youth pastor's family rented out a local community pool for two hours on Friday night as a giant combined birthday party for him and his two boys. It was a great ending to a great week!


Check out what others are doing on Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Two for Tuesday: Fluffy Pancakes

Yes, it's Thursday. Why do you even act surprised about these things anymore?

Even though it's Thursday, I'm sharing my favorite pancake recipe of all time.

Fluffy Pancakes

Originally, I found this recipe on allrecipes.com. I haven't changed anything from the original except that I double the recipe when I make it for the family. We have breakfast for dinner about once a week. We don't always have pancakes and eggs, but we often do.

Here is the recipe, with the amounts already doubled. (So, don't double them again and come whining to me about it making a crap-ton of pancakes.)

Ingredients

  • 1 - 1/2 cups milk
  • 1/4 cup white vinegar
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1/4 cup white sugar
  • 2 tsps baking powder
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/4 cup butter, melted
  • cooking spray for pan
Directions

  1. Measure milk and vinegar into a large bowl. Set kitchen timer for five minutes and allow milk to "sour."
  2. Meanwhile, measure dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt) into another bowl. Use a wire whisk to blend completely.
  3. Melt your butter if you are still waiting for the 5 minute timer to beep.
  4. When the milk has soured for 5 minutes, whisk two eggs and the melted butter into the milk.
  5. Add your dry ingredients to the milk mixture and whisk until all lumps are gone.
  6. Heat your skillet over medium heat and spray with non-stick spray. Spoon 1/4 cup batter into the skillet to form pancakes. Cook until bubbles begin to form on surface. Flip and cook until browned.
This recipe doesn't lie when it calls the pancakes "fluffy". These pancakes are absolutely the best. Thick, rich, light...and yes, they CAN be all three of those things at once. I've been making these for two years now as my go to pancake recipe.

I've considered stirring in some other ingredients. Blueberries or chocolate chips or bananas or sliced strawberries. I haven't gotten around to try that yet. (Mostly because I'm usually pressed for time and not feeling very creative on pancake night. There's a reason I'm making quick and easy pancakes for dinner. Stir-ins sort of defeat that whole quick and easy goal.)  If someone else does try some stir-ins, let me know how it goes.

And the two part of my Tuesday, Cuppa Cuppa Cake from the Pioneer Woman is going with me to a friend's house on Saturday. After I pick the gross rubber grapes out of the can of fruit cocktail of course.


Monday, August 15, 2011

Not-Back-to-School: Meet and Greet

Sweetling

 
  • Favorite Subject: Science
  • Favorite Thing about Homeschooling: "the freedom that's involved with it"
  • Least Favorite Thing about Homeschooling: "It's also kind of distracting doing school in my house because there are so many other things in the house that I enjoy doing."
  • Most Anticipating This Year:   learning Spanish

Toa of Boy


    • Favorite Subject: Math
    • Favorite Thing about Homeschooling: "I don't have sit for 800 hours and get sleepy and stuff."
    • Least Favorite about Homeschooling:  Spelling
    • Most Anticipating This Year: "the end of school"
    Mrs. Random


    • Favorite Subject: Art
    • Favorite Thing about Homeschooling: "marching to the beat of our own drum"
    • Least Favorite about Homeschooling: "teaching higher level math"
    • Most Anticipating This Year: "cooking with Sweetling"
      Not Back to School Blog Hop

      Saturday, August 13, 2011

      Weekly Wrap Up.....First Week!

      Not our First Week EVER, of course. Just our First Week for this school year.


      We don't have any First Day of School Traditions. I feel like a heel admitting that. I do try to do a special dinner on the evening of our first day of school, this year it was homemade pizza, but no super cool breakfast or first day of school parties that we do every year.

      But this year, we lucked out. Our good friends were having a double birthday party for the two boys of the family in the afternoon our our first day of school. So, on our first day, we did school from 8 am to 11am and had a happy, productive morning. Then, at 11am, we made some cards for the birthday boys, ate an early lunch, went shopping for two presents, and was at the party at 1 pm. The kids spent the afternoon outside with good friends tossing water balloons, going down slip n slides, playing in a sprinkler, tossing corn hole bags, eating iced watermelon, breaking a pinata, and having cake and ice cream. Best Back to School Activity EVER.  (The only downside, in the rush to get card made, lunch eaten, and out the door in time to get presents and get to the party, I didn't think to grab my camera. This is sad, because some outdoor pictures by the lovely beds of flowers that bordered the back lawn at the birthday locations would have made terrific First Day of School photos.)

      What I do have pictures of is our art project for the week.

      This year, we're doing a "badge/ribbon" earning system for school work. Here, you can read about all the kinds of "badges" the kids can win if you want to know more about this project. For the badges themselves, I'm going to grab small clip art images, make some pages in MS Publisher with the little image and the badge title, and print the page onto iron-on transfer paper. Then I'll cut out the images with their labels and iron them on to wide white satin ribbon. Behold, quick and easy 'awards' for school projects. I, of course, don't have any pictures of any finished ribbon badges, cause they aren't anywhere near finished. That's tomorrow's project.

      But, as part of this whole concept, I picked up cheap 17x23 cork bulletin boards for each child. This week they painted the bulletin boards as their art project for the week.

      Toa went with an abstract using analogous colors. He is going to sort his badges by type, lining them up in rows and pinning them to his bulletin board.
      Sweetling decided to subdivide her bulletin board into ten sections, one for each month we will be doing school. She will pin her ribbons up and organize them by month she received them.

      But the biggest news from the first week, is that I am really, really pleased with our curriculum and textbook choices.

      My biggest worry was in my purchase for Toa of Boy of the Language Arts Island Series by Michael Clay Thompson and Royal Fireworks Press. But so far, we love the books. We dug into Grammar Island this week, spending a few minutes on the couch each day reading about what parts of speech are and about nouns and pronouns. Sounds dry, doesn't it? SURPRISINGLY NOT. Thompson did a phenomenal job making this very pleasant to read and to look at and easy to understand.

      Our reading introduced the difference between subject and object pronouns. I knew this was the only concept that wasn't going to stick in Toa's mind from just the reading alone. Thompson gently suggested memorizing the lists. That sounded like drudgery. Instead, I invited Toa outside to play a game. In preparation, I made fifteen small tiles out of cardstock, printing one pronoun on each tile. (You and it were on each list twice, so they wound up with four tiles between them.) Before we went outside, I shuffled the tiles and let Toa sort them with the book open to the page with the lists of subject and object pronouns. He placed the subject pronouns in a pile at the top the book and the object pronouns in a pile at the bottom of the book. Then he sorted them again with the book closed, and remembered them all correctly. Then we went outside.

      I asked Toa to draw three large circles on the driveway. Then I labeled the circles, subject, object, and either. I drew a  nearby line for Toa to stand behind. The game was, Toa pulled a pronoun tile from my hand. He stood on the line and tried to throw a rock into the appropriate circle. If the rock landed in the correct circle, it stayed there and would count as a point for Toa. If it bounced out of the circle, it counted as a point for me. If he threw it, or it landed, in an incorrect circle, I knocked it and another rock outside the circle to be two points for me.

      Toa loved the game. We played it three times, at his request. If later on, we ever need to review subject/object pronouns, it will be super simple to do again.

      Another huge curriculum win was our science curriculum from Exploration Education. You know its a huge win, when a child is CHEERING when it is time to do science.

      This week, Toa's lesson was "What is Science". He will be studying a unit on Forces, Machines, Motion and Energy. The first step of that unit is to build a small car, (all materials and instructions are included in the curriculum kit.) Toa is rightfully proud and pleased with his car.

      Sweetling is beginning a unit on Electricity and Magnetism (I think, Sweetling is doing her science curriculum independently.) She has the Advanced Intermediate curriculum level from Education Exploration. So her car building was different and more involved.
      Note the glue gun on the table? Toa and I came upstairs from building his car at his old school desk downstairs. Toa said, "I smell burning feet." I didn't know burning feet smelled like a really old hot glue gun, nor did I know that Toa was an expert on such matters.

      We are doing a home-brewed history curriculum this year, another nail-biter decision for me. But, after the first week, I can breathe a sigh of relief for that one too. We're planning on focusing most of our studies on the events of the 20th century. But, I felt like we needed at least a couple of weeks of some further background.

      Every year on the Fourth of July we read and discuss the Declaration of Independence together. From just general conversation through the years, I felt like Toa had at least a basic understanding of colonial America and the American Revolution. And, during our three week road trip out west this spring, we hit a lot of Oregon Trail and Westward Expansion type museums, so I felt like that period of American History had also been reasonably covered. (Sweetling had already spent an entire year studying American History from exploration/colonialism to 1856, so it was primarily Toa I was concerned about patching in any gaps.)

      After some discussion with the kids, we decided NOT to do an in-depth study of the Civil War or Reconstruction. The Jedi is not in favor of this decision, and since he is almost always right, I'm sure I'll regret this decision later. I'm so sure of it, that I'm considering searching for a four week unit study on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Anyone have one they can recommend?

      For now, we are watching America, the Story of US, specifically the episodes on Division and Civil War to quickly patch in this important chapter of our history.

      We're also spending time daily reading from the abundance of library books crammed on our shelf.

      Finally, we completed a lesson on how to create historic timelines. I'm planning on writing a separate post for a history link up about the steps for making your own timeline. But for now, it was a great introduction to the process, and a technique I'm hoping to use throughout the year. I let each child pick their own topic. Toa picked the year some of the States we drove through on our trip West had joined the Union. (That's a terribly constructed sentence. I have a gold star sticker for anyone who can fix it.)
      Sweetling chose to research and create a timeline for important events and developments for the deaf and hearing impaired. I haven't yet seen a finished product, which means this might require some poking tomorrow.


      In ultimate irony, the weather outside has been absolutely beautiful this week. Normally, we start school in late summer when the weather is too hot and crappy to have any fun outside. Since we are stuck inside all day, we just get busy with school. Then we take a fall break when the weather's better. Well, all summer, the outdoor temperatures have been hovering around "stupid hot". It's just been unbearable. We should have started school in July, but I wasn't ready. Finally, everything is in place and we start school, and the thermometer drops nearly twenty degrees outside and we are blessed with a beautiful, beautiful week. And we're doing school.

      In response, we scrapped our afternoon of history on Thursday and headed to the park instead. Sweetling took inline skates, her mp3 player, and earbuds and just skated away.



      Toa and I tried to sneak up on Sweetling to take some candid shots of her. See what ninjas we are?
      And then Toa had to try to hide from the camera.
      Failing that, to run from it.


      After Mommy was happy with some camera shots, Toa and I headed to the playground while Sweetling skated the path around the edge of the playground area. Toa found a boy from church to play with, and I sat and read the first chapter of Writing the Breakout Novel, part of Sweetling's language arts choices for the year. I took a little notebook with me and jotted down some ideas for my own writing projects.

      Our week wrapped up with some cooking projects on Friday afternoon. Sweetling made whole wheat bread completely by hand and she made sweet carrot jam to go with it. The wheat bread needed a total of 4 to 4 and a half hours to complete. She made the carrot jam during its first rise of its hour and a half. The jam needed to be cooked and stirred for an hour. She stood at the stove reading a book and stirring her jam.

      Toa made some more of the delicious mango-avocado salsa which we had tried earlier in the summer. This time, we used the food processor to finely dice our pepper, onion, and mango. He also helped make twice-baked potatoes for dinner. Grilled chicken breasts completed our meal, and what a hearty one it was!

      Perfect first week of school!

      Check out what others are doing on Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers!

      Wednesday, August 10, 2011

      Wordless Wednesday: Indoor Basketball


      I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends

      Day Three of School.

      Lesson Two of Geometry.

      I was stumped on problem number two. This does not bode well for the school year.

      Sweetling, fortunately, got through all twenty problems without any difficulties.

      The lesson is "Evaluating the Validity of Statements and Arguments"

      In the student exercise, we were to apply the concepts taught in the lesson (changing "all" statements to "if...then" statements, using the Law of Detachment and the Law of Syllogism, and finding counterexamples), to determine whether a series of 20 statements were true or false.

      I resorted to just marking the statements as true if I liked them. I got 16 out of the 20 correct. Sweetling actually used logic and did much better, only missing one where she had misread the greater than/less than sign.

      However, I am turning for help to my good friends for one of the statements. Sweetling marked it, correctly, as false, but I want to know why, using the basic rules of logic, this statement is false.

      The statement is: "There is a unicorn on Saturn who loves pepperoni pizza."

      We encountered this past spring, doing some sample pages of the text to determine if this was the text we wanted to purchase for our upcoming school year. Sweetling marked the statement as 'false' both times we have encountered it.

      Because, she says, hello? Unicorns?

      I have two cute webkinz (which Sweetling brought to me to console me at the end of the lesson) which say, yes, thank you very much, unicorns.

      Our textbook agrees with Sweetling that the statement, is in fact, false.

      I fail to see anything inherent in the statement that would necessarily mandate that it is false.

      Could someone else please explain to me, in simple easy to understand terms, how that statement is logically false?


      Monday, August 08, 2011

      Not-Back-to-School: Our "Room"

      Through the years, our school room has literally moved all over the house. 

      I started at the kitchen table when I was homeschooling my youngest brother. My teenage sister was living (and unschooling herself) in our spare room, and our own daughter was two. Our foster daughter joined the family at the age of 15, and she joined us at the kitchen table for some of her lessons, and worked at the desk in her room for others. (Her favorite algebra lesson was one done with permanent markers on the outside of partially full brown paper grocery sacks that were all over the kitchen table. It had been one of those days. I had managed to get the groceries in and the perishables put away. It was getting close to dinner time and I was bound and determined that we were indeed going to get algebra finished, but the table was still covered with the bags of groceries, so.....)

      I got sick of trying to juggle schoolwork and cooking and everything else at the ONLY table in our house. When my sister moved out and moved into the dorm room at college, I converted her room to a school room. I loved that solution. That little room stayed the school room for most of my daughter's schooling. But, when my mother needed to move in with us for health reasons, we had to relocate.

      I spent two or three years trying to arrange one side of our basement recroom into a school room I was happy with. And I never really succeeded. Oh sure, it looked like a school room, but I was never motivated to go down into the basement to do school.

      We spent all of last year with our materials and books downstairs, while we hung out on the couch and did school at the table upstairs.

      I've thrown in the towel this year and moved everything up to our small living room. But, I'm pretty much a clutter magnet. I didn't want the living room shelves crammed full of books and looking all cluttered and crappy. 

       I had visions of beautiful organizer boxes, color coordinated for each of my two children, all lined up looking neat and pretty. Those visions lasted until I started hitting stores and pricing those lovely looking boxes. At $6-$12 a box, there was no way I could the ELEVEN boxes I wanted to get to sort our school books into.

      But check out what I managed instead. I'm so thrilled with this!

      This is a little hand me down shelf tucked under our living room window. See how nice the containers are? Want to know how much they cost me?

      $5.24 TOTAL, plus tax and a little time and effort.


      I used a few cheap plastic magazine organizers which I had out in the garage, and I made a few other boxes, using the cardboard boxes our curriculum had shipped in.

      I bought a can of brown spray paint ($3.24) and headed out to the driveway to spray everything down to make it uniform.

      Then I covered the front, the top, and an inch or two of the sides of each box with shelf paper from the dollar store. (Two rolls at $1 each.)

      Last, I made labels using some paper and cardstock I had leftover from my scrapbooking days.

      The other thing I'm really pleased about is that when it time to do math with my boy, we just grab the Math box off the shelf and carry it to the kitchen table. Then it goes back to the shelf when we grab the next box. No more stacks of books everywhere. No more twenty minute trips downstairs "to get a pencil".

      Two more boxes like this wound up on the bottom of our video shelf. We also had to take over a three shelf case at the top of the entry stairs. Our basic school supplies went into plastic organizers on the top shelf, our rotating library books are on the middle shelf (still looking a little cluttered, but c'est la vie.) And the bottom shelf is our history resource books and portfolio binders.
      The large clear plastic boxes on the bottom of our supply shelf are a great find I made last year. I got a flat tackle organizer from the fishing department. It comes with small plastic dividers that can be used to create a variety of compartments of different sizes and shapes. Ours holds crayons, colored pencils, markers, and a few other things, like glue sticks and scissors.
      So, while we don't have a "school room" this year, I am happy with how we have our books and supplies organized!

      Tour where and how others do school on The Heart of the Matter.




      Friday, August 05, 2011

      Ferb, I know what we're going to do today....

      Dear sweet, zombie-loving cousin' Charlie is absolutely to blame for derailing my morning.

      She posted a link on Facebook to a site called Pinterest. It's highly addictive. It should never have been allowed anywhere near me. Putting that up on Facebook was nearly akin to leaving a loaded gun laying around the house where young children live. I should counter by sending Charlie a free copy of plants vs zombies or something. That's the loving thing to do, right?

      What is this evil she fostered upon my day? A HUGE online collection of craft and gift ideas, that's what.

      Valentine's Day for Toa.












      And Sweetling too











      Now I need to make a separate, never to be seen by others, post for Christmas gift ideas.

      Thursday, August 04, 2011

      Weekly Wrap-Up.....End of Summer Theme Song

      There's 104 days of summer vacation
      And school comes along just to end it
      So the annual problem for little family
      Is finding a good way to spend it

      Like maybe...
      Adopting a Torchet,
      Or making a mummy,
      Or riding up the Gateway Arch

      Sewing a Japenese sailor fuku (Haruhi, no! )
      Or petting a two foot shark!

      And also...
      Making some salsa
      Without the tomatoes,
      Or killing a seqoia tree

      Spelling our names on the Salt Flats of Utah
      And capturing Mommy's queen! (thrice)

      Baking yummy "Pake"
      Breaking a safety net
      Or making some patches for school! (It's not done yet!)

      Eating some barbeque
      Losing at Pandemic
      Or watching a Fire Lord duel! (Go Aang!)

      Escape a buffalo
      Jump off a pontoon boat
      Or climb upon a mountain side! (They were "foothills"!)

      Buy a propeller cap
      Become a teenager
      Or drive through the Great Divide! (With Christmas carols!)

      As you can see
      There's a whole lot of stuff we did
      Before the start of school. (Where's my pencil?)

      So to sum it up our summer break
      Was really, really cool.
      Yeah to sum it up our summer break
      Was really, really cool!

      (Dad! Mom is making us plagiarize a theme song! )

      Hope your summer was a fun as ours. To see what other homeschoolers are doing, check out Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. 

      Tuesday, August 02, 2011

      Two for Tuesday: Mango Salsa

      I don't like mangoes. I don't like avocados.

      This recipe has both of those things as its two main ingredients. Toa of Boy, who is allergic to tomatoes, wanted to try to find a salsa recipe which he could eat. Toa of Boy loves both mangoes and avocados, so we thought we'd give this a try. I just planned on not eating any myself.

      This stuff was delicious. Capital DEEEEEE-li-cious. Yum yum yum.

      Here it is.

      Avocado-Mango Salsa

      Ingredients

      • 1 mango, peeled, pitted, and finely diced
      • 1 red bell pepper, seeded and finely diced
      • 1/2 cup finely chopped red onion
      • 1 tablespoon white sugar
      • 1 tablespoon olive oil
      • 1 tablespoon lime juice
      • 1 avocado-peeled, pitted, and diced
      Directions
      1. Toss together mango, bell pepper, onion, sugar, olive oil, and lime juice.
      2. Gently fold in avocado.
      3. Season with salt. 
      That's IT!!!

      This was delicious with chips. This was delicious served over a grilled chicken breast. This was just delicious, delicious, delicious stuff.

      And, to keep my "Two for Tuesday" status, here's the next recipe I'm drooling over, but haven't made yet. They're called Knock-You Naked Brownies. I mean, how can you go wrong with a name like that?

      Next week, I'm planning on posting with an easy, melt in your mouth, beef fajita recipe, but I might change my mind, so no promises!