Monday
Fried Chicken, baked potatoes, green bean casserole. I hope I can equal my mom's reputation for the chicken. Good advice here if your mom is not available.
Tuesday
Chili for crock, cornbread
Wednesday
Herb-crusted Pork Chops , Walnut-Sage Potatoes au Gratin , (test-driving for Thanskgiving), steamed broccoli
Thursday
Orange Chicken in Crockpot (or "crocked" as AMCD coined), rice, stir-fried asparagus
Friday
Mac'n'Cheese "crocked" , green salad
Doing this cuz the family LOVES Dad's "mac-cheese" as we call it , again thanks to AMCD. Wish me luck though after reading all the comments posted to CrockPot's site.(eyeroll)
Saturday and Sunday: no plan. There are leftovers or DadR and Tai can cook. They both love to. To be frank, I love to do almost anything else.
Nov 14, 2009
Cooking Again
I've been blessed abundantly for the last two years with DaddyRobin's willingness (even eagerness) to make dinner virtually every night. In fact I had practically forgotten how to cook! He can grill, he can stir-fry, he can put together interesting ingredients and all without a recipe.
He had been laid-off in the spring which allowed him to be home all day and do odd jobs, cut grass, help with MeiWei, and most importantly COOK. But when that ended last week (and we are singing God's praises that it has, don't get me wrong! :-)), I confess I was in tears at the thought of homeschooling all day and being responsible for dinner every night along with other evening "taxi jobs".
I'm that spoiled. How embarrassing.
I always chastise myself about this, how "other mothers", particularly those homeschooling ones that have five kids under 10 and one on the way, who garden organically and bake all their own bread--whole grain--do it. Okay, my excuse can be GAD (general anxiety disorder), but then that kind of thinking only adds to my anxieties!
Well, sweet, supportive hubbie talked me through it and my fears began to subside as he assured me that frozen entrees by Stouffer's were OK.
Then I found some blogs other homeschoolers were using:
I'm an Organized Junkie and A Year of Slow Cooking . "Junkie" encourages weekly menu planning. So that's what I've done for a record two weeks in a row.
This week I've even added home delivery from Giant Food's Peapod program. I'm justifying the $7.95 delivery fee as the time-value of money saved for not driving there and back, spending on spontaneous purchases, and exhausting AMCD and me at the end of a school day. AND they'll give me free delivery on my next order over $100.
I'll keep you posted. Delivery is Monday morning!
He had been laid-off in the spring which allowed him to be home all day and do odd jobs, cut grass, help with MeiWei, and most importantly COOK. But when that ended last week (and we are singing God's praises that it has, don't get me wrong! :-)), I confess I was in tears at the thought of homeschooling all day and being responsible for dinner every night along with other evening "taxi jobs".
I'm that spoiled. How embarrassing.
I always chastise myself about this, how "other mothers", particularly those homeschooling ones that have five kids under 10 and one on the way, who garden organically and bake all their own bread--whole grain--do it. Okay, my excuse can be GAD (general anxiety disorder), but then that kind of thinking only adds to my anxieties!
Well, sweet, supportive hubbie talked me through it and my fears began to subside as he assured me that frozen entrees by Stouffer's were OK.
Then I found some blogs other homeschoolers were using:
I'm an Organized Junkie and A Year of Slow Cooking . "Junkie" encourages weekly menu planning. So that's what I've done for a record two weeks in a row.
This week I've even added home delivery from Giant Food's Peapod program. I'm justifying the $7.95 delivery fee as the time-value of money saved for not driving there and back, spending on spontaneous purchases, and exhausting AMCD and me at the end of a school day. AND they'll give me free delivery on my next order over $100.
I'll keep you posted. Delivery is Monday morning!
Nov 10, 2009
Nature Notes
We had three great spottings today in the wild. On our daily walk, we were surprised to hear--in broad daylight--an owl calling from far off. It turned out to be a Barred Owl . You can hear it at: Barred Owl - Whatbird.com
Then, while we didn't actually SEE it, we must have startled some small rodent or shrew scuttling under the fallen leaves right next to the road we walk on. It had a raspy squeak of an alarm that it sounded many times. We hoped it would show itself, and finally we started poking around. Within seconds however we saw movement 10 or more feet away. It hadn't taken any time for it to be outta here!
It was an especially well-timed event as we have been reading about the Rodent family for many weeks now using Thornton Burgess' Animal Book for Children. Just today we had read about shrews, and came to know that in point of fact, neither shrews nor moles are rodents! They are in their own group, the Family Insectivora, or "insect-eaters." Now that I think of it, they don't have gnawing teeth, the hallmark of Rodentia. Learn more about the Northern Short-tailed Shrew.
Then towards evening, Father Robin, who was on his way to the mailbox, almost stepped on a little garter snake. He called out to me, but it wriggled away just before I got to it.
As I was planning to lead a Bible study of God's creation at our Pioneer Girl meeting that night, I thought having the little snake available would have been the icing on all the natural materials that I had collected for observation. I could just hear the girls scream!! :D More on Garter snakes
Even on the WAY to the meeting, our luck continued as I warned myself that, with Mother Nature hitting us from all sides today, that I better turn on my high beams to avoid really being hit--by a deer! No sooner was the switch flicked than a large bird of prey--owl or hawk--swooped across the road right in front of my car!
Before leaving, I did capture a possible kind of stink bug (in the kitchen) so we would have something from the Kingdom Animalia to observe. The girls actually fell quite in love with the ugly little thing. It was long and thin with large, heavily jointed legs, brownish gray in color all over. It moves slowly and deliberately and its friends like to hang near my windows (where they get caught in spider webs!) The odor it emitted wasn't even unpleasant. It did not have the standard shield shape, so it may have been some other kind of beetle. We had a grand releasing at the end of the meeting.
I think the girls got the message: God's world is very cool when you stop and take a look.
Nov 9, 2009
Science Fair Display Board
And Here is MeiWei's final project (most of it).
All the kids, right down to the kindergarteners, did a superb job! Watch out, world!
All the kids, right down to the kindergarteners, did a superb job! Watch out, world!
Nov 8, 2009
Coop Science Fair!
For six weeks, our coop met on Friday afternoons for 2 hours of PE, art, and this season, Science. Since it was Mother R's idea to have a science fair, MotherR ended up teaching it. Such is what happens to people who have a popular idea.
The focus was on the scientific method--you know, lite stuff. Each week we explored another step of the process. If you've forgotten, it goes like this (with small semantic variances): Problem, Research, Observation, Hypothesis, Experiment (within which lies Materials, Procedure, and Data collection), Results, and Conclusion.
The kids in my group were between 3rd and 6th grade. We had lots of fun (I think) doing experiments and discussing the progress of our projects. I made sure we made messes and blew things up. But in the end, I was not sure if the fair would fly or fail.
MeiWei was very gung ho with a hypothesis of her own making after a subject near and dear to her heart: doing laundry. She postulated that clothes hung outside would fade at the same rate as clothes in the dryer.
The materials were purchased: a half dozen t-shirts in an array of colors, cut up into pieces that would be divided between line-drying and machine-drying. But after a couple of loads, the scientist ran into weather problems that prevented collecting enough data. The trending forecast was not good. With a week to go it was time to bail.
Experiment 2 was out of a God-send of a book entitled Last-Minute Science Fair Projects (Scholastic): When Your Bunsen's Not Burning but the Clock's Really Ticking . She chose (with a little urging by Mom who thought the mommies would be interested) "Young and Lovely: Does Vitamin E Really Prevent Aging?" Three rose petals were treated to either a dip in water, a smear of vitamin E oil, or plain old air and then baggied.
Sho' nuff! After several days the "E" petal was still fresh while the others had shriveled to brown little wormy things.
Research showed it's best to apply topically, so I'm headed to that health food store and get me some youth in a bottle!
Like MomR always says, "You never stop learning!"
The focus was on the scientific method--you know, lite stuff. Each week we explored another step of the process. If you've forgotten, it goes like this (with small semantic variances): Problem, Research, Observation, Hypothesis, Experiment (within which lies Materials, Procedure, and Data collection), Results, and Conclusion.
The kids in my group were between 3rd and 6th grade. We had lots of fun (I think) doing experiments and discussing the progress of our projects. I made sure we made messes and blew things up. But in the end, I was not sure if the fair would fly or fail.
MeiWei was very gung ho with a hypothesis of her own making after a subject near and dear to her heart: doing laundry. She postulated that clothes hung outside would fade at the same rate as clothes in the dryer.
The materials were purchased: a half dozen t-shirts in an array of colors, cut up into pieces that would be divided between line-drying and machine-drying. But after a couple of loads, the scientist ran into weather problems that prevented collecting enough data. The trending forecast was not good. With a week to go it was time to bail.
Experiment 2 was out of a God-send of a book entitled Last-Minute Science Fair Projects (Scholastic): When Your Bunsen's Not Burning but the Clock's Really Ticking . She chose (with a little urging by Mom who thought the mommies would be interested) "Young and Lovely: Does Vitamin E Really Prevent Aging?" Three rose petals were treated to either a dip in water, a smear of vitamin E oil, or plain old air and then baggied.
Sho' nuff! After several days the "E" petal was still fresh while the others had shriveled to brown little wormy things.
Research showed it's best to apply topically, so I'm headed to that health food store and get me some youth in a bottle!
Like MomR always says, "You never stop learning!"
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