Three Plus Two

More posts at And the Kitchen Sink!

A few Advent and Christmas posts, including a recipe for grain-free St. Lucia buns and a bonus grain-free Christmas "cookie" in the New Year's post...

and

I'm doing the Whole 30 this month, eliminating dairy and all sugars along with grains.

Also working on moving this blog off typepad (still)... but the photos are a giant problem.  Does anyone have any experience in importing blogs with lots of photos?  I had to use Wordpress, as my blog was too big to import to Blogger using the free converter without breaking it into pieces.  But the photos show up only as links. Help?

 

The Homeschooling Meme

Pam at Everyday Snapshots tagged me for the homeschooling meme that's been going around, so here goes...

1) ONE HOMESCHOOLING BOOK YOU HAVE ENJOYED

Well, I was going to put a photo of my homeschool book bookcase here to point out the difficulty I might have with "one" book, but... I couldn't get the bookcase to fit in the frame! Actually, that's probably not as bad as it sounds, because it's a tall skinny bookcase, and there's not a lot of room to maneuver in the little piece of hallway where it resides, but still... I've collected a lot of books over the past 10 years.  For instance, I have all 3 editions of The Well-Trained Mind.  Does that sound nutty? I use it mainly for the resources.

Since I have a hard time following directions, here is a list of some of my favorite homeschooling books:

A Little Way of Homeschooling

(I love this book.  It is like having a good friend at your elbow telling you to relax, that it's going to be okay, really.)

Better Than School: One Family's Declaration of Independence  by Nancy Wallace

The Latin-Centered Curriculum by Andrew Campbell

Hard Times in Paradise  by the Colfaxes

How Children Fail   by John Holt

Homeschooling Our Children Unschooling Ourselves by Alison McKee

Pretty dang unschooly. With a little classical thrown in for good measure.

2) ONE RESOURCE YOU WOULDN'T BE WITHOUT

Er... one? Well... if I was stranded without all my stuff, what I would absolutely want most would be a library card.  So I guess the one resource I wouldn't be without is ACCESS TO BOOKS, and lots of them. 

3) ONE RESOURCE YOU WISH YOU HAD NEVER BOUGHT

Hmmm... Off the top of my head, I would say the IEW writing curriculum.  I don't know how I thought I could get past my deep aversion to teaching "dress-ups.

4) ONE RESOURCE YOU ENJOYED LAST YEAR

Gee, that's tough.  There were some good books last year, but I think one of the "resources" we most enjoyed last year was the Lego unit I blogged about here.

5) ONE RESOURCE YOU WILL BE USING NEXT YEAR

Would that be this year maybe?  Because I can't plan to the end of the week, much less know what we'll be using next year!

A few resources from this year...

Discovering Moths: Nighttime Jewels in Your Own Backyard  

Rosetta Stone French and Japanese

Other Worlds: Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

Fieldwork Marine Biology plans

Holling C. Holling books

Among the Night People

Seeing Is Achieving: Improve Your Child's Chances For Success  

A really good voice teacher

6) ONE RESOURCE YOU WOULD LIKE TO BUY

Does anybody have a schoolroom/art studio/home library space for sale, cheap?

7) ONE RESOURCE YOU WISH EXISTED

A schoolroom/art studio/home library space you could unfold and attach to your house.  Like the TARDIS -- bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

(This sounds like a good excuse to stick in a Doctor Who Youtube montage.)

 

Actually, Doctor Who has led to some good discussions in our house, so I guess it counts as one of my favorite resources, right? (Just smile and nod; it's easier that way.)

8) ONE HOMESCHOOLING CATALOG YOU ENJOY READING

Sonlight (although I don't like their new catalog as much as I liked the old format) ... Emmanuel Books... Montessori Services... (I guess that's technically not a homeschool catalog, but that's what I use it for, so I think it counts.)

Ok, so -- tag, you're it!  If you haven't already done the meme and you'd like to, consider yourself tagged!

 

 

 

Seven Quick Takes Saturday

One

After a lot of back and forth debating, I've finally decided to switch to blogger. I started working on the new blog this week and will hopefully have it ready soon.  I realized recently how much I missed blogging.  I'm trying to find that balance in my day that will allow me to have the laundry at a manageable level and a couple of minutes available for not working, too.

Two

What reminded me that I like to blog?  Elizabeth's knitting posts.  I have been sort of casually dipping in and out of them for a while, but this week it really hit me: it sounds like she's having fun.  Fun knitting and fun blogging about it.  I like learning about new things (like marine biology and physical geography and quantum physics) so I can give my kids some structure for the things they want to learn about, but I really, firmly believe that one of the most important roles of a teacher (especially a mother-teacher) is to model what it means to be an active learner.  Kids want to see their mothers learning interesting stuff.  Too often I think that having all the work done and keeping everyone on a perfect schedule means that I am being a good mother.  But what good is having all the work done if my patience is short, and I don't have time to do the things that will nurture our souls?     

Three

The work isn't done, by the way.  In case you were wondering.

Four

I keep meaning to update my Grocery Project.  When I started keeping track of my grocery expenses, I was amazed at how much we were really paying for food, household items, and common over the counter medicines and vitamins -- even as I was trying to cut costs.  And then food prices started going up, and I wasn't sure how much I ought to be paying for food.  What I ended up doing was taking a portion of our medical budget (medicine and supplements) and attaching it to our grocery budget (food and household products) to account for the stuff I was buying at the store.  It took too much time to separate that stuff out, and I had started using this nifty savings tracker from The Coupon Project and wanted to track those savings, too.   I've been able to cut $100 to $200 a month off what we were actually paying to eat a grain-reduced, organic, real food diet when buying primarily from stores. (This masks the fact that I'm also getting more food for my money, which is important when all your boys suddenly hit a growth spurt!!) Now that I have some experience with the stores here and with coupons, I could cut more by eliminating some of the organic processed and convenience products that we buy (almond milk, Stoneyfield whole milk yogurt, Larabars, and the gluten-free chicken sausages at Costco, for example), but a) my husband likes to try new things; b)he travels a lot and sending him with a grain-free packaged bar like Larabar keeps him from eating junk on the road; and c)I have four kids playing baseball right now.  Paying a little more for good-for-you convenience saves us from paying a lot more for not-so-good-for-you fast food.

Five

We haven't totally eliminated fast food from our diet either.

Six

The grain-free experiment is going well.  Since mid-January I've lost 30 pounds.  My husband has lost about 20.  (I'm still nursing, which he thinks is an unfair advantage.)  I feel a lot better.  All the candida related problems which were so bad after a year of inhaled steroids for asthma and 30 days or more of antibiotics at #7's birth have improved quite a bit.  I also made a huge discovery: my depression is diet related.  After cutting out grains, sugar, and starchy vegetables, I am sometimes discouraged but I do not get really depressed.  I have much more energy.  My face does not break out (which has been an ongoing problem with me since I was 10).  And some of the real evidence of the benefits our new diet came recently when Andy had his physical for Scout leadership: his blood pressure, which had been high, dropped 15 points into normal bounds.  Part of the reason for his success is exercise, but diet seems to count for a lot.  In particular, he gave up the large amounts of soda he was drinking; large amounts of high fructose corn syrup in the diet have been linked to hypertension. 

Seven

I'm sitting next to a 10.9 lb. cabbage here at the breakfast table this morning.  It came from my garden, which makes it doubly amazing. It's about 14 inches in diameter, and I had to hack off the root with a butcher knife like a machete.  I wish I could take a picture, but we've lost the battery charger and are awaiting a new one in the mail.  (I miss my old camera with its old-fashioned batteries.)  The coolest thing about this cabbage is that it came from a plant my neighbor gave me, and she got it for free from a program an Alabama plant farm sets up for 3rd graders to grow giant cabbages.  I didn't have a 3rd grader this year, so this plant is technically an "extra".  Maybe next year we'll participate in the competition.  This year, it's just going to make a lot of lacto-fermented sauerkraut (or cortido or kim chi).    

 

Just Call Me Rocky Road

 

 I was quite surprised to learn that I've been nominated for Best Nitty Gritty Blog again this year!  Thank you!!!

I've already voted in some of the categories so I can't link to those to campaign for blogs I like.  But Erin has a good list!

A Week in the Life

I continue to get back up to speed with life, both real and virtual. This morning I saw an interesting post at Charming the Birds from the Trees beginning her participation in the Week in the Life project .  Yesterday I had been catching up on Sarah's blog and enjoyed her Day in the Life post.  This morning, surrounded by trip chaos that was in the process of being beaten back little by little, I thought,  hmmmm.

I like writing "day in the life" posts (I have a whole  category for them,actually, going back 4 years).  To be honest, I think they are some of my most valuable posts -- not to anybody else maybe, but to me as Iook back.  But often while I am keeping track of our day, I end up thinking that maybe it doesn't give the whole picture.  The day I choose to track may be wonderful or awful,for instance, but that doesn't mean that all our days are wonderful,or that all our days are awful.  I once tried to keep track of one of our weeks (in more detail than the usual weekly review), hoping to provide a little more balance, but I got bogged down in the details and never finished.   But I like this project's emphasis on the photoessay and on the ordinary. As long as I don't try to put down exact times for everything every day, maybe I'll be able to do it. 

Not this week, though, as we have not achieved "ordinary" yet.  Next week.  I hope. 

Anyone else participating in the project this week?  Leave me a comment and let know!  (I love reading those sorts of posts.) 

Nominated!

Wow!  I can't tell you how surprised I was to wake up this morning and find that Three Plus Two was nominated for Best Nitty Gritty Homeschool Blog.  In fact, I am so surprised I'm almost speechless! But not so speechless that I can't say THANK YOU VERY MUCH.  It's nice to know that my blog made even one person feel "that it is OK that we aren't perfect."  Because that's what I'd like my blog to be.  Kind of a virtual, "Honey, I've been there."

Well!  Now that you've made my day, head on over to the polls and check out the nominated blogs in all the other categories, too!

Week 3: Feeling Better

So in Week 3 (August 31 - Sept. 6), everyone started to feel a bit better -- the kids faster than I did, actually -- and there was more work.  In some cases, a lot more work.  Work undertaken because the kids were interested in it, not because I planned to do it.  Work that leads me to contemplate that balance between "required" and "interest-led" again.

The one thing I did during Week 3 was to get out the pan watercolors to try and teach the twins (who need new nicknames!) how to keep their colors separate.  They wanted to paint rainbows initially, because of the rainbows from prisms that we had been playing with.  Somewhere along the way, however, "rainbows" turned into "robots with lasers".  Anyway, pan watercolors were new to them, they couldn't remember that you need to rinse the brush before dipping it in clean water and putting it in a new color, and they didn't understand why you couldn't just mix all the colors up in the pans.  But that was sort of the whole point of the lesson: how to mix only what you want to mix, and not everything up together so that it makes a muddy brown.  Which is what they often do.  In any case, they lost patience, got down from the table, and went outside to play dinosaur guys.

(If you're wondering where Chipmunk was this whole time, he was painting newspaper with water.)

This left a whole table full of painting materials set up with nobody using them, and a big roll of easel paper (not the best for watercolor, but we were painting big) for the taking.  When Farmerboy happened by, I asked if he would like to paint.  He said yes, sat down, and sketched out a dinosaur, then worked very hard at filling up all the available white space.

A note here: Farmerboy is left-handed.  That's why his painting set-up is reversed.

The finished picture, with a volcano in the background -- small, "because it's far away" -- and a sunset sky.

Then Katydid came through and thought she might like to paint with the watercolor pans, because we hadn't had them out in a while.   And that led to several days spent painting for hours.   We paged through some watercolor books to figure out a bit more about technique, and had a good time with the blog Let's Paint Nature.  She particularly liked the Baby Phoebe Nest, so she painted her own nest with baby birds using watercolor and ink.  She also painted many flowers and a downy woodpecker.  She also spirited all these paintings off to her room without giving me a chance to photograph them at all.  Well, I am thinking about making some photo albums on the blog to hold all the photos of artwork.  So maybe by the time I get around to doing that I'll also get the chance to take pictures of some of her paintings!

As well as painting for hours, Katydid also decided that her wee felt dolls needed some friends, so she worked on making some more of those.

... when I was trying to organize the art cabinet...

... and also before breakfast.  Actually, a lot of art work gets done before breakfast in our house.

The wee felt dolls also had another purpose, I think, and that was to populate the fairy houses that have enjoyed a resurgence lately:

And, yes, fairy houses do tie into the Victorian emphasis in the Sunflower Basket. I mean, that's what I'm saying.  And since the kids used the book Fairy Houses ... Everywhere! (The Fairy Houses Series), which is really a beautiful book showing very complicated structures the kids tried to imitate, I'm also counting it as art. Anyway, it was too nice to stay inside... a bit cooler, though, as you can tell by the long sleeves.

But -- back to dinosaurs.  Farmerboy has had his interest re-ignited and spent the day he painted the dinosaur picture doing nothing but dinosaurs.   In fact, he did dinosaur related "stuff" from the time he woke up until he went to bed, which was sometimes exhausting.  He took a break to do a little phonics and math with me, but mostly it was all about dinosaurs.  He papier-mached the make-a-saurus we started back in June, doing the papier mache about 97% on his own on the front porch while I ran around with the little boys, made dinosaur pictures using How to Draw Dinosaurs (Usborne Activities), and had me read See Inside the World of Dinosaurs.  And then there was playing dinosaur guys.  Of course.

  

Where have I been?

Well, mostly I've been writing plans for my two oldest.  This is something new for me, writing things down in an organized fashion, and I am hopeful that it will work well this year.  I guess I've still been planning a little differently than most people; the kids' plans are mostly based on lists of interests they gave me last month. Jen ever so kindly sent me some editable tables in Word which she and Elizabeth used to plan their Literature for a Young Lady curriculum, and I used them to plan A Bunch of Stuff I Think My Young Man Will Like.  I'm not sure it hangs together enough to give it a title, but I borrowed the idea of using a guide by Father Lasance -- in this case, The Young Man's Guide -- to be a sort of organizing thread.  Katydid will be following along with the Serendipity plans this year, by request, although I am altering them for a slightly younger girl.  (Katydid is only 10.  I guess technically she's in fifth grade, although for some reason I keep forgetting and thinking she's in sixth.  Oh well.)

If anyone's curious, I'll post my plans for Gareth, who will be in 7th grade this year. (I mean, for real, and not just as pictures.) But I have to warn you, they're a bit individual.

I mean, I doubt that every 7th grader will want to start with prehistoric people before moving on to a study of the Middle Ages.  But, to be honest, the subjects he wanted to study -- prehistoric people and evolutionary biology -- are just the sort of things you want to study with a "shield of faith" in hand.  I gave him the plans today and he seemed to think they were decent... He has the kind of personality that needs both choice and structure.  Using the table I was able to list a whole bunch of choices as far as projects go, which will hopefully solve the problem of the whiteboard.  We'll see how it goes. 

While I was working on the plans, I had to mostly go offline.  Which is okay because I have been in one of those funks where I'm not sure I have anything of worth to say anyway and the blogosphere left me largely feeling inadequate.  It occurred to me that since we usually go on vacation this time of year and I get enforced (and therapeutic) time away from all computers, I usually get a retreat that I wasn't planning on getting this year, with so much poultry to care for.  So maybe it wasn't really that I'm inadequate,  just that I needed some time off.  Then Andy sent me an email asking whether I thought we could make a family trip to New Hampshire with him when he visits there on business, so maybe I will get a brief retreat anyway.

(Actually, what Andy said was, do you think we could stock the chickens, etc. up on water and food for a few days and just have the kid down the street come by a couple times, and what I replied was, do you think we could put the kids in the coop, too?  Okay, so yesterday was a little tough.)

What part of spring are you?

You Are Blooming Flowers

You are an optimistic person by nature. In even the darkest times, you are hopeful about the future. You feel truly blessed in life and can sometimes be overwhelmed with emotions. You have an artist's eye. You are always looking for beauty in the mundane. You have a good sense of aesthetics, especially when it comes to shapes and color.

What Part of Spring Are You?

 

(HT: Dawn, of course :)

Fridge and Pantry Cleanout Challenge

(HT: Christine at Memories of a Catholic Wife and Mother, whose mention of food blogs directed me to some new reading material!)

Discovering Organic and Thrifty couldn't have come at a better time, as I really needed to clean out my fridge and I really need to do a better job of planning meals around what needs to be used up now. I've found that the most difficult thing about eating from our stores (garden produce I've frozen or otherwise perserved; local produce and meat we've bought in bulk; and all the eggs the chickens are laying) is planning.  Planning to use the potatoes before they sprout, using more onions when they start sprouting, using the squash in the pantry before the green beans in the freezer so the squash doesn't go bad, rotating hamburger with lamb with chicken with beef roast so that all the hamburger doesn't get used up right away... not eating the bacon ALL IN ONE MEAL... that kind of thing. So I was happy to find this challenge.

Here are the rules:

1) List "Notable Items in Fridge to Use Up" (feel free to post a pic as well)

2) List "Notable Items in Freezer to Use Up"

3) List "Notable Items in Pantry to Use Up"

4) Either list your menu plan or at least 2-3 meal ideas with which you'll use those items.

5) E-mail me the URL to your post and I will add it in to my post for more "link love" for you. (If you don't have a blog, feel free to leave a comment!!!)

6) Link back to my weekly fridge & pantry cleanout post.

So. Andy was out of town last week when we had the flu AND he had a company retreat to attend on Saturday for 13 or 14 hours.  Sunday the weather was "nice" (i.e., above freezing), so I justified cleaning out the fridge on the grounds that a walk to the compost pile would be nice.  I was really embarrassed at the amount of food that was taken to the compost, but at least it will be put back into the soil and not just thrown away. After I came back from the compost, I resolved to do a better job of using up what I had, starting then. Here are my lists:

Items in Fridge to Use Up:

After I got done cleaning out all the science projects... er, leftovers... I wasn't left with much. Monday has recently become our shopping day, and we were quite low on a few things. But here's what I discovered after I emptied and reorganized the fridge:

• Feta cheese
• EGGS. I have 4.5 dozen in the refrigerator right now. Our girls work hard!
• 4 packages of tortillas (the kids eat cheese quesadillas for lunch quite often, but apparently we had gotten ahead of ourselves a bit.)
• celeriac

 

No, it's not very pretty. I don't imagine that you have any in your fridge. But if you can find it in the fall and winter (its other name is celery root), it's good in soup or stew.  And it keeps practically forever. I've had this celeriac in my refrigerator since November.

• 1 grapefruit

Items in the Freezer to Use:

• 1 turkey carcass and 2 chicken carcasses I saved for stock
• vegetables frozen in the summer: broccoli, green beans, corn, squash. I need to use these before others.

 

Bit of a mess right now, actually. The meat is mostly beef, with a little lamb and pork mixed in. We have about 5 chickens left, I think.

 

The door held mostly fruit, which we are making a dent in now with the Vita Mix.

Items in the Pantry to Use:

• potatoes. Some of them may be past the point of use, though, and might be better off left for planting next month.

  

(We have to figure out a better way of storing potatoes. Digging up the ones in the middle our bottom of the pails is almost impossible.)

• sweet potatoes

The sweet potatoes are actually in pretty good shape... which was surprising to me, because I haven't checked them in a while. But we need to eat them.  Next to the sweet potatoes are onions, which -- as you can see -- are sprouting.  Our storage conditions aren't ideal and/or we didn't cure the onions enough last summer.  I can't use all of them up, so I might try planting a bunch of them next month -- just like the potatoes.

Menu Ideas:

Since I did my clean out on Sunday, I've already used some of this stuff. I made turkey stock with the turkey bones, some onions, and 2 of the celeriac on Sunday.  For dinner Sunday, we had Mustard and Black Pepper Braised Beef Shanks (seriously adapted from a recipe in the Williams Sonoma catalog) with baked sweet potatoes. (Farmerboy ate 3.)  Monday was spaghetti, with extra spaghetti sauce to freeze. Tuesday was Turkey Divan, using up some leftover frozen turkey plus the meat that came off the bones when I made stock -- and some of the broccoli from the freezer.

Meals for the rest of the week,..

Wednesday: busy day, so... frozen shrimp, salad, tropical fruit

Thursday: quiche or a puff pancake... something that uses up A LOT of eggs. Fruit on the side. Peas with quiche.

Friday: Black bean tortilla casserole, corn, fruit.

Saturday: I'd like to try to recreate a sweet potato -bacon soup I saw at our local farm store, grilled cheese sandwiches.  I'll use some of the turkey stock.

Sunday: Braised beef tips, mashed potatoes, green beans, fruit.

Hopefully taking stock of fridge and freezer won't be so much of a challenge next week!