Three Plus Two

Plan It, Don't Panic: Progress and Menu for Week 2

I'm participating in the Plan It, Don't Panic! Meal Planning Challenge at Keeper of the Home.  This is Week 2.  If you're curious, you can also read about my preparations and menu for week 1.

How did last week go?

The hardest part about this challenge seems to be... blogging it on Monday!

I have lots of ideas for blog posts that never make it to the blog.  Sometimes (often) it's due to lack of time, but sometimes...

 

It's the lighting.

In real life, a Spanish omelet looks much yummier.  Much less... Dayglo.

(And I know what you're thinking about this huge cooktop, because I thought it, too, when I first saw the house. But the grill does not work. I sometimes use it as a prep space by laying a cutting board there. Back in 1980, though, this thing rocked!)

Anyway, having the menu plan helped keep me on track, but there was still some unplanned pizza.  We were all sick with colds last week, and one night every time I tried to make dinner the baby pulled up on my leg and bit me.  He was not happy with his sisters or brothers either.  So pizza it was.  I just readjusted the plan and we had almond flour pancakes on Saturday instead of Friday. 

I didn't grind up any nuts and seeds for breakfast, and the chocolate coconut bark was a complete flop.  I was trying to use unsweetened chocolate and then sweeten the whole concoction with honey, but it just wouldn't combine.  We were left with a much too sweet layer on the bottom and a bitter layer on top.  I tried stirring my raspberry syrup in, but it didn't help much.  None of that seemed to matter to my 4 year old, however, as he came back for seconds.

The hardboiled eggs were lifesavers -- mostly for me as snacks in the afternoon, especially on meatless days.

Menu Plan for Week 2

Breakfasts:

I'd like to have some grain-free breads made up this week to use for breakfasts.  I also need to make yogurt. And I've had one request for soaked oat porridge, which we'll have on Weds.

Lunches:

Standard lunch fare.  Leftovers.  (On Monday I had a decent salad made from leftover cold chicken sausages, romaine lettuce, and tomatoes, dressed with oil and apple cider vinegar.  Simple, but good.)

Monday: Chicken cacciatore over zucchini, green beans from the garden, fruit

(Ok, so the almond flour I used to coat the chicken pieces turned mushy and my cast iron skillet was too small to hold everything, which meant I couldn't put it in the oven without it bubbling over onto the oven floor.  My small wall oven has no vent and functions mainly as a steam oven, so when anything bubbles over, even more steam comes out the top of the door -- yes, really.  In clouds.  I finished cooking it on the stove.  It didn't look anything like Ree's, but it sure tasted good! I'll have to keep experimenting with the almond flour. And ask for a cast iron dutch oven for Christmas.)

Tuesday: Crockpot Tacos/Taco salad (for me) using stew meat, with homemade fermented salsa, fruit

Wednesday: Butternut squash soup (enough to freeze some)/almond flour zucchini bread (to be planned over for breakfast), fruit... I'll probably cook some breakfast sausage as a stir-in for the soup, but I'll freeze the "planned over" soup without it,

Thursday: Slow Cooker Coconut Curry Chicken (without the rice, using free-range chicken), salad, peas maybe, fruit

Friday: I'm sticking this in as our pizza night, because we are going to be cleaning for family on the weekend!

Saturday: Crockpot roast beef w/carrots and assorted veggies from the garden,  potatoes for my dad, fruit

Sunday: We have some important family events going on, so we'll have a BBQ lunch with family and pick and snack leftovers for dinner

 

 

 

Plan It, Don't Panic: A Meal Planning Challenge

Keeper of the Home is hosting the "Plan It, Don't Panic: Meal Planning Challenge" for the next six weeks to give those of us who need it (ahem) some accountability in the meal planning process.  Lately life has been so busy that grocery shopping gets smushed into whatever time slot happens to be available, and meal planning has been rudimentary.  As a result, we've been eating way too much pizza, and I end up feeding the kids toast for breakfast every day.  A low point happened at Costco two weeks ago when I bought a giant box of packaged granola bars to feed the kids snacks in the van on the way home.  Obviously they did not need 60 + granola bars to eat on the way home, so they ended up gorging on them for breakfasts and snacks, at which point it became apparent that my boys had eaten 60+ granola bars in less than a week.  (Like -- a lot less than a week.)  Granted, we were just coming home from vacation, but 60 granola bars??

I signed up with the Plan It, Don't Panic Challenge as soon as I saw it.

Our vital stats:

• Family of 9
• 6 boys, ages 14-1
• 1 nursing mom
• grain-free diet (at least for some of us)

Since I know that people are curious about the grain-free diet, I thought I would try to blog this challenge in a little more detail.  I hope to post not only my meal plans, but what we (and I, the most grain-free of our family) actually ate during the week.  As usual, I'll be keeping it real.  I like Mark Sisson's "Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good"  and 80 %  principles when it comes to eating a grain-free/paleo/primal diet.  I am not perfect.  I have 7 kids. Things are going to fall apart sometimes.  They probably fall apart at your house, too.  But that's okay.  You don't have to be a superhero to make changes in the way you eat.

This what I'm hoping to accomplish with this challenge:

•  Stop eating so much pizza for dinner just because I haven't figured out dinner or managed any prep work.
• Make better use of my (minimal) garden produce as well as the store produce
• Start working in more grain-free breakfasts and lunches for the kids.
• Make it a regular habit to have some real snacks on hand that are a change from the everyday fruit and cheese, which are starting to get a little boring. In addition, I need snacks that I can eat, with a bit of protein in the afternoon.
• Start making my own yogurt and kefir again.
• Keep the grocery budget at a decent level.  I'm not aiming for the lowest level, but I do want to keep a top on it by weeding out the impulse buys (like 60+ granola bars). 

 So how am I doing this first week?

Thursday night I sat down and got some coupons together.  I don't spend a lot of time couponing, and am probably one of the more un-extreme couponers you'll find, but I do find that coupons help us on paper and cleaning products and our Whole Foods shopping especially.  I wanted Andy to make a run to Whole Foods after work on Friday, so I had to get everything together for him.  Our standard Whole Foods run usually includes whole fat yogurt, unhomogenized whole milk (not raw), good quality heavy cream (minus the carageenen), and whatever organic fruit is on sale for a good price.  We also stock up on free-range chicken and pastured butter if we need any (we didn't this week).  This week, in addition to the dairy, Andy bought a little over 4.5 lbs of plums, some chocolate for coconut bark, and got a deal on Clif bars by stacking some manufacturers coupons with Whole Foods coupons.  (He'll take the Clif bars with him when he travels.  No, they aren't grain-free.)   

 On Friday night I watched the videos from the Cook More Real Food Challenge (taking inventories of pantry, freezer, and fridge, and meal planning, all of which are good), so I was ready to jump in Saturday morning as long as Katydid and Andy helped by watching Leo, who was sick and prefers to live outside these days.  (Fortunately, they came to my rescue).  I finally got around to cleaning out the fridge, which I have needed to do for a few weeks now.  We recently bought a second fridge to store veggies and milk and cut down on trips to the store, but the luxury of space brought with it a disturbing habit on the part of all of us to disregard all former organizational rules for using the fridge in the kitchen.

(There are some pictures of a seriously organized fridge and freezer in this post from I Heart Organizing.  My fridge does not look like that, but it's a lot better.)

On Saturday afternoon, I finished up the grocery shopping at Kroger.  (Sure seemed like they raised their prices again.  Their "mega-event" didn't seem so mega to me.)

Stuff in the fridge and freezer I'll be using in my meal plan this week:

• black bean salad (homemade)
• romaine lettuce
• carrots that are looking a little hairy
• baby carrots in a giant bag from Costco (mainly for lunches)
• shrimp stock (freezer)
• chicken broth (freezer)
• stew meat (from a side of beef, freezer)
• gluten-free chicken sausages (from that Costco trip)
• almond flour (which I buy in bulk from Honeyville Grains)
• raspberry "syrup" -- organic frozen raspberries from Costco that had thawed and refrozen into a giant block, cooked down with honey because I had to do something with 3 lbs of raspberries at once... a yummy and sugar-free topping for yogurt and pancakes

Snacks and sweet stuff for the week:

I have the Healthy Snacks to Go e-book and am excited to try many of Katie's ideas.  But... everybody in the house (including me) is sick right now with a cold, so we'll see how much gets accomplished. 

Some simple ideas for this week:

• hardboiled eggs
• chicken broth (good for a cold!)
• apples and bananas with peanut, almond, or sunbutter
• applesauce rollups (from the Healthy Snacks book)
• coconut bark (from Primal Blueprint Quick and Easy Meals)

A Note on the Calendar:

Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday are Ember Days in the Church.  We'll be meatless for those days. Meatless and grain-free can be difficult, especially when your family doesn't like beans or lentils.

Breakfasts:

I am not awake enough in the morning to cook.  What I am aiming for this week is to grind up some nuts and seeds ahead of time in order to make grain-free porridge, which will be a nice change from my regular eggs.  (Our chickens are only beginning to lay, so I'm still buying cage-free eggs from the store.) Hopefully some of the kids will enjoy it, too.

Lunches:

My goal is to have leftovers.  With 6 boys, sometimes you plan for leftovers and in spite of your best efforts, you realize what you have left over is crumbs.  My own go-to lunch for days when there are crumbs is a peanut or almond butter/coconut milk smoothie.   

In other words, I'm still working on lunch.  I'll be getting up to speed on dinners first.

 

 

Dinners:

Sunday -- Black bean soup (leftover black bean salad, stew meat from the freezer)

(I did make this and it turned out well, but the little boys refused to eat it again for lunch on Monday and had cheese sandwiches instead.)

Monday -- chicken wings with baby carrots, fruit, possibly some bleu cheese dip if I feel up to it

Tuesday -- shrimp bisque (I'll be altering this recipe, since I don't have cognac or sherry, and I won't be adding flour) and salad

Wednesday (meatless)  -- Spanish Omelet (I add some cheese to mine, and of course, I use more eggs!), roasted eggplant from the garden, fruit

Thursday  -- gluten-free chicken sausages, green beans from the garden, fruit

Friday (meatless) -- almond flour pancakes with raspberry "syrup"

Saturday (meatless) -- cheese pizza out

Well!  I'm not sure how I spun a menu plan into such a long post, but if you're still with me, check out all the other menu planners at Plan It, Don't Panic! Week One !

 

 

The Grocery Project

 

Every year I start out with a project.  Sometimes it's intentional, sometimes not. One year January came and I was hooked on reading about life in the country.   One year I read Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dillemma and started clearing processed food from our diet.  One year we spent New Year's Eve by painting our kitchen.  Last year I decided I wanted to read more classics... but, gee, what with having a baby and getting ready to move, that kind of got hung up at Jane Austen.  (As in, I read two books.)

This year's project is back in familiar territory.  Food again.

I find that this whole "switching to real food" thing is a long, slow process, in which one reads and make changes, reads and makes changes, reads and makes even more changes.  Moving may set you back a ways.  Where is the farmer's market?  Are there any farms that sell pastured meat or eggs in your area?  Or will you have to buy practically everything at the grocery store?

We're still in the "buying everything at the grocery store" phase.  There is more wiggle room in the budget now that our house in New York has been sold (St. Therese certainly had her hand in that one!), but there is not so much wiggle room that I feel happy about plunking down $11.99/lb for strip steak on sale at Whole Foods.  That's why it's cheaper to buy from a local farmer.  You'll get about 200 pounds to the side for beef, which will run you about $900.  If you can free up the funds, that's a deal: $4.50/lb for all cuts, which is cheaper than I can buy grass fed ground beef at my local Whole Foods.  ($5.99/lb is the usual price and sales seem to be rare.)  You might say that those prices are still higher than standard ground beef at Kroger's, but have you cooked with that stuff lately?  Beef fat is not supposed to be sludgy and orange!

Anyway, my goals are not to eat as cheaply as possible, but to eat real food at a reasonable cost.  Lately we are dealing with some health issues and food allergies -- mine, actually, as lately I have had a couple of itchy, wheezy episodes after eating maple syrup (sob) and I am beginning to suspect that my sensitivity to corn may, in fact, be worsening.  I have 2 kids with mild peanut allergies, so I buy the more expensive nut and seed butters in addition to organic, natural peanut butter from Costco for the other kids.  One of the children who is allergic to peanut butter is also allergic to anything weird on his skin, so I have to use the free and clear stuff, and not whatever is on sale in the laundry aisle this week.  And, oh yeah, there's also ADHD, which means no BHT, TBHQ, vanillin, artificial dyes, or conventionally raised fruit or vegetables with heavy pesticide exposure.  (An article about studies linking ADHD to pesticide use here.)  Another necessity is raw, fermented cod liver oil supplemented with Nordic Naturals Ultimate Omega, which keeps me depression-free on a daily basis.  (I'm not a doctor and make no claims, yada yada, just saying what works for me.)

I want to make it clear that we are not scraping by here financially. But everybody has financial goals they'd like to meet, beyond the realm of basic subsistence.  Ours include saving for college (for 7) and paying off our house, in the long term, and collecting enough money to redo our kitchen (which is literally falling apart) in the short term.  In addition, I woke up one morning recently and it occurred to me that at some point we will have five boys from the ages of 10 to 17 in the house at the same time.

Ok, so that scared me.

In any case it's time for me to figure all of this out.  Coupons?  Sales? Costco?  Shopping multiple stores?

Have I mentioned lately that I'm not organized by nature?

Fortunately a person can learn.  I will never be as highly efficient at saving money or making everything from scratch or canning all my own produce as many women you see on the internet, but the point is that slow improvement makes a difference.

 So here are the basics:

• I'm feeding 9 people, including 2 adults and 1 teenage boy.  One of us isn't on solid food yet, but that means I'm nursing exclusively.
• We're moving toward a grain-free diet... or at least a graid-reduced diet.  I doubt I will be able to have everybody completely grain-free, as there are a lot of us.  But we'll be cutting out as many grains as we can.
• We will eat organic, pastured, unprocessed, antibiotic and hormone-free food as much as we can.  And local, if possible.
• We will endeavor to use non-toxic cleaning and health/beauty products.  Homemade or store bought.
• I will not drive myself crazy trying to pick up "deals" from every store every week.  I don't have time for that. Two stores is my limit.
• My monthly budget is $1250 -- for everything.  That includes food, diapers, paper products, cleaning products, vitamins - etc. (When I was grocery shopping this weekend, I had to pick up lightbulbs.  It's too hard for me to keep all that stuff separate.)  That may seem high to some of you, but remember -- slow improvement makes a difference.

I'll do my best to blog about what I'm doing.  Maybe I'll even take a picture of a grocery haul or two... if I can stop my kids from putting it away too fast... or from eating it too fast!

(A side note: I will be moving my blog some time in the near future.  More about that when I get my act together!)

Today was the kind of day...

... where you wake up and your eyes feel like they have been rubbed with sandpaper and you realize that 2.5 hours of your 6ish hour sleep time was spent sitting up against a wooden headboard with a baby on your shoulder, and then you realize that two of your little ones have runny noses - again! - and it is December 17 and you are not done with your (online!) Christmas shopping and also that even your well kids are moving in slow motion and so the scheduled cleaning up the house is probably not going to happen.

So I declared a "nothing is going to get done" day.  Having had experience with these sorts of days, I know that the only thing worse than feeling like your eyes have been scoured with sandpaper is the accompanying feeling that you are running behind with no hope of ever accomplishing what you need to accomplish.  If I don't stop and do a reality check, what I end up with is a whole lot of meaningless guilt.  This sort of guilt -- "if God is a God of order, why'd he give me this brain and 7 kids, there's no way I can ever manage, blah, blah, blah" -- is counterproductive in the worst sort of way because at the same time it is paralyzing ("I just want to give up"), it also just gets worse as the day goes on and more falls by the wayside because of that sandpapery-eye thing ("Just how long have I been sitting here staring at this open jar of peanut butter???"). 

Today I wasn't going to get sucked into that well of destruction.  No, today I was just going to give myself a day of not getting anything done.  I called Andy at work and told him the situation and that nothing was going to get done today.  "Fine by me," he said, because he is a nice guy, and also because we have twins and he knows what sandpapery eyes feel like, but mainly because he was having one of those days himself.  So now it was a family affair, and I felt better.  Having your husband's seal of approval on a "nothing is going to get done" day will dispel any remaining shreds of guilt you have. 

So.  There I was.  The day had been completely written off.  There was absolutely no guilt about staring blearily at a computer screen, searching Amazon for Christmas presents...

It was about 2 PM when I realized that I had gotten something done today.  In fact, not just something but some things.

I'd gotten the Christmas shopping done because I gave myself permission to sit at the computer, but I couldn't just stare at the screen.  I might not have done my bedroom the way I was scheduled to because I had to put the baby in the Ergo and picking up the floor seemed a little bit too much like doing squats at the gym, but I did clean my mirror (finally) and I swept up the kitchen and the front room and did two loads of laundry, folded them (!), and put them away (!!)  I made a Target list and gathered coupons for it.  I oversaw the baking of shortbread cookies and my teenage son did his usual Friday bathroom cleaning chores, which does not mean that the bathrooms are clean but that they are cleaner.  I used our stash of emergency Annie's mac and cheese for lunch, but we ate.  I put small people down for naps.  I took out some recycling. 

And now here I am with the third load of laundry awaiting folding, and a fourth in the washer ready for the dryer.  My washing machine may or may not actually be cleaning these clothes -- it's making this high-pitched eeeeeeee noise of the sort you usually hear in bad 50's scifi movies -- but I figure rinsing them in hot soapy water must count for something.

Kind of like a day on which nothing is going to get done so there's nothing to lose by doing just one thing, regardless if it's the thing that's "supposed" to get done or not.

This Advent my primary reflections have been about my vocation and coping with the difficulty of slowing down to embrace ordinary life again after a year (or more) of constant upheaval and uncertainty.  On the one hand, constant upheaval will wear you out.  And on the other hand, some of us have the sort of personality that can come to expect it.  And when the upheaval begins to even out... it's tempting to create more upheaval rather than embracing the ordinariness of staying put.

Anyway, what I'm faced with these days is how to create a new ordinariness here in

 

Beginning to keep records for high school when you're on your own

We're taking a break for Thanksgiving, and I thought that I would take the time to share some specifics about the older kids' learning this year, including some issues I've been fiddling with for high school.  High school posts tend to be sparse in the blogosphere, maybe for a few reasons.

1) To respect a teenager's privacy.

2) Because many homeschooling families turn to traditional texts, courses, or independent study schools to help them through the high school years.

3)Because teenagers do fewer cute crafts.

4) Some homeschool families choose to send their teens to brick and mortar high schools.

There are probably more reasons, but those are the ones I can come up with on the spur of the moment.  While I certainly respect all of them, it does leave those of us who are just starting high school in a bit of a state of uncertainty.  I do intend to respect my teen's privacy, but hopefully I'll be able to share a bit about our high school experiences as well.

Gareth turned 14 in October and is "officially" in "8th grade", although we don't have to report him as such to the state and I tend not to think in those terms very often myself.  To complicate matters, much of his work is on a high school level... whatever that is, as what is considered "high school level" seems to vary widely, even among packaged programs -- compare Kolbe's high school history to one of Winterpromise's senior high programs, for instance, and you'll see the dilemma facing the parent and teen who attempt to chart their own course.  In any case, having reviewed various high school textbooks to get an idea of what "high school earth science" or "high school history" (particularly on a 9th grade level) might be like, I'm pretty sure that he's doing it.

There is some debate over whether or not colleges want to see (or care about) any courses done in 8th grade.  (There is an excellent discussion of the matter on Kind Conversation.)  From what I have read the answer is: maybe not.  On the other hand, I think it is better to have too many records on hand to choose from rather than too few, and so I am keeping track of all books, projects, field trips, papers, videos... etc.   If we were the types of homeschoolers who lay out year-long courses of study and complete them every year, I would perhaps be less worried about keeping track of Gareth's history, science, and literature selections this year, but since we are not, I am going more with age than grade. From Alison McKee's book From Homeschool to College and Work: Turning Your Homeschooled Experiences into College and Job Portfolios:   :  "Since we don't believe that homeschooled children are in traditional 'grades' we prefaced many of the portfolio's dated entries with Christian's age at the time the activity took place."   Elsewhere in the book she tells how they began the documentation process with an "academic journal" when her children turned 14.  Thinking of "high school" and the documentation process in these terms fits very well with our experience.  Since we began homeschooling (when Gareth was 4), I have noticed that I tend to think of him as a grade "higher" every January, even though he may still "officially" have several months to go in the grade in which he began in July or September.  This is because his birthday is in October and every fall and winter he experiences a period of both physical and mental growth.  By the time January rolls around, he's a different kid.

In any case, since we tend to pursue interests more than timetables, I fully expect most of our home-designed courses (in history and science, say, or literature -- not math or Latin) to spill over into the "official" years of high school.  It's my plan to -- as Alison McKee says often in her book -- "sort and resort" those learning experiences into official packages after the fact, and not before.

But "after the fact" reporting has its own pecularities.  When activities, books, etc. are written down, they need to be recorded in such a way that they will be easier to "sort and resort" when the time comes.  Alison McKee recommends doing this sorting on at least a 6 month or yearly basis.  Since her book was written before all the nifty homeschool tracking software was developed, she was simply doing her sorting from a notebook that her kids kept.  Also, she did not give grades or credit or write her "narrative transcript" to bear much resemblance to the kinds of transcripts produced by traditional high schools.  When her children applied to college, colleges had not seen many homeschoolers.  Today many colleges have policies in place to deal with homeschooled applicants, and I want to cover my bases.  I am tracking hours in subjects that are not textbook based (like math or Latin).  I plan to use the Carnegie Unit of 120 hours to grant credit, after the hours have been collected, sorted, and grouped.

(I want to be clear here that my oldest is just 14.  I have absolutely no experience with applying to colleges beyond the train wreck that my own college application process was.  I am not an authority on the matter -- just sharing the results of my own research process.)

This is how I have set things up for now. 

I'm using Homeschool Tracker Plus.  I don't enter assignments ahead of time.  Instead, I record as "assignments" activities already done.  I try to enter "topics" and "time spent".  Entering topics will give me a scope and sequence later on and will help me sort out the resources.  The software tabulates hours for me (and grades if anything is graded), and I can tabulate hours over more time than just a school year.  It will also generate lists of resources used.  When I assign courses I try to either be very broad or else -- in the case of science -- fairly specific. For instance, I have a course titled "High School History" right now to kind of separate what I tend to think as "junior high" stuff from the books I think probably ought to appear on a high school reading list; I'll sort this work into courses like "European History" or "Medieval History" later, when I see what we've got.  But I have broken down "science" into courses by discipline -- geology, paleontology, astronomy, evolutionary biology, etc.  This is because, depending on the number of hours accumulated, Gareth could end up with a course called "Earth Science" incorporating the fields of geology/paleontology, astronomy, oceanography, and meteorology... or he might end up with courses called simply "Geology" or "Astronomy".  At the time of application (assuming he does decide to apply to college, which I think likely), I would sort out and discard any dead ends or topics that just didn't add up or combine with anything else.  But until that time I'll keep recording anything I think might be useful.

 

Seven Quick Takes Saturday

 

One

So... Rocky Road is really nutty, isn't it, not nitty?  Would you believe that every time I woke up last night I was thinking about that?  Sheesh.

Two

I must get some cheesecloth.  I have a couple of dairy cookbooks, but how did I miss that ricotta was this easy ?  I think I am still hung up on the idea of making yogurt so I haven't yet graduated to thinking about cheese.  (I haven't yet attempted yogurt, by the way.  It's the incubation that requires too much planning for my disorganized brain.  Well, that and the fact that we are always about to run out of milk.)

Three

Over the past several months I have become addicted to grocery blogs, the kind where the blogger takes a picture of her insanely cheap grocery haul and posts all about how many coupons she used and what everything cost.  I notice that most of these women do not have large families, which is probably why they can get away with buying in quantities like, "3 apples."  I thought about this quite a lot a couple of weeks ago when I found ripe bananas marked down to $.39/lb.  I bought 14 lbs of bananas, and they were gone in 3 days.  I did not cut them up and freeze them.  I used 3 ( not lbs, bananas) to make banana bread.  The rest were gobbled up mainly by the little boys.  Adjusted for family size, time constraints, and organic/unprocessed eating (which means fewer coupons), though, I have found many of these blogs to be quite helpful, which is probably why I have become addicted to them.  (The other reason is that I am constantly in need of a challenge.  If I don't actively have a problem to work on, I start making them up.) 

Four

I actually took all the kids with me grocery shopping this past week, which is something I do NOT do frequently.  Most of my kids are little and although the little car carts are definitely an improvement over no car carts, 3 or 4 kids can NOT fit into them, no matter how hard they try. (And no, Pop, you are NOT allowed to ride on the roof!)  But Andy was in Arkansas for the day and there was a Mom's Night Out I wanted to attend later that night, so a morning grocery trip it was.  In order to combat some of the chaos, this is what I did:

• Made a super structured grocery list, including quantities and brands, based on the sales flyer and what we normally buy.  Katydid was in charge of the list.
• Gareth pushed the second cart.  The three year old got to drive the "car".  5 year old twins and 7 year old were designated as helpers to pull things off the shelves for me.  4 month old baby blessedly slept through most of the store.  That was nothing to do with me; that was divine intervention.
• Went as fast as we could, do not stop to read labels, do not wonder if you should buy the fish on sale, do not pass Go, head directly to the checkout.  We made it out of the store in 45 minutes.  I did buy a few extras (like Kozy Shack pudding) that were marked down for quick sale, but otherwise I think I actually spent less than I would have had I gone alone and been able to linger a while.

Five

A few of the grocery-related blogs I've been browsing lately (and note that these are all American):

Mama Says Food Stamp Challenge -- Big, Catholic family, very low budget.  This year  she's written a real food manifesto and changed the way her family eats somewhat.  Her manifesto is a useful guide to the compromises many of us must make in order to eat real food on a real budget.

Money Saving Mom -- not just about groceries, but she posts natural and organic deals and has a helpful series about lowering your grocery budget.  She hosts a Super Savings Saturday where people can link all the gory details of their latest shopping trips.  I think it says something about me that I enjoy looking at pictures of groceries, but I'm not sure what.  I thought about taking a picture of our groceries when we came home, but everything got put away too quickly, and anyway, it wasn't that amazing.

100 Days of Real Food on a Budget -- just found this one.  She's trying to feed a family of 4 "real food" on a budget of $125 a week.  Apparently this is less than what she would get with food stamps (and interestingly enough according to the data she links to, a family of 9 would be eligible for as much as $1350 a month.  We've been trying to keep ours around $1000 a month, including paper products, diapers, etc, and while I don't think we've come in at exactly $1000 yet, we're still way below $1350!)

Grocery Cart Challenge -- when I was sitting on the couch this summer trying to get my C-section incision to heal, I spent a while reading through her archives on my iTouch.  After we moved, I tried her system of just buying what we needed every week without trying to stock up on anything, but I found that our lives are just too unpredictable and I was far more likely to go out when there was only a meager amount of "emergency food" around.   So our budgets have been a little higher from time to time as I try to build up our freezer and pantry after moving. 

Healthy Life Deals -- She posts coupon match-ups to Whole Foods.

Six

When I was in the middle of writing Quick Take #4, I received a call from a new friend of mine.  They were going to be in our area for most of the day but they had a gap of a few hours before they had to drop off a couple of their boys for Scouts.  (My Boy Scout did not need dropped off because he decided he would rather go to a Civil War re-enactment than hike in the rain.  If you knew him, you would have been able to see that coming.)  The night before my husband mentioned that they ought to hang out at our house.  Could they hang out at our house?  Of course!  The kids and I spent the morning trying to make the house presentable and baking pumpkin bread, and we spent the afternoon talking and playing with our new friends.  One of the boys, about Farmerboy's age, likes rocks.  Once they discovered that (and our rock hammers), it was a match made in heaven.

So that is why I am now finishing up Seven Quick Takes Saturday.

Seven

Because I fell into bed quite early Friday night (after all the scurrying, talking, etc.), I woke up before 6 this morning.  It's amazing what you can see in the quiet morning if you're willing to be quiet, too.  The daddy longlegs have been invading my house recently.  This morning I saw one inside a jar of tempera paint I had mixed and left on the window sill.  I mixed it from powder, and the powder had all settled on the bottom, leaving a skim of water at the top.  The daddy longlegs clung to the rim of the jar with two of its long legs and lowered itself slowly to the surface of the water where it stuck out its mandibles to drink.  Once, twice, three times it drank, and then slowly, carefully, testing every step before it took one, it backed up and out of the jar.  The whole process took longer than it took me to write it, and certainly longer than it takes to read about it.  In order to watch, I had to slow down, too.

Then I came into the computer room and sat down at the computer.  I looked up "Costco shopping trip" because my new friend and I had been talking about Costco, and since I just spent 5 years in the frozen wilds of upstate New York, far away from any Costco's, I had to restrain myself from asking her too many questions.  Then I looked up from the computer screen and saw that the whole outside was pink.  Not just "tinged a rosy pink with dawn", but actually, really pink.  I got up to take a better look.  The eastern sky was clear and the sun was up.  But from the west, a front had set up a wall of gray and white cloud.  The sun reflected pink off the clouds, caught the glow from the yellow and crimson autumn trees, and colored the whole world.

Now it is almost 7 AM and I can hear the boys talking in their room.  The clouds have come in and the world has settled down to gray sky and the sound of the bathroom door slamming.  But I'll carry the early morning slowness, the pinkness, into my day.

 

Where Do I Start? Daybook

Outside my window: Sunrise.  I'm facing west and looking at the trees in my pasture, the small sycamore in the "back yard" area, the floodlight pole.  The windows on the back of the house are of the 1980 variety of just not quite big enough.  I miss my big dining room picture window.  In fact, I miss quite a few things about my old house, but at least this house does not make me wheeze.  Being able to breathe trumps picture windows.

Weather for today:  Ridiculously warm and sunny.  Back into the upper 80's and low 90's again. Temperatures dropped down into the upper 60's this past weekend.  We saw people wearing toboggans and laughed.  The weather has been a little beautiful, though... the land is parched and so in need of rain.  Leaves and grass crunch underfoot.  It looks like they are trying to predict a "few showers" for Gareth's birthday next week, so we can hope!

In my yard: The beginnings of a potager ... some unidentified red flowers (from bulbs) that have pushed up through the soil in  Azaela Garden ... pecans and persimmons falling... a mockingbird that sits in the magnolia tree in the paddock and sings to us in the morning.

In my kitchen: Oh my, the kitchen.  Where do I start?  The kitchen has been my focus in one way or another since we've been here.  First it was just trying to set things up so we could eat decent food instead of the fast food and convenience food we'd been eating since June.  It felt good to cook fresh hulled black-eyed peas bought at a local farm stand on rice, even if most of my kids turned up their noses and only ate the bacon and rice.  It felt good to find a farmer's market and eggplant and tomatoes and make ratatouille.  It felt good to discover that Hot Chow Chow is one of the more addictive foods on the planet, and a little mournful to realize that the lady you bought it from had just sold out her stock.  Cooking, though, has also become a little bit of something else for me in the time that we've been here.  It's the one thing I can almost sometimes control.

Here is where I have to begin again, and it won't be anything about the kitchen, except that it all links up in the end.  This is where I have to write down what has been ordering our lives -- or disordering them -- for the past two months, and it's not boxes.  On the day before we arrived in town, my father-in-law had a heart attack.  He did not go to the emergency room.  He drove to meet us at our new home the next day to give us the keys.  It was 103 degrees and about as humid as a steam room.  Andy's mom said that he was having chest pain and his shoulders hurt so he would not be wandering around our new house with us but sitting somewhere in the air conditioning.  That Monday, he went to the doctor and discovered he'd had a heart attack. 

Then began a month of tests, culminating in bypass surgery, 9 days in the hospital, a few days at home, then 4 more days in the hospital, and -- thank God -- now he seems to be recovering.  Andy has spent a lot of time with his dad.  I have spent a lot of time taking care of kids late at night.  And feeding them.  And trying to feed Andy, when he's here.  And sometimes making food for my inlaws.  And talking to Andy about diet.  And reading about food.  And thinking about food.

It's situations like this that make it clear how important the cook's role is in a family.  My husband (to some extent) and kids don't choose what they eat too much.  They depend on what I cook, what I buy.  Am I feeding them the right things?  Or is what I'm cooking going to contribute to heart disease down the road, to 13 days in the hospital and many weeks of recovery at home?

All my reading has convinced me that real food, real meat, real fat is best.  I feel better when I eat it.  My husband feels better.  My kids calm down.  (Give them a slice of commercial birthday cake and watch them zoom into the upper stratosphere.) 

But it's hard to ignore all the conventional, "expert" advice about saturated fat.  Hard to believe that all the experts are wrong in their touting of a low-fat diet, high carbohydrate diet, but then again, I do a lot of head scratching when I look at the data and wonder why all the "experts" seem to be ignoring it, too.  Gosh, it feels like deciding to homeschool all over again.

It leads to a lot of frustration at the grocery store.  We're trying to make two house payments right now (and don't even get me started on the situation with the other house).  We have some padding in the form of a savings account, but we want to keep the padding, so we're trying to be very frugal.  But how frugal do you get when it comes to food?  (I've been reading all the saving-money-on-groceries blogs, which usually just make me feel inadequate in completely new ways.)  Do you buy the cheap milk that says it contains skim milk even though it's sold as "whole milk"?  That has to mean it contains powdered milk.  So -- no -- I go out of my way to find better milk. (Note I'm not talking raw milk here or even organic milk, just milk that doesn't have "skim milk" or hormones added to it and isn't ultra-pasteurized.)  Do you buy the $.49/lb chicken leg quarters in the 10 lb bag?  I tried.  I couldn't.  They looked horrible.  Maybe I'll buy the $1.78/lb chicken breasts, although I stand there at the meat cases and think about conditions on industrial farms and food-borne diseases.  When we first moved in, we bought some "all natural" hamburger -- not grass-fed, but we had to eat.  The fat that came off that meat turned into an orange sludge.  Now I am never tempted to buy cheap hamburger. I often wonder if we shouldn't just be vegetarian for a while, but then I'm nursing a 3 1/2 month old linebacker and there are times when I really crave meat.

Fortunately we have found a nearby farm that sells grass-fed beef and lamb and pastured pork by the quarter, side, and whole.  If we can make it to January, we'll have some decent meat in the freezer for less than the price per pound of Whole Foods' grass-fed hamburger (including cuts like Porterhouse steak and all sorts of roasts.)  The moral of this story is: support your local farmers!

Coaxing order from chaos: Moving on... down from the soapbox... after a bit of a down point this week as I sniffled through a cold and we had to run Gareth to urgent care and I contemplated all the business trips Andy has planned... I've concluded that the best way for me to cope with the house at this point is to close the remaining book boxes and move them back into the garage.  We had to leave our two biggest bookcases in New York because nobody could figure out how to get them out of the hallway.  (They were moved into that hallway, but neither I nor Andy could remember exactly how.)  We were already pressed for shelf space, although I donated boxes and boxes of books before we left (including a few books I now wish I'd kept!)  So now I'm being even more ruthless and donating more boxes.  Hopefully at some point we will become proud owners of some new Ikea bookcases.

Are they learning anything?: Well, gee, I hope so.  I've been a little frustrated at my inability to keep the little boys to a decent schedule, but then I remind myself that I have a 3 month old baby.  He sleeps at night pretty well and with all the other stuff that's been going on, sometimes I forget how little he is.  But even happy, peaceful, good-sleeping babies need to be held and nursed and walked and played with and enjoyed.  So at those moments when I am frustrated that I am not accomplishing enough, I stop and take a deep breath and remind myself to be patient.  We've been saying our prayers every day, and the big kids are reasonably independent with their baskets and shelves of books.  For the twins and Farmerboy, I am focusing on reading lessons out of Phonics Pathways.  If I pray with them and work on reading, I know I've done the most important things.

A picture:

We have managed to set up some rudimentary art shelves.  The kids were happy to find the watercolors.

 

 

 

 

A Week in the Life: Friday 4/30

Friday is "extra chore" day.  All I have from our Friday (4/30) is one lone picture:

 

... in which Chipmunk and Pip put pots on their heads and pretend to be daleks.  (We have to be prepared for Saturday night.)

After that the day is much less exciting.

Our usual Friday routine goes like this:

• Breakfast
• Morning prayers (at least a Morning Offering, Our Father, and Hail Mary to start our day. Our Lady of La Salette instructed the children to whom she appeared to pray both morning and night, at least an Our Father and Hail Mary, if they couldn't do more.  So this is what I take for our bare minimum every day.)
• Baltimore Catechism (we're currently working through #2) and read aloud (in today's case, more on William the Conqueror in Our Island Story).  The kids usually draw or color during this time.  This morning I must banish Lego daleks from the table so that certain boys can concentrate on the catechism.
• Kids dress, brush teeth, and start daily chores --  Gareth (collect eggs, empty and load dishwasher, wipe counters, take out recycling); Katydid (feed and water chickens, bring and sort laundry, MTWTH wipe out bathroom sinks); Farmerboy (pick up family room); little boys (brush teeth and put on clothes without driving everyone insane).
• After their daily chores, we move on to extra chores -- Gareth (clean all bathrooms and take out bathroom trash); Katydid (fold one basket of laundry, put it away, pick up the always messy laundry room and vacuum it, help watch little boys; Farmerboy, Pip, and Pop (pick up the hallway that functions as our toy room for Legos, Playmobil, and Star Wars action figures); me and Chipmunk (work on bedrooms, picking up, vacuuming etc.) 
• Lunch time!
• Outside (This Friday happened to be warmer than the previous Thursday, thank goodness, so we spent a while outside.  Considering that we had been mostly stuck inside all week, I chose to let the big kids have more outside time when I took the little boys inside for naps, instead of making them take the usual two hour work period.)
• Work on Fridays generally consists of projects, nature walks, art, maybe a Latin quiz, reading... but no math or grammar or other textbooky things.
• Wii and computer time for all (including me)
• Dinner (frozen pizza tonight, as I am tired and Andy will be out of town until very late Saturday, but we do often have "pizza night" on Fridays)
• After dinner chores --  Gareth (pick up living room and entryway, sweep floors, vacuum rug); Katydid (wipe table, pick up and sweep kitchen and dining room floors); Farmerboy (clear table, pick up family room and vacuum rug), Pip and Pop (assigned each to a big kid as a helper); me and/or Andy (dinner dishes and kitchen duty, laundry).
• The usual stack of books for the little boys and bed... 10:30 at the earliest when Andy is out of town.  I stopped trying to put them to bed earlier, because they went to bed at the same time whether I tried to put them in bed at 8::30 or 10:00.  It's much less of a fight to wait. 

New Year, New Plans, New Routines: part 2

New Work

Well, this is what I was actually going to write about when I started my post about New Year's planning.  As usual, I got a bit side-tracked and longwinded.  And out of order.  Before I started tweaking the schedule, the kids needed something to work on. 

We're beginning First Form Latin, and Katydid -- having learned the basics of long division and multiplying two digit x two digit numbers -- is ready to move on to Saxon 6/5.    Farmerboy is nearly done with his handwriting book and wants to learn cursive, and I'm debating whether to stick with Handwriting Without Tears or go with New American Cursive, Memoria Press' new program designed to teach cursive to first graders. 

Beyond that, I also had to make some more complicated plans for my older two.

Gareth -- 7th grade

 

Over the past year, I have been noodling around with the idea of using Ambleside Online's Year 7.  Last spring I bought some of the books to preview them for this year.  I bought How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children's Books by Joan Bodger, which I never finished because I am not well-read enough, and frankly, does not seem to be the kind of book I could get Gareth to read at all.  (Katydid will be another story, but Gareth -- not so much.)  I bought Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, which is an amazing, amazing book that I love, but -- not so sure about Gareth there either.  Gareth himself snatched up Watership Down last spring and gulped it down, no narrations of course, and not as a school book.  (This was the same time he read Animal Farm -- sans reading guide, book reports, or narrations either.)  And then I kind of let things drop as we got into other "stuff" at the beginning of this school year. 

Unfortunately, the chart I made for Gareth at the beginning of the year mostly bombed.  He read a few of the books I had listed because they were sitting in a basket on the couch, I think.  He did not want to do many of the projects.  Sitting down each week to plan from the chart was a nightmare for both of us.  The book report I had him write on Out of the Silent Planet using Kolbe's Junior High Literature Guide sapped the joy from the book for him -- and for me, too.

We picked up medieval history as a family beginning in early November and that seemed to ignite a few sparks for him.  I had decided to use Our Island Story, another Ambleside Online selection from earlier years, as a spine and family read aloud.  By this point, we had also switched grammar books to use Our Mother Tongue: An Introductory Guide to English Grammar, also recommended in AO Year 7. Remembering that AO Year 7 matched up with the medieval material and that I had been thinking about using it... I went back and looked at the booklist.

It made a lot more sense this time.  And I had to scratch my head as to why I had picked up the books I had when obviously it was the history books that would make the big hit.  And Beowulf.  And maybe even Idylls of the King.  I was also pleasantly surprised to see that he had read a number of books from the Year 7 Free Reading List.  In the past year, growing from 12 to a few months past 13, he has also matured quite a bit.  So it seemed like a good fit. 

So now one can often find Gareth happily ensconced on the couch reading Winston Churchill, or Seamus Haney's translation of Beowulf, or practicing his Old English.  He probably won't be reading every single book on AO's booklist, simply because there are A LOT of books, and also because AO is a Protestant curriculum and we would need to substitute the appropriate Catholic books for the Suggested Devotional Reading List.  I haven't planned out his reading to a great extent, but I have begun making up weekly to-do lists for him:

We're still getting up to speed on these lists, and he doesn't really want to write twice a week, but so far I think they have proved to be a workable guide.  Although Gareth likes choice, he also needs structure.  For the moment, I think we've hit on a decent compromise.  Did he finish everything on this list last week? No. But he did accomplish a decent amount of work, and he didn't complain about much of it.

Katydid -- 5th grade

Katydid has enjoyed working with Literature for a Young Lady this year and finished up with our version of the Sunflower Basket in the fall.  During Advent and Christmas, she attempted our version of the Literature for a Young Lady Advent plans.  (I say "attempted" because December was a bit rough around here.) So with the start of a new quarter, she was also ready for some new work.  Fortunately I had made a bunch of hand written notes on the Ivy Basket back in November, so -- feeling somewhat less green by January -- I could finally sit down and add my notes to the Word chart which Jen so thoughtfully included in the plans. I had to make some fairly substantial tweaks in some instances -- to the literature section, because Katydid is 10 not 12 or 13, and because she has read the first three Anne of Green Gables books many, many times already; and also to the bits that were written with fall in mind, or a winter less snow-covered than ours. 

(Did I make any of you cringe with my creative use of punctuation? Mmm.  Sorry. I am overly fond of semi-colons.)

If you're curious, here is Katydid's version of the Ivy Basket:

Download Ivy-basket-

I'm not sure if Katydid will do everything listed for this basket, as she didn't do everything for her Sunflower basket, and some of the books have been carried over.  We usually sit down Monday morning and write out a list of what she wants to work on over the course of the week, along with the daily work that I want her to do (math, Latin, grammar 3x a week).  We don't map out page numbers or set specific goals or assign tasks (like reading Little Men or taking a nature walk) to specific days.  When we tried that what invariably happened is that I would find her sitting down with her watercolors for a couple of hours on the day that she had written she would be working on Apologia Botany ch. 2 and reading In the Days of Queen Victoria.  And if I suggested before she had a chance to start her work that today was the day she had decided to do xyz, she would sigh and huff.  But if we just write a loose list for the week, she usually works her way enthusiastically through most of it.

The picture I put at the top of my Part 1 post?

Those are Katydid's books.

New Year, New Plans, New Routines: part 1

(I started writing this post Monday, Jan. 4.  I am completely unable to start writing without setting the scene, and I like rooting my thoughts in time and place.  Even if the ending of a post is written weeks after the beginning.)

Yesterday (i.e., a couple of Sundays ago), while the snow whipped past my window and piled into 3 and 4 foot drifts like waves on a white sea, I sat down with a big stack of papers, catalogs, and books and attempted to provide some direction to my two oldest kids for the next quarter.  It was a good day for planning.  The wind chill never climbed above zero all day and the 4 inches of snow we were supposed to get turned into 6 or 8 or 10.  (I mean, if the size of the drift on my front walk is any indication.  It looks just like ice cream that's been frozen just a little too long, then cut with a scoop. Funny how I can go from waves to ice cream in less than a paragraph.)  We had been supposed to spend the afternoon sledding with our Little Flowers and Blue Knights group, and then on to dinner at a friend's house, but I had canceled a few days before because all 4 of the little boys have rotten colds and anyway, once the weather turned bad, sledding was out of the question. So there was really nothing better to do but sort through that big stack and try to make some sense of it.

I work from quarter to quarter.  While I might have a broad theme (usually historical) for our family studies for the whole year, or a math or Latin book, the details get planned out a few months at a time, and not in such great detail.  Around the end of December/beginning of January, I also think about how the year has gone thus far and if any changes need to be made for the remaining time.  (I think this is pretty common, so I'm not telling you anything original here. )

We often need a schedule shake-up in January, too.  The holidays plus winter's viruses (etc.) in combination with a definite change to WINTER weather have usually wreaked havoc on our schedule, and it usually becomes apparent about this time of the year that a portion (or portions) of the schedule are broken and need to be fixed.  Maybe we've been banging our heads against the wall over some piece of time management for months (usually mornings in our house) and things have finally come to a head.  So January can be a bit of a mix-up for a while as we sort out old, new, broken, and fixed.

My New Best Friend

 ... is a yellow legal pad.  Nothing fancy, 1 of a 3 pack picked up at the grocery store.  I had been using a moleskine journal to scrawl notes, but while it's good for brainstorming and writing, its size was a bit limiting and of course, I couldn't tear the pages out.  At this point I like my yellow legal pad better than a computer because it's a)more portable; b)it has no buttons for 2 year olds to push randomly in an attempt to demolish hours of Mommy's work; c)it requires no tutorials in order to use; and d)it can't crash, lock up, or perform any maddening adjustments to your formatting.  So here I am, a bit of a Luddite. 

Anyway, I have used my new yellow legal pad to troubleshoot our old schedule, to make various new schedules hoping to address our morning problems (i.e., big kids getting up later and later, therefore making it impossible to have our normal prayer/catechism/read aloud time), and to make a neat Montessori math chart for Farmerboy so I would have some idea of what to do next with him (which is what you see in the photo above.  Page numbers correspond to the NAMC Primary Mathematics Album.)

The New Schedule

After too many mornings that didn't get started until 10:00, I made out a couple of new schedules and showed them to Gareth and Katydid.  After discussing how the day would go using each one, they chose one they preferred.  Fortunately, it was the one I liked best, too, but it is requiring us to make a few more changes in our morning than just getting up earlier.  On the other hand, this new routine is much more like the routines we had when the kids were younger.

6:00-7:00: I get up and have breakfast with Andy.

7:00-8:00: I drag the big kids out of bed and at some point take a shower. The little boys usually get up some time in between 7 and 7:30 anyway, so this is normal for them.  They can watch a little TV at this time.  The big change is that the big kids do not have to get dressed when they get up, but they do have to be at the table for breakfast by 8 AM-ish.  (The reason we used to have the "you have to be dressed when you come out" rule was because certain people were taking so long to get dressed that it crunched the before lunch work time.)  And instead of everyone eating here and there, everybody eats at the table.  We have morning prayer, go over the Baltimore Catechism, and then I read aloud (currently D'Aulaire's Norse Myths and finishing up Beorn the Proud).  After the kids finish eating, they can get "something to do" while I read... this morning for the little boys it was paper punches and scissors.

 

Around 9:00 or 9:30 (depending on how long our reading session lasts; this morning we spent some time talking about Haiti before we read and then during our reading of Beorn, we had to get out an atlas to look at Jutland, so it was about an hour and a half), it's time for everyone to get dressed and do chores. We have an hour for this, as chickens need to be fed and watered in addition to everyone's assigned house chores, and it takes a while to help three little boys with clothes and teeth.

10ish/10:30 -- 12:00: This is a work period.  (Beginning with a snack for a pregnant Mommy and four "starving" small boys.)  We've always had a period of work (or choice time) before lunch, but it was getting squeezed shorter and shorter and/or pushing lunch later and later.  Hopefully, the new "breakfast at 8 in your pajamas" will help. 

A new element to this work period, however, is that Farmerboy (my 1st grader) is doing some of his required work -- math, phonics, handwriting -- at this time instead of waiting to do it all in the afternoon.  That's the way I used to have it set up because the twins and Chipmunk made it impossible for me to work with Farmerboy individually or for Farmerboy to concentrate.  So we waited until the three littlest were asleep before we tried to do any sort of required work.  The problem with waiting until afternoon has always been that a)it's afternoon and b)Chipmunk still will not sleep for more than 20 minutes on his own.  It is very hard to do any kind of math with manipulatives while lugging around or rocking a sleeping two year old. 

Anyway, although I do use phonics workbooks and primers, we're still using straight Montessori math.  He doesn't really have a choice of whether to do it or not, but I do like to introduce him to enough math works so that he has a choice of what math to do every day.

 Right now we're working on place value.

12:00-2:00: Lunch and a break.  Outside, weather permitting.

2:00-4:00: Another work period, primarily for Gareth and Katydid. And yes, it does usually go to 4:00... but that's only because either chores eat into the morning work period, or the kids are outside and don't come in until 2:30 or 2:45... I'm not likely to interrupt sledding if they've been stuck inside all week.  (I just count sledding as PE.)

This brings up another point.  Our work periods are not primarily devoted to seat work.  For instance, if Gareth decides he wants to use the elliptical during work period, or if Katydid tells me she wants to take a nature walk, that's perfectly fine with me.  The point is to be gainfully employed, not sitting around playing Pokemon.  Both kids do have some required daily work and/or weekly work (which I'll talk about in a minute), but I like to leave the order of the work up to them.  If there's a conflict somewhere (say, I can't help two people with math at the same time), I let them know my limitations and we work something out.

Also during this time I read to the little boys and put the twins and Chipmunk down for nap/quiet time.

4:00-6:00: The kids can play Wii during this time.  The problem we're having is they all want to play Wii individually instead of together, and so their allotted 30 minutes a piece (except for the twins, who do play together) racks up.  The related problem is that even though most of them are waiting for their turn, they're watching everybody else's turn.  Thirty minutes of game time a day I'm ok with; two hours is pushing it.  So we're still working on this.  Wii time was actually a point of contention in the creation of a schedule, because previously the afternoon work period lasted from 2:00-5:00... which, I will just tell you now, is nuts.  But we were doing that because  our days weren't starting, for one reason or another, until 10.  Anyway, if they had to work until 5, then not everybody could have Wii time before dinner, which made it seem like Wii just went on all night.  (On the other hand, Andy sometimes likes to play Lego Star Wars with the boys after dinner, which is a bit different.)

I usually get on the computer for a little while during this time, then wake Chipmunk up so I can fix dinner and do laundry.

Chipmunk helps.

Next up... new work for the new year.