ABC catch-up

J is for…JJ. My husband. Best friend and provider, great dad, and killer charcoal griller. He’s also handy at the lake!

K is for…Katie. Me!

After my Couch to 5K walk/run this afternoon.

L is for…lemonade. Or, as D & A say it, yemonade. Nothing better on a hot summer day.

Baa.

M is for…muffins. My kids and I have been making our favorite breakfast a lot lately, “Tommy Brock and Mr. Tod’s Wheat Germ Muffins” from Peter Rabbit’s Natural Foods Cookbook, an apparently out-of-print kids’ cookbook that was published in 1977. It was my mom’s, and she gave it to me a few years ago. My mom has the wonderful habit of writing comments on recipes, and on the top of the page for these muffins she wrote “good-good, mommy!” Guess my brother and/or I liked them. I still do!

The recipe (with our little tweaks) follows in the extended entry.

N is for…natural. Something I am striving for in the life of my family. I want to live more naturally…with less plastic, less processing, less chemical influence. More on this to come.

O is for…oatmeal. Another favorite breakfast of ours is oatmeal, specifically steel-cut oats, prepared in a simple but delicious way. The way I make it follows in the extended entry.

Sorry for the boring photo. Really, it’s super delish.

P is for…pencils. Since we began homeschooling, I have sharpened and resharpened countless numbers of pencils. And you would not believe the eraser crumbs. They now outnumber the food crumbs on the kitchen floor…until I do the almost-daily vacuuming.

There, I think I’m almost caught up! Think I can maybe stay on track through the end of the year?

And the recipes…

So, we’ve survived the first three weeks of homeschooling! It’s going well. When we first started looking at all of the curriculum materials available, I was leaning toward one of the all-inclusive packages that gives you every subject you need in one convenient package, but it ended up being so expensive that I ended up putting my own materials together. We live really close to a huge homeschool bookstore warehouse, who knew? So going in there and getting advice from the employees was easy, and I found everything I needed (and a lot more I wanted, but unfortunately I can’t buy every book I want, can I?). The place is amazing. So, for the first half of the school year, we have a math workbook, a reading workbook, and a handwriting workbook. I only bought one “semester’s” worth so I could make sure the books I chose worked for us before investing in the whole year. (We’re doing a modified year-round schedule of what works out to be about 6 weeks of school alternating with two weeks off, until some of the holidays come, when we will spend more time off than on so mama doesn’t go crazy.)

We also have some readers, and a bunch of other books related to science (mainly bugs and worms and stuff) and social studies subjects, and we will add more as we get through them. Right now we’re reading about the frontier times and Abraham Lincoln, and yesterday our chapter was about spinning! Here’s a random fact for you: the cloth the women used to weave back in old Abe’s day was called “linsey-woolsey”. Part linen, part wool. DJ wasn’t nearly as fascinated by that fact as I was, though! But anyway, school is going well. His handwriting has improved by leaps and bounds in just three weeks of daily practice, which I’m especially excited about. We do butt heads on occasion, or lose our (his) focus, but usually it just takes a little prodding and he digs back in.

I haven’t been doing much knitting. I did finally find my artichoke socks and manage to snap a few pics.

Love these socks. And again, I need to thank Beth for the yarn! Finally my birthday gift has become something besides a hank of yarn. And I have plans for a sweater for AJ (Ravelry link) that I can hardly wait to start, but I need for the weather to cool down so I feel motivated again. Lately I’m just not in the knitting mood. And actually, I haven’t been in the sewing mood, either! I started cutting up AJ’s baby clothes, finally, so I can make her baby clothes quilt like I did for DJ. I meant to have that done by the time she turned two, and now here she is almost three and a half. Time flies! But I’m almost done with the squares and will hopefully lay it out and sew the top up this weekend.

Not much else is new.  Right now I’m not sure what I’m blogging for, but I don’t really want to give it up, so bear with me.  I’m kind of all over the place, as I juggle some new responsibilities and interests all at once.  Life, it’s always evolving!

When I get this behind with blogging, I don’t even know where to start! Life has been busy. We’ve been up to visit my in-laws in NC several times this month (or make that last month), had VBS at church (which left me totally knocked out), done some fun crafts, and I’ve still been working an hour or two a day. It’s hard to find the time to think up a post, let alone type it out. But I have been taking pictures!

I knitted three pairs of baby booties for a project sponsored by Woolwinders, a knitting shop in MD near my parents. Someone there is taking them to Zimbabwe, where they will be given to babies (not sure if the babies are at a hospital, or orphanage, or what). I used the pattern provided by Woolwinders for the first pair,

then I used the adorable and fun Magic Slippers pattern for the other two.

I used leftover yarn from socks for all of the booties. What a great way to use up those leftovers!

We also made a whole family of tie-dyed t-shirts, using a Jacquard dye kit that we bought at Michael’s. It came with gloves, three colors of dye, soda ash, rubber bands…everything you need to make good tie-dye (as I now know, because the only tie-dye I ever attempted was with Rit dye and turned out pale and horrible). First we just made one for each of the kids, but then we had dye leftover, so we bought four more shirts and made two more for them, and one for me and one for my husband. D & A loved this activity and I’m sure it will become an annual summer project!

I sewed a reusable shopping bag, using a Target plastic bag for a pattern. It came out OK, and I sent it to my mom for her farmer’s market trips. The fabric is from Superbuzzy (back when they first opened) and has French food terms all over it.

DJ lost his first tooth.

He was so excited when he finally pulled it out (himself!) that he started jumping up and down, and then he fell over. It was a scene straight from a blooper reel somewhere, so funny.

I made homemade hamburger buns,

and found a new favorite bread recipe, which uses potatoes and graham flour and is so delicious.

And, during those trips up to NC, we played in Mimi’s garden.

Look at that corn!