Merry Christmas
From our family to yours, we wish you a very merry Christmas.
Blessings,
Author: Wendy
H is for House of Cards
A few weeks ago, Seahawk decided that he wanted to try his hand at building a house of cards. We don’t have carpet in our home, so he quickly found out that this made his goal quite a challenge. But, being the good problem solver that he is, he simply got a washrag out and used that as a “carpet” for his tower, which gave the cards much more stability.
Seeing Seahawk’s success inspired Munchkin to join in the fun, and for several days, our living room had two houses of cards going at any given moment. And with my kids, working on the task isn’t necessarily what they enjoy. They like the finished product. So once they’d completed their houses, we were walking gently in the living room so as not to accidentally knock over the towers before they were ready to put them away. This lasted about a day and a half.
And when they were ready to tear them down, what did we discover? That those cards were pretty darn stable! Even after a lot of jumping right next to the towers, only a few cards had fallen. Kids and Dad had to physically take the cards down by hand. They weren’t going to fall over mistakenly.
Have you ever built a house of cards?
Blessings,
SchoolhouseTeachers.com Sale!
This post contains affiliate links. By clicking through using my link, your purchase will help support this site at no additional cost to you.
Hey guys! I just wanted to put up a note to let you all know that SchoolhouseTeachers.com, the homeschool curriculum site of The Old Schoolhouse magazine, is having a fabulous sale right now.
Here’s how it works: You can sign up for an account and choose to pay either monthly or yearly. The normal price for the monthly membership is $12.95. If you sign up by Christmas (at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time), you’ll get a 40% discount, making your monthly membership $7.77.
The normal annual rate is $139, which is 10% off of the normal monthly rate. If you sign up for an annual account by the Christmas night deadline, you’ll get a 50% discount, making your fee $64.26.
Now, here’s the best part: If you sign up during this sale, you will be locked in at this discounted rate until you cancel your membership. That’s right: whether you keep it for three days, three months, three years, or more, you will never pay more than the discounted rate. How cool is that?!
In case you’re still not sure if this is a good site for you to invest in, you can read my review from a year ago. Additionally, there’s a whole new crop of Schoolhouse Crew Reviewers doing reviews of the site this week, so you can get an idea of what other homeschool moms think of this valuable resource.
Just click on the above banner to take you to the sale page if you’re interested in buying, or just want more information.
Blessings,
Picture of the Week: Cranberries are Not Good!
I bought fresh cranberries at Thanksgiving time to make fresh sauce to take to my in-laws’ for dinner, and then what did I do? Forgot to make it or bring the berries to have it made while we were there. So I ended up with two bags of fresh cranberries in my fridge the week after Thanksgiving. Because they weren’t of the “sweetened dried” variety, I’m not sure how to use these cranberries in any way other than to make sauce, so I did that one night last week to go with a roasted chicken. As I was pulling the berries out of the fridge, Small Fry was right up with me, begging for a berry. What he didn’t know was that uncooked, unsweetened cranberries are not very palatable. So I handed him one, knowing what his reaction would be, and told him to wait a minute to eat it until I could get the camera ready. His response was pretty much exactly what I expected: a disgusted face and pulling that berry out of his mouth just as fast as he could! My camera shutter was a bit too slow to capture the face, but you can see him frantically scraping his tongue. What a funny boy! [Read more…]
G is for Gingerbread House
For the second year in a row, my dad bought the boys a gingerbread house kit to build and decorate. The difference this year is that he chose a gingerbread village instead of just a house, so while the individual buildings were much smaller, each child got his own to decorate. They didn’t fight last year, but I still think this was a better way to do it. They weren’t crawling all over one another to try and decorate their wall like last year. And as an added bonus this year, while we were decorating, one of the boys’ friends came over. I was happy to have an extra house to share with her. (And even more happy to send it home with her when she left!)
Blessings,
A Plethora of Crocheted Hats
I’ve been busily crocheting stocking hats for all of our nieces and nephews for Christmas. There are nine of them altogether (five nieces and four nephews), so we could really go broke if we bought toys for each of them, because those are in addition to our own three children. Besides that, it kind of goes against our life philosophy of simplicity to buy cheap plastic toys. [Read more…]
Our Reading List – December
Here are in a new month. Can you believe that it’s December already?! A new month means time for a new reading list. Here’s what we’re reading in December.
Read-Aloud – everyone
I found a book called A Newberry Christmas at the library. It’s a collection of 14 short stories by beloved authors including Beverly Cleary and Madeline L’Engle. We’re really excited to dive into this one! [Read more…]
F is for From the Mouths of Babes
I have this statue on my bedside table. It was a gift from Will a few years ago, and is very special for a few reasons. (Mainly because he gave it to me, but also because it’s done in a style that his mom – who passed away in 2007 – really enjoyed and collected art in.) It’s been a mainstay on my bedside table ever since I got it. We’ve tried putting it in different places, but nowhere else is quite “right.” Some things are like that, you know?
So, there the statue sits. Small Fry is a bit behind on his speaking skills (but he’s making real progress the past couple of weeks!). He has just a handful of words he says (Mama, Dada, water, bubble, yeah, no). When I went into our room the other day to get a fresh diaper so I could change him, he followed me. He’s seen the statue before, of course, but this time he picked it up and pointed at each figure in turn, saying, “Mama. Dada.”
I love that this is how he sees his parents: in a caring, loving relationship.
What a way to melt a mother’s heart!
Blessings,
Wendy
Recipe: Pork Chops with Apple Cider Sauce
Some days you cook simple stuff (spaghetti with jarred pasta sauce, for example). But sometimes you really just want to cook, if you know what I mean. And as we move into the cooler months, those times seem to be more and more. It’s easy to “phone in” dinner in the summer when it’s hot and all anyone wants is salad anyway, but we crave warmer, heavier foods in the winter. Today I have a recipe for you that gives you that warm, real-cooked feel, but isn’t actually too heavy. I found the base recipe at AllRecipes, but I’ve modified it to make it my own. [Read more…]
Quiet Book
I mentioned back in the summertime that I’d made a quiet book for Small Fry’s second birthday. It wasn’t that awesome, but it was okay for my first time out. Well, for our nephew’s second birthday in September, I poked around online (as well as exploring my fabric and notions stash) and found some ideas for quiet book pages for him. Would you believe that there are whole blogs dedicated just to making quiet books? I was shocked. And amazed at the incredible talent of some of those ladies.
So, while my second book still wasn’t quite as awesome as some of the others you’ll find online, it was much better than my first, and I’m very pleased with the way it turned out. Here are the pages I made. [Read more…]