Odds and Ends

A few minutes before bed to blahbitty blah blah.

A, have you been getting turkeys? Cheap turkeys? What? You haven't? It's pre-Thanksgiving time people. Right now at Walmarts all over the country there have been reports of 40 cents a lb turkeys. The turkeys have been around $5.50. Yeah 5 big bucks. Now there's a 2 turkey at a time limit. Over the last few days we've gotten 8. I sure wish I lived closer to town. I want 30 total. It's not looking good. But I've got my mom on the turkey hunt and she's going to be getting me 2 a day when they have them. Go Team Mom!

And in case you didn't know, turkeys are great. Yeah I wish I could afford nice free range turkeys (we raised our own this year, and unfortunately didn't take good enough care of our baby turkey poults this Spring) but at $40+ a turkey for free range, it's not in the budget. But 5 BUCKS?! Dude. And turkeys go so far. Far far far. See next paragraph. :)

So we cooked a turkey today. Actually it's me cleaning out all of last year's turkeys. We had a huge Thanksgiving turkey meal. Ahh the wonders of my mom coming and making homemade stuffing with sausage and mushrooms. Yum. But we ate loads of turkey. Then I stripped loads of turkey meat off. LOTS of it. And I put the carcass in the crock pot for soup. I easily have 2 full meals worth of shredded turkey meat. And more for soup. All those meals include a full dinner, lunch for Clay, and leftovers for us at home the next day. So that's how many meals? 8 meals in total? For $5 for the meat? Understand now why I want so many? 2 turkeys a month. Wouldn't want one every week cause we'd get sick of them, but every other week? Go budget, it's your birthday.....

What's that sound? You running to Walmart? Pick me up one while you're there eh?

*note* some Walmarts have been selling out of turkeys. The manager told my mom to call ahead of time. Might be worth a call if you live 30-45 minutes away like we do.

*note 2* if I were a cool blogger I would have taken a picture of the turkey and crock pot and whatnot. Does it ever feel ODD to take pictures of things like cutting meat off a turkey carcass? Sometimes it feels way too weird. When you're ripping tendons and hacking away at the turkey it feels pretty full of myself to take pictures of that grossness and feel like people will care about them. **Then I type out my post and wish I had taken the weirdness, narcissistic pictures to make my blog post look cool.**

B, Forget my old Last Hoorah post. I've had many of them in the last week. I'll touch on that Monday. Or late tomorrow night. Blasted weight loss. I hate it. Why can't I look like a goddess at 200 lbs? Why? Or live in one of those countries where they love their women fat? Now that, THAT would be nice. To weigh 200 lbs and be thought of as the most attractive woman in the room. Okay I don't seek to have men look at me, in fact I try to dress modestly so they don't. And the heavier I am the harder it is to dress modestly and feminine. It's not easy to find feminine modest clothes at Goodwill. So maybe the other country business would be even worse? um...No. It wouldn't. Where ARE these magical places people talk about anyways? And anyone want to make me some nursing jumpers or find some XL blouses for me at Goodwill? Okay. THis is it. So this is the LAST Last Hoorah Day LOL! Time to lose this weight. It wasn't so bad really. Some homemade stevia chocolate before bed. But let's not forget that I ate a plate and a half of Thanksgiving dinner. Even it being 5 hours ago and it was still Last Hoorah worthy. If I lived in that magical Fatland would I eat Thanksgiving every week? Do you think women specifically TRY to get fat there and being skinny is considered the state in which women are to strive to not be? That would be weird right? "Ew look at how skinny she is. Blech. Honey I love your fat." Okay enough. Must go to sleep. Can you see my tiredness morphing into madness? Eh... ignore my ramblings. This is just the tiniest glimpse into the rambling nonsense that makes my sweet rational, reasonable husband roll his eyes at me :) I love him.

C, Why am I up this late? Oh yeah, babies who don't sleep. Or prefer staying up until 1am and then sleeping til 9. I've never had a baby sleep through the night before the age of 2! And here I have this baby that sleeps 8 hours at night. But seriously me not being able to go to sleep until 1-2am isn't a huge help. I really need to buckle down and get working on him going to bed earlier. The first key is... NO, I don't want to say it. I can't. Sigh. Getting him *cough Me cough* up earlier.

D, Thanks mom for coming over and making a pre-Thanksgiving meal with me.

E, and because I read something that said people hate blog posts without pictures... I leave you with this. Garrison...
And that headdress thing was brought back from Egypt, real Egypt by my mom. Why Garrison is wearing it and why he looks so grumpy in all the pictures I found of him wearing it, I don't know. But it just feels like this post. That's what I should be wearing right now as I typed it. And I leave with that look on my face.

Sleep. Must. Find. It.

Our Hospital Stay....

I've been missing this last week or so. You know you were thinking I was going to get back into the blogging almost every day thing again. And I am. Unless we're in the hospital with the baby that is!

Early last week Cassie and Adric had a little bout of something or another. They both had little fevers. But it all lasted just a day or two. Adric was sick for only about 12 hours! But because of the baby, my great mom came and took the fevery children away from the house until they were well.

Thursday Garrison had a little of an off day. He slept most of the day. But Friday he was feeling fine so I just figured, hey, normal baby stuff. But then Saturday mom came over and we were going Goodwilling. But Garrison wasn't feeling so great. He was fussy fussy. He would fuss when I picked him up instead of being comforted when I picked him up. I realized he was hot. So I took his under arm temperature. It was 101.5. I immediately called the on call nurse for the pediatricians and she said "Take him to the Emergency Room right now". Sigh. Just what every mom with a 5 week old needs to hear to make her a worried mess.

So we went.

And it turns out that with babies that age, it's a 100% "Better Safe Than Sorry" policy. Because newborns can go downhill so fast when things ARE serious, they treat things like they are serious until they find out they're not. So they take a spinal tap, blood and urine to culture all three to rule out any sort of bacterial type infection.

Ahh spinal taps in little babies. Not the best thing to watch. But I'm not one to be squeamish, so I watched all his procedures. Did you realize that little itty bitty babies have litty itty bitty veins? Yeah, 2 HOURS, 4 sticks, and 10+ people later, Hartley got his IV in. And he was a tad too dehydrated from his fever to get spinal fluid. He'd need ANOTHER spinal tap later. Great...

I did get to go in an ambulance. They transferred us from our local hospital to the Children's Hospital in Nashville. Mandatory 48 hour stay. There they did another spinal tap, got all his IV antibiotics going and by 2:30AM we were in a room. Poor Clay. He probably got to sleep at 3:30 and his alarm went off at 5 to go to work.

So I spent the next two days in the hospital. Let me just say, it's like Grand Central Station in the hospital room of a baby. All.... night.... long..... And let me also say that antibiotics make my baby Hartley gassy. And that gassy Hartleys stay up most of the night fussing.

Oh and they also give you meals if you're breastfeeding the baby. Nice. And you get to order off a stacked huge menu. Nice again. And let me give you an idea of how good the food is. I ordered PORK LOIN in the hospital. Twice. And it was fantastic.

But after 2 days, the cultures came back fine and we were discharged! I've spent the last week glad for a baby with no fever, trying to get the children back into normal life, and get my sleep schedule better again.

To all my friends and family that prayed for Hartley and sent well wishes, it was more than appreciated. Love you.

Back to regular blogging tomorrow.

Beautiful Results!

Okay sometimes we need God to show us that what we're doing is working, that what we're doing is important. I'm so dorky to be excited about this right?

So since I originally typed my beauty post, which was a handful of days before posting it, I really have been trying hard to get the house in order and just looking nice. This morning I awoke to THIS email:
Making an effort in the little things does NOT go unnoticed even if you never get a thank you email.

What is even more lovely to me is how working on the little details adds to the big picture, making Clay think to thank me for the things I have done for a long long time.

There are some things I normally do to show Clay how much I love and appreciate him. I gather Clay's clothes before bed so at 4:30 in the morning he can just walk in the bathroom and take a shower. He has an ironed shirt everyday. And I make his breakfast and lunch everyday. I make a container of oatmeal, a quart of unsweet tea, a quart smoothie with raw milk and strawberries, a lunch, and now that he's working until 9:30 at night, a dinner as well. And I set up his coffee maker, grinding the beans, setting it up so her can just turn it on, setting out a coffee cup.

And if you rolled your eyes thinking how old-fashioned that all is, and how I'm giving into male/female stereotypes, that's good!

Menu for Nov. 6-12

Here's our weekly menu to soothe those who have been waiting on the edge of their seats for our menu since I mentioned it a couple days ago.

Friday:
Breakfast: Sweet Rice (leftover brown rice simmered with milk, cinnamon, vanilla & honey until the rice is soft, then beaten eggs mixed in to thicken)
Lunch: Bean salad with an open faced PB&J
Dinner: Black beans and brown rice with salsa
Tomorrow's Prep: Start sourdough, soak oatmeal, reboot kefir, get pita recipe written on card for recipe box for morning

Saturday:
Breakfast: Oatmeal with Vanilla Kefir
To Do: Make Pitas and bread
Lunch: Beans and rice leftovers (Clay will be at work) with kombucha
Dinner: Creamy Garlic Potato Soup with my sourdough bread
Tomorrow's Prep: Make Pitas, Start Sourdough IN pans so can bake first thing in morning, soak lentils, kefir grains in fridge, make quiches

Sunday:
Breakfast: Mexican Scrambled Eggs with my sourdough bread
Lunch: Pitas with hummus and coconut curry lentils
Dinner: Quiche
Tomorrow's Prep: Set up baked oatmeal before bed,

Monday:
Breakfast: Baked Oatmeal
Lunch: PB&J on sourdough
Dinner: Turkey and Mashed Potatoes and our yummy canned green beans
Tomorrow's Prep: Reboot kefir, soak pintos, soak oatmeal

Tuesday:
Breakfast: Oatmeal with Kefir
To Do: Make tortillas
Lunch: Leftovers
Dinner: Shredded Turkey with beans and homemade tortillas, reboot kefir, soak oatmeal, start sourdough, put turkey carcass in crock pot

Wednesday:
Breakfast: Oatmeal with Kefir
Lunch: Cream cheese scrambled eggs (made by a 9yo)
Dinner: Turkey Soup with my sourdough bread

Thursday:
Breakfast: Homemade granola with homemade yogurt
Lunch: In town.
Dinner: Red curried cabbage and carrots over brown rice(unless I see my mom before then and get the red curry paste I left at her house. Then I'll do it earlier in the week cause I'm craving it!)

To see the beauty....

Clay loves Fall. He loves it. Every time we step outside he revels in the beauty of the colors of the trees. He'd live somewhere that was Fall all the time. I can see awe in his eyes at God's creation.

And there's me, looking, thinking it's pretty and all, but...

There was a time as a young wife that I was SO focused on bringing beauty to every area of our lives. At that time, Clay and I lived in a schoolbus. It was a rockin' long schoolbus. And I made it home. We had a bed, a dresser, a rod for our hung clothes. It had a wood stove and a propane stove and oven. It had recliners and a small couch and a bookshelf. Everywhere you looked you could see touches of beauty I had tried to instill in our little humble abode. Curtains, doilies hung over backs of chairs, random little things here and there that as a new wife were my ways of showing love for Clay and bringing beauty to our simple lives.

After we moved here to TN, as a young wife I wore lovely skirts and dresses everyday. I did my hair and wore a nice floor length floral apron. We lived in a.. hmmm what's the word for it? Very hillbilly looking shack I mean house. And still again it was lovely in it's way. I had nice curtains, throw blankets on our free stained couches to try and cheer them up, a nice green rug on the floor, everywhere again there was me trying to bring beauty in the little things.

Now as Clay looks with wide eyes at the glory of the leaves changing color I sit and ask myself "Where's the awe?". As I sit in my nonfeminine grey sweat pants, needing a shower, with not a single picture of my children on the walls, and ask myself again....

"Where's the awe?"
(okay it's not a picture of Fall, but man, the beauty of that simple little creek running over rocks!)

Where's the awe in how amazing it is that the Lord blessed me with a husband to love and care for, truly amazing children to train and love on, a home in the country to tend, just a life that is so overflowing with blessings I can't number?

Somewhere amidst laundry piles, dirty walls, diapers to change, tangles to comb out and school to do I forgot to look around and see the beauty in life. And it shows. I no longer get up and put on lovely feminine clothes. I no longer leave scriptures in Clay's lunch. I no longer try and make little corners of my house lovely. I no longer plan meals ahead to be 100% sure we have nutritious meals for our family. I no longer keep the house in the beauty that is order and cleanliness. I no longer make it a priority to keep my body beautiful and slim.

I've officially let myself go. And everything else in a way. I've stopped appreciating the beauty in an organized closet, in not only clean dishes but an empty dishdrainer (*gasp*), in a mopped floor (do people actually still DO that?), I've stopped appreciating the beauty of straightened books on a shelf, of colored leaves strung on strings around the house for Fall (do I have to actually DO that now that I've posted it? *help*).

I've heard it a gazillion times about learning to love homemaking, learning to love the little things like laundry and dishes. Honestly I don't love those things. I may never. BUT I purpose to start seeing the beauty in them well done. To look in the mirror with a nice skirt on in the morning and see the beauty the Lord sees in me, that Clay does. I purpose to not just look in the mirror and see the overweght woman, he one that doesn't need to look nice because what difference does it make? I purpose to smile when I smooth out wrinkles in our bed in the morning. I purpose to cover that bulletin board with pretty fabric and hang it up. I purpose to empty the dishdrainer, wipe down the counter and see it's beauty.

When I think of the Lord's creation, the tiny details He made with such loving care, I am reminded that I need to treat the little details of life with such loving care whether it's combing tangles out of 8yo hair or stacking cups in the cabinet. Beautiful.

Red Shirt Fridays

Red Shirt Friday is a symbol of unity of support for our solders who have given their lives and their freedoms so we might enjoy ours.

Red Shirt Friday is not just to give thanks to the thousands that have died for us. It is also for the millions that have served our country, our serving our country now, and to the millions that have supported our brave military.

It is for the loved ones that have sacrificed and continue to sacrifice for our benefit. Mothers, wives, brothers, sisters, children, and relatives.

It is for the friends neighbors, communities, organizations, states and our nation that suffer from our loss.

It is for all of the ones that are serving now and have served.

Our Homeschool 2009-2001 -Part 1

I am going to do a few posts about what we're doing this coming year. Actually our year goes from about Jan-Jan since we school year round. The Winter is when the children seem to switch to new books. But since I read many a homeschool blog post this Fall, I, being one that always gives into peer pressure figured it was time :) I'm going to break these into a couple posts. I'll post what we're using, why we like it and where to get it.

Math first. Seems there's always more talk about math than anything else. Maybe phonics, but math still seems to be the one people debate more, have strong opinions about, and doubt whether they're using the right thing, the most. We as a family use Math U See. I LOVE it. I won't say I haven't had my moments where I considered switching, but the fact that my children love it and thrive on it always keeps me on track with it.

MathUSee is definitely in the middle of all homeschool math debates for a reason. There's also a reason SO many homeschoolers use it. It's different. It's succeeding where for many children, the same old math was not. MUS (Math U See from now on in this post) is different for a few reasons. A, it's visual and tactile. It teaches learning using blocks all the way up through higher math. Being able to see and touch and build using manipulatives helps the brain visualize math. So it's good for those great at math. AND it's good for those who struggle with math. That makes it a great fit for the homeschooling family that will have children all over that map.
The blocks:
B, it focuses on the how and WHY you solve a certain problem a certain way. It's not just about learning how to do something but why you use a certain method, why you are doing what you're doing. I've learned a lot already and Frankie's only in 4th grade.
C, and perhaps the most important and controversial part of MUS, is that it uses the mastery method instead of the spiral method. Normally math is taught via the spiral method. Spiral programs introduce a variety of topics without expecting children to fully understand them. With repeated exposure and continuous review, children are expected to learn and master all necessary concepts. BUT with the mastery method, which I LOVE, a child masters a concept before moving onto a new concept. So you would master addition before moving to subtraction. So you would learn addition, then multiple digit addition before even starting subtraction. Then you would master subtraction, complicated subtraction, before moving onto multiplication, and so on and so forth. I love that my children are actually getting to cement an idea, cement what they've learned before being expected to move onto a totally new topic. They have 3, yes three, pages per lesson (each page has word problems too!). So if your child needs more than just the standard one day on a subject (like most children) they have 3 lesson pages, three days, to do the lesson. Then, it has 3 systematic review pages for each lesson. SO not only do they review past lessons and books (which people worry about) they also get more lesson practice if they need it. And of course lastly, the fact that we USE addition to subtract, that we use it to multiply. Just because we already did addition, it doesn't mean that the children don't use it every day.

Another worry is about the fact that schools use a spiral method so children aren't always in the same place testing wise, or won't have learned the same thing school children have at the same time. Don't worry! It all comes out in the wash. They WILL all learn the same things, they just learn them at different times. So while a public schooled child in one grade would have learned single digit addition and subtraction, our MUS children would have learned addition and double digit addition that year. But the next year the school children would learn double digit addition and subtraction, our MUSers would learn single and double digit subtraction. So after a couple years everyone's learned the same things. And my homeschooling goals do not include mimicking the public school system's goals, so I don't worry about it anyways.

MUS also comes with a DVD that has Mr. Steve Demme teaching each lesson up with a white board. My children just put the DVD in the computer, watch their lesson and that's it. Now I do have to teach now and then :) but Frankie especially doesn't need me at all. The DVD is all he needs. So if you aren't sure about teaching math, then this is great for you.

Check out a free demo here:
http://mathusee.com/demo.html

That was longer than I expected! Maybe I'll just stop with that for now.