In the Yard: November

Yesterday Duncan and I strolled around our yard for one last dose of that wonderful mix of summer and autumn. You know, the days when the summer flowers are still blooming, peeking through the leaves…

Those crazy roses are blooming like it's June, and the lantanas are just now at their most beautiful. Throw in some patches of salvia, marigolds, Black-eyes Susans, four o'clocks, mums, and even some straggly impatiens, and we have a crazy quilt of mixed seasons.

The cat watched us from his favorite bench. He's extremely lazy.

Duncan took his new remote-control car out for a test drive through the leaves…



Today is cold and rainy. By tomorrow, the leaves will be mostly on the ground and our first real dose of cold weather will hit. Suddenly, summer and fall are really gone.

I guess I'll have to take down the pumpkin lanterns. I could be really proactive and throw away the real pumpkins before they rot.

But then Dr. H. would miss all the fun of scraping pumpkin goo off the porch.

Linked up with Outdoor Wednesday and Just for the Joy of It

Common Cold Cures

Both Randy and my Dad are already battling terrible colds this year, hacking coughs and dripping noses. Pure cold misery. Last week I made chicken tortilla soup for my Dad, and I swear he was better within a couple of days. Tonight I'm making French onion soup for Randy, and I'm expecting him to be back to normal by tomorrow or so.

Chicken Tortilla Soup

2 TB. vegetable oil
1 medium onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 chipotle pepper in adobo sauce, minced, plus a tsp. of the liquid
1/2 to 1 TB. chili powder (the more, the hotter)
2 tsp. salt
8 cups chicken broth
1 cup corn (frozen or canned)
1-2 cups cooked and shredded chicken
1/8 cup lime juice
tortilla chips

If you don't have a store of cooked chicken breasts in your freezer, you'll need to cook about 2 chicken breasts before starting this. You can boil them for 20 minutes or grill them. A rotisserie chicken also works great for this.
Sauté the onion, garlic, chipotle, chili powder, and salt in oil for about 5 minutes. Add the chicken broth, bring to boil, reduce heat slightly, and simmer uncovered for 10 minutes. Add the corn and cook 5 minutes more. Stir in chicken and lime juice and warm through, for about 15 more minutes.

Ladle into bowls and pass the tortilla chips to crumble on top of the soup.



French Onion Soup
Serves 4

2 TBS. butter
4 large yellow onions, sliced thin
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. mustard
dash of thyme or Italian seasoning
6 cups water
3 TBS. soy sauce
2-3 TBS. dry white wine or red wine (opt.)
few dashes of pepper
******************
Croutons (recipe below)
Grated Mozzerella or thin slices of provolone or swiss cheese

1. Melt butter in a kettle or Dutch oven. Add onions and salt. Cook over medium about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
2. Add mustard and thyme. Cover. Continue to cook very slowly for about 35 minutes. The onions will be so soft and will simmer in their own liquid.
3. Add everything else except the toppings. Simmer 15 minutes more. Dish into overproof bowls and top with croutons* and cheese (in that order). Put under broiler briefly to brown the cheese. Serve with smoked turkey sandwiches or just crusty bread.

*Croutons
Cube some old hoagies, hamburger buns, stale bread, or whatever you have handy. Saute in garlic butter and then toast at 300 for a few minutes.

Seriously—this stuff is good for colds. Try making one of these next time someone in your house needs his stuffy nose and sore throat cleared up! Do you have a cure-all soup?

Linked up with Tasty Tuesday

On the Menu

I am ashamed to say it's been nearly a month since my last On the Menu entry. We've been on the El Cheapo Menu Plan for the past few weeks, AKA Life with College Tuition. It seems too short of a time ago that we were paying our own graduate school tuition, and here we are again. (It was only a decade ago, after all!)

Anyway, my mealing planning mostly involved eating out of the pantry and freezer for the last few weeks, but with a paycheck comes groceries. But before I post this week's recipes, I wanted to review a couple from my last menu post. We tried two new recipes from Pioneer Woman: Chicken with Olives and Pasta with Tomato-Blue Cheese Sauce. The first one was completely unexciting and won't be making my On the Menu list. But the Pasta with Tomato-Blue Cheese Sauce was fabulous! I get kind of drooly even thinking about it.

Here's what we'll be eating this week at SmallWorld:

Baked Teriyaki Chicken
Broccoli Cheddar Soup
French Onion Soup with Turkey Sandwiches
Corn and Bacon Chowder
Hamburgers
Country Fried Steak

I'll be checking out Menu Plan Monday and Tasty Tuesday this week, and of course I always see what's happening with Pioneer Woman. I love adding new recipes to my "Recipes to Try" file. Latest ones include, besides all of the above except the French onion soup: Pumpkin Scones and Swirled Pumpkin Yeast Bread. I also made some yummy cakes recently. One of these days I'll get around to posting the recipes!

Linked up with Menu Plan Monday and Tasty Tuesday

Weekly Wrap-Up

We have settled into a comfortable rhythm thus far. I am quite sure that, in 11 years of homeschooling, we've never followed such a predictable schedule as we are this year. It wasn't really intentional, but we are all enjoying our days, knowing "what's next."

Ten weeks into the year, I can say with absolute assurance that taking a year away from our regular Sonlight studies was the right thing to do. We are all loving going through the Chronicles of Narnia, and I know this is a year they will cherish. I think, in my heart of hearts, that perhaps my main goal of this year was to instill in them the kind of love for the Narnia books that I've carried with me my whole life.

Here's what's been happening this week:

Monday: Co-op classes and Moms' Night Out. I enjoyed and very much needed a night out with just moms. In both my literature circle class and my creative writing class, I'm having the kids work together in groups for a project.In literature circle, the groups had to write a poem with a specific character and mood (drawn from a basket) and then get to choose everything else (rhythm and/or rhyme scheme, setting, theme, etc.). In creative writing, they are working in groups on advertising a certain project with a certain advertising technique. I look forward to seeing what they come up with at our next class.

Real life snapshot: notice Duncan's Sharpie tattoos
and the pencil he has sharpened down to a nub.

Tuesday:
All the regular things (math, spelling, grammar, essay writing, handwriting). We began reading Prince Caspian. The kids kept saying, "That wasn't in the movie!" Yep.
In the afternoon we had a consultation with an ENT for Duncan. We've always known that he is tongue-tied, as his brother and father are. (Both of my boys are in the "we don't clip tongues" generation. Nowadays, pediatricians are again clipping anchored tongues.) But by the time Jesse was Duncan's age, his tongue seemed to have loosened and he was able to pronounce his "R" and "L" sounds fine. A speech therapist evaluated Duncan several weeks ago and said that she'd rarely seen a tongue as anchored as his. We decided to go ahead and see an ENT and made an appointment to get his tongue clipped next Tuesday! I expect he'll have a year of speech therapy coming up as he learns to retrain his tongue.

Wednesday-Friday:
All the regular things. We are halfway through Prince Caspian now, so we're right about on schedule. My plan is to finish Voyage of the Dawn Treader by Thanksgiving, just in time for the movie to come out. We'll take December then to break from Narnia reading and indulge in a good Christmas book. I'm not sure yet what that will be.

We also had American Heritage Girls and Cub Scouts this week, which takes up most of our Thursday. Duncan is on a Cub Scout camporee this weekend, and Laurel worked for four hours last night doing childcare during a funeral.


This was a quiet week, with the leaves changing and the temperature truly getting cooler. The leaves are really falling, and Duncan says, "Poor Daddy. Look at all the raking he'll have to do." He seems to have forgotten his job as Daddy's raking partner.

The kids are getting a good dose of life lessons this week in addition to bookwork. Our church lost a sweet man this week to cancer. He was only diagnosed a couple of weeks ago, and his death at age 51 has everyone reeling. Laurel's servant heart was a blessing to so many people last night as she and another girl took care of a dozen kids so their parents could attend the funeral.

One of our cats has also gone MIA this week. This is the kitty that the kids spoil rotten, wrapping him in blankets and calling him "baby." As the days go by, we lose a little hope that he will come home, but they seem to be dealing with his loss well. We've always taken the attitude that animals come and go, especially indoor/outdoor cats, fish, hermit crabs, gerbils, etc. They've had lots of such pets through the years, and they seem to be pretty accepting of the cycle of life.

Linked up with Weekly Wrap-Up

Wordless Wednesday: Soup and Pumpkins

It's our one big party of the year: 50+ friends, crockpots full of soup, BB gun contests, kids running around in the dark, parents relaxing, Guitar Hero, candy, and of course pumpkin carving. It's the one I hope our kids and their friends will reminisce about when they are grown. Maybe they'll carry on the tradition, or maybe they'll still come and bring the next generation.

Linked up on Parenting by Dummies, 5 Minutes for Mom, and Wordless Wednesday

October Morning

I caught a small slice of perfection this morning as I took the dog out. The wind is strong here and gusty, which is unusual, and quite warm for an October morning. The mountains were clear and the leaves seemed to have peaked overnight, in spite of the warmth. Red so bright I couldn't look away. The moon, just past full, was above our house, and the sun just coming up over the mountains.

I sat outside on a bench with my coffee and watched the leaves, and breathed.

Yesterday was cluttered with contention and bickering. Seems like everywhere I turned, someone was being mean or melting down or abdicating responsibility. So many undercurrents of discord and deceit. We exhaust ourselves with temporal things.

Still, there were glimpses of good things yesterday. Laughter with friends. Friends, period. My mother in her light blue gardening hat. My brave daughter. A compliment about my son. Twenty minutes before bed to talk with my husband, to rehash the day. It wasn't a bad day, but I was happy to sleep, knowing that with sleep comes the gift of a new day.

Today: bathed already in warmth and an unearthly glow, a glimpse, an opening of sky, wind in the trees, flurry of leaves. Rejoicing does, indeed, come in the morning.

Linked up with Tuesdays Unwrapped

Friday Ramblings

* Seems like all I'm good for this week are ramblings and miscellany. Some weeks are like that.


* October 22 always sticks in my head because during my sophomore year in college, my boyfriend quit school on October 22, which would have been his 20th birthday. He disappeared in the middle of the night and went to Florida. I have no idea why. The next day, some of his former band members cornered me in the library and asked me where he was. I really had no idea except that he had gone to Florida. Turns out, as I discovered later, he had stolen most of their band equipment to sell. You know, I'm still really fuzzy on all those details. I often wonder if someday we'll get to see a play-by-play of all those confusing moments in our lives, when we didn't really know what was going on beneath the surface.

* But that was a long, long time ago, and an abbreviated version of that story. For over 21 years, I have been married to the boy I met after the one-who-escaped-in-the-middle-of-the-night-with- stolen-equipment. Sometimes happily-ever-after is all that needs to be said.


* Tonight is our most exciting night of the year! For many years now, we've been hosting a Soup and Pumpkin party for lots of friends in our home. Everyone brings a pot of soup, an appetizer or dessert, and their pumpkins to carve. We sometimes do pumpkin chunking, too, with all kinds of fancy trebouchets and slingshots, and this year we're adding in an all-new BB gun shoot-the-pumpkin feature.


* The Soup and Pumpkin party marks the start of indoor, stay warm, be cozy season. And it reminds us, every year, of how incredibly blessed we are to live in this place with these people in our life.

* And now I must return to cleaning, cutting flowers, and making apple crisp. Joyfully.

Linked up on Just for the Joy of It at Good, True and Beautiful

Tuesday Miscellany

* Some days are like this: Duncan walks into my room in an apron, carrying a stuffed animal with a chef's hat on. "Let's make cookies for school today!" he says. Yes. That is exactly what we needed to do this morning. Forget math and reading and grammar. Some days are chocolate chip cookie days.

* The Carnival of Homeschooling is up at HomeschoolBuzz.com. I'm going to go spend some time there this evening.

* Jesse's fall break is over, and we probably won't see him again until Thanksgiving. He has been dealing with remnants of a drama here at home for the past couple of visits. I am hoping that we can all put this behind us now and move on, away from the craziness that has been sucking the joy out of our days.

* I have a friend who accused me once of sweeping things under the rug. I call it "moving on." At times like this, I ponder our difference in interpretation.

* I sent half the cookies back to college with Jesse. The rest are gone already. Tomorrow, we'll do math and reading and grammar. And try to remember "normal."

Making Grammar Relevant with Facebook Faux Pas

My writing students have always enjoyed proofreading with the Daily Paragraph Editing books. My daughter joined the Facebook craze on her 13th birthday, and one of my conditions was that she use correct grammar and spelling. She's been great about it, and I was tickled (and a little chagrined) one day to see that she'd corrected her friend's spelling on a status. So I thought: why not make daily status editing exercises for my daughter?

I did a quick scan of my Facebook friends and came up with a great list. This is just one day's collection, and I'm sure I'll never run out of examples! If you'd like a change from your regular editing exercises or just to add a little variety to your grammar program, feel free to start with these and then find some more on your own. Trust me, it's easy!

(Here's a link to common proofreaders' marks if you don't have that handy.)

You can buy this assignment on Teachers Pay Teachers for just $1!


Making Grammar Relevant: Facebook Faux Pas

In many ways, your Facebook page reflects who you are. You choose your friends, join groups, accept “Flair” and bumper stickers, add your lists of “likes,” and more. You also set our own status and make your own comments. You make the choice: will you take the time to use correct grammar and spelling, or will you take the easy way out?

Directions: Each of these “sentences” below comes from an actual Facebook group or status. Your assignment is to correct these sentences. Look for errors in grammar, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and more. Write the corrected sentence under the original.

1. almost done with homework then babysitting the adorable riley boys then church then hopefully going to eat at burger king!
2. Thank you SO Much for the Happy Birthday wishes, it makes my day a little more special. I have some great friends and an amazing Family!
3. Life isn't about Worrying. Thats a waste of time.
4. I wish you werent so far away so i could share all my happiness with you.
5. I sprang my knee n i cant get up!
6. I hate my english teacher seriously shes an idiot
7. I do believe he would have ran all morning if I did not stop him.
8. Sorry I never texted you back, I had dinner then my phone died
9. dont know my friends address but I know exactly where theyre house is!
10. We get wear jeans tomarow but not sneakers, what's the point of wearing jeans then?
11. i can’t talk to you anymore, its not that I a mad at you, it’s just that when I talk to you I realize how much I love you and when I realize how much I love you, I realize I can’t have you and that makes me love you even more.
12. I love going to a concert and loosing your voice the next day.
13. The same person who laughs, talks a lot and seems happy, may also be the person who cry’s themselves to sleep.
14. please don;t be evil, its not very nice you know.
15. i just cleaned out the friends list if your still here your lucky.
16. i have 3 tests this week two of which are tomorrow I hate this week already.


Answer Key
Note: These are suggested corrections. There will be more than one way that a student could correct each sentence.
1. I am almost done with homework. Later I’ll be babysitting the adorable Riley boys, heading to church, and then hopefully going to eat at Burger King.
2. Thank you so much for the birthday wishes. It made my day a little more special. I have some great friends and an amazing family!
3. Life isn’t about worrying. That’s a waste of time.
4. I wish you weren’t so far away, so I could share all my happiness with you.
5. I sprained my knee, and I can’t get up!
6. I hate my English teacher. Seriously, she’s an idiot.
(Better yet: I love my English teacher. She’s brilliant.)
7. I do believe he would have run all morning if I did not stop him.
8. I’m sorry that I never texted you back; I had dinner, and then my phone died.
(Even better: I’m sorry that I didn’t return your text message. I had dinner, and then my phone died.)
9. I don’t know my friends’ addresses, but I know exactly where their houses are!
10. We get to wear jeans tomorrow but not sneakers. What’s the point of wearing jeans at all?
11. I can’t talk to you anymore. It’s not that I am mad at you; it’s just that when I talk to you, I realize how much I love you. When I realize how much I love you, I realize I can’t have you. That makes me love you even more.
12. I love going to a concert and losing my voice the next day.
13. The same person who laughs, talks a lot, and seems happy, may also be the person who cries herself to sleep.
14. Please don’t be evil; it’s not very nice.
15. I just cleaned out my friends list. If you’re still here, you’re lucky.
16. I have three tests this week, two of which are tomorrow. I hate this week already.

© Sarah Small, 2010.

Weekly Wrap-Up

I often get to Saturday and think, "I have absolutely no idea what we did this week." That's why I rarely post a Weekly Wrap-Up. I dislike having the days all blur together. When the kids were little, each day seemed to last for eons. These days are fast ones, hopping from moment to moment, place to place.

Still, we have our quiet moments at home each day, and I am often amazed at how much we get done in a few short hours. Laurel asked about homework the other day. She said that a friend at church couldn't come to Bible study because she had so much homework. "What kind of homework does she have to do in 7th grade?" she asked. "Why does she have so much of it?" I went through our day with her, explaining that while we take 15 minutes to go through a math lesson, her teacher probably takes up to an hour so that everybody understands it. And the math problems that Laurel does right after her lesson—those, I explained, would be homework. We went through our whole day like that, and I think it was very enlightening for her.

I'm glad we don't have to spend our evenings doing homework. I remember what it was like when Jesse was in 1st grade, and we spent up to an hour each evening doing tedious busywork. Blech. What a waste of great bike-riding, digging-in-dirt, or kicking-leaves time!

But I digress.

Teaching Textbooks is working well for Laurel. For the first time ever I'm grading her, and she enjoys that. Still, though, how does she get these questions in her head? Are they innate? I give her an 85%, a B. "Is that good? Is that failing? That's bad, isn't it?" Good grief.

Duncan is taking a few weeks off from his regular math to drill multiplication tables again. Since I skipped a whole year of math with him, I figured he'd better at least spend some more time drilling. Unlike Jesse, he loves being timed. He gets great satisfaction from beating his previous days' times. I love how each of my kids is motivated in such different ways!

We finished reading The Magician's Nephew this week. Sigh. I've been reading these books for 35 years, and I still get choked up every time I read them. Now both kids are writing essays on the book. This is Duncan's first real essay, so we're totally writing it together. Laurel is comparing/contrasting how the Cabby responds to Aslan's request that he be king and how various Biblical people responded to the calling to be leaders. Duncan's topic is about miracles, based on Digory's mother's recovery.

Everything else goes on as usual: spelling, grammar, vocabulary, handwriting, co-op homework, reading, science. We're slowly making it through our Focus on Scientists book, enjoying a casual year. Duncan and I have also been reading Richard Halliburton's Complete Book of Marvels. Published in 1937, this is an absolutely fascinating journey through the natural and man-made wonders of the world. Halliburton's style of writing is almost exactly like Hillyer's A Child's History of the World, and Duncan loves it. I'm not sure where my copy of this old book came from—either my family or Randy's—but it is an absolute treasure. We've been looking up the various marvels on the internet so that he can see modern-day photos of them. This is my favorite geography "program" we've done yet!

In other news:
* my fourth brother is visiting from New York, and he brought a carload of apples from his orchard.
* we had yearbook pictures on Tuesday. (Yes, our support group has a gorgeous yearbook.) My kids' pictures turned out fabulous, thanks to Donna. She's going to have her own photography site up soon, so watch for it, local yokels!
* Jesse is home for the weekend for fall break. He got his midterm grades, and I'm happy to report that he has all As and Bs. Mostly A. ;-) So yes, your homeschooler can do well in college, in case you ever doubted. (As an interesting side note, that he was homeschooled has never come up in any of his classes. He said a couple of people have asked where he went to high school, just as a matter of course, and no one has given any sort of negative feedback when he said he was homeschooled.) Also, he's reported that there is a mouse in his bedroom. No wonder the cats have been meowing to go up there…

And that's about it for this week. Randy has taken the Cub Scouts hiking on this beautiful October day, and I'm about to finish lesson plans for this Monday's co-op classes.

Linked up on the Weekly Wrap-Up