Ordinary Time

Since we started back to school, we started back in on our round the world tour. The first stop has been Vietnam. The food aspect to our tour has proven so popular, that even before we began school again, I was getting questions as to when we would be eating our special dinners and when they would happen. Now, the trouble with Vietnam is that we have Vietnamese food somewhat regularly, and the things I cook have become just a part of our family repertoire of meals. To make it special, I needed to come up with something new and different. So I started thinking. I have a lot of quail eggs. Many people love any variation of meat in dough. TM had been missing the steamed buns from the Vietnamese bakery which was just 20 minutes away from our old house. All of these things together meant that I decided it was time to try making my own steamed buns, or banh bao in Vietnam. The girls from China call them baozi. Pretty much everyone calls them something different. In prepar...

My quest to find the horse supplies we will eventually need at affordable prices continues. As well as spending Saturday at a wedding all afternoon and evening (lovely wedding, by the way, and fun to catch up with some friends), J. and I spent all afternoon and evening driving to pick up this round pen I found. After church, we came home, I put dinner in the crock pot, got everyone settled, loaded R. in the car (some days it is just easier for everyone if she comes with us), hooked up the large trailer we borrowed from friends, and headed out. When I first looked at the map, I thought it was going to be a little over two hours, one way. Not quick, but certainly not too bad, either, especially given the money I was saving. As we get ready to go, I look at the map again, and realize that the place we were going was significantly passed Peoria. The trip was going to be over three hours one way. J. and I look at each other, decide we've come this far, why stop now, and I text the sel...

I haven't done this in a couple of weeks. We finished our first full week of school. The week went well. The plan is working, and we have gotten through everything. I'm tired, though. Evidently, it is going to take me a little bit to get back into shape. Fridays are usually reserved for our art appreciation/history lesson (we're doing Rembrandt), and for some kind of craft. Today's craft was to make a Japanese abacus called a soroban. It uses base-5 to count, and we'll be using it next week when we make more attempts at counting in base-5. Here are the result. Some children were more interested in decorating than others. Notice G.'s pirate soroban up on top. I'm still volunteering with the therapeutic riding place, and still really enjoying it. We collected nearly two dozen eggs today. I need to sell more eggs. We need to eat more eggs. So many eggs! Rooster is still mean. Aster is getting a little more comfortable, and has a bit more ener...

Grammar geek would be referring to me, mainly because I started teaching the five youngest how to diagram sentences yesterday. I was actually inordinately excited, because I think diagramming sentences is cool. Even better, you know that extra English grammar book I ended up with during the teacher manual saga ? Well, I did hand it to H. to use along with the other four. We are all doing English together, which is working well. With a little help H. is managing to keep up. The biggest difference being I need to sit with H. while she does the written work, and the others can pretty much handle most of it on their own. When we got to diagramming compound subjects and compounds predicates today, I wasn't sure how it would go. I was correct that she was confused when I was teaching everyone all together, but then when I sat with just her and explained it again, she was able to do this. It actually makes me kind of glad that I had the whole textbook fiasco and ended up with an ex...

I realized that while I write a lot about reading out loud to my children, and share many of the books we've read together, I have never (so far as my cursory search effort tells me) actually written about the actual idea of reading out loud. It's time to remedy that. If you've spent more than a couple of minutes here, you will know that I am an avid reader and that I enjoy sharing books with my children. We read together a lot. We started when M. was an infant, and never stopped. I read out loud during school time, at some point in the middle of the day (it started out as a lunch time reading session, and eventually turned into a tea time one), and we read to people at night. That's at least three different books going at the same time, though J. usually has at least two chapter books he is reading from at night, so more often it is five. This does not include all the books which my children read to themselves. All total, that is a lot of words and a lot of stories. ...

I'm afraid this blog may be heavy on the puppy pictures for a while, because there really are not many things cuter than an 8 week old husky puppy. Aster is doing exceptionally well. She has only had two accidents, and those were mainly because someone wasn't watching her. TM reports that he has only had to take her out one time in the middle of the night each night. She is starting to feel a little more comfortable, and is a little bouncier. She may like shoe laces, so we'll have to keep an eye on those. Kenzie pretty much ignores her, as does Midnight. Amun, M.'s cat does not like any dogs, even puppies, so gives her a wide berth, Nefertiti does not care, but likes to keep the other animals in their place. Thus, the de-clawed cat has already made the puppy whimper twice. Olive? Well, she is very interested in the puppy. Very. Aster is often a little damp all over from Olive's interest. It may get a little crazy when the puppy gets big enough to genuinely play ...

We tend to eat dinner later around here. We feel on top of our game if we are sitting down around 7pm, though often it is ootching to closer to 7:30 when we actually sit down. And then there are some days where we sit down even later. Take last night, for instance. We finally had the food ready to serve at 8:30, which is late even for us. But I think the reason was totally worth it. I had planned a slightly more elaborate meal because it was a weekend, and I figured we had time to fix it. The trouble was, we both misjudged exactly how long it was going to take, and got a little later start than we had planned. (Or more precisely, if we had done any sort of planning at all, we might have realized we needed to start earlier.) And what was this dish that took us so much longer to make than expected? It was out of my new cookbook that I bought at the Mexican Museum last week, The Best Mexican Recipes by America's Test Kitchen, and the dish I chose to begin with was Baja Fish Tacos...