Feeding my boyz

Many years ago, after a pregnancy which resulted in the loss of a daughter, I was diagnosed with high blood pressure.  Since then, I have tried to adjust the diet of my family so that we can all eat together.  This has not been an easy task.  My husband is a southern food addict, loving mushy green beans and red meat.  My boys, needless to say, take after him.  And here comes mom, loaded with fruits and vegetables, chicken and fish - yikes!  Not to mention the meatless meals, those always go over so well in this family, haha!!  "Honey, where's the rest of the meal?"

One of the many changes that I have tried to keep going, is having salmon once a week.  No one in the house likes it except for me and the wee one, who is 3 now.  And he dips his in so much ranch dressing I'm not sure if he is getting the nutritional stuff from it or canceling it out with the ranch.  :)

So anyways, I am looking for some good salmon recipes!  I am trying my best to make this as painless as possible on my family and I'm hoping that my readers can help me.  I have a recipe that I pulled from one of my mom's cookbooks that we are trying this evening, Salmon with ginger Marinade.  I will have to let everyone know how that comes out.  The marinade smells delicious, so hopefully that is a good sign.

If you have a recipe to share, just leave it in the comments.  I can't wait to try some new ways to cook our salmon!!!

Until next time,
Gail

Joy

Hot tea, the sound of rain......beautiful.


          I could loose myself in these moments.

To me, this means peace, serenity.


  Life....as the plants gather the water into themselves.


The tinkling of a wind chime, a train whistle going through town

     Joy.

For God's Glory

I'm reading through the book of Exodus, and as I am reading, I began to think just how unfair it was that God continually hardened the heart of Pharaoh in order to show His amazing power.  But then what struck me, was even though the things God did to Pharaoh and his people were harsh, had they been God fearing people, they would have followed the directions God gave and would not have received harm.  Except for when God comes to kill the first born of each family, but God is purposely hardening Pharaoh's heart.  Is that really fair?

We know that when someone dies, they go to heaven where they get to meet God and sing praises to Him.  So, with that knowledge, if our first born was taken to show a whole people the power of the Lord, would that be a blessing or a curse?  Knowing that we would see them when we got to heaven.  Just some food for thought, had to pass it on.

Planet Earth

My little angel (I'm speaking of the two year old).  Today we were working on cutting play-doh.  Him and his brother did a phenomenal job.  While I read the Bible stories today, the two of them had a blast with their play-doh.  By the time it was all said and done, here is the creation of my two year old, see if you can guess what it is.

Any guesses?


                The answer is, drum roll please,


                                             PLANET EARTH


I love the creativity that comes from these little minds.  I am so blessed.

Baby it's cold outside

It's cold, really cold, where we live.  This is starting to be seen in the youngest boys behavior.  He is an outdoor boy, and being locked up in the house, does not bode well with him.  We take him out when we can, but wind chills in the negatives, it's just time to find something in the house to entertain.  So today, he spent his time throwing rolled up socks into a basket (advice from www.abcjesuslovesme.com), bouncing on the bed trying to hit a ball while I threw it at him, and running around trying to hide his tummy so no one could zerbert it.  He was not in the sit down and learn mode today, at 2 years old, I get it.  We don't push it if we aren't going to learn anything.

We had already experienced Bible study time with him that morning, to say the least, it was not my most enjoyable experience.  It brought me back to last year when he was only a year old and thought fits actually accomplished something.  If the house were a little messier right now I would have put him on clean up duty, but we actually have the place cleaned up.

So anyway, we are studying sound, and hearing, and the different languages and dialects across the United States.  I find this to be very interesting since I have lived on different ends of the U.S.  I have lived in Hawaii, Alaska, Florida, the West Coast, the East Coast, and the Carolinas.
                 Here is a fun game we enjoyed playing, even the nutty two year old enjoyed this one.  When he got one right he would jump up and down all excited.       http://www.scholastic.com/magicschoolbus/games/sound/
                 The other fun thing we did with this, was learn about the different dialects spoken in this country.  One that many people do not know about, but which I have experience first hand, and used to speak some, is Hawaiian Pidgin.  It's real, look it up.  It is such a fascinating local language.  We looked at a lot of others, but that was the most fun.

We are praying for some warmer weather, hoping to get out of the house a bit.  It will be nice to have some sunshine without the chill.  I know it's coming, and then I will complain that it's too hot.

Our Curriculum

This is our 2nd year homeschooling, and it has been a crazy ride.  Last year was full of discoveries, a lot of mistakes, and learning who our family is and what is important to us.  This year, I think that we are finally getting a handle on what works for us and what does not.  For those that are out there still looking for the right thing, I want to share with you, our thing.

Thru a lot of prayer, it became apparent to me that the study of the Bible and our relationship with God is the most important part of our homeschool adventure.  For my two, almost three year old, we use the ABC Jesus Loves Me - http://www.ABCJesusLovesMe.com/ curriculum for age two.  We come nowhere close to completing everything on that site each week.  We focus on the bible story and the activities for the bible, and then post the main ideas for the week on the refrigerator and try to work them into our play.

For the 10 year old, we have found a great bible program that is perfect for his level, http://foundationspress.com/.  We are using Foundations 1:  Preparation for Christ and there are days that we take longer than the time allotted.  So our days do not always align with the program, but that does not seem to be an issue.  We are able to pick up and start our week wherever we left off with no problems. 

For math we are still stuck on the Life of Fred series.  We love them.  They do not teach things "in order", but everything we are learning, we are retaining.  That is the most important to us.

Language Arts we decided to go Charlotte Mason, working in very small short lessons.  We found a workbook that we really like called Language Lessons for the Elementary Child Volume 2.  This is perfect for our son, very short lessons but very thorough and teaching him ideas that are new.

For history we are studying the middle ages.  This has been a challenge and we are using a combination of books and online resources.  As of right now, he is reading King Arthur: Tales from the Round Table (Dover Children's Evergreen Classics) by Andrew Lang.  We have also enrolled him in MineCraft Homescshool Castles and Cannons which starts next week.  He is VERY excited to start this class.  I am hoping that he will do some learning as well as playing.

We are also using portions of The Weaver Curriculum for our science, field trip ideas, music, health, and physical education. 

My sons very favorite thing this year though is learning computer coding.  He is using SCRATCH which is very user friendly for a 10 year old.  We have watched his programs just get better and better, it is amazing what he can do.  It blows my mind.

Oh yeah, and he's helping my husband to rebuild his motorcycle.  Right now they have a naked motorcycle frame in the garage, so far he has learned to solder and how electrical wiring works.  Tickle me impressed.  :)

Till next time,
adios 

REVIEW TIME!!

I have a 16 year old that attends the public high school, a 10 year old that is home schooled, and a 2 year old that is always moving around doing whatever crazy thing he can think of.  ALL BOYZ.

Time4Learning gave me one month to preview their product and give my honest opinion on it.  I was able to set it up for each one of the boys.  If you read my post before, I mentioned that I thought the 2 year old would enjoy it, wasn't real sure about the 10 year old, and thought the 16 year old might be able to use it for review or help with some ideas that he needed review with.

I was WRONG!  The two year old was interested for about a day or two and then had no interest to sit down at the computer to "do school".  He prefers doing hands on crafts and playing with toys.  This is not my sitting still boy.  He would rather be outside tearing things up than watching a story on the computer.  There were a couple activities that he did enjoy, but there did not seem to be a lot of variety and the games were only able to be played one way and there was no variance.  Once the questions were answered, they were presented in the same order again the next time.  This did not seem to challenge or keep the attention of my two year old son.

Now, my 10 year old on the other hand, really seemed to enjoy himself.  Except for the fact that the science is presented as the universe being millions of years old as fact, it looked very well put together.  My 10 year old really liked the math program and said he learned a lot.  If Time4Learning offered the programs separately, I might consider just purchasing the math.  But, we did not use enough of the other subjects for me to purchase the whole program.

My16 year old, wouldn't even touch it.  I started up the math for him and he walked away laughing.  So, I have no real opinion from him, he didn't use it.  You win some, you loose some.

All in all, it was fun to try and it gave us something new to do.  A little break from the norm is always a good thing.