Freezer Meals

Yesterday after teaching a full day of school, changing sheets, two loads of laundry and cleaning out the freezer I decided that I would try my hand at bulk cooking.  Bulk cooking has been around for a while an is called various things.  The concept is to cook an abundance of food at one time, store it in the freezer and pull out the meals as needed.  Hopefully incorporating this concept will save me time and money.   Over the weekend I did some shopping and was really excited to try my hand at this thing called freezer meals or once a month cooking.  So around 4 pm I boiled two fryers deboned them.  One quart of chicken was set aside in a Ziploc bag for enchiladas.  Some of the stock was set aside the rest of the chicken was put back into the pot for chicken noodle soup.  Next I halved a package of boneless skinless chicken breast.  I used half the breast to make home made chicken and dumplings with the above broth. The remaining half I made chicken quesadillas.   I had two packages of drumsticks  one package was used to make Caribbean jerk chicken.  The second is still in my fridge, that batch will be made into BBQ chicken. 
Around 11 pm I  waived the white flag of surrender.  I was tired, really, really tired. My entire body ached and my bed was a welcome retreat after my marathon day.  Go ahead and laugh at me, it really is funny.  However it's a new day and I'm feeling good, thankfully.
There is value in freezer cooking and I will continue planning my meals this way.  However next time my cooking day will be set apart for cooking only, it will not follow a full day of other activities.  Also a prep day prior to cooking, where I chop vegetables, cube meat etc. will make the cooking day faster.

Back left chicken and dumplings, back right chicken noodle soup.  Front right quesadilla meat.

Clean freezer with meals.  Soon some of these things will go to the garage freezer.

In other news Christopher is moving up the ranks.  He has been promoted to the Koolaid maker of the family.  He made his first pitcher of Koolaid today, it was great. 

Join me in December as I close out Decluttering My Life and Home series.  This series was started earlier this year and was never finished I will close the year out completing my post in this series.  

Thanksgiving Break

Thanksgiving day was a wonderful day.  My house was full of people.  There were children running everywhere the game was on it was just a fun time for all.  Later in the day we had an opportunity to share what we are thankful for.  I am thankful for my husband who is an excellent provider and my best friend.  I am thankful for my boys that keep me in constant prayer for direction on how best to shepherd their hearts.  There is not a day that passes where I am not filled with awe, joy and laughter at the things that are said and done in our home.  I am thankful for my mother who is always close by to offer a helping hand.  In addition I am grateful for friends and family far and near.  My blessings are too many to count.  Thank you Lord for your grace and mercies.  Your hand working in my life is very evident and I thank you. 

Today I will be planning for our upcoming week of school and running a few errands.  Unfortunately we did not hit the Black Friday jackpot like we did last year.  Many of the stores opened up at 12 am and so there were more people out shopping, which meant longer lines and less of the door busters.  Such a bummer but hopefully we will still find some great deals on the things we have on our list.  In the mean time I am enjoying an interesting book Growing Up Bin Laden by Najwa Bin Laden, Omar Bin Laden and Jean Sasson.  The book is a non fiction book and gives insight into the life of Osama Bin Laden from his first wife Najwa and his fourth son Omar.  Did I mention I am savoring a piece of pumpkin pie with a dollop of cool whip.  Yum!  Hopefully you are enjoying this holiday with family and friends. 

Weekly Review:# 4

Last week I did not get a chance to post an update.  It's a shame really because we had a great week. 

What's new this week-  This year we are hosting Thanksgiving.  My husbands family will be in town so I am preparing to host approximately twenty five people for  the day.  My intention is to keep things as simple as possible thereby reducing my stress.  My hope is that everyone has a great holiday. 
LA- Learned the not contractions.  This can be a very complicated lesson, keeping the first word and dropping letters and adding an apostrophe.   We continued with our practice of vowel set ea, ee, ai and ay.  When two vowels go walking the first does the talking.  This rhyme was around when I learned phonics and is still helpful. 

Math- Lessons 67-70

History- Hammurabi's code. 

Grammar- Christopher has memorized The Caterpillar but we continue to review it.  He is working on remembering proper names and relationships.  My mother's mother is my grandmother etc. 

Science- We grew crystals this week and they were so cool. I was not sure that the experiment would actually work.  Doubtful Darla checking in. Despite my doubt the crystals were a hit. 

Originally I intended to watch the crystals grow over a week time span but after a day I realized we did not have adequate counter space to keep our crystals so we had to discard them.  Christopher was not happy about this. 

Bible- Still reading the book of Exodus. We made unleavened bread and ate it topped with butter and honey. 

Emmanuel had his first performance this year at the expo for our co-op where he did absolutely nothing zip, zilch nada.  Honestly I was a little disappointed.  Emmanuel is usually the first to sing or dance and to watch an entire performance where he just stood there was beyond frustrating. 


Joshua

Color orange, letter E, shape square and the number 2

Acts of Service: Project 3

Tuesday morning we were blessed with another opportunity to be outward focused.  My family along with several other families from one of our homeschool support groups got together and prepared a food box for a program hosted by a local food bank.  The program is called Thanksgiving Meal Boxes.  The meal box is filled with items for Thanksgiving dinner.  Each box cost approximately $100 to fill.

We met at a grocery store split the list amongst the families and went on our way searching for items on the list.

Once we purchased all the items we placed them in two different boxes.

Then we headed to the food bank to tour their facility. On our tour we saw how donations are sorted, scanned and then placed on the shelves. The set up is similar to a grocery store. Once our tour was complete we headed to an off site location to drop off our meal boxes.

There were a lot of  meal boxes that were donated.  I am elated that we were able to contribute to a great cause. 

Acts of Service: Project 2

This Saturday we completed our second act of service, which was to deliver coats and blankets to the homeless.  We teamed up with an organization Project Warm Us whose goal is to keep the homeless warm in our metroplex.  Project Warm Us has set a goal of 5,723 coats and blankets they would like to collect by Thanksgiving. We took our contributions to our drop off point and the boys got to fill the donation box.  While the boys were filling the donation box I was able to speak with one of the coordinators.  She informed me that we have collected over 2,000 coats.  Way to go! Every little bit helps and I am happy we were able to help a great cause. 

Weekly Review # 4

This week was Halloween so I decided to let the boys have costume day on Monday. 

Joshua was not interested in the costume at all only his brother's video game.

What's New- We incorporated grammar into our daily routine.  It feels good to see the big picture coming together.  We are using First Language Lessons by Jessie Wise.  The lessons are mostly oral and are very repetitive.   We learned that a noun names a person, place, thing or idea. Additionally, we learned common nouns within family relationships.  Mother, father, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, grandmother and grandfather. Introducing young children to grammar is debatable.   Some people think the study of grammar should be postponed until the child is older.  Delaying formal grammar study until the child is older means less time spent studying grammar and  ideally the child can grasp more complex ideas. On the other hand some people feel that you should not wait to introduce grammar.  Children are able to handle many complex ideas but most are not given the opportunity to wrestle with such ideas.  Why aren't children children exposed to more complex ideas, books, etc?  Well that's a long conversation for another day and if I get into that I will not complete my weekly review. 



Spelling- CLE is not laid out the way I remember spelling.  When I was was in school we were given a new list of words on Monday and then had an exam  on Friday. CLE has structured their spelling to reinforce phonics rules that are being mastered within the lesson.  Some of this weeks words were math, whiff, lake, game, bell, chop, chick, whale, that, cube, tune and kiss.  All of which follow a spelling/phonic rule that  we are learning or reviewing. 
Consonant Digraph- sh, th, wh
Double Consonants f, l, s, z  at the end of a short vowel word.
The /k/ sound at the end of a word is made with a ck or ke.  Ck is used at the end of a short vowel words and ke at the end of long vowel words.
Interesting approach to spelling and Christopher is doing well with this method. 

Memory Work- Caterpillar by Christina G. Rossetti

Independent Reading- Christopher completed another Frog and Toad book this week.  One night he read one of the chapters to his brothers as their bed time selection.  He is participating in the Pizza Hut Book It program.  So I have set a goal for him of fifteen minutes of reading time daily.  If he meets his goal he is rewarded with a personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut. 

American History- We mapped out Erik the Red's journey from Norway to Iceland and later Greenland and added it to our American History binder.




Math- Lessons 60-63.  One assessment this week which he scored 100%. 

Bible- Read Exodus chapters 13-16.  We also had a devotional titled Who Is God? 

Music-Edward Elgar who is the composer of Pomp and Circumstance.  This piece contains the famous graduation march. 


Science- Our scientific exploration this week was about density.  We found out that liquids have different densities.  We began with a jar halfway filled with water.  Then we poured oil into the water.  The oil settled on top of the water because oil is not as dense as water.  Then we poured molasses into our solution and the molasses went straight to the bottom.  Our molasses was the heaviest liquid. Then we placed several objects in the solution to see if they would sink or float.  We discovered that some items floated in the oil and others went straight to the molasses. 

Reading- We completed Light Unit 106 and are now in 107.   This week we completed lessons 1-4.

Language Arts- This weeks focus was helping students recognize question words in sentences.  We continue our review of long and short vowel sounds and words ending in ck or ke. 

Preschool Corner

Science-Elephants

Letter Skills- The letter E with elbow macaroni.

Math- Finished pages 27-36.  Emmanuel clearly enjoys math.  My plan is to complete two pages a day but many days we end up completing 3 or more pages.    This week Emmanuel is learning to show a number with his fingers. 

Piano- Sadly I have not been able to teach this area as regularly  as I had hoped.  I guess I will have to outsource this to someone else. 

Emmanuel decided he would write a letter to Santa so I asked him to read it.  Parts of it you can not hear but he was so cute reading and writing his letter.  Enjoy!

Social Studies- We learned about emotions, happy, sad and angry.  Then we sorted the emotions.

Motor Skills- Emmanuel we are still working our way through the ABCD Rod and Staff series.  We matched items with like items and identified the smallest and largest items in a group.

Joshua continued his learning board nothing new to share about him.

Goals from previous weeks-  Again we did not start class by 9 am.  I am beginning to think that we should just continue with our current start time of 10 am and not worry about moving the time up.  Cleaning and organization is still a work in progress and I am making small progress.  Developing and implementing a systematic way of cleaning has its benefits. 

Goals for next week- Finalize my chore system.

Website I visited this week - Donna Young She has a site that is full of homeschool aides. 





Happy Birthday Christopher

On October 28th my oldest son turned seven. I can't believe seven years have passed so quickly. This year we held his birthday party and the Lego land Discovery Center. This place is a mini heaven for Lego lovers. The birthday party was the week prior to his birthday because we took a mini vacation the weekend of his birthday.

The birthday gang.

Best friends.

At the birthday table.

Waiting for the doors of the Lego factory to open.

The moms, watching on of the 4D features.

I had some personal matters to look after so the family and I loaded up the swagger wagon and headed south to Houston.  We decided that the space center would be a great way to spend Christopher's actual birthday.  We could not have decided on a better place.  Our time at the Space Center was amazing.  There was so much to see I felt like a child in a toy store.  Personally my husband and I probably enjoyed the space center more than our children.  We even discussed going back without them.


We took the tram tour and our first stop was mission control.  Our tour guide gave us the scoop on the future of space missions here in the US.  So they are planning to go to Mars.  It will take six months to travel there, six months on the planet and a six month return home.  Wow! How fascinating!

Work center for mission control. 

Next we saw the mock up facility where astronauts train for their missions.  I was not expecting the size of the shuttles, and rockets etc.  They are really large.

Family on the tram.

Several years ago there was a shuttle that exploded once it re-entered earths atmoshpere.  There is a 10 tree memorial for the lives lost that day. 

Challenger memorial. 

Well, Christopher I hope you enjoyed your birthday celebration.  These seven years have been such a joy.