Sorry it has been so quiet. I can hear the crickets outside as I type this. This past week, we were introduced to the show The Blacklist. We are catching up on the first two seasons on Prime right now. Yes, that is why I have not posted all week. My spare time is being filled with The Blacklist. And I have loved every minute of it. Go watch it if you haven't seen it. At least do the one month free Prime trial and binge watch it in a month, then cancel. It can be done.

This picture below is not of the kids watching The Blacklist, by the way.  

Our days this week have been relaxing. Lots of cooking has been going on. The oldest two love to help. It takes twice as long, but they are so happy to assist. I keep having to remind myself to have patience, I'm not running a race. It takes time to cultivate these little souls that God has placed in my care. Every little action and word means the world to them. 

Princess has been feeling rather independent, and has offered to make lunch most of the days this week. I let her. She does a great job. One day we had strawberries, pickles and cottage cheese, while another day we had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with chips. All prepared by her. For me, it was one of the best lunches ever. Her eagerness to make lunch, means I don't have to. Now to get them to do the dishes...

Side bar: Does anyone know what kind of tree this is?

For our extra studies, I have been letting them choose what we learn about. Sometimes I get questions like "Do spiders pee and poop?"  Answer (since now you are wondering) they "pee" uric acid and "poop" white dots called guanine. 

This week Princess asked why the leaves changed colors. We found some really informative videos online and a ton of fun activities to do with the leaves. Below we tried a science experiment using alcohol and leaves to extract the color. They thought it was neat at first, but by the time the results were ready, they decided to use the colors they made as paint. That didn't work either. 

It is officially my favorite season. 

Yes, I am that person that loves all things pumpkin. 

All things. 

Pumpkin.

What has your week been like? 

This week, I posted my September Meal Plan. First up on my calendar was this ravioli with pumpkin sauce recipe. You can find the original recipe HERE.

I was pretty spot on while following the recipe, like to the T. With the added pumpkin in the sauce, I was afraid to change to much, not knowing how it would effect the taste. 

My review of the recipe: 

The sauce was very hearty. It was thick and chunky. I like thick and chunky. Sadly, I was not able to taste the pumpkin, at all. My tastebuds were waiting there, with open arms, ready to embrace all things pumpkin that evening. When the sauce hit their open armed anticipation of pumpkin, sadness set in when the pumpkin decided not to greet them. It almost acted as a filler rather then adding any flavor to it. The sauce was tasty, but lacked the fall pumpkin taste we were all hoping for. My kiddos loved the sauce, but were as disappointed as my tastebuds, that there was not any hint of pumpkin. 

On the plus side, this recipe was incredibly easy to throw together. It is a really tasty homemade sauce, just don't expect the pumpkin zing one would hope for.

See how deliciously thick this sauce is.

A few things I will change when I make it next (I like to try recipes at least twice, you know, to give them a fair chance):

I will caramelize the onions before I put them in the crock pot. Who doesn't like caramelized onions? 

Store bought ravioli is quick and handy. We did go grocery shopping that day, so I was not in the mood to make ravioli. But, come on, you can't beat homemade ravioli. Perhaps I'll find some sort of pumpkin ravioli recipe to pair with this sauce to add more fall flavors into the mix.

I did find this Fresh Pumpkin Pasta recipe I might use instead of ravioli. 

Adding some roasted rosemary might be tasty. Or even some pumpkin spice or nutmeg? Less tomatoes possibly. More pumpkin.

Or, just a whole new pumpkin sauce recipe to get that pumpkin flavor. 

This was a tasty non pumpkin flavored sauce. If you make it, just don't expect your tastebuds to dance around pumpkin tastiness, but instead a nice hearty sauce. 

I think I will rename this sauce Hearty Sauce. Yep. Hearty Sauce.

I love to try out new recipes I find on Pintrest. If you have any that you would like me to try, email me or comment below!

Happy cooking!

Chelsey

Dear Readers,

I love fall, so much.

This menu is very fall food focused.

I realize September is already half way over. Therefore, this meal plan is for the next 30 days. I like to double all my recipes for the month and only plan two weeks. So week 1 will be the same as week 3 and week 2 the same as week 4. It seems to save us a bit of money doing it this way. Majority of these meals are crockpot meals. Why? Because I can. Next month might be different, I'll just surprise you. 

Side note: a friend from church recommended the Cozi app for keeping schedules and such. I explored it today and discovered they have a meal planning section! You can save all your recipes in the app and then drag and drop the meals when and where you want them for the month. I think I have fallen in love. Other then typing all my recipes into the app, I think it will be a great tool. Plus, it's FREE. Also, an added bonus with Cozi, if you follow flylady.net for your cleaning schedule, it links directly to your Cozi calendar. 

I'll quit rambling.

Here are the 13 meals I'll be making this month. 
Wait? 13? Yes, on fridays we make homemade pizza and the kiddos get to pick out the toppings then make it themselves. 

Click the meal to get a link to the recipe

Applesauce Chicken


Bacon and Cheese Chicken


Barbecued Chicken and Cornbread


Broccoli and Three Cheese Soup


Brown Sugar Chicken


Butternut Squash Chili


Chicken Cordon Bleu


Chicken Parmesan 


Chicken with Apple and Sweet Potato


General Tso's Chicken


Meatballs and Gravy
A friend of ours makes THE BEST meatballs and gravy. Anytime I attempt to recreate it, it just never comes close. But here's to trying this version! (raising my mug of coffee)


Ravioli with Pumpkin Sauce


Summer Harvest Soup

Note: I have not made any of these recipes. I love to experiment with different foods and tweak them to our flavor pallet. I'll try to post reviews of some of these as I make them. 


13 recipes + 2 pizza nights = 2 weeks worth of dinners
Then repeat for the next 2 weeks.


BAM! One month of dinners. 
Your welcome.

I am so excited to share with all of you my curriculum choices for the kiddos this year! Optimus is 3 and will be doing some preschool work and Princess is 5 which mean she is officially in Kindergarten. Time goes way to fast.

Let me start by introducing the planner I have chosen for this year. It is Mardel'sA Simple Plan planner. Oh, I just love it so much! It includes pretty much everything you need to keep track of records for your state and for yourself. It has sections for monthly book lists, curriculum choices, year at a glance, days attended and some sample pages for us newbies for suggestions on how to use it and so much more. I love it.

Preschool

I have found that Optimus is an audio learner. He picked up so much stuff from last year when Princess was doing K4 work that I have kinda needed to adjust some of what he is learning this year. First, I focused on Reading and Math. 

Reading

He already knows his ABCs so we are starting to go through The Ordinary Parent's Guide To Teaching Reading. First lesson is Aa recognizing the letter and knowing the short vowel sound. It starts off with short vowel sounds in a catchy little poem. Then he would start on consonants, which is a nice catching poem as well. Great for my little audio learner. We are going to take the lesson's at his pace. He is only 3, I'm not in any rush.  Then why am I even starting you ask. Because he wants to. His older sister gets to do studies and he has asked to do them as well. My goals for him this year is just to be able to recognize all the letters and be able to say the short vowel sounds as well as the consonant sounds. If he just recognizes the letters this year I'll count that as a win.

Click the image to view on Amazon

Math

Again, I'm just doing math with him because he wants to. I do not have a set curriculum for him in this area. He mainly sits with his sister and pretends to do the same worksheet she does in his spiral notebook. Just from sitting he has learned to recognize and know the value of a penny, nickel and dime. We are working on counting objects to 100 by the end of the year, as well as number recognition. 


Writing

My main focus for both my kids is reading. Everything else will always take a back seat if they are struggling with their reading. Why? I believe if they can read, they can learn anything. What good is math and writing if they can't read? What good are any of the subjects if they can't read? Assuming he is excelling, at a healthy pace, with his reading and math, then we will focus on writing. For Optimus, I bought him a Kumon tracing book. They are fun, and he likes that he has his own workbook. Goals for him this year in writing is to work on staying in the lines. 

Click the image to view on Amazon

Kindergarten

Reading

Princess is also using The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading. It's a complete reading curriculum. There have been some parts that she has been bored with, but I started to incorporate the optional activities at the end of each lesson and now she is liking it quite a bit more. She is a bit like me in that she wants to just jump to the end and be great at it, rather then taking it slow and mastering blends. I think I have her convinced that she needs to learn how to read so she can read to me when I'm older, because I might go blind (She knows I'm joking, or am I...) Don't be a hater about my methods. 

This is her playing the silly sentence game, which her and her brother thought was hilarious when the cards were mixed up.

Math


I started Princess last year on Horizons K math and just did the first book. This year we are working through the second book. I think you are suppose to do them both in one year but, she wanted to start last year and we just worked when she wanted to. I love this math curriculum. It is a spiral method of learning. Which means they hit a topic briefly and then revisit it over and over again in other lessons throughout the book, rather than staying on one topic and mastering it before they move on to the next topic. This year we are sticking with it. She isn't to crazy about math because "it's just numbers". Some of you know I was kinda a math nerd in high school, so it slightly hurts my heart. My goal for her this year in math is to fall in love with it, because numbers are beautiful. And hey, if she doesn't, I have two others. One is destined to like math. I hope.


Click the image below to view on Amazon

Writing

Princess will be going through Handwriting Without Tears Kindergarten this year. Its a pretty simple program. And, it is suppose to be great for lefties, which my son is. I have also printed out copy work for her to do every other day and laminated it, so that we can use it over and over. She enjoys writing therefore I give her as much as she wants. Here in a few months we are going to start writing to her pen pal.


 Click the image below to view on Amazon

Combined Subjects

Bible

This is something that we do daily also. I printed out memory verses on index cards that I wanted us to memorize for the year. We are using the Charlotte Mason method of memorizing them. Which you can find here: Memory Box. Last year we just took a chunk of a chapter and memorized it, this year we are using the box and I am really loving it. We memorize these verses all together, which makes it fun. I have searched high and low for a Bible curriculum to use and God laid it on my heart to just read straight from the Bible. Well, that couldn't have been more obvious huh? Each day we focus on two stories. One from the New Testament and one from the Old Testament. We read only 2-3 verses of those stories a day. After we read we act out the story from the beginning up to what we just read that day and then we draw pictures of it. They both love doing it this way as well as retain the information well by going over it and only adding on a little to the story each day. 


History

The kiddos are a little young to remember or even care about history. This subject is more for me. Ha! In my last post I mentioned we were reading The Mystery of History. That is all we do, I read the lesson for that day while they draw pictures of what I'm reading. Most of the time we will get online a google what we were reading about. For example, we read about the ice age last week. We then got on and googled ice caps, ice sheets etc. which were all in the reading that day. 

Click the image below to view on Amazon

Science

We are doing two different things for science this year. One of them is Nature Studies. We are studying birds and flowers this year. Nature studies are fun because we can just go out in our backyard with my laptop and their spiral notebooks and study nature. With the birds we made binoculars out of toilet paper tubes to spot birds. Then we research what birds we have in our backyard, as well as try and listen to the song that that species sings. We also research what type of nests they make etc. Putting out bird feeders and houses we make is also on the list. It's really a no pressure way of learning. The kids lead what we learn about the birds or anything they observe in nature and we google the crap out of it, through reliable websites of course. 

On days we can't go outside and observe nature we get on Wonderopolis. Its a site that has a random wonder of the day. And they are very random, which makes it fun. It's free, check it out!


Art

I am not a huge fan of organized crafts. I really like to just give the kids stuff and let them do whatever with it. Although, we found this cute show on Amazon Prime called Creative Galaxy. It's this alien that discovers different art techniques to solve whatever problem they are facing. It's really cute. Anyway, we will watch a show once a week and then they want to try out that technique. For example, this week the show was about pointillism, after it was over we grabbed paper, q-tips and paint, then painted pointillism pictures. When we do this I make sure they repeat and incorporate the word pointillism over and over while they are creating or describing what they just created.


Click the image below to view a free episode on Amazon. They are all free if you have Prime.

We do their three R's every day as well as our Bible. But, Science, History and Art we do every other day or more if they ask. This year we are trying year round schooling with only four days a week. I'll blog more on that later, but two major reasons we are, are 1) four days makes for either three or four day weekends which allows us to be very flexible with our time and 2) kids lose so much of what they learn over the summer, we would rather not have to review what they learned the year before when school starts back up the following year. Ok, and third, I would much rather have a few weeks off in the spring and fall when the weather is gorgeous then in the summer when it's so stinking hot. 

We are sticking with our curriculum choices this year, come next year we will examine what did and did not work for each child then adjust from there. 

What does your curriculum look like for the year? Or, if your kid is in public/private school what does their curriculum look like for the year?  I hope school is starting off great for all of you! 

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Good morning!

Every weekend, I am going to post some of my favorite reads and things I have found around the internet. Enjoy!

Homeschool

I have been searching far and wide on what would work best, for our family, to organize our homeschool year. I stumbled upon Growing Clovers this week and her different methods of organizing her kiddo's work. I love the way she did the file/bin system and set up one for us this week. My kids loved it! 

Here is the link to her organizing systems: How to Organize your Homeschool Curriculum 

Make sure you watch her video at the end. She is absolutely adorable. I wish I knew her in person, I think I could sit and listen to her for hours, just soaking up all her years of homeschooling wisdom. I might have went to her youtube channel and did just that! 

Recipe

You guys, oh my gosh. Have you ever heard of Churro Waffles? They are as delicious as they sound, I promise! I found the recipe a few years back on Pinterest and have been making them every few weeks since! Sometimes we put the cinnamon and sugar on, other times I just make the waffle and douse them in peanut butter and syrup.

Click here to make this delicious piece of heaven: Churro Waffles

Book

I have been reading a ton of different books this week, some for pleasure, some for fun facts and some to the kiddos for their studies. We are reading The Mystery of History for history this year. This book is so fascinating! I have started to read beyond what our lesson was for the day, after the kiddos go to bed. I have never read a history curriculum book that has made history feel so real before! If you just enjoy reading about history you should check it out! I bought the first volume/first quarter on kindle, just to try it out, for $3.99. I think I'll take the plunge and buy the whole book! I love it!

Here is the link to the $3.99 book if you want to try it out: 

I will mention it is creationist based.

Etsy Find

I have a slight fascination with Octopi. They are just incredible creatures. Isn't this beautiful?
Illustration of Blue Octopus Tentacles 

Fun Fact about Coffee

I'll leave you with this fun fact about coffee:

Coffee is a hug in a mug.