Yum

Some recipe links, from me to you:

Cheesy Kielbasa Bake

Baked Ziti

Quick Chicken Divan

Slow-Cooked Chili

Also, for using up leftovers:

Fry an onion in some butter. Add 3 tbsp of flour, then slowly add half a pint of milk (I think) to make a roux. Add a "cream of" soup (chicken, mushroom, celery, etc). Then add your left over meat and veg (about half a pound or so). Put it in a pie plate and top with mashed potato, biscuits or (our favorite) a puff pastry sheet. Bake on 400 for half an hour.

Your welcome.

Laughter

It's good for the soul. After all, how could this laugh not make your day a little brighter?

Take Them a Meal

Shortly before Daniel was born, we heard about this website, takethemameal.com. What a nifty thing!

Take Them a Meal is basically an online meal organizing tool. Someone just had a new baby or coming home from the hospital? Wanna take them food but don't want 12 casseroles to show up on the same day? No problem - once you sign in, you invite anyone you think would like to be involved in making and taking food. They decide what available days they would like deliver the food and fill in their details (name, number and what they'd like to bring). The system will then email the meal-deliverer on their delivery day to remind them, and email the meal receiver, so that they know who's bringing them what food and when.

The lovely Marie set one up for us (thanks again, Marie!) when Dan was born. I had 2 weeks of meals delivered hot and delicious. We even had the facility to say what time we'd like to eat and if there were any allergies or food preferences. When we signed up to take a meal to someone else, it was a major help knowing what others were bringing, so there were no duplicate meals.

The website even has some suggested recipes and other little hints and tips to make life easier.

It really is a cool little tool. If you get the opportunity to check it out, I highly recommend it.

If anyone else has used it, what is your verdict?

A quick parenting lesson

More parenting instructions here

Homeschool Top Tip

For the families that use paper-bound workbooks or worktexts, try this:

Go to your local copy place and politely ask them to cut the binding off the book and either rebind the book with a spiral binding or three-hole punch it. Avoid comb binding if possible, since the combs always seem to pop out. If you choose spiral binding, take your newly bound book home to enjoy. If you've had it three-hole punched (as I have), ask for the spine back and get yourself a big enough three-ring binder.

I didn't think to ask for the spine, so made due with an index card. I'll be asking for the spine next time!

Put the front and back covers in the sleeves and the binding in the spine. Load your pages into the book and enjoy the flexibility that comes of being able to remove pages from workbooks while still having a home for them and, best of all, avoid all the sin issues that come from an open book not lying flat!

Just read

"Read great Christian writers who know God deeply and saturate their writing with the Bible and take you deep into its spirit.
They are like reading the Bible through the mind and heart of great knowers and lovers of God. Don't let long books daunt you. Finishing the book does not matter. Growing by it matters. But finishing is not as hard as you might think.
Suppose you read slowly like I do—about the same speed as you speak—200 words a minute. If you read 15 minutes a day for one year (just 15 minutes, say just before supper, or just before bed), you will read 5,475 minutes in the year. Multiply that by 200 words a minute and you get 1,095,000 words that you would read in a year. Now the average book has about 360 words per page (that's what Carson's book has). So you would have read 360 words into 1,095,000, or 3,041 pages in one year. That's 13 books the size of Carson's book, or reading his in 21 days. All that in 15 minutes a day.
The point is: the words of Jesus will abide in you more deeply and more powerfully if you give yourself to some serious reading of great books that are saturated with Scripture. "

-John Piper

Check out the full message here.

We went horseback riding!

Toby works with a sweet gal who loves her horse and is kind enough to share, so she very kindly invited us all out one Sunday to enjoy a ride on Sunny.

It was so fun! Now all us girls want a horse. Again. Still.

Embellishing onesies

You can do this in one of two ways (actually, there are more, but whatever...):

You can search through your scrap material and cut said fabric into some sort of recognizable shape and stitch it on.

Or you can swing by a store that sells iron-on embellishments, pick out one that rings your bell, and get to ironing.

Either way, your cherub is cute and you look cool.

Reading "styles"

I remember reading my books like this once upon a time.

Now I know why my parents didn't get it, either.

More stitches!

I suppose Abigail was serious when she declared that she wanted stitches like Anna's, because she got 'em - in spades!

This past Saturday, she was playing "Doggies" - you know, that game where you crawl around on all fours as fast as you can? No, me neither. Anyway, her hind quarters must have been going too fast for her front paws to keep up with, and she hit the floor.

We thought we'd try Urgent Care this time, since it was closer and we could compare for next time (because there will, of course, be a next time, considering the family in question). She got twice as many stitches as Anna for three times the cost, so for the locals, go to Patient First. The care was fine, but would rather pay $15 than $50.

So, Saturday has been declared Stitches Day in our house, which means:

I can't take my eyes off them for a second

and

Noah's being locked in a cage this weekend.