Our little getaway

Getting my husband to smile is a difficult task. As this picture shows though he was smiling and enjoying himself. Wednesday we left town.... just the two of us. Michael had received two free nights at a hotel in Laughlin, which is not a place we would normally go.
For the record, I don't really ever need to go there again. That said, we had a nice time just the two of us. Free hotel rooms apparently have no cable tv, no Internet, no refrigerators or microwaves. The room was clean and there was soap.
Thursday morning had us driving around Bullhead City trying to find a unsecured wi-fi signal. Thank-you to Louisa who unknowingly provided us with a 5 bar signal! We parked near a large blue dumpster and got our online stuff taken care of.
Our wild extravaganza had us going to exotic places like Goodwill and Lowes. Both which we can do here at home but it is much more fun in a strange town when you are killing time until the evening buffet at the good casino starts. Only problem is that last hour that you think you accomplished getting rid of only comes right back when you cross back over to the Nevada side.
I did purchase a pizza stone for baking my bread on at the outlets stores there. Only $9.00!
I am sure if we were the type of people who knew how to party this would have been quite wild. Alas, Michael's partying days were over when he married me.
Joking aside... It was nice to relax a little and not have Monica (aka Home Depot) calling every hour. The kids did great while we were gone and we probably should go away more than every five years.

Carrie's Pic - Color

Lydia got a little kite paper happy when making her window star last week. I think she was trying to put as much on there as she possibly could. Hope you like the color Carrie.

first attempt

Last month while perusing through old ( late 60's) Waldorf school newsletters online I found a recipe for beeswax crayons. The recipe is a little vague: 1 part beeswax , 1 part grated soap and paste food coloring.

It said to use glycerin soap in the article then later said that Ivory would be okay. It also said for older children to use fresco artist pigment.

I do not have a scale so I freehand figured out soap to beeswax mixture. This is a first attempt for sure! The color is good on the paper but when the wax cooled it wasn't even throughout. I will not grease the mold next time. It was silicone and they popped right out but I had to wipe them off . They are sticky. I think this is because the soap was old and glycerin soap is a little sticky to start with. I will try the ivory next. I will use more beeswax than soap and let the color mix longer. The ones I did later had more of the coloring left over from the can, they turned out better.

I got three different shades of yellow / orange. I will need a separate can for each color to melt the beeswax mixture over the water. Since this was a trial run, I just focused on one color.

These are softer than what you would be purchasing from Stockmar.

Not that I would want to try and make every color, I just want to experiment a little to see if I can get a good beeswax crayon after all.

Camera found!

Oh I am so happy we found the missing camera! Okay, let us just say... that my sweet husband doesn't have a good memory. When I say I am putting the camera in a high place to keep it away from small hands, he is supposed to remember where I put it. Right?

Since the camera is now back in my hot little hands I could take a picture of this yummy loaf of bread! I mixed up a batch of the master mix from the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes book. The recipe is in the last issue of Mother Earth News and they have it on line at their website.

Verdict: The kids loved it. The loaves are very small for our family. I made two and one of the loaves was basically a small snack. I will have to try to make a little larger loaf and see if it will bake as well.

I can not see this dough working for whole grains, it is a very dense and heavy loaf as it is. The taste is excellent. This would not be a bread that I would bake often as we use mostly whole grains and this is definitely a white flour style bread. I think I made my slashes a little too deep.

I would eat a loaf all by myself though with some clam chowder and probably have little flashes of heaven as I was munching. Either chowder or some really good cheese. I can definitely see this as a wine and cheese type bread but I don't drink.

The kids ate their slices with butter while we were studying some igneous rocks. Quayde's main lesson is basic geology. I would love for him to be able to take a walk and identify the rocks on the ground by type. I think Chaiya is having fun with the Lyrical Earth Science songs that we are singing too.

Tammy had this G on her blog last week and I had a sketch of it in my notes from a long time ago to use for future use. I wish I would have learned it this way when I was a child. It would have been so much easier. I also loved Tammy's gallon man. The P's (pints) have the C's (cups)inside of them, the picture isn't quite clear.

Chaiya has been having to take breaks in between reading Tale of Two Cities. She came out of her room disturbed. The French Revolution is gory! I think she is going to go and re-watch Maire Antoinette dvd again because she will understand it better. The first time she watched it was with me for design purposes for my work. This has been a difficult main lesson. We have been using the blessing of the Internet for songs of the era and wood prints etc.. I love being able to have her "bounce" ideas and insights with me. Teenagers are wonderful!

I'm going to go grab another slice of bread now!

Character traits

You see this face? All the character traits that have kept her alive and kept her fighting are just not working for me right now. She is my princess, a part of my soul, my sweet baby angel but.... she does not want to do school work the way I want her too!
She is spoiled and adorable. She is amazing! I want her to write and do her best drawing and she wants to get online to watch Disney Channel because we don't have real tv.
So there is no balance here. I don't believe it exists because she is just so much a miracle.

Food

I am thinking that a little three year old has taken the camera somewhere. The last time I saw it was on the table right here sitting next to my laptop. It is now very gone!!
No one can locate it so I do not have pictures of what I have been doing for the last couple of hours.
Since 8:52 pm this evening I lost it, my sanity. Although it might be debated that I haven't had sanity for quite awhile.
I have made the master mix from Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes book, it is now in the refrigerator for tomorrow which looking at the time currently is now today.
Ground wheat
Baked a batch of brownies
Baked 3 dozen cookies
Made beef stew for my husband's lunch tomorrow
Mixed and baked a rosemary, tomato, basil loaf (to go with the stew); a cinnamon-raisin loaf and a regular loaf of wheat bread
Cleaned up the kitchen , that's a big one.

This all started because I began reading food storage and frugal mom blogs. Our grocery budget for this next week is close to nothing. Which means my kids will be happy....because I go crazy baking.
I think I had better go to bed now before it hits 1:00 am

Carrie's Pic - Texture

Texture is one of the main things I love using in wedding decor. This is from a western style wedding we created for a sweet couple a few seasons back.

Happy Birthday Quayde!

On January 20, 1996 in a little duplex living room on Drew street , my first born son peaked his head through at 6:45 am and came into this wonderful world!
I made fun tie-dyed chocolate cupcakes. The darker color blue was really very purple but didn't photograph well. They were quite sugary and very tasty. Thayne ate way too many and was on a little sugar high in the evening.
Quayde wanted to take a few friends to the local bowling ally. Lydia was so excited you would have thought that it was her birthday. So the plan was the bowling ally, pizza at Peter Piper and then at the end, divide and conquer in the various automobiles to get everyone to their various scouting , homes and young women's activities.

We celebrated this amazing boy and all the joy he has brought us!

Love those shoes Zack!

AND THE SCORE>>>>>>


Lydia won! (of course) She was also the only one to get a strike. We all know that she is magic.
Even if she can't eat a cupcake without becoming a total mess.

It wasn't one of our beautiful 'up in the woods' birthday celebrations. It was just what Quayde wanted. He had so much fun and really enjoyed the games and fun. I think everybody had a great time and quite a lot of sugar. Isn't that what birthdays are all about?

County Board of Supervisors

For Quayde's birthday..the first thing he got to do was attend the county board of supervisors meeting. Whoo who. I wasn't there so I am not quite sure what he said but apparently it was quite funny from the look on their faces. He and his fellow scouts did a flag ceremony and then participated enough to get a snazzy certificate from the county. This helped fulfill some of his requirements for a Citizenship merit badge. He probably had more fun in the hour car right back and forth with his friends. LOL

Measurement

Lydia and I started her main lesson unit on measurement. I drew out this "lovely" ark (please don't laugh too hard) and learned all about cubits, spans, palms and digits. That was last week. Generally in ancient times a cubit would be aprox. 18 inches. Today we took what the measurement of our own bodies would be and found something very interesting.
Using our own bodies as the guide for measuring; we found that everyone was 3 cubits, 1 span and 1 palm for their height. Except Lydia. Now she has a form of dwarfism so I am sure this is where the inconsistency was. She was missing the palm part.

So we are wondering; since our little experiment wasn't scientifically accurate at all...if this would hold true for other people. We measure our nurse's granddaughter today and she was the same.

Our nurse then showed us if we lay our pointer finger along our nose then the tip of our thumb meets at the bottom. From the base of your wrist to the crook of your arm(where you bend your elbow) is how big your foot is.
We had lots of fun today figuring out all the ways to measure our bodies.

Winter nature walk

Today we headed across town to one of the many lakes that surround our little city.

Thayne was really happy to be by the water. We just needed to keep a really good eye on him so he did not try to swim like last summer's incident

First serious business was finding the perfect skipping rocks
Maliea found several that were just right!

I think Lydia gets sick of me taking her picture all of the time

Yeah I did it!

Then we headed over to the other side of the lake. It was frozen in spots. So fun! I do not think that the kids have ever seen a lake frozen. They were taking huge rocks and throwing them to see if they could break the ice. Then they slide rocks all the way across to the other side.

We were able to grab out some nice sized sheets of ice. This piece was about 3 inches thick on the one end. Thayne loved it. He tried to carry it away but dropped it and it shattered.

Quayde is not going to push his dad in here but it does look like it.

I'm surprised that Quayde did not try to walk on it. Maybe he's getting a little wiser in his "old" almost teenage years.

It was a wonderful afternoon, the weather was perfect for exploring, not too hot and not too cold.

We are going back to pan for gold when it warms up. Michael was spotting all these little flakes and I wasn't going to take off my shoes and socks (and freeze) to try and get them today. Maybe I am just not dedicated enough to my husband's needs. LOL!

Tilt shift cheating

Are you ready to spend some time? I stumbled across this tilt shift creator and have been making my family and other pictures into miniatures!!! I took one of my favorite pictures from our Chihuly day and transformed it. So much fun.

Now I probably should get back to lesson planning huh?

Carrie's Pic - Macro

I woke up to this little guy starring at me from my window sill. Hope you like it Carrie.

Need to laugh?

Chaiya and I stumbled upon this Hello Kitty Site. If you need a laugh and just want to wonder a little about what kind of minds make up this stuff, just head on over and go through the picture gallery. The things that first look like lollipops are NOT. This is not a site for young children unless you want to explain bodily functions and other points. Very funny though.

fun times

Right before Christmas, we dropped by my sister Shawna's house to visit. Her son earned this marvelous little bubble maker machine for some fund raising thing at his school. Now I have never known one of these that actually did work well. This one is soooooo fun! We made giant bubbles. Even Chaiya had a blast. I just got these pictures from Shawna.

Lydia is punching them as fast as they were coming out of the machine.

I just love this picture of Thayne's head in a bubble!

Conflicted

Sunny and 58 degrees was our temperature today. Which I am not complaining in the least bit but.... I understand that if we don't get some moisture soon it will not bode well for the rest of the year. I am fairly sure that Tammy or my family in Alaska would love to send us some snow.

So at this point I am conflicted. I have never made peace with being cold.

When I was a child we would huddle around the small pot-belly wood burning stove and get all toasty warm, on ONE side! Then one must turn around and freeze on the other while getting one's backside warm. Round and round we would turn our bodies. I don't think I was ever truly warm as a teenager.
My high school AP English teacher would always say 'cold hands, warm heart'. I am not so sure my heart was warm either.
Some day I hope to come to celebrate the "cold" winter months with joy. Meanwhile I live in Arizona!

Bliss day

Chaiya and I headed to Phoenix with Nana yesterday. We headed to the airport and said our good-byes. Then we were off for what Chaiya described as the best day of her life. First we went to Scottsdale for a little shopping. Anthropologie, J-Jill, and Sephora , oh yeah!! Had we more time we would have played with the make-up a little longer but Chihully was calling.

I can't even begin to describe how much gratitude, joy and bliss that Chaiya and I experienced at the Desert Botanical Gardens at the Chihully exhibition. The map is horrible but we didn't care as we meandered along enjoying every single piece. The sun was bright, as it was just about noon when we started our adventure, I was concerned that the pictures would be too washed out but I think they turned out okay.

This pink piece had a very sacred feeling all around. The pink was a little darker than what my camera captured. So stunning!
Somewhere around this point I realized that tears were streaming down my face as I was watching my seventeen yo daughter. I was so filled with gratitude for the opportunity that homeschooling has afforded us. I have children that are still filled with wonder and have a passion for learning. She stood admiring these pieces with such respect.
After about an hour and a half, hunger drove us to find a hidden patio cafe at the back of the gardens. Food never was so good! I had this delish chicken strawberry salad and Chaiya had a vegetarian sandwich with roasted sun-dried tomatoes and peppers.



Okay the garlic potatoes and chocolate brownie were really yummy too!

Okay these red ones.....I got some really good pictures but the guard thought I was a little toooooo close and had to ask me to get back. Does it look like I was too close in this picture below?


We were laughing so hard and having such a great time that even clear across the gardens the security people came to check on us. I believe Chaiya feels that this was one of her best Christmas presents ever.