Menu for the Week of December 3rd

Hi Everyone,
I have the link to next week's menu. The featured produce item ("Harvest of the Week") is Cranberries! That means I've included one recipe each day that uses cranberries in some way shape or form. The full menu includes breakfast, a packable lunch, snack and dinner for each day of the week.

Cranberries are a great source of Vitamin C and a good source of vitamins E and K as well! Plus they're just fun to eat.

Here's the link if you'd like to see the menu:

Menu Dec 3 Cranberries

Clicking on the link will take you to a pdf document. The first page is the menu, if you click on any of the items with a square around them, it will automatically open up the recipe. The second page is the shopping list. It looks long, but it's usually not so bad, once you cross off what you already have. You can check out my menu page if you'd like to see the method behind my madness when making my menus.

Let me know if you enjoy any of the recipes, and I'll keep you posted next week as I try to get some very picky eaters to try cranberries!!

Oh The Things We Are Thankful For.....

 So here is a picture of our first day of the "Thankfulness and Gratitude" Projects. Jay really loved the gratitude paper chain. Most of the things that he was thankful for were pretty routine, but my favorites were "glue" and "online.com."

Here's his fishing for compliments lake. Sorry I couldn't find his fishing pole to get in the shot. At the top is his thank you card (the words got covered in stickers). This was my favorite activity of the day, espeically since the the inside of the card as dictated by my three-year-old reads:

Dear Dad,
Thank you for the remote control helicporter that Santa is going to bring me for Christmas.
Love Jay

If you'd like to join along with us, the link is in the post below!

Here are some more of our pilgrim crafts from this past week. (We ran out of room on our refrigerator for our story magnets, but thankfully we have a magnetic surface on our dishwasher too!)
Next Monday we'll start our projects for "Thankfulness & Gratitutde." If you'd like to join along, I've posted the link below. It will take you to a pdf document (you need to have a pdf reader on your computer) The first page lists all the activities for the week. If you click on the activity, it will take you right to the page with directions and printables. If it's not my original idea, when you click on it, it will open up the webpage with directions and/or printables.

Thankfulness & Gratitude

Thanksgivings Past

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! I hope everyone is having a wonderful relaxing holiday with friends and loved ones! I thought I would share a story from our family's most memorable Thanksgiving. It happened a while ago - 2007 I believe. We were still living in a 2 bedroom apartment with three children and we were working as the assistant managers.

Anyway, this year I'm thankful that it's not 2007!!

Our Thanksgiving morning started at 2 a.m. I awoke to the sound of someone getting sick in the kids’ room. As I was preparing to get up to see who was sick, Anarosa came into our room to tell us that Jacob was throwing up. Of course as soon as she got that much out, she promptly threw up on our bed. Well, that began a long night.

I finally got Anarosa and Jacob cleaned up and settled in the living room with blankets and bowls. It wasn’t much use trying to go back to sleep, they were both sick several more times that night, so we all just watched all-night cartoons. At about seven-o-clock in the morning someone was knocking at our door. They wanted to know if we knew about the flood in back. The Flood! Yes, that’s right the entire back of the apartment complex was flooded in about a foot and a half of water. Apparently one of the irrigation pipes had burst in the night.

Now, the regular managers were naturally out of town, this being Thanksgiving, so it was now our problem. We called the owner, Roto-Rooter and just about anyone else we could think of. They all came out and started working on the pipes. Of course the water to the entire apartment complex had to be turned off. Naturally the kids are still throwing up. There is no running water to give them baths. The water is turned off to the complex, so there is no water to wash clothes or blankets in the laundry room either, and since it is Thanksgiving Day there are no laundromats open in the entire city (we checked). Luckily we had a good supply of bottled water in our emergency kit, so we could sponge people down to clean them off. Of course we won’t even mention the bathroom situation, or our happy neighbors who seemed to hold us personally responsible for the mess.

Well, in the afternoon Mark made arrangements with the bishop and everyone else to open the Church building across the street to the tenants, so they could at least use the restrooms there. The missionaries agreed to stay in the church and host. I took Anarosa over a little later on to use the bathroom. Of course when she walked in the women’s bathroom it was flooded too!! At this point I decided that God was making fun of me. That was the only logical explanation for that!

We called everyone who needed to be called for that emergency and went back home! Needless to say we skipped the typical Thanksgiving Dinner at our friends’ house this year. I ended up going over at about 10:00 that night to do a loud of laundry (Jacob had thrown up on the very last piece of clean linen that we had in the house) We kept thinking that the water would be turned on soon, but they ended up having to take out the walkways in back to get to the pipe. The water didn’t come back on until 4pm the next day!

Our Thanksgiving Dinner!

Our Flood

Pilgrims

Happy Monday Everyone!

The theme I'm doing with my little ones this week is pilgrims.
If you'd like to join along the link is here:
Pilgrims

Have you ever had one of those weeks?? This is really just a long excuse for not posting any of the menu or theme ideas we did throughout this past week! For one thing my camera mysteriously disappeared. (I finally found it yesterday) Plus, this particular pregnancy has proven to be a bit more challenging. (Meaning most days I get home from work and fall flat on my face on the couch until the next morning – when I have to get back up again for work. This plan does not work as well as might be hoped when you have four other children.) And then on Thursday my three-year-old threw a video game thingy at my nine-year-old and sheared off 2/3 of her front permanent tooth! The older I get the more these things through me for a loop. I’m staring at her tooth trying desperately to remember my EMT classes from ummm…. fifteen years ago, and trying to figure out what to do with a screaming kido who is hopping up and down holding her tooth in her hand. Fortunately we have the best dentist in the whole world (and his home phone number) and he very calmly talked me through keeping the tooth, calming the child, icing her lip, and giving her ibeprofen. The next morning he glued her tooth right back on!

The next day (and yes, I know its not nearly as important as the whole tooth thing) I spent an hour trying to figure out why my Dyson was no longer working. It turns out that a Dyson does in fact loose suction, if you put a three inch super hero into it’s inner intake tube. It did however, take me an hour to take apart the entire vacuum cleaner to find it. And it took my husband an additional hour to get it back out. The great part about this is that when we finally got my three-year-old to explain how on earth he managed to get the super hero into the vacuum cleaner, he very calmly showed us how you had to take certain parts off of the vacuum cleaner in order to put the toy in! I’m seriously considering military school for a certain three-year-old!!! Did I mention it is a Dyson!

So, I’m starting fresh this week. And my appolgoies for not posting the theme and the menu earlier.

The menu for this week is:  November 12

And the theme is:  Turkeys



Here’s to another week, and hopefully a less eventful one.

Umm...well, because I wanted to draw a picture on my face.

Menu for November 5th

One of the biggest chores I have is menu writing. I'm a bit lazy at it, and then resent the fact that we eat out so much. I'm trying to get better at it. I love looking for recipes online, but can never find a menu/shopping list that covers three meals a day (I have found a few that have 7 dinners, but that leaves me with 14 more meals to plan!) So... I thought I would share what I have planned for next week along with the shopping list that goes with it.




Here are the guidelines I try to use:

• Every breakfast has two servings of fruits/vegetables and at least 1 protein

• I include a healthy snack for every weekday

• Lunches are "packable" for the kidos in school

• I have a "Harvest of the Week" produce item that I try to serve once a day (in the hopes that eventually my kids will break down and try it. Also, by "in season" I literally mean something that Safeway has on sale for less than $1.00 per pound - my Harvest of the Week item is highlighted in green on the menu!)

• The first page is the menu, the second page is the shopping list (It looks scary, but you probably have a lot of the ingredients already) If the recipe calls for a specific amount I list is first. Some items are going to vary by how many people you are shopping for (for instance I have a family of 6 - mostly little kids, if I need to buy grapes to serve in two lunches I only need 1 large bag of grapes - you might need less or you might have three teenage boys who are also linebackers, in which case you might need a whole case of grapes!!!) I list the amount I'm buying for my family after the item on my list - so you know to adjust for your family!


Here's my menu for this week (My Harvest of the Week item is: Sweet Potatoes)

November 5 Sweet Potatoes

Weekly Theme: Trees & Leaves!

I've been thinking about trying something new on this blog! I've had a lot of people (when they found out I was expecting my fifth little one) ask "How on earth do you do it all?" The short answer is, of course, "I don't." In fact, I still consider myself quite the amateur at this motherhood thing (hense the name of the blog!) But, I did think it would be fun to share some of the tips and tricks and fun things that I have found along the way. And hopefully other people will jump in on the comments section and share what things work for them!

One of the things I really enjoy doing with my kids is having a weekly "theme." It started when my oldest child was about eighteen-months-old. Being the responsible mom that I was, I read an article somewhere on the internet that said that eighteen-month-olds should have a 300 word vocabulary. I of course panicked that my poor child only knew ooohhh about 200 words, and therefore I must take action to help her!!! (I have sinse learned that none of my children are ever at a shortage for words.....I have never since worried that they do not speak enough!) But, I had so much fun with the weekly theme idea, that I tried to keep it up!

So, I thought I would start by posting the weekly theme ideas every week that I use at my house. Right now I only do the theme ideas with my three-year-old. My older kids are all in school now, and I'm a big beliver that kids need some unstructured time to just be kids. And with our crazy schedule, the older kids don't get a lot of unstructured time. I do put together themes for my other kids when they're not in school (so I'll have some for the older kids at the end of November, when they're out of school for Thanksgiving Break).

The weekly theme for next week (I start them on Mondays) is Trees & Leaves. If you'd like to join in, I've posted a link to all the activities I'll be using here:

Trees & Leaves 

It also includes a list of all the materials you'll need for the week (I try really hard to use stuff that's just around the house - and you can always substitute something you have as opposed to buying "stuff") There is also a snack for every day of the week and a list of all the ingredients for those as well!

If it sounds like fun, you're invited to join us! You can use all or just part of the weekly plan - my confession: I don't always do all of the activities listed either!

I'll post throughout the week, how we've been doing the activities, and I'd love to hear from you, if you try any of them as well!!