Apple Spice Bread

May 27th, 2011

I’ve been gone all these days and all you get when I get back is a recipe.  But I can assure you, this recipe is worth it.  I’m just having a tough time finding time to sit down, collect thoughts, jump through all the hard-to-blog-hoops, not getting my head crawled all over by a crazy toddler, and hitting publish.

I will tell you, despite posting this recipe right now I’m still sticking to the new way of eating.  It’s just that groceries are low, the kids can stand to eat some fancy bread, and I had leftover applesauce, just not enough to divvy up between a bunch of kid-vultures.  So, this is the perfect fix for all that.  Oh, and I made my granola bars that same day too and I nearly fell smooth off my diet over that.  It happened to be on the same day as the last round of tornadoes that came through and that didn’t help my stressy snackingness.  But overall, I didn’t lose it eating it, I just had a few bites and then stepped proudly away.  And even though the numbers don’t matter, I am, for the record, down to 123.  And after all that diet discussion I will now give you a decidedly non-diet recipe.

I know I’m full of contradictions, but with this recipe I’ll also be full of sugar and spice and everything nice.  ;)

Apple Spice Bread

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup margarine
• 2/3 cup white sugar
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground allspice (I didn’t have allspice this time so I threw some nutmeg in it, be creative)
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup applesauce (any kind – cinnamon, unsweetened, whatever you like or happen to have on hand)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Spray bread pan well and then flour the pan.

2.  In a large bowl, cream together the sugars and margarine.  Add vanilla and eggs, and beat until smooth.  Blend in cinnamon allspice (and/or nutmeg), baking powder, and baking soda.  Alternately add in a half cup of applesauce, one cup of flour, remaining applesauce, and remaining flour.  Stir until just blended together.  Pour batter into bread pan.

3.  Bake in preheated oven for 30-45 minutes.  Just check for doneness by inserting a butter knife into center.  When the knife pulls out clean, it’s ready.  Let sit for 5 minutes in pan and then flip loaf out onto cookie rack to cool.  Slice and enjoy!

*******

I usually double or even triple this recipe (like my Pumpkin Bread) so that I can freeze, share with others, or just have another loaf first thing in the morning.  And like the Pumpkin Bread, this is good fresh out of the oven (obviously) and reheated, or even just straight out of the fridge all cool and everything.  So, get to doublin’, triplin’, and handing these things out!

If you like this you might also like my other recipes, be sure to check them out!

Impressionists at the Arkansas Arts Center

May 22nd, 2011

For art this year we’ve been working our way through The Lamb’s Book of Art 1.  It was a very generous gift from Marsha from her homeschooling hand-me-downs.  I’m more than grateful.  I’ve taken the black and white pages of the book, run copies for my kiddos, put them in a folder and taught a lesson a day.  For the most part, the kids love it.  Sometimes, the lessons are a little difficult, but mostly they can do them with ease.  I love this curriculum because it covers the fundamentals of art in small easy steps, incorporates the masters and encourages studying them further, and is biblically based.  Here’s the author’s philosophy from his official site.

In that art curriculum we had been studying color, painting techniques, and Impressionism.  We noticed that our local Arts Center had a temporary exhibit of the Impressionists and I got super excited!  Until I saw the prices ($10 per adult, $6 per child over 5 years old).  But I was still determined to find a way to take the kids.  I really, really wanted them to see a Monet and Degas in real life and to discuss all those neat things we had just been learning.  Then I recently ran into another homeschooling friend who mentioned theArkansas Arts Center has a 2 for the price of 1 deal on the third Thursday of each month.  Yay!  That lessened the steep cost for us and we made plans!

It was a beautiful day and while we were gathering our crew we snapped a few pics.  I asked The Oldest to take some pictures of Matt and me since we don’t have very many of us.  I’m so glad he did.  And didn’t he do a marvelous job?!

I must tell you the reality is that Matt was trying to lick my face for all the shots leading up to this so I was pulling away from him and laughing hysterically.  And since one of my sweet friends mentioned that I looked all put together (Hi Christie!) I feel the need to also tell you the necklace is my 3 year old mall buy for 7 bucks and that I was wearing men’s too large gym socks with men’s brown dress socks over them because my only “town shoes” are too big and I don’t own any girl socks.  Put together, I am not.  Looks are deceiving.

Then we made our way into the exhibit and were glared at unapprovingly by the curators and museum techs.  For good reason, it turns out.  We were giving the kids instruction on not getting too close to the art, not being too loud, all while trying to contain the Toddler/Baby who was wiggling and fussing, attempting to teach the olders about what we had been learning, and keeping the 4 year old entertained.  You know, while smiling, taking pictures, and trying to enjoy it ourselves.

And then it quickly unraveled.  The 19 month old Baby went from irritated to wailing, the 6 year old girl was overcome with awe and TOUCHED the more than 100 year old art then when corrected melted, cried, and pouted, and 4 year old BigMan started running around the museum.  Within minutes of this scene, the museum techs saw that Matt was taking pictures and confronted him, even asking him how many pictures he had already taken.  Embarrassing.  In our defense, in Chicago when Matt was visiting the Art museum there he was completely allowed to photograph the art so long as he didn’t use a flash.  We wrongly assumed the same there.  For the record, don’t take pictures there.

But I was determined to make it through the exhibit.  Because I wanted dearly to see the masters’ works.  And I knew the kids would take away something from it.  And because I’ve quit expecting perfection, life is going to happen in the midst of littles being, well, littles.  And the rest of the world would do well to learn a little tolerance and acceptance.  Plus I had paid a good half price to be there alongside the public high schoolers who were oblivious to the awesome works they were standing in front of.  At least my hooligans were under the age of 10.  So, there, take that stuffy stuck up art center goers.  Oh, I kid.  :)  Kind of.

The whole art-viewing experience was less than 40 minutes I’m sure, but I tell you all this to say – we take field trips.  We expose our kids to culture.  We don’t leave some of the kids home, we just don’t most of the time.  We go, we lower our expectations, and we laugh (a lot).  We aren’t waiting for the right time.  This isthe right time.  The 2 oldest boys were picking out the art with mostly “cool colors”, finding the art with bold short strokes, talking about how the artist had used complementary colors here and there, looking at how the art was an “impression” of women standing off in the distance, seeing what the masters’ “still lifes” looked like.  And excitedly telling us which ones were their favorites.

For all the outward appearances of failures, the art center experience was an outstanding success!

May you also see the successes in the midst of all the failures!

Teaching Sight Words Without A Curriculum

May 16th, 2011

I had a friend ask me recently how I teach sight words.  As usual, I have no tried and true method that I’ve used for each and every child.  Partly because each and every child is different.  But I really like what we’re doing this go ’round and will more than likely use it for the upcoming kids in turn.

I’m a member of Enchanted Learning (which I am not paid to promote, but love and highly recommend, for the record).  It costs around $20 a year and you have unlimited printing capabilities of so very many pages.  It’s great for reinforcing your public school kids’ work, it’ great for homeschooling, I loved it when I lapbooked, and now for anything extra that everyone from my preschooler to 4th grader is learning.

So, anyway I went to Enchanted Learning and looked up Dolch Sight Words.  I printed off all 3 list pages.  I then hung those pages inside our homeschool cabinet.  Since my kindergarten girl has been working through Hooked on Phonics and Teach Your Child to Read in a 100 Easy Lessons, she already knew a few of the sight words.  I pointed to the page to some of the words I thought she knew.  When she can say them without sounding them out or getting them wrong (like, really and truly knows them) then I color in the box with the word in it.  We will do this until the entire sheet is purple.  Then we’ll continue until she’s completed all the pages.

When we come to a word she doesn’t know I point to it, say it for her, have her look at it and say it after me.  Then I write the word on a piece of paper for her (since she’s learning cursive right now too I write it in print and cursive).  I have her write it both ways.  She’s learning quickly enough now that I’m writing 2 words at a time instead of just one like I’ve shown here.

Then the next day before we begin a new word, I will go back to the page posted in the cabinet and ask her the words from the previous day.

If she really, truly knows them we get to color in those words.  I’m not going in any particular order.  And I’m just going at her pace (which for this particular child is like a million miles an hour, please don’t think your child should go at this pace – my 2 older boys went no where near this quickly – do what works for you and your child).

Sight words.  Visually (since I’m visual to the core)!

So, tell me.. how do you or have you.. taught sight words to your little ones?

Judges and Ruth - War and Love

May 12th, 2011

At the end of Joshua and the beginning of Judges I cried.  I mourned the loss of Joshua.  I say again, after you’ve spent this much time with these people and really see them as people, it’s hard to let them go.

After we got out of Joshua we moved onto Judges where we found a lot of battles.  And can I just say, “Ew” with all due respect?  My boys talked on and on about the sword through the bad guy’s belly and how the girl stuck the tent stake through that other bad guy.  Oh my.  The battle scenes in the Narnia series got nothin’ on this, y’all.  “Ew” again.  But then we got to Gideon.  We fell in love with Gideon all over again.  I {heart} Gideon.  We loved how he was called a warrior while working in a winepress.  We loved how God told him he did indeed have the strength to fight.  We loved how God kept revealing Himself to such a doubter.  We loved how God kept telling him to calm down.  And we especially loved the whole clay jars, torches, loud noise scene.  My kids cracked up when we read it and they wanted me to read that part again.  All the confusion!  Too good!

But we were rather dismayed at the ups and downs of the people of God.  My kids kept saying how they couldn’t understand how the people kept falling away from God.  And I gently reminded them of how many times we (and I, oh, I) fall away from Him daily.  These people were real people, with real struggles.  Oh, how I know the struggles.

And then we got to Samson.  They were not as enamored with Samson as I thought they’d be.  I thought the boys would be all about a “super strong man”.  But really, the story moved so quickly to Samson’s women that he shouldn’t have married and how he told her his secrets even when she kept tricking him and they just couldn’t relate to him.  They thought he was stupid.  Big, strong, and stupid.  Maybe so.  And they were grossed by his ending.  Poor Samson.

Then there were the very violent, sad last chapters of Judges.  Very violent, hard to explain to the kiddos, made us very frustrated with the Benjaminites.

But Ruth.  Oh sweet Ruth!!  I cried nearly all the way through this sweet little book.  I cried when she wouldn’t leave Naomi.  I cried when she married Boaz.  And I especially cried when we got to Ruth 4:16 and Naomi cuddled her sweet grandbaby.  And we marveled when we read through the names that would eventually lead us to Jesus.  MyOldest at one point in the story said, “I know!  The people who made “The Nativity Story” the movie should make a movie about Ruth!  It would be awesome!!!”  Yes, it would, sweetie, I would definitely watch it!  What a sweet oasis in the middle of the Judges, battles, and fighting desert!

Love and war.  It’s part of life.  I keep reminding the kids it wasn’t supposed to be this way.  And someday we won’t need the instruments of war.  Someday love will, just like in our reading, overshadow the memories of fighting.  But, for now, it just is, war, is.  We mourn with those lost, we hate the fighting, and we rejoice with those who fall in love and overcome the evils and sadnesses in their lives.  Because, really, in the realworld.. the forever world.. love is Everything.