This Moment

Footprints in the chalk


{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. See Soulemama to play along

Exploring life

What a day. We have been planting, tending to the chickens and goats, prepping gardens and exploring. On today's adventure we discovered a big frog, lots of cool bugs, and right on our porch there is a robin's nest with 2 blue eggs. Mamma Robin wasn't too far away watching us admire her nest and making sure we didn't over step our boundries!

This Moment~ Little Monet

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. See Soulemama to play along.

This Moment

Catching Waddlesworth

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. See Soulemama to play along.

A Week Without TV

Last week, as most probably know, was TV turn off week. I must say, I have really enjoyed it, and I think the kids have too. Now, don't think that TV has been a long time addiction that we began working on for TV turn off week. I actually caved and got cable back in December. Sadly, in just those few short months, my kids have taken quite a liking to the TV. I really was hoping that I could get cable so my husband could watch the games he wanted and we could watch an occasional family show, but was I ever naive. I am all the time turning off the TV pulling my kids away to do life. So, when National TV turn off week was upon us, I told the kids we were going to celebrate. We made up lists of things we wanted to do and got my kids to live life again. Our week consisted of nature walks, making nature bracelets, painting, building. playing games and just exploring and imagining. It was great. Now, we have gone to a show a day on the TV and rest of the day, enjoying life!

The science of making bread

Today the kids and I tried a fun experiment using yeast, sugar, warm water, a pop bottle and a balloon.





First you need 1 cup of warm water in a dish. To this you add 2T sugar and a packet of active dry yeast. Once it is dissolved, you pour the mixture in the pop bottle, we made a funnel out of a piece of paper to do this. Once it is in the bottle, stretch a balloon over the top of the bottle. Now, you are going to want a larger balloon and you may want to blow it up a couple time ahead of time so it is stretched good. Then just sit back and watch the balloon blow up. The yeast feeds off the sugar and releases carbon dioxide which is blowing up the balloon. Now, see if your little ones can tell you why bread is so light and airy. Now, I must tell you, I did mess up a bit on ours. I don't get my yeast by the packets, I get it in bulk from our natural foods store, so I measured out a packet worth, I believe 2 1/2t. Well......I used a tablespoon by accident. So our yeast mixture also filled up our balloon. You can imagine how eager the kids were to take that outside to pop it!! If you are interested in experiments like this, I would recomend this website to you. It's called the science of cooking, and it is full of lots of fun experiments related to cooking. http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/index.html

What a Beautiful Week

This week was such a perfect fall week. No rain, mild days, beautiful leaves, good friends and pumpkins!! How wonderful are weeks like that. Some of the kid's friends had a couple days off from school so they joined us on our nature walk Tues. We made the comment about this is our phys ed, now they want to come to our phy ed all the time :). We truly are blessed in the manner in which we are able to have school. We spent Wed. at Pumpkinville, a local fall attraction. The kids watched cider being made, went though a corn maze, shot a corn cannon, and had lots of fun. Add that to impromtu puppet shows, real life bussiness math lessons, and lots of crafting, we had a really nice week. Hope yours was equally as blessed.