Ben (4 1/2)
He held his hand out and asked, “Is this my right hand?” His mother said, “yes”.
He asked, “Is this my right foot?” Mother said it was.

He ran out to play. A little while later, Joe (3 1/2) ran in from playing and held up his hand and asked his mother, “Is this my wrong hand?”

Eric (1 1/2)
His mom pointed out the different vegetables she had growing in the garden.
He told her she should plant meat.

Bethy (3)
Someone at church gave Bethy a drink of water. She told her mother later, “I didn’t like that water very much. It was too wet.”

Twins, Emily and Katie(4)
Anne (13) was fixing sandwiches for the twins (4) when she asked them if they wanted a half or whole sandwich. Katie said she wanted a whole. Emily said, “I want lots of halves.”

Ben (3)
While being kissed goodnight and during goodnight prayers, Ben asked his dad to pray for Jesus’ Birthday. When questioned why, he responded that he liked cake. His daddy said his Birthday was coming up, so Ben said, “Let’s pray for yours!”

Anne (5)
She was telling Gramma all about TillTill, her mother’s cat, and how old she was – she was so old, she was turning brown. She looked up at me and said, “Gramma, you’re turning brown, too!.”

Dennis and Ruth took the (then) 4 kids on a trip to Sacramento, California. It was their first experience of seeing palm trees. They said, “Look! Giant pineapples!”

Eric (2 1/2)
(You have to understand, Eric is a very compliant child) Eric was supposed to be cleaning something up with the other boys and he wasn’t doing his part. Ruth asked him if a spanking would help him do it. he replied, “Uh..uh..uh..uh..NO!” Ruth asked, “What would help?” He answered, “Pop!”

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Grammoo’s Notes

Aunt Barbara’s Mexican Wedding Cakes. See recipe here.

These are light but taste similar to shortbread

Dipped Pretzel Sticks

These are easy for even the smallest child.

Super easy and super good, creamy fudge. See recipe here.

Anne

Anne

Peanut Butter Cookies With Kisses. See recipe here.

Peanut Butter Cookies With Kisses

We also made:

• Molasses Cookies (See recipe here)
• Peppermint Bark (See recipe here)
• Martha Washington’s Bon Bon’s (See recipe here)

All the cookies laid out for the neighbors

After the plates were wrapped, we drove around town caroling and handing out these lovelies to our dear friends and neighbors. We had a couple neighbors gone, so those will probably be distributed tonight.

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Baking Day!

Click on the link below and enjoy! Don’t forget to view the video of the moose!

http://www.allanne.com/hunting-2008-part-one

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Hunting, Come Take a Look

Anne created the fried ramen noodle recipe and my son, Joe, created the green bean and bacon topping.

Anne Fried Ramen as told by Joe
Servings: 5 or 6 people (maybe 7 or 8 for people who eat a little)

5 packages of pork or oriental flavored Maruchan Ramen packages
7 to 10 eggs (generally you use two eggs to one package of ramen, but I like it a little less eggy)

You may crunch up the noodles before you cook them, or you can leave them long, but you’ll chop them up anyway while frying them. It’s easier to handle them when they are crunched up. Put all the noodles in a pot of water and heat it short enough not to bring it to a boil but long enough to separate the noodles. While that’s cooking, crack the eggs in a bowl or blender and purée them… the eggs that is. Not the blender. Once the noodles are done cooking, strain the water out and put them back in the pot you cooked them in, add the puréed eggs and mix well.

Put a table spoon of oil in the bottom of two frying pans and add the egg and noodle mixture. I like to cook on high and after a while turn it down to medium to let the sliminess in the eggs cook out a little. While frying, use a pancake spatula to chop and turn the eggs. Sprinkle the flavor packets over the noodles to taste (I do two to each pan while the egg is still cooking then I might add another afterward if needed). Once the egg is cooked, the fried ramen is complete.

Green bean and bacon topping
Serving: 4 or 5 people (or more)

Bunch of bacon (I use bacon ends)
Couple hand fulls of frozen green beans
Couple hand fulls of chopped and diced onion. You can use rings if you wish, although I’ve never tried that. It’d look cool.
Salt
Dash of garlic powder

Optional: Bell peppers or jalapeños (not pictured). You’ll add them when you add the green beans

I like to cook this before I cook the fried ramen and use the bacon grease to cook and flavor it later.

First you’ll want to chop the bacon in to bite size pieces. In a frying pan cook the bacon and onion. When the bacon is half cooked, add the frozen green beans and a few dashes of salt and a dash of garlic to taste. When the beans are cooked and hot all the way through, scoop them out of the frying pan (leave the grease) and put them in a covered dish and fry the ramen in the bacon and onion grease.

Once everything is done, top the ramen with the bean topping and don’t think about how fattening this is. Just do a couple jumping jacks after your thirds to justify it.

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Anne’s Fried Ramen

• Coffee
• CTBHH chat
• Watering the yard
• Quiet time
• Wish my twins Happy Birthday!
• Finish getting our network hooked up to use SOS (Switched on Schoolhouse)
• Finish our MOTH schedule before school starts next week
• Attend a maquillage party, hosted by two of my daughters, Bethy and Anne
• Laundry

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On Today’s Agenda

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Weekly Round Up In Photos

An evening storm

Jayden

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A Few Photos From This Past Week

In theory, it’s supposed to streamline and organize your family.

Reality is another thing…or is it?

This year, I sat Anne down with me to help me work out our schedule.  You see, the main reason we’ve been using the MOTH is because we have 3 networked computers and a handful of students and I needed a way to coordinate everyone doing their Switched on Schoolhouse Language Arts and their DIVE math CD in order to do their Saxon, not to mention all the “earned” computer time and educational “stuff.”

We got the schedule down.  It looked like a dandy!  It was beautiful!  I was pleased.

A few things have changed since last year due to Benjamin graduating and working full-time, as well as Anne taking on a new job of sewing hunting decoys for MT Decoy and Cabela’s.  (She does this from home)

The first day of our schedule arrives.  We are poised.  Mom is excited and motivated to take on the days ahead!  The schedule has been gone over, checked and rechecked.  By the end of the first couple of hours, it becomes very apparent something’s amiss!

I knew that something was wrong when Emily came to me and said, “Mom, you forgot my SOS.”  Ok.  I could deal with that minor oversight.  Another child came to me and said I had forgotten to schedule them for a bathing!  Hmmm  Later, Elizabeth came to me and said, “Mom, you forgot my SOS, but put me down for reading three times.” (Poor girl. Imagine that! What a rough schedule when reading is your very favorite thing to do in life!)

Of course, I got the usual complaints, “Mom, can you reschedule us to feed and care for the chickens at, say, 7:00?  6:30 Is too early.  “No, sweetie.  If I did that, then you couldn’t eat breakfast.”  “Mom, I don’t like that my ‘free time’ is scheduled.  It doesn’t feel free if it’s scheduled.”

Back to the drawing board…or in our case, Excel.  I work our MOTH in Excel.  Since there are so many of us, it seems to work well.  Some great ladies at the Titus2 forum, since closed to any ol’ yahoo, helped me out to learn how to monkey with the cells to get them to conform to my likeness. At least that is the hope.  In the past, I color-coded everyone, but this year, I am trying something new by color-coding times in which a person is on a computer in order to keep it all straight! It also helps that each of our computers have names.  My computer is fondly called “Mother” or “Mothership.”  Since the other two computers came from our office, we lovingly named them after the people who used them, “Darren” and “Valarie.”

I finally made the unfortunate decision to delete Abigail (1) and Jayden (2) off the schedule since we were hanging off the edge of the paper and I couldn’t find my tape to print more pages to put together like a puzzle.  I didn’t want to attempt “landscape,” for this old brain of mine just couldn’t handle further confusion.

Well, after a week of stumbling through my first draft of the final schedule, or was that the final draft of the first schedule… I sat down and revamped it once again.

Of course, there is an exception to every perfect schedule and our exceptions are those of Thursdays when one son has guitar lessons, every other Wednesday, two sons work in the morning, they just began a job each afternoon at a neighbors “until the snow starts flying”, Monday’s Daddy’s home, so we have to remember that we may not always follow schedule on Mondays…shall I continue with the “exceptions to the rule?”  Of course there’s sick babies, and sometimes, sick mama’s.

We used to have a “loose” schedule.  Up by 8 o’clock, chores and fed by 10 o’clock then start school until lunch, finishing in the afternoon.  When baby number 9 was on his way, I knew a few things had to change:  One, we needed curriculum that freed me up a bit, and two, we needed more order and discipline in our lives.  However, many other benefits have come from this schedule:  I can make sure we are doing everything Daddy wants us to get done in a day, if laundry is sitting there, I am assured it will be taken care of “in it’s time.”  You know the old saying, “A place for everything and everything in it’s place?”  Well, using this MOTH schedule is like that.  We could say, “A time for everything and everything has a time.”

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MOTH “A time for everything and everything has a time”