Grumpy Kitty

How to start your day

I was surprised to find recently that many Moms don't cook hot breakfast in the morning. I'm lucky, mine almost always did when we were young. As we got older and demanded more junk I guess she succumbed, but we still often had a hot breakfast or two throughout the week. Around here my kids would riot if they didn't get eggs, porridge, waffles or baked french toast.

My standby of course is oats. My kids love "porridge" and we dress it up or down as much or as little. I soak them the night before either steel cut or rolled in warm water and whey. They get served with:

maple syrup

honey

blueberries

eggnog

cinnamon

coconut flakes

raisins or cranberries

 

A family tradition

The Professor comes from a big tennis family.  He even taught tennis himself at one point. The Kitty started "formal" lessons this past week. He loves it. He gets to join two friends and have something all of his own after watching a ballet sister for so long now. His coach is wonderful and has been doing this for over 30 years. 

 

Winter crafts

I wanted a winter themed wreath AND didn't want to spend any money so I scrounged around my overloaded sewing room and found some stuff. It also only too me 5 minutes to make which may or may not be a bad thing. I'm pleased with it, I was looking for simple and stark, yet not too boring. A bit of burlap, a bit of lace all tied up with some yarn, pretty quick and easy.

I also LOVE Pinterest! What a great way to keep me from having ANY MORE PAPERS. Really it's a great thing for a paper/magazine/book hoarder like myself. But I also want to actually accomplish some of the projects I pin. Here's one and it got me to finally unearth the glue gun. Butter and I did it right before Christmas, but we're leaving it up until the end of the month.

Friday Nature Walks

This fall I noticed three things: science, art, and nature time were lacking in our homeschool. We began Latin in earnest and while Butter is great at it, these are important things to her as well. Now don't get me wrong, we live on an acre and the kids get plenty of outdoor time, but a real concentrated effort at examining the natural world wasn't happening. So with children at elementary, kinder, and preschool levels I committed our Fridays to just this: a trek in nature, fins stuff, draw it, and then back at home carry it into further scientific study.

We put out a notice to friends that we would be alternating locales each week for awhile and then once this is habit we will make a few forays that are longer distances from us. Two families joined us and it was great fun. Not everyone brought drawing things so we opted to at until later to do ours. 

We read about the science of snow this week and since it was the coldest weather so far went out and looked at the ice formations in various spots. We're still holding out that we get some snow in February.

 

A part of the whole

We are trying to make sure the kids can join in on everything: from projects, meals, to cleaning, etc. We want them to see the value of work and taking care of things. The Professor has been honing his woodworking skills and I was able to convince him to build a basic locker for our mud room. Hopefully it will be installed this week. Here are the girls helping paint it. It was a fun time for them and they took it seriously. The Kitty did help as well, but didn't want pictures since he had to wear a "girl shirt," meaning an old t-shirt of mine:)

My version of the 365

Okay I'm going to try it. I finally got the camera I've been wanting FOR.EVER. so I'm taking lots more photos and ones I'm not terribly embarrassed to post. I love the 365 blogs, but doubt I can hang with posting everyday, just not me. Maybe one day, but I'm working on routines elsewhere in my life is much more important. So I'm committing to one day a week. One day a week I'll load up some pics and what we've been up to and blah, blah. I doubt anyone reads this anymore so it's mostly for me to chronicle pics.

This week we got out the beeswax again...it's been ages and all 3 kids loved it.

Kitty made a Hobbit.

Below are my gnome/bird and Butter's King Winter-Love!

We drank yummy hot chocolate and made a great banana bread, started washing our dishes after every meal which the kids were Thrilled to do and began using our blessing candle in earnest.