Halloween - 2012

Here are pictures from TWO different evenings.  First is the evening we attended the pot luck dinner and Trunk R Treat at church.  Then comes the pictures from the actual Halloween.  Two fun evenings… and in some cases two different costumes or at least variations on the original.  All costumes were put together earlier in the day on Saturday from the dress up box in the attic and the backs of the children’s closets.

First I had to settle the children down long enough to take their pictures.  They were quite excited.

Friendly spider                         Purple spider ballerina                Joker

     Taylor Swift  (different view of hair in second picture)              80’s chick

And Tristan took away a costume prize; not bad for pulling together his costume from the attic earlier that day and putting it on over his PJ pants.  It is an old dance costume that his older sister wore for a recital.

Then Tuesday October 30th we carved some Jack o Lanterns.  Actually just Rick and Tristan did it.  Awesome looking!  Tristan’s is the fierce looking one!

I finally caught the whole group of them right before I took them out to fill their candy bags and buckets.  Kaitlyn bought herself a pumpkin bucket at the school’s annual “Pumpkin Patch” just because she likes pumpkin buckets so much. 

The friendly spider again!   He is “friendly” so I wouldn’t be scared of him.

Purple spider ballerina, this time with a black and purple spider mask she made herself at the Kindergarten Halloween Party.

Tristan the ghost changed his outfit all together.  That way he didn’t have to “decide”. 

Taylor Swift!  Since it was raining the guitar got switched out and Lindsay carried a horse with her instead.

And my 80’s chick with the wild socks over her pant legs, her high pony tail off to one side and blue eye makeup.  Yeah, we made our own fashion statements.  The shirt is authentic from 1986 too!  I got this for my 16th birthday and it was one of my favorites.  It came out of a box and into the dress ups several years back for 80’s day at school!  Now I know what my Mom felt like when we had 60’s day in High School every year.
After the coldest, wettest Halloween we’ve had here, thanks to Superstorm Sandy, the children were very grateful to return home, regain feeling in their extremities and eat some of their goodies.  Happy Halloween!

R.I.P. (or “rest in PIZZA”) With “Heart-y” blood sauce

Each year the 4th grade does a “gross grub” luncheon instead of a Halloween Party… no sweets allowed.  So Tristan and I decided last week what our plans would be and signed up to bring this goody in.  Apparently most of his friends are pretty jealous of Tristan’s pizza lunches when he brings them in and so we thought this would be fun to add to the grub table with a Chicago style cut for everyone to enjoy.  I added the pepperoni to this after it was baked but still hot so the pepperoni would stay in place to spell RIP.

Friday night pizza with a movie started out many years ago at our house now as a cost cutter.  We wanted a break, wanted some fun, so did our kids but we were also feeling tired after a long week working and most important was the fact that we were tight on money so going out let alone paying for a babysitter was not possible.  Also, it was something for the kids and I to look forward to as they got older and for all of us when Rick was working Friday nights.  The menu for one night a week is a no brainer; nice for me, and we NEVER seem to get tired of eating pizza.  Pizza is cheap to make and fun to eat.  That’s that!  Plus if you’re feeling lazy or rich you can order out or pick up a pizza or even buy frozen and heat it up.  Pizza is pretty easy to come by.

So pizza making every Friday night which is about 104 of the pies a year (more now) has added up to virtually THOUSANDS of pizzas coming out of my oven over the years.  I’ve been making two every Friday and now sometimes I make three pizzas to have a few leftover pieces for lunches to stick in the freezer for a later date and also to satisfy some growing appetites.  In that time, nearly 1 1/2 decades, I’ve tried many different pizza crusts but this is the recipe I always fall back on now.  It’s easy to handle and is tasty as well.

Crusty Pizza Dough  (makes 2 crusts)
4 1/2 tsp. yeast (or two packages if you purchase it in the pouches), 2 cups warm water, 1 tsp. salt, 4 tsp. olive oil,  6 c. flour, cornmeal
Directions:
Add yeast to 2 cups warm water.  Let sit for 5 minutes if you have time; long enough for it to dissolve and begin to bubble.  Add salt, olive oil and flour to the yeast mixture.  Mix with dough hook until kneaded.  Divide dough in half and with cornmeal roll out into a circle to fit the pan forming a collar around the edge of the pan with your fingers.  Place on sprayed or lightly oiled pans.  You can let these unbaked crusts sit covered to rise for up to an hour if you need/want or you can immediately dress your pizzas.  It works well either way but works better with letting rise with certain pizza pans.  Add toppings as desired and bake at 450 for 14-15 minutes.
Pizza Sauce  (the BEST sauce)
I make my own pizza sauce.  At one point I was buying a huge can of pizza sauce, splitting it at home and freezing it because this made a small difference in my budget.  Sometimes it was a pain to remember to defrost the sauce in time though.  I don’t know how much it costs in the stores anymore because it’s been years since I’ve purchased any.  One time I discovered I was OUT of sauce and had absolutely no money to buy any.  (I’m rather strict with my budget because I have to be and if it’s not there it’s not there).  Not wanting anyone to be disappointed I came up with my own sauce after reading through some old classic cook books using basic ingredients I did have on hand in my pantry.  The next week I doctored it up based on my previous experience with it and I now consider it perfected.  We prefer this sauce over any we’ve purchased and it is way less expensive than store bought canned sauce.
Incidentally an improvement to this sauce came in the form of home canned tomato sauce this year.  I made 14 jars of it; enough for 28 pizzas and it is SO GOOD!!!  But store bought canned tomato sauce works fine.
Directions:
Olive oil, 8 oz. tomato sauce per pizza, 1 tsp. minced garlic or 1 clove garlic per pizza, pepper, parmesan cheese, oregano
Brush each pizza crust thinly with olive oil.  Stir 1 clove/1 tsp. garlic into each 8 oz. can of tomato sauce.  Spread garlic tomato sauce over oiled pizza crust.  Sprinkle pepper over tomato sauce.  Lightly sprinkle with parmesan cheese and then sprinkle oregano over the parmesan.  Dress with Mozzarella or a mozzarella/provolone blend.  Add desired toppings; pepperoni, mushrooms, peppers, black olives or whatever else you like.  Bake as directed above in the recipe for the crust.
(In a pinch you can use garlic powder or dried minced garlic to = 1 clove.  Tomato paste can also be played around with to make pizza sauce but the above really works well and is our favorite). 
ENJOY!

Progress in German… and Teddy Bear Day!

My elementary children attend  German Language School… a magnet in our Public School System or actually our neighboring public school district that my husband teaches within.  It is an excellent school, also with an excellent rating and is one of the most desirable schools to get into if the 9 day campout for registration is any indication.  For these reasons and others, it is worth any sacrifice we make to attend school there.  Thankfully we’re in the school already and we never had to do any such thing like camp out to get our children into it.  But we do love it and maybe we’d camp if we had to.  Rick and I were impressed the first time we walked through on a tour with the principal to see where our daughter would be attending.  The German classes are taught once or twice a day (depending on grade) in both large and small groups and usually reinforces regular classroom learning… but in German.  Each German class room has a set of flags and when the German flag goes up there is no more English spoken.  There is no English allowed unless the teacher makes a move to switch back to the U.S. flag (which rarely happens) or if a kindergartener needs to use the bathroom then allowance is made.  When Rick questioned the age/grade level of the students we were observing several years back we were both astonished to find that we were in a 3rd grade class.  Rick said he’d never gotten near that far taking German in college.  (Our daughter entered German II as a seventh grader after leaving here and was “bored”).  I am amazed at what these kids can learn.  My children sometimes have German conversations between one another, one has occasional dreams IN German and once two of them tricked some other kids on the playground leading them to believe that they understood no English and only spoke this foreign language.  So while they are still getting a strong academic education in their native language they are obviously learning quite a bit of German with puppets and songs and stories and all kinds of creative instruction unlike anything you will find in a regular High School language class.  This stuff is fun!  Here is a little of what Tristan and Kaitlyn did at the beginning of the new school year.

On the left is a poster all about Tristan.  It is written and labeled completely in German and tells all about his birthday, family, friends, hobbies, pets and favorite foods and color.  On the right (not in German) he enthusiastically is showing us a science experiment he learned in school… the upside down cup remains full of water!  Amazing!  Like magic!

In anticipation of Teddy Bear Day, the Kindergarten German teacher, Herr Heinze gave instructions to finish this Teddy Bear worksheet ONLY in German after just 17 days of instruction.  These students are challenged not just to recite but to respond.  After just three weeks Kaitlyn could give a basic greeting, tell her name, age and how she is feeling in complete sentences, count to 10, name five colors, sing “Alle meine Entchen” and “Guten Morgen ruft die Sonne”, tell what the German flag is and the colors of the flag and respond to rules and procedures given to them in German only.  Kaitlyn is having a great time learning German and loves her teacher, who is new this year.  Kaitlyn received “The Best Holiday Bear” award in her regular classroom after a Teddy Bear Tea Party.

August Activity

August is really a month of change and from beginning to end are two very opposite experiences.  Aside from all the other things we did here are some of our everyday moments of fun and learning.

At the beginning of the month Nathan still had his life long playmate at his side.  By the end of the month she was experiencing school for the first time and Nathan was experiencing some alone time for the first time in his life.  He enjoyed a farm story puzzle many mornings at his request and he fit in the number circles into the right places in the puzzle as we went through the story.

Having Nathan “alone” without his constant companion I was able to spend long periods of one on one time with him, in between household chores.  I was able to assess and realize what he knows on his own.  He can problem solve and figure so many things out on his own.  He is able to sort things by size, shape and color.  He can count to 11 on his own at least but thinks counting to 10 in German is silly.  He can look at objects of five or less and know how many there are without counting the objects out.  He can count his fingers to show me and tell me how old he is and he understands one to one correspondence.
 
Nathan can both nest and stack and he self corrects as he goes as he sorts by understanding the relationship of size.  

Most letters of the alphabet he recognizes both capital and lower case letters. He gets very excited when he finds letters that are in his own name. N is for Nathan is a big deal too.

Spooky lay pining each morning daily for the first couple of weeks of school.  His favorite pet person was disappearing suddenly each day all day long.  He and Kaitlyn share a special bond and he was waiting for her trying to understand why she was disappearing all day now too.

After school was a great time for Nathan to try to snag someone for some playtime out in the backyard and a great time for school children to get some much needed outdoor time.  Most afternoons were too homework filled to grab a playmate, but one day Nathan and Tristan really went to town in the sandbox coming up with a really cool sand creature complete with a volcano in his center.

Then there was bath time!!!  Sometimes the tub needed a good rinse after a sandy child’s shower, for sure!  Our dry erase keeps the bathroom schedule running smoothly in the evenings.  Baths and showers and “open bathroom” are marked out on the dry erase according to who needs a bath, who gets home when, who has what chores daily, who needs to go to bed first and who can’t take a bath until after they eat.  For example, I don’t assign my dinner prep. helper a bath at 5 p.m. or my kitchen cleanup person a 6 p.m. bath time.   Nathan always takes a bath after he eats on his bath nights.  The bathroom schedule pretty much runs non stop each day switching every 15, 25 or 30 minutes from 4:30 or 5 p.m. until around 10 p.m. so I take family outings in the evenings with serious consideration first.  And if we do all go out then we all take lightening showers/teeth brushing time and tag the next person to finish ASAP.  The schedule does take a break most days so we can all eat together and for Family Night on Mondays.  And I build in a few five minute breaks in case we’re running behind as well as some “Open bathroom” time for the first people to run through a second time before they go to bed.  I find this necessary to keep things moving so Rick and I can get to bed at a semi-decent hour.  Getting through a single bathroom first started getting hairy when our 3rd child toilet trained.  Now with 7 of us all using a single bathroom I find this is the only way we function efficiently reducing late bedtimes and arguing.  I can thank a friend I used to Visit Teach for the dry erase idea she talked about years ago.  It works pretty well.

Nathan declared himself a Cub Scout in training and wore Tristan’s old neckerchief, slide and cap since Tristan is now sporting his new Webelos gear.

Off to the pack meeting with the youngest scout!

Nathan LOVES playing games; especially ABSeas where we fish for the letters and match upper and lower case letters to our boards hoping to catch a shark for an extra turn.  The cats found this game irresistible as well to the point where it was hard to play with them in the same room.

Nathan always wants the blue fishing pole.  The cats don’t care what color the string or fish is attached to.

We decided to get some play time in for the cats with their own toys.

Each cat has his favorite toy.  They loved the attention and activity.

Rick gave his pampered pet some extra time and attention too.

LOVE!  Rick comments how much he loves having kitties in his life now.  Good thing!

Content!  Spooky loves to go out in the backyard on pleasant days and that’s pretty much where he stays.  He keeps a careful eye along the back fence since he has good luck catching chipmunks back there.  So far we’ve gotten all the chipmunks away from him and they are still capable of running… a little stunned but alive.  Our back neighbor keeps all kinds of junk along the back fence and I’m hoping that chipmunks are all he’s got living back there.  That junk drives me crazy.

Lindsay, wanting to make a treat for lunch boxes on her lunch prep week, became my new cookie master!  These chocolate chip cookies were out of this world good!  She followed all of my personal cookie rules that I’ve passed on to her and then… she pulled them out of the oven early.  Combined, it makes the perfect cookie!  As she was packing them for school she found one with a chocolate chip smiley face!  Cute.

Nathan played chef nearly every time I went to make bread and he discovered the game “Mouse Trap”.  Though we didn’t play the game, we just built it and had fun repeatedly catching the mice after putting the whole trap back together over and over again for a fun cause and effect lesson.

Candy Land… a good game for learning colors, counting, turn taking and sportsmanship.  Nathan loves it!

And as the drought wore on, my August lawn began to look more like that of late September… another reminder that summer freedom is no longer with us.