A Day’s Accomplishments

-5 Loaves of Bread, 1 Pan of Cinnamon Rolls, and 1 Tray of Cinnamon Crust

-24 Mini-apple tarts, 6 Big Apple Turnovers and 1 Large Apple Tart with Crumble Topping

-Loom warped and ready to go!

-A stack of Chamomile Soap, smelling good and ready to use!

-Big batch of Chicken in a Pot for the freezer (trust me, you don’t want to see a picture, it is not very pretty, but it tastes awesome!).

-Bulk Cooking Day Planned. (Mostly lunch foods so we can cut down on the time spent cooking during the day and concentrate on school)

-Blog updated for the day

Update

We are finally into the swing of school and I am finding that it takes up a good portion of my day right now.  We are still dealing with the quirks of our curriculum.  You cannot misspell a word by even one letter or it marks it wrong, so I have to go in and manually check everything to see whether the error is a spelling or comprehension error.  Other than that the kids seem to like the curriculum and get up and get started on school without a lot of prodding from mom.

I have been working on a few projects, I whipped up a couple more of the colored pencil holders.  I made a beach tent for the beach on Friday, but I cannot take pictures of it until then, I have nowhere to set it up.  I have also been working on cutting warp for the loom.  I finally have it all cut and now I am working on getting it on the loom.  I would take a picture but there really isn’t anything exciting about a jumbled mass of yarn draped all over the place.

I must admit I have been staying up way too late watching the Olympics!  But really, it is so exciting to watch things like Michael Phelps and the other guys on the relay team beat the French!!!  Now if all of these exciting events happened before Midnight it might be better, but it is only a couple of weeks.  Maybe I will have to up my coffee quotient in the mornings to keep me going.

Michael Phelps of the U.S.
Reuters – Aug 11, 10:38 pm EDT

The weather here has been cool and rainy for several days and it doesn’t look like today is going to be to much different.  I think it is going to be a lazy day.  Dan was up early this morning to catch a flight for Houston, so I am operating on about 5 hours sleep (definitely not enough for me).  The kids should be finishing up school soon, and then I just might curl up and take a movie nap or something.  I have plenty I need to do, but just can’t find my motivation today.  Hannah made some pancakes for lunch and I just ate a couple with blueberry syrup–yum!

Well, I need to go help with some spelling words and get the kitchen cleaned up in case I decide to get ambitious later and get some bread baked.

The end of another week

It has not been a very eventful week, so I really haven’t had much to write about.  We have spent a good deal of the week organizing stuff and getting ready to start school…tomorrow.  I have cleaned and moved stuff around trying to make it workable for us.  I am not sure how much progress I have made, sometimes I feel as if all I have done is shuffle the piles and not made it any more organized or accessible.

Dan’s niece and her husband visited us for a while today.  They are in the process of buying a new house and it seems like the bank and lawyers can’t communicate, making the whole thing very frustrating.  Hopefully they felt they had the chance to relax some today. 

Tomorrow we are starting school.  I know it seems early, but I want to get ahead some, so that we can enjoy our 2 week vacation in Sept. without feeling like we are getting behind. There is nothing worse than starting the school year feeling like we have to catch up already.  That is one of the best things about homeschooling, the flexibility.  Hopefully as the year goes along we will meet some other homeschool families and be able to get involved in some activities.  I know that is one of the things I miss the most right now is the wonderful families we had met in our old homeschool group.

I am also hoping to finally get my loom warped this week and be able to start on some projects.  I am still torn between towels and a table runner.  I also need to start thinking about Christmas.  I need to get things done early so that I can get things in the mail.  Guess I will have to get busy.

Treasures Found!

Yesterday was a day of treasures!  We started the day visiting the farmers market and hitting a few yard sales.  Nothing caught our eye, so we stopped at The Salvation Army store where Dan found a pair of wading boots for Hannah for $5! 

Next we decided to stop at an antique store, where we saw all kinds of neat treasures, but the one that followed us home was a vintage milkshake machine.  My dear husband has wanted one of these forever, but they are hard to find and can be very expensive!  This particular store had TWO, and the one we purchased was on sale for an additional 20% off!  I love the minty green color of the base.

And yes, we had milkshakes for lunch!

The other treasure of the day was a beautiful 45″ Leclerc loom!  I have been wanting a new loom for a while, but finding one in my price range and near enough to pick up has taken a while.  It was definately worth the wait!  Not only is this one the size I wanted, it can be upgraded to as many as 12 harnesses, which is way more than I will probably ever use!  Of course, this treasure was not so easy to get as the first was.  We had to rent a Uhaul trailer and drive to Connecticut (2 hours), disassemble the loom, load it up, drive it home which was plagued by a fuse that kept blowing out leaving us with no tail lights –NOT a good thing at 10 o’clock at night, unload it and return the Uhaul all before going to bed! 

Of course, that meant first thing this morning I had to get up, clean house, take down all my sewing stuff and move it to odd corners of the house and reassemble the loom.  It actually went fairly well and it now has a place of honor (and most of the floor space) in the front room!  I can’t wait to start weaving on it, if I can just figure out what project to do first!