Weekly Wrap Up/Tot School - 11/18/16

Life is kinda back to normal now. My big show is over. It's still my busy season, but I have time to breathe and not spending 36 hours a day in my office is nice. I still have another show to do before the holidays but it's a much smaller scale show and I can get everything I need ready in a day. So my office time has been spent catching up on our family's "needs for winter" clothing list and gifts.

The girls have been doing well in their online schooling (Time4Learning and Reading Eggs/Math Seeds) so we'll be continuing doing mostly that for the rest of the year. We do really need to finish our Thailand Country Study though! Joshua has been doing a lot of the same school activities (his favorites) so not too many pics of his schoolwork, but he is loving independence learning too!

My booth at my big show. I had record sales so all the hard work was worth it!

Olivia and Joshua have a huge set of wooden blocks in their room. Olivia has taken to making elaborate stories to go with towns she's built

Boxes are a kids favorite toys. Joshua and Olivia like to color them too

Joshua loves to help with the laundry

Safety is very important in construction. No one needs to know it's just a bike helmet!

Joshua loves to "circle the correct answer." Here he's finding all the red items

The girls and I took part in the local Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph. Olivia wanted to leave her poppy for the soldiers.

Brianna and Olivia did a lot of baking for various Guiding activities. Here, Brianna's teaching Olivia how to grate orange zest.

And here, Olivia taught Joshua how to roll out cookie dough with the rolling pin.

Brianna worked with her Pathfinder group, putting on a spaghetti dinner for the public to raise funds for their England trip. The girls did everything from busing tables to dishes and clean up afterward.

Making music is one of Joshua's favorite things.

Two of Olivia's friends (2nd and 3rd here) are going to be living in Australia for the winter. Olivia is very sad that her friends will be gone, but they plan to penpal so at least they can keep in touch!

Joshua keeps stealing Tupperware lids to make "pizza"

Most of Joshua's shape tracing end up looking like circles, but you've got to start somewhere!

The girls had their Enrolment Night for Guides and got a bunch of new badges!

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers, 1+1+1=1, Practical Mom, Hip Homeschool Mom and Homeschool Creations

Taking Health Seriously Pt. 2

This is a follow up post to my March health post.

I am now at 42.6 pounds lost (!!!!), at least 4 clothing sizes and (going by bust+waist+hips) 10.5 inches smaller. All since January.

I am SUPER stoked. I haven't been this small since I was about 5 mths pregnant with Isaac (17 years ago,,,). I am only 12 (!!!) pounds from my ultimate goal (which is still technically "overweight", but I have a large frame and have no interest in being "skinny", just healthy).

January to the end of May I worked really hard. I've never done so well for so long and my new clothing sizes proves it. In June I had 2 surgeries 11 days apart, one of them major abdominal surgery. I was on restrictions for 6 weeks and even after that still felt like a zombie.

While I didn't get much exercise done over the summer, I still worked really hard to keep my eating good. 95% of the time I stayed below my calorie goal on MyFitnessPal. Even with the lack of exercise, I managed to lose 10lbs over the summer.

By the end of Sept, I was feeling 100% again. The temps were cooler. Workouts could happen again! We all love walking and have a great bike path that's only a block away. I put together a daily workout to try to tone, since losing all that weight has shrunk a lot of parts but also made a lot of parts floppy.

We joined AquaFit now that beach season is over. While AquaFit is MUCH harder than it looks, it is still fun. And it's something different than the usual sweaty reps. We walk there while the weather is still nice so we get a 2 mile walk in as well.

As winter comes, it'll be tempting to get lazy. I really hope I can keep the will power to keep going!

Day in the Life of Waterview Homeschool

This week, the final week, on iHomeschool Network's Annual Back to School Blog Hop is a "Day in the Life of" post. I love doing these. I haven't done one in forever though!

8am - alarm goes off. I am NOT a morning person and even 8am is way too early for me. Thankfully, Lee works nights and is home before Joshua wakes up, or, if I'm extra lucky, Joshua will wake me up at like 6am *grumble* I poked Olivia, who is not surprisingly in my bed. She doesn't even flinch. I come down stairs to find that Brianna's alarm has been going off for the last half an hour. I need an earthquake bed for her or something. Pour coffee and head outside to my porch to smoke and coffee in silence. My mom, Grandma, has already left for work.

8:30am - I come inside, Brianna's alarm is not still going but she's not up here. Olivia is also not out of bed. I send Lee upstairs to wake Olivia and head to the basement to drag Brianna out of bed. She fakes being dead. Dude, there is not enough coffee flowing through me yet to think that's funny.

8:50am - Breakfast is finally happening for the girls. Joshua on the other hand has been awake 2 hours and is happily "cooking" his sippy on the stove (placing it on the cold burner and calling it hot).

9:05am - Joshua's sippy might be "hot" but his toes are like icecubes and I refuse to turn on the furnace this early in the fall. Operation find-everyone's-slippers begins.

9:15am - veg fest before school. Since it's Monday, Lee didn't work last night (he works tonight though), so the little kids pile on Daddy in the living room. Brianna and I hang out on the porch, being kitten perches and discuss what's on the agenda for the day and I fill in chore lists for the week in their agendas.

9:45am - meltdown begins over the fact that it's not snack time yet. Cue Joshua's most pitiful look. He is temporarily soothed by a blanket fort to watch Brianna play her game.

10am - let the schoolwork commence! Nope, wait... let the hang out in the bathroom for long periods of time commence....

10:25am - school actually starts. Thomas starts on Netflix for Joshua. Lee hides in our bedroom to watch non-preschooler tv.

10:40 am - I cover Brianna's eyes to enter her laptop password while she's on her phone doing DuoLingo. "She chocolate eats" is now the French phrase of the day. Olivia is excited to see seasonal (fall) worksheets in her pile.

11:30 - Laundry on the line! Joshua loves to help Brianna with the clothes pins.

11:50am - Olivia is done her paper schoolwork. Since it's almost lunch break, she just breaks early. She is loving her newly allowed privilege of cutting with a steak knife, so cut up Joshua some strawberries for lunch

12pm - lunch break! Also, mail call! Brianna got a card from the local organizer of the Terry Fox Run with this year's pin.

12:30pm - back to work. Brianna starts with a load of dishes, Olivia starts with her Reading Eggs and I get to work with Joshua's schoolwork.

1:10 pm - Joshua's (and Lee's lol) nap time means my work time. While the girls work on schoolwork and chores, I head up to my office to sew zippers and necklines into car seat ponchos. Right now is my bust season in general but also the only time of year I really sell car seat ponchos. So add prepping for Christmas sales and shows to roughly 40-50 ponchos means I'm pretty busy!

2:50pm - read aloud time. Today we are reading from our biology unit on respiration and our novel "The Family Under The Bridge".

3:20pm - reading is done so I go to wake up Joshua. I find him napping under the bed, silly boy. Under-bed napping apparently makes a grumpy boy. Brianna tried to cheer him up some by making a train track for him.

3:40pm - Olivia and I finished her apple experiment. It was her first long term science experiment so she was excited for it to finally be done.

4pm - school work and most chores are done. Electronics time for the girls. Olivia hides in a blanket for to play Minecraft and Brianna plays a bunch of games for Joshua (who wasn't terribly impressed with Brianna's track building skills and went back to being grumpy). I do some tidying up so I can get some freezer cooking done. When Joshua is finally less cranky, Brianna joins me to make Sausage Breakfast Muffins.

6pm - Brianna got ready for Pathfinders and then researched how to tie her scarf properly. She was so proud to have figured it out! She noticed that the videos she found on youtube were using the older style scarf (uniforms changed recently), so once she perfects it, she plans to make a youtube video with the current uniform.

6:30pm - Brianna is dropped off at Pathfinders. I come home and finish making the gazillion muffins (and ate about 348765 of them!). I manage to get Olivia to consume something of nutrients other than cereal (extreme picky issues here) - homemade apple honey oatmeal!

8pm - Lee and I went to Brianna's Pathfinders meeting for parent planning. They announced the current planned international trip - ENGLAND! Mommy is massively jealous. In 2019, Brianna will be able to go to England for approximately a week with the Pathfinders and Rangers to the Pax Lodge. Brianna is insanely nervous as she hates sleeping away from home, but in the next 3 years she will have a zillion opportunities to sleep away with Guides.

8:50pm - back home. Joshua and Lee have gone to snuggle to bed. Olivia cleans the living room and Brianna started her garbage and dishes chores.

8:55pm - for some reason, Brianna's alarm started randomly sounding. Why on earth it would be set for this time, who knows....

9:30pm - bedtime! I tuck Olivia in, Joshua's still awake so I snuggle with him for a few. I send Brianna downstairs to write in her Pathfinders Journal and park my butt on the computer to veg out on facebook.

10pm - Tell Brianna it's lights out.

10:10pm - kick Lee off to work and hang out on my porch with the neighbour, talking about Brianna's England trip.

10:40pm - I packed all the sausage muffins into freezer bags and found room for them in the freezer. That's a lot of freaking muffins!

10:50pm - I feel sorry for my American friends after reading the aftermath of the Presidential Debate.

11pm - I work on some online stuff for work, talking to customers, organizing coop buys.

11:30pm - Well past my bedtime...

Thanks for reading our newest Day in the Life post. I can't wait to read everyone else's on iHomeschool!

Weekly Wrap Up - 9/23/16

The girls got their Girl Guide uniforms in this week which they were super excited about. Brianna and Olivia are now "officially" a Pathfinder and a Brownie.

Both girls received Girl Guide cookies to start selling to raise funds for Guides activities. As they just came out of fundraising for Terry Fox, this is easy work for them! Their goal is to sell 7 cases each to get a crest for their badge sashes.

We're getting into more recent history in our history studies. We covered the beginnings of the written word. Which sent the girls to play a game that Brianna remembered included hieroglyphics. I'm waiting for Olivia to decide that learning to read is overrated and she'll just write in pictures lol

Also in this week's history was talk of rituals for seasonal celebrations. Which tied coincidentally into the fact that it was Autumn Equinox on Wednesday. We discussed this Pagan/Wiccan story of Mabon (the picture below is what we read. The previous linked words take you to a longer description of Mabon) and what happens to the world in the fall. We also watched a cool video on why there are so many different types of apples.

Joshua and I painted a fall handprint tree, Olivia started an apple experiment (more about this in a later post!) and Brianna made apple muffins.

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and Hip Homeschool Moms

Weekly Wrap Up - 9/16/16

Monday was a day off for Daddy's birthday. We always take off family birthdays, but learning often still happens!

Brianna is loving getting back into CNN Student News. It teaches her current events and brings her around the world. It has serious stuff, and fun stuff (like Tuesday's llama jumping segment).

The beginning of fall has some great weather. Not too hot, not too cool and most of the humidity is gone. The girls took Poetry Tea Time onto the porch this week.

Brianna spend a lot of time this week busting her butt to hit her $500 fundraising goal for The Terry Fox Foundation. In the last 5 years she has raised almost $2000!

We have an outdoor cat who had kittens 5 weeks ago. Olivia is SUPER protective of them. She is a giant worry wart as they get bigger and more into exploring. Thankfully they love her and happy put up with her smothering.

I love freezer cooking. Brianna's helped me a few times, but it's always been "get me this" or "get me that". This time, I had her HELP. Figuring out what to make, what spices we needed, mixing (hamburger, by hand), forming hamburgers and meatballs. The whole shebang. She loved it! We made hamburgers, chili, meatloaf, sloppy joes, tator tot casserole, cheeseburger rice, sausage breakfast muffins and chocolate chip cookies.

In more "schooly" news, we finished up the Nervous System portion of our Biology course. Brianna chose to write about amnesia for her writing assignment. Olivia spent a lot of time poking and pinching herself to "send signals to her brain" so clearly that portion was well learned lol

Brianna had a bit of a meltdown over her French writing. She is a terrible speller, even in English, and Rosetta Stone won't mark the activity as complete unless you score 80% or more, which means in the writing portion, she has to spell at least 80% of the words correctly. I'm not sure how we will proceed in the next 4 years of the course. I WANT her to be completely fluent, including writing, but I don't want to make her hate it because she's a naturally poor speller.

See what Joshua did this week in my tot school post.

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and Hip Homeschool Moms

I WILL Take This Year's Weight Loss Seriously

Several times now I have done the common "New Year, new ME!" fad. I've lost as much as 40lbs (3-4 years ago and starting from a much higher weight). Last year I lost 14. Then gained 9 of it back.

Last year I started buying sewing patterns. I don't want to waste money and time buying fabric and making myself cute stuff for it to flip flop being too big and too small. I want to be able to enjoy my hard work for a long time!

I have the added bonus of a new friend, who kinda lives next door (she actually lives on the street behind me but our back yards share a fence so that still counts!). She too is overweight and wants to be healthy for her family.

She overeats but has loads of energy. I eat pretty healthy but am lazy. We bounce off each other great! She yells at me to get off my butt, I yell at her if she grabs a chocolate bar.

I have loads of fantastic online friends who have been my weigh loss buddies for years. I love them to bits and would probably be a lot heavier right now if it weren't for them. But there's just something that makes you extra accountable to have someone right there in your face telling you not to cheat.

This year, I'm already down 11lbs.

All I've done is the same thing I always do - eat better (and less) and move more.

I use MyFitnessPal to track my calories. Calorie counting in general isn't a big thing as it doesn't take into effect good and bad calories. A banana and a half a chocolate bar are both roughly 100 calories. But counting calories works for me as I can see, first hand, portion control. Which is my big food issue. I eat fairly healthy stuff, but I eat way too much of it.

For exercise, I track my steps via the S Health app, built into my phone (an S5 but is now available for download for some other Android phones). Again, the visual helps me see my progress and motivates me to make the numbers go up. I also occasionally use a treadmill and an exercise bike, but I really dislike exercise equipment. I can't wait for the snow and ice to vamoose so I can get back to walking outside!

I'm still 43lbs from my goal. Will I see goal this year? Maybe. But I will get a hell of a lot further than I have in the past!

World's Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe

Brianna and Olivia went to make my favorite cookie recipe and the recipe seems to have disappeared from Food.com, where I originally found it! So I'm posting it to my blog to prevent it from permanently disappearing if I lose my recipe card.

Soft & Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

2 1/4 cups     flour
1 tsp              baking soda
1 cup             butter
1/4 cup          sugar
3/4 cup         brown sugar
1 tsp              vanilla
1 pkg             instant pudding
2                    eggs
1 pkg             chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375F.
Mix flour with baking soda in a small bowl.
In a large bowl, combine butter, sugars and pudding mix. Beat until smooth and creamy.
Beat in eggs and vanilla and gradually add flour mixture.
Stir in chocolate chips.
Roll into balls and flatten slightly onto a cookie sheet.
Bake for 8-10 minutes.

Weekly Wrap Up

As summer winds down we tend to do more fun hands on stuff that doesn't really resemble school.

We watched Magic School Bus's "Gets Energized" and chatted for almost an hour about how various things worked. I had Brianna think about some things she needed electricity for and what she would do if she didn't have the power running through those items.

Olivia loves her Melissa and Doug alphabet stamps. After spelling Olivia, she had me write out her full name so she could copy it in stamps.

The girls had their Super Show for Park Leaders, a "year-end" talent show of sorts. All the parks in the city got together and put on a really cute show with all the kids. Our park was fairly disorganized this year, but they did pretty good for putting it together in only a few days! Olivia ended up not wanting to take part at the last minute, but Brianna had a blast

Brianna in the red dress

The girls decided to bake banana bread to take to the last day of Park Leaders. Olivia also created a "craft" that involved gluing sticks and leaves and flowers to paper to bring to their Park Leader. I missed getting a pic but it was cute to see her come up with her own idea.

Linked up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Weekly Menu/Fitness Plan

I walked 9.46 miles last week. I was actually doing really good and then it rained, and I mean RAINED, for 4 days straight :(

My menu plans are a rough guesstimate. I don't often "feel" like what I've planned lol But this is generally what we'll eat this week.

Monday
leftovers

Tuesday
Pork roast

Wednesday
Lentil tacos

Thursday
Brianna cooks

Friday

Ofnsteiktur fiskur með lauk og osti - Easy Icelandic fish casserole, Brúnaðar kartöflur - Caramelised potatoes, Icelandic brown bread, chocolate soup, pepper cookies - Country Study - Iceland

Saturday
Joshua's 1st Birthday Party

Sunday
Serve Yourself

Linking up with Southern Living Yankee and I'm An Organizing Junkie

Weekly Menu/Fitness Plan

I walked only 5.57 miles last week. It was a horrible, poopy week, motivation wise. This week WILL be better! 

3 miles of my distance was Sunday where I went out for a walk with the stroller and my radio on my cell. I walked to the beat of the music. It was a great workout! I'll be doing that more often!! Now that we're into hot weather, the humidity levels dictate how much I can get outside (I actually get sick when it's humid), but I'll be doing as much as I can handle!

My menu plans are a rough guesstimate. I don't often "feel" like what I've planned lol But this is generally what we'll eat this week.

Monday
leftovers

Tuesday
chicken kiev

Wednesday
Coq au Vin, Gouda and handmade crackers, fresh real lemonade, baguettes, Bavarian creme - Country Study - France

Thursday

Crockpot Sausage Penne Bake with Sun-Dried Tomatoes and Spinach

Friday
Brianna cooks

Saturday
Out of town = fast food

Sunday
Serve Yourself

Linking up with Southern Living Yankee and I'm An Organizing Junkie

Weekly Menu/Fitness Plan

I walked only 6.98 miles last week. No excuses other than I suck :(

My menu plans are a rough guesstimate. I don't often "feel" like what I've planned lol But this is generally what we'll eat this week.

Monday
Enchiladas

Tuesday
Pot Roast

Wednesday
Fish and chips

Thursday
BBQ

Friday
still undecided - Country Study - France

Saturday
Brianna cooks

Sunday
Serve Yourself

Linking up with Southern Living Yankee and I'm An Organizing Junkie

Menu/Fitness Plan Monday

I walked 9.88 miles last week. Much happier with my miles, but still not what I *know* I can do!

My menu plans are a rough guesstimate. I don't often "feel" like what I've planned lol But this is generally what we'll eat this week.

Monday
Lemon and Dill Basa

Tuesday
Pot Roast

Wednesday
Bruchetta Chicken

Thursday
Aloha Burgers with cheese fries, sweet tea and flag cake (Country Study - USA)

Friday
Brianna cooks

Saturday
Out of town = fast food

Sunday
Serve Yourself

Linking up with Southern Living Yankee and I'm An Organizing Junkie

Mean/Fitness Plan Monday

I walked 5.15 miles last week. I need to up this way more if I want to hit my goal of 500 Miles in 2014!

My menu plans are a rough guesstimate. I don't often "feel" like what I've planned lol But this is generally what we'll eat this week.

Monday
Leftovers

Tuesday
Baked chicken with mushroom and cheese sauce

Wednesday
Apple pork tenderloin, stuffing and mixed veggies (third week this is on the menu... maybe I should actually cook it this week)

Thursday
Chili

Friday
Brianna cooks

Saturday
Lemon and Dill Basa

Sunday
Serve Yourself

Linking up with Southern Living Yankee and I'm An Organizing Junkie