The last remaining survivor of the Titanic Disaster passed away today. Her name was Millvina Dean and she was 97 years young. Here is a tribute on my son's site, Titanic Gazette.

I am sure like many of you, it was a busy weekend. We actually had a nice, relaxing weekend...Sort of.

Saturday, we went to Birmingham for a friend's sons homeschool graduation. What a blessing to see a Godly young man transition from one phase of life to another.






While in Birmingham, we went to visit our friend's and their A.D.O.R.A.B.L.E baby. Nate is Aaron's best friend from work and his wife (who is Russian) was our former piano teacher. Their baby is just over a year old and is PRECIOUS. He absolutely LOVES the piano, and begs to get on it (no surprise since his mommy is a concert pianist). He points to the music, lays on the piano and smiles. He also LOVES the drums. He plays and every time he hits the drums or symbols, will cackle and laugh outloud. Just precious!





Sadly this weekend, our bird's nest tipped over to it's side. Our 3 baby birds are now 1. One fell out and died. We don't know what happened to the other, so now we are down to one. I have reached my hands in there several times and made sure the next was upright, fearing the last one would fall out. Don't worry, I checked and many birds do not have a sense of smell, so I did it hoping that mom and dad wouldn't abandon the nest and so far so good and we still have a baby in there.



For those that don't know, Luke is um, obsessed, I mean in love with horses. Always has been. I can't tell you how many books we have on horses. His whole curriculum one year was built around his love of horses. When we lived in Alabama, we carried carrots and apples in the car, um, for the horses. You get the idea.... Anyways, We had a great time at church on Sunday. On our way home from there, there was a man riding a horse down our street and this man went into our neighbors yard. It happened to be our neighbor's father, who brought his two Tenneessee Walkers. Luke was, In love. I don't even know if I have any apples left. Needless to say, he was having fun...and wanted to take them home, but that is another story, lol.

Books of the Bible for Angela:

I have a friend that responded and said that she was going to try something like lapbooking for her children to review the Books of the Bible. Since we had already done it, I told her I would put up pictures of it. It was VERY simple. I mean VERY! We just left the folder as is and divided the left into Old Testament and the right the New. Then he took small booklets and wrote on them the categories. I typed out all the books of the bible and then we glued the ones that belong in the right category. Luke did it when he was about 5 or 6, but even Joshua and Joseph were using it today to review. We are also using it for reviewing for our Bible Bee.

**UPDATE** In my own fashion, I constantly try new recipes or try to improve the ones I have. I have tried many (MANY!) different kinds of muffin recipes. I have a friend that makes them with yogurt and they are the lightest, spongiest, muffins that will MELT in your mouth. Well in my on way, I decided to set out to find another recipe. This recipe is NOT the same as my old one and has been updated to reflect my new one**

You will never forget these! This recipe is terrific and gives you that unexpected delicious taste with the Chocolate chips in them.

Enjoy!


Raspberry and Chocolate Chip Muffins

2 cups hard white flour (you can mix soft white with hard white to add more gluten or "lift" to the muffins)
1/4 cup Sucanat (Organic Sugar is what I use)
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/4 cup plain yogurt (I make my own organic yogurt, but you can use Stonyfield)
2 eggs
1/2 c milk with a small amount of vinegar added (or 1/2 c buttermilk)
1/2 stick butter
1 1/4 c raspberries (I bought organic frozen and I chopped them in a chopper)
1 c chocolate chips (I used Giradelli)

Directions

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
Spray muffin pan (I used minis)

For muffins: Combine flour, sucanat, baking powder, soda, salt in large bowl.

Beat together yogurt, eggs, butter, in small bowl.

Add to flour mixture; stir just until dry ingredients are moistened.

If batter is too thick, add a little bit of buttermilk until it's smooth.  You do NOT want a cake batter.  You want a very thick batter but not a paste.

Gently fold in raspberries (fresh or frozen but not thawed to keep from Leaking color) and chocolate chips.

Spoon batter into muffin tins to top.

Bake at 425 for 5 minutes.  While muffins are in the oven, change tempt o 375 and bake 15 more minutes or until golden brown.

Cool in pan for 10 minutes.

Sometime ago, I responded to a post on Money Saving Mom, and someone emailed me about my MUFFIN recipes, especially Raspberry Chocolate chip and Millet. You can follow THIS LINK for my muffin recipes and ENJOY!!

More Frugal Friday tips!

As I work towards a more healthier and cleaner household, I will be doing a third post on cleaners. You can read my posts on Homemade Deodorant AND Detergents at their links. Today though, I want to talk about all purpose cleaning and what I have been using not only for a disinfectant but my kitchen too! I TRIED to do mostly or even 1/2 vinegar, 1/2 water, essential oil and tea tree but the vinegar was incredibly over powering and lingered! Doing some research, I realized that I only NEEDED 1/4 of a cup of vinegar (and the rest water), to 3-4 drops of tea tree oil and essential oil, and to activate the vinegar and its effectiveness, I added 2 tsp of baking soda!







For more frugal friday tips, please visit Lifes a Mom!

Eventhough the boys are fighting a virus with the headache, fever, runny nose, etc we were all excited to wake and find that THIS:


Has turned into THIS:




It is in our rose bush next to our house. They are cardinals (one of Joseph's favorite birds). We have enjoyed so much watching them. I guess today is their birthday but what a wonderful thing!

Plans for New School Year

We ARE planning on going through the Summer this year. During the summer, we will continue with Math (Math U See), Write Your Roots, Galloping the Globe, Trail Guide to Bible Geography and Reading Hillyer's Child's Guide to Geography.

This next school year:
History for all Three: Truth Quest: Age of Revolution I (1600-1800)
Math for All Three: Math U See
Joshua first semester: Notgrass Government and second Semester Economics in a box
Joshua and Joseph are doing Rhetoric with writing
Joshua is doing an indepth study of Revelations (not his first and won't be his last! He loves Eschatology!!
Joshua and Joseph both are doing Apologia Biology and Luke is doing Biology using Biology 4 Kids and matching their experiments/labs with help from Home Training Tools (which I absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVE!). The oldest two are finishing Latin and will start Spanish in the fall. Joshua will of course, continue with his piano (he has come a LONG way since meeting our teacher). Of course we will be using GREAT literature from Ambleside Online, and also doing art and music study!

Whew! I think that is it....

As we wrap things up from the school year (we have already gotten in our required 180 days) and begin our new summer schedule (we have already started it), I am trying to get some things wrapped up. One thing I wanted to get done, was for the kids to put together their Weather Lapbooks. If you want to see other lapbooks we have done, you can click on this link. Our boys are now 15, 13 and 10. We used the Weather book from Master Books and a few other resources on weather too.

**I have been trying to get these uploaded for the last week or so, but for some reason Blogger is Flipping the pictures. Don't know why. My apologies to you but atleast you can get the idea**

These were done by our 15 year old son, Joshua:
(Front cover of the lapbook)














These were done by our 13 year old Joseph:
(Front cover of the lapbook)

**NOTE** This is much bigger than it looks!!

Tonight we made dinner. I have had a couple of requests that I thought I would go ahead and make tonight. The first request was for Calzones. These are pretty simple and easy. I used ground turkey and raw milk cheddar for the cheese! MMM! I used my 7 grain recipe HERE and let it do the first rising (for 1 hour). Pinch off enough of dough, about the size of a baseball and roll it all the way out. I cooked 1 lb of ground turkey, used pepperoni (about 3) and sprinkled some rich raw milk cheese in the middle and folded it over like a pocket and pinched it. I heated up 1 can of spagetti sauce. I baked the calzones for 30 minutes at 350 degrees. When they came out we scooped out one ladle spoon of sauce over the top and sprinkled with cheese. This is VERY FILLING. You could do this in a vegetarian way and use veggies instead of meat.


Another request I had was for Peanut Butter Bars. You can find the Peanut Butter Bar recipe HERE. They were yummy and we served them with vanilla ice cream. They are AWESOME warm!

We have heard some activity lately in one of our rose bushes. Joseph's favorite bird is a cardinal and we can hear them before we see them. But nonetheless, we went searching to see what we can find and sure enough, here is what we found:




We will keep you updated on when the babies come and hatch....

Scenes from Mother's Day

We were able to visit with family and spend quality time with them during Mother's Day. Saturday evening, we were able to spend time with Aaron's mom and Grandmother.





Sunday afternoon, We met my family at a beautiful village. It is a 19th century village and it is about 45 minutes or so from here. It is also free. The village is authentic and contains a waterwheel, cabins, stream, all kinds of stuff. It had been a while since our family had made family pictures, so before we met for dinner, we went to the village, took pictures and then went out to eat. That worked out well and we were able to avoid those Mother's Day crowds. Also at the end of these pictures you will see a critter that decided to "invade" our family time. I wasn't thrilled AT ALL. I almost ended up in a tree. Here are the details of the pictures:

Kurt, Casey and Grace (My brother's kids:)


The 6 Grandchildren on my side:


This is our immediate family on my side:


My mom and Dad:


My brother's children:


Luke (our 10 yo):


Joseph (our 13 yo):


My brother and his family:


The 6 grandchildren on my side:


My parents and their 6 grandchildren:


My husband and I:


Our 3 boys (15, 13 and 10):


The beautiful water wheel:


Waterfall next to the water wheel:


Joshua, our 15 yo:


Our 3 boys:














The "critter" that my brother said was "innocent". When I got close enough to see it, I KNEW that it wasn't "innocent" and identified it IMMEDIATELY as a baby copperhead. My brother then promptly took MY TRIPOD and put it back on the rock, in the stream. UGH! I could then breathe. AHHHHHHHH!!!