iDad and other fun Father's Day Crafts on the net

Image from Charlotte's Fancy.
Make your own iDad card with this tutorial!

Image from mylastbite.com
Or how about a bouquet of BACON roses?!?!?!  There are several tutorials for this craft.  To make the roses above click here.

Image from ourbestbites.com
This bacon bouquet is a little more involved, but super cute and YUMMY!  Perfect for the pork loving father in your life.  Click here for the tutorial

Image from Pinterest.
Here's a cute card to make from the children!  I snagged the photo from pinterest.  It seems that the one minute craft website is down, otherwise I would like to it directly.  I think I can actually get all of my kids shoes on this size I have such variety in ages.

image from Pinterest.
And, being a homeschool parent, there is a certain joy in turning ALL things into an educational experience.  So download this free project and get those kids writing about Super Dad!

And of course, Pinterest is the source of all things craftsy so click here to see a sampling of Father's Day crafts and ideas. 

Happy Father's Day crafting!
Mrs. P

How to learn those pesky math facts.

Drill, Drill, Drill.

Ok.

End of story.

No really, that is the best way to learn them.  And if you are like me, then this isn't such good news.  I couldn't keep up with a stack of math flash cards if my life depended on it!  I mean, my toddler thinks it is great fun to see the math facts "rain" down on the bottom floor from our school loft.  Imagine hundreds of math facts and/or Latin flash cards raining down.  Not that I've actually witnessed this...at least I'm not admitting it.  So although, in theory, flash cards should be do-able.  And, in theory, it shouldn't be hard.  Somehow it IS hard to keep up the drill work involved in memorizing math facts.  So let me just say that when I heard about and used www.xtramath.com on the internet I sang praises!  I danced in the moonlight without coercion from flying insect!  I signed all of my kids up and set them straight to work on drill work.  And then I threw away the random and stray math flash cards that survived the rain. And then I ate chocolate, because all celebrations should include chocolate.

10 Great things about XtraMath:

1. It's FREE
2. It's EASY
3. I don't have to keep up with which kid knows the 2's, 5's and 10's and which kid needs to practice their 4's!  This is HUGE!!!
4. It's on the computer so I can't lose it!
5. No papers to keep up with or print out!
6. No more index cards all over my house!
7. The kids don't even hate it!
8. It only takes 5 minutes a day!
9. You can see progress on a special "teacher" page.
10. You can play several times a day, if needed.

XtraMath

Cheese Making for the Beginner

At the farm these days, my milk pail overflows.  So I spent some time this week making some cheese.  It’s a good way to preserve the excess milk.  I also freeze extra (goat) milk  and I have a recipe for canning milk.  However, I have not canned milk.  yet.  It’s likely that I’ll can some milk one of these days.  Oh…that reminds me that I have a recipe for sweetened condensed milk.  Yes, that may be my next canning project. OK..back to the matter at hand, cheese.
Cheese is a rather simple way to preserve your milk for a little bit.  So when the milk pail overflows at your house, try this recipe.  It is easy, requires very few ingredients, and your friends will think your are an artisan cheese maker when they have a bite.  The best part is you don't even have to milk an animal.  Just grab some whole milk from your local supermarket.

You take little balls of this delectable cheese and layer them in a jar with herbs and seasoning.  Then you pour olive oil over it all.  The olive oil helps preserve the cheese and seals out air.  The flavor is amazing, especially if you are patient enough to wait a week or so to let the flavors meld together.  So here’s your supply list. 
Labaneh (a yogurt cream cheese)
You will need:
1 gallon of milk ( can be any kind, store bought, fresh, skim, whole)
1/2 c. cultured yogurt (like Brown Cow or Dannon, plain, unflavored)
fresh basil leaves
sundried tomatoes
fresh cloves of garlic
olive oil
pint jar
butter muslin (or a square of fine weave fabric like batiste or muslin)
colander
gallon glass jar
heating pad
cooler
How to make Yogurt:
Add 1/2 c. of yogurt to your glass jar.  Heat your milk to between 110-114 degrees.  Stir milk into yogurt.  Incubate for 6-8 hours at 90-110 degrees.  To keep this temp, put your gallon jar in a cooler with a heating pad set on low. Or do as I do and use fresh, strained milk straight from the barn.  It's the perfect temperature.  Then I incubate it in my Excalibur dehydrator.  It makes perfect yogurt every time.  After the yogurt is thickened, chill in the fridge overnight.  It will thicken more in the fridge.  If you are using goat’s milk, you may want to add 1/2 c. of dry milk to the milk and yogurt when you are starting out.  This will thicken it slightly.  As a general rule, goat milk doesn’t thicken like store bought yogurt.  If you want to cheat, then just buy the biggest containers of plain yogurt you can find (to equal 1 gallon of yogurt) at the supermarket and proceed as follows. 

How to make the Lebanah:
Strain the yogurt in a cheesecloth for several hours.  The easiest way to do this is to line your colander with cheesecloth.  It will need a very fine weave and usually is sold as "butter muslin" rather than cheese cloth.  To sterilize the cloth, iron with a hot iron.  When the yogurt is poured into the muslin in the colander, tie the four corners together.  You can then hang it on a cabinet door or hook with a bowl underneath to catch the whey as it drips.
Once the yogurt has been strained, scoop little balls of the yogurt cheese with a spoon or cookie scoop.  Put them in a quart mason jar.  As you add little balls of cheese add in layers of herbs and spices as desired.  A nice combination is fresh basil, sun dried tomatoes, peppercorns, and garlic cloves.  When the jar is full, pour olive oil over the top.  Let this sit in the fridge several days to a week for the herbs to season the cheese.  To eat, serve the little cheese balls on a plate with crackers or veggies.

I learned to make this cheese in a Cheese Making class at Homestead Heritage.  You can see the lebanah in the photo above taken from the cover of the How to Make Soft Cheese book published at Homestead Heritage.  Here is a link for more information on the class that I took.  It was worth every penny.
http://www.homesteadheritage-homesteading.com/soft_cheese.html
Blessings,
Mrs. P

Home Economics Resources (repost)

Training Daughters to be Keepers at Home

Training Our Daughters to Be Keepers at Home
by Ann Ward

Not everyone celebrates the year their daughter is in sixth grade, but I did.  I’ve been looking at this marvelous 7 year curriculum and waiting for Miss A to get old enough to justify the expense.  Well, now that she is in 6th grade, she has just 7 years before finishing high school.  Oh my!  How can it be?  Time really does fly.  So in my rainbow resource box I found this book just for me Miss A.  Here are the topics that I Miss A will learn about this year.
Year 1
Godly Womanhood (utilizing The King’s Daughter’s and Other Stories for Girls; circa 1910)
Sewing I
Cooking & Baking I (utilizing Sue Gregg’s Lunches & Snacks cookbook)
Gardening I (utilizing Square Foot Gardening, Weeds: A Golden Guide, Weeds and What They Tell)
Knitting I (I may substitute smocking since she wants to learn and I am knitting challenged)
Greeting Card Making I (utilizing various books from the library)

Before Miss A was old enough for this curriculum, I still taught some home economics skills.  I especially loved the books by the Pearables titled Home Ec for Home Schoolers.  I have all three levels and Miss J is thrilled to be old enough for level 1 this year. 
Level 1 Skills:
Nutrition
Baking
Cooking
Sewing
Cleaning
Organizing
Hospitality
for a detailed list see the link below. (my linky thing doesn’t work so you’ll have to copy and paste it.)
http://rainbowresource.com/pictures/018510/c/1/1249415261-1246826

Blessings,
Mrs. P

Middle School Nutrition Unit-USDA

[Photo Source]


Summer time is a great time to get in some short units on all those things you want to teach, but they just get pushed aside because they are last on your priority list.  I was looking up some menu planning forms for my oldest so that she could work on finishing up her Home Economics curriculum for this year.  She still hasn't completed the cooking unit.  During the search I came across this free resource from the USDA.  It looks like you can get a kit to teach in a classroom setting, but they have also provided downloads of all of the workbooks as well as the little mini-magazine on Food and Nutrition.  This would be a great resource for the 4-H student who has a project area of food and nutrition.  It would also work well in a homeschool co-op setting.   It is geared to 7th and 8th grade students, but after looking through the magazine, I think it would be suitable for kids in 5th grade and up.  For our house, we will use it as a short unit to supplement her lessons in Training Daughter's to be Keepers at Home.  And I might read select portions aloud for certain children that think Little Debbie's snacks are deserving of their own food group!

Oh and about that menu planning form....here is a link to 11 different forms free on Money Saving Mom. 

Happy Teaching,
Mrs. P

Spiders and Snakes, Give me a break! (repost)

This isn’t the actual snake skin I found in the feed room, but you get the idea.  The one I found was about 3 and a half feet long.  Long enough to freak me out and impress Mr. P.  Now I know what happened to the mouse problem we had.  I was complaining about the little mice, but now I think I preferred the mice.  At least I saw them and was creeped out.  Seeing a skin and no snake really is MUCH worse.  Who knows which feed sack he’s hiding behind?  or even worse, which feed sack he is IN.  Miss A pointed out that it might be a mother snake.  Oh! Please let it not be a mother snake.  I can’t even let my brain think that for one minute.

And with snake season comes spider season.  The spiders return every summer and take their posts in the barn to help with the fly population.  I’m thankful they eat flies, but still I get all worked up if I walk into their webs when I enter the barn.  ("All worked up" =  the dance I do when taking laundry down under the guard light. )   I have no less than two dozen spiders that look just like the fellow above, on fly patrol.  After the last couple of weeks, we seem to have come to an understanding and they are no longer making their webs directly across my walkway (since I knock down their webs every, single day).  Instead they have moved their webs above my head.  I could squish them, but I really like that they eat flies and they don’t jump, so I let them live.  Any spider that jumps at me is dead.  I cannot deal with jumping insects.  So if you visit the barn at our farm, just don’t look up….unless of course you really like the haunted house look or just love spiders. 
I will say that Mr. C loves to come to the barn at sunrise or even the porch for that matter.  We say we are watching the spiders go to bed, because after a long night of eating they all fix their ragged webs and go to the edge of the web like they are tucking themselves in.  It truly is amazing to watch as long as no spider jumps AND I do not touch any webs.  He also thought the snake skin was the coolest ever and immediately went on a snake hunt.  Me, on the other hand, I just pray daily that I don’t find a snake IN a feed sack.  It just might cause irreversible mental trauma.  (I mean worse than the mental issues I already have with spiders, snakes and bugs.)  Maybe I should teach Mr. C to milk the goats and cow and he can do chores with the snakes and spiders!  Except for the chore part, he’d have a blast. 
Your insectandsnake-aphobic dairy maid,
Mrs. P

Never Do Laundry Under the Guard Light (repost)

(image from allposters.com)

Never Do Laundry Under the Guard Light
OR
Ways to Entertain Your Neighbors on a Summer’s Eve

As I said in a previous post, we are up to our eyeballs in green beans, carrots, turnips and a cow with mastitis.  I still did some laundry today because it just isn’t worth it to get behind, especially when you have three children who aren’t afraid to get dirty.  So I did a couple of loads today between other tasks.  Well tonight, while the beans were in the pressure canner, Mr P asked if I had taken the clothes off the line.  I remembered that, in fact, I had not.  So I headed outside with a laundry basket in order to quickly gather the clothes off the line.  It is a warm  night with a slight breeze and the moon is just a sliver so it is pretty dark.  Never fear though, we have a guard light.  A tall light on a utility pole that comes on at dark and turns off at day break.  It is quite near my laundry line so this alleviated my fears of stepping on one of the friendly rattlesnakes that like to live here. 
At the clothes line I realized that snakes are my least fear.  There were small bugs on the clothespins.  Oh wait, they were FLYING bugs.  I really, really hate flying bugs.  I hate them so much that I generally scream like a little girl when they fly near me.  Really, just ask my friend Cathy who got quite a giggle one day when I tried to get away from honey bees on a field trip.  By the way, bugs that sting scare me even more than plain ol’ flying bugs. 
So I bravely tap the clothes pin, shoulders tense and legs ready to run the other way, and the bugs fly off.  "Good," I thought.  But then I realized the laundry was literally covered with these small black flying bugs.  I didn’t know what kind they were so I assumed that they sting and are possibly even venomous.  Better safe than sorry, I always say.  Well, not really, but when it comes to bugs and snakes, this is definitely my motto.  
After a few good shakes, carefully aimed away from my body, I folded the first t-shirt and put it in the basket.  Good, one shirt done only a couple dozen more to go.  The next thing I knew I was dodging flying bugs who were aiming for my hair and shirt.  Apparently the smell of sweat and garden attracted these critters.
I managed to get several more t-shirts folded when I decided to pretend I’m Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice.  Why? Because I’m trying to overcome my fear of the flying, possibly stinging and venomous bugs, of course.  That’s why.  And the best way I can think of is to pretend or think about something else.  Pride and Prejudice is the first thing that pops in my mind.  There is a scene in the movie where Elizabeth is taking laundry from a line in the rain.  I was actually wishing it was raining so the bugs would be hidden. 
While I was distracted with thoughts of Pride and Prejudice, I was hit by another bug, in the hair.  Yikes.  I did a really big little, "all shook up" Elvis Presley dance, but to no avail.  The "bug" was still there.  I began to squeal and beat myself silly whack my head with my free hand and continued doing so until I realize that the "bug" is really a bobby pin.  Smooth move, I thought.  Then I realized that the neighbors were enjoying an evening on their front porch and thanks to the guard light’s illumination, I must have been giving them quite a show. 
Well, the last couple of garments came down uneventfully.  So once again I realized that I really must get over my fear of bugs and even then I don’t plan on doing laundry under the guard light ever again.  Next time I forget to bring the laundry in, I’ll send Mr. P.  He isn’t afraid of anything.

Blessings,
Mrs. P