Monday, October 23, 2006

My Dad has surgery Tuesday a.m. He'll be the first one in. Please pray for wisdom for the doc and for Dad's recovery. They are saying it will be about six weeks before he can put any pressure on it this time. Here's hoping the 3rd time's the charm????

Nah - here's praying for God's will.
White Sauce - makes 6 cups - equivalent of 4 cans of condensed soup


OK - you KNOW that those condensed cream of soups aren't good for you....if you WANT to find a substitute, here you go...if not...no condemnation here...sometimes all you can do is open a can. LOL


3/4 C Butter
3/4 C flour (I used soft white - they use mix of whole wheat and all purpose)
6 C warmed milk
Chicken or Beef Flavoring (bouillon granules (2T), bouillon cubes (6) or broth powder (1/4 C)*

Add mushrooms or whatever if you want.

Note: 1 1/2 C of white sauce = 1 can of condensed soup

*You can get a fat free, all natural broth powder (chicken, beef or veggie) from Frontier Herbs

Conventional:
melt butter over low heat, add flour and stir until smooth. Cook the mixture until it bubbles. Do NOT let it brown. Gradually add the milk - STIR CONSTANTLY. When the sauce has thickened (could take 30 minutes - STIR), add flavoring of choice.

MICROWAVE (because I have to find fast!!!)
Microwave butter until melted. Add flour and microwave 1 1/2 - 2 minutes until bubbly. Add 2 C of milk and microwave for 2 minutes. Stir. Add 2 more C of milk and microwave for 2 minutes. Stir. Add last 2 C of milk and microwave for 2 min. Stir. Keep microwaving and stirring in 2 min increments until sauce is thickened....about 15 minutes today...and I could prepare the rest of the meal while I waited to stir instead of stirring continuously for 30 minutes. LOL

I made enough today to use 1/2 for the Chicken Divan and the other 1/2 I'll use either for a pasta sauce or add cheese and use it over cauliflower or broccoli.

Original recipe from "The Freezer Manual" - the 30 day gourmet folks
Mondays -

are dreaded around here. We always weight our studies heavily to Mon - Wed. I'm trying to play catch up on laundry after Sunday. I don't mention it every day but laundry is a constant theme to my days (3-5 loads a day except Sunday).

This a.m. we got up and kept adapting as needed throughout the day. I began to think about that when I read Debbie's comment to my school post. Nothing went quite as planned but enough got done. LOL

So...school. Dinner: Chicken Divan, another 39 second salad (yippee)...something else. We were just finishing dinner when Josiah got called in to work.

I had Mom's Night Out. I really enjoy that time but am not sure that I'll be able to keep it up until Mike gets home. Things were pretty rough for the children left at home....we even left before folks were done so that I could be home close to bed time for the littles. It seems to me that maybe park days or family activities are going to be better for my "outs" than Mom's Nights...but the boys want me to try it one more month. We'll see.
School Daze

We got a late start on school today because I called my folks. Then we discovered that we were less than impressed with our library's selections on the Russian Revolution. I went ahead and purchased two books that I'd not ordered earlier. They'll hopefully be here tomorrow. The older three boys will double up on math and science today and tomorrow and then double up on history after that. This happens once or twice year where we didn't order a book because it was used for one week and the library had books on the same subject (or sometimes the library doesn't). I usually let the boys read the World Book article excerpts and Tapestry of Grace teacher notes when this happens. This time, they are more interested in the topic, and the book was "highly recommened", so I ordered it.

Arielle and Nolan had been working independently on table school, while I got the big boys going for the week.

I had them come work on their quilt squares from last week. They were excited. Arielle made a square on The Wright Brothers and Nolan chose to make one on the San Francisco Earthquake.

Arielle works on her square



newest squares began our second row...not sure how to tie it all LOL


For history (there are 3 more weeks of WWI) we'll cover the Titanic this week. I spent today reading to them about oceans, reveiwing continents and looking at some pictures of the great old ocean liners. We breifly skimmed through *Ghost Liners* - checking out the pictures - then and now. {G} I'll go online this afternoon and see if I can find some interactive sites with photos of the elegant liners. We read *The Seven Seas*. The illustrations in this book were awesome. The text left much to be desired. It was a good spring board for our review and I edited the text on the fly. . . the same ole' evolution stuff, theories presented as fact, global warming and "man is bad" themes.

For grammar we worked on collective nouns by reading Ruth Heller's *A Cache of Jewels*. Zander was even intriqued by the pictures and joined us. We also read some more tidbits about Texas from the *Roundup, a Texas number book*.

For math we read *Seaweed Soup*. We had checked this book out over the summer but it was worth another read. It teaches about matching sets. Zander joined us for this too. I suggested making some seaweed soup - an idea that was met with strong disapproval. We also played a math folder game I had made. I got the idea of this game from *File Folder Games for Math* from Scholastic. Amazon had it for $25 or so...I was relieved that Scholastic had it for $9 at the time I purchased it. Now that I've gotten my feet wet I'm seriously considering buying the "file folder game SET" that they sell or maybe just another book with reading games. Though Sing Spell, Read and Write has tons of great games for reinforcing phonics...I'm a bit bored after using the program for the past 9 years. I can't believe I've had a new reader for 9 years. LOL

Playing Nine in a Hive

We put Stacia down for a nap. I loaded Zander into the bike trailer, Arielle and Nolan got their helmets on and we took off for a bike ride. I needed to get at LEAST 30 minutes of riding in today.

Back at home, I corrected table work and then worked with Nolan on phonics. He's reviewing short vowel sounds...yes...we're about to leave Step 17 in Sing, Spell, Read and Write.

Josiah was at work when we watched Nicholas and Alexandra, so he watched that today.

Stacia woke up and it's time to start dinner and play with her. School's out.