Cardamom's Pod

I had already planned to post this as a tongue-in-cheek WFMW tip, and then I saw the theme for this week was tips on cleaning!  Don’t my boys come up with the neatest ideas?
You have to admit this could work…

I do have other (real) WFMW tips – go to We Are THAT Family for hundreds more!
For more wordless photos of ours, click here, and then be sure to visit 5 Minutes for Mom.

Hello!

It’s good to be back! No, I didn’t leave town, and I hardly left the house except to go to the grocery store and attend a baby shower. When I said we’ve been busy, I mean B-U-S-Y. Here’s some of what I’ve been up to, besides the everyday routine items:

• finishing up some home office paperwork on which I was shamefully behind
• planting garden seeds in pots – tomatoes, collards, herbs
• prepping the garden plot for direct planting – dumping hundreds of gallons of organic material
• making kombucha starter successfully – I’m on my second batch of the tea, which my husband greatly enjoys
• writing in my home organization notebook – starting from scratch and reevaluating EVERYTHING: chores, schedule, menus
• having some “boot camp” time with my younger children
• decluttering – going through bags of clothing people gave us and cleaning out our own dressers

It hasn’t been all work – well, a lot of it has, but I like to take a break from my regular work by doing a different kind of work.  Here’s a few of the fun things that have been going on:

• playing around with a new camera and taking digital videos -  now I need to download everything!
• reading a series of books aloud to my children – took 2 weeks, and a couple of days we read for 3 hours straight.  I say “we” because I’d start yawning, hand the book to the children, and they’d take turns reading chapters while I cuddled up with my nappers.
• making t-shirt rope out of old t-shirts – I’m eyeing everyone’s shirts with new interest now…
• making plarn, or plastic yarn from Walmart bags – yesterday we made a 40-foot piece of plarn from only TWO bags.
• dreaming of what vegetables, fruit trees, flowers to plant around here to really get the edible landscaping theme going.
• designing a solid wood towel holder and recessed toilet roll holder for the boys’ bathroom
• attending a baby shower for a dear friend of mine who is pregnant with her 11th child – the whole time was like a mini-reunion for me and my girls as we saw some friends we only see at baby showers!
• celebrating Deborah’s 12th birthday yesterday – friends made the cake for us and delivered it (what a blessing that was!) and we had a great time.  We ate homemade parmesan chicken nuggets, broccoli, corn chips, and “beveled” eggs along with the cake.

I have plans to begin organizing my blog for better navigation, and to expand the topics.  I’ve been blessed with a few blog awards, and need to get the posts up about those.  Here’s a few of the things I have in mind:

• homeschooling – how we started, and details about what we use/have used and what works for us now
• farming and gardening – in the past we’ve raised our own quail, chickens, ducks, geese, guineas, turkeys, pigs, and goats.  Right now our two French Alpine does are due January 5th, so we’ll be getting back into our milking routines soon!
• large family chores, routines, and scheduling – I’m not that great at this, but I’m learning – perhaps people can learn with me.
• do-it-yourself projects and crazy re-purposing ideas of mine (possibly titled “Never Throw Anything Away If You Can Turn It Into Something Useful”?)
• some of our favorite large family recipes – freshly ground whole wheat bread, pizza “snakes”, granola – you know, GOOD FOOD!
• pregnancy and homebirth – our first 2 children were born in hospitals, the last 7 were born at home with a midwife

I could use YOUR help here – what would YOU like me to write about?

Well – that’s it!  It’s 6am, and my cell phone just beeped at me.  OK, I’ll tell you what it says… “WAKE CHILDREN” i.e. get off the computer and get the day rolling.   Yes, sometimes I need to be reminded to do just that…

Life is blessedly busy for me right now, and I’m slowing down on blog posting.  Besides our basic daily life with our 9 children, there’s so many other things we are working on.  There’s gardening, tweaking chores and routines, getting ready for our goats to kid in January/February, homeschooling, and numerous other little projects that are wonderful to finally knock off our lists.

My blog address changed, too, so I’m slowly changing old hyperlinks and re-organizing my blog to make it easier to navigate.  Personally, I don’t see any point in putting up too many new posts until I have all the old ones reorganized and ready to roll.  Any blogging shortcuts, tips, or plugins that do the work for me (ha!) would be greatly appreciated – since I’m still learning!

I’m still checking email and comments, so please leave me a note one way or the another.  Twitter is easy to update through my phone, so I’ll try to remember to let y’all know what’s going on – last week I twittered about 550 gallons (10 barrels) of leaves that the children and I raked up and dumped into the garden!

More of our wordless photos here; check out 5 Minutes For Mom for more!

For today’s Blog Hop, I’m delighted to be able to share two of my nine-year-old son’s drawings.   This child can draw for HOURS every day – and he absolutely loves it.  I think you can see a larger version if you right-click and View Image on the first drawing, the detail is amazing!

This is his own version of an "I Spy" picture - there are several things hidden in here.

This is for a story he is writing - he can be author AND illustrator!

While wearing my cell phone and a walkie-talkie, I do not flip open my phone when my children call me on the radio.  I definitely do not try talking and wait for an answer before realizing what’s going on.  This has never happened more than once.

While at the dinner table, I am not known for telling my children, “Don’t eat with your mouth full.”

I’m working on growing my own kombucha scoby.  SCOBY stands for Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeasts.  It did not take me a while to figure out that using anti-bacterial soap on my culture jar would inhibit the B part of SCOBY…

We are gardening now, and are working on making compost.  Just for the record, no matter what my family says, I have not gone compost crazy.  I have not raked piles of leaves for my children to pick up the next day.  In planning chore charts, I am not scanning our property, calculating how many 55-gallon drums of organic material I can reasonably expect 9 children to fill in one hour.  When the wind blows pine needles before a storm, I do not shout gleefully, “It’s raining compost!”

Check out my other Not Me Monday posts, and some of our family’s humorous moments.  How about a surprisingly popular post on an easy way to peel boiled eggs?

More of our wordless photos here; check out 5 Minutes For Mom for more!

A few months ago I stumbled across a quick way to thaw 2 quarts of chicken stock I had in a tall glass container. I had forgotten to take the stock out of the freezer, and needed it for soup – fast.

I placed the jar in an 8-quart pasta cooker – the kind that has a nested “colander” in it.

I filled the pot with about 2 inches of hot water – just below the level of the frozen jar – and turned on the heat. Then I used an upside down stainless steel bowl for a lid – since the jar was above the rim of the pot.

After only 40 minutes, not only was the stock thawed, it was really hot! Usually I freeze my stock in plastic containers, but I think I’ll freeze the large amounts in glass jars, just so they can be thawed this way in a hurry – in case I forget again. Not that I’m planning on forgetting, mind you…

Did you know that I enjoy turning moments of desperation into loopy ideas that actually work?  For some other great Works For Me tips, go to We Are THAT Family.

For today’s post, head over to my first guest post at Raising Olives – my friend Kimberly is on vacation and invited me to make a blogging contribution. 

Cardamom’s Pod has recently moved from www.cardamomspod.com to:
http://www.countryclan.net/mom/
If you link to my site, I would really appreciate it if you would update the address. THANKS!