{p,h,f,r} August 6 :: a new start

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~ with the lovely ladies at Like Mother, Like Daughter

I am joining in with Auntie Leila and the girls today because she's right… it's hard to get to blogging. But I really do want to record some of the things happening here and move on from the tragic sadness that I posted about most recently (thank you for all the prayers). And sometimes, a little push helps. Thanks for being pushy, Auntie Leila! :)

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 Pretty girl dressed up for Sunday Mass looking at her pretty collection of holy cards…

...and pretty new cutting boards that are useful and decorative. I'm really trying to embrace my newly renovated but tiny kitchen and learn to use the space that it does have for the best. Storage space is a limited, so why not store something beautiful out in the open so that its beauty can be appreciated?

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Miss Cupcake is our self appointed spiralizer around here. She loves to help, even if she doesn't really love to eat what she's helped make. Helping is her love language. It makes her very happy to have big girl privileges. We are having fun with our new kitchen gadget as you can tell. We've done zucchini, cucumbers (accidentally… they look so much like zucchini!) summer squash, sweet potatoes and russets. I'm thinking about trying a jicama next. Here is a great resource for learning what can be spiralized.  

Speaking of big girl privileges… even though she has started reading simple words, she's not reading for real right now. However, our library allows toddlers to participate in the Summer Reading Program by counting the hours that they spend listening to stories. Cupcake was so excited. She wanted to win a rubber ducky just like BigBoy so the big kids got together and kept track of the time they spent reading to her. We added on the time we spent reading to her before bed and… she earned her prize! Plus two gift cards for kids meals at local restaurants. Each sticker counted for an hour of reading and she was very adamant that she could put them on all by herself. I treated the big kids to some Firehouse Subs last night so that she could use her coupon and to thank them for all of the Ella Bella stories they read to her. 

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Sweet potatoes… fun to spiralize, not fun to eat (according to her… I liked them). Her fake smile cracks me up.

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Finding things to do is hard right now. Yes, that is our real weather forecast. These are the dog days of summer… the time when we hunker down, keep hydrated and mostly stay inside. Pulling out boxes of saved toys from the garage is the most exciting thing we do some days. Iced tea parties are a thing, right?

{phfr} Glassblowing, cake, cuckoos and clotheslines

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~ with the lovely ladies at Like Mother, Like Daughter

Wow, I haven't participated in a {p,h,f,r} day in so long. Here's hoping this gets me back into the swing of things.

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We took a field trip to a local glassblowing studio that is owned by one the families in our homeschool group. We've been there before, back in 2007 but BigBoy didn't remember much of it so when the chance came up again to go for a demonstration, we took it. The owner and his team were working on a sculptured glass project which is different than a blown glass project. One of the guys took time out to give us a demonstration. He made a glass ornament, a glass flower and a fluted glass bowl.

 Glass ornaments

 Demonstrating how a glass ornament is blown.

 Glass blowing studio field trip with a demonstration coming up. The hottest place to hang out on a cold, rainy day!

 Making a glass flower

Just one piece of amazing artwork hanging in their studio. There were so many things I wanted to come home with!

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 My kids were very happy that I tried out this new recipe for an Extreme Chocolate Cake in a Cathedral cake pan to honor St. Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church. I seriously thought it was going to flop when I put it in the oven. The batter was soupier than soup! But it tasted amazing and made it out of the pan with only a few cracks that were easily repaired. I topped it with a simple chocolate glaze. It was awesome. Might have to make another one for Easter. (I did follow one reviewer's advice and replaced the boiling water with hot decaf coffee. I think it makes the cocoa taste richer. Also, the Cathedral pan that I have is too small for all this batter. Only use 3/4 of it and place the rest in another pan so it doesn't overflow and mess up the bottom of your oven and make you have to scrub and scrape it all off. Ask me how I know.)

My happy is this… my cuckoo clock. My grandparents had a beautiful one in their house. I wish I knew who had it now. I think my uncle, maybe. I loved that clock. I loved the tick tick tick of it. I loved hearing the cuckoo in the middle of the night when it was too hot to sleep. Knowing how special their clock was to me, my husband surprised me with the on my 30th birthday. It's is a real German cuckoo clocked shipped from the Black Forest. It's smaller than the one in my grandparents' farm house, but it's got the cutest little deer on it and trees and logs. I really love it. It has stopped working a few years back and we tried everything we knew or could find online to fix it. Nothing worked anytime it started up, it would stop again. So I left it on the wall figuring that we'd have to find a clockmaker to fix it. Well, something inspired Sean to take it down, open it up, clean it throughly (like he would an old computer) and it's working again! He doesn't know what he did to fix it, but it's fixed and Miss Cupcake has been just as enthralled with it's sweet cuckoos, just like I was when I was little. 

{funny}

A ribbon tied to door knobs, a basket full of unmatched socks and a handful of clothes pins... that's entertainment! 

Seriously… if you have a toddler, try this. She spent about an hour hanging socks and then taking them down again. So much fun! So much quiet!

{real}

 Look at my cutie pie babies the first time they visited the glass blowing studio! So tiny. So cute! Seems like so long ago and yet only yesterday. So big now. So fast. Hang on to those tiny ones as long as you can.

Baptisms, boardgames, birthdays, and (not) bees

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~ with the lovely ladies at Like Mother, Like Daughter

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Pretty is this little princess on her baptismal anniversary yesterday. My how she's grown!

{happy}
A gaggle of teens having fun playing a new-to-us board game that is sadly out of production. It's called Heroscape. If you love hearing riotous laughter and merriment and your kids like strategy type board games, get yourself over to Ebay and hunt down a copy!

{funny}

Yesterday was also my mom's birthday. I posted this picture of her on FB.  She's the spunky little one in the red dress. Her mom is the one smiling affectionately at her while two of her older sisters look on. The original was very dark and the two faces on the left were almost completely in shadow. I lightened it up using Picmonkey and was surprised to see them so clearly.
My mom is the baby of a family of 7… one boy… SIX girls. My grandpa used to tell the story that when he and Grandma got married, being a farmer and needing lots of help to run the farm, he expected to see nothing but overalls, overalls, overalls hanging up on the family clothesline. Instead, he got nothing but panties, panties, panties.
That man sure loved his girls, though and they did their job helping to haul in the cotton.

{real}

This is a Texas Spiny Lizard. We have quite a few around our house and they stay mostly outside. Lizards don't freak me out because they eat the bugs and we don't like the bugs more than we don't like lizards. However, they don't eat yellow jackets. Grrrrr.  We've been dealing with a yellow jacket problem. 

This is where they first started building a nest, in the ancient retaining wall that keeps the neighbor's yard from sliding into ours. (Yes, it needs to be replaced.) When we first noticed this activity, we checked to make sure they weren't honeybees. Honeybees we would have had relocated. Don't want to kill the bees. But yellow jackets? Just kill them all. So we had them treated with the spray and dust of death and not even a week later, we found they had moved about 15 feet further down the same wall. So today, we are dropping the death dust on them again. This time, the pest control people are sending out TWO technicians. Not sure what two guys can do better than one, but hey… whatever gets them gone.

{phfr} Early fall-ish edition

Remember that lovely family that my Sunshine sold gloves for? Well, they have recently been burdened with even more troubles (of the plumbing variety) but if you want to see what the power of prayer and some intercession of the earthly kind can do… check out this little miracle.

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~ with the lovely ladies at Like Mother, Like Daughter

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On Tuesday, I had a splitting sinus headache so we postponed our candy rosary to celebrate the Feast of the Most Holy Rosary until yesterday. It still counts, right? In fact, since the whole month of October is dedicated to the rosary, I think you've got until October 31st to make one, if you really want to.

Kendra has been touting the simple and lovely M&M and chocolate chip rosary route. Me? Well, I've got teenage girls who take it upon themselves to create beautiful things. As we've done in years past,  Rain decided to put together a rosary with candies made from white chocolate and candy melts all on her own without any assistance from me so… it doesn't get any easier than that in my book. (OK, I did the dishes for her when she was done, just to say "thank you" for her sweet service to the family.)

{happy}

My new tortilla press is making everyone happy these days. Corn tortillas are so easy to make! Like Jennifer's family, mine never much cared for corn tortillas, but homemade corn tortillas are a different story. This one was filled with eggs and asparagus. Yum!

We spent a delightful day with some dear friends up at our alma mater last Friday for Family/Alumni Weekend. It was such a fun afternoon watching the kids play and laugh together at the place where our stories both began. Sunshine took this picture just before we headed up to meet Dr. O. for some stargazing. Some of those crazy kids climbed that tower… twice!

{funny}

One of the day's earlier activities was getting to sit in on some classes. The Professor wanted to see what college classes were like so he and I headed up to campus. Discussing the necessity of Hector's death, Sumerian and Egyptian art and some Latin review… yeah… he was in Heaven! I posted this picture on IG with the caption, "Over 20 years since my last Lit. Trad class and I can't not take notes!" It was true. The paper looks washed out here so you can't see the half page of notes I'd already taken. Old habits die hard.

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Knitter or ninja in training? Don't mess with her!

I'm hosting a Mom's Night Out tomorrow night for our homeschooling group and it's a Pumpkin Party! I guess for me, it's a Mom's Night In. Everyone is bringing their favorite pumpkin flavored dish to share. I decided to turn a pie pumpkin into a flower vase for decoration (you can see it up there in the candy rosary picture) and toasted up the seeds... much to the delight of my children. First toasted pumpkin seeds of fall! (Totally ignoring the almost 90 degree temps.)

{p,h,f,r} June 5th :: Park play & Shakespeare!

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~ with the lovely ladies at Like Mother, Like Daughter

{pretty}

Somebody decided she's done with baby swings… sniff sniff.

I love her curls in the sunlight!

We've been spending our mornings at the park. It's the coolest part of the day and it lets my big kids have some quiet time to work on their school work for the day. We are kind-of-sort-of year round schoolers and some are still catching up from switching back to Saxon Math so math and a few other subjects will continue through July and then we will start our "next year" in August. Just a few subjects though, just enough to keep a little schedule to the day. Our days seems to go so much better when we have a little bit of a schedule to follow.

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Miss Cupcake is ready for all things "big girl"… swings… slides...

 …but not "rockwalls", yet! Thank goodness. Of course, Sunshine scurries up them in no time! I'm totally ok with that.

{funny}

So, I sent my mom a Lily of the Valley for Mother's Day because I thought I remembered her saying that my grandmother used to grow them in her garden. Turns out, I was wrong and it was actually Bells of Ireland that my grandmother worked her green thumb magic on. Not having inherited that gardening gene, I had a vague idea of what a Lily of the Valley looked like but no idea whatsoever about Bells of Ireland. Just last Sunday, we were at Central Market walking by the floral department and look what I spied!

{real}

Tomorrow, I will post the next Summer Shakespeare Chat selection. I figure I'll post it this Friday and then post the link-up next Friday and leave it open for a week or two after that. That gives everyone a chance to watch the show and reflect on it and then chat about it.
Also, don't forget The Little Oratory Father's Day Giveaway below!

{p,h,f,r} First Day of Spring edition

 

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~ with the lovely ladies at Like Mother, Like Daughter

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{happy}

Sharing a fruit rainbow with your big brother and getting a card in the mail… it's the little things that can bring such joy.

{funny}

My big girls dumped cups of water on our back porch just so their baby sister could splash in the puddles. She insisted that they splash too. Silly girls! Oh, I love them so.

{real}

Do you see that scowl on her face? I'd love to pretend that that's the face of a serious artist at work. Sadly, it's the face of a toddler firmly embracing her Terrible Two's grumping because mom didn't bust out the "real" paints for her rainbow but tried to get by with some water color pencils. Bad mom! Oh… and that piece of cheese. We call it "crabby cheese". You can guess why.