Month: February 2015

Product Review: Koru Naturals

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koru CollageReview season with The Schoolhouse Review Crew is officially underway! The first product I have the pleasure of bringing you this year is from Koru Naturals, a company bringing the all natural skin, hair, and lip care products from New Zealand to those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. For this review, each member of the review team received a 2-ounce bottle of Emu Oil and their choice of skin balms, lanolin cream, lip balm, or shampoo and conditioner. I chose the Koolpurrie Restoring Balm, which is a combination of Koru’s lanolin and emu oil. [Read more…]

Quilting with Scraps

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One of the blogs I read on a regular basis, Homemaking Organized (which happens to be written by a friend of mine), posted about a pretty cool e-book that’s available for free right now. I downloaded and read through it (it’s only 21 pages with lots of photographs), and knew that I wanted to share it with you guys. If you sew at all, even just a little bit, you’ll be able to benefit from this book.

What is it? [Read more…]

Weekly Menu: February 22

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meal plan feb 22

The weekend got away from me a bit, and today (Monday) was full of errands, so I barely got the meal plan written out and shopped for in time for dinner tonight, much less in time for a blog post this morning. But I did get it done, and we’ll be right on track this week. This will make 4 consecutive weeks of weekly shopping, and I must say: I am loving it!

I think I’d like to do a report on how we did last week, too, since I mentioned that posting this here is as much for my own accountability as it is for something you might find helpful.

Last week, we ate out (unplanned) once. We had some errands to take care of, and since the boys had Pizza Hut Book-It coupons, we went there for lunch. But we went on Tuesday, which is the day Pizza Hut has two pans of pasta and five breadsticks for $10, so it was a fairly painless dining out excursion. On top of that, I had a last minute change late in the week to what I’d planned. Nothing that caused us to eat out, thank goodness, just a shift from the planned meal. [Read more…]

Picture of the Week: Painting with Watercolors

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Picture of the Week: Painting with Watercolors

Seahawk requested some watercolor painting supplies for Christmas, so we happily obliged. As part of that, we got him a journal made with watercolor paper rather than regular paper. The understanding was that he would use his paints and journal to record some of the experiences we have this year. The goal is to paint a picture every day, but that doesn’t always happen. I’d say we’re averaging about twice a week at this point. In the few weeks he’s had the opportunity to paint regularly, I can already see drastic improvement in his skill.

Have a great weekend!

Blessings,

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Simplicity: Potty Training with a (Truly) Minimalist Wardrobe

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potty training

It’s no secret that our family has fewer clothes than an average family. Much fewer. It’s not because we can’t afford more; we just choose not to have as many. This has its benefits and drawbacks. A benefit is that we have fewer clothes to wash, and therefore less laundry to do. A drawback is that we have to wash our clothes more often, so there’s more laundry. I know, I know, completely contradictory. We have more loads of laundry to do, but each one is smaller. It’s a trade off. Since putting the laundry away is the part of the chore that I hate the most, I’ll take more loads with fewer items in them.

But that’s not the point of today’s post. Today I want to address something that was asked of me during my last wardrobe post: How do you potty train a toddler if you don’t have a lot of clothes to change him into? The answer is very simple. During toilet training sessions, I don’t put any clothes on him at all. This doesn’t work when you go out, obviously, but at home, it works swimmingly. And honestly, I’ve found that it’s too stressful for the child to go more than a few hours at a time when they’re learning anyway. [Read more…]

Weekly Menu: February 15

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Weekly Meal Plan with recipe links | Ladybug Daydreams

As a way to help keep me on track with my weekly shopping instead of daily shopping, I’m going to post our weekly menus for a while. Maybe it’ll give you some new recipes to try; I would love if these posts helped you guys out in some way instead of working solely as something selfish for me. If one of the recipes doesn’t have a link to a recipe and you’re interested in how to make it, let me know in the comments, and I’ll post a recipe later in the week. The other reason I’m posting this is because last week, I made a menu plan and corresponding grocery list, bought all the groceries for those meals, and then misplaced the list. So I ended up having to try to remember what I’d planned or, more often, just reverting to my old habit (from when we shopped daily) of cooking whatever sounded good that day. By posting our meal plan here on the blog, I’m not going to have to do that again.

As a rule, we just eat cereal for breakfast, so I don’t plan those outside of making sure we have cereal in the house. We have fruit (usually apples, bananas, or oranges) for snacks, so I don’t plan those, either. I do plan lunches, though, whereas a lot of these kinds of posts (that I read) on other blogs only cover weeknight dinners. A fair number of the days, Will is here with us and he doesn’t like a regular cold sandwich, so I have to have something “more” planned for lunch. If I know in advance that it’ll just be the kids and me, we’ll usually just have grilled cheese sandwiches. [Read more…]

Picture of the Week: The Audubon Society

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audubon trip collage

These pictures, in case you can’t tell by looking at my children in them, are quite old. Way back before Small Fry was born, we took the boys to the Audubon Society in Portland and enjoyed a couple of hours of walking the trails and viewing some of the natural wildlife. It was really neat, and the kids loved it. I think they’d actually forgotten about it (even though they loved it at the time), but when I was pulling photos off of the camera this week, I found these. They’d somehow ended up on the actual camera rather than on the memory card, so they didn’t get moved during the multiple times I’ve moved pictures in the intervening years. It’s always fun to see what they looked like so long ago :).

Have a great weekend!

Blessings,

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Book Review: Supermarket Healthy by Melissa d’Arabian

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supermarket healthy collage

Last year, I wrote about how I was going to try to plan a weekly menu instead of shopping daily. Back then, the plan lasted all of one week. That’s right: we couldn’t even make it work once. So I just kind of accepted it, and we went back to daily shopping. Fast forward to two weeks ago, and I decided it was time to try weekly planning and shopping again. This corresponded perfectly with the arrival of a book for review I requested from Blogging for Books: Supermarket Healthy by Melissa D’Arabian. The premise: It really is possible to make wholesome, healthy meals using whole-food ingredients found in a regular grocery store.

The book, like any standard cookbook, is divided into types of meals: snacks, breakfast, pasta, sandwiches, poultry, beef, soups, etc. We haven’t tried recipes from every category, but we have from several of them. Some of the ingredients aren’t as readily available as I hoped, at least in my area, so I’ve had to make a few substitutions (kale instead of Swiss chard in a soup, for example). But despite that, I have definitely found that the recipes in this book are absolutely amazing. And doable with “normal” ingredients. Out of the 15 or 20 that we’ve tried so far, all but two have gone onto a list for regular rotation. To have found at least a dozen new recipes that we all love is a wonderful thing.

My main complaint of this book is that it’s a trade paperback. I think cookbooks should always be printed with spiral binding so that it will stay open to make following the recipes easier. Additionally, I would like to see a photo of every recipe. I know this isn’t always feasible, but it’s very helpful in making sure you’re building everything correctly. These criticisms are minor in the long run, though. The book is so full of amazing recipes that I’m happy to overlook the problems.

So, what have our favorites been? I can think of three offhand that were exceptional. First, the sausage-lentil soup with chard (we used kale). The soup was very flavorful and hearty, and making it with brown-n-serve turkey sausage made it easy and healthy. We were all kind of sad when the pot ran empty. Next, the garlic chicken with potatoes. Oh, my goodness, that was amazing. Start by roasting some potatoes (whatever kind you like – we used slices of Yukon gold) and (a lot of) garlic in a roasting dish (I used my deep dish 9×13 baking pan) with a little bit of olive oil. [Read more…]

Crochet Scribble Hat

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Scribble Hat 1

 

After spending much of the month of December crocheting hats using patterns from Repeat Crafter Me, I wanted to make something that was “mine.” But even though I can create things, I’m not typically very creative. I always need some sort of inspiration. A nudge. When I went to JoAnn the other day, I decided to look at their buttons to see if I could get the push I craved in order to make my own item. I lucked out and found several different shapes of buttons for a great price, and I picked up three packets. The first project I tackled was using these crayon buttons, and I’m very pleased with the result. [Read more…]

Picture of the Week: Football!

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PITW football

 

In honor of the Super Bowl this week, the kids decided to dress up in football “uniforms” and play outside for a little while. I have no doubt that Seahawk was the mastermind behind this, since he’s the biggest football fan in the family. He had some birthday money a few months ago, and he used it to buy the Seahawks jersey and helmet (which he then wore for Halloween). Munchkin’s helmet is technically a softball helmet that we bought from Goodwill for Halloween 2013 – Seahawk went as a football player that year, too. When he bought his official helmet, he passed the other one down. Munchkin is actually a Baltimore Ravens fan (no idea where that came from considering we don’t live near – or have ever traveled to – Baltimore), so to make the softball helmet “his,” he drew his interpretation of the Ravens logo on paper and taped it onto the helmet. (He’s currently saving his allowance for a Ravens version of the set Seahawk has.) Small Fry’s helmet is a knight helmet that my dad bought him from the Dollar Tree. [Read more…]