Planning meals around here is quickly becoming a navigational nightmare with the chances of pleasing 5 people both in taste and dietary requirements being about as remote as being struck by lightening.   Maybe more so—I’ll have to try that as a probability problem.   And I don’t even have particularly picky kids.    The perfect meal would have these requirements:

Me–I pretty much love food, and so if I’m putting effort  into it my goal is that the meal be healthy.  And by healthy I mean it doesn’t contain any of the big nasties (HFCS, hydrogenated oils, food coloring, fake sugar), that it contain at least one ingredient purchased from the produce department and involves something more than opening a frozen package and putting it into the oven.  And, preparation has to be just enough that I feel like I deserve a big pat on the back but not so much that I have to block out a chunk of the day in my schedule for cooking.

Aubrey–has been a vegetarian for about 9 months.  Strict, but not vegan.  But she won’t eat rice in any way shape or form.  She would happily live on beans and peanut butter.

 Jordan - Lactose intolerant and sensitive to a meal’s appearance.  Food tastes better when she’s helped prepare it and if there is a sweet ending in sight.  Loves Asian food, sushi and fruit.  She is seriously a fruitavore.   She eats non-stop, so just keeping healthy food available is my main challenge.

Alex - Would list onions at the top of his favorite foods.  Has various digestive issues and he is the kicker here in that we are doing fairly limited foods right now to try to figure out what is triggering his problems.   He is currently eating GF/CF (except when he licks the empty pizza box to try to get at the crumbs, <sigh>).  He won’t do beans, and the boy loves him some meat.  I would settle for anything that would go in one end and out the other in a somewhat reasonable time frame without deciding to reverse direction (trust me, you don’t want further details!).

 Dh - well, it all boils down to mood with him (but he would vehemently deny this and insist that he is not a picky eater).   The worst thing right now is he is working nights and comes home in the morning ravenous (I can’t tolerate even the smell of food beyond oatmeal or cold cereal in the morning) and he isn’t in the mood for anything with any taste when he gets up (at our dinner time). 

Makes a gal want to stock up on endless packages of tofu pups and canned pears and sneak off to a wine tasting (with appetizers of course!).   Of course, if anyone is up to a challenge, any recipes that meet all the above requirements would find a place of honor in our kitchen.

I met a friend who homeschools her 3 at the pumpkin patch today.  Beautiful, sunny, 75 degrees and the place was almost empty except for a brief visit by a preschool group.   I was worried that Aubrey would get bored quickly, but my friend has a daughter her age and they all played and played and played.  

It was our first day out in public (since Jordan’s pox were finally all scabbed over and she could be declared no longer contagious). 

I can’t even imagine being cooped up inside on a day like this.

Of the pox variety, that is.   Jordan woke up this morning with about 4 little blisters.  Since she has had both the vaccine AND a prior case of chicken pox I took her to the dr. to confirm.   She’s gotten a few more since then, but it is a mild case.

 Hmmm, so maybe we should have skipped park day on Tuesday and the Creepy Crawly session at the Discovery Center yesterday. 

So far she is actually feeling pretty ok, other than being traumatized by having blisters on her face. I’m so negligent–the nurse asked if she’d been running a fever and I said not a bit.  Then the nurse took it and told me it was almost 101.  Ooops.  

 So, I guess we’re staying home tomorrow.

Day 1 of our taking a break week.

First, we watched “Tales from the Hive“–a Nova episode on bees we’d gotten from Blockbuster Online that had been sitting around for a while because we “didn’t have time” to watch it.   The kids were fascinated and I was amazed by what they already knew.  Some really great photography.

Then Alex got inspired to try to make a really long pipe to transport water.  (Anyone else see Kid Nation?)  So, he headed outside and began building.  If you think spinning eggs captured their attention for a long time….well, lets just say this entertained them for hours and I COULD have decided to be productive. 

Luckily, we had a bunch of pvc pipe and connectors that they normally use to construct forts that was perfect for this project.  After confirming that his contraption was leakproof, Alex put acorns in at the top and ran down the hill to watch them come out the other end.   It is a learning experience, right?

With all that extra time on my hands I decided to bake.   Hunger called them inside and they got in on the action.  We made pita bread.  Sadly, they didn’t bubble up properly, but were still very yummy warm from the oven.

After lunch we played a game of mythmatical (well, Alex and I did–Jordan has no patience for such nonsense).   They did work some on a writing assignment from last week.  They resist writing, but we’ve been reading the Spiderwick Chronicles series together and their writing prompt was to describe a meeting with one of the creatures from that world and then share an adventure.   They are both mildly in to it, and Jordan finished her story today, edited it with me and wrote a final draft. 

I think I need another “do nothing” day to recover from today’s do nothing day!

That would be the inevitable bumps in the road ending our run of cooperative, productive and creative homeschooling days.  Ahh, all good things must come to an end.

Started the week with a humdinger temper tantrum by Alex.   Which resulted in the horrible threat of “Do you want to go to school, mister!”  Sigh.   The poor bugger just hasn’t been feeling all that great.  He’s still dealing with some G.I. issues and then seasonal allergies struck and really messed with his cheery outlook.   Grumpy mom and grumpy kid do not make a good Monday morning combination!

Between that and three appointments (above and beyond our normal activity chaos) we didn’t get a lot done and the schedule keeper in me tried to push push push so we could cross it off our list.  

So maybe that is why I had to throw in the towel and spin eggs! LOL.

 Next week Aubrey is out of town and we are going to have a week off of the formal stuff.  We’re going to keep going on reading the Spiderwick Chronicles, but other than that we’re going to play some games and take some field trips and try to relax.

While making some hard boiled eggs earlier this week I remembered that I’d read somewhere that you can tell if an egg is hardboiled or uncooked based on how it reacts when you spin it.  Don’t have a source to cite, but that didn’t stop me from getting the kids to start spinning eggs.

They spent almost an hour, before snacking on the eggs they had determined were hard boiled.   If you spin an egg, completely stop it and let go it will resume spinning if it is uncooked.  Aubrey quickly reasoned that it was due to the yolk having inertia and continuing to spin even when you stopped it and this spinning yolk restarted the whole egg spinning when you release it.   We didn’t come up with an explanation for the fact that if you spin a hard boiled egg it will upright itself and spin on end while an uncooked egg will not. 

 And we didn’t even break any uncooked eggs!