Things we've been doing

1. Shovelling snow. A lot of snow. The most snow that fell in 24 hours in the past four years, and that includes a blizzard three years ago. Having this much snow on the ground, but still having daylight at 7 p.m. to shovel it by, is something my head can't quite put together.

2. Making crackers (a recipe from the first Tightwad Gazette book). The Squirrelings are starting a Homemaking unit about making things from scratch.

3. Getting ready for the local homeschool conference.

4. Getting to "Cornwallis surrenders" in Crayons' history book. (Seemed like the War of Independence would never end.)

5. Ponytails realized that she never did what she wanted to do with some of her yard-saled fabric, so she's been making plans for that. Plus, The Apprentice gave her a box of clothing pass-ons to refashion for spring!

Butterscotch-Chocolate-Chip-Chunk-Oreo Monstrosicookies

Some of you may be wondering what a girl is to do when she's finished school in the middle of a school year and job prospects are not the finest.

This is what I'm doing, anyway.



These frightening monoliths made themselves known to me at our last young adult event, and I decided to recreate them this afternoon. They're Oreo Stuffed Chocolate Chip cookies, which would be right up there with anything from This is Why You're Fat if only they were deep-fried.



Obviously they are catching on, despite the quadruple-bypass potential, because they're gaining on the Neiman Marcus in popularity. I came by the recipe, originally from Picky Palate, via my youth coordinator, via Amandaleine, via Bon Appetit (who refers to them as the turducken of cookies), via Becky Bakes. Viral cookies, anyone? Mine vary slightly in that I used half butterscotch chips, one quarter chocolate chips and one quarter chocolate chunks, as we were terribly short on chocolate chips. I also was stuck with store-brand chocovanilla sandwich cookies, because Oreo Double Stufs are awfully expensive to buy just to bake with. So get your Stairmaster warmed up...

Ingredients

1 cup (2 sticks) softened butter
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
3 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 package Double Stuff Oreo cookies

I know the amounts sound crazy, but that is really how much dough you will need to successfully cover a whole bag of Oreos.

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Farenheit.

Cream butter and both sugars together until well combined. Beat in eggs and vanilla.

In a separate bowl mix the flour, salt and baking soda. Slowly add to wet ingredients along with chocolate chips until just combined.

Using a cookie scoop take one scoop of cookie dough and place on top of an Oreo Cookie. Take another scoop of dough and place on bottom of Oreo cookie. Seal edges together by pressing and cupping in hand until Oreo cookie is enclosed with dough.

I don't have a cookie scoop, it works just as well if you free-form it around the cookie with your hands and perhaps the aid of a teaspoon.

Place onto a parchment or silpat lined baking sheet and bake cookies 9-13 minutes (it took me even longer than that) or until golden brown. Let cool for 5 minutes before transferring to cooling rack.

Makes about 2 dozen colossal cookies!

Frugal substitute: Leftover Sweet Potato Cake

Southern cooks have done this for years--used pureed (cooked) sweet potato where Northerners might use pumpkin, such as in pie.

But have you ever tried it in Pumpkin Cake? It works very well. Just make sure you puree the sweet potato very well--you can mix all the wet ingredients in the blender or food processor, just to be sure. I added a sprinkle of cinnamon-sugar on top before baking--sweet potato always tastes good with a bit of extra cinnamon.

Beats putting out a couple of dollars for a can of pumpkin.

(And of course you can do the same thing with any winter squash that you can get to puree smooth.)

Making coleslaw, the quick way (it's also lower-sodium)

What's that stuff? McCormick's No Salt Added Table Shake Seasoning. What does it taste like? Dried veggies, with a hint of lemon, and something like curry. And yes, there are corn syrup solids in it, so if you don't do corn syrup, this won't be for you.

What do we use it on? Mostly things like baked fish that go well with lemon and the curry-ish flavour. Sometimes veggie dip. More recently, Mama Squirrel has discovered that it makes a good substitute for seasoned salt in the Betty Crocker Coleslaw recipe (the type made with a mayonnaise dressing). In fact, right now that's the favourite coleslaw around here, beating out our usual oil-and-vinegar version. It's even easier if you use pre-cut coleslaw mix; this week it was 99 cents a bag at Food Basics.

Here's the recipe, from Betty Crocker's Cookbook.

1/2 cup dairy sour cream or plain yogurt
1/4 cup mayonnaise or white salad dressing (we use salad dressing)
1 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. dry mustard
1/2 tsp. seasoned salt or no-salt seasoning
1/8 tsp. pepper (I just throw a little in)
1/2 medium head cabbage, finely shredded or chopped (about 4 cups), plus 1 small onion, chopped (about 1/4 cup) OR half a bag coleslaw mix (we get the Colorful Coleslaw Mix: shredded green cabbage, red cabbage, and carrot)

Mix up everything but the cabbage and onion (or coleslaw mix). Mix in the veggies. If you make it with sour cream, sometimes it seems to need a bit more moisture--you might add just a little milk. Chill until ready to serve.

Linked from Grocery Cart Challenge Recipe Swap, March 2011

If you and your house were on a desert island

Yesterday I mentioned that I'd found a copy of Flanagan's Smart Home, by Barbara Flanagan.

The subtitle of the book is "The 98 Essentials for Starting Out, Starting Over, Scaling Back."

That concept is introduced at the beginning of the book, but seems to get lost a bit in discussion of whether the items described are durable, well-designed, and/or eco-friendly.  Flanagan doesn't explain exactly how or why she came up with 98 "essential" items for a home--she does say that she was aiming for 100 but that it came out at 98.  As someone said in a review of the book (I think on Amazon), her magic 98 didn't include a toilet plunger...someone else said they can't live without a roll of duct tape.  We could probably debate the "essentialness" of such things as a salt cellar, an electric blanket, a headband flashlight, and a floor lamp in the bedroom; and whether a microwave AND a toaster oven should be essential (yes, we have both, but I admit they do take up a lot of counter space). Also, "98" refers to the number of different items, not the sheer number of objects; for example, "fork" counts as one item, although most households would have more than one.  "Night table" assumes that you have just one.  "Bookcases" count as one item, but books don't figure into the count at all.  She also recommends vinyl records (Mr. Fixit would appreciate that), but the records themselves aren't counted with the 98.   Neither are personal items or clothing.

In contrast to today's "essentials" (based, perhaps, on what a single person living in a small condo would need), here are the useful items acquired by Joyce Radway in Grace Livingston Hill's Not Under the Law (1924/1925), on the first day that she starts housekeeping in a house about the size of a garden shed:

Wooden box, pile of newspapers, and a few peanut shells (came free with the house)
Thread, needles, thimble, pins
Enough cheese cloth for window curtains
Blue and white chintz
Half a yard of white organdie
Blue and white checked apron
"Canned alcohol and a little outfit for cooking with it"  (No, that doesn't mean an apron and chef's hat!)
Paper plates and cups
A sharp knife
A pair of good scissors
A hammer
A can opener
Some tacks
A few long nails
A broom, a scrubbing brush, soap, a galvanized pail, and a sponge
Several wooden boxes and two nice clean sugar barrels (she makes chairs out of those)
Candles
Two more aprons (she needs them for a temporary job)

But "one couldn't just exist if one was working, one had to have things tolerably comfortable for resting and eating or one couldn't do good work.  So she went back to her little house and sat down to think.  The conclusion of her meditation was that she decided to buy a saw."

So she takes the train into the city and buys:

A Bible (used)
The saw ("the best of steel")
Gray denim for upholstery
Flowered cretonne to cover her box dressing table
"A lot of wire springs, some upholstery webbing, and twine, a long, double-pointed upholstery needle, and several pounds of curled hair and cheap cotton."
Some personal items like a hairbrush and nightgowns
Towels

"It really cost very little to live when one was careful.  As for heat and light, she did not need either at this time of year....Sheets and pillow-cases were not expensive when one bought remnants of coarse cloth and hemmed them; and washing was not hard to do with the outside faucet and drain so near."

One person's salt cellar is, I suppose, another person's saw.

The interest in Joyce's shopping list (fantastical and overly optimistic though it is--living in a garden shed does present some practical problems that GLH never goes near), and the value of the Smart Home book, is similar to the effect that Material World has on its readers.  (You know, the book where people around the world put all their worldly goods out in front of their houses.)  Each one makes you ask yourself--could you live with less?  If you have lived with little, or have been through a bad emergency situation, or have lived with inconveniences such as having to cook in the garage for a season, you might not find the idea of "essentials only" particularly romantic or desirable.  Most of us want enough stuff to be at least comfortable.

But how do you know where to stop?

Do you have a list of 98?  498?  998?

Does everybody need a salad spinner?

What's your take?

You thought your reading list was challenging?

"A discussion of Little Women included everything from a lesson on the Civil War to an explanation of the allegory in The Pilgrim's Progress, which the little women in Alcott's novel loved to act out.  When the children studied Aristotle, they learned the principles of logical thinking.  Plato's Republic led to de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, which led to a discussion of different political systems, which brought in Orwell's Animal Farm, which touched off a discussion of Machiavelli, which led to a look at Chicago's City Council."--Marva Collins' Way (1982)

And how did Marva Collins get so smart?

"I read constantly in order to tie together fragments of information and interweave subjects.  As a business major in college I had not taken many courses in the arts and sciences.  My education was about the same as that of the average grammar school teacher, merely a sampling of some basic courses.  I had to teach myself more.  I read with an urgency so I could teach my students what they needed to know.  I believe a teacher has to keep polishing his or her skills.  You can't take the attitude 'I know how to teach,' and resist learning anything new."

"Theodore shouted, 'Hey, Mrs. Collins, that's cool.  Everything links into something else, doesn't it?'

"Marva beamed.  'Now you've got it.  Every scholar, every writer, every thinker learned from those who came before.  You are all becoming so erudite, we are going to have to dub you MGM--'Mentally Gifted Minors.'"

Why there weren't enough children's books...and why there aren't enough children's books

[Baker:] Where are you off to?
[Belle:] The bookshop. I just finished the most wonderful story about a beanstalk and an ogre and a -
[Baker:] That's nice. ...

Have you ever found your own particular suddenly meshing with a much larger general?  For instance, when you read those books about Boomers and GenXers and Beepers, and you suddenly realized that that 40ish guy you knew who worked a McJob and lived in his parents' basement with a reel-to-reel tape recorder wasn't that unique?

I started thinking awhile back about what kids' books used to be like, back when I was growing up--we'll say from the '60's through the '80's.  There were some things that puzzled me, or that I thought I had misremembered.  But I put a lot of that down to growing up in Ontario (rather than in the catalogue-happy U.S.) and in a small-town, working-class kind of place where you wouldn't expect to find a lot of bookstores.

I don't remember most kids I knew owning a lot of books.  My sister and I actually did better than most:  our mom got us the Parent's Magazine Press picture books by mail (Miss Suzy and the rest), plus we got several monthly magazines over the years, plus we were taken to flea markets and odd places where we found older treasures, plus my mom had been a teacher and had a few anthologies and such things around.  Also, we had a great public library, and a fairly good school library. But the standard at-home books of the time were the drugstore, supermarket and discount department store books:  Wonder Books, Little Golden Books, Dr. Seuss, anything printed by Whitman-Golden...and some series books that were easy to come by like Trixie Belden and the purple-bound Bobbsey Twins.  Most homes might have a few older hand-me-down classics around--Grandpa's copy of The Water Babies, or an older sister's cache of Scholastic books.

What there weren't a lot of...from the way things looked to me then...were places where grown-ups bought interesting books--or a lot of grownups who seemed to want to buy or read them.  Most living rooms had chairs, ash trays, televisions, but not bookshelves.  (One of my great-aunts was the exception--she had a little painting/sewing room with a wallful of books.)  And most children's picture books--again, other than the inexpensive ones like The Poky Little Puppy--and novels--other than the short list of real classics--were borrowed from the library.
 
So I thought about this--realizing that I was fortunate to have been gifted early on with old-but-cherished copies of Winnie the Pooh, Heidi, and Fifty Famous Fairy Stories...and wishing we had held on to that long-gone Mother Goose that I've never been able to identify...and wondering when all that changed...

And then recently I came across this, in Perry Nodelman's 1990's book The Pleasures of Children's Literature:

"In the mid-1980's, the sales of children's books in North America skyrocketed.  The most obvious reason was that the children of the so-called baby-boomers....were beginning to read.  Furthermore, the baby-boomers seemed more willing, or able, than their parents had been to buy children's books.  Because many of them had put off having children until much later in their lives than had been typical, many had already established careers.  Even those well off were often in two-career marriages.  There was more money to spend on relatively nonessential things like children's books."

Yes!--I thought--everybody during the '70's worried about money.   And yes, I think it's true that the later, younger '80's parents wanted more for their kids, wanted to buy them more stuff, wanted them to "read" more (in a qualified sense), had higher expectations (also in a qualified sense).  The inconsistent part, though, is that the parents of the kids I knew were usually as generous as they could afford to be when it came to Christmas and birthday toys...but we hardly ever asked for specific books.  First of all, the Sears catalogue didn't carry books, except for a few Dr. Seuss and baby titles. Besides, wasting your Christmas wishes on books seemed akin to the dentist suggesting you ask Santa for an electric toothbrush.

And though I loved books myself, I didn't have a strong desire to own more than a few.  The library had all my favourites, and surely they would be there forever.

"Meanwhile, the political climate meant that government at all levels had less money to spend on libraries.  According to Adam Hochschild [New York Times Book Review 1994], 'fifteen or twenty years ago, some 85% of all children's books were sold to school or public libraries.  This figure has plummeted'....The dramatic increase in the proportion of books purchased by parents and other relatives transformed the children's book business....Now, the people who buy the most books aren't experts, and they have no way of choosing books other than to try to figure out what the children they know might like.  This means, primarily, things they or their children are already familiar with."--Nodelman, 1996/1992

So there's the crunch, you see.  All of a sudden there was more money and more interest in buying children's books.  But according to Perry Nodelman, that did not mean that parents (and kids with money to spend) immediately went out and started buying the same sorts of books that discriminating librarians and teachers had once chosen for them.  Other than picture books, which did survive as something fairly easy to market, the rapidly changing publishing industry and bookselling industry started to concentrate only on

"1.  Reprintings and new editions of favorite books from the baby-boomers' youth: books by Dr. Seuss, book versions of classic Disney cartoons.

"2.  Other movie and TV tie-ins; books about characters the baby-boomers' children were already familiar with from other media.

"3.  Books about new characters, but ones that came in series, so that once children became familiar with these characters they could read new books about them again and again."--Nodelman, 1996/1992

Now obviously there is more to the last twenty years of children's publishing than that; otherwise how could the Horn Book have survived?  Obviously there are still at least a few good books for older children still being written and still being published and still being sold.  But I think Perry Nodelman makes some good points...and his timeline of the change in the mid-1980's comes more than coincidentally close to that pre-1985 CPSIA ruling (outlawing pre-1985 children's books because of supposed lead hazards).  Why have we been fussing about that for the last few years?  Because those pre-1985 books, lots of them, are the good ones, the lasting ones.  Not the TV tie-ins, not the "classic Disney," but the real stuff.

And I learned something else from Nodelman's chapter about publishing.  This is about the U.S., so I'm not sure how it relates to Canada (other than the major publishers being in the U.S.), but it's interesting anyway:

"In the early 1980s, in order to encourage aggressive sales, the U.S. government raised the taxes charted on goods left in warehouses at the end of each year.  As applied to books, this meant that publishers could no longer afford to keep large numbers of titles on their backlists.  Books that had been in print for decades suddenly became unavailable.  Now, only those titles that still sell widely remain in print for very long."

I mentioned this to The Apprentice, and she pointed out that maybe this will change again with the advent of electronic book readers and publishing on demand. Maybe so.  Maybe in the near future there won't be any such thing as an out-of-print book.

But will there be anything left that we care to read?

When I realized myself that it was getting harder to find the kind of children's books that I used to like myself, and the books that were recommended by authors like Gladys Hunt and Dorothy Butler, I started bringing home any of the good ones that I could find at library sales and thrift shops, from other homeschoolers' for-sale lists, from yard sales, from anywhere.  I have a lot more children's books now than I did as a child.  That's all right, because I've had the excuse of having young Squirrelings for almost two decades now.  But am I going to sell them all off (the books, not the Squirrelings) when the last one leaves home?

Not on your life.

Image obviously copyright and owned by Walt Disney, although I found it on somebody else's blog

What's for Supper? Stir Fry

Tonight's dinner:

Beef Green Bean Stir Fry, except I'm making it with ground chicken instead of beef, and adding in sliced-thin leftover lasagna noodles (they look really interesting along with the green beans)
Rice
Almonds and chow mein noodles

Vanilla pudding, cookies

Banana cake, a little different

Ponytails asked me to post about this because she said it was amazing.

Ingredients:  1 batch standard muffin batter (I added a teaspoon of vanilla); two sliced bananas; one cup chocolate chips.

Directions:  Scrape half the muffin batter into a greased 8-inch pan.  Top with sliced bananas and chocolate chips.  Cover with remaining batter (it's okay if it doesn't quite cover).  Bake at 350 degrees for about half an hour or until it tests done.

If you eat a piece of the cake still warm from the oven, the chocolate chips will be gooey and the bananas will have that slightly strange, hot, cooked taste (like a baked banana) that some people like and some people really don't.

But if you chill it, the chocolate chips revert to a rich kind of cold chocolate chunkiness, turning the whole deal into a chocolate-banana-muffin-sandwich-cake.

You could probably get the same results with individual muffins.

So if you ever start making plain muffins and decide too late that you would rather have had banana bread, or just want a change, try it this way.

What's for supper? Beef and cabbage soup

Tonight's dinner:

Canadian Living's Beef and Cabbage Soup (without the rice, but with leftover sausage and sauerkraut added in)

Peasant Bread

Fruit yogurt, or last night's blueberry crisp, or an apple

What's for supper? Sausage and polenta

I like dinners that make people come in and say, "Something smells good in here."

Tonight's dinner:

Italian sausages, baked on sauerkraut (really, they taste fine together)
Baked sweet potatoes
Sliced polenta rounds, topped with a mixture of olive oil, Parmesan cheese and fresh parsley, and baked in a hot oven for about ten minutes

Blueberry-Applesauce Crisp  (frozen blueberries) and yogurt

Robinson Crusoe making pottery, by Crayons

Created in Paint by Crayons

What's for supper? Barbecue Meatball Mini Subs

One of this week's dinners:

Salad (made from a half-price bag of mixed greens, plus chopped carrots)

Sweet potato fries (just sweet potatoes cut into long strips and sprayed with pan spray before baking)



Meatballs (one-quarter of this recipe), made small, baked on a cookie sheet and then added to simmering barbecue sauce;












served on dinner rolls (the More Expensive Supermarket often has these for half price on Saturday afternoons, if we happen to be in the neighbourhood),

 and topped with shredded old Cheddar cheese.

Photos:  Ponytails.

Footprints in the Snow: Crayons illustrates Valley Forge

(Artwork done using Paint)

What's been happening in the Treehouse?: School Plans

Usually I have written out a daily schedule for each girl, for a month at a time, based on where we need to be by the end of the month.  But as always happens, some things you get ahead in and some things you get behind.  This month I'm planning more by the week, and we'll see how that goes.

The notes are deliberately rough--they're at the kind of "maybe" stage that such plans usually take on before you get really doing them.

SCHOOL SCHEDULE FOR MARCH 2011

This month’s composer studies:  Edward Elgar--later works

This month’s picture studies:  Woldemar Neufeld

This month’s nature studies:  TBA

This month’s hymns and folk songs:

Review:  Christian Dost Thou See Them; All My Hope on God is Founded

New:  Tell me the story of Jesus; At Calvary (need links to music)

This month’s art and craft activities:

Homemade cornstarch clay/bread dough clay/Sculpey

Crocheting (doll vest, hat)

Ponytails: Sewing group during March Break

Sugar study / maple syrup

Edith Schaeffer on writing and on reading together

Other planned activities:

Preparing for Easter

Possible field trip:  syrup museum

Games:  Quiddler, ?

St. Patrick’s Day

Homeschool drama performance

WEEK ONE

It Couldn't Just Happen, by Richards (week’s chapter):  Family Tree

Week’s poetry:

Week’s Latin:  Finish lesson 7 (review & quiz), start lesson 8

Week’s French:  Zoo study

These Happy Golden Years:  13-18

Marva Collins' Way:  5, 6

Week’s Age of Fable, by Bulfinch:  18, 19, 20

Ponytails:

Continue Christian studies and lit  

Continue math and science

Week’s history:  Story of the World Volume 4 by Susan Wise Bauer, chapter 26; Canadian history

Continue composition and grammar

Crayons:

Week’s math:  p 60-64, geometry

Week’s English:  Alpha Omega 149-155, copywork based on those spelling rules

Week’s science:  Physics Lab in the Home, chapter 1: Plumbing.  Science Alphabet A-E.

Crusoe:  pages 106-121

Week’s history:  George Washington's World by Genevieve Foster, pages 209-211, 212-215, 215-216; timeline book

Bible lessons

Monday, Feb 28

Picture study

Tuesday, March 1

Ponytails:  Whatever Happened to Justice:  Instability chapter

Homemaking: Writing

Wednesday, March 2  (afternoon appt.)

Ponytails: Foster: Golden Eagles Come Home

Thursday, March 3

Jack & Jill 15

Homemaking: Writing

Friday,  March 4

Ponytails: Foster: Out of Persia

Shakespeare:  Macbeth

WEEK TWO (3 days)

Richards (week’s chapter):  Amazing & Wonderful

Week’s poetry:

Week’s Latin:  Finish lesson 8 (quiz)

Week’s French:  Finish lesson 7

Finish chapter from The Fearless Treasure by Noel Streatfeild (London Town)

Happy Golden Years:  19, 20

Marva Collins:  7

Week’s Bulfinch:  21

Ponytails:

Continue Christian studies and literature

Continue math and science

Week’s history:  Bauer 27, Canadian history

Continue composition and grammar

Work on French with Mom

Crayons: 

Week’s math:  p 65-68

Week’s English:  Alpha Omega p 155-157; copywork

Week’s science:  Physics Lab chapter 2: Faucets & Pipes.  Alphabet F, G, H.

Crusoe:  pages 121-126

Week’s history:  GW’s World 217-218

Bible lessons

Monday, March 7

?

Tuesday, March 8  (Shrove Tuesday)

Hidden Art of Homemaking:  “Drama”

Ponytails:  Justice:  Democracy & the Constitution

Wednesday, March 9   (Ash Wednesday)

Ponytails:  Foster:  We Still Call it Sunday

Thursday, March 10:  EXAMS

Friday, March 11:  EXAMS

SPRING BREAK: March 14-18

WEEK THREE

Richards (week’s chapter):  In God’s Image

Week’s poetry:

Week’s Latin:  Do Lesson 9, including quiz

Week’s French:  Start Lesson 8

Happy Golden Years:  21-25

Marva Collins:  8, 9

Week’s Bulfinch:  22, 23

Ponytails:

Continue Christian studies and literature

Continue math and science

Week’s history:  Bauer 28, Canadian history

Continue composition and grammar

Crayons:

Week’s math:  p 69-74, geometry

Week’s English:  Alpha Omega p 157-161; copywork

Week’s science:  Physics Lab chapter 3:  Water Seeks its Own Level.  Alphabet I-L.

Crusoe: pages 126-143

Week’s history:  GW’s World 219-220, 220, 221, 222

Bible lessons

Monday, March 21

?

Tuesday, March 22

Homemaking: “Drama”

Ponytails:  Justice:  The Constitution

Wednesday, March 23

Ponytails:  Foster:  Herod & the Temple

Thursday, March 24

Homemaking: practical skills / Sugar Study

Jack & Jill 16

Friday, March 25

Ponytails:  Foster:  Hillel

Shakespeare:  Macbeth

WEEK FOUR

Richards (week’s chapter):  A Sure Word

Week’s poetry:

Week’s Latin:  Start lesson 10; finish if possible

Week’s French:  Finish lesson 8

Happy Golden Years:  26-end

Marva Collins:  10, 11

Week’s Bulfinch:  24, 25, 26

Ponytails:

Continue Christian studies and literature

Continue math and science

Week’s history:  Bauer 29, Canadian history

Continue composition and grammar

Crayons: 

Week’s math:  p75, 76, chapter test; geometry

Week’s English:  Alpha Omega p 161-168; copywork

Week’s Science:  Phys Lab chapter 4 & 5:  Surface Tension, Hot & Cold.  Alphabet M-P.

Crusoe:  pages 144-161

Week’s history:  GW’s World 223-225, 226-228, 229-230

Bible lessons

Monday, March 28

 ? 

Tuesday, March 29

Homemaking:  practical skills / Sugar Study

Ponytails:  Justice:  Competing for Privilege

Wednesday, March 30  (afternoon volunteering)

Ponytails:  Foster:  Law of Moses

Thursday, March 31

Homemaking: practical skills / Sugar Study

Jack & Jill 17

Friday, April 1

Shakespeare:  Macbeth

What's been happening in the Treehouse? Rummage sales and thrift shops

It's harder these days to even find rummage sales around here. Because who puts ads in the paper these days? And the shopper paper has gone to a mostly-blab format with only a page or so of classified ads. Some sale notices go onto Kijiji, so I do check there; but it seems harder in general to know when the good ones are happening.

Anyway, we did go to one, but mostly found just books--not that that's a bad thing. A whole stack of Penguin Classics: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Sir Thomas Malory, Chaucer, Tolstoy, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And a few came home this weekend from the library sale shelf as well. Crayons has been busy working her way through those.

As for thrift shops: Ponytails and Mama Squirrel are on the brink of a new adventure in volunteering. More on that one later.