Not Inadequate

Here’s the thing. I can’t face making dinner every. single. night. An hour of cooking and hour of cleaning is just not my idea of a good time. Eating out is not a good solution, because I am a tightwad. Also, I want to feed my family reasonably healthy meals. How do I avoid cooking whilst still providing home-cooked meals? (excellent question, pets!) I am a freezer cook. Every three months or so, I spend a week or two in a cooking frenzy and make a bunch of meals for the freezer. 

I have been cooking this way for so long, I don’t know what to do if there aren’t any meals in the freezer for dinner. I stare into the refrigerator in a stupor, as if something will leap into my arms. Maybe with a little sign on it saying Cook Me! 

I’m at this point right now as a matter of fact. We have been alternating between two kinds of soup and some chicken of indeterminate origin. And we just polished off the last of the soup. So I have resolved to get off my ass this week and cook. If I work hard enough now, then I can DO NOTHING over the long weekend, which, as you know, is an ongoing goal of mine. 

Yesterday I made my knockoff of Q’doba’s Mexican Gumbo (or Chicken Tortilla Soup as it’s known in other circles). I have been perfecting this recipe for about a year, and it’s pretty good. I had two crock-pots of it going all day, and last night I put 10 quarts of soup in the freezer. 

My recipe for Mexican Gumbo

Above Ingredients + Crock Pot =

Today I need to get our bread reserves back up, but tomorrow I am making meatballs and meatloaves. I have to. I have 20 pounds of hamburger in the refrigerator.

The state of my office is not good. I have so much stuff in here – knitting stuff, home schooling stuff, craft stuff, stuff to occupy the kids for one freaking minute so I can check my email…it’s driving me nuts. I have been trying to organize it, but it feels like I am just shuttling stuff from one corner to another and then back again. However, I am a big believer that if I only had just the right basket, my house would magically transform itself into a clutter-free picture of organization…

So, in an effort to corral the all the crayons, markers, alphabet magnets, stickers, etc. that are all over the place around here, I surfed the internets until I found these: 

They are fantastic. AND they got here in less than twenty-four hours! I order a lot of stuff off the internet. A LOT. I might be single-handedly keeping Amazon afloat. I don’t think I have ever received something that quickly. 

Check the cuteness:

All lined up:

Could they BE cuter?

* This blog post title clearly a feeble attempt to communicate my hipness. Who even says “hip” anymore? I probably could have snapped my fingers and said “Groovy, Daddy-O” and gotten the same result. Which is that it is painfully obvious No One Hip Lives Here.

So I took some internet personality test the other day. I have taken these occasionally, as they filter around. It’s interesting. Sort of. I pretty much always get the same result – INTJ. Apparently, not very many people get that score. Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging. 

That seems to be code for You Are A Stubborn Reclusive Unromantic Judgey McJudgeyPants.  You spend too much time in your head and suck at social situations. That analysis is pretty much spot on, unfortunately. 

On the other hand, I tend to over analyze the questions, so maybe it’s not seeing the real me. Vague question phrasing irritates me. I don’t like not being able to answer every one decisively.

2) You like to be engaged in an active and fast-paced job 

Well, when I worked for money I did. It made the day go faster. But now that I am at home, I am overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I have to do every day and I spend a lot of time wishing I could just sit on my ass and watch teevee all day. I DON’T do that, but I WISH I could, so what is the answer – what I wish I could do or what I actually do? As soon as I get all my crap done, I am going to be the laziest person around. That is my personal goal. 

4) You feel involved when watching TV soaps 

What does that mean – involved? That I think I am in the show like a crazy person? No. On the other hand, I look forward to watching the Real Housewives of Anywhere with probably more glee than is entirely healthy. I went with NO, so the little man in the computer wouldn’t think I was nuts.

68) You get pleasure from solitary walks 

Um… ok, I like to be alone, if that’s what they are getting at. Not so much a fan of the walking. 

So, who knows. The analysis didn’t get to the part where being around me is so awesome and uplifting it makes people believe in unicorns, but they probably just ran out of room.

Ok, so Big is all into Volcanoes, right? Last fall, this fellow home schooling friend of mine tells me that there is an actual volcano in New Mexico, right across the border at Raton. It’s a National Park and looks just like a volcano should, with the cone shape and the crater and everything.
 
Jim immediately wants to plan a trip to it. And I’m all, Really? because it’s a four hour drive. Little gets cranky driving to the grocery store and insufferable beyond that. But it seems like HOW can I really resist a trip to an actual VOLCANO for my precious baby who works things like “lava lake” and “pyroclastic flow” into his everyday vocabulary? So I go online and check it out. There’s this teeny-tiny little blurb that yes, you can walk down the trails into the crater, but it is Nature and everything, so there might be wildlife. Obviously, I instantly have visions of The Aggressive Rattle Snake lying in wait on the trail to nibble my poor baby girl’s toes while she is helplessly trapped in her stroller, with no one around to defend her because I have been taken down by the Marauding Bears.
 
I tell this to Jim, and he pooh-poohs me and my irrational(!) fear of snakes and Nature. I say, Lookit, it will be cold and all the snakes will be sunning themselves RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TRAIL. No, he says, snakes hibernate and will not give us any trouble. We leave it at that. But I know I am right.
 
Then! THAT VERY NIGHT! On the local news, a story about some jogger who got bitten by a rattlesnake that was sunning itself RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TRAIL. I (naturally) say, I TOLD you so! And he’s all, Huh. I thought they would be hibernating by now. And then the whole thing starts back up again about whether snakes hibernate. Eventually, he says ”let’s go online right now and I’ll prove that I’m right.”
 
Fine. His they are cold blooded creatures and frogs hibernate too arguments are convincing, but I play the odds. I mean, come on – how often is he right? Three, four times a year?
 
So he googles it. It turns out they DO hibernate for a few months. BUT they also sun themselves on rocks and trails in the fall while it is merely chilly. So I was also right, and more importantly, I was right FIRST. He just pulled something out of thin air to argue with me and it was a pure coincidence that he was also right.
 
Ok, so you got all that? Because here is the takeaway from this whole story:
 
DO NOT GOOGLE RATTLESNAKES AT 10:30PM RIGHT BEFORE BED.

So that’s what next year sort of looks like for Big. I run our school schedule from January to January, so this stack will be for 2011. Both my kids have birthdays at the end of the year, so it just makes sense to start a new calendar year, a new age, and a new school year all at the same time.

Although…now that I am looking at that picture, I can see that some of that will be started this Fall (the second semester of this school year) and some of what I have planned for next year isn’t here yet. And none of Little’s preschool-y sticker books or Hidden Picture puzzles are in it. Plus there will be some mom-created geology and US geography in happening, and lots of critical thinking excercises, and I may save the Nutrition until Little is old enough to do it with us, and there are always a few of those lapbooking-unit-study-tangents to chase…..so that picture doesn’t really represent anything specific at all, does it?

Huh. Oh well, you know how it goes. I have an overall picture of what I want to accomplish in any given school year, but if we finish All About Spelling or Math-U-See (two programs I am married to, forever and ever, amen) ahead of schedule, we’re not just going to sit on our hands and wait until the next year comes around (as long as I am linking, I may as well proclaim my love for Real Science 4 Kids, which is trés awesome. also Evan-Moor).

Who am I kidding? I do have an overall picture in my head of what we need to accomplish, but that is backed up by approximately four hundred and seventy-three excel spreadsheets, meticulously detailing curriculum options and sorted by age, all the way through high school. I have an excel spreadsheet for everything I do. It’s an illness.

So I went up to the home school curriculum fair last week. I saw a couple of speakers, bought a bunch of school stuff for next year, and stayed BY MYSELF in a hotel for 3 nights. 

My frugal nature beat back my wish for a spa pedicure and room service and only allowed me to stay at Hotel Relatively Inexpensive. They provided mind-numbingly-loud air conditioning and forty channels of soccer (soccer = wtf? I did hear tell of a match where one of the teams scored an entire goal. Sounded absolutely riveting. I’m sorry I missed it).  I had to fix the stupid toilet myself because it was running constantly and driving me nuts. Not only the noise, but did you know that a running toilet can waste up to two hundred gallons of water per day? The guilt got me. However, the hotel did have a little fridge and was right across the street from a Target, so I immediately went over and loaded up on Mocha Java ice cream and Pringles. There was a bit of an awkward moment when I schlepped actual grocery bags though the lobby of the hotel, because nothing says “classy” like making four trips to your car for a three night stay away from home. And wearing a six-dollar t-shirt while doing it. I was rocking some cute shoes though. 

I LOVE to shop for school supplies. I’m a curriculum junkie. However, I did restrain myself mightily this year, and not just because some of the vendors I was looking for weren’t there. Frugal Deb was harshin my shopping vibe. 

I am settling into the programs that I like and am planning to use over the long-term, but I would have liked to see more vendors there. I do a lot of research online, but there is no substitute for seeing it with my own eyes and deciding if my kids would find the material engaging. I was disappointed that that I couldn’t find most of the things I was looking for, so I don’t know if I will go next year. It will depend on the speakers. 

I did notice last year when I went that all of the speakers seemed to have a specific worldview. Some of it I agreed with and some of it I didn’t. I shrugged off the stuff that I disagreed with and happily immersed myself in the shopping. But since then, I have found out that apparently CHEC does not let vendors in who are not “Christian” enough. Or something. I don’t know. I don’t know why they would deny Sonlight (which is definitely a Christian company) a spot because they use Usborne books, when I saw Usborne books at other booths. Or maybe because they have not come out firmly with a company-wide young earth position? What about the other vendors? I am unaware if The Critical Thinking Company even has a position on Christianity, never mind the specific age of the earth. Ditto for Miller’s Pads and Paper, The Rainbow Resource Center, and the two politicians that had booths there. AND the cost to get in was $80! Which I think is prohibitively expensive, especially considering I couldn’t even FIND any history or geography. I mean, the average home school family is trying to make it on one income. Maybe CHEC should be a little more concerned about that reality, rather than examining the metaphysical beliefs of every vendor. 

Don’t get me wrong – I am a firm believer that private organizations have the right to run things the way they see fit. But keeping people out because they do not share the exact same beliefs as you, down to the smallest detail, does not seem like a good business plan. Or a good evangelical plan, for that matter. And being so inconsistent about it isn’t really working for me either. So we’ll see if I continue to attend. It’s a bummer, really. Because I do get so much out of going – just being around my own kind is refreshing. And there is a lot of encouragement to be had from the speakers – I saw Shirley Solis give a talk on Living Books, and it inspired me so much, I accosted her in the bathroom to tell her how swell she was. 

And seriously – can we talk about the young-earth vs. old-earth controversy for a minute? Which I didn’t even KNOW existed until about a year ago. I’m not sure what my position is on this issue, but I don’t think St. Peter is going to be standing at the Pearly Gates with a quiz on how many years ago Creation happened (oh…sorry, that’s the wrong answer. And you were so close too! You can catch the Down Elevator right over there). Are churches really being torn apart by this? It’s not that big of a step above fighting over the color of the hymnals, imo. Frankly, I think that being so focused on figuring this out is kind of…arrogant. There are things (like this) that I don’t fully understand, and I am fine with that. Not being all-knowing is sort of one of those things that separates us from being, you know, Him. And it really seems cheeky to try to become all-knowing and craftily trying to decipher it by parsing this and re-interpreting that. Which is what that fight looks like from here. 

Furthermore, the fact that I am a home schooling parent pretty much indicates that I am prepared to take on the burden of being in charge of my children’s education. I don’t need CHEC telling me what materials are suitable for me anymore than I need the government doing it. 

So that’s what that’s about.

* Slightly Inadequate blog post title brought to you by yours truly.

My Dearest Children: 

Since we are home educating you, my precious babies, I would like to take this opportunity to administer a wee quiz to see how we are coming along in our studies. Just one question today.

When I say “mommy has to go potty, play nice for a minute,” is that code for:

a) And….FIGHT!

b) Come quick! Verify that I am, in fact, going potty. Marvel that my legs resemble bread dough.

c) Loiter outside the open door (technically not IN the bathroom! very clever, darlings!), and have a tug of war over one single Lego. 

Ah, you saw my little trick – can’t slip anything past you, can I?

The answer, as you so rightly demonstrated, is ALL OF THE ABOVE!

Excellent work, my pets!

Now, has anyone seen mommy’s box of wine?

So a few weeks ago, Big and I were watching America’s Test Kitchen on PBS. We’re all about the bread-baking shows now. Anyway, they made these amazing looking cinnamon rolls and we immediately decided that is what we would make Jim for Father’s Day breakfast. I managed to find the recipe in the Cook’s Illustrated Make Ahead Recipes magazine. 

Yesterday morning, we got started pretty early, around 8 am. I had to ask Jim to stop at the store on the way to get coffee because I didn’t have all the right ingredients. Flour, dough, mix-mix-mix. 

Huh. This calls for a TWO HOUR RISE. Fine. Starbucks will tide us over until mid-morning. 

Wait, what? After we sprinkle the filling and roll it up, there is ANOTHER two hour rise. How, exactly do people make cinnamon rolls for breakfast when it’s a six hour process?

Well, they were a good mid-afternoon snack, even if chances are I’ll never make them again. I mean, six HOURS? I don’t think so. 

The amount of frosting the recipe called for seemed downright stingy, so I tripled it. Just right. The frosting was made with powdered sugar, buttermilk, and a smidge of cream cheese. It was TO DIE. Seriously. It had the exact right amount of tanginess. Like carrot cake frosting. I think I might need a little snackage right now, actually…

The real present was a collage poster I got from Snapfish. This is my new tradition for Jim’s Father’s Day gift. I make a collage full of the best pictures from the previous year. He lines them up around the walls of his office. I suck at scrapbooking, so this way at least there are pictures of the kids somewhere.

What, I go away for a few days and all my peeps abandon me? Where is the love, people?

I shall write about my Home School Curriculum Conference Adventures next week, but in the meantime, here are some randomly awesome links that I read over and over and they always inspire and/or amuse me.

Three Degrees of Freedom – You Weren’t There

Three Degrees of Freedom – Butchers to Investigate Vegetarianism 

Smrt Mama – How will home schooled children learn to deal with tough situations? 

More Smrt Mama – National Teacher Appreciation Day

• No Tangle Spray – After listening to little girl hysteria for the last two years every time I brought out the hairbrush, it finally occurred to me: OH YEAH. Johnson’s No More Tangles Spray. TWO YEARS. I am a dumbass.

• Thrift Stores – I went to this little Mennonite thrift store down the street from me a few weeks ago and totally scored on boys stuff. I was in shock since I never find boys stuff. I was able to get TEN pairs of shorts, a pair of jeans, and a little jean jacket that is beyond cute. I was in heaven. A whole summer wardrobe for $20. Why spend a lot of money when he’s just going to rub dirt all over everything, that’s what I say. It’s hard to find boys stuff at thrift stores as it is, and Big is such a skinny little thing*. I even found these cute little galoshes that they can wear to play in the mud. Because that’s what we have now. We had grass for about ten minutes, but then we let the kids go outside and now we have dirt patches. On days when Jim waters, Big goes around with all his dump trucks and buckets and places them strategically to catch water for mud making. Always a plan, that one.

• Wednesdays – which I both hate and love, because they are Big Cleaning Day. I have the incredible good luck of being the employer of a wonderful 14 year old home educated girl who comes and scrapes the dried pee of our toilets. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Top ten, anyway. Sixteen bucks a week and Jim and I no longer have the division-of-labor arguments we’ve had for the last hundred years. Well, fewer. (I told Big to clean up his blocks the other day and he says, “Why, is Miss M. coming tomorrow?” Which is an indication of something not-very-complimentary about my daily housecleaning schedule, I’m sure.)

• That I am going BY MYSELF to shop for school stuff for the next three days. See you Monday!

*For kids with the slim build and moms that shop at the thrift store, a little something call the Dapper Snapper is The Best Thing Evah. It tightens the waistband without interfering with the all-important Bathroom Operations.