Bountiful Harvest

 

Least Expensive/Most Effective Laundry Soap Ever

Reposted from Jill Savage's Blog

Ingredients:

5 gallon bucket	1 bar Fels Naptha Soap
1/2 cup Borax	1 c. Arm and Hammer Washing Soda

Directions:

1. Grate and melt bar of soap in 4 cups water on stove.  Add to other ingredients in bucket. 

2. Fill bucket w/hot water and stir.  Cover and let sit overnight.

3. Stir and then pour your homemade detergent into left over laundry detergent bottles only until 1/2 full. Add water to fill to top. 

4. Shake before using each time.

5. Use a full cup of detergent in each load.  

Notes:

1. Ingredients not always available at Walmart, but usually you can find them at Cub Foods and Kroger.

2. This detergent does not create suds in the washer, but it cleans just the same. Because of this, it also works in High Efficiency Front Load machines.)

April

Yet another Spring month has come and gone, I can’t hardly believe it!  Maybe it’s because we’ve had much more winter than we’ve had spring!

The girls and I got to go to another homeschool event with our local homeschool group – REACH.  We went to a seminar put on the Martin family.  Job Martin is a scientist who travels around educating and speaking.  It was a great conference and we got several great books and videos of his.  It’s worth checking out his stuff – some of his videos are available to watch on Netflix online as well.

Casey took the girls to a Butterfly Ball in Fargo (daddy-daughter dance).  The music wasn’t really their taste but they enjoyed dressing up and spending time with Dad.

I caught the kids making roll cages for boys.  Each of the boys squeezed themselves into a laundry basket and then their sisters so graciously tied pillows on top of them with some ribbon.  Luckily I arrived on the scene before they sent them for a wild ride down the stairs.  Kalister was disappointed “it’s safe mom, laundry baskets have holes so we can breath.  geeze!”  I always have to ruin their fun with my crazy safety rules – it’s tough to be a mom sometimes!

Easter

We had a nice Easter at home this Spring.  The weather was great and Casey was able to hide eggs for the great Andersen egg hunt outside.  This year to add to the challenge and give Max a bit of an advantage, the big boys were a team (tied together by one arm) and the girls were a team (tied together by one arm and one leg).  It was pretty hilarious to watch.  It definitely added to our Easter laughs.

I made a feast of traditional Turkey dinner this year.  I know it’s not “the official Easter food” but our family just loves Turkey dinner.  This year the girls each contributed a dish of their own as well.  Kenzy made a cranberry fruit salad and Kaela made peach cobbler for desert.  After our big feast, we walked to the local school playground for some fun on the equipment and a friendly soccer match.  It was our first real outside-all-afternoon kind of day – boy did everyone sleep well!  WELCOME SPRING!

Looks like Chicken

A couple pictures of our chickens – the kids just LOVE them.  I never knew the kids would spend so much time loving their chickens!  We got 12 chicks this spring – they lived in our basement until they got “fully feathered” and finally the day before Easter Casey and the kids moved them to the barn.  I like chickens but not enough to have them in my house!  The chicks were really excited to get out and have some room to run.  Our additional 11 big chickens didn’t really give them any trouble either.  Hopefully in a couple months our egg production will pick up enough to keep up with our consumption. 

March – Discovered Some Great Homeschool Materials!

Okay – March came and went WAY too fast. I’m not hardly even sure what happened! It was a double birthday month for us with Max turning 2 and Mikaela turning 10. The girls and I attended our first ever ND Homeschool conference in Jamestown. We traveled to the conference with a friends and stayed over one night. The girls and I had a good time. The girls reconnected with some friends they had when we lived down in Abercrombie and some new friends they’ve made in the homeschool world.

At the conference I was able to check out all the vendors and see some really cool stuff. One of the vendors, Moti-venture had a cool product to enable families to setup these motivational adventures. I got a couple and we’ve enjoyed getting started with them. It’s a really fun and creative idea. We also picked up some additional reading material including reading books from Christian Light – the kids and I both agree these are wonderful books to continue.

One of our favorite vendors was a family-run homeschool store – Heppner’s (from MN). I recommend them to anyone looking for great books. One find at the conference was the Viking Quest series – Kaela plans to read the series with a friend this summer. Another great series we found there is the Kingdom Series followed by the Knights of Arrethtrae Series – totally awesome books for boys and girls (and I thoroughly enjoy reading them to the kids as well). We definitely found some great stuff!

Other than birthdays, that’s all I can remember of March . . . .now I need to catch up with April – I’m SO behind!

Happy Birthday Mikaela!

Mikaela has now entered double-digits! Wow! My how the years fly by! She's become such a big kid! She's gotten to be a huge help and very responsible. As we celebrated her birthday this year we really have reflected on how much we enjoy having spending time with our "big girl". She's quite a special kid! Some things to know about Kaela - well she's a bit of a tom-boy. Pink and purple "make her puke" and she loves to read, bake and practice babysitting. She's become a great help to our nanny and a big help when it comes to teaching her brothers. She is doing some great work teaching her biggest little brother to read - they're making great strides! Mikaela loves to eat rice (almost as much as desert) and while she doesn't like to sleep in she doesn't like HAVING to get up in the morning. She's active - loves to do gymnastics and dance and play soccer. Adventures in Oddysey is one of her favorite radio shows and Kathleen Fuller is her favorite author and Toby Mac is her favorite singer.

Mikaela's birthday had a Hawaiian theme this year which was really fun and lifted our spirits despite the 3 feet of snow in our yard. We've started the tradition with our older kids of starting their birthday with a special gift of something they have to wear all day or else face the dreaded birthday spankings. Mikaela received a flowered head-dress as well as a lei and bracelet. We also decided to be extra-silly and give ourselves Hawaiian names for the special day. Mikaela was Prnicess Kiwi, Mikenzy was Bananas, Mikah and Mikalister were Sand and Water and I was Mapoopoo. The girls also had a couple friends and their family join them for supper - Coconut and Volcano added to the fun. We served the kids a Silly Supper and they ordered off a delightful menu at the Aloha Café. Mikaela's favorite was the hot lava special (a fruit smoothie).
Mikaela was pretty tired by the end of the night and was ready for bed when we realized we still needed to get to the presents - she was pretty excited to come up and find a new bike in the living room. She got her first bike with gears! She really outgrew her kids' bike last year but she made it last through the fall anyway - until the chain continually kept falling off and tearing up her pants - do you know it causes big wrecks when your pants get stuck in your chain!? Who knew! Good thing she's tough! She loves her knew bike.

Happy Birthday Max!

Max turned 2 on March 7th! It was a big day for our littlest man. He spent the day getting treated like a prince with Kari and the whole gang and then wrapped up with a birthday dinner of and presents. He kind of seemed to miss the fun of the presents when as soon as he got all the hard-work of opening one, his sisters would sweep it away and enthusiastically start him on the next one. Finally when all the opening was done, he was delighted to find a big, heavy John Deere trike in the kitchen. THE BOY WAS IN LOVE! He screamed bloody murder when his mean parents made him get off to eat his cake and ice cream! YAY! Max is 2!

February 2011

Ah, the love month. I love it because it’s the last month of the most brutal winter weather here in Fargo. Sure, February does not bring the end of our huge mounds of snow or blizzards or kids trapped in-doors for weeks at a time, but things do get *better by March. It’s cold but not AS cold and it’s snowy but not AS snowy. Look, in all reality, we can get snow storms easily through April here, so we have to hold on to what little glimmer of relief we get with a little warmer temps! This year, due to all the snow we’ve had the weather service is expecting a big flood year. Fargo started calling for volunteers to make sandbags starting on Valentine’s day. Microsoft is giving us two days off work to start with to participate. More will be negotiable when the reality of the flood level is upon us. I’m tired of the arctic cold – I’ve got my sandbagging boots on – LET’S GO! We don’t foresee any sandbagging being necessary on our property – unless things get really crazy – which is always possible.

There's not anything to terribly exciting that happened in February here. I went back to work February 2nd after being home since before Christmas with the addition of Max to our family. I had just started working a compressed week shortly before Christmas so going back to work has meant really getting into the swing of the new schedule. I work four 10-hour days and take Tuesday's off. The schedule enables me to have an extra day at home to get the kids' medical appointments in and have a little more time to do school with them as well. It seems to work really well.

Casey's is enduring his slow time well this year. The spring looks promising as he's been doing estimates pretty intensely and that's usually a good sign of work to come. He has several projects he's excited about and several smaller ones he's been able to work on this winter as well. One week was especially busy for Casey in February as he remodeled the Mrs. Fields in the Fargo mall. It's a small job but the remodel involved squeezing 2-weeks of work into 6 days. It looked awesome when he and EZ get done with it. The project only involved one ER trip! Casey somehow managed to get some medal in his eye, which didn't slow him down one bit until it started to rust. Apparently the rust was more irritating to the iris than a hunk of medal. He had to make 3 or 4 trips into the doctor but all ended up well and good.

The kids were getting a little wild being cooped up inside so they started a gymnastics. All four of the big kids got classes AT THE SAME TIME ON THE SAME DAY! Yeah, unbelievable! I couldn't pass that up! They've enjoyed it.

School has been enjoyable. I'm not sure who learns more - the kids or the parents. It gives us lots of interesting things to talk about though.

Well, we've come to the end of the things I can remember as interesting in the least for February so I'll have to close. I suppose I'd do a better job of remembering what went on if I didn't wait until 2/3 through the next month to write the previous month's summary. Sometimes you just have to let some things slide if you're going to make it through, though. I better get a jump-start on those two birthday posts and the March one too!