Menu Plan Monday - May 16, 2011

Finally, a week where we're all mostly home!  The weather continues to bounce all over the scale, so we're doing a bit of everything this week - but with lots of fresh veggies from the market.  :-)

Breakfasts:

Cereal and bananas

Cereal and fresh strawberries

Scrambled eggs, toast, and watermelon

Omelets with carmelized peppers, onions, and sharp cheddar with watermelon

Yogurt and fruit parfaits

Vanilla muffins and watermelon X 2

Simple lunches ...

Suppers:

Monday - Grab it and Growl

Tuesday - Chili, cornbread, salad

Wednesday - Stir fry with chicken, brown rice, and steamed veggies

Thursday - Italian London broil with grilled herbed potatoes and fresh green beans

Friday - Pizza, sliced veggies, watermelon

Saturday - We're building our first campfire of the year!  Most likely, we'll be eating hot dogs, veggies, and canteloupe

Sunday - Leftovers

I'm still looking for a good granola recipe.  I want to make it while we've got lots of fresh strawberries!  I've always wanted to make waffle cookies, too, and so I might have to make these this week, too!

For more menu plans, visit Menu Plan Monday!

Field Work Fridays: A Day at the Ballpark

You can find a lesson in everything.  Today, we found all sorts of lessons at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park.

The Durham Bulls are a AAA-affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays, and a few times each season, they hold a special Education Day.

Now, financially speaking, this is a great deal.  All teachers get in free - so for a home school group like ours, that meant that fully half of our group didn't pay for a ticket.  You have the option of buying a boxed lunch for only $3.50, and there's also a baseball-related curriculum that's available for download.  Several kid-friendly booths were set up in the concourse area, with things like Smokey the Bear, Bobber the Water Dog, and the Durham Museum of Life and Science.  The museum staff brought along snakes and other animals for the students to touch and check out.  

Educationally speaking, the curriculum is great.  It's written for students in grades 2 through 8, and it's written specifically using the North Carolina Standard Course of Study.  The plans are detailed and very applicable to real life, and although none of the kids who went with us today are ready to use those plans, it is very possible to alter them to our students' levels.

Practically speaking, a day at the ball park is just plain FUN!  If you have one in your area and you haven't been, you should definitely check it out.  

We go a few times each year, and my Little Man was quite excited to be back.

Of course, if your children don't know the basic positions and rules of baseball, you could always talk about that.  No matter what your focus, you must watch the game - you never when a pop fly will come heading your way!

Sometimes, even the players have to pow-wow!

Keeping score, track of batting averages, hits, runs, strikes, outs, and balls is all math.  Complicate it a bit by tracking and graphing it before and/or after the game to get an idea of how your team is doing over a given period of time.  Or, you could learn about other jobs related to baseball.  For example, at the DBAP, the numbers on the scoreboard are changed manually.

One of the great things about this type of event is that it's a real bonding experience.  For our family, it's something that we enjoy doing together several times each season.  There's just something about the roar of the crowds and cheering for your favorite players together that you can't recreate in front of a TV!

With the cheering goes the eating.  We personally prefer the refillable monster tubs of popcorn - we can munch through the whole game, and if our little hands spill a little, we can always request more! (And at ballpark prices, you can teach some great economics lessons right there.)

 

I somehow doubt that all of these people turned out just for the game, though.  Watching the actual players was not exactly my favorite thing when we first started going, either.  I preferred  ...

the giant sumo matches held between the innings.

My Little Man's personal favorite is watching the team mascot, Wool E. Bull, race around the field in his little blue sports car.

Celebrating home runs and winning scores with the Bull is always fun!

If none of these float your boat, I suppose you could always get a haircut!

The Durham Bulls do an exceptional job of making a trip to their field fun for the whole family, and it really is educational, too.  

Have you spent a day at the ballpark learning??

Monkey See, Monkey Do ... Snapping Beans

So I've had access to a wonderful man selling fresh green beans, which means that my little Bean Snapper is back in business!

The best way for children to learn is to be involved.  I mean, think about it - two hundred years ago, were children playing video games or choring alongside their parents?

To that end, the kids help me with many of my daily tasks, and the ones involving food or massive amounts of dirt are their very favorites.  Since Luke is a serious bean lover, he adores this task.

My Little Man can't yet snap the ends off of the beans.  He can't get quite that precise about where he snaps them yet, so we have a system.  First, I snap off the ends and lay them on the table.  Then he snaps the beans in half to make them a more manageable size for eating.

My Little Man is happy to be helping.  I'm happy to be spending time with him - and knowing that he'll have some basic knowledge of these things when he gets bigger is just icing on the cake ... ahem, the beans.  :-)

Ham, Green Beans, and Potatoes

This is an incredibly simple meal that apparently people don't make here in the South.  It reminds me of home, though, of the farms and the Amish and the mountains of Pennsylvania, and it's a great way to use leftover ham.  I love this meal because it's fairly healthy and incredibly easy to pull together - and best of all, my picky little man will always ask for seconds!

Ingredients:
Cooked ham, diced
Potatoes, 1-2 per person, washed and diced
3-4 cans of green beans

Layer the potatoes in the bottom of your slow cooker.  Place the ham on top and pour the beans over the whole thing.  Put the lid on and cook on 'low' all day.

Serves 3-4

Goes great with cornbread!

GratiTuesday - Big Boy Pants

Some moms hate diapers.  They can be smelly and they leak and honestly, who wants to focus in on that part of your child 10 times each day?

I've never minded them too much, though.  

My husband's always been good about taking his turns with those smelly things, and as long as the little ones were wearing them, we were good to go.  We could travel anywhere - whether they had nice bathrooms or not.  We could go on long car trips without visiting every cornstalk and hillside along the way.  Quick changes could take place behind an open car door wherever we happened to park with no one the wiser.

But, times change, and the time came for my son to change - but he was afraid of this ...

and did not want to use it.

I was quite worried about this and have been interviewing my friends for months to find out exactly how they went about teaching their little boys.  We finally decided that it was time, though, and he moved into these about two weeks ago:

After a few days, he decided that he was okay with this whole thing, and that he was going to wear his "unnerwear" all the time.  Diapers are now only for bedtime, and even then he's almost always dry.

So, today, I'm very thankful for little boys who take suggestions well.  For a Daddy who was willing to spend a few days working with our son on this project.  For electric washing machines and good detergent for those early days when he didn't quite 'get it,' and even more for his determination now to do so.  I'm even grateful for a little boy's ability to make those cornfield and hillside visits quite a bit easier than they were for his big sister.

But most of all, I'm glad that our diapering days are over, and that we're now firmly entrenched in the world of big boy "unnerwear."

Join us for GratiTuesday at Heavenly Homemakers!

Menu Plan Monday - May 9, 2011

My husband has to work late a few nights this week and we're going to make strawberry jelly.  I'm feeling adventurous, too, so we're going to have a few old favorites and try some new things.  Here's our plan:

Breakfasts:
Waffles X 2
Scrambled eggs and bananas
Cereal and Peaches
Pancakes and Strawberries X2
Vanilla muffins and bananas

As always lunches will be sandwiches, fruit, sliced raw veggies, or leftovers.

Suppers:
Monday - Grab it and growl (Tonight, we had leftover chicken tenders, cheesy rice, fresh green beans, fresh corn on the cob, and watermelon)
Tuesday - Pizza, salad, homemade applesauce
Wednesday - Barbeque, rolls, salad
Thursday - Ham, potatoes, and green beans with cornbread muffins
Friday - The kids will eat dinner at a birthday party, and we'll grab something!
Saturday - We might be hosting some of the kids' friends, so dinner will be something kid friendly on the grill.

A friend is having a birthday this weekend, and she loves cookie dough.  I might make up some of this and freeze it for her.  I also made my own version of these and stuck them in the freezer for lunches or a quick dinner, as well.

Visit OrgJunkie for more Menu Plan Mondays!

Field Work Fridays: Cinco de Mayo

In honor of Cinco de Mayo, we visited a local Mexican restaurant for lunch.  Many of the people who were there are from Mexico, and the manager agreed to speak to us about the significance of the holiday.

We ate at Torero's, a local place with bright decor, flat-screens mounted near the ceilings throughout, and a very yummy menu.  (Well, the food is good, not the menu itself, but you know what I mean.)

This is my chair.  See what I mean?  The whole place is like this - tables, chairs, wall hangings, etc.  It's very bright, but there's lots to look at, and my kids love to go there - because they can eat chips while they wait for their meals, and so they can talk about all the things carved into our table.  It's just fun.

First, we ate, with my kids really getting into the Mexican theme.  Luke with his 'matoes, nuggets, and rice ...

and Andi with her cheeseburger.  Oh, well!  (Most of the rest of us did actually eat Mexican food - but I must admit, they do have good burgers!)

While we finished our meal, the fabulous manager David brought over one of his staff members to tell us about the history of Cinco de Mayo.  Basically, we learned that the holiday is a celebration of a Mexican defeat over Spain back in the 1800s, and that the holiday carries with it no special foods or traditional means of celebration.   Whatever the case, we certainly celebrated with an abundance of chips, salsa, and chicken nuggets!

David and his staff were very kind in sharing a bit of their heritage with us.  Are there any restaurants near you where you could visit and learn a bit of another culture?