(And All My) Work Be Praise

With my husband out of town at a conference all week, I relied heavily upon the benevolence of others for our dinners and entertainment this week. :) So, here's the short list: What I'm Cooking Homemade Cheerios  (using the first recipe on the site). We stopped eating most cereal several years ago, but I've always kept a box of Cheerios on hand during the finger-food stage of babyhood. (If you really want to know why, it's because of articles like this one . The same information would apply to baby "puffs." If you don't want to know why, don't click the link. I'm not judging anyone.) Note that I did NOT spend time making O-shaped snacks!! I cut the squares a bit too big, and baked them a smidge too long, but overall they were easy to make and surprisingly tasty. Toby and Silas are fans. :) Cinnamon Coffeecake Muffins (made with leftover oatmeal) . Sounds weird, right? I thought so, too, but I had a pesky one cup of oatmeal hanging out in the f...

Silas and I consolidated his knowledge of circles and lines in yellow crayon to make a sun. He was pretty excited about it while it happened. Then he threw a big fit (over who-knows-what), crumpled up his paper, and threw it off the table. As such, there are no pictures of our sun drawings. Just keepin' it real, folks. So sweet one minute . . . 

What I'm Cooking Bean* dip and tortilla chips. This is one of my go-to 20-minutes-or-less meals for days when I've forgotten to thaw something or just want something easy. The beans take a bit of work up front, but it's so nice to have jars of re-fried beans on hand for quick meals! Blueberry muffins . Not my favorite recipe, but they were easy, and I had just a little bit of orange juice that needed to be used up. Indian Butter Chicken . I do this as a crockpot freezer meal, so I just had to pull a bag out of the freezer the night before, dump it in the crockpot with some milk, and breathe in the delicious Indian aroma all day! Served over brown basmati rice (cooked with turmeric) and peas. What I'm Reading True Beauty by Carolyn Mahaney. A dear friend of mine is leading a Bible study for our church's junior high girls using this book, and she was sweet to invite me to join in. Given the four babies I've had in the past 6 years, I haven't been invo...

At long last, Silas is starting to get interested in doing things. He's only 2-1/2, so it's not like he's behind or anything. My older two were just so engaged in activities by this time that I've been frustrated, not sure how to entertain the toddler all morning long! Finally, two weeks, ago, he asked for a dot marker, and happily sat at the table for nearly half an hour. That was my cue to pull up the ABC Jesus Loves Me two-year-old curriculum and plan a few activities! My days already feel pretty full right now, so we're just doing one shape and color activity (combined) each week. I didn't manage to post last week's, so here are the two we've done so far: Red Circle I cannot overstate how simple I am keeping things. Print the ABCJLM circle page from week one . (Or just draw a circle on a piece of paper. Who's going to care?!) I chose to write the word "RED" in the middle, because Silas knows most of his letters and likes to point ...

It's been nearly two years since I did a weekend check-in . I'd like to get back into the habit, but only time will tell whether I'll be able to keep it up. Only way to know is to start, so here we are! What I'm Cooking Pulled pork on cornbread waffles with maple-apple chutney . This is leftover from last week, but it was delicious  so I had to share. The pork was nothing fancy, just a loin in the crockpot with some seasonings and some chicken broth. Whole wheat English muffins . I actually have these going in the skillet as I'm typing. I tried one right out of the skillet, all warm and toasty, and this recipe is definitely a keeper! We read Mr. Putter and Tabby Pour the Tea this week, which features English muffins, so it seemed like a good week for a baking project with help from little hands. Baked chicken and potatoes . Super simple comfort food. I did a mix of white and sweet potatoes, since the boys prefer sweet potatoes. For the freezer: a triple ba...

When we first moved into our home in 2009, I painted (or, more precisely, had my parents paint, because I was 36 weeks pregnant) an accent wall in my living room: dark blue against the three khaki walls, a moderately-striking background to our giant wood entertainment center. A year or two later, we rearranged the living room furniture, putting a cream-colored couch against the blue wall in place of the entertainment center. Needless to say, the couch didn't take up nearly  as much wall space as the cabinet had, so suddenly I was faced with a big, blank, blue wall. I browsed Pinterest and schemed and planned and even went so far as to send my husband to Home Depot for materials. Four-ish years later, the materials still sat in the basement, the wall still blank. Until yesterday. My mother-in-law had a great picture of the boys turned into a picture canvas for us for Christmas, and the logical place for it was above the cream couch. It was lost in the sea of dark blue, howe...

Both of our winter birthdays felt a bit unusual this year. Months before his birthday (in November), Owen declared he wanted no celebrations at all: no cake, no presents, no candles, no dinner out, no grandparents, no nothing. I agonized for just as many months, trying to decide whether to plan things anyway, on the assumption that he'd change mind eventually. In the end, Isaac hid a present "just in case," and I made sure we had ingredients on hand for a cake if needed. And, of course, it was needed. After approximately two years of being two years old (he never did accept that he had turned three in 2013), Owen woke up the day of his birthday and wanted a cake because he was now four! His request: a sun shape, made with red, yellow, and orange frosting. Manageable.  I was quite pleased with my fiery frosting. We filled up the day with things Owen loves: painting . . .  hot dogs and "soft" (cooked) carrots . . .  candles and jammie...

This morning we started a new Sunday school series at church on the prophetic books of the Bible. The teacher (a very intelligent and gifted young man, who also happens to be a dear friend of ours) was comparing the biblical prophets to the pagan prophets of the same time. They (the pagan prophets) were obsessed , he said, with figuring out what the gods wanted and what the future would hold, and used all sorts of bizarre means to gain answers to their questions. You know, fun things like dissecting sheep livers. We all nodded along, yes, they were crazy, who would do a thing like that. And then he asked a question that stalled most of the nodding (or, at least, it did for me): " how often do I obsess over some question I have instead of just asking God for the answer? " I'm not typically prone to worry about the future, so I often gloss over questions like that. But I started thinking about how much time I've spent wondering about certain things. (Always at the...

Owen asks me nearly every day if we can do a craft of some sort. I sort of got away from "preschool" activities this year, but if I am to honor my artistic four-year-old's interests, I need to plan these more frequently!  Over Christmas vacation, Levi was reading the Magic Tree House: Dinosaurs Before Dark , so Owen logically asked for a dinosaur craft. A little Pinterest-searching later, we ended up with these cute guys , made from a cereal box, two toilet paper rolls, and some green paint. (There is a template to cut out the dino bodies in that link.) This week, I let Owen browse my "crafting for kids" Pinterest board and choose something (within the very necessary limits that we have the materials on hand). He chose these paper plate rainbows  and we set to painting! I used random objects from the kitchen to draw concentric circles on the plate in pencil. Later, Levi had me cut his in half so that it was the shape of a rainbow, ...

After taking last year off because we expected to have a newborn [we didn't, because Toby was eleven days late, but it was too late to plan something], we re-instituted our mostly-annual New Year's Celebration with my college BFF and her family. We've added two more kids since the last time, bringing the grand total to seven kids under six years old, including two five-year-olds, two two-year-olds, and two nursing babies. Yikes! See past years: 2013 and 2012 . We kept the same idea as two years ago, planning one activity every hour from 4pm until 8pm. Jenny and I got really  fancy this year and used Pinterest for our planning, creating a board just for us where we could both pin ideas. Instead of opening paper bags containing the activity, this year we wrote the activity on a slip of paper, tucked it inside a balloon, and then let the kids take turns popping balloons on the hour. A blurry Owen attempting to pop his balloon. Now that three of the childre...