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Weekend Check-in: July 23

What I'm Cooking
Chicken scampi. Half a cup of butter AND a quarter cup of olive oil . . . this is delicious. I saute yellow peppers along with the chicken and serve over thin spaghetti.

Toffee brownie brittle, for small group. You can buy this at the store, but it's surprisingly simple and just as tasty to make at home.

BBQ pork sandwiches on homemade buns. Pork roast in the crockpot with about half a bottle of Montgomery Inn sauce, still in my cupboard from Cincinnati. For the buns, I use all white whole wheat flour, not a mixture of white and red ("regular") as the recipe calls for.

Chicken spaghetti. I guess I was craving pasta-chicken dishes this week.

Peanut butter chocolate chip banana bread. I have two favorite banana bread recipes, and this is the preferred among my children. (The other has blueberries and walnuts: healthier, but not as indulgent.) I always double the recipe and do half as muffins, the other half as a loaf. The days are quickly coming to an end, however, when twelve muffins is enough to feed us all for breakfast!

Homemade pizza. After many, many attempts at whole wheat dough, this is my favorite. (The major downside, of course, is remembering to start it the day before, but the soaking is SO worth it to make a lighter whole wheat dough!) This makes two large pizzas, so I generally do one for the kids with just pineapple, and a second primarily for the adults with whatever interesting things I can find in the fridge to use up.

What I'm Reading
Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner by Linda Silverman. I read a blurb about this in a Facebook group and it sounded so much like Owen that I had to check it out. I'm only two chapters in, but he does seem to meet a lot of the criteria. The way he approaches school (and life!) is so different from Levi (and from myself); I'm hopeful for lots of helpful suggestions in both parenting and educating from the remainder of the book!

What the Boys are Reading
Levi: The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode by Eleanor Estes. I honestly know nothing about this book, but we have loved other things by Estes (the Moffats series, the Hundred Dresses), so I grabbed it off the shelf last library trip. He also finished The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois and probably a number of other things I didn't keep track of. He's still on a space kick, so this week's library trip saw a new stack of books on planets in the bag.
Owen: Poppleton in Winter, some Cam Jansen
Silas and Toby: Curious George and the Puppies, Fred and Ted's Road Trip (a P.D. Eastman early reader that they think is hilarious)

Weekly Snapshots
Teaching Levi how to play 500 rummy in the Thomas family tradition.

Silas scanning the Bible during the sermon for words he can read. He recently conquered the sight word "said" and is still excited about finding it in books.

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