I'm Moving

After five years of blogging, I am moving to my own domain. The blog is not pretty yet and is basic. I have been using Blogger for 5 years and wordpress for four days. It may take some time, y'all, but eventually it'll look nice.

I hope.

See you there!

Menu Plan Monday

I have not participated in Menu Plan Monday in quite a while. My menus have been pretty plain of late. However, since I am currently working with Courtney on getting the Faithful Bloggers site up, as well as moving my blog, I thought it would be nice to take a little break from writing a post. We eat coffee cake and sausage, or oatmeal, for breakfasts. For lunch we have sandwiches or leftovers. This menu will consist of dinners only.

On to said menu. . .
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Monday -

Chicken Hash from Kate's site

Tuesday -

Pancakes (yes, we eat breakfast for dinner!)


Wednesday -

Rice, beans, and stir-fry veggies


Thursday -

Macaroni and Cheese


Friday -

Enchiladas (We have guests coming over this Friday, yay!)


Saturday -

Homemade pizza (What toppings do y'all use on your pizzas? I need new ideas!)


The Happy Housewife is guest hosting this meme today, so be sure to visit her and leave the link to your own menu!

Current Projects

My list of projects has fallen woefully to the side. This is my sad attempt to redirect my activities to getting some of these projects done. I am considering taking a very belated part in the 101 tasks in 1001 days project. I know a lot of folks did this two or three years ago, but I now know not one single person in my small lists of contacts who is participating. Perhaps they have completed their tasks already and are moving on.

Anyways.

On to the afore mentioned list.

• Finish skirts for girls and I. Maybe a few dresses along the way.
• Get sewing machine serviced. That thunk-thunk noise? Can't be good.
• Find a whole wheat bread recipe I actually like.
• Learn WordPress. Okay. So that is a really broad task, but until I can break it up into smaller WordPress topic chunks, it will just have to stay like that.
• Get blog redesigned.
• Learn how to use my point and shoot Panasonic Lumix TZ5 camera.
• Learn how to use my brand-new JVC camcorder.
• Pick up bulk cooking again. This will be hard to do with my silly side-by-side freezer. But, as usual, I am sure I'll find a way to make it work.

Of course, I reserve the right to add or take away to this list. My brain is always coming up with ideas and then of course the inevitable crashing back down to earth takes place. We'll see what stays and what goes.

What is on YOUR to do list?

Web Design for Kids - Review

One of the first products I received for review recently as part of the TOS Homeschool Crew was Web Design for Kids (...And Curious Grown Ups). This DVD was designed to teach children aged eight years and older the basics of building a website with html. Priced normally at $40, a 50% off summer special is running now at $19.99. This is not a downloadable product and comes to you in hardcopy form.

Mr. Richardson has created a very useful tool. While I already knew the content he covered, I sure wish I had had this DVD way back when I was starting to learn basic html. Step-by-step, he explains very clearly what every beginner should know about building websites.

In the video, Mr. Richardson instructs two children in building their own website. The children ask questions that would normally come to a young person's mind.. With the understanding, that he is teaching children something that can become very complicated, he will at times change names of some coding. Nestled tags, for instance, are referred to as sandwich tags. This gives a child an easy visual and helps them keep in mind what the tag actually does.

What is covered?

• Ten basic lines of code
• How to add backgrounds
• Marquees
• Headers
• Changing fonts
• Adding pictures
• And more

Web Design for Kids has one thing going for it that many other web design instructional programs do not: all the software you need to begin a web site are already on your computer: Notepad and Internet Explorer (or TextEdit and Safari if you are on a Mac). There is nothing extra to buy and no expensive WYSIWYG - What You See is What You Get - software needs to be purchased.

I personally use Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer and so I did have to make adjustments. For instance, when Mr. Richardson has you view page source under View in my browser, Notepad does not automatically pop up as it would in Internet Explorer. It is very easy to just open up Notepad independently, so that was not a problem.

What this program is not

Web Design for Kids (. . . and Curious Grown-Ups!) will not teach you or your child all you need to know. It is not an all-inclusive video. Learning coding for websites can be very involved and there is much to learn. Web Design for Kids teaches the very basics, enough to get your feet wet. The great thing about this is that you can easily see if your child has the love of website-building fairly inexpensively. If your child does not like it, you have not spent a lot of money on a expensive program that will just gather dust on your shelves. If he/she does like it, then you can proceed accordingly.

I highly recommend this product. It is easy to use, the quality is professional, and the instructor knows how to teach the subject. This is one item that I am happy to have on my shelves. For more information, please visit the Web Design for Kids website.

Things Baby Eats

You know, I really wanted to start writing today on my BlogHer '09 experience in Chicago. But first I wanted to share a story with you that is actually pretty gross. It involves something that my baby girl ate. So if you are eating any food right now, wait till later to read this post.

Anyways. So, before you become a mom, you have lofty dreams of how sweet and beautiful babies are. And they are sweet and beautiful. But what you do not realize is that these little persons carry with them the ability to do things that bring with them the "ewwwwww" factor.

And I am not talking about dirty diapers, folks. This goes beyond that.

My youngest daughter is not quite a year old. She is very curious and she does not give up easily. She is also walking now and so is very mobile. One thing children her age do quite a bit of is pick things up off of the floor and stick them straight into the mouth.

Well, my daughter does this a lot. More so than my other children. We sweep and vacuum every day and she still manages to find things. She has great eyesight, that one. I have picked out of her mouth lint and old pieces of sausage, as well as beads, paper, crayons, play dough, thread, and other things that I still do not know what they were.

That is all very gross and nasty as it is. Eating off of the floor turns my stomach. Unless it can be picked up and rinsed/washed off - think runaway grapes - it goes in the trash. The five-second rule does not apply in my book.

Back to my story.

Sunday evening I was picking up in our sitting room. My baby was toddling around doing the whole "Step, step, fall, get back up" routine. As I was picking up crayons I turned my back for 2.6 seconds. That was my mistake. As I turned back around, I noticed daughter again was chewing on something.

I walked toward her. She was standing there with a big grin on her face, the one that melts my heart. I call that her Mommy Smile because she does save her biggest smiles for mama. The closer I got I noticed more chewing and a little black thing on her lip.

I was inwardly complaining about having to yet again fish some unknown object from my daughter's mouth. Sticking my finger amongst all those sharp teeth is dangerous. And painful.

Sitting down next to her I discover horrifying fact #1: that black object on her lip? Yeah. It's a bug leg. My stomach turns at the memory.

I quickly realized that that leg belonged to a fly. A fly. Those things that eat rotting garbage and worse. Yes, a fly.

Gag.

I shudder as I realize she is still chewing on something.

I tell her "Baby, spit it out into Mama's hands." Okay. I was not ready for what came out though the fly leg should have clued me in.

Baby girl obediently spit out into my hand a fly body. No more legs or wings were attached. Just the body. I do not get sick easily. But this time I nearly did. I seriously thought I would lose my dinner. Of course, mama was running toward the sink with slobbery fly body in one hand, at the same time scooping up happy smiling baby, all the while yelling "SHE ATE A FLY, SHE ATE A FLY" to my husband.

That was a moment when I seriously wished that someone would invent a safe, non-toxic, edible version of Lysol. I would pay a lot of money for that stuff. I might even buy stock.

I am still recovering from that. The recovery will take a while. Actually, I don't know if I'll ever recover from that one.

Please tell me that I am not the only mother whose child eats stuff not made for human consumption. Please.

How to Meet a Famous Person

Because my life would not be complete without a hint of weird added to my every day, I submit to you my little tips on how to meet a famous person.

1. First, win a trip from JVC to BlogHer '09.

2. Take a flight to O'Hare airport. It must NOT be an uneventful flight. No. Your plane must be sitting on the tarmac for an hour due to bad weather before it even takes off.

3. Land at O'Hare airport when the President of the United States of America happens to be landing at the same airport so that you again have to sit on the tarmac for quite a while.




4. Arrive at your hotel with a major headache and rush as fast as you can through check-in. Then, you must wrestle your suitcases that weigh more than you do up to your room. On the 28th floor.

5. Throw said suitcases into your room, brush your hair, and take amazingly fast hotel elevator down again to catch a taxi. You must be amazingly late to this dinner in which you will meet the people who paid for this great opportunity.

6. Alternately feel terrible that you are late while trying to give directions on how to get to the restaurant to the taxi driver who barely speaks English.

7. Arrive at Harry Caray's. Meet your fellow winner's of the sweepstakes and the sweetest PR gal. Because you haven't eaten anything in 9 hours, and you are hypoglycemic, order the first thing your eye lands on on the menu. It was Chicken Marsala, which I had no idea what that was. But it was so yummy. So all's good.

8. Sit there and talk to the other people at your table and then realize that lots of cameras are flashing toward the table behind you.

9. Find out that the person at the table next to you is Ernie Banks.

10. Say "Hey, cool! Ernie Banks." Then lean toward PR gal from JVC and ask "Who is Ernie Banks?"

11. Whip out your BlackBerry as you and your other friends at the table take out their portable devices and Google "Ernie Banks."

12. Find out that Ernie Banks was a baseball player and learn his whole life story from wikipedia. BlackBerries are amazing things, folks.

13. Take picture of Mr. Banks, who was very gracious talking to a young mom from Texas who had had no idea who he was just a few minutes before.




And that, folks, is how you meet a famous person.

Making Ancient Egyptian Paddle Dolls

Continuing on in our study of Ancient Egypt in Tapestry of Grace, my three older children and I worked on some Ancient Egypt Paddle Dolls.




These were fairly easy to make and involved only cardboard, paint, pony beads and yarn. The kids take these everywhere with them. My son puts his on the back of his little John Deere ATV and rides around with it.

Thank you for looking!