Not much

I haven't posted much around the old blog lately. We have been, well, living life. Not much has gone on outside of the daily activities and we didn't build any projects last week with Winter Promise and the camera, well, let's say it sat on the shelf.

It is getting colder each day. This morning I think is the coldest yet at 22 degrees. It will warm up when the sun makes its appearance but I have a washer full of winter coats, hats, mittens and the like getting all washed up in preparation. The laundry pile was huge yesterday morning with all those extra things added to the weekend laundry pilings. The pile was reduced greatly yesterday and by the time we go to bed tonight we should be caught up to normal laundry amounts. (Laundry is never finished) I may even go build a nice cozy fire in the wood stove this morning.....

May the Lord find us faithful.

Weekend update

It seems as though the weather in the lower 48 was quite active this weekend in some areas. Our weather was fine and we had a rather uneventful weekend. The menfolk went duck hunting on Saturday morning and blessing #1 shot a duck and Emmy (our lab) retrieved it for him. She is a good hunting dog other than that she leaves dog hair around for me to vacuum or swiffer. 
I am officially in that place where I get exhausted quite easily. Energy does not aboud but I am getting things done and thankfully I can sit on the couch for school work and that helps tremendously. My three hour glucose tolerance test revealed that I am tolerant of glucose and by the end of the three hours I had very low blood sugar levels to the opposite extreme that they were looking for. I could have told them that!!  I have always been that way, even when not pregnant. If I go too long without eating I can tell. I am thankful that I do not have gestational diabetes. 

Our weather is still holding out pretty good and the leaves have stayed on the trees but one good rain or wind and they will be off. The blessings have been outside quite a bit and enjoying the sunshine and playing as much as possible.

May the Lord find us faithful.

Finished

The moose meat is all packaged and snug in the freezer. While visions of dinners dance in my head...

Okay, that is enough corny. But, the moose is tucked away for the winter and my husband can now do what he loves best, waterfowl hunting. Moose in necessity, duck is his first love. He is getting the decoys and boat ready as dinner is finishing on the stove. What are we having? Moose fajitas of course. Tomorrow, I will opt for some seafood for a little change of menu, but then if my mighty hunter hunts all day, the blessings and I may just have a snacky dinner tomorrow, who knows, it will be Saturday and we usually play that day by ear.

May the Lord find us faithful.

Also

Our school week was interrupted due to a Monday DR appointment and today was a family work day, so.... there is no Winter Promise project this week. That is okay, we had two good days of school this week and we had two days together as a family working together as well.

May the Lord find us faithful.

Moose Season

My husband and a moose came home on Tuesday evening. Therefore, yesterday and today have occupied my husband with a moose to cut up and package for the freezer. The blessings and I help with packaging but my husband does all the butchering himself at this point. I was dreading this necessary task but it hasn't been too difficult so far. I have actually cleaned and organized about 6 of the kitchen cabinets this morning. I pop outside every so often and package what is waiting for me. Back to the cabinets, I threw away quite a few lids without bowls or old sour cream containers,etc. I streamlined some of the dishes and put less frequently used ones up high and out of the way. I moved some of the everyday dishes down low since blessings empty the dishwasher. I still have a few more cabinets to go but that will be for another day. Some time in the next hour or so the grinding of burger meat will begin and I will be needed for that whole process.

Tomorrow brings a three hour glucose test. I have never had to take this one before but my test results were high from the one hour test. I just think about wasting three hours sitting at the lab waiting for the time to tick away. You can only sit so much when you are 27 weeks pregnant. I wish I had already started to knit the cardigan for the baby. I guess I can read and knit some dish clothes while I wait. From the lab I will head over to my first oncology appointment. This is just the monitoring process that I will have to go through and not any bad news. I am thankful that my husband came home before all this so that he and the blessings can spend the morning together.

 May the Lord find us faithful.

• Sep. 10, 2008 - Back to the Nature Journals

It is about time we got back to our Nature Journals. Our leaves do not last long here in Alaska so we have a short window of fall leaves to do whatever we need to do to our leaves.

We gathered leaves of all types and brought them in for crayon rubbings. Here are some blessings peeling crayons.

September2008058.jpg picture by kaysmarmey

Rubbings, blessing #1 really enjoyed this and said he could spend a lot of time doing so, he did!

September2008065.jpg picture by kaysmarmey



September2008066.jpg picture by kaysmarmey

Blessing #2 wanted a little closer look at her leaves.

September2008071.jpg picture by kaysmarmey

Finally, they cut out their leaves and glued them into their nature journals. I read about leaves and trees from the Handbook of Nature Study.

Then, we cleaned up all that mess from cutting and pasting and crayon paper, etc.

The Great Outdoors

 We went for a leaf collecting walk that ended up taking us to the mailbox as while we were outside we saw the mail lady heading toward our mailbox. Oh, yeah, football is involved in almost everything we do at this time of year.

Almost to the mailbox, these two never hold hands, I thought that was precious.

After the walk, I sat down on the swing to rest and sort through the mail, the blessings were not as worn out as Mom so they continued on with physical education and played monkey in the middle on the trampoline. Note the football, again.

We then went inside to make crayon rubbings of our leaves and do a little leaf studying inside, but you will have to pop over to Alaska Nature to read more about that.

May the Lord find us faithful.

• Sep. 9, 2008 - Vitamins C and fungus

Rose Hips (I may be out picking rose hips to dry soon) My children were at a friend's home today and they helped pick some of the last raspberries and strawberries of the season. We have a few in the fridge. Yumm-O tomorrow!!

August2008125.jpg picture by kaysmarmey



Here are some mushrooms, I did not take time to look up this specific kind tonight. We had a good mushroom showing this year due to all the July rain that poured and poured down upon us.

August2008126.jpg picture by kaysmarmey

94 days to go

94 days isn't much time left. It is also nice to see the baby is closer to home than to zero! There is much to do but it is so nice to know that baby's birth is getting closer every day. I go to the DR tomorrow for my monthly check in and it is the glucose test day as well. While I am talking pregnancy talk, sleep was painful last night. Both hips hurt so no matter which side I tried to sleep on it was no use. I had a friend inform me this morning that there is a name for that and that it doesn't go away until the baby comes. Goody, something to look forward to!! I actually hope that is was just the effects of a lot of house cleaning yesterday which meant being on my feet most of the day. I would love to sleep good tonight. I must go read up on how we are going to build the igloo this week......

May the Lord find us faithful.

This week

This weeks Hideaways in History building project was the Great Wall of China. (You will notice a little better quality workmanship this week due to  Dad being the project builder.)

This week's build was a little bigger than previous weeks.

We had some sunny days so the wall was moved outside to be painted. I normally do not spend this much of my time painting a project but part of this will be taken down and folded flat to be used again when we build a castle later on, so it received a little extra mom attention.

The finished product.

 

Notice the yellow leaves, fall is upon here in Alaska!!

We are all enjoying our preview journey through history. We are reviewing things that blessing #1 has studied last year and that has helped. We all enjoy Story of the World, which I did not think I would like at all. I was wrong.

 

 May the Lord find us faithful.

Labor Day, Girl's Day

Labor Day weekend is not a family weekend for us as it is for many families. The beginning of September brings moose hunting season and waterfowl hunting season. This year with Labor Day being on the first made it a very special day for the men in our family as it was "opening" day. The men spent the morning waterfowl hunting and the afternoon and evening getting ready for moose hunting. The girls spent the day at home so we made desserts.

Blessing #2 received this cookbook as a present from a dear friend and we finally made something from the book. She decided on a teddy graham cake. She gathered the ingredients and we went to work.

 

 

She was happy to put her first item ever into the oven.

The finished product

Blessing #3 made a cookie pizza , look at that hair flying.

Her finished product:

May the Lord find us faithful.

Catching up

I am still trying to tweak our schedule and get all the school work accomplished daily. Some things, like laundry are going well, and some things...well, let's just say, we are working on those things slowly. I do have a  few pictures to share today.

First, here is blessing #3 sitting outside of her cave "preserving" some of the "catch". She is writing either halibut, silver salmon or jumbo prawns on the package. We made the cave for week one of Winter Promise Hideaways in History. She and her sister added some pictures (aka cave drawings) to the cave of things from their daily life.

 

Next is a picture of how and where we do school work. We use the family room because we enjoy the comfy couch and chairs for reading and we really enjoy the warmth of the wood stove in the colder months, also there is a lot of sunshine through those windows in the winter when our sunlight hours are at a minimum. I call this our tv tray homeschool!! I sit in the chair with the red throw and the large water sitting on the table.

Week two of Hideaways in History found us in Ancient Egypt and building a pyramid. (Which I think weird since they buried their dead Pharoah's in those things but we built one anyway, minus the dead Pharoah.) Big Brother helped with this one and he is showing blessing #3 how to use his flashlight so she could have some light in her pyramid.

These are all the pictures I have uploaded at this time. So that is all for now. Hope you have a good weekend.

May the Lord find us faithful.

• Sep. 1, 2008 - Nagoonberries and a flower

August2008121.jpg picture by kaysmarmey

Here we have a nagoon berry, looks just like a raspberry but grows low to the ground.

Information on the Nagoon Berry (common name)

Latin Name: Rubus stellatus

Family: Rosaceae

Grows best in peaty soil or tundra

And is a perennial plant

These plants grow all around our yard and the blessings enjoy picking them and popping them right in their mouths. They grow so low to the ground that it wouldn't be a lot of fun to pick them in any large quantity, but we enjoy munching on them during the summer.

August2008118.jpg picture by kaysmarmey

Clover