Home School Ice Cream Social

Gearing up for back to the books, our HS group had a social so we went and were social.

We call Benjamin “scooter mc gee”. He is one scooter riding two year old.

Ice cream, he got the ice cream out of the way so he could go play football.

Benjamin eating a cookie with his ice cream

Judith worked and was busy handing out balloons to one and all.

 

Playing football

Benjamin watched some kids playing with the parachate.t

Tug O War

Sauerkraut

 

Since we have a lot of cabbage I thought we would give making sauerkraut a try…here goes nothing.

We used about four cabbages, Alaska sized cabbages. The cabbage was chopped and five pounds of cabbage at a time were added to our handy dandy extra large container along with 3 TBSP of salt and then the workout began. Pound, pound, pound the cabbage to bring out the water. Watching a movie helps with chopping time.

 

Once all the cabbage was chopped, salted and pounded a covering of plastic wrap was added, then a plate and more plastic wrap and weights to keep that cabbage down in the cabbage water to ferment. Yep, fermenting is going on around here….for three to four weeks.

First Two Year Old Library Story Time

Benjamin really enjoyed his first week at the library story time. He was a little quiet at first, which is unusual, but he got into things rather quickly. He really enjoyed using the glue stick to glue decorations on the quilt  for the bears. Nana was here so Benjamin and I were able to attend just the two of us. That was odd, I can only count a handful of times that he and I have gone anywhere alone.




Outside of the library. Warm weather has abounded the past few days!! Yahoo!

Harvesting and Preserving the Garden

 

Cauliflower and Broccoli awaiting the freezer

The green beans were picked on this sunny evening…canning to come.

We even had Nana out picking green beans.

Nana comes to visit

The day after Nana came to visit the Blessings and I had some meetings we needed to take care of for school. Since Nana was here we stopped for Alaska made ice cream after the long meetings.

Yummy Hot Licks ice cream

Benjamin really likes ice cream

Playing a game with Nana

Nana's Coming

Busy bees around here today...we are getting ready for Nana to come today!

Pitiful but True

What is pitiful but true? The fact that I get about 75% of my "news" from Facebook. I don't mean what my friends are doing, but I mean real news, you know like earthquakes in Virginia. Bless those peoples hearts that post such things. Not to downplay the Virginia earthquake at all but we have earthquakes here in Alaska very regularly. One of our local homeschool moms posted a link to the USGS website that shows earthquake activity in the US. Pretty neat, I'd say.

Looking through

I was looking through pictures tonight and found this picture of my wonderful husband. I really like this picture because it so shows the real him. He is always happy, clear conscience I say. Or it might just be that fact that he had just returned from a duck hunting trip with Levi and Poppa last fall, which reminds me, moose and duck season open in a few days!



One thing I have not shared on my blog is that for the past eight years my husband has traveled regularly with his job. Thankfully, the majority of his travel happened Monday through Thursday, so we still had three days a week together as a family. It wasn't the ideal life for us but we managed fine and learned to survive and he wasn't gone every week, just two or three weeks a month. All that changed a little over a month ago! He was able to make a change to a position that does not have the same amount of travel. It took a couple of the kids a few weeks to stop asking if Dad would be gone this week, but now they are getting used to the fact that Dad is home. None of our kids remember a time that he didn't travel. I have  noticed that I am a little more on top of my game in some areas of homekeeping and I dare say that the laundry load has increased slightly. I will gladly do an extra load or two a week if it means that smiley man will be home.

I must be a good mom

I saw this at The Modest Mom  .

"Please pass the bear meat" ??? Really

"Please pass the bear meat." might not be a request that many people hear at the dinner table. But today, that very statement was said at house at least three times.
Yep, we had bear meat for lunch today, bear tenderloin to be exact. My wonderful husband and a friend were out on some pre moose hunting business and came across a black bear. This black bear was literally gorging himself on blue berries (no, he did not taste like blueberries!).
Talk about knowing where your dinner comes from, I think he was an organic bear. We had chicken fried bear tenderloin, green beans and new potatoes (from our garden), and cornbread. Yummy!
In the past I have been an avid avoider of bear meat, today I decided to embrace the bear or ingest the bear? Anyway, Benjamin thought eating bear meat was great, when he wasn't shoveling in green beans.

The Fair 2011

Big Cabbages…I think that says 45 pounds.

Other vegetables.

 

We took these pictures of the kids and then we were kicked out of this exhibit….no signs, doors wide open, but it was drop off for something or another. Fairbanks is often very unorganized, ugh!

Benjamin checking out the fire engine.

That is me waving from the gondola on the ferris wheel.

Bumper cars

Watching Bumper Cars.

Then we found the funnel cakes, one of our favorites. I skipped the Denali Cream puffs since I learned how to make my own whole wheat cream puffs!

Benjamin liked funnel cakes.

Viewing animals…

Rabbits

Piggy Sue the 500+ pound pig.

Beef!

Okay, my favorite part, the bagpipe band.

Judith thought they were loud! They were.