My life, my kids, my home.
The Red Bird – Astrid Lindgren
Here’s a lovely book I wanted to share with you. I have reviewed it on our home schooling blog Sit Walk Sleep Rise.
I won’t repost it here, but it’s a beautiful tender story about two orphaned children accompanied by lovely illustrations.
Warning. You have just entered a venting zone
I hate mealtimes in our house. Dinner mostly and in a descending order all the way down to breakfast which admittedly isn’t all that bad.
Before I go any further with my complaints, let me just put it out there that I take responsibility for the lack of training and poor food discipline my children have. BUT…
D isn’t home for dinner during the week….he gets home anywhere from 5:45 (absolute earliest) to 6:45pm. The kids are usually hungry around 5pm, so I have dinner ready then and I usually eat with them sometime between 5 and 5:30pm. But, oh how I long for quiet child free dinners. I am so tired of the mess. I find managing the three of them for a meal overwhelming. It’s a bit better when D’s home for dinner.
My children are particularly fidgetty at the table and find it hard to stay on their chairs. At least twice every meal I have to remind one if not both of them to not stand on their chairs. One night as a joke (kind of) I took a couple of large strips of velcro and strapped them to their chairs. They thought it was hilarious to have a seat belt at the table.
The baby often shouts his way through dinner and still hasn’t mastered feeding himself particularly well, so unless I want to have more food on the carpet than in his tummy, he requires almost constant attention. Until recently when he’d finished he would hurl the bowl over the side of his high chair regardless of what was left inside it.
They are also messy eaters. I can’t remember the last time we got through dinner without food or water being spilled on the table and/or the floor. I usually have to vacuum the floor afterwards, particularly after rice. (Which I tend to leave for at least a couple of hours – preferably a day or so, and vacuum up when it’s dry and crunchy again. Believe me, I know all about vacuuming food scraps. Dried weet-bix tends to stick to the carpet quite badly incidentally).
I hardly see a completely empty bowl in a week, unless it contained ice cream. They are fussy. The girl doesn’t like anything remotely spicy (even plain sausages are spicy for her, and tomato sauce has her asking for water to drink). The boy doesn’t like vegetables. The girl doesn’t like meat. Reminds me of Jack Sprat and his wife.
Tonights meal of Beef Casserole and Rice. These are the leftovers of the three children.
I’ve tried not to pander too much to their fussiness, thinking that if I just serve up what ever I plan for the family’s dinner, that’s what they should eat. I appreciate there are the odd things a person has a genuine aversion to, but generally I reckon they should eat what they are given. Our meals a pretty child friendly most of the time anyway. Simply prepared foods. But this isn’t working because if it’s something they don’t like they just don’t eat it. Which in one way is their problem, but is quite demoralising for me. Honestly, what’s the point? Maybe they should just have cheese sandwiches 5 nights a week. Oh, wait, then they don’t eat their crusts and the boy really doesn’t eat sandwiches either.
And….I know this is a big part of my problem…… I give them ice cream for desert sometimes whether or not they’ve finished their food. I’m just a sucker really. I know my problem is because I’m always too lenient with them regarding food.
Help! I so dislike eating with them that I try to get the whole experience over with as fast as possible. Oh, and then no one helps clean up. I’m left with the mess and usually feel so depressed by the whole experience that I run away and hide (and write a long whingy blog post about it while the mess sits there alone in the kitchen and the kids dance to the radio in the lounge).
The problem is I really think family mealtimes are important and precious, especially as the children get older. It would be nice if we could actually have opportunity to talk. I know it should/could be better. How can I fix this? I probably know what you’re all going to say, but say it anyway. It might help to get my head straight, and give me the resolve to change something. (That was a cry for help by the way, so let the comments roll.)
My Mum’s recipe. She tells me she can’t count the number of people who have asked her for the recipe. I made it the other day for the first time and shared it with a friend who has asked for the recipe. So, it’s a goody. And pretty easy too. (Shown here without the almonds because of an allergy in the family)
Here ’tis:
CAKE:
225g butter 450g sugar 3 eggs 1 cup milk 450g Self raising flour – sifted 3 apples peeled and sliced 1/2 cup chopped almondsTOPPING:
2 tbsp sugar 1 tsp cinnamon 2 tbsp butter meltedCream butter and sugar. Add eggs one at a time and combine. Add flour and milk and beat until smooth. Put half of mixture into a greased 24 x 24cm cake tin. Spread sliced apples over cake mix and top with remaining cake mixture. Sprinkle with almonds. Bake at 220 C for approx 35 minutes. Test with skewer.
Mix together sugar and cinnamon. Brush cake with melted butter and sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar mixture.
Serve cold with coffee, or warm with cream and/or ice cream.
Freezes well.
Today our church hosted a holiday program for children under 7. It was for kids and their mums/dads to come and have some fun. We had arts and crafts, music and dance, a jumping castle, dress ups, space to ride bikes, and storytime. I was asked to read stories to the kids and I loved it! I enjoyed the whole thing….from selecting the books, to reading them, and making funny character voices.
It was great to see the kids listening so intently to the stories, and it occurred to me in the middle of it all that it’d be kinda fun to be a kids librarian. Books are cool, and I love to see kids enjoying books. Once a child has a love of reading, they can learn anything. Anything? Yep, anything.
So one day when I’m not home schooling, mothering three little ones, considering going back to work part time, dreaming of medical missions, trying to decorate my home on a shoe string, sending stuff to Africa or planning a secret garden maybe then I could be a librarian in my spare time.
“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” Victor Hugo
The Catcher in the Rye – J D Sallinger
I have wanted to read this book for a long time and finally did after finding an ex-library copy for sale at our library. They were supposed to be $1 each, but the kind librarian gave me two novels for 50c. Not each….50c for both! Ha, that’s a bargain if there ever was one. (The other book was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain)
I really enjoyed this book, although was nervous throughout that our character was going to do something really nasty. I thought it was a brilliant look inside someones mind and it seemed so very real to me. You know the term when watching a play or movie, that the audience has to ’suspend their disbelief’ and how that is really hard when there is bad acting? Well, sometimes in books I find myself thinking about the author and what they are trying to tell me instead of the characters speaking for themselves. Well, no such trouble in this book. The character was so convincing that I barely even though of it as a work of fiction but a record of someones actual thoughts. Clever writing. Brilliant.
(Nothing much happens though, and the story only spans a few days, so if you’re into action, this might not be the book for you.)
OK, so who knows how to get toothpaste out of the carpet?
The more I try to clean it the more it turns into foamy frothy lather.
It’s there courtesy of R1 who has a running obsession with it of late. He grabs in out of the bathroom at any given opportunity and eats as much as he can before I take it away. Today however, he managed to sit, stand or squeeze it out onto the carpet. (I don’t know because I wasn’t there….I was on the internet busy doing something.) E5 alerted me “Mum, Come! It’s a toothpaste storm!”
At least it’s minty fresh!
I made this canvas of words the other day. It’s an idea I saw on Heidi’s blog. Heiidi used ‘happy’ words for hers (which looks much better than mine) but mine ended up just being words about us. It’s going to be hung in our room just for some colour. I’d originally planned to hang it in the lounge, but it’s just the wrong green.
I painted the words on with a brush, which was tricky and why they’re a bit wonky. He he…..I was a bit disappointed with how it turned out, but you gotta start somewhere.
