A new hobby...

Last weekend we did the Granny Miller challenge. It was a great weekend for us. We learned a great deal and agree with Granny Miller that everyone learns so much more from a hands on experience. We sure did.

It seems that some level of preparation has always been important to us. I grew up in a home that had a stocked pantry (even though we didn't grow our own food, my mom always had the next boxes of cereal, bottles of catsup, cans of tuna and bars of soap in a closet in our hall bathroom). Vern grew up in Minnesota and his mom always had extras in a closet in case they were stuck at home after a snow storm. We have generally carried that with us and expanded on it some. In our first country home in Minnesota, we expanded on the idea more. Since we have moved to our current country place, we are sometimes overwhelmed with how much more we seem to need to expand our skill set.

When we read about the Granny Miller Challenge Weekend, we pretty much all agreed that we should give it a try and test out just how prepared we are for a power outage. We altered the plan a little to suit our family.

For our first challenge weekend, we intentionally chose a weekend that would likely be neither too hot nor too cold. We left the power running to the fridge and the freezers. We also used power to process 18 roosters that have been needing to be culled. We used power to run the well pump for water and the plucker. We do know how to process chickens by hand, and realistically, if we had no power for freezing, we would not process 18 chickens at a time anyway.

In general, we would all say that the Granny Miller Challenge weekend for us was like having all the benefits of camping (reduced stress, time together, minimal interruptions, quiet...) without the negatives (we weren't in a leaking tent when it rained, we slept in our own beds, we didn't have to haul a flash light down to the bath house for a middle of the night run.)

Over the next several posts, I plan to cover more specifics in the areas Granny Miller recommends:

1. Food and Water
2. Shelter
3. Clothing/linens/laundry
4. Hygiene/toilet
5. Recreation/communication
6. Miscellaneous
7. Review/what next?

If you have any general questions, please comment and I will try to address them as I work through the list. Please feel free to share your own helpful tips!

Pizza night!

Pizza night has been almost every Friday. This last week, we had pizza on Thursday. This time, almost all of the pizza ingredients were homemade. I made the mozzarella and ricotta earlier that day, the pesto, I made earlier this year and froze and I followed and adapted a pizza dough recipe, so everyone could eat it. And the most important part of all, this time I didn't burn the crust... I think I'm finally learning how NOT to burn the crust!

Building a doggy house, part 1

I was trying to upload all the pictures from building the doggy house into one post, but Picasa isn't letting me upload more than three pictures at a time :(...

Poor man's mushrooms

We joke around here about what the poor man substitutes for the more expensive things. I've used canned salmon to make Salmon Pesto Pasta (a delicious dish that Nona made for us a couple years ago). Nona uses salmon fillets and we do too, when we have them. But this particular evening, we didn't have a meal planned and Daddy was almost home. So, I cooked the pasta and dumped in salmon and pesto and served it. The only bad thing about it was that the salmon broke up into little pieces.
The other day, Katie was cooking and I taste-tested for her (we do it all the time around here). I was surprised because it tasted like mushrooms and I knew that we had used up the mushrooms in the fridge. Then Katie said that it was a eggplant tart with a potato crust. Now I guess the poor man has eggplant for his mushrooms!

Hannah

Mendelssohn's 200th Birthday

This evening, Momma, Katie and I went to a concert given by GCSU, celebrating the 200th birthday of the famous composer, Felix Mendelssohn. It was very pleasant to listen to the choral groups and finally the orchestra play. We heard 'There Shall A Star From Jacob Shine Forth' from his unfinished oratorio, Christus and some from the oratorio, Elijah, and then the orchestra played first movement of Mendelssohn’s famous E Minor Violin Concerto (there are clips of the concerto on the link), which was awesome to listen to. We ended up leaving during the intermission, because it was already 8:40 pm and we had things to finish up at home. As we talked on the way home, we agreed that James would love going to listen and it would have been neat to hear more of Mendelssohn's music. Going tonight inspired me to learn more about Mendelssohn and perhaps get some, if not all, of his music from the library to listen too.

Hannah

Cultures for Health giveaway

There's a giveaway going on over at Kitchen Stewardship. It ends at 11:59, so if you're interested, you'd better hurry over and enter. It's cultures again. There is sourdough, yogurt, kombucha, buttermilk, milk kefir and water kefir. Someday I'd really like to make water kefir. It's suppose to be a good-for-you substitute for soda.

Hannah

Cultures for Health

In 2007, James had a big yeast infection. He was on, and sometimes still gets, fluconazole, an anti-fungal med. During this time, we kept James on probiotics, in the form of yogurt and some high-quality supplements. Since then, we have come across food blogs that help us in feeding James good food. One of the blogs we follow is offering a giveaway. Culture starters for yogurt, sourdough, milk and water kefir (One of the more common things people use water kefir for is homemade 'soda pop') and kombucha. All of these cultures are good for you and some add probiotics and prebiotics so necessery to our gut health. So I would like to invite you to visit Kelly's blog and enter the giveaway for the cultures.

Hannah

Old time TV

I mentioned earlier that we now have a newly refurbished laptop and DSL. These are from the first evening after the DSL was installed.

Vern found YouTube and shared some favorite music with the children (this would be the arts in homeschooling ;*)). They watched and listened to Nat King Cole, and I think Ray Charles singing Georgia on my Mind, some Bing Crosby and others.

Then we found some old "I love Lucies".

Fun times.

Helpers

During the last couple of months, I have been working on cleaning, staining and sealing the wood trim in our house. Mostly that is the window trim and sills in the big room and the front door. The other trim and doors (in the mud, laundry, bed and bath rooms) are painted. All while I was working on the trim (in the evening and on weekends) the little girls would ask if they could 'paint' too. And I would have to say, "not this time."... Finally the day came when I was done with the trim (everything got a few coats and I couldn't do it all in one evening). Then I started on the boards for the shelves that would go over my very messy desk in the kitchen.

I was happy to have help since this would be done outside:

Me and my two little helpers. "Painting" and wiping the boards.

Happy faces, dirty hands. We smelled of paint thinner for a few days!!!

Homeschool blessings

Carrie and I have a running game we play with her school work.

It is simple stuff. Practical and innocent. It is a kindergarten curriculum created by Rod and Staff, the Mennonite publisher. There are no modern cartoon characters, but plenty of things Carrie sees everyday.

Like chickens.

I am glad there is such a sweet curriculum I can use when my children are small. But my favorite part is the love notes we write on each page.

Noah's Ark

We are really enjoying our new history curriculum. Each four week unit ends with individual or small group projects to explore the knowledge gained from the unit or to deepen knowledge in a particular area.

Katie and Owen are working together to build a model of Noah's ark.

Below is 'Noah' perched on Katie's finger:


They are building all of this to scale. One-quarter inch per cubit. Noah is six feet tall. You can see Noah standing on the table in front of the ark below. Kind of puts some things in perspective. Nothing like the nursery wall 'arks' :*)...



I think they are planning to add a few more details to demonstrate perspective.