Day with Grandma

Once every couple of weeks my mom will come over for the day, just to spend some time playing with the kids and chatting with me.  :-)

This time Mom spent some time doing crafts with the kids.  Here she is tracing around their hands onto paper to cut out.

And here is a classic picture, Grandma and Granddaughter.  :-)

Homemade Laundry Soap

To help save money for our family I make our own homemade laundry detergent.  One batch lasts around 3 months.  I wash about 20 loads a week.  So for a smaller family it would go a long ways!  Here is the recipe I use, as well as some pictures of the process.

First, gather your ingredients:

4  Cups - hot tap water
1  Fels-Naptha soap bar
1 Cup - Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda
½ Cup Borax


The fels-naptha bar can be bought at Ace Hardware and the Borax and Washing soda come from King Soopers.

 

Grate bar of soap.  I use a cheese grater from the dollar store reserved only for this.  Put in a saucepan along with your water.  Stir continually over medium-low heat with a wire whisk till soap is dissolved and melted.   It's important to stir it continually or the mix will not gel.  You can use it if it's not gelled, it will still clean.  But for me it's a mental thing, it needs to be gelled to seem like I'm using the "right" thing.  :-)

Fill a 5 gallon bucket half full of HOT tap water. Add melted soap, washing soda and Borax. Stir well until all powder is dissolved. Fill bucket to top with more hot water. Stir, cover and let sit overnight to thicken.  This is what it will look like the next day.

Stir.  Divide the mix between two 5 gallon buckets.  Fill each to the top with HOT tap water and stir again.   Fill a used, clean, laundry soap dispenser with this mix.  Shake before each use.

For those of you who just like to see the recipe without all the pictures, here it is:

Homemade Liquid Laundry Detergent
4  Cups - hot tap water
1  Fels-Naptha soap bar
1 Cup - Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda
½ Cup Borax

1.  Grate bar of soap.  I use a cheese grater from the dollar store reserved only for this.  Put in a saucepan along with your water.  Stir continually over medium-low heat with a wire whisk till soap is dissolved and melted. 

2.  Fill a 5 gallon bucket half full of HOT tap water. Add melted soap, washing soda and Borax. Stir well until all powder is dissolved. Fill bucket to top with more hot water. Stir, cover and let sit overnight to thicken.

3.  Stir.  Divide the mix between two 5 gallon buckets.  Fill each to the top with HOT tap water and stir again.   Fill a used, clean, laundry soap dispenser with this mix.  Shake before each use.
 
Yield: Liquid soap recipe makes 10 gallons.
-Top Load Machine- 5/8 Cup per load (Approx. 180 loads)
-Front Load Machines- ¼ Cup per load (Approx. 640 loads)

A bad day for flying...

On Sunday we went out to Mark's parents house to celebrate his Mom's birthday.  Because the weather forecast called for perfect RC airplane flying weather Mark decided to bring all his airplanes.  The first plane he took up was his bi-plane, shown here when he first got it last year. 

After flying it for a bit he decided to do some fancy moves.  Bad idea.  The tail of this airplane has never been very stable, we bought it already built and it wasn't straight.  Mark took the biplane into a loop but when he went to pull out it went into a spin. Then it went into a nose dive straight into the ground, where it literally exploded into a million tiny slivers of wood.  Here is all that is left of the plane.

After such a poor start, I thought Mark would be done flying but he wanted to keep going.  Next he tried to fly his piper cub (the yellow one).  I should explain that Mark's parents drive way is pretty short as far as runways go, and there is a fence at the end of it.  Anyhow, he started the piper taking off only to find that the plane didn't respond to any of the controls.  He cut the engine and tried to land it but it didn't have enough airspeed, flipped over, and landed on it's wing, ripping the wing struts from the plane, tearing a hole in the wing covering and denting the front engine cover.  But at least this one is fixable.  I didn't get any pictures of this crash, I was in shock that he had crashed again.

Next up he flew the T-Craft (the little blue and white one).  This one flew perfectly, with no problems at all.  So, Mark decided to take his Extra up (this is the black one, that I gave him for Christmas) for it's maiden flight.  Mark started the take off roll, lifted off the ground, and... the engine died!  Because of the fence at the end of the runway Mark tried to turn the plane to the side.  The wing was ripped in half and the landing gear ripped off as well.  I didn't get a picture of this either.  It was simply to painful to see all that time and effort ruined in such a short time.  It is fixable, the fuselage is fine, but Mark has to rebuild the entire wing from scratch.

So, at the end of the day, Mark had 3 planes less than when he started.  What a rotten day for flying!

Book It

I enrolled Elijah in the Pizza Hut Book It program for the first time this year.  The first day of the program was October 1.  I told Elijah he needed to read 3 chapter books for the month.  Well, on October 3 he had already read 3 chapter books!  To say he was excited about the program might be understating it a bit!

Mark ordered Elijah's pizza and they went to pick it up together, then came home and ate dinner with the rest of the family.  Elijah was so excited to eat his pizza, all by himself.  :-)  Now he is counting down the days till next month!  (The goal for next month will be a bit higher, so it will take him a little longer to earn, hopefully...)

Airshow!

This past weekend we went to our local airshow!  It was a lot of fun, although very hot!  We all enjoyed watching the different planes flying and looking at the planes parked at the show.  We even got a bit of excersise in, we had to walk almost a mile from the parking area to the airshow (and back again at the end of the day)!

Our first stop was an army helicopter, Mark thought it was fascinating to see the difference between helicopter controls and plane controls. 

The babies stayed in the stroller for most of the day, but that didn't keep them from getting to see everything!

Here we have a "flying car"!  We didn't get to see it fly but it was so cool to see it in person!

A nice shot of the family (except me of course ;-))!

Mark enjoyed seeing this Piper Cub and comparing sizes with his model.  :-)

3 WWII fighters, flying in formation.

We had a good seat, right by the fence!  The boys took advantage of our good view!

Our last stop for the day was this small Cessna, similar to the one that Mark took his first flying lessons in.

By the end of the day we were all beat, sunburned, hungry, (no food allowed unless bought there), and tired.  But lots of good memories were made (we hope) for the kids!

Fall Tea with Friends

    As many of you who have known me for awhile know, I used to do a Fall Friendship Tea every year in September or October.  Last year it became too much for me so I gave it up.  Now this year my mom had a small tea for my family and some old friends of ours.  It was not a friendship tea like I used to do, but it was still so nice to have a tea in the fall again!  We all had a lovely time!

    I arrived early to help mom get everything ready.  We always have so much fun catching up on all the news.  Our friends arrived around noon and we went ahead and had the tea right away.  Everything was so good, and the company was great!

All of my kids had so much fun having tea at Grandma's!

 And here is a picture of our good friends!  We have been friends for over 15 years!

After the tea we spent some time looking at Mom's teacup collection and chatting about tea related things.  Fun!

Our Weekend

This past week we aquired a shed off of craigslist!  Mark spent all day Saturday setting it up, it was a big job!  We are planning to use it for storing outdoor type stuff (rakes, lawn chairs, etc.) and stuff for my annual garage sale.  I love it!  I didn't get a chance to get a picture of it yet.  When I get one taken I will add it to this post.

On another note, while Mark spent Saturday setting up the shed, I was busy taking everything out of our crawlspace.  Why?  Well, we got over 4 1/2 inches of rain in one day this past week, and our crawlspace flooded.  Yuck!  That was a big job!  Fortunately only a few things were ruined, most of the stuff was able to be salvaged.  Also didn't get a picture of that, but believe me it was a mess!


Update:  Here are a couple of pics I took.  The first one is a  picture of our old turtle tank sitting on our back patio table.  It was empty before we got all the rain.  So, all the water you see in it is how much rain we got!  Wow!  All of this almost brings us up to the normal amount of rainfall for the year!

And here is a picture of our new shed.  It's a really nice shed and very roomy.  It should work perfectly for us!  I can't wait to get everything moved into it!

Cousins!

This past week I had some of my neices and nephew over for the day!  It was a wonderful time of fun and fellowship for the kids!

My oldest niece helped Elijah with some of his school work that had to be done, a huge help for me!  She also helped me in the kitchen quite a bit, the day that they were over is my kitchen day and I had a lot of things to get done.  I was amazed at the difference a few more years can make in ability!

The other girls had fun playing with all our little people sets.

And my nephew teamed up with Josiah, they are quite a pair.  Of all the kids these two are the ones that tried my patience the most (said with a smile, they are just both "all boy")! :-)  

All the kids also spent a lot of time playing in our backyard.  Fun!

Altogether for the day I had 10 kids, 9 and under.  It was a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to doing it again sometime!

Another weeks worth of meals

Since some of you expressed interest in seeing what a "regular" weeks worth of meals is in our house, I went ahead and took pictures of this past week, a Very normal week for us.

I apologize for the pictures, I'm not a food photographer by any stretch of the imagination.  So, here we go...

  Last Wednesday we had sausage egg burritos and water.  Included in the burritos were sausage, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, green peppers, cheese, and sour cream for those who like it.  I also like to have lettuce but my lettuce plants died and I didn't have any on hand.  I used some sausage that was given to us but we didn't really like.  This was my way of using it up, it masks the taste quite well.

The kids like this meal, although the younger ones don't eat the tortillas, just the egg mix.

Thursday's meal was taco salad, cantaloupe, and water.  The tortilla chips are actually tostada shells crushed up, there wasn't enough left for another meal of tostada's so rather than throw them away we used them for this meal.

Friday was pizza, as always.  I forgot to take a picture of the pizza's but here's a picture of the leftover pieces.  (Yes, only 2 pieces were left from 2 extra large pizza's!  Our kids eat a LOT.)

Saturday was Smorgasbord Day!  In other words, leftovers!  Our leftovers included biscuits, taco salad, pizza, green beans, mac n' cheese, peaches, bananas, pasta salad and sausage egg burritos.  We ate almost all of this up except for the taco salad which was slimy.  We put that in a container to give to my mom to feed to her dogs, which is what we do with all our leftovers that are inedible (not much).

Sunday was Tea Time!  We had lemon muffins, tomato slices, peach slices, ants on a log (celery, peanut butter and raisins), and cookies.  Yum!  This is my favorite meal of the week!

Monday I tried a new recipe, Taco Pasta Salad.  It was not a hit.  Oh well.  I served watermelon with it and we finished up the last of the cookies from the tea yesterday.

Okay, so this meal looks a bit weird.  It is baked potatoes topped with taco meat, cheese, and sour cream.  Served with corn.  I had plans to also serve tomatoes and a fruit salad with this but had some discipline issues to work through right as I was making dinner soooo, this is what it ended up being.

Well, there you have it.  This is a normal week for us.  You might have noticed that we don't serve meat plain hardly ever, it's ususally a casserole of some sort.  I try to serve fruit and vegies with every meal, not always succesfully.  We drink water with nearly every meal.

If you missed my post on a different kind of weeks worth of meals, you can find it here.

Balloon Classic 2011!

To celebrate Labor Day we got up early (5:15) and headed over to see the annual Balloon Classic!  It was 6:45 by the time we got everyone ready to go and actually got to the park but we were still in time to see the balloons being filled and watch all of them go up!  The weather was perfect for it, hardly a breeze at all.  The kids had so much fun!