Rutabaga Dreams

I have to go to my cousin’s wedding in San Francisco the first weekend of April. At that point I will be 32 weeks pregnant and I have absolutely nothing nice to wear that will fit my huge, whale-like body. I found a maternity dress that looks reasonably decent on Old Navy’s website for for only 10.99. However, it is all black and I’m wondering if that would be acceptable for a 4 p.m. wedding. Hmm. The price certainly is right, and perhaps being in all black would be *ahem* bulk reducing. I also have a $25 gift certificate for Old Navy lying around, so that would certainly help this fit into the budget. (The budget being one that allows no expenses other than the mortgage, rent, loan payments, buying stuff for the house and oh yeah, food and utilities)

I’m also realizing that I while I have lots of huge winter maternity clothes, I have almost nothing spring-ish to wear that fits. All my spring/summer maternity clothes are early maternity and I am way beyond that point now! Ah, the problems of having an early summer baby when you’ve had two winter babies. I wonder if this means all the baby clothes I’ve saved will be out of sync too.

After having a fair amount of success making some skirts last spring, I started thinking about making a maternity skirt or two. I have no idea what a maternity skirt should look like though, so that is a bit of a problem. I found this tutorial online last night though, and I am thinking of giving it a try. I do rather wonder how well it would stay up though, especially with a two year old who likes to hide behind my legs while grabbing my clothes whenever he is feeling bashful!

A couple weeks ago I started thinking about what I want to do with Emma next year for first grade. This perhaps might seem a little early to many of you, but I’m a planner by nature and I also have a baby coming in early June, so it seemed like thinking ahead would be a good idea. Thankfully, I’m quite pleased with a lot of what we’re doing, so we’ll just be continuing those materials next year (we’ll keep going with Prima Latina and move onto Math-U-See’s Beta program, for example). My biggest stumbling points right now are what we are going to add for next year. I really should add some more history to our course of study, and Emma would really like to add science and art. I think I’ve figured out what I want to use for science at least, but I’m not entirely sure what I want to do for the other two subjects. I’m also not sure how much time I want to devote to each. I try to keep Andrew Campbell’s multa non multum approach in mind, but I’m finding that Emma’s desires are coming in conflict with this whole approach. Sure, formal art and science aren’t necessary at her age, but if she wants to do them saying no hardly seems to be the right path to take! I’d love to add in some music appreciation, but since Emma doesn’t seem particularly inclined that direction I’m going to hold off on that for a bit.

I think for science I’m going to try the Noeo Biology Level 1 program next year. I like that it uses real books instead of a textbook, has a schedule with has experiments built in and sync’ed with the books, and doesn’t cost that much, considering what you get. I think it will be a good program that we’ll both enjoy, and if we do like it there are two more subjects available at level 1 and a series of level 2 programs as well. They recommend doing it either two or four times a week, and at four times a week it should take around 20 minutes per session.

For art, I’m thinking I’ll finally break out Child Sized Masterpieces (I bought it several years ago for some reason, but haven’t used it yet) and for a more hands on component I’m trying to decide between the rather easy and straight-forward Draw Write Now series or a more difficult (for me, at least!) but perhaps ultimately more useful Drawing with Children. I own the book, but I haven’t looked at it enough to do anything other than get intimidated.

For history… well, that’s where it gets somewhat complicated. I’m really not sure what sort of approach I want to take. At this point I’m leaning towards doing Story of the World, Vol. 1 next year with some of the activities from the activity book. This should give us a nice overview of the ancients and the classical world. Then in the following three years we’ll dive more deeply into the ancient world and do Old Testament history and Egypt in grade 2, Greece in grade 3, and Rome in grade 4. I’m also toying with the idea of doing California history during the summer, with field trips and read alouds as our main focus for learning this subject at this age. Comprehensive? No, not in the least. Fun? Yes, a great deal, I think, and Emma agrees. I think I’m going to go for fun rather than comprehensive study at this age, and we’ll get a better overall view of world history through the ages as she gets older.

The other thing I’m thinking a lot about is Emma’s sacrament preparation. She’ll start that next fall, and I’m wondering if I should plan on supplementing this with some additional material at home (besides our Bible reading, that is) I guess I’ll just have to wait and see how the program is before I make that decision. On the whole I’m reasonably pleased with what Emma’s doing this year (well, I think the pre-K/K stuff they are doing is generally lame, but what the slightly older kids are doing looks decent enough) so we’ll see how this goes.

I’m also trying to decide if it would be worth it to join one of the local public homeschool charters. I had never intended on doing such a thing, and I definitely don’t feel I need the help planning or anything, but the money ($1000 per school year) would pay for gymnastics or dance or something which I know Emma would enjoy and we would be hard pressed to provide in the next year. It also might be a good way to meet some other homeschoolers… because so far we’re doing dismally in that department. There’s supposed to be lots around here, but so far I haven’t met anyone (other than our cousin Christopher, of course - but he’s a little out of the age range for playdates ) I joined one email group, but I’m kind of thinking that we wouldn’t exactly fit in well with most of the folks there. So I don’t know - I have to decide if I can deal with the “oversight” and paperwork well enough to make the other aspects worthwhile. Granted, I don’t have to do it for the full year if it is really awful, but I’d rather not get into that situation if it is going to be that bad.

So that’s where I am right now. I’ve also recently written a where we’re at now sort of update, but of course it is really long (do I ever write short posts? sheesh) so I’m not sure if I’m going to post it or not.

Oh, and if you’ve recently read that the sky is falling for CA homeschoolers, all I have to say is don’t believe everything you read. It really isn’t as bad as many (most?) are making it sound. I was reading through the legal docs yesterday and it is far more complicated than “a CA court makes it so that only credentialed teachers can homeschool” story that’s going around. If you’re interested in reading more, take a look at CHN’s legal update page and the links they have for a more in depth and less inflammatory view.

I have a ridiculous amount of quinoa in a bucket in my downstairs closet, and I’ve decided I need to do something other than let it sit there.  It is a great grain - cooks quickly, tastes good, has a fair amount of protein and nutrients in it.  However, I got stuck in a rut where I was only using it in one dish, and then Matt’s stomach decided it no longer could deal with this dish.  So, I’m branching out.  Yesterday I cooked a cup of it and I’ve since made two loaves of quinoa bread in my bread machine.  It turned out quite well, and it has 5 grams of protein per slice (can you tell I’m pregnant? LOL) which is quite good for bread.  I also made the quinoa muffins from Deborah Madison’s book (substituting spelt flour for the quinoa flour because I am trying to use that up) as an afternoon snack for the kids and me.

I like trying to think of ways to use different grains and such in meals other than dinner.  It is so easy to fixate on dinner as the time to try and include everything (various grains, lots of veggies, etc) and then overlook all the other oppportunities throughout the day to work that sort of stuff in.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently about the whole grocery shopping/making dinner thing.  Before we moved I had everything quite settled - where I shopped, how often, how much planning I needed to do, and the various lists I needed to keep to manage it all.  It all worked quite well, and while I probably should have spent less money on the split board of my buying club it was all and all a good system.

Ever since we moved though things have been rather different.  First we were camping with no refrigerator, and this necessitated a trip to the grocery store every 3-4 days to buy ice.  Then we were in the trailer and I was so sick the very thought of food was misery so the whole menu planning thing went out the window.  Really, I have no idea what we ate for the month of October and I can’t think about that time without feeling nauseous.  (I still can’t even look at a trailer, any trailer, without feeling nauseous.  Isn’t that ridiculous?  Ah, pregnancy)  November saw the kids and I living with Matt’s mom and grandparents and December saw us trying to get settled into the apartment and traveling and such.  In January and February I tried to recover my old patterns but I’ve found that they don’t really work anymore.  I don’t have the resources I used to have, for one (no buying club, no Trader Joe’s) and my budget has shrunk as well.  I’ve been bouncing back and forth between SaveMart and Safeway, but I’m not particularly happy with either one.  SaveMart is ugly, poorly organized, under-stocked in the produce department, and while dairy and produce are  generally cheaper, everything else costs more.  Then there is Safeway, the store that likes to play games with their prices to a ridiculous degree.  I resent paying anywhere from 5.99 to 7.99 for the same 2 lb. block of cheese (which actually retails at 8.95, if memory serves) within a given month and I get tired of seeing all the extreme price fluctuations on everything else as well.  Sure, you get to walk out with a big savings on your receipt, but who really expects to pay something like $4.50 for a dozen store brand eggs (yes, that is the list price for a dozen of the Safeway brand eggs - they just are always on sale to varying degrees) The whole real price/sale price game is really tiresome, and over the past two months I’ve started to resent it as well.

I felt like I was stuck in this though, until I happened to go to WinCo when I was down in Roseville visiting Home Depot and Lowes.  Sure, WinCo doesn’t exactly have a lot of ambiance, but the selection is quite good and the prices are excellent.  The prices are far less than Safeway or SaveMart at list, and generally better than some of the better sales at Safeway (at least for the stuff we buy).  Trader Joe’s still has some things that I would rather get there - either because of price (for that level of quality at least), but there’s a TJ’s not far from the WinCo so they could be hit on the same trip.  The main drawback is the distance - it is about an hour away, each way.

I started thinking though…  would it be worth doing the drive to not have to play the price game and still get good prices?  Sure, buying local is great and all - but we’re comparing large retail chains to large retail chains, and the items I’m buying generally aren’t taxed so the benefit to the local community is quite small.  It also seemed rather much to make the drive every week just for a grocery run.  Granted there’s a lot of other stores there that I might want to go to occasionally, but in the end I decided it was too much driving time for a weekly event.

While also thinking about my general dissatisfaction with the whole grocery shopping thing I also came to the realization that the time has come in my life to simplify what I cook.  Now is not the season in my life where I get to try lots of new recipes, new ingredients, new cookbooks and new cooking sites.   I just don’t have time anymore - or at least I have other things I would rather allocate this time towards.  I used to think that it didn’t take that much longer to cook a new recipe than one that I already know,  but generally it does take longer and timing is more difficult because I don’t completely know what I’m getting into when I start.  And yes, I do read through the directions first - I just am a habitual underestimator of the amount of time it takes to do, well, just about anything. 

After a lot of thought, I decided I was going to try going to a monthly menu.  I never thought I would do this, but it seems far more reasonable now than it ever did before.  With my husband’s help we listed out about 25 main dishes we like that are reasonably easy to make and have a fair amount of protein.  About 2/3 to 3/4 are vegetarian, in order to make this easier on the budget.  I then printed out a calendar of the month of March and put menu items on days that made sense, given how the flow of our week tends to go.

Coupled with this monthly menu is a plan to go to WinCo and Trader Joe’s once a month to stock up on all the things I need this month.  This way I no longer have to pay the price game for most of the stuff we usually buy and I think ultimately I’ll spend less time shopping and planning.  Since I have the month planned, I know just about exactly what I need for my main dishes and even though I will be buying a fair amount of stuff, I should be fairly well assured that I’m actually going to use it all.  Storage might be a bit of an issue given my 9 linear feet of pantry space, but there’s always the downstairs closet.  I’ll continue to go to a local store for produce probably every week and a half or so, and I’ll just focus on whatever is in season/on sale and it should hopefully be a pretty short and painless trip.

At this point I’ve put together my pantry list (that’s another thing - I’ve vowed that I’m not going to cook anything that requires things not on my basic pantry list - I’m so tired of all these odds and ends that are only used for one recipe), my grocery lists for Trader Joe’s and WinCo, and figured out what I need to get for the rest of the month and into April.  I’m going to try this out on Monday and see how it goes.