Believe it or not! A menu - for the week of 9/22/13

Sunday

• Breakfast -  Scrambled Egg Skillet, Bagels & Cream Cheese
• Lunch - Mashed Potatoes & Hamburger Gravy, Corn, Salad
• Supper - Chicken Packets, Chips & Salsa, Brownies

Monday

• Breakfast - Egg "McMuffins"
• Snack - Peanut Butter & Bananas on Graham Crackers
• Lunch - Spaghetti & Meat Sauce, Garlic Bagels, Green Beans, Salad
• Snack - Chips & Salsa
• Supper - Leftovers

Tuesday

• Breakfast - Baked Egg Casserole, English Muffins
• Snack - Pretzel sticks & cheese cubes
• Lunch - Chicken & Rice Vegetable Soup, Bread Sticks, Cheese
• Snack - Apples & Peanut Butter
• Supper - Tater Tot Casserole, Salad, Peas

Wednesday

• Breakfast - Breakfast Burrito Casserole
• Snack - Granola Bars
• Lunch - Sandwiches
• Snack - Ice Cream Cones
• Supper - Taco Pasta Bake, Corn

Thursday

• Breakfast - Steel Cut Oats, Toast
• Snack - Cheese & Crackers
• Lunch -  Chicken Wings, Garlic Buttered Noodles, California Medley
• Snack - Cereal
• Supper - White Chicken Chili

Friday

• Breakfast - Fried Eggs, Bacon, Toast
• Snack - Pretzels & Juice
• Lunch - Leftovers
• Snack - Graham Crackers & Peanut Butter
• Supper - Cookout at W's

Saturday

• Breakfast - Overnight Blueberry Buttermilk Oven Pancake
• Lunch - Hamburgers & Toppings, French Fries
• Supper - Pizza

Flowers for Mommy

This morning, the youngest three had their piano lessons.  While Heidi was at her lesson,  I took the two boys to a thrift store to drop off some things, and while we were there we looked around to see what they had.

At the back of the store, there is a shelf of glassware.  Lincoln stopped to look, and stood there for a long time just staring at the shelves.  Finally he asked me, "Mommy, do they have any little vases?"  I pointed out a couple and he asked me which one I liked better.  Then he picked one of them up and Garrett picked up the other one and asked if they could buy them for me to put the flowers in them that they bring me from outside.

An elderly lady was at the front desk, and when she learned what the vases were for, she looked at the boys and told them that any little boys buying a vase for their mommy to put flowers in could just have them for free.  I think they made her day.  I know they made mine!

Modern day calendar

We were driving along and I heard this conversation in the seat behind me.

Lincoln, "Did you know that we use the Gregorian calendar?"

Unnamed sister, "No we don't! We use Google calendar!"

Enjoying the simple things

The temperature wasn't exactly perfect to sit around a fire tonight (notice how far away from the fire the chairs are...), but the little people around here have been scrounging up wood for a couple of days and asking if we could have a bonfire.  This morning, the first thing Garrett wanted to do was to have Todd go out and help get more wood...

Summer is over - Another year of School begins

We haven't posted much this summer- we've been too busy!  And a great summer it was!
Tamara spent her Labor Day in the traditional Erickson way - fine tuning the school schedule for the official start of our new homeschool year tomorrow.
If you've ever wondered how we schedule 7 different grades of school each day, feel free to take a look at our schedule here: Erickson Home School Schedule
This schedule is for Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.  On Wednesday the oldest four have piano lessons in the morning and all of the girls have violin lessons in the afternoon, so we have a separate schedule for Wednesdays.  The three younger children have their piano lessons on Tuesday morning.  Garrett has his first lesson tomorrow so now all seven are taking Piano.
Tamara starts out with a blank schedule in 15 minute increments.  Then she fits in piano and violin practice and the subjects where two or three children are taking the same class.  She arranges classes for the younger children so she can be available to work with them.  In some cases we team up an older child with a younger one.  This year Heidi is going to be doing First Language Lessons with Garrett.  This program is very scripted so it will be easy for her to read the parent part and prompt Garrett for his part.
In addition to this daily schedule, we enter the daily assignments for each child and subject for the semester into a Program called Homeschool Tracker.  As the children finish their assignments, they check them off.  This helps everyone if they are ahead or behind in each subject.
And if you are curious about the Children's chores here is a link to that schedule: Erickson Chore Schedule  These jobs change each week.

Little Red Car

Since we've been married, we've been a one car family.  We've always lived close enough to Todd's work to make it possible for me to drop him off if I needed the van, and it has worked out well.  A few months ago, I was chatting with one of the ladies at our insurance company while I was there for some reason and told her our oldest daughter was going to be 16 in November.  She said we would be better off insuring her on a little beater car than on our family van, so we've been keeping our eyes open for one.  One of Todd's co-workers mentioned that he was selling his little 1998 VW Golf (stick shift, no air, non automatic windows...) the other day, so now for the first time in 16 1/2 years we are a 2 vehicle family.

Todd brought the car home on Monday and drove it to work yesterday and this morning.  6 of our kids had piano lessons this morning, so after I had dropped a few of them off so the rest of us could squeeze into the Golf, we picked it up to run errands in (did I mention that it gets at least twice the gas mileage as our big 15 passenger van?).  One of the errands was to go to the Driver Services office and get new license plates.  The next - to the vet to pick up medicine to treat pink eye in our cattle herd.  I left 3 kids in the car since I was going to be in there for about a minute or less... and while I was in there I heard - thud!!! squeal!!!  Yep, a pick up truck backed right into the side of our little bitty bright red car... and shoved it over a foot or so - about 5 minutes after we transferred the title to our name...  We had a couple of pretty scared little girls and a nice little dent and broken tail light on the car.  When I stopped by to show Todd, all he could do was laugh at the craziness of it.

Little brothers are pretty handy to have around...

For the past few days, Lincoln has been making paper airplanes - lots of paper airplanes.  There are scraps of paper following him around everywhere he goes.

This morning, he asked me if I thought a lot of people would buy his paper airplanes.  I didn't want to discourage him, exactly, but I told him that not many people would probably want to spend money on something they could pretty easily make by themselves...  "But what about my North/South - East/West plane?" He asked.  (He's been working on his own design and thinks it works pretty well).  I told him to keep working on them and getting them really good and then maybe someone would want to buy one.

A few minutes later, he showed me a piece of paper that he had accidentally folded to look like an ice cream cone.  Next thing I knew, he was back, exclaiming that he had already had a customer!  ... Garrett had bought his ice cream cone for $0.01...

Even the table is lonely...

Our 3 oldest girls are away for a few days - Even though we still have the four younger ones buzzing around the house and keeping it lively,we already miss the girls so much and they have only been gone for a few hours.  Since we don't want to have to throw the food to each other at the table , we thought we'd take a few leaves out of it while they are gone.

THIS is what the table looks like when all the chicks are home in the nest

This is the table missing 3 of it's chairs - doesn't it look lonely?

It has been a long time since this was the normal number of chairs around our table!

Some pictures of our trip...

... to Connor Prairie last week.  

Teeth

Lincoln lost a tooth today.  As a result, a couple of the other kids started checking their teeth to see if they had any wiggly teeth and came to have me wiggle them to see how loose they were.  Garrett came up to have me check his out and sure enough one of his bottom baby teeth is just the slightest bit wiggly.  When I made that announcement, he was very excited! The rest of the family, however broke out in a chorus of "Oh NO!" and denying that it could possibly be loose.  I don't think any of us are ready for our baby to be growing up!

Getting to know their new critters

The kids have been saving their birthday, babysitting, and any other money that heads their direction for "something".  So when these two showed up for sale on the computer, they jumped at the chance.

Unloading

Checking out the new arrivals

Thunder & Lightning

Just my size

Every girl needs a horse...

...  and their brothers need a pony...

Back in 2011, Beauty joined our farm.  The kids have really enjoyed her, but she has been getting a bit lame and the older kids don't want to ride her much in case they would hurt her.  We had Cheyenne for a little while, but she ended up being a little too ornery for us to enjoy.  We've been watching for a horse that would work well for our family.  We're hoping we found one (plus her friend)

Lightning...

... and Thunder

Making progress

Laura must be getting pretty good at driving. As we are going along I all of a sudden realized I had forgotten to be nervous.

The progress I am talking about is more mine than hers, she has been doing a great job of driving for a long time, my not getting nervous is taking a little longer

Feeling old

We were driving along tonight and talking about some of the differences between when Todd & I were growing up and now - no water bottles, no cell phones, no internet, no microwaves... When I mentioned remembering when they tried to change us over to the metric system, Laura exclaimed, "Oh, I remember reading about that in my history book..."

The auction barn

After we got our sheep sheared this spring, several of them kept getting out of the fence - I guess they could fit through it a lot easier without their wool.  Anyway, yesterday afternoon we got a call from a neighbor and some of the sheep were over in his yard... so off to the auction barn they all went.  Our pasture and yard are so quiet tonight - no sheep or lambs calling to each other.  I didn't realize how much noise they made.  Hopefully we can get sheep again sometime... we all enjoyed them.

Summer Strings

The girls started violin lessons a few months ago.  Several of the music teachers in the area get some of their students together and have a couple of months of orchestra lessons with a concert at the end of July.  Tonight was the first practice.

Memorial Day Weekend

I meant to get an after picture of the laundry room after our 5 day weekend away visiting some friends, but I forgot to do it before we started the washing machine.  The only problem was, I didn't believe the weather reports and didn't pack clothes for cold, wet weather.  We had fun anyway and only had to spend time outside in the rain if we chose to.  It made having a bonfire fun, too.

My Farmers

Not for the squeamish... Lilac giving birth to a bull calf

I hope you don't mind another video of an animal giving birth.  Lilac actually belongs to some friends of ours but has been staying on our farm.  The kids went out to check on her the other evening and happened to catch her just at the right time.  We're posting this video so our friends' children can watch their calf being born.

I'm putting in several returns since the beginning picture is pretty graphic.  So if you don't want to see it, don't scroll down.  :)

Introducing our new driver to Chicago traffic