Adventures in Mama-Land

Chanukah presents for my sisters, as modelled by Ted (and yes, I’m Canadian, so 2 L’s really IS the correct spelling!): 1) Shark mitts for Sara.  These were going to be elephants, hence the grey, but then I remembered that she’s kind of sick of elephants.  Like if somebody figures out that you like orchids, say, or salt-and-pepper shakers, then they’re going to get you nothing but orchids or salt-and-pepper shakers for the rest of your life.  She’s probably not really sick of elephants, but I figured a new animal would be a nice change of scenery.  So… what else is grey?  After pondering sheep for a while and yawning tremendously at the idea of sheep mittens (cute, but blah), I realized that sharks were the very thing.  There was also a matching grey hat, but I don’t seem to have gotten a picture; it’s exactly the same as the one I made for Abigail in the picture below.  Oh, and I slipped a little elephant into one of the mitts – a quick project ( Per...

This week only, a quickie lapbook contest!  The winner will receive their choice of free lapbook PDF on Sunday, just in time for Chanukah.  (Make sure your comment below indicates what your choice will be so I can send it to you!) Click on either lapbook to view its free full-sized preview on CurrClick: Here’s the Rafflecopter thing-a-ma-jig… many chances to win, so enter and pass this post around – pretty please:   a Rafflecopter giveaway

Here’s what’s included: (components are scrambled, and so do not appear to scale in the collage!) Utterly exhausted from finishing and posting this thing, so I’m just copying and pasting the description I wrote for its CurrClick sales page : Come lapbook through the modern Land of Israel with these 26 delightful mini-books!  This lapbook includes a detailed 13-page guide to "Teaching Through the Israel Lapbook" (including web links), along with the following 26 mini-books ready for you and your child to fill in together: Physical Details 1.            Three Continents 2.            Map / Regions 3.            Bodies of Water 4.            How Big is Israel…? Spirituality 5.            Three Faiths...

  Y’all know I like to give credit where due, so here is a great big shout-out hooray to my friend Rachel .  Only an IRL friend will let you stand in her dining room and watch as she offhandedly does the most awesome things with food. Let me just back up a bit to say that we love freezer burritos and the kosher kind – breakfast, with egg, or beans & cheese – cost about $3 or more.  A pack of 6 burrito wraps costs $3-something.  A can of black beans (don’t gasp; yes, I use canned, though she probably doesn’t) costs under $1.  A pack of shredded mozarella – ditto; cheap (the pre-shredded is often cheaper than the blocks, these days, though I don’t like the powdery cellulose stuff it comes packed with). So here’s what I did, in an attempt to recreate Rachel’s freezer burritos.  I happened to have chicken filling because we were having burrito night here anyway.  If you don’t, just use salsa like she does.  In fact, you can use salsa anyway – ex...

Based on a “ladder” idea for Vayeitzei that I saw in Mommzy’s Montessori-based booklet of parsha ideas for Bereishis, I came up with this craft concept very, VERY quickly to occupy my kids and a friend who happened to come over last Friday for a 6-hour playdate (it wasn’t as gruelling as it sounds – I promise!). I borrowed a picture of Yaakov sleeping from this PDF of parsha colouring pages at Aish.com (I didn’t bother printing the rest of the picture, just used a PDF-to-JPG program to strip out that page, then used a paint program to cut out Yaakov, then used Word to paste three Yaakovs on one page so all three would fit on a single piece of paper.  Okay, that sounds like a LOT of work when I type it all out like that.  Trust me – it took about 2 minutes or less. The kids all enjoyed building the ladders and cutting out stars from yellow construction paper.  Gavriel Zev drew an alien above Yaakov’s head – that’s what he’s dreaming about.  Naomi Rivka wanted to...

“It’s my own invention!” Here’s a quick easy medium-hearty soup to go along with a rice-based stir-fry – especially good for a cold evening when there wasn’t much in the house beyond rice and tinned tomatoes… I improvised this, writing down what I did along the way so you could enjoy it, too (cuz I knew ahead of time that it was destined to be just as fabulous as it turned out to be!). What’s in it: 1 tin tomatoes (the big kind of tin – 700-something ml?) 2 tins water or nice veggie broth 2 cubes frozen ginger 4 cloves garlic 3 tbsp ch soup mix (omit if using nice veggie broth) 1-2 cups of frozen corn kernels, depending on how much you like corn; I forget how much I tossed in 1 package extra-firm tofu, browned in wok 2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce (contains fish) black pepper to taste sriracha / hot sauce to taste, optional – OR red pepper flakes, optional 4 tbsp soy sauce (s/b a bit less?) 6 tbsp seasoned rice vinegar (I used lite = low sodium, just because we bought it by...

A long, LONG time ago, I posted a link to a printable “summer” reading list I’d made up based on Five in a Row (FIAR), a popular unit-studies curriculum for ages 4-8 based around classic picture books that generally emphasize good stories and wholesome values.  Took us a bit more than a summer to get through the books, but eventually we did it, which felt really good.  I’ve wanted to do the same thing ever since then for the books in FIAR2, the second “level” of the curriculum (there is a little-kids version AND a “beyond” curriculum for older kids that generally covers only 1-2 novels per year instead of 20-some-odd picture books.  And now, at last, it’s done! As much as I like the idea of FIAR, this list is my pragmatic nod to the fact that we have absolutely no time or space in our lives to fit in unit studies, and probably wouldn’t be good at them even if we tried.  However, if you’re inclined in that direction, I have heard from others online that the actual...