A Rainy Summer Day as a Busy Mom of 5!

Up to a rainy summer day here on the farm. I don't know if you can hear the rain out there but rainy days call for pancakes in the morning. So that's what I'm going to do. Make some sourdough pancakes. We have some fresh local peaches on hand here that I need to use up. So we are going to start off with that this morning. Jesus come. Inhabit the praise of the sinner and the saint. Jesus come. And Jesus move. Here and now. We call on you Lord come meet us today. Here and now. So much more. Here and now. My favorite quick and easy lunches is homemade nachos. I like to make the chips from scratch. Also I do not use seed oils. I love frying these in avocado oil or today I have some lard here. I use that as well. I have served these to so many people and they're like where have I been? I need to make my own chips and they're seriously so easy. So I just have some corn tortillas. Already quartered these. I usually cut them into quarters and then I'm going to fry them, season them. I like to use this. This is the Redmond Real Salt. And then what makes nachos so nice other than that they taste delicious is it's a great way to also clean out leftovers. So I showed you a salad a couple of videos ago that a number of you were loving and were like wow I really want to try this. Great way to use up leftovers and that's what I'm doing again today. Leftovers sometimes looks like a bunch of different things just dumped into a 9x13 pan and that's what we eat for lunch and it's delicious. Not quite as pleasing to the eye but toppings are kind of endless with nachos. If you don't know what to make for lunch today maybe give that a try. Got a little break in the rain so I am quickly heading out to the garden before it starts again and I want to grab a jalapeno for the nachos as well as maybe some herbs to top it with. See what all we have ready here. But before we do that I want to tell you about today's video sponsor which is Blueland. I've talked to you about them before. For a couple of years now I have been on a mission to really just revamp so much of our home. We've been decluttering a lot, getting rid of a lot of things and along with that a lot of products that are filled with chemicals. I have been trying to find much better options and I've actually been using Blueland now for a number of months. Things that I had just given up as forever stained stains came out of and things came out brighter. Colors were more vibrant and so I was very pleasantly surprised. If you are new here and wondering what in the world I'm even talking about, basically Blueland is a company that has all these cleaning products specifically that are free of lots of junk that you would find in lots of other cleaning products. So parabens, ammonia, phosphates and a whole list of other things. A lot of times when you go out to buy yourself a bottle of cleaning supplies you'll have, you know, jugs of things. One of my favorite things about Blueland is they don't send you jugs of things. They just send you the tablets that you can then put into your washing machine, literally pop this tablet in, then fill the rest with water. But this August they launched a brand new scent in their laundry detergent which is Spring Bloom and it is the most beautiful scent. I would describe it as kind of citrusy, wildflowery with amber. This is what the refill packets look like. You can buy them in bulk or even set up a subscription which is what I've done with my laundry because I was like, I never want to run out of this stuff. So if you would like to give Blueland a try you can use my code right here. It will give you 15% off your first order. I'll also leave that code for you in the description box below. My other favorite thing about doing nachos is that it's a one-dish meal so you can just get one big tray, even a cookie sheet, pile everything on here and it's not so many dishes to wash later which is big brownie points when you are a busy mom or homemaker. I don't have a recipe for any of this stuff. I just literally throw it together but for my queso here I normally like to use butter. I don't have butter right now so I'm actually using avocado oil. I'm just going to make a roux with some flour and the avocado oil, add some milk, and once that's thick I just add shredded cheese. I have some fresh mozzarella down there that I'll add then until it is melted and it's just a nice smooth cheesy sauce. What in the world? My daughter just brought me this. Since when are leaves changing color? Oh my goodness. Must have been an early tree, right? We're not that close to fall, surely. I'm actually kind of excited for fall-ish but I'm not ready to give up summer yet so mixed feelings on this. My bed using fresh mozzarella. This is what it's doing so we are just making little clumps instead of drizzling. What I've been wanting to do all summer long is to make homemade ice cream with like a cobbler or a crisp or something mixed in with it and eat that for like dessert on our little personal sized cantaloupe. We have these tiny little cantaloupes that are the absolute cutest things and I want to fill the inside of them with ice cream. I think that'd be an adorable summer dessert. Yeah, thank you. I mixed up my base yesterday so that it would have time to chill. This is just vanilla bean. Pour it in there and then when I do add-ins such as a crisp or a cobbler or things like that, I first churn it like this till it is pretty much completely done churning and then I'll stir in the add-ins. So I'm still not sure what I want to do with this. We could even keep it and add a little bit of crumbles to the top later. I don't know. I'll need to figure that out but for now I'm just going to churn this and we can go take a little nap, right? Somebody needs a little nap. Somebody is popping teeth left and right, right? You're doing a good job. So this is the consistency that it is right now. Pretty good but I want to get it a little bit thicker. I'll have the recipe for you in the description box below. I did share it a couple videos ago but it is only cream egg yolks, maple syrup, a pinch of salt and vanilla bean paste. So super easy and super delicious. Abby, can I help put these in jars? In each breath that I breathe When I wake or I sleep Everything I need is found in you All in you Everything I need is found in you Found in you Jesus What is love that the God of the heavens would scoop down to love me with grace In the midst of my pride and rebellion His love wouldn't give up the chase In each breath that I breathe When I wake or I sleep Everything I need is found in you Jesus Everything I need is found in you Next batch of herbs going in the freeze dryer and I also whipped up this. It's basically a cobbler, peach cobbler, but just the top of it. So little tip if you are doing add-ins into homemade ice cream is chop this up and freeze it a little bit before you mix it in. You really don't want to add any warmth to the ice cream or else it will start to melt the actual base. So that is what I want to do now and apparently I should have used parchment paper but I will chop this up if I can get it out of the pan and freeze it for maybe an hour before stirring it into the ice cream. I don't know if the rain is done or not. It's kind of windy. Looks like we might have more rain coming. I don't know but for now Josh is able to work on this chicken coop I was telling you about before. So I am wanting a little break from the kitchen so let's head out there and see how it's coming along. I think we are finally ready to put all of this together. My ice cream is not frozen hard yet but I think it'll work. My cobbler crumbs here are nice and cooled off now so I'm going to mix those in and then we'll get ready to put the cantaloupe together. Okay how cute right? These are our little personal sized cantaloupe. We grew these from seed and we also did these last year. I just think they are adorable. I also did go ahead and make a caramel sauce. This is just like a salted caramel. It is still really hot so I'm not sure. Homemade ice cream does thaw a lot easier or faster than store bought so I'm kind of hoping this cools off a little bit until I actually drizzle it on. Let's see how it does. How fun is that for little dessert plates? Let's give it a taste test. 10 out of 10 recommend. Those flavors actually go really well together. So if you need an easy but kind of impressive looking little summer dessert I highly recommend giving this a try. This is what summers on the farm look like. I just pulled out all these peaches from the freeze dryer. They have been a favorite snack. You can see the kids have already been eating out of one of them. I need to put these into jars which I have one almost full here and then we'll fill some more. I also have tomatoes from the garden here. I have a bunch of red beets cooked here that I need to can today and then we have melons from the melon patch. I don't know if that's even on the screen but lots of fresh produce going on. Then I also have some things, sourdough things, that have been fermenting overnight that I need to bake. So I'm going to see what all we can get to today. We actually have friends coming over for picnic lunch and then a play date this afternoon. So I don't have too much time here this morning but hopefully we can at least get a start on things. The jars that I'm using, these are actually from a dollar store probably two or three years ago. Love them. Super inexpensive. And then this one I actually found on sale at Crate and Barrel maybe a year ago. Giant five pound jars. I have a couple of these that I picked up for like $15 on clearance. So that's what I'm storing these in because they will not be long-term stored. Literally cannot keep these jars full. Okay wow what a terrible angle but if I was storing these long-term I also have these mylar bags that I would store them in to keep them super long-term. But I was saying wow how nice will it be to have peaches to eat in January and Josh is like yeah how nice will the idea of it be because they definitely will not last that long. I was trying to think what to make for our snack this afternoon at our play date and I thought you know what I haven't done sourdough baking actually in a little while. I feel like it's been sitting in the fridge more as I focus on canning and all the things but I have a bunch of peaches here that need to be used up. They are very ripe. So I thought it'd be fun to make some sourdough cinnamon rolls with peaches so like peach rolls essentially. Peach sweet rolls I guess you'd call them. And then hopefully with a cream cheese frosting. I need to actually check if I have cream cheese. So that's what we're working on next. I totally forgot to take out my butter to soften so I just melted it and we are gonna put a nice layer of butter on here because butter makes everything better doesn't it? Well this is fun kind of like I'm painting. Sometimes people are like is there anything you can't do? Yes there is. I am no artist. The best you get from me is stick figures and I am no seamstress. I tried altering a brand new dress not long ago and it didn't go so well and I ended up throwing the entire dress away so but I do love obviously a lot of things that you see here on my channel. week's video to film this for you and for whatever reason my audio was terrible and had to delete that clip so we're trying again but if you don't follow me over on Instagram you are probably wondering what in the world is going on. Sitting down again with curriculum. Yes we thought we had everything planned out figured out for our homeschool year and turns out so much has changed from what we were planning to do and we could not be more excited so I wanted to sit down and chat with you. For those of you that follow me over on Instagram this is not news to you. I was talking about it there but so many of you were asking can you please do more of a walkthrough of this new plan over on YouTube so that's why I'm tagging that onto this video. I'll try to make it as concise as I can. I know I did a curriculum overhaul video just what a month or two ago here on my channel. I had no idea what was all to change and so basically what happened we have been doing the good and the beautiful for a number of years and we're really really excited about it when I found them. I should just give that disclaimer this whole segment is not to bash any curriculum anybody that homeschools differently than us or anybody that doesn't homeschool. I am just simply sharing what we're doing what we are super excited about right now and so that's that's all there's to it. But basically as time went on I felt less and less like the good and the beautiful was the best fit for us but I didn't know what else to do so we kept doing it however I was finding myself very overwhelmed especially as this whole tower thing is not working for me so I was finding myself really overwhelmed as we added more kids to school. So we started off with two in school and we did the good and the beautiful and that worked pretty well then we added a third and then we had another baby and just as time went on I found myself more and more mommed out as I called it. Basically I would sit there trying to teach you know three different lessons, three different grades, three different books while I have a toddler pulling on my skirt calling mama mama and a baby crying needing to be nursed and I just felt like I could never reach around and it was just getting quite overwhelming so I had been praying for quite some time that this would be the best school year yet but not expecting anything to change I guess. I was telling Josh the other day I guess that's really a lesson for me. I was praying and praying for this but I went ahead and just ordered the exact same thing pretty much. So obviously I had my curriculum ordered as you saw in that video and I don't know it might be three four weeks ago now that one of my good friends came over and she was telling me about this curriculum she had heard about. I just knew this was what I had been praying for. I got so excited over the next couple days. I pretty much read through the entire website. I've never been more excited to start school. In fact Josh kept saying, babe I've never seen you this excited for school before. The kids have been seeing my excitement literally I just cannot contain it. So without further ado I'm gonna get right into that and for math we are keeping things the same. The big kids are doing teaching textbooks so that's been going really well. Really good fit so far for us and that is what we were planning to do with that. For our kindergartner I got this one. It is math with confidence. She's really enjoying that so far and I did also kind of start supplementing her with this throughout the summer which she has really been enjoying. She's been begging to read. I'm happy with that book so far. This one is another one I think I showed you in that video and we are still doing this. We're actually just we have been for a month or two just reading a chapter of this at dinner and the kids love it. They will come bring this book out if I forget. So that is everything that we had planned to do and plans have not changed. Okay now everything else changed. So we are doing campfire curriculum. Where do I even start? So basically what it is it's a Charlotte Mason style of homeschool. I used to always think Charlotte Mason was just for the people that didn't really want to do school but still call it something and I realize now how wrong I was. Like that is not at all the case and honestly pretty much brought to tears over and over just the gift that this whole style of teaching feels to me and fits my kids learning styles and all that. I know it's not for everybody and that's okay but basically campfire curriculum specifically was founded by a Christian dad actually. Christian family and they have all these different unit studies. So we are starting on the zoologist one but they have all kinds of different ones and different like fields. So we have zoology, they have veterinary, they have ER provider, they have living off the land, natural medicine, meteorologist, titanic, history units, and then they have specific ones for certain holidays. So they have a Thanksgiving one and a Christmas one and fourth of July they have one on the holocaust. All kinds of different units. We are planning to spend about one month per unit and so we're planning to go through a number of these throughout the school year which is really exciting but if you are interested in it I would highly recommend just going and reading through their website like I did because they answer so many questions on there. But one thing that's really stuck with me since thinking more like a Charlotte Mason homeschool which is so far from what we've ever done is that knowledge does not necessarily mean learning. So if you stick this big fat encyclopedia type of textbook in front of your kids they're not necessarily going to learn more than in some hands-on activity. So it's so much more about what your kids actually retain and teaching them to love learning than for them to do all of these like super crazy textbooks. So when you get on their website you can select your unit and we picked zoology because this is the one that goes into note-taking. Now something about this curriculum specifically is there are no worksheets which is hallelujah. That does not mean your kids just sit there and do nothing. It goes really in-depth into note-taking and specifically the zoologist unit goes really in-depth into that which is why we started with this one specifically. But their philosophy is that in the real world if you go to college or if you job shadow or if you you know all these different things you don't sit there with worksheets you have to be good at taking notes and all of these scenarios and so what we focus on with this is teaching the kids to take notes really well and I'll show you more of that here in a minute. But they do that, they do narration, they are definitely learning and in my pretty much one week of experience with this so far they are retaining way more than they ever did out of worksheets and so that's been really exciting. But when you go on Campfire's website you see the different units and then when you make a purchase, which one unit is about $30 at least that's what I paid apparently, I just missed a sale they had which is kind of a bummer, you do not get the actual books when you make a purchase. It is just the digital copy so you can then bind and print them at home, you can have them printed elsewhere or you can just do them directly off the laptop. I wanted to print them because I'm a very like pen and paper type girl, I do not like to spend that much time in front of the screen with the kids, all of that. So this is what we did, I just printed them at home, I got a little binding machine, I bound them and then you have options. So you can see I have four books here, the way that it works is you have your early learner, that's this one and this is more for like preschool, kindergarten kids that are not yet reading and so this is a lot of hands-on activities or even coloring or cutting things out that go with your main subject, that's what early learner is. Next is growing and this is the one that we are mainly using, they also have advanced. Advanced is high school and adult so this is really the main one that we use and the way that it works is first of all their art is absolutely stunning throughout here, you can see all the bright colorful pictures, very pleasing to the eye like the good and the beautiful was. Then how it works is everything in black text you read together, so we will sit down together, me and the kids around the table, I will read this to everybody and while I'm reading this, my older kids have their composition notebooks, I think I showed these to you in my homeschool hall as well, they are the most beautiful composition notebooks that I found on Amazon for under seven dollars and they are lined and the older kids will sit and take notes out of what I am reading and then the little ones will sit there and draw, color, cut pictures of things that I am reading about, that kind of thing which has been really fun for them, they feel all grown up doing that and I will read here, sometimes I'll take turns with the older kids if it's a bit of a longer lesson and then on the side they have some color-coded things that's color-coded by age and just more advanced for the older ones, less advanced for the younger ones, the information in this is just absolutely incredible, they actually build this curriculum off of shadowing people in the actual fields, interviewing them and that kind of thing, I love that at the end of each lesson they have a faith talk which pulls in the bible and this could kind of be used as your devotions and then they also have a think tank which teaches your kids critical thinking, something that is so lacking in our world today and those have been things that really stick out to me, they have optional activities with each lesson that you can do to just kind of enhance the experience and so that is basically what it is, we spend so far about I would say an hour, hour and a half per half a lesson in this, so one unit only has 12 lessons and at first I was like, oh my goodness, I can't imagine that taking a month but now I can because one lesson is literally, I counted, 16 pages long and so we're splitting them in half which then takes us the month to do a book but before I get too off track here, that is the growing portion I guess of this curriculum, the book that we use the most, now you can do campfire curriculum, these three books that I just showed you, pick whatever ages your kids are and that can be just like an elective to what you're already doing, like an add-on, something to add to your homeschool or if you want to make this your core curriculum and include all your other curriculums except for math, they don't do math but you want science, history, reading, phonics, all the things then you also print out this one which is your core connections and when you add this to your homeschool, this is what makes it cover all the rest of those subjects and so that has been really neat, that is what we are doing and just absolutely loving so far, we've kind of divided the days up depending on what day of the week it is, so we're doing math and campfire curriculum every day and then Mondays is piano lessons, Tuesdays is nature journaling which is what we're using these little notebooks for, these are just like blank pages, I cannot wait to do more of that but Wednesdays we are doing a hero of the faith study, so we're starting off with Corrie Ten Boom, I think I have a book on her somewhere here, this one I just got off of Amazon and the first week we just read the story, the second week we want to go on torch lighters and watch, it's like a cartoon or like an animated video of heroes of the faith which is really good because a lot of those are pretty heavy stories and the fact that it's animated really helps when you have kids but still brings the point across, so we do that the second week, the third week of the month we do a page on her in our art journals or nature journals and I will print out some pictures just off Pinterest or whatever of her quotes, maybe a picture of her, things like that, they can do a page on here about her, things that stuck out to them from her story and then the fourth Wednesday of the month we either write a letter to one of our sponsored kids, kids that we sponsored or a letter to a missionary, something like that to encourage missionaries, so and then Thursdays we have homeschool co-op and Fridays we're actually doing passion projects, I wasn't sure how this would go off but the kids have been devouring this idea, so basically they still do math Friday morning and then the rest of the entire morning they have to work on something that they are super passionate about, so it's kind of an open book but they need to know by Thursday evening what we're doing Friday because we can't spend all morning Friday trying to figure this out, last time Hudson and Lessie both made something in the kitchen, Hudson made dinner, Lessie made these sourdough cupcakes that she frosted, it was so cute and Kyra actually made a vlog of all the animals on the farm, she videoed it, it was the most adorable thing but basically I want that time to be for them to just really work on things that they're passionate about, get better at skills that they are interested in and it's all things, they're not sitting down and watching movies Friday morning, they are doing something with their hands, something that they are learning, something that will benefit them for the rest of their life, so anyway that is a really quick overview, I hope that that kind of answers your questions for all of you that were asking for more of a rundown of exactly how this is gonna work, a number of you have been asking over on Instagram for like how to learn more of Charlotte Mason's style and all of that, the Campfire Curriculum website was very helpful to me and just reading pretty much, I think I read pretty much every single page on their whole website, very helpful, there is another YouTube channel called Simply Charlotte Mason, also tons of information, very helpful, obviously that's more broad like Charlotte Mason's style, we are not incorporating every single aspect of it but I do find that really helpful just to listen to those and learn more that way, I'm also currently reading this book, it's called Home Education by Charlotte Mason that also has really good meat in it for the subject and if you have been doing Charlotte Mason and have anything to add, I would love to know, leave that in the comments below but really quick, one more thing, these pencil pouches have been a highlight which is kind of funny, they're literally pencil pouches but how it works is I embroidered each of the kids names on these which is so sweet and then they just unroll like this, they have their crayons in here, I picked up these darling little gold scissors from Amazon for literally like $3.50, I even got one for myself but this has been really cute but very practical, they can just literally take this with them wherever they go, for whatever subject they need it, anyway so that's just a fun little Amazon find to tack onto that, let me know if you have any more questions about all of this down below, I am so excited about this, I'm sure you'll probably be hearing quite a bit more throughout the school year and as we keep going but we are so excited and so thankful for all this, thank you all so much for joining me today, I hope you were inspired and I'll look forward to seeing you next time, bye friends!