Back to School

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It’s that time of year again. Some kids are already back in school and many others will be boarding buses next Monday to start the new school year. This time of year also signifies one of my favorite things: back-to-school shopping!

I am not a big shopper. Send me out in search of an outfit or shoes, and I will come back frustrated, discouraged and empty-handed. But school supplies I can handle.

I love new notebooks and unopened packs of crayons and pencils. And more than anything else, I love post-it notes. So many different colors, shapes and sizes. And they are so practical!

Some days I think my world would spin out of control without my post-it notes to keep me focused.

A lot of moms I know have taken advantage of the tax-free shopping days to stock up on fall clothes for the kiddies. Those of you with young children probably have their first-day outfits chosen and maybe even ironed. Those of you with older children may be dreading their choice of first-day clothes.

Whether your child is five and starting kindergarten like my oldest or fifteen and beginning another year of high school, it is important to send kids off the first day feeling prepared and loved. Ask your child how he or she feels about the first day, listen attentively and encourage with words and hugs!

Share your ideas for commemorating the first day of school!

Dinner: Fast and Easy

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There are days when I get home at 6:00 with two ravenous kids and a hungry husband on the way, and I find nothing that can be made quickly. Usually I have meat in the freezer, but by the time I defrost it and then cook it, I am too hungry to even stand up. And usually, when I defrost meat in the microwave, I end up cooking the outside of the meat while the inside is still frozen. Has that ever happened to you?

There are some nights when I need a dinner plan that involves one or two steps and doesn’t require chopping. Cue the chicken.

The key to fast and easy frozen chicken is cooking it before you freeze it. I always buy one of those big boneless, skinless chicken packs because I need to feel like I’m getting a deal. But it’s perfect because I can cook one or two pieces the first night and prep the rest for future dinners. And you can too!

Here’s the plan:

Put the chicken in a roasting pan, drizzle with a little olive oil, and then sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cook at 400 degrees for 20-30 minutes, until the juices run clear when cut through the thickest part.

After it cools, cut the chicken up into bite-size pieces and freeze portions in Ziploc bags. You are now all set for fast and easy dinners!

And here are some menu ideas:

  • Barbeque sandwiches: Heat chicken with some watered-down barbeque sauce and serve on hamburger buns. Fancy it up by topping the chicken with coleslaw.
  • Quesadillas: Heat chicken and put it on a tortilla with shredded cheddar. Fold the tortilla in half and brown it in melted butter in a frying pan.
  • Subs: Heat chicken and top with provolone. Place on toasted sub rolls with shredded lettuce, tomato, and mayo. If you have extra time, add in sautéed onions, green peppers and mushrooms. Yum!
  • Chicken salad sandwiches: My favorite recipe includes a little orange juice, apple cider vinegar, mandarin oranges, sliced grapes and toasted almond slices. But you can use any recipe you like.
  • Wraps: Warm the chicken and place in a tortilla with chopped lettuce, diced tomatoes, shredded cheddar and ranch dressing. You can even add in corn and black beans!
  • Pasta: Toss chicken in fettucine alfredo or your favorite pasta dish.
  • Nuggets: My kids will eat the chopped chicken like nuggets as long as I give them a dollop of ketchup for dipping!

 

How else could you use the cooked, chopped chicken?

Bel Canto

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The book I finished last week has all the makings of a fabulous read.

Exotic setting: somewhere in South America

Action and suspense: a group of international bigwigs have been taken hostage

A little romance: one female opera singer among many male captors and captives

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett was a well-written and fascinating story of love and friendship. But I didn’t love it. I did stay up too late one night to finish it, but it’s not one that I would fervently recommend to friends. It would be a great choice for a book club; the intricate bonds the characters formed and the unexpected ending would generate a fabulous discussion.

A book by the same author that I did love was State of Wonder. Also set in an exotic locale with some action and suspense, it was a page-turner that I couldn’t put down.

Have you read any books by Ann Patchett?

A New Enemy

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I don’t have too many enemies in the world that I know about, but there is definitely one.

Can you see him? I know, it’s difficult to see him. I need a better camera (hint, hint, Mr. Nine Lives).

He’s a groundhog and he’s decimating my garden, vegetable by vegetable. First it was the cucumbers, then the green beans and now it is my tomatoes. He just grabs them off the vine, takes a couple of bites and leaves them on the ground. It’s like he’s taunting me.

He won’t even stand up and fight for himself. Every time I go out to confront him, he runs away and hides in his hole. Chicken.

Now I spend my days, staring out the window, waiting for him to make his move so I can go out and defend the fruits of my labor. Don’t picture anything too brave. I stand on my deck and throw little stones to try to scare him.  I tried to talk my five-year old into standing watch for me so that I can get something productive done, like wash the dishes or maybe even shower, but she just looks at me like I have two heads. Come to think of it, if I did have two heads, I could at least write a blog post or check my email as I stare at the garden.

The worst part is that every time I venture into the garden, I am a little afraid. I go in wearing my tall rain boots, armed with a stick. I never turn my back to his hole, lest he spring out and attack!

But what really keeps me awake at night is the fear that this day will just repeat over and over again, until there is nothing left in my garden. Bill Murray, I feel your pain…

Overnight Oats

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Peanut Butter Fingers is a blog about fitness and eating. The blogger, Julie, describes the foods she eats and her exercise routine for the day. I tend to skip over the exercise details as my eyes start to gloss over. I don’t know why… But I do like to read about the healthy food she makes. It may be a subconscious effort to balance out my obsession with The Pioneer Woman’s buttery, cheesy, creamy recipes.

Anyways, Julie eats Overnight Oats a lot and raves about how good they are. Mr. Nine Lives and I like oatmeal and I am always looking for easy and portable breakfast foods.

You can mix up the flavors by using different varieties of yogurt and adding your favorite toppings. I used apple-cinnamon flavored Greek yogurt and I chopped pecans to add in the morning. Actually, I crushed them with my hands because I was too lazy to get out a knife and cutting board. Sad, isn’t it?

Overnight oats were very easy to make. I like the flavor of the apple-cinnamon with the pecans, though I may add a little more cinnamon in the future. The gummy consistency took a little getting used to. But I would definitely make overnight oats again, especially since Mr. Nine Lives asked for more!

Have you ever made overnight oats?

 

The Slide and Reading

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Summer is a wonderful time for children to relax, explore non-academic interests, and engage in outdoor activities. The opportunity to develop hobbies and creativity is priceless. Reading, however, should be incorporated into every child’s summer schedule.

For younger children, read to them every day. Find fun summer books about the beach, the pool, ice cream or mosquitoes! From infancy, you can read short books to your child, pointing at pictures and repeating key words. In the preschool and early elementary years, read easy books together to work on skills such as decoding (sounding out words) and using the pictures as clues to understanding. Another great idea is reading more advanced books aloud to your child and focusing on discussion. Why do you think he did that? What do you think is going to happen next? How would you feel if you were that character?

For the child who can read independently, a reading log or journal is helpful for recording summer reading. This provides for the child a visual representation of his or her reading progress and a way for you to hold the child accountable. If a child has sufficient writing skills, include in the log an area for a response to the reading. This allows for a time of independent reflection on the reading, and a basis for later discussion with a parent. The table below shows a template for a reading log.

 

Date

Number of minutes

Book & pages

Summary of what happened

My thoughts & questions

 

As with all reading throughout the year, discussion is essential. Use the same types of questions previously outlined, focusing on the skills of summarizing, predicting, and making inferences and connections.

Local libraries often offer summer reading programs that provide suggestions for books, an outline for logging and responding to reading, and incentives for completing a certain amount of reading. For students who like competition or desire social interaction, a library program might be quite motivating.

Whatever route you choose, make sure you read all summer long. You are not only helping prepare your child for the coming school year, but you are developing in your child a habit for lifelong learning.

So easy!

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After I had my first daughter, I met two other new moms. For the past five years, we have supported and encouraged each other in so many ways. We talk about everything having to do with our kids- how can we teach them to share, in which sports should we enroll them, and even the array of colors found in stinky diapers.

I will not forget the time when our kids were maybe 18 months old. We were eating lunch at an outdoor restaurant and one of the moms brought rice cakes and hummus for her son. I couldn’t believe it.

My daughter tried some and loved it! Ever since that moment, hummus has been one of our staples. We use it to dip vegetables and pita chips. I love it on a tomato and muenster cheese sandwich. I even spread it on whole wheat tortillas and fold it in half like a quesadilla for my daughter to take in her preschool lunchbox.

What gets me, though, is the price. If it’s one sale, it’s okay. But if it’s not…

A few of my friends have been making hummus and so I experimented using a recipe one had written down for me. It was good, but needed a little adjustment. I realized that I should use a little less olive oil and use one of slightly higher quality. The one I used had been sitting for quite a while and tasted a little bitter.

For my second attempt, I turned to one of my favorite cookbooks, How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. You can also find Mark Bittman’s hummus recipe on his website. His recipe was almost identical to my friend’s, but his called for more tahini.

I decided to use less tahini than he recommends; for one can of chick peas, I used 2 tablespoons of tahini and 2 tablespoons of olive oil. And I threw in a roasted red pepper to give it a little extra sweetness.

Good for you, and so easy!

A Weekend of Culinary Delights

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This past weekend, our wonderful friends invited us to stay with them at the beach. These friends are so kind to us, and they are a ton of fun to hang out with. I am pretty sure that one of the reasons we get along so well is that we all appreciate good food and drink.

There are no recipe links to the following culinary delights, just photos and descriptions to make you a tiny bit envious. I’m so sorry. Well, not really.

On Sunday, we spent a few hours on our friends’ boat. I know, the hard life… We stopped for lunch at a yacht club on the bay. After much thought and discussion, we made the difficult decision to share nachos as an appetizer. It was a perfect blend of crunchy chips and soft cheese, hot spice and cool sour cream, healthy tomatoes and not-so healthy everything else. Yummy!

 

Can you see all the fruit in this sangria? We chopped up everything we could find- clementines, cherries, plums, grapefruit, and lemons, and then let it all sit in red wine for a few hours. Wow!

 

I have never been a fan of bread pudding. Like most wonderful foods in my life, if I didn’t try it, I figured I must not like it. Since I was a guest this past weekend, I forced myself to use my manners and try the bread pudding. A decision I do not regret. Melt-in-your-mouth warminess with just the right amounts of creaminess and cinnamoniness. Not words, I know.

 

Well, we didn’t really eat this one, but we did eat crabs steamed in Old Bay. So delicious! And Mr. Nine Lives learned a valuable lesson. Crabs are not only fast but also have very sharp claws. If you see a piece of seaweed stuck to a crab, resist your OCD tendencies and leave it alone!

Because if you don’t, it may grab onto your finger. And if it does, you may instinctively pull your hand back. And if you do, the crab may find a free ride out of the bucket it is trapped in. And then it may hide in the corner of the boat, keeping all passengers on edge until it is captured.

I will leave you with a picture of Mr. Nine Lives looking for the hidden crab. Watch your nose!!!

 

The Summer Slide- Part III

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It is the last day of July. Summer is more than half over. August starts tomorrow and for many kids in this country, this is the month that school begins again. A few more weeks of freedom, then back to the classroom. Have your kids done a single math problem this summer?

Group activities tend to be motivating, and therefore, more effective than sitting alone, completing a review packet.

It is probably too late to enroll your child in a math camp or in a camp program that devotes part of the day to math. But this might be something to think about for next summer.

It is definitely not too late to start a summer math group with peers from the neighborhood. There are many different formats this group could take. They include:

  • One or two parents could volunteer to organize the group and choose/lead math activities.
  • Each week a different parent-child pair could plan and lead an activity.
  • A set of math games/review books could be purchased by the group, and each session the students could choose a skill on which to focus.
  • A teacher (on break for the summer) could be hired to plan and lead lessons with the group sharing the cost.

You could even plan a fun, one-time event, like a back-to-school competition. The first 30 minutes could be spent reviewing and practicing skills. Then the students could compete against each other on a variety of problems. Parents could pitch in to purchase a prize for the winning student. To motivate the whole group, ice cream or a pool party could be planned for after the competition.

Most kids will do anything for ice cream. Wouldn’t you?

Completed!

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Here is the space I have used as an office for the past few years.

More proof of my lack of organization…

Not only is it an office, it functions as a pantry, recycling center, and art studio for the kids. It is a disaster. There was no room for a desk, and the room is someday going to become the dining room, if it ever gets cleared out and remodeled by Mr. Nine Lives. But I digress…

Feast your eyes upon this, my new office:

A little nook in the open area above the foyer, it is the perfect space to contain the bills and important paperwork. It is now painted and trimmed and fitted with the furniture my husband and parents bought for my birthday. I cannot wait to get things organized!

But I need your help in the next step to setting up the new office. In the comments section, leave me your favorite tip on office organization!