In my life this week…

I think we have won the war on the mice. I have not caught another one since the last post. I switched out the traps for the glue kind in case they had figured out the old traps.

Saturday was our church fall bazaar. It was a great time despite the rain. My kids were way to lucky. They did the cake walk twice and won each time. There was a box raffle. I bought $10 worth of tickets. The older two split their tickets between two items each and Ian put all of his tickets in one item. I also put all of mine in for one item. We won everything except the one Ian wanted. Given the luck of the other two I made them go a buy the item for him out of their allowance.

Sunday was a benefit concert for a girl that we know that is battling leukaemia. My wife is part of the band so it was me and the kids in the audience. It was a good evening and great music. We also had the winning bid for one of the silent auction items. Hopefully the kids will have forgotten what it is before Christmas. That’s not going to happen.

We also added some decorations to the back wall of the reading nook. The kids made this pool noodle rosary at Catholic Family Camp a couple of weeks ago. We hung that up and thought the picture we have of Mary would go perfectly in the center.

In our homeschool this week…

We have hit our groove and things are moving along nicely. We have started to make concrete progress on our project, ie they are starting to have some real world presence not just research and in our head.

Philip has written a first draft of what would be required for living on Mars. It has a lot of editing to go and I would like to see more detail added in. We also started talking about population, population density and settlement patterns for his social studies project.

Margaret has been working through her unit studies on explorers. Her major accomplishment for this week was building this ship with some help from mommy. I think this might be the first time she has appeared in a photo. They ran out of time but there are sails and rigging to be added.

Places we’re going and people we’re seeing…

We went over to the local BMX track with a number of other homeschooling families. We had met the previous week at out monthly coffee meeting. The nice thing was that there were a number of kids there that match my kids in age. They had a blast. We are planning on repeating it this week but it looks like it will be raining. Hopefully it will be nice.

My favorite thing this week was…

I bought myself a new cookbook by Chef Michael Smith. He is my favourite TV show chef and I like his simple approach to cooking.

My kiddos favorite thing this week was…

Winning all those toys in the box auction.

I’m cooking…

Philip came back from Grandpa’s with some fresh picked lemon thyme. I wanted a recipe to use it in. In searching I came across this recipe for lemon thyme chicken. I used boneless skinless chicken thighs instead of breasts and lemon juice instead of fresh squeezed. It came out great and everyone in the family ate it. That is rare in this house. Above is the version I found online and below is how mine came out.

I am also trying a new recipe for bread that is a lot easier. It comes from Chef Michael Smith’s show. I have been modifying it to fit our family and my pans. The first time I made it it over flowed my pan on the second rise. Doing a 3/4 batch seems to have solved that problem.

I rewarded my kids this week by…

Going to the BMX track.

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