Cooking Lessons

When my children turn a year older, they are given a new responsibility and a new privilege. When Nadia turned eleven last month, I moved her bedtime to 9:30 and said that her new chore would be to cook one dinner per week. Due to Camp Good News, Creation music festival, our visit to Long Island, and her week at Camp Susque, this was the first week she could take on her new responsibility. She likes her new chore, primarily because she can choose to make something she likes eating. I taught her how to make what my mom called goulash (pasta, meat, sauce, and cheese); she said she wants to make meatloaf next week. Oliver wanted to help. I told him that I am planning to make potatoes au gratin with ham on Thursday, and he can help me make that. Eventually Nadia will be able to cook dinner independently, but for now she needs some instruction.

On Monday the only time we left the house was to take Nadia to the pediatrician. Because it was raining, we ate lunch at home on Monday instead of going to Kid's Café. It rained so

much that water came in through one of our windows in the basement. I used eleven towels (beach/bath) repeatedly until I got most of the water off the basement floor. The baseball/softball clinic is held rain or shine, but due to the water in the basement, I opted to have the kids skip the first night of the clinic. Yesterday we left the house twice - we attempted to have lunch at the Kid's Café, and the kids participated in the 2.5 hours clinic last night. I said "attempted" to have lunch because the main ingredient in the main dish was rice, and none of my kids like rice. I am going to start serving rice more often until they get to the point where they will eat it. Oliver usually eats everything except for a few fruits so I was surprised when even Oliver wouldn't eat it. The clinic was held indoors on Monday, but last night it was beautiful outside. The kids rotated between five different stations - catching pop flyballs, catching infield grounders, throwing the ball, running bases, and hitting. They have the kids divided into five different groups. There is one softball group and four baseball groups

separated by age (5/6, 7/8, 9/10, and 11/12). Ian was thrilled that a friend of his (Micah) was in his group. He and Micah were in the same cabin at Camp Susque in 2018. Nadia knew a girl in the softball group from the homeschool gym class.

This morning the kids attended the first morning of a history camp at the Joseph Priestley House in Northumberland. When I arrived they were playing games with marbles. We made it back five minutes before the end of the Kids Café lunch program ended. While the kids were in the history camp I worked on the social studies lesson plans for the next school year on my laptop in the public library in that town. Thus far I have 312 picture books plus nonfiction books selected and put into lists in my library account. I also have a list of 52 chapter books and biographies - some we own, some we could get on CD from the library, and some we can listen to on Overdrive or Hoopla. Then I have a list of another 86 chapter books that Nadia and Ian will be asked to pick from. My plan this year is to ask that every other

book they read be from this list (during the school year) and the other half of the chapter books they read can be completely their own choice. For example, Nadia has been reading the Mother Daughter Book Club book series and Ian has been reading books from the Littles series. If we finish the list of 52 books, I might read them some of the books on "their" list. I purposefully picked some that were more geared toward Nadia and others that are more geared toward Ian. So altogether there are 450 books on the list, and believe it or not, the list shrank this week as I deleted all the ones I had planned to get through Bloomsburg University. I haven't mapped out exactly when we will read all the chapter books, but I have organized which day we will read the 312 picture/non-fiction books from August through March. That has taken time!