Seven Quick Takes on Seeding my Lawn, Cleaning my Counters, Eating Liver, and MORE!

:: 1 ::

Our back lawn has been a disaster for a couple years now. During the time we had a construction project going out there {a future mother-in-law unit}, the crew accidentally crushed or broke a couple sprinkler pipes. It took a long time to diagnose and repair the issues, and even if it hadn’t taken very long, they were throwing trash out next to the unit {not that I’m complaining — construction is what it is} and I probably wouldn’t have wanted to soak it anyhow. I was able to keep alive a couple large strips that I could reach with a sprinkler attached to a hose, but for the most part, the pasture died and the goats I had at the time survived off whatever was growing wild plus piles of hay.

Once the apartment was done, it was summer, and too hot to do anything about the situation. Once it was cool enough, we were on drought water restrictions. Our allotment was not sufficient for any sort of lawn repair — sod, seed, nothing.

Fast forward to last Friday. We knew there was supposed to be a lot of rain this week, but it arrived earlier than expected. Friday afternoon, after recording a Scholé Sisters episode with Pam and Ravi Jain {oh yes — you will love this one!}, I ran out to buy some topper and a new seeder {Sophie the desert tortoise had had her way with the old one and it was unusable}. E-Age-Thirteen stayed home and prepped the yard while I was out. I grabbed a few pizzas on my way home, and by late afternoon, I was at work seeding the lawn. By early evening, my kids and the neighbor kids were helping me put on the topper and lo and behold! Right before sundown the lawn was seeded and {mostly} topped and ready to go. It rained enough on and off from Friday to Wednesday that I only had to run sprinklers a couple times, and for only a short while. I am so excited to maybe, God willing, have something like a lawn again!

My seed, in case you are interested, was actually a pasture mix of bermuda and clover. Lots of clover. This way we can still graze the rabbits and, honestly, clover takes about a third of the water as grass to maintain, so my hope is that a clover lawn might be my drought solution.

 

:: 2 ::

Christa introduced me to ecloths and I am already in love. I have a couple children who are sensitive to cleaning chemicals, but I hate paying for the more natural stuff. I do it, of course, but I dislike it very much. Anyhow, I took the plunge and went all in on Amazon by buying an 8-pack that had clothes for range, kitchen, bathroom, glass, all sorts of things.

Oh. my. word.

These are pure awesomeness!

You clean with hot water and the cloth. That’s it. The microfiber technology does the rest. No more searching for spray bottles, dealing with chemicals, or other excuses. I practiced on my bathrooms this weekend and it came out amazingly — my tile hasn’t looked this great in a loooooong while.

Here’s a boring but explanatory video if you are interested in how they work:

 

:: 3 ::

This week’s links collection:

• Cure for cataracts: scientists use stem cells to grow ‘living lens’ in eye from The Telegraph.
  • So cool!
• What does amazon.com have to do with sexual exploitation? from Covenant Eyes.
  • Thinking about this.
• Alabama Supreme Court Rejects U. S. Supreme Court’s Marriage Opinion from Liberty Counsel.
  • This is certainly an interesting development.

 

:: 4 ::

This month in 2011:

A bit of encouragement for when it feels like we’ve messed up…

 

:: 5 ::

Someone asked me about getting kids to eat liver. Um, yes. One does. But sometimes, one doesn’t. Or good quality liver is hard to come by. In which case, I really do like Perfect Dessicated Liver.

High Quality + Good Price = Happy Mommy.

You know: #thingsilove

 

:: 6 ::

Oops — I almost forgot! The fourth episode of Scholé Sisters is out today: We Dare You to Read the Classics:

You can do it. You can read classics and not be afraid. 🙂

 

:: 7 ::

 

Answering Your Questions:

• Question: I wanted to ask you about math. One of the the reasons I thought I could do MEP (after thinking it was just an all around great program) was that Brandy was doing it. 🙂 My oldest is in Year 2 although I suspect that there are several places where he’ll cruise along quite quickly. However, I’m not doing a very good job at teaching right now. We’ve only just begun about 2 weeks ago. I’m not sure if I should drop it for a less “teacher intensive” curriculum or if I’m just not doing it well. I’m asking you though because you’ve juggled multiple children. The Lesson Plans often seem a bit hard for me to follow on the fly. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe this isn’t a fit for us right now. Maybe there is something else I can do with them for the next 6 months…. Would you mind sharing your thoughts and experience?
  • Answer: Well, I don’t know how helpful I’m going to be, but I’ll give it a shot. 🙂 Probably the most important thing I could say is that for me the big appeal of MEP was that it was teacher intensive — I recognized that my girls needed a lot of direct teaching, and I didn’t really know how to teach math, so MEP’s scripted lessons were a good solution. My oldest didn’t need as much direct teaching. My youngest probably doesn’t, but he’s doing MEP because everyone else is. With that said, I’m not juggling all that many grades. Not really. My girls are combined, and E-Age-Thirteen is super independent in math. So I’m really only juggling two {the girls and my youngest}. I say this because I think that juggling more than two might be hard, although Jeanne assures me that MEP is designed to be more independent in about Year Five {my girls aren’t there yet}. I have all the worksheets printed out and waiting in a binder. I’ve also printed out all the shape and number cards and such, and those are in plastic baseball card pockets in the same binder. Dawn taught me to put the lessons {the scripts for me to use} on my Kindle instead of printing them, and this has saved me tons of ink. Hallelujah. So all I do is follow the script, except on the rare occasion when I don’t understand it. Then I {gasp!!} skip it. We sit at the kitchen table, and I teach one grade at a time — youngest first, followed by the girls. It did take me a bit of time to get used to the feel of the lessons, so perhaps you just need more time to get your rhythm? I’m sorry I’m not more helpful. This answer feels sort of lame to me!