Pinewood Derby and a New Recipe

 Lincoln participated in his very first pinewood derby. He's been talking about it for months. Lincoln designed his car, Aaron helped him use the scroll saw to cut it out, and together they put it together. Lincoln painted it. He was so proud of it, and I thought it turned out great. He had a blast racing it with all the other cub scouts, and he won the award for best convertible.

Also, I'm obsessed with this new recipe. I want to eat it every night for dinner, because it's that easy and that good. Try it, you'll see.

Avocado Caprese Skillet Chicken

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

• 2 (10 - 11 oz each) boneless skinless chicken breasts, butterflied and halved
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp onion powder
• 1/2 tsp Italian seasoning
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• 6 oz fresh mozzarella, cut into 8 slices
• 4 avocado slices (from a firm but ripe large avocado)
• 2 medium vine ripened tomatoes, sliced
• 3 Tbsp balsamic glaze (I used Bertolli)
• 1/3 cup chopped basil ribbons

Directions

• In a bowl mix together garlic powder, onion powder, Italian seasoning, 1/2 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp pepper. Sprinkle mixture evenly over both sides of each chicken cutlet. Heat olive oil in a 12-inch skillet over medium-high heat. Add chicken (cover pan with a splatter screen if you have one) and cook until golden brown on bottom, about 4 - 6 minutes. Rotate and cook opposite side until chicken has nearly cooked though, reducing burner temperature just slightly if needed, about 4 - 5 minutes (it should be nearly 160 in center on an instant read thermometer) then add two slices of mozzarella to the top each cutlet, followed by one avocado slice, and 1 - 2 tomato slices. Cover pan with lid, return to heat and allow to cook 1 - 2 minutes longer until cheese has melted and chicken registers 165 in center.
• Sprinkle chicken with pepper, drizzle with balsamic glaze and sprinkle with fresh basil. Serve warm.
• Recipe source: Cooking Classy

Sisters and Girl Clothes

Adelia is starting to transition to the idea that she is getting a baby brother. We keep talking about Baby Cal, and how she'll get to hold him, and how she'll get to choose clothes for him to wear. We talk about how she and Ruby will get to share a bedroom, because Ollie will move into the room with Cal, and how then it will be an awesome 'girls only' room. She's brainstorming all sorts of possible ways to decorate. So I'm thinking it's going to be ok.

The young men in our ward are doing a yard sale fundraiser to help pay for some of their scouting trips. I figured it was as good of a time as any to go through all the baby girl clothes and get rid of everything Ruby has outgrown. Half my garage is full of clothes in all sizes for both genders, and it's time for something to give. I can't go on storing it all forever. If I ever need little girls clothes again they are easy enough to come by, and someone else might at well get use out of these while they are still in style.

I thought I would be so thrilled to be creating more space in our garage. And I am. But it was also pretty hard to give away all my baby girl clothes. I wasn't expecting that part.  So many memories came back to me of my two cute girls wearing this outfit or that one, and the different stages of their lives that I'll never get back. I got a bit sentimental over it, actually. But, I filled two huge cardboard boxes anyway, and set them out on the porch for the scouts to come pick up. :(

More Glorious Spring!

It is still very much spring around here, and my soul is rejoicing in it. Rain showers and sunny days are taking turns coming out to play and it's leaving the earth fresh and new and green and alive. It has become my habit right after lunch, while my kids are in quiet time, to make my rounds outside in the yard. I check on each tree, each vegetable, each chicken, to see how it's doing and celebrate it's growth. I get my hands in the earth, in the grass, in tree leaves. I pull weeds, twine vines, straighten branches, smell flowers. I connect. These one-on-ones with nature each day rejuvenate me, they fill me back up. The other day Adelia said to me, "Mom, our backyard is a magical place! Isn't it?!" I couldn't agree more.

The grapes come back every year.

I found the very first lilac bloom on a bush I planted two year ago.

At a nearby park the kids and I were able to peek at a nest of duck eggs before the Mama Duck came back.

Life is beautiful. And new life is a miracle.

Ollie was playing ring-around-the-rosy with one of my Linden trees a couple weeks ago and it snapped. I almost cried. Not because I was mad at him, but because I thought we'd have to buy another tiny tree and start the growing process all over again. Aaron tried to fix it by propping it up and wrapping the broken part in layers of wet paper towel, plastic wrap, and tape. I thought the tree was a goner, but to my amazement the leaves continued to bud. Just when I started to think it would live after all, a huge wind storm came through and knocked the tree flat to the ground again. It wasn't strong enough to fight it's own battle yet. Lincoln convinced me to give the tree one more chance. We took all the wrappings off and re-wrapped it. Then we took a large bamboo stick and buried the end of it in the ground right next to the tree, then we carefully tied the tree to the bamboo stick. So far so good. The tree still looks healthy, it's trunk is springy, and the leaves are full and green. I think it will live.

And we have chicks. I've been doing some reading about raising chickens, and came across a method for maximizing egg production that I wanted to try. Basically, chickens produce the most eggs in the first two years of their lives. They can lay eggs for around five years, but after the second year production goes way down. With this idea I've read about, what you do it add a couple new chicks to your flock every year. That way you always have some that are laying a lot, and some that are still laying but getting older. And instead of all of your chickens dying at once because they all get old at the same time, you stagger it a bit, so you never have a time when you have to go without eggs while you raise new chicks.

Aaron and I (mostly me, be he gave me the go ahead) really wanted to try this out. So I took the kids to Cal Ranch and we picked out four new Barred Rock chicks. The seven chickens I have are all in their third year, so this year I got four new ones. Next year I'll only get two. Another idea I read about was each year buying a different breed, and rotating through the breeds, that way you always know how old which chickens are. People are geniuses. :) And so we welcome Zebra, Bandito, Belle, and Oreo Dragon into our chicken fam. They are living in a box in the garage until they get a little bigger.

We took the chicks to Adelia's Kindergarten for show-and-tell. 

Baby #6 Gender Reveal

Yesterday was our 20 week ultrasound. Our baby is healthy, happy, and growing as HE should be. Yep, that's right. It's a boy. Boy number 4 for the Swans. I was surprised, but by no means disappointed to learn we were having a boy instead of a girl. I love being the mom of boys! And we make such darling ones. :)

I think almost everyone thought we were going to have a girl. I know Aaron was pretty convinced. It took him a little bit after finding out to shift his frame of mind away from it being a girl. But I don't think anyone was as convinced of the baby's girlness as Adelia was. I'd venture to say she was dead set on getting another little sister.

She was going to be at school during my appointment and was upset that she wouldn't be with there with the other kids when we came home and told them. So, I made a deal with her that we would wait until FHE, and I would announce to all the kids the gender of the baby when we were all together as a family. That satisfied her. Unfortunately, the news of a baby brother did not. You can see her reaction in this video.

Poor Del. She cried for about 20 minutes. Aaron took her aside and showed her all the pictures from the ultrasound, I took her upstairs for some 'girls only' time and painted her fingernails and toenails. The combination of things stopped the crying. But all night she just kept saying, "But I just don't want it to be a boy!" She'll come around though, when she sees how cute and little and snuggley the baby is.

We are about 95% set on the name Calvin Tanner Swan. He'll go by Cal. The kids and I are already calling him Calvin or Baby Cal. :) Aaron is agreeable to the name as well.

To me, Calvin is the name of someone who is laid back, easy going, and brilliant. But also kind, enthusiastic, and a bit mischievous. :) The baby name website that I haunt describes it as, "a slightly quirky but cozy name that has a fashion edge. It has been steadily on the popularity lists since records were kept, never lower than #250, peaking in the 1920s." Quirky and cozy -- perfect. Plus, the names of some of my other kids hit their peaks in the 1920s as well (Adelia, Ruby, and Oliver), so I feel like that connects Cal to the other kids. The name Calvin ranked #182 on the US Social Security list in 2014 so it's the perfect sweet-spot of not being too "out there" but also not being overly used. It means 'bald', but that isn't a deterrent for me. And who knows, he could come out bald! Lincoln did. ;)

As for Tanner, we found out a few months ago while doing some family history, that Aaron and I share a 10th great grandfather named William Tanner. The line goes back indirectly through both my mom and my dad, and through Aaron's mom. I'll do another post another time on all the super awesome family history details of that. I drew it all out on a paper and everything. :) But for right now, suffice it to say that Tanner is pretty much the perfect name to connect both sides of the whole entire family.

Cal Swan. It sounds like late summer/early fall. It sounds like sitting outside on the front porch listening to the crickets in the evening. It sounds like the grass under a big shade tree blowing in a cool breeze, and time slowed down. I love it.

I've made it 20 weeks so far, only 20 more to go.

Two Book Reviews for Two Boys

How to Become Gluten Intolerant (Funny Video)

A friend of mine (who happens to be "GF" by the way) posted this on FB today. I watched it and laughed and laughed and laughed. Satire and sarcasm can do that to me. Because seriously, sometimes I think I'm intolerant of listening to people talk about their gluten intolerance. And it's for all of the reasons he mentions in this video. Especial bodily functions and symptoms. Nobody, with the exception of possibly your doctor, ever wants to hear about your symptoms and bodily functions. Just sayin'.

Now don't get your panties in a twist and be all offended. I know there are people out there who are actually gluten intolerant. I can totally respect that. Most of the people I know who are actually gluten intolerant don't feel the need to talk about it 24/7, and most of them don't expect others to cater to them. They just take care of it, and go about their normal, awesome lives. It's the ones who are jumping on the gluten intolerance fad band wagon, and feel the need to constantly shout it from the rooftops that I have an intolerance for.

And that's why this video made me laugh. Preach Brother!

The Lindens

The Linden trees are budding. There are five of them planted in my yard right now, and someday I'll plant four more along the park strip. I have always loved Linden trees. They are a shade tree with heart-shaped leaves; in the summer time little yellow flowers blossom on them and fill the air with a fragrant sweet scent. The smell reminds me of summer nights, and home, and my dad.

My dad loved Linden's too. They reminded him of the parks in Munich, Germany where he served his mission.When I was in 3rd or 4th grade, he planted six or seven Lindens in the backyard close to the house, and then had the cement for the patio poured around them, in the hopes that one day they would grow up to shade the entire patio and he would have a cool spot to sit and watch while the grandkids played in the yard.

His wish came true. The Lindens are as tall as my parents' house now, and create a canopy over the patio. They smell fantastic in the summer. The adults gather underneath at family parties, while the grandkids play. Only Dad isn't there to sit in the shade with us. I miss him like crazy, still, even after 13 years. And I think of him at the most random times, like when the Lindens are budding.

 

Winding Down Slowly

 Our yard is still blooming. I'm obsessed with it. I love to be outside. I check my garden several times a day to see if any green things have poked through yet. Spinach and peas, and one or two beats!

peas

spinach

Our school days seem to be getting shorter and shorter and a lot less structured. Eventually, it'll just settle in to one eternal round of P.E. and outside time. :) I'm ok with it. I like that our learning has a cycle. Sometimes it's very structured and orderly, sometimes it's interest based, and sometimes it's free time to be outside or create or experience things.

There are so many ways to create. I've found that when I feel the need to create I turn to language arts. I read out loud to the kids more. We write together. We cut pictures out of magazines and make collages. When I'm feeling creative, I like the kids to be creative too, and I might show it by being more lenient and counting their desire to build with K'Nex as "school time".

Ollie has discovered the pattern blocks. :) I love his concentration face. I love how he gasps in delight when he picks out which shape goes where. I love that he's starting to want to be apart of what the big kids are doing. The other day he came running into my room while I was filming a couple of book reviews with Ivan, and insisted that he had book reviews to do too. I let him climb up in the chair and have a turn. It was adorable. (Just ignore Ivan being a goober in the background.)

Ever since our Redwoods trip, Ivan has been painstakingly working on a poetry book of his own entitled River and Rain. I got to see the finished product the other day. He put a lot of his heart into it. And I am in love with it.

And this last page coming up, it's my favorite. When he was working on it, he came to me and asked, "Mom how do you spell 'thum'"? At first I was confused, but then he said, "you know like when you see one of thum." So, I told him 'them' and didn't realize what he was doing until he showed my the page all finished. He recognized that sometimes in speech we pronounce 'them' as 'thum', and he rhymed it with drum. A slant rhyme! And although he probably couldn't give it that name if you asked him, he's recognizing it in language and using it in writing. This makes my little literary heart beat a little faster. :) And, of course, the eyes drawn on to the word 'see' are fantastic too.

Ivan has also picked back up on his reading goal. He did two book reports for me this week.

Adelia only has a month and a half left of her Kindergarten class. And although it has been a really good thing, I am ready for it to wind down. Getting her to do homework every day is not my favorite thing. Especially when some of the material she is supposed to be memorizing isn't on my priority list for Kindergartners. But the school has been great for her, and I'm glad we enrolled her. I'll do my best to push through 'til the end. (Even if that means bribing her with an M&M for every line of math facts she completes.

I have really been trying to work on descriptive language with the kids in our writing time. We did a fun activity last week that was sort of a clash between an art project and a writing assignment. We drew our hands on a piece of paper and wrote the word 'flowers' in the middle on the palm. Then on each finger we wrote different way you could describe a flower. Color, kind, feel, size, smell, other. Then we gave each of those categories a section. In the section we thought up descriptive words for the category heads. I encouraged them to make it as colorful as possible.

Ivan's

Lincoln's

The End of an Era

I can't believe we actually did it. I've been wanting to forever. Now we actually have. And I can't believe it. It kind of just...worked out. Which I knew it would, eventually. I just didn't think it would be this soon. Let me back up.

We bought a Suburban on Saturday.

Knowing that come September there would be more Swans than van seats, we've been looking around some, but not super seriously. I knew what I wanted, and Aaron knew the price range he wanted, and we were having trouble finding anything that fit into both categories. But most specifically, we really wanted a Suburban that had a ninth seat up front, and we had seen zero of those listed; at any price. But we weren't in a rush...September was still months away.

Then Wednesday evening, when we were least expecting it, Aaron randomly jumped on KSL (it had been a week or two since we'd even looked) and there it was, "Chevy Suburban Rare Ninth Seat". It was in our price range. It had low miles. It had 4-wheel drive, and many other wonderful features. AND it was a color we liked (that NEVER happens! Seriously, it seems like if you can find everything else you want, it's always in an ugly color and you have to settle. But not this time!) Aaron called, the owner lives in Wellsville, so we made an appointment to go up Saturday and see it. My mom happened to be available to watch our kids, so we dropped them off up in Hooper on the way.

Everything clicked. And we drove it home.

So now, I guess, it's goodbye Mini. The van has been good to us for 7 great years. I never thought I'd be a "minivan person", but this Odyssey grew on me rather quickly, and I will always remember it fondly. It's taken us a lot of places, and contributed to many memories. As soon as we get it cleaned up, we'll do our best to sell it. The kids worked their little fannies off today cleaning out junk, vacuuming and wiping everything down, and then washing the outside with sponges and the hose. (Aaron may or may not have bribed them with an ice cream cone for FHE treat if they did a good job.)

Spring Acrostic Poems

I hang out with the coolest group of homeschool moms on the planet. I love them, and I love my interactions with them. Recently on our email forum some of them have been posting their spring inspirations. Some took photographs, some wrote poetry, and some just told of their beautiful thoughts on Springtime. It left me just itching to be creative! 

Last night Aaron and I were sitting around, he was working on some things for work. I was telling him how all day I'd been craving the way it feels to write with a permanent marker on a nice thick piece of paper, but that since I don't really draw or doodle, I didn't know what I'd do on the paper with the markers. He suggested I just start, and see what happened. 

This is what happened. I came up with a fun poetry activity to do with my kids! Apparently my poetry skills never got past elementary school. Forget deep and moving, forget lovely, powerful language. Acrostic poems are what it's all about. I guess. Ha! I don't know why I like acrostic poems so much. But I wrote this one as an example to show the kids. 

So this morning, I started out by asking them to tell me all the things that came to mind when they thought of spring. I wrote their ideas on the whiteboard. They came up with things like baby animals, clouds, flowers, rain, kites, gardening, wind, blossoms, etc. 

Then I asked them to pick just one of those things, clouds, for example. And write down as many descriptive words as they could things of just to describe clouds. Examples: fluffy, lots, white, dark, stormy, angry, heavy, puffy, floating, changing, etc. 

Once each kid had a list of descriptive words to work with, I wrote the letters SPRING on the board vertically. Then I wrote their descriptive words and their topic off to the side. Together we all looked a the words we might be able to use in SPRING. It was rewarding to see them catch on. There were obvious ones, like Adelia's choice of 'run' for the letter R to describe rabbits. And then there were ones that came about more slowly. Ivan chose crickets and had described them as loud, musical, chirping, which were great words, but didn't fit with our letters. But eventually we decided that calling the crickets instruments would work for all three of those AND fit for his letter 'I'. 

Anyways, I felt like acrostic poems were a really good exercise in brainstorming and (for some of my T4s) understanding that it's ok to put ideas out there, even if they aren't perfect, even if they aren't fully formed, and even if you don't use all of them. (This concept was incredibly hard for Lincoln, and extremely easy for Adelia.) 

Writing acrostic poems was also excellent practice in word choice. We were able to talk about synonyms, and how some words have the same meaning as others, and some words mean almost but not quite the same things as others. And I also thought it was great for practicing how to describe something. I noticed that when the kids first picked their topic and were asked to come up with descriptive words, the words were very bland (big, fast, soft, etc.) but once we needed to fit the descriptions to a certain letter of the poem, they had a dig a little deeper, and come up with more interesting words. 

I also found that it was really helpful for everyone to talk through each person's poem out loud together, I thought that was really valuable, and got thoughts generating better, and kept frustration down, because one person wasn't on the spot to come up with all the ideas on their own. 

Here are the poems the kids came up with. I love them all. They are currently decorating our downstairs closet door. :)

My Shameless Plug for Teaching Computer Programming

All things technology. That's what my two oldest boys are into. Especially Lincoln. A couple years ago, Aaron found a free online program put out by MIT called Scratch that teaches kids how to code using pictures. I bought Linc a couple of books online, that walked him through how to create different sorts of things using the scratch program. He LOVED it. He flew through it. And in no time at all I found myself searching for more.

I know practically nothing about computer programming myself. And wasn't really sure where to go for something kid friendly. Then my friend Wynter told me about a website called code.org where there are videos and lesson plans that teach kids ages 6-18 how to program using fun games like Angry Birds. I got on the site, watched their promo video, and am now pretty much convinced that every kid should learn to program. :) But don't take my word for it, watch this video, then check out code.org.

Oliver Twist and The Canterville Ghost Reviews

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens Children's Classic Literature

The Canterville Ghost Usborne Young Reader series

Spring Break!

It looks like Spring around here! Every tree in my yard is flowering as if to shout it from the rooftops. But I have to admit, the peach blossoms are my favorite. :)

Adelia was off from Kindergarten this week, and we took advantage of it to trade in our school books for outside and sunshine. It was time well spent.

Aaron took an afternoon off to come to a BYU baseball game with us. We spent another day in Hooper with my mom and Tanner, getting hair cuts and having rides on Tanner's new Harley. And we picnicked at Aaron's work during one lunch break.

BYU baseball

Tanner and Ivan

Adelia, Tanner, and Krystal

Kids in the trees at Aaron's work.

Aaron showing off his skills

 The chickens got relocated to the other side of the yard. The plan is that we are going to build a bigger, fenced off area for them to run around in, and then leave them there so they will stop eating my garden and pooping on my patio. I think they are happy in their new home.

 Aaron finished his workbench. Hopefully with it's completion, work can start again on my kitchen table and second bench. :) But at least all the saws and drills have a space to call home in the garage now. That makes me happy. I forgot to take a picture of it all done. I will, one of these days.

 And April marks the two-month count-down until the day this rascal can go to nursery! Hooray! The first week in June is just around the corner, and then maybe I'll actually get to go to Sunday School, instead of chasing Miss Turkey-feathers around and around the hallways.

At any rate, Spring Break was glorious. I think we'll just stay in this state of bliss and no-schedule for the rest of the school year. Ha! I wish. But being outside is definitely going to be taking a bigger priority in our lives from now on.