Update - Food, School, etc.

Because the kitchen is probably the busiest room of the house - always - I might as well give some pictures.

an attempt at Pavlova

Thanks to a friend giving me a SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast) I've been making lots of kombucha lately.  (Learn more about Kombucha Here.)  Basically it's a probiotic drink made with sugar, black tea, and a scoby - the bacteria eat the sugar and caffene and it turns into something that's really good for you.  And if you do it long enough, it gets carbonated - like soda (sorta). 

brewing the tea

the SCOBY duplicates during every batch, so if you want one let me know

the finished product - YUM!

We don't have much of a garden ourselves because of our shade (except for a few pots with hot peppers and herbs). 

a few of our peppers

But it almost feels like we do because we have generous gardening friends. 

Our neighbor gave us lots of tomatoes from her parents' farm...

A friend from our homeschool group gave us a bunch of pickling cucumbers.  I've never made pickles before, but a friend gave me a book with recipes, so I tried it.  That makes me think - I wonder how they taste?  We haven't tried them yet!

The setup - pickle water and water for the jars

my new book

stocked up (with peach jam from a few weeks earlier)

We have a good friend from church who loves to garden and has a great yard for it.  Since his mom died, he's had little motivation to garden until... we made a deal with him.  He grows us veggies and we make him healthy meals!!  So far he's grown us lots of zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, a couple peppers, yellow squash, and a HUGE watermelon!  

Our personal produce gardener

It's a 34 pounder!!

This is one of the many meals we made with his produce - Zucchini, Eggplant, and Basil bake - yum!

Then we have another friend from church who likes to eat healthy, so he suggested a barter: he gives us a bag of the best organic raisins and the best natural chocolate chips.  We bake cookies with them (healthy ones, of course) and give him 1/3 of the cookies.  It made a total of around 90 cookies. 

Joanna and I have started up our little bakery again, called Kneaded Nourishment, so we've been baking a lot and working on advertising.  We're learning so much about business!

I thought you might find our schedule planning interesting.  This is Mommy's August calendar and our meal schedules and grocery list. :)

This is Julia trying to memorize a verse for the Bible Bee a few weeks ago.  We had the most incredible places and postures for memorizing and reviewing which included: sitting, laying (on back, on stomach, on head, on the floor, on the couch, on a chair, on the porch, on a sibling), walking around, sitting on the quizzer's lap, sitting (or should I say exploring) in the car in the driveway, walking in circles, with a pillow case over the head, with a blanket over the head, singing, and even a bit of weeping and gnashing of teeth (for the less motivated).  

one of Julia's drawings

And now school has officially begun.  Wednesday was the first day of soccer, and yesterday was the first day of speech for Jessica, Jason, Jeannine and Julia.  This is the first year to do speech and they are all quite excited.  They're doing ICC with the Speak First chapter.  

Well, this is more than enough for today, so I'll leave you with that.

~Janelle