Behind the times is good. Just because it’s common nowadays doesn’t mean it’s wise. My husband worked as a public prosecutor specializing in sex crimes with minor victims for ten years, until he changed his focus for mental health purposes. Cell phones are a major component in the circumstances that lead to so many of these tragic cases. As the common age for cell phone use has dropped, so has the common age of the kids involved in these crimes. And it’s not just families where the parents aren’t paying attention. It’s happening in good families with attentive parents, who thought they had sufficient safety programs on devices. It’s happening to kids on devices that were provided and required by their schools, that were supposed to be safe. The convenience of socializing this way is not worth the risks. There are other ways to fulfill this need.

Oh, and we finally got a dining room table and chairs! We have been making due with a folding table and various chairs collected from around the house whenever we need to eat for months now, because I didn’t want something cheap and flimsy, we need something larger than standard size, and I wasn’t willing to pay a thousand dollars. I found this nice, sturdy table in good condition to seat 8 on Craigslist. The folding leaf mechanism is broken so it can’t go down smaller, but we don’t have any use for that anyways. It came with 6 wooden chairs, one of which had a loose leg. I figure I can get two chairs in the same wood finish to put on the ends and it will look fine, as lots of dining sets have a different style of chairs for the ends. And fixing the one chair leg will be pretty simple. My budget was no more than $500, and we paid $160.

I have perfected my Greek yogurt recipe to where I now get consistently great results. (Before I would have variations in tartness and texture from one batch to another.) I love it! Ingredients cost me $3.95 for over half a gallon of thick, creamy Greek yogurt. So I’m making a batch of that about every other week. Using up the last of the charter school funds for the year this week on AOPS self-paced classes for the boys. They will work on them lightly during the summer, and will still have a lot left after, so that will cover math for them up through Fall semester, which will help next year’s funds go farther. We used to have to look for ways to use it up, when we got the allotment for more kids but the youngers weren’t taking any outside classes and were mostly reusing items we already had. I will have just two homeschooling with the charter next year and they will both be taking outside classes, so it might not cover all our education expenses anymore. Dh’s business is thriving right now. His profit share disbursement was larger than expected. We put a chunk into the IRAs, a few hundred in the kids’ 529s, and have set aside $3500 for paying next year’s medical deductible, as the kids will not qualify for the secondary insurance through the state anymore. We need to set aside another $4500 for that before the end of the year, and just have that as part of the budget from now on. I think. It’s hard to know how much we will actually need, exactly. The family deductible is $16k, and dh’s work will reimburse up to the individual deductible, which is $8k. But ds9 may well be able to keep his secondary insurance through the appeal process based on his diagnosis. However, the primary insurance doesn’t cover dental or more than 30 sessions of all types of therapy per year. (We have had that many in under 2 months before!) I think I will get some credit card with sign-up benefits for high spending at the beginning of the year and put all medical bills on it and immediately pay them off, then use the rewards towards a family trip.

59 items total, 11 that hang in my closet. That includes things I don’t actually wear currently like maternity shirts and my wedding dress. I really need more clothes.

My three older kids are all fairly mathy, but not to the extent that a lot of the kids here are. My fourth is my most mathy kid, and is fairly accelerated in math despite his medical struggle and it’s extensive interruptions to his education. Kindergarten is the only complete school year he’s ever had. Between the hospitalizations and appointments and the crummy chemo+sick days, he’s had well under half the normal number of school days each year since then. He’s just turned nine and is finishing third grade, and is about to start AOPS Prealgebra. I hope it will work well for him. He quite likes looking over his big brother’s shoulder when he’s doing Prealgebra and trying to answer the questions first, and he absolutely loves Beast Academy. I do wonder sometimes where he’d be without the constant interruptions. Do what your kid loves with her. There’s no need to spend your time together pushing her through something just because she can. Do something you’ll both love doing together.

Ds9 finishes chemo on the 9th. It is a 27 month protocol; he was 6 when he went on it. He will continue to have MRIs every three months and will start treatment again when the tumor starts to grow again. He is very fatigued and tired of hurting. I am so excited for him to get a break from treatment. Of course we hope for a few years, but even if it is just three months his body is getting a break from all the meds and we are going to have a glorious summer!

Thank you very much! I miss it, too. I was mostly a lurker back then, but I loved reading those conversations.

I’d love to hear more about your Anne of Green Gables study. ETA: Or buy it. I’m currently going through Treasured Conversations for the fourth time.

It’s time for the semi-annual clothing sort. Which means we need to wash and go through all the children’s clothes this week, checking what is still in good condition, what can still be worn, passed down to a sibling, or donated. Then go through the stored things to see what they’ve grown into and make a list of what everyone still needs, and go shopping. This year I am planning on giving my eldest her list and her budget money and letting her handle the rest (with me providing transportation of course). I think she will do just fine. Really my only hesitation is my second daughter, who will certainly think she ought to be allowed the same privilege and who is still very inclined to insist that anything she wants always fits her perfectly and to forgo mundane practical items in lieu of another pair of sparkly dress shoes. She is not ready and dd14 is, but I’m not looking forward to the complaining.

Does anyone else want to share?

My final strawberry bed is planted. I have six varieties: Charlotte, Ft. Laramie, Seascape, All Star, Albion, and Gurnsey Giant. We are going to have more strawberries than we know what to do with next year. Four of my five little cherry trees are putting out leaves, but I am worried that the fifth might be dead.

My oldest two are going to school, and the baby will be two. I will be teaching only two kids for the first time in seven years, and both of them are pretty compliant when it comes to schoolwork. Plus ds9 is finishing chemo soon and taking a break from treatment for a while. I should have the time and energy, for the first time in a long time, for the type of fun and messy projects and side trails that my girls got to enjoy when we started homeschooling but the boys barely remember. I don’t know what to do precisely but I want us to have an awesome time together in this interlude before Ri has to go back on treatment. Some of the things I did with my girls would be great to repeat with the boys (they can’t remember Cluckmose I) but they are older and have different interests. Maybe if we incorporated a hands-on study of ancient technologies that ties in science with ancient history-what kid wouldn’t want to build his own trebuchet? They’ll be doing AOPS for math. Ds9 will do MCT for English. Not sure about ds10 for English. Language Convo tutoring for Japanese and Spanish, respectively. Ds10 is going to take the Python class from AOPS. If they want we will do the AMC. But I don’t want it to be too high pressure. We don’t know how long of a medical break this is going to be, and mostly I just want to have fun. ETA: They will be 4th and 6th grades.

I was looking for the annual planning thread for some motivation and couldn’t find it. Is there one I’m missing?

Still waiting to hear back about the taxes and insurance issue. The accountant filed an extension for us. If I’d known he was going to do that, I would have just filed them myself, but oh well. I’ve been very busy. I made a detailed plan for landscaping the yard over the next few years, made a water zone map off of that, and gave it to the irrigation supply company. They make the sprinkler system plan and supply list for free if you are buying the materials from them. We are going to do the labor ourselves, with the guy who did our irrigation pump checking our work for us to make sure it’s done right. I have also weeded, hoed, fertilized, and planted four out of five strawberry beds (I am so sore!) and repaired our old damaged shed in preparation for converting it to a chicken coop. I also pruned my cherry trees and am saving the cuttings to try to start new trees from them. If it works I will try selling them on Craigslist.

We had snow again on Tuesday. I’m hoping it was winter’s last gasp, and that it didn’t damage the bareroot strawberries I planted last week. I have the beds under 3 of the 5 cherry trees planted with different varieties of strawberries, and have the plants for the 4th bed waiting to go in today. I need to find one more variety at a reasonable price for the last bed. I still need to prune three of the cherry trees. The buds on the cherries are swelling. I am so ready for Spring! I spent the last few days making a detailed blueprint of our property and planning out everything I would like to someday put in the yard, and then making a water zone plan off of that. It’s quite a bit different and more complicated than I had originally discussed with the irrigation guy. When he asked me for more detailed measurements and I was out taking them in the yard I realized that the proportions really weren’t right, and that I wanted to lessen the lawn areas (the high-maintenance low-interest parts), and kept having ideas to include. It’s years worth of work, but I am so excited to see it take shape.

Except that the Beast was only 9 in the animated version when he was cursed. The rose would bloom “until his 21st year”, and it isn’t quite there yet. Your 21st year is the year between age 20 and age 21, so he isn’t yet 20 years old when Belle is taken hostage. And Lumiere sings that night “ten years we’ve been rusting” to her, so he was only 9 at the time of the transformation. There’s never any mention of parents, so who was raising this bratty kid? Were they around but not mentioned in the intro and just died since, or were they already dead and he was such a brat because he was being raised by servants who just gave him whatever he wanted to placate him? And that was one harsh sorceress to transform a nine year old kid into a monster for his misbehavior.

Last year we had an irrigation pump installed for the yard, and last month we got the electrical circuit it requires added. Now the irrigation/sprinkler guy is making a plan and parts list for us, and we are going to do the labor to finally install our sprinkler and drip line system. We are hoping to finish before the weather turns scorching, but Spring is always short here, we are amateurs, and we have almost an acre. I am so excited to go crazy with planting in our yard once we have water!

Dh’s work decided to pay for their accountant to do people’s personal taxes, too, so someone else is handling our taxes for the first time. I feel oddly torn about it. I should be glad to have a disliked responsibility off my plate and handled by a professional, but it’s weird having something important like this go and coming up on the deadline and it’s not sent in yet and I feel like I still don’t have a grasp of the changes to our taxes. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll get used to it. And coming up on the deadline means I will know soon whether my kids lose their secondary insurance retroactively to the beginning of this year or if they will lose it at the beginning of next year. Because dh’s firm has had a great start to the year, so I am sure our income will disqualify the kids after this year. Dh just received a profit share that was significantly more than expected. We are hanging onto it for now until the taxes are done so if we do have to pay medical bills back to the beginning of this year, we have enough to cover most of it between that and our emergency fund.

We have a deep freezer in our garage that is at the end of its life. It still keeps things cold, but the door is coming apart. So in my efforts to clear it out to get rid of it, I rediscovered bags of individual chocolate milks frozen when the school bus was dropping off meals daily during the shutdowns. The kids loved them at first and then it was too much, and I froze them thinking they’d want them later but they never have. Even now they love other chocolate milk but won’t touch that brand. So I decided to make chocolate pudding with the milk. I have a huge batch of it cooling right now (22 cartons of milk!). We will freeze some of it as fudgesicles.

My cold frame is made of straw bales with windows set on top.

I thought the winter weather was finally breaking, and planted a bunch of things on Friday, mostly in the cold frame plus a couple trays on our kitchen table. This evening it was snowing. This is my first year using a cold frame, so I don’t really know how much protection it will offer. I went out and added a tarp over it for another layer, but I guess I will just have to see if anything comes up and replant if it doesn’t.

You could look for them on shopgoodwill.com. They frequently have sets or partial sets of older Oneida cutlery, for cheaper than Ebay prices. If you keep an eye on it for a while your pattern is likely to show up eventually.

Well, it’s on a river not a lake, but Tu Tu’ Tun Lodge is incredible, close to mountains, ocean, and less than an hour from the redwoods.

Sure. They’re quite sweet. 5 cups rolled oats 1 cup almonds, roughly chopped 2 cups sweetened shredded coconut ⅔ cup honey ¼ cup butter ¼ cup vegetable oil ½ cup brown sugar 2 t vanilla extract ½ t salt 1 cup dried cranberries, roughly chopped ½ +¼ cup mini chocolate chips Heat oven to 350 degrees and line large rimmed cooking sheet with parchment paper. Leave the edges of the parchment paper extra long. Spread oats and almonds on another large rimmed baking sheet and bake 5 minutes. Add coconut and stir then continue to bake, stirring every 3-5 minutes until they begin to toast. Remove and place in a large bowl. In the meantime, combine butter, oil, honey, brown sugar, vanilla extract, and salt in a saucepan over medium heat and stir occasionally until the butter is melted and bubbling and the sugar is completely dissolved. Pour the butter mixture into the bowl with toasted oats, almond, and coconut and mix together. Let cool for 5 minutes, and then add the cranberries and a 1/2 cup of the mini chocolate chips and stir. Put the mixture into the pan prepared with parchment paper and press the mixture firmly into the pan. I start with a spatula and then my hands as it is cool enough, and then I fold the long ends of the parchment paper over the top of the granola mixture and place my heaviest pot on top and press down for a couple of minutes. I then lift the parchment paper, sprinkle the remaining 1/4 cup of chocolate chips on top, set it back down and press on top the paper with my hands to press the chocolate chips into the surface of the granola mixture. Refrigerate at least 2 hours before removing from the fridge. Peel the parchment paper off the block of granola mixture and cut block into bars. Makes about 3 dozen.

I quit buying paper towels, Lysol cleaning wipes, windex, and liquid dishwasher soap. Reusable cloths, generic versions of cleaners, and the powdered dishwasher soap get things just as clean. I also quit buying cereal, granola, granola bars, and eggs. Oatmeal and homemade Greek yogurt and granola for breakfast. I started making homemade granola bars a few months ago to save money, and then when dh brought home a box of (previously favorite) granola bars, no one wanted to eat them. They prefer mine.