Kid pics

It's time for another edition of ...

Pictures I Found In My Camera Not Taken By Me!

The mysterious things that go on around here that I'm not privy to. The thing is, most of the time, we're all in the same room together! I don't understand how these things happen.

On the side

I told my son that tonight for dinner we were having macaroni and cheese with hamburger on the side.

He asked, "And Mac and Cheese on the front?"

Courage

The definition of courage is not the absence of fear, but of doing what you have to do in spite of the fear.

Yesterday my husband bit the bullet and did something that took a lot of courage. He came home devastated, but I'm so proud of him.

I baked a turkey yesterday because I wanted something different for lunch. Turkey sandwiches, yummy.

My turkey did not look like this. It burned on top, so it looked, well, Cajun. But fortunately that was only the skin, and the meat underneath was still delicious.

I also made gravy from the drippings. It was fantastic. I made biscuits this morning so we could have that gravy again for breakfast.

I'm afraid I have this tendency to love people with food. But my poor brave husband deserved the best spread I could put on.

No Stroganoff

A couple people asked how my stroganoff turned out last night.

Except, er, it turned out that I made something else.

I made THESE bad boys!

Ground Beef and Bisciuts from Taste of Home.

I didn't have the mushrooms and consumme that you need to make stroganoff, which I didn't realize until 5 minutes before I started cooking. So I typed "ground beef" into the search on Taste of Home and picked the first thing that looked tasty.

It kind of tasted like the Sloppy Joes in a Pan that we used to make off the Bisquick box. The recipe calls for canned biscuits, but I just whipped up a batch of baking powder biscuits. It was delicious. Even the munchkins ate it, which is a change from the norm. :-)

Wednesday chats

Doing Patrice's Farmhouse Chats today!

We're staring into an interminable period of Tule fog. But one of the neighbors is anticipating spring. They're even helping it along with silk flowers in a bush.

I chuckle every time I walk by.

Anyway, onto the meme questions!

Kimberly asks: How long have you blogged?

I started up my art blog in August 2009, and this blog in February of 2010. So 3 years, give or take. My art blog gets me to occasionally draw things, and this blog helps me stay in touch with family.

Lana asks:What is the most difficult part of taking care of chickens?

Keeping their pen cleaned and keeping them entertained. Bored chickens are destructive to themselves and their eggs. Chickens aren't much harder than any other pet, provided you don't have too many of them. And you can play with them and make them into pets just like any cage bird. Except you can banish chickens to the coop when you're tired of them. :-)

Susannah asks: Would you prefer to live where it's hot or cold?

Somewhere hot. Oh wait, I already live there! I can't tolerate the cold. I can't do real extreme heat, like the Sahara, but Southern Cali isn't too bad.

Farm Girl asks: What sort of things are you looking forward to in 2012?

That depends on a lot of things. Holidays and birthdays, hanging out with family, canning time rolling around again. Beyond that, the future is uncertain so I have no plans.

Dreaming asks: What's for dinner?

Beef stroganoff! I only just realized that Hamburger Helper is stroganoff in a box. Except when you make it from scratch it has a sour cream sauce and stuff. So I'll give it a shot tonight and see how folks like it. The munchkins are hugely picky right now. I don't know how health-food people get their kids to eat anything fermented or whatever. If I make food that tastes slightly off, they turn up their noses.

Cold Cali

You know how I just posted last week about how warm it was?

Well, the weather changed. Now it's frigid. And since coldness is relative, I won't tell you the exact temperature because you'll laugh. We actually have rain on the forecast for this weekend. We need rain, because it's only physically possible to have rain here in the winter. You know how Arizona gets monsoons and Texas gets big thunderstorms in the summer? We get nothin'.

The oldest munchkin is almost reading. I've been making him do phonics drills on a game called Phonics Vowels on my ipod, and it's taught him how words fit together. He wants to read in the worst way. He sounds out signs and logos on passing trucks and comes up with words out of his head. I imagine this will lure me into a false sense of how easy it is to teach reading, then my other two won't read until they're 10.

Not much else has been going on. I've been educating myself on how to write for publication. Writing for publication means that you write your heart out and then edit your brains out, in that order. With small children around, I can't feasibly publish anything, but I can sure practice.

And then next year I'll start homeschooling in earnest. I'm sure my oldest munchkin will wind up like Ramses from the Amelia Peabody series. "It's obviouswy the tibia of a winocerwus."

Worried eyebrows

Look at those little worried eyebrows! This is one of those pictures taken by the munchkins as they ran amuck with my camera. I'm always amused to see what they come up with, because their pictures have such fun perspective.

Happy Monday! Martin Luther King has nothing to do with how dirty my house is and meals that must be cooked. Some people just don't get days off. :-)