The Semiconservative Granola Girl

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Day Three: Advent Calendars

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Today, we are on to Day Three of the 25 Days of Christmas Activities to do with your family.  When I was growing up, we always had Advent Calendars.  There are so many ways to include this tradition in your family’s Christmas plans.  I remember as an elementary student that we made Advent Calendar chains.  This is a really easy project to do with your kids.  Pre-cut strips of paper, and let them tape, staple or glue them together to make a chain.  Each day, they them tear one of the chains off.

Many, many years ago, my mother made a felt applique Christmas tree with 24 ornaments that hung on little gold beads.  And each year, she bought each of us paper Advent Calendars from a catalogue with little paper doors to open each day.

Advent Calendars

Our Advent Calendars

Advent Calendars have taken a twist in our house.  Each of the kids gets one with doors that open to reveal toys.  For a number of years, each have gotten a different Playmobil Calendar.  We love Playmobil in general.  (A corner of our living room is dedicated to Playmobil Village.) But the Advent Calendars are awesome.  Each day the kids get to open the doors to reveal toys connected to a theme/scene.  The first few years, Sunshine had holiday related calendars.  However, last year, we decided that there are only so many Playmobil Santas you can have, so Sunshine got a Fairy Themed Advent Calendar and The Boy got a Pirate Themed one.

    

This year, Sunshine has elected to get a Lego Advent Calendar.  She is very into Lego Friends right now.  The Boy has decided on the Hockey Themed Playmobil (although I was pushing for the Jewelry Heist one–I probably shouldn’t have given him a choice; he wouldn’t know the difference!)

If you have younger kids, Playmobil 1-2-3 now has an Advent Calendar for the under 5 crowd.  When The Boy was old enough to participate but too little for regular Playmobil, we got one from Schleich.

Counting Down to the Real Christmas

So that we don’t forget that Christmas is actually a religious holiday, we also have a Nativity Advent Calendar that I made.  It was a panel that I purchased at quilt shop a number of years ago.  Just like the Christmas tree that my mother made decades ago, the kids take turns hanging the angels, Mary and Joseph, shepherds, etc. on buttons to create the scene.  The only caveat, Jesus goes last–we don’t hang him until December 24.

25 Days of Christmas Activities

Be sure to check out the other 24 Days of Christmas Activities this month with 25 Days of Christmas Activities to do with Your Family.

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PS. This post contains affiliate links. When you click the link and make a purchase through the link, we make a little money, this helps to keep The Semiconservative Granola Girl going. Thank you for your support.

25 Days of Christmas Activities

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I love Christmas. And, now that I have kids, I love it even more. Each year, we work to make the whole Christmas season a special time for our family. We plan special outings and do special activities. So each day for the next 25, I am here to share 25 Days of Christmas Activities to do with your family.

25 Days of Christmas Activities

Of course, as I share, you will find that some of them are things that you already do.  But some of these 25 Days of Christmas Activities are part of our family’s evolving traditions.  Some of our family traditions are ones we bring from our parents and grandparents.  However, a number of these activities are ones that we have done together and enjoyed so much that we decided to MAKE them traditions.  And, that’s the great thing about traditions.  You can make new ones.  You can add to your family’s traditions each year.  I hope that you will find at least one of these resonates and that you give it a try with your family.

Don’t Miss a Day of 25 Days of Christmas Activities to Do with Your Family–Join our Email List today!

25 Days of Christmas Activities to Do with Your Family

(These links are not broken–if you get a page not found error, you’re too early.  Come back tomorrow!)

One:  Keep a December Daily Scrapbook

Two:  Blow Glass Ornaments

Three:  Advent Calendars

Four:  Read Christmas Books

Five:  Make and Send Christmas Cards

Six:  See a Special Show

Seven:  Elf on the Shelf

Eight:  Bake Cookies

Nine:  Christmas Toys

Ten:  Cut Your Own Christmas Tree

Eleven:  Email from Santa

Twelve:  Make Gingerbread Houses

Thirteen:  Make Christmas Presents

Fourteen:  Decorate Together

Fifteen:  Christmas Nativity Scene

Sixteen:  Play in the Snow

Seventeen:  Wrap Presents

Eighteen:  Practice Act of Kindness at Christmas

Nineteen:  Write Letters to Santa

Twenty:  Watch Christmas Specials

Twenty-one:  See Santa

Twenty-two:  Deliver Teacher Gifts

Twenty-three:  See Christmas Lights

Twenty-four:  Christmas Pajamas

Twenty-five:  Go to Church With Your Family

PS. This post contains affiliate links. When you click the link and make a purchase through the link, we make a little money, this helps to keep The Semiconservative Granola Girl going. Thank you for your support.

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Back to School Resolutions

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Transitioning Back to School with Back to School Resolutions

Back to School Resolutions

This week is back to school for much of the Northeast.  As a family of teachers and students, we have been in relaxation mode since the end of June.  Late nights, late mornings, reading whatever we want, and to say there was not routine is not an exaggeration.  So this week, we are transitioning back to school.  And, September always seems like a fresh start for me.  It rings of a New Year in a way that January 1 rarely does.  So, it seemed like the time for some Back to School Resolutions.

Continue to be consistent about Meal Planning

As I mentioned in my post about Why Meal Planning is a Must for Working Moms, meal planning has been a blessing both for the structure that it provides and the money it saves.  Saturday, I sat down with my meal planner (free meal planner here) and made a plan for this week.  This week is still a little more relaxed because most of our extracurricular activities don’t begin until next week and yesterday was Labor Day, but the plan helps get us back into a rhythm.

meal planner

Here is our menu for the week:

Tuesday:  Taco Tuesday—venison tacos

Wednesday:  Dill Pickle Brined Chicken

Thursday:  Breakfast for dinner—Caprese Egg Bake (recipe coming)

Friday:  Pizza and Wings (a bake at home pie from the supermarket)

Saturday:  My husband has a booth at a craft show, so we’ll be eating out.

Establish better Reading Routines

back to school resolutions--establish reading routines

Each of our students will be expected to read for at least half an hour each night.  Sunshine needs to do half an hour of her own reading which at times last year got pushed off until bedtime.  And sometimes when it gets put off, it becomes a battle.  I would like to make sure that she does her independent reading right when she gets home. Then reading at bedtime is a bonus.

The Boy will be expected to do 15 minutes of his own reading and be read to for 15 minutes.  Generally, we will do more than that. Again, I would like to see him do his independent reading right after the dishwasher, but sometime he needs more attention and instruction, so we’ll have to see how it goes.

We will get this routine in place this week even though the official start of`the assigned homework will be a couple weeks off.

Clearer Chore Routines

back to school resolutions--better chore routines

During the summer, the kids continued to do their chores and even some extras. However we will return to a chore schedule and perhaps return to using the Chore Monster App.  As I mentioned in my post, Why Your Kids Need Chores, the kids have a section of the dishwasher to empty.  The Boy is in charge of the silverware and Sunshine is in charge of the bottom rack.  This is determined by what each can reach.  This is actually the first thing we do we when walk through the door after school.  This is really important to my dinner and lunch preparations because we run the dishwasher pretty nearly everyday, so I need it done so that I can get right into meal prep.  They will help clear the table and do routine picking up.

Dinner and Lunch Preparation

Venison Pepper Steak

After the kids have emptied the dishwasher.  I plan to begin making dinner and lunches at the same time.  Most days, our meals include salad and cut vegetables as do our lunches.  Sandwich and homemade lunchable making fits easily between dinner steps.  It is so refreshing to not have to worry about making lunches after dinner or in the morning–ugh!

Better Bedtime Routines

Back to School Routines--bedtime

This is the one that needs the most help!  After a summer of fishing expeditions after dinner, campfires and “late night” movies, it is time for regular bedtime routines.  In fact, the goal is to get to bed earlier this year than last.  We will take baths/showers,  brush teeth and then do half an hour of reading all three of us together.  Sometimes Daddy joins us for reading too.

 

What back to school resolutions have you made as the summer draws to a close and you reenter the school year?  I would love to hear your thoughts.

 

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Super Easy Venison Tomato Sauce

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Homemade tomato sauce conjures ideas of tomatoes slow cooking on the stove for hours.  However, the truth is you can make a super easy venison tomato sauce in about 20 minutes.  And, you’re Italian friends will not know the difference.  Oh, and if you’re not into venison, this can be made vegetarian or with the ground meat of your choice.  Friends, you never have to buy jarred sauce again!

Super easy venison tomato sauce

We use this as the base sauce for many a recipe.  Obviously, we use it for sauce over pasta.  Just the other night, Sunshine made the sauce (with guidance) while The Boy and I made Venison Sausage Meatballs.  In this version, the only meat was the meatballs.  A batch of this sauce is also the foundation of Baked Ravioli.

Super Easy Venison Tomato Sauce

Start by browning venison (or the ground meat of your choice) in olive oil.  Add onion and garlic  when the meat is mostly done.  Cook until the onion is translucent. (Love the Oxo Garlic Press for fresh minced garlic–see the photo below.)

browned venison sausage for venison tomato sauce

Add canned crushed tomatoes, oregano, basil, parsley, and salt.

super easy venison tomato sauce ingredients

Simmer 15 minutes or longer.  Serve over pasta or as the base for another meal.

Super Easy Venison Tomato Sauce & Meal Planning

super easy venison tomato sauce

This is so quick and so easy.  It can easily fit into your meal planning for a weeknight meal that takes 20 or so minutes to prepare.  You can make it on the weekend and use it during the week for an even quicker weeknight meal.  Double, triple or even quadruple the batch and freeze it for later.  I’m not very good with the whole freezer meal thing which I mentioned in my meal planning post, 5 Tips Meal Planning; however, frozen sauce is a different thing because frozen sauce can become so many other things.  I just freeze it in quart sized freeze zipper bags.

We also freeze our leftovers and these become the foundation of the next batch of sauce.  Before the kids started eating sauce, I think we had leftover sauce in the freezer that we would thaw and add to for a run of probably a year or more.  I know that sounds gross, but really it wasn’t.  It was never exactly the same sauce as the one we pulled out at the beginning of the meal.  Now, we generally use it up within a month of two because we add it to Venison Parmesan or Baked Ravioli or Baked Ziti.

So, give this sauce a try and let us know in the comments below how you use it!

PS. This post contains affiliate links. When you click the link and make a purchase through the link, we make a little money, this helps to keep The Semiconservative Granola Girl going. Thank you for your support.

 

Print Recipe
 Super Easy Venison Tomato Sauce
Course Main Dish
Cuisine Locavore
Prep Time 5 minutes
Cook Time 20 minutes
Servings
people
Ingredients
Course Main Dish
Cuisine Locavore
Prep Time 5 minutes
Cook Time 20 minutes
Servings
people
Ingredients
Instructions
  1. Heat oil in a large sauce pan. Brown the ground meat.
  2. When meat is just about cooked through, add chopped onion and minced garlic.
  3. Add tomatoes, herbs and salt. Simmer at least 15 minutes.
Share this Recipe
 

Summer Reading July 2017

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Summer Reading July 2017 is going splendidly in our house.  We are reading so many great books together as a family and everyone is working on something independently.

This post is part of a series of posts where we share what we are reading each month.  We hope that you will get some inspiration for your reading and reading with your children.

Summer Reading July 2017

Free Book from Barnes and Noble

First, I finally got around to reading my son’s end of the year teacher letter.  It got set aside after kindergarten graduation.  Then we were off to the cabin and it got buried.  Okay, so what I just read got me really excited: free books for my kids for reading!  Apparently, Barnes and Noble has a summer reading incentive.  If your child reads eight books and he or she (or you) writes down the titles, authors and favorite part, and you take that journal to Barnes and Noble before September 5, 2017, your child will get to pick out a book (from a list).  Unfortunately, this is only for grades 1-6, but if you have kids that fall into that category, be sure to take advantage of this one!

My Summer Reading July 2017

       

I mentioned in my initial Summer Reading 2017 post that I was looking forward to reading Eowyn Ivey’s new book, To the Bright Edge of the World.  And it is everything I hoped it would be.  The story is super engaging.  It takes place in the late 1880s on the Western Frontier of Vancouver and Alaska.  Husband and wife each narrate their own stories.  Allen is mapping new frontier on the Wolverine River of Alaska for the army and Sophie is left behind on base in Vancouver.  Both write journals of their experiences that are compelling and at times, heart wrenching.  Ivey is an excellent story-teller.  She effortlessly switches between the two narrators, and just like Snow Child, she incorporates elements of mythology and magical realism into the tale.

Sunshine’s Summer Reading July 2017

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Sunshine is devouring books this summer.  A little bit on her own and a lot together.  She read the three Chicken Squad (Doreen Cronin) books out loud to me and The Boy.  They are easy for her to read, so they helped to boost her confidence.  She can’t pick a favorite among the three books that we read:  Chicken Squad:  The First Misadventure, The Case of the Weird Blue Chicken and Into the Wild.  The Boy favors the second book, The Case of the Weird Blue Chicken, which we actually read twice!

Independently, she is reading Frannie K. Stein, Mad Scientist:  Fantastic Voyage.  I really enjoyed watching her bring this book to the beach to read at times when she needed a little rest from the roughness of the boys.

Her favorite book so far has to be The Door to Andara.  This book was a gift from her reading teaching, whom the kids call Mrs. J. Smith because there is another Mrs. Smith in the building.  Mrs. J. Smith’s husband, David R. Smith, is also a teacher and he is also the author of several children’s books.  Throughout the school year, Mrs. J. Smith read several of her husband’s books to her second grade group.  At the end of the year, she gave each child a personalized and autographed copy.  Sunshine was super excited to get the book and get started on it.

Even on nights when she is so tired she can barely climb into bed, she wants to hear a chapter or two.  We are pretty nearly done.  I, too, am looking forward to finding our just what happens in the parallel world of Andara where Nate and Annalyn must use their twin powers to save Andara (and possibly earth, too)  from the evil Morloch.

The Boy’s Summer Reading July 2017

         

Reading to and with The Boy is sometimes a challenge, but we have found a few favorites to keep his attention.  He did great with The Chicken Squad books.  So I think we will move on to the fourth book in the series:  Dark Shadows: Another Misadventure.  The chickens are super quirky and the story is filled with irony which is a great skill to help kids develop.  We are also reading and enjoying the first book in The Adirondack Kids series.  The second book, The Adirondack Kids: Rescue on Bald Mountain is in our queue.

         

In the picture book zone, we are reading The Great Gracie Chase (Cynthia Rylant) and the new Pout-Pout Fish Book:  The Pout-Pout Fish, Far, Far From Home (Deborah Diesen) As we read these books, The Boy “helps.”  I read along with my finger on the words until I come to a sight word that I know he knows.  Then it is his turn and he read his words.  Occasionally, I try to add a word to his repertoire like we added “dog” with The Great Gracie Chase.

Coming Up

     

We are always looking ahead to what we will read next.  I have my eye on a couple of additional Doreen Cronin chapter books about J.J. Tully who is a character in the Chicken Squad books.  I don’t know if these are part of the series or a companion series, but J.J. Tully is a fun character in the Chicken Squad books: a retired search and rescue dog.  The first book is J.J. Tully: The Trouble with Chickens and it is on our list for August.

Sunshine has started another series: The Cobble Street Cousins by Cynthia Rylant.  These books have been on our shelves for a while and I’ve had trouble convincing her to read them because the cover is not as flashy as some of the other series we have.  I forced her to start the first book the other day:  In Aunt Lucy’s Kitchen and she is totally hooked.  It’s about three cousins who are living with their Aunt Lucy while their parents are on the road for work.  In the first book, the girls start a cookie business In Aunt Lucy’s Kitchen.   Like the Chicken Squad books, these are easy for her to read so they add to her fluency and confidence.

Your Turn

So tell me, what are you and your children enjoying this summer?  We would love to hear what you are reading.

PS. This post contains affiliate links. When you click the link and make a purchase through the link, we make a little money, this helps to keep The Semiconservative Granola Girl going. Thank you for your support.

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Let Your Kids Do their own Packing

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The Fourth of July is over, but there still is a lot of summer left.  Many of you still have trips planned:  little road trip jaunts, camping trips, and some of you may even have epic once-in-a-life-time trips planned.  And I am here to tell you that you should let your kids do their own packing.  Even young children can pack their own bags and toys with a list and some instructions.

Let Your Kids Do Their Own Packing

Vacations are awesome.  And, if you’re a teacher like I am, summer is the best.  Right?  Freedom from work (and paychecks–they never glamorize that part) and other people’s kids.  I get to spend a lot of time with my favorite people in my favorite place:  our Adirondack cabin.  However, that lead up to packing the truck and hitting the road can be stressful for Mommy.  Really, I mean, Mommy has to shop for and pack the food, pack for herself and the kids. Stress should not be what vacations are about, even in the days and hours beforehand.

Last summer, we were doing a lot of four-day weekends at our cabin which meant a lot of packing and unpacking.  All I did on Tuesday was laundry and all I did on Thursday was pack.  Then it dawned on me, Sunshine is beginning to read.  If she can read and count, she can pack.

Kids & Packing

I am a list maker.  At some point, I will likely do a post on this, but for now, all you need to know is that I was making lists of items to pack for each trip anyway.  So, this was a natural progression.  Prior to creating the lists for the kids, I thought about creating a packing list for myself.  We go to our cabin regularly throughout the summer, so there are standard items we take with us.  A list that I print from the computer would be just the thing to make sure we have all the things we take each time.  We still don’t have lists for the grown ups, but the kids have theirs and the kids do their own packing.

I started them packing for themselves toward the end of last summer.  Sunshine was 7 and The Boy was 4.  I created a list for each of them that I could print from the computer each trip. They could check things off as they added the item to the bin.  (We travel by pick-up truck, so we pack in plastic bins with lids.  If it rains, our stuff stays dry.  If it is sunny, the bins are still easy to fill, move and load onto and off of the truck.)

As we were getting ready to go on our first big trip of the season, I told Sunshine that we would need to pack on Wednesday because we wouldn’t have any other time before we left on Saturday in the wee hours of the morning.  Her response?  Simply, “OK, can I have my list?”  It was that simple because we have made it routine (just like chores).

Tips for Letting Your Kids Do Their Own Packing

Have a Plan

Before you call your child to do his or her own packing, you should have the list, what you want them to pack into and have decided whether he or she can bring more or less of items.

Start Small

We have been asking both kids to make decisions about and pack their own toys pretty much since they could walk and talk.  Of course, we used to supervise and/or make sure the blanket and stuffy she can’t sleep without is in the bag.  This also allows us to eliminate more toys than they need.  Sunshine would bring her whole bedroom if we would let her.  We issue each child a grocery bag (one of those reusable bags you get for a dollar at your local store) which he or she can fill but not exceed.  The Boy does fine.  The Girl always ends up trying to negotiate for extra space for all of her dolls!

Make a List

Create a list that is in chart form.  The list should be easy to read, have clear expectations (like numbers, types of clothing, rain gear, etc.) and have a place to check off when the item is packed.  If you are not quite sure how to start, here is a free download. (I left toiletries off of this list because we have a second set at the cabin, but even if we didn’t, I would still pack them myself because it is just as easy to grab 4 toothbrushes as it is to grab 1.)

Give Up Control

It is so hard sometimes to give up the control.  I know that you can do it better and faster.  In the long run, that is not in your interest or the interest of your kids.  You are helping yourself (eventually) by getting that time back and you are teaching responsibility.  If Sunshine gets to the cabin and says, “Mom, where is…?”  I can say, “I don’t know, did you pack it?”  And then she might have to suffer the consequence of not packing it (or, we might have to make a trip to Walmart, it’s a potential reality, but it hasn’t happened yet!)

Conclusion

I truly hope that you have a super vacation with your family.  One that starts out with less stress because you were able to delegate a little.  And friends, if you have tried letting your kids pack, share what works for you.  I’m always looking for new ideas about how to streamline our lives.

 

 

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