Completely adorable!

Game Day Jitters!

Okay the team has been here at our home since about 12 noon. Full tummies, a bit nervous and a bit anxious BUT ready to let the Journey begin.......

Alex's Kitchen Science Lesson #1 ~ Braising

Braising = cooking with liquid

Recipe: Grandma Shari's Pot Roast with Peas

Chapter 3 "Braising" in Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food

Searing the meat.

(This was our last pot roast from our half a cow we buy each year. What an awesome way to use it!)

Cutting the veggies. He got a little knife lesson in here too and did a wonderful job! Uniform potato bits is not the easiest trick to learn.

Making the cooking liquid. First, he added a Bullion cube to the water...

And the finished dinner! Man, it was good! I am going to keep this recipe in our stocks so we can try 'braising' again!

Listen to the Raiders take on the Bulldogs

Okay here is your chance to listen live to the Raider's as they take the field for our first playoff game of the 2010 season. Click on the link and then click on the listen live button. Game starts at 7 pm on 10/30/10.

http://knuj.net/page/local_sports

"Try"-athletes

Here are the swimmers about to enter the pool and kick some bootay! I was really proud of these guys. Shay probably passed 15 people.

Here we are at the finish-line. Whoo hoo...I sure love these guys

We did it!!! Our stake held its 1st annual tri-athalon and our family entered as two seperate teams. We didn't really train...although Shay has been doing swim team at the highschool. It was a 1/2 mile swim, 4 mile bike and 2 mile run. The bike was supposed to be 8 miles, but because of the huge number of people that signed up they changed it to 4. They didn't have a permit for that many people to bike on the roads...Anywho, here's how it went down.

Shay-swim, Steve-bike, Kinsey-run (Steve actually ended up running w/ her because she was nervous to do it by herself)

Kevin-swim, Derek-bike, Amy-run

Around our City ~ Farm Tour #3

Today is a beautiful day! In fact, it is the ONLY beautiful day we have had in over a week now. And, unfortunately, the only one in the forecast future. So we decided to take advantage of it. Don took the day off and we headed out on our Pumpkin Patch farm tour. The first farm we visited Picha's farm in Puyallup, was closed until 3pm (which is during nap time in this house)... so we decided to look for another one. And we found Scholtz Farm!

They had all sorts of features out for the harvest season. Their animals were all ready to be petted and watched, and one of the hands told a story about one of the pigs escaping into the corn field (which is a maze) only to come home a bit late for dinner when they were sure 'Mrs Piggy' was gone for good.

But of course, what fun with animals can be complete without Cyan having a close encounter or two:

The pony nibbled her hand pretty good and although it was scary, he was looking for apples, not little girl fingers, so she was fine. After a brief hug from mom and then dad, she was able to go make up with the pony again and feed him some dandelions she found in the pumpkin patch.

We picked up some beautiful pumpkins and quite a few of my favorite squash.

The Delicata!

It was a great sunny day trip!

Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!

Science Everywhere

Alex is starting up with a good dose of Science this year and that had me searching through books and cookbooks, looking for kitchen chemistry concepts on which to base future lessons for him. Which led me to find a book I had stashed away: Janice VanCleave's Biology for Every Kid.

This book is a gem for those Science impaired homeschoolers like me. She has laid out 101 experiments that are simple, easy, and take mostly household items. And best of all, most of them don't make a mess!

I paired it with this wonderful simple science ditto:

which can be found here (there are two pages) and were super easy for Cyan to translate her experiment this afternoon to the sheet. On the second sheet, there is a place to draw a picture of what she had done or the results of her experiment.

Today we did the experiment "Limp Spuds" and we talked about Osmosis. Both my kids are excited about doing more Science this year. Alex actually was able to set up Cyan's experiment for her before he moved on to his written briefing about kitchen safety for his Grandma on Thursday. He says to me as he is reading about osmosis and setting out the table salt "Haha! This is fun!"

Creative Writing and Poetry Class ~ Similes

Today we did a big review of what the kids had learned in the previous three lessons. I was thrilled with how much they have remembered and are able to use in real writing applications!

The second half of the class was dedicated to Similes. Comparison sentences using 'like' or 'as'. Our enrichment project was to take a rainbow, and for each color, create a simile. We had what colors looked like, felt like, smelled like, sounded like, and even tasted like. The sentences were awesome! "Purple tastes like a ripe plum bursting in my mouth on a warm summer day." These kids have a heck of an imagination. Even the youngegest in the class really enjoyed this activity and were able to bring some really great sentences to the table.

Cyan and Tucker the squirrel

Tucker is still around. And now he brings his friend 'Hank' over as well. They had another friend for a couple weeks, but Tucker chased him away. Big family drama, apparently.

Alex decided to film Cyan feeding and petting Tucker... and although she hardly got to touch him here, you can see how comfortable he is with her. It's just amazing!

Please try to ignore the mouth breathing of the videotographer... he's new. ;)

Some of our recent drama of our own... my poor daughter is going through some dental issues. But she is well on the mend and we are currently canning away!

Happy Birthday Dalton!

Happy 14th Birthday Dalton!

Alex's kitchen science inventory

My mom, Alex, and I are starting to implement the Alton Brown science stuff we have worked out over the past few weeks. My mom had two fantastic ideas which have taken up our first week with this science curriculum. #1: a kitchen inventory and #2: a kitchen safety briefing

Here is Alex's inventory:

I think he did a fantastic job! He said he wants to take pictures of the toaster and coffee maker too, but I told him that was unnecessary as long as he remembered he had them to use if he needed to.

(Just for my own sanity, I feel the need to point out that we had just made pizza with the mixer when he decided to do this. It doesn't just sit that dirty. ;) )

Can we please get some Sr photo's taken

We have put it off too many times and starting taking a few Sr photos today. Out of 100 he maybe smiled in 3! This might be a work in progress.

Victory at Alden-Conger

Well when we sub our starters out of the game starting in the second quarter and start putting 8Th graders in.....sorry your starters can't score against us........so the score Wednesday night was 53-0. For every game we win we post a new football helmet on the "Rudenick Bus" for all to see. But as the playoffs start who knows what will happen. We just need to take every play one at a time because we know that anytime our season could be done. We just need to keep everyone healthy and be thankful for the time we have on the field!

Around our City ~ Farm Tour #2

Terry's Berries organic farm.

First stop is the chickens. We get to feed them the scraps from the farm...

And perhaps get to see a few eggs being collected.

Next stop, hay ride to the apple orchard. This took much longer than we could have walked it, but it was super fun for the kids to get pulled by a real working tractor!

At the apple orchard we picked enough for two gallons of cider to take home. One to freeze and one for right now.

And of course, what is cider, without a toddler bitten apple or two between the tree and the press?

We carried the apples back to the farm house to be cleaned, pressed and bottled.

Terry's Berries is a wonderful farm and only 7 miles from our house. This is where I go when my shares at the CSA stop coming in the winter. They have a little farm store open on Tuesdays and Wednesdays year round that provides food from local vendors as well as some imports that are organic. Their staff are friendly, their products are AMAZING, and they have lots of things to see and do during the Autumn months.