Three Things Thursday

 

I thought that this might be a fun way to beat some of the winter blues or cabin fever that some of us are experiencing.  I heard that we may be in for another round of snow! Oh I so hope not!  Anyhow, for right now I am warm and cozy in my pj’s and I thought it would be fun to join this blog hop!

 

So here goes this is Three Things Thursday and I will share 3 random things about myself that you may or may not know. 

 

1.  I live in the country now but I was raised in the city!  I love living in rural Brown County, however it wasn’t always this way.  You see when it suddenly takes you about an hour to get anywhere instead of about 15 minutes, it is a bit of a change.  I have adjusted though and wouldn’t want to go back to the city.

 

2.  I wanted to go to college to be a special education teacher!  I changed that half way thru my second year of college at Wright State University and switched to nursing.  After my mom’s passing I decided to take some time off of school.  After I am finished raising my kiddos I will go back and be a neonatal nurse!

 

3.  I am in the process of reteaching myself the piano.  As a kid I played the piano for many years.  I thought it was like riding a bike and once I sat down it would come back to me.  Well, at the slightly over 40 years of age that I am, I am thinking that if this statement is true then I should never get back on a bike!  It is slowly coming along, though, and I won't really be hesitant about bikes either :)

 

That is it for this week!  If you want to read other Three Things Thursday posts, or participate in the blog hop, you can check out Heidi's Head by clicking here.

Enjoy!

Waterless Dog Shampoo~ Does it work?

     

Here are my two dogs. Daisy, on the left is the lively and spirited one.  I know you wouldn’t know from this pic!

Dixie on the right is our calm, docile one.

       As a dog owner of not one small dog, but two large Labs, it is a constant struggle to keep them clean and smelling fresh.  My labs are girls so they are smaller compared to their male companions that can easily be over 120 pounds.  Weighing only 70 pounds each my girls are still rather large to be indoors, however that is part of our crazy life.  Originally we had one lab in the house.  Then along came a stray that we decided to keep outside.  Well being black and hot in the summers I started to bring her in for a few hours in the afternoons.  Then suddenly they both were indoors full time!  I don’t know how that happened at all
     When the weather is warm and dry it is so easy to give the dogs a bath outside and they truly love it.  We then tie them up to the deck so that they can dry.  When it rains or is cold like it has been outdoor baths are not an option.  I have resorted to washing them in my bath tub a time or two.  That is a disaster though as I have to then wash the bathroom walls as well as the rest of the bathroom literally top to bottom to rid it of the dog hair.  Not very fun on my part.  We have them groomed from time to time, however that is an hour away.
    In my quest to make my own cleaning things like laundry soap, window cleaner and dishwasher soap I thought about waterless shampoo.  I knew there was a said product for people what about for dogs?  I found a recipe from The Krazy Coupon Lady.  You can find the recipe here.   Who would have thought that you could use cornstarch and baking soda to freshen up your dog? So does this really work?  Well, Joe and I talked about giving it a try and we finally did it.  I made the recipe and put it in a mason jar.  Joe punched holes in an old lid, making a large salt shaker looking thing. I recommend doing this outside as we did about Thanksgiving time.  The pictures are from today when we had to do it inside due to the recent frigid temps here.  The shaker worked awesome to distribute the powder over the dogs.  Then it says to leave it on the dogs for about 10-20 minutes.  Well, we thought that it couldn’t hurt to leave it on for about 30 minutes.  As you can see on the left we put them in their kennels to wait out that 30 minutes.  Once that time was up we used our FURminator brush to brush the dogs.  It doesn’t pull the powder out as I thought it would, but it did get most of it out.  
    So we then did the sniff test.  Did the dogs still smell?  NO!  I am so excited to report that this stuff does work.  It sweeps up really nice.  It works by clumping to the oils and dirt in the hair and then that gets removed when you brush/sweep the dog. I wouldn't recommend using this all the time.  I couldn’t see how it would replace an actual bath, however it is a great in between.
Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Homemade Dishwasher Powder

  With 4 kids in the house we use our dishwasher a lot.  Like the washer, it runs at least 2 times a day on average.  We are currently on our 4th one with in 16 years.  One of those dishwashers we replaced because it just didn’t seem to do a good job so after about 2 years we replaced it.  Another dishwasher had to be replaced because the control panel caught on fire,  thank goodness we were home
  With our latest purchase, my husband did a bit of research and found that Bosch is one of the top names in dishwashers.  My mother in law purchased a Bosch when she purchased her last one and loves it.  So guess what we bought?  Yep a Bosch.  We purchased a midgrade model, as kiddos are hard on appliances!
     With a dishwasher you need of course, dishwashing soap.  You can't use Dawn, trust me, I accidently put a bit of Dawn in my dishwasher a long time ago and we didn't like the bubble show that was all over my kitchen.  Fortunately it was a drop and not a full dispenser worth!  So along with a few dishwasher searches we have visited the detergent search a few times as well.  At one point one of our dishwashers couldn't even clean off a bit a ketchup left on the plate!  Yes, I said Ketchup.  Can you guess which one this was?  If you said the one that was only 2 years  old you are right!  Even with coupons the  detergent that we had to use to get clean dishes was the expensive cascade ones in the tub.  You get 20 packets and we would make about a week with the it.
    I started to make my own laundry detergent about 2 years ago and it works as well as Tide if not better.  To find a dishwashing detergent that I liked I had to try several recipes and I think I have found one that will I will stay with.  So this is what I use:

Homemade Dishwasher Soap:

         2 cups of borax

        2 cups of washing soda

      1 cup of citric acid

      1/8 cup of kosher salt

Now, when I made my first batch I thought I could take it and keep it in a mason jar with a cute little tag attached with raffia.  Well that was a failure and resulted in one big hardened clump!  So now I take these ingredients and mix them up.  I spread it out on a large cookie sheet and let it sit for a day or two.  Then I can put it in that mason jar tied with raffia!  I was told at the citric acid makes it harden.  So make sure you let it dry out well first.

Do you have a homemade dishwashing detergent that you use? Feel free to share.  Did you try this one?  I would love to know how it worked for you!

Friday fun~Roller Skating

       I think that gym class is one of my kids favorite classes!  Of course that would be next to lunch and recess, if these would be considered actual classes.  So what does a homeschooler do for gym?  This is going to vary from family to family and season to season as most homeschoolers don't have a huge gym with all the equipment in their basements.  We do lots of things.  My kiddos get on the treadmill, dance, play ball, hike and then of course roller skate!
     I remember going to the skating rink as a kid.  I wouldn’t say that I went a lot however I did go.  It was one of the things to do in our small town of Loveland, Ohio.  It has grown over the past couple of years since I moved .  It has kept it’s Castle Skateland!

                                                                                                                               
 This is what Castle skateland looks like on the outside.  I was always amazed with the building.  We actually have two “castles” in Loveland.  We have this one and then a real one the Loveland Castle.  I will share that one another time.
    This is what the Castle Skateland looks like on the inside.  Yep I bet it looks similar to other skate rinks.

                                           

          The skaters were of all different ages including adults and most were really great on their skates.  This of course is not including me   I was very proud that I didn’t have any crashes when we left, however it may have something to do with the fact that I did hug the wall a lot.  I even had the “ref” or what ever her title was that skated with us come up to me and tell me that you weren’t supposed to stop at the wall.  Who knew that you couldn’t lean on the wall the whole way around?  It has be probably 25 years since I was on rollers skates.  Being 40+ as my kiddos now tell me I have to take these things slow     I was so impressed with Joe and my boys.  It has been about the same time since Joe was on skates and my boys had never been to a skating rink in their life!  We do have inline skates that they have taken maybe a half a dozen times to the park, however they don’t take them often because there aren’t any to share.

 

        The pic below was one of my favorites of the day.  Joe going around the rink with Cecelia.  Isn’t that sweet!

Finally this is a picture of us outside on the front side of the castle. 

Hope you have enjoyed sharing our outing!

Loving our science!

     As I have said before I love when you find a curriculum that works and for more than one kiddo. Also stated, before I love Apologia Science.  This week we started back our school from our Christmas break as a lot of schools have.  The snow in our area gave our brick and mortar kiddos a longer break that others, like my homeschooled ones, but hey that is how it happens sometimes.
     Anyhow, we just started studying the nervous system with the three younger ones.  The writing in Apologia’s Exploring Creation series is written for kids!  My oldest works on his science on his own!   I remember many times sitting in the classrooms of different classes, like History, English or Science and thinking what are they saying here? Or we really discussed this yesterday?    I obviously, wasn’t the class valedictorian but I made it work and made it through.  I am the type of person who has to say it, read it, write it, dance it and then sing over and over to make some things stick.  Thankfully it isn’t everything.  I don’t know what the reasoning is as to what makes something stick and something else not but other than that is the way God wired my brain.  I think it is amazing that God designed us to think differently, learn differently and like different things because of how interesting it makes the world.  It is however, bothersome to me when it comes to learning.  Nothing hurts more than to see your child struggle because they are not getting something.  We have so many different learning styles and one teacher to teach it. 
     One of the benefits of homeschooling is tailoring your child’s education to specifically meet their needs.  Our brick and mortar schools don’t have the time, money, resources or whatever to individualize each students education plan on a daily basis.  They teach according to the majority not the individual.  I try to look for things that my children need on an individual basis for the most part.  We have some subjects that we have always done on a group basis, like history or science.  I have found that we all learn better when there are hands on projects/activities that accompany our studies. 
     So as we started back we started with the Central Nervous System-The brain and spinal column.  Of course there is a lot of information when it comes to most science programs, and studying human anatomy is no different.  So we made brains out of playdough!  As you can see, we made each part a different color.  Now in explaining the functions of these parts my second grader may say “We are talking about the red part, right?” We have only been discussing this for 2 days so I think that the fact that she knows what part is being discusses is a great testament to the power of hands on activities!  So here are the brains……
    


                                                               

Then we made neurons as you can see below.  Now you may have noticed that there are 4 brains and only 3 neurons.  I made a brain to show the kiddos how to make it then I let them do the neurons on their own. The exciting part was that each of my kids could tell what the different parts were after just that lesson.  Yep even my second grader!  With her though it was just like the brain and she would say “the blue part or the green part”.  I have to say that I think that is a lot for a second grader to take in for an hour lesson.


                                                                                       
Hope you have enjoyed checking out our science!