I drew a comic strip about Betty Blonde and blueberry muffins a few days ago. That comic strip was not drawn on some random whim. Oh no, no, no. That comic strip was based on my recent experiences with making the most scrumptious blueberry muffin ever.
About two weeks ago, I discovered this “Blueberry Cream Muffin” recipe on Taste of Home magazine’s marvelous website. I measured, mixed, and added several large spoonfuls of sour cream and sugar to the batter. Needless to say, the muffins came out moist, rich, and delightfully dangerous to Dad’s diet.
I thought they could use a little improvement though, so I chose a different recipe. This one was entitled “Nutmeg Blueberry Muffins”. Now there’s nothing wrong with a bit of nutmeg in a muffin, right? Right. Unfortunately, I didn’t follow the recipe correctly and added a half teaspoon of powdered nutmeg directly to the batter when I should have sprinkled a little on top of each muffin while it was baking. A whole half teaspoon of powdered nutmeg does not do wonders to baked goods.
I want a blueberry muffin akin to Panera’s Wild Blueberry muffin. Sweet and chock full of berries inside, and crunchy on top. I suppose my muffins are not destined to be a culinary masterpiece, but there is still a ray of hope! Third time’s the charm they say! Right?
Right.
I really liked the nutmeg muffins. Why change!?!!
Too much nutmeg!
Hi Kelly and Ken and Lorna and Christian,
It is good to read all that I missed out on while our family was on our 3rd annual camping trip on the Big Sur River. We had a blast! School starts up in earnest this
Monday. I spent several weeks laying the year’s plans out prior to camping and
thought that I would solidify them while on vacation, but I did not look at them,
not even once! I will certainly suffer for it this week, especially on the “creative”
stuff, but we should get into a good clip very soon! My biggest task is to get the
kids back onto a managable sleeping/rise schedule, as well as having routine mealtimes,
which really tend to be the support of a successful homeschool year for us. That
may seem funny to some, but things just go better when we go to bed at the same
time and have our meals at regular intervals. The summer always gets us out of the
sleep/meal time routines and it is always a bit of a struggle getting back into the
swing of things when “school” comes around again (like life is not learning).
It also doesn’t help that we go an 2 long camping trips twice in the last month
before starting school, and especially one that ends the Saturday before we are to
officially start! Much too much late night Boggle, reading, card games and star
gazing, as well as crawdad hunts in the dark down at the river…can’t go to bed
early with those activities as alternatives to sleep.
On a side note: Emma is almost finished with Rosetta Stone 1. She liked the format
so much that she will be studying Spanish using Rosetta Stone 2 this year. She is
hoping to finish long before the end of the school year. She won’t be able to devote
several hours a day to it, but she is planning about 4-5 hours a week. We shall see
how it goes. Wish us luck this coming week!
I have mounds of laundry to do, a dog to wash and a master list for camping to make.
We forgot our pots and pans! Most of our dinners were premade and required a pot or
pan to re-heat. Thankfully, someone had extras and lent them to us for the week!
Ruthie
P.S. Kelly, make sure (after you have perfected the recipe) that you overfill the
muffin tins to get that coveted “muffin top”.
Although they are not wanted on our bodies, we certainly will pay well for a bag of
yummy muffin tops.
We were wondering where you had gone Ruthie. We hope you had a great time, but we are glad you are back! We go through the same thing here in North Carolina when the homeschool year starts. Everyone is inspired to start homeschool with all the new books, but where the spirit is willing the flesh is often weak when it comes to getting up at 6:30 AM instead of 8:30. We are just getting back into it.
Your camping trip reminds me of many, many stays at my grandmothers home in Cottage Grove, Oregon. Especially the crawdad hunting int the creek. I have to figure out a way to get my kids into an ice cold stream to scavenge under rocks for crawdads. It does not get much better than that on a summer vacation.
That was a great tip on the muffins. We liked her muffins enough that we are going to make her keep practicing until she gets it EXACTLY right. Of course, we will help her eat the mistakes. Nothing is better on a muffin than the top that cooks above the muffin tin. She is going to need several tries to get that right! 🙂
Well we hope you get uncovered with your laundry and cleaning. We are excited to hear how Rosetta Stone 2 goes this year. Emma now at the same level as our kids. We got the CLEP book for Kelly with the hope that if she does Rosetta Stone 2 in conjunction with studies in the CLEP book, she will be ready for the test by the end of the year. Please keep us posted on how Emma does.
Hello Chapman Clan,
I think it is great that the kids will be posting on this blog…it is entitled Chapman
KIDS blog, right?! I am sorry for spelling Lorena’s name wrong on my last post greeting.
You guys have inspired me to consider purchasing the CLEP Spanish book and look
into taking the test at the end of the year. Your kids
do have the advantage of speaking Spanish in the home. We do have some neighbors who
are native speakers. I will have to check into that. I am also thinking about having
Emma take the CLEP English for English this year. She has a friend who has all the
material and even took the class, but didn’t finish up with the test! I don’t know why.
Ruthie
Glad to hear we are not the only ones with rising early issues…although the first week is great
because the kids are so excited to start. We start Sept. 1st. I bit the bullet and bought
Rosetta Stone Spanish Latin American version 1, 2, and 3 plus audio companion. My kids are 10,
8, 5, 3 and 2 mo. I was planning on having them do 30 minutes per day unassisted. How much of my help
will they need, and how much can they do on their own? Which ages will be able to participate?
I just got tired of Spanish programs that were “kiddie” because they are past that level.
Also I would like to know, maybe in a future post from Kelly, what specifically she does on a
daily basis to prepare for the CLEP tests. I also started reading the Well Trained Mind and I’m
fascinated by it and the resources she suggests. Is Kelly following any of those suggestions?
Tomorrow the kids will be ecstatic when I start opening all the boxes we’ve been receiving and
start organizing the “homeschool room.” Just to make it fun/more exciting, I’ve forbidden them
from entering the room until I have it ready! This year, instead of them each having their own
desks, I’m going to try using “stations” for each different subject. Has anyone tried this?
I decided that individual desks were a product/necessity of public schools, and for some reason
have this crazy idea that “stations” are going to be really fun (not to mention easier to keep
organized.) For example, I’ll make a math table with all the math books, supplies and a
computer for the CD rom that goes with the Singapore math program we are using. Ditto for
history, science, language arts, typing/Spanish, etc. One reason I think this will work better
is because the kids pair up differently for different subjects. For example, Addie and Konrad
do math together, Addie and Adrianna work on history together, and Konrad and Adrianna are together using
a language arts/writing program by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Bauer. I’ll keep you posted on how it works!
Man, Audrey, you have come to the right place for advice on Rosetta Stone. I think Ruthie might have some great input on the Spanish thing because she is a non-native speaker who her daughter, Emma just finished the first year. The way we use Rosetta Stone, there is not really much to do other them turn them loose with the program. It was like a game for Kelly and Christian for quite awhile. Tedium can set in, but way less so than for other systems I have seen. The really good thing about Rosetta Stone as a home schooling parent is that the program keeps very close track of everything the kids are doing. You can really track their practice. Having been through this myself, I really believe that, after a base of knowledge has been established (maybe after the first year of Rosetta Stone), immersion four 2-3 weeks by visiting a place where no one speaks English is far and away the most helpful thing you can do. It allows the ear to get practiced and it is very inspiring. If you cannot get that, regular practice with native speakers is a distant second in terms of helpfulness.
As for CLEP, I am very interested to see how it goes with Emma. Ruthie might have some comments on that, too, as Emma works through it. We were very fired up with the progress Kelly has made using CLEP, not only as a way to get college credit, but as a learning tool. She believes she learned more about the big picture of U.S. History from CLEP than from her other Sonlight books. The Sonlight U.S. History books have a very liberal bent to them. They are good and go into a good depth, but the CLEP pulled it all together for her. The Freshman English Composition CLEP preparation was also good. Christian is doing Composition, U.S. History I & II, and maybe Spanish this year. We will keep you posted on how it goes. In addition, I will have Kelly do a blog post on how she does her CLEP preparation. She has a very systematic way she goes about it. Maybe she could even put up some of the notes she takes.
Susan Rice Bauer. We read The Well Trained Mind when we were getting started and we do a lot of “classical education” kinds of things. We have some good friends in San Diego who even studied Latin. They really loved it. At the same time, I get a little irritated with some of the ideas people have about classical education. It seems like it is very well suited for training lawyers, but less well suited for training engineers and scientists. You can take that last statement with a grain of salt, though, as I am pretty much unbalanced on the engineer/scientist side of that scale. A lot of people really love classical education–I guess balance is the key for any of those kinds of things.
We did not have and CD ROM’s that went with Singapore Math. That would have been great. Let us know how that goes.
Hi,
Concerning Rosetta Stone. Since Emma is 17 and a very independent and trustworthy student,
I did not purchase the Homeschool edition of Rosetta Stone. It reviews ALOT and keeps
some kids bored by not letting them progress. I made my choice by speaking with the
RS representative on the phone. He said that if I tried to limit her progression
by having her do the homeschool edition, she would not be able to progress as fast
and would become frustrated with the program. Emma kept track of her time daily in
the program, as well as the scores for all of her “Quizes”. I did, however, use the
student workbook pages from the homeschool edition (purchased by the school for
multiple student use) for Emma to fill out as she went along. She also made daily
flash cards so that she could review on the road, etc…
The thing that we lack is a native speaker in the home. I need to search one out. I
believe that my sister can speak with Emma over SKYPE (if you don’t know about this a
amazing piece of software that allows you to speak audibly using computers, a mic and
headset, you need to look into it. Can even use live video). She was married to an
Argentinian? and speaks fairly fluently, but lives an hour away and is busy with a 2
year old! We have a neighbor who speaks very poor English and is a native of Mexico.
I need to ask her if Emma can speak to her regularly. She has 2 elementary aged kids who
speak only Spanish in the home, too, but they have some behavioral problems…hmmmm
Anyway, we have to figure something out.
Ruthie
I have heard Mrs. Bauer speak at several Homeschool Conferences. I get a feeling of
superiority from her and in regards to her classical method. I believe that you are
right on when you state that the purely “classical” method seems to be more fit towards
those who want to be a laywer, or perhaps a politician (ha), but I believe that there
are many different approaches to home educating your children. I have used some of the
method, but I am truely ecclectic, and I seem to use what works best with our family.
We talk to our family in Mexico every day on Skype and love it. We highly recommend it, too. It is especially good for Lorena because she can talk to her mother as much as she wants. I did not know about that non-homeschool Rosetta Stone. In fact, the kids have taken quite awhile going through it. I am glad to hear that I am not completely out to lunch on my “Well Trained Mind” theories.
The non-homeschooled program (personal edition)covers exactly the same material,
but allows the person to the freedom to progress as soon as they master it. It is
hard to bypass the SMS? part of the homeschool program; I forget what it is called,
but it is the part of the homeschool version that manages the and keeps track of
the student’s progress for the parent. The tests are still there on the software,
you just choose how you go about doing the program. Oh, I remember, it is called the
Student Management System.
No, no, no, you are not out to lunch. My dad is an electrical engineer, too. That
purely “classical” method would drive him bananas. He was actually a systems analyst
with the now defunked SR-71 program from almost its inception in the 1960’s until
its ultimate demise in the 1990’s. He is a pretty brilliant guy.
Ruthie
Wow! I would love to meet your Dad. I lived in the bay area for awhile and met a few of the old skunks works guys at Lockheed. Congratulations!