All Things Supercinski

I leave two kids coloring in the kitchen while I go in another room for just two minutes, and this is what came to find me…

The post-discipline washing:

And then we dressed up for a tea party.

For the first time in several months, we are without fresh lettuce and spinach in the garden. All that fresh lettuce made me experiment more with salads as meals. Here are a few of my favorites:

Pioneer Woman’s Ginger Steak Salad – This is absolutely delicious and an easy way for me to use up some of the steaks in our freezer from our portion of a grass fed cow.

Chipotle Chicken Salad – Mildly spicy and so good you will want another bowl.

After eating at the Cheesecake Factory a few weeks ago in Frisco, I had been craving the BBQ chicken salad I split with my brother. Here’s my adaptation:

BBQ Chicken Salad, serves 4
Ingredients
2-3 chicken breasts
BBQ sauce (make it or by some honey bbq sauce)
spring mix lettuce or romaine
1 can black beans, drained and rinsed
about 1 cup frozen sweet corn, warmed
1/4 cup red onion, diced
2 roma tomatoes or a handful of cherry tomatoes, sliced
1 avocado
about 1/4 cup ranch dressing

Cook chicken breasts with BBQ sauce. You can do this in the crockpot for a few hours, bake them in the oven, grill them on the grill (basting frequently). After chicken is cooked, but into bite-sized pieces. On each plate, layer a good deal of lettuce. Divide black beans, corn, onion, tomatoes, avocado and cooked chicken among each of your four plates. To make your dressing, combine equal parts of Ranch and BBQ sauce–I used about a 1/4 cup of each and drizzled it over the salads. Enjoy!

We got a a better crop of potatoes and onions than we imagined–30 pounds of potatoes and I have no idea how many onions. Not too shabby considering the potatoes had early blight.

Last week, we had a most disturbing visitor in our garage. I opened the garage, and the kids were running around as I gathered our belongings and ushered them to the open car door. Suddenly, Josiah yells, “I see a snake!” I follow his pointed finger to see a HUGE snake just outside our open garage door, slithering (I’m gagging just remembering it) INTO our garage! I am shrieking and grabbing children and hurling them into the open car door. Thankfully, I already closed the door into the house. I cannot stop shaking and shrieking.

The snake curls up into the corner of the garage behind some old chicken wire and fishing poles. I still cannot stop shaking, and Josiah says, “Momma, call Daddy! He will know what to do!” So I call him. I don’t really remember what he said except that he was coming home and that we should stay in the car and watch to see where the snake goes. I back the car up into the driveway and the kids and I sit there watching to see if the snake moves, and in our rear-view mirror, I see our neighbor across the street, watering his grass, having witnessed everything, but not offering to help. Anyway, I end up calling Thomas and he calms me down and I talk with him until he gets there.

He ends up poking around (apparently the snake moved to the other side of the garage on my watch, I’m not sure how I missed that, unless there were two snakes and I cannot believe that or I will go insane). Thomas pokes at it with some garden tools, but the snake keeps striking at him, so I call animal control (which I have programmed in my cell phone for both CS and Bryan, you never know when you will need it–I have actually called three times in the past year, but I digress.) Thomas gets impatient waiting, so he ends up taking care of the snake himself with the hoe and some other hoe-like garden tool. The animal control man arrives shortly after to identify the slain–a rat snake, the third one the CS Animal Control man has been called about that morning.

Watch where you step, folks. Watch where you step. I kindly (and hurriedly with no editing experience) edited this photo to spare you the blood and dismemberment of our intruder. You can click it to view it larger. I’m second-guessing this whole live-in-the-country-and-grow-our-own-food idea.

For reference, that raised area of the garage where the snake is lying is about 2 feet deep.

There was a brief discussion in one of the comments of the previous redecorating posts about whether or not I am pregnant and nesting. While I am not pregnant, I am finally able to complete many of the nesting projects I obsessed about had in mind when I was pregnant with Annalise. Thomas forbid me to paint during pregnancy or to start any major projects like this until I completed my CLE requirements. So here I am, almost two years later, checking projects off my list.

This is a before shot, just before I began taping and removing everything.

The bathroom is “jack-and-jill” style with three white doors and a ton of built-in white cabinets. The color is a bit more blue-gray than the pictures show.

The pictures aren’t perfect, but you get the idea. My budget was $100, I think I ended up around $110 with rugs and decor, and I am still wanting to redo the cabinet hardware (on the cheap), hopefully I will get to it soon.

My mom’s husband/my stepdad is super-handy and it turns out, is also great at wood-working. I mentioned that I wanted a bench with storage for our entryway, mainly for my Bradley students to have a place to sit and take off and put on their shoes. And this is what he made from an old headboard and a few other supplies!

I made the cushion for the bench, it turned out better than I expected.

They artwork on the wall was inspired by this post.

My model demonstrates the storage capacity of the bench:

Thank you again, Woody! You did a fantastic job!

We are blessed with a large laundry room that separates our kitchen from the garage. This room functions as my sewing room, the staging area for leaving and entering the house (which means it holds bags, shoes, hats, coats, umbrellas, etc.) and, of course, as the laundry room. It has always been a source of frustration for us in organization, also because it has a ton of shelves that hold our canning supplies, some food storage, tools, papertowels, and so on.

We have spent a lot of time this year organizing and sprucing things up around the house, and this is one of my favorite projects so far. We purchased some storage cabinets for sewing and art/school supplies, along with a cube shelf for bags and shoes. I love it! The top of the dryer is no longer covered with stuff, and our floor is not littered with shoes. Each of the kids have a box to put their shoes, coats, hats, and toys in, and this helps a lot. On to the pictures!

I painted the walls with leftover paint from the master bathroom, and sewed and hung a curtain above the washer and dryer. Our hanging apparatus is not perfect, but it works. There are three openings in the curtain for ease of reaching in to get stuff.

The pink post-it note has diaper-washing instructions for someone (not me) who loves to help but has a hard time remembering how.

The wall opposite of the washer-dryer with our shoes, bags, and new cabinets. There is a covered magnet board above the cubes.

My sewing area on the other wall:

These pictures don’t show the shelving on the taller parts of the walls, but who wants to see canning supplies and bags of flour?

We have been busy expanding, planting and tending our garden these days. The kids have enjoyed helping and Annalise has squashed more than her share of sprouts. Most things are growing really well. I may have planted my tomatoes a little early, but time will tell. I abandoned my efforts of starting tomatoes from seed this year and purchased seedlings.

Our lettuce is growing like crazy and I have been giving away kale to anyone who comes over and will take some. We harvested at least 3 gallon freezer bags FULL of carrots–tops not included and we are eating a lot carrots, baking carrot cake for any festive occasion and juicing them.

In this picture, you can see the tomato plants in the foreground (just behind Josiah), with our squash (zucchini, butternut and spaghetti squash) in the far right, the newly expanded area. Behind the tomatoes are two rows of green beans, three rows of yellow onions, two rows of broccoli (some are starting to make their heads, some are younger) and some brussel sprouts at the end of one of the rows.

This picture shows the other end–two rows of potatoes (I need to mound them once more), with a third half of a row in the far back, the newly thinned lettuce patch, some bell peppers, spinach, kale, and a few beets hiding behind the kale. I have yet to plant the melons and cucumbers, but will do that this week.

Not pictured our the old 4×4 raised beds that we moved to the side yard, one has little strawberry plants and the others were recently cleared out to hold some of our melons. The milk jugs beside the tomato plants are to help keep them warm at night from an article I read in Texas Gardener… not sure if it is working or not yet.

And my almost all-Supercinski-raised meal: roasted chicken from broilers we raised at our friends’ home and Thomas helped process, Maple-Cranberry sweet potatoes from our garden last fall, and a salad (er, lettuce, I’m a lazy salad-maker and eater) from our garden.

You have got to try the sweet potato recipe! My pregnant friend, Leslie, recommended them, and you know if pregnant woman recommends a recipe, it is probably delicious. Never in my life do I think about and dream about food as much as when I am pregnant. Anyway,the sweet potatoes are delicious and I enjoy them so much my non-pregnant self craves them for a snack.

We have continued doing our once-a-week homeschool preschool lessons with Josiah and his friend. I have enjoyed planning more involved activities than we would do on our own. I have also enjoyed the weekly playdate and love that Josiah and Andrew enjoy each others company so much–especially since his mom is great company for me, too!

(If you don’t want to scroll through all of these pictures, here are some of my favorite places to go for ideas submitted by other moms. Easy! ABC & 123 and Unplug Your Kids. I am sure there are tons more, do you have a favorite?)

Here are some pictures from some of my recent lessons:
Recently we did a lesson on Cars and Wheels. We did a matching game and a sorting by size game (not pictured). They were both too easy. Maybe I’ll let Annalise try it soon. I did most of this lesson with clipart and markers. :)

Our experiment involved making predictions about whether or not different objects would roll or slide down a little ramp I made. We charted our predictions and the results of our experiments. (Annalise colored on it as we worked.)

Lastly, the boys painted on paper using cars and trucks. Josiah was a ham and took his shirt off and painted his chest.

Another week, but without pictures, we learned about crickets and insects. They learned about the basic anatomy of insects by looking at pictures (head, thorax, abdomen, eyes, antennae, mouth and palps–sung to “head, shoulders, knees and toes”), looking at a dead cricket pinned on foam and identifying its parts, and then making collages of bugs from different shapes I cut out before we started. The boys glued the shapes to make a head, thorax, abdomen, legs, antennae, eyes and mouth. They each had several live crickets in a jar to observe throughout the week.

Many of the weeks that I host school, I make the boys little “BOB”-type books for them to practice reading at home. I write them and draw basic pictures for each week. They only take about 10 minutes to write and draw the very basic pictures, and Josiah loves to practice reading with them. I cover them with construction paper and sew the binding, which takes like 10 seconds. For car week, the books had this little story:

Bob is a car.
Bob sat in the sun.
Bob was hot.
A cat sat on Bob.
Bob gets gas.
Bob can go fast.
Bob hit a big rig. Uh oh!
Bob gets a tow.
The End.