When Mom's Away

Muffin Tin Monday

This week marks our first Muffin Tin Monday! The basic idea - food in a muffin tin. It's intended to change up the mealtime routine (what routine?) and can be breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, dessert, whatever!

The theme this go-around is Pumpkins, so here's our entry.

Clockwise from the left, we have a Happy Pumpkin bologna sandwich, three mellocreme pumpkin candies, a stack of mandarin oranges with an onion sprout stem, homemade pumpkin bread sticks, and yogurt with pumpkin purée. Of course, Isaac started with the candies.

Apples, carrots, and now pumpkins. Don't you just love fall?

They help you see in the dark, don't they?

The weather this past week in Southeast Michigan has been absolutely gorgeous. Cass Lake weather, we would call it - sunny and mid-60s/70s in the day, 40s and high 30s at night (good sleeping weather). It's this type of weather that makes me miss being in an office all day *so much* </sarcasm>

Anyway, so I took advantage of the day and did some fall clean-up around the garden beds. As I was pulling dead leaves and weeds out of the raised bed, I found some of the carrots that we planted (at Isaac's behest, though he won't eat carrots to save his life) back in the late spring. Not expecting much, I tugged at the tuft of green and found a tiny little carrot, about half as long as my pinky and not much bigger around.

Yay, a carrot! That I grew! Nobody famous once said, "Food never tastes so good as when you have raised/grown/cooked it yourself." Or they should have, at least.

Continuing with the garden cleaning, I pulled up the netting that we had placed over the sown carrot seeds to deter little munchy creatures from going all Peter Rabbit on our garden. If you ever want to harvest carrots easily, install plastic netting over them when you sow. The tops grow up through the netting, and when you pull it up, zzzzipp!, up come all the carrots at once!

But Zeb, I didn't know you could grow pre-sized baby carrots? Yours are so cute!

I will confess that I have always been apprehensive about growing things from seed - too high of a failure rate after the seedlings get to be about 2 inches tall. With that in mind, when we saw a plethora of tiny carrot sprouts, I was so overjoyed that they were growing(!) that I couldn't bear to thin them out. What if I plucked the good one and the rest of them failed?

As you can see by the photos, none of our carrots grew very large, because they were overcrowded. But we did get carrots, by George! Who knows if we'll try again next year?

Esther continues her agricultural exploration

Just to tie this to home education, Isaac worked on a file folder game later in the afternoon. And what should appear out of the bag, but a carrot counting game! Isaac breezed through it like a champ. Counting 1-5, check!

Psalm 46:10

In this past Sunday's church bulletin, we received our monthly Focus on the Family insert. One of the articles therein addressed the practice of observing a Sabbath, a day of rest.

Sabbath has been rattling around in my brain for years. I don't like to work for pay on Sundays, and I try to focus Sunday activities more on family time than other things.

I don't really want to get in to a deep study right now, but both the Old and New Testaments talk about observing the Sabbath and proscriptions for activity during the period of rest. I've also got a book at home called Sabbath Keeping by Lynne Baab; I'm about two-thirds of the way through that. I'll probably do some more in-depth study and writing about Sabbath once I finish the book, but that'll probably be posted somewhere other than KU.

That said, there's no time like the present to begin new practices and forming new habits. As of sundown Saturday, I plan to observe a 24-hour sabbath. My basic guidelines at this point are:

• Mark the beginning of Sabbath with some type of ritual. For now, I think lighting a candle will be in order.
• Take a leisurely shower either Saturday night or Sunday morning to refresh the body.
• No work for pay, no housework (dishes, laundry, yardwork, etc.), minimal cooking (flameless, if possible)
• No electronics, which is mainly the computer since we don't have a TV. Cell phone will be on for incoming emergencies, but no outgoing calls.
• Enjoy my rest with my family.

We'll see how this goes and how the practice evolves in our household. How do you explain Sabbath to a four year old and 1.5 year old? ;-)

Do you practice sabbath in your home? What does it look like? Share in the comments below.

Shalom, my friends.