I Heart My Kids (and Matzo Ball Soup)

She loves me.

See the heart-shaped matzo ball she made for me last week?

What you don't see is the floating head she put in her daddy's soup. Aren't kids fun?

I hope you are enjoying yours this weekend. Make some fun memories together. It goes by so fast. In a blink, your one year old will be fifteen. Trust me on this. I know first hand.



P.S. Because I know someone will ask... This soup was a Matzo ball kit from the grocery store (Manischewitz) - my daughter made the balls, home made chicken broth I made from a previous night's rotisserie bird, shredded carrot, diced onion and celery (all pan fried in butter before dropping in the soup), a few dashes of hot sauce, some pink salt and fresh ground pepper. Mmmm.

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Busy Friday List

Today is the last day in Texas to vote early. You better believe I'll be there this afternoon. That means before I pick my husband up, I have to...

::have the laundry done::
::clean the house::
::pay the bills::
::homeschool the kids::
::help son find his book reports (oy!)::
::change the diapers, bathe the babies and dress them::
::pack the kids' suitcases so they can go see grandma::
::buy a graduation gift::
::make lunch & clean up the mess::
::find out why my driving record never came & drop off my certificate at court::
::file the paperwork on my desk::
::record the grades and completed work in Homeschool Tracker for this week::
::take daughter's computer to Best Buy to see if they can fix it::

What'cha wanna bet that the entire list won't get checked off? I'm going to need to prioritize. This is an example of what all my days look like - #harried!

Thankfully, I have the peace and joy of the Lord in the midst of my chaos. I was just nursing the baby, smelling and chewing on his tiny foot (a fetish of mine), and thinking of how wonderful it was to have these little people in my life.

While I'm checking my list off, head over to the Homeschool Post and see what the rest of my fellow author friends have been posting about this past week. If you were going to bookmark a site, I would highly suggest bookmarking the Homeschool Post. I heart the team of talented authors and highly recommend the great content streaming from www.hsbapost.com. Normally, when I'm really quiet over here, I'm still working behind the scenes over there to keep things fresh and make sure the Homeschool Blog Awards happens every year.

I've also been working on getting this blog re-designed and moving to WordPress. It has been a project on the "back burner" for some time. I have a few sweet friends that are helping me free of charge, so I'm tagging along on their "when I get time" list. I hear that it may happen soon... so you might just surf in one day and not recognize the place. Be sure and set your bookmarks to www.sprittibee.com - because the old Blogger blog will be going away forever. After seven years here! June 8th is my SEVEN year blogiversary.

Of course, you can also find me piddling with my iPhone camera at Instagram (I'm Sprittibee there, too). I like to fall asleep after uploading the day's photo goodness and scrolling through my feed to see what all my iPhone-addicted friends are shooting at.

What do you have going on for this busy Friday?

On Growing

Spring is a quick passing breeze in Texas. We start to feel rather summery in May. This year seems to have been pretty mild as far as the weather goes, though. We are just now beginning to get the first signs of the heat waves that will be here in June.



Being as preoccupied as I have been with homeschooling, planning, paperwork, and the logistics of running a house with a kid in every age group... we completely neglected the garden this year. It was good to us, anyway. We had LOTS of cilantro. Yep - that's the white stuff with the bees and butterflies in it. It begins to taste funny after it flowers, and it dies off at the first sign of heat, but apparently, it seeds itself and takes over your entire garden if you leave it alone and let it do "its thing". This is the second year we've let it alone in the garden, so next year, I suspect our entire yard may be one big forest of cilantro.



I enjoyed eating dishes with cilantro, making salads with it, using it in soups and stuffing it in tacos... but it eventually begins to look REAL tacky in the yard as it dries up. Currently, you can hardly see the raised flower beds. We are going to go out and gather some seed to take to my mom's garden, and cut the rest of it down to clear the beds. We missed the growing season for any other type of veggie this year due to this mess of cilantro weed. If we tried to grow anything now, the heat of summer would surely kill it (or cost us a fortune in water bills).



There was one other thing that grew in the raised beds - I forgot - just one thing: a lone stalk of dill weed. And sadly, I didn't make good use of it before it dried up.



Most of what we've done in the yard this year is enjoy feeding the birds, mulch, weed flower beds, water trees, and mow. It has been great seeing the tiny trees get so big. For instance... these were the purple Vitex trees when we planted them...



They were knee-high!



And then there's the mulberry tree we planted on Arbor Day when the 3yo was about the same age as the 1yo is now. It's huge.



Let's just say that the birds are plenty in our yard. We have a resident mockingbird or two, a family of red house sparrows, a bunch of humming birds, and a slew of other seasonal visitors that enjoy the seed, flowers, berries, and bugs.



My son even picked one and ate it. Don't eat them until they are ripe, though. They have a hallucinogenic affect if you eat too many unripe berries. I haven't ever tried to use any of the ripe berries in recipes. Maybe someday I'll have time for those types of domestic gardening pursuits. I imagined having a yard full of crops to harvest when we started our raised bed project, but the amount of work I have indoors with 4 kids and homeschooling keeps me from all those green thumb ideals.



Sweet berries remind me of my sweet sugar lumps that cry when we make them come inside to take a bath after playing in the yard. Yesterday they enjoyed spraying each other with the water hose until the three year old sprayed the one year old in the face and nearly drowned him. Should have seen that one coming.

We keep our trees green using child labor. Shhhh! They don't know they are working.



There are more important things growing on the inside of our home, though. Tiny hearts, minds, little bodies growing bigger (and hopefully wiser) each day. I love tending that garden the best... so I don't mind so much that there are a few weeds that got away from me outdoors. I'll get around to those later.

If you think in seasons, plant cereals. If you think in decades, plant trees. If you think in centuries, educate your children.  ~Chinese Proverb

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Bluebonnet Time (every Texas spring)

In case you haven't noticed yet, I'm a native Texan... and we Texans have a little crush on our state. Especially lovely are the things we think make Texas wonderful: like bluebonnets, which happen to be the state flower.



This year's bluebonnets were THICK, y'all. Maybe it was the drought last year? That's what we were guessing. I wondered if we would ever see green again after being in the worst drought in Texas history last summer.



Anyway, whatever the reason, we were delighted to get out and enjoy them... and to do a little science and research lesson about our bold, blue floral friends with Lucas Miller's book: Bluebonnet Time



I love a good Texan picturebook... especially one with cute illustrations and lots of fun facts in the margins. This one came with MUSIC, too!



There's a CD that has fun bluebonnet hunting (and photo-taking adventure) music for your drive!



The book is an Evan Wilder science journal - and it includes everything you might want to learn about bluebonnets. Fancy that!



The author of Bluebonnet Time is also a singer-songwriter that goes by the nickname "the Singing Zoologist". In fact, you can listen to his bluebonnet theme song in the little movie above.



Bluebonnets are awesome - who wouldn't want to learn more about them? If you are a Texas educator, a Texas parent, or just a bluebonnet lover, I'd say this book would be a perfect fit for your library.



As good as the book was, though, the flowers are what took the cake on our bluebonnet photo field-trip this year. I thought we might lose a three year old in the deeper spots.



The rain has been awesome this spring... and things are lovely here. Now that these pretty blue flowers are gone, there are fields of yellow in their place.



I'm still remembering the blue. See you next spring, bluebonnets!







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disclosure: I was provided a free copy of this book to review, but the opinions are my own.