Sweet tooth....

We had a bit of a rough week. All of us have been sick with some sort of a bug. Nothing serious, just really bad headaches and dizziness. We finally got over it - yeah!

In the middle of our painful days we really had a craving for something sweet. It took a while to find a recipe, because reading was difficult and painful - but I found a recipe and tried it out. It was really good, so I thought I would share it here. Maybe someone else needs some comfort food ;-)  We are still eating gluten free, though we don't know if we feel better due to the flu bug...... I am sure that we will find out now that we are well again and sunshine is once more our friend. 

Gluten free Banana Lemon Loaf

by John D Lee

1 cup rice flour

1 cup buckwheat flour (I usually just use 2 cups rice flour)

3 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup plus 2 tbsp margarine or butter

1 1/4 cups sugar

23 oz bananas (I use 3 average sized ones)

4 large eggs

4 tbsp icing sugar (I just use regular sugar)

1 tbsp lemon juice

Preheat oven to 350

Sift flours with baking powder and salt.

Beat the butter, sugar and bananas together until smooth and then briefly stir in the eggs.

Stir this into the flour mixture until blended.

Pour into a large loaf pan and bake for about 1 - 1 1/4 hours or until a skewer comes out clean and the cake is just firm.

Cool for 10 minutes and then mix the sugar with the lemon juice and drizzle over the top. (I like it lemony so I use more lemon juice)

That's all there is to it!

I personally have used only rice flour and doubled the powdered sugar and lemon for the icing.

This cake is lemony and moist and delicious, and will keep well for several days. Even if you have no problem with gluten, you should try this fantastic recipe.

Physical Science

I was up fairly early today and could enjoy some time before everyone else woke up. I sat down with hot and wonderful smelling cup of coffee and started checking my email. It was so nice and peaceful and quiet and relaxed....until I came to an email from someone on one of the email groups I am on. She said that she researched the topic and called some Colleges on the east coast and she found out that many of them didn't accept Apologia Physical Science as a High School course. That the way it is written right now, it doesn't qualify as one anyway. In order to give a High School credit, there needs to be a research paper at the end of the course! My heart dropped...REALLY???? How is it that I didn't know about this? My poor child is suffering through this. There is some math that is pretty tough for her because she didn't have that yet. Yesterday she finally had a break through and really understood the math and the subject. She also wrote the test and got an A - in science! Yeah, major accomplishment! I am so proud of her! Now I had to tell her that she has to write a pretty good research paper (I am thinking something like 8 pages, 5 points...but have to find out more). She was pretty sad, because she was so looking forward to being half way done with this......

I feel awful, I should have researched this better ..... in my defense, it does say on their website that it is for 8th grade but can also be a 9th grade course.... sigh......

Well, I guess we are off to the library ..... maybe I get a nice big Latte to comfort me....

Gluten Free Pumpkin Cake

We have started eating gluten free (gf) in our house. At this stage it still is an experiment, but it seems that we are all profiting from it. Nina always had stomach aches and we have been trying for years now to find out why. We did food journals, medication, no dairy, all kinds of examinations - all to find out that it is inconclusive. The results from all the tests are saying she is a very healthy girl. Her, at times severe, stomach aches are begging to differ. She was also tested for celiac disease, but that was negative. After I got the results, I investigated a little further and found that one of the readings was elevated and that this could point to a wheat sensitivity. After reading a little more about it and talking to some people, the decision was made to go wheat free for a while. Well, we managed to do it for about a week before we "fell off the wagon" and went back to eating wheat. Which in itself was very interesting. During our gf week, we all felt better. Nina's stomach aches were not very bad, they were very manageable, my headaches were gone, Jamie and Jeremy felt better and were quite a calmer than usual. When we went back to wheat, Nina's stomach aches became VERY severe. I was almost at a point where I was getting ready to tell her that she couldn't go to Camp. She has been living on her prescription drugs for the last three days. I am back on my headache pills and the other two are their usual .... lively selves. All this after just one week!!! Maybe it was a coincidence? Well, Nina is coming back from camp tonight and tomorrow we will go wheat free again. I got rid of just about all the wheat stuff we had. So those temptations are gone ;-)   So far the most challenging thing was finding bread we all agree with. We have found that Ezekiel bread fits that bill. I have just heard from a friend about some other bread I can order but haven't tried yet. Instead of regular pasta we use rice sticks from the grocery store. You can find it a somewhat reasonable prices in the ethnic isles. That was okay for us as well. I have tried my hand at baking and one recipe was pretty good. I got it from Sheri's blog, which is really, really good. So here is Sheri's recipe for :

Pumpkin Spice Cake

• 4 eggs
• 1 ½ cups organic sugar or Sucanat
• 1 cup olive oil
• 1 15-oz. Can pumpkin
• 1 cup brown rice flour
• 1 cup cornstarch
• 1 teaspoon xanthan gum  (Since guar gum is much cheaper, I used that)
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon allspice
• 1 teaspoon sea salt

In a large mixing bowl, cream eggs, sugar, oil, and pumpkin on medium speed until smooth.

In a medium-sized bowl combine the remaining ingredients.  Add to wet ingredients and mix at low speed just until everything is blended and smooth.

Spread the batter in a greased 9×13-inch baking dish.

Bake for 30-35 minutes at 350 degrees.

Allow to cool completely, then top with a vanilla frosting.

Vanilla Frosting:

1/4 cup butter, softened
2 cups powdered sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
2+ teaspoons milk

Cream the butter, sugar, and vanilla. Add in milk 1 teaspoon at a time until the frosting is the desired spreading consistency. Once you get the frosting the right thickness, then beat on high speed with your mixer for 2 minutes.

Frosts a 9x13 inch cake. 

This is the cake fresh from the oven

with the icing....

very light, fluffy and yummy !

Books we use this year

We are using Tapestry of Grace and are going through year 4, which is the 20th Century. I am using the DE version and so can print whatever I need and how often I need it. Which is really nice, because if one page is all messed up because I made too many marks and comments on it, I can just print out a new one. Also, it allows me to take it with me since it's on my laptop. All through the week there are several days when I drop the kids of and am waiting for them to be done, like AWANA and youthgroup, music lessons and so forth. Now I can use this time and plan for the next day or week. The kids are in different levels, lower grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. We do enjoy many of the books used by TOG, for one of the kids I try to use audiobooks whenever possible, because of dyslexia it is easier to listen than to read, obviously and it allows us to stay more on track. I really like that we are all working on one subject together, just in different levels. I don't have hunt down the right books for each level, that has been done already! I used to put our curriculum together in a VERY ecclectic way, but that didn't work anymore when I had to separate them all into their own levels/grades. I didn't manage well before when we all worked on different things, now most of the work is done for me and I have a teacher's manual - really cool. I also like the price of TOG, which is more than reasonable.

We use Math U See for math, Apologia's Physical Science for High School and Jeannie Fulbright's Anatomy and Human Physiology for elementary. Some of the kids use Rod and Staff for grammar and spelling while others use "All About Spelling" which is a great program for dyslexics. I ordered it about a week ago and just got it in the mail. I am very excited to try it out with the kiddos! I'll talk about it some more as we go along. We have tried some other things before, one was Sequential Spelling, but that didn't work for us. It is absolutely possible that we didn't use it the right way..... We are very curious about the new program and are eager to start!

We use Life in the Word for Bible at this time, along with The Answer Book from Answers In Genesis. The Answer Book is not as easy as I expected it to be, my little guy has a hard time following it in parts. We are only in the first chapter, but I don't feel that the language is for younger kids. We just take a slower pace to work through it. 

Other than that we pick up different books, many of them from our Christian library, but I also make extensive use of the public library!

We usually work from 9:00 in the morning until about 4:00 in the afternoon. We also have one hour lunch in there. I would like to shorten the day but since we only have half a day on Wednesdays, because of Science co-op and meet with our homeschool co-op every other Friday, we don't have much time to get through the books. We do have weeks when we don't get started until 10:00 or so. Unfortunately, those are the days when we don't do the more fun things like Art or Shakespeare/Plutarch....

I think that is about enough insight into our far-from-perfect home school :D 

Freezing cold....

We didn't have a good school week...the children were feeling sick with coughs, sore throats and headaches. We didn't get a lot of school done, by the middle of the week two were feeling better and got inspired to start their work on the upcoming science fair for our co-op. It started with one project, which I am not quite ready to share yet....but then my little guy remembered that water freezes when you throw it up into the air and it is cold enough. Here is a little video of his experiment which his sister filmed..... It didn't quite work out the right way when they video taped this. However, the water did freeze when it was thrown high in the air when the kids did it just before making this video.