Homemade Cleaning Stuff...

The last few days, actually since Monday two of my kids have been sick. I am very lucky though because when my kids are sick, they sleep A LOT. Nice for them and me ;-) That meant school was out for the week. I found that pretty frustrating at first, but then quickly adapted and found a few interesting recipes to try. I have told you about making my own laundry detergent, well, I am still working on that and I am adjusting it to my needs. I did 6 loads of laundry and it worked just wonderful. The only thing I did with the whites is that I added half a cup baking powder. The laundry came out as clean as it does with commercial detergent. So I am very pleased with that. That will save a lot of money. 

I also looked around and found how to somewhat make my own softener, well, sorta anyway. I had an empty spray bottle and so I filled it with water and added some softener, I happened to have Downy, but I have heard that the cheaper brands actually work better for this. 

Fabric Softener/Fabric & Air Freshener


A  spray bottle

One part softener and five parts water, shake - done.

When I put my laundry in the dryer, I spray a couple squirts on the wet laundry and turn on the dryer. The laundry comes out nice and soft and good smelling. Though I think I will try something else when this is gone because I am trying to use as much natural stuff as possible and commercial softener is just pretty heavy on the chemicals. I have an idea but I am not sure if that works, so I will have to experiment a little first. Anyway, the watered down softener also works well instead of Fabreeze which is pretty spendy. I sprayed some sneakers, works great! 

Another really cool thing I tried was homemade dishwashing detergent. I had everything I needed from making laundry detergent and so I thought I give it a try.

Detergent for the dishwasher

1 cup of Borax
1 cup of Washing Soda
1/2 cup of Salt


White Vinegar


Mix the first three ingredients together in a tub, I used a yogurt tub.   Pour the vinegar in the compartment where you normally put the rinse aid. That is all ! I use 1 Tablespoon per load. I tried 2 tablespoons, but the result was not so good. So, you may want to start out with 1 tablespoon and adjust from there.


There is no vinegar smell, I save a ton of money and I am lightening the load a little bit on our environment. I did several loads now and the results a amazing. Everything is clean and spotless. 


I am in the process of trying some more things, I will post about those experiments later.

Know what you believe....

I don't know if you have been following what has been going on in the last few days in the homeschool community. It seems that it is making big waves and it doesn't paint a very nice picture of some people. Hhm, maybe that is not quite right, I should re-word the sentence. I personally have been disappointed by the stance some people took. 
If you happen to be a friend of Ken Ham and/or Answers in Genesis on Facebook, you will most likely know what is going on. If not, you may want to skip to Mr. Ham's page and read a little. I can try to recap a bit. Ken Ham was invited to speak at two Homeschool conferences, in Cincinnati and Philadelphia. Some of the other speakers were Peter Enns and Jay Wile. Well, I don't know much about Peter Enns but what I have about him and from him - well, let's just say I REALLY don't agree with him. You can read what another author wrote about Mr. Enn's theology here.  It doesn't come as a big surprise that Dr. Ham doesn't share Dr. Enn's theology either and there were some tensions. Ken Ham felt it was important to warn people about Peter Enn's Bible curriculum that he is selling at the conference as well. Ken Ham thought that at the very least people need to know what Mr. Enns believes. The organizers of the " Great Conferences" didn't like that and dis-invited Ken Ham/AiG from both conferences!
As just one example Peter Enns doesn't think that children should be taught about sin and flood until they are mature enough to discuss the tough subjects of PG-13 movies. If you click on the links, you will get a good understanding about what Peter Enns believes and why Ken Ham had to say something about it. Unfortunately Dr. Jay Wile sided with Peter Enns, along with Susan Wise Bauer, and was quite harsh about what he said about Ken Ham on his blog ( Jay Wile's) blog 
I would encourage you to read up on this for yourself. I personally am very much disappointed by Dr. Wile and was wondering if we should continue to use his science books. Then today Apologia send their Newsletter out where they distanced themselves from Dr. Wile. 
I am writing about this because I think that this whole situation is really sad. On the other hand it is also an eye opener and as such it is important for us to note it and dig into our bibles and pray. We NEED TO KNOW what we believe and why we believe it. There are many good Christian resources out there, we need to discern the best ones for our families. 
In all of this I have learned to better check into our curriculum and make sure I agree with the stance of the author. I have become way too trusting in the way I view Christian materials. I have been just scanning over things and didn't really check into what the author believes. Sometimes it is rather blatantly out there but often it is not so obvious but still finds its way into the schoolbook. I also find it very important to stay on the up and up about who is who in the "Christian " world. I think I will investigate Peter Enns for myself and I will have a lot of discussions with my kids about this. This is a good time to teach our children how to be discerning. If we don't believe this but that - why do we do so? What is the biblical basis for that? What does God say about this?  I think I have a pretty good idea of what we will be doing for Bible study for the next few months. At some point my kids will be out there alone, I really need them to be discerning and make good choices. In order to make good choices we need to find out where we stand not just  say what everyone says and do what the majority does. When we start doing that, we start being dumbed down. After a while we really don't anymore what is really going and we can be manipulated by all kinds of "winds".  As much as I cringe about the thought to have a Peter Enns book in my house (where in all likelyhood it will not stay) and read it and discuss it with the kids, I think we will put right in the schedule as an elective, critical thinking. I think for next school year we will have a subject called Apologetics on our schedule. I do agree with Ken Ham / AiG and I do agree with the Institute for Creation Research and we have tons of both those materials at the CRC library, this will be heavily perused next year!

Home made Montessori

My little guy has some problems grasping the decimal system, place value and such. We have been using Math U See and I really like it, but despite large amounts of effort and patients it didn't really catch on. So I was being on the look out for something to help us. As some of you know, I am volunteering for the Christian Library here and it is now in the building of Hand in Hand Christian Montessori School. When I came to the library one day, I saw what Montessori kids had worked on that day. In the long hallway they had many, many chains of beads strung out in one long row. Underneath were little arrows with numbers. This got me interested and so I researched more. After quite a while of searching and reading I decided that this would be helpful for us. So I set out to make our own Montessori math materials. I decided that we would start with the golden beads and the exercises that go along with that. We have use the materials now for about two weeks and I think he starts to understand more. It is really hands on and it can almost be experienced, just what we need. Now I am not saying that I do montessori math, I don't know enough about that, I just read from one lesson to the next what I can do to help him understand how units become tens and how tens become hundreds and so forth. In any case he has fun doing it because it is so logical and hands on that understanding comes pretty much effort-less. Here are some pictures of our materials.....

 Due to finances, we had to tweak some things. The "golden beads" are amber colored pony beads, the thousand cube is printed on cardstock. I found two trays for 99 cents at Goodwill. The bottom is cut from a piece of foam, so that the materials won't slide around too much.
The number cards which usually are made from wood, but I have printed at on card stock. The strange looking bead thing is supposed to be a hundred square.

 This one actually doesn't look too bad, it is our hundred chain.

In the basket are ten hundred chains, we have nine thousand cubes, 47 tens (in the red bowl) and 50 or more units in the glass dish.
It was kind of fun making these.

Our school week in review

We have been working pretty hard this week and as a reward we could all feel good about the job we have done this week. Yeah! We have been in kind of a slump and didn't seem to be able to get out of it. So this was a our week of victory ;-)  We have been  learning about World War I this week. It was somewhat difficult because the girls don't really get into the war theme. We read in Flanders Field and several other books and have been very saddened about the realities of war. It was somewhat heart wrenching to see the girls reading biographies and such and for the first time "feeling" war on some level. 
Still it was all good, we talked a lot and worked a lot. Papers were written, tests taken, math conquered and foreign language taken by stride. Reading and spelling were done with good attitudes, too! Unfortunately we didn't manage to do our maps this week, instead we had our co-op day which was a lot of fun.
We also had some new snow, much to the disappointment of us all. We even had to shovel the snow, well, Jamie did anyway ;-)

 Here is Jamie shoveling the balcony, her hair was turned into a lump of snow.

The snow was pretty wet......

a

......and rather heavy......

 Bible study.....

 Nice cell drawings, the Golgi body looks much better the second time around.

Facebook in the background, I gotta keep watching this one.....

Home made Detergent

I have heard that people make their own laundry detergent. The other day I decided to give it a try. I bought a bar of Castile soap with lavender at Trader Joe's, I still had Borax and I bought a box of Washing Soda. Next I grated the bar of soap. Then I boiled some water and added the grated soap and stirred until it was dissolved. Now I added one cup of washing soda and one cup of borax, again I stirred until it was all dissolved. I then took an empty bucket (it did have laundry detergent in it at some point) and filled it with hot tap water. Now all I had to do was add my boiling soap mix into the bucket of hot water, stir. Done! I let it sit 24 hours and now we have wonderful laundry detergent without all the ugly chemicals and much cheaper! My detergent didn't gel, but I have since learned that whether it gels or stays watery depends on the bar of soap you use. I used Fels-naphta before but I didn't like the strong smell. I really like lavender so, that's why used that one.  Here are some pictures.....

NOTE: I have since found out that you shouldn't use more than about 1.5 gallons of water. It got too watery the way I made it at first.

this is the water and grated soap

                                                                                         

                                    

here it is dissolved....

Here is the the mix in the bucket of water

One Love | Playing For Change | Song Around the World

     


Pray for Japan - One Love by Playing For Change