Tutorial: A Kid-Friendly Aluminum Pour

You can do anything with a Dremel.

At Maker Faire Detroit, I hadn't thought to bring my power tool collection with me (silly me!), and so the girls and I scratched out our scratch block for the iron pour with some random hand tools--a butter knife, a quarter, a spoon handle. We love our finished piece, but that was hard, tedious work for a couple of little kids, and I didn't come away from the process feeling like carving a scratch block was a very kid-friendly enterprise.

When our local hands-on science center teamed up with our local hands-on metal sculpture studio to do an aluminum pour, the scratch blocks were available to purchase from the museum several weeks in advance. I bought one each for my girls, took them home, unpackaged them, tossed the huge nails that came with them as a suggested carving tool straight into my Odds and Ends for Crafting bin, and instead brought out my Dremel and its grinding stone bit.

You might think that power tools are too dangerous for little kids to use, but really they give any kid with decent motor skills and a good pair of safety goggles safe and easy access to a wide variety of projects that are too hard, too dangerous, or simply too tedious to perform by hand. Kids like drilling holes, kids like cutting, kids like carving, and kids have big ideas. Heck, that's why power tools were invented!

Nevertheless, I get ahead of myself. At this point, all we have is a scratch block in front of us. Measure your scratch block--


--then draw out several mock-ups on newsprint so that the kiddos can practice their design:


There are two things to remember about a scratch block design:

1. The image will be reversed. This is only a big deal if you're writing words; I had the girls dictate to me the words that they wanted to write onto their scratch blocks as I typed them into our handwriting software program, then I printed them out mirror-image for them to copy.
2. What you carve in will stick up in the final block. You can do some really cool things to play around with depth in your scratch block, although this time everyone stuck to simple single-depth line art, which is fine--playing with a process takes time!

Each girl used a black Sharpie to copy her final design directly onto her scratch block--

(tangent: I love the look of peace on her sweet little face as she works. She is truly a child who thrives learning at home.)

--and then, because hallelujah it was an unseasonably warm day in mid-winter, we took the scratch blocks and the Dremel outside and didn't get dust all over the living room!

Here's what they look like when they're sketched on but not yet carved:

When using power tools, a good, clear pair of safety goggles is the height of fashion:

Using the Dremel with grinding stone attachment as a stylus, set to just perhaps a 1 or 2 speed setting, all you have to do is trace the Sharpie lines:

Have I mentioned how great it is to have a little girl with dirty hands?

Especially when she loves power tools with the same goofy love that I do?

Syd did not feel safe using the Dremel, but she's a brave kid, and so when I assured her that she was safe, and explained that I would not carve her scratch block for her, she gamely gave it a go:

And here's what a scratch block looks like after it's been carved!

Matt is REALLY hard to buy presents for (he doesn't like anything as much as he likes not spending the money for it), but he is an artist, and so a scratch block of his own to carve was my Christmas present to him:

And what did he give me for Christmas, you ask? Oh, just this brand-new laptop! Ahem...

(Hint: I'm REALLY easy to buy presents for...)

After a few days of admiring our scratch blocks, and of studying aluminum as our schoolwork, we all trooped over to the Wonderlab one Friday night to watch the metalworkers pour molten aluminum into our very own scratch blocks:

It's always the process, not the product, for us--having fun bowling is more important than your lousy score at the end of the game, goofing around in shaving cream is just as fine as doing your math right then, etc.--but I have to say that in this case, both the process and the product?

We LOVE them!!!

Homeschool Math: Our DIY Roll to a Hundred Game

I have a strict Montessori-style policy that I do not discourage my children from doing academic work that is "too easy" for them. If Willow wants to play the Jump Start Kindergarten CD-Rom that I checked out from the public library for Sydney, then that's okay. If Sydney wants to spend the afternoon working color-by-number pages, then that is totally fine by me. If Willow suddenly develops a passion for those old First Chapter Books that she first read two years ago, and reads them all again, then good for her!

It's an important part of my homeschool philosophy that repetition reinforces skills, internalizes concepts, and builds the feelings of mastery that reward children for learning, and the confidence to take on more learning challenges.

Therefore, although our DIY Roll to a Hundred Game highlights skills that both my girls have already learned, we LOVE this game! It's excellent reinforcement for number recognition, sequencing, counting, and addition concepts. The unpredictable nature of the roll of the die prepares the girls for future lessons on statistics, graphing, and averages. The coloring requires fine motor skills, and is also graphing, and pattern-building.

Oh, and the game is based on a die, so the little one can win as often as the big one does, hallelujah.

To play Roll to a Hundred, you will need:

• a copy of a Hundred Grid for each person. You can use either a labeled hundred grid, or a blank hundred grid that the child labels for herself--this turns the potentially tedious activity of labeling a hundred grid into a useful activity that a child might choose to do for herself, by the way!
• one die
• crayons

1. Decide who goes first. The first player has the advantage, so it's important to remember to take turns.

2. During her turn, a player rolls the die--

--and then colors the same number of squares as pips on the die:

3. Change crayons each time so that you can see each individual roll on your hundred grid, and the first person to reach one hundred--

Wins!!!

We play such that you have to roll to reach 100 exactly--waiting for that perfect roll gives everyone time to catch up and makes the game a little more exciting.

Ways to modify the game:

• Use two dice, or a 20-sided die, etc.
• Play on a 200 number grid. 
• Play on a number line.
• Play Roll to Zero, where the game is subtraction!
• Multiply each roll by two.
• Assign a different mathematical operation to each number: One must be subtracted, Two gets doubled, Three gets added to the previous roll, Four gets divided by two, etc.
• Have everyone graph their rolls to see how many times each person rolled each number.

It's certainly not a bad way to spend a rainy afternoon!

Sneaky Momma Trick #1001

As long as some of the rice is white, they don't seem to notice that some of the rice is brown. Mwa-ha-ha!

Tutorial: How to Repair Kids' Adjustable Elastic-Waist Pants

Will was about four the first time I ran across a pair of adjustable elastic-waist pants in her size at Goodwill.

Brilliant!

I LOVE these pants for kids. They look like normal jeans or cords or slacks or what-have-you, and the length is the length that you'd expect for the size, but hidden inside the waistband is a length of buttonhole elastic, and on either side of the casing--a button!

No more Husky or Slim, no worries with hand-me-downs, no baggy waists for the kid who just had a growth spurt, and the kid who actually cares about such things doesn't have to wear "baby" pants that are obviously elastic-waisted (I told her she could also call them old lady pants, but still...).

These pants can be tricky, though, because if that button works its way out of the elastic, or (more likely) that kid who cares about such things tries to adjust the elastic herself and leaves the elastic off of the button, AND it goes through the wash, then the elastic will get lost inside the waistband, rendering it useless.

Here's how to fix it! 

(Apologies for the terrible quality of the photos. It turns out that the gloomiest, stormiest, darkest days also happen to be the best mending days!)

Take hold of the other end of the buttonhole elastic and pull it all the way out of the waistband:

If the buttonhole elastic looks worn or has lost its stretch, replace it. 

Pin a safety pin through the elastic, about 1/2" from one end:

 Use the safety pin to help you feed the elastic into one of the openings in the waistband casing--

--and then all the way through:

Now keep that elastic buttoned on BOTH ends this time, will you?

P.S. You can also add a waistband to any existing garment, sew a couple of buttonholes and buttons, and DIY a pair of adjustable elastic-waist pants. 

The Rainbow Fairies' Favorite Candles

Are anybody else's kids as rabidly into the Rainbow Magic series as my kids are? Willow's been reading them since back when she first began to read, which means that my Sydney may very well have been weaned on them, and is now just as obsessed as Willow ever was.

The Rainbow Magic books are notorious between the adults in our family for putting the both of us straight to sleep when we read from them. Syd, who can't yet read, of course, checks out piles of them every time we're at the library, and since there are no audiobook versions of the Rainbow Magic series yet (GRRR!!!), Matt and I find ourselves reading them out loud to her. Every day. For hours. It was our little joke that in the summertime, I'd always read to Sydney out in the backyard in the hammock, with a nice pillow and a summer-weight blanket, and when I'd finished the book, Syd would climb out of the hammock, give it a little push, and send me off on a nice afternoon nap.

Everything is rainbow around here again these days--the fairies, Syd's design for this year's Trashion/Refashion show (more on that later), the play dough that we're making today, the Kool-aid-flavored bubble gum that we're also making today, and all our candles. As I was out in the yard last week in the suspiciously mild weather, taking photos of some new etsy listings, I took a second to update my rolled beeswax rainbow fairy candles listing:

For no other reason than that taking yet another photo of these little fairy candles is one more excuse to bask in their yummy, tiny rainbow-ness.

Rainbow Rolled Beeswax Waldorf Ring Candles

Completing a custom order a couple of weeks ago, I was called upon to research the diameter of candles used in traditional Waldorf birthday rings.

Having FINALLY discovered the right number, I whipped up a set of rainbow rolled beeswax candles the perfect size for a Waldorf ring:

These Waldorf ring candles are twice as thick as my birthday candles, and twice as long as my fairy candles. I'm hearting them so much that I'm starting to think that I my girls REALLY need a Waldorf ring to put them in.

Rolled Beeswax Rainbow Birthday Candles

I've had it in my head to make a simple set of birthday candles in rainbow colors for quite a while, and I do believe that I've had them made for nearly that long, but winters are so grey in Indiana that it can seem a long time between those sunny days that I love so much for product photography.

And although these unseasonably mild, warm, sunny days that we've had lately have given me nightmares of a post-apocalyptic global warming collapse in which we're all forced to migrate south on foot, pushing shopping carts full of canned goods in front of us, these entire days that the girls have spent playing with toy ponies and Duplos outside, or kicking a soccer ball around with me at the park, or having the kind of mid-morning playground playdates that we've haven't done since summer sure are making me very, very happy, as is the opportunity to get plenty of product shots done.

And that's why I've done something nearly unheard of this Fabruary: I put a brand-new listing up on etsy!

rolled beeswax birthday candles, rainbow set of seven

At least Global Warming is productive!

Super Bowl Village People

Matt loves football, I'm generally fairly down with being a tourist (even though I DON'T love football), and the girls just get dragged wherever we go, so off we went to hang out at the 2012 Super Bowl Village, just up the road in Indianapolis, one day recently.

You get a welcome right up front--

--and ample driving directions downtown--

--which is a good thing, because just in case you were relying on turn-by-turn driving directions from Mapquest, you should know that some of the streets have been, um, festified:

There are a lot of activities downtown that cost money, but are also pretty cool--even I would have liked to go to the Super Bowl Experience to see the championship ring collection, and I DEFINITELY would have done the zip line--but it being Matt's day, and being that Matt's favorite thing to do in the world, other than watch football, is not spend money, we stuck entirely to the many free activities (okay, I would have bought a zip line ticket anyway, but they were all sold out for the day by the time we walked over there).

We posed:

We watched the ice sculptures being made:

We watched participants struggle through the Hundred-Yard Hamster Wheel, cheering them on with the cry, "Be the hamster! Be the hamster!":

And we goofed around on the football field set up just outside the stadium, just under the zip line with people passing hollering overhead every minute or so:

We didn't do everything, no, but we did pretty much all the free stuff, our Matt had a good time on his idea of the perfect budget, and we got away with plenty of time to hit the Children's Museum of Indianapolis and Trader Joe's.

Super Bowl Village, done and done!

Coloring Pages and Fine Motor Skills

We've been doing some "formal" handwriting study these past few weeks. It's true that this particular area of study is not so much child-led, since it comes from me noticing Willow struggle through writing something, only to end up frustrated that it took SO much work and was absolutely illegible, and taking the lead to insist that it's time. As a seven-year-old who's been reading since she was five, it's obviously been clear for years that her handwriting needs work, but she's never wanted to, and I've never pushed--until now. I'm feeling that now is finally the appropriate time, however, because when I did insist, Will did not argue.

My Will. Did not argue. The child who will throw a huge tantrum when I insist that she wear pants to the grocery store, or stop reading so that we can get ready to go to the ice cream shop, did not throw a tantrum about weeks and weeks of daily handwriting practice. Amazing and illuminating to behold, that is.

It's quite possible that Will simply didn't possess the level of fine motor skills necessary to pursue neat handwriting until recently, and pushing her would have been much more frustrating (for everyone!) and taken much longer to accomplish than it will now, when she's clearly mentally and physically ready. If she had been in public school, imagine how unhappy she and her kindergarten and first grade teachers would have been with each other!

I'll save the actual handwriting for another day (although if you're curious, I'm doing it myself and using Startwrite 6.0 to create custom copywork). What I wanted to tell you is that in addition to the copywork, I'm sneaking into the girls' days lots and lots of drawing--

--and lots and lots of coloring pages:

The kids are both thrilled about it because every day, they can tell me what kind of coloring pages they want--horses, dangerous mythical beasts, cats and dogs and unicorns!--and I'll find them online and print them out. For whatever reason, the kids haven't asked for and I haven't strewn coloring pages in a while, so they're novel again, and apparently hugely enjoyable, because the kiddos whip out pages and pages and pages each day.

Coloring pages? They're fine motor practice. My Syd, who's been scribbling with a perfect tripod grip since she could hold a chubby crayon, and has had neater handwriting than Willow for years now, colors in each little section with precision, but I've long noticed that Will prefers to paint great swaths of colors across the page, nearly regardless of borders and guiding lines. I've never pointed it out to her, but I've gradually noticed over the past few weeks, as we've been doing both handwriting copywork, drawing lessons with Daddy (more on that later, too), lots and lots of coloring pages, and also lots of these  that I purchased back when Sydney was a toddler who didn't know her numbers up to ten (vastly easy for the children now, and yet they still come back into favor every now and then), that her coloring in has become more precise. Her work isn't yet what you would call "inside the lines," but it's approximately so, these days, and her crayon movements are shorter, closer together, and more conscious of detail.

Mentally and physically ready for detail, my kid. We're also starting book reports this week, because when you're ready for detail, you're ready to perform critical analysis, mwaa-ha-ha!

Dragon Dance the Rest of the Day

What started out on Chinese New Year as simply the perfect opportunity to get out the dragon puppet kits that I purchased on clearance from some big-box arts-and-crafts store long ago, so that the girls could make them, along with red cake, as our little celebration--

--turned into something else. It turned into this face:

And this face:

And then a lot of this dancing, to some Chinese children's folk music tuned into on Spotify:

How magical these kids are, to take a cheap-o out-of-the-package activity that I basically tossed at them just to clean off my shelves, the most half-assed New Year's celebration ever, and to make it into magic, too.

For the rest of the day, those two dragon puppets were The Greatest Things EVER in my daughters' eyes. They flew, they danced, they roamed upstairs and down, they played out elaborate roles in their pretend sagas:

Needless to say, math and handwriting and geography waited just fine until the next day.

P.S. I haven't seen the dragon puppets since. No doubt they were tossed down at the children's feet the moment that I called for dinner or bedtime, and, like the Velveteen Rabbit on Christmas Day, utterly forgotten. Children's magic...so wild, so fickle, so fey.

Montessori Math: Building Big Numbers with Base Ten Blocks

As we've casually, slowly, and happily meandered through our first couple of homeschool years, we've gradually evolved into ways that keep us happy, engaged, and productive. We're no longer the unschoolers that we were for over a year, and yet we still do not follow a curriculum, and, believing that play is still the most important work of my so-big seven-year-old and five-year-old, I still strictly limit the amount of formal, structured work that I ask my girls to perform each day.

In other words, no matter what you're doing with your own kids, you can feel free to agree that I'm doing it all wrong.

The girls' schoolwork is almost entirely guided by their interests--Ancient Egypt, werewolves, the desire to be in the next community fashion show, the desire to earn exactly enough money to buy herself a certain ipad app. I see my role as to surround the girls with all the resources at my disposal involving their interests, to guide them through formal study of their interests to deepen their knowledge (and thus appreciation) of these areas, and to set up and moderate as many hands-on, context-deepening, multiple-intelligence activities as is desired. We do this until their knowledge is, for the time being, sated, adding other areas of interest and focusing and re-focusing and coming back to former loves as the little ones wish.

Our number-building study came about when, for some reason, it kept coming about that Willow needed to add multi-digit numbers. She needed to add the tax to the list price of an ipad app to calculate how much money was going to come out of her piggy bank for it, then she had a lot of change to add up to see if she had enough, and when I did the math in front of her, talking her through the carrying the ten and such, it was mysterious and fascinating and something that must be learned!

We watched the Khan Academy video on addition with carrying for background, but obviously when it comes to actually mastering the skill, you've got to back that train on up. Here's the progression:

1. Before she learns the shortcut, Will needs to understand the concept of carrying tens and hundreds to the next place value.
2. Before she understands the concept of carrying tens and hundreds to the next place value, she needs to understand how numbers are built from hundreds and tens and units.

We've played with that second concept plenty, so that it was a comfy review for Willow before we moved onto the first concept (where we'll be for a while), but such regular review is very important, because not only does it continue to cement the concept, but it also aids contextualization--Will sees that multi-digit addition with carrying is built upon the concept that numbers have place value, and when we go back to this review again before we start subtraction with regrouping, she'll see it again.

To build numbers in a way that highlights their place value, in a way that internalizes the basic fact of each number, in a multi-sensory, hands-on way, you need two things: Montessori-style number cards, and a BIG set of Base Ten blocks. Base Ten blocks consist of one-centimeter-square unit blocks, ten-bar blocks that are ten centimeters long by one centimeter wide and represent "ten", hundred flats that are ten centimeters long by ten centimeters wide and represent "one hundred", and a thousand cube that's the size of a stack of ten hundred flats and represents "one thousand." We're happy with one regular set of Base Ten blocks, and an extra purchase of eight more thousand cubes, on account of I wanted nine of them total.

To start the number-building unit, Will cut out a few of the following math journal prompts, and glued them, one to a day, in her math journal:

Building Numbers With Base 10 Blocks Math Journal Prompts

She didn't do all of these prompts, but Sydney, when she finishes the patterning math stuff that's currently fascinating her and starts on number building, probably will.

Each day, Will reads the prompt in her math journal and gets out the appropriate supplies. To build the number 487, for instance, she first gets out our Montessori number cards. She chooses a 400 card, an 80 card, and a 7 card, and lays them out in her work area left to right. Next, she gets out her Base Ten blocks--

--and builds the number, with four hundred flats next to the 400 hundred card, 8 ten bars next to the 80, and 7 units next to the 7:


To finish, she stacks the number cards from biggest to smallest, and behold! The number appears:

We also own a set of Base Ten stamps, so that Willow can write the number and record how it's physically built right in her math journal:


On days when we didn't feel like dragging out all the blocks and the stamps and doing some elaborate math, Willow played with this Montessori number-building app to further reinforce her skills:

I like the step-by-step, physical building work involved in this activity because I want the concepts, and the ones that come beyond, to be something that the girls can mentally visualize. I think it helps them to actually, physically see what a thousand looks like, and to see that a big number is made up of so many thousands, and so many hundreds, and so on.

Here are the manipulatives that we're using:

Teach Your Children Algebraic Notation!

Our family loves a casual game of chess. Matt and I are evenly matched--he's a more creative player, although I have a better structural knowledge of strategy--and Willow plays a great overall game for her age, although she hasn't yet mastered setting up a checkmate.

If you merely love a casual game of chess, then you likely don't need to learn algebraic notation, the method of recording the sequential chess moves of your entire game. If you find intellectual pleasure in chess, however, then you must learn algebraic notation, because I guarantee that you'll love what the knowledge of algebraic notation can open you up to. And if you have children who enjoy chess, then you must teach them algebraic notation, as well; not only is it a great precocious math skill, but otherwise they, too, are closed off from studying and mastering the game. The study of chess is full of just the sort of things that delight little children--tricky pawn tricks, secret strategies, patterns that carry you straight to checkmate if you only recognize them as they're unfolding, etc.

Here's a little of what you can do:

algebraic notation in action

Will's a reluctant writer, so don't tell her that this is writing practice! Finding a specific point on a grid is a crucial math skill, and translating the board's play to paper builds her three-dimensional visualization skills, which will be powerfully useful throughout her life, everywhere from performing high-level physics to nagivating her way on the highway one day.

I date-stamp her game notations just as I date-stamp all our schoolwork, and I have her write them in one spiral-bound steno notebook. When she's a more mature player, she'll be able to play these games back and alter the outcomes using better decision-making. Also--what a cute memento of a childhood!

replaying a game using notation

Of course, right now Will usually chooses to replay a game, using her notation, immediately upon its conclusion--this is called a Post-Mortem, and it's actually an important strategy in chess study, as you have the unique opportunity to study the board and recognize better/alternate moves while your reasoning for making the original moves is still fresh in your mind. In chess club or at a competition, your teacher or coach will go through the Post-Mortem with you, and it's also an opportunity for them to see where your skills stand--needless to say, this opportunity is lost if you don't know algebraic notation.

Will simply thinks it's fun to play both sides. Sneakily, the Post-Mortem also requires her to read and translate the algebraic notation back to the board, again strengthening her math, logic, and three-dimensional visualization skills.

re-playing famous games

Here, Willow and Matt are re-playing Bobby Fischer's The Immortal Game, with Matt (and later me, because Matt doesn't have the practice at algebraic notation that Will and I do and got overwhelmed, poor dear) calling out the moves using algebraic notation, and each player moving where the notation says to. This sounds dry, I know, but if you like chess it's actually really fun--the game moves fast, since you're not sitting and thinking up the moves yourself, and it's a GOOD game, because it's one that great players have played, with exciting tricks and tricky traps and fabulously bold machinations. Usually the game that you're reading through will be annotated, as well, to point out both the genius moves and the boneheaded ones, and it's fun to see.

When we do these re-plays, I always position Willow on the winning side, to give her practice at developing a checkmate. It's especially fun because, when a great game is playing out in front of you, even a little child can often see and exclaim over these genius or boneheaded moves--there was much outraged shouting during this particular match over Donald Byrne's dead-end strategy of simply moving his king back and forth in the endgame. It's an excellent model, because you can see how the center is developed and how the pawns get sacrificed and how truly excellent it is to fork your opponent's pieces. Several times, after Fischer did something amazing, we rewound the pieces and played it out again to better see how he set it up.

And yes, that's how we spent last Friday night. Do not judge.

studying chess problems

Will's not normally a kid who loves worksheets, but nevertheless these are fun for her, probably because of their novelty. Worksheets set up chess problems, from simple "What are the possible moves for the knight here?" to the more challenging "Find the mate in two moves" types. Since these worksheets abstract chess from the board-and-pieces manipulatives, they distill into some serious intellectual work--consider the difference between solving 19+24 with Base 10 manipulatives, and solving the same problem on paper! Many studious chess players can go one step further, and work these problems, and even entire chess games, entirely in their heads, the same way that you and I mentally solve 19+24.

Will's also a member of our community's scholastic chess club for children, which is nice because she can play with children her own age and has access to coaching that we otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. She's also a scholastic member of the USCF, which means that she receives a children's chess magazine quarterly and can earn rankings when she competes--a leg up in case she decides to get serious about competitive chess later in life. Sydney's not yet interested in chess, so it's divide and conquer so far: Matt attends chess club meetings with Will, and I accompany her to competition. I'm looking forward, though, to Sydney's inevitable decision to try chess out for herself--just think about how much more fun we'll have when this game is truly an activity that the entire family enjoys together!

Until then, it's something special that Will has with just her parents, which, of course, is also pretty great.

What I've Been Busy With

Whew! Now just two more orders to make tomorrow, and then I'm going to do something entirely non-productive.

The Third Biggest Milestone--

--lagging only behind toilet training and sleeping all night in their own bed (and, well, breathing on her own, but you can't count Syd milestones that way, lest you first count down a list of at least forty medical-related milestones, from 1. breathing on her own to 41. finally getting our insurance companies to cover her $200,000 hospital bill), is witnessing the children put on all their own snowgear, from snowpants with the elastic ankles and zipper up the front and overall straps, to snow boots that go under the elastic ankles, to sweaters that need to be buttoned or zipped, to the hat that's pulled on just right to keep hair out their eyes, to the coat that needs buttoning AND zipping, to both mittens, even that tricky second one that you have to put on with your other hand in a mitten!

Of course, it's handy to have a sister to assist you.

Chocolate Pumpkin Icebox Pie from the Pantry Stash

I am saving money. Week by week, sometimes day by day, sometimes one challenging minute at a time, I'm setting aside bits of hoarded cash--a $3.99 ipad game that Willow wanted me to buy for her, but that I asked her to pay for herself. Plus tax, that's five dollars in my stash.

A trip to the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, sans the typical visit to the gift shop. That's a good fifty bucks in the stash.

A choice not to order take-out at all last week. That's thirty bucks in the stash.

I'm saving money for a (hopeful) September trip to Disney World, if you must know. Yes, it's silly and expensive, but the girls and I want to go, and Matt is willing to indulge us, and so I'm saving money.

One of my most controversial money-saving experiments, and one that I'll have to evaluate for a couple more months before seeing if it's actually worth it, is attempting to do without one of our weekly trips to the grocery store each month. We spend approximately $150 a week at the grocery store, so that's $150 straight to savings every month if we can pull it off. The theory behind the practice is that we have ample food supplies in the pantries and the freezer--stuff that I bought at good price in bulk ages ago, stuff that I have a lot of and don't regularly use, stuff that got lost and then re-purchased and then found again during the Great Kitchen Remodel. I certainly don't need the excess, and I certainly don't like the clutter that an entire case of canned tomatoes, or three half-used jars of tahini, or a giant bag of powdered milk out of which approximately one quarter-cup has been taken, adds to the minimal storage in this house.

Wouldn't it be nice to save money AND declutter our food storage, and spend a week eating a nice canned  tomato-pesto soup with homemade bread and last year's frozen corn, and chicken and dumplings from that frozen chicken we need to process, and DIY pizza with homemade dough and all those bits and bobbles of leftover cheeses, and barley with our stir fry one night instead of rice, and peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches for lunch one day, because why on earth do I have half a jar of marshmallow fluff in the back of the pantry?

That's the idea, anyway.

So with a can of pumpkin (minus the quarter-cup that I used making pumpkin-spice latte creamer), a cup of chocolate chips, and a pie crust that I found in the back of the freezer (I DO know how to make a pie crust from scratch, but Matt doesn't, and he's the one who made the pumpkin pie last Thanksgiving. Apparently frozen pie crusts come in pairs?), I whipped together one of our favorite desserts, the chocolate pumpkin icebox pie from Chocolate-Covered Katie. I often make desserts from Chocolate-Covered Katie, and I'm always pleased with them--they're healthy-ish, since they're minimally sweetened and made mostly from highly nutritious foods, they're delicious and satisfying, and they feel better in my tummy, probably because they don't have all the usual crap. I have a big sweet tooth, and it's highly UNUSUAL for me to be satisfied with desserts that aren't southern redneck rich, so these are extra happy foods.

The chocolate pumpkin icebox pie calls for lots of nutrient-dense pumpkin, a pie crust that you could make far more healthily than Matt's leftover Pillsbury pie crust, a cup of melted chocolate chips, whose sugar content you can monitor when you select the brand, and some extract (I used vanilla and orange extracts, because that way I could use up the last little bit in the orange extract jar, and I really liked the resulting flavor). It looks like this after it's set:

But less than an hour after all four of us came back from sledding, the entire pie looked pretty much like this:

I usually make hot cocoa from scratch these days, so I had no idea that we still had all these envelopes of powdered hot chocolate! Another no-groceries-week score.

Hands Off My Pinterest!