It' Saturday!

We all slept in this morning and had a leisurely morning. Now my eldest dd is cutting fabric and then I'll be sewing. We're wanting to get all our 'business' work done over the weekend in hopes of having more time to do some fun schooling etc. this upcoming week. So once I'm done posting, I'll start in on the sewing.

The three younger girls are busy cleaning up a storm to earn some extra funds. All three of them would like to each buy a little webkin. They've been eyeing them at our local grocery store for months now and asked if there was anything they could do to earn extra funds. So they've been busy folding all the laundry and cleaning anything and everything that isn't already clean. lol Nothing like a little incentive to get a person moving!

This past week we finally completed all the large orders we had to do, and got them shipped out. It was such a relief. Then on Wednesday in school we made a volcano out of plaster. We were going to paint it yesterday but I ended up with some sort of stomach flu, so we'll do that on Monday. We also want to do some wool yarn and silk scarf dying with kool-aid this upcoming week. We've been wanting to do this for a while. I'll share some photos of that.

On a side note, since moving back to an 'open' journal, I've been wanting to keep things a little more annonymous so you may have noticed I haven't been using names in my posts any longer. That makes things difficult with so many kids though, so I'm going to make up names for them. My eldest dd from now on will be Sia, our son is the only boy, so I'll just call him Son. lol Then our next dd will be Beth, twin number one will be Ally (she likes that name lol) and twin #2 will be Blessing. All the kids are blessings, don't get me wrong, but our second twin dd was an 'extra' blessing we never expected, so the nick name sticks.

So folks, meet Sia, who is 16, Son is almost 14, Beth is almost 10 and the twins Ally and Blessing are almost 8.

Lately the three youngest have been LOVING helping with cooking. I've been letting them get right in there as much as they, and I feel comfortable. This week I taught them how to make homemade beef stew from scratch. I'm trying to branch out to using more foods that are unfamiliar to me. Like this week, believe it or not, for the first time I used a turnip. LOL Dh came grocery shopping with me and I asked him to help me find some extra veggies to try in the homemade stew that I don't normally use. He said turnip is great in stew, and it was! Yummy! So I learned about a new veggie. If anyone has any other veggie suggestions for stew, we'll add them next time.

With the girls wanting to learn to cook more, I've been inspired to get back into more cooking completely from scratch. Today we're making homemade cinnamon buns with homemade cream cheese icing. This is my husbands absolute favorite thing that I cook. He just LOVES them. Maybe I should take a photo or two along the way and share them later. They are VERy yummy. Cinnamon buns without cream cheese icing are just NOT the same. We also cheat and use the bread maker to make the dough, so that really cuts out on the work. I simply use a basic bread dough recipe, you can use white or wholewheat. It works very well.

So we're having a bit of a snack-y type dinner. Cinnamon buns with cream cheese icing and Elephant Ears. A favorite of the kids. Again, I just make basic bread dough in the bread maker, and then we roll it out, slice it into triangles and deep fry it (no, not the healthiest thing in the world, but yummy. lol) Once it's deep fried, you sprinkle cinammon sugar over it and eat it while it's nice and warm. Yummmmm..... Anyone who's ever been over when we've made these always falls in love with them. I should take some pics of these and share as well.

*Edited to add a couple of photos of our cinnamon buns.
Before adding the icing:

Iced:

Well that's enough rambling. Sia has done enough cutting that I can get started on sewing now. The kids are done their cleaning and Blessing is sitting next to me doing some knitting.

Bye for now.