A Month of Meals: Freezer Cooking Day

We have our menu, our recipes, and have done our shopping. Now it is time for food prep. What I love about this particular menu is that the food prep is so incredibly easy. Most of the items are already frozen. All you have to do is put the ingredients in the bag and you are ready to go. I did my freezer cooking in just under 2 hours from beginning till the last hand washed dish was dried.The first thing you will want to do if you are following my menu is cook your ground meat. This is the only actual cooking involved in our freezer cooking day. You will want to drain it and also let it cool before putting it into the bags. While you are waiting for the meat to cook start writing up your bags. I label them with their name, special instructions like adding water or what to serve it over, the date, and cooking instructions.

Once you are ready to put the food in the bags you want to do two things. First puff up the bag and zip it shut. gently squeeze to make sure there are no holes in the bag. We had a major mess on my mom's white table cloth because half a bottle of BBQ sauce gushed out of a hole in one of our bags. You live and you learn, right. Second flip the zip top out. This helps the bag to stand on it's own and hold the mouth of the bag open.

Now it is just a matter of tossing the ingredients in the bags. This menu is well designed for freezing. With just a bit of work you will have those quick and easy frozen meals we all love the convenience of using. In this 2 hours you will have 26 meals done for the month, just heat and serve. Okay, some of them will be served on rice or pasta, but that is quick and easy to whip up.

Now is the time for your questions! Ask in the comments or where ever you have seen this series. Tomorrow I will answer all your questions and link back to all the posts in case you missed one. See you then!

You can find the rest of the series here.

Playing Pirate

Our little guy loves to play in the bathtub. He is getting older though and now he mostly takes a shower. Today's theme for Illustration Friday made me think of how kids grow and change over time. This tub time scene captures a single moment in the metamorphosis every child makes into adulthood.

Taking a Sabbath Day

Once upon a time there was a family who booked every day of the week, became totally drained and irritable, and couldn't figure out to fix it. They said yes to too many service activities, to many get togethers, and tried to fit in extra curriculars on top of it all. They were exhausted, taken advantage of, and tired of living every day like a race to the end.

I know that our family is not the only one this story is about. We want others to be happy. We want to serve. We also want a chance to breathe from time to time and make sure our family is healthy both mentally and physically. One day I read this passage from Exodus:

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Exodus 20:8-11

God, the one who made every living thing and breathed out the stars, works for 6 days and then takes a day off. God took a day to rest and we were not. God even tells us to take a day off and we ignore Him. Maybe we think we know better or maybe we don't want to waste our limited time on earth. But is it a waste? When I am weary, exhausted, and irritable no one is getting my best. If I am constantly thinking about the next thing for me to do then no one is getting my full attention. But, if we take one day a week to rejuvenate our minds, bodies, and spirit, we can serve and work in gladness, giving our best.

We realized we needed a Sabbath day in March. We had to wait till May for our commitments to be over so we could begin taking one. Unfortunately, our Sabbath day was the most booked day of the week, Wednesday. Adam has 2 days off a week, Sunday and Wednesday. Many people think of Sunday as the Sabbath day. That doesn't work for us because we generally serve in our church or are support raising for our mission trip on Sunday. Wednesday was once booked with Bible studies, Awana, and youth group. Now it is the day that we take life slow and easy. We don't work, serve, or run errands unless it is an absolute necessity.

What do you take out? Everything we have chosen to take out has been a good thing to do. Mostly everything that is vying for our time is a "good thing". If we take on every good thing because it is "good" we become like the sad family at the beginning of my post. We need to stop letting others place their expectations on us or to feed us guilt so we will say "Yes". Let's all lighten the load on ourselves and take a Sabbath day!

Do you take a Sabbath? What day do you take it? If not, when do you think you would want to take one each week? If it is good for God, it can only be that much more good for us!

Freetime Unlimited

Little Guy got a Kindle for Christmas. It is going to be an essential tool for our homeschool abroad  One of my favorite parts is an app only available on the new generation of Kindles, Kindle Freetime. I love it! You can set it up to only have the books, videos, and apps you want each child to have. You can set it up for each child, so they all have the materials that are right for them. You can also set up timers. You can set it for overall screen time or you can set up time by category. We currently have ours set at unlimited for books, 1 hours for videos, and 1 hour for apps. This has been an incredible app on Little Guy's new Kindle and we are so happy to be able to have and use it.

Amazon thought this wasn't enough, so they created Freetime Unlimited. For a low monthly fee, your kiddo has access to tons of apps, videos, and books that are appropriate for ages 3-8. There is a lot to choose from and you can only find some of it by doing a search. It includes some really great educational materials in all categories. It also contains a lot of fluff, more than I would like.

Little Guy has enjoyed exploring all the content, but filled his Kindle by the second week. There is so much on there that he can't find what he is looking for and some of what he does find, and grow attached to, is more toward the 8 year old level than the 5 year old level. Our free trial subscription is nearly over and I have not been won over.

I would love it if I could personalize it. With normal Freetime I have to manually select what is available for him to use, but with Unlimited it is all there. I would like to be able to at least remove things that I don't want him to have access to or that he doesn't want. It would clean up the screen so he could find his favorite things. In the meantime, we did find a handful of content that we will be buying after we end the subscription. We also got 2 weeks of free educational content that covered all of our history, science, and read-alouds since we started school back up again.

Let Me See...

Jayne and Adam have been crafting...with LEGOS! They certainly make some interesting things together. I had to share this "functional" creation. It is a pair of glasses and the part that goes on your ears can actually open and close. I love how Jayne can go creatively with legos and especially that he can take them apart and start again so there is no continual purchasing like there is with crayons.