PSSST! To find great deals on fun stuff to do in your area, go HERE!
11th Heaven's Homemaking Haven
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
A Great New Christmas CD!
Hey Guys, one of my best friends in the whole world has a son who has just released his first CD. Below I've copied and pasted her email with all the details and the reasons why the band After Daybreak would love to have a great first week of sales. Thanks so much for your support! :)
From Elaine Boushka...
"The day we've been waiting for has finally arrived!
WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD is available NOW at iTunes, AmazonMP3 & at the Official Online Store. Or buy a physical copy of the EP at www.brickmanmedia.com/
WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD is available NOW at iTunes, AmazonMP3 & at the Official Online Store. Or buy a physical copy of the EP at www.brickmanmedia.com/
Release Date:U.S. Release: November 9, 2010
Label: Bandhouse Music Group
Debut project from the classical crossover/pop trio: Drew Boushka, Daniel Fritch and David Beck.
.Track Listings
1 WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD
2 ADESTE FIDELES (O Come All Ye Faithful)
3 WORTH
4 O HOLY NIGHT (Cantique de Noël)
5 THE LORD'S PRAYER
6 DREAM ON
I can't decide which is my favorite. But, "Worth" and "Dream On" are in my top three. That's Drew's voice at the beginning of "Worth" in case you can't tell.
Now, this what's really important. Their next step, career-wise is getting on other labels. As their manager/producer put it: "I have been talking to several folks about licensing our next record (which will be the "Wonderful World" CD expanded to a full CD, but without the Christmas songs) with foreign labels. This is the next step we will be taking career-wise, to start working with labels outside the U.S. They will actually be promoting and marketing AFTER DAYBREAK in foreign territories, and setting up opportunities for career growth, radio and TV opportunities, and eventually, touring. Our sales numbers are VERY important for these labels...another reason why we MUST have a great first week. "
So, please, don't wait! Buy the album for Christmas presents-because it's only six songs it's very inexpensive, but is an impressive gift. The CD costs $8.50 and the download at iTunes is $5.94. Help us get the sales numbers for this first week up to numbers that will convince other labels to pick it up. Thanks!
Label: Bandhouse Music Group
Debut project from the classical crossover/pop trio: Drew Boushka, Daniel Fritch and David Beck.
.Track Listings
1 WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD
2 ADESTE FIDELES (O Come All Ye Faithful)
3 WORTH
4 O HOLY NIGHT (Cantique de Noël)
5 THE LORD'S PRAYER
6 DREAM ON
I can't decide which is my favorite. But, "Worth" and "Dream On" are in my top three. That's Drew's voice at the beginning of "Worth" in case you can't tell.
Now, this what's really important. Their next step, career-wise is getting on other labels. As their manager/producer put it: "I have been talking to several folks about licensing our next record (which will be the "Wonderful World" CD expanded to a full CD, but without the Christmas songs) with foreign labels. This is the next step we will be taking career-wise, to start working with labels outside the U.S. They will actually be promoting and marketing AFTER DAYBREAK in foreign territories, and setting up opportunities for career growth, radio and TV opportunities, and eventually, touring. Our sales numbers are VERY important for these labels...another reason why we MUST have a great first week. "
So, please, don't wait! Buy the album for Christmas presents-because it's only six songs it's very inexpensive, but is an impressive gift. The CD costs $8.50 and the download at iTunes is $5.94. Help us get the sales numbers for this first week up to numbers that will convince other labels to pick it up. Thanks!
Please forward this email to any of your friends who appreciate good music. Thanks."
PSSST! To find great deals on fun stuff to do in your area, go HERE!
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Homemaker Monday: Kids Paying Consequences
Welcome to the 108th weekly edition of...
Thank you for joining us! If you're new to this carnival and would like to enter your post, please check HERE for the rules and regs.
YOURS: (Today's "YOURS" will be posted soon....)
MINE: So today, I'm going to journal my Saturday, which will include an anecdote about how my kids had to pay consequences.
My day started at about 6:30, as it usually does, because that's what time Baby Hippo awoke. I went to the kitchen where John was already up making breakfast for the twins and 4-year-old boy, which gave me time to make my favorite breakfast of all time, a half peanut-butter and honey sandwich with psyllium husks.
Once I was finished eating, I made the dreaded chore list. Each kid has personal and family chores. The family chores must always be finished first, then the personal chores can be tackled. The personal chores include cleaning their bedrooms, hanging up and folding their laundry and cleaning their bathrooms. Thus, if they stay on top of their personal responsibilities during the week, they won't have much to do on Saturday. And that never happens.
They each have four family chores, which entail deep-cleaning two rooms and their parts of the kitchen and babysitting Baby Hippo for 30 minutes each, thus affording me time to do my work as well. Their family chores include...
The living room
The dining room
The hallways
The entryway
The basement hallways
The basement theater
The basement game room
The basement bathroom
Their monthly kitchen responsibility after breakfast, lunch and dinner
These chores are evenly divided among the four able-bodied children, and while one of them is babysitting, I do my chores, which are laundry, cleaning my room and the 4 four and under's room, John's office and loft, sweeping the kitchen and doing any baking that may need to be done for the day.... and of course, lots of breastfeeding and diaper changing.
Now, I mentioned sweeping the kitchen. As you may remember reading from previous posts, my kitchen is about 600 square feet in area, and it takes me about 15 minutes to sweep it after a meal. I have special sweeping songs that I listen to while I sweep, mostly by Cold Play, and I usually go through three of them before I'm finished. Thus, because I spend about 45 minutes a day, at least, sweeping, it's extremely important to me to have a proper broom. I love a good plastic broom, with clean flexible plastic bristles that can really fling the dirt and food where I need it to go. However, when these bristles get old, they become stiff, and maybe even a little sticky, and make sweeping much less pleasurable.
Recently, all three of my brooms (and I have 3 so we all can sweep without hindrance) began to wax old and I asked John to buy me three more during one of his trips to the states. He gladly did, and I happily swept with my new clean, flexible brooms. However, not a month later, all of the brooms had disappeared. I told the kids that I know that they always leave them in their rooms, so they must be there and they had better start looking or they wouldn't get any computer time that day. They all did, for more than half an hour, but to my dismay, not one broom could be located.
The last thing I wanted to do was to ask John to buy me three more brooms, at the cost of $30 total, after he had just recently bought me a set. However, I couldn't go on sweeping with the one old sticky, stiff broom I had saved from my previous set.
Now normally in a situation like this, I would tell the kids that they would need to earn the money to replace the brooms via working for me or John. Their options are usually being my servant, giving me massages, doing chores, or babysitting. I pay them $5.00 per hour. This time, however, since I was feeling poor, I decided that they were going to have to replace the brooms using outside funding. I just didn't want to pay, regardless of whether I got a massage or not.
So I've told you that we've found the best doughnut recipe ever, right? It's HERE. And I suggested that they make these and sell them around town. I told them that I would be going to the dentist and that they could start on it while I was gone. They were all very angry about this, especially after having had to do their chores in the morning. I was relentless, however, and insisted that they WERE going to pay for the brooms they had lost.
So I went to the dentist and had an interesting experience there. First I must preface this part of the story by telling you that I would rather go to the gynecologist than the dentist. I absolutely loathe dental visits because I had a horrible experience with a dentist as a teenager, and I have been scarred for life. While at my visit on Saturday, I told as much to my dentist, saying it was nothing personal, and he laughed.
My dentist is a handsome man who is about ten years my junior (it's still difficult to get used to the fact that many of my doctors and dentists are now younger than I am) and he began his work on filling two cavities by numbing my entire lower jaw, drilling, filling, shining a blue light and who knows what else. As I lay there listening to him speak Spanish to his assistant, I began to feel relaxed and a little tired, so I closed my eyes. My mind began wandering and I remembered a time when one of my daughters, at the age of five, had fallen asleep for about twenty minutes while our dentist filled a cavity. I couldn't imagine how someone could fall asleep with someone sticking hard, vibrating metal tools in their mouth, but she had snored away until he was finished.
The next thing I knew, I was choking on my own saliva and when I stopped and opened my eyes, my dentist asked, "Did you have a nice nap?" I looked at him in a daze, and after he removed his tools and the two cotton logs from my mouth, I asked if I had really fallen asleep. He confirmed that I had.
Okay, I guess dental visits aren't that bad after all.
When I returned home, the kids had done jack, but I continued to be unrelenting and INSISITED that they WOULD sell baked goods to pay for my brooms. None of them liked the idea of making doughnuts, but they did think they would have success selling other baked goods, so the 15-year-old girl reluctantly made four loaves of white bread and the 10-year-old boy made a quadruple batch of chocolate chip cookie dough. He only made one mistake, well no, two. He put 4 tablespoons or baking soda and salt instead of 4 teaspoons. However, I was able to salvage the dough by adding a cup of sugar and a tablespoon of vanilla. The cookies were super flat, but they still tasted very good.
When they were finished, they went to the homes of people from our church, told them they were raising money to replace their mom's brooms that they lost, and came back in a matter with about twenty minutes with $30 profit. It was a profitable evening in many ways, one of which was that I don't think they will forget to put the brooms back where they go from now on.
Thanks for listening.
OURS: Okay, it's your turn now! Can't wait to see what your homemaking tip is. Thanks for visiting and linking up and I hope you have a wonderful Homemaker Monday!
Thank you for joining us! If you're new to this carnival and would like to enter your post, please check HERE for the rules and regs.
YOURS: (Today's "YOURS" will be posted soon....)
MINE: So today, I'm going to journal my Saturday, which will include an anecdote about how my kids had to pay consequences.
My day started at about 6:30, as it usually does, because that's what time Baby Hippo awoke. I went to the kitchen where John was already up making breakfast for the twins and 4-year-old boy, which gave me time to make my favorite breakfast of all time, a half peanut-butter and honey sandwich with psyllium husks.
Once I was finished eating, I made the dreaded chore list. Each kid has personal and family chores. The family chores must always be finished first, then the personal chores can be tackled. The personal chores include cleaning their bedrooms, hanging up and folding their laundry and cleaning their bathrooms. Thus, if they stay on top of their personal responsibilities during the week, they won't have much to do on Saturday. And that never happens.
They each have four family chores, which entail deep-cleaning two rooms and their parts of the kitchen and babysitting Baby Hippo for 30 minutes each, thus affording me time to do my work as well. Their family chores include...
The living room
The dining room
The hallways
The entryway
The basement hallways
The basement theater
The basement game room
The basement bathroom
Their monthly kitchen responsibility after breakfast, lunch and dinner
These chores are evenly divided among the four able-bodied children, and while one of them is babysitting, I do my chores, which are laundry, cleaning my room and the 4 four and under's room, John's office and loft, sweeping the kitchen and doing any baking that may need to be done for the day.... and of course, lots of breastfeeding and diaper changing.
Now, I mentioned sweeping the kitchen. As you may remember reading from previous posts, my kitchen is about 600 square feet in area, and it takes me about 15 minutes to sweep it after a meal. I have special sweeping songs that I listen to while I sweep, mostly by Cold Play, and I usually go through three of them before I'm finished. Thus, because I spend about 45 minutes a day, at least, sweeping, it's extremely important to me to have a proper broom. I love a good plastic broom, with clean flexible plastic bristles that can really fling the dirt and food where I need it to go. However, when these bristles get old, they become stiff, and maybe even a little sticky, and make sweeping much less pleasurable.
Recently, all three of my brooms (and I have 3 so we all can sweep without hindrance) began to wax old and I asked John to buy me three more during one of his trips to the states. He gladly did, and I happily swept with my new clean, flexible brooms. However, not a month later, all of the brooms had disappeared. I told the kids that I know that they always leave them in their rooms, so they must be there and they had better start looking or they wouldn't get any computer time that day. They all did, for more than half an hour, but to my dismay, not one broom could be located.
The last thing I wanted to do was to ask John to buy me three more brooms, at the cost of $30 total, after he had just recently bought me a set. However, I couldn't go on sweeping with the one old sticky, stiff broom I had saved from my previous set.
Now normally in a situation like this, I would tell the kids that they would need to earn the money to replace the brooms via working for me or John. Their options are usually being my servant, giving me massages, doing chores, or babysitting. I pay them $5.00 per hour. This time, however, since I was feeling poor, I decided that they were going to have to replace the brooms using outside funding. I just didn't want to pay, regardless of whether I got a massage or not.
So I've told you that we've found the best doughnut recipe ever, right? It's HERE. And I suggested that they make these and sell them around town. I told them that I would be going to the dentist and that they could start on it while I was gone. They were all very angry about this, especially after having had to do their chores in the morning. I was relentless, however, and insisted that they WERE going to pay for the brooms they had lost.
So I went to the dentist and had an interesting experience there. First I must preface this part of the story by telling you that I would rather go to the gynecologist than the dentist. I absolutely loathe dental visits because I had a horrible experience with a dentist as a teenager, and I have been scarred for life. While at my visit on Saturday, I told as much to my dentist, saying it was nothing personal, and he laughed.
My dentist is a handsome man who is about ten years my junior (it's still difficult to get used to the fact that many of my doctors and dentists are now younger than I am) and he began his work on filling two cavities by numbing my entire lower jaw, drilling, filling, shining a blue light and who knows what else. As I lay there listening to him speak Spanish to his assistant, I began to feel relaxed and a little tired, so I closed my eyes. My mind began wandering and I remembered a time when one of my daughters, at the age of five, had fallen asleep for about twenty minutes while our dentist filled a cavity. I couldn't imagine how someone could fall asleep with someone sticking hard, vibrating metal tools in their mouth, but she had snored away until he was finished.
The next thing I knew, I was choking on my own saliva and when I stopped and opened my eyes, my dentist asked, "Did you have a nice nap?" I looked at him in a daze, and after he removed his tools and the two cotton logs from my mouth, I asked if I had really fallen asleep. He confirmed that I had.
Okay, I guess dental visits aren't that bad after all.
When I returned home, the kids had done jack, but I continued to be unrelenting and INSISITED that they WOULD sell baked goods to pay for my brooms. None of them liked the idea of making doughnuts, but they did think they would have success selling other baked goods, so the 15-year-old girl reluctantly made four loaves of white bread and the 10-year-old boy made a quadruple batch of chocolate chip cookie dough. He only made one mistake, well no, two. He put 4 tablespoons or baking soda and salt instead of 4 teaspoons. However, I was able to salvage the dough by adding a cup of sugar and a tablespoon of vanilla. The cookies were super flat, but they still tasted very good.
When they were finished, they went to the homes of people from our church, told them they were raising money to replace their mom's brooms that they lost, and came back in a matter with about twenty minutes with $30 profit. It was a profitable evening in many ways, one of which was that I don't think they will forget to put the brooms back where they go from now on.
Thanks for listening.
OURS: Okay, it's your turn now! Can't wait to see what your homemaking tip is. Thanks for visiting and linking up and I hope you have a wonderful Homemaker Monday!
PSSST! To find great deals on fun stuff to do in your area, go HERE!
Thursday, November 4, 2010
100% Whole Wheat Cheese and Mushroom-Stuffed Half Pies
So the other day, my dearest brother-in-law mentioned to one of my kids that he would like to watch a movie in our theater downstairs. I'm not sure if he wanted to watch it alone, but whether he did or not, I invited our whole family to watch it with him and his wife and son.
It seems that one thing the kids LOVE to do is prepare food and eat it downstairs while they are watching a movie. And on this night especially, since we were trying to cram in tons of stuff we needed to do, I was happy to support them. Why not kill two birds with one stone and take dinner downstairs and spend family time together?
Now, my dilemma was what to make. I needed something the kids could just grab with their hands so we wouldn't have to worry about plates and forks and knives. I thought of what movie theaters serve. Nachos wouldn't work because I didn't want cheese all over the carpet. Hot dogs wouldn't work because hot dogs are disgusting. I kept thinking and thinking and finally I received a revelation. I would use the super-easy-to-make bread stick dough, then fill it when mushrooms, cheese and onions, then bake it! I followed some of my pizza-making techniques and these stuffed bread pie things turned our surprisingly delicious! Below is the recipe, and don't forget to check out the nutrition data HERE. Enjoy!
Ingredients
For the Filling:
1/4 cup butter
1/2 onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, chopped
20 chopped mushrooms
3 cups of shredding cheese (I used mozarella, but whatever you prefer is fine, too.)
For the bread:
2 1/2 cups warm water
5 teaspoons yeast
6 tablespoons brown sugar
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 cup oil
6 cups whole wheat flour
6 tablespoons vital wheat gluten
Olive oil for brushing
1/4 cup butter for brushing
Salt and garlic powder or granulated garlic for sprinkling
Directions
1. To make the bread, dissolve the yeast and sugar in water warm enough that you can barely stand to hold your hand under it when it’s running.
2. When the yeast starts to foam like root beer (after about 5 minutes), add all of the other ingredients, then knead dough in a food processor or by hand for ten minutes.
3. While bread is mixing, saute onions, garlic and mushrooms in butter, then set aside.
4. When bread is finished mixing, divide the dough into 16 pieces. Roll each piece into a ball, then roll out into a 7” to 8” circle. Brush with olive oil to keep the dough from getting soggy.
5. Fill with about 2 tablespoons of the mushroom mixture and cheese, then fold the dough over, pressing the edges with a fork to help them stick together.
6. Place the pies on a greased cookie sheet, then let them rise for about half an hour. Brush with butter and sprinkle with garlic salt, then bake at 350 degrees F for 25 to 35 minutes, or until they are lightly browned.
Today on some of my other blogs...
365 Days of TV-Free Toddler Time: 100% Whole Wheat Bread Stick Time!l
life in mexico {a picture a day}: {a red pot}
PSSST! To find great deals on fun stuff to do in your area, go HERE!
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