Modeling Bee's Wax recipe

I found this recipe here for modeling beeswax. Since we found some bee's wax at the local festival for $1.00 a small bar I bought 5-- to try some modeling wax with the kids. My Grandpa Curtiss raised bees and I love the smell of bee's wax. It reminds me of him. It's like a hug from the past.

Modeling Beeswax
Approx 1 cup of beeswax
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp lanolin [do not use if you are allergic to lanolin]
Melt the beeswax in a double boiler, [add grated crayon for colour]
Mix the lanolin and the olive oil together and add to the beeswax.
Once all is melted – remove from heat and keep stirring and pour into a walled [and lined] cookie tray. Cut into pieces and leave to cool
To check consistency, warm a piece in your hand and check its pliability. If it is to hard, add lanolin or oil. If to soft add beeswax.

*note while looking for this recipe I found out what was in the modeling clay from the store-UGGGHH!!! I will never buy that again. Definitely worth making our own naturally.

Happy Birthday Taylor!

My "onely" son is turning 17 years old today! When he was about 8 or 9 years old he wrote me a letter about how I should let him have a snake as a pet. He signed it "from your onely son". The typo has always stuck even if he isn't my only son anymore he will always be my number one, oldest, first-born "one-ly" son.
Happy Birthday Tay!
P.S. You still aren't getting a snake!

Thrifty deals

 A Neighboring town is having its yearly festival and the whole town is one giant garage sale. I went to get some kids clothes for the little ones. But I didn't find many clothes in my price range.


Board Books
1,2,3 to the Zoo by Eric Carle for $0.50
Colors $0.25
Peek-A-Boo Alaska by Bernd and Susan Richter $0.25 Little-man calls the moose a cow.



Childrens Books
The Silver Nutmeg by Palmer Brown $1.00
Tomie's Little Mother Goose by Tomie dePaola $0.10
The Little Penguin by A.J. Wood $0.10

Creatures of the Night by David Cutts $1.00
Abe Lincoln Remembers by Ann Turner $0.25

The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss $0.10 Yes a FIAR book for $0.10!
The Growing Story by Ruth Krauss $0.10
Terry and the Caterpillars by Millicent E. Selsam
A Child's Garden of Verses Illustrated by Tasha Tudor for only a $1.00
The Amazing Pop-Up-Geography Book by Kate Petty &Jennie Maizels
Sunset of the Sabertooth Magic Tree house #7 by Mary Pope Osborne $0.50
Ghost Town at Sundown Magic Tree house #10 by Mary Pope Osborne $0.50
Good Morning Gorillas  Magic Tree house #26 by Mary Pope Osborne $0.50
Blizzard of the Blue Moon Magic Tree house #26 by Mary Pope Osborne $1.00

Mom's Books
Leather bound Harvard's Classics copy of Shakespeare  $0.10 (Yes ten cents!) in mint condition

Baskets
Basket shaped and decorated like a chicken $2.00
Small Nantucket wood and woven basket $0.50
Watermelon shaped basket $0.50
Tiny watermelon basket $0.50

Toys
Magnetix  (several sets at three sales) $20.00 total Tippy-toe spent an hour playing alone with the robot ones
Baby doll, bed, stroller $2.00 Pitty-pat picked them out for herself
Step two tool bench $2.00
Set of wooden nuts and bolts (for a Montessori tray) $0.50
6 wooden train pieces $0.75--that match our wooden train the boys got for christmas

I need to make a list of all the books we own because I have several duplicates-but I couldn't resist the FIAR book for $0.10 That's a bargain!

Art Supplies
Almost new set of pastel chalks for drawing $0.50 (new they were $3.47-- perfect for Cam and for some Waldorf influence in our home school nature center.)

frugal crock pot meals

Slow Cooker Dr Pepper Ribs

This all-time favorite ribs recipe because it is SO EASY.

• 3 1/2 pounds pork loin back ribs or pork spare ribs (we just buy a full rack of ribs)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon pepper
• 1/2 cup Dr Pepper (or water, or other soda)
• 2/3 cup barbecue sauce (we like Sweet Baby Ray's the best for this recipe.

1. Spray inside of 5-6 quart slow cooker with cooking spray (or just use one of those bags ).
2. Cut ribs into 2 or 3 rib portions. Place ribs in slow cooker; sprinkle with salt and pepper. Pour Dr Pepper (or water or other soda) into slow cooker.
3. Cover and cook on low heat setting 8 to 9 hours or until ribs are tender. Remove ribs. Discard liquid.
4. Paint BBQ sauce over ribs and replace ribs into slow cooker. Pour a little additional sauce over ribs. Cover and cook on low heat for 1 hour.             

Found this recipe here and I thought I would try it. Maybe Aimee would like it too?

History in the making

Aaron got up at 4:30 am to watch the Royal Wedding of William and Kate with Camryn. They talked me into letting her stay home from school today to watch the wedding on television so early this morning. He is such a good Daddy! As he said it is living history. We after-school homeschool Cam to make up for the deficiencies of our local public school (she was going to a church based school until December when it became to hard to transport her back and forth). I remember staying home to Watch Dianna and Charles' Wedding as a teen. Every girl loves a fairy tale wedding story. I remember watching William grow up. History isn't just the past. It is the here and now as well.

Enjoying the rain!

I can't help but enjoy the sound of the rain on the roof and the light show put on by the lightening storm this evening. We have a screened in front porch that is perfect for viewing storms. Aaron is so much like my Dad, a weather watcher. We don't want the kids to be afraid of storms so we try to invite them to enjoy them with us. What better way to study the weather than to enjoy it first hand?
    Camryn remembers reading Thunder Cake but we don't own a copy. I am going to have to make a trip to our library to find the book. It goes perfect with our weather theme this week.  Better yet, I should make a trip to the used book store after work this week.

Have you read these books?

Copy and paste then bold the books you have read. See how you compare. The original post can be found here. I saw it on this blog and had to see how wrong the BBC is about me!
The BBC apparently believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - read all
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 
I have read all but 26 and my computer will not let me bold any of them I have read for some reason.But the ones I have not read are the most recent ones. Probably because I was so busy starting a career and raising my oldest kids to read those.