This is one of Sarah’s Bestest Friends, Tarah.
Kathy
Project 365 – Day 341
All posts by KME
I Can Write My Name
Well, almost.
Sarah tries out her new Gel Paint.
Project 365 is coming to an end. Wednesday is Day 339. It’s been a long year of many pictures. No wonder I’m having trouble writing our family Christmas newsletter, I’ve already said everything on the blog.
I never thought I could really take a picture every day for an entire year. I guess I should have been more worried about taking only a SINGLE photo each day. 
Maybe the second edition of Project 365 should be: Take a meaningful picture every day. Hmmm.
What do you think?
- Another round of Project 365 – don’t make it specific, just capture one image each day
- Scrap the whole thing. Enough is enough, how many pictures of cute kids do we really need?
- Change the whole focus – give each day a theme.
- Less rambling/babbling on the blog, more pictures.
Other thoughts…
Kathy
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WFMW – Easy Meals
I’m excited about this week’s Works for Me Wednesday category – What do I Fix Edition – because I am the worst meal planner ever! I LIVE in that place of constantly wondering, always at the last minute, what we will eat for dinner. I plan to plunder all the blogs linked to the site for fabulous ideas and never have to worry about coming up with a last minute, easy meal. Assist my poor family and leave a comment with your favorite easy-to-fix meal.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
My younger children thank you.
My (perpetually hungry) teenage son thanks you.
My (please tell me you’ve started dinner) husband thanks you.
This homeschooling mother of five, too busy teaching the little darlings to feed them, thanks you.
I try to have the children work with me in the kitchen but it’s so hard to find good help these days.
Super Easy Family Meals:
Italian Chicken – Frozen chicken breasts in a baking pan, top with Italian salad dressing and fresh parmesan cheese. Bake.
Biscuit Pizzas – Pillsbury biscuits topped with spaghetti sauce and cheese. Bake.
Noodle Casserole – Cook package of noodles, mix in spaghetti sauce and quartered (Costco) meat balls (microwaved), top with cheese. Bake.
Champagne Chicken – Frozen chicken breasts in a baking pan, top with Champagne salad dressing and fresh parmesan cheese. Bake
Any resemblance to Italian Chicken is entirely coincidental.
Red Wine Vinegar Chicken – do you see where I’m going with this? Easy chicken dishes and quite varied for the family with discerning tastes.
That pretty much exhausts my list of easy meals (that don’t involve frozen pizza, chicken nugggets or salad dressings). You can see why we need help.
Kathy
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Tuesday Tips for Parenting – Guest Blogger Tina
Tim and I are thrilled to share the Tuesday Spotlight with Tina Burt. It is particularly appropriate that Tina be featured as a guest blogger, since she is a dear friend we first met while living in the Duckabush Valley, for which this blog is named. Now serving with New Tribes Missions in Thailand, Tina and her family are dearly beloved kindred spirits. Wherever they go, Greg and Tina live out the example that Paul laid down for the Thessalonians:
We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us. (I Thessalonians 2:8)
Kathy and Tina on the eve of Tina’s departure for Thailand.
Hello Duckabush Blog Faithfuls,
As a guest blogger today, I will try to uphold the high standards set by my dear friends. Kathy asked me a while ago to think about submitting a post on her Tuesday Tips for Parenting blog. While obviously very honored by such a request, I was not sure what parenting gems I had to offer. We have our fair share of teasing, annoying, disobedience and unruly behavior at our house.
I mean beyond what my dear husband incites of course!
After some deep thinking, (it doesn’t take too long to get to the bottom of my well!), I thought we could share one of our discipline techniques. We like to call it the Jack LaLane method of child training.
It began when with our son, the youngest of our three children. He seemed to find the most trouble of our kids, not always out of rebellion, but from a lack of thought or wisdom. Other forms of, cough, cough, physical discipline did not seem to make much of an “impact†on him, and so we drew on DH’s army training and instituted …
The Pushup!
Doesn’t he have nice form, and a smile to boot!
We now use it liberally with all three kids, and they may find themselves dropped for pushups whenever the situation, or attitude demands. Rolled eyes at a request, rude speech, sassing a parent, slow or delayed obedience,…… The number of pushups has a direct correlation to how often the child has been previously corrected for said offense, or how severe the offense.
When beginning, we suggest only 5-10, depending on the strength of your children. Don’t want any excuses to get out of dishwashing!
We liberally used this technique while trying to break our son of his finger sucking habit some years back. Each time we would catch him with his finger in his mouth, he would ‘earn’ 10 pushups. After a particularly long car trip, the poor child sometimes owed us up to 80 pushups! (Yes, we let him take a break in between sets of 20 or so.)
Hey, it came in handy when he began wrestling, and needed all the upper body strength he could get!
There is a boy (in the #2 place – Great Job, Zach!) who has benefited from some loving discipline.
An extra tip, when an attitude is particularly bad, or you feel you need a little more oomph in your sentence, diamond pushups are great! Instead of having hands under the shoulders, they must have their hands together under their chest, making a little diamond with their first fingers and thumbs. We have found that even the suggestion of diamond pushups will improve cooperation greatly!
Zachary, Leah, and Ema.
What cooperative children, no pushups necessary here.
Tina
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Pictures
Tim and I spent hours (okay minutes) reviewing the family pictures we received yesterday from the photographer, once the Blogosphere Taunting Police (BTP) finished questioning him, and reluctantly released him on his own recognizance.
“Let that be a lesson to you, Mister,” they warned him sternly. “Some of your blog readers don’t take kindly to that kind of taunting, and one or two of them have friends in high places.” Tim was a little shaken by the hours he spent under the interrogation lights, down at BTP headquarters. But I digress.
The pictures are GORGEOUS!!! Can I say that when it’s my own family? Is there any possible way that I can be objective?
Well, I take a LOT of pictures of my beautiful family and I rarely (okay never) call them GORGEOUS. Cute, sweet, dear, fun maybe, but not GORGEOUS.
I have to put in a huge plug for our photographer, Crystal. She did an outstanding job on our family portraits. She is currently working part time for a professional photography company while establishing her home studio. Crystal is offering a pretty fair deal for an hour-plus sitting ($75 plus tax). She works with each family, taking the pictures and poses requested, and then mails out a cd with ALL the photos. From there families are free to pick the ones they like and have them printed anywhere (Costco, Kodak, CVS, etc) they choose.
Even Mr. Cynical (“I don’t like to waste my time sitting in a studio when I can take pictures myself”) was truly impressed. Have I already stated that the shots are GORGEOUS? Just wondering.
Now we’re all fighting over which one we like best.
Too hard to choose – there are so many! Wow.
Crystal’s home studio is in the Puget Sound region, and I can’t recommend her services highly enough. If you are local and in need of a photographer, contact us for recommendations.
The only problem we had at our studio appointment was getting Joshua to smile. The rest of the crew was susceptible to silly jokes and the playful attitude of the photographer. Not Joshua: he was a rock. A pleasant, smiling-because-I-have-to, grit-your-teeth-and-bear-it, kind of rock.
Joshua’s tendency to bang his head against the side of the wall when I announced we had forgotten to take one last round of pictures was a bit distracting, but we managed to ignore him. I’m afraid all my blogging and extensive picture taking have completely exhausted his patience.
Next year (can you hear Joshua’s groans from where you’re sitting, when I say the words “next year”?) I’m going to come armed with a list of key words that will extract a natural smile (maybe even a wry chuckle) out of Joshua.
Cephalopod
Stanley Leonardo Sappovitz
“Oh wait, we left Jimmy!”
“You take care of your noof spiff, I’ll take care of mine.”
Maybe I’ll prepare a flashcard for each of the children.
Kathy