well.

Turns out, Rocco was sick.  Who knows why.  Who knows if it will spread to anyone else.  All I know is that he was suddenly sick - really sick.

He was acting totally fine throughout the day on Monday, eating and playing normally.  Then I laid him down for nap, and when I went to get him up later that afternoon he was just covered in vomit and running a fever.  So baths and laundry and Daniel Tiger on a mattress on the hardwood ensued.  (I take rug protection very seriously in these parts, in case you haven't noticed.)

It had been a long couple of weeks for me, so I kind of just broke down a little at the prospect of having the flu in our house again.  I took a bunch of activated charcoal to preemptively ward off any sickness in myself, and then I ducked out of the house for an hour or so to catch a breather.  I picked up library books.  I wandered around the fancy grocery store.  I went to the less-fancy grocery store and bought a chicken.  You know.  The kind of things people do in their free time.

Rocco ended up sleeping in our room overnight, and was waking up pretty often to throw up.  But then around 3:30 a.m., it stopped, and he was able to keep water down.  Yesterday, he was still running a fever and sleeping a lot, but he had an appetite and was able to keep everything down.

This whole thing was just the weirdest.  I wonder what caused it?  I'm really, really hoping it doesn't spread to any of the rest of us... knock on wood.

good, cheap, quick salmon patties that even kids will eat!

"Good, cheap, and quick" are my cooking trifecta in this season of life.  I want to spend as little money as possible at the store, and as little time as possible in the kitchen, with as few fights-slash-bribes as necessary when trying to get the kids to eat what I make.  If it's healthy, that's a bonus, too.

I've always kind of had to be a budget cook.  When Todd and I first got married, our weekly grocery budget was $30 per week.  Every two weeks, we treated ourselves to a takeout meal, but other than that, it was on me to feed the two of us on less than $5 per day.  I clipped a lot of coupons and we ate a ton of Hamburger Helper.

Our budget has obviously had to increase as our numbers have increased, so I've had to get creative with ways to keep it reasonably low - especially since I don't really do Hamburger Helper-type meals all that often anymore.

A few years ago, I came across a recipe for salmon patties.  I honestly hadn't ever heard of them, and was equal parts intrigued and disgusted by the idea.  I ran it past Todd, who said his mom used to make them a lot growing up, and he always really liked them, so I figured I'd at least give it a shot.

And you know what?  They're really good.  Like, really good.  My kids don't even fight me on them.  Plus, they're crazy-cheap.  A can of salmon at Aldi is less than $3, so I double this recipe in order to feed all of us, and it still only costs me about $7 for the whole meal, including sides of steamed broccoli and rice.  That's a HUGE win.

So here's what you'll need to know:

Salmon Patties

Total prep/cook time: 20 minutes
Makes: 4-6 salmon patties

Ingredients:

1 (14.5 oz.) can of salmon

1 egg

1/4 c. almond meal or bread crumbs

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. pepper

1 tsp garlic powder

1 Tbsp. dried minced onion

1 tsp. paprika

Fresh green onions, chopped (optional)

(Feel free to mess around with seasoning quantities, or add or take out any as you see fit.  I'm not really a measurer of things, and usually just throw in whatever I have on hand that sounds good, and they always turn out fine.)

Steps:

1.  Drain salmon and mash it with a fork.  You could pick all the bones and skin out, but there are some really great nutrients in those - things like calcium and Omega-3's - and honestly, once you mix it all up, you can't even tell they're in there.  I recommend just leaving it all in there and mashing it well.  It'll be our secret.

2.  Mix in the rest of the ingredients.

3.  Heat about 1/4 c. cooking oil over med heat.  (I like to use bacon grease, but whatever you use most often will work.)

4.  Using your hands, form medium-sized balls of the mixture, and then flatten into patties (just like if you were making burgers).  When oil is hot, cook for 3-5 minutes on each side, until the outside is crispy and the inside is cooked through.

To serve, I like to mix about 1/4 c. mayonnaise with 1 Tbsp. lemon juice as a dipping sauce, or as a topping if serving these on buns.

what's up weekly.

This week has seen us trucking along towards the end of the school year.  I could not be more excited.  Granted, we do year-round school (and love it!), so it's not really like I'm chomping at the bit for our term to be over.  But there are only four more weeks of the university year left, at which point the college students will disperse for the summer and my weekly schedule will suddenly look a lot different.

I will be taking the opportunity of a slower pace to get started on potty training Rocco.  He is so ready - he's at the point where he requests to sit on the potty before he pees or poops in his diaper, so I know he's mentally 'there'. ("I poopin'!  I sit potty? MOMMY, I POOPIN' NOW!")  But we just do not currently have the available time to hunker down and really focus and set him up for success, so I've been trying to get him to hold off a bit longer.

In other news, we've been playing a lot of charades lately.  For Christmas, the kids got Todd a boxed set of family charades, and it has been so fun.  Laurelai is absolute gold.  You should have her do her T. Rex impression for you sometime.

This week's weather was really weird.  On Sunday, it was snowing.  By Wednesday, it was 82 degrees out.  On Thursday, in temperatures pushing 90 degrees, the girls and I planted potatoes and a second sowing of peas.  I'd picked up the seed potatoes and some onion sets up at the Amish on Wednesday, and I'm hoping to have enough decent weather to get the onions in before it starts snowing again this weekend.  Seriously schizophrenic stuff.  I just hope we don't get any tornadoes as a result of the wacky temperature swings - I don't tend to be an anxious person at all, but I'm legitimately terrified of tornadoes.

Um, let's move on to talking about something else.  Todd shaved his massive beard this week.  I think he was pretty sad to see it go, but I'm really liking having his face back, even if only for a little while.

And lastly, this little girl has been making the funniest faces and doing the funniest things.  She has figured out how to wave, and how to bob around when music plays, and is so close to figuring out how to clap.  I am so dang smitten with her.

I've been trying to do more reading this week than I had been lately.  So there have been lots of nursing-slash-reading sessions.

And, in case you missed them, here are this week's vlogs:







Have an amazing weekend you wonderful people!

morning quiet time with the kids.

I've kind of been slacking on my 'quiet time' routine lately - it had been the case for a while that I was really consistent, but then I fell off the wagon.  Chalk it up to a combination of things: Callista is still an inconsistent sleeper at night, so the exhaustion caught up with me; I started spending my morning time making breakfast for myself and Todd before he headed to work instead of reading; I eventually got pretty far behind in my Bible read-through schedule, so I got discouraged and lost motivation; yadda yadda yadda.

Combine this with the fact that we hadn't really instated any kind of structured Bible time for the kids, and the guilt was hitting me pretty hard.  The kids weren't reading their Bibles.  Like, ever.  I wanted to change that for them, and I also wanted to be setting a better example.

So when I put together my visual schedule, I decided to add in a routine Bible time for all of us, and so far it has been working!

So, basically, the way it's been happening has seen me getting up around 8:00 or a little after to make everyone's breakfast.  Now that the kids can tell time, I've told them to plan on cleaning up their rooms at about 8:20, so we can sit down at the table around 8:30.  We read until 9:00ish, and then I put breakfast on the table.  So far, the start time hasn't been as ironclad as would probably be good for us, but it's at least a jumping-off point.

The biggest two kids, being fluent readers, are required to spend time in the Word.  The younger ones are given the option of either sitting with us to look at illustrated storybook Bibles, or continuing to play until breakfast.  Rocco just kind of wanders around, making a bunch of noise and generally being as distracting as possible.

Is it efficient?  Absolutely not.  Some days I only finish about a chapter... in thirty minutes.  Every other word, I'm interrupted.  It's frustrating at times.  Do the kids love it every single day?  No.  And that was hard for me at first - I didn't want time in the Bible to be seen as a chore.  But then I had to realize that, just like anything that's ultimately good for them, and anything I hope they would eventually choose for themselves, I have to train them.  Self-discipline begins parent-directed discipline when they're young.  And honestly, once they're sitting down and reading, they do enjoy it - they just need the little external nudge to start.

So, there it is.  It's simple, but it is a step in a good direction, and I'm feeling good about it!

an age-old question, answered.

Lately, I've been doing a lot of thinking about a very hot topic:  Cake Versus Pie.

I would like to clear something up: the winner is Pie.  It was never not Pie.  Those who would tell you there's even an argument to be made in favor of Cake are just trying to lead you into darkness.

First of all, Cake is essentially just flavored dry bread.  Would you want to eat a piece of cake without frosting on it?  No, because cake is gross without frosting.  But I bet you've eaten frosting without cake.  I bet you didn't even really miss the cake when you were scooping plain frosting out of the bowl with your finger.

So really, if you say you like cake, what you really mean is that you like frosting, and are open-minded to having some crumbly bread attached to it.

Second of all, it's not even a contest.  Pie just wins.  Case closed.

via GIPHY

what's up weekly.

One more week in the books!  If Mondays are my favorite days of the week because of the fresh start they offer, Fridays are my second-favorites because of the sense of accomplishment I often feel.  Even at the end of mundane or hard weeks, there is always at least one thing to look back on and feel really good about.  It's a privilege to get to live this life with My People, and it's so fun to spend time each week counting and recounting those blessings.

Last weekend was all about Easter.  On Friday, a friend of ours came and 'egged' our house with plastic eggs for the kids to hunt for in the yard.  They had SUCH a fun time!  I had previously felt a little guilty for planning literally zero kid-activities for Easter, and the kids had kept asking for an egg hunt.  But then I realized that, yet again, God has used our amazing church family to provide for us.

On Sunday, we got dressed up and partied.  (By partied, I mean we picked up Wendy's on the way home from church and took naps.) I spent time recording a couple of vlogs, so I stayed dressed (an unusual feat for me - usually on Sundays, I'm in pajama pants faster than you can blink.  I basically trample the kids in my one-man stampede through the front door on my way to change).  However, vlogs are only filmed from the waist up... so I put on pajama pants under my dress, and no one will ever know the difference.

Classy stuff, Van Voorst.

The rest of this week basically reflected some of the principles I've been working on with my visual schedule - we moved Atticus' speech appointment to a different day, which meant for an extra 'down' day than we're used to.  I met with the public school speech therapist to discuss some group therapy options for him, and I'm trying to figure out which time slot she offered (if any) will work with our routine.  Unfortunately, they all seem to be scheduled for the exact middle of afternoon nap, so I'm trying to figure out how that would work.  The college students are back, so that part of my week went back to normal after Spring Break last week.

And other than that, I've spent a lot of time in my pajamas.  As per usual. 

On a totally tangential sidenote, I'm a firm proponent of pajamas-as-clothes.  I know all kinds of stay-at-home moms who do things like actually get dressed every day, or do their hair and makeup for a day at home.  I even know a few gals who put on shoes in the morning to help them stay 'on' throughout the day.  I am decidedly not one of these moms.  I like to be as comfortable as possible while I work, hence my nasty pajamas.  I'd rather spend my free time reading a book than blow drying my hair.  And I don't put on makeup everyday because, 1.) it takes time, 2.) it takes money, and 3.) I have terrible skin; why make it worse by suffocating it with makeup all day, everyday? 

Totally just a personal preference thing, but I never hear that perspective touted as an ideal in SAHM circles.  Maybe it's because I'm a nutter spewing bad advice that no one else would corroborate; or maybe it's because we all think we ought to be that other kind of mom and could stand to hear that it's fine to fastidiously wear pajama pants as a work uniform.

And speaking of work uniforms...  The boys are off to the salt mines.

And here's your Friday Bonus Gift for reading all the way to the end!  A video, just for you!

our visual family schedule.

Sorry in advance for the terrible photo quality.  We get no natural light from this side of the house, so pictures are hard to take from this direction.

Have you ever read "Managers of Their Homes" by Steve and Teri Maxwell?  If not, you should.  It is full of absolute gold.  It's basically an instruction manual for doing with your time what Dave Ramsey says you should do with your money: make it work for you.  You decide how to spend it.  You decide where it goes and what it does for you.  I don't necessarily believe as strongly as the authors that sticking to a strict daily schedule is a moral issue (I'm more of the 'routines over schedules' type), but I have found many of the principles really helpful and biblical.

Because I'm more of a routine-type, I haven't really felt the need to have a chunked out visual schedule for the family until recently, even though they strongly recommend it (and the book itself actually comes with a kit to accomplish just that).  Lately, however, I've just felt like I'm always dropping a ball somewhere - college girls will show up at my house for meet-ups, for instance, and I'm caught completely off-guard, even though they come at the exact same time every single week.  I just can't keep it all in my brain anymore.

So a few weeks ago, Penelope and I sat down to make a large poster board schedule, with color-coded Post-Its for each activity type.  It took an inordinate amount of time, and I started to worry that I was just wasting my already scattered time on a glorified craft.  (Psychotic scheduling is the crafty-fun-time of the left-brained, Type A, firstborn set.)

I keep it on the inside of the basement door so it doesn't ugly up the rest of the house, and a side benefit of its placement is that I can stare at it from the spot where I eat breakfast and plan my day.

But you know what?  THIS THING HAS SAVED MY LIFE.  That's almost not hyperbole.  Not only can I know, at a glance, what the day will hold, but I've also started using it to move activities around to more efficient time-slots.  I never realized there was a more streamlined way of doing things until I saw it on paper.

Those blue slots are discretionary time for me - helping the kids with their independent school work, running laundry through, taking a shower, reading a book, etc., all happen during the blue slots.

So, for instance, one regular sticking point for us has been Atticus' speech therapy appointments.  I'd scheduled them on Tuesday mornings, which often meant we got no morning school done, throwing the rest of the week totally off as we tried to play catch-up.  But seeing on paper that I was already running a lot of errands on Wednesdays, and very little school is ever scheduled on that day, helped me to realize that scheduling speech then would actually work so much better.  We tried the new arrangement out yesterday, and while it makes for a looooong day of errands, it also meant that it purchased back for us almost an entirely normal half a day on Tuesday.

The weeks are color-coded, too: Oranges are 'out of the house' activities, Pinks and blues are school, bright green/yellow are meet-ups/ministry, light purples are family activities.

It's also helping me brainstorm where to fit things I was frequently dropping the ball on.  I figured out how to fit family quiet time in before breakfast (I'll post more about this soon), and it has been working out really well.  I also noticed that I don't have a regular weekly cleaning time, so I'm trying to puzzle out where that should fit in.

This has been so insanely helpful to me lately; I really have no idea why I was so resistant to doing it sooner.

in case you missed it...

Today is Wednesday, but I thought I'd share this week's Marriage Monday vlog.  Because I'm nothing if not an enigma.

ode to the beard.

Oh, Todd's Beard.  You have reached truly Nordic proportions.

I would like to document your grandeur before you bid us a partial and temporary farewell.

I call this one, "Old Timey Wrestler With Beard":

I call this one, "I Want YOU (To Stand Awestruck)":

I call this one, "This Chest Is Almost As Beefy As This Beard, But Only Almost":

I call this one, "Todd Van Voorst: Theologian, Reformer, Claims Adjuster, Master of Fate, Grower of Beard":

Goodbye, big fella.  You will be missed, though Penelope is already begging to carry your remains around in a Jar of Remembrance, so perhaps I will end up simply wishing for the opportunity to miss you when I find you sitting on my kitchen counter during dinner prep.

easter, easter, read all about it!

Yesterday was Easter, The Best Day of the Year!

To prepare, I pulled out all the Easter clothes in the kids' current sizes that we already had stored away, and made a list of what we needed.  Atticus, Penelope and Callista all needed new outfits, but a trip to Target only yielded some pants for Atticus.  Todd, on a trip to Sears over lunch one day, found not one, but two dresses on sale that fit Penelope.  I experienced an existential crisis deciding between the two, but all y'all on social media helped me pull the trigger on the raspberry one - doesn't it look beautiful on her?

Also, it cost $7 because Sears was going out of business.  Sad for Sears, bully for us.

I love how the kids' outfits turned out.  Finneas looked like he was trying to sell me a nice three-bedroom ranch on a cul-de-sac.  Atticus put on his outfit, looked down at himself, and stated, "I look like a BUSINESSMAN."  He knighted Finneas, "Businessman, Jr."

For my own outfit, I wore my go-to dress from years and years ago.  (I think I bought it the year I was pregnant with Laurelai.)  It has seen better days and is starting to fade, but it worked. 

Unfortunately, when I was trying everything on earlier in the week, I realized that my legs are very soft and very white, kind of like larvae.  So to fix the problem, I bought some self-tanning spray.  Unfortunately (again), I am only accustomed to using lotion, so I didn't realize that when you spray yourself in the bathtub, the spray settles on the tops of your feet, and then puddles on the tub floor and saturates the bottoms of your feet.  So I woke up yesterday morning with neon orange feet - tops and bottoms.  Luckily, baking soda effectively scrubbed the majority of the Cheeto dust off the tops, but the soles of my feet are still absolutely fluorescent.

What did I take away from all of this?  Nothing, other than a reasonable guess that what's happening with Trump's spray tan is that he stands on his head while he sprays himself down, and that's why it all settles on his face and in his hair.

Finneas will be running for President in 2020.  His platform will focus on equal rights, balancing the budget, education reform, and the solemn oath that he will never, ever use fake tanner.

And just because the best day of the year is worth celebrating with funny faces, I submit the following:

Happy Easter!