Creative Ideas for Kids:

Homemade Kids Meal from No Time for Flash Cards

Preschool Lessons in the Kitchen from The Homeschool Classroom

Parenting:

Your Child’s Heart: How Do You Find the Time, Part 1 from Raising Olives

Recipes:

Pear & Buckwheat Pancakes from Bake at 350 – This recipe sounds delicious!

Homeschooling:

How to Get Started Homeschooling from Confessions of a Homeschooler

Why Our Family Has Chosen to School Year Round from The Homeschool Classroom – We have not made the decision to school year round, but it has crossed my mind. This post gave me a lot to think about.

Spiritual Growth:

Status Updates from Blissfully Domestic

Hope Forgotten from Pursuing Harmony

Today I would like to say Happy Birthday to one of my bloggy friends, Sandra!

Sandra blogs at Heart for Him, Celebrate Every Day, and Today’s Housewife (a collaborative effort between Sandra and three of her friends). If you’ve never visited Sandra’s blogs, I hope you’ll take this opportunity to visit her and say Happy Birthday!

I’ve selected two of my favorites from her Heart for Him blog, if you’d like to start there:

Sanctifying Sandpaper

Calling to Do More

Sandra, you are a blessing! I hope you have a great day!!

Two sweet bloggers have given me the Beautiful Blogger Award in last couple of weeks:

I’ll be the first one to admit that I’m pretty clueless when it comes to HTML and CSS. In fact, I don’t even know what the difference is between the two! After several days of dealing with code and blog setup, my brain feels pretty fried.

Maybe that’s why I had such a crazy dream the other night. In this one, coffee spilled all over the inside of my MacBook. In the dream, the computer looked different, and the inner workings of it were actually exposed. It was just weird. Anyway, the coffee was everywhere.

Much to my amazement, Apple sent someone to our house to repair my MacBook for free. He was extremely nice and helpful, assuring us that this sort of thing happens all the time. If only they’d come and do repairs for free in real life, right?

As if my brain wasn’t feeling tired enough, this week I discovered that our kids think we are ancient.

During a recent conversation about play-doh, M remarked in amazement, “You mean they had play-doh when you were a kid? Wow! That sure was a long time ago, but not nearly to Bible times.”

For the record, I consider 32 to be quite young!

I need to make a clarification for those following via Google Friend Connect from my old Blogger blog. Even if you are still getting my feed that way, please re-follow me here on the new Google Friend Connect widget. I will be deleting my old Blogger account very soon, and if you don’t follow me from here you’ll lose my feed! Thanks!

Again, those of you subscribing via RSS feed or email don’t need to do anything!

I hope you are having a great weekend!

- Erin

Today my little blog turns one year old! It’s hard to believe that much time has already passed. On the other hand, it seems like I’ve been blogging forever. That’s kind of how life seems to go, isn’t it?

To celebrate the one year mark, I’m introducing a new design that I think is a lot more “me” than what I had before! In the coming weeks I will continue tweaking the new design, while also updating my About page and introducing a new Homeschool page as well.

I had considered doing something bigger for my blogoversary, with giveaways and everything, but I decided that switching to self-hosting, working on a new design, and trying to catch up on reading the Bible in 90 Days would be enough to keep me occupied!

I’m so thankful for all of you who read Closing Time! When I first started blogging, I didn’t even know if anyone would read it, aside from my family. To all of you who are here reading today…thank you!

There are a couple of “housekeeping” things I need to point out:

IMPORTANT INFO FOR ALL GOOGLE FRIEND CONNECT FOLLOWERS – For those of you who have continued to read Closing Time through Google Friend Connect, you will need to re-follow via the new Google Friend Connect widget at the top of my sidebar. I will be shutting down my old Blogger blog very soon, and to continue following you will need to make this change. Now that I am self-hosted, I can add that widget back in. Unfortunately, I can’t transfer you, so please do re-follow me here. I don’t want to lose any of you!

If you subscribe via RSS feed or email, everything should stay the same for you. I haven’t changed my domain,  just my hosting.

To go along with the new look, I also have a new blog button. If you have my old one, would you please grab the new one and update? Of course you are all welcome to grab it!

<a href=”http://www.closingtimeblog.com/” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i664.photobucket.com/albums/vv1/herewegoproductions/CTButton.png” border=”0″ alt=”Photobucket”></a>

Thanks for stopping by today! Please leave a comment so I’ll know you were here. I’d love to know what you think about the new design! Also, if there are any issues with my feed or glitches that you notice, please let me know so I can get those fixed right away!

I’ve learned a lot during this year about who I am as a writer and what I want this blog to be. In light of that, I need some room to grow! I’m making the switch to self-hosting! I know many of you are thinking, “But she just switched to Wordpress a few months ago!” That’s true, but part of my reason in doing that was that I wanted to see what it was like and learn more before I made the final move.

I’ve been working on a new design for a while, and I’m super excited to unveil the whole new look! (And that is a big part of why I haven’t been posting as much lately.) There will also be some other changes coming up, but I’ll tell you more about that later.

My domain name won’t change, and my RSS and email subscribers shouldn’t notice any changes at all. For my Google Friend Connect followers, I will be able to add a new widget for that (something I can’t do here at wordpress.com)! I’ll tell you more about that when I make the move.

In the meantime, I’ll be gone for a couple of days while I switch over. See you again soon!

I was incredibly honored when Amy from Mom’s Toolbox asked me to guest post for today’s Bible in 90 Days check-in. You can read my post here!

Have a great Monday!

Here are some highlights of what I’ve been reading this week:

Parenting/Life:

Slowing Down: Taking the Time to Make Some Time from Simple Kids

Your Child’s Heart Requires Time from Raising Olives

Spiritual Growth:

Memorizing Scripture: You Can! from Homegrown Mom

Recipes:

Mexican Fiesta Dinner from $5 Dinners (guest post from Hoosier Homemade)

Pasta with Bacon and Mushrooms from The Pioneer Woman

Sprits Cookies from Dutch Girl Cooking

Chicken Palava (African Peanut Stew) from Dutch Girl Cooking

Homeschooling:

Imitation Versus the Real Thing from The Homeschool Classroom

Our One Room Schoolhouse from The Homeschool Desk

Educational Philosophies Defined, Part II from Simple Homeschool

Educational Philosophies Defined, Part II from Simple Homeschool

I am sad to say that there are no photos to go with this week’s library book favorites. I actually did take pictures of the books, and they are stuck on my camera. I am trying not to be very upset, but at the moment, our camera will not download any of the pictures onto the computer. This is not good…not good at all. Hopefully it will get over whatever problem it’s having, but until then, here are the books without photos:

Ten Apples Up on Top! by Theo. LeSieg (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss)

Amelia Bedelia’s Masterpiece by Herman Parish

Cowboy Small by Lois Lenski

Whose Nose Is This? A Look at Beaks, Snouts, and Trunks by Peg Hall

Saturdays and Teacakes by Lester L. Laminack

I hope you all have a great weekend!

One thing that you can pretty much count on…when you stop by Closing Time to read my Time Out for Theta Mom Thursday post each month, it will probably always involve coffee! Unlike last month though, this time I actually left the house for my time out.

Okay, I have to admit though that I did leave the house on a quest…a search for homeschooling supplies. That may not sound very fun to some of you, but for me it was incredibly exciting. See, I have a four year old who loves to learn. When M is in this midst of her schoolwork, E will not leave the table. She wants schoolwork to do. The problem? While E loves the IDEA of worksheets, she is not necessarily fond of actually doing them. They have to be interesting and exciting. The average worksheet doesn’t fit the bill. She’s really more of a hands on learner, but thinks worksheets sound great.

So I am left trying to balance this conundrum. My task on this particular Time Out for Theta Mom day was to get some new materials for E, the key being that I would go shopping ALL BY MYSELF.

My original hope was that when the day came I would have time to shop and sit down for a cup of coffee. When the day arrived, it came along with life, and I knew that the extra time wasn’t going to happen.

The first stop was at a local parent/teacher store, where I completely struck out. I left feeling a bit frustrated. How on earth could they have so much stuff, yet not have anything that would fill E’s needs? On top of that, the employees barely gave me the time of day, even though there was only one other customer in the store. I left feeling discouraged.

My next destination:  Barnes & Noble. I was so busy analyzing and over-analyzing my plight, trying to figure out what to do for my 4 year old who wants fascinating worksheets, that I almost missed the potential. As soon as I opened the door and stepped in, though, I was greeted with the welcome aroma of espresso and books. That was all it took. With a spring in my step I made my way over to the cafe and ordered a cappuccino.

As the barista handed me my drink, he offered to put more milk in it if needed. I thought this was a bit strange at first. Then I wondered how many times a day people come in and order a cappuccino, expecting to get the heavily sweetened, flavored convenience store “cappuccino.” I had to laugh. I knew what I was getting, and it was exactly what I wanted.

With coffee in hand, I made my way to the childrens’ section, where I promptly found a stack of workbook possibilities for E. I then found a cozy chair and perused them all, making my choices while sipping my cappuccino. And just as easy as that, I found everything I needed! I paid for the books, and left feeling refreshed and rejuvenated!

I’m also happy to report that E loves her new workbooks, and it has made our school time go much more smoothly!

I hope you’ll hop over to Theta Mom and see what other moms did with their hour off this month!

You just never know what you might find with little girls in the house!

For more Wordless Wednesday posts, visit 5 Minutes For Mom.