I was all ready to show you this yesterday…and my camera cord went AWOL.  Oh, well.  Better late than never, right?  I found these stacking shelf organizers at the Dollar Tree.

(Looking into the back corner of my pantry here, you can see glimpses of our junk food! lol  Thank you to Bekah for helping me get this all sorted out.)

These shelves sort of “hook into” each other so the upper ones stay put.  When you’re not using them, they fold up.  Not bad for $1.  I wouldn’t recommend piling them up with really heavy stuff – we decided that filling one completely with jelly jars was probably not their best use, although we could have gotten away with it, if necessary – but overall I was pretty impressed.

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When I first started eating gluten-free, I was very frustrated to be able to find nothing that talked about eating gluten-free but still whole.  All of the gluten-free recipes I could find, and all of the gluten-free cookbooks I could find include lots of processed foods and white starches.  At best, recipes generally use 2/3 flour – the other 1/3 is always some form of white starch (potato starch, cornstarch, tapioca starch, etc.)  I felt like I was being given the option to either be unhealthy one way or to be unhealthy another way.  I didn’t want to trade in my whole wheat for potato starch!

I finally gave up on finding anything that included what I wanted, and just started substituting rice flour for wheat flour in my regular recipes.  When things worked, I wrote them down.  When they didn’t, I tweaked them.  Eventually, I included my recipes in one of my Kindle books* (Whole and Gluten-Free).  Ironically, in the process of looking up my book to check on it, I discovered a gluten-free whole foods cookbook!

Found one!

I’m not sure how I didn’t find this before, because I have two of Kim’s earlier books.  Everyday Gluten-Free uses all whole foods – no junk.  It also happens to be vegan (thus dairy-free and egg-free) and soy-free, and many recipes are free of oats and corn.  This does not attempt to be an all-purpose cookbook; rather, it focuses on breads and such that are not typically gluten-free.  (If you want dinner recipes, for instance, you’ll have to look elsewhere.)

I appreciate that Kim’s philosophy on gluten-free breads seems to be like mine.  I don’t necessarily need a “bread substitute” that tries to imitate whole wheat yeast bread.  When you try that, you have to jump through all kinds of hoops and add all kinds of weird things to try to get a similar texture.  All I really need is something I can spread peanut butter on!  Kim seems to agree, emphasizing pancakes and similar breads in her book so she can stick with wholesome ingredients.

I do not advocate a vegan diet, long-term – I don’t believe it’s healthy – however, it’s very easy to add eggs and milk to a vegan recipe if you like, while it’s harder to adjust things the other way around.  (And you can certainly incorporate your animals foods in other ways if you want to, like using these breads for toast to go with your eggs at breakfast.)

My only disappointment with this book is its size.  Because I already have Everyday Wholesome Eating and Everyday Wholesome Eating…in the Raw, I expected this to be similar.  It’s actually less than half as thick as those books.  (The page numbers are listed, so they didn’t trick me or anything.  I just didn’t pay attention to the numbers.)  However, all of the books are apparently (mostly) gluten-free, so if I’d realized beforehand (which I didn’t, because I wasn’t gluten-free when I first got those books), I would have known that I could cook anything from those, and that multiplies the number of recipes available.

*Did you know that you can read a Kindle book without a Kindle?  Download the free app for PC or Mac.  (There are apps for smartphones and tablets, too.)

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MyBestColors.com is a system designed to provide users with a personalized color palette.  You choose your skin tone from an available 33 (warm, neutral, or cool), and the system generates a palette of 380 colors to correlate with that skin tone.  The palette is sent to you as a series of images which you can print off yourself or have printed as 4×6 “photos” to go in a small brag book-style photo album.

Having tried it out, I have mixed feelings about the system and the results.  I love the simplicity of the system: you choose your number, your palette is chosen, it’s simple as that.  I love the accessibility of the system: because you print your own, it’s inexpensive.  There are a lot of color options (380 is plenty!)  Thirty-three different combinations, and a computer-generated palette should, in theory, be able to provide highly-accurate results.  I didn’t quite find that to be the case, though.

The hue (that is, what most of us know as colors – blue, green, aqua, red, etc.) was, for the most part, correct.  (There were some browns, and I can’t do any brown at all.)  However, there’s a very broad range of saturation levels (that is, how bright or dull/muted a color is) in my palette.  Having not seen any of the other palettes, I don’t know if that’s inherent to these palettes – that is, if they all have a broad saturation range – or if it’s inherent to the one I received, and I didn’t choose well.

See, the biggest weakness of this system is the process of actually selecting which skin tone is yours.  You match the patches of color on the skin tone card to your own skin.  This is quite tricky, as skin tones can appear very similar!  I even had a hard time ruling out cool vs. warm, which one would think would be distinctly different.  I’m not positive I chose the right one in the end.  An easier way of more precisely matching the skin tone would help a lot in helping people end up with the proper palette.  (I wonder about printing the skin tone swatches on transparency.  Then the transparency could be held over the skin and, like makeup, the user could see which one “disappears” into the skin. In theory.  I’ve not tried it, so I don’t know for sure if it would work.)  Below, you can see a series of photos demonstrating my attempts to match the swatches to my skin.

Once the proper skin tone is selected so the palette can be chosen, I love the way the palette is laid out.  Each page of the palette displays 20 colors – four across, five down – of a specific hue.  So the reds are on a page (or two), the greens are one a page (or two), etc.  At the top of each page is a segmented circle, highlighting the portion of the color wheel that particular page pertains to.  This makes it very easy to design color combinations, because you can create a color scheme based on which segments of the color wheel you want to draw from.  In fact, the first portion of the “palette” is actually several pages showing how to create different types of color schemes.  (I think this is all available on the website, but it’s handy to have it printed to carry with the palette, as well.)

Here you can get a little bit of an idea of the breadth of the N2 palette:

I’d love to see how the various palettes differ, because I see such a broad range here already.  I’d also love to see this computer-based technology employed to generate palettes based on specific user-submitted parameters (saturation within a certain range, value within a certain range, temperature/hue within a certain range).  There is tremendous potential here!

To be honest, I don’t think I would want this to be my primary (or only) palette.  I think the ranges of color elements are simply too wide for that.  But as a supplemental palette, it serves as a wonderful tool for expanding your range of color-combining.

Disclosure: I was provided with a palette by MyBestColors.com to try out the system and facilitate this review.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

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I’ve read a lot of child training books over the years.  I always stuck with Christian ones, because the secular ones can have quite a propensity for psychobabble.  But the sad fact is that many of the Christian books are pretty much the same.  There may not be anything wrong with them, but they’re pretty narrow in scope, and all cover the same narrow scope.

So when Sophia became such a challenge, I decided to expand my range.  I bought/checked out a bunch of secular child training books – many specifically about strong-willed children – and figured I could probably glean something from most of them, even if they weren’t any good overall.

Well, with the sheer number of them and with the rest of life intervening, it’s taken me a long time to get to reading them all.  (Or most of them, anyway.)  But a couple of the most recent ones have had some very helpful insights.

Relational Parenting

Okay, as it turns out, this one is a Christian book.  (I assume.  It’s put out by Moody.)  But I’d never heard of it before.  Relational Parenting, by Ross Campbell, M.D., had a lot of helpful things to say.  Most of the really good stuff (at least for my needs) was summarized, though, in chapter 4.  The chapter is about “training and discipline,” yet the really compelling thing about it is that it actually puts discipline into context.  Many Christian child-training books are criticized for being “too harsh,” when I suspect that the real problem is that they only show one little piece of the puzzle.  Even while dealing with that one piece of the puzzle, though, Dr. Campbell puts it into context.

“…punishment is a type of discipline, but the most negative type.  And punishment should be only a small part of discipline….the parent/child relationship has become primarily negative….Guiding a child toward right is far superior to punishing a child for wrong action.”

“When a child misbehaves, there is always a need to be met.  We need to ask, ‘What does my child need?’”

(Campbell goes on to point out that sometimes the need will be met with punishment, but not usually.)  If the “love tank is empty,” for instance, then all the punishment in the world will not correct the behavior.  You have fill the love tank first.  (Often, this won’t be the only thing needed, but it must be included.)

The most helpful thing I picked up from this book was five ways to direct/train a child’s behavior:

• Requests
• Commands
• Gentle Physical Manipulation (for instance, taking a child by the hand and bringing him to you)
• Punishment (This would include time outs, revocation of privileges – anything that is a type of  “payment” for an offense – it’s not just spanking.)
• Behavior Modification (which the author suggests should be used quite sparingly, but is useful in specific types of situations)

You would, of course, have to read the whole book to put this entirely into context, but this was the most useful thing I got from it.

Parenting by Heart

Parenting by Heart, by Ron Taffel, Ph. D., is another one I read recently.  The most helpful thing I took away from this book was three different ways of interacting with children.  In my mind, I see them as somewhat “positional,” and there is one that dominates at each stage of development (‘though there is some shifting and juggling and overlap at each stage).  Dr. Taffel calls these:

• Parent Protector (I see this as standing somewhat over your child.)  Dominant in the very early years, this is when you function primarily in the role of making your child feel safe and secure.
• Parent Chum  (I don’t like this term, as it sounds like the whole “be your child’s friend, not his parent” thing.  But it’s not, in the book’s context.  It simply has to do with interacting with your child side-by-side, such as when you have a conversation while folding laundry.)  This is dominant in the middle years.
• Parent Realist (I see this as somewhat at the end of an imaginary leash your child is on.)  Dominant in the teen years, this is when you’re – carefully and with oversight – letting go to let the child test the waters on his own.

These descriptions are way oversimplified, as there is a lot of discussion and illustration in the book, but the summary is helpful to me as a reminder.  (These also can, potentially, help answer the question, “What does my child need?” Does she need a Parent Protector, a Parent Chum, or a Parent Realist?)

Have you read anything good on this topic lately?

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“I have this friend who…”  Most of us have heard this phrase before.  It’s usually a thinly-veiled attempt to get advice for oneself without admitting to an actual weakness.  As strange as the title Teach Your Dog Latin sounds, it is based on essentially the same principle.  Latin can be an intimidating language to tackle – so don’t set out to learn Latin.  Just decide to teach your dog a bit of Latin, and if you happen to pick up something in the process…well, even better.

Although we ascribe to the methodology of classical education (dividing education into Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric stages), we actually don’t teach classical content.  I don’t believe Latin is a necessary language to learn (apart from roots, which are very useful, and which we do teach) – however I do think it is useful if you choose to teach it.  Teach Your Dog Latin, by B. Kay Neal, is a great introduction because the lighthearted, dog-oriented slant makes it fun and removes much of the intimidation factor.

You will learn to give your dog commands, such as sit, stay, shake, and  “don’t chew the furniture.” You’ll also learn to ask him questions, such as “do you want to go out?” or “who wet on the carpet?”  Literal, word-for-word translations to English are supplied, so you (and your dog) can begin to grasp the structure of Latin sentences.  Pronunciation is explained, and both singular and plural options are supplied.

The chapter about Latinizing your dog’s name offers interesting insights into how names work in Latin (particularly the differences between masculine and feminine names).  The chapter about dogs in Roman (and Greek) literature gives a little glimpse into ancient writings.

The chapter on grammar is something of a crash course.  It doesn’t cover every possible eventually, but it does cover the basics of parts of speech, number, gender, word order, etc.  In my opinion, it’s fascinating even if you don’t intend to fully learn it.  When things are somewhat oversimplified, the author notes that, so if you go on to further study, you shouldn’t be confused.  But if this is enough for you, you won’t be unnecessarily overwhelmed.

Following the grammar chapter is a chapter of English derivatives that come from the words already used in the book.  This is a fun chapter – and a great one for showing students why Latin is useful today!  Other chapters that follow provide sayings about dogs (for instance “Canis meus pensum edit*,” or “my dog ate my homework.”) and “what to do if you and your dog want more Latin.”

Many of the chapters in this book – the grammar chapter, for example – are written in three segments.  The reader can stop after the first or second segment and the text will still make sense (and the reader will have learned something).  This is great if you’re working with students on multiple levels.

If you would like to teach some actual classical content, but in a more laid-back fashion than traditional classical education (or if you just would like an introduction to Latin for some other reason), I highly recommend this!  It’s playful and fun, and definitely takes the “boring” out of Latin studies.  It’s also the sort of thing that provides enough of a foundation that it will probably help keep you from getting completely lost if you decide to move on to a more formal Latin program later.

Disclosure: I was provided by the author with a copy of this book for review.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

*There are accent marks on some of these words, but I can’t type them on my English keyboard.

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(ends at midnight CST)

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I know I’ve been a bit scarce, and I wanted to let you know what I’ve been up to “behind the scenes.”  Apart from the obvious need to do (*ahem* some of) the things that keep the house running, I’ve been working feverishly on a couple of projects.
1) I’ve been working on getting the remainder of the units posted at my unit studies site.  Altogether, there are sixty units, and each one is taking me between fifteen and thirty minutes to get online, so you can imagine how massive a project this is!  Once all the information is actually there, I will be doing some juggling of the interface to make it easier to use.

I will also be adding linkies, so I can link up any relevant reviews I write here, and so you can add your activity ideas.

2) I also have a new blog in the works.  I don’t want to give out too many details just yet – I want to tie up some loose ends first – but my hope is to be ready to launch at the beginning of next month.  This blog won’t go away; it will just stay more general (as it is now), and the new blog is a more specific “niche.”  I look forward to sharing more details as I have them!

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The Hidden Recycler is an innovative new product from Rubbermaid.  The top portion mounts inside a cabinet (or pantry); the bag attaches to the frame with built-in buttonholes.  Most of the upper portion can be lifted off (with the bag still attached) for emptying.

The bag itself has a leak-proof interior, is machine washable, and is large enough to hold three dozen uncrunched soda cans.  The product itself is also made from recycled materials, and recyclable.

It’s a great concept.  Honestly, though, I still haven’t mounted mine, because of the only downside I’ve yet been able to determine – there are a limited number of “hidden” places to mount such a thing.  As far as cabinets go, it has to be mounted in a cabinet that has no shelving inside (or shelving that only comes as far forward as the back half of the cabinet).  I only have two cabinets like this (well, one cabinet – two doors) – the ones under the sink – and I already have things hanging there.  Pantries and garages would also be good places to hang these and, if you have a good space for it, this is a great option.

I’d love to see them come out with a mini version that could be mounted to bookcases, desks, etc. as a small, convenient “wastebasket.”

Win It

If you’d like to win one to try it out yourself, enter via the Rafflecopter widget.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclosure: The product above was given to me by the manufacturer to facilitate this review.  The manufacturer is also providing the prize to the giveaway winner.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

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We got this nifty book to review way back at the beginning of the school year, but I saved it for this month because we’ve been studying machines.  This is a great book for reading during a study of machines or the westward movement (which we’re actually just starting into) or the Industrial Revolution or WWI or WWII or modern times.  Or all of the above.  Why?  It follows the history of land transportation in the U.S. over the years.

Just Fine the Way They Are: From Dirt Roads to Rail Roads to Interstates covers just what you’d expect it to.  As each new modernization comes along, there are always those who balk at the improvements, believing that things are “just fine the way they are.”  But, of course, modernization comes along, anyway, and it eventually becomes mainstream.  Then comes the next development and, once again, things “are just fine the way they are.”

I actually learned some things through this book, myself.  I didn’t know that interstates didn’t come about until the 1940′s – and were primarily installed because they allowed military personnel to travel throughout the country more quickly.

The writing style is a lot of fun, too.  The wording is such that it’s really fun to read aloud in a somewhat “country” or “backwoods” accent.  At each stage of development there is also the mention of children watching the… (wagons, or train, or whatever) and dreaming of what they will do or be when they grow up.  This adds an interesting dimension of imagination to the text.

It’s very up-to-date, making mention toward the end of cars that run on electricity or corn.  And it keeps current – and engages the imagination even more – by being open-ended.  Maybe someday we won’t need cars that run on anything, because we’ll have other, better ways to get around.  Then again, why would we?  Things are just fine the way they are.

Disclosure: I was provided by the publisher with a copy of the book to facilitate this review.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

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Isn’t that the “million dollar question” we’re all (as humanity) attempting to answer?  Ladaisi says:

I know from personal experience that being asked to define oneself can be a daunting task, at best.   Oddly enough, it feels as if it should be the easiest question to answer.  After all, shouldn’t I know, better than anyone else, how to describe me?

I can identify.  It seems as though it should be an easy question with an obvious answer.  But it’s not!  I think I only partly agree, though, with the quote that created her “aha!” moment:

You do not find yourself; you create yourself.

On the one hand, it’s true.  We are not defined by our pasts, so there is always room to grow and change and stretch and shape ourselves toward what we ultimately aim to be.  On the other hand, we are, at least in part, shaped by our past.  Additionally, we are each created by God with certain inborn tendencies, gifts, strengths, weaknesses, passions, etc. and there is a (strong, in my opinion) degree to which we already are who we are – even if we can’t yet identify or put a name to it.

For this reason, I’m always fascinated by “systems” or methods that help people to recognize these patterns in themselves.  Chazown was something like this.  Right now, I’m working my way through Style Statement.  I found it through the style forum I’ve been frequenting, but it’s about so much more than style.  The bulk of it is actually a workbook to help identify the  “theme” (I guess you might call it) of your life.  These would make fantastic journaling exercises, even if you have no interest whatsoever in style or fashion.  (For those homeschoolers who are classically-oriented, I also found it to be an interesting look at grammar-stage versus logic-stage questions.)

What do you think?  Do we find ourselves or create ourselves (or both)?  Do you like to do these sorts of self-reflective exercises?  Do you have a favorite?

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