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Five Thumbs Up: Apple Butter Bars

30 Nov

Caroline loves using the pastry cutter to cut the butter into recipes. This one provided a perfect opportunity to use it!

I’ve got a great new recipe for you, and it got all thumbs up from everyone in my house this week! That almost never happens!

I originally found this recipe for Apple Butter Bars on Pinterest, but it’s from the site Three Many Cooks.  I pinned it because my kids love apple butter. Overall the recipe seemed somewhat healthy: no eggs, no white sugar. Apple butter is healthy in itself, so other than the stick of butter that helps to form the crust and topping, it’s not so bad for you, I don’t think.

Caroline made these herself and it was a very easy recipe to follow. If I could change any one thing about it, I’d double it! It makes an 8×8 dish, but with five of us, it didn’t leave many leftovers to last into the next day(s).

Here is the recipe from Three Many Cooks. Enjoy!

Apple Butter-Cinnamon Bars with Oatmeal Crumble

Makes 16 bars

Relatively healthy ingredients makes for a keeper on my list!

INGREDIENTS

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup old-fashioned oatmeal
3/4 cup light brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 stick (8 tablespoons) butter, melted
1 cup apple butter
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Spread the apple butter between the layers.

DIRECTIONS

Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position, and heat oven to 350 degrees. Coat an 8- by 8-inch baking pan with vegetable cooking spray, then line pan bottom and up and over 2 sides with heavy-duty foil to facilitate removal of bars from pan. Coat foil with vegetable cooking spray.

Mix flour, oatmeal, sugar, and salt in a medium bowl. Stir in butter with a fork until well mixed and clumps form. Spread half the oatmeal mixture over pan bottom and up the sides about 1/4 inch, pressing to form a thin crust. Mix apple butter and cinnamon in a small bowl; spread mixture over crust and then sprinkle remaining oatmeal mixture over apple mixture.

Bake until crisp and golden brown, 35 to 40 minutes. Set on a wire rack and cool to room temperature. Use foil “handles” to remove bars from pan. (Can be double wrapped and frozen for several months.). Cut into squares and serve.

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Seasonal snack mix: Pumpkin Pie Crunch

26 Nov

A new after school snack for the kids with a seasonal flavor!

My kids are always on the lookout for new recipes for me to try. They read magazines, pour through cookbooks, and even check the backs and sides of cereal boxes, always looking for the next great recipe. They love it when they find out that I’ve tried “their” recipe. I love surprising them.

Most recently, Elizabeth stumbled on the jackpot: a Chex cereal box with three recipes on the back of the box. She found one she wanted me to try, and it had a seasonal flavor to it, just in time for Thanksgiving. One Monday afternoon I decided to give it a try because I had everything I needed on hand with the exception of one type of Chex cereal. It called for three different kinds and I had three, just not the exact three. You’ll see what I mean in my notes below.

Lots of recipe options to choose from!

The other thing I liked about this recipe, besides the fact that it was fast, is that it was a microwave recipe. No need to preheat the oven. In just five minutes in the microwave, it was done.

Here is the recipe for you to try too! This one was found on the back of the Honey Nut Chex cereal, which also happens to be gluten free.

Three bowls of ingredients: cereal, spices, liquids.

CHEX PUMPKIN PIE CRUNCH

INGREDIENTS

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 tablespoon pumpkin pie spice

1/4 cup butter

2 teaspoons vanilla

2 cups Cinnamon Chex cereal

2 cups Wheat Chex cereal (I had Rice Chex cereal instead)

2 cups Honey Nut Chex cereal

8 oz. pecans

Make sure your bowl is big enough and is microwave safe!

DIRECTIONS

1) In small bowl, mix brown sugar and pumpkin pie spice; set aside.

2) In small microwave-safe dish, microwave butter on high about 30 seconds or until melted.

3) Stir in vanilla.

4) In large microwave bowl, mix all cereals and pecans. Pour butter mixture over cereal mixture, stirring until evenly distributed.

5) Add sugar and spice mixture and stir until coated.

6) Microwave uncovered on high 5 minutes or until mixture begins to brown, stirring every minute.

7) Spread on wax paper or a cookie sheet to cool.

Store in an airtight container.

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Bye Bye Summer Memories Time Line!

5 Nov

Last week the east coast suffered a horrible, devastating hurricane, Hurricane Sandy.

Before reading this post, please remember all of those who are still reeling from this event. Although we were not personally affected, as you’ll read below, so many we know were.

If you would like to donate, I have linked to the American Red Cross and their Hurricane relief site.
You can click here to make your own donation.

Thank you, and enjoy today’s post.

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Our Summer Time Line has been up for a long, long time.

You all remember our Summer Memories Time Line, right?

Started in June, finished in August.

It’s November.

I was thrilled with how the Time Line came out. I loved the pictures, I loved re-living my favorite season.

Til about October. Early October.

“I’m going to take the Time Line down soon,” I’d say.

“No, don’t! I still like looking at it,” someone 13 and under would say.

“I still like remembering all the fun things we did,” another would say.

So I’d leave it longer.

Caroline was 12 when the Time Line went up and 13 by the time it came down.

Caroline’s birthday came at the end of October. The cards went up on the wall, above the Time Line. Halloween decorations went up, around the Time Line.

Christmas was coming, cards would be coming in a matter of weeks. I knew I had to take the Time Line down. I wasn’t going to throw it out, I don’t throw anything out. Ever. I was going to save it.

Then came Hurricane Sandy.

I was wandering around Target the day before the storm, picking up canned goods and thinking about the possibility of being out of electricity for what they said could be weeks.

With an S.

Weeks.

I tried not to think about that possibility and tried instead, to think of what kinds of things one could do with three kids with no power, for weeks, or even a few days.

I wandered through their scrapbooking aisle, and that’s when it hit me, like a ton of canned goods.

The Time Line!! We could scrapbook the Time Line. Together. I’d let them do it, each creating their own pages, using the photos I’d printed for it and the little papers they’d written the events on.

Being a former Stampin’ Up! demonstrator, I had tons of empty scrapbooks and probably thousands of pieces of paper to use.

Thousands.

With an S.

It was perfect.

We never lost power.

Not even a day. Without an S.

They watched TV for two days straight, while we prepared on Sunday and while I typed like crazy on Monday for an extra-early deadline, with us thinking that any minute the lights would go off and I’d whip out my plan.

But, then Tuesday came, the day after the storm ended. Lights on but no school again. Thankfully we were unscathed by the storm.

So many papers to choose from!

This would definitely be the day. We went out during the day and ran some errands and then after lunch but before dinner, we cleared off the dining room table (or at least one end of it) and brought up all the scrapbooking stuff.

I picked out an album. The kids started looking through all the designer papers.

Lots to choose from.

And I started. I began to dis-assemble the Time Line.

Piece by piece, and they were fine with it. I’d give each child a page to work on and give them all the pictures and the posted events to go with it.

Everyone knew the pages they wanted to work on before we started.

They went to town. It was totally their project. I let them put the pictures on the pages they wanted, in the order they wanted. No direction from me.

That’s really big for me you know. I’m a director. I like things to be a certain way usually, but I really liked that this was all them. They owned it.

In about an hour and a half we were done.

The Time Line was empty, ripped off the wall and thrown away and our Summer Memories Scrapbook was done, filled with the events and photos showing our summer of 2012, preserved forever, in their writing, their words. There’s even room in the book for next year’s Time Line photos.

Total independence. Very hard for me, great for them.

Because we already decided, we’re doing it again next summer.

And soon, we’ll have thousands of memories of our summers.

Thousands.

With an S.

All gone!

So proud of all the pages the girls created!

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Pumpkin Palooza Recipe of the Day: Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

2 Nov

Originally posted on: November 16, 2011

OK seriously, what could be more perfect than the combination of pumpkin AND chocolate chips!? Last year I made these for a school party and the kids loved them.

At the time, I wrote on Facebook that a friend of mine posted this recipe and she got it from Allrecipes.com. I can’t remember who the friend was though! What I do remember is they were delicious!

I did double it when I made it last year. I didn’t even use my standup mixer, I used a wooden spoon. You could use one though if you have one.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies III
from Allrecipes.com

Ingredients

  • 1 cup canned pumpkin
  • 1 cup white sugar
  • 1/2 cup vegetable oil
  • 1 egg
  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon milk
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
  • 2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
  • 1/2 cup chopped walnuts ( I did not use walnuts)

Directions

  1. Combine pumpkin, sugar, vegetable oil, and egg. In a separate bowl, stir together flour, baking powder, ground cinnamon, and salt. Dissolve the baking soda with the milk and stir in. Add flour mixture to pumpkin mixture and mix well.
  2. Add vanilla, chocolate chips and nuts.
  3. Drop by spoonful on greased cookie sheet and bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for approximately 10 minutes or until lightly brown and firm.

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First One In Bed

22 Oct

Nighttime means bedtime.

During the summer, bedtime is a free-for all. It doesn’t matter who goes to bed when and there’s usually no reason to get up early in the morning, so everyone can sleep late if they need to.

The school year is a whole different ballgame though.

Recently on Facebook, a lot of my friends have been venting about the tough job of getting kids to bed on time, in a reasonable manner. My kids are older now and our routines are pretty set at this point, but I *so* remember those days.

Setting a bedtime routine is so tough. You have to determine a bedtime, first off and then stick to it. You have to determine what you’re willing to do at bedtime (read a story? Watch an episode of something? Have a tickle fight?) and what you’re not. You have to make sure the kids do their jobs at bedtime (“bathroom, hands and teeth” is our mantra to this day) and still make sure they’re in bed on time.

Sometimes it seems like you need to start at noon in order to get them in bed, on time, with everything done, and staying in bed.

Early on, when we just had Caroline, we’d watch one short video (on a video TAPE) before bed. That worked well for her, as a wind-down routine, and we’d read a story.

With Elizabeth, we found that watching TV wound her up, instead of winding her down.

With Alex, I think most nights we practically threw her in (figuratively, not literally), shut off the light and shut the door, she was so easy.

But there came a time when we had preschoolers and toddlers that getting all three in bed on time just seemed hopeless. We had three kids with three different bedtime routines and we needed to figure out what one thing would work for all of us. It didn’t seem possible.

Until we came up with The First One in Bed challenge.

I don’t even know which one of us came up with it, to be honest.

Let’s just say it was me, for now. 😉

It probably wasn’t though. Don’s always better at creating a challenge.

In a nutshell, here’s how it worked:

Each child had a sticker book (which was a small notebook of some sort, I remember two of them had Strawberry Shortcake on them at one point) and we parents had a big ole’ pile of stickers. All different kinds of stickers worked best, rather than just one kind.

The challenge was to be the First One in Bed. If you were, with all your jobs done, you got three stickers. Second one in bed got two and the last one in bed got one. Or maybe it was four, three and two. I don’t remember, but you get the gist.

You had to be in bed, under the covers in order to pick out your stickers. You had to already have done the whole “bathroom, hands, and teeth” routine.

You had to yell it from your room, really loud: FIRST ONE IN BEEDDDDDD!!!!!!

The others would follow, yelling out that they were in bed too. Ties were allowed. We didn’t want to start a fight or make anyone cry, rather we wanted to get everyone in bed and fast, so we could go out in the living room and sit down for more than three seconds at a clip.

Elizabeth in particular is VERY competitive and loves a challenge. She wanted to win EVERY time. She was known to leap over a smaller child and roll the rest of the way down the hall, in order to get into that bedroom first. (Well not really, but she’d race down that hallway and leap into bed, for sure.)

She was also known to get in there and not be 100% honest about whether her teeth were brushed, and have to get back up, losing her First One in Bed spot.

Their goal was to fill their notebook pages with stickers. Lots and lots of stickers.

This went on for months and months, until somehow we phased it out. I don’t remember how or when, but it was a while ago.

The point is, it worked for us. We were able to create a bedtime routine that worked for all of our kids and let us keep our sanity at the same time. It only cost us a few stickers and a few notebooks.

Hopefully this will help someone else with that particularly challenging time at their house too. I hope so. If not, maybe it’ll spark a different idea that works for you and your child/children at bedtime.

And in our house, to this very day, there are still some occasional nights when we hear someone yell out from their rooms, “FIRST ONE IN BED!!!!” just for the fun of it.

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Breast cancer awareness month and why I do what I do

15 Oct

October is breast cancer awareness month!

Last week I had the privilege of covering a story at our local high school where the student body had come up with several ways to show their support for a teacher recently diagnosed with breast cancer and to raise money for the breast cancer cause itself. It was an amazing show of support. The students had given their all, and it showed. The American Cancer Society will greatly benefit from their donations. I felt blessed to be there as a witness to it. (I have put the link here in case anyone wants to make their own charitable contribution to ACS.)

According to the principal, the teacher is a young woman with a young family.

My worst fear.

Every mother’s worst fear, right?

It was Meredith Israel’s worst fear as well. I don’t know Meredith but about ten days ago my brother sent me the link to her blog post, which the Huffington Post had just posted on their site as well. He doesn’t know Meredith but she’s the friend of a friend and he was so moved by her writing.

When he gave me the heads up as to what the content of her blog was, and that she had a five year old daughter, I couldn’t read it.

But eventually I did.

And I’ll never forget it.

I won’t give you the details because you’ll want to read it yourself.

Or maybe you won’t be able to either.

But as I read it, and as I thought about my own life and family, I thought to myself, “See, this is why I do what I do.”

So often I’m told, “I don’t know how you do it all,” but really it’s not the how, because most days I don’t know how either, but it’s the why.

Clearly I’m an overachiever, and I definitely can’t sit very still for very long. But I wasn’t always this way. It wasn’t until I became a mother and I began having those fears every mother has, the “What if something happens to me,” fears. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t worry about that, even deep down.

Those fears awakened in me the drive that keeps me going every day. It’s the drive and the desire to have no regrets. For as much as humanly possible, I want to have no regrets, looking back. That’s why I do the things I do, whatever that may be, why I give 110% to everything I do, especially if it involves my children.

Now I know that the chances of something happening to me are probably slim, and I also know I could be hit by a bus tomorrow, as they say. But I look at it kind of like life insurance. You pay it all along, hoping you never need it, but when and if you do, you’re so glad you did it all along.

Should something happen to me, looking forward I’d be sad for what I’ll miss in the future, but looking backward, I will have no regrets. I’ll know I did it all, as much as I could, to live each day with no regrets, to spend every moment possible with my children and my husband and my family; and to make the moments count.

Meredith Israel said it well in her recent post; a great piece of advice, definitely words to live by, in my opinion:

“Until then, live each day to the fullest, laugh at the stories from your past, laugh at something at least one time that day and hug those you love.”

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Lazy Cake Cookies

12 Oct

This recipe needs just a few ingredients, cooks fast, and makes a great dessert to bring or even mail, anywhere!

I love going on Pinterest, you find so many great things that other people have already tried out. I’ve found some nice new additions to my repertoire, and today’s recipe is one I tried out this summer and have done many times since.

In July my school book club had it’s summer meeting which is one that is at someone’s house and everyone brings something to munch on. This year I wanted to bring dessert and I was looking for something new.

Lazy Cake Cookies from the I’m a Lazy Mom blog was it. When I saw the limited amount of time and ingredients needed, I was sold. It was summer after all, and who wants to spend all day baking? Not me.

The other thing about summer is that it’s both of my sister-in-laws’ birthdays, all in the month of August, with mine. My West Coast sister-in-law is at the beginning of the month, I’m in the middle and my East Coast sister-in-law is at the end of the month. So I decided that if this recipe was good (and it was), I’d make these cookies for their birthdays.

I’ve since made them for a play date in September and for when we went to my cousin Val’s for dinner this summer.  They’re great for any occasion and everyone always likes them.

See how cute? Chocolate hearts!

The neat thing is you use a cake mix as your base, and I’ve done white, chocolate and yellow. Chocolate was my favorite (surprise!) with white as my next favorite and yellow as my last favorite. Another neat thing about this recipe is that because it’s a bar cookie, you can use a cookie cutter to cut them into cute shapes. I did hearts for both my sister-in-laws because we love them, and I actually kept all the “scraps” and put them into a ziploc bag for my family to munch on after we shipped off the cookies.

Next time you need a fast recipe, a recipe to make and take, or just a recipe for your own family, give this one a try. You’ll be hooked on how fast it is, and you’ll make them again and again. I know I have!

LAZY CAKE COOKIES
INGREDIENTS

Cake mix, eggs and butter!

1 box yellow, white or chocolate cake mix

2 eggs, beaten

5 Tablespoons melted butter

2 cups mini chocolate chips or m&ms. (I don’t do mini.)

Use a pizza roller for ease in spreading!

DIRECTIONS

Mix the first three ingredients. Batter will be dry.

Add in your filler (chocolate chips, m&ms, etc.)

Spread in a 9×13 greased baking dish. (I find that spreading with a pizza roller works great!)

Bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees.

Make them and take them!

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What’s For Dinner Wednesday: Dinner on the Run

10 Oct

Even if we all have just one commitment, if they all fall on one night, that makes for a tough schedule to keep and we don’t want our nutrition to suffer.

Lately on Facebook, I’ve seen a lot of people asking for ideas for healthy and nutritious “dinners to go,” not as in take-out or fast food, but more as in, “What can I feed my kids on a night where we have to run from school to soccer to CCD,” type of a thing. Although we do try not to over-schedule our kids, I find that if you have more than one child, along with adult commitments too, it’s nearly impossible not to have a jam-packed schedule after school even if each child chooses just one activity. You multiply that times a large family and some nights you have no choice but to have a quick meal or to eat on the run.

The good thing about these Egg Muffins is that you can put anything you want in them, and people can tailor them to the likes and dislikes of the members of their family.

Recently I tried a new breakfast idea that I saw on Pinterest, originally from the Kalyn’s Kitchen blog  for Egg Muffins, and as we were eating them, I thought it’d be a perfect idea for dinner on the run, even though it was breakfast at the moment. It even said that you could use the leftovers from breakfast during the week if you refrigerated them. Another thing to think of when you have a large family: there aren’t often leftovers anymore! But, if I were doing this ahead of time, we would not eat them for our Sunday breakfast.

A couple of other things I liked about this meal were: 1) I thought they’d be great for a brunch item and 2) When you have several different sets of taste buds living under one roof, the ability to make one meal in a variety of ways is great. You can fill these with whatever you’d like.

When I made ours, I started out slow, just using two different fillers: spinach/cheese and ham/cheese. The ham/cheese filled muffins were the more popular of the two, although I liked them both.

With five of us, everyone had two and there were two left over which I put in a sandwich sized ziploc bag and later in the week I reheated them for my lunch after work one day. It was perfect.

If you’re looking for something healthy and different for those on-the-run nights, give this recipe from Kalyn’s Kitchen a try!

See her recipe below.

Filling goes into the cups first, then the eggs on top.

Egg Muffins

(Makes 12 muffins, recipe created by Kalyn with inspiration from The South Beach Diet book.

15 eggs (for silicone muffin pans, use 12 eggs for metal muffin tins. You can use less egg yolks and more egg white if you prefer.)
1-2 tsp. Spike Seasoning (optional, if you have food allergies or don’t have Spike, use any type of seasoning blend that’s good with eggs.)
1-2 cups grated low fat cheese (I like sharp cheddar or a blend of cheddar/Jack cheese, use less cheese if using meat)
Optional, but highly recommended, 3 green onions diced small.
Optional: chopped veggies such as blanched broccoli, red pepper, zucchini, mushrooms, etc. (Using veggies will reduce the fat content)
Optional: diced Canadian bacon, lean ham, or crumbled cooked turkey sausage

Yum!

Preheat oven to 375 F. Use regular or silicone muffin pan, 12 muffin size. If using silicone pan, spray with nonstick spray. If using regular muffin pan, put two paper liners into each slot, then spray liner with nonstick spray.

In the bottom of the muffin cups layer diced meat, if using, vegetables, if using, cheese and green onions. You want the muffin cups to be about 2/3 full, with just enough room to pour a little egg around the other ingredients. Break eggs into large measuring bowl with pour spout, add Spike, and beat well. (I used to add a bit of half and half or milk, but lately I like the way they turn out without it.) Pour egg into each muffin cup until it is 3/4 full. I like to stir slightly with a fork. Bake 25-35 minutes until muffins have risen and are slightly browned and set.

Muffins will keep more than a week in the refrigerator without freezing. Egg muffins can be frozen and reheated, but I like them best when they’re just refrigerated. For best results, thaw in refrigerator before reheating. Microwave on high about 2 minutes to reheat.

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What’s for Dinner Wednesday: Quinoa, Black Bean and Corn Salad by Haile Thomas

3 Oct

Quinoa, Black Bean and Corn Salad was on the menu at the Kids’ State Dinner at the White House in August.

Ever since our trip to DC for the Kids’ State Dinner, I’ve had a list a mile long of things I want to make that we either had on the trip or are recipes in the cookbook (free download here) we received from epicurious showing all the recipes from the other winners. One of the things I’d heard about but had never tried til DC was quinoa. It was in one of the dishes we ate at the White House, and it is now today’s recipe.

A few weeks ago I picked some up and I spent some time reading about what it is, how you cook it (has to be rinsed first in most recipes) and what kinds of things you eat it with. Even though I had the recipe for today’s dish, I actually used it first to make muffins, which four out of five of us liked, so you’ll see that at some point in the future too.

Caroline was so excited that we were finally going to try out this recipe, it’s been at the top of her list too!

Last week we tried out Haile Thomas’ recipe. Haile is from Arizona and Caroline and I both loved her dish when we had it in DC. Haile is 11, and the cookbook blurb states that they began experimenting with quinoa when the family gave up eating white rice when her dad learned that he was a diabetic.

“The secret to [the recipe’s] success is that ‘all the kids love it, the ingredients are affordable, it’s easy to make and it’s just plain good,'” Haile’s mom says in her quote. They say it can be served hot or cold and I agree. We had ours as a side dish with quesadillas and again, the same four out of five of us loved it. I guess quinoa is now going on Alex’s Don’t Like List.

Coincidentally, just as I finished typing this, I found out that Haile is featured in this month’s Food and Flourish Magazine. In fact, she’s not only featured on pages 26-31, but she’s ON THE COVER!

If you haven’t tried quinoa before, I highly recommend it. I’m thrilled to have another healthy option for side dishes with our meals and I’m glad so many of my family members love it!

**Any modifications I had to make for this recipe I have put in parentheses. **

Haile’s Quinoa, Black Bean and Corn Salad

Serves 6

I love all of the colors in recipes like this. We definitely “ate a rainbow” with this dish!

INGREDIENTS

2 (15 ounce) cans of organic black beans (ours weren’t organic) drained and rinsed
4 cups fresh corn (we used a bag of frozen, cooked but not hot)
1 pint cherry tomatoes, quartered (I chopped up a large tomato)
2 cups cooked quinoa
1 medium red onion, chopped (I used half, it was large)
1/2 bunch fresh cilantro or flat-leaf parsley (I used dried parsley)
2 avocados, pitted, peeled and cut into cubes
1 Tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1 lemon halved (mine was bad so I used lemon juice instead)
Sea salt

DIRECTIONS

In a large bowl, combine the black beans, corn, tomatoes, quinoa, cilantro or parsley, red onion, avocados, and olive oil.

Squeeze the lemon halves and add their juice to the bowl.

Toss to combine, then season to taste with salt and serve.

Cook’s note from the Thomas family: To make this dish hot, warm it on the stovetop of in a microwave, or saute all the ingredients together and add the avocados and cilantro or parsley after it’s plated.

This was a perfect side dish for our quesadillas last week!

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This is what I am the most proud of this week

1 Oct

I’m trying out something new for this school year. We’ll see how it goes!

Well, we’ve been in school exactly one month now. That means at our house, approximately 300 papers have come home from school between the two schools and the three kids.

I say this with slight exaggeration.

Slight.

We get a ton of papers home daily, weekly and monthly and I’m sure we’re not the only family drowning in notices, tests, quizzes, homework, art work and the like, for 180 days a year.

I’ll also tell you…I’m a saver.

Not a hoarder, there’s a difference. I’m a saver, safekeeping, keepsakes.

I’m also, as most of you know, a former teacher, so I have those types of tendencies as well: bulletin boards, displays, things like that.

Put it all together: my dining room is my classroom. I’ve been known to have classroom-style calendars on the walls when my kids were little, sticker charts encouraging good behavior, paper chains counting good deeds or days until something starts or ends, and papers on display; tons and tons of papers.

I also use that space to hang all their crafts and birthday cards. Hallways too.

With so many kids, there’s so many crafts, cards, artwork and good papers to display. It can get overwhelming.

This year, our Summer Timeline is still on the wall. I wanted to take it down but the kids weren’t ready yet. I only just got the second half of the summer’s pictures up on there, so they wanted some additional time to look up on the wall and remember their summer before I take it down to save it. (For a keepsake.)

That meant though, that there wasn’t really a good space to start displaying school work as it started coming home these past few weeks.

In the meantime, we’ve been spending the last six months or so doing some work on our house and I came across some unused items from a Stampin’ Up! class I once taught, as I was cleaning out my office. Those items included some magnetized display boards which can stick to a refrigerator.

BINGO.

I had an idea. I had five or six of those display boards. I had a sharpie marker. I took the marker and on the bottom of the display boards I wrote “This week…I am the most proud of this!” on three of the boards.

I stuck them on my fridge, one above the other. (We only just recently removed all the alphabet magnets from the fridge door, so there was a perfectly empty space there for about five seconds before I re-purposed that space.)

Now, each child can go through the papers they bring home that week, or whenever they bring them home, and choose the item they are the most proud of and stick it in the display until another paper comes home that they are even more proud of. It can be a piece of artwork or a test or a homework page that was hard, or really whatever they want.

When I taught, student portfolios were huge. They were a chance for the students to show what piece of their work meant something to them, without someone choosing for them. Many times the piece you think is important, isn’t and to them another piece has more meaning for a reason you don’t even realize. At the end of the school year, the students got to take their work portfolios home and they’d have a year’s worth of work to show, all pieces that were memorable for them.

So that’s what we’re trying out at my house this year. We’ll see how it goes. I still have the urge to cover my “bulletin boards” aka dining room walls with stickered school work, but for now, I’m trying to refrain. We’ve got a birthday coming up anyway….I’ll be able to fulfill that urge by putting up birthday cards instead.

I’m still saving all the good papers though.

Keepsakes. For later.

Saving. Not hoarding.

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