I had a big project to work on most of the day, but in the evening I wanted to give some time to my children. So to go with the book below that I had read the day before, we played the game above. I had discovered it online over a month ago, and then found it on sale at Target for only $10, right before the big wave of quarantining. I’m glad I got it! It’s sweet to read all the character names and say, hey, I remember Bob Dog and Chef Brockett (played by the same guy), and Neighbor Aber, and Cornflake X. Especially. Talk about a blast from my past.
Image credits: amazon.com
It’s a super cute game, just the right mix of strategy and friendly competitiveness. A great game for parents to play with kids because it has a good balance of luck and skill. If you draw the Mr. Rogers card you have to give a compliment, kind word or share something else nice with your neighbor. It passed the sunshine test. Everyone showed some ray of sunshine at least once: a smile, laugh, or sparkle in the eye.
then for Bugsy’s bedtime story, I read the book below. He loves it a lot. I like it for discussing the 5 love languages of Dr. Gary Chapman. This is the third or fourth time we’ve read it. I think Mr. Rogers would approve. We’re stuck with all these library books, having to recycle them, until the library opens back up. Everybody who listened to Marie Kondo is hating it now. Fortunately I didn’t, haha. I do have a deep storage of books to unearth when he gets tired of these ones, thank goodness.
Even though it was technically math and science day, we read the book above. Sometimes I am just random like that. It’s such a great book about everyone’s favorite neighbor.
Then we played 24. This is currently my fave math game. I love it so much it has made my Top Ten list of Tabletop Games. I just love that it’s so easy and quick. You just have to figure out how to add, subtract, multiply, or divide with all four numbers on each card to get 24. See if you can do it with the image below. We played the first person to earn ten cards. You earn the card if you get the answer.
Then we played Hidden Panda to practice logical reasoning and deduction. You can get it free here, as a print and play game. It’s kind of like Secret Hitler but a lot more cute.
May I present to you….a classic yellow keto cake that doesn’t use flaxseed meal, oat fiber, or beans, like my other keto yellow cake here.
I’m so excited about this! For years since going low carb, I’ve been using flaxseed meal and oat fiber to make cakes because I have a teenage son allergic to almonds and coconuts. That’s what keto cakes are usually made of. He “graduated” from our homeschool last spring and moved out of the house. I miss him terribly. The only consolation with him being gone is that I can bake with coconut and almond flour to my heart’s content with no risk of him going into anaphylactic shock! Coconut and almond flour definitely have a better mouth feel than flaxseed meal and oat fiber. So yay!
This cake is so rich and dense, you probably will just eat one piece and definitely feel satisfied! See how small my piece is above? That’s all it takes for me as a dessert. If I had it for breakfast, I would eat more. 🙂
OK, ready to bake? Here you go…
Melt three sticks of butter on low heat, that is 1 1/2 cups of butter
While the butter is melting, beat 12 eggs, yes 12 eggs! I guess you could try 6 if you need to skimp on eggs.
1 cup whole Greek yogurt
1 T plus 1 tsp vanilla (alternately, if you want lemon cake, omit vanilla and add 30 drops lemon essential oil)
1 cup water
Combine these wet ingredients listed above together
In another bowl mix these dry ingredients:
1 cup Trim Healthy Mama Gentle Sweet or equivalent substitute (1 c ground erythritol, pulverized to a fine powder in the blender, and mix in 1 tsp stevia thoroughly)
2 tsp baking powder
4 c almond flour
1 c coconut flour
pinch of sea salt
Add dry mixture into wet mixture and mix until blended.
Pour cake batter into a greased 9×13 pan or two greased round cake pans. It will be thick. If you do want two round pans or a thick cake in a rectangle pan then half the recipe. If you want it to be thinner but a lot of cake use the recipe as listed above but use a greased jelly roll pan.
Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
Let cool then frost.
Easy way: whip up cream with some stevia and vanilla or lemon essential oil to taste
More complicated…
Vanilla Frosting: Take a bunch of whole Greek yogurt, like 1 cup, sweeten with stevia to taste, add vanilla or lemon essential oil to taste, and a teensy pinch of sea salt, and frost cake
Chocolate Frosting: Take the same amount of whole Greek yogurt, add stevia and cocoa, a teensy pinch of sea salt to taste and frost cake
Here is my list of my current Top Ten Favorite Tabletop Games and why. I reserve the right to change this at any time, of course!
Codenames. My all time favorite, because it involves logic, deduction, vocabulary, word association, and teamwork. Also because you can customize it to whatever subject you are studying.
Bananagrams. Sooo much better than Scrabble!
24. A math game that moves fast and encourages people to learn math facts.
Scotland Yard. It also teaches logic and deduction, and gets so exciting!
Spontuneous. It involves singing and/or shouting. You really don’t have to be musical to win, just good at remembering lyrics. Also I love it because all people can play at once.
Say Anything and Wits and Wagers. These are made by the same company and involve the same mechanics. One involves opinion answers, the other involves fact answers, always expressed in numbers. I love that Wits and Wagers involves trivia AND knowing the other players well and reading their body language. So if someone isn’t good at trivia they can still win because they can get good at knowing how the other players would respond. You can totally DIY this game. I will have to blog about that later.
Backseat Drawing. A reverse of Pictionary. I love that it involves more teamwork than Pictionary and everyone can play at once, like Pictionary sometimes allows.
Reverse Charades. I love that this one is fast and involves acting.
Taboo. It’s just so fun. Also involves vocabulary and word association.
Qwirkle. A great math game for increasing pattern recognition and logical thinking.
Runner-ups: Dixit, Therapy, Brain Games, Trivial Pursuit, Word on the Street, Apples to Apples, 789, and Jeopardy!
We started this book last week on Audible. (It’s not part of the free collection being offered right now during the pandemic…but here are my recommendations of the free ones being offered.) We’re doing a chapter a day. I learned about it from my sister Emily who highlighted it on her “First Friday” book recommendations on her blog. She quotes Kate DiCamillo as an enthusiastic reader of the book, who actually wondered how it could be the author’s first work. What a great testimonial! My sister gushes over it, saying she’s jealous of anyone who hasn’t read it and that it gave her many moments of mother-child bliss while listening to it and sipping cocoa. See what you have to look forward to? So far I’m loving it, especially that it shows the main character as a teen who doesn’t have a phone and is cool about it.
Then I let my son read aloud the book below. I love that it touches upon each of Dr. Gary Chapman’s five love languages. Next year I will read it during Valentine’s Day week. Sometime soon for Family Night I’m going to encourage my kiddos to brainstorm about the five love languages and family members and encourage them to act on that. Why wait for Valentine’s Day for that?
We then played a rousing game of Apples to Apples Jr. Bugsy, at age 10, won the game. The metagame went well, as nobody got upset or stormed out of the house. Everybody smiled or laughed at some point. This is such a great game! I love that everyone can play on every turn. It teaches new vocabulary words. It’s a good game to peek inside people’s souls a bit to see how they perceive definitions, also to see if they play seriously and pick honest matches (“small=mosquito bites”) or just want to be silly and pick crazy matches (“tame=pillowfights” ?!?!). And…it’s always fun when someone, the “judge,” picks a person’s card that if that person knew who submitted it, wouldn’t pick it. As is what happened this morning.
I love the surprise in that moment! I was pleased that a certain someone was slightly foiled when he/she did that. It’s also good for showing the players that some people can actually agree with them with clever choices, who they thought maybe couldn’t or wouldn’t. It’s fun to see when people are thinking on the same wavelength. We’re going to play this more often on Mondays, our language arts days. Another game that makes my mind reel with DIY-themed possibilities! Like using family photos or family-themed words and names.
With all the turmoil going on, it’s just soooooo good to feel the bright spots coming up…General Conference this Sunday, and Easter, the following Sunday!
So watch above and below for ideas on how you can prepare spiritually.
Foodwise, it’s time to get some Easter molds from amazon if you want to make Easter chocolates. Here’s my recipe for the chocolate. Then here’s my recipe for marshmallows. Combining the two together makes one of my favorite Easter treats, chocolate dipped marshmallows.
For more spiritual helps, here are more resources. Scroll to the bottom and start with Tradition #1. Also see the video above.
I made a cake last night to celebrate the birthday of the Book of Mormon, which is March 26, 1830. So instead of celebrating on March 26, last Thursday, we celebrated last night, with cake, ice cream, and a movie!
We ate our cake, sugar-free and grain-free, while watching the video below. (My new version of a classic yellow keto cake. Recipe coming soon!) This documentary is very interesting! It says that the birthday of the Book of Mormon (March 26) is the same day as the First Vision, but ten years apart, 1830 vs. 1820. I love that the video shows interviews from four scholars, an astronomist, a church historian (Dr. Susan Easton Black), an economic historian, and a meteorologist, PLUS a maple syrup farmer, to pinpoint the exact date. So fascinating!
I just love that April General Conference, Easter, the anniversaries of the Book of Mormon, the First Vision, and the birthday of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (April 6, 1830) are all in spring. So symbolic!
For Friday’s art day we read the above book, based on the true story of a guy who stole the Mona Lisa painting from the Louvre and hid it for two years.
Then we played some art games. (We are group of fewer than ten people so it’s OK that we are meeting together for games every morning.)
(All three of these came from Goodwill.)
and…
the latter was to practice acting/drama skills. It’s like Charades on steroids, because everyone is doing charades at once. We sent the boys out to play football and played it. I’m glad we sent them out, it might have been too much noise. It’s a great game with the right kind of people who don’t mind being silly or acting but can also not get too intense about it and will play fair.
I read this one aloud over Zoom to some homeschool friends! Such a beautiful book about Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf’s childhood in war-torn Europe. It gives me hope for this crisis we are in now.
This one was a bedtime book for Bugsy. It’s the true story of a scientist, Charles Henry Turner. It’s so fun to discover along with my children people I never heard about in public school! He was a renaissance man for sure.
Guess what this is? It’s an online version of Codenames! We played it long-distance over Zoom with some homeschool friends that afternoon. Then the next day we played in Zoom with cousins in Maine, then the next day with my adult sons in Utah and Texas, for an online Family Game Night. We played brown eyes vs. blue eyes. Just go to horsepaste.com and you can play too! You share the link to the website and then speak your clues over the phone or through video chat. My life just got a lot more fun during social distancing!
If you need rules on how to play Codenames go here. If you want to make your own Codenames cards, go here. It’s seriously one of the most brilliant games ever invented. You could use it for any subject that involves words, which is anything right? I love the subtleties of the clues and the excitement of wondering if your teammates will get it and then the rush when they do! Then when I’m not the spymaster I love collaborating with my teammates to decipher the clues. I’m going to make a family photo Codenames version, then a family history version. My mind is going wild with possibilities!
Wednesdays we do history and geography for our gameschooling. I read this picture book above to Bugsy for his bedtime. In the morning, on Wednesdays lately, I’ve read a few chapters from the book below. We will finish it up this coming week.
Then we played Scotland Yard. This was one of the six games I picked up at my local Goodwill in my amazing, historic board game haul, on March 6 (6 fabulous games for $13.55 in case you missed that news, including Codenames, still in shrinkwrap!) We were going to play it the day before for logic and strategy (which we do for Tuesdays) but ran out of time.
So we played it on Wednesday and I counted it for geography, since the game board is a map of London. A great game, but if you have people involved who are intense personalities, it might bring out the worst in them. It gets exciting! It’s a game where up to 5 players are the detectives for Scotland Yard, chasing a criminal, Mr. X, all over London to nab him. We had strong emotions at the end with the winner storming out of the house because one of the “losers” had a hard time acknowledging that she won. We ran out of time and had to end the game even though it wasn’t finished, and since the winner, who was playing the elusive “Mrs. X” hadn’t been caught, I proposed that she either be the winner, or we could put a bookmark in the game and save everything to come back to it. The winner was rubbing it in that she won and that it was so fun to watch us not catch her.
Then the afore-mentioned “loser” decided to peek at her location when he shouldn’t have so then I said since he did that we couldn’t bookmark the game, it was now over, and she was now the winner. So then he claimed he disqualified himself but she still wasn’t the winner. What?! We are obviously still working on being humble winners and gracious losers. Definitely part of a study of the “metagame.” See video above.
That night I got to play a new game. (Yes, most days we do more than one game. If you’ve read this blog for long you have noticed that :-). ) I was super excited to play Compose Yourself with my daughter for our parent mentor date after dinner. It’s a music game I’ve been eyeing since seeing at my-little-poppies.com. It had just come in the mail that day, because I ordered it in on ebay for less than $20, brand new, significantly lower than on amazon.
photo credit: amazon.com
So for our date, we sequestered ourselves in her bedroom, listened to Jane Eyre on audio, and drew. I’m going through the “Drawing Textbook,” which I’ve had forever and have attempted to draw one drawing a day for years now. It’s a fantastic drawing education book by Bruce McIntyre, even though it looks so humble with it’s paper cover and stapled binding.
Photo credit: amazon.com
I’m currently on a jag of being consistent in drawing for 15 minutes or so a day, so yay! Dear daughter draws for hours everyday, and will never say no to more time for drawing, especially on the iPad with her stylus she got for her birthday. After listening to two chapters, we played the music game.
Since before Christmas, it’s mostly been unavailable on amazon. I found out why. The website that allows you to upload the music cards included in the game is no longer functional. Apparently the game is no longer being printed or supported. So we had to play the notes on the piano, but because we didn’t want to leave the bedroom, we downloaded a keyboard onto the iPad. The tunes we made weren’t like John Williams’-movie-scores-bowl-me-over-spectacular-melodies but I can see that if I have more time I can really get into this and hopefully create music I love. I plan on playing with this a lot more to hone my music composition skills. Since I’m not driving back and forth into town two hours a day for seminary and track, I have time! Yay!
Tree of Life Mothering 