Walking is getting to be more challenging for me at this stage of pregnancy. We have always had Wednesdays as our errand or ‘town’ day. Three of the children have piano lessons in the afternoon. We usually try to hit a thrift shop and the grocery store and anyplace else I need to go.  Short runs I can do while they are at lessons. Groceries come afterwards. Problem is, I can no longer run errands during piano and still make it all the way through Walmart and do the half hr drive home. We came up with a very workable solution. Asher and Alannah head into the grocery store ahead of me and the little ones.  We catch our breath in the van and meet them inside when they are about finished so I can check the carts and pay. This is such a blessing! Because they have shopped with me for so long now they know which brands we buy, what size bags/cans things should come in for our family, and where things are.

Alannah kicked it up a notch this past month.  We had read and loved Fanny at Chez Panisse this summer.(link below) It was a wonderful book that held the attention of even my antsy little boys who asked for just one more chapter. It is the real story of the daughter of a restaurant owner (author) and her adventures with the cooks, the florist, the farmer’s market vendors and so on. It is full of simple watercolor paintings that begged to be copied by small people. It is also full of easy recipes.  Half the book in fact! That started the ball rolling. Alannah wanted to try several.

I told her to get me a list. She did better – she made a menu (for the week) based on this book and others we had reserved, wrote out a list, and then shopped for the ingredients (with Asher pushing her cart ; )) Then she prepared the meals for that whole week. The cream puffs at left are a sample of her newly honed baking skills. God bless her!

Her younger siblings have followed her lead and are eagerly taking weeks to be chef or chef’s helper. Aidan has had this past week. Granted no cream puffs for him. It’s been hot dogs, quesadillas, and tacos, all of which are more his speed. He still needs a lot of help but can do much more food prep than one would expect from an almost seven year old.

On a seemingly unrelated note I was thinking about the copywork we are doing. I have been cutting and pasting quotes from people we are studying and the gospel stories from Sundays into Word documents. I change the fonts to whatever type hand each child is working on and then change the color to the lightest gray possible and print. They trace over the correctly formed letters.  They are wild over this for some reason. At first it felt like ‘cheating’ because they were tracing vs forming the letters. But it does fall into line with Charlotte Mason’s idea of implanting the habit of perfect work and is also similar to Montessori’s tracing of the sandpaper letters.

It occurred to me that the shopping and the cooking were very similar. In home ec curriculum for middle grades and higher you see detailed instructions in cooking and meal prep. They tend to presume no previous instruction. They bring to mind my own efforts to learn to cook – LOTS of effort, lots of guessing, and mixed success. My children, by contrast, seem to be preparing dishes with very little help or effort and much success. It would seem that having the children shadow me for many, many years has prepared them much better than a rigorous cooking curriculum ever could have. They have learned not only to prepare food but to plan meals and purchase ingredients. They have seen it modelled over and over. I am hopeful that the copywork will serve the same purpose.

Guess it all falls under the proverb:

Below are a few links to resources we have used for both:

Clear Print font

print with lines font

dashed Cursive font

Honest Pretzels cookbook for kids – step by step!

Fanny at Chez Panisse