Category Archives: frugal strategies

Simple Shabbos preps, celebrating birthdays,reassessing school plans

frugal strategies, homemaking, homeschooling

Last Shabbos we had all of our children and their spouses with us for Shabbos, for the first time since the sheva brachos after the second wedding. It was SO nice to have everyone together; we’re a good sized crew and fill up every space of our dining room table with all the extensions in (seats 16). I’m unsure about where we’ll put anyone else when the time comes!

We celebrated my husband’s birthday while everyone was there. We have a family tradition that everyone shares something they appreciate about the person celebrating the birthday. I especially appreciate that all of our in-law children contributed. My older kids commented that they can really see that the younger boys have gotten the hang of this. When they were younger, they would say silly things or repeat whatever the person before them said. But now they’re able to share meaningful appreciation.  Definitely a family tradition that I’m glad we instituted.

This Shabbos was super quiet – just the younger six boys were home. I made a super simple Shabbos: challah, dips, soup, chicken, sweet potatoes and salad for dinner, with fruit compote for dessert. Day meal: chicken, dips, potato kugel and two salads as well as a plate of carrot rounds (cut by Yirmi) and another plate of tomatoes, with fresh fruit (plums, melon and kiwi) and popsicles for dessert. It’s nice to see that the kids are satisfied with no baked desserts – they keep thanking me for the fresh fruit I’ve been buying!

I made homemade chummus this week. For a long time that has been one of the few things that I buy ready made (other things include mayonnaise and mustard) because my kids like the store bought stuff. It wasn’t very time consuming or difficult to whip up a huge batch – I soaked 1.4 kg of dried chickpeas, cooked them up and made over 4 kg of chummus – the actual prep time was probably about 15 minutes. My version isn’t as creamy as the store bought but it tastes good; it’s definitely better for them since it has no additives, and I use higher quality ingredients, like extra virgin olive oil and fresh lemon…and it still comes out cheaper.

When I make a dip, I prepare a large amount and then fill several smaller containers for the freezer. That way I don’t have to make each dip fresh every Shabbos (I usually serve 4 – 5 dips). This week I pulled out matbucha (a cooked tomato dip), carrot dip, and I had dill dip in the fridge from the double batch I made last week, along with the chummus.

This week I got whole chickens on sale for 12.90 shekel a kilo. Usually I cook them whole, though chicken breast is much better when cooked separately, since it needs less time to cook than dark meat and ends up being on the dry side. I decided to experiment and cut the fresh chickens up myself rather than buy the more expensive cuts separately (chicken breast on sale is twice the price).

So I cut them into different cuts: quarters (in our family this is the preferred cut for Shabbos), wings and necks (for soup), chicken breasts (I made homemade cold cuts for Shabbos lunch with half of them, then put the other half into the freezer – this is my preferred cut for the week for myself). I’ll have to watch a youtube video on how to efficiently cut up a chicken and get a sharper knife before I do this again – it was worth it financially but time-wise was less efficient than I would have liked. Once I’m better prepared, I’m game to try again.

 

I’m happy to share that Rafael (17 months) has been accepted for one of the coveted spots for the special inclusion program at the day care center we applied to. Though I would prefer to keep him home with me next year, that won’be allowed and this program seems like a good option. I’m grateful the process for getting him in was so smooth – believe me, I don’t take that for granted.

Meanwhile, we’ve been researching schools for our twelve year old son. After repeatedly being stonewalled by the school we were interested in, my husband and I finally had a powwow and reassessed if this was really what we felt would be in his best interest. We decided today that we want him to continue homeschooling for another couple of years and will put him into school for high school. He is literally the easiest child to homeschool – he’s fluent in English and Hebrew, is a voracious reader and interested in everything and basically educates himself. It’s really nice to have some clarity and closure on this school decision, because we’ve been in limbo for more than four months and limbo isn’t a fun place to be.

As far as Yirmi’s school plans for next year, I’m also in limbo. I decided to send ds12 and Yirmi to school for the coming year around the time we were making two weddings. I was feeling I wasn’t giving the kids as much time and attention as I would like, and that was a big part of my decision to put them in school. But as time passes and I regroup, I’m able to look at all the gains that they’ve experienced even during the busiest times, rather than focus on what I didn’t do. Also, I’m now back in the groove with regular activities and that feels good to me.

My definition of education is focused on much more than the transmission of information; I place a lot of importance on large amounts of unstructured time for play, time outdoors, physical movement, music, creativity, life skills, money management, time with family, and lots more. Things that aren’t really on the radar in the school setting.

All that is to say that we’re in the process of reassessing our intended plans for Yirmi for the coming year. I’ll write more about whatever decision we make and why, once we make the decision. 🙂

Avivah

Making Shavuos flower arrangements

frugal strategies, homemaking, personal development

I love greenery and flowers, and so yesterday I popped into the florist to buy a couple of bouquets in honor of Shavuos.

For my daughter’s wedding, I put together the flower arrangements (something I had never done before and I give my daughter a lot of credit for having faith in me). I ordered specific flowers that I wanted to use, then made two large arrangements for next to the kallah’s chair, a bridal bouquet and centerpieces for thirty tables. It was beautiful, it was very affordable, and I really enjoyed doing it!

Here’s the main arrangements below – you can see all the flowers to the side waiting to be turned into something! (I wrapped the top of each large white vase with a large bow of gauzy white material; this was still in process when the picture was taken.)Tehila's wedding flowers

I thought it would be fun to do a little flower arranging for Shavuos!

Although we love the look of large bouquets, they end up being so large when placed on the table that they block people from seeing one another. So I decided to make several table arrangements using the flowers that I bought.

This is what I started with – a bunch of white lysianthus and a mixed bouquet of lysianthus (each was 20 shekels):

shavuos flowers

I bought a couple of blocks of floral foam, called an oasis, and turned to my garden for additional clippingst.

So far I’ve only used one of the bouquets; I bought two because I didn’t want to be short of flowers but I really could have sufficed with just one. I haven’t decided what to do with the bouquet of white lysianthus; at this point I’m leaning toward mixing it with dusty miller (I have a lovely huge plant of it in my yard) in one big arrangement, using the large white flower urn that I used for the wedding arrangements.

Here’s what I made using the bouquet of mixed lysianthus:

shavuos flowers 2

I decided to mix the fresh flowers with some succulents as well as a few leaves and flowers from our passionfruit vine.  Total cost: 30 shekels for all three (the foam block was ten shekels, then I cut it into thirds).

I chose to put the cooking and baking to the side to spend some time doing this first, because it was something relaxing and enjoyable for me. I tend to push off the ‘fun’ things for last – honestly, flower arrangements are a total extra and who except me would care if I just stuck the original two bouquets in vases?

But when I push off the ‘want tos’ in favor of the ‘have tos’ I end up not doing the things that make me feel happy and cared for.

Whose job is it to make me happy? Mine!

So it’s important that I make time to do things that I enjoy, not just the things that everyone expects me to do. I consider taking the time to make these floral arrangements a form of self-care for me.

Avivah

Weekly menu plan

frugal strategies, menu plans

I like to plan my menu for the week on Saturday nights; otherwise, a few days into the week I’d be figuring out the meals as I went along and wondering why I didn’t do some advance planning to keep mealtimes running smoothly!  Posting it here helps me feel more accountable to myself to get it done at the beginning of the week.

I start my planning by taking a look at what I have in the fridge, freezer and pantry (this includes leftovers).

Breakfast at this point is just about always eggs, oatmeal or polenta so it doesn’t require any planning.  Snacks are usually vegetables, sometimes fruit. I usually include some kind of vegetable with dinner if the dish that I plan doesn’t include any but I don’t plan that in advance – it’s pretty easy to chop up a plate of cucumber rounds.

I avoid gluten (no pasta and bread) and dairy.

Sunday: lunch – Shabbos leftovers; dinner – lima beans with chicken

Monday: l – chicken minestrone soup ; dinner – hot dogs, potatoes and green beans

Tuesday: l – lentil loaf, chummus, tomatoes ; d – chicken breast, rice, roasted summer vegetables

Weds: l – Spanish chickpeas and rice; d – baked sweet potatoes, chicken wings, salad

Thurs – l – chickpea and peanut stew; d –  kasha, ground meat sauce

Last week I made lentil loaf and made four pans; I stuck two of them in the freezer. I usually don’t like to serve the same dish two weeks in a row but this week my freezer is jam packed since my husband generously stocked us up on chicken. Combining that with the large amount of donor milk that I suddenly received in a two day period for Rafael (I never say no to donor milk, it is so vital to his health and it always gets priority for freezer space!), I want to get whatever I can out to make room for holiday cooking.

Here are some examples of how I integrate what I have in the house along with planned leftovers into this week’s menu:

I don’t have lima beans but chose the lima beans with chicken recipe since my planned experiment to roast broad beans for a snack didn’t work out. I overcooked the beans and then they were too soft. They don’t taste the same as limas but I think they’re similar enough that it will work.

For Monday’s lunch, I’ll be using whatever is left of Sunday’s dinner of broad beans and chicken, and add vegetables to make a soup similar to minestrone. That way I won’t have an odd container of dinner leftovers sitting around in the fridge growing mold while I forget that I put it there and don’t recognize it when I finally open it up.  (No, that has never happened to me. :))

When I cook rice for Tuesday night’s dinner, I’ll double the recipe and use half of what I make for the next day’s lunch of Spanish chickpeas and rice.

I’ll use any leftover roasted summer vegetables from Tuesday night’s dinner in the chickpea peanut stew for Thursday lunch, since those are the vegetables the recipe calls for.

By the way, I don’t buy canned beans so I soak and then cook all beans that are in any of the recipes I use. Very frugal and super easy.

On Tuesday night I’ll soak a large package of dried chickpeas, then will cook them first thing Weds. morning.  They’ll be ready to use in time for lunch, and I’ll have enough for lunch the next day of chickpea peanut stew, too.  Often I’ll freeze a large amount of cooked beans, and later I can quickly pull them out to add to a dish.

Most weeks I make a double recipe of a dish and then put half of it in the freezer for another week. This cuts down on how many meals I’m making from scratch and simplifies my day. We all prefer this to what I used to do, which was to make something for dinner, then serve it again for lunch the next day.  I’ll empty my freezer a bit at the end of the week when I cook for Shavuos and then in the coming week I’ll get back to freezing meals for dinner.

I haven’t been careful to record all the food expenses separately so I can’t tell you exactly what our monthly food bill is at this time. We budget 1100 shekels a week for food, transportation and miscellaneous expenses.

Have a great week!

Avivah

Remaking my mother-of-the-bride gown

frugal strategies, homemaking

My sister-in-law will be coming for the weddings, and very generously offered to bring me a gift. I told her that what I wanted was a sewing machine (I left mine behind along with most of our other belongings when we made aliyah since we didn’t bring a lift), and that the gift would be to bring it to me! She agreed, and I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it!

The sewing machine isn’t here yet – I just ordered it last night – but just thinking about it got my sewing juices flowing.  We mostly have males to outfit for the weddings, which is pretty straightforward. Early on I bought the ties and bow ties for both weddings, dh got a new suit, and this week I’ll go through the younger boys wardrobes to be sure they have what they need – the clothes from ds’s wedding seven months ago should still fit them.

Then there’s the gowns. The two brides found their gowns each within a couple of weeks of their engagements (and quite miraculously neither gown needs alterations), but despite my desire to get the gowns for the sisters and mother wrapped up much earlier on, these are still very much in process.

For the first wedding, the color scheme is blue and I was fortunate to find a gown in the first place that I went.

For the second wedding, the color scheme is maroon.  I went to three different gown places and couldn’t find anything. There aren’t a lot of maroon gowns available, so finally I ordered a gown online. It was the perfect color and it had a couple of features I liked but would require a matching shell and another significant alteration (you can see the pic here). As I thought about the alterations and shell shopping, I kept thinking about adapting a gown that I bought for ds24’s wedding.

It’s a very high quality gown that I got for a great price but I purchased it before we decided on a color scheme for ds’s wedding, so the color (black and ivory) didn’t work. It’s been hanging in my closet all this time, and I thought fleetingly, what if I took apart both gowns and then put them back together, combining different elements of each….it might work.

Too much work to sew by hand, and with no machine, it wasn’t an option. But like I said, my creative juices started flowing at the thought of the sewing machine. So around 11 pm, when due to tiredness there was less well-reasoned restraint to hold me back, I started taking them apart. I intended to just start taking it apart, little by little, but the new gown was assembled in a completely different way than I had anticipated. So once I started I had to completely take it apart.

With the new gown I had just purchased now a pile of cloth – the only thing left assembled was a zipper barely connected to the original lining – and the other one partially disassembled, I mused ruefully that I might have just ruined two perfectly good gowns if my idea didn’t work out. I wouldn’t have time to re-sew either one of them before the wedding, and in any case, neither of them worked for my needs without substantial alterations and there wouldn’t be time for that by the time the sewing machine arrived.  I reassured myself that my backup plan would be to rent to a gown and if I couldn’t find a maroon gown, I’d get a neutral solid color gown instead.

At 3:45 am, I decided to call it a night, but by that point the gown was mostly finished. Yes, sewn by hand. Amazing what you can do when you’re not being interrupted by young children! I still want to do something with the sleeves but I think the gown actually looks quite nice. The bodice is black, the skirt section is maroon and overset with black lace. I don’t think anyone would guess that this wasn’t the way it looked originally.

After I finished it I thought it’s too bad I didn’t take a picture of both gowns before I started, but since I don’t have a working camera it’s not very surprising that I didn’t. 🙂 So you’ll have to wait for the pictures from the wedding to see my handiwork.

Dd21 was very complimentary when she saw it, and since it’s for her wedding, her opinion is the one that matters the most to me.

So I can now check one more item off of my to-do list!

Avivah

Lentil Rice Mushroom Loaf – recipe

frugal strategies, recipes

Several readers requested the following recipe. Here you go!

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Lentil Rice Mushroom Loaf

  • 1 c. cooked rice
  • 1 c. cooked brown/green lentils
  • 1/2 c. onion, finely chopped
  • 1 c. chopped mushrooms (I used canned sliced mushrooms and don’t chop them)
  • 1/3 c. shredded carrots
  • 1/4 c. broth (I use chicken broth)
  • 1 c. quick oats
  • 1 t. parsley
  • 1/2 t. basil
  • 1 t. salt
  • 1/2 t. pepper
  • 2 eggs

Saute the onion, mushrooms and carrots.  Mix in the remaining ingredients.  The spices are just a suggestion, add whatever you like in the quantities you like.

At this point I like to pulse the mixture with a immersion blender so that it holds together well when it bakes. Pour into a pan lined with parchment paper.

Bake in a greased pan at 350 degrees for 30 – 35 minutes.

Eat and enjoy!

Avivah

Weekly menu plan – nourishing, gluten free

frugal strategies, menu plans, recipes

After my last post when I shared some of my kitchen happenings, I got a good number of responses saying that readers miss my food posts.  I stopped sharing my menu plans when I moved to Israel, thinking they weren’t very interesting.  Interesting or not, it’s what we eat!

Here’s the plan for this week!

Sun: breakfast – homemade breakfast pizzas; l – black bean burgers, baked beets; d – chicken tamale pie

Mon – b- polenta; l – potato kugel, chicken soup; d – oriental rice (with cabbage and chicken)

Tues – b – morning rice; l – pumpkin smoothie bowls, d – chicken pot pie

Weds: b – oatmeal;  l – chicken pot pie; d – lentil meatloaf

Thurs: b – polenta; l – baked sweet potatoes, eggs; d – red lentil dal, rice

On Sundays I try to plan my menu for the week. I first check what I have in the fridge and freezer so I can integrate those foods. Today I defrosted chicken and a couple of frozen dishes that I’ll be using in the next 2 – 3 days. I also usually start the week by soaking at least two kinds of beans.

We make challah weekly and when there’s extra dough, we freeze it in smaller portions for use during the week.  This morning the boys defrosted homemade pizza dough for their own breakfast and each made his own version to eat.  My house smelled way too good for a Sunday morning! 🙂

Ds11 is preparing the black bean burgers for lunch as I write.  He didn’t mind making the recipe when I told him he didn’t have to chop the onions. 🙂 Last week while I had the food processor already out, I decided to dice a bunch of onions at once and then popped them in the freezer in portion sized bags to make meal prep faster.  This morning I defrosted a one cup portion of the onions in anticipation of this recipe, so it was ready to be used by the time he began.

My purchases last week are influencing my menu this week!

Last week I got a case of bananas on sale for 4 shekels a kilo and put a bunch in the freezer, frozen as single bananas, chocolate covered bananas (for a Shabbos treat) and 1 c. portions of mashed banana. In addition, the kids ate so many fresh bananas, plus I made a couple of huge pans of funky monkey baked oatmeal for Shabbos in two different flavors.  This week I’ll be using the frozen bananas for smoothies.

There was also a good sale on pumpkin (2.90 shekels a kilo) so I bought a lot.  I put all that was on the refrigerated shelf into my shopping cart and then asked the produce guy to open up another huge pumpkin and give me half of it.  He couldn’t believe I really wanted that much and asked me a couple of times if I was really going to use that – so I had to reassure him that I really knew what I was doing.  Obviously I don’t have the buying habits of a typical customer.  🙂  I prepped that pumpkin together with the boys the day that we bought it and froze it in 4 cup portions, so all it’s my ready to be used.

Having my menu plan ready at the beginning of the week gives me a calm and relaxed feeling around food preparations.  When I don’t have it ready, I end up wasting time and feeling pressured while trying to figure out each day what I should make.

Avivah

 

 

Brunswick Stew – recipe

frugal strategies, recipes

Here’s the recipe for Brunswick stew for my readers who requested it!

This recipe comes from The Joy of Cooking.

Brunswick Stew (serves 8 – 10)

  • 5 pounds of chicken parts
  •  2 T. oil
  • 1 c. chopped onion
  • 1 c. chopped celery
  • 3 c. fresh or frozen lima/cooked white beans
  • 1.5 – 2 c. chopped tomatoes, canned or fresh
  • 1 c. barbeque sauce or unseasoned tomato sauce
  • 1 c. tomatoe puree
  • 1 c. chicken stock
  • 1 T. minced garlic or 2 t. garlic powder
  • salt and pepper to taste
  • 3 c. corn, fresh or frozen

Sprinkle salt and pepper on the chicken parts and saute the chicken in batches over a medium heat. Set aside.

Using the 2 T. of oil, saute the onions and celery until tender.  Add the chicken to the pot.  Add all remaining ingredients except for the corn, and bring to a boil over a high heat.  Reduce the heat to low and simmer until the chicken is almost tender, about 35 – 45 minutes.

Add the corn and simmer for another ten minutes.

This makes a nice large recipe and is frugal, filling and tasty!

Avivah

 

Why cooking in bulk will make your life easier

frugal strategies, homemaking

Have you ever felt like you’re constantly cooking and struggling to keep up with the meals that need to be served?  I have!

This year I have five boys ages 11 and down home all day, and not having any teenagers who are homeschooling means that there are fewer older children to delegate tasks to. That means that the younger boys are learning to step up and help more, which is good, and also that I do more.

Having meals ready on time makes our home run much more smoothly – there’s nothing like kids asking again and again for food and not having anything to serve them makes everyone irritable!  Nutrition is important to me but I can’t spend hours in the kitchen – I try to stay home as much as I can, but I still have homeschooling, shopping, regular therapy appointments and extracurricular activities for the boys to attend to. Not to mention my work – sessions with clients in the evenings and in a couple of weeks I’ll be adding workshops back in to my schedule.  Oh, and I try to get some sleep, too. 🙂

I make meals from scratch three times a day.  It’s rarely fancy – we have hot cereal or eggs for breakfast just about every day.  There’s nothing wrong with scrambled eggs and rice for lunch or dinner but when I get busy that becomes too frequent and it doesn’t feel like a meal to sit down together over!  Since having a sit down meal with our family is an important value for me, I try to make a satisfying dinner.

With all of the holidays, I had been caught up in the cycle of cooking, cooking, cooking but never getting ahead.  This week I’ve been able to get back into a cooking routine that makes my life much easier – cooking in bulk!

What I try to do is plan ahead so that I can double whatever I’m preparing for dinner.  I then can serve some for dinner and ‘feed the freezer’ a meal that I can pull out at a later time.

Here’s a list of dinner meals for the last few days:

Mon – black bean vegetable soup and rice

Tues – baked chicken, chickpeas with sauce, salad, baked sweet potatoes

Weds. – chicken tangine with chickpeas

Thurs. – Brunswick stew

Here’s what my cooking schedule looked like the last few days:

On Sunday we had leftovers from Shabbos for dinner (chicken, potato kugel, roasted vegetables). I didn’t need to do any cooking for that night, so on Sunday afternoon I prepared a large pot of black bean soup.

I went out with the boys on Monday afternoon and before I did, left the soup on a very low flame to heat up. We walked in at 6:35 pm – I try to serve dinner at 6:30 pm – and were able to sit down to eat dinner as soon as we got inside.

Later in the evening I soaked a pan of chickpeas.

On Tuesday I cooked a pot of rice, a pot of buckwheat, ds10 baked a large pan of sweet potatoes and I asked someone else to put the chickpeas on to boil.  I also baked a pan of chicken – all quick and simple things to prepare.

On Wednesday I did a big shopping trip and got a bunch of chicken on sale (including chicken wings for just 4.90 shekels a kilo so I got twelve kilos!). Since the chicken was fresh, I made peanut butter/honey chicken with sesame seeds for Shabbos and plain roasted wings to use for two other dishes I planned to make that day.  I also cooked a few kilos of chicken gizzards.

(The buckwheat cooked on Tuesday was intended for a dish but the boys asked if they could eat it for lunch, so I let them have it.)

While the chicken was cooking, I prepared two chicken dishes: a double recipe of chicken tangine with chickpeas (using chickpeas I had cooked the day before), and Brunswick stew (using white beans I had also cooked in advance).  I also made some quinoa black bean burgers using some leftovers I had in the fridge that I served for lunch the next day.

We had the chicken tangine Weds. night for dinner. Later in the evening I boiled a large pot of potatoes and soaked a pan of lentils.

On Thursday morning ds10 mashed the pot of potatoes and I cooked the lentils.  While they were cooking I prepared two lentil mixtures: lentil meatloaf and lentil-rice-mushroom casserole.   I made 2 large 9 x 13 pans of each. We had one pan of lentil-rice casserole for lunch; the other three pans of food went into the freezer.

I then had an unexpected furniture delivery that took a lot of time and energy to organize (looks great now, though!), and it was later in the afternoon before I could take a nap. Before I lay down, I put the Brunswick stew on a very low flame to heat up. I got up at 6:10 pm but dinner was ready on time thanks to the advance preparation!

Thursday evening, I prepared the filling for shepherd’s pie, chopping up the chicken gizzards I cooked the day before, then topped the chicken and vegetable mixture with the potatoes ds10 had mashed that morning.  Once the two huge pans were baked, they went right into the freezer for two different meals.  (In case you’re wondering, I also made some chicken soup and roasted chicken for Shabbos.)

With some advance thought and a bit of extra effort, I now have four different dishes/6 meals in the freezer. It didn’t take much extra work but ready to go meals in the freezer are my ‘fast food’ for busy days!

Avivah

Homemade Taco Seasoning

frugal strategies, recipes

A friend of mine gave me some packages of taco seasoning that she wasn’t using and while I wouldn’t have bought them, once I had them I started noticing how many frugal bean/legume recipes I had that called for taco seasoning. The mix of flavors definitely enhanced the taste of the final dish, even if the processed mixture didn’t enhance the nutritional value!

This recipe for homemade taco seasoning makes it possible to enjoy the convenience of a premixed taco seasoning mix without any objectionable ingredients!  It’s super quick to mix up, affordable, and good for you.

Homemade Taco Seasoning 

  • 1/2 c. chili powder (*note below)taco seasoning
  • 1/4 c. onion powder
  • 1/8 c. cumin
  • 1 T. garlic powder
  • 1 T. paprika
  • 1 T. salt

Mix all the ingredients together, and store in a jar.  Two rounded tablespoons equals one packet of taco seasoning.

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* If like me, you don’t have chili powder in your pantry and don’t want to go out and buy it just to make this recipe, it’s easy to mix up your own. To make chili powder, the recipe I used called for: 2 T. paprika, 2 t. oregano, 1 1/2 t. cumin, 1/2 t. garlic powder, and 3/4 t. onion powder.

**Yet another note: chili powder and cayenne pepper are not the same thing! Cayenne is much hotter and not a good substitute.  I learned this years ago when I made what I thought would be a  delicious and exotic salad and dressing, and used cayenne since I thought it was interchangeable with chili powder.  Every single person took a bite and then reached for his water glass.  🙁  No one touched the salad after that first bite.

———————————–

Avivah

 

Shifts in our home as the teens move out of homeschooling!

frugal strategies, homeschooling

It has been a busy summer and has only gotten busier as the official school year has begun! I’ve hoped to write in detail about some of the following points, but due to time constraints will just touch on some updates!

First of all, dd16 is now in seminary!  She travels daily to Jerusalem and I get to see her a few minutes in the evening, if I’m luckly.  She is really loving it so far.  My experience has been when my kids have wanted the school experience, they have thrived because it was something they chose and are emotionally invested in.

Next big change around here is that ds15 is now attending a local yeshiva high school.  It’s a new program with a small first class.  He leaves around 7ish in the morning and gets home about twelve hours later, so it’s a long day and that’s an adjustment.

Ds18 is in a post high school yeshiva (and I never got to tell you about his high school graduation and how he spoke beautifully when asked to represent his class…) and has said that everything is better than he expected. His yeshiva has a no cell phone policy, which has some benefits.  But it also means that in addition to seeing him once a month instead of once a week, I hardly speak to him.  I count myself lucky if I speak to him ten minutes a week.  And that’s longer than he’s speaking to anyone else on the phone during the week!

Dd21 is working on building up her industrial design business. She works from home, and that makes my transition from not having homeschooled teens around to keep an eye on younger siblings a little bit easier.  But she’s supposed to be working, not babysitting, so I really try to keep this to a minimum.

Dd22 is working locally and I enjoy that she’s living at home so I get to see her a bit in the evenings.

And ds24 and his lovely wife are doing well and it’s always nice to see them together!

So that leaves just the youngest five boys at home during the days – officially four are homeschooling this year.  It’s going to be a big shift not to have the older kids around.

I do like my children.  And I miss them when they’re not around.  But I’m grateful they’re growing into independent adults even if it means some pangs and inconvenience for me.

I’ve been busy in the last month doing lots of decluttering and reorganizing of my home space.  The kids (dd21, ds18, dd16 and ds15) built a pergola for our yard with swings and an integrated set of monkey bars, and we build another pergola on our porch that completely covers the porch.   They are all hard workers and did an amazing job.  I realized just yesterday that the one large beam remaining from building the pergolas is perfect for a balance beam for the kids, and yesterday set that up on the porch for them. It’s a nice to feel very settled as we begin our homeschooling year that everything was mostly in place to support us, inside and out.

I’ve also been giving a lot of thought in the last couple of months to what I’d like to focus on in the coming year, personally and with my family.  Doing this clarification process is always powerful for me.  I also just finished locally giving a four week family mission statement workshop series, helping others to navigate this process that personally has been so valuable for me.

Yesterday we finally had a speech evaluation for Yirmi, eight months after I started the application process.  We also had an OT eval a week ago, and Yirmi is now authorized for weekly therapy if we want it.

And just a couple of hours after completing the speech evaluation, I headed to Jerusalem together with ds11 to meet with the Ministry of Education’s representative regarding the new homeschooling application that I filed for this year to include Yirmi.  The rep is hoping that my past request made when living in the north was technically completed so that it will make the process of approving our new application simpler.

However, I got a call today from the local department of Education in the north asking me to remind them of the status of my file!  I thought they should be the ones with a record of that but sometimes I can have unreasonable expectations. 🙂   He wasn’t clear if an official exemption from the compulsory education law was granted or not.  However, the representative did remember me and that I had done all the necessary steps, and it’s clear that I’m not the one who dropped the ball in completing the legal paperwork.   If they don’t have a record that I was granted permisson to homeschool, we’ll need to begin the entire process again.  More on that as time goes on.

In addition, yesterday my bulk order arrived – I make an order twice a year.  Mostly this is several cartons of coconut oil, but this order also included a 20 kg bag of coconut flour and 11 kg of almond flour.  I’ve been wanting to make desserts that are gluten free for everyone in the family – until now we’ve made special desserts for ds5 that look as similar as possible as the gluten filled treats that everyone else gets.  While white flour and sugar still remain much less expensive than these ingredients, buying in bulk makes the cost of baking gluten free more reasonable.

I hope you’ve all had a wonderful summer and your autumn is off to a great start!

Avivah