I finally made "perfect" whole wheat bread!! It was delicious. The trick, it appears, is to add gluten. Normally, my bread is heavy and rather dry. With the added gluten, the bread rose nicely and is wonderfully soft. My kids usually like bread right out of the oven, but they also like this bread for sandwiches. They previously would only eat the homemade bread as toast, but now they will eat it for everyday things, making it a money-saving venture. Hurray!
My parents are here visiting this week. This weekend is the kids' dance recital. Tonight is one of Ga'Hoole Girl's dress rehearsals. The others are tomorrow before the Saturday night show. She is in her three dances plus the two daddy-daughter dances. Wild Man is in one dance. I am trying to not go too crazy. The good news is that Ga'Hoole Girl is old enough now to manage most of the costume change stuff. She still needs me to help her with her hair, but that is far less stressful than trying to keep up with all the costumes, etc.
It feels very busy because of recital and the extra people in the house, but we are actually doing less than usual. We are done with schoolwork until July (we'll do a couple of weeks in July and a couple of weeks in August). Ga'Hoole Girl and I need to go buy some fabric to get her started on her 4-H projects. I want to get back to painting next week. That's an adventure because I can only paint for an hour or so each day otherwise I get a bad headache. So, it takes about a week to do one room! It will get done eventually, I'm sure.
Movie review: One Night With The King - based on the novel Hadasseh: One Night with the King by Tommy Tenney.
This movie tells the story of Esther from the Bible. It actually starts with King Saul and his disobedience to God by not killing all the Amalekites immediately as directed by God. Samuel, the prophet, confronted Saul about this and killed Agag, the Amalekite king, himself. There is a rabbinical tradition, apparently, that Haman was a descendant of Agag and that explains his hatred of the Jews. Interesting. The acting, costumes, and sets were all just wonderful. The movie took some license with the story itself, but this isn't surprising. One of the things that I found interesting was that the story took place during the time of Xerxes (who is the same as Ahaseurus, apparently). This is cool because we have been studying the Greeks and just watched a History Channel show on the Battle of Thermopylae (which included a lot of background info on the conflict between the Greeks and the Persians). Knowing that the story of Esther occurred during the time of Xerxes really helps to put it into history for me. I highly recommend this movie for adults. Kids over the age of 8 can probably watch it, too.
Book review: Adam of the Road by Elizabeth Janet Gray
This is a children's book that Ga'Hoole Girl will be reading a little later in her curriculum. It is the story of the son of a minstrel in medieval England who gets lost and spends several months trying to get back to his father and his dog. I most enjoyed the descriptions of life in that day and place. I highly recommend it for older elementary age and up.
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