Worm compost

One thing I'm really looking forward to in owning a house is having a garden.  We have been renting our entire marriage and haven't very much success in the little gardening we have tried.  When we lived in a duplex we got a good sprout in our little veggie patch that grew and grew, but then was completely trampled by the neighbor kids (and dogs) before anything was ready to be harvested.  If you haven't guessed, it wasn't fenced off.  The only garden success we've enjoying in our marriage has been when we were living with my parents, and my mom had already done the parts of soil prep and planting, so we "helped" harvest, consume and make freezer jam (which we later helped consume).  If everything works out with the house we're in the process of buying now, then we'll be moving in in early May.  Kind of later in the spring than I'd like for garden starting, but you're supposed to start small anyway, right? Since I am a tightwad and sometimes a big of a tree-hugger, I am a big compost advocate.  It's wonderful for soil, prevents things from going in landfills, and it's FREE!  The drawback here is that it does take a little while for compost to form, so it'd be nice to have some already ready when we move in to get the garden going. As I was mulling over this in my mind, I was also thinking about what we should cover next for homeschool.  After a little research, pondering, and a few internet searches, I decided to go ahead and give worm composting a try.  I checked the bait shop at Walmart, and they only had Canadian night crawlers, which I had read a lot about and they're not a very good composting worm. So I ordered some online, from amazon.com.  This was the least expensive I could find.  And the kind to look for is red wigglers, sometimes just called composting worms.  In the mean time, I went to the library and picked up some non-fiction children's books about worms. 
While we were waiting for the worms to arrive, I looked up home made worm composters  (since the store bought ones are insanely expensive!) and got a small storage bin with a lid (opaque), and a dishpan to go under it and catch the "worm tea" that it wonderful for gardens).  To make holes for air and drainage, I took a nail, and held it with a rag (so as not to burn myself) then heated the tip of the nail with a match (a candle would work better, but ours are all wickless so I improvised!) then I poked the headed tip in the big to make small holes.  I did this in the lid, around the top of the sides, and a few in the bottom.  I had to re-heat the nail a few times, which is why a candle works better, but I got it done. Then we added shredded newspaper and cardboard and eggshells and produce scraps.

The kids were so excited when the worms arrived in the mail!  WE added them to our bin right away and gave them lots of water (they get kind of died out during shipping).  The bigger kids thought the worms were cute, my youngest kept growling at them!

 The worms come packed in peat moss to keep them from getting banged up in the shipping process.  You can see them starting to move around right after we added them to our bin.

 The worms were in this bag, tied shut, in a box labeled "live worms"

Here is a shot of our bin from a little farther away, before we put the lid on of course.

I am surprised by how fast the worms have been eating our regular household compost, and I'm very excited that we'll at least have one really good thing to improve our soil when we move in to a house! 

Swagbucks

You may have noticed the widget at the bottom of my blog for swagbucks.  Swagbucks is a site that offers reward points (called swagbucks) for things like taking polls, filling out surveys, watching their videos, doing tasks like answering questions about internet searches, and doing internet searches with their search engine.  There are also a few other things like printing out and redeeming coupons, trading in electronics and books and things like that, but I've never done those things.  When you earn enough swagbucks (points) you can redeem them for a number of prizes, but my favorite is the amazon.com e-gift card. 

 
There are several other great gift cards, but you always have to look at the fine print.  Many of the gift cards will give you a coupon code after you redeem them, which you can enter at checkout of your online shopping and get $5 off or however big of a gift card you got.  With the amazon.com gift card, you copy the code and apply it to your amazon.com gift card balance, which never runs out and you can add as many as you want and only take away what you want when you want to purchase anything.  I have purchased several home school books for free (the gift cards cover shipping too)  but we mostly use books from the library and have a few to use as references and guidelines (What Your Kindergartener Need to Know, What Your Preschooler Needs to Know, the Ultimate Book of Homeschooling Ideas, and Homeschool Your Child for Free are the main ones).  So I am not working to get household items for free from amazon.com.  To get one $5 amazon.com gift card it takes 450 swagbucks.  There are bigger gift cards, but strangely, they require more swagbucks per $5 increment (For example, to get 5 of the $450 gift cards, it would take 2250 swagbucks.  To get a $25 gift card, it's 3150 swagbucks, you get the idea).  There is a limit on how many gift cards you can earn in a month, but I've never earned enough to top that out.  I usually earn 55 to 60 swagbucks a day.  It's not much, but that allows me lots of time with kids and household responsibilities and hubby time, and gives me one gift card every 7 to 8 days. 

Here's what  do:
I get online and go right to swagbucks, at the top of the website there are several tabs, one is "earn" I click on that and scroll down to daily pols, I answer the daily poll and get one swagbuck (hey, every little bit helps!)  Then I go back to the earn tab and go to NOSO (no oblligation special offers) It takes me through a series of ads and I click skip on every one of them every time, then it gives me a word or phrase to types in and I get 2 swagbucks.  No, that's not much, but it all adds up.
Next I go to swagbucks TV from the earn tab and start one of their short videos.  I usually keep the volume down, unless it's really interesting, like a lot of the ones in the home and garden DIY network section, of in the Paula Dean part of the food section.  When that starts to play I open another tab and usually go to my blogger homepage, I check to see if there are updates on any of the blogs I'm following, and click on them if there are.  Every two or three minutes I click back to the swagbucks tab to click on another video.  The vidoes are short and your earn 3 swagbucks for every 10 you watch.  But since it takes almost no time, it's a good way to keep adding points up.  When I'm done reading any of the blogs I follow (sometimes during if a post inspires a question) I'll go to swagbucks in a different tab than swagbucks TV ( I close other tabs so I don't get too distracted) and so a search or two for something I've been wondering about of questions that come to my mind.  I also don't bookmark very many pages, if it's a blog I really like, I follow it, other than that I just read it carefully, ad then if I want to refer to it again I do a swagbucks search (like google) to find it.  You don't get points for every search, and it doesn't help to keep hitting search in rapid succession, but if you really are looking for something, open some of the links and go the succeeding search pages you can earn quite a few (most of the time when I get rewards for searches it's around 7 to 12 swagbucks, but I've gotten as high as 28 before). 
Keep in mind that this is all in several chunks throughout my day, I don't just sit on the computer for hours on end trying to earn swagbucks, but if I'm on for other reasons anyway, you can rest assured I'll be earning swagbucks simultaneously.
When the kids are alseep and I've had a busy day and want to relax, I will go to swagbucks games.  I only do a few, but I really enjoy puzzle games.  Usually I get 2 swagbucks for every two games I play, which doesn't take very long, and I only do it a little so I'm not wasting my day on frivolities.
I do check the survey section regularly, but I rarely qualify for surveys, I guess I'm too boring.  I also do tasks from time to time to change things up a bit.

If you aren't already signed up for swagbucks, but you'd like to be, you can go to my widget at the bottom the the page.  At the bottom right of the widget it says sign up.  If you sign up through me I get a few more swagbucks (Thanks in advance!).

I hope this helps with those of you who want to save some money or get things for free!

Impromptu Nutrition Lesson

This past weekend we went to visit my in-laws.  It was a good enough visit, but there's something that always gets to us about visiting there: the food.  Sure it tastes great, but there's almost no nutritional value and there's a TON of salt, fat, and sugar.  We always say that we gain about 5 pounds for every three days we spend there.  While we noticed the huge difference in ourselves, this past visit, the kids noticed too.  They were tired, had tummy aches, and were constipated.  They asked me why they felt this way and I explained that it was because we hadn't been eating healthy food.  We've had a lot of mini lessons on nutrition, but them experiencing the consequences of poor food choices seemed to really drive the point home for them.  Then, while we were waiting in the grocery store for my husband to use the restroom, the kids and I walked around and talked about what foods are healthy, which ones are not, and why.  They really enjoyed it, and when we got home, they wanted to go to the store to get healthy food!  It was a great little impromptu lesson!

Volcano!

  
As you may know, we home school our kids.  Our oldest is only 5 so we are doing Kindergarten with her and preschool with our 3 year old.  We've been going through the regular lessons and things suggested in What Your Kindergartener Needs to Know and What Your Preschooler Needs to Know, as well as doing a few worksheets, but this week I thought we'd do something a little more fun that most Kindergarteners and Preschoolers don't get to do.  We learned about volcanoes!  Not only that, we made one!  First we checked out a few books from the library about volcanoes, watched some educational videos on youtube, and then made and made errupt our volcano!

Here is the final product.  Painted and with people and trees and houses and rocks made of modeling clay.

Here is a shot of one of the volcanoes "erupting."  We did the regular baking soda and vinegar, I just added some food coloring to it so we could have red or orange "lava."  During this project I used some of my husband's worn out work shirts for the kids to wear over their clothes so they wouldn't get messy, and put some old sheets on the table to protect it.

I had a hard time getting a picture when the lava looked just right, here my timing was right but there's a little kid arm in the way!  That's how it goes I guess!

In case you were curious:
to make the volcano I used an old milk carton cut in half with the halves upside down.  I duck taped some empty yogurt cups on top of that, then made the basic volcano shape with aluminum foil.  My 5 year old held with the tape, ripping the foil, and smoothing it out.  Then my five year old and I covered it with paper mache, using a mix of two parts water with one part glue, and strips of newspaper, while my three year old played with the baby.  When that was dry the baby ate in his high chair while my 3 and 5 year old painted, and as you can see from the interesting placement of green and purple, they had a lot of fun!  When the paint was dry they made trees, houses, people and rocks from modeling clay, I thought all of these things looked very much the same, except the two big rocks my three year old made, but the point is they had fun and learned a lot, and they knew what those things were supposed to be!