Christy – Page 13

15 Ways to Burn 500 Calories Without Technically Exercising

(Random bit of entirely unrelated knowledge before continuing this post: a piece of homemade cherry pie is around 400 calories. Moving on.)

So you want to lose weight, but exercise isn’t your thing. I get that. Or maybe exercise is your thing, but right now your bigger thing is nursing a newborn or homeschooling what feels like half the community but is really your own children. I get that, too. Or maybe, just maybe, you think exercise is mind-numbingly monotonous unless it can be done in a national park or an ocean. I get that, too.

I know some studies say that weight loss is more than a simple calories in/calories out equation, but for now let’s ignore those scientific studies and stick to remedial math. Burning 500 extra calories a day will result in losing a pound a week. After a year, you will be 52 pounds lighter…if life were as easy as basic math, which it isn’t.

To make burning those 500 calories more fun, I found this article about ways to burn 500 calories. Unfortunately, many of them are basically “Exercise until you almost die.” Check them out. As for me, I’m not into near-death fitness, so I garnered the least intense, most fun, or most practical methods of burning 500 calories. In other words, I gathered the ideas that looked the least like actual exercise.

Here are fifteen fun (or at least practical) out-of-the-gym ways to burn 500 calories.

1. Play guitar standing up for 130 minutes. That’s intense, but think how good you’ll get!

2. Shop for two hours and 15 minutes. Some of us might think this is more torturous than a treadmill.

3. Give a two-hour massage. I volunteer if you need a subject.

4. Work in the garden for 90 minutes. Pretty flowers; yummy veggies.

5. Clean the house for 2 hours. You have to do it anyway.

6. Mow the lawn for 75 minutes. Ahem–that’s a push mower.

7. If you’re a gearhead, work on a car for 80 minutes. Vrooom.

8. Shovel snow for 50 minutes. Throw in a snowball fight and you’ve got extra burn. Wheeee!

9. Play with kids for an hour and a half. This ties apron strings and gets you all fitter…or more fit.

10. Ride a bike for one hour. That’s not exercise if you ride a real bike someplace fun, or ride a stationary bike while watching, I dunno, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World with your kids who share your off-beat sense of humor.

11. Smooch your hubby for six hours. Yes, that says six hours.

12. Eating for five hours will burn 500 calories. Let’s not address the logic of this weight loss recommendation.

13. Go bowling for two hours. That could almost negate the nachos you eat while you’re bowling. Woo hoo!

14. Ride horses for one hour and 45 minutes and you’re good to go. The horse is even “gooder to go.”

15. Lie still for 7 hours and 15 minutes. Hey, I do that every night. Check!

Before you call the cookie cops on me for sounding like a lazy mama who lies around eating pie in an effort to burn calories, I do exercise and don’t eat much pie or cookies–I only talk about eating pie and cookies. I walk regularly with the dog, hike mountains and canyons with a three-year-old on my back, and do basic muscle exercises with the family.

I do not go to the gym or run, unless I’m being chased by a bear that didn’t read the “Don’t run from a bear” pamphlets. And, yes, I was an A student who flunked gym in college, thank you. I just can’t do gyms. I can do trails, horses, and lying still for 7.25 hours.

I’m not sure I even want to ask for your thoughts on this post. Okay, fine–thoughts?

The Get Dressed Challenge

Some time ago I wrote about the importance of dressing for your man. While I firmly believe in and try to follow through with that philosophy, I admit that I am writing this in the middle of the day in my PJs.

Life gets in the way. It’s time to push it back out of the way.

For a little kick-in-the-pjs motivation, I have joined up with Like a Warm Cup of Coffee’s Get Dressed! challenge. I don’t know the details, but I do know that I am required to be dressed with shoes on by 8 a.m. each morning.

Are you with me?

Echo…echo…echo.

Ha ha, you’re so funny!

Come on! Take the challenge. It’ll be fun…except on Saturday morning.

See you bright and early with shoes on for the Get Dressed! challenge.

Okay, ‘fess up. What are you wearing right now?

Whether or not you participate in this challenge, hop on over to Like a Warm Cup of Coffee and read this insight from SarahMae about keeping the proper focus. These words are excellent for people who tend to be driven by guilt…like me, and whose focus has shifted from internals to externals.

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Teaching Kids to Handle Money Responsibly

There was a time when expressions like “A penny saved is a penny earned” actually meant something. You remember this poem, don’t you?

Use it up,
Wear it out,

Make it do,

Or do without.

What ever happened to financial responsibility and resourcefulness? They have apparently been usurped by the need for instant gratification and keeping up with the Joneses, the Browns, the Smiths, and who knows who else!

In America, the average college student enters “the real world” with over $20,000 of student loans. The average American household carries over $15,000 in credit card debt, plus a mortgage, medical bills, the aforementioned student loans, and car payments.

Where is the “simple” in being buried under mountains of debt by the time you hit 30? There is none!

It’s time to focus on the basics, one of which is teaching our children (and ourselves in most cases) how to handle money responsibly.

Today I am writing over at Purposeful Homemaking where I offer seven strategies for raising financially responsible children who agree with Thomas Jefferson’s sentiment, “Never spend your money before you have earned it.” Go check it out and raise your kiddos right! Someday they’ll thank you.

Click here to read 7 Tips for Teaching Kids to Handle Money Responsibly over at Purposeful Homemaking.

Click to read it now!

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10 Tips For Clean Floors Without Cleaning (much)

In our former lives dwelling in a house of nine people and a shaggy dog the size of a Harley, floors could get pretty dirty. I can think of about 18,274 things I would rather be doing than sweeping or mopping. (Vacuuming I don’t mind, since it involves chasing down a laughing six-year-old boy who double dog dares me to vacuum up his toes, so that qualifies as family bonding.)

photo credit

As the great (and tidy) Benjamin Franklin once said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Applied to floors, it means “Don’t get them dirty in the first place and you won’t have to clean them.” (Forehead smack.) Why didn’t I think of that seven children ago?

As my gift to you other forehead smackers, here are ten tips for keeping your floors clean without actually cleaning (much).

10 Tips for Clean Floors

Eat only at the table. This especially holds true if you have children or a hole in your lip (the most common excuse grown-ups use for spills). In good weather, shoo everyone outside to eat and call it a picnic.

Don’t wear shoes in the house. This at first appears to fly in the face of some theories such as the Flylady’s dress to shoes philosophy, but you can switch to house shoes when at home. Optionally, put comfy slippers on. Don’t wear your house shoes or slippers outside…unless the house is on fire, naturally.

Brush your pets daily…outside. It will significantly reduce the amount of pet hair on your floors…and in your food.

Feed your pets on a mat or outside. They might plead with those big brown puppy eyes to eat elsewhere, but resist. Resist!

Use one entrance to your home as much as possible. This confines the majority of the tracked-in dirt to one location.

Place mats on the floor near sinks and toilets. Better the spills and leaks go into a washable mat than onto the floor where they will get stepped in and tracked all over your carpet by a small child looking for Mama to announce “I missed.”

Cut back on floor clutter. The less you have on the floor, the easier it is to do quick maintenance cleans and prevent little messes from becoming ground in floor disasters.

Place floor mats inside each door and welcome mats outside of each door. This will trap a lot of dirt and debris. If you place a funky boot scraper/brush out there as well, people might (but no guarantee) use it.

Clean up spills immediately. It’s easier to wipe up the PBJ splatters right away than to scrub them out of your carpet and off your couch after someone steps in it…and someone will step in it.

Keep strollers and other outside “vehicles” outside. No parking the mini van in the family room. If tricycles and wagons must come in (and at our house, they must), run them over the welcome mat a few times, or pop shower caps on the wheels.

And a bonus tip: get a dog…with a big tongue…and name him Mop.

What’s your best tip for clean floors without actually cleaning (much)?

Linked up to Weekend Whatever, Teach Me Tuesday and Works-For-Me Wednesday.

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Save Money on Groceries and Earn $5

In a family our size, one of the best contributions I can make to the finances is winning the lottery or coming into a large inheritance, but since I don’t have the kind of luck that wins lotteries, and I’m not in too many wills, neither one is working for us. The second best thing I can do is cut back on our spending. Our biggest area of spending is groceries–no surprise there.

I don’t clip too many coupons these days, because I like to sleep, but I do use rebate sites. One of my favorites is Checkout 51.

Here’s how Checkout 51 works:

Go shopping. (This is the hardest part.)
Upload your receipt by snapping a picture of it.
Click on the products you bought.
Watch the savings rack up.

That’s it–it’s SUPER simple. It’s especially simple for me because my 10-year-old son has designated himself Family Savings Manager, and he uploads the receipts for me.

Checkout 51 is having a special right now. If you sign up through this link and upload a receipt within the next two weeks, you and I each get $5. That means you get your $5 and I get mine–we don’t have to split it.

You’re not going to be able to retire off your Checkout 51 earnings, but it’s a better life approach than buying lottery tickets.

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High School Literary Study Guide of The Scarlet Pimpernel {Review}

Take note: We received an electronic copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel pdf interactive study guide for high schoolers by Michael S. Gilleland and Eileen Cunningham in exchange for this fair and unbiased review. Thank you, Progeny Press, for this opportunity!

Don’t you love reading a book with your kids. I know I do. Now that I have teens (four teen girls, thank you), we often read books “together” without reading them aloud, although we’re still into read alouds. We don’t often do formal literature studies, because I had the joy sucked out of reading while attaining my five-year bachelor’s degree in English. When Progeny Press sent me the study guide for The Scarlet Pimpernel, I fought my instinct and assigned the book to my freshman, Elisabeth, and my seventh grader, Emily Rose, with the intention of reading the book simultaneously, but separately, and going through the study guide together.

Here’s the thing about youth–they can read a book without falling asleep. Both of them finished the entire book while I was still inching my way through chapter two. Sleep–you beautiful, cursed, necessity; how I love/hate you! I did finally finish the book at 2 a.m. one beautiful night.

Regardless of my slow pace through the book, the girls still were able to work through the study without my having finished the entire thing in advance. In fact, they didn’t need me to read it at all, but it’s so much more fun to read together than alone and to share quotes and frustrations and joys and laughs, isn’t it? Plus, I can add legitimately to the discussion if I’ve actually read the book. Duh.

About That Study…

The Scarlet Pimpernel study guide contains the following:

Instructor’s recommended usage guide with options–I love options!
Book synopsis, particularly awesome if you didn’t read the book–ack!
Author bio–fascinating! (I am totally over-using exclamation marks here–pet peeve.)
Historical background, which helps make this book an excellent history study, if only to add to a timeline or book of centuries.
Ideas for pre-reading activities…none of which we used, I have to confess, although we did use some as post-reading activities. We started reading the book before we received the study guide link.
Exercises divided into groups of five chapters, containing a fun variety of vocabulary activities (which my kids enjoyed), comprehension questions (which my kids didn’t like, since they already understood the book), analyses, and digging deeper activities (some of which they liked).
Overview, which can be used as a final review or exam.
Additional essays and projects
Answer key, in case you couldn’t stay awake long enough to read the book and therefore are struggling to contribute intelligently to the conversation.
More resources, including my personal favorite, further books to read–A Tale of Two Cities,
anyone?

What We Did…

We each read the book independently, but simultaneously. We bought the book on Kindle for free, and also bought a paperback copy for a little more than free. The girls (and I) prefer a real book to an imaginary one, but someone (me) had to read the digital version until everyone else was finished with the real thing.

We then dove into the study guide. I printed up the vocabulary sections for them to complete together or independently. I did not print up the comprehension or digging deeper questions. Comprehension questions are usually a waste of time on my kids, since they “get it,” so we breezed through these together. We didn’t skip them, because sometimes there are misunderstandings of the story line, so the questions do prove useful. We did, however, often have to be sneaky about our answers, because the discussion around this book made it so appealing to others in the family that they wanted to read it, too, and didn’t want spoilers. For digging deeper, we discussed the questions orally…preferably with a bowl of popcorn at hand.

I assigned them the final “exam” overview section to work on as they were working through the study guide instead of at the end. I’m not much of an examiner…except in math. I love giving math tests–bwaa haa haaa!

We dug a little deeper into the history of the time. We used the study guide, the intro in the book itself, and the internet. We also added the French Revolution and Orczy’s life to our timeline books and Orczy to our list of new favorite authors!

The Big Question…

Did this suck the joy out of the reading experience? Here are three brutally honest opinions on that matter:

Emily Rose (13): I already understood the book, so the comprehension questions were boring. It would be good if you didn’t understand it, but I understood it. [Teacher interjection: I knew this and we talk about books that we read anyway, so I breezed through these questions.]

Elisabeth (15): I thought the vocabulary was a good idea, but the comprehension questions were just kind of lame. If you didn’t understand the book in the first place, you wouldn’t understand it to answer the questions. [Teacher interjection: exact opposite answer of her sister. Hmmm.] Some of the discussion questions were interesting.

Christy (That’s me.): While I certainly wouldn’t assign a literary analysis to every book we read, I do believe it has its value. Used on, say, every fourth book assigned, a literary study guide of Progeny Press caliber is quite fun…at least for this book geek! (Oops, another exclamation point. Good grief.) I really enjoyed studying the book and time period with my two middle girls–they sometimes get lost in the school shuffle as we teach reading to littles and help olders navigate college at home. This opportunity provided scheduled time to share my love of literature with my two lovelies.

While my daughter’s reactions don’t sound very positive, they enjoyed most of our discussions. Just today I heard them chatting about the revelation of the Scarlet Pimpernel himself with another sister who just found out his identity, and {SPOILER ALERT} describing it as a “dramatic irony,” something they learned from the discussion questions. They’re “doing” the discussion questions without even realizing it.

I love that.

Additional Thoughts for My Fellow Roadschoolers

Printing vs. Interactive

While ideally you would normally print discussion questions and activity pages, those of us who live in about 25 square feet of space are a little printer-phobic, especially if you have to unbury the printer like an ancient Egyptian treasure every time you want to transfer something from the computer into the real world. That said, printing up this guide is not that big of a deal–do it all at once, throw it in the kids’ binders, and you’re done. Or you can do what we did, and just print parts of it.

If you really don’t want to do any printing, I have good news! because this is an interactive guide, the students can type the answers directly into the file, so there really is no need of printing at all! Of course, then there is need of a computer to do the work. Our computer is named The Behemoth for good reason, so lugging that baby out requires a forklift and some crow bars. (You could also load it onto a Kindle and have them write the answers on paper.) I gave the girls the option of using the interactive guide on the Behemoth, looking at the screen and writing on paper, or using printed sheets. They’ve done all three, but paper is the winner.

Internet Access

The download time was not an issue, so even if you’re stuck in that po-dunk campground with the nearly non-existent internet access because everyplace else was booked by weekend warriors, you should still be able to download the pdf guide with minimal angst. That’s good news.

Weight and Space

Many, if not all, of the books for which Progeny Press has published study guides are available on Kindle, so that is not a space issue. Of course, there’s nothing like the real thing–nothing like it. So grab the paperback and swap it out at an RV park when you’re finished…if you can bear to part with it after falling in love with the brave heroes of this treasure.

Summary

Progeny Press digital study guides are a really great option for portable literature studies without breaking your leaf springs.

A Little More About Progeny…

Follow Progeny Press on Facebook or Twitter and get to know this small family company.

Click on the banner below to learn what other homeschoolers have to say about a variety of literature studies for kiddos of all ages from Progeny Press.

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Online Bible Curriculum for the Whole Family

Note: Veritas Press gave us a one-year family subscription to VeritasBible.com in exchange for this fair and honest review. It would be ironic, don’t you think, if I would be dishonest on a review about a Bible curriculum. Ha ha. Am I the only one who sees the irony there?

People ask us what Bible curriculum we use, and I usually answer, “God’s.” We read straight from the Bible and talk about it. It works for us.

But that doesn’t mean we’re the least bit opposed to other programs in addition to getting the goods straight from God’s Book. Veritas Press’ Veritas Bible program has been an excellent supplement for my children. I’ve even learned a few things and brushed up on some rusty information.

Veritas Press’ Bible program is an online subscription that takes you through various chunks of the Bible. You can enroll in one segment, or purchase access to all three for the whole family, which is what we have for the year. They currently offer these three segments:

Genesis through Joshua
Judges through 2 Kings
The Gospels

The following are coming soon:

Acts through Revelation
1 Chronicles through Malachi and Job

The sections cover 32 events from those portions of the Bible. The students are guided through the lessons by real life people in period clothing (or possibly there was some time travel involved in the filming). They chat with the student and banter with each other.

My prudish side didn’t always like the bantering, like when the siblings were bickering, but my laid-back rough-around-the-edges side thought, “Ha, good one! I’ll have to remember that line for when I see my brothers.”

The videos move into animated lessons, with each collection introducing the kids to different animated friends–like a big ol’ gnat. Every kid loves a big ol’ gnat, right? Wink.

They then offer games and challenges for the kids to do to reinforce the lessons. The games might just make this the most exciting way to learn the Bible. See:

If you read it online, it must be true!

Seriously, the games do a good job of reinforcing what was learned, and it does make it fun for the kids. They’re not those horribly obnoxious loud video game type annoyances either…although they are, technically, video games.

One issue I have with all children’s Bible programs is the lack of realism, which sometimes makes Bible truths look like fairy tales–can you say cutesie little arks? Of course, children might be scarred by a video of hundreds of thousands of dead bloated bodies floating in the water, so…there’s that consideration. There must be a balance. The live people help to get across the idea that the Bible is real, and I don’t think the cartoons negate that.

What we did:

I used this program with three of my kids:

Elijah who is 10
Rebecca who is 7
Eliana who is 4 (I’m four and a half, Mommy.) Eliana who is four and a half

Elijah flies through lessons with no assistance whatsoever. He is completely independent, and is doing all three sections at the same time. The course keeps track of where he is so I can check in.

Rebecca needs minimal assistance, usually merely a matter of our rebellious internet connection. Unless she has a problem, she’s completely independent as well. She’s working through the Genesis through Joshua section.

Eliana needs hands-on help. She can’t read, so the challenges and quizzes require guidance. If someone is willing to help her, she can do them, but she’s really better off doing the program with someone else. She is also working through Genesis, but isn’t moving very quickly…but that’s how we roll…slo-o-o-o-o-o-wly.

The kids are retaining what they’ve learned, asking to do their lessons, and enjoying the process. I’m pleased.

Additional thoughts for my fellow roadschoolers:

I’d love to recommend this for roadschoolers, but it is highly situational. As you know, the roadschoolers two main considerations are…you guessed it…space and internet connection.

Space

Because this is entirely online, it takes up no space whatsoever, as long as you have the necessary electronic device to use it. If you’re reading this, you have the device, I’m guessing.

Internet connection

Here’s the rub. Some of you have great internet set-ups; others, not so much. We are not so much and sometimes we are not at all. This was a pretty big issue with this program. Sometimes it wouldn’t work at all with a slow connection, and other times it would alert us to the slow connection and work slowly, or at least switch screens slowly. When we had a good to great, this program was a delight; when we had a sub-par connection, it was frustrating for the kids.

One benefit is that when we would completely lose a connection and have to quit, the program saved our progress for the most part. That was nice. Elijah experienced some repetitions, which got dull, but when I worked with Eliana, we didn’t have that problem too often.

So consider this a situational recommendation. Remember, we are in a new place every 2-3 days and usually hooked up to church, RV park, or state park wi-fi. Your situation is almost definitely different than ours. For example, I have some great pictures of my kids using this program, but I can’t get them “down” from “the cloud,” because I have a not-quite-good-enough internet connection where we are this week. See what I mean? Of course you do. So make that judgment for yourself–if you can stream videos without frustration, you should be A-OK with this nifty Bible program.

Honestly, the best thing you can do is hop on over to their site and give the free trial a go.

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