I spent the weekend making various goos.  I started out with rosemary mint hair conditioner and toothpaste.  The conditioner recipe is found here and the toothpaste is just a combination of coconut oil, baking soda, and essential oils (peppermint, lemon, and orange).

I put the bulk of the toothpaste in a storage jar but put a small amount in a little container for daily use.  I hate, hate, hate regular toothpaste (don’t make me give you details or you’ll puke all over your keyboard) but am loving this homemade version!

Then I made some chapstick/lip balm.  I used this recipe and went with the lemon/orange/peppermint essential oils again.  It’s another hit and I’m pleased with it.

I wanted to make a hard lotion bar so started with this recipe and this one.  Then I remembered this one.  Now this is where I started getting a bit cocky.  I ended up using 75 grams beeswax, 250 grams cocoa butter, 100 grams shea butter, 75 grams avocado oil, 75 grams sweet almond oil, 10 capsules vitamin E (snip the capsules and squeeze the oil out), and some lemon & orange essential oils.  Having never made lotion bars before, I wasn’t completely sure if this would end up hard enough to be a bar, most especially in the heat of the summer.  Thinking about carrying gooey lotion bars around in my purse in July made me go the container route.  It turned out pretty hard and I think it would be good as a bar but not so sure it would hold up to that July heat terribly well.  I filled several small travel containers plus one big jar for keeping in the bathroom.  I love, love, love this stuff and will never, ever go back to storebought lotion.  I’ll tinker with ingredients, of course, to experiment but I am completely thrilled with this version.

(FYI:  The lotion wasn’t yet cooled & set up in the big jar below.)

For melting the wax and butters, I used a ramekin for the lip balm and a cleaned-out tomato juice can for the lotion with a rednecked double boiler.  They both worked well.

I got this beeswax from a local friend and am ga-ga over the smell.  I could sit & sniff this stuff all day long.  But grating/chopping it up for measuring/melting?  Not so much.  I tried a potato peeler.  No go.  I tried a chef’s knife.  No go — it worked but I was going to end up losing and eye and/or finger.  Finally, I settled on a cheap serrated knife.  It mostly worked but I had to work too hard at it.  I’ll have to think up the best way to do up our wax from our own harvest later this year.  I’ve gotta make it easier!

I wonder if the bees will try to eat me when I use the wax-containing goos this summer.

The excess roosters from this spring’s chicks were finally butchered late one recent evening.  After stuffing the skinned & gutted birds in a cooler for an overnight brine soak, we completely forgot about them.  Oops.  Today, we discovered that they’ve been frozen into one giant chicken ice cube ever since.  Lucky.  Now we’ll have to have one big chicken cooking day and put them in the freezer already cooked.  I’m cool with that.

Wintersowing finally began this past week.  In jugs are landrace tomatoes, cilantro, brown mustard seed, dill, orange star calendula, mystery aronia, Aunt Molly’s ground cherries, wildflowers, zinnias, marigolds, and chard.  Charlie also wintersowed several jugs for his garden.  There’s more to wintersow but I’d better get on it quick.  It’s almost March!

Steve got one of the raised beds (4′ x 40′) along the front walk built.  This one has sunchokes and a few mints in it from last year.  I’m not yet sure what its permanent use will be.  There will be another one between the sidewalk and the house when he gets to it.

Another bed going up, this one the first of six 4′ x 40′ in the front yard.  These will give each of the kids a garden bed of their own to do with as they wish.

So we did a quickie check on the bees a while back and concluded that the Carniolans were toast.  Then the $%@&@&$ snots decided to make fools out of us and come back to life right after we announced our conclusion to several folks.  Really, I just do not get these Carniolans.  Not that I get any bees but still…  Anyway, so I felt sorry for them being such a pitifully small cluster and yet impressed that they’d made it so far into winter.  I decided I’d make them a treat — some Bee Candy!  Only, like much of my cooking since moving here, things went wrong.  Terribly wrong.  Being a heartless SOB, I made the kids take it out and feed it to the bees anyway.  That’ll teach them for faking death

A couple of weeks ago, our homeschool group got a chance to hang with Hannibal’s mayor & city manager in the council chamber.  They even got to do a mock council — very cool!  That’s Charlie there to the mayor’s right and Duke & Isaac to the mayor’s left.  (The mayor is the fell in the center of the council seats.)

And just you wait until you see what I’ve been up to today!  Messes made & pics taken…

Josie turned three years old today.  Wow.

She had a great birthday, filled with family, friends, food, and pink stuff.  Lots of pink stuff.

The boys did a great job today!  Nary a one of ‘em chickened out.  Very cool stuff.

It’s past my bedtime now so I’ll give a full report when the news story comes out in a few days.  For now, I’ll leave you with two videos.  Steve manned the iPhone from one spot and I handled the camera from another.  Between the two of us, you get a complete picture.  Cody’s in the gray shirt & brown shorts, Isaac’s in the black, and Charlie’s in the white shirt & jeans.

Wednesday…  Thursday…  Friday…  Saturday!

Thanks to all of our sponsors so far!  Aunt Rosie & Denny, Grandpa George, and Anonymous.  Ahem.  I know who you are but since you chose to sign it “anonymous”, I’ll keep the secret.

If you look at their team page here, http://somo.org/speedkin, you see they each have raised $70 for a team total of $210.  Not too shabby for a trio of kids, right?

Ah, but it gets even better.  Their 4-H club has agreed to donate their “brag box” money in the kids’ names!  How cool is that?  They’ll bring a check the day of the plunge so it won’t show up until after the final tally.

And that’s still not all.  Steve’s employer, Titan Wheel, has written out a big ol’ check in the kids’ names, also to be presented the day of the plunge.  I know it’s just a monetary drop in the hat to such a huge company but I’m mightily impressed all the same that they’d take the time to do such a thing.

As of right now, the kids have raised over $1000 for the Special Olympics.  *proud mommy moment*

Of course, there’s still time to donate if you’re so inclined.  Maybe some stragglers will push that total even higher by Saturday morning!

Hint, hint, hint…

I’ve been taken over by an alien from Planet SoccerMom.  Help!  January and February are completely insane, schedule-wise.  I’m still taking pics but I have no time to get them uploaded & posted lately.  So how about we take a little journey into the past?

In October of last year, my Grandma Stark died.  The four younger kids and I piled into the (fuel-efficient) little car and headed off to her memorial in southeastern Kansas.  It was the best memorial ever — we had a blast!  Isn’t that the way it should be?  I think so.  Lots of pics were taken (some of which I’ll get around to putting up after I have time to finish sorting through them) but I’m especially fond of the following ones.

Meet my Uncle David.

He’s a teacher and it shows.

My grandma was a teacher, too.  She had a voice that always seemed to me like velvet and, when she laughed, it was the sound of that velvet being juggled and tossed.  Corny, yeah, but that’s what I always thought.

My Uncle David, my dad, and my brother David all have her voice.

She had this way of talking, a teacher’s way, that could make you understand anything.

Again, the gene pool lottery blessed my Uncle David, my dad, and my brother David with that same way of talking.

I wish I had those gifts.

And, as if having one unicycling uncle is not enough, I have two!  This is my Uncle Mark, the preacher man.

I want my memorial to be exactly like Grandma’s — including my kids having two uncles riding unicycles there!  You hear that, David & John??

Thanks to our donors so far!  I got an update in my email this morning.  I’ll post the interesting bits below.  (For those who stumble on this not having a clue, go here to read about it.)

Now here’s the really cool part:

As a team, they’re in the #2 spot and, as individuals, the boys are all tied in the 3rd spot.  Cool, huh?

I’ve printed the boys up sheets to hand out, explaining what they’re doing, so they can try to round up a few more sponsors now that the holidays are behind us.  Wish them luck!  (Or donate if there’s money burning a hole in your pocket.)

Try being G.I. Joe in a house full of Barbies!  That’s him there, in the black.  On the Pink Pony.  On Cinderella’s lap.

At least Cinderella Barbie and Snow White Barbie seem to be okay with sharing. 

(Is it is just me or does Snow White Barbie look a little too much like a cross between Rosanne Barr and Sarah Palin?)

Crazy Hair Barbie, however, seems to be a bit domineering.  She scares even me.

At long last, the Barbies all retire to the kitchen for a snack  It’s then that they remember they’re all anorexics and fall to the floor in a pile of bony self-pity.

G. I. Joe finally has some alone time to ride his Pink Pony in peace.

Oops, that didn’t last long.  Nellie is now trying an orange, sleeveless number on G. I. Joe.  A man’s work is never done.

(No, I didn’t set any of this up, you goobers.  I just sat here taking pics while the girls played Barbies.)

Duke had a pack meeting for Cub Scouts last night.  They learn all sorts of valuable life lessons, such as how to pelt each other with marshmallows and mummify each other in toilet paper.

That’s Duke there in middle wearing the hat & scarf.  I was tempted to shout, “Freeze!” and scurry across the floor to take a close-up pic.  But I figured Duke is already warped enough without me emotionally scarring him with over-mommying, embarrassing moments.  However, I fully reserve the right to further scar him at some point in the future.

FYI:  While the zoom camera on the iPhone is handy, it’s no match for trying to capture perpetual-motion boys across a large, dimly-lit auditorium.

Have you heard of it?  Mommypotamus posted about it yesterday.  I’m in.  Even if I have nothing earth-shattering going on in our lives to post about, I still love taking random pics of the kids.  Now I have an official excuse.