Recipe Monday - Simple Enchiladas

The other night I meant to make fajitas, but I didn't have some of the ingredients. So, I found myself trying to make enchiladas for the first time in my life. And they were great!

1 lbs beef strips

1 tablespoon butter

2 medium onions, chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 cup chicken broth
1 cup milk
2 cans (4 ounces each) chopped green chilies
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
12 flour or corn tortillas
1 cup (4 ounces) shredded Monterey Jack cheese
1 cup (4 ounces) shredded cheddar cheese
2 green onions with tops, thinly sliced
Sour cream
Salsa

chili powder

Directions:

Saute beef strips with a dash of cumin, salt and chili powder. Set aside.

In a saucepan, melt butter over medium heat. Saute onion and garlic until onion is tender. Blend in flour. Stir in broth, milk, chilies, salt and cumin. Cook and stir until thickened and bubbly. Reduce heat; simmer 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Set aside.

Grease a 13-in. x 9-in. baking dish. Spoon a little sauce in the center of each tortilla; spread to edges. Place about 2 tablespoons meat down the center of each tortilla. Combine cheeses; sprinkle 1-2 tablespoons on top of meat. Roll up tortillas and place in baking dish, seam-side down. Pour remaining sauce over. Sprinkle with green onions and remaining cheese. Bake, uncovered, at 350° for 20-30 minutes or until hot and bubbly. Serve with sour cream and salsa.

Yield: 6 servings.












 

Moment of the Week - The girls' show

Kindergarten Kids - Night Terrors

Problem:

Out of nowhere, your child is "waking up" at night screaming and talking gibberish. She's clearly scared and distressed, but there's nothing you can do. You go to her, hold her, bring her into another room, rock her, talk to her, smooth her hair, try to comfort her. Her eyes are open but she can't see you. She stares past you, through you, seeing things that aren't there. Obviously horrific, terrifying things. And she's calling for you, she needs you, but you're right there! Nothing you can do will shake her out of it. She'll go on and on, then out of nowhere, appear to "drop back to sleep". As you return her to her room, sometimes she'll wake up, and ask you why she's not in bed. She remembers nothing.

One of my daughters just started having night terrors. She's had three in about a week and a half. First time in her life. I'm at a loss.

Solution:

I have been told by multiple sources including friends, family, social media, and even academic studies, that there is nothing you can do. You just have to wait them out. Apparently, children grow out of them. I'm slightly concerned because in my opinion, five and a half is late to develop these terrors. I was under the impression they started most often at two and three, and wrapped up around now. So there's that.

I can't really sit around waiting it out, so we're trying various things. I feel certain (as many people have suggested) that it has to do with over-tiredness. The girls have stopped napping entirely in the afternoon, and I know better than anyone that they are tired. They go to bed around 9 p.m. and get up at 6:30 a.m. each morning. It's like this because of my husband's work schedule. He doesn't get home until 8 p.m. most nights. The schedule was working fine when they napped after school, but without that extra hour-two hours, the girls are struggling. So, we're trying to adapt down to an earlier schedule.

I thought it was perhaps a recently started allergy medicine, Zyrtec. I stopped it. But three days after stopping it, she had her third terror. So, it's most likely not that (although I haven't started it again, just in case.)

It could also be sugar. The day of the third terror, she'd consumed more sugar than an army of kids should consume. It was her half-birthday (we celebrate those), so she had had cake, cotton candy, regular candy, and root beer. Damn. So, we're trying to cut down on the candy, too, but of course, it was just Valentine's Day, so there's going to be a lot of "no" and a lot of tantruming in this house forthcoming.

Somebody mentioned red dyes. We don't have too much of that, I don't think.

Anyway, if I ever figure it out, I'll let you know. But for now, it looks like I'll have to sit by absolutely helpless for 10 minutes or so every so often while my daughter screams in terror, unable to comfort her.

The only relief is that the kids going through this don't remember it happening.



 

Saint Valentine: The Story Behind the Guy - Contributor Post

Thealogian Kate Allen from Life, Love, Liturgy, has been going through some amazing and exciting changes! And yet she still made time to explain the roots of Valentine's Day to us. We are so lucky.

...

As Americans flood Hallmark and grocery stores and 7-Elevens everywhere for chocolates, pink paper hearts, and roses for their beloveds, some will wonder who this Valentine guy was, and what the connection is between him and Cupid.

The connection is rather tenuous, it turns out. 

St. Valentine’s Day has been around for ages.  Legend has it that the actual saint named Valentine was a Roman martyr for the Christian faith.  His feast day on the Western liturgical calendar is February 14 because that is the day he is said to have been beaten with clubs and beheaded.  In any case, that was the day set aside for him in A.D. 496 by Pope Gelasius I.  This pope was the same one who banned Lupercalia, a Roman pagan fertility festival lasting February 13-15, during which observers of the festival ritual would run naked through the streets to counter sterility.  Most contemporary scholars reject any direct connection between the banishing of Lupercalia and the instituting of the feast of St. Valentine’s Day by the pope.

So why the violent death?  Some say Valentine failed to renounce his Christian faith to Emperor Claudius II in A.D. 269, when it was still a big no-no to be a Christian (Christianity wasn’t tolerated by the Roman Emperor until Constantine early in the fourth century).  Others say on the night before his execution, he wrote a letter to his jailer’s daughter, whom he had healed of blindness, signing his note, “From your Valentine.”

There is no substantial evidence that Valentine had anything remarkable to do with romance and lovers, however, until the time of Chaucer.  Chaucer is widely argued to be the one who made Valentine a man of fame and romance in his “The Parliament of Fowls” (a modern translation of which is available here).  It’s in this poem, written in the fourteenth century, that we get talk of lovers, birds, flowers, and finding the perfect mate on Valentine’s Day.  The earliest known reference to calling one’s beloved “Valentine” is in the fifteenth century letters of Margery Brews to her future husband, John Paston III.  The rest is history!

With the founding of the Hallmark Cards company was founded in Missouri in 1910, the feastday of St. Valentine was destined (or doomed), among other holidays, to become a highly ritualized day in the United States and other Western cultures.   Now Valentine’s Day, rather than serving as a memorial to a martyred saint, has become a feast of love.  Adult lovers celebrate it with everything from jewelry to store-bought Valentine’s cards to sweet treats to hand-written poetry to lace and lingerie to sex.  Meanwhile, the ritual of sharing some sentiment of “love” is taught early to children, who create Valentine’s card boxes as art projects and exchange miniature Valentine’s cards with all of their classmates.  Whatever its actual origins, and regardless of its actual connection to the man named Valentine, the Western rituals of Valentine’s Day won’t be going away anytime soon.

From my perspective as a liturgist, the lesson of St. Valentine is this: don’t underestimate the power of a retold story to change a community’s ritual, even if the community is as large as the Western world.  If the likes of Chaucer decided your life were worthy of a retelling centuries after your death, what rituals might spring up around you? 

Courtesy of “Presbyterian Voices for Justice” Facebook page

 

Learning Disabled or Teaching Disabled - Guest Post

Tracey over at Inside the Mommyvan has some really great tips on teaching when your child seems stuck on a concept. And I have to be honest, when my kids have to do this, we're screwed. I have no idea what she is talking about. Give me sine and cosine any day over this!

...

Last fall, one of my young students began to struggle with a particular math concept. In his case it was adding numbers with sums just beyond the next ten, like 8+7 or 43+9, and doing similar subtractions "across a ten.". i put that away for a bit and moved on to some different math topics, thinking maybe we just weren't quite ready to tackle that. The "Asian math" curriculum we've been using as our primary is known for being fairly rigorous and fast-paced.

When i revisited it in December, the results were no better; if anything it was worse. i tried every teaching method i could think up or read about, but nothing seemed to stick with this child. ALL of the manipulatives came out: the unit blocks, the base-ten set, the abacus, the ten frames. i drew pictures and diagrams. I explained with words and we counted on our fingers. We used online programs and iPad apps to make it more interesting. I offered bribes and made dire threats. He could get to the correct answer by brute force (and, interestingly, he had many of the sums between 10 and 20 already memorized) but i could tell that he just wasn't getting the key concept.

(That concept, for those interested, is that the "ones" being added are split into two parts. First enough are "given" to the other addend's ones digit to complete "the next ten" and then the remainder become the ones digit of the sum. 28+5 becomes, first physically with blocks or abacus and then on paper with little tens-and-ones pictures and finally with numerals, (28 + 2) + 3, and on to 30 + 3, and finally 33. That they learn this before the old "carry the one" vertical addition algorithm is critical to developing strong mental math skills.)

We'd hit a brick wall. This child was going nowhere, and I had exhausted all of the topics with which I could work around this one. If we were going to progress, I had to find a way to get this idea into his brain. My patience was wearing thin at this point, and i was about ready to throw in the towel and... i don't even know. We even tried an outside enrichment program, to no avail (it wasn't a very good one).

Finally, I took a leap and purchased another popular math curriculum. I'd previously shied away from it because it seemed to have a lot of busywork, drill questions which looked like duplicates of work we were doing online. it wasn't cheap for something i wasn't even sure we'd use, but i was desperate. It devotes a couple dozen pages to slowly building this particular topic up, step by tiny step. Surely the kids would be bored before we were halfway through, going over and over the same material.

I pulled every page relevant to our trouble topic out of both the main text/workbook and the supplement. i reviewed the first baby step with our manipulatives. I took a deep breath, and set the first page in front of him. He breezed through it! We tried two more pages the next day... same result. I could see the light bulb flickering to life! Before long, he'd made it through the entire section. Best of all, he's gotten a taste of success where previously there had been only frustration, and he's enjoying it! He is now doing sums in his head that he could previously do only with base ten blocks and lots of coaching.

Often, a failure in the classroom - even a homeschool classroom - is unilaterally placed on the student's shoulders. It's inattention, carelessness, laziness or willful obstinance, even a learning disability. For some students this is accurate, but before slapping one of those labels on we need to be sure it's not instead a failure of the teaching. As homeschoolers, we have the luxury of slowing down, even backing up to try a different teaching method or curriculum, but we must remember to take advantage to that and not be slaves to the checkboxes in our lesson planners. In our case, a simple change from one math book to another was the ladder we needed to hop right over that brick wall we'd slammed into a few months back.