Fresh Apples

This week's giveaway: A give away contest for TWO scripture memory music CDs! 
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A basket of apples at the orchard we visited last week. So lovely!

Ways To Use Up Leftover Ham

This week's giveaway: A give away contest for TWO scripture memory music CDs! 
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A few weeks ago I found a large ham marked down at the grocery store; Strider looooooves ham but we almost never eat it because it's almost never at a price that works well for our grocery budget. This ham did, though, and we'll be eating from it for a while to come. :)

Here are ways the ham has been used or will be used.

1) Ham Salad ~ Last night de-boned the ham and trimmed the fatty bits (but didn't throw them away!). I then ran the ham through our little food processor (it's an old Betty Crocker one and I can't find it online, so I'm wondering if they don't make it anymore. That's sad, because it's a trooper). The chopped ham went into the freezer to make ham salad for Strider's work lunches. I don't have to think about buying lunchmeat for a while now.

I ran the food processor in the bathroom because the striderling was sleeping... in an efficiency apartment, areas quickly become multipurpose. ;) If I'd done it in the kitchen, the noise of the processor would have woken him up.... and I am of the firm opinion that Sleeping Babies Should Be Allowed To Sleep.

2) I used the ham bone today to make this split pea soup. I heartily recommend the recipe! Strider didn't remember ever having split pea soup before and was intrigued by the process and a fan of the flavor, although he's now itching to try cooking it on his own so he can mess around with his own spice combinations.

3) The fatty bits I want to use as a substitute for salt pork in some version of Boston baked beans. This crockpot recipe looks pretty intriguing. The DHM has a post about cooking beans in the Common Room Kitchen and it's well worth a read if you're new to the world of dried legumes.

Other recipes that would work well for using leftover ham:

* One-Handed Quiche

* Ham & Egg Breakfast Burritos

* Noodle Fritters

* Potato Cheddar Ham Soup

The Poor Zeus Dog.

He has a biopsy scheduled this coming Tuesday to test for Lupus or other auto-immune disorders.


This depresses The Equuschick considerably.

The DPG's Chore Chart

I posted about it over at Frugal Hacks. This wall hanging I found at a yard sale was my jumping off place.

My bathroom smells like ham.

Any guesses as to why?

Hint: These three things are associated with the reason.

1) a sleeping baby

2) an efficiency apartment

3) a food processor and a bunch of leftover ham

More on it later, including all the ways we intend to use said leftover ham, but for right now the baby is not sleeping. ;)

Four Moms: Memorization **And A Give Away!**

Don't miss what the other four moms have to say:

Raising Olives,

Life in a Shoe,

Smockity Frocks,

and ME, at the Common Room

This week we are discussing memorization.

Obviously, or at least it seems to me something I would take for granted about my family, most of our memory work has focused on scripture memory, although we do take breezy little trips off into the realm of poetry memorization and the memorizing of Shakespeare, and we often speak in movie quote, although this is spontaneous rather than planned.

However, most of what follows could be used just as well whether you are memorizing the first of the Psalms, a Hamlet soliloquy, or a Yeats poem, although obviously (there's that word again), I think one of them is more important than the others. These tips are probably a bit much for the memorizing of grocery lists, and if you want help with memorizing your kids names, I am not your woman. Some days around here we resort to Thing Four and Thing Five. Of course I am joking. You think I can remember their birth order?

I have a couple of guidelines which we more or less loosely try to follow when memorizing scriptures.

Don't let the music overpower the lyrics if you are using verses set to music: I do like Bible verses set to music, but for memorization purposes, not when set to complicated music, not to music where the recording is so jazzed up and spazzed out that the instrumentation overwhelms or just outshines the lyrics. I like it simple, so I can focus on the words- we're memorizing the words, after all.

Context matters: I don't much like verses out of context, but of course, all verses memorized in singlets, as they must be at some point, will be out of context. But still, if you're memorizing verses by topic, don't take them out of context and apply one topic to a verse that isn't related. Confusing? Here's an example of what I mean- a friend of mine attended a catechism class for potential, well, whatever- new members? Converts? Not sure, it wasn't a church I've had much to do with. They were to memorize questions and answers, both of which had verses attached. One of the verses to memorize was Acts 2:37,' when the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and asked Peter, brothers what must we do to be saved?'

They were also supposed to memorize the answer to that question- that is, question and answer, both verses, were memorized as a matching set. Except the answer to be memorized wasn't the very next verse,where Peter answers the question, it was some other verse from another book, from another place and context altogether, and had nothing to do with Peter's answer to the question.

I've also seen a couple verses from Job quoted authoritatively, when the statements made in those verses are made by Job's comforters, about whom God said nothing that they said is true.

Don't confuse the topic: For the most part, I like memory work to be memory work, not diluted by something else. That is, while we do use Bible verses for handwriting practice, I personally don't think that this is all that effective for memory work, though as you'll see below, I think it could be different with typing practice.

So... how? Basically, memorization requires repetition and some regularity. There really aren't huge shortcuts (as in so much of life). There are some helps.

• You can use this free memory verse box system. This would work,by the way, for any memory work- speeches, poems, grammar rules.

• You can type up (or find online and paste to a document) the things you want to memorize with the children, print them out, cut them up and paste to index cards to use with the above system, or you can laminate them, punch a hole in the corner, attach them to a d-ring, and have portable memory verses..

• Write out the verse on a white board or chalkboard. Read it aloud. Erase all the one letter words, read it aloud, inserting the missing words orally. Erase all the two letter words, repeat. Three letter words, repeat. I also erase the reference last. If it's a long verse or we are pressed for time, I will erase all 1 and two letter words, then all three and four letter words.

• Same concept, but write out each word on a separate index card. Lay them out, then take turns removing an index card, and reading the entire verse as though the missing word were still there.

• Say a verse loudly, then whisper it, then shout it.

• Take turns repeating a memory verse at the table at dinnertime.

• Print out a longer passage for memory work, cut it apart so each line is on a single strips and put the strips in order.

• Here's an idea I just found on this website:

write (or type) the passage on a practice sheet in full, word-for-word. On the opposite side of the page, write (or type) it out in verse-by-verse format, but only providing the first letter of each word, the capitalizations and punctuation. After reviewing the full-text version, turn the page over and try to do the first-letter version.

• If that sounds intriguing to you, then you'll love this- it has a handy tool that converts a chunk of text into a chunk of first letters of each word for you.

• Put the verse to music. The easiest way to do this is to find somebody else who already has. Abe and Liza Philip did this with over two dozen verses on God's Word from A to Z (full disclosure- they sent me a free CD several months ago. Also full disclosure- my godson Blynken asked for Psalm 34:15 to be replayed all the way home, a distance of some 20 miles, one night. I love John 3:16, and if you can resist singing along to 'o give thanks unto the Lord,' well, you're a stronger and possibly more sour woman than I. Or maybe you just have laryngitis. I guess I won't judge)

Here you may freely download 24 verses set to music.

There are a number of longer passages in the NIV set to music here, also free. The quality of the sound isn't the greatest, but if you open your Bible or an online bible program to the passage and follow along as they sing, you should have no trouble.

• Use tunes you already know- you could use the tune of Ring around the Rose to sing "In the beginning/God created/ the Heavens and the earth/Genesis 1:1" It's not particularly inspired match, that tuen and that verse, but it works well enough to help memorize it quickly.

• If you want to combine scripture memory with some typing drill, this is a neat free program.

Other Resources:

Navigator Press' Topical Memory System has been around for a long time, although I've never used it, I've seen excellent reviews (just don't get the Kindle version).

Bible Memory System. Illustrated Mem-lok. God's Word Changing the Heart

Memlock has been a favorite of many for year, although, again, I've never used it.

Another sort of memorization- the Bible chronology box is cool.

What about you? What are your success tips for memorization?

~ ~ ~ ~ The Four Moms Are Doing Another Give Away! ~ ~ ~

What's more... it's a give away with two winners! You could win either:

a) The God's Word From A to Z CD (why, yes, the very one mentioned earlier in this post. It sounded good, didn't it? :)

or

b) One of the Psalms CDs (Pure Words, Ascending, or Songs from the 40s, 50s, and 6os) from Jamie Soles ~ I've been listening to Ascending on and off almost all day and really liking it. His style reminds me a bit of Michael Card and I love how he's taken the Psalms of Ascent and grouped them together into an album. Personally, I think it would make for an excellent and meaningful study period for a teenager to combine this album along with the reading of Eugene Peterson's A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, which is also based on those Psalms.

The Small Print & How To Enter:

~ A to Z CD winner must be a resident of the United States

~ Psalms CD winner resident of the United States or Canada

~ winners will be chosen at random

Four Ways To Enter!

1) Leave us a comment (we really do love to hear back from our readers!)

2) Subscribe to this blog (it's an option on the sidebar... and you've been meaning to do it for a while anyway, right? :)

3) Tweet a link to this post *or* like us on Facebook if you're not a twitterer

4) Facebook a link to this post

Please leave us a separate comment for each thing you've done so we can better keep track of entries. :)

Aaand the winners will be announced next week in the next Four Moms post!

(full disclosure: most of this post written by the DHM, but contest information entered by the HG as the DHM is somewhere without internet access for part of this week. Thus, the HG takes full responsibility for any issues with this post :)

Comments are now closed.  Winner to be announced later today (October sixth)

Baby Joseph has gone home.

In March I posted about Joseph, a Canadian baby with a rare and fatal neurological disorder. A Canadian medical board (who refused to visit Joseph in person) and a Canadian judge ordered him removed from life support and just left to die in the hospital instead of agreeing to his parents' request for the placement of a trachea so that he could come home and be with his family before dying.

Frank Pavone, of Catholic Priests for Life, helped the family get a transfer to a hospital in the United States where they were able to successfully do the tracheostomy. The family then got several more months together before little Joseph's death yesterday afternoon.

So thankful for the extra time his family had with him, and so thankful for his parents' exemplary perseverance and love.

Not Feeling Quite So Inspired Today.

That is to say, The Equuschick is inspired...just asking different questions.

Why, after a long and exciting day trip yesterday and a late night last night, why was the 2 year old up at 6 am?

Why did he wake his sister up at 6:30?

When will The Equuschick have coffee? How soon does she get a hot shower?

An inquiring mind just wants to be able to look into these little mysteries of life and comprehend them. Yes?


But enough of that. Yesterday was a good day. Came home to a delicious pot roast Shasta had prepared for JennyanyDots, Pipsqueak, and The Equuschick. Watched the first episode of the A&EPride and Prejudice with said family members.

Today will be a good day too. The Equuschick shall repent of this morning's inner tantrum, complete with stomping and sighing and door-slamming that leaned a wee bit more in the outward direction.

We shall move forward. We shall, as The Equuschick tells the 2 year old, Find Our Happy Faces.

Couponers: $2 in CVS Extrabucks!

Pledge not to be a money trasher here and get a $2 Extrabucks coupon e-mailed to you. Nice, yes? :)

Possibly Strider's Favorite Kind of Soup

A variation of this recipe for Cheddar Ham Soup always makes Strider ridiculously happy in the autumn. You know the smile guys have that lends credence to the notion of "the way to a man's heart is his stomach"? Yeah, that smile... he gives it every time he gets this soup. ;)

It's extremely easy and has simple ingredients (ie... it's not "a can of x and a can of y" ~ THAT does not make for homemade soup!). I usually can get it and a batch of muffins made in a little over half an hour.

How do I do the variation? I skip the peas and add more carrots and onions. I don't particularly care for peas in soups, unless they're of the dried/split variety that make for a porridge-y soup.

The recipe says it serves 7... personally, if there are more than four people in your family, I'd double it. This stuff tastes excellent as leftovers and I think portion sizes would have to be scanty indeed to really serve 7 in just a single batch.

Streeeeeetch Those Grocery Dollars!

You're standing in the grocery store, staring at incredibly good marked down deal, and trying to figure out if it's worth getting or not... like my bananas from a few weeks ago... the whole box was $2.99, but there are only two of us eating bananas and there is no way we could eat through all those bananas before they went bad. I brought home the box (shoulda seen Strider's face when I asked him to carry it in from the car; it's fun being married to a husband who appreciates cheap deals) and we used the bananas in four ways.

1) Shared them with family: Some of the bananas went to my mother-in-law and mom. This is always something to consider when looking at a deal; are there other people who could benefit from it? Call them to see about splitting the costs, or simply share your surplus.

2) Eating ~ Strider had a banana in his work lunch for many, many days.

3) Freezing for Smoothies ~ I peeled and individually wrapped the nicer bananas in saran wrap and stuck them in the freezer to throw into smoothies.

4) Freezing for Banana Bead ~ I peeled the more browned bananas and put them in ziplock bags, 3-6 per bag.

Other ways to stretch grocery dollars with steeply discounted prices:

Milk ~ Recently I found two half gallons of milk marked down to .80/each at our grocery store. We didn't need milk, but I scooped them up anyway... $1.60 for a gallon of milk is an incredible price. They now sit in my freezer, waiting to be used for bread and muffin baking this winter. I don't like drinking milk that has been frozen, but it works well for baking.

Bread ~ Bread can be frozen (which is why we're still eating some of the yummy cinnamon raisin bread I found for .59/loaf at the discount bread store), but if it's gone to the dry and stale stage or you don't really have a lot of freezer room, you can toast it, throw it in the blender, and have breadcrumbs. Voila! Breadcrumbs are great as casserole toppings, to help with meatloaves, for providing breading for fried goods. You can buy bread crumbs at the grocery store, but they're usually insanely overpriced.

Ground Beef ~ When I get bulk packages of this on sale, I tend to just divide the raw meat into uncooked pound size portions and freeze them individually. This is because we have a deep freeze... and I really think an extra freezer is one of the best investments a family can make... but they do take some saving up to get. If your freezer space is limited, you can batch cook the ground beef (adding in onions and some seasonings) and then freeze it in quart sized bags.

Apples ~ Last year apples went on sale for .59/lb and I made crockpot apple butter for the first time ever. It was fantastic and we're still eating some of the stuff I stashed in our freezer (we didn't have a chest freezer at that point, either. I made sure to put it in compact containers and then put them in the door of our kitchen freezer).

Strawberries and other berries ~ Flash freeze these. Rinse them, lay them out flat on a cookie sheet and put the cookie sheet int he freezer for an hour or so. Then freeze them in ziplock bags. Use them with the frozen bananas for smoothies!

Yogurt ~ freezing yogurt does not harm the beneficial cultures. There's another smoothie ingredient ready to go! :) Or a way to get cheap frozen yogurt.

Peppers and Onions ~ lightly sauteed with garlic, thrown in bags or containers, and you're halfway there for pasta sauce!

** What are other things you've purchased on major clearance and used/preserved creatively? **

And stay tuned for a post on how to find ways to help build up savings for something like a deep freezer!

Addendum: Should Food Stamps Be Good At Farmer's Markets?

Well, yes, as good as they are anywhere else groceries are sold.  And I particularly like this program thus far.

Holders of the food stamp card (SNAP) can get twice as much bang for the federal food buck if it's locally grown and sold at the Farmer's Market.  To me the coolest part of this, the part that is how this sort of thing ought to be done, is, sadly, the part they are seeking to change.  It's this:

Thus far, the Fair Food Network has supported the program almost exclusively with philanthropic dollars (including support from over 30 local and national foundations and corporations, particularly George Soros’ Open Society, which chose DUFB to be beneficiary of their Special Fund for Poverty Alleviation).

 There are limitations- one of them being it's just good for up to 20 dollars a day, but spending 20 dollars for 40 dollars with of fresh, locally grown, nourishing food is pretty cool

I'd love to see this remain supported by philanthropic dollars, and expanded to other areas.

Incidentally,if this is important to you, there is a way you cand do this in a small way yourself, even if such large scale philanthropy is not available in your area.  If you know somebody with a tight budget, buy them some produce, a gift card to a local farmer's market, or slip them a few dollars and offer them a ride to the farmer's market.
Or buy a case of locally grown, organic food and donate it the local soup kitchen.
Or make a good, wholesome meal using the food you think people need to eat more of, and take it to the local soup kitchen, or wherever the homeless in your area seem to be found.

We've had the boys mother stay with us a few times early on in our relationship (she has refused invitations since them) and without comment, cooked foods from scratch, giving her the recipe when she expressed interest in a meal.  I gave her a cookbook all about egg recipes when she told me she needed to know more ways to prepare eggs because WIC provided them with more eggs than they would eat.

When my husband was active duty I often invited young military brides to go to the commissary with me, both to show them the ropes at the commissary, and to show them what it might look like to buy ingredients rather than convenience foods. Those curious enough would ask me about what I was buying and how I prepared it.  This was a low key, non-confrontational, comfortable, and even fun way to learn about how other people cook. I learned things, too, so it was mutual.


Just a few ideas.  You may know of better ones.  A great big thank-you to K.W. for passing on the link to the story about this excellent program.

The Magic Keeper

Shasta and The Equuschick, like most married couples, differ in many ways but one way in which they are very much alike is their shared sense of cynicism. This is not necessarily always a bad thing. They're practical. Feelings matter to the extent that they ought to be acknowledged, but never to the extent that they ought alone in themselves to define their choices, convictions, or attitudes. So far so good.

As a child The Equuschick was quite a sentimental soul, but just as her childhood heroine Anne Shirley discovered that romance was not appreciated in Avonlea,so The Equuschick grew up and discovered that sentiment did not accomplish much and that sometimes you get hurt and have to limp along anyway, and that sometimes it might be Fall outside but your old friends are gone and somehow, well, it is such a terrible cliche, but sometimes the crisp fall leaves get rained on in a storm and the rains wash the magic away. Life goes on. But there is no more magic.

Such was the death of The Equuschick's sentiment and the birth of her cynicism.

Shasta's childhood innocence was sacrificed entirely on the altar of his parents' divorce and any sentiment that may have survived such a childhood as his died with his comrades in Iraq.

Do not misunderstand The Equuschick, The Equuschick and Shasta are not unhappy people. They're very happy. And when they married and set up house, they set it up with love and good humour and they set it up with commitment and conviction.

But no magic. They will have been married for three years in November and for themselves they haven't bothered much with creating any unique family traditions, and decorations to celebrate the passage of the seasons just seems like such a hassle when there is so much that must be done. Who has time to make the Magic?


No, they are not sentimental people.

But children are sentimental people. They come that way, wanting magic. It is a sin and a shame for children to grow up without it. They grow up too soon without it and they grow up believing it doesn't exist.

There was a time when The Equuschick stepped out from under the umbrella of her childhood magic and she knew then that the World was cold, but because she had grown-up in the protective cocoon of her family's magic she never stopped believing that warmth and joy and delight existed at all. Even in the dark, she had faith in warmth and light because in her mind's eyes, and hands, and nose, and tongue, she had tasted these good things in the form of Russian Tea and hot chocolate and holiday music and pumpkins and Anne of Green Gables.

Yes. She had tasted these things and known that they were true.

And yes, there are things that must be done. But they must be done the right way and in the right spirit. This is hard. Our cold hearts sometimes need help.

What sullen spirit cannot be cheered by a strain of Vivaldi and a handfull of candy corn? What dark mood cannot be dispelled by a whiff of homemade potpourri on the stove and what drained heart cannot be cheered by home-made mashed potatoes and a roast on a cold and rainy day?

If it were not just and right that our spirits be trained and conditioned to respond to the cues of our physical senses, The Equuschick doubts very much that the Word would be so full of references to aromas and tastes and seeing and touching. All these things are tools that we must train to appreciate beauty and joy.

All these things being so, what did The Equuschick do?

She set aside the larger chores she'd meant to tackle the other day and went into town instead to buy apple cider, candy corn, and oranges and lemons. She came home and put the oranges and lemons with cloves and cinnamon to simmer as potpourri on the stove, and she put the apple cider in the crockpot with a splash of pineapple juice and more cloves and cinnamon and put the candy corn in dishes on the table and resolved even that at some point soon she really ought to purchase a pretty and seasonally appropriate candy bowl.


Why?

Because somehow through her children's childhood, she must rediscover her own.

Because it is now her turn to introduce the coming generation to the magic of the Story all around them.

Because she is the Gate-keeper. She will use the keys of all five senses to open wide the Gate of her family's home to delight and warmth and joy and gratitude. She will harness the powers of the senses to dispel the demons of despair, anger, irrelevance and yes, sometimes even cynicism.


Because she who guards the gate must also guard the magic.

Menu Plan Monday: at HG & Strider's

Since Strider works the night shift (4:30 pm through at least 1 am, very shortly to be 3 am as the factory will start running ten hour shifts) and the Striderling isn't yet of the I'm Awake! And What's For Breakfast?! Stage (actually, he is, but his breakfast is very predictable: donor breastmilk ;), our menu plans aren't done in quite the traditional style. We very rarely have a traditional breakfast, for one. I get up a few hours before Strider does and eat something on my own and then when he gets up, we'll shortly be having a big lunch. I pack him a work "lunch" (dinner at the factory is around 9 pm) and then eat something by myself in the evenings. When he gets home, he feeds himself before bed. Thus, breakfasts and dinners are very, very simple and I often make enough of the big meal to work into one of the other meals we eat (my dinner, his work lunch, etc.)

Breakfasts

* Yogurt

* Cinnamon Raisin toast with peanut butter and homemade apple butter (found the cinnamon raisin bread for .59 at our local bread store and bought enough to stock the freezer with)

* omelettes

* smoothies (oats, yogurt, fruit, juice or water)

* apples and cheese

* cous cous

Lunches

* Tortellini Soup with Quick & Easy Garlic Breadsticks and fruit on the side

* Ham, Mashed Potatoes, and broccoli (ham found marked down at the grocery store)

* Split Pea Soup (made with the hambone, of course!), bread, fruit

* Crockpot Pasta & Fagioli Soup

* Marinated Chicken Thighs (still working on what I want them marinated in), butternut squash, cous cous

* Black Beans and Rice, carrot sticks & cottage cheese

* Ravioli, creamed spinach, apples & cinnamon

* Grilled Cheese Sandwiches, apple slices with cinnamon

Strider's Work Lunches

* ham salad sandwiches (made with leftover ham)

* boiled egg sandwiches (he likes to have a sliced boiled egg, with salt and pepper, and on bread with Miracle Whip. Much easier than egg salad!)

* peanut butter and homemade apple butter sandwiches

* Muffin Tin Meatloaves

* Leftovers

September

Since the first or second of this month, we have had:

Three serious E.R. visits:
One for my husband's kissing the face of death with C02 poisoning

One for my married daughter's oxygen sat issues down in the eighties due to asthma, and I drove her to the E.R. at 3 a.m. or so, reminding me of many frightening trips of a similar nature when she was a wee tot.

And one for my dad.  He was up wandering around at o'dark thirty, as he is wont to do, which is why my mother locks the doors from the inside.  He fell down and couldn't get up again.  He has done this before, although mostly he's just fallen out of bed and not been able to get back up.  Partly it's a mobility issue, but mostly I think it's a confusion issue.  This time, however, he also smacked his head and cut it when he fell and he wasn't quite himself, whoever himself is these days.  He wasn't talking, nor was he very responsive.  My husband and son-in-law got him off the floor and into a bed, but then it was decided the ambulance would be a good call.  They menfolk went to work, assuming the ambulance workers could handle it.

The ambulance service sent two women- middle aged, says my mother.  Old, says my 15 year old.  Whatever their ages, they were unable to operate the gurney and get my 6'3" or so tall father out the door and onto the ambulance.  I will add that all the doors in my mother's house are wheelchair accessible.  And my 13 and 15 year old went next door to help and managed to get the 'broken' or 'caught' gurney uncaught (because, they say, there was nothing wrong with it but operator error).  At the hospital they determined he has a concussion, and sometime Monday (today) they will do another CAT scan and maybe an MRI, or some other alphabet soup test.  The doctor thinks it's time for Mother to consider other housing arrangements for him, because he is very difficult to move, maneuver, and manipulate into doing things he has no desire to do.

So, three E.R. trips, three weeks.

Furthermore, in the realm of personal health, the flu visited all of us except, and this is no small mercy, the Cherub.  It seems to have hit the HM and me twice, which hardly seems fair. Also, my mom reports she believes my dad began to display signs of the stomach bug in the hospital, which is also no small mercy as it's better for my mom to have the hospital staff have to clean up that mess.


I've had five doctor appointments and/or time consuming medical tests (compare this to usually not visiting the doctor that many times for the whole family in a *year*) and Pip had two or three, mostly because we changed doctors and this one takes his job more seriously than the last.


I seem to be fighting off the start of one of those nasty head colds that makes your head feel like it weights fifty pounds and all you want to do is lay it down.

The van died and had to be towed. We had to fix the tires as well. And our married kids each had car trouble- one just got her car into the shop and the other just got it out and is selling it. Plus Shasta's truck is making funny noises.


Then there was a major upheaval/rearranging of the upstairs. I would not list this but it was M.A.J.O.R. and necessitated Jenny's swain having to rebuild some shelves for us and the full rearranging took something like three or four days to finish, plus my husband and I had to have our perennial, er, *discussion* about how his speakers trump any other furniture arrangement I have in mind (at the moment we compromised, which means each of us is dissatisfied and feel the other one won). it also involved sorting through several hundred books, looking them up at Amazon to see if they worth anything, listing those that were for sale, sending those that were not out to the garage for later removal to a thrift shop. This really is one emotional blow after another to a book lover, you know? Say yes.

We had a singing at our house, and we had company-company (the kind you have to clean the house for) twice. No, wait. We had to cancel one set of company-company because of the flu, but not before we'd cleaned the house anyway. We did have the Striderling and his parents over for an overnight stay, which was fun, and we had a friend out to help rearrange the house, plus the swain came for two weekends, plus several of the young folk stayed the night after the singing, plus the little boys a couple of times, plus the apple orchard/pumpkin patch trip combined with thrift shop and grocery store shopping.. I don't know how many extra people that means we fed, I used to try to count them, but I gave up a while ago.

My fifth child turned 21. Yes, this is traumatic.

We had one more set of overnight company come stay with us last night or at least, I assume they did, since I am writing this on Sunday afternoon and they are not expected until late Sunday evening.

We also had the gospel meeting,  an overnight camping trip for the guys,my son went hunting on his first realio, trulio hunting trip (there was one practice run previously, but this was the real deal) with my husband's boss Saturday morning at 4 a.m. so then of course I thought cheerful thoughts about hunting accidents until I fell asleep and was still in bed when he got back without having seen a deer until they were driving back home and spotted, oh, I don't know, four. They went out again several hours later until long after dark and again saw nothing.

I'm writing this on Sunday afternoon and I leave for a week long camping trip with my husband, our two youngest, and about 300 Christian homeschoolers that I don't know all that well, but I'll be sharing a cabin with a dozen of them.   I am not packed for camp and I have about six seven eight nine loads of laundry to fold on my bed, and I am not exaggerating. I have a huge writing project I am one month behind on and there is no internet at the camp. Plus, I am so not a social person and the entire trip fills me with angst and in the wee hours of the night anguish for reasons we do not discuss so about that laundry... My husband and I slept in the guest bed two three nights in a row because I did not get to the folding of the laundry, unless I don't get to it Sunday night, in which case it will be four nights, so naturally, because I have so much to do I decided to go ahead and clean out my closet and do some rearranging of the contents.  Plus, write a blog post.

Also, one of the medical tests I had this month reveals I have a low functioning thyroid and thus no energy or stamina to speak of and another reveals I have arthritis in lots of places and thus lots of pain (neither were really a surprise and I'm still waiting the results of the rest of the tests).

And actually, I feel pretty good about all this, mainly because it puts the unfolded laundry in perspective and explains why, no, thank-you very much, years of *no* energy were not a sin.

Also the torn achilles tendon the previous doctor diagnosed is just a bone spur. On the achilles tendon. So it still hurts just the same. Plus I have bone spurs on my knee, but not on the one that hurts the most, go figure.

In the month of September I have also listened to you-tube videos of Old McDonald had a farm at least a million times because my grandson the Dread Pirate Grasshopper likes them,although as his mother points out I have nobody to blame for this except myself and I plead guilty, plus  we have sung all about the Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, the Farmer in the Dell, the lady who sailed away on the crocodile, the five little ducks who did not obey their mama, the doggy in the window, the monkeys who jumped on the bed, the monkey who chased the weasel, and the monkey who drove his grandmama crazy with Old MacDonald had a farm but of course that one isn't really a folk song it is autobiographical and I made it up on the spot.

And the clothes on the bed? They are not folding themselves, nor are my bags packing themselves, nor is my writing project writing itself (because this, o best beloved, is most assuredly not it).

But there were cookies in the oven when I started writing this, and Jenny made Nutmeg muffins and banana cake, and there are grandbabies I have snuggled with and I sold nearly 100 dollars worth of books this month most of which Pip kindly mailed for me including one at the very last minute on Saturday morning when she really wanted to rest.

Also I am arguing with my husband about where his speakers go instead of burying them with him, a blessing of which I am more acutely aware than most, and a grace I do not deserve.

And my 21 year old took my beleaguered mother out to lunch and my 15 year old volunteered to babysit for the young marrieds at church tomorrow night and my son may bring him a deer for the freezer this month and if he doesn't, he is having a wonderful time and I am quite sure when he came home Saturday morning he was two inches taller, and I picked delicious crisp apples with Blynken and Nod,  and God is good, no matter what.In fact, I often ponder if my dad's dementia isn't a mercy as well.  Like King John of the great big India rubber ball in A. A. Milne's poem, I have to say my father was not a good man, but perhaps it is a mercy to him to be in his second childhood.

Backward, turn backward, Oh Time! in your flight
Make me a child again--just for tonight!

Was never a poem to which I could connect, and no doubt his childhood was worse than mine, but maybe getting a second childhood is what he needed after all.

It's September, and my husband is alive, and I am richly blessed.  It's September, and the days are polished with a morning haze.


It's September, and the Equuschick has new prescriptions for new asthma medications (which she cannot currently afford, but it's a step in the right direction) and she can breathe.  It's September and:

The goldenrod is yellow;
The corn is turning brown;
The trees in apple orchards
With fruit are bending down.

It's September and I have see all my Progeny step up and pitch in with blessed acts of service.  It's September and The scales have tipped and the days have more of early fall than early summer in them.

It's September and we are blessed with and by so many good friends whom we do not deserve.
It's September, and summer's a step behind us,
And autumn's a thought before...

It's September, and we can sing, Jenny has a swain we all love, we had an emergency fund to take care of the van,  The Striderling, oh, the Striderling, how much hard work he and his parents have to do and yet how he thrives.  How we have been richly blessed by perhaps dozens of wonderful women sharing the bounty of their own human milk with him (we're picking up several hundred ounces this week, delivered from donors in several states..

It's September, so let us, for his golden corn,
Send up our thanks to God!
 

I wish I had the gift for poetry, but I must be content with the gift of poetry. Which is also no small mercy.

Sunday Hymn Post

Eternal life is in God’s Word
For dead and dying men;
By it alone we know the Lord,
Unseen by mortal ken.

Refrain

O blessèd Word, O gracious Word,
We’ll love thee more and more;
Be thou our Life, our Strength, our Sword,
’Till earthly strife is o’er.

God’s strength is in His holy Word;
We need it ev’ry day;
In all our conflicts this the sword
Our spirit foes to slay.

Refrain

By this same Word we know our task,
And how it should be done;
How now to live, and how at last
Our crown is to be won.

Refrain

Sunday Hymn Post

The Equuschick Plays Hooky

The Equuschick's adorable children coordinated their naps to overlap for about an hour today. She actually put them down for naps at their Grandmama's house.


Then she went back to her house to fold and put away three loads of laundry and sort through the Dread Pirate Grasshopper's summer and winter things and generally just get much house-cleaning done.







Teehee. That's a complete fiction.

The Equuschick went horse-back riding. In the woods and everything. A girl must have her fun when she can. ;-)

Happy Things At The HG & Strider's

* The Striderling (who is not a thing, but a Person) is very happy today. He was also happy at 1 am, 2 am, and 3 am last night. My head feels sort of fuzzy because of that.

Striderling, by the way, has started scooted his away across the floor to get things. Love this!

* Listening to Thistle & Shamrock on the radio. It goes so perfectly with the grey, rainy day we're having.

* a ham in the oven (purchased marked down). It will be lunch this afternoon, with potatoes and broccoli on the side. Strider loves ham but we only have it rarely, so the smell in the apartment makes him happy. The marked down price makes me happy. ;)

* going to the library today! I haven't been in ages and realized I was missing the adventurous joys of browsing stacks and coming out with new things to read and listen to. Strider is at the home of one of our midwives right now, working on a bartering project (we have incredible midwives) and when he's done we'll make a quick trip. He has to work today (the first Saturday of many for a long time :() and so I won't really have an opportunity to overindulge with books.

What's up with your Saturday?

The Pink Band-Aid

I was alternating between reading and crocheting, both activities I have to do without my glasses. Without my glasses, I am pretty near blind. So when my husband sat down at the other end of the couch from me to chat about this and that, I thought he had a milk mustache.
I put on my glasses, all the better to see my beloved with, my dears.

"Why," I asked, and quite reasonably, I thought, "Are you wearing a pink band-aid on your upper lip?"

"Because," my beloved answered, "we were all out of blue band-aides."

Oh. Well okay, then. That answers that.

He smirked at me, the man-smirk, you know the one? And they talk about that look that we have.

I gave him that look. You know the one.

"Airsoft?" I asked.



"Yes."

Then he proceeded to explain to me how smart our son is because after the injury he realized the would not play any more airsoft until they found eye protection, and he (the Boy) found some safety goggles for painting or other construction work that hadn't even been opened yet, and fit perfectly well over their glasses, and wasn't I comforted by this fact.

"Look," he said.  "It's not even that bad.  It really doesn't hurt. It's just going to be a bear to shave. But it's nothing."

Nothing at all.  But a flesh wound.  No pain.  No problem.  No trouble.  No big deal.  Really.

"I know," he said, "you just don't get guys enjoying shooting at each other."

"Well, not so much that," I said, "as the fact that I find it hard to understand why you think I should take comfort in the fact that you don't think about eye protection until you have an open wound on your face, and the fact that the protection you came up with still won't prevent the same injury. Plus, it's lucky your mouth was closed."

He says that mostly he's really embarrassed, but then he suggested I blog about it. He's also stoked because he remembered tomorrow is his last day at work for a week, and he could go without shaving for the rest of the week because we will be camping.

Still.  I think he's awfully cute, even with a pink band-aid. 

The Department of Education

i

Protein Wisdom linked to Doug Ross's post on five sound reasons for abolishing the Department of Education. I think my favorite is number 2:

Because it's been an abysmal failure that we can't afford: the Department of Education’s 2011 budget is nearly six times its original budget. It has increased from $13.1 billion (in 2007 dollars) in 1980 to $77.8 billion in 2011. And, by every measure, it's been a horrific waste of money, which the United States simply can't tolerate in its current fiscal situation.

Jay Howard at Protein Wisdom adds another:

And of course, #6: In too many places it dispenses a steady and growing stream of progressively-tinged dogma quite willfully isolated from objectivism.
Which as far as Jane Robbins has found (August 31st of this year), is the tip of the progressive iceburg.  Read. The. Whole. Thing. Emphasis mine.

…President Obama seems to reject America’s founding principles and embraces instead the belief that people must be managed, for the good of the country, by elites in government and other institutions. This was the philosophy of the early-20^th-century progressives, and it is pervasive in the Obama administration. A prime example is the complete transformation of the American health-care system in a manner that has proven to be ill-founded everywhere it has been tried.The progressive view of health care—that the system should be managed by “experts” for the good of the economy and society in general—is identical to the progressive view of education: the education of children is simply too important to be left, as the Founders intended, to parents, localities, and the states. This view is far more entrenched than most people realize. The progressive agenda threatens our constitutional system and parents’ right to transmit their values to their children through education. It is an ongoing effort that predates the Obama administration and has been infiltrating American culture for decades. With a renewed effort in the current administration, it is no exaggeration to say that we are now at a critical point in the battle for the soul of America.
Progressive educators have long advocated sweeping national control of education. One prominent progressive reformist, Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), fleshed out this view in a now-famous letter he wrote to Hillary Clinton (then a member of NCEE’s Board of Trustees) shortly after the 1992 election. Tucker laid out his vision, which, to conservatives, describes a dystopia of authoritarian control: “remold the entire American system for human resources development . . .  [a] seamless system of unending skill development that begins in the home with the very young and continues through school, postsecondary education and the workplace.” Beginning with the creation of national standards of curricula and assessment, and then solidifying control of education from preschool through the workforce, this vision is being implemented by the Obama Department of Education (DOE).

There is so much more linked at both the above posts.  You really should read all of it, carefully, thoughtfully, check the links, bookmark it, come back and read some more in a day or two- and think about what's being said.

What's the usual objection to getting rid of the Department of Education?  It's for the children.  Nobody explains how spending billions of dollars (dollars which these children will have to pay when they grow up) for decreasing results is somehow of benefit for these children.
What if we are asking too much here, more than can be delivered? Isn't that an important question to ask ourselves?   If the Education Department isn't even doing what we want it to do (and do we know what it's supposed to be achieving?  Is there even agreement about what our tax dollars are supposed to be doing?), then, shouldn't we be trying something else?

China's One Child Policy

In China there is an ancient tradition called 'sitting the month-' or did you see this NPR segment, too? Sitting the month involves the new mother staying home for a full month after the birth of her child, wearing pajamas, avoiding drafts, and enduring other restrictions on what she can eat, drink, and do. The richer moms are able to go from hospital to specially staffed apartment complex to sit out their month. Here the specially trained staff prepares and serves the foods required for sitting out the month, they sponge bathe the new mothers (who aren't allowed to bathe), and help them learn to take care of their babies- if you call it care to provide:

24-hour-a-day supervision from trained nurses; a nutritionist; doctors on call to diagnose every baby sniffle; and someone ensuring that the rules are followed at all times — not just by the new mother but by her extended family too.

"My mum thinks it's a pity that she can't come in every day to cuddle my baby," Wu says, enumerating the reasons she's been given for this by the center's experts. "It's not very good for the development of newborn baby's bones to be cuddled too much. We don't want him being held too much as he might become too dependent. I pretty much only hold him when I nurse him."

And I'm going to go all cultural imperialist and say that I do not consider this care, and it's difficult to imagine what is going to happen when these only children grow up.

The girls and I saw it or heard this NPR program when it aired, and the same two statements struck us all. The one above, and this one:

Some argue that this new generation of Chinese mothers — who, as part of the generation of only children under the one-child policy, have not grown up with younger brothers or sisters — need help more than ever before.


"They're kids themselves," says the center's pediatrician, Zhang Jianna. "They don't really know how to look after kids. So they have even more demands. They're just happy that someone knows what to do."


A nurse is even teaching Wu Lili how to sing lullabies to little Momo, though halfway through the new mom gives up. At this postpartum center, paid nurses show the new mothers what to do, rather than their own mothers or aunties.

The more I think about this, the more the mind just petrefies at the prospect.

One child.  No siblings  No cousins. No friends with younger siblings.  No friends with older, married siblings who have a baby or two.
A nation of only children- I'm not one of those who thinks an only child is a terrible thing.  Only children have advantages kids with many siblings don't have, and large families have advantages only children do not have.  I don't even think it's a question that only children can grow up well adjusted, happy, productive. Of course they can.  But what a nation of only children cannot do is grow up with much experience around babies.  There will be a few exceptions here and there, but this vast social experiment has got to be changing the culture in ways that nobody thought through or realized.

The more I think of it, the more problems I see- of course, there are people here and now who grow up without much experience with babies until they have one  of their own.  But what they also have is at least a few friends with more experience, family members they can ask.  Here we have an entire nation of people who have grown up with a peer group of fellow only children.
They don't know their lullabyes, their baby games, their finger plays and nursery rhymes, how to diaper a baby, what to do with a baby, so these things are automatically transferred over to the experts.  Can you imagine a culture where trained nurses are the ones who know the lullabyes?  This is a country where the most basic of cultural transmissions, the things we take for granted- the method of transmission used for centuries and centuries- it's been cut and cauterized.

And then, of course, there's the gender gap, because forced to choose only one child, the Chinese generally prefer to make that one child a boy, so there are about 120 boys for every 100 girls, and teh age gap, whereby now about two workers will have to support one elderly citizen.  What does that mean for the future of China?  Will we see telethons begging for food for the starving elderly of China?

This is an incredibly valuable read that considers just those questions. It covers many aspects of China's one child policy and the harm it has done and continues to do. Here's just one excerpt:

And then there were the forced abortions and sterilizations. On this score, the Chinese government had help from the West. In 1979, as China prepared to roll out One-Child, the government signed an agreement with the United Nations Population Fund, which pledged $50 million to help control births—a euphemism that in practice meant groups of government workers rounding up pregnant women and forcing them to have abortions. The U.N.’s presence opened the door for other Western organizations, including the Ford Foundation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which poured resources into China in an effort to kill babies. These groups were not unaware of what was happening. The IPPF’s Benjamin Viel wrote admiringly, “Persuasion and motivation [are] very effective in a society in which social sanctions can be applied against those who fail to cooperate in the construction of the socialist state.”

We can point with horror at what China has done to herself, but it turns out, we have been complicit. How many of PPF dollars came from tax dollars confiscated from citizens and redistributed to an organization that helped commit this brutal attack on female babies?

GOP Debate Tonight

(The roughest of impressions, as I was also playing with the Striderling while watching)

Dear Governor Perry,

It is not evidence of how very pro-life you are that you mandated 12 year old girls get a vaccine in your state. It was a cheap politician's trick to say such a thing.

And I am not lacking in compassion if I think non-Texan residents should have to pay non-Texan rates for college tuition.

In conclusion, sir, I really wanted to like you... buuuut you're making it rather difficult. Herman Cain is looking better and better.

Dear Herman Cain,

Why does the media ignore you so much? I'm glad you're so gracious about their clear favoritism for Perry and Romney. I haven't decided yet if you're the best candidate for President, but I've been very impressed so far.

Dear Mitt Romney,

Meh. Must we talk about books so much? I don't really care what you said in a book. After all, Rousseau wrote Emile and then let his own children starve in orphanages. I care about what you've done and, quite frankly, RomneyCare makes me nervous.

You did appear more amicable and sensible than Perry, though. That also makes me nervous.

Dear Michelle Bachmann,

I like you too, mostly, although you clearly lacked confidence and clarity on some things. It took you a leetle bit too long to realize that you were potentially arguing for no taxes at all, which doesn't work.

Still, I loved what you had to say about education belonging to the parents.

Dear Rick Santorum,

I absolutely loved what you had to say about education too. Thank you. It drives me a little bit batty the way supposedly conservative commentators consistently downplay you and Herman Cain. I'm a grown up, please let me decide on my own, I want to tell them.

Dear Gary Johnson,

Uhm. Somehow I missed that you were running. I'm sorry? Your comment about your neighbor's dogs creating more shovel ready jobs than Obama was funny, though.

Dear Ron Paul,

I feel the same way I did about you before... lots of good ideas, some I cannot go with, and a wish that the media would let you, Santorum, and Cain out of the corner and into the real playing field.

Dear Mr. Huntsman,

I don't want a moderate. That's the game McCain played too, and look where it got him (and us).

Dear Newt Gingrich,

You're still a brilliant politician. And I have no doubt you'd make a better President than Obama, but I really do wish you'd bow out and let some of the fresher blood have a chance at things.

~ ~ ~

Other things in my head:

Why, YES, please let's get rid of the NEA and EPA. Now.

We're headed in a very depressing direction.

Kept thinking of the lecture my professor from Argentina gave: "you think you have freedom of choice in America? You don't, really. You go into the grocery store and are proud because you can choose skim milk, 1%, 2%, whole milk... you never think about all the choices that have already been amde for you before that point. It's not real freedom of choice."

Or: "A country ends up with a dictator once? That happens occasionally in history. A country ends up witha dictator more than once? That is an indication there is something seriously wrong with her people."

sigh

~ ~

Final note of the evening.

Dear Striderling,

I love you. I will make the best political choices I can for your future but I'm not really certain how things will end up. I don't want you to grow up with negativity and worrisomeness around you, though. I want you to grow up with hope, determination, and resourcefulness. So I will always try my best to make political calls, but not dwell on them... and to let you know that as important as this life is, it's the one coming up that has the real hope in it.

Love,

Mom

Four Moms Q and A

(updated to fix the book titles and some formatting errors)

Don't  miss what the other four moms have to say:

Life in a Shoe,

Smockity Frocks,

Raising Olives, .

Common Room,

This week is Q and A, where we answer questions you, our wonderful readers, put to us.

Q. Do you want all your children to live with you until they marry, even if they don't marry?

A. We don't have a set in stone plan for this, even though we are a stone age family who prefer our girls live at home until they marry, and we prefer our son move out and live on his own before he marries.


Q  If you could only have 15 picture books, which would they be?

A. That's a tough one.  That one is so tough it's almost mean.  My answer will probably be different on a different day, but off the top of my head:

Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
Flossy and the Fox by Patricia McKissick
Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown
The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton
The Year at Maple Tree Farm by the Provensens, or maybe Oxcart man by somebody else
The Little Engine That Could, by Watty Piper and the Haumans, because nothing else will do.

On Market Street, because these remarkable pictures give children much to look at and think about.
The Story of Little Babaji because it has all the charm, wit, and humour of the original Little Black Sambo without the ugly, cringe-worthy illustrations of the original illustrations and without the baggage that would make your friends of color worry about you.
Miss Rumphius because it has a marvelous Captain Idea that cannot help but inspire the young reader and their parents.
THE REAL MOTHER GOOSE: or any good Mother Goose collection, because Mother Goose is the birthright of every English speaking child. It is the child's earliest experience, apart from the King James Bible, with poetry, rhyme, and meter.
Storytelling and Other Poems, Childcraft (Volume 2) or Any older volume 2 of Childcraft, preferably pre-1960 (yes, I cheated)
Six by Seuss: A Treasury of Dr. Seuss Classics, Six by Seuss, a large volume of six of his books (I just cheated again)
Catch Me & Kiss Me & Say It Again, by Clyde and Wendy Watson because it's pure joy and a modern day Mother Goose. Catch me and kiss me and say it again, set sail in a cockleshell boat. If no-one fell out, then who stayed in? Catch me and kiss me and say it again!

Cockyolly Bumkin merry go bet
Fell in the duckpond and got all wet
A nickle for a nappy and a penny for a pin
To wrap my little Cockyolly Bumkin in.

The illustrations are darling- not too sappy, but siblings who love each other. Some of them are nude little darlings, and some most conservative parents may take to the white-out, but don't let that prevent your family from sharing the rollicking, frolicking, joi de vivre in this collection of rhymes.

Oops- I think I undercounted.  I am really hardpressed to limit myself to 15, as you see, but perhaps Pelle's New Suit
(and so many others by Elsa Beskow)?
Or Sandra Boynton's Board Books,
Mo Willem's Pigeon Books
or Each Peach Pear Plum by the Ahlbergs,
or The Mitten by Jan Brett
or Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
This is torture.  I could go on.  I checked my LibraryThing listing and after numerous cullings and in spite of the fact that I have not had children who enjoyed picture books for over 7 years, I still have 300 of them.

Q. Have you/ how do you use bones for stock?

A. Yes. The easiest way is just to put the bones (with bits of meat on them), in a big pot of water, add a dash of salt and a splash of vinegar and simmer all day, then strain, cool, skim the fat (save for cooking) and use your broth.  Or you could do this.

Q When you use organ meats do you use certain recipes for them or do you substitute it for other meat in recipes.

A. I use specific recipes for liver.  I just cook tongue in the crockpot all day, then peel it, slice it, and serve with salt.  Heart I substitute for other meats, mostly grinding it and using it anywhere I'd use ground beef. I also had it recently simmered all day in BBQ sauce in the crockpot. I thought it was great.

 Q. Can your family tell the difference?

A. Yes, mostly.  The only way they can't tell is when I mix ground heart half and half with ground beef or turkey. 

Pip won't try the heart.  She's 21 now, so my previous practices with picky eaters don't work. 

One Form of Culinary Bliss

Whole Wheat Cous Cous.

Cooked in homemade chicken broth.

Slathered in butter and salt.

It's almost addicting, folks.

~ ~ ~

I did the cous cous as a side dish for yesterday's lunch (a complete treat and splurge of a lunch... angus strip steak I'd found marked down at the grocery store and an organic watermelon marked down at our local farm stand). I stirred in some chopped carrots at the last minute and they were good, but it would have been better to put them in at the same time I put in the cous cous so they could be softer. I used my much loved Joy of Cooking

for instructions on how to cook the cous cous (and the steak for that matter... I think I've only cooked steak one other time in my life), but there are also good instructions here. Apart from being a savory side dish, I like to cook it in water and then add a little bit of milk, honey, and cinnamon for a breakfast item.

What are some of your favorite cous cous recipes? The DHM recently gifted us with a bag of it and as the cooler autumn days approach I'm beginning to get the Ever Familiar Fall Feeling of wanting to try new things in the kitchen!

Climate Models And Other Global Warming Shenanigans

Check out these two graphs which compare and contrast climate model predictions with reality.

Here's another interesting comparison- the infamously inaccurate Greenland map in the new Times Atlas and a strikingly similar map in Wikipedia.

The blog Skeptical Science, which isn't much of either, has been recommended to me before as a go-to source for 'accurate' climate information.  This is how they do things there.  Using the Way Back Machine, the good Bishop Hill demonstrates that:

Astonishingly, more than six months after having their errors pointed out to them, the denizens of Skeptical Science rewrote the article and then inserted comments suggesting that their commenters hadn't read the article properly.
I'm simply flabbergasted.
And it's even more amazing when one recalls that Skeptical Science was recently the recipient of an award from the Australian Museum for services to climate science.

A few commenters suggest this is just an innocent update, but:

Respectable blogs use a strikeout of the old text so that the reader can see the edit. Such a change informs the reader. They do not add a comment suggesting that the edited version was "the first point I make". Such changes are intended to disinform the reader.

 If a revision is more significant than a typo, it's customary to leave a note on the post saying that it's been revised.  Not at SS:

Having rewritten the "argument", SS could have removed the old comments; or leave them with a note saying they had become out-of-date; or a different note specifying that the new version of the page addressed the issue highlighted by the commenter, eg AnthonySG1's.
Instead, the SS team decided to rewrite history (the Ahnenerbe would have been proud). SS opted for tampering with the contribution of commenters such as AnthonySG1 and PaulM (members of us skeptical and therefore inferior race), transforming them into total trolls in a way that that shows not a jot of attempt of respecting fellow human beings.
Why would the SS do that? Total disregard for skeptical visitors of course means SS is completely focused on indoctrinating the believing masses, and especially the scientifically-illiterate journalists visiting the site. Therefore the SS "narrative" has to be linear, clean to the point of being spotless, with not a single error or omission, and not a meaningful point by any skeptic in a million years.

Cook defends himself here:

How SkS works is that the rebuttals to climate myths are organized as an encyclopedic reference, as opposed to blog posts which are more like snapshots in time. This means I regularly update old rebuttals when new data is released or when new papers are published. In this case, I updated my original rebuttal of the "Antarctica is gaining ice" myth with the latest GRACE data from Velicogna 2009 and while I was at it, also incorporated references to a number of other papers, trying to give a broad overview of what the peer-reviewed science had to say about what was happening in Antarctica.
When I posted the responses to those particular comments, I mistakenly thought they were comments to the updated post (SkS is a big site so I don't keep track of all the comments as they come in). So in responding to the commenters, thinking they hadn't read the updated article, I was unfair to them. It was an honest mistake but I'm a little annoyed with myself for making it because the focus on the timing of comments and responses distracts attention from the science discussed: Antarctic land ice is shrinking at an accelerating rate but Antarctic sea ice is increasing despite the fact that the Southern Ocean is warming faster than the rest of the world's oceans. This information is accurate, derived from peer-reviewed research, as SkS's main commitment is to maintain fidelity to the peer-reviewed literature.

Except, since he knows he's changed the post, wouldn't you think a fairminded person would check the dates of the responses?  And:

When you update your old rebuttals, how is it that you wrote responses to commenters that makes it appear as though they don't know what they are talking about,and you do?

Curiouser and curioiuser:

How did John Cook manage to mistake those comments as new when one of them already had a response attached to it? And who deleted the original response?

In other words, his explanation is merely a second foul and lacks credibility:

1) The comments are DATED, so it is quite clear when the comments were made, and quite clear that they are/were not commenting on any updated article but on the original article, before SS decided to re-write it.
2) The comment from "AnthonySG1 at 20:25 PM on 9 May, 2008 " was replied to by Cook (or someone at SS) the reply stated:

[ Response: Funny you should ask, the last few weeks, I've been preparing a series of posts on Antarctica and the Arctic. First one next week. Stay tuned... ]

Which was a perfectly reasonable, if completely uninformative, reply - one which actually failed to address the commentators point entirely.
In order for Mr Cook to post the 'revised' replies he subsequently much later posted, which make the sceptics out to be bumbling trolls, he would have had to DELETE the original reasonable, if uninformative, reply and insert the new reply.
It is clear that in doing so he could NOT have been unaware that the comment from AnthonySG1 was in reply to the original article.

Like this commenter:

I really do find it very hard to swallow [Cook's] claim that:
1) knowing that you (or someone at SS) had already 'revised/rewitten' the article,on at least one or more occasions, and
2) that seeing that there was already an 'official SS-response (undated) to the commentators posted comment,
3) that you somehow completely neglected to check the date of the comment despite the fact that you would have had to actually delete the original SS-response in order to insert the newer 'revised' and much more caustic SS-response.
The fact that the 'revised' SS-response, to what were completely reasonable criticisms of the original article, all had the same dismissive and caustic tone, gives some insight into your own personal attitude to people that would dare to point out errors in your argument.
Personally if I myself were to engage in such behaviour, to write such caustic replies knowing full well that the original article had been SUBSTANTIALLY re-written since it original publication, I would have made certain that the replies I was responding to were in fact replies to the rewritten version and NOT, as in both of these cases, responses to the original, and incorrect, article.
I note, and commend, that after I pointed out that you still had not corrected your 'mistake' at your website, you have now put some sort of 'correction' (such as it is) HOWEVER, I also note that instead of leaving your 'erroneous' revised-responses intact (with a strikethrough so that readers might see your 'revised' response) you decided to delete them entirely - thus removing from the casual visitors eye, evidence of your own errors and subsequently removing evidence of your own personal attitude to people that would dare to point out errors in your argument.
What we get instead is the revised revised response.

Cook continues to insist that he just forgot or 'didn't bother' to check the dates of the comments in his revisions.  But revising an article to substantially change the argument within it in a way that answers the rebuttals in the comments without acknowledging the revision is itself a strange procedure for one professing to love truth.  If you are taking the time to revise and update a post, it is simply good, sound protocol, and fair to your readers to say something simple like, "Note: this post was revised and the arguments and references updates on this date."

It should be second nature for an intellectually honest person to check the dates on comments to a revised post before replying.  But then, this isn't the first time the SS folks have shown their dark side.  As Lucy Skywalker notes, they are a crooked court.