Cookbook Recipe: Fully Loaded Tater Tot Casserole Recipe

It's the age-old question: what's for dinner? 

In my house, this question is often followed by: what's for dessert? If I haven't done my meal planning and shopping for the week, instead of a real answer, you will get a blank stare from me.

Problem solved!

The Tater Tot Casserole Cookbook, is ON SALE in print version for just $6.99 (free shipping with Amazon Prime!)* so you can hold it in your hot little hands and keep it on your bookshelf for easy reference. I have even included a chapter on Meal Planning, so you can figure out which night of the week will be the very best one to serve one of my 35 tater tot casserole options (and 13 desserts!).

This cookbook is a unique holiday gift or birthday gift, so you not only get a fun resource for your own kitchen, but you can at the same time make someone else very happy with a fun present!

12+ Ways You Can Save or Make Money Today

Finding Dave Ramsey back in 2015 was very inspirational for my family. Money had been flying out of our home in the form of co-op fees, sports fees, doctor and hospital fees, a vehicle payment and the higher gas and insurance and tags that went along with that, etc. Then we moved to a larger home but still had some debt plus grocery costs are soaring! 

1. Be a safe driver. Stop speeding and observe traffic rules and you won't have to worry about a costly ticket. I am being super careful on my errands today and when I am driving around town in general. You can even save money on your car insurance if you get an app that tracks your driving (probably something like Life360 where it can track your quick acceleration and hard braking).
2. Buckle up and make sure your passengers are also properly buckled. This applies to making sure your kids are buckled properly in your vehicle. In my state, it can be $60 per ticket plus court costs if your kid is not in the proper booster or car seat so make sure you know the rules.
3. Get the Ibotta app! You get cash back in the form of PayPal cash or gift cards when you buy specific products! I recently received a Pillsbury pie crust to bake a pie and take a survey and there was $15 in my account! Check out my post here.

Three Ways to Ignite Your Child's Love for Learning

Children are little sponges, soaking up anything and everything. And while the time you spend with your child is something that nothing can compare to, they will also benefit from time away from home and interacting with others. Here are three ways you can open your child's life to that enrichment.

Choose a Program

Your choice of schooling will likely be dictated by your family's overall situation. But it's important to understand the types of early childhood education, and how they're different. There are wonderful programs that educate without it really feeling like school, such as the Montessori approach. Checking out options for preschool Redmond Wa can give you an idea of what to expect from this type of learning environment.

Head to the Library

Chances are you have a local library that does a regular weekly storytime for children. Have you made that part of your routine yet? If not, you should! It's a great way not only to interact with others, but to learn basic social skills such as sitting quietly, following directions and waiting patiently. A trip to the library also means checking out books — and lots of different books at home encourages a love for reading early on.

Let Kids be Kids

It can be helpful to schedule activities and plan out each day, especially if you have a young child. But sometimes the opposite is more beneficial. During a playdate, do you sit back and let it flow, or do you become a third wheel? Children thrive on independence and can learn a whole lot just on their own. Encouraging that is important. Know when to step back and just enjoy watching your child self direct.

Throughout your parenting journey, remember that this classic saying rings true. "It takes a village to raise a child."

Summer Reading Update #1 2020

Happy Memorial Day! I couldn't sleep last night, so I was up at 2 a.m. reading Little Fires Everywhere. It's one of the books on my Summer Reading List 2020 (click the link to check it out).

Here's my Goodreads profile, if you'd like to follow me and check out my progress and notes (and reviews) on each of the books I'm reading.

I'm doing additional "updates" posts here on the blog because things change fast around here, plus books I'm reading to my kids are not on the original list. We read year-round here at my house, and I wanted to share some of what we're loving (or not).

You'll find over on Goodreads that we're reading:

Little Fires Everywhere for fiction fun that makes me think, touches a nerve here and there, and makes me want to write fiction because it's so well done.

The War of Art to help kick my butt into some creative and life action.

Junior Great Books Series 5 Second Semester is what I'm reading to my three youngest kids (ages 10, 12, and 15) for the rich short stories, including Shirley Jackson's Charles. I may have bought 6 more of these books since we love them so much. These are also going to translate into a fabulous class at our homeschool co-op, pretty much from grades K-6+.

Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman is what I plan to start with my teen boys this week when they're not working or busy (ages 17 and 18).

Ghosts of Greenglass House by Kate Milford is what I'm reading to my 15-year-old daughter. It's the follow-up to Greenglass House, which we loved.

Hope you're gearing up for a wonderful summer! I'd love to hear what you're reading this summer!

Here's a post I wrote on Goodreads: I love being a homeschooling mom of 5, which means we are always reading lots of different things. I'm usually working on a fiction book and a nonfiction book for myself, then we love read-alouds at my house, so I might be reading something different to each of my kids, who are ages 10, 12, 15, 17, and almost 19 :-) It's such a great bonding activity and a chance to talk about different issues.

Summer 2020 Reading List (plus more) by The Kerrie Show Blog

Yes, friends, family, fans and freaky fast readers, it's that time again, and I don't know about you, but I'm excited to get crackin' on The Kerrie Show Blog's Summer 2020 Reading List!

Not sure what your part of the world looks like right now, but our library system here in the middle of America is a little bit still on lockdown and has been for a coupla months. That means I've been digging out some buried books from my closet as well as ordering some new ones from eBay … and then sitting by the mailbox in a chair waiting for them to arrive. My husband thinks I have a problem but, hey, when I'm reading I'm out of HIS hair, right?!

Conversely, find me on Goodreads and let's connect so you can see what I'm reading and I can see what you recommend! And here is the 2020 Summer Reading List!

I have to admit I already started this one. I get bored with it, then something perks me up and makes perfect sense. I read it to Sam the other night and it made him sleepy. He's 10. Anyway, my goal is to get unstuck from a whole lot of writing projects as homeschooling slows down and summer hits my household full force.

I think I picked this one up at church and never read it. It's pretty thin but I'm hoping it packs a helpful punch.

LOVE Shirley Jackson. Watched The Haunting of Hill House series a while back based on her novel, then recently read a short story by her called Charles to my 12-year-old daughter and we laughed and laughed. Our ex-neighbor recommended the story The Lottery, so I said why not get even more stories by her? (I'm wondering already if Suzanne Collins got the idea for the Hunger Games series from The Lottery)

I like my husband. I love my husband. I should be praying for him with more specific intentions.

This will just be a guilty pleasure read, I'm guessing. (started May 11, finished _______)

I like my kids. I love my kids. I'm gonna pray for them with more specific intentions.

I kinda feel like I have to read this one since we moved to a city called Peculiar, MO. My kids don't normally like this kind of dark stuff, so I'm doing a pre-reading for them. I like that there are more books after it.

Been meaning/needing to read this one for years. 

I love me some vintage times. When the kids are all moved out, Aron and I plan to burn all our current furniture (except for the items he made himself) and buy up all the mid-century modern we can get our grubby hands on!

My friend Ginette mentioned this once and I thought it sounded like a good thing to check out.

I got this one years ago with a Half Price Books gift card from my dad and stepmom, but I never read it. Loved his earlier stuff when I was in my 20s. Hope I also love this one.

Pretty sure I proofread this for one of my very first clients on Fiverr like 7 years ago. Full of good info.

This is one of my favorite authors, or she used to be anyway. Haven't read her work in a long time. Loved The Handmaid's Tale … haunting (check out the slow taking of power from the women and the people over time). Read The Robber Bride to Aron when we were first dating (poor guy). Got my daughter Callie's name from The Blind Assassin in 2000. Hoping to fall deeply in love with this book.

If none of these float your boat or you flew through them and need more ideas, check out the 2020 Summer Reading List by Sarah's Bookshelves here.

Make Homeschooling A Little Easier For Yourself

Homeschooling is a wonderful way to ensure that your kids are ready for life. If you have been homeschooling for a while, then you will know that there is a lot involved in it which you might not have expected. Of course, a lot of people are turning to homeschooling now that they are in lockdown, and it looks as though it might become very important this year to be able to do it well and know what you are doing. Whether you are new to homeschooling or not, you will always be keen to make it as easy on yourself as possible, and there are many ways in which you can be sure to do that. In this article, we will take a look at some of the ways you can make homeschooling that much easier for yourself, and more effective for the kids.

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Make A Plan

You will quickly learn the value of planning when it comes to homeschooling your children. There are many things that you need to plan, and you will want to start on these as soon as possible in order to feel that you are ready for what lies ahead. You will need to plan what you are going to teach and in what order, for a start. That might follow a national guideline or syllabus, or you might want to think of one yourself. Either way, make sure it covers all the necessary ground. It’s vital in ensuring that your children actually get the education they need.

You also need to make sure that you plan out individual days, as well as what the week is going to look like. Be sure to include everything you need, including lots of breaks for both of you. The more that you plan, the more ready you are going to feel, and you will find that you are much less likely to simply get stressed out by it all.

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Supplement Your Gaps In Knowledge

Just because you are homeschooling your kids doesn’t mean that you are expected to know everything about everything. That’s just not possible, and you are always going to find that there are the occasional gaps in your knowledge. All you need to do is have a contingency plan for when those things come up. You can spend some time beforehand learning the information yourself, for example, and then teaching it to your kids. Or for those really tricky topics and subjects you could think about calling in some outside help, whether in the form of an online math tutor or a physics teacher, or whatever the subject might be. There are always ways to supplement your own gaps in knowledge, and you should make sure that you are always doing so if you want the education to be as full as possible.

Find A Teaching Style

Everyone who tries to teach soon finds that they have their own teaching style, and you should make a point of trying to find yours as soon as possible if you want to make the homeschooling process considerably easier on yourself. It helps you to settle into a groove which feels natural for you, so that is something that you are going to want to consider. As long as you can do that, you will find that your teaching is much more natural and easygoing, and that your children are going to respect that a lot more than you trying to copy someone else’s teaching style instead. The style can be strict or easygoing or whatever in between, so long as it is effective and it is one which seems to work for you well, and for your child well.

Pic Source - CCO Licence

Make It Fun

The more that you are able to make the learning fun for your children, the easier it is going to be for you. Making it fun is actually easier to do than you might think, and it is mostly just about ensuring that you find a way to capture their focus and intrigue day by day. Because they are your own kids, you probably know how to do this better than anyone else, so that is something that you are going to want to think about. If you can make it fun, you will find that you are going to have more fun yourself, and all of you will be glad to be doing it. That is the kind of situation you are probably looking for here.

Are You Still Busy during the "Shelter in Place" Order?

Every now and then I'll interact with someone who thinks I have a lot of free time on my hands now that we are "stuck inside" due to the shelter-in-place guidelines which are in place all over the country and the world. (We are actually NOT inside all the time; we are outside quite a bit because why move to 8 acres of land with a pond and stay inside in the springtime?)

At the beginning of this whole thing, I put a lot of things on hold to make sure I was checking up on the virus numbers and checking in on the press conferences by the governors on both sides of the state line, checking in on my own city's Facebook page and county's website. I realized some things were starting to suffer and it was taking its toll on me and how I lived my life and how I was steering the lives of my children.

4 Fun Things to Do While You Are Trapped Indoors

With a huge number of people around the world currently trapped indoors for their own good – and with this impromptu state of quarantine likely set to last for a while – boredom and cabin fever are very real possibilities.

Of course, just because you are stranded indoors for a while doesn’t mean that there aren’t still plenty of things you can do in order to have fun, stay entertained, and to turn this otherwise stressful and negative situation into something altogether much more positive.

So, without further ado, here are a few fun things to do while you are trapped indoors.

Spend some time coming up with goals that motivate and excite you, and begin the planning process

Even if you can’t currently go outside and engage with the world in the way you might want to, there is nothing to stop you from sitting down and spending some time coming up with goals that generally motivate and excite you, and from then beginning with the planning process in earnest.

On an everyday basis, it’s common for everyone to get a bit too caught up in their own personal dramas and the rapid pace of everyday life. One consequence of this is that it’s often easy to end up operating on autopilot, without paying much thought to whether or not you are actually pursuing goals that you find genuinely meaningful.

Interesting Facts About Memory That You Will Love

As we get older, we are all guilty of taking advantage of certain things; one of the things that we all take for granted is the human brain. While it may sound odd, the human brain is the one thing that functions without our influence, and often we don’t pay it too much attention.

What is more remarkable about the human brain is the sheer power it holds and the fact that it just cannot be replicated. Why can it not be replicated? Well, that is sheerly down to its memory capability.

If you think of the brain as a computer hard drive, it really becomes something quite remarkable to behold. When we are born, the hard drive is very small, possibly 1-2 MB of data can be held, but as time passes, this is where things get fascinating.

The brain is thought to be able to hold around 2.5 petabytes of information, to put that into perspective, that’s around about 3 million hours of television shows, or just over 342 years worth of information. 

Taking all of this into account, it is no wonder that the brain is such a sensitive and incredible thing. When it comes to seeing how remarkable it truly is, the chances are that we will never really know. What we do know is that while there have been ridiculous statements of us only using 10% of our brains, and other notions that we are able to communicate with upper realms, this has all been shown to be complete nonsense.

What we do know is that the brain is so remarkable that we will never be able to recreate it, and we never should. While there are companies that claim that AI will eventually match up to the human brain, we also know that you cannot program intuition and emotions. As both of these play a huge role in what makes the brain so incredible, we can safely say that AI will never reach that point.

While we are looking at the remarkable nature of the brain, we have today fashioned a post that is going to point out a few remarkable facts about memory that you may, or may not know. 

Hopefully, this post will highlight some things that remind you that your mind is a fragile and beautiful thing and really deserves your attention. While it may not happen, losing your mind is a possibility, so you may want to appreciate your best tool while you are young.

Image Credit - Pexels CC0 Licence 

Most Short-Term Memories Are Easily Forgotten

Have you ever spent a whole night studying only to find that as you head out of the door, you have pretty much-forgotten everything you sat down to learn?

If this sounds like you, then don’t worry, this is pretty much the same for everybody. Most experts that have conducted memory studies have found that when you ask a person to memorize seven items, they are generally only remembered for around 30 seconds.

If you want to remember more, you can use methods like chunking in which you group together things and this way the mind tends to grasp more information. If you are more of a fan of technology, then one of the best things you can do is turn to your favourite flashcard app to help you retain information.

Over the years students have relied on flashcards as they help create a visual pathway in the brain and compared to simply reading something in a book, this can be one of the best things you can do to store more information.

Amnesia Is Not What You Think It Is

Ok, so when it comes to lies that Hollywood tells, it seems that when it comes to amnesia, they really like to stretch the truth when it comes to what it really is. 

Amnesia is actually incredibly complicated and generally presents in one of two ways. The first form of amnesia is called retrograde amnesia. Retrograde amnesia involves the loss of ability to recollect past memories. The second type of amnesia is known as anterograde amnesia; this form of amnesia stops you from creating new memories.

As you have possibly worked out, most moves you have seen involve retrograde amnesia, and usually, you will see the star of the film not even able to remember their own name, which in itself is nonsense. 

If you want to look for an accurate depiction of amnesia in a film, then it has been said that the film that really hit the nail on the head was Finding Nemo, and no, that is not a joke. 

Smell Can Trigger Memories Better Than Anything Else

Have you ever been somewhere and you have been hit by a smell that has suddenly thrown your brain back to something that you thought you had long forgotten? Well, this is because the smell is one of the most important things in the triggering of memories.

The science behind this gets very complicated, and it’s all to do with the olfactory nerve being very close to the hippocampus and amygdala. What is even more remarkable is that if areas of your brain that connect to memory become damaged, you may even have an impaired sense of smell.

So next time you smell something familiar, make sure you take some time to really appreciate what you can whiff, who knows what memory may be triggered by a familiar smell.

Your Brain Will Learn More From Visual Stimulus Than It Will From A Book

One thing that may shock you is the brain's ability to learn from textbooks. It seems that while the human race has been learning lessons for thousands of years in written form, the brain has evolved and nowadays, watching information is far more valuable than reading it.

So, if you find you are struggling to take in some information, then maybe you should consider watching something rather than reading about it.

If you struggle to believe this one, try a little experiment. If you are a fan of a film and book series, you will be perfect for this experiment. 

Let’s say you love Harry Potter, we think that if somebody asked you to quote a whole scene of the film, you could do it with ease, but the question you should ask yourself is this; can you quote an entire page of a book? 

What to Include in a Disaster Preparedness Kit

Image by Ray Shrewsberry from Pixabay

                    It's difficult to think about a scenario in which you and your family are confined to your home or an emergency shelter. Nonetheless, it is important to be prepared in the event of a hurricane, tornado, pandemic or another worst-case scenario by assembling a disaster preparedness kit and storing it in a secure location. Make sure to include these items in your kit.

Bottled Water

It's impossible to survive for more than a few days without access to water. In order to anticipate both drinking and sanitation needs, your disaster preparedness kit should include one gallon of all-natural bottled water Tampa FL for each member of your family per day for a minimum of three days.

Food

Make sure to include nonperishable food that does not require heating, cooking or refrigeration. Peanut butter, crackers, canned fruits and vegetables and granola bars are all good options. Don't forget a few sets of utensils and a can opener in order to make sure that you can access and eat the food.

Flashlight and Extra Batteries

To prepare for the possibility of losing power, add a powerful flashlight and extra batteries to your kit. Whether you may be fortunate enough to remain in your home or you need to relocate to a shelter, having no way to see would be frightening and debilitating.

Entertainment

Remember, in an emergency situation, you could be confined to an area for days or weeks on end. A deck of cards, a board game or a book will help to pass the time and take everyone's minds off of the situation at hand.

Chances are, you will never need to use your kit. Still, just in case a disaster does strike, it doesn't hurt to be ready. Assembling supplies and storing them in a safe place is an important way to look out for yourself and your family.

               

Incredibly Simple Ways To Support Your Child's Education

As parents, we spend a long time looking for the right school environment for our children and for their needs. When you choose to home educate, you choose to ensure that your child has a rounded, open education that encompasses everything that they are interested in and more. The children have to learn, and as their teacher, you have a whole world to introduce them to. Children are daydreamers with big ideas about the world, and you are there to funnel that imagination and make something of it.

The least that you could do for your child is to support their imagination and their education in every way that you can. If we want the very best for our children, it starts by working with their wants. You are running the classroom, which means that the topics of education are all decided between you. You can support your child to push to their potential, and you get to choose the resources that will support the subjects you are following. For example, if you have a budding writer on your hands, you can click to learn more about how to publish their stories. As their teacher, you need all the support that you can get to help your child to achieve their dreams, and if you want to be a partner in your child’s education, let’s look at how you can better support their education.

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• Give Your Time. Parent volunteers are generally welcome throughout the homeschool groups and clubs in most areas, so have a conversation with the local parents and offer to volunteer your time when they need helpers for an event. You could even just volunteer your time to help in other homeschool classrooms to learn about how to do it yourself before your kids have hit school age.
• Support The Teacher. You’re the teacher at home, but not at gymnastics, trampolining or the many sports clubs you could take your child through the day. While there are always going to be questions if you’re hearing that your child has been disruptive, it’s important to remember that your kid isn’t an angel from heaven. They WILL play up at some point. If you’ve been told this by their teacher, support them in their response and work with them. Don't immediately berate them for disciplining your kid - there is a chance they needed to do it.
• Work As A Team. Parents and club leaders must work side by side to ensure that a child has every ounce of encouragement and support possible. Stay in contact with them about your child’s learning, and have meetings together to discuss their progress and behavior. It’s how your child knows that they have you all on their side.
• Help With Resources. If you feel like you have ideas about their topics, or you want to suggest some student publishing initiatives and take an interest in writing, let your child know that you’ve found things that will be exciting to learn with. They’ll be happy to know you are actively trying for them!