House O' Sullivans

Snippets of Sullivan life of late. We just finished up hosting another semester of our homeschooling book club--Liberty Girls. This year we read (or re-read, in our case) the 8 books in Little House series. We've had a great group of 9 girls this year and it's been so much fun. Each time we meet, we review and discuss what we've read. The girls give presentations on the reading and then we do various activities related to the time period and the books that we are studying. At our last meeting we made pie plant pies (aka rhubarb) and they were the best pies I've ever eaten in my life! Seriously.   Hallee and Laine's masterpiece. Charlie and Sophie with their pie plant pie. At one of our Liberty Girl's meeting this month we made molasses popcorn balls. They were so good that we made them again for our Friday Family Movie Night treat. Making molasses popcorn balls Last week marked the end of our school year and we celebrated with homemade piz...

Pi Day has always been epic for me. When I was teaching at Wasatch Junior high, my classes celebrated heartily. The day's festivities always included Pi artwork, a Pi memorizing contest (there were kids every year who memorized more than 50 digits, sometimes more than 100), Pi explorations, Pi music, Pi poetry, Pi movies, and pie (usually donated by Harmon's, good solid people that they are).  One of my favorite memories of teaching math at Wasatch involves a Pi Day:  I had a certain zealous Geometry class one year. They loved math. They asked for extra proofs. They wanted to derive the formulas that we learned. They thirsted for mathematical knowledge. They were over-zealous . And they were fun . Every Friday, I'd allow them to stand on their desks, and to the beat of my fist pumps, we'd shout out, "WE . . . LOVE . . . MATH!!!!," as loud as we could. Everyone in our wing of the building heard it. That's why I'd only let them do it once a wee...

Casey turned 41 last month (June 3rd) and to celebrate I made four pies of his favorite persuasion--strawberry rhubarb.  Yum!  I remember visiting my Grandma White in Lemont, PA during the summers when I was a little girl and she'd make this pie too.  It is one of my best childhood summer food memories because it was always so good and "rhubarb" sounded so exotic.  (We never had it at OUR house.) Uncle Dewey's birthday is the day after Casey's, June 4th.  Dewey turned 61, and we were lucky to share a dinner of homemade pizza and salad harvested from our garden on his birthday with him and with my mom.  His "cake" was a batch of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. At least once a summer, we end up at Sugarhouse Park with a bucket of greasy KFC and a picnic blanket.  I think this is another replay for me of good childhood food memories.  We spread the blanket out by Parley's Creek (the stream that runs through the park) unde...