When the snow starts to fall and the weather cools, I can think of nothing better than homemade soup for dinner. One of my favorites to make is this very easy, flexible potato soup. Several years ago I discovered that using frozen hash browns instead of peeling potatoes makes it so much faster and easier.

This is a pretty flexible soup - make it vegetarian by eliminating bacon (use oil instead of bacon fat) and using vegetable stock. Or use whatever kind of stock you have - it doesn't have to be chicken stock. I use my own homemade chicken stock, but canned broth works well also.

Bacon, Cheese & Potato Soup

1 package bacon

1 package Southern Style Hash Browns, thawed

1 small diced onion (or about 1 tbsp dried minced onion)

1 quart chicken stock

1 cup milk

1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

Brown bacon in a large pot or dutch oven. Remove bacon slices, drain & crumble. Pour off bacon fat until about 3-4 Tbsp remain (or add oil if necessary). Add hash browns & onion and cook for a few minutes until potatoes brown slightly. Add stock and simmer for 15 minutes. Use a potato masher or hand (immersion) blender to puree the soup. Add milk and cheese; simmer for about 5 more minutes. If the soup is too thick, add a little more milk or water to thin.

Serve with crumbled bacon pieces and additional cheese if desired.

This soup is great paired with a batch of homemade biscuits!

Mmmmm ... Snacks

We like snacks around here, and I find them a great way to get some good nutrition into my kids' bodies. Sure, they'd love to just down a couple of tablespoons of sugar, but we all enjoy a lot of good snacks.

Popcorn: I recently bought a bag of "real" popcorn (www.boulderpopcorn.com), and now I'm not entirely sure what I'll do with the boxes of microwave popcorn I just ordered from local Boy Scouts.  OK, we'll still eat that stuff when we just want something fast, but the Boulder Popcorn site even sells a microwave popper for fresh popcorn. Organic, tasty with just a little salt, how can you get better than that?

Cheese & Crackers: good protein with whole grains!

Yogurt Smoothies: I have a hand blender, which makes these quick, easy, and easy to clean up. I always keep large tubs of yogurt on hand and fruit or berries in the freezer, and I mix in a couple of acidophilus capsules, too.

Cookies: I love oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, so that's what I make when I'm making cookies. Every now and then I'll make snickerdoodles (hubby's favorite).

Other stuff I keep on hand: graham crackers (the kids love them with raw honey), low-sugar granola bars, and if we have an exceptionally good day together, Pop Tarts. Well, I'm not a complete health-food fanatic!

First, I want to thank my blogging friends who haven't given up on me since I haven't been blogging much lately! I will start getting around to visiting your blogs and catching up soon, and I hope to post more about what's going on around here besides puppy, puppy, puppy.

This week's theme on the Homeschool Memoirs meme is "Something New" - sharing about something new we're using this year. I must tell you all about a fantastic new math curriculum I found this year. I hadn't planned to change math; I was happy with what we were using. But as I walked through the vendor hall at my state homeschool conference last summer, one of the vendors stopped me, saying, "Would you like some information about a new math curriculum? The Old Schoolhouse says it's their new favorite." Well, that piqued my interest, so I started looking into it.

Math on the Level takes a different approach to teaching math than anything I've seen or used before. It uses neither a "spiral" or a "mastery" approach but what I see as a flexible approach. It gives the teacher a complete math scope and sequence from preschool through pre-algebra, and I decide what to teach my children and when to teach it. In our old math curriculum, I had to kind of hold my son back and not teach him multiplication because he hadn't fully mastered multiple-digit addition and subtraction with regrouping. Now I can have him continue to review and work on those concepts while we also move on and start learning multiplication facts. We'll probably get started on fractions soon, too, even before we work on division. Why not? MotL is a flexible curriculum that allows the teacher/parent to decide what the child is ready to learn, and I'm all about flexiblity.

The flexibility can be overwhelming to someone who's used to being told what to teach and in what order to teach it. Realizing that, the author, Carlita Boyles - and her husband John - offer as much help as needed. They have also started a Yahoo! group (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mathonthelevel/) where new (and experienced) users can ask questions and get help using it.

Finally, the thing that my kids like best about math this year is that they only have to do 5 problems a day. Seriously. And, yes, that's enough. Each problem is to review a different concept. For example, my son's math "5-a-day" today included:

• multiplication by 2 (3x2=__)
• skip count by 10
• use a clock to show 5:15
• multiple-digit subtraction without regrouping using a $ sign
• place value (breaking the number 6,492 into thousands, hundreds, tens and units)

Concepts that are mastered (or mostly mastered) are reviewed less frequently (once a week or two weeks), while those that the child is still working on are reviewed daily or every other day. The hardest (if I can even call it hard) part of using this curriculum is that I need to prep their 5-a-day worksheets, but since most of my curriculum is no prep, then I don't mind spending a little time on this.

Can you tell I really love this curriculum?!

I tend to be fairly routine-oriented in our homeschooling, but I'm finding that having a puppy changed much of that!

My preferred routine is something like this: get up, get breakfast. let the kids play while I get my chores done, take a walk or bike ride together, then go through our school routine with pre-planned breaks. We don't usually finish school before lunch, but we generally wrap up between 1:00 and 2:00. After school, the kids have their chores to get done before they can play around or watch a little TV.

But now everything is different. Adeliza needs a lot of attention when she's awake - whether playing or watching for her signals that she needs to go outside. So we wait until she goes to sleep and try to focus on school work for the couple of hours that she naps. When she wakes up, we spend a lot of time with her outside until she's ready for another nap, and then it's back to the books, so to speak.

I find myself spending a lot of time just sitting and doing nothing but waiting for her to go potty, but it's good for me. August was busy and fairly stressful (with good things, but a lot of them!), and now I appreciate the forced relaxation. Eventually we'll be back to routines, though.