Sunday Dinner: Amish Church Dinner

I have been editing a cookbook written by an Amish woman, and among other useful, fascinating ideas I picked up from her is the Amish church dinner.  The Amish meet in each others' homes for church services and eat Sunday dinner together afterwards.
This is the menu:

homemade bread + butter
jam
church spread (peanut butter, marshmallow creme, and corn syrup)
homemade pickles and pickled beets
2 kinds of sliced cheese
cold meat
coffee
garden (mint) tea

homemade pie

Aren't the Amish ladies clever to plan for a meal that is easy to transport and can satisfactorily feed a crowd? I welcome the simplicity of this meal, the ease of getting this on the table after church. In the winter, I like a cozy Sunday dinner that is baking all morning long while we're at church, but now, in hot weather, no one wants that heat and heavy food.  So we're going Amish for Sunday dinners in the hot weather!

My version, today, was BLTs on storebought bread with popcorn. Homemade ice cream (Jeni's black coffee) and pretzels for dessert.  I'll share more iterations as we have them.  My only conundrum is what we're going to eat for Sunday supper, which was always popcorn and sandwich-y scraps and leftovers.

A Tulip Shift for Phoebe

I had this nice big piece of chambray left from Genevieve's sundress, and Phoebe still needed some play clothes. 

I used some of Laura's pretty scraps, plus some rick rack and pink bias tape to a tulip with a stem and leaf.  There needed to be rick-rack on the back of the dress, too, because rick-rick.   I am really pleased with how it turned out! 

Except that, my, they wore their dresses short in the 70s. This is the same pattern I used to make her anchor shirt.  I put little shorts or leggings under this shift for Phoebe - I suppose I could see if I have enough scraps to make a pair of bloomers, but I'm on to other things now. Just trying to keep up with blogging it all!

Ben's Summer Haircut

One of my friends was telling me how she cut her son's hair, and I looked at the YouTube tutorial she used and thought I could do that.  I asked Ben if he wanted his hair a little shorter before the summer heat, and then I bribed him with Minecraft time, and everything was golden.  For every minute I would spend cutting his hair, he would get a minute of Minecraft time (this is an extremely big deal to Ben: currently he only gets 30 minutes of Minecraft on Saturday and Sunday).

I took him out in the yard with the clippers my dad gave me, and set to.  I cut off his longer hair (we're still finding chunks in the grass, to Genevieve's disgust), so the clippers did not hurt so much. The haircut lasted 15 minutes - Ben was almost disappointed it wasn't longer, but I was so pleased with the results and he was ultimately pleased to have extra screen time.  Bribery is probably not a great parenting tool, but it gets great results.  It's also how I'm getting ponytails on Phoebe these days.

Ben felt so fine and sharp after his shower to wash off the hair that he put on his favorite shirt for supper.  Someone in the house dressed for dinner!  How I love that boy.