Spring Salad

This salad started out (as many great salads do) by checking to see what produce looked really fantastic.  Wilty, underipe, scrawny, or otherwise unappealing produce was left at the store.  I also decided to leave out some of the things we always eat (carrots, romaine, spinach, cheddar) in favor of some different (if not new) flavors.  It seems our tongues tone down flavors we are accustomed to in the same way that our eyes will reduce the intensity of a color we look at for a prolonged period of time.  (Expiriment--Grab a bright colored shirt, book, whatever.  Make sure it is one solid color.  Cover half of it with black construction paper.  Stare at it for three or four minutes, then remove the black construction paper.  Surprised?)  I digress.

Anyway, here's the recipe.  With the exception of the cucumber it is all stuff that we could theoretically have here by mid-spring without shipments from Chile, California or Australia.


one butterhead lettuce, washed and torn
one large bunch fresh basil
one cup pea sprouts (alfalfa or bean would work too)
1/3-1/2 cup sundried tomatoes, cut in strips, preferably packed in olive oil
8 oz fresh mushrooms, quartered
one sweet onion, sliced and rings separated
one small cucumber, sliced
3-6 ounces good soft goat cheese (chevre)
1/3-1/2 cup toasted pecans

Add favorite dressing

Nova Sophia

Nova has been having some big thoughts for a little girl.  Sunday she surprised me with "I have two beliefs, but they get in the way of each other.  One is that you never know what is ahead, and the other is that anything is possible."  It took me a minute to catch this one, despite my philosophy degree.  But there it was--if anything is possible, it is possible that you might know what is ahead--ta-da!   (She is SIX!)

Today Nova announced that "nothing can do anything by itself"  My first reaction was that she was wrong, but she went on to explain that we needed trees to breathe and trees need sunshine and on and on--the kid came up with the notion of the ecosystem!  I asked her where she heard about that and she said she thought of it herself, but wasn't sure it was true.  

Winter Snapshots Part One

Sledding around the block (a daily exercise for awhile)

Making Valentines

Climbing the stairs ( a favorite activity--now she is working on going down too).

Reporting On the Census

Hey All,

I wrapped up another news story last month.  The subject it the census.  The angle is race.  I got to talk with a lot of people for this one--far more than I could fit in the story.  Listen here .  Oh, also if any of you happen to be fans of KFAI,  PLEDGE ! (It is their Spring pledge drive right now).

Using the Potty

Early in the morning,

Charlotte uses the potty.

This all started just after Charlotte turned one.  Charles was running the clean diapers up from the basement, I needed to use the bathroom, and we had a little potty out for a 19 month old friend who was visiting later on.  I thought, why not?  Like most people Charlotte often needs to use the facilities first thing in the morning, and now she usually does so in the potty.   

Charlotte's Birthday in Pictures

To the zoo and conservatory...the pond in the Sunken Garden is always a favorite spot.

 

Home for cake and ice cream (and presents of course).  You can tell by all the long legs there were lots of loving grownups about.

            

We skirted the dairy-free, wheat-free issue with coconut sorbet and banana bread cake made with almond flour,  enjoyed by all.  

Nova is Six!

Nova is Six!

Nova turned six on the 3rd of March.  As she put it, she got to turn six three times because we had relatives over the weekend before her birthday, went sledding and opened presents from mom, dad, brother and sister on her birthday, and had a sledding party with friends (the last sledding day of the season) the weekend after her birthday.  She thoroughly enjoyed it (though I must say--I think we will do our best to consolidate parties in the future--it was just a little too much excitement for Mom).

   

Nova is a wonderful six-year-old, full of new ideas and capabilities.  She is a maker, and often appears in at breakfast or bedtime in a costume of her own creation (super hero, warrior, puppy dog, etc).  To my delight, she now keeps her room clean with no prompting, having decided she likes it better that way.  After watching an old episode of Carl Sagen's Cosmos she decided to study Astronomy and has been diligently working all week.  We never know quite what to expect from Nova, she is full of unexpected, exuberant, brilliant, surprises.            

script from the day

I'm just going to lay this one out as it unfolded.  Sorry there are no pictures--grabbing the camera was not my top concern, but a striking image was at the center of this little vignette.

Scene One (A Spring day, late afternoon)

Nova: Can I play outside?
Me: Yes
(ten minutes later)
Nova:  (in tears)  Why can't you climb some trees?
Me: Some trees grow in a way that makes them hard to climb.  We can find other trees to climb, even if we can't climb the ones in the back yard.  And they are good for tree houses (we are planning to build a tree house next week).
Nova goes out to play in the yard again
I continue making dinner

Scene Two (fifteen minutes later)

I glance out the window.  Behind the black walnut tree (which all the tree house books have informed me have exceptionally brittle branches)  I see stacked precariously, our patio table, a dining room chair, the bathroom step stool, and Nova, reaching for the nearest limb.

Me: Come in here now!  (luckily Nova can't hear me and I get a minute to calm down, see the positives of the situation, and go about things in a more nuanced way).
I scoop up Charlotte and head out back.
Me: Nova, I'm impressed that you thought of a way to get in the tree but its really not a good one to climb.
Nova: Why not?
Me: Its branches break easily.
Nova: Mom, I never get to climb trees (tears)
(repeat the conversation from scene one regarding tree-climbing)
Me: Solomon and Nova, bring the chairs and things inside.
Solomon: (emerging from a book) I didn't help her do any of that.
I am thunderstruck--the table seats four and is made of cast iron, and Nova is only a head taller than the dining room chair.


Well--I'm not a playwrite, but you get the idea.  Man that kid is strong, quick, determined, and totally unconcerned with safety (or asking permission).  No broken bones, life continues.  

Charlotte at a Year (warning--this is a gushing babylove post)

Charlotte turned one two Tuesdays ago (February 9th) , and I am no longer going to wait for pictures to post...they will come eventually.   For those of you who haven't seen her in awhile, she is nicely round with lots of light brown curls and big blue eyes.  Some have told me she looks like a Maurice Sendak baby or an Anne Geddes baby.  If you remember Solomon as a baby, just picture him as a girl with curly hair and toned down eyelashes.  In the mean time, I'll tell you what she's been up to.

Charlotte is talking more everyday.  Yesterday she said "baby"  (meaning a doll) and "mine" (meaning the same doll).  When I asked her if she wanted to kiss the baby, she did.  Two days ago she said "flower" and "get it"  and so we looked at the flowers together.  Just last Thursday at her one year check-up, I put her work count tentatively at three (her favorite being "hi" along with a wave).  She is learning to talk a lot like Nova did--lots of words and even sentence structure, but not a lot of articulation.  

She is walking, sometimes very fast, and on her birthday she climbed an entire flight of stairs for the first time.  Now it is one of her favorite things to do.  Sometimes Solomon will spot her during her stair-climbing.  Solomon and Nova continue to be just great with her.  Both enjoy helping her and playing with her.  Charlotte likes to wake them up in the morning.

Putting things in boxes and other containers is another recent fascination of hers.  Right now she is putting a cloth diaper in a cardboard box.  Unfortunately, trash cans often strike her as the perfect  
receptacle.  At the photographer's Charlotte put her little sweater into the trash when no one was looking; we finally found it half an hour later. Pitchers of water also appear to her to be good places to put books.   This containerizing has been a challenging habit.

She loves music and chasing games and cuddling.  This morning I showed her the little 1/16 size violin.  She touched the stings and said "mine" (don't worry, we don't locked in instrument decisions at age one).  Every now and then she gives me a mischevious smile and runs the other way.  All in all she is just a delight!        

Forthcoming Posts

When I finally get my pictures off my camera, there are a few posts I hope to do.  Here's the list. 

A Weekend Away
Charlotte is Walking!  (at 9 and 1/2 months)
Homeschool Art Adventure
Family Felting and Fun Party
St Lucia Day
The Importance of One Child Outings
Christmas Collage
Family Photo?
Resolutions!
Book Making
A Trip to Zumbrota
Making Felt Balls, Take Two
The Loppet

Charlotte is One

Felt Balls for a First Birthday

I love felt balls.  Round, soft, warm, bouyant (yes, they float), and beautiful, I could hardly ask more of a ball.  I was inspired to make a handmade gift for my (almost) one-year-old by Amanda Blake Soule's lovely blog, Soule Mama.  She also happened to make felt balls for  her one year old, using the knit-then -felt method.  Since I am a novice knitter, I went for the straight felting method.  Following these directions, I produced three rainbow-hued, baseball-sized balls in about an hour.  If time permits, I will add pictures via needle felting.     

Gardens in Winter

The frost on my window is so high only a sliver of scenery is visible, and outside the once-soft snow has sublimated into something more like sterofoam.  Without a doubt,  January is the perfect time to plan and dream of gardens.
    Bright tomatoes, with bottoms like sunsets and tops like pumpkins, grace the cover of my Seed Saver's Exchange catalog.   I fell in love with Seed Saver's colorful heirloom vegetables back in my days of apartment living.  I gardened vicariously, planting their blue potatoes, red dragon carrots, and yellow watermelons.
    Now I get to pick for real.  My desk is fill of lists of possible produce and areal drawings of my yard, spiffed up with crayon to make my gardening intentions clear to the whole family.  Solomon has insisted on potatoes, and has chosen the yukon gold variety.  Nova is most looking forward to watermelon--surprisingly, she is a vegetable traditionalist (in terms of color) and has picked out the handsome Chris Cross strain.   For Charles we will plant cucumbers, though he may have to eat them in the form of pickles since he will be away.  I, of course, want tomatoes.  The rest (including the fruit trees) are yet to be decided.  

 

You may have noticed that I often post about things we do away from home.  I love cultural events and museums, history and the outdoors.  I love travel and outings, encapsulated time bound up in a well planned sequence, with every need prepared for--even spontinaity.

But there is another reason I rarely write about home.  I'm not particularly fond of it.  Yes, I was (and still am) thrilled we were able to buy a house last Fall.  Yes, I like the floor plan, the hardwood floors, the 1940s doorbell that chimes once for the back door and twice for the front; but I don't love my home.  It feels, not like a refuge, but more like a big closet--with beds; a place we dump our stuff and sleep when we are not out in the wide world.  In short, it is not cared for.  I have often told myself that the barrier to a more inviting home is money.  Lack of funds for decorating and so forth.

But that is not true.  I knew it the minute I felt warm, fuzzy house-pride after putting up plastic to insulate our 70-year-old windows.  Window plastic is ugly!  But it made me feel so good about my living space because it was evidence of care.

The point of this long ramble is to explain my challenge to myself.  Make my bedroom into a warm inviting place with a focus on using what I have.

I was planing on putting up a before picture.  In short--I chickened out.  Maybe I will put one up alongside an after picture. 

  

When Asia was the World

What a fascinating place mideveal Asia was!  Europe was certainly not the place to be from about 600-1500 AD/CE, but it was an excellent time to be in Asia.  During Europe's Dark Ages, glass making, silk, cotton, sophisticated trade, the rise of new religions, and the invention of zero were just a few of the things going on east of the Ural mountains.
    I've been reading  When Asia was the World by Stewart Gordon in preparation for studying Persia, India and China with the kids.  The book follows the memoirs of a different traveler in each chapter, giving plenty of backround information about the greater historical context.  I love it!  I must warn any who pick it up--it is history, not fiction.  It does not read like Devil in the White City (History as a page-turning, heart-thumping thriller).   However, it does feel like a whole new fantastic world.  There is so much out there we just never get to in standard History survey courses.  All of Asian history is like a great big epic I've never heard of before.  Lots of place names are new and almost all ancient historical figures are unfamiliar.  New History, what fun.

PS  The link embedded in the title will take you to Amazon, not because I'm urging any purchases, but because the look inside feature gives a chance to peruse the first few pages.   

No More Pig Flu! (as Nova calls it)

   H1N1 has come and (almost) gone... from this household, anyway.  Charlotte's fever was gone this morning, and we will be free and clear to be out in public starting tomorrow.  As a result of this 5+ day confinement I have learned;

1.  We are over scheduled and it is nice to have a few days "off"

2.  More than three days in the house is enough to drive me bats.

3.  Some very nice homeschooling can happen just reading out loud on the couch (followed up by a couple of trips to our maps in the basement).

4.  Artificial dyes and preservatives (such as those found in children's Tylenol) have a pronounced (negative) affect on Nova.  (We will be starting the Feingold diet as soon as the materials arrive).  

5.  There is a blog called The Happiness Project that looks intriguing.  Actually more than that.  I'm now a follower.    

6.  There is surprisingly little information on training your very own messenger pigeon online.

7. "The Name of the Wind" is a good book--at least up to page 482, which is all the further I've gotten.

8. "Harry Potter" is just as good the second time around.  

9. Babies really sleep best while they are being held (I guess I really already knew this one, but I wanted to explain to the rest of you why I spent so much time reading and online).

10. It is good to check up on your credit cards now and then even if you aren't using them--it saved us $2,000.00 this week.

11.  Sitting outside in a sunny spot in your yard feels great! (and is not technically breaking the quarantine).  

12.  Sitting in a parked car overlooking the Mississippi river valley is also not technically exposing other people, but provides all the sensations of "getting out" a bit.

13.  I like parenthetical statements.

14.  The flu is no fun!

15. Oh, and, last of all, being sick is always worse at night.   

  

Blend and Super Blend

I was asked not to write about this so as not to "give away"  the secret recipe, but it is one of those sweet childhood things I know that I will forget about sooner rather than later if I do not write it down.  

Several months ago when Charlotte was a very new baby,  Solomon was helping out by making very many peanut butter and jelly lunches.  One day a disagreement erupted between Nova and Solomon about her sandwich.  She wanted jelly first, then peanut butter, and he had  made it the other way round.  I was about to come down and break up the impending fight when they came up with the most childishly ingenious solution--flip it over!  From then on this type of sandwich has been known as the Super Blend.  Regular (unflipped) sandwiches are known as Blend.  For weeks, the question at lunchtime was "Blend or Super Blend?"  There was even much talk about a restaurant--which is why I was under strict instructions not to share the "secret" recipe.  

So, please enjoy your Blend and Super Blend, but don't tell anyone else!  

My facination with Cleopatra

When the kids and I were discussing what they wanted to learn about this year, I discovered that they felt we had never "finished " studying ancient Egypt because we had not had our "Egypt Meal" (a rough approximation of ancient Egyptian fare, eaten with much pomp and circumstance and created by all).   We last studied Egypt almost two years ago!!  

Ancient Egypt, Round Two

This time the kids wanted more than just mummies and pyramids and daily life.  They wanted history, and out of all ancient Egyptian history, most of all they wanted Cleopatra.  I do not even know where they heard about Cleopatra.  All I knew about her at the time was that she was supposedly very sexy, had an affair with Mark Antony, and was the last Queen of Egypt.  How to make this appropriate for an eight and five year old?  Luckily I found "Cleopatra" by Katie Daynes , published by Usborne.  I love Usborne books.  Still in the kids section I found the less discrete but oh so fascinating "Cleopatra; Ruler of Egypt" by Kerrily Sapet.  

Some highlights include

-Cleopatra was Greek!

-Cleopatra was a distant relative of Alexander the Great

-Cleopatra's parents were brother and sister, a common practice in her family

-Cleopatra was the first in the very long Ptolemaic dynasty to bother to learn Egyptian

-Cleopatra had a son with Julius Caesar

-Cleopatra was about as politically savvy as they come

-Oh, and she first met Caesar after she had been smuggled into her own palace (seized by her little brother/husband and his scheming advisers) wrapped up in a rug.  

Now, if you caught this part of ancient history in school, none of that will be a surprise, but if you didn't, go back and take a look, Cleopatra is fascinating. 

  

 

The Blog Avalanche; Or What We Did This Summer Part II

Fiddle camp was a blast!  I've never seen Solomon happier than he was at the finale performance!  Here we are dancing as the teachers fiddled on.  As you can tell, there was a lot of movement.  Hopefully we will have audio on here one of these days, so I can share the sounds too. 

A visit to Zumbrota!  We had lunch with GG John and GG Rose, then went on to the county fair with GG Rose showing us all the highlights.   It was a delightful afternoon. 

Camping...at least we still call it camping.  We opted for a cabin this year because of the wee babe.  Our original plan was to go to Glendalough State Park out in western Minnesota, and then perhaps on to Canada.  Due to a very unhappy little traveler, we opted for William O'Brian State Park, just 45 minutes from home.  We plan to go to Canada next June.  

A last hurrah of summer at Como Town, a pint sized amusement park that proved to be just right for our family.  

Charlotte and Dad at the amusement park.

Solomon 8, Nova 5 1/2, Charlotte Magdalen 6 months 3 weeks

If technology allows, there may be a video of Charlotte, pre and post crawling, posted here some day.  At present she is 8 months and has been crawling for six weeks.  She taught herself to stand two or three weeks ago and is extremely proud of herself.  She just looks ecstatic every time she stands without holding on to anything.  Her brother and sister clap and cheer wildly. It's a lot of fun.  

The Blog Avalanche; Or What We Did This Summer Part I

Hello All,

I know the idea with a blog is to post things bit by bit, even day by day, giving everyone following said blog a window into the author's thoughts and/or life.  It didn't work that way for me for this season.  Here comes a big long list of everything we've done since June.  In one night.  

Frog Dissecting!

Nova wanted to get the most out of this as possible (the whole endevor was her idea).  She insisted that we get at the brain.  There were no instructions for this, and the skull was harder to crack than a nut, but we got it.  Frog brains are VERY small.  

The Minnesota Zoo

 

The kids did see some animals too.  The Grizzly Coast exhibit was our favorite place to hang out.  We have fond memories of many trips to the zoo this summer.

Charlotte Finds her Feet!

Here is Charlotte at five months.  Grabbing her feet was one of her favorite activities.  She also liked sticking out her tongue at this age.

As it turns out there is too much for one night.   This takes us through about mid July.  Be on the lookout for a second installment.   

New Radio Story

I've got a new story up on KFAI's archive.  It is about Coldwater Spring, the last natural spring in Hennepin county.  I encourage you all to check it out (in person and via the news story).  It will be posted at www.kfai.org under Programs, KFAI Evening News, 8/20 for another week.   Or just click here.   If you go, be sure to gather water from inside the pump house (the stone arch structure in the background).