Three Plus Two

Seven Quick Takes Saturday

One

After a lot of back and forth debating, I've finally decided to switch to blogger. I started working on the new blog this week and will hopefully have it ready soon.  I realized recently how much I missed blogging.  I'm trying to find that balance in my day that will allow me to have the laundry at a manageable level and a couple of minutes available for not working, too.

Two

What reminded me that I like to blog?  Elizabeth's knitting posts.  I have been sort of casually dipping in and out of them for a while, but this week it really hit me: it sounds like she's having fun.  Fun knitting and fun blogging about it.  I like learning about new things (like marine biology and physical geography and quantum physics) so I can give my kids some structure for the things they want to learn about, but I really, firmly believe that one of the most important roles of a teacher (especially a mother-teacher) is to model what it means to be an active learner.  Kids want to see their mothers learning interesting stuff.  Too often I think that having all the work done and keeping everyone on a perfect schedule means that I am being a good mother.  But what good is having all the work done if my patience is short, and I don't have time to do the things that will nurture our souls?     

Three

The work isn't done, by the way.  In case you were wondering.

Four

I keep meaning to update my Grocery Project.  When I started keeping track of my grocery expenses, I was amazed at how much we were really paying for food, household items, and common over the counter medicines and vitamins -- even as I was trying to cut costs.  And then food prices started going up, and I wasn't sure how much I ought to be paying for food.  What I ended up doing was taking a portion of our medical budget (medicine and supplements) and attaching it to our grocery budget (food and household products) to account for the stuff I was buying at the store.  It took too much time to separate that stuff out, and I had started using this nifty savings tracker from The Coupon Project and wanted to track those savings, too.   I've been able to cut $100 to $200 a month off what we were actually paying to eat a grain-reduced, organic, real food diet when buying primarily from stores. (This masks the fact that I'm also getting more food for my money, which is important when all your boys suddenly hit a growth spurt!!) Now that I have some experience with the stores here and with coupons, I could cut more by eliminating some of the organic processed and convenience products that we buy (almond milk, Stoneyfield whole milk yogurt, Larabars, and the gluten-free chicken sausages at Costco, for example), but a) my husband likes to try new things; b)he travels a lot and sending him with a grain-free packaged bar like Larabar keeps him from eating junk on the road; and c)I have four kids playing baseball right now.  Paying a little more for good-for-you convenience saves us from paying a lot more for not-so-good-for-you fast food.

Five

We haven't totally eliminated fast food from our diet either.

Six

The grain-free experiment is going well.  Since mid-January I've lost 30 pounds.  My husband has lost about 20.  (I'm still nursing, which he thinks is an unfair advantage.)  I feel a lot better.  All the candida related problems which were so bad after a year of inhaled steroids for asthma and 30 days or more of antibiotics at #7's birth have improved quite a bit.  I also made a huge discovery: my depression is diet related.  After cutting out grains, sugar, and starchy vegetables, I am sometimes discouraged but I do not get really depressed.  I have much more energy.  My face does not break out (which has been an ongoing problem with me since I was 10).  And some of the real evidence of the benefits our new diet came recently when Andy had his physical for Scout leadership: his blood pressure, which had been high, dropped 15 points into normal bounds.  Part of the reason for his success is exercise, but diet seems to count for a lot.  In particular, he gave up the large amounts of soda he was drinking; large amounts of high fructose corn syrup in the diet have been linked to hypertension. 

Seven

I'm sitting next to a 10.9 lb. cabbage here at the breakfast table this morning.  It came from my garden, which makes it doubly amazing. It's about 14 inches in diameter, and I had to hack off the root with a butcher knife like a machete.  I wish I could take a picture, but we've lost the battery charger and are awaiting a new one in the mail.  (I miss my old camera with its old-fashioned batteries.)  The coolest thing about this cabbage is that it came from a plant my neighbor gave me, and she got it for free from a program an Alabama plant farm sets up for 3rd graders to grow giant cabbages.  I didn't have a 3rd grader this year, so this plant is technically an "extra".  Maybe next year we'll participate in the competition.  This year, it's just going to make a lot of lacto-fermented sauerkraut (or cortido or kim chi).    

 

A Week in the Life

I continue to get back up to speed with life, both real and virtual. This morning I saw an interesting post at Charming the Birds from the Trees beginning her participation in the Week in the Life project .  Yesterday I had been catching up on Sarah's blog and enjoyed her Day in the Life post.  This morning, surrounded by trip chaos that was in the process of being beaten back little by little, I thought,  hmmmm.

I like writing "day in the life" posts (I have a whole  category for them,actually, going back 4 years).  To be honest, I think they are some of my most valuable posts -- not to anybody else maybe, but to me as Iook back.  But often while I am keeping track of our day, I end up thinking that maybe it doesn't give the whole picture.  The day I choose to track may be wonderful or awful,for instance, but that doesn't mean that all our days are wonderful,or that all our days are awful.  I once tried to keep track of one of our weeks (in more detail than the usual weekly review), hoping to provide a little more balance, but I got bogged down in the details and never finished.   But I like this project's emphasis on the photoessay and on the ordinary. As long as I don't try to put down exact times for everything every day, maybe I'll be able to do it. 

Not this week, though, as we have not achieved "ordinary" yet.  Next week.  I hope. 

Anyone else participating in the project this week?  Leave me a comment and let know!  (I love reading those sorts of posts.) 

Week 3: Feeling Better

So in Week 3 (August 31 - Sept. 6), everyone started to feel a bit better -- the kids faster than I did, actually -- and there was more work.  In some cases, a lot more work.  Work undertaken because the kids were interested in it, not because I planned to do it.  Work that leads me to contemplate that balance between "required" and "interest-led" again.

The one thing I did during Week 3 was to get out the pan watercolors to try and teach the twins (who need new nicknames!) how to keep their colors separate.  They wanted to paint rainbows initially, because of the rainbows from prisms that we had been playing with.  Somewhere along the way, however, "rainbows" turned into "robots with lasers".  Anyway, pan watercolors were new to them, they couldn't remember that you need to rinse the brush before dipping it in clean water and putting it in a new color, and they didn't understand why you couldn't just mix all the colors up in the pans.  But that was sort of the whole point of the lesson: how to mix only what you want to mix, and not everything up together so that it makes a muddy brown.  Which is what they often do.  In any case, they lost patience, got down from the table, and went outside to play dinosaur guys.

(If you're wondering where Chipmunk was this whole time, he was painting newspaper with water.)

This left a whole table full of painting materials set up with nobody using them, and a big roll of easel paper (not the best for watercolor, but we were painting big) for the taking.  When Farmerboy happened by, I asked if he would like to paint.  He said yes, sat down, and sketched out a dinosaur, then worked very hard at filling up all the available white space.

A note here: Farmerboy is left-handed.  That's why his painting set-up is reversed.

The finished picture, with a volcano in the background -- small, "because it's far away" -- and a sunset sky.

Then Katydid came through and thought she might like to paint with the watercolor pans, because we hadn't had them out in a while.   And that led to several days spent painting for hours.   We paged through some watercolor books to figure out a bit more about technique, and had a good time with the blog Let's Paint Nature.  She particularly liked the Baby Phoebe Nest, so she painted her own nest with baby birds using watercolor and ink.  She also painted many flowers and a downy woodpecker.  She also spirited all these paintings off to her room without giving me a chance to photograph them at all.  Well, I am thinking about making some photo albums on the blog to hold all the photos of artwork.  So maybe by the time I get around to doing that I'll also get the chance to take pictures of some of her paintings!

As well as painting for hours, Katydid also decided that her wee felt dolls needed some friends, so she worked on making some more of those.

... when I was trying to organize the art cabinet...

... and also before breakfast.  Actually, a lot of art work gets done before breakfast in our house.

The wee felt dolls also had another purpose, I think, and that was to populate the fairy houses that have enjoyed a resurgence lately:

And, yes, fairy houses do tie into the Victorian emphasis in the Sunflower Basket. I mean, that's what I'm saying.  And since the kids used the book Fairy Houses ... Everywhere! (The Fairy Houses Series), which is really a beautiful book showing very complicated structures the kids tried to imitate, I'm also counting it as art. Anyway, it was too nice to stay inside... a bit cooler, though, as you can tell by the long sleeves.

But -- back to dinosaurs.  Farmerboy has had his interest re-ignited and spent the day he painted the dinosaur picture doing nothing but dinosaurs.   In fact, he did dinosaur related "stuff" from the time he woke up until he went to bed, which was sometimes exhausting.  He took a break to do a little phonics and math with me, but mostly it was all about dinosaurs.  He papier-mached the make-a-saurus we started back in June, doing the papier mache about 97% on his own on the front porch while I ran around with the little boys, made dinosaur pictures using How to Draw Dinosaurs (Usborne Activities), and had me read See Inside the World of Dinosaurs.  And then there was playing dinosaur guys.  Of course.

  

Where have I been?

Well, mostly I've been writing plans for my two oldest.  This is something new for me, writing things down in an organized fashion, and I am hopeful that it will work well this year.  I guess I've still been planning a little differently than most people; the kids' plans are mostly based on lists of interests they gave me last month. Jen ever so kindly sent me some editable tables in Word which she and Elizabeth used to plan their Literature for a Young Lady curriculum, and I used them to plan A Bunch of Stuff I Think My Young Man Will Like.  I'm not sure it hangs together enough to give it a title, but I borrowed the idea of using a guide by Father Lasance -- in this case, The Young Man's Guide -- to be a sort of organizing thread.  Katydid will be following along with the Serendipity plans this year, by request, although I am altering them for a slightly younger girl.  (Katydid is only 10.  I guess technically she's in fifth grade, although for some reason I keep forgetting and thinking she's in sixth.  Oh well.)

If anyone's curious, I'll post my plans for Gareth, who will be in 7th grade this year. (I mean, for real, and not just as pictures.) But I have to warn you, they're a bit individual.

I mean, I doubt that every 7th grader will want to start with prehistoric people before moving on to a study of the Middle Ages.  But, to be honest, the subjects he wanted to study -- prehistoric people and evolutionary biology -- are just the sort of things you want to study with a "shield of faith" in hand.  I gave him the plans today and he seemed to think they were decent... He has the kind of personality that needs both choice and structure.  Using the table I was able to list a whole bunch of choices as far as projects go, which will hopefully solve the problem of the whiteboard.  We'll see how it goes. 

While I was working on the plans, I had to mostly go offline.  Which is okay because I have been in one of those funks where I'm not sure I have anything of worth to say anyway and the blogosphere left me largely feeling inadequate.  It occurred to me that since we usually go on vacation this time of year and I get enforced (and therapeutic) time away from all computers, I usually get a retreat that I wasn't planning on getting this year, with so much poultry to care for.  So maybe it wasn't really that I'm inadequate,  just that I needed some time off.  Then Andy sent me an email asking whether I thought we could make a family trip to New Hampshire with him when he visits there on business, so maybe I will get a brief retreat anyway.

(Actually, what Andy said was, do you think we could stock the chickens, etc. up on water and food for a few days and just have the kid down the street come by a couple times, and what I replied was, do you think we could put the kids in the coop, too?  Okay, so yesterday was a little tough.)

What part of spring are you?

You Are Blooming Flowers

You are an optimistic person by nature. In even the darkest times, you are hopeful about the future. You feel truly blessed in life and can sometimes be overwhelmed with emotions. You have an artist's eye. You are always looking for beauty in the mundane. You have a good sense of aesthetics, especially when it comes to shapes and color.

What Part of Spring Are You?

 

(HT: Dawn, of course :)

Fridge and Pantry Cleanout Challenge

(HT: Christine at Memories of a Catholic Wife and Mother, whose mention of food blogs directed me to some new reading material!)

Discovering Organic and Thrifty couldn't have come at a better time, as I really needed to clean out my fridge and I really need to do a better job of planning meals around what needs to be used up now. I've found that the most difficult thing about eating from our stores (garden produce I've frozen or otherwise perserved; local produce and meat we've bought in bulk; and all the eggs the chickens are laying) is planning.  Planning to use the potatoes before they sprout, using more onions when they start sprouting, using the squash in the pantry before the green beans in the freezer so the squash doesn't go bad, rotating hamburger with lamb with chicken with beef roast so that all the hamburger doesn't get used up right away... not eating the bacon ALL IN ONE MEAL... that kind of thing. So I was happy to find this challenge.

Here are the rules:

1) List "Notable Items in Fridge to Use Up" (feel free to post a pic as well)

2) List "Notable Items in Freezer to Use Up"

3) List "Notable Items in Pantry to Use Up"

4) Either list your menu plan or at least 2-3 meal ideas with which you'll use those items.

5) E-mail me the URL to your post and I will add it in to my post for more "link love" for you. (If you don't have a blog, feel free to leave a comment!!!)

6) Link back to my weekly fridge & pantry cleanout post.

So. Andy was out of town last week when we had the flu AND he had a company retreat to attend on Saturday for 13 or 14 hours.  Sunday the weather was "nice" (i.e., above freezing), so I justified cleaning out the fridge on the grounds that a walk to the compost pile would be nice.  I was really embarrassed at the amount of food that was taken to the compost, but at least it will be put back into the soil and not just thrown away. After I came back from the compost, I resolved to do a better job of using up what I had, starting then. Here are my lists:

Items in Fridge to Use Up:

After I got done cleaning out all the science projects... er, leftovers... I wasn't left with much. Monday has recently become our shopping day, and we were quite low on a few things. But here's what I discovered after I emptied and reorganized the fridge:

• Feta cheese
• EGGS. I have 4.5 dozen in the refrigerator right now. Our girls work hard!
• 4 packages of tortillas (the kids eat cheese quesadillas for lunch quite often, but apparently we had gotten ahead of ourselves a bit.)
• celeriac

 

No, it's not very pretty. I don't imagine that you have any in your fridge. But if you can find it in the fall and winter (its other name is celery root), it's good in soup or stew.  And it keeps practically forever. I've had this celeriac in my refrigerator since November.

• 1 grapefruit

Items in the Freezer to Use:

• 1 turkey carcass and 2 chicken carcasses I saved for stock
• vegetables frozen in the summer: broccoli, green beans, corn, squash. I need to use these before others.

 

Bit of a mess right now, actually. The meat is mostly beef, with a little lamb and pork mixed in. We have about 5 chickens left, I think.

 

The door held mostly fruit, which we are making a dent in now with the Vita Mix.

Items in the Pantry to Use:

• potatoes. Some of them may be past the point of use, though, and might be better off left for planting next month.

  

(We have to figure out a better way of storing potatoes. Digging up the ones in the middle our bottom of the pails is almost impossible.)

• sweet potatoes

The sweet potatoes are actually in pretty good shape... which was surprising to me, because I haven't checked them in a while. But we need to eat them.  Next to the sweet potatoes are onions, which -- as you can see -- are sprouting.  Our storage conditions aren't ideal and/or we didn't cure the onions enough last summer.  I can't use all of them up, so I might try planting a bunch of them next month -- just like the potatoes.

Menu Ideas:

Since I did my clean out on Sunday, I've already used some of this stuff. I made turkey stock with the turkey bones, some onions, and 2 of the celeriac on Sunday.  For dinner Sunday, we had Mustard and Black Pepper Braised Beef Shanks (seriously adapted from a recipe in the Williams Sonoma catalog) with baked sweet potatoes. (Farmerboy ate 3.)  Monday was spaghetti, with extra spaghetti sauce to freeze. Tuesday was Turkey Divan, using up some leftover frozen turkey plus the meat that came off the bones when I made stock -- and some of the broccoli from the freezer.

Meals for the rest of the week,..

Wednesday: busy day, so... frozen shrimp, salad, tropical fruit

Thursday: quiche or a puff pancake... something that uses up A LOT of eggs. Fruit on the side. Peas with quiche.

Friday: Black bean tortilla casserole, corn, fruit.

Saturday: I'd like to try to recreate a sweet potato -bacon soup I saw at our local farm store, grilled cheese sandwiches.  I'll use some of the turkey stock.

Sunday: Braised beef tips, mashed potatoes, green beans, fruit.

Hopefully taking stock of fridge and freezer won't be so much of a challenge next week!

 

Katydid Loves New Guinea

We're all still sniffling, but on the mend. As you can see, my mending hasn't extended to my ability to come up with catchy or meaningful titles. Or catchy or meaningful blog posts. I subscribe to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Twitter updates, and this morning they sent through a link to an expedition to New Guinea undertaken by members of the California Academy of Sciences. Katydid maintains that when she grows up, she is going to study birds of paradise in Papua New Guinea -- thus the title.  And also, thus my pleasure at finding such a nifty link to Papua New Guinea.

Do explore the link -- gorgeous pictures of caves, birds, bats, arachnids, and snakes. 

(And, yes, in our house, all of the above-mentioned creatures merit the adjective "gorgeous".) 

Seven Quick Takes #... Oh, I forget

See Jen at Conversion Diary for more quick takes!

 

One

The twins were playing construction workers this morning.  First they had to clear the land.  (I.e., whack at a bunch of toys with light sabers and plastic swords.)  Then they had to climb up on "ladders" -- the high chair.  (It's wood, no tray, don't worry!)  Now they are wearing plastic racing helmets and using the vacuum cleaner as an excavator.  One of my favorite things is to watch these two play.  They turn all the received early childhood wisdom on its head.  Yes, sometimes they do "parallel play".  But more often they are involved in the same game: interacting with each other, playing off what the other does or says, really playing together.  Is it twins, I wonder, or being in a large family, or both?  Or maybe the received wisdom isn't as wise as it lets on?

Two

Yesterday I finally made it to the developmental optometrist for my own eye appointment.  For the past few years I've been going to Lens Crafters and other chain-type places, because funny things have been happening with my eyes.  It's not that I can't see -- and let me tell you, it really is consternating to your run-of-the-mill optometrist when I walk in with 20/20 vision and say, "But my eyes are tired, I'm getting headaches, and I have to cover one eye when I read."  Our beloved Dr. Fox, however, started laughing after he examined me.  "It's a wonder you can read at all," he said.  Apparently, I have convergence problems I've been compensating for all these years by doing weird gymnastics with my focus.  Now my ability to focus is "running out of gas".  At least now I know that when I lose track of what I'm reading and have to reread a page three or four times it doesn't mean I'm getting dumber; it just means that my eye muscles are "running out of gas".

Three

I also found out that lens strength is generally measured in quarters.  I'm a something and 5/8.  "That's the story of my life," I told him.

Four

I am right now listening to the happy squeals of children sledding onto the icy driveway.  (At least I think they're happy, right now and this moment...)  The sun has been out all day, which is, well... you want to say, "What is this 'sun' of which you speak?"  Anyway, after a really miserable icy, rainy, snow, windy, beat-up tin gray run of days, the sun coming out is like your favorite uncle coming to visit, and you'd better make the most of it.  The big kids have been outside for an hour and a half, and temperatures are only in the teens with a wicked north wind.  But cabin fever has set in already.  Everywhere I went yesterday, people were talking about how hard this winter has been.  I'm not from here, so I never have any idea.  It always seems long and hard to me.

Five

I have been meditating all day on these lyrics, in fact: "This morning I shot 6 holes in my freezer/ I think I've got cabin fever/Somebody sound an alarm..."

Six

I have to figure out a better way to get a shower and do all the outdoor-related morning chores and get settled for our morning time before 10 AM.  This morning I had to beat the latches on the chicken coop open with a big pair of pliers.  I wasn't sure I was going to be able to get the eggs out before they froze.

Seven

Since signing up for Facebook, I have had quite a few old acquaitances ask me if I'm still writing.  It's like they think I ouight to be or something.  and I'm not sure how to answer that question, really.  I am still writing -- this blog, basically -- but a blog is not really what they want to know about.  They want to know if I'm still writing novels.  It's somewhat embarrassing to tell people that I haven't written any fiction in a long time.  And I can't even blame it entirely on the kids.  (After all, I'm sitting here writing this now, aren't I?  Instead of 7 Quick Takes I could have written 7 quick paragraphs on a story.)  The truth is, I stopped writing fiction because I suddenly wasn't sure if it was the kind of fiction I ought to be writing.  I have always written a little (cough) dark.  As my kids got older, I had to stop and ask myself, "Is this the kind of story I would want my kids to read when they're teenagers?"  It's not that I have ever written smut -- much to the relief of one of Gareth's preschool teachers who actually said to me, "You don't write that smutty stuff, do you?" -- but adult science fiction and fantasy has grown darker and darker over the years, and even the explosion of juvenile fantasy fiction, with some notable exceptions, has had its dark side as well.  I had to conclude that I did not want to be a part of the slide into darkness.  On the other hand... we're not all cut out to write Anne of Green Gables and Little Women.  So basically I have had a long, introspective dry spell in which my blog has kept me from going insane, which is what not writing anything at all does to me.  I hope that this dry spell will soon end, and I'm keeping an ear out for whispers from God.  

So that's my answer to the question, "Are you still writing?"  

A Room Without Books...

Lately I've been thinking about a few things, including the purposes (plural) of blogging.  I use my blog as a scrapbook, and a place to write essays, and a place to talk about my garden, and to post nature photos, and to document my kids' learning, and also as a little piece of community.  I use it to post cute pictures that Grandma will like, and I also use it to provide information that I think homeschooling mothers like me will be interested in.  I use it for fun -- the occasional meme and quiz -- and I use it to help me sort out my thoughts.  I think this jumble of purposes and subjects might lose me some readers, but... am I really blogging to gain readers?  Or is my blog more like a home, a sort of collage representing all the people who live here?

In spite of the fact that my writerly nature likes to gain readers, I lean toward collage.  And that means that sometimes I'm going to use the blog for its usefullness (in documenting the kids' projects, say) and sometimes I'm going to use it for its fun value.  Hopefully the fun value will sometimes also be interesting or useful to someone else, but I suppose that it really doesn't have to be.  But I think there's a sort of fundamental tension there, when you happen to write a blog both for yourself AND for others, especially when there is also laundry and meals and the needs of children to think of.  Sometimes it sets up a kind of tug-of-war in my brain.

See, this weekend I started thinking about books.  And I started thinking that although we are constantly reading around here, I never seem to get around to talking (much) about the books themselves.  And I thought, gee, it might be fun to give you all a tour of our bookshelves, the way Lissa and Kathryn and Meredith are doing.  But then I walked down the hallway to look at the bookcases which are stuffed to the gills with the "grown-up" books, and... wow, what a mess.  I've just been stuffing new books into the shelves in any available nook or cranny (or, really, even the unavailable ones) and it is past time to get a new bookcase... or purge the books.  So... with a deep, fortifying breath... I set about purging books. And as I did so, I thought, what is the use of writing about all these books, really?  There are a lot of books!  Can I justify taking the time to write about them?  I don't have time to write in the first place! 

Well, that was what I thought in between thinking things like, Oh, that's where that went! and I forgot I had this book!

Anyway, I eventually came to the conclusion that blogging books is, at its root, just taking part in a good conversation.  It's like sitting around a table talking about books, which are my favorite sorts of conversations.  I can't pretend that I'm going to show you a bunch of books that you don't own, because, frankly, I get a lot of my ideas for what to read, adult and child, from your blogs.  We have a really pathetic public library, so we end up buying most of our books... but Borders is far away, and we can't all fit in the used bookstore in town at the same time.  So, for better or for worse, most of the books we read come from Amazon, which I hardly ever browse the way I would in a library or brick and mortar store; I go there looking for a specific thing, and maybe I click hither and yon and end up with something weird, but -- still different.    

Now, giving you a tour of my books is a big job.  We have more books than many, not as many as some.  But a lot of books, in any case.  There are books, literally, in every room (and outbuilding and vehicle).  Like the other homeschooling mom bloggers who started this conversation, I'm going to have to go slowly -- one shelf at a time, given to you here and there.  But if you're still with me in this long and rambly post, let me give you a view of the terrain upon which we are about to embark.

Real, undoctored photo of bookcase with upside down atlas and floor in need of sweeping.

Entryway: 1 small three shelf bookcase holding reference books.

"Pantry": seasonal cookbooks

Living room:  3 6ft. bookcases holding children's books in bins; 2 built-in units holding science reference books, home education books, and coloring books; 1 small three shelf unit holding children's faith and geography books, also in bins. 

Family room: (attached to the living room) book display unit, 2 baskets of themed children's books

Kitchen: cookbooks on top of cabinets, island... am just about to order an 84 x 30 inch unit (!I found one!) so I can actually use my cookbooks, and for gardening/farming books

Dining room: 2 small shelves of art books

Closet in hallway: 4 plastic drawer units + assorted bins and stacks of rotated picture books

Master Bedroom: 2 file crates for home schooling books; books piled on nightstands; cardboard box of Andy's books that has no real home

Little boys' room: 3 shelf unit which routinely drives me insane; Rubbermaid tub of rotated board books on shelf in closet.

Long hallway (which serves as a playroom):  3 big bookcases, not quite floor to ceiling, lining hallway.  (The previous owners took a closet out of a bedroom and turned the space into an alcove in the hallway to try and make the loong hallway less claustrophobic.  It's a perfect place for bookcases, but now Gareth's room has no closet.)

Gareth's room: 2 bookcases, one floor to ceiling, but not entirely full of books

Katydid's room: many bins, 1 small built-in shelf, one small unit in closet, and a few hundred books scattered all over the floor. 

Basement: curriculum not in use, cookbooks I have no space for up here, woodworking, gardening, and homestead books on shelves in "workshop" area. 

Now, to decide where to start... any requests?

Seven Quick Takes... Saturday?

I'm addicted to the Seven Quick Takes post now, so I'm going to post one even though I'ma little late.  (I started this one yesterday.)  Go see Jen for more!

One

I cooked a 21 lb. turkey for Thanksgiving.  It was the biggest turkey I have ever seen.  We didn't need a 21 lb. turkey -- there were only 10 of us, our 8 plus Grandma and Grandpa -- but we bought our turkey fresh from a local farm, and that was what they had.  Enormous turkeys.  I actually bought a roaster this year because I knew the turkey was going to be big, but the lid still wouldn't close.  I baked the turkey in an oven bag inside the roaster with no lid instead.  Please don't tell me about all the carcinogens with which I infected my pastured turkey.  I am blissful in my ignorance. 

Two

Next year we have decided to raise our own turkeys.  We just have no clue how to do this.

Turkeys, I hear, are a lot more skittish than chickens.  Also, it appears that they may be less intelligent than chickens.  (How an animal could be less intelligent than a chicken, I have no idea.)  There are not as many varieties of turkey to choose from as there are chickens, largely because factory farming has selected for ONE breed -- the Broad-breasted White -- which has white feathers for easy plucking and cannot mate because it is soooo heavy.  We'd prefer to conserve one of the few other remaining breeds, but which one?  The Bourbon Red?  The Naragansett?  The Royal Palm?  It seems that mail order turkeys have a 15 minimum order.  Do we really need 15 turkeys?  Where would we put them?  Would we try establish a breeding flock?  Are we going to need an extra freezer?

Thanksgiving suddenly seems a lot more complicated.

Three

Sweet Potato Souffle is the absolute best way to eat sweet potatoes.  Just remember to call it a "souffle" and not "pie filling."

Four

Andy took the big kids and his parents to our local used book store on Wednesday, while I stayed home with the little ones (and Farmerboy, who was sick.)  He brought home a book called Malabar Farm. Malabar Farm is now a state park in Ohio, to which Lehman's apparently donates a portion of their proceeds, but it began life as an organic farm (sort of a commune, actually) back in the 1930s and 40's.  Andy read me an interesting passage from it last night,  linking various social problems to the depletion of the soil, because poor soil produces "sick and stunted specimens".  What was most interesting about the passage came in this line:

"Education comes third because it is useless to attempt education with people sick physically and mentally from deficiencies of vital minerals.  It is no good trying to solve the problem by taxes, WPA, charity and relief, although these may be necessary in times of acute crisis." 

Five

He also read me a descriptive passage about one of their lunches on the farm, for 14 people:

Reba is off for the week end in Mt. Vernon so Tom and Nancy cooked lunch aided by bits of advice, some corn-husking and potato-paring by the rest of the family.  And a good lunch it was -- young White Rock broilers, mashed potatoes, gravy, cauliflower and sweetcorn fresh from the garden, quantities of fresh butter churned Thursday, tomatoes like beefsteak and the first limestone lettuce, newly made peach butter and freshly made pickles put up by Nanny and Jenny Oaks, ice-cold cantaloupe watermelon, big bunches of Niagara and Concord grapes and fresh peaches, ice-cold glasses of Guernsey milk or fresh buttermilk with little globules of butter still floating in it.  Everything on the table was produced on the place.

To which I replied, "Good grief, that was lunch???"

Six

Thanksgiving has, I think, become more meaningful to us as we have attempted to put more of our own food on the table.  This year we had our own sweet corn, Gareth's green beans, our onions, and our potatoes.  One of our own eggs went into the sweet potato souffle. (Ahem.)  We had a local turkey, local garlic flavoring the turkey, local sweet potatoes, blueberries picked from a local farm in a blueberry-cranberry sauce.  During the week we had pumpkin bread made from our pumpkins and yellow squash bread made from our squash.  We had whipped cream made from fresh local cream on our pumpkin pie. 

It was a meal that tied us to our place, a thanksgiving for our harvest, and the harvest of other farmers in the area... a harvest which is keeping those farms afloat in difficult times.  Raising that food was a lot of hard work, for us and for others.  It was a lot of dirt and weeds and bugs, and chickens messing up the front steps.  Was it worth it?  Well... yes, yes, it was.  Yes, it is. 

Seven

The night nurse who took care of me and the twins when they were born dubbed one of them "The Complainer", because he fussed A LOT.  He didn't cry for hours on end; he just "complained".  Now that he is three he throws from 1-6+ fits a day over anything which is impossible.  For instance, the other day right before his nap we were reading a book that had pictures of strawberries in it. 

 "I like strawberries," he said. 

"Me, too," I replied.  "We'll eat strawberries again in the spring." 

"I want to eat strawberries RIGHT NOW!!!" 

0 to temper tantrum in 5 seconds.  But as long as you remember that he will throw a fit about anything as long as it is impossible, this particular behavioral trait of his becomes an amusing quirk and not a source of endless frustration.  Last night he was complaining about something and my husband looked him in the eye and said, "We can't go to Mars."

(You see where this is headed, don't you?)

Immediately he stopped complaining about whatever it was and switched gears.  "I want to go to Mars!" he sobbed, throwing himself backwards on the couch.

There's a stack of catalogs on my dining room table right now.  I've weeded through them and thrown away most of them already, but still the stack is a big one, reminding that 'tis the season to remember that I can't go to Mars either.  There's not room for a 3-stage booster rocket in my house.