Three Plus Two

On New Year's Day

We finally have a camera that works.

(New Year's Eve)

(New Year's Day.  Note green moving sticker on chair from two moves ago.)

(Shouldn't somebody tell that kid we're on Christmas vacation?)

(Salad -- spinach, lettuce, and, yes, if you're Southern, there is cabbage in there, too --  in my new simple white serving bowl, a gift from Andy.  Katydid was trying out the spiffy "gourmet" feature on the camera.  She didn't take a picture of the Hoppin' John, but it was there.)

Smile!

Ok... good enough.  Happy New Year!

Today was the kind of day...

... where you wake up and your eyes feel like they have been rubbed with sandpaper and you realize that 2.5 hours of your 6ish hour sleep time was spent sitting up against a wooden headboard with a baby on your shoulder, and then you realize that two of your little ones have runny noses - again! - and it is December 17 and you are not done with your (online!) Christmas shopping and also that even your well kids are moving in slow motion and so the scheduled cleaning up the house is probably not going to happen.

So I declared a "nothing is going to get done" day.  Having had experience with these sorts of days, I know that the only thing worse than feeling like your eyes have been scoured with sandpaper is the accompanying feeling that you are running behind with no hope of ever accomplishing what you need to accomplish.  If I don't stop and do a reality check, what I end up with is a whole lot of meaningless guilt.  This sort of guilt -- "if God is a God of order, why'd he give me this brain and 7 kids, there's no way I can ever manage, blah, blah, blah" -- is counterproductive in the worst sort of way because at the same time it is paralyzing ("I just want to give up"), it also just gets worse as the day goes on and more falls by the wayside because of that sandpapery-eye thing ("Just how long have I been sitting here staring at this open jar of peanut butter???"). 

Today I wasn't going to get sucked into that well of destruction.  No, today I was just going to give myself a day of not getting anything done.  I called Andy at work and told him the situation and that nothing was going to get done today.  "Fine by me," he said, because he is a nice guy, and also because we have twins and he knows what sandpapery eyes feel like, but mainly because he was having one of those days himself.  So now it was a family affair, and I felt better.  Having your husband's seal of approval on a "nothing is going to get done" day will dispel any remaining shreds of guilt you have. 

So.  There I was.  The day had been completely written off.  There was absolutely no guilt about staring blearily at a computer screen, searching Amazon for Christmas presents...

It was about 2 PM when I realized that I had gotten something done today.  In fact, not just something but some things.

I'd gotten the Christmas shopping done because I gave myself permission to sit at the computer, but I couldn't just stare at the screen.  I might not have done my bedroom the way I was scheduled to because I had to put the baby in the Ergo and picking up the floor seemed a little bit too much like doing squats at the gym, but I did clean my mirror (finally) and I swept up the kitchen and the front room and did two loads of laundry, folded them (!), and put them away (!!)  I made a Target list and gathered coupons for it.  I oversaw the baking of shortbread cookies and my teenage son did his usual Friday bathroom cleaning chores, which does not mean that the bathrooms are clean but that they are cleaner.  I used our stash of emergency Annie's mac and cheese for lunch, but we ate.  I put small people down for naps.  I took out some recycling. 

And now here I am with the third load of laundry awaiting folding, and a fourth in the washer ready for the dryer.  My washing machine may or may not actually be cleaning these clothes -- it's making this high-pitched eeeeeeee noise of the sort you usually hear in bad 50's scifi movies -- but I figure rinsing them in hot soapy water must count for something.

Kind of like a day on which nothing is going to get done so there's nothing to lose by doing just one thing, regardless if it's the thing that's "supposed" to get done or not.

This Advent my primary reflections have been about my vocation and coping with the difficulty of slowing down to embrace ordinary life again after a year (or more) of constant upheaval and uncertainty.  On the one hand, constant upheaval will wear you out.  And on the other hand, some of us have the sort of personality that can come to expect it.  And when the upheaval begins to even out... it's tempting to create more upheaval rather than embracing the ordinariness of staying put.

Anyway, what I'm faced with these days is how to create a new ordinariness here in

 

Seven Quick Takes Saturday

 

One

So... Rocky Road is really nutty, isn't it, not nitty?  Would you believe that every time I woke up last night I was thinking about that?  Sheesh.

Two

I must get some cheesecloth.  I have a couple of dairy cookbooks, but how did I miss that ricotta was this easy ?  I think I am still hung up on the idea of making yogurt so I haven't yet graduated to thinking about cheese.  (I haven't yet attempted yogurt, by the way.  It's the incubation that requires too much planning for my disorganized brain.  Well, that and the fact that we are always about to run out of milk.)

Three

Over the past several months I have become addicted to grocery blogs, the kind where the blogger takes a picture of her insanely cheap grocery haul and posts all about how many coupons she used and what everything cost.  I notice that most of these women do not have large families, which is probably why they can get away with buying in quantities like, "3 apples."  I thought about this quite a lot a couple of weeks ago when I found ripe bananas marked down to $.39/lb.  I bought 14 lbs of bananas, and they were gone in 3 days.  I did not cut them up and freeze them.  I used 3 ( not lbs, bananas) to make banana bread.  The rest were gobbled up mainly by the little boys.  Adjusted for family size, time constraints, and organic/unprocessed eating (which means fewer coupons), though, I have found many of these blogs to be quite helpful, which is probably why I have become addicted to them.  (The other reason is that I am constantly in need of a challenge.  If I don't actively have a problem to work on, I start making them up.) 

Four

I actually took all the kids with me grocery shopping this past week, which is something I do NOT do frequently.  Most of my kids are little and although the little car carts are definitely an improvement over no car carts, 3 or 4 kids can NOT fit into them, no matter how hard they try. (And no, Pop, you are NOT allowed to ride on the roof!)  But Andy was in Arkansas for the day and there was a Mom's Night Out I wanted to attend later that night, so a morning grocery trip it was.  In order to combat some of the chaos, this is what I did:

• Made a super structured grocery list, including quantities and brands, based on the sales flyer and what we normally buy.  Katydid was in charge of the list.
• Gareth pushed the second cart.  The three year old got to drive the "car".  5 year old twins and 7 year old were designated as helpers to pull things off the shelves for me.  4 month old baby blessedly slept through most of the store.  That was nothing to do with me; that was divine intervention.
• Went as fast as we could, do not stop to read labels, do not wonder if you should buy the fish on sale, do not pass Go, head directly to the checkout.  We made it out of the store in 45 minutes.  I did buy a few extras (like Kozy Shack pudding) that were marked down for quick sale, but otherwise I think I actually spent less than I would have had I gone alone and been able to linger a while.

Five

A few of the grocery-related blogs I've been browsing lately (and note that these are all American):

Mama Says Food Stamp Challenge -- Big, Catholic family, very low budget.  This year  she's written a real food manifesto and changed the way her family eats somewhat.  Her manifesto is a useful guide to the compromises many of us must make in order to eat real food on a real budget.

Money Saving Mom -- not just about groceries, but she posts natural and organic deals and has a helpful series about lowering your grocery budget.  She hosts a Super Savings Saturday where people can link all the gory details of their latest shopping trips.  I think it says something about me that I enjoy looking at pictures of groceries, but I'm not sure what.  I thought about taking a picture of our groceries when we came home, but everything got put away too quickly, and anyway, it wasn't that amazing.

100 Days of Real Food on a Budget -- just found this one.  She's trying to feed a family of 4 "real food" on a budget of $125 a week.  Apparently this is less than what she would get with food stamps (and interestingly enough according to the data she links to, a family of 9 would be eligible for as much as $1350 a month.  We've been trying to keep ours around $1000 a month, including paper products, diapers, etc, and while I don't think we've come in at exactly $1000 yet, we're still way below $1350!)

Grocery Cart Challenge -- when I was sitting on the couch this summer trying to get my C-section incision to heal, I spent a while reading through her archives on my iTouch.  After we moved, I tried her system of just buying what we needed every week without trying to stock up on anything, but I found that our lives are just too unpredictable and I was far more likely to go out when there was only a meager amount of "emergency food" around.   So our budgets have been a little higher from time to time as I try to build up our freezer and pantry after moving. 

Healthy Life Deals -- She posts coupon match-ups to Whole Foods.

Six

When I was in the middle of writing Quick Take #4, I received a call from a new friend of mine.  They were going to be in our area for most of the day but they had a gap of a few hours before they had to drop off a couple of their boys for Scouts.  (My Boy Scout did not need dropped off because he decided he would rather go to a Civil War re-enactment than hike in the rain.  If you knew him, you would have been able to see that coming.)  The night before my husband mentioned that they ought to hang out at our house.  Could they hang out at our house?  Of course!  The kids and I spent the morning trying to make the house presentable and baking pumpkin bread, and we spent the afternoon talking and playing with our new friends.  One of the boys, about Farmerboy's age, likes rocks.  Once they discovered that (and our rock hammers), it was a match made in heaven.

So that is why I am now finishing up Seven Quick Takes Saturday.

Seven

Because I fell into bed quite early Friday night (after all the scurrying, talking, etc.), I woke up before 6 this morning.  It's amazing what you can see in the quiet morning if you're willing to be quiet, too.  The daddy longlegs have been invading my house recently.  This morning I saw one inside a jar of tempera paint I had mixed and left on the window sill.  I mixed it from powder, and the powder had all settled on the bottom, leaving a skim of water at the top.  The daddy longlegs clung to the rim of the jar with two of its long legs and lowered itself slowly to the surface of the water where it stuck out its mandibles to drink.  Once, twice, three times it drank, and then slowly, carefully, testing every step before it took one, it backed up and out of the jar.  The whole process took longer than it took me to write it, and certainly longer than it takes to read about it.  In order to watch, I had to slow down, too.

Then I came into the computer room and sat down at the computer.  I looked up "Costco shopping trip" because my new friend and I had been talking about Costco, and since I just spent 5 years in the frozen wilds of upstate New York, far away from any Costco's, I had to restrain myself from asking her too many questions.  Then I looked up from the computer screen and saw that the whole outside was pink.  Not just "tinged a rosy pink with dawn", but actually, really pink.  I got up to take a better look.  The eastern sky was clear and the sun was up.  But from the west, a front had set up a wall of gray and white cloud.  The sun reflected pink off the clouds, caught the glow from the yellow and crimson autumn trees, and colored the whole world.

Now it is almost 7 AM and I can hear the boys talking in their room.  The clouds have come in and the world has settled down to gray sky and the sound of the bathroom door slamming.  But I'll carry the early morning slowness, the pinkness, into my day.

 

My Kitchen Window

1 tomato from the produce stand, 3 Fuyu persimmons from the neighbor's tree, Madonna and Child.

Because I wanted to remember it.

Where Do I Start? Daybook

Outside my window: Sunrise.  I'm facing west and looking at the trees in my pasture, the small sycamore in the "back yard" area, the floodlight pole.  The windows on the back of the house are of the 1980 variety of just not quite big enough.  I miss my big dining room picture window.  In fact, I miss quite a few things about my old house, but at least this house does not make me wheeze.  Being able to breathe trumps picture windows.

Weather for today:  Ridiculously warm and sunny.  Back into the upper 80's and low 90's again. Temperatures dropped down into the upper 60's this past weekend.  We saw people wearing toboggans and laughed.  The weather has been a little beautiful, though... the land is parched and so in need of rain.  Leaves and grass crunch underfoot.  It looks like they are trying to predict a "few showers" for Gareth's birthday next week, so we can hope!

In my yard: The beginnings of a potager ... some unidentified red flowers (from bulbs) that have pushed up through the soil in  Azaela Garden ... pecans and persimmons falling... a mockingbird that sits in the magnolia tree in the paddock and sings to us in the morning.

In my kitchen: Oh my, the kitchen.  Where do I start?  The kitchen has been my focus in one way or another since we've been here.  First it was just trying to set things up so we could eat decent food instead of the fast food and convenience food we'd been eating since June.  It felt good to cook fresh hulled black-eyed peas bought at a local farm stand on rice, even if most of my kids turned up their noses and only ate the bacon and rice.  It felt good to find a farmer's market and eggplant and tomatoes and make ratatouille.  It felt good to discover that Hot Chow Chow is one of the more addictive foods on the planet, and a little mournful to realize that the lady you bought it from had just sold out her stock.  Cooking, though, has also become a little bit of something else for me in the time that we've been here.  It's the one thing I can almost sometimes control.

Here is where I have to begin again, and it won't be anything about the kitchen, except that it all links up in the end.  This is where I have to write down what has been ordering our lives -- or disordering them -- for the past two months, and it's not boxes.  On the day before we arrived in town, my father-in-law had a heart attack.  He did not go to the emergency room.  He drove to meet us at our new home the next day to give us the keys.  It was 103 degrees and about as humid as a steam room.  Andy's mom said that he was having chest pain and his shoulders hurt so he would not be wandering around our new house with us but sitting somewhere in the air conditioning.  That Monday, he went to the doctor and discovered he'd had a heart attack. 

Then began a month of tests, culminating in bypass surgery, 9 days in the hospital, a few days at home, then 4 more days in the hospital, and -- thank God -- now he seems to be recovering.  Andy has spent a lot of time with his dad.  I have spent a lot of time taking care of kids late at night.  And feeding them.  And trying to feed Andy, when he's here.  And sometimes making food for my inlaws.  And talking to Andy about diet.  And reading about food.  And thinking about food.

It's situations like this that make it clear how important the cook's role is in a family.  My husband (to some extent) and kids don't choose what they eat too much.  They depend on what I cook, what I buy.  Am I feeding them the right things?  Or is what I'm cooking going to contribute to heart disease down the road, to 13 days in the hospital and many weeks of recovery at home?

All my reading has convinced me that real food, real meat, real fat is best.  I feel better when I eat it.  My husband feels better.  My kids calm down.  (Give them a slice of commercial birthday cake and watch them zoom into the upper stratosphere.) 

But it's hard to ignore all the conventional, "expert" advice about saturated fat.  Hard to believe that all the experts are wrong in their touting of a low-fat diet, high carbohydrate diet, but then again, I do a lot of head scratching when I look at the data and wonder why all the "experts" seem to be ignoring it, too.  Gosh, it feels like deciding to homeschool all over again.

It leads to a lot of frustration at the grocery store.  We're trying to make two house payments right now (and don't even get me started on the situation with the other house).  We have some padding in the form of a savings account, but we want to keep the padding, so we're trying to be very frugal.  But how frugal do you get when it comes to food?  (I've been reading all the saving-money-on-groceries blogs, which usually just make me feel inadequate in completely new ways.)  Do you buy the cheap milk that says it contains skim milk even though it's sold as "whole milk"?  That has to mean it contains powdered milk.  So -- no -- I go out of my way to find better milk. (Note I'm not talking raw milk here or even organic milk, just milk that doesn't have "skim milk" or hormones added to it and isn't ultra-pasteurized.)  Do you buy the $.49/lb chicken leg quarters in the 10 lb bag?  I tried.  I couldn't.  They looked horrible.  Maybe I'll buy the $1.78/lb chicken breasts, although I stand there at the meat cases and think about conditions on industrial farms and food-borne diseases.  When we first moved in, we bought some "all natural" hamburger -- not grass-fed, but we had to eat.  The fat that came off that meat turned into an orange sludge.  Now I am never tempted to buy cheap hamburger. I often wonder if we shouldn't just be vegetarian for a while, but then I'm nursing a 3 1/2 month old linebacker and there are times when I really crave meat.

Fortunately we have found a nearby farm that sells grass-fed beef and lamb and pastured pork by the quarter, side, and whole.  If we can make it to January, we'll have some decent meat in the freezer for less than the price per pound of Whole Foods' grass-fed hamburger (including cuts like Porterhouse steak and all sorts of roasts.)  The moral of this story is: support your local farmers!

Coaxing order from chaos: Moving on... down from the soapbox... after a bit of a down point this week as I sniffled through a cold and we had to run Gareth to urgent care and I contemplated all the business trips Andy has planned... I've concluded that the best way for me to cope with the house at this point is to close the remaining book boxes and move them back into the garage.  We had to leave our two biggest bookcases in New York because nobody could figure out how to get them out of the hallway.  (They were moved into that hallway, but neither I nor Andy could remember exactly how.)  We were already pressed for shelf space, although I donated boxes and boxes of books before we left (including a few books I now wish I'd kept!)  So now I'm being even more ruthless and donating more boxes.  Hopefully at some point we will become proud owners of some new Ikea bookcases.

Are they learning anything?: Well, gee, I hope so.  I've been a little frustrated at my inability to keep the little boys to a decent schedule, but then I remind myself that I have a 3 month old baby.  He sleeps at night pretty well and with all the other stuff that's been going on, sometimes I forget how little he is.  But even happy, peaceful, good-sleeping babies need to be held and nursed and walked and played with and enjoyed.  So at those moments when I am frustrated that I am not accomplishing enough, I stop and take a deep breath and remind myself to be patient.  We've been saying our prayers every day, and the big kids are reasonably independent with their baskets and shelves of books.  For the twins and Farmerboy, I am focusing on reading lessons out of Phonics Pathways.  If I pray with them and work on reading, I know I've done the most important things.

A picture:

We have managed to set up some rudimentary art shelves.  The kids were happy to find the watercolors.

 

 

 

 

Bits and Pieces

What we're up to:

Watching the Olympics -- trying to deduce the rules of curling without looking anything up.  Wondering why it looks like they're using shower scrub brushes, and why brushing the ice in front of the stone makes it go where you want it to.  Realizing that we have lived in upstate New York for 5 years now (almost) and have never been skiing or snowboarding. Wondering when hockey is on??? Working on a 2010 Winter Olympics unit study  (Katydid) and remembering how very, very tall the ski jumps in Lake Placid are.

 

And also swimming and Marian Aides with the Little Sisters of the Poor (Katydid) and Farmerboy listening to The Goblet of Fire on CD over and over again (minus the last three discs, which are being held hostage by Gareth because he says they are too scary) and watching the snow blow out of our yard and into the road and wondering if the sun is ever going to come out again and knowing it will take a few months and building rock forts inside since the rocks outside won't be available until April and anyway, all the little boys have a cold and must stay inside out of the snow and wind.  And building Sculpey creations to go in the rock forts, too.

 

 

And reading Susan Wise Bauer's History of the Medieval World and Sons of Charlemagne and, if you're Gareth, a bunch of old Anglo-Saxon poems, just for fun.  And also if you're Gareth, you are beginning to think about Scout Camp and wonder if you might be able to work on the Sailing merit badge, because like the rest of us, you can't help dreaming of spring.

And me? I'm learning to soak grains and make old-fashioned oatmeal (soaked in buttermilk overnight) and getting in over my head because now the boys want "porridge" every morning, probably so they can pretend to be pioneers, and I do not have enough good glass or ceramic bowls to soak all the flour I need to keep everyone supplied with muffins and bread, and my counter space is really shrinking, but you know what?  Oatmeal tastes better this way.

An Art Supplies Post

There have been a few instances in the past few months when people have asked about the organization of art supplies, and I haven't had any up to date pictures to show them.  So as I was reorganizing and inventorying our supplies recently (well, a few weeks ago now), I took some pictures and thought I would share them with you.

I know that a lot of people around the blogosphere now have their art supplies out in glass jars, etc., so nothing I'm going to show you is very revolutionary.  I first started organizing our supplies this way last November.  So it's been almost a year, and it's been very successful.  The jars make it easy to find and put away all the materials.  They look nice and the cabinet is generally easy to clean up.  People do still put "stuff" on shelves that isn't supposed to be there, so there is some level of maintenance involved.  But it isn't as high as when there's a big bin full of various supplies that get stuffed in and thrown around willy-nilly.  Considering the fact that I am a terrible housekeeper, having one area in the house that doesn't look half bad most of the time is a real blessing.

Anyway, on to the pictures...

This is our art cabinet.  We bought it years ago as unfinished furniture from Lowe's.  It has probably seen better days.  The shelf-by-shelf breakdown:

Very top: laminator, roll of easel paper, Ziploc bag of Katydid's quilling supplies which I am hoping to relocate to a basket I want to hang on the wall.

Top shelf: Collage supplies -- plastic gems, sequin shapes, wooden beads, chenille stems, googly eyes, feathers (natural and dyed), corks, florist's wire in 3 different gauges, pompoms, pasta shapes, foam shapes, buttons, Elmer's glue, ModPodge, glitter glue, scissors, my rainbow Sharpies (in the back to keep them away from little hands)

Middle shelf: Drawing -- Prismacolor markers, Prismacolor pencils, drawing pencils, black Sharpie pens, oil pastels (put out for the first time when I did this reorganization because I had more space), beeswax (doesn't have anything to do with drawing, I know, but I didn't have anywhere else to put it), wooden organizer with Ferby pencils and crayons. 

Bottom shelf: Modeling for the most part -- playdough tray with various tools, box of air dry clay, recycled can with clay tools, tape dispenser, drawer unit with watercolor pans, masking tape, pencil sharpeners, and sculpey.

Drawer: construction paper, watercolor paper, painting pad

Under cabinet: This used to be where I kept the paint, and I locked it.  But now I have shelves for the paint, so I reorganized this part and took the lock off the doors.  Here I have a bin of powdered (unmixed) tempera paint, stamps and stamp pads, more paper and paper masks, and Do-a-Dot markers.  Since I took the lock off, the Do-a-Dots and stamps have seen a lot more use again.

And here is the reason why I could suddenly open up the bottom of the art cabinet and actually use all the supplies contained therein. :-)  These shelves are from... Home Depot, I think, but maybe Lowe's... I can't really remember now.  We bought them over the summer.  It took a while for the stars and Andy's work schedule to align before he could put them up for me, and then he ran into a few problems: our walls are plaster, not drywall, for one, and hard as rock, and this does not combine well with cheap screws.  The other weird thing about these shelves is that the shelves actually float on the supports.  They just sit on top of the brackets, which means that anyone walking by could easily knock the entire shelf onto the floor.  A little woodglue took care of that problem, though, and now I have a nicely expanded space which looks halfway decent in the room, too.

I actually took this picture before I ordered all our new watercolor supplies.  If you're curious, I ordered:

• a Compact Cotman set
• Van Gogh watercolors
• several new brushes, including some of these

The good brushes now share space with the pastels in the glass jelly jars.  I just put them in another recycled 28 oz. tomato can, with the label removed.  (I have one of those Pampered Chef can openers that removes can lids from the top, leaving no sharp edges.)  The tube watercolors went in the dogwood tin, and the watercolor set squeezed onto the bottom shelf.  The bottom shelf is the watercolor shelf: watercolor pencils, Lyra aquacolor crayons, the tin of good paints, not-so-great brushes, reachable by boys who are inclined to use paintbrushes as light sabers.  The dogwood tin also holds acrylics and mixing media for the acrylics, which no one has tried yet.

Second shelf up: pastels, which had not been used since Gareth was small.  I bought the set at a great art supply store in Clayton, MO, but they languished in the closet until I put them in these jars.  The twins immediately wanted to use them, and soon after, Farmerboy asked if he could take them outside and draw after viewing Julian Beever's amazing sidewalk illusions.  Well, how could I say no?

So that's what happens when you bring your art supplies out of hiding -- kids actually want to use them!

Anyway, now the pastels are worn down to little nubs, but I'd rather see the $20 I spent ten years ago blown in a morning than have the box sit mouldering in the closet for another ten years.  A long while back we had some good sidewalk chalk from Magic Cabin which is probably more economical -- and much better in quality and color than Crayola -- but I don't know if they sell it anymore? (A quick check, and -- yes, they do!  Much, MUCH better than Crayola, but not quite as vibrant as a pastel.)

But I digress.  Back to the shelves... although I'm sure it's obvious that the top shelf holds mostly tempera paint, as well as those foam paints Discount School Supply doesn't seem to sell anymore.

Here's what the shelves look like on the wall:

They look crooked, don't they?  Until we put the shelves up, we didn't realize how crooked the switch plate was.  So it's not the shelves that aren't level, it's the switch plate that's off center and crooked.  (Also, that side light looks as if it needs a good cleaning!)  The bookcase underneath the shelves is where I set out activities for Chipmunk... or where I try to set out activities for Chipmunk.  We go through periods of time when I can't put anything out because it ends up scattered to the nine winds if I so much as turn my back.  At the moment, I've actually added another knobbed cylinder block, some fish and transportation counters, and a clay-and-golf-tee activity.  If you think he actually uses those lovely colored wood stacking bowls, think again.  I keep hoping, but actually what happens most often is that the twins try to hurl them down the hallway as bombs.

Oh, but that has nothing to do with art supplies, does it?  Coming back around to the point of this post... I actually do need to make another big supply order, because reorganizing the supplies always initiates a flurry of art, which uses up the supplies, necessitating another order and reorganization.  On my master wish list right now...

• Sculpey
• Plastilina
• wooden beads
• glitter
• different collage material, possibly tile pieces for mosaics
• different colored or gauge wire
• masking tape - lots and lots of it, and in different colors
• India ink -- black and colored
• block printing ink + brayers + linoleum blocks and cutting tools (making one's own stamps seems to have piqued everyone's interest)
• Prismacolor markers to replace the ones that have dried out
• black Micron drawing pens
• blending stumps
• colored pastel drawing paper (especially black, which we have been using a lot of lately with oil pastels)
• construction paper (esp. in fall colors)
• new playdough
• plaster wrap
• new acrylics to replace the tubes that are being used up

I won't order all of these supplies at once (no, dear, don't worry).  Instead I'll try to determine what seems most useful or necessary right now, and those are the supplies I'll order.  For instance, Sculpey will definitely make the list, as will glitter, the different papers, new playdough, and masking tape.  I'll have to think about what else will make the list.

So those are the basics of how we handle art supplies around here. 

 

 

Emergency preparedness: working on the pantry

Last week, when I wasn't thinking or writing or reading about educational philosophy, I did a fair amount of reading and thinking about groceries.  Actually, since I plan on making emergency preparedness a focus of our year, this does actually relate to homeschooling. :-)  Periodically it hits me that we live in area where winter storms might knock out the power for long periods of time (as happened to many people we knew during last winter's ice storm).  It also hits me that I have a bunch of little kids.  How would we be able to get them out in a fire? (This thought kept me up nights when the twins were infants and Farmerboy was only 2.)  What if something happened to me?  Would my kids know what to do?

So we're going to work on this throughout the year.  (I'm putting it in the curriculum I submit to the school district as health.)  Gareth and Katydid are both working on the Boy Scout First Aid merit badge right now (Gareth will be able to actually earn the badge; Katydid is doing the same work for the Pilgrims of the Holy Family badge) and I am working on rebuilding our pantry.

When we decided to eat mostly local, the number of meals using canned goods we bought from the store went way down and we had very little canned food in our pantry.  The freezer was full of meat, vegetables, and fruit, but the pantry was not.  It's far easier for me to freeze our produce than to can it. There's a problem with having most of your food frozen, though.  What if the power goes out to the freezer?   And sometimes (like last week) we ran into tough weeks where there wasn't a whole lot that was easy to make (or that didn't require defrosting, as in a five pound chicken or a four pound roast), and of course we fell back on what American families often seem to fall back on. McDonald's. 

As it happened, we also loaded Quicken this week and were able to see just how much falling back on McDonald's in a bad month (or two) was costing us. Yikes! And then there was this conversation at 4real on the cost of meals per serving, which has given me a new hobby. ;-) The challenge is, of course, in using high quality local in-season ingredients in an economical way. In thirty minutes or less, since Chipmunk still refuses to sleep anywhere but on me.

Anyway, this week I bought extra emergency rations to start rebuilding our stock of just-in-case canned goods -- primarily so we'd have something to eat if we all got sick or if I got sick or if we'd been running hither and yon all day.  After this, the plan is to keep stocking up a little at a time, taking advantage of sales, etc.

(You know, some people think about how the world will be beautified or inspired by what they blog, but I must confess that I just think things like, "Hey! My cupboard's full of food again! I think I'll take some pictures! LOL)

So here are my "the cupboard's full of food again" pictures, which I hope you'll tolerate... I am working on a couple of homeschooling posts, so if you come here primarily for those, just click away and come back later :-).

This is the cupboard I use for canned goods.  You can see that it's not very big.  Our house was built in the 1950's by a doctor with five children -- girls.  Apparently large families in the 1950's only stored food in their bomb shelters.  Actually, I'm not really joking; the doctor did put a bomb shelter in the basement of this house, along with his practice, and this bomb shelter (totally wasted on a house outside tornado country) is lined with wonderful can-size shelves.  In contrast, the kitchen has a skinny little pantry with an almost uselessly deep cupboard on top.  I don't like storing too much in the basement, because a)I forget about it down there and b) it's damp, and I don't want the cans to rust. I'm sure it was all much nicer when it was first built.

Anyway, I restocked some of our "emergency" food, which in our case means soup, canned fruit, and creamed corn. (And spaghetti sauce, since I usually make and freeze my own.  But I used up the two emergency jars right before I took this picture.)  Everything else I use in regular cooking: canned beans, various tomato products, canned salmon, coconut oil, molasses, and (you can't see it) enchilada and barbecue sauce.  I'll continue restocking a little more every week, since this is obviously not enough to keep a family of 8 going for any length of time. I cleared off a shelf in another cabinet so I can expand.

I would also like to can tomatoes this year... if it ever gets warm enough or dries out enough for them to ripen... and if the groundhogs don't get them first.  My garden this year has been one catastrophe after another.  But that's another story.

This is the cabinet next to the canned goods, which I use for pasta and rice (and dried beans).  We had gotten low on spaghetti, which is also an emergency around here.  The blue bags are tortellini --  convenience food, but a lunch staple. Definitely something to rely on when I can't cook, too.

 

The actual "pantry".  I had it organized not too long ago, but it doesn't take long for it to degenerate.  Top shelf is really supposed to be staples like various vinegars and sugar (I keep my flour in the freezer because of bugs), but you can see that a couple of bags of chips-on-sale have crept in, and that the sugar has moved accordingly to the third shelf.  What you can't see in this picture is the 5lb jar of buckwheat honey that's out on the kitchen counter, or the jars of strawberry jam tucked in behind... something... on the 2nd or 3rd shelves.  The Gatorade is also gone by now, even though it was supposed to be for sick emergencies, not for kids to come out drinking after playing soccer in the yard.  We really try hard to avoid all food dyes, BHT, and TBHQ because they affect the behavior of some of our kids.  I don't think Gatorade is on anybody's diet.  There's more juice in the basement, because Wal-Mart was running a sale.

The freezer forms the bulk of our food storage, but I was more excited about actually having food in our cupboards.  We're in that time of year when the garden hasn't really gotten going yet and the supply of meat is dwindling, too.  I think we're pretty much done with the lamb we bought last year, and we've eaten a good chunk out of the side of beef we bought in October.  We have a few chickens left -- in the freezer, I mean.  The bulk of our chicken supply is pecking each other in the brooder right now.  It's the time for inventory: we need more lamb, I can't buy enough pork, we didn't eat very much of the broccoli I froze, I stumbled upon two more bags of squash, we're out of corn, and we're still eating last year's green beans.

I am beginning to refill the freezer in a small way, though:

 

14 quarts in the freezer.  And like I said, I made jam.

 

It turned out pretty well, if the rate at which it's being eaten is any indication.

So... anyone else want to share a peek in the pantry?  If you do, leave me a link in the comments!

Designs for Living and Learning

"Children are miracles.  Believing that every child is a miracle can transform the way we design for children's care.  When we invite a miracle into our lives, we prepare ourselves and the environment around us.  We may set out flowers or special offerings.  We may cleanse ourselves, the space, or our thoughts of everything but the love inside us. We make it our job to create, with reverence and gratitude, a space that is worthy of a miracle! Action follows thought.  We can choose to change.  We can choose to design spaces for miracles, not minimums."  ~ Anita Rui Olds

My copy of Designs for Living and Learning: Transforming Early Childhood Environments came yesterday, and after flipping through it expectantly, I settled into the rocking chair with Chipmunk and began to read.  The Anita Rui Olds quote prefaces the entire book.  "Wow," I thought. "'We can choose to design spaces for miracles, not minimums.'" 

Olds was talking about institutional childcare environments. But how often does this apply to my home?

The first chapter of the book contains a helpful assessment for current environments to help teachers decide what is working and what they want to change about their space.  Some of the questions they list don't apply to the home environment (one of my strongest first impressions is that the authors continually exhort teachers to make their environments more "homelike", which made me think, hmmm), but others do. 

The first thing they suggest is that you draw a floorplan of your learning space and ask a set of questions about each area.  Since the book is directed at early education environments (and since that is what I'm focused on, too), the questions are asked from the point of view of a 3-6 year old. 

1. I can see who I am and what I like to do here...
2. The natural world can be found here (such as objects from nature, animals, living specimens.)
3. There is something sparkly, shadowy, or wondrous and magical here.
4. My teacher leaves a special object out here every day so I can keep trying to figure out more about its properties and how it works.
5. There are materials here that I can use to make representations from what I understand or imagine.
6. I can feel powerful and be physically active here.
7. I can learn things from different perspectives here, literally and through assuming roles in dramatic play.

Lots of full-color photographs pepper the text for inspiration.

I'm very happy that I finally ordered this book after months of looking at it on Amazon. It's meeting me right where I am, clearing out, organizing, and rethinking our home for the new year.

 

 

On a rainy June day

• I overslept because Andy overslept because he stayed up too late reading Harry Potter.
• I tried to do part of my new T-Tapp video but Chipmunk woke up and instead I tried to do part of the T-Tapp video while holding Chipmunk.
• I had to get several drawings back out of the bin which I was attempting to put away for the year because a child suddenly needed to look at them after not thinking about them for at least 9 or 10 months.
• I cleaned out the dress-up bin, which had somehow also become the repository for all the missing puzzle pieces in the house.
• I provided props for "caving", but I did not paint with anybody today.
• I allowed two three year olds to use heavy utensils to pound Saltines into cracker crumbs.
• I took every. single. book. out of the little boys' room. Because they keep ending up in big piles on the floor.
• I made a strawberry and coconut smoothie with coconut oil because I heard that coconut oil helps you lose weight.
• I also asked Andy to bring home McDonald's. Because I had been holding/rocking Chipmunk for three hours and he showed no signs of letting me put him down. And everyone was hungry.  And there is no such thing as a package of chicken breasts when you buy your meat from local farmers. And we were out of spaghetti, and the person who is supposed to collect the eggs every day hasn't, and now we are "out" of eggs.
• During the three (and a half) hours I was holding Chipmunk, I put in a Home Science Tools order for insect-related "stuff" (including an ant farm, which I am a little anxious about) and a Montessori Services order involving color paddles.  I also ordered a Mass kit, after ignoring the fact that all our statues are missing body parts.
• And I looked at shelves online until my eyes crossed.
• And I studied all Jen's pictures. 
• And I skimmed through The Nature Corner and Where Women Create.  I determined I was born without decorating genes. 
• And I watched the Weather Channel. Until finally the child woke up and allowed me to put him down.  Then I folded two loads of laundry and gave permission for the two "flood monsters" to build a flood out of pillows.  And had a discussion with Andy about whether or not we could handle football season, if Gareth decides he wants to play
• So maybe you are not surprised that I totally forgot about Scouts.