The weather has warmed up and we are outside more again. It almost feels spring-ish, though I know better than to get my hopes up, there is still lots of winter ahead and that is okay too. We missed our Imbolc/Candlemass candle-making day (still planning on dipping some candles at some point,) but we sure have been noticing a change in the light- a happy reminder that spring one day will come. Valentines was a sweet little celebration with paper hearts and flowers and heart shaped crepes. Ari did his 100th show on the community radio and it created quite a stir- he got 3 interviews-1 newspaper and 2 on different CBC shows, and handled it all like a pro. And the station manager who is a good friend made him this terrific gold record (and also took this photo) which he is rather thrilled with -as you can see!

Other things: We saw a huge great grey owl on our driveway the other day- such magic to watch it swoop from tree to tree. 

There have been a lot more sick bugs in the house this year than in past years- nothing serious, but enough to throw things off  the rails a bit. 

Listening to lots of stories on tape- A Mouse Called Wolf was enjoyed this weekend. Dorian has almost memorized some of Jill Tomlinson's stories- they really are so perfect for this age and he adores the accent of the woman who reads them.  (and looking up this link I realize there are several here we have not read/heard- good to know as winter marches on!) 

Willa is such a wonder- gosh we enjoy this baby girl! Tonight she was copying Dorian's movements- wiggling from side to side and up and down- knowing she was making a good joke. And I could just snuggle her sweet little self all the day long. My favorite moment is lifting her out of bed after a nap when she is all warm and sleepy and cuddly. Oh sweet baby girl, we love you! 

 And looking for a new book, preferable one that would be good to read aloud with my love- any suggestions?

Goodnight friends! 

I am joining in with Jamie at Simple Homeschool for the Day-in-the- life homeschool series, documenting a typical day in our homeschoolin' home. We homeschool using the Enki Education curriculum with our kindergartener and 2nd grader- and our 8-month-old baby is along for the ride.

Today I get up with the baby and find the boys already up with Perry as he gets ready for work. They have pulled out the "barley bin" - a big sensory bin full of dried beans and barley and shells and cups and little vehicles and are engaged in a game together. I make a cup of tea and start on breakfast. When it is ready the boys leave their game to come and eat and I eat with them with the baby on my lap. I start cleaning up while they finish up and then take turns with each boy for "mini-practice"- our new attempt to get a daily music practice in. Just a quick once or twice through a single song for school days, with longer practices on weekends when mama can focus more fully on the little musicians. They play their songs and are off for free play time.


I use this time to change and nurse Willa, put away dishes and get a start on supper. Days where supper prep is done first thing go so much smoother- I manage it about half the time. Willa plays on the kitchen floor with some measuring cups and spoons (baby math!) while I bustle around.

After about an hour I start humming the cleaning-up transition song and start the boys cleaning and getting ready to go outside. I have to give these songs some thought- they work really well for my dreamy kindergartener, but my second grade boy is getting resistant to them and the transition into outside clothes does not go smoothly for him today. But before long we are all outside in the new snow and happy to be out. The goal of our morning outside time is to have a short exercise walk to get our blood moving before lesson time- and the boys do have a lot of energy to burn- jumping and running and sliding down the hills, walking in the deepest snow for the extra challenge. Willa loves the ride in the ergo and watches the sky for birds, and I enjoy the brisk walk. By the time we near home Willa is asleep and the boys have slowed down a little, but they are not quite ready to come inside.  I lay babygirl down in the bed upstairs and get a few things ready for morning lesson and then call the boys in. 
 
We used to do a longer circle at this time, but it just wasn't working for me to try and hold that kind of formal space with just the 3 of us, so now we just keep it very short. I am confident that my active fellows are getting plenty of base-sense activity with all the sledding, skiing, wrestling, shovelling and racing about that they take part in during an average day. So now we just do a sensory integration activity and a couple cultural dances that are based in the culture we have been working with, and some academic activities- multiplication clapping games and a number fact chants for Ari, beanbag counting and days of the week for Dorian and then our form walk to end it. We sit down to work on our morning lesson.

Our morning lesson focus is math right now, and we are working with place value for Ari. Dorian is free to join in as he likes or do his own thing, but he usually wants to be part of what his big brother is doing. A few days ago Ari and I read a place value story about the Kingdom of Jewel and a character called Tricky Mischief who saves the day by counting all the jewels in the kingdom. Last day we counted a huge pile of bean "jewels" together, using envelopes and little boxes to sort and count together. Today we work on a drawing in our books and then move to the chalkboard to work with numbers and drawings of jewels. 
 
Both boys really enjoy this and are excited to draw and erase the jewels to change the huge number, and then reading it out together. I can see Ari really starting to take hold of these concepts in a playful way, and I think he will be ready to move on to using manipulatives and written numbers on paper in the next lesson. The boys continue drawing and writing numbers (creating "funny numbers" like 5555! haha!) while I prepare lunch. Willa miraculously sleeps through all this- she is not much of a napper, so these long ones are a rare treat! I hear her waking up just as I am getting lunch out, and I go up to get her, kiss her cute self 1000 times and bring her down to eat beside us in the highchair.

After lunch is quiet time. Ari starts first in their room, turning on a story CD and bringing in some art supplies, and Dori and I have storytime on the couch. We light a candle- he likes to do it himself these days- and read his Enki kindy story. This week's story is The Talking Fish from Armenia, and he is loving it, and I've been hearing bits of the story in his play. When we are done I start an audiobook for him on the ipod and he goes to his quiet-time spot in the book corner of the living room to listen and draw. With Willa having just woken, this quiet time wont be a rest time for me, but I enjoy some time with my wee one, check my e-mail and slip upstairs with her to my sewing nook to sew a few seams before Ari comes to get me for practice time (by sneaking up the stairs and shouting "boo!" and scaring the pants off me!) Willa loves the basket of ribbon and trim!
 
Dori takes his story to finish in the bedroom and I work with Ari for a bit. On days where we have a new curriculum story to read we do it during this time, but today we get right to his reading time. He reads me a book and then he does some practice work. He works on a printing sheet and some language arts work. In a perfect world I would be able to give Ari my full attention during this part of the day to work with Enki language arts games, or on some journalling or story writing, but that rarely happens these days. Babygirl is getting fussy on my lap and Dori comes out from quiet time needing my attention. I am glad for the workbooks we have for Ari to practice these skills and he usually enjoys working on them independently. He gets through the work quickly- it has started to snow and the boys want to get out in it to play "arctic explorers."
The explorers are out for about an hour and manage to shovel all the pathways before coming in for a snack and a chapter of our read-aloud by the fire. 

Afternoons vary quite a bit from day to day around here- there is a ski class on one day, and there is music lessons and the boy's radio show- and on home days our afternoons are each quite different, with the boys working on various projects of their own creation, or helping me with kitchen projects, or doing puzzles or craft projects. Today Ari asks to set up the rope ladder and Dori asks for a puzzle, but they are getting a little grumpy with each other so I pull out a craft kit that their grandparent's sent for them to work on while  I get the baby down for her (late!) nap and work on supper. She sleeps approximately 3.5 minutes and then I juggle her while I finish supper.
 
 Supper is mostly ready when Perry gets home, but that isn't always the case. Evenings are the usual dinner and bedtime routines. Sometimes there is time for playing with Papa or having some family art or music time or other activity. Tonight the boys pretend they are circus performers as they get ready for bed, doing tricks on the rope ladder that is still up in the living room. They give me their autographs (as "Strongman Ari" and "Strongman Jack") before heading off to the bedroom. Perry does the final bed routines for the boys and I take the baby off to bed. Then we try and clean up and catch up on a few things, have some sort of uninterrupted conversation, and get ready for the next day ahead!

 

This past week we had some very cold weather, which kept us inside more than usual. The boys had some epic play going on, with games that have been going on for days, being set up and taken down and set back up again. We are moving on to a math block now, with a place value unit which is going to be good fun- a story about a castle being won by counting up all the jewels in the kingdom-  and then working together to sort and count a huge pile of "jewels" (beans) of our own. This sort of hands-on and image rich activity really suits my active, story-lovin' boy.

I came downstairs with Willa on Saturday morning and both boys were already awake and busy on projects. Dorian had stapled together some papers and was busy illustrating a book and dictating words to Perry, and Ari was writing a King Midas story on the computer (he's never typed anything up before, so he was very excited!) At the end of Dori's book he drew pictures and titles of several other books in his book series, and he has gone on to complete several of these over the course of the weekend. I love homeschooling.

 I am knitting so slowly these days, but getting somewhere with a few projects. I have a couple baby girl projects in the works, including this little maxi-dress that I found half finished in the bottom of my knitting basket and picked back up again. Also something for my dear, patient sister, who just might get it by her half-birthday!

And Willa, oh my, this baby! She has my heart. She is utter sweetness. She is scootching backwards on her belly now, and playing peekaboo by pulling blankets over her head and then pulling them off again when we say "where's Willa?" And when I gave her that apple to play with she surprised me by spending an hour carefully peeling the skin of with her new teeth, spitting it out and sort of mashing it against her teeth to slowly carve away at it. Brilliant, this baby of mine.

We had a lovely long weekend together, slow days mostly at home, really enjoying some time as a family. We even managed to get a few things done off the list! Couldn't every weekend be a 3 day one?

Happy Monday, friends.

feeding our families

 I am excited to be joining in with the feeding our families blog series hosted by the wonderful Renee, along with some lovely mama bloggers, all writing once a month for a year about the joys and challenges of keeping our families fed and nourished.  

 This is a topic close to my heart, as so much of my time and energy is spent in the kitchen, and thinking about meals and nutrition and preserving and preparing food for my family is central to my days. Growing up my family was pretty serious about food- if I had to list of my most vivid childhood memories many of them would center around it- my mom in the steamy kitchen canning vats of cherries and peaches, running through the mazes of raspberry canes at a berry farm, taking part in salmon cleaning work-bees when the salmon run was in, hiding my strange whole food lunches from my classmates at school. There was no processed food in my family's pantry. Words like "cake mix" and "instant"-anything were like swear words in my mother's kitchen.   

And though I tried junk food here and there, I never could really enjoy it- not after growing up knowing how real food tasted, and knowing the importance and deep nourishment that being connected to our food can provide. Sure I traded those whole grain sandwiches my mom packed for potato chips now and then, and I certainly did keep the thermos of buckwheat-tofu noodle soup hidden deep in my backpack,  but I never really wanted to eat the way my peers were eating. By the time I left home I had a stack of vegetarian cook books to cart along with me, and a few simple wholesome recipes up my sleeve. I met Perry when I was 21 and he was a terrific vegan cook, and we spent many happy hours together cooking and experimenting with cashew cheese and tofu cake and nut loaf and such. 

 And though the specifics of diet and food choices have morphed and changed in various ways over the years, having children and owning our own rural property has only deepened our connection to our food and where our food comes from. Nourishing my children has become such an important part of my days, and I can guess that when they look back on their own childhoods, food memories will be strong for them too. Cooking, preserving, growing and sourcing our foods are central to our family life. And though there is a lot else that I do as a homeschooling, stay-at-home mama, feeding our family is pretty core to every single day.

 These days my thoughts on food center around what is simple to cook and nourishing to my family. I think about how to fit cooking from scratch into my full days. I think about how to get organized enough to make cooking and baking and soaking and sprouting and fermenting and all those other good things, somehow happen seamlessly in between the homeschooling and nursing and general mama duties (so far, I don't. But I keep trying!) I think about how to feed this little baby of mine. I think about how to get my picky child to try more food and how to get both boys to snack less and eat better at meals and how to cut the honey consumption and up the broth consumption.  I meal plan (mostly.) I try and figure out recipes my kids will eat for the abundance of cabbage and turnips and rutabagas in our local food box.

And I compile lists of easy meals that can be thrown together with simple ingredients and not too much work. I'm not sure these could even be called recipes, as they are more approximations that I change and adapt depending on mood and timing and ingredients on hand, but I will try and share a few over the series in case they might work for someone elses family too. This one is a favorite egg dish that came to us from Perry's mom (thanks Nana!) and so it is known as Nana's Favorite Quiche in our house, though it isn't really a quiche. It is a fritata. But to my kids, there are quiches with crust (which they don't like,) and quiches without crusts (which they do.) They like this one. We often double it for lunch leftovers.

Nana's Favorite Quiche
5 eggs
1 cup ricotta or mix of feta, yogurt, milk, cheese etc (we never have ricotta so I usually mix yogurt and whatever cheese we have in a measuring cup.)
veggies of choice (mushrooms, tomatoes, greens, peppers- whatever you have and your kids like,)
herbs if you want some

saute veggies (and herbs if using) in cast iron pan until soft. Whisk eggs and cheese together. Pour egg mix into pan. Cook on stove top until starting to set, then finish under broiler. Eat up!

Melanie from Our Ash Grove

http://ourashgrove.blogspot.com

Jules from A Little Crafty Nest

http://alittlecraftynest.typepad.com

Melody from Bespoke

http://www.littlehomeblessings.com

Sarah from Our Island Home

http://sarah-ourislandhome.blogspot.com

Tonya from Joyful Living

http://plainandjoyfulliving.blogspot.com

Nicole from Redbeet Mama

http://redbeetmama.blogspot.com

Lisa from Hullabaloo Homestead

http://www.hullabaloohomestead.com