First Snow

It melted just moments after hitting the ground, but the icy tinkling sound was unmistakable. Perfect excuse to break out the hot chocolate; Lily likes to great the nutmeg. Luckily we just today got around to re-potting the butterfly plants to take them inside. Hopefully at least a few will survive the winter indoors. 

Here's our Dame Holda song:

Dame Holda shakes her bed like this - 

and the snow comes down, 

and the snow comes down. 

She fluffs up her pillows,

she shakes out her blankets, 

and the snow comes down, 

and the snow comes down.

It goes this way and that a-way

It goes this way and that a-way

It goes this way and that a-way

All through the town.

Applesauce

Stuck inside on a rainy day, so I'm posting twice.  ;)

We do a lot of cooking from scratch together, both normal cooking for meals and special cooking projects for fun. This week we baked bread from scratch 2 ways, with yeast and with baking soda. We also used up some soda bread ingredients making tasty little soup crackers. Lily likes to choose which herbs to use and grinds them herself with sea-salt in the mortar. 

We made applesauce from scratch too - Lily peeled the apples, I cored and chopped them, she chose the ratios of spice - cinnamon, cardamom, allspice, plus she grated the nutmeg herself, she helped me zest and juice the lemon. It was seriously the best applesauce ever, and a great use of plentiful and on-sale organic apples. 

For lunch we had the peels with cheese.

For normal meal cooking we frequently do stews & curries. Bebe helps me wash and peel the vegetables, this works great with our "vegetable of the week" project. 

Each week we choose a vegetable, or sometimes a grain, herb, whatever. To stretch it out we will do red beets one time, and sometime later do golden beets, and then after while do a load of different root bulb vegetables we have already done before, but as a group, or foods that also have edible greens as a group. This is often inspired by The World's Healthiest Foods, a website I really enjoy. We pick something in season, she helps me pick the item out at the store or farmer's market, we talk about it, sometimes read about it, look up tidbits on some of the cultures that favor the item. I buy enough that I can let her have some of the item to play around with. She has a garden basket that she uses to collect leaves and things in nature, and she'll add the vegetable to the basket, carry it around, pretend to pick it; it's sort of part of the seasonal table play that we do as part of our Waldorf inspired home-work. 

She enjoys exploring foods in this way, gets really interested in seeing what's inside the vegetable, talking about how it grows, and where. So... will little kids eat kale, beets, onions, spicy curry, squid? Definitely! Especially if you let them play with the food a little first, talk about it, learn about it together, let them help prepare it, and serve it on a nicely made table. Lily eats a better variety of food than most adult Americans - she'll eat bitter dandelion greens, broccoli, onions, yams, spinach, edamame, she eats pretty much everything that's growing and good. We don't allow the word "yuck", and we don't do sugary drinks, or anything at all with corn-syrup or preservatives in it. She's about the only kid I know that refuses ranch dressing for dipping vegetables, preferring olive oil, or nothing. How cool is that? 

Parks Department

Recently we've been going to classes at local parks, Dance, and Tumbling, both at beautiful Welles Park.

Miss Patty is the teacher, and bebe likes her a lot, she really gets the kids moving. Not having been exposed to much of the institutionalization that mainstream people call "socialization" (no pre-school or daycare) in the past she's been less likely than the other kids to focus on the teacher and do just what the other kids are doing. Miss Patty has such a great cheerful manner though, Lily's been following along pretty well. We already do yoga at home, but now bebe has new moves of her own, which is cool. 

We get there early and watch the squirrels putting away stores for the winter. The park has loads of grey squirrels, and even rare black ones. Locals apparently feed them quite a lot. Welles is also a good place for biking around with our trail-a-bike. When the weather is bad we take the Brown Line El train, the Western stop is just 2 blocks north of the park, and has a nicely graffiti-ed section of the Berlin Wall on display. 

Just south of the park is one of our favorite local kid-friendly restaurants, delicious & wholesome  Drew's Eatery, home of organic everything - brats, soup, and a large selection of ice cream. Lily entered a watering can in the art contest there, so go vote for her entry if you're nearby. Other Welles Park highlights include good climbers, a clean-ish sand play area, some of the best climbing trees around, and for some reason loads of big crows! Tons of crows! I know they are not technically actual ravens, but they are the biggest corvids you are likely to see in the region, and there are loads of them. I wish I was a better photographer, they're neat. 

getting cold

Spanked the baby today after trying to stick to the "no spanking program" for so long. Yelled at her when I couldn't get her co-operation. 

We were at the park, it was nice, then got cold, we were both tired. 

She was really bratty at the park, I'm not sure what she's so miserable about. What ever it is, since she is a child and I'm an adult, it's my fault, so it's hardly fair to hit her for being emotional.

Talking about the poodle with her just upset her. She wants to give an opinion but is worried she will be in trouble if the choice turns out bad. We agreed if she was open minded about color we could let the rescuers help us pick the dog that's personality would best suit her. She can pick all the dog's gear in whatever color. So that was a silly thing to let her worry about, but hopefully it's sorted.

Another thing I did wrong was let her see frightening & vulgar tv, things she shouldn't see, and left her to watch some acceptable things alone, using the tv as a sitter, a stupid, lazy thing to do, in my desperate scrambling to fill my miniscule & sad leisure time. 

So I apologize, but apologizing doesn't fix it.