And the Kitchen Sink

Armed and Dangerous: A Trip to the Art Museum

2012-02-28T07:06:00.000-08:00

On Saturday we finally got a chance to visit the Armed and Dangerous: Art of the Arsenal exhibit at the Brooks Museum in Memphis. I had the exhibit on my mental list of "stuff that we really need to do" since I learned about it the fall, but for one reason or another (sickness, holidays, museum was closed on Monday, etc.) we hadn't made it yet. This Saturday the museum held a "family day" with activities for the younger kids and free admission for everyone, so I was determined that we make it. The Boy Scouts scheduled a Camporee practice for the morning, but we managed to get Gareth to the practice for a few hours before we swung by and picked him up again on our way to the museum. He didn't want to miss it either.

The activities began outside, with swordfighting displays from the Society of Creative Anachronism (SCA).

George told them, "We do that at home, except without armor."

Inside, there were stations in every part of the exhibit where kids could make their own paper and cardboard armor.

The breastplates were just paper bags cut into vests with a piece of colored construction paper glued (with glue dots, which don't last too long) to the front. Onto that piece of paper, they glued a flattened foil cupcake liner, and in the center of the liner they glued a circular cut-out of a printed emblem the kids could choose and color, like a dragon or a griffin or an eagle. The boys didn't get to make a shield, because they wanted to see the real shields and swords first, and by the time we made it back to the shield station, they were cleaning up. (Note to self: 10-2 means "10 - 1:00 or so when we will start cleaning everything up so you will not know it ever existed by 2:00. Live and learn.) They did, however, get to fool around with the embossing tools provided to "make your own coat of arms". All the boys (including the 15 year old) enjoyed that.

Embossing materials are now on my mental list of stuff that would be good for us to do.

At the end of the exhibit, there was a room where you could try on various helmets and see what you looked like wearing samurai armor. The kids were all surprised at how heavy the helmets were.


Katydid decided that the samurai looked better in black and white

We were also surprised at the size of the Japanese swords, at least one of which was longer than Gareth (who is at least six feet tall). Photography wasn't allowed in most of the museum, so we have no pictures of the plate armor or the intricately forged Indo-Persian knives or the maces, which were a little sickening to look at when you contemplated what they were for. Until you see all these weapons in person, it's harder to imagine what warfare before guns was really like.

It bothers me when field trips like this get crowded out by too many scheduled activities. It's not that activities like Scouts and archery and baseball and voice lessons are bad, in and of themselves. In fact, they are very good, especially since they all stem from interests that the kids have and want to develop. But trips to the art museum (or other museums or natural areas or hands-on events) aren't "extras" for us. They're essential for the kind of learning we do. They illuminate and solidify the learning that comes from books, and in turn, they spark new interests. After attending this exhibit, now I can say, "Do you remember how heavy that helmet was? Think about how heavy it would be to wear a whole suit of armor! And how strong you would have to be to fight in it!" And the boys will know exactly what I mean. Gareth, Katydid, and I snuck away to the Renaissance paintings for a few minutes before we went home. Katydid, who has been studying the Renaissance, analyzed the use of perspective in all the paintings she saw. Seeing those paintings in person was totally different than looking at paintings in a book... no matter how faithfully printed the plates.

So it's a fine line. I'm not sure I'm walking it well, but we all enjoyed our Saturday at the museum!

Seven Quick Takes Saturday

2012-02-25T18:31:00.000-08:00

One

I spent yesterday morning negotiating a Playmobil Solution. We have lots and lots of Playmobil sets, and therefore, lots and lots of tiny little plastic coins, cups, helmets, shields, crossbows, flags, hands, hair, and horse bridles scattered all over the playroom floor. I bought a Stack-On organizer like the ones my dad has always had in his shop, but then we had to negotiate what pieces would be the sole property of a single owner and which would be held in common. I can now move on to my new position as the Secretary of State.

Two

Around lunchtime I took myself to urgent care to have my toe x-rayed. Tuesday morning I walked out into the garage in my sock feet to retrieve some frozen juice from the freezer. Being half-awake does not help my general lack of peripheral vision. I whacked my little toe on a piece if disassembled wooden scooter. Then I came back inside and whacked it again -- the same toe -- on the leg of a chair we had to tip over to keep Leo from climbing on the table and swinging from the chandelier. (You think I'm joking about the chandelier, but I am not. He really will stand on the table and try to hang from the chandelier.) My toe swelled up like a sausage, but turned a much less attractive shade of purple. By Thursday night the swelling showed no signs of going down, and Andy asked me if I thought it was broken. I said I didn't know, but maybe I better go get it looked at. I took myself to urgent care after dinner, but the receptionist there was new and unfamiliar with my insurance and told me I needed to come back tomorrow when she would not have to use the insurance answering service. I'm afraid I was a little impatient with her, and now I have yet another thing to add to my list for Confession.

Three

Fortunately my toe is not broken. But I just hit it again on the leg of a wooden high chair, and it does not feel good.

Four

After I had my toe x-rayed, I hurried home and we all piled into the van to go pick up a whole hog we bought from a local farmer and had butchered. The smokehouse is about an hour and a half away, and we had to drive through Holly Springs National Forest. I expected miles and miles of pine trees, but the interstate runs through a section of the forest which is logged and (sparsely) populated. About every ten seconds, Chipmunk asked, "Are we in the forest yet? Are we in the forest?" I think he was expecting grizzly bears.

Five

We arrived home with nearly 200 pounds of pastured pork (the bacon and hams are still curing), including about 70 pounds of unpackaged ground pork "plain sausage". The processor added MSG to its breakfast sausage, so we opted not to have them prepare it. Thinking we wanted to make our own sausage, they gave us the pork fresh and in 7 big plastic bags. We weren't really prepared to make 70 pounds of sausage, so I sent Andy out to Wal-Mart for the emergency purchase of a FoodSaver V3020 Vertical Vacuum Sealing System With Starter Kit. (Actually, I just said, "Buy a vacuum sealer!!!") I have had this purchase in the back of my mind for years to use in freezing garden produce, so I think it will get some good use. (Although it's cheaper on Amazon than it is at Wal-Mart, in case you're wondering.)

Six

This morning I did make my own breakfast sausage, which was demystified for me by the book Charcuterie, a Christmas present. It is a lovely, big cookbook to read, even if you will probably never make your own salami. Breakfast sausage is a lot easier than salami, especially if you start with already ground pork. I made the recipe in the book a few times, which gave me the confidence to modify it at will. The sausage I made this morning used about 2 lbs or so of ground pork, 2 tsp of salt, 1 tsp-ish of pepper, peeled and grated ginger root to taste (I didn't measure, so I can't tell you how much I put into it), about 5 medium to small cloves of garlic, diced, and a couple of glops of maple syrup. Mix it all up and use a spoon to make small patties in the pan. It was excellent, though the maple syrup gave it a tendency to burn.

Seven

On the way to the art museum for a family day I will be blogging shortly, I looked through the Kitchen Garden Seeds catalog. As usual, I am late. Here in Zone 7 is already spring. I discovered how spring it was when I walked out in the garden this afternoon and found...

... the first asparagus shoot of the season.

Pinning It Down v.2: Plate to Pixel

2012-02-21T18:03:00.000-08:00

I pinned a review of Plate to Pixel a while back on my Art and Photography board. I like photography and I like food and the review made the book sound like a solid one for the reference shelf, but it was one of those things that I pinned so I wouldn't forget it and then I promptly forgot about it. Last week when I was cruising my boards looking for projects, I stumbled across my pin again and ordered the book from Amazon.

I wasn't disappointed. Although Dujardin does provide lots of advice specific to food photographers (including bloggers who would like to post better pictures of their food), she also gives a clear and introductory explanation of photography basics such as aperture, shutter speed, ISO, the Rule of Thirds, and the importance of good lighting. Example photographs are provided throughout with aperture, shutter speed, and ISO information, both as examples of good photographs and bad photographs. So there is quite a bit of attention to visual demonstration of why light is important, how aperture affects the quality of photographs, etc. This is information that can be used in any kind of photography, not just food photography. In fact, in using this information to play around with the camera, Katydid took this picture:

Toddler scrapes and all!

When I tried to style and take some food photos, though, I ran into trouble. For one thing, my camera's maximum aperture (aperture is basically how much light the camera allows in) appears to be f/2.8, which is not as low as the maximum values of many of the photos she shares in the book. As I understand it, the fuzzy backgrounds one often sees in photos on food blogs are created by lowering the aperture number. I gave it a shot, but my backgrounds didn't really blur as much as I had hoped. Instead, they just looked... blurry.

Not the same thing.

I guess cameras can't iron, can they? Sigh.

(Oh, and it's a strawberry smoothie -- strawberries, plain kefir, a little honey, and a spoonful or so of coconut oil.)

It was also difficult to find a place with good natural light that wasn't in somebody's bedroom. The picture above (with its weird angle) was taken in the living room on the coffee table. That spot came with its own difficulties...

Of course, I did totally ignore the author's advice about choosing a relaxed day with a lot of time to experiment with camera settings and a bowl of fruit. But, honestly, are there ever those kind of days in this house?

Anyway, I've been having fun trying to figure out my camera. I own a Sony Cybershot DSC-HX1, which (I think) is classified as a "high-end compact." One of the most helpful things I discovered with the help of this book was how to set my camera's White Balance, and now my indoor pictures have started looking a little better. The light is still mediocre in this house -- no getting around that -- but having some knowledge about how to work with it helps!

This camera does have a "gourmet" setting, though, which may actually turn out better food photos automatically than I get by fiddling...

Or maybe it's just that Katydid took this photo.

Hmmm...

Another thing I liked about this book were the tips on styling. I thought they were helpful not just for taking photos, but for setting a nice table -- worrying about the little things, like how the color of the food should combine with the color of table linens, for instance.

Looks like I should have bought the paper plates with the blue flowers. Darn it!

If I had been following the tips in Plate to Pixel, I also would scattered some chocolate chips in this shot to let you know what you're looking at. My kids christened these "Oreo Pancakes." We ate them for our Mardi Gras/Shrove (Pancake) Tuesday dinner. The kids take two hazelnut-chocolate chip pancakes (made following the pancake recipe in The Gluten-Free Almond Flour Cookbook, except substituting hazelnut meal for almond flour and honey for agave syrup, fold in some chocolate chips at the end) and sandwich some whipped cream between them. It's homemade whipped cream, maple syrup sweetened... not hard to make, and soooooo good.

The kids told us we were the best mom and dad they'd ever had.

In any case, I'm looking forward to improving my photography (and my place settings, since we don't always eat on paper plates). Plate to Pixel is a very solid book, easy to read, and one I'd recommend if you're interested in food photography at all, even at a strictly amateur level (although she does provide enough information for you to develop your talents past hobby level, too.)

If you're curious about what her photography looks like, Helene Dujardin blogs at Tartelette.

And also check out the other posts at Sarah's Pinning It Down!

This Week at Our House: Photography

2012-02-20T08:03:00.000-08:00

Not this week, but last week at our house now... It was a busy weekend, not all because of have-to's. There were some want-to's mixed in, too, like a trip to the bookstore and dessert crepes in the afternoon at, of all things, a fast-food crepe shop. It wasn't exactly a little bistro in Paris, but something different on a cloudy, chilly February afternoon. So that was why I didn't post a "this week".

A few little snippets from last week, though...

World War II comics

Pine Warbler photo courtesy of Katydid

Great Backyard Bird Count

Messing around with photography: BetterPhoto Basics: The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Taking Photos Like a Pro

Nature Photography Photo Workshop...

And Valentine's Day.

Photo by Katydid, iPhoto editing by me

Great Backyard Bird Count

2012-02-17T20:17:00.000-08:00

The Great Backyard Bird Count started today, and to make up for what promises to be a wet weekend, we piled in the van this afternoon and headed out to count birds.

Well, some of us headed out to count birds. Others of us headed out to play with sticks, throw rocks in the water, and balance precariously on river bluffs.

We visited a local natural area that follows the Wolf River. Adjacent to this area is a large agricultural research station that floods 20 acres of fields every winter to provide habitat for waterfowl. Also adjacent to this area is a really busy road lined with office parks. It's an interesting little slice of nature in the middle of suburban sprawl. Since the trailhead is paved I thought the whole trail was paved as well. Silly me, confusing memories. We had actually not visited this particular nature area with Gareth and Katydid when they were small, and I did not really remember taking a stroller through it. If you ever want to feel like you're exercising, take a double stroller with a four year old and a twenty month old off-roading through mud, loose sand, and tree roots.

Anyway, most of us had a good time even though we didn't see many birds. Some of us may have been frustrated because certain members of our party were so loud that most birds within a twenty mile radius fled the vicinity, but certain members of our party were also pretty oblivious to the displeasure of some of us, and helped make up for the loudness by sitting in the van eating raisins out of a giant Costco bag while some of us watched ducks and geese from the observation tower on the flooded fields.

A few pictures from our adventure (all taken by Katydid, as I was too busy maneuvering the stroller through wet sand):

Species on our checklist:

Canada Geese
American Robin
Belted Kingfisher
Ruby-Crowned Kinglet
Song Sparrow
Killdeer
Downy Woodpecker
Chickadee-
Mallard Duck
Gadwall ducks
Grackles
Tufted Titmouse

Family Birding: Starting Out

2012-02-15T15:55:00.000-08:00

When she was six years old, Katydid, my only daughter, announced that she wanted to be a professional birdwatcher when she grew up. She's twelve now, and her only concession to other interests is to broaden her career goals a little to "naturalist" or "wildlife biologist".

In other words, she still wants to be a professional birdwatcher. (Excuse me -- birder. It won't do to confuse those terms!)

The rest of us have learned a lot about birds from Katydid along the way. I know what "pishing" is, for instance, and Andy is regularly hauled on early morning bird walks where hummingbirds buzz by watchers' heads or snow geese numbering in the hundreds congregate by the black waters of a winter lake. Even Katydid's brothers sometimes catch the birding bug, and she eagerly takes them for birding walks in our backyard, patiently explaining the differences between hairy and downy woodpeckers and why flickers are called yellowhammers down here in the South.

On the other hand, I can look back at our bird-related activities over the years and think that they haven't been that complicated. Mostly they've been kid-driven, although I'm the one who put up our first feeder years ago in our small St. Louis backyard. (Actually, even then, and Katydid was younger than two, I think, she was already birdwatching and would never tell you she saw a "bird", but instead would point and say, "Cardinal! Blue Jay!") This winter the younger boys have become particularly interested in birds again as we participate in Project Feederwatch, so I thought I would share some of the activities, projects, and books that we have enjoyed over the years.

A house finch at our wire feeder. Photo courtesy of Katydid.

Feeders
First on our list is simply hanging a feeder somewhere you and your family can easily see. (We haven't had good luck with the suction-cup feeders you are supposed to attach directly to your window, by the way. They always fall off.) If you hang more than one feeder you'll have more birds, but even if you only hang one small feeder you'll still have some to watch. We currently only have 4 feeders: a tube feeder with perches, a collapsible wire feeder, and 2 suet feeders. In the summer we add hummingbird feeders. (A hummingbird tip: the more feeders you hang close together, the more hummers you'll see. Hummingbirds are fiercely territorial. The key to seeing more of them is to make it impossible to defend all the feeders in a particular area.)

You never know what you're going to see at the feeders, though, really. One morning at breakfast we heard a huge ruckus of crows outside. When we opened the door to see what was going on, we saw a huge brown bird in one of the feeder trees, surrounded by a ring of crows and mockingbirds, and being dive-bombed by three broadwinged hawks and a kestrel. We were stunned! Katydid ran outside with the camera (barefoot and in pajamas, which is a theme with her, as I'll revisit a little later), but the huge bird took flight before she could get a picture. It was a barred owl, and none of the birds in our yard were going to stand its presence!

What to put in the feeders?
A long time ago, we switched to black oil sunflower seed in all our feeders after Dawn wrote that it was the only kind of seed she used (and she had lots of birds). We've had the same experience. It doesn't matter what kind of birds are supposed to eat thistle seed or mixed seeds, we get more birds of all the different species when we feed with black oil sunflower seeds. These species include cardinals, goldfinches, chickadees, titmice... etc. My father-in-law ran an experiment a year or so ago testing the different varieties of suet available to see what kind his suburban backyard birds liked best. I forget the results of his test, but you could certainly run this kind of experiment in your own backyard. We usually use the high-energy stuff. If you want to attract woodpeckers, you need a suet feeder.

A good reference book for all things related to feeders is
The Backyard Bird Feeder's Bible.

Field Guides
Another birdwatching basic is a good field guide. This is specific to your region, but if you're in the US, we like Stan Tekiela's Birds of... the States field guides (like this one for Louisiana and Mississippi. ) These are good field guides for beginners, and they're the right size for a kid to handle.

Katydid's favorite field guide is the Peterson Field Guide. The link is for an earlier edition. From the Amazon reviews, it looks like the latest edition doesn't update much and has become bulkier. Katydid's book has become her trusted friend. It contains a checklist of all the birds in the guide, so you can check them off when you see them and begin your life list.

What's a Life List?
This is where we get into more advanced -- but not more difficult -- territory. If you are watching birds out your living room window with your children all under the age of five or six, a life list can probably wait. But if your kids are older, or if you or your kids of any age get really interested in birding, then a life list can be a fun undertaking, and it isn't difficult.

Basically a life list is a list of all the different species of birds you've ever seen in your lifetime. You can keep it in a field guide, a special birder's notebook, a cheap spiral notebook from the grocery store, or on a piece of paper stuck on your refrigerator. You can keep a family life list or an individual life list. Katydid started life lists for her three younger brothers aged 6 and 8 this year. They told her what birds they recognized, and she wrote them down in a spiral notebook. If she saw a bird she recognized but they didn't, she would point it out to them and identify it. Then it went on their life list. The thing about life lists is that they become a record of memories. Sometimes they're not so much about just having seen the bird, but more about the circumstances in which you saw the bird, the stories that go along with it. For instance, pileated woodpecker on my life list (I haven't actually written one down, for the record) would make me remember the time we saw three pileated woodpeckers on one of our spruce trees in New York, and Katydid ran outside in her nightgown through the slushy, half-snowed yard to see them.

Katydid's contribution to a collaborative field guide

Make Your Own Field Guide
As a sort of more complicated project than a simple life list, your family might enjoy putting together your own field guide to species you've seen or that live in your yard. You can do this by drawing the birds from pictures in your field guide, pictures you've taken with your camera, or from live birds in the wild (definitely the hardest kind of drawing!).

George's contribution, in progress

An easier way to do this is to use these North American Birds notebooking pages. (Or perhaps Birds of the World or Tropical Birds if you don't live in North America. Or maybe your child is like Katydid and wants to do them all!) My boys like to use the big coloring pages because they don't take too much work, and yet they do document birds they've seen. Sometimes in very unconventional ways!

George built this bird model (it's a blue jay) out of Legos after we read the book Birds: Nature's Magnificent Flying Machines. George, a budding engineer, was most interested in the idea of why birds have different feet that serve different functions. After we read the book, he went upstairs and spent a long time figuring out how he could build a model bird that could flap its wings and perch. The bird he built could actually grip the gate around our hearth.

On the other hand, documentation is not something we spend a great deal of time on. In fact, it's pretty hit and miss around here for everyone other than Katydid and 99% of the time kid-devised; it's much more fun simply to walk around with a pair of binoculars.

Do I Really Need Binoculars?
You don't have to have binoculars to watch birds, but kids like real equipment. The binoculars we've had the best luck with for young kids (ages 4 and up) are these, from Montessori Services. They're rugged and real. If you can afford it, having a pair per kid works better because then nobody has to practice patience, which can be a little dicey when you are six years old and somebody has just seen something really exciting, like... well, even a cardinal can be really exciting when you're six!

Older kids, especially those who are a little more serious about birdwatching (or birding), can use the compact binoculars, but will probably be frustrated by the optics. For Christmas one year, Katydid received a pair of Nikon Action binoculars, which have served her well several years running. (They are also great for observing the moon.) They're not too expensive, but they aren't "cheap" as far as quality is concerned either. A good addition to your science shelf, binoculars are especially nice to have handy if your feeders are a little too far from your window for you to make easy identity calls. And of course, they also come in handy for birding walks.

Citizen Science
Something that can get everyone energized about birds is to participate in a citizen science program like Project Feederwatch. Project Feederwatch starts in November and ends in April, so there's not much time left, but you can participate in The Great Backyard Birdcount, which takes place this weekend, Feb.17-20! Participating in the GBBC is fun and easy. You can find the instructions here. You don't have to be a birder, or even a birdwatcher. You can just spend 15 minutes a day for four days writing down the birds you see and logging them into the Count website. Then visit the results page to play with the data. The maps are half the fun.

If you find you like logging your bird sightings online, you should also check out ebird. Ebird is free, and you can enter lists year-round, as often as you like. If you really get interested in ~~birdwatching~~ birding (excuse me), you might even see your backyard become a "birding hotspot".

Disclaimer: There are Amazon affiliate links in this post. I'll make a tiny bit of money if you buy anything through these links, which I will turn into more books!

Pinning it Down 1: Strawberry Valentines

2012-02-15T11:09:00.000-08:00

I feel like I'm cheating by telling you about recipes I've made courtesy of Pinterest, because Pinterest has really become my go-to cookbook. No more printing out recipes I want to try and losing them! No more stuffing clippings in files and binders and forgetting about them! I just go straight to one of my food boards.

Now if I really wanted to challenge myself, I would make a craft. Like these cute little cardinals. I had an idea to make them for the pine garland on my fireplace for winter. But now it's practically spring, which means that I should probably be making bluebirds and switching out my pine garland for forsythia.

Maybe next week.

This week was Valentine's, and so I made frozen yogurt-covered strawberries for our Valentine's Day treat. They look so pretty and heart-like in the photo. But I discovered two things: 1) you probably should use Greek yogurt and 2)letting them thaw a little before trying to eat them is probably a good idea.

I made mine using homemade kefir, because I didn't have any yogurt around. My kefir is thicker than most store-bought kefir, but a little runny for yogurt. I dipped the berries, then froze them, then dipped them again. It still didn't produce a pink and white berry heart like the Pinterest photo.

After the first dip. Another difference with my homemade version was that the kefir became a little brownish with the addition of honey and vanilla, not the bright creamy white of the storebought vanilla yogurt in the pin.

As for note #2...

Beware of brain freeze.

The general consensus, though, was that these were very good and I should make more. And I should especially make more in the summertime, when their sweet iciness would provide a welcome relief.

My 4 year old "fruit monster" (that's what he calls himself) did not seem to mind the brain-freeze tendency, however, and made continual trips to the freezer to pull out "just one more". He probably ate half the strawberries himself!

Check out more Pinning it Down at Everyday Snapshots!

This Week at Our House: Septic System Adventures

2012-02-12T17:51:00.000-08:00


The view out my kitchen window this week.

So, yeah. Septic system adventures this week and pretty much all that implies, including the lack of organized academics. It's hard to keep seven kids in a house where none of the bathrooms work.

What happened is this. We knew the house's septic tank might need to be pumped soon after we bought the house, and we also knew that pumping the septic tank would only be a stop-gap solution with this many people in the house. The city had installed sewers after the house was built in 1980, so we knew we could connect to the sewer... but that it would be complicated and expensive. The septic tank was fine for the moment. This was, of course, a license to procrastinate.

We're pretty good at procrastinating, but back around October or so the toilet in the hall bath started burbling whenever it rained or we did laundry. We all lived in fear of the burbling toilet. If you have never heard a toilet burble, you don't know what an ominous sound it is. If someone used the burbling toilet, then woe to us. If I did laundry while it was raining... or the day after it rained... then there would be trouble. The kind of trouble you will not want to find on your bathroom floor when you get up to feed the baby at 3 AM... if you know what I mean.

When we decided that we could procrastinate no longer, we called a plumber. We explained that we wanted him to dig a huge trench all the way across our paddock from the back of the house to hook up to the city sewer. He said somebody would come out to give us an estimate. Nobody came. We called another plumber. We explained that we wanted him to dig a huge trench across our paddock to hook up the city sewer. He came out to look at the house and said he would call us back with an estimate. He never called back. We called Andy's old neighbor who owns a plumbing company. His son said he would come out to look at the house. He never came to look at the house, but he did give us the phone number of another contractor who dug pipe.

We called him, and he called us back! He said he would come out to the house, and he did! He said he would come back with a backhoe on Tuesday, and he did! And now I can do laundry whenever I want, and someone can take a shower and flush the toilet at the same time.

Life is good.

The yard, however, is a huge, muddy mess. Which my husband attempted to conquer today using only a shovel and wheelbarrow. Not such a good idea, maybe, but he did get a good workout.


I call it "window-schooling".

While we were out of the house, we did do a few interesting things. We played at a new (to us) playground.

... with some interesting equipment. Some of the slides are built into the sides of large pits in the ground. And then there is the rope section, which stretches from one tree platform to the other. I didn't have a chance to take many pictures on day 1, because we happily ran into another family from our homeschool group, and on day 2, the boys were ~~running off the effects of pink lemonade~~... er, learning some lessons in socialization.


Do I play in the sand or finish this brownie? Impossible decisions.

The second day we went to the park, Katydid and George managed some bird watching. Or, actually, duck watching.

photo by Katydid

Katydid also got some exciting news this week... but we have to keep it under our hats for now. It's keeping her busy, though!

This Week at Our House: Busy

2012-02-05T18:43:00.000-08:00


Dennis playing with Story Cubes

Our busy season has officially begun, a little earlier than I expected it to. I knew we would be busy in March because that's when baseball practice starts. I did not expect February to be stuffed quite this full. Last Sunday Gareth came directly home from a 16 mile hike weekend to Grandma's birthday dinner, and then there was archery, Greek, the International Linguistic Olympiad, Scouts, a Scout-sponsored spaghetti dinner, Lazer Tag with youth group, George's usual vision therapy appointment... and the unexpected rabbit-related errands of midweek, when more baby rabbits were borne to the rabbit that must be the worst rabbit-mother in the history of the world.

The babies lived for about a day this time, which was better than last time. Katydid discovered the newborn kits in the morning, which was also when we learned that a rabbit's period of gestation is exactly 32 days possibly from the very day that her previous litter was born. That was an eye-opener. Katydid, who handles most of the animal chores, had read Storey's Guide to Raising Rabbits and Your Rabbit: A Kid's Guide to Raising and Showing, but neither of those books tells you what to do when your rabbit has babies on the floor of the cage. A quick google brought us to this rabbit care guide specifically geared toward taking care of rabbit kits. We followed the directions as best we could, putting the babies in a large bucket tipped on its side and filled with cedar shavings. I sacrificed a buckwheat heat pad to help keep the babies warm (the guide calls for a hot water bottle, but we don't own one) and drove all over looking unsuccessfully for a proper nest box. Andy and George ended up building a nest box after work. And the babies died anyway.

It reminds me a little of the year we raised turkeys. Poults (baby turkeys) are cute and curious creatures that are fun to watch. But they are very fragile in the first three weeks of life. They die at a horrendous rate. And there seems to be nothing anyone can do to stop it. When we decided to add animals to our little homestead, we hoped that the kids would learn something -- about producing their own food, about being responsible. But the biggest lessons seem to be the ones about life and death. When you put a pair of feral rabbits in a hutch, you have to compensate for all the necessities they would have been able to do for themselves had they remained living in their warrens beneath our barns. When you try your hardest and the kits die anyway, there are some big questions kids can be driven to answer.

The morning after the kits were born (before Katydid went out to feed the rabbits and discovered that they were dead), Gareth spent three hours working linguistics problems for the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad. The top 100 scorers will be invited to the next round, and from there, teams will be chosen for the International Linguistics Olympiad. Surprisingly (to us anyway) only two people showed up at our site to take the test. Snacks and drinks were provided, but they couldn't leave the room. The participants aren't allowed to talk about the problems at all until they're posted on the official website. Gareth will hear in early March whether he's one of the top 100 or not. When I asked him how it went, he said it was "fun". I treated him with a visit to the university bookstore afterward and a copy of Ender's Shadow .

I also picked up The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession -- the novel upon which the movie is based. I got it to read myself, but Katydid grabbed it before I had a chance. Of course she probably got all the birder humor better than I would anyway.

Other books this week:

World War I: "The War to End Wars" (American War Series)
Masterpiece (The story of a beetle who is also an artist.)
Brother William's Year: A Monk at Westminster Abbey (review at Bibliozealous. I bought this picture book almost solely because of the garden plan illustration on the inside front and back covers! )
Bridges Are to Cross (Chipmunk is fascinated by bridges and usually only gets hand-me-down books. So I thought it would be good to get a collection together just for him.)
The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge
Building a Bridge
Leonardo da Vinci (Katydid has decided that she wants to study the Renaissance through art. I have a list of resources in her basket right now that I'd like to post about.)

Don Bosco (The Blessed Friend of Youth)

Videos this week:

Games this week:

Set
Blink!
Uno
Story Cubes (Jenn just mentioned these. My boys love them, too. I picked them up at Target a couple weeks ago, and they were an instant hit. They were also the inspiration for me to finally put together some storytelling resources in a "center", the way I have been meaning to do since Gareth was, oh, about 5 years old. I'll tell you about it in another post. Promise. I just have to take some pictures.)

(I'm having trouble figuring out what size font I should use. If you prefer the larger font, please tell me! I don't know why the "normal" size is so small!)

***(Also, if you buy anything through one of my Amazon links I will get a tiny kickback, which I will eventually use to buy more books. I will probably tell you about them, too.)

Plateaus and Problems with Paleo

2012-02-04T06:19:00.000-08:00

This is where I come clean and tell you about some of the problems I have had with the paleo diet. These problems go beyond added expense (and it is more expensive, especially if you have a big family) and can become rather serious. At least, in my case they might have.

When I finished the Whole 30, I was a little disappointed. I didn't have the fantastic increase in energy as advertised, or a super-re-charged weight loss, or a feeling of better health. In fact, when I went to a previously scheduled doctor's appointment in the middle of the month, my thyroid levels were low enough that the doctor wanted to put me on medication.

Now, I have never had thyroid problems before. I have 7 children. Fertility -- which is one of the areas most influenced by the thyroid -- is not my problem. But ever since about the middle of October, and worsening to the end of January, I could run down the list of low thyroid symptoms and check off a lot of them. Most worrisome were the digestive symptoms, because -- you will all think this is weird, unless you've read the GAPS book -- my problems with depression, anxiety, and worrisome dreams all seem to be connected to what goes on in my stomach. This in turn really affects how I am able to care for my family.

So I thought it must be because I wasn't doing something right. I had eaten too many carbs and that was why I was gaining weight again. I had cheated once too often on pizza, the cream in my coffee was not good for me, adding dairy back into my diet in the form of yogurt and kefir was a bad idea, etc., etc. I just needed to be on an increasingly strict diet.

I was not happy with this idea, because, frankly, I am really bad at "strict". I was not happy with the idea that I might need to be on medication indefinitely either. Reluctantly, I started taking it, but I had heart palpitations on the lowest dose imaginable, and the toddler was cranky and waking up a million times a night to nurse but my milk supply seemed to be going nowhere. The pharmacy had replaced the doctor's prescription with a "generic" which was actually replacing the wrong hormone according to the test results I had pieced out of the phone static when the nurse called. I stopped taking the medicine. I hemmed and hawed about calling the pharmacy or the doctor.

I think that after you have broken away from the mainstream to the extent that we have -- homeschooling, Catholic, open-to-life, and eating food the government says is bad for you -- you start to wonder if maybe you ought to trust your instincts occasionally. That was what my feet-dragging was about. I didn't think that my thyroid had suddenly decided to go haywire for no reason. I thought it probably had to do, ultimately, with food.

My prayers grew a little weepy. I have a habit of flipping open the Bible at random after I say my nightly prayers. I kept opening it to passages about food. (Jesus liked to feed people.) Mostly the message of those passages was, "Stop worrying about what you are going to eat. God knows your needs, and you will be cared for."

And -- I feel like I have been! Let me tell you why.

A couple of days ago I was reading blogs over breakfast, and I opened this book review from Nourished and Nurtured. The book is Diet Recovery by Matt Stone, who blogs at 180Degree Health. (I haven't read the book yet and if you read through his site, be prepared for some bad language and crude humor.) I remembered that I had read a guest post of his about raising basal temperatures, so I went back and read that, plus the post and comment thread on his site relating to his guest post. Buried in the comments, I found a reference to this book:

The Don't Go Hungry Diet by Amanda Sainsbury. Thanks to the miracle of Kindle, I downloaded it and started reading in "less than a minute". In this book, Dr. Sainsbury (who is Australian) talks about the importance of the "Famine Reaction" in diets. Basically: whenever you start losing weight, you will come to a point at which your body thinks it is dealing with a famine. It will therefore slow down its metabolism in order to conserve energy (and fat). At this point, you will be hungrier than usual and your weight loss will slow down. Maybe it will even stop -- or reverse. The more you try to resist the increased hunger and cravings, the more convinced your body becomes that this is indeed a famine. Your metabolism slows even more.

That list of thyroid symptoms I linked to above? Yep. All symptoms of a Famine Reaction, too.

The cure for a Famine Reaction? Eat as much as you need to satisfy your hunger.

So basically, a "plateau" in weight loss is really your body's way of trying to save you from a famine. In order to get around this, you must eat more in order to bring your metabolism back up. When you eat more, your body gets back on the level, allowing you to lose weight once again. According to Dr. Sainsbury, however, the nearer you get to your ideal weight, the more frequent and intense your Famine Reactions will be.

This all fits with my experience. When I first stopped eating grains (except for the odd piece of pizza here and there), I lost weight very quickly. This was probably water weight at first, but I did end up losing 40 pounds between late January and late September. At that point, I figured I had about 8 more pounds to lose to get down to my college graduation weight. I was excited! But as time wore on, the weight loss stopped and then reversed, even though I was eating the same way. I thought maybe I needed to revise the amount of carbs in my diet, so I went lower by cutting out honey and most of my fruit, but this was obviously not what my body needed.

After reading about famine reactions and metabolism on Wednesday morning, I consciously made an effort to eat more the rest of that day and Thursday. I didn't stress about having to go through a drive-thru on Wednesday afternoon when we forced into an emergency errand to take care of the unexpected (again) arrival of baby bunnies (who sadly died again, after living a day longer this time). I ate a chicken wrap and tater tots. That afternoon, I made myself a banana smoothie with almond butter and prunes (sounds bad, but was actually pretty good). I also ate a big hunk of almond flour bread with butter and honey. That night I had a decent dinner -- pork roast, brussel sprouts, and purple sweet potatoes -- but I was hungry before I went to bed, so I ate some cheese. In the morning, I did not worry about the orange juice I use to take all my vitamins. I had two big slices of grain-free French Toast (almond flour bread dipped in egg and sprinkled with cinnamon), a banana, and cream and honey in my coffee. I had a Naked mango smoothie and the insides of a bacon/sausage breakfast croissant later that morning when I was waiting for Gareth at the Linguistics Olympiad. It seems like a huge amount of food, but it kept me from getting hungry when we weren't able to eat lunch until 2 PM. I was forced to have chicken strips for lunch. Then I had a regular dinner of gluten-free sausages and green beans.

The result? Friday morning my basal temperature was in the normal range. It's been low for a month. Raising it took 2 days and no medication, just adding more carbs and calories to my diet. A fluke? I took my temperature again this morning. It's a little lower than yesterday, but still better than it was throughout January.

I'm not saying that all thyroid problems can be fixed without medication, or that I regret giving up grains. What I am saying is that without all the pieces to the puzzle, it's easy to make mistakes. For myself, I doubt that I'm going to go back to eating cereal and pasta on a daily basis. When I ate lots of grains, I also had lots of problems. But I think there's a happy medium, matched to my individual needs. I feel better when I eat fruit and drink my coffee with cream and honey. A bit of rice or potatoes every now and then will probably not kill me. And carrying around a few extra pounds for a while longer would be a small price to pay for better thyroid health. I'm sure my family would agree.

The key, I think, is to listen to your own body. There's a lot of conflicting information out there, even outside the mainstream, so that sometimes it feels as if it would be easier not to eat at all. At some point, I think that it's probably better to just shut all the voices off. There may not be that many "supposed to's" after all. Maybe it all comes down to how your body processes food, and how you feel after you eat. I still think it's best to focus on eating nutrient-dense food unaltered by modern science, but beyond that... well, we're omnivores. There probably isn't a perfect, one-size-fits-all diet, no matter how often we (I) wish for one.

Whole 30 Week 4

2012-01-31T07:03:00.000-08:00

Katydid's almond butter and jelly sandwich on Pecan-Raisin Bread from The Gluten-Free Almond Flour Cookbook

This post is a little late because Monday was a whirlwind after a busy weekend, but I'm here for what amounts to my last week on this Whole 30 challenge. I say "this" one because I think I'm going to reset everything as of February 1st... perhaps allowing for a something honey-sweetened around Valentine's Day. I guess that makes it less of a "challenge" and more of "a way of life", at least for now. I think starting a medication in the middle of the challenge made it harder in some ways. Prior to starting the medication, my taste buds had adjusted so that it was hard to eat an entire apple, because it was too sweet. An apple! But since I've been taking the medicine, I've broken down and eaten some of the honey-sweetened breads I've made for the kids. The problem with those is that it doesn't matter if they're made of almond flour or regular flour, I tend to eat either to excess. My brain thinks, Quick bread! Whoo-hoo! One thing I was happy to discover is that the Pecan-Raisin bread pictured above (with jelly, but that wasn't what I ate) and the Scrumptious Sandwich Bread (linked below in the menu) are unsweetened. No honey, no agave, etc. I can eat those. But the other stuff is not so good for me right now.

Monday:

blueberry-banana kefir smoothie (kids)/leftover chicken soup (me)
almond flour sesame crackers, cheese, deli roast beef, bananas (kids)/leftover chicken sausage, kimchi (me)
meatloaf, roasted carrots and parsnips, green beans
Snacks: fruit, sesame crackers, almond butter, hardboiled eggs, string cheese (kids)

Almond Flour sesame seed cracker dough rolled out on a cookie sheet and ready for the oven.

Tuesday:

almond flour cranberry scones (kids)/eggs (me)
leftovers
Roast Lamb (based on Ina Garten's Herb Roasted Lamb, but I didn't use butter, and I cooked it at a lower temperature), roasted brussel sprouts, green beans, fruit
Snacks: cheese, leftover scones (kids), sesame crackers, almond butter, fruit

Wednesday:

banana kefir smoothie, hard-boiled eggs (kids)/eggs (me)
Beef Polish Sausage Sliders, sauteed onions and green peppers, green beans, frozen blueberries
Red Sauce (with meat) over spaghetti squash, oranges
Snacks: leftover lamb, fruit, cheese (kids)

Almond flour Cardamom Raisin Bread

Thursday:

almond flour Cardamom Raisin Bread (recipe below), plus eggs for me
sugar-free hot dogs, fermented dill relish, pineapple, salad (me)
Crockpot Ginger-Orange Chicken Thighs (a recipe born of desperation which turned out not so badly), stirfry veggies in coconut oil, mango
Snacks: popcorn and Club crackers (Grandma's house, kids), cheese (kids), leftover raisin bread, leftover lamb

Cardamom Raisin Bread:

Inspired by Elana's recipe for Date Pecan Muffins.

6 c. blanched almond flour
1 tsp sea salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp cardamom
2 tsp cinnamon
zest of 1 or 2 lemons
1/2 c. melted butter (you can substitute coconut oil for a slightly different taste)
4 tbsp honey
4 eggs
2 tbsp vanilla
a couple of handfuls of raisins (more if your family likes raisins)

Combine the dry ingredients (except for the raisins) in one bowl, wet in another. Pour the wet into the dry and stir until thoroughly combined, then fold in the raisins. Bake at 350 (if your oven runs hot, 325) for 35-45 minutes. Yummy.

Friday:

blueberry-peach kefir smoothie, hardboiled eggs (kids)/um... you can probably guess what I had for breakfast by now
Elana's Pecan Raisin Bread - sunbutter (or almond butter) sandwiches, oranges **I doubled the recipe for the bread, left out the arrowroot and used double the amount of almond flour per recipe. So instead of 1/2 c. of almond flour for a double loaf, I used 1 c. almond flour and no arrowroot powder. Clear as mud, right?
"Tropical" salmon patties, snow peas, kiwi and pineapple, salad for me
Snacks: The pecan raisin bread sandwiches were so filling, all the boys asked for until dinner time was a glass of milk! Before bed, they each had an orange and some cheese, and a couple of them ate spoonfuls of almond butter. Macadamias for Andy and me.

Saturday:

Elana's Scrumptious Sandwich Bread with sunbutter (kids)/with butter for me and fried eggs (I made this bread the same way as the pecan raisin bread, without using arrowroot or flax.)
Mexican restaurant -- the kids ate chips, quesadillas, etc./Andy and I had fajitas, minus the tortillas, rice, and beans, w/extra veggies
Pan-seared tri-tip, sauteed onions, green beans, butternut squash fries, blueberries
Snacks: cheese (kids), banana chips with almond butter

Sunday:

Chocolate-almond kefir smoothies (kids)/eggs and leftover steak (Andy and I)
A train wreck as far as the kids' diet went. Andy took the kids to Costco at lunchtime while I was in my class and they had drive-thru on the way (we didn't have enough time to pack lunch, and Andy didn't want to mess with that); for dinner, there was Grandma's pizza birthday party. Lots and lots of soda. The boys were bouncing off the wall by the time it was over.
The pizza place thankfully had a "build your own salad" entree. I built mine with a lettuce mix, roasted red peppers, green peppers, onions, Roma tomatoes, avocado, bacon, and turkey.
Andy and I both had Larabars.

This Week at Our House: Whiplash?

2012-01-29T15:21:00.000-08:00

Katydid took this picture in our front yard, January 26.

So I'm giving in to peer pressure and starting up a weekly review post again. Thank you for your kind words in the com box!

Spring

It's been a strange week. I'm pretty sure the calendar says "January", but we began this week with the tornado sirens sounding at 10:30 PM on Sunday night. Although the Weather Channel had classified the severe threat for our area a "Particularly Dangerous Situation" and rated us an 8 on their infamous Torcon scale, we just ended up with some strong wind gusts and a lot of rain. It was with some surprise the following day that we discovered Trussville, AL had been hit by a tornado. My family lived in Trussville for two years when I was about 6 years old. Oddly, most of what I remember about living there is hiding in our basement through tornado warnings. I called my mom Monday night and found we were both squinting at the online photos, trying to decide if the subdivisions that were hit this time looked anything like the one where we used to live.

After the storm system blew through, the weather cooled down a little... but not too much. We had some more rain, but when that moved on, we had...

Blue skies. And mud.

Lots and lots of mud.

And bugs! Centipedes and millipedes and earthworms. (Actually, a giant red centipede that bites and now lives in a plastic container in the garage after being banned from the kitchen table.) And a sulphur butterfly. And honeybees.

And... flowers on the trees? What?

Five years in New York put me on a different calendar. Actually, I never adjusted to the long winters and cold springs (and summers) of upstate New York, but apparently they got into me just enough to make me expect that January and February would be cold months. Not "January is somewhat chilly and rainy and then we have spring!" months.

So, still getting used to this. The kids think it's funny. Bees in January!

With two mainly outside-in-the-yard days, plus archery, vision therapy, and a voice lesson for Katydid, it hasn't been the most organized of academic weeks. We didn't get reading lessons in every day, but the twins' math focus continued.

Math at our house
It is with some trepidation that I mention my 6 year old twins are doing Teaching Textbooks 3. I know this is a sensitive area, because some people think that when you mention your kids are working ahead of grade (or age) level, you're bragging, and some people think you must be pushing them too hard, and some people will feel inadequate because their perfectly fine kids are not doing what your kids are doing. Comparison is really the root of all evil here. Anyway, the twins are the only kids I have who are really interested in math, and Dennis in particular will go through 2 lessons a day (and ask to do "the math disc" on weekends, too). It does seem to me that Teaching Textbooks 3 is a little easier than I would expect for 3rd grade math, but maybe there's just lots of review in the beginning? We didn't start using it until October or November, and that sort of haphazardly for a while, so even George is only on lesson 35 or so.
The twins and Chipmunk also ask to play on the Cool Math Games site every day, too. These are more spatial and logic games than number games. The boys like Ninja Painter, Build the Bridge, and Photon Zone.   Some of the games stretch the definition of "math" in my opinion and have been banned from official school time, as they are mainly used to produce cool explosion noises, but some of the other games require quite a bit of thought.

Sink and Float:

Otherwise known as "Chipmunk likes to play in the water." The other day George built a Lego submarine and wanted to test it in the sink. This began a long string of the little boys building Lego creations and "testing" them in the sink. I suggested stacking them with pennies to see how much weight they would carry. Yes, there was a giant wet mess after this.

Books:

Lots of books from the bug bin, scattered all over the yard.

I keep trying to pick up This Country of Ours with the boys again, where we were reading about explorers, but World War II has been an inexorable force lately. We read D-Day: A Day That Changed America : They Fought to Free Europe from Hitler's Tyranny , which I have just discovered is part of a "A Day That Changed America" series of books that I will probably try to collect. The D-Day book is set up as the story of four different, real soldiers who took part in the invasion of D-Day. The boys were most impressed that the book was not historical fiction, and that all four of the men were still alive in 2003, the publication date of the book.

I did manage to sneak in Sir Francis Drake: His Daring Deeds. This is a picture book with an odd style of illustration that makes all the people look like they've been stuck in a vise and compressed head to toe. The big kids listened in to my reading and we all poked a little fun at the rhyme scheme, which was either very British ("again" and "Spain" appeared frequently) or a little forced, depending on your perspective. Or maybe they just thought my Queen Elizabeth voice wasn't very good, who knows.

Computational Linguistics

I probably just gave you whiplash, going straight from a picture book to computational linguistics, but... welcome to life at my house. I get whiplash on a daily basis.

"Computational linguistics" has become something we all know a little about because Gareth has decided that it's fun. J.R.R. Tolkien introduced him to linguistics. Then he started studying Greek. Then he added Japanese. Then I started hearing that he wanted to be a linguist, and that he thought it would be good to go to a school with a good linguistics program.

Which was sort of how we ended up on MIT Admissions' Enrichment page , discovering the International Linguistics Olympiad. To make a long story short, Gareth is going to participate in the Olympiad this coming week, so he spent this week working on practice problems. (You can try some sample problems here. Tell me if you discover that you're molistic.) And we spent Saturday in the city tromping around the college campus where the Olympiad will be held, trying to figure out where to park on "game day".

Gareth spent his weekend hiking 16 miles with the Boy Scouts in Arkansas.

I'm not sure if that's "molistic" or "cloovy".

Ordinary Days

2012-01-24T07:23:00.000-08:00

A journal of sorts.

When I don't write down our days -- the ordinary ones, the ones that pass loudly or quietly but without fanfare -- I find that they slide into the past without leaving much of a mark and I miss them. In the past I haven't meant not to record them, but it's only too easy not to make the effort. There's always something pressing to do, something more important than writing about little things that get swallowed up all too often by the hustle and bustle that accompanies homeschooling (and life in general) as children become teenagers.

Since we moved to Mississippi, which is a state that doesn't require a lot of paperwork to homeschool, I have found that my "writing down the days" has become a little lax. My teens and I collaborate on keeping reading lists and videographies (ok, so I just like to say the word "videography") so that the basic records for high school are there, but the younger kids? I have dozens of pictures that never seem to make it anywhere.


Like this one of the little boys looking at atlases and dividing up territory between them.

Beyond the fact that it's nice to be able to look back and remember the days when they're gone (which is the most important thing, really), I was also reminded of how important recordkeeping can be earlier this month when Gareth was up for a rank advancement with the Boy Scouts. He had met some of the requirements when we were in New York, but his troop in New York was disorganized and nobody had ever initialed any of his accomplishments in his Scout book or, in some cases, had even filled out paperwork for completed merit badges. (The way I think of his old troop is kind of like the Bad News Bears.) His troop where we are now made up mostly of boys from our homeschool group and their dads, so it's not like he was applying for college or anything, but he still needed a few pieces of proof in his file since his goal is to eventually make Eagle.

Enter the Rubbermaid tub. At the end of every year I throw all the completed workbooks, binders, etc., including any records I've kept, in a big Rubbermaid tub which I mark with the year and the kids ages and approximate grades. (The grades they're supposedly in, I mean, which actually mean approximately nothing to the kids themselves, by the way.) Last year's Rubbermaid tub was actually a small file case. But the last year we were in New York we had a tub, which we did move, and which I knew was still sitting in the garage and not up in the attic because its lid had been broken or gone MIA. (Which is neither here nor there, but maybe there are advantages to procrastination?) Anyway... I pulled out my record book...

(The Homeschooler's Journal is the one I like to use.)

... and I spent an afternoon looking through it for any Boy Scout notations I could find. Then I pulled out my hard copy of all my "Week in Review" posts from my old blog, Three Plus Two, and searched through it. I had to go back to the actual blog in a few cases because some little bits I hadn't included in my week in review, but I knew they were there. I pulled out everything I could find, photocopied or printed it, and sent it with Gareth to his review.

Then I thought about my current recordkeeping lack of a consistent system.

I decided to go back to The Home Schooler's Journal, which makes the most intuitive sense for me, because I can write all the kids across the top of the double-page spread (you can see a sample page here) in the "subject"sections and then just jot down a few notes for each one. When we do something together as a family, I use the "Notes" section. Gareth and Katydid (ages 15 and 12) keep track of the books they're reading in their own spiral notebooks, and I have a spreadsheet set up to take care of their reading lists. (More about high school recordkeeping later. I'm still figuring that out, too.)

What I'm still tossing around is this idea of weekly reviews... do I want to go back to weekly reviews on my blog? Sometimes they're tough to keep up with. Do I want to start a blog for my own consumption as an online journal of our days, a depository for all those photos?

Or maybe I just want to start an "Ordinary Days" post on my blog. A place where every week I can pick a day and write about it. Like yesterday, when I was thinking how I hear sometimes that unschoolers must be lazy because they don't make their kids do anything, and here we were, with Katydid eating her lunch in front of her online Latin class so we could jump in the car immediately afterward for her and Gareth to attend an archery safety class. From there Andy took them to work with him so that Gareth could meet his Greek tutor, and Katydid worked on the only thing I am really requiring in top down fashion this year for them: math. We made a switch to The Art of Problem Solving texts, and she's working methodically but understanding what she's doing. So maybe all that hands-on, Montessori-ish background paid off. While the big kids were having a rather intense day, the younger boys made Star Wars pictures to cheer up a young friend who had to be rushed to the hospital over the weekend, and George (he who used to be Farmerboy) did his vision therapy, and on the way home from dropping off Gareth and Katydid, we went to Target, where they helped me find toilet paper and milk and spent the money they'd been saving on Bionicles. Then we came home and they built Bionicles and took them outside and ran them around in the crisp air... and (sigh) we discovered that another chicken was missing and looked around for evidence of a murder (didn't find any, so maybe it was a hawk?)... and when the little ones were in bed, the big kids finished their viewing of Sherlock Holmes, and we talked about the stories vs. the movie, and how everything seems to be just a little steampunk these days...

So that was our ordinary day yesterday. And I'm glad I wrote it down.

Whole 30 Week 3 and a Menu

2012-01-23T06:45:00.000-08:00

Notes from the Week:
I had a dentist and a doctor's appointment this week, which made things a little weird. I haven't been to the dentist in a very long time (you don't really want to know how long), so I went with some trepidation, expecting lots of problems. I know so many people who need root canals, etc. But I was relieved to discover only a single cavity! I can't claim that this diet has stopped my cavities, because it has been a really, really, really long time since I've gone to the dentist, although I imagine the diet has probably helped. This only makes the third cavity I've had in my entire life, so I think I have to chalk it up to my grandfather's family, who all had really strong teeth.

The doctor's visit was interesting as well. I finally lucked into a holistic doctor who was experienced in treating candida. My neighbor, who has many autoimmune issues, raved about him and told me I should see him. I've been having more trouble since Thanksgiving, when we visited my parents' house, which has whatever kind of mold triggers my asthma. By the end of the week, my inhaler was not doing much and I was forced to use my inhaled steroids. Inhaled steroids are not good for me, and I made it worse over the holidays by frequently eating pizza and indulging in chocolate. So, while it wasn't exactly back to the drawing board, it has been (I hope) a temporary setback. (I keep telling myself that one should not expect to fix the problems of a lifetime in a single year - or a month! -- but my self is somewhat impatient and tends to get discouraged easily at times. )

Anyway, the doctor prescribed me a course of Nystatin, which is a mild antifungal drug unfortunately sweetened with... some kind of sweetener. Following the Whole 30 diet during this period is crucial, though, because yeast thrives on starch and sugars, and unfortunately, it is impossible to totally get rid of candida (in addition to many other strains of harmful bacteria in the gut); all you can do is to control it. So I will probably be resetting myself after this course of medicine, meaning that I'll be doing a "Whole 60" or "Whole..." who knows. This is not exactly primal, and I really enjoy eating primally a lot more because it's more relaxed. But I'm afraid that my problems function more along the lines of food allergy.

Speaking of which, I finally got tested for food allergies, too. Still awaiting the results.

The funniest thing about the visit, though? My blood pressure was so good, the doctor blinked a couple times and asked me, "Are you an athlete? Do you run a lot?"

If you knew me, you would know that I am about as far from an athlete as you could possibly get. My blood pressure has never been bad, but it's even better now. It's the food!

It wasn't the best week for the kids, diet-wise, because we got caught out sometimes. However, my fifteen year old told me: "Sonic doesn't taste so good when you haven't had it in a while." So maybe they're learning. Andy and I have stuck to our diet pretty well, though, aside from some more cheese for him...

Monday:

**A note about the oats: I use Bob's Red Mill Gluten-Free Steelcut Oats and soak them overnight with a few tablespoons of yogurt or kefir***

Oatmeal porridge (kids)/ 3 egg scramble with peppers (me)
prosciutto and string cheese, leftover chicken sausages (I didn't eat the cheese), pears, carrot sticks
Curbside take-out (a treat), steak, shrimp, and hamburgers. Kids ate bread and french fries, but Andy and I had steamed veggies.
Snacks: almond butter and blueberries

Tuesday:

Blueberry-pineapple kefir smoothie and hardboiled eggs(kids)/3 egg scramble with peppers (me)
fried bologna, cheese, and apples (kids)/2 hardboiled eggs, cup of leftover pumpkin soup (me)
winter vegetable and pork stew, sauerkraut, sliced kiwi (I ate a mixed green salad with grapefruit)
Snacks: cheese, apples, pears (kids)/almond butter and apple (me), carrot sticks

Wednesday:

cheesy eggs (kids)/fried eggs with peppers (me)
sugar-free hot dogs (kids)/chicken from a Wendy's chicken go wrap and a garden side salad (me)
Chicken and cauliflower with garlic-anchovy sauce, green beans, mango
Snacks: hardboiled eggs, oranges, kefir, pistachios

Thursday:

almond flour orange scones (kids)/eggs for me (I'm boring)
prosciutto, Dubliner cheese, carrot sticks, fruit (kids)/leftover chicken and cauliflower (me)
leftover winter vegetable stew with pork, yellow squash fritters (summer squash frozen from the garden, almond flour, eggs, salt and pepper)
Snacks: carrot sticks, bananas, kiwi, kefir, string cheese (kids)

Friday:

oat cakes (leftover oats and eggs, fried in butter) - boys, banana kefir smoothie (K and Leo)/3 fried eggs (me)
salmon patties (all of us), salad (me), peas and pineapple (kids)
Shrimp Boil (minus the corn, potatoes, and sausage because it was Friday), green beans, pineapple
Snacks:string cheese, bananas, and apples (kids), almond butter and blueberries (me)

Saturday:

banana-pineapple kefir smoothie (kids)/fried eggs again (me)
crockpot chicken soup, oranges
pan-seared tri-tip steaks, sauteed onions, mushrooms, and peppers, green beans, apples (I didn't eat any apples)
Snacks: string cheese, almond flour snickerdoodles (Katydid made them), bananas (kids), prosciutto (everyone), almond butter and blueberries (me), pistachios

Sunday:

almond flour cinnamon coffee cake (kids)/omelet with leftover mushrooms, onions and peppers and a little leftover steak (me)
Sonic for the kids (ouch), salad with leftover steak and apple with almond butter for me (I had to go to a class after Mass, so I brought my lunch)
Aidell's Gluten-Free Chicken Apple Sausages, carmelized onions, sauerkraut, apples
Snacks: Grandma's house. The kids had crackers, smoked sausage, cheese, fruit, and store-made chocolate chip cookies. I stuck to carrot sticks and apples. Probably too many apples.

Whole 30 Week 2 Progress, Nursing and Paleo, and a Few Links

2012-01-16T14:38:00.000-08:00

Andy told the kids these stuffed squash were called "Dinosaur Eggs"

Whole 30 Week 2:
Andy has lost about 5 pounds so far, but I keep bouncing around. We made an interesting discovery on Saturday when he ate a little cheese for lunch. That night he had a bad nosebleed and Sunday morning what felt like the beginnings of a migraine. By Sunday afternoon, he also had a stomachache. So now we know that dairy might be one of his migraine triggers. I don't think he is happy with this, as he does not like coconut milk (or coconut kefir) in his coffee at all. I'm going to try to make homemade coconut milk from shredded coconut and see if that tastes better.

I have been a little frustrated with my up-and-down progress so far. One day I feel really good... the next, not so much. I dropped my adrenal supplement because it was giving me a headache. And then I did a little reading which made me think that I may not be getting the carbs I need for nursing.

Dear Mark: Nursing and the Primal Eating Plan
This Food Can Slow Your Brain (with commentary by Nell Stephenson )... an interesting discussion on determining the optimal diet
Breastfeeding and Paleo

So I went to FitDay and logged a few days of meals and snacks. Lo and behold, the days I fell below 100 carbs (from fruits and veggies like butternut squash, carrots, and pumpkin) were also the days my mood suffered the most and the days I felt least motivated. I also noticed that on those days my calorie intake was not really adequate, mainly because I was not eating decent snacks, and I was hungry. When I bump my carbs up above 100 and eat a good lunch and a decent afternoon snack, I feel much better. I also regained a pound I had lost (but I'm still down 3 pounds since January 1), but I think that's just an occupational hazard of nursing a toddler. I do get to claim an exact 40 pounds lost in a year, though, since I started eating a paleo/primal diet last year on January 19!

Oh, and another interesting link from this weekend: Thomas E. Woods, author of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (among lots of other books about economics that my husband really likes), announced that he and his family were going primal and his wife started a blog of their journey. They have 4 girls ages 8 and under, and they are in the very beginning stages of giving up grains. She is a lot gutsier than I am, because she is doing this on vacation with her girls! I have such a hard time ignoring the siren song of the McDonald's drive-in when the boys are in the backseat claiming to faint from hunger.

Speaking of boys and fainting from hunger, I have some thoughts about feeding boys, in general and on a paleo diet, but I think they're going to have to wait until later. This post is already long enough! Just remember when the list of snacks in the menu below seems to drag on and on...

Six boys live in this house!

Anyway, this is basically what we ate last week:

Monday:

Breakfast: Homemade yogurt (kids), leftover lamb ribs, fermented sauerkraut, and beef broth (me)

Lunch: sugar-free hot dogs, apples, fermented dill relish (me)

Dinner: "Dinosaur Eggs", peas (kids), romaine and spinach salad (Andy and I), some kind of fruit
Snacks: An enormous amount of fruit (kids), apple (me), orange (me)

Recipe for "Dinosaur Eggs":

Season ground pork with ginger, sage, and salt, about 1 tsp per pound, and 1/2 tsp pepper per pound. Chop up an onion and as much garlic as you like. Brown the onion and garlic with the pork. Add 1 chopped green apple (or more, depending on how much pork you're cooking) and a little water or chicken broth and cook until the apple starts to get soft. Scoop the pork mixture into winter squash halves or quarters (a variety with a good cavity) bake at 350 for about 45 minutes or until squash is done. I covered the pan with foil until the last 15 minutes or so. Tell your kids they're dinosaur eggs, and maybe they'll even eat the squash part.

Tuesday:

Breakfast: Almond flour pumpkin scones (kids), leftover "dinosaur eggs" (me)

Lunch: Cheese, summer sausage, jicama, bananas (kids), leftover lamb ribs, snow peas (me)

Dinner: Crockpot chicken soup, oranges

Snacks: Leftover pumpkin scones (kids), fruit (kids)/ still snitching on the lamb ribs (me), macadamia nuts (me), pistachios (Andy), pecans and sunbutter (Leo and Chipmunk), apple with almond butter (me)

Wednesday:

Breakfast: Homemade yogurt (kids), leftover chicken soup (me)

Lunch: Ginger Drumsticks (chicken drumsticks coated in coconut oil, ginger, salt, pepper, baked in a 400 degree oven for 25-35 minutes), jicama for kids, romaine salad for me, oranges

Dinner: Fish Sticks ("breaded" with egg and almond flour, seasoned with salt and pepper), homemade tartar sauce, green beans, canned pineapple (kids)

Snacks: cheese and summer sausage (kids), US Wellness beef snack sticks (everyone), bananas (kids), apple (me), last of the chicken drumsticks (me), sunbutter on a spoon (Leo and Chipmunk), almond butter on a spoon (Andy), orange (me), raisins (Leo and Chipmunk), coconut I was trying to make flour from (me... and, yum! but alas, not flour)

Thursday:

Breakfast: Almond Flour Cinnamon Apple Muffin Bread for kids (I used butter instead of ghee and doubled everything to make quick bread in a pan. I was also adapting Elana Amsterdam's original recipe from her almond flour cookbook. This one's a real diet-breaker, though; it smells so good it's hard to resist!)/ 3 egg scramble with onions and peppers for me (and Leo)
Lunch: sugar-free hot dogs (again) for kids, mango, leftover chicken soup for me
Dinner: Pumpkin Soup with Turkey (Katydid said it should be called "Thanksgiving Soup"), cut-up kiwi (I didn't have any), salad for Andy and me (romaine, green leaf lettuce, scallions, avocado, grapefruit.) Surprisingly, I really liked the grapefruit in the salad.
Snacks: oranges (kids), leftover Cinnamon Apple Bread (kids), pecans and raisins (Leo), carrot sticks (me), macadamias (me), hardboiled eggs (everyone)

Friday:

Breakfast: Peach Kefir Smoothies and hardboiled eggs (kids); leftover pumpkin soup with 2 poached eggs (me)
Lunch: fried bologna, cheese, fruit (kids); tuna salad with homemade mayo on romaine (me)
Dinner: hamburgers (no buns), carmelized onions and mushrooms (in ghee), kimchi (me), butternut squash fries
Snacks: oranges, hardboiled egg (me), pecans and raisins (boys), hazelnuts (me)

Saturday:

Breakfast: Pumpkin smoothie (kids, nobody liked this much); 3 egg scramble with peppers and onions (me)
Lunch: raw milk cheese, carrot sticks, and fruit (kids), prosciutto and pears (me and Andy)
A 2nd lunch for me, since I was at Costco around lunchtime: leftover hamburger, dill relish, and leftover pumpkin soup, blueberries
Dinner: Pan-Seared Salmon, roasted brussel sprouts and cauliflower, kiwi and pineapple
Snacks: blueberries, apple with almond butter (me), string cheese (kids)

Sunday:

Breakfast: homemade pork sausage, bananas (kids), 2 egg scramble with peppers (me)
Lunch: Aidell's Gluten-Free Chicken and Apple Sausage, carmelized onions and mushrooms, oranges (kids), spring mix salad with avocado and grapefruit (me)
Dinner: Roast chicken (seasoned with coconut oil and ginger), green beans, apples
Snacks: almond butter and frozen blueberries (my new favorite afternoon snack), string cheese (kids)

A Fresh Start

2012-01-10T17:06:00.000-08:00

A crowd for Teaching Textbooks

(The pictures are from yesterday, our first day back at work.)

I always seem unable to get going again the week of New Year's like everyone else. I usually feel guilty about it, but this year we worked (or at least the teens worked) until December 23. Then taking off 2 weeks for the Christmas season made perfect sense. We've never been good at stopping for Advent anyway, although for the younger kids I do shift gears and we mostly read stacks and stacks of picture books.

But now we're back at work. The calendar is filling up with interesting things to the point that I am going to have to put the brakes on soon. We have some fun ideas for high school science we're going to try out and an adventurous rabbit trail I'm heading down with Gareth (age 15) and George (age 8) and anybody else who wants to come along.


Playing Quick Chess

Our New Rabbit Trail
Over the holidays I got one of the Teaching Company's frequent catalogs and noticed that a course named Espionage and Covert Operations: A Global History was on sale. For cheap. (Much cheaper than it is now!) So of course I snapped it up. I used to love to read thrillers, the Cold War variety, and I still have a soft spot for anything that relates. I started playing the lectures at lunch this week. Katydid is not interested, but Gareth and George sit and listen along with me. The lecturer is a good storyteller, so my 8 year old (who is keenly interested in spies at the moment) has no problem following along. Lecture 2 includes the mention of Rahab the harlot, except a synonym for harlot is used, and later on in the course it looks like there is the strange story of a French spy who dressed as both a woman and a man. (I may preview that lecture, as I've already read the notes.) Otherwise, I don't see any difficulty with listening to this course with my children. One interesting aspect to this course is that it relates Biblical stories of spying and spends quite a lot of time discussing the Jesuits and Catholics in Elizabethan England (including the unfortunate Gunpowder Plot). After listening to his relation of the Biblical story of Rahab and Joshua and reading the lecture notes on the Jesuits and Elizabethan England, his treatment seems to be pretty even-handed. In any case, it should give us something to talk about. Now to run down a good history of the Jesuits. Gareth is trying to decide between St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Xavier as his Confirmation saint, so I think there is a serendipitous connection here...

And we're talking about what sort of history he wants to pursue for the next few months. I have given up the idea of traditional "courses" with him for the most part, but he knows more history than I do anyway so I'm not worried. Today we tossed around the idea of a semester of military history with the Espionage course as a part of it.

George (age 8) got spy glasses and commando gear for Christmas, and with a Barnes and Noble gift card he bought:

So it all dovetails rather neatly.

Sci-Fi Highschool?


He's not in high school. He's just cute. (Also: I lied. This picture is not from yesterday.)

For literature this year, we decided that Gareth could pursue a "classic science fiction" course. This is in keeping with me relaxing a bit more into unschooliness. He's using the Other Worlds curriculum for writing science fiction, which also provides an in-depth history of the field. So far this year he's read Heinlein's juvenile books, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, a bunch of books by Isaac Asimov... among others. We discuss the books, and he also writes about them (sometimes). He's enjoying himself, and I find that we get to some real meaty themes sometimes. About scientific ethics. About theology. About the place of humanity in the universe. It's good.

So I was trying to catch up with my recordkeeping over Christmas, and I was trying to sort out books and Science Channel documentaries and NOVA episodes into "astronomy" or "conceptual physics", and I was trying to keep track of the topics he'd covered, and I got to thinking that it looked an awful lot like his science and literature were all related this year. The next morning I pitched him an idea: how much physics could you learn by researching a science fiction novel, or vice versa, what kind of physics could you learn if you investigated the science behind science fiction? Gareth is a great fan of Michio Kaku, so he was up to the challenge. He made a list of all the physics (and astronomy) topics and questions he could think of relating to science fiction, and the plan is to choose a topic from the list, research it, and hopefully to do some kind of related hands-on project or experiment. We'll see how it goes. The first thing I have to do is order a rocket.

Coloring in the Dover Dinosaur coloring book

New Basics
We decided to start fresh with our non-readers using Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. I've never used this program before, but my struggling 8 year old has been inching slowly through everything I have for the past few years and my husband and I agreed it was time for something new. The vision therapy he's been doing since September has really seemed to help, and we're hopeful that this will be an approach that works for him. I just started using it with my 6 year old twins, too. Initially -- a long time ago -- I had passed on 100 Easy Lessons because I worried about the special alphabet it used. In practice with these particular kids, though, it seems to work pretty well. So - hopeful.


This is how the day ended: toddler warpaint.

Whole 30 Week .5

2012-01-09T17:55:00.000-08:00

Chicken and Cauliflower in Garlic-Anchovy Sauce

Well, I started out saying that this wouldn't be a food blog in spite of the name, and I think what I have done is blog mainly about food. December and January seem to be food-focused months, though, don't they? One's all about eating, and the other is... oh, I don't want to say it's "anti-eating", but that's the vibe that's out there.

I am definitely not anti-eating, and fortunately I am not finding the Whole 30 protocol to be anti-eating either. I think it would have been harder if I hadn't spent a year trying to get grains out of my diet and my kids' diet. But after a bit (ahem) of whinging about not being able to have coffee with honey and cream every morning, I've found that hot tea with lemon is perfectly okay for me. (And certainly better than the coffee with coconut milk that Andy is drinking. Bleagh. Sorry.)

Since I started the Whole 30 last Tuesday after breakfast it hasn't been quite a whole week yet, but Erin and I were chatting and agreed that it would be helpful if we could post the menus of the last week, like Amy is doing with her newly gluten-free menu plans. (Erin just posted a very helpful update about her family's grain-free journey. Especially good if you have a large family!) Eva also asked me in the comments what supplements I was taking. So I thought I would offer a status report.

First, about the supplements.
Technically on the Whole 30 you're supposed to ditch them. Well... most of them. I think they say that a magnesium supplement is ok. The rationale behind ditching the supplements is the same as it is in the GAPS Intro diet. If something in the supplements is making you unwell, you will only discover this if you stop taking the supplements for a while. Some supplements contain lots of questionable ingredients, many of which are derived from corn. Maltodextrin is a common ingredient derived from corn. Vegetable cellulose (what the plastic capsules are made from) is also derived from corn. If you're allergic to or intolerant of corn (as I am), the supplements you're taking may be a source of your problems.

That said, I've already sourced many allergen-free supplements. These supplements are powders which I can dump out of the vegetable cellulose capsules into a glass of orange juice (which is what I do, because I can't swallow giant pills anyway.) But I'm not sure whether I should still be taking all of my supplements or not. I have some autoimmune issues, probably low thyroid, I'm dealing with adrenal fatigue (although it's much better than it was), and I'm still nursing multiple times day and night. On the other hand, I didn't take my regular probiotic today (which includes inulin from chicory root, but nothing else bad), ate some fermented sauerkraut and dill relish instead, and I feel better than I have in a while. So who knows. Maybe that miniscule amount of chicory root was bothering me.

Here's what I'm still taking:

Raw, fermented cod liver oil - 1 tsp daily because I'm nursing
Dr. Ron's Best Multi - not sure whether I should stop taking this for the Whole 30 or keep on
Dr. Ron's Cal-Mag
magnesium oil topical spray
Vitamin D (because it's been really cloudy lately)
digestive enzymes when I remember

I also recently started adding in thyroid and adrenals at a pretty low level. (I empty the capsules into a cup of bone broth. It tastes a lot better than it sounds.)

(Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a doctor and in no way should you take anything in this post as medical advice. I think you probably know that already.)

Now, how am I doing?
I'm doing well! I did feel pretty rotten the first few days -- tired, discouraged, headachey, digestively not good -- but since then (and since I added the thyroid and adrenal) I've had a lot more energy, and I've dropped two pounds. We started school again today, and I hadn't been looking forward to it. But this morning I managed to get in a shower before the kids got up, I ran 3 non-reading kids through reading lessons, handwriting, and math, grappled with a cantankerous 4 year old, a wild toddler, an 8 year old who is going through bread withdrawal, and a teenager not fond of math, read aloud before quiet time, graded all the backed-up Latin quizzes, cleaned out 3 shelves in the school bookcase, and generally maintained my good humor... at least until I noticed that my kids had eaten a couple of bunches of bananas and nearly 4 pounds of apples (not to mention the oranges) in less than 24 hours.

Keeping us all in produce is the hard part of being grain-free.

Andy has had somewhat the same experience. He spent two or three days feeling very down, sniffly, etc. Then his energy picked up. He's lost 3 pounds since Wednesday (although the emphasis of the program is not supposed to be on weight loss, it is a happy side effect), and more importantly, even with our whacky, rainy weather, he has not had a migraine. Every week in December, he had from 1 to 3 or 4 migraines. So we are cautiously optimistic.

Here are the particulars of how I kept everybody fed last week, starting with about Tuesday. (Since I began this post somewhat late in the week, I couldn't remember what day we'd eaten what in some cases, so I apologize for the jumbled listiness.)

What we ate:

Dinners:

crockpot chicken soup, apples

spaghetti sauce with meat on spaghetti squash, grapes

butternut squash and (leftover) pork sausage egg bake, green salad with avocado and scallions, clementines

Chicken and cauliflower with garlic/anchovy sauce (from Primal Blueprint: Quick and Easy Meals), snow peas, blueberries
Brisket/Chuck Roast with Carmelized Carrots (tweaked a little from Carmelized Tomato Eye of Round by Paleo Parents), salad, mixed frozen berries
crockpot Mustard-Rosemary Lamb Ribs, carrot sticks, raw snow peas, jicama for everyone else (but not for me because apparently it isn't SCD legal), oranges (but I stuck to veggies).

Lunches (all of which had apples, pears, clementines, or blueberries for kids):

taco soup (Brown ground beef and onion, add beef broth and tomato paste, 1/2 to 1 can of pumpkin, bag of frozen red and yellow peppers, cumin, salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes to taste. Top with any taco topping you want.)
sugar-free, grassfed beef hotdogs with homemade ketchup
leftovers (spaghetti sauce or hot dogs or cheese)
leftovers (taco soup or egg bake or cheese) for the kids/ smoked salmon on arugula, baby kale and chard with oil and vinegar for me
salmon patties (made with almond flour), pineapple, jicama for everyone else/salmon salad (made with homemade mayonnaise) on romaine with snowpeas and jicama for me
leftover beef brisket/smoked salmon salad for me

My breakfasts:

2 fried eggs in ghee with homemade pork sausage

leftover chicken soup with 1 poached egg

2 poached eggs in beef broth (bone broth)

3 fried eggs in ghee w/ beef broth

Kids' breakfasts:

almond flour cranberry scones

homemade pork sausage, once with clementines, once with frozen blueberries

porridge (made with gluten-free, steel-cut oats), served with milk, butter, and maple syrup

oat cakes (leftover porridge and eggs made into cakes and fried in butter), served with butter and maple syrup
yogurt
kefir peach smoothie
almond flour cinnamon coffee cake (made from the recipe in The Gluten-Free Almond Flour Cookbook, but without currants or walnuts, and with a simple honey and cinnamon topping) -- Sunday breakfast

My snacks:

macadamia nuts

blueberries (frozen from last summer)

strawberries (at Grandma's house)

pear

chicken soup

beef broth (seasoned with salt, pepper, and cloves, 1 capsule each Dr. Ron's Thyroid and Adrenal with Liver )

leftover chicken in garlic/anchovy sauce

apple

US Wellness Beef Snack Stick Ends with spicy mustard

Disasters:
Kale chips. Apparently making them with small, tender kale leaves from your garden is a lot different than making them with giant, tough kale from the grocery store.

Victories:
Chicken in garlic-anchovy sauce (pictured at the top of this post.) Do not turn up your nose at this just because it has the word "anchovy" in it. My kids absolutely scarfed it up... and they even ate the cauliflower! The original recipe called for artichoke hearts, but I didn't have any so I substituted a head of cauliflower, and I also used ghee instead of butter.

Yum!

Winter Harvest

2012-01-06T15:27:00.000-08:00

Kaleidoscope carrot mix, Thumbelina carrots, and an Ameracauna egg

There are many things I love about gardening in Zone 7. Sure, the squash bugs and I have become mortal enemies, and dealing with summer heat is certainly requiring an adjustment in the varieties we grow and how we grow them (after gardening for 5 years in upstate New York). But in Zone 7 you can have a true four season garden without the use of greenhouses or hoophouses, and I am loving that.


A picture of one of our winter beds, taken in November. From left to right: Nero di Toscana kale, Bright Lights chard, and bok choy.

I'm really excited about the fact that our raised beds allow us to grow decent carrots. In New York we grew tiny little misshapen carrots because of our rocks and weeds (and lack of timely thinning). In our Mississippi clay carrots would not grow well either. But the raised beds produce fine carrots. More importantly, they are convenient enough that I can take a toddler into the garden and let him play while I do some thinning here and there.

And in Zone 7 -- carrots can stay in the ground all winter. Come spring we'll be planting a lot more!


A giant mound of turnip greens. And a sweet potato (not ours). And my camera, which was defunct at the time... so I took this picture with my phone. Actually, this is sort of a snapshot of daily life at our house.

We experimented with turnips this year. We didn't plant many, and I didn't do much with the greens. I like them all right cooked in bacon grease (or fatback or with some sort of pork product) and sprinkled with hot pepper vinegar, but the rest of my family is not too sure.


All those turnip greens and this was the extent of the turnips.

I tried one of our turnips raw when it was small the way gardening books will tell you is good, but mine was hotter than fire. At this size, I roasted them with butternut squash and apples, and some of my kids even ate them.


Smoked salmon on a bed of baby kale, baby chard, and arugula

This salad was my lunch today. We are having beautiful January weather -- today anyway -- with temperatures in the 60's. I went outside at lunchtime and picked some greens for lunch. Smoked salmon was a recent splurge. I had never eaten it before, but I think now that it is one of my favorite foods!

Pecans from our two mature pecan trees.

After lunch, Chipmunk and I picked some more kale so I can make kale chips, and we also gathered pecans. We have two large mature pecan trees on our property. They're smaller than commercial pecans, but also sweeter. And we didn't even have to plant the trees!

The Whole 30

2012-01-05T06:22:00.000-08:00

Andy and I just started The Whole 30. I'm the kind of person who has to ease into changes in my diet, so I've been eating about 95% grain-free since last January. I dropped grains not to lose weight -- although I needed that -- but to deal with a lot of candida-related problems (otherwise known as systemic yeast) which had reached a crisis point after the birth of my seventh child. It's a long story which I want to tell some time, but for now I'll just say that giving up grains is the best thing I've ever done for my health. I've lost about 40 pounds, but more importantly, I discovered that grains and sugar are what fuel -- no, strike that -- cause my depression and anxiety. If I slip up a few times (or a week), I know that I'm going to have some bad days.

So I've been slipping up a bit and having more bad days than I care to anymore, and since Halloween, I've put back on a few pounds. Upon further investigation, I found that I was still eating a lot of carbs in the form of sugars like honey and orange juice, and I was trying to add in more dairy again (having never completely removed it from my diet in the first place.) In the fall I took the plunge and eliminated store-bought bread from my kids' diet and figured out to serve them mostly grain-free meals and snacks at home. With that under my belt (and trust me, that was hard), I felt like I was ready to give up honey and cream for a while and tackle the rest of the mystery health problems.

A brief digression:
You know, it kind of bothers me sometimes when I read blogs or talk to other moms, etc., that we all seem to be looking for something to fix. It's like we're all worrywarts. I don't want to be a worrywart, but when something's wrong, ignoring it because you don't want to deal with it is not a good policy. Maybe we're all trying to fix "things" because lots of "things" really are broken. I know it's a fallen world, but it has seemed to fall a little further in the past few decades, hasn't it?

Anyway, if you've been suffering from weight gain, blood pressure or blood sugar problems, asthma or allergies, foggy brain, depression or anxiety, and you're the kind of person who likes to dive in, go check out The Whole 30. If you've gotten mostly off grains and sugar and you're ready to take the next step, you should check out The Whole 30, too.

On the Whole 30, you can:

1. Eat lots of meat, fish, eggs, and good fats like coconut oil and avocado.
2. Eat lots of vegetables.
3. Eat some fruit, but don't overdo it.
4. Eat nuts, but don't overdo them either.
5. Drink coffee or tea, as long as you don't add any sugars, honey, or cream (or fake creamers, made of soy or dried dairy.)
6. Eat sweet potatoes in moderation.

What you can't eat:

1. Grains and pseudograins.
2. Sugar of any kind (including honey and agave syrup).
3. Dairy, including butter... but ghee (clarified butter) is ok.
4. White potatoes.
5. Legumes (beans, peas, soy)

For 30 days.

If you're still eating standard American fare and reading that list made you want to run and hide, read the "easing into it" post I linked above and go check out Mark's Daily Apple. Don't hyperventilate and keep an open mind.

I'm on my 2 and half-ish day of the Whole 30, and as predicted... I'm feeling kind of rotten. I'm pretty sure it will clear up soon, though, because I'm familiar with the pattern. You feel rotten for a while because all the evil little microbes in your body are starving and dying. You're not feeding them their preferred foods of starches and sugars. And your metabolism has to shift, too. But after that, things should get better.

If you decide to go "Whole 30", too, let me know! I have a feeling that this sort of challenge goes a lot better with support!

On New Year's Day

2012-01-01T15:54:00.000-08:00

On New Year's Day, I watched the Pope's Mass for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God on EWTN. Eighteen month-old Leo has RSV. On New Year's Eve, we were at urgent care and he was so furious at having to wear the nebulizer mask that he bit it and would not let go. Fortunately, he was allowed to come home with an aero-chamber inhaler, which he finds mildly amusing instead of infuriating, and is feeling better today. The twins also have a mild cold (RSV without the wheezing, I'm sure), so I'm at home with all the sick kids while Andy takes the well ones to the late Mass -- otherwise known as the Mass of last resort.

The Pope talked about the importance of a moral education vs. simple instruction in knowledge for the young. Staying home to take care of sick kids is not without its blessings.
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On New Year's Day, I put a pork sirloin roast in the crockpot. Tonight we'll eat it with sauerkraut, in honor of my German roots... and Hoppin' John, in honor of our Southern ones. (And maybe some kale from the garden, if I can manage to run outside and grab some.)
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On New Year's Day, I ate more of the pistachio-fig balls I made last night...

... except I didn't cover them in chocolate, the way I did for Christmas. Covered in dark chocolate, they were everyone's favorite Christmas "cookie". Or "candy". Call them whatever you want!

Here's how to make them:

Use a ratio of 2:1, unsulfured, dried black mission figs (I got mine at Costco) to pistachios. To see if you like them, try 2 cups of figs and 1 c. of pistachios. If your pistachios are unsalted, add a little sea salt. I don't know how much, just taste.

Take the remaining stems off the figs and puree them in a food processor until they form a sort of paste. (You really need a food processor for this, because the mixture will overheat a Vitamix. Trust me.) Next add the pistachios, and grind them up until they're as fine as you want them.

Now roll the mixture with your hands into little balls, bite-size or a little bigger. The mixture will be crumbly and a little dry, so you may have a little trouble getting it to form balls, but just keep smushing it together. At this point you can a) eat one or two (or three) b)refrigerate them and eat them later (they will hold together better after refrigeration) or c)coat them in chocolate.

I melted a 60%cacao Ghiradelli baking bar in a rigged up double boiler (i.e., one pot sitting in another pot with simmering water) and rolled the balls in the chocolate using a spoon. Set the chocolate-covered balls on a baking sheet or plate covered with parchment paper, and pop them in the refrigerator for a while to harden the chocolate.

Absolutely divine.
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On New Year's Day, I read through the new Territorial Seed Catalog while I rocked the RSV baby and decided that it would be good to add an herb garden this year, and that we need passionflowers growing along our fence, and also that the thing that is missing from our front landscaping is jasmine.
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On New Year's Day, one of our feral rabbits had babies... but all 7 of them died because we didn't realize she was pregnant when we trapped her.

Sigh.

The feral rabbits are a long story. They are actually escapees from our neighbors' rabbitry. (It's not really a rabbitry, but they have a bunch of rabbits. I think they eat them, but I don't know.) Anyway, these two rabbits were essentially living with our chickens, eating the chicken food, and had even been named by our children (Peanut and Midnight Ninja), but they were tunneling under the barn in so many directions that Andy was afraid the chicken coop was going to be next, and that a nice tunnel under the chicken coop would be like a giant neon sign saying EAT AT JOE'S for the resident fox population (which is high.) So George, age 8 (who used to be Farmerboy on my old blog) rigged a trap in the barn near one of their holes. Ten minutes later, he had a rabbit. Five minutes after he got that rabbit out and set up the trap again, he had another rabbit.


Katydid took this picture.

Our neighbors told us if we caught them we could keep them. So it was a good thing we had an old chicken crate... transporter... box... thing... laying around, because we were not prepared to take care of two incredibly tame feral rabbits (who assent to petting but not to being picked up.)

The black one is apparently the female. (And yes, her name was Midnight Ninja. Now it is just "Midnight". Ahem.) Katydid had figured that out from her rabbit books. But how do you tell if a rabbit is pregnant? Anyway, we felt really bad, because a rabbit near kindling needs a nest box, kind of like a nesting hen, and we would have built one for her if we had known. I don't know what we would have done with 7 half-feral hybrid bunnies, as I have discovered that I am not too keen on rabbit meat, and I doubt they could have been sold, but...

Sigh.
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Katydid mentioned today that this was another in a long line of her weird New Year's memories, which include an extended power outage one year and breaking her wrist another. To that I would add my very first New Year's Day as a parent, which I also spent at urgent care with an infant with RSV.

Hmmm.

That infant did not spill an entire bottle of glue on the kitchen floor on New Year's Day, though.

I think this particular RSV baby is feeling better.
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On New Year's Day, I wish you and your families a happy, peaceful year, full of God's blessings. And now I'm off to put together that Hoppin' John!

Christmas 2011

2011-12-28T14:46:00.000-08:00

Wishes for a merry and bright Christmas season to all of you!

Grain-free St. Lucia Buns

2011-12-15T07:10:00.000-08:00

St. Lucia's Day (December 13) is one of our favorite Advent feast days. In fact, we joke that St. Lucia seems like a particularly good saint for our family, because my husband's family is Swedish and one of my great-grandfathers was born in Sicily. St. Lucia (or Lucy) is a Sicilian saint beloved by Swedes. Who could be more appropriate?

Since we try to follow a grain-free or very grain-reduced diet in our home, however, I knew that St. Lucia's Day was going to present a problem. The Swedish tradition is for the oldest daughter to serve everyone saffron-spiced yeast buns called Lussekatter or "Lucy Cats" for breakfast. (Why are they called "Lucy Cats?" I don't really know, but after a quick google it appears that it may be that the traditional S or somewhat cross shape of the buns resembles a cat's tail.) In Sicily, food made from wheat flour isn't eaten on St. Lucia's Day in remembrance of how the saint saved the city of Syracuse from a famine by sending ships full of grain, which seemed promising, but instead Sicilians eat a porridge made from wheat berries (called cuccia). And all of the gluten-free options I could find contained starch of some kind... and xantham gum, which is derived from corn. I'm allergic to corn. No xantham gum for me.

My daughter was still most adamant about having Lucia buns, in their traditional Swedish shape, for St. Lucia's Day. So I decided I would have to make my own.

I started out with this recipe for Lois Lang's Luscious Bread, a Specific Carbohydrate Diet staple recipe, because I read... somewhere... that it could be rolled. If it could be rolled, I thought, it could certainly be shaped. To feed my large family, I began by doubling it. The dough was rather sticky after I got done adding my sweet additions and adjusting the amount of almond flour to compensate for the increased liquid (in the form of honey), but Katydid and I rolled it in our hands (dusted with almond flour) and it puffed quite nicely in the oven. No, the buns didn't taste exactly like yeast buns, but the boys didn't seem to care. And Katydid pronounced them a success as well.

Please ignore the child sitting on top of the coffee table.

Before I give you the recipe, though, I should tell you... I am not the kind of cook who follows directions well. So when I say that this is a "recipe"... consider it more a set of guidelines. All right? Good. Here goes:

Makes approximately 2 dozen buns
(The recipe should half well)

*6-7 cups almond flour, depending on how much honey you use and the size of your eggs
(If the dough is too gooey, it will be hard to shape and will not hold together when baked)
*1/2 c. melted butter
*2 c. dry curd cottage cheese (more on this in a minute)
*5-6 eggs
*1/2 c. honey
*juice of 1 lemon
*1-2 tbsp lemon zest (depending on how much you like lemon)
*2 tsp. baking soda
*1/2 tsp. salt
* 1/2 tsp. cardamom

For the topping:

*raisins
*1/2 c. honey (this is only an approximation)
*2 tbsp cinnamon (or cardamom, which I will try next time)

You will also need parchment paper. Almond flour baked goods stick to pans like crazy. Parchment paper will save your sanity.

Also, oven temperature really matters when using almond flour. If your oven is too hot, the bottoms of the buns will burn before the insides are done. The original Lois Lang bread recipe calls for a 350 degree oven, but my oven runs hot. If your oven runs hot, preheat your oven to 325 degrees.

Directions:

Combine everything but the almond flour (and the topping ingredients) together using a stand mixer or a food processor. Remember that you're not using yeast, so beat the mixture until it's fairly smooth. Now add the almond flour. Start with a lower amount and add more until the dough looks like you will be able to roll it in your hands. It won't look dry like regular bread dough, though -- more like a sticky cookie dough.

Lay out a piece of parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Butter it and dust it with almond flour. Take a gob of dough and roll it between your hands to form an S shape, or also you might want to roll two logs and form the buns into crosses. At either end of the S, place a raisin. Leave enough space between buns for them to spread a little, because they will puff up when you bake them.

Combine the topping ingredients and drizzle over each bun. Bake for about 15 minutes, but start checking at 10. (It took about 18 minutes in my oven at 325.)

Substitutions
At this point you are probably wondering what the heck is dry curd cottage cheese and where do I get it. Dry curd cottage cheese is probably more commonly called Farmer's Cheese in the US.

It is sold under the Friendship Farms brand here, and the SCD website maintains a list of sources in various US states, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. I recently splurged and ordered a grass-fed, raw milk Farmer's Cheese from US Wellness. I think it is the same thing, but we'll see. The main problem with this stuff -- aside from where to get it -- is that it's expensive (especially when combined with the cost of the almond flour.) I do think there are substitutions you can make if you can't find farmer's cheese, are looking to keep your costs down, or can't have dairy. I did use the farmer's cheese in this recipe, though, so if you use a substitute, you'll have to experiment a little with the amount of almond flour, eggs, and honey you include in your own recipe.

Some ideas:

*yogurt cheese (homemade from your own or storebought yogurt or kefir), probably closest
*yogurt
*pureed prunes (as suggested in the Lois Lang recipe)
*applesauce

The recipe for Lois Lang bread also suggests using ghee or coconut oil for the butter if you are dairy free.

(If you want a dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, nut-free St. Lucia bun, check out the Spunky Coconut's St. Lucia buns. They do contain xantham gum, tapioca starch, and flax meal, though, and so are not strictly GAPS- legal if that makes a difference.)

Disaster at Lego Christmas Village

2011-12-05T11:33:00.001-08:00

High winds and giant robot attacks wreaked havoc today at Lego Christmas Village, destroying the Christmas Toy Shoppe's roof and toppling oak trees. Numerous patrons were injured, including the Lego Snowman, but no fatalities were reported. Miraculously, the Christmas tree escaped untouched.

Versatile Blogger Award

2011-12-04T05:54:00.000-08:00

My friend Erin at Seven Little Australians surprised me today with a Versatile Blogger Award. It's kind of ironic, I guess, that at a blog called "And the Kitchen Sink" all my posts so far have been about books. But in defense of versatility I am working on a post that involves smoked turkey, an ER visit, and the New Translation. Maybe that one will be worthy of the award.

Thanks, Erin! :-)

Here are the rules:

Thank the person who gave you the award and link back to them.

Tell your readers 7 things about yourself.
Give this award to 15 recently discovered bloggers.
Contact those bloggers and let them in on the news.

So, seven things completely random things about me...

1. NOVA is one of my favorite television shows. I think that makes me a nerd, but I don't care. And I've passed my interests to my kids. Sometimes I think that NOVA forms the bulk of our science curriculum.

2. I eat grain-free most of the time, but I am still ordering pizza on Friday nights. Not every Friday night, but... a lot of Friday nights. I know that this creates more problems than it solves, but still... hooked on pizza. Especially with bacon. Almond flour crusts do not cut it, in my opinion.

3. I'm finally learning to knit! It's going very slowly because I have little people who like to pull on the yarn while I'm working, but one day I may have an actual washcloth. This is not to say that it will be square, but I do hope that it will be finished.

4. One of my favorite ages to parent is 18 months. I think 18 month olds are just a lot of fun. Busy, but fun. My youngest is just about 18 months old now and has finally started walking. He toddles across the floor, laughing in delight. Just because he finds walking so much fun. I wish I found walking that much fun.

5. I like the idea of having a milk cow, but so far the reality of having a milk cow still intimidates me. We inherited this giant barn, though, and it seems like some kind of animal bigger than a chicken should live in it.

6. I like to draw, but I've never been able to consistently keep a sketchbook. Mostly I like to do botanical illustration. When I was a kid I used to spend hours drawing, but I quit when I started writing, and then in high school I thought I couldn't draw, so it took homeschooling to show me that drawing is a skill anyone can learn and now I enjoy it again.

7. I am hooked on the Real-Food Kitchen Tours at Cheeseslave.

Now, for 15 recently discovered blogs... Hmmm. Recent is going to be a relative term here, and I'm going to include blogs I have rediscovered because they've begun posting again after a break, or the subscription got knocked out of my Google reader for some reason for a while... not sure I can do 15, but here goes...

1. My Symphony
2. Grace in Loving Chaos
3. Untrodden Paths
4. Family in Feast and Feria
5. Everyday Snapshots
6. Living Childhood (and her other blog, Those Northern Skies, is just gorgeous, too.)
7. The Careless Catholic

Ok, going to have to stop at 7. (Somewhat embarrassing.) There are many, many more deserving blogs out there I know, but I must confess that I tend to stick with a pretty defined blog list for long periods of time. Right now I still have a lot of grocery/deal blogs in my reader, some of which are helpful and some of which are overwhelming. I know I'm missing some great reading!

Coming soon: a "blogs which Angela was prompted to go out and discover when she realized that her Reader needed updating" post!

Reading Week Roundup

2011-11-16T14:02:00.001-08:00

Does it surprise you that I have not been able to read for hours and hours?

Well, I can't blame the responsibilities of motherhood completely. Some of it has to do with (mumble, mumble) computer usage. And that new iPhone. Boggle can suck away your life completely.

Here is a list of everything other than reading the kids have been doing for "Reading Week":

Playing Scrabble. Real Scrabble, on a gameboard at the kitchen table. And also iPod Scrabble.
Katydid has been writing a report on Orangutans. (The World Wildlife Fund catalog sparked an interest in endangered animals again.) Since she's taking Latin online from Memoria Press this year, she's also had to keep up with Latin this week. And she had a voice lesson, but that's probably not the reason there's been lots of singing.
Gareth is listening to the Teaching Company's Story of Human Language course. He also had a Greek tutoring session.
Sniffling. Coughing.
Vision therapy.
Plotting out what toys they want to bring to Grandma's house for Thanksgiving.
Packing.
Cleaning.
Investigating the Montessori materials I was finally able to unpack because my dear, dear husband put shelves in our previously useless hall closet.
Playing baseball.
Attacking fire ant nests.
Strategizing tank warfare.

But we have been reading, too.

My books:

I finished Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health. Excellent book. Can't say enough good things about it. Go read it. It will change what you eat, and you'll feel better for it. What I really like about this book is his emphasis on the science (or lack thereof) of nutrition. I'm putting it on the shelf for my kids to read as somewhat older teens, as much for the practice of logic it demonstrates as for the information about health and diet.

The Quarter-Acre Farm by Spring Warren. Not finished with this one yet. Decent. Good information on tomato problems and how to solve them.

Dove, by Robin Lee Graham. I've wanted to read this book for a long time. The story of a teenager who sails, alone, around the world, it is often mentioned in books about unschooling. (I am not a big swimmer, but I like to read books about sailing. Go figure.) Anyway, it's a compelling book, considering how our culture treats teenagers, and not just because he sails around the world all by himself, but also because I don't think his parents understood that if they let their son become an adult, he would really become an adult. He met a girl on his trip and married at 18.

The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz. I bought this book for myself, but Andy stole it off the stack as soon as it came in. Husbands like Reading Week, too. It's the story of a Pole who escaped from a Siberian labor camp after being deported from Poland in WWII. He and several other prisoners from the camp walked all the way to freedom. (Like: across the Gobi Desert. Over the Himalayas. That kind of "walked".) Andy told us most of the story over the course of a few nights' worth of dinners, and we got off onto an interesting rabbit trail because I had read The Endless Steppe and also Walter Ciszek's books, He Leadeth Me and With God in Russia. (I'm just beginning The Long Walk, but I think that it and With God in Russia make a fascinating study, since both men were prisoners in the Lubyanka and were subsequently sentenced to Siberian labor camps, but God had different plans for each man: Slavomir Rawicz was called to go and taken care of on his way, while Walter Ciszek, as an American priest, was called to stay in the camps and minister to the prisoners.) I'd also just watched an episode of Fr. Barron's Catholicism DVD series at church, in which Bl. Pope John Paul II's history had figured prominently, so we talked about John Paul II and Poland and Communism, which led us to Lech Walesa, the encyclopedia, and The Visual History of the Modern World for timelines, pictures of the Berlin Wall, biographies, descriptions of the Solidarity Movement, etc.

Gareth and Katydid's books:

(They didn't finish all of these, but this is what I noticed them reading. Actually, I'm trying for the third time to post what I saw them reading, because Blogger's automatic save feature keeps getting hung up when I try to add Amazon links. Is it my browser? Is it Blogger? Is it Amazon? Is it frustrating?)

Firegold, by Dia Calhoun

Inkspell, by Cornelia Funke
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkein
Fellowship of the Ring
Summer World, by Bernd Heinrich
The Trees in my Forest, by Bernd Heinrich
Winter World, by Bernd Heinrich
Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan
Mission to Cathay
Space Cadet
Tales from Shakespeare

Picture Books :
(The ones I can remember anyway!)
Autumn: Signs of the Seasons Around North America
(Checked this one out of the library. The only book I have ever seen that talks about what autumn is like in different regions of North America, instead of portraying autumn everywhere as a New England autumn.)
Leaves, Leaves, Leaves
(Nancy Wallace is one of the boys' favorite authors.)
Fall is Here, I Love It!
Trapped in Tar: Fossils from the Ice Age
(One of the very few books for children about prehistoric mammals. Old, but worth looking for.)
Nature Detective
Almost Gone: The World's Rarest Animals
Exotic Invaders
(Fire ants. What else can I say?)
In November
Roanoke, the Lost Colony: An Unsolved Mystery from History
(Some political correctness, but there's an interesting legend about Virginia Dare in the back.)
The Construction Alphabet Book

Baby Books :
Hush, Little Baby
(We have owned this book for years. It was never anybody's favorite until Leo.)
Carl's Birthday
Baby in a Car
(This book has fallen apart and Leo still brings us the pages.)

So Reading Week wasn't a complete success, but I can't write it off completely either. The 24 Hour Internet Readathon in April is still on our calendars!

Note: In the interest of full disclosure, if you buy anything from amazon through one of my amazon links, I will make a tiny bit of gift certificate which I will use to fuel our book habit. The Goodreads links just go to Goodreads. I don't get anything from those, just the satisfaction of sharing the books.

In which I declare a Reading Week

2011-11-13T06:41:00.001-08:00

Recently I thought that I might like to read through a stack of books the way my kids do. I'm pretty sure I read this way once, on long, hot summer afternoons or cold winter weekends, as a kid sitting on the red and black plaid couches in our family room. Stacks of Black Stallion, Three Investigator, and Trixie Belden books. Or The Golden Field Guide to Mushrooms and Fungus. (I wasn't picky.) As a grown-up, my reading has lagged a little. I stopped reading novels because I couldn't put them down, and then I would be up until 2 or 3 AM and unable to take care of babies, toddlers, and otherwise active small children in the morning. (Or at 4 AM, whichever came first.) My interests kept narrowing and narrowing until there would be times I would have to tell myself, You have read every single book on homeschooling ever published. You can only read Homeschooling Our Children Unschooling Ourselves so many times. Go read something else!

I blame the Internet. I used to have more attention span.

(I tried to read The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, but I had to give it back to the library because I set it down and didn't finish it. Oh, the irony.)

Lately life has been very busy, and I am getting to that point where I think, but there isn't anything to reeeeeead, which is like my kids saying there isn't anything to eat around here just because instead of toast every morning I'm making them almond flour breakfast breads, eggs, yogurt, bacon, etc. We have lots of food, it's just not what they're used to, exactly. Likewise, I have lots of books, it's just that I've been eating a diet of mental toast.

In October, I stumbled onto the 24 Hour Internet Readathon too late to participate, which put me out a little because it sounded like fun. When I told my older kids about it, they thought it sounded like fun, too. ("You mean, you could just read all night and not go to sleep?") But the next one isn't until April. So you can see how all of this conspired to put me into the mood to declare a Reading Week at the drop of a hat... or at least at the drop of an "I'm-tired-and-why-am-I-arguing-with-this-kid-about-math-again" kind of afternoon.

The rules for Reading Week are simple. Read. Read whatever you want. Picture books, chapter books that are too "easy" for you, chapter books that aren't too easy for you, novels, nonfiction, classics, not classics, bibliographies, field guides -- whatever. Audio books count. (I'm hoping to start listening in the evenings while I make dinner.) One of my children has decided that our "read-a-thon" also counts as a "Lego-thon" because he builds Legos while he listens to audiobooks. The prospect of being left to build Legos and listen to books for as long as he wants (within reason, of course) has made him very happy.

I'll try to update our reading over the course of the week. But mostly I hope I'll be spending a lot of time reading myself.

If you'd like to join in "Reading Week" along with us or just let me know what you're reading, leave me a comment! I'd love to do a reading round-up at the end of the week.

At my kitchen sink

2011-11-05T07:29:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of my kitchen sink. Since I named my blog after it, I thought I ought to include a picture.

My old blog is Three Plus Two. I started blogging there in 2005, right before my twins were born, when the title made sense. I had three kids... and I was about to have two more, no easy transition into large family territory for us. We had just moved from St. Louis, MO to upstate New York, and I was tired and lonely and pretty huge at the time. I couldn't think to write stories, so instead I decided that I would try writing about homeschooling, and I would hope that other homeschooling moms would want to read what I wrote. The blog soon escaped the boundaries I set for it, of course. I did blog about homeschooling and all the different educational philosophies I tried out on my kids, but I also blogged about our garden, and our chickens, and all the snow we got every winter, and the art projects we did, and how I struggled to organize -- well, anything, really -- and the books we read, and the birds my daughter photographed, and what life with a bunch of boys was like, and I even wrote more essays than you would think possible about going to the doctor's office. But at its heart, it was really a homeschooling blog... or at least I thought it was "a homeschooling blog", and after a while, when I'd had two more kids so the title didn't fit, and I wanted to post more about food and I worried that nobody would want to read about that from me, and I stopped doing so much Montessori because we'd moved and there wasn't time or space for it... well, the blog seemed to stop fitting, too, like a sweater you once loved but has now become stretched and a little worn in the wrong places.

Mostly, though, it was because we moved. At heart I am still a fiction writer, and living my life in chapters seems right and good. The time we spent in St. Louis was one chapter, the time in New York another. When we moved to Mississippi, a new chapter began. It's all part of the same story, of course, but in this chapter, I start digging myself out of the cold frozenness that characterized so much of life in New York (and not just the weather). I start rebuilding my health after five years of living in a house to which I was seriously allergic. As I start plowing away the accumulated weight, toxicities, nutritional deficiencies, and psychological debris, I start remembering what I used to be like, before I began trying on educational philosophies like new outfits, before I began worrying that we didn't do things the way other homeschoolers did them, before I thought I needed fancy organizational systems -- before Facebook, blogs, and Internet message boards.

Now, don't get me wrong. I like blogs and Internet message boards and -- well, not Facebook so much, though I have to admit that I am completely and totally addicted to Pinterest. In fact I have made some very good friends courtesy of the Internet. The problem is that the Internet is a little like Yellowstone National Park. On the one hand, it's an experience you wouldn't want to miss. The mountains are gorgeous, the geysers are curiosities, the wildlife is unique. On the other hand, there are bears, wolves, pools of boiling water, and a giant reservoir of lava seething underground.

So it's pretty easy to misstep online, too. To fall into the comparison trap. And once you fall in, it's hard to crawl out.

Anyway, it came to a point when I thought, It's time to start over. I'd made a lot of false starts, but paying Typepad had really stopped making sense a long time ago and I guess when you lose a bunch of weight and cut your hair, then the blog needs to change, too. Or maybe not, but it was a good excuse. I had been throwing around titles for a long while -- Chaos Theory was one, but a google search turned up a bunch of blogs with that name -- but all of a sudden (I believe it was a Saturday morning), And the Kitchen Sink sounded good, and well, why not? At first I thought it was simply because I like to write about everything, regardless of theme or category, but as I've worked on this post over the course of a week, I've come to think that it's more because I want this blog to be a little like my kitchen sink.

My kitchen sink is pretty ordinary, often filled with pots and pans. It's not glamorous, but it does have a great view. If you came to visit me, we might stand in front of the kitchen sink for coffee or tea, and our conversation would range all over the place -- from what was cooking in the crockpot for dinner, to all those green tomatoes on the ledge and what to do with them, to the books in the bookcases (or on the table and counters), to the boys running yelling through the kitchen on their way upstairs to play Lego or outside for a sword fight... you get the picture. The kitchen sink is an eclectic place.

And the kitchen sink is a place for thinking. I don't have a TV in my kitchen, and I don't want one. Sometimes when I'm making dinner, chopping carrots or stirring soup, it's the only island of quiet in my day. Kids drift in and out, but there might be five minutes here or there, and I can think. Our mornings aren't working quite right; why not? Do we really want to paint our bricks? I can see the ducks waddling around the chicken coop, and I wonder if there will be another duck egg today. I need to tell somebody about the book I'm reading. One day, I'm going to write stories again, what if... Wouldn't it be fun to be able to knit?

So this blog is going to be a little bit like my kitchen sink. It won't be perfectly organized or perfectly polished, but I do hope you'll find yourself at home!