Crumb Central
I got tired yesterday. Or, woke tired. Saturday was productive: I made yogurt (4 litres of yogurt!), and baked a batch of bread. I also made almond milk from scratch. But yesterday I felt weary of kitchen work. So I baked a rhubarb crisp for supper (dessert) and left it at that. Our fridge is full of homemade. Our house is in disarray, and thank heavens for my crocs (which I wear as slippers) because the floor is crumb central. (“You don’t have to work all the time, you know,” Kevin told me yesterday, as I was confessing an overwhelming desire to do NOTHING AT ALL.) Yesterday evening, the whole family went into a fugue state: Fooey went off to sleep, CJ puttered with Little People, Albus played piano in order to figure out a song on the guitar with Kevin (and Kevin was amazed by everything Albus knew about music–his ear, his rhythm, his understanding of musical theory; I just knew putting in all those years of early childhood music, and this past year of piano lessons, would be worth it! yay! I truly believe in giving kids the rudiments, so they can take them and develop on them; I’m so excited by Albus’s new enthusiasm); and AppleApple and I worked on her school project (that child has an extremely organized mind!). Time passed. Soon, it was 9:30 and we were like … um, responsible parents, bedtime, sheesh. So, children all put to bed, Kevin and I collapsed in the living-room with a beer, and I said, you won’t believe this, but I swear I spent a lot of time tidying this room today. He said, you won’t believe this, but so did I. It was a puzzle/games disaster, and mixed-up puzzle/game pieces are just endlessly frustrating to sort. The things I found under the couch. But the kids had a fun morning playing restaurant (at least, it was fun till they called me to be their customer, and I showed up and went, AAAAAGHGHG! Mommy has to leave the restaurant right now or she will make you start cleaning all this up!). Anyway, by the time Kevin and I wandered to the kitchen, post-beer, it was past 11. I did not try very hard to set my internal alarm for early morning yoga. And my internal alarm did not go off. Here’s the thing about the early mornings: I love them. But I have to go to bed early. There is no compromising on this. My body makes darn sure of it. So, if I have to choose between quiet early morning and hanging out with my husband, I generally choose the latter. I’ll get a wee bit of exercise right about now (though hardly a zen moment) as I walk to school to pick up the kids.
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PS That photo above is my boys this morning: my biggest and my littlest. One off to work, the other off to nursery school … leaving me alone in a quiet house for a couple of blissful hours.
She Took Notes
I keep finding scraps of paper around the house with paragraphs in tiny printing: AppleApple recording and making up stories about our daily lives. This overwhelms me with happiness. A child who loves words! I do hope she’ll finish her newspaper; however, she’s currently sidetracked by a school project on orcas, which she is typing up on my computer.
Here are excerpts from the writing I’ve found; I’ve corrected some eccentric spelling and grammar.
This one is from a school assignment, asking, If your mom told you the three most important things to remember, what do you think she would say? Why? “Keep earth clean. Stay safe, and have fun. I think she would say this because she wants to be environmentally friendly she doesn’t want to worry about us and she likes us to have fun.”
{side note: YAY! Talk about affirmation. I think she’s bang on.}
Here’s an advertisement she wrote for a school assignment, selling a candy of her own invention: “Have you ever tasted a yummy healthy morsel that will last forever? Would you like to try one? Is your wish to fly? Well you will get it if you eat this. Is your wish to talk to animals? Well you will get your wish if you eat this. You know how mom says don’t play with your food? Well you can with this and it won’t get dirty. Do you get bored of going over and over in the same swimming class? If you eat this it will make you swim better. Are you worried that you will waste your money? That’s not a problem because my special candy comes with ten and multiplies twenty. So amazing saving 20 dollars! Now you must try this now. Come on kids. Don’t sit there. Come and buy it now.”
{side note: re doing the same swim class forever: She passed, FINALLY! Unfortunately, her brother did not. And somehow, Fooey managed not to pass after having already passed the level three times previously (which likely says more about her instructor’s standards, than Fooey’s accomplishments).
Also, it would appear that AppleApple has her mother’s head for math …}
“Things I like to say at lunch. Can I fill my water bottle? Can I have your autograph? Can I go to the bathroom? Can I get a drink of water? Can I get an apple?”
And this might risk scooping her newspaper, but here’s an excerpt from the notes she’s taking toward that project: “Dad’s crazy about the world cup. Right now he’s watching the world cup. It’s the main subject at home today and yesterday.”
{Totally and completely true. He’s “cleaning up the living-room” right now.}
I Took Notes
Thoughts come to me while I’m hanging laundry. Do yours strike during particular activities?
On an evening out with friends, recently, we came around to talking about chores (we’re all moms or moms-to-be), and one friend mentioned that she genuinely enjoys hanging laundry on the clothesline–she didn’t mean that she finds it a chore she can tolerate, or doesn’t mind doing, but that she genuinely takes pleasure from it. She described hanging the napkins together so they flapped in the wind like a prayer flag. And those of us who regularly hang laundry realized we often do something similar: making patterns, following interior rules about what goes where; in essence, creating something that pleases us aesthetically. Do you have rituals you follow, or patterns you make; or does another chore bring you a similar kind of aesthetic pleasure? I think it points toward the artistic impulse.
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Lately, I’ve been thinking about a particular philosophical dilemma, which is related both to parenting styles and parenthood generally: I think all parents are occupied, whether consciously or otherwise, with finding a balance between individual pursuits and collective responsibility. (This is a societal question, too, and where you land on the scale is probably indicative of your political beliefs).
This balance comes into play in virtually everything I do. Do I push my son to practice piano, or do I hope he will come to develop his own talents? Probably a bit of both, right?
Maybe I need to explain this idea in more concrete terms. I’m thinking about how families work. How very much I would like my children to walk to school together, and to take responsibility not only for themselves, but for each other. However, my eldest wants to walk with his friends: they have made a thoughtful plan for meeting and walking together. I am proud of his initiative, and glad that he has strong connections with friends. But I want him to be a helpful big brother, and I’d planned to have the three kids walk to school together next year. What’s the balance? This one is easy, because we’ve already worked it out. Albus will walk with friends. We have other options for getting his two sisters to school. In this case, we went with the individual, because it did not harm the collective.
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I don’t think the balance between individual and collective is ever perfected. It’s an ongoing challenge. For example, I’ve also been thinking a great deal about how spiritual and artistic practice requires uninterrupted time. There’s no short-cut for this. In order to go deep, you need to enter into yourself while letting yourself go. This isn’t necessarily selfish, but it might appear to be, and certainly can feel selfish, when one is a mother (or father) to small children. Children are notoriously good at pulling you out of wherever you’ve gone–if they need you. And mine seem to need me a lot.
But there’s another issue: If I’ve arranged childcare and freed up time to work, what guilt I feel if the work that ends up getting done is invisible, even to me. If it makes next to nothing. If I sit and stare out the window. Writing a story sometimes appears to be a quick process, but I believe there is a great deal of invisible unknown work going on beneath the surface that makes the story possible.
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One final thought from my laundry-hanging philosophy session. Practice, and consistently doing something, makes that thing easy to do, so that that what appeared impossible or even merely inconvenient proves otherwise. I am thinking of the snack-making. Nothing in the cupboards to pull out, so I whip together cheese and apple slices and raisins, in individual containers, and the kids love it. Nothing in the cupboards, so I pull out the popcorn popper and everyone watches the process, and devours the results.
Yes, it takes more time and effort, but not that much more. The difference is actually inside my own head. Does it feel difficult and hard, or possible and simple?
(I did not get up early most of this week, and I missed it a great deal. So, this morning, I did again, and went to yoga, and appreciated both the effort and the ease).
Kitchen Day
Carrot Bars (adapted from Simply in Season)
Beat together 1 cup of butter, 1 cup of white sugar, and 1/2 cup of brown sugar. When creamed, add 1 cup of vegetable (canola) oil and beat till combined.
Add 3 cups of shredded carrot (or more), 2 beaten eggs, and 1 teaspoon vanilla. Mix well.
Sift together separately: 4 cups of flour (I used all white, but my guess is that you could substitute some whole wheat); 4 teaspoons baking powder; 1 teaspoon salt. Stir into wet mixture.
Spread on a greased cookie sheet, and bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes (in my oven, it took 23 minutes to reach buttery soft goodness). Remove from oven, cut into squares while still in the pan and hot, and let cool on the tray before removing to storage containers. In keeping with my no-pre-packaged snack plan, I’ve made up three containers with eight bars in each in preparation for piano and swimming outings (those have gone into the freezer). I also have a full container for eating and lunch boxes sitting on the counter.
This was a good use for those extra carrots languishing in the bottom of our veggie drawer; AppleApple took the last and rubberiest to her horse camp this afternoon.
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Today, I woke up early to go for a run with a friend. We got soaked and the rain was cold, so we did not go quite as far as usual. When I returned, I fed the kids “dessert as breakfast”: leftover rhubarb crisp, served with milk over top. Kevin informed me that my clock was off due to waking so early, and all day I’ve tuned in to CBC Radio in the Maritimes, because it runs an hour ahead of CBC Radio here.
It has been a wonderfully productive kitchen day. Started by making 1. the above carrot bars (with help from AppleApple on the carrot-peeling-and-grating, and CJ on the sifter; whenever we start to bake together, he runs to wash his hands, and then shouts: “Where my napkin, Mama? I want my napkin!” Translation: apron). Then, helpers bored and dispersing, I whipped together 2. Really Good Granola, which, judging by anecdotal feedback, just might be the most popular recipe on this blog. While that was baking, I made 3. my traditional Sunday waffles, with three bags of leftovers frozen for breakfasts this week. Because making waffles is a brainless activity involving time rather than focus, I took the opportunity to attempt 4. yogurt. By this point in the morning, let it be known that I was a touch irritable. Do not interrupt your loving mother while she is trying to do something finicky and brand-new! (It is safe to report that my children rarely–perhaps even never–take note of such advice).
To make the yogurt, I used this recipe, and this one, too, kinda. If it works, I’ll detail my method in another post. The jars are currently sitting in a cooler (in this case, it’s a heater, with boiling water in a container to keep it warmish). I will let you know. Between snapping at children who wandered between me and stove, I had to remind myself that I will make mistakes and operate less-efficiently the first time around, and that it will get easier as it becomes more familiar (like bread-baking, something I can do with my eyes closed; almost).
I still haven’t solved how to make yogurt without creating plastic bag waste (in Canada, our milk is sold in 4 litre quantities divided between three thick plastic bags, which completely amazed and baffled me at age ten when my family moved back to Canada–milk in bags? This is definitely less wasteful than milk in solid plastic containers. But where can I buy milk in returnable glass jars? Without, as mentioned in an earlier post, having to forgo sending my children to university?). That was a long aside. I’ve totally lost all track of where this began. Oh, the final cooking venture of the day is 5. tomato sauce for supper tonight, made up fresh using tomatoes frozen last summer; a batch big enough to put some away for another meal this week or next.
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Fooey spent all morning outside with Kevin, working on her own garden patch. Today is cold. That was some hard work. She came inside for some waffles and playtime, and is back outdoors again. “What would you like to do today?” I asked her this morning. “Look for Pooh Bear, and play.” “Anything else?” “Nope. I guess playing is what I do.”
AppleApple spent all morning working on a magazine she plans to produce, inspired by the “newspapers” that I made many years ago, and which one of my brothers printed and bound in hard cover for posterity, as Christmas gifts, a couple of years ago. AppleApple found the “book” on our shelf and was entranced. We are still working out what computer program she could use to most easily produce the magazine (ie. with the least assistance from her parents). Today, she took a number of photographs for the first edition, brainstormed story ideas, and interviewed every family member on subjects such as: “What is your favourite toy?” (Published interviews will not include CJ, who was taking too long to reply, and being too silly). If you live in the neighbourhood, you might just receive a hand-delivered copy of her first edition sometime in the next several weeks. If you live far away and would like a copy mailed to you, please drop me a line. This is assuming her project comes to fruition … but the child is very determined …
Albus has had a friend day; in fact, he’s had a friend weekend. He was also treated to a 3-D movie last night (the latest Shrek), and returned home with these glasses, of which he is very proud. (I will not post the photo of Kevin in the same glasses, shirtless and wearing his pants like a hip-hopping teenager, which was what he was wearing–minus the glasses–when Albus arrived home and Kevin went outside to chat with the mother who was dropping him off. Now you want to see the photo. But I’m keeping it for future blackmailing purposes).
A Key
Downloading photos from our point-and-shoot camera today, I discovered AppleApple’s take on life in the backyard, just before suppertime, today. Kevin was attempting to fix a hand-me-down bicycle for Fooey to ride (the effort was futile). AppleApple was mourning and recording the loss of her hammock (to time and to weather). Fooey and CJ were playing–what else? And I was photographing myself for my 365 project: how strange, almost jarring, to see that process recorded, from her perspective.
(I don’t know where she found that key, but she keeps it on a loop of leather, and it might have something to do with her ongoing Harry Potter game; in any case, it is mysterious, and mysterious objects are powerful for the imagination.)