Thirteen

Today, my first-born turns thirteen years old.

Those of you who have been reading here for a (very) long time will probably find this as improbable as I do, but I assure you, that tiny Cubby is indeed now a teenager.

Per his request, I no longer post photos of him, but I do have one of the knife he up and made yesterday:

He just . . . woke up and decided to make a knife. So he found a piece of scrap metal, cut it to shape, filed it, punched holes, and there's a blade.

Next he'll fire it in the forge he made with his dad last summer, then carve a walnut handle for it.

Because he can do all of those things. Along with hunting, baking, writing, gardening, training horses, splitting wood . . .

He is incredibly skilled at thirteen years of age. Certainly much more so than either of his parents were at that age. I can't wait to see what else he learns and does as he gets older.

Happiest of birthdays to Cubby, a truly remarkable boy.

Floating Islands: A Labor of Love

In an effort to, um, encourage the older two children in their bathroom-cleaning endeavors this summer, I decided on a combination threat/bribe. 

The threat is that if they don't do their bathroom chore, they don't get Sunday dessert. 

The bribe is that whoever is on toilet-cleaning duty (they trade off every week) gets to choose what the Sunday dessert is.

This is how I found myself making Floating Islands last weekend.

There is, of course, a backstory to this, because Floating Islands is not a dessert your average 11-year-old would think of on his own. Or even your average 21st-century person, of any age. It is a very old-fashioned dessert. Which is why A. knew about it.

See, when A. was growing up, Floating Islands was a kind of a running joke in his house. The rich older relatives of more-affluent times in his father's family were served Floating Islands by their servants. And so, when A. was a kid, the joke was that the only proper dessert was Floating Islands.

The MiL actually made it a few times, so A. has had it. And he, in turn, has told that story and the joke to our children.

So when Cubby was presented with the opportunity to choose any dessert at all, he chose something he knew I would never otherwise make: Floating Islands.

I, of course, have never made this, nor eaten it. And it's not in any of my cookbooks. So I looked up recipes online, and decided to play it safe with a Julia Child recipe for it, via this blog.

It's a very detailed recipe, which I appreciated, because this recipe is a complete pain to actually make. The prep time for it is two hours.

Yeah.

I split it up over two days. So on Saturday, I made the creme anglais, which is a very thin vanilla-flavored custard. That's what the "islands" float in.

The "islands" are meringues. In this recipe, the meringue is baked, all in one big pan. I've never made meringue before. It was kind of fun how it puffed up in the oven.

Dramatic.

Somewhat disappointingly, it deflates as it cools, though.

Definitely not as dramatic.

The meringue, incidentally, tasted just like a giant marshmallow.

Then there's a caramel sauce to make at the end. The final dish is a pool of the custard with a piece of the meringue in it, and the whole drizzled with the caramel sauce.

Like so.

The whole thing was kind of annoying to do, because every step requires quite a bit of slow cooking and attention. And that does not jive with my life. The kids were really excited that I was making this famous dessert, and spent most of the time I was making it in the kitchen with me. So right behind me while I was carefully stirring my creme anglais so the eggs didn't scramble, or watching the caramel sauce to make sure the sugar didn't burn, I had this:

Just like Julia Child's kitchen, right? Oh wait. SHE HAD NO CHILDREN.

Everyone was SO excited to try this:

Including this curly girl.

And in the end? Eh. 

As I was making it, I noted the granulated sugar I was dumping in quantity into every part, and thought, "This is going to be way too sweet." And, indeed, it was definitely too sweet. It was also very one-dimensional in flavor with the vanilla in everything. 

And really, really sweet.

The MiL found a different recipe for me to try, with less sugar, should I ever make this again, but I can't say I'm that motivated. 

It was fun to try, and definitely more an Event rather than just a dessert, but I would much rather have some chocolate pudding.

Eleven

Happy birthday to

the ever-evolving Cubby.*

* Someone commented here once that Cubby is getting too big to be called Cubby anymore. To which I say: I invoke the mother's prerogative to call my giant sons by their baby names for as long as I live. Amen.

Look! A Pie! FINALLY

 I'm just gonna come right out and say it: I don't like pumpkin pie. And I don't really like baking. So why did I spend almost an ENTIRE DAY baking a pumpkin pie?

Because I love my son. That is the only reason.

Cubby wanted to make a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. He's into pie, as I've mentioned before, and he knows pumpkin pie is the traditional pie for Thanksgiving. So he asked to make one.

We have so much squash on hand, it's ridiculous, so I said okay. I thought, since neither of us is an expert pie baker, it would be best to make this pie the day before so I wasn't dealing with a kid in the kitchen and an unfamiliar dish while simultaneously cooking the rest of the holiday meal.

This turned out to be the only smart thing I did in the entire process.

Although I have plenty of squash already cooked and in the freezer, I figured I might as well just cook one of the squash that's still sitting in A.'s office. So I stuck one in the oven at 8 a.m. 

When the squash was done, Cubby scooped it out into the food processor and we pureed it. Then he started making the crust, using this recipe. He wanted to do it all himself, so I just read the recipe to him while he did it.

While he was doing that, I started removing the squash from the food processor. It was nice and smooth and thick. I tasted a bit as I was putting it in a Pyrex to measure it. Good thing, because the entire thing tasted like mold. 

Awesome. This is what I get for not using a can of pumpkin, like a normal person.

So all eight cups of that nicely pureed squash went to the chickens, and I took two bags of frozen squash out of the freezer after all.

Cubby meanwhile had finished his pie dough and put one half of it in the refrigerator to chill. The other half went into the freezer for some future use.

I had to thaw the frozen lumps of squash, so those went into a pot on the stove to simmer until it was all thawed. I had to use a pot anyway for the pumpkin pie filling--according to this recipe--so I figured I might as well thaw the squash in the pot.

Then I transfered the squash to the food processor, again, and pureed it. Again. And then I tasted it, again. No mold. Hooray!

Moving on.

I measured out the approximately four cups of squash we would need back into the pot and then called Cubby back into the kitchen to add the spices. Again, he wanted to do it himself as I read the recipe to him. I sat at the table to read the recipe from my computer while he was at the stove measuring spices. Then he turned the stove on and the squash started blurping all over my stove. And the wall behind it.

Cubby thought this was awesome and called Charlie in to see. I told him to STIR IT so I wouldn't be washing half the squash off the wall.

I was so over all of this already. 

Now it was time to get the pie dough out of the refrigerator and roll it out. I told Cubby I would stir the squash while he did that. 

While I was stirring, I tasted a bit. Remember how well that went last time I tasted squash. Yeah, this wasn't any better.

No mold this time, but waaaay too many spices in that pot. This was explained when I asked Cubby what he used to measure the spices and he showed me the teaspoon measure. He was supposed to use a half teaspoon measure. So there was twice as much spices as there was supposed to be. 

It tasted gross, all acrid and way too gingery. Even though Cubby definitely added more than the recipe called for, I think this recipe as written called for a LOT more ginger than necessary. I had to add all the rest of the pureed squash to the pan, and it still was too spicy. So I ended up adding a can of pumpkin I actually had in the pantry, thanks to our neighbors and the commodities drop-off, to further dilute the spices.

Yes, you can all chortle over the fact that after all that crap with the squash, I STILL ended up using a can of pumpkin. I just couldn't face thawing and pureeing yet more squash.

Anyway, we ended up with twice as much filling in the pot, which did not help the spattering situation.

Who's having fun now! NOT ME.

I froze the extra pie filling, to be used at some future date with the other pie dough in the freezer. How fortuitous.

There were no notable disasters with the rolling of the pie dough, although Cubby did have to be instructed more than once to roll it out more. I don't have a pie plate, so we were using a cake pan, which is a little higher, I think.

Looks pretty good so far.

We used pinto beans as our weights for the blind baking. I dumped a full quart jar of dry pinto beans into the lined pie crust and found when I poured them back into the jar that the hot pinto beans had apparently swelled a bit in the oven. I found this out when many beans went cascading all over my counter and onto the floor.

Sigh.

The blind baking proceeded without incident, and then we put the custard filling into the pie shell. I did not push the filling through a strainer as instructed by the recipe, because I was not about to get involved in anything like that after everything that had already happened.

After the complete pie was in the oven, I set Cubby to washing some of the millions of dishes that had been used during this fiasco. The pie was supposed to bake at 400 degrees for ten minutes, at which point I turned it down to 300 degrees, per the recipe.

About ten minutes after that, I realized that the oven had been accidentally turned down to less than 200 degrees while Cubby was putting dishes on the stove to dry.

At least I noticed it relatively quickly, I guess, although it was just the icing on this incredibly annoying cake. Or rather, pie.

The pie came out of the oven at 1:35 p.m. That's five and a half hours after we embarked on this ridiculous project. 

Obviously, we haven't eaten it yet, but I think I can state with some certainty that it was definitely NOT WORTH IT. I don't care if it's the best pumpkin pie in the history of pies. And I know it isn't, because of the overabundance of ginger.

But it's done, and we will have pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving dinner. 

So there.

We are also having turkey, which I also don't like and have never made but promised Cubby, again, that I would do it this year because EVERYONE has turkey for Thanksgiving, MOM.

I can only hope the turkey isn't as annoying as the pie. 

Mr. Green Thumb Strikes Again

 

Master Cubby

(Not at all chubby)

How does your garden grow?

With lettuce heads,

And snowpea beds,

And everything all in a row.

A few weeks ago, when A. and I were planting peas, carrots (successful), sprouting broccoli, and collard greens (not so much), Cubby asked if he could have some seeds for a fall garden.

A. showed him where he could plant, I gave him lettuce, snowpea, and cabbage seeds, and he dug out some trenches and made himself a garden.

I suggested to him today that perhaps he needed to thin his lettuce and gave him a bowl for the thinnings. This is what he brought in:

Boom.

If a green thumb is real, then Cubby has it. On both hands. 

Not that this is totally unexpected. I mean, he did start successfully solo gardening when he was five years old. And he was the reserve champion for vegetables at the county fair last year.

Maybe by the time he's fifteen he'll have a market garden and I can buy all my produce from him. I wouldn't be surprised.

A Sign of the Times

We have discovered a new use for the decorative iron thing in our front entry:

 

Mask central.

I bet I could show the kids that photo in twenty years, and they will know what year it was taken. Unless we're all still wearing masks whenever we leave the property in 2021, which I suppose is possible.

And in related news, Cubby has found a new use for the sewing skills taught to him by the MiL years ago:

He was complaining that the masks I bought for the other kids didn't fit him (they don't--he has a big head) and that nothing fits him and everything is uncomfortable and "I'M GOING TO MAKE MY OWN."

And so, with an old t-shirt of Jack's and a needle, he did. It took him about thirty minutes. I helped him very minimally. I don't sew at all, except for the odd button that needs to be sewn on, so my help was limited to assisting him with the measuring of his face and the length of the ear loops.

We didn't actually look up any instructions, instead just winging it, but it turns out there are quite a few tutorials for t-shirt masks online. Of course.

I did tell him he needed to make sure to cut the shirt with the double layers, figuring that would make it more effective, and after the fact I found that I was more right than I knew.

Nice to find scientific confirmation.

Anyway. School starts for us today, so we need all the masks we have. And if we need more, I know who to ask.

Some Small Slices

Let's just say that these photos and the accompanying explanations are small slices of the bizarre pie that is our life. Because there's really no other connecting theme.

We'll start with yesterday and work back in time.

Slice #1

In the summer, it is often the case that I spend all day trying to get my children to stay outside, and then they go out about an hour before bedtime. That means that then I have a very hard time getting them back IN.

It's very annoying.

On the plus side, though, we do all get to see skies like this as I'm marching them inside by the ear. (Literally.)

The view to the east looked alarmingly like a mushroom cloud.

And the view to the west looked much more impressive in person. (Both photos--plus about two dozen identical ones--taken by Cubby.)

Slice #2

There is a bull snake that hangs around our property. Cubby has named him Howard. Howard is liable to turn up anywhere, but the other day, the dogs' frantic barking alerted us to the fact that Howard had turned up under the bunk bed in the covered porch*.

We put the dogs in the shop to get them out of the way, then A. nudged Howard out from under the bed and out the door. The children were thrilled to be able to examine Howard up close.

Relatively speaking, that is.

Given that Howard is most likely the same snake that struck at me in the chicken coop, I don't feel quite so friendly towards him as the children do. However, bull snakes do eat rats and gophers, so I grudgingly tolerate his presence.

Slice #3

Remember that goldfish pond Cubby was excavating in the back pasture? Well, he hasn't gotten it big enough for goldfish yet, but it was certainly big enough to make a satisfying children's pond when it filled up after several big rains.

Muddy play is the best play.

Okay, I think that's a big enough pie for now. Over and out.

* Yes, there is a bunk bed in our porch, left there by the previous owner. I think his nephews used to sleep out there when they were visiting. We use the top bunk to store junk we don't want the kids to get. The bottom bunk is now a dog bed, and the space under the bed is also a dog den.

Photo Dumps Are Fun, Right?

Sure they are. And who couldn't use a little more fun in their lives?

I mean, how fun is this photo of the top of my old stove?

I do not miss this filthy black junk that got all over my kitchen.

Also fun: Blurrily captured acrobatic displays by two-year-olds.

Just after this was taken, she started to actually stand on his head, and I cruelly had to end the game.

Cookies are definitely fun, especially when they're completely made by someone who is not me. That is, by Cubby and Poppy.

Poppy was in charge of the chocolate chips, and she took her job very seriously.

And then there was the homemade pasta Cubby requested we make.

This child has definitely (and unfortunately) inherited my love of simple carbs.

There! Wasn't that fun? Back to our regular, boring lives now.

What To Do If You See a Lion

I found this piece of paper randomly on a kitchen chair the other day, written in Cubby's handwriting:

It reads as follows:

"What to do if you see a lion . . . you should run strait at them duck the mouth. Then come back up and bite the neck. Then rip a chunk off. (Repeat until it dies.)"

I have no idea what precipitated this instructional sheet. I can only be thankful we don't have any lions around here, lest my sons decide to put this advice into practice.

No More Pencils, No More Books

And this officially ends the most bizarre school year ever.

School ended this year via distance learning on Zoom, because that's what life is like now.

Charlie had his last Zoom class meeting at 8 a.m., during which his class had a pet show and everyone got to show off their pets. The other five students in his class all showed off their dogs. Charlie chose to introduce everyone to Dorito, the chick that Charlie named and that we're pretty sure is a rooster. Not a pet for much longer, I guess.

Cubby had his last Zoom class meeting at 10:30 a.m., during which his class showed everyone the kites they were invited to make and fly this week. Cubby insisted all week that he didn't want to make a kite--it wasn't required, so I didn't insist--but then decided an hour before his meeting that yes, he DID want a kite.

It was made from a coat hanger, a trash bag, and duct tape, and amazingly, actually flew about twenty feet for ten seconds on his sixth try running down the road to launch it.

Jack had his last Zoom class meeting at noon. His preschool class had "Cowboy Day" for their last class, which was hilarious because the teacher showed a bunch of photos from her own ranch and all the kids basically dressed in their, uh, clothes. Since 80% of them actually live on working ranches.

Jack's cowboy outfit is not his everyday apparel, but we do at least have all the correct items.

He was very excited that I let him borrow my hat, which I do not ever let my children use unless it's for a very specific purpose. Because anything they use gets broken.

Then we celebrated with some banana bread. I felt like I should make them a treat since they were missing their end-of-year sugar-binge parties.

And that was it. It was pretty anticlimactic. 

Our daily lives will change very little now, except I no longer have to nag the older two to do their math or force my very reluctant boys to sit still for Zoom meetings on Mondays and Wednesdays.

Ah, summer. You came none too soon.

For All the Mothers (Ovine and Otherwise)

We have a brand-new mother around here, and for once it isn't me. One of the full-to-bursting ewes had a lamb three days ago. It's another girl lamb, and it was lucky enough to be born during our warm spell and thus did not require any shepherd intervention.

Do I have a picture of it for you? No, I do not. But! I do have a picture of the Megaton cabbage plantation!

Cabbages are just as cute as lambs, right?

Because it is Mother's Day and I get to do what I want, I spent the morning planting out almost all of the starts that were in the kitchen grow box. There are now 12 tomato plants and two pepper plants out in the backyard cells A. prepared for me. They are protected from our vicious winds with the most aesthetic of objects:

Our house is definitely going to be on the next Home and Garden Tour.

I got the idea for the tires from the lady we used to buy milk from. She said they work really well, and you can just keep stacking them up as the plants get bigger. God knows, we have plenty of old tires on our new (abandoned) property. I'm also hoping the heat absorbed by the black tires will keep the plants a bit warmer and happier during our cool nights in the summer.

I also planted out the remaining eight basil seedlings in various places. Those have some attractive plastic milk jugs around them, too.

A. spent the morning cutting up and hauling away the board fence that used to be where that stone wall is in the above picture. It was big, heavy, and awkward, and has been sitting in the middle of the yard near my lettuce for months now. His gift to me was two hours with a chainsaw and wheelbarrow to get it off the ground and out of my way.

Beautiful bare ground, just waiting to be planted with something. More cabbages, maybe?

Cubby nailed up some of the wood to cover gaps in the fence to keep the dogs from racing around that yard and over my carrots. He also used some hinges that had been on the section of fence A. cut up to actually afix the gate to the post to that yard, so now I have a fully-functioning gate there, instead of various propped-up pieces of wood that were always getting blown over in the wind.

I knew all those hours he spent playing with tools as a toddler would pay off later.

After Poppy's nap, A. took all four kids (and the dogs) to our neighbor's canyon so I could sit here in a quiet house. Except it's not all that quiet, because I'm listening to music on my computer. I love music, but I absolutely cannot have it on when my kids are around, because they make too much noise of their own and the combination of them and the music just makes me crazy.

So for now, it's just me and Gary Allan.* And both of us are right where we need to be.

Happy Mother's Day to all my sisters in arms. I hope the day is exactly what you wish it to be.

* It occurs to me that I should be taking advantage of my children's absence to listen to something not appropriate for their innocent ears. Pink, coming right up!

The Seeds of Revolution

Cubby has created a country within our household. Sort of like Vatican City in Rome. This country is called Goth, and it has four residents. I bet you can guess who they are.

Poppy is the Queen of Goth. Cubby is the commander general and de facto ruler, despite Poppy's honorary title.

Their currency consists of "smacks" and "half-smacks," (despite the name, actually pieces of paper, not physical blows) which can be used to buy such necessary items as a tube of lip balm without its cap and pencils. Cubby is also the Secretary of the Treasury.

The country's borders are the driveway, barn, and fence on the south side of their enemy country of Mom's Dictatorship (I made that name up myself).

Their aim? To go to war with Mom and Dad and win greater independence.

This is their military command unit, set up in the heart of enemy territory.

The sign says, "Hello. We don't want you here. Go away."

Inside, Goth's military strategist is hard at work.

They thought I was just taking a picture to show Nana and Baca. Little did they know it was a not-so-covert spy mission.

Shortly after that picture was taken, Cubby came into the kitchen requesting "provisions" for the beleaguered troops. So I guess they need to work on their supply trains.

Will the plucky but ill-equipped rebels succeed? Or will they be ruthlessly quashed by the might of the Mom Dictatorship?

What do you think?

A Homesteady Sort of Day

A. discovered during shearing that one of the sheep that had been sold to us as a bred ewe was, in fact, a wether. That is, a castrated male sheep.

A. found the silver lining, though. His exact words were, "What the hell? This thing isn't going to give me a lamb. Oh well. We needed more meat, anyway."

After the fleece was removed, all we had to wait for was appropriate butchering weather. When we woke up to 34 degrees with clouds today, A. decided the time had come.

The wether was duly killed, gutted, skinned, and hung up in the shed to age for a few days. As A. was gutting it, he discovered this sheep had a great quantity of fat around its kidneys, known as leaf fat. This fat is the best, purest, and mildest tasting fat on an animal, and A. was very excited to see it.

He proudly bore in a big pan of fat and deposited it in the kitchen.

Based on a lot of past experience, I knew that the best course of action was to render it immediately, lest I end up trying to store an unwieldy pan of fat in my refrigerator.

So I immediately cut it up and put it in my cast-iron dutch oven to render.

Cubby was very interested in this and hovered over the pan. "Can I make a candle from it?" he asked.

Huh. Can you? Well, I didn't see why not. I mean, I know people make candles from beef tallow, which is very similar in consistency to sheep tallow. So I quickly looked up a few sites about making tallow candles, and we made one in a jar.

All you have to do is render tallow*, pour it into a jar into which a wick has been suspended, and let it harden.

You can buy wicks online (of course), but I already had cotton kitchen string, so we used that. I saw on one site that soaking the string in a solution of water, salt, and boric acid makes it burn slower and more evenly, but we didn't have the boric acid, and our wick worked just fine as is. All we had to do was drop the string in the melted fat and put it in the freezer to harden and get stiff so it would be straight.

The hardest part was getting the wick to stay up straight in the jar. The top of the wick is wrapped around a pencil that is placed over the top of the jar. A dab of hot glue was recommended on the bottom of the jar to hold the wick straight. I don't have a hot glue gun. The best I could do was some bright blue Elmer's with glitter in it.

It sort of held the wick, but there was a lot of minute adjustments, dropping the thing entirely and starting again, many, many times (plus, I must admit, some cussing--it was really frustrating) before I decided it was good enough and let the tallow harden.

After an hour or so in the refrigerator, we tried it out. And lo and behold, it burned.

This little light of mine . . .

Yes, my wick is still not straight, but nonetheless, we burned the candle all through dinner. Despite the frustration with the wick, it was fun. Maybe next we'll try making a dipped tallow candle. We got nothin' but time, and there can never be too many lights in the darkness.

* I didn't use A.'s precious leaf tallow. We still had some regular old fat from the wether we butchered last spring, so I used that.

Let It Be Known

The first garden produce of 2020 has been consumed.

Okay, so it wasn't much. I just thinned the arugula and added the thinned plants to my salad of roasted sweet potatoes, toasted nuts, cheese, and broccoli. But still! Fresh greens! On March 18!

A. said I had to write about it so we would remember next year when the first harvest was this year. Because this blog is pretty much the only way I remember anything anymore.

Also in Breaking Garden News, yesterday I transplanted our measly five tomato seedlings into their own pots and put a heating pad under the pepper seeds to try to encourage them to just sprout already. Today's gardening fun will probably be planting more tomato seeds, since our planned trip to the small city with a nursery has been postponed indefinitely.

And since that was a topic of very specific interest to me, how about something of more general interest?

Did you know that A.G. Thomas was a famous British composer who wrote the opera "Esmeralda"? I did not either, and neither did Cubby until he was directed to choose any entry he wished in the "T" volume of our encyclopedia to write about.

When it comes to expanding your knowledge base, the sky's the limit with a 1970s World Book Encyclopedia set and excess free time.

I suspect today's carefully-planned at-home school curriculum* will include a time to listen to that opera. If I can find it online. Because I'm all about child-led learning.

* Sarcasm. So much sarcasm.

Another Day of Academic Rigors (and Planting)

You know my tongue was firmly in cheek when I wrote yesterday's post, right? I applaud anyone who manages to maintain some semblance of real school work with children at home, but I am not that motivated to do so, I'm afraid.

However! I did make my older two children do one sheet of handwriting practice this morning, because their handwriting is abysmal, to the point that it negatively affects their grades.

I also had them each do one page of math problems, as well as fifteen minutes each of Spanish and typing on their computer.

Do you know how much whining I heard about this? SO MUCH WHINING.

And then! Then I had the gall to make them read about Ireland and St. Patrick in their encyclopedia*!

And the crowning indignity? When Cubby asked me what the Reformation was, after coming across the term in the passage about St. Patrick, I made him look it up himself.

"So what, you're just going to make me look it up every time I have a question?" complained Cubby.

Dingdingding! Got it in one!

Anyway. All of this torture lasted for a whole hour of their day, which is clearly excessive.

The rest of the day was spent in wholesome outdoor activity. By which I mean, planting.

In honor of St. Patrick's Day and our Irish heritage (which, yes, both A. and I, and thus our children, can truthfully claim), I planted cabbages.

There are never enough empty milk jugs in the spring.

Also potatoes.

My helpers and I planted an even fifty potatoes. I didn't intend to have a round number, but I found it very pleasing.

I also planted some spinach and carrots, which aren't particularly Irish, but I'm hoping will grow well.

Oh! And check out my lettuce!

Grow, babies, grow. So I can eat you. Ahem.

So there you have it. Planting and not really teaching. The current story of my life.

* A. bought a set of World Book encyclopedias for five dollars at the thrift store a month or so ago. I freely admit I rolled my eyes at this purchase, but I will also admit that now I like having them. Because when the kids ask me a question, I can send them to a book rather than having them looking at my computer. Anything to keep them off screens as much as possible.

How I Homeschool

I fear that I, uh, don't.

Today was the first day of the three-week (yeah, we'll see about that . . .) school suspension. I thought, "Hey, what a great opportunity for Cubby and Charlie to do some things they don't normally get to do at school! Geography! Typing! Spanish!"

Let me tell you what we actually did today, which was sunny and almost seventy degrees.

We put some potatoes outside that were already sprouting to sprout further and get ready for planting. I put seventeen potatoes in the sun and had Cubby help me figure out how many potatoes we might potentially get from those seventeen potatoes. We came up with 134*. (Math!)

The shearer came and we all stood around watching him work and helping however we could. Cubby took care of the gate so A. could go in and out with the fleeces, I wrote down the ewes' ear tag numbers along with a description of each (so we can figure out which ones to cull), and A. actually caught the sheep and moved the fleeces. (Agriculture!)

Cubby on gate duty.

That's a lot of wool.

A. dug many feet of dirt so I could plant 500 beet seeds. Cubby filled pots with soil and planted watermelon seeds. (Botany!)

The boys made boats out of paper and had a contest to see which ones would sail the longest in the bathtub. (Science! And also, lots of screaming and tears about cheating!)

So, all in all, a most academically successful day.

I was obviously born to be a teacher.

* They're really big, so our calculations included cutting each potato in half and getting a minimum of  four potatoes from each half planted.

Feeling the Love

So how did Valentine's Day go down in our house? I instituted a strict Sugar Ban for the entire day because of the previous three days of sugar bingeing (birthday+two days of class parties).

And Cubby chased Charlie around trying to kiss him ("But Valentine's Day is all about love!") until Charlie collapsed on the floor screaming, "I hate Cubby! I hate kisses! I hate Valentine's Day! I HATE THE UNIVERSE!"

So, you know. Typical.

Ten

Happy birthday 

to Cubby,

a totally terrific ten-year-old.

The Woodstove Smackdown

All day, every day.

Charlie: "I suddenly completely understand Flat Stanley."

And the Award for Earliest Seed Order Goes To . . .

Not me.

Yesterday when I was playing with Jack and Poppy, Cubby found a Seeds 'n' Such catalog that had recently arrived and informed me that he and Charlie were planning their "dream garden."

I didn't pay too much attention, as I was being smothered in 80 pounds of small children. But then, about fifteen minutes later, Cubby reappeared with his list of seeds and announced that he was ready to place an order. He had added the seeds up already and knew how much it would cost. He told me that since it was his idea, he was going to pay all the dollars for the order, and Charlie was going to pay the cents, plus shipping.

Charlie sure got the better end of that deal.

I showed Cubby how to look up the catalog number for each kind of seed they wanted, where to enter it on the order form, where to put the sub-total and totals, and where to check the tiny box informing Seeds 'n' Such that we do not want them to share our information with other companies "for marketing purposes."

Sneaky.

Anyway.

You want to know what they ordered, don't you?

Only three things. They ordered one pack of seeds for a giant cabbage variety, one pack for a variety of sweet corn, and one pack for a variety of watermelon*.  Because they ordered early, they're also getting a free packet of basil seeds and one of tomato seeds. They thought this was a great deal.

I wrote a check for them and collected the cash myself. A. promised he would help them stake out their garden area and spread manure and everything on it, though they were disappointed to learn that they can't actually plant their seeds for quite some time yet.

They found another catalog today and wanted to order more things, but we persuaded them that they had plenty of seeds coming and shouldn't overextend themselves in their first year of real gardening.

That's a common newbie mistake, you know.

Anyway, they're very excited to get their seeds in the mail soon. The next generation of gardeners has discovered the joys of seed ordering.

I'm so proud.

* A seeded variety, of course. My watermelon prejudice has definitely been passed down to my children.