... snow? I'm loving all the bright new colors in our mudroom now that I've put away the snow gear and unearthed the rain gear and crocs.
I'm sure I've now jinxed things and it will snow.
I love getting all the snow gear organized and packed away.
I have quite a pile of mending and washing though. I think this year I might take it all to a laundromat--it's quite a pile!
Then again, the girls might end up wearing it this week....
...summer dreams!
On Saturday, I brought my tea and garden journal to the dining table for some thinking and planning.
We spent last summer getting dirt hauled in for grass and compost prepared for gardens. Now I get to garden! It has been fun to think about what I'd like to do where.
Before we sold our house....4 years ago now....I stashed my favorite plants in a friend's garden. They've done well, and I look forward to bringing them home.
Within moments of my sitting down, the girls joined me. Lou poured through her plethora of journals and had fun looking at all the things she collected from last summer.
Hels got more ambitious and pulled out a bookbinding kit to make a journal for a friend's birthday.
It was a delightful morning of summer dreams.
I took a walk to the mail today. It's about a 1/2 mile each way--perfect for a lunchtime break.
I thought about those who came before me on this old land. I thought about how interconnected they were...not in ways we strive to be, but in ways they needed to be.
Huge old haying fields such as this could not have been managed alone. Men and boys moved from field to field and farm to farm during those long, hot days of summer cutting the sweet, dry hay.
The fields needed to be cleared for wheat and corn. The stone walls rose maybe walling in, maybe walling out, but always making good neighbors.
In autumn, they ground their grain...
...and the children walked to school--65 of them converging on this crossroads from farms in all four directions.
The teacher boarded at each farm. The men took turns providing the wood to heat the school and the time to make repairs such as to this outhouse.
In March, they tapped the trees and boiled the sap through the long cold nights while playing the fiddle, keeping each other company, and enjoying the chance to be outside after the winter snows.
I can imagine the women walking this road to spend an afternoon spinning or quilting as they shared work, news, and friendship.
Just for a day, I'd like to follow this wall, into the shadows of time, and meet those who cleared this land, walked our roads, worked our fields, and borrowed cups of sugar.
Seeing as it is TV Turn-Off Week, I thought I'd tell the story of our family and television. We turned off our satellite dish soon after Lou was born. It was a decision that was a combination of N and I realizing that we were just staring at lame home improvement shows night after night and understanding more and more that we did not want television to be a significant part of our family's life. We have kept our DVD player for weekend movies and I confess I download A Daily Show and Grey's Anatomy.
The benefits of not watching television have become more and more apparent over the years:
More Imaginative Play
We had noticed that watching TV or movies in the morning led to a day of difficulties. It was as if our girls couldn't re-engage with life after a chunk of television. They would fight and they would need our structured help with play. Their imaginative capacities seemed lost and, rather than losing themselves in the world of play during the day, they needed activities figured out for them.
Fewer Materialistic Needs
We've noticed that our children don't have long lists of things they want for birthdays and Christmas. This is actually sometimes a problem because we then don't know what to get them, but their wish lists are shorter and reflect what they actually like to do rather than what someone else tells them they should like to do.
More Active Children
We've noticed that our children are much more active and creative without the television. If we say "no" to a movie, they are instead outdoors, crafting, or playing a game.
While in Florida, we watched some television. I realized that my reasons for not wanting our girls to not watch television have changed. When they were young, I was most concerned about TV's impact on their developing brains. Now, I'm concerned about its impact on their emerging adolescence.
Now that I'm more aware of Hels's increased interest in friendships, her body and clothing, it felt like every show and commercial was an example of how not to behave and what not to wear. It felt like the premise of so much television today is that people are unhappy or inadequate. The way to solve the problem? Take a pill. Use a certain handcream. Buy a certain outfit. Be a backstabber and vote the person off. While this would have gone over her head while in early childhood, it wasn't going over her head last week.
I'm once again grateful that we turned off the TV as early in our children's lives as we did. It's a complete non-issue for them. There's a rhythm to our lives that involves media on the weekends and television when visiting Grandparents. They seem to just live with this rhythm and have never challenged it.
Now...the computer? Another story, another challenge that I have more mixed feelings about.
What do you do when you run out of sugar while baking? Do you hop in your car and run to the store for sugar or do you stop over at your neighbors and borrow a cup?
I've just read an article in the New York Times magazine by Michael Pollan that looks at a few good reasons to go green. In the article he talks about the impact of cheap energy on community. "Cheap energy" he says, "allows us to leapfrog community by making it possible to sell our specialty over great distances as well as summon into our lives the specialties of distant others".
This has made me think about our neighborhood. We have a great little community--there are four families with children at our school as well as a couple of lovely retired couples. We gather for the occasional bonfire or cookout, we sometimes borrow a cup of sugar and reciprocate later with a sample of what we've baked, but we aren't actively engaged in each other's lives. How can we make some changes through being more green?
The first is we could begin carpooling! One mother likes to get to school early. I like to be on time and visit with other parents. Another neighbor is always late and then heads to the gym. If we carpooled, the children would spend a bit more time together (which would really help some fragile friendships) and the Moms would interact (with my last carpool, we had a daily after-school tea--so good).
The second is that we could expand our gardens. Too much zucchini makes for lovely neighbor interactions. At our last house, our neighbor had a huge garden. She left extra veggies on the stonewall and she had a huge harvest dinner each year. Some evenings we would wander over at dinnertime for a tomato or zucchini when we were bereft of veggies.
So, for Earth Day today, I will be calling my neighbors to discuss carpooling. The era of cheap energy is ending and it is time to pool our resources. I will also, finally, go get that compost container and start to plan a garden expansion. I can't wait to leave a few big zucchinis in certain mailboxes!
Next time you run out of sugar or need some exotic spice for your evening dinner, why don't you ask a neighbor?
It's spring and our neighbor's pond is brimming with turtles, salamanders, frogs, eggs, and all sorts of slimy, cool stuff. Yesterday the neighborhood girls spent the afternoon exploring it (and they're back again now). The water was cold and the ground was so saturated that water squished up between our toes when we walked. Tadpoles raced out from under the wet leaves at the edge causing little thrills of excitement.
I joined them for a few photos, but then, after extracting promises that they wouldn't actually swim, left them to their own devices. They arrived home at the end of the afternoon with frog eggs which they are planning to settle into an aquarium. They were only wet to the mid-thigh :)
This is the kind of nature-time I want our kids to have. I want them to feel daring by a pond without an adult. I want them to watch out for each other. I want all their senses to be engaged--cold toes, slimy fingers, smelly hands.
I want them to hold a living thing and to worry about the impact of their actions on it.
I want them so alive in nature that time floats away.
We will probably make nature journals for the summer. We'll probably go out sketching wildflowers. We'll probably engage in some deeper learning of nature. But more often, I hope the girls are out having days like today--they'll be learning plenty.
We made it back from Florida on Friday. We stayed with N's parents and had a delightful time exploring the area with them. We had the somewhat surreal experience of meeting one of Helen's classmates at the airport, seeing a local family biking on Sanibel, and discovering a photo of one of Lou's old preschool classmates in the newspaper. Seems like half of Vermont was on the island.
We took a wildlife tour where we saw everything from tri-colored herons to manatees. We also kayaked in a mangrove forest. Of course we spent time on the beach and we plowed through an astonishing number of books--the highlight for me was People of the Book.
We arrived home to find our road graded, the snow gone, 70+ degree weather, and some daffodils about to bloom. It was perfect timing.
We're packing tonight and I just had to share the contents of Lou's unedited carry-on bag:
Cabot, the squirrel
Tundra, the snow leopard
colored pencils
Books: Harry Potter flip book, Bad Cat, Magic Tree House, and Tales of Long Ago
Little erasers shaped like birthday cakes
Rubber ducky
Spy Kit (2 old cell phones, highlighter, 3 old hotel room keys, and compass)
Magic box
CD Player & CD's (Jim Weiss and the Boxcar Children, Shrek)
wallet
Wooden box with hair clips, hydrocortisone cream, bar of soap, and Dr. Hauschka's toned day cream
purple pen, green pen, journal
2 polished stones
We arrived home last night to a fun package from Suse of Pea Soup. Suse and I had been corresponding about our children's Waldorf experiences. It was fun to compare Australia to Vermont and discover that our children (who are about the same age) are having very similar educations. I asked her if she or her sons had read any good stories about Robin Hood, King Arthur, or tales of Medieval life as that's next for Hels in school. She suggested some Enid Blyton for Hels and A Year of Wonders for me.
I read Enid Blyton's entire "Famous Five" series when I was a child. My parents would bring them back whenever they went to England. I loved how this pack of children would head out on grand adventures with delicious picnic baskets and torches to solve various mysteries. We read one last summer and the girls were on the edge of their seats as much as I had been as a child. This set I found at a local thrift shop and am saving for our summer vacation.
It's really hard to find Enid Blyton in the U.S.A. A few months ago, Suse wrote that she had found some Enid Blyton tales of Robin Hood and King Arthur at her local op shop. Yesterday, they arrived all the way from Melbourne. Not only had she sent tales of Robin Hood, but another volume filled with Greek Myths and tales of the Arabian Nights. What a treat!! I'm really, really happy to get Hels out of contemporary fantasy fiction and into these books for awhile.
Suse--thank you so much. We're saving the chocolate for the airplane tomorrow. And to all the commenters about books for me--thank you too! I've got a nice little stack for the beach. I CAN'T WAIT TO GET AWAY FROM MUD AND SLOPPY SNOW!!!
We're heading off to Florida on Saturday and I'm needing a few good books. All I want to do is lie in the warm, moist air and get rid of my lingering flu. I've been tearing through books recently and have managed to read a lot of the newer books at our little local library such as:
Resistance --a story about Wales/England set during World War II--what would have happened if Germany had invaded?
Farewell Shanghai --a story set in Shanghai during World War II--Shanghai was one of the last "open" cities that admitted Jews, yet became administered by Germans.
Someone Knows My Name --the life story of a woman captured into slavery in Africa and her experiences in the United States. She eventually is freed and ends up in Nova Scotia and then England. I particularly liked this book because I have been to many of the sites in the book.
The Lemon Tree --a non-fiction book about two families--one Arab, one Jewish--and their interwoven lives going back to before World War II. This was an important read for me because I now have a much more grounded opinion of what is going on in Israel.
Out Stealing Horses --a Norwegian novel about an elderly man contemplating events in his childhood. A quiet novel that I sank into.
And one more I can't remember about a woman in the Middle East just after World War I--the Europeans are dividing up the Middle East--again, like the Lemon Tree, some history I'm really glad to have learned.
N has Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (a book we saw on Jon Stewart). Hels has the latest Bloody Jack novel, and Lou is deep into Misty of Chincoteague.
I have three books on reserve at the library--
Song Yet Sung (another slavery book), People of the Book and In Defense of Food --however I doubt they'll arrive by Saturday.
So, any book suggestions for poor me?
This morning Lou went out for a morning bike ride before school (a sure sign of spring). She came racing down the driveway shouting for us to look out the window.
And there it was, a sure sign of spring. We see hot air balloons all summer and fall. They launch right in front of the school and, sure enough, when we arrived at school there was the balloon hovering right outside Lou's classroom window.
I had planned on another post about the fascinating topic of green cleaning, but when moments like this appear in life, one must stop and take note.
Last year Animal, Vegetable, Miracle turned out to be quite influential in my life. This year Green Housekeeping takes the prize. I confess that for the past however many years I have been using whatever cleaning agents are on sale at my local store, not paying much attention to the fact that the residues they leave behind are almost as bad if not worse than the dirt they are meant to eradicate.
After reading this book, I've been working much harder at cleaning up my cleaning. The bathroom was the obvious place to start. I bought squirt bottles for each bathroom and filled them with vinegar and water. The vinegar worked great. Everything felt much cleaner. I also felt more comfortable letting my able assistant join in the fun (there's nothing like a squirt bottle).
We have very hard water which makes cleaning more difficult. This book suggested switching our soaps over to plant-based soap. Since starting to use Castille soap or artisan soaps, there is less film on the tub and my skin has been MUCH happier. I also like that I'm not washing my body in petroleum-derived products.
So, spring cleaning/green cleaning has begun in our house. It will continue throughout the month with a break next week while we go to visit N's parents in FLORIDA. Wow do we need that break.
The blog has been calling my name, but I just haven't been able to respond! N and I have been outrageously ill with the flu. Neither of has been this sick in years.
This bowl of Easter grass caught my eye this morning. I could look at it as one more thing I haven't cleaned up ...or I could look more closely and see that little teepees have been made in it. I believe there's a little china frog living in there. There are little play scenes like this all over the house right now. Sweet, but messy.
I'm starting to breathe more freely and have just declared to the family that the theme for April will be SPRING CLEANING!
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