The beach

My husband's brother's family is in town, and one of their must-do trips was the local beach.  So, we hit the beach after swimming lessons today.  Our children were quite excited by the trip to the beach, so they were wonderful helpers with getting us ready to go and packing the car.  Not that there was much to pack.  Each of us (except our toddler!) had a backpack, we had a lunch bag, and a small box with sand toys.  We're a simple bunch.  Besides, there's only so much a mama can carry with one empty hand.

Our relations arrived shortly after us, and it didn't take long to blaze a trail to the water.  My youngest was terrified of the water, and even more terrified of the blow-up turtles her grandparents brought, so she stayed in my arms or sat on the sand with a pail and shovel.  Which was enjoyable.  We built a few towers.  We looked for different-coloured stones, rubbed smooth by the waves.  We watched the antics of the gulls.  My other daughter brought us seaweed to look at.  We hung out with her baby cousin.  We enjoyed the shade while the rest got a wee sunburn.

And the other children loved the terrifying turtles.  Until the sun got the best of them and they forgot how to share.  And listen.  And fought pretty much from the time they got home until the time they went to bed, which wasn't early enough unfortunately.  

And then I found it difficult to keep my cool too.  Despite all these years as a parent, I still haven't found the magic way to calmly deal with what feels like constantly grumpy children.  And I'm frustrated when it feels there is little I can do to resolve the root of the issue.  Today, I think it was the heat combined with needing more sleep.  And it is still uncomfortably warm in our house, even after 9:00 pm, so they will likely struggle to fall asleep tonight too. 

So tomorrow, we may need to turn up the creativity.  What to do about the heat?  Maybe sleeping in a tent in the backyard.  Maybe hanging up sheets and curtains in our unfinished basement so we can sleep down there.  Maybe having an early supper so we can leisurely go through our bedtime routine, including a refreshingly cool bath for each child.  Maybe shipping them off to their grandparents, who have air conditioning, for a sleepover (with their cousins!).  Lots of cool damp cloths for sure.

What to do about my nerves wearing thin?  I'm thinking quiet time tomorrow for each child, as best I can given the errands that need to be run.  I'm thinking lots of reading time.  I'm thinking activities that my children are experts at so I can heap praise on them.  I'm thinking lots of hugs and cuddles and "love you's".  I'm thinking lots of deep breaths for me.

I think we can do tomorrow.

To become a gardener

My husband and I went to a supremely inspiring movie a while back...To Make a Farm.  In it, Tarrah Young from Being Green Farm compares a gardener to a symphony musician.  She observes that a gardener might have 30 or 40 tries to learn how to garden and be really successful at it, as there's only one try a year.  But a musician - say Beethoven - would have likely practiced the same piece hundreds or even thousands of times before performing it for an audience.  The conclusion...the learning curve for the gardener is very steep.

Tonight, her observation stayed with me for a long time as I reflected on our gardening experiences.  I've already mentioned some of our failures this year.  And we've had more learnings since.  Like where we will put our bok choy next year so that it will hopefully not go straight to seed.  And how we will keep the ants from eating our sui choy.  And what we will do to try and prevent water from simply floating over the dirt and making its way to the sidewalk instead of nourishing our onion patch. 

My heart is at ease knowing that my children are learning beside me, and that they are already on their way on the gardening learning curve.  And it's exciting that they too are marvelling at how quickly nature can take its course.  When my daughters and I went to our community garden plot, I asked if they noticed anything different.  Jaelyn immediately saw the peas that we will likely be able to pick later this week.  And that the pumpkins were almost twice as big as they were the last time we visited.  And that our potatoes, which we had planted just a week ago in our failed corn patch, were starting to come through.  And that 21 corn plants did make it after all.  She immediately set to weeding, then got out the hose and started watering.  Then knew when she'd had enough and played with her sister while Mama finished up.

And we're having some successes too.  Like enjoying the first few raspberries of the season.  Or munching on cilantro just because it's there and ripe for the picking.  Or the tomatoes that are doing fabulous.  Or those peas at the community garden.  And now I've realized that I've moved up the learning curve too, because now I know when the peas will be ready.  I know when our lilies will burst open.  I know when the corn can be picked.  These are things I didn't know too long ago, but that knowledge is with me now.  And I can share it with our little ones.

I truly love being on this learning journey together.

A week in pictures

Some fun we had that we didn't write about...

Enjoy your weekend!

Club Day. Nature Version. Volume 1, Issue 1

My daughter has also started a club.  She chose a Nature Club, because, as she says, "She likes nature."  So simple, for both of us.  She gets to be with the friends she's made over the last two years at school and be outside.  And "nature" is so wide open that we should be able to run this club for a long time before needing to repeat an activity.

Our first meeting had me observing how different this group of children was from the ones in the Birds of Prey Club that was on Tuesday.  While the crew of 9-year-old boys didn't want a snack, this group could have ate all afternoon.  While the "Birds of Prey" could have made up games to play all afternoon, this group wanted - needed, perhaps - someone to guide them through structured activities for the whole time.  It was this last point that I totally wasn't prepared for, as I really believe in the value of unstructured play time and wanted to give them the opportunity to just enjoy one another.  I had one activity planned, and just wasn't in the frame of mind for thinking on my feet.  Well, lesson learned, and we'll be ready for next time. 

Well, I guess I did think a bit on my feet.  We had a short little scavenger hunt while we waited for everyone to arrive.  So, the children learned what baby basil looks like, what cilantro tastes like, and that celery grown in a garden in a cooler climate looks much different than the stuff in the grocery store.  We also played a short game of Monopoly Jr.  Nothing to do with nature, but a good game for this age group.

Our main activity today was making nature journals from Tyvek house wrap.  It is a project from Maya Donenfeld's inaugural book Reinvention:  Sewing with Rescued Materials.

 
There was some pre-work involved on my part...measuring and cutting out the wrap and the paper, sewing the fronts and backs of the journals together.  My daughter helped by getting all of the painting materials together.

As we painted our journal covers, we had a brief chat about what "nature" is, and that although Tyvek doesn't look like or feel like "nature", everything we use on this planet has to come from the Earth.  What's different is how much work needs to be done to get it to its end state.  We also talked very quickly about the life span of materials, and that it seems that the longer it took the Earth to make the materials, the longer it takes to for that material to be reabsorbed by the Earth.  Which is why, instead of sending our Tyvek scraps to the landfill, we turned them into beautiful journals.  It was a lot for 6-year-old minds to absorb, but perhaps a nugget or two will stick with them.

It was a lovely meeting, and I'm already looking forward to the next one!

Do re mi

In January, my heart was telling me we needed a piano.  Sure, there was a 30-year-old organ sitting down in the basement with flashing lights and lots of different sounds.  But it seemed like a piano would fit in nicely with our antique (read:  hand-me-down) furniture and with the sensibilities we're moved to follow.

I scoured the web for free local finds, and was lucky enough to spot a 1929 Heintzman & Co. upright piano.  Once we moved it here, I went far back into my memory and started to play.  I've never had a desire to really read music and would prefer to play by ear, so it didn't take to long to get back into the groove.

Still, being an organ player, my left hand was never very strong.  So, I set out to teach myself some new songs.  I went to the used book store to pick up some books and started learning to read music.  I practiced.  I made mistakes.  I played the same tunes over and over until I got them right.  I would play for my children and niece if they asked.

Then, something unexpected happened.  My daughter sat down at the piano and tinkered around.  And it sounded good.  Then she did it again, and again.  Was there some interest in learning an instrument?  I wasn't, and am still not, willing to put her into lessons until she is asking for them.  But what would happen if we worked on some of the basics on our own here at home?  And where would I begin?  Would learning piano be terribly different than learning the organ?

I wasn't sure, so I picked up a few beginner piano books.  The Alfred's Basic Piano Library All-in-One Course to be exact.  When my daughter showed interest, we would look through the exercises and songs, and play a couple.  Other times, I would walk her through a song she was familiar with and teach her how to play it.

Last week, she opened to a page that was just too advanced for her.  I suggested we start at the beginning and, if we practiced, we would get to that song she pulled out soon.  Today, she showed interest in getting into some more of the details.  Like how long to hold the notes.  The notations that indicate volume.  When to know that the song needs to be repeated.  How to know the song is done.

So, we opened up our piano book and started.  And when she was done, we stopped.  She did a beautiful job.  It was thrilling to see her learning a new skill and being a part of it. I'm full of gratitude for the moment we shared together at the piano.

Club Day. The Birds of Prey version. Volume 1, Issue 1

My son is into everything owls right now.  It's been that way for about a year now.  That was when we started reading the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series.  He's at book 11 now, To Be a King, and plowing through it steadily.

So, when I talked to my son about starting a club so that he could remain in contact with his friends, he immediately suggested a Birds of Prey club.  Not just owls, because he knew the friends he would invite are into different kinds of birds.  Mostly the flesh-tearing kind, like vultures, eagles, and hawks.  And so the Birds of Prey Club was born.  I decided that we would do a trial run during the summer so we could figure out what we needed to do to make it work for everyone.  Get the wind beneath our wings so to speak. 

We sent flyers to his friends well in advance.  We thought of a few activities we could do.  We picked out a few books about birds of prey.  And we waited until the first club meeting.  Even though I asked for parents/kids to RSVP, we didn't hear back from many in advance and I was terrified the club members would be my son, daughter, and myself.

But never fear...our four club members arrived full of energy, so we walked over to our local park to play "Predator and Prey", which is basically tag.  Our "predator" picked a role...I think we had an American Kestral Eagle and a Golden Eagle.  And our "prey" also picked a role...king rats, lemmings, and kangaroo rats were the order of the day.  It didn't take long before our group of boys were tuckered out.  Oh, and the boys put together a secret handshake while we were at the park, which was quite hilarious.  Too bad I didn't take a video camera along.

We returned to our house for a snack, which my son prepared in advance...some of those freshly picked strawberries and some blueberries too.  And then we moved on to our craft.

We made a cross between artist trading cards and hockey cards.  Some chose to draw scenes or birds, others cut out pictures, and I made a collage.  Then, most of the kids wrote on the back of the card some cool facts about whatever they created.  Did you know that an eagle's nest was measured to be over 20 feet high?  Neither did I!

Anyway, there was a little trading, and then the kids were done.  They clearly felt in their bones it was time to move on to something different.  They wandered outside and our backyard became an imaginary war zone, where each kid was an army commander in the same army, whatever could be a weapon (dog toys?) was a weapon, and strategies were made to defeat the evil Mama and Papa spies in the backyard.  A most pleasant afternoon.

But I feel pressed for ideas for future meetings.  Of course, I'll ask my son for his ideas.  But here's all I have left:

   ~ building an eagle's nest out of twigs or toothpicks
   ~ scavenger hunt, perhaps at our local museum, to find and identify all the birds of prey they have on display
   ~ building kites that resemble birds of prey
   ~ perhaps there is a project in our The Wright Brothers for Kids book?
   ~ a desperate Google search

Any other suggestions?

Local strawberries!

We found out yesterday...the strawberries at our local berry patch, Very Berry Farm, were ready!  So, we cut off sleep-in time a bit and put the playhouse-building on hold.  We packed up all the honey and ice cream pails we could find, sunscreen, books, water, rubber boots (we had a big storm last night), and headed out to the peaceful country side.

We had plans to pick 4 or 5 pails, as we didn't think the children's attention would last too long given our past experience.  But there were so many ripe, juicy berries just waiting to be picked that it was just too easy.  The berries would make a wonderful popping sound as they came off the plant!  And we picked 6 pails in about one hour.

Our oldest daughter is a strawberry-picking lady.  She filled almost 2 of our 6 buckets on her own.  She kept on announcing how many she had picked...like when the bottom was covered, when it was about half full, and when it was getting really close to the top.

Our son preferred to eat them, and who could blame him, really.  He figured he had filled one bucket and the rest were up for grabs.  And Henry, the Very Berry Farm owner, did say we could eat as many as we wanted.  What's a constantly hungry boy to do?

Our youngest daughter is well on her way to being just like her big brother, and her face was covered with sticky red juice in no time.  But she learned to say "strawberry, please", so that counts for something.  I'm pretty sure that if we would have let her, she would have been right in the berry patch with the rest of us.  She would have been covered head to toe with berry juice.

I'm so proud of our children, and how they help on these projects and field trips that we go on.  But it's likely not an accident that they are helpers.  We talk about how when we all work together as a family, there's a lot more to enjoy.  And they have been berry-picking with us for at least the last 4 seasons...when our oldest daughter was about as old as the youngest is now.  They know what is expected of them, what to look for, what should stay behind.  And they see our enthusiasm and I think it becomes a little contagious.  And they like strawberry smoothies in the winter from our frozen stash, and trail mix with dried berries, and strawberry jam on their toast.  They know where their food comes from.  They've had a hand in gathering the ingredients and making it.  They know that they have an important role in the food that hits our table.

They are important members of our family, and we so enjoy their company!