Scarlet Runner Beans: An Unexpected Toy

When we planted the bamboo pole bean teepee in our natural playscape this spring, we used scarlet runner beans. They grew beautifully, covering not only the bamboo poles, but also our downstairs neighbors' clothesline:

Then, for no particular reason, we let them get absolutely enormous--they're now huge, long, fuzzy beans that I can't imagine would be good to eat. Even our hamster, who has literally devoured every other veggie scrap we've ever given her, turned her little nose up at the leathery skin of these beans.

So we're finding other uses for them. A few days ago, the chicks and I picked a few just to marvel at how huge they are and how pretty they are in the inside.

When you open a giant scarlet runner shell (skin?), you find plump, girly-pink-and-purple speckled beans:

Bojey thought she'd serve us some in a child-sized springform pan:

Even the toy animals got in on the action, with the giraffes preferring the smaller, salmon-colored beans, and the elephants the large pink and purple ones:

And can I just mention how much I loved that Ninna thought to dig out this scrap of flame fabric to put on top of the animals' campfire?

These beans are now scattered all over our house, hopefully drying out instead of rotting. There are still a ton hanging from the plants that need to be harvested. Aside from drying them to plant next year, I'm not exactly sure what we're going to do with them. I'm thinking some dried ones might make a fun collage art project. Any other ideas?

Batch Cooking: Whole Wheat Blueberry Waffles

One my big concerns over the past couple of weeks has been my need to get us out of the house early and happy--not early and miserable, or happy and late. I'm happy to announce that we have improved dramatically.

This is due in large part to the fact that we've entirely shifted our breakfast approach. I can't believe I'm about to admit this, but we are now eating our breakfast on the bus. I'm a real fanatic about family meals at home, at the table. It's something that since becoming a single mom I've held onto very tightly, hoping to keep steady and healthy daily rituals around eating and other important needs.

But...desperate times call for desperate measures, right? I've realized I'll take a quiet, peaceful morning with waffles on the bus over a morning complete with both warm steel cut oats with milk and honey and crabby, hurried children. And so we are dining on the road three mornings a week.

I'm still coming up with a list of food ideas that don't involve dropping spoons over the bumpy road or spilling milk on the lady next to us. So far I have:

*Nut butter and jelly sandwiches (not my favorite option)

*Homemade waffles

*Cooled slices of puff pancake

*Muffins (also not the best option)

Aaaaaaaaaaand...that's about it. I know I can think of more. Bars of some sort, maybe? There must be a healthy granola bar type thing I can make.

So I spent Wednesday night making loads and loads of delicious whole wheat blueberry waffles with our new hand-me-down waffle iron. I froze most of them and brought some for breakfast on Thursday, and it went smashingly well.

Any more breakfast-on-the-go ideas? Something healthier than what I've come up with? I think there's a real need for a whole cookbook geared toward portable healthy food. If I knew more about cooking, I'd write it.

Invasion of the Playmobil People--the Secret Life of Toys

I'm about to admit something weird: I often take photos of my kids' toys. I'm rather fascinated by toys; they're miniature versions of bigger things, lifeless when alone but lively in conjunction with children, and can range from amusing to downright scary. When they chicks are away or asleep, I often catch a glimpse of their toys left mid-fantasy and do a double-take, wondering what they might do next if given the opportunity.

I also enjoy photographing them in action. Last week the chicks discovered that my Medela nursing stool makes a great open-ended toy.

Look me in the (virtual) eye and tell me this is not scary:I see Playmobil zombies trapped in the inverted nursing stool, peeking over the edges looking for their next meal. According to Bojey, this crowd is "on their way to get new batteries." For what? One can only imagine. This was apparently quite significant; the next night she once again said "they're on their way to get new batteries" after placing them in the upside-down stool. I felt like I was in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and she was going to start making Playmobil sculptures out of mashed potatoes.

I wondered if I was the only weirdo who felt this way about toys, and, thanks to Google, I've learned that there are more of me. I even googled the phrase, in quotations, "the secret life of toys," and guess what? It returned 2,730,000 results. Check out this site. If you're a Star Wars dork (and I hope you are), you'll love some of these prints. There's even a Flickr group with this name that has over 14,000 members.

I'm signing off now as I decide whether to straighten the chaotic toy pile on the floor next to me, or leave it so things can proceed as they were intended. Maybe this is a good excuse not to have to clean...

Until next time!

Braided Bread: The Joy is in the Details

Ninna takes after me in that she finds great joy in small details. Recently, she has been requesting braided bread. She doesn't mean challah necessarily (though really, who doesn't love challah?); she just wants the bread to look pretty.

And so I've been braiding the bread. That little added detail makes us happy and makes Ninna feel special since she thinks it's just for her. It's more work, yes--but just barely. It takes maybe an extra minute per loaf, but it somehow really adds so much to the bread.As I'm typing this I'm realizing there are so many more fun shapes I could try (other than traditional loaf, round loaf, rolls, and braided--the only four I've ever tried). Maybe I'll be the next Jim's Pancakes, but for bread.

Our New Nature Display: A Roadside Find

I've talked about my love of free things on this blog in the past. In Montreal, we have the most amazing roadside finds. On any given day (more often a day or two before garbage day), people leave out nice furniture, vintage toys, boxes of books, and weird, random, but potentially interesting items. It seems to be part of the culture here, or at least in my neighborhood.

When I started scavenging, I was a little shy about it. I might peek around nonchalantly as I slowly creeped toward a pile of refuse on someone's front lawn. I've come a long way since those first garbage-picking days. Now I pull over quickly, informing the chicks--"there's some good stuff on that lawn!" and speed over to my find like a shopper let into Walmart on Black Friday, racing toward a cute vintage bookcase instead of a $59.99 DVD player. Fellow scavengers beware--I'm fast, and I've got an amazing radar for the free.

A few months ago I picked up this divided display shelf from a curb somewhere. I have no idea what its intended use was, but I knew I could come up with something for it. It sat in our second bathroom collecting dust and annoying me with its presence until a few days ago when I decided to actually straighten the bathroom while the chicks were bathing instead of using it as "free time" to sit next to them and read. I pulled it out, wiped a centimeter-thick layer of dust and cobwebs off the top, and decided to use it for a nature display.

Until now, we were using a small nature bowl on the dining table to display and collect our nature finds. I was getting a little bored with that setup, and the chicks didn't seem to notice it anymore. It had begun to blend in with the landscape of our home. I installed the shelf-thing above their little table, used most often for drawing. We've been very happy with it so far. I've been finding little treasures all over the living room, which tells me someone is aware that they exist and is playing with them. I was thrilled to see Ninna pull a couple of pieces down for inspiration during a drawing session.

Here's a little close-up of part of the bark collection:


And the chicks' view as they're sitting at their little table:

I've said it before, and I'll say it again--Yay for free!

Our Attempt at Apple Prints

The chicks and I tried making apple star prints the other day with some of our huge bounty of apples. I'd never done this before and was pretty excited to see, when I cut into the apple horizontally, that there truly was a star inside:Our stamping experience was not what I expected. The instructions I used stated that you should water down the paint to thin it out. Terrible, terrible idea. Instead of making a nice, crisp stamp, the paint just runs, and you have an amorphous paint blob instead of an apple with a star in the center.

No matter--we were happy to do some art anyway. I decided to cut shapes into the apples, much like you would with potato stamps, and that worked significantly better.
I left Ninna at the table with the paint while I went to put Bojey down for her nap. Yeah...maybe a little crazy, but I knew it would keep her quiet and occupied. She did what she does with any painting activity--turned it into finger painting. Leave Ninna to her own devices with some paint (or vinaigrette, or yogurt, or mustard...) and you are almost guaranteed some eventual finger painting art. As you can see, it makes her very happy.
Here are the final products. They're not what we intended, but they're still a fun reminder of our attempt at apple stamps:

Apple Picking--a Perfect and Lovely Day

Today the chicks and I went apple picking with sweet friends--a family with two girls almost identical in age to my own. Believe it or not, it was my first time apple picking. How I made it thirty-four years before I did this, I do not know, but it was so much fun!

In true Canadian fashion, the day started off with coffee from Tim Horton's. After a half hour drive out of the city, we arrived at Quinn Farm, a U-pick farm popular with Montrealers. We took a hayride, oohed and ahhed over the manual apple peeler/corers in their little shop, and visited their farm animals (complete with a huge donkey who did the most cartoonish "hee-haw" I think I've ever heard.)

Most importantly, of course, was the picking. This was so nice for two preschoolers and two toddlers! I often find that events that welcome young children are not really geared toward them; the kids are too young to take part themselves. Not so in this case. The apples were hanging so low to the ground that even the two year olds were able to pick as many apples as they wanted.

Here are both of my girls entering the orchard: Ninna and her friend, hand in hand, looking for the right tree from which to start picking:
Ninna practicing the "turn the apple up towards the sky" method we were trained to do before being let loose into the lanes of trees:
Time to take a rest and test out the apples:
Three hard-working harvesters:
When Bojey became tired of picking, she entertained herself by hiding under my skirt:This was such a lovely pre-fall activity. The weather is starting to turn, but it was still warm enough for no jackets. We enjoyed harvesting the fruits that have been growing now all summer. And best of all, we came home with an enormous bag of apples to eat, cook with, and share.

New Routines and Dinnertime Distractions

Ninna started preschool this week, and this meant some big changes around here. Most of them are related to our new need to be out of the house at 8:00 AM three mornings a week. I have to admit that we have not yet actually made it out of the house by 8:00, or 8:15, or even 8:30. If I want to avoid paying for parking, we have to leave early enough to catch the bus, and that's tough with two chicks who like to take.................... their.................... time..................... in the morning.

The painted clothesline is an incredible help; it's not a full solution, however. I'm going to have to go over our morning routine with a fine toothed comb to see where I can improve our timing and in what ways I can motivate the chicks to be quicker without making the morning stressful and unpleasant. If we arrive at preschool already crabby and unhappy, to me that cancels out much of the benefit of having her in the class at all. It needs to be a positive thing all around, so I've got some work to do to get us onto the bus without any tears.

In other news, I've made great strides in the evening dinner-cooking time, or "the witching hour," as it's commonly termed. Some days the chicks entertain themselves just fine with their elaborate cooperative imaginative play that has suddenly sprung up from thin air, but some days they need some assistance. I've been trying to keep a few tricks up my sleeves for those days. Recently, during a particularly unsavory pre-dinner time, we made bubbles in the kitchen sink and added colored ice cubes.

First, just bubbles:

Then the magic cubes:
Ninna hard at work:
And when the cubes melted (too quickly due to too-warm water), I pulled out the big guns--the two mammoth non-cubes. I know it looks like frozen coffee, but I promise it was purple water:
And this--oh, sweet Ninna. Knowing that I tend to take a lot of photos of projects, she insisted that I get a shot of her holding an almost-melted non-cube. She couldn't stop laughing, and neither could I, so the photo is blurry. I love it anyway--this is my favorite way to see her:

I feel almost as if the witching hour problem is solved in my house, replaced by the problem of the sleepy morning chicks. No doubt I'll be posting about more morning solutions in the future, as I come up with them ;).