This Moment

Inspired by Soulemama.

Tonight, first time using chopsticks. It went like this: she picked them up with one hand, reached down, secured some food, and ate. Just like that, in about fifteen seconds. I didn't show her how. Why do I feel like it took me years to learn?

Various and Random Items to Address after an Unintentional Hiatus, Part Three

Ages ago, I used to leave out unannounced art projects, or puzzles, or bowls of feathers, or some other such things for the chicks, with the intention that they'd pass by them and engage with them if they felt motivated to do so. I hadn't done it in a long time, but I recently noticed that there was some crabbiness around these parts in the mornings, so I thought I'd pre-empt that by leaving something fun on the dining table the night before.

I did it for several days in a row, and each day Ninna made a beeline for the table and spent at least twenty minutes (sometimes much longer) working on some art. Bojey also joined in most days, if for a shorter time. One day I forgot, and Ninna said "mama, you forgot our project! I want you to leave us a project every day. It has to be an art project, and I want it to be something different every day."

Well baby girl, that's a tall order, but I'll do what I can. Here's what I left out one night last week--homemade blank books with a rectangle of cardstock for a bookmark:

And with that, I'm off to bed!

Various and Random Items to Address after an Unintentional Hiatus, Part Two

A few days ago, Ninna came to me with a very specific idea for a "prog-jeck." She wanted to use this long, thin cardstock we inherited to make a standing rainbow, with a standing guy. Her idea was very Made by Joel-ish.

I couldn't help it; I had to make one too:
Then we made him a door to walk through. Don't you love his teeth? Ninna's very into the small details right now. Every person she draws has a huge mouthful of teeth and exactly ten fingers, counted aloud as she's drawing them.

And here, strangely out of order, we have the remnants of Easter breakfast. I like this photo because you can see we have leftovers, but one plate is practically licked clean; that would be the bacon plate. It's a good thing we very rarely have it. You can also see our egg tree. That was a really, really fun project that I wasn't able to document in time.

Perhaps, in a sec, I'll be back for more.

Various and Random Items to Address after an Unintentional Hiatus, Part One

I'm being driven insane by my computer right now, which won't allow me to upload any more photos to this post. This computer is in fact not the computer I usually use; that computer is now in the computer graveyard where it will take millions of years to decompose and continue to off-gas until hundreds of generations of my ancestors have walked this earth.

I finally had one too many problems with that laptop, a Dell, if you must know, and I ultimately had the hard drive taken out and put into a case to work as an external hard drive. I've had this old desktop sitting around since we moved here but could never figure out how to get it to hook up to the wireless connection. After almost bursting into tears from frustration a few nights ago, I managed to solve the problem, and now, I'm back! Rather than attempt a thorough, well-thought out post, I'm just going to empty my camera onto the screen with a little bit of captioning.

Sunday was our third annual backyard Easter egg hunt with our good friends:


I love watching kids hunt for eggs. All four of them walked by this one at least four times each, and I couldn't help laughing:

Here are this year's eggs. All of them, except for the two "cheating" ones with tissue paper dye, were colored with homemade plant dyes. We've had mixed results over the years, with this year's eggs being the least striking in color. We tried to go with just the primary colors this year--purple cabbage for the blue, turmeric for the yellow, and raspberries for the red. The red, as happens every year, was more of a brown. Apparently what we need to make a true red is something called madder root, a plant I know nothing about but have 51 weeks to find before next Easter.

This, my friends, is brilliant, to my mama eyes at least. The chicks and their friends made a fire with sticks and chalk to cook their pretend Easter dinner. I love it.
Expect me back in a few minutes with more, assuming this computer will cooperate.

The Lachine Canal and Atwater Market

We took a little field trip today to the Lachine Canal and Atwater Market. Since it's April, there wasn't a ton of produce at the market (aside from some sickly-looking imports), but there was loads and loads of local maple syrup, and all kinds of maple candies, maple vinaigrette...pretty much everything maple. We walked through the market and bought a small bag of maple donuts before heading down to the canal. It was mostly a gray, partially-sprinkling kind of day, but the clouds literally parted and the sun shone just long enough for us to take a little journey down to the water and across the bridge.
The donuts looked and tasted as if they had been fried three times, and they were so delicious in a disgusting kind of way.

Even in front of the most urban of backdrops, the chicks entertained themselves by looking for big sticks:
As of bedtime tonight, Bojey was still lamenting the fact that she had decided to throw hers in the canal.
And some fun in the (pretty much deserted...and slightly creepy) metro station on the way home:



Fun! Now that Bojey's a little older, the weather is warming, and I'm no longer afraid to get on the metro with kids, I'm hoping we'll spend more of our Sundays being tourists in our own town. Do you find time to be a tourist in your town? I regret not doing that enough in the previous places I've lived, so I guess I'm trying to make up for it now.

Spring Cleaning and Other Adventures

Wow, it's been over a week. There's been a lot of cleaning here, a lot of organizing, and a lot of outside time. We (and I do mean "we") cleaned things that have never been cleaned since we've lived here, almost three years. I dismantled and washed the chandelier, I moved furniture to sweep--some corners are literally cleaner than they were when we moved in. Other spots, not so much, but we're getting there.

And I've had several mundane realizations about the point at which cleaning, organizing, maintaining a home, and having small children all intersect. First off--wow...it really does get easier as they get older. At the risk of sounding like a crazy person, I'll go ahead and say that the spring cleaning with the chicks has actually been fun. I'm sure the fun of which I speak is, to some extent, relative, in the way that it would be more fun to wash windows than it would be to have dental work done; but still, I'll take what I can get.

I've been able to accomplish so much, every day. The chicks are so great at entertaining each other, and it's a whole new world when you can complete more than 90 seconds of a job before stopping to handle a crisis.

And I've also been seeing the payoff of having the kids "help" when their help is not yet quite so useful, something I did with the faith that one day, they would be accomplishing actual cleaning. These photos I'm about to post look a little nuts given that Ninna is not only doing some serious mopping, but she's also wearing a Little House on the Prairie-type apron-covered dress (with intricate smocking, something my mom made me circa 1981!). As if that weren't enough, there's a second apron around her waist for good measure.




It may look like she's doing some sort of penance, but I assure you she was having the time of her life. She had been begging to mop for a week. The best part is that she actually did the job, fully--as in, I didn't have to go over it when she was done. Woohoo!

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While we're cleaning, we're organizing. I've been on a mission to de-clutter and simplify for ages, but I got a slow start, I think in part because we just had so much stuff. I'm finding that the more I de-clutter and organize, the easier the process gets and the more visible the results. But I've also come to realize that with a family whose needs are constantly changing (which is the nature of things when you have small children, of course), our organization and home set-up are never really done because as the chicks grow and their abilities and interests change, the ways we use our "stuff" changes. I've found there's a sort of peace of mind that comes with recognizing and acknowledging that organizing our life is not something that has an endpoint but is rather an ongoing process.

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In other news, this year's Easter baskets have been planted:

Seedlings are coming up:
And we've got some fun spring projects to share soon. Happy Saturday!

This Moment

I've decided, at least for this week, to join along with Soulemama's "This Moment" series. And here's my moment: this little munchkin, marveling at the fact that she can be outside with no coat but still be carrying around a bucket of snow--

Reading under the Canopy

One bed canopy, four munchkins, and a huge stack of books:
I snuck in quickly to take a photo, not wanting to disturb them or make them suddenly self-aware. There was no need, it turns out. I crept closer and closer and not once did any of them glance up at me; they were far too engrossed in their "reading" to notice the mamarazzi in the room.

I love this little cocoon of early childhood. I hope to keep my chicklets there until they're really ready to climb out, which is much later than our culture would have it, unfortunately. I've had this on my mind lately as my book club just discussed Rudolf Steiner's The Education of the Child last weekend. Steiner believed in protecting children from the adult world and keeping their lives slow, calm, and peaceful. I can't imagine a better way to ease these little beings into life, but it seems that it sometimes takes a strong will and a desire to question our current norms in order to actually achieve this.

Sensory Tray: Piles of Random Pantry Items

Ninna has a quiet time every day during Bojey's nap. I usually read to her, and then she does something on her own. Some days (like yesterday), she comes up with her own plan, and on other days, I give her something to do.

A few weeks ago, I gave her this:There's between a teaspoon and a tablespoon of each thing--barley, rice, couscous, macaroni, oatmeal, steel cut oats, white peppercorns, flour, salt, brown sugar, oat bran, lentils, popcorn, rolled oats, chick peas, kidney beans, pinto beans, and a cinnamon stick thrown in for good measure. It seems like a lot, but it was really just the tiniest bit from each container.

Then I gave her a chopstick, a fan-shaped paintbrush, and our plastic dinosaurs. I have no rationale. That's just what I grabbed.

Ninna played with this for a long, long time. I was walking around doing chores, which gave her the opportunity to take advantage of the one flaw in my (lack of a) plan. Do you see it in the photo above? The cause of my downfall?

The glass of water. And the water pitcher. By the time I came back up from switching the laundry, the dry goods were no longer dry, and there was a soup of the most absolutely disgusting variety sloshing around in that cake tray. I don't have a particularly weak stomach, and I was gagging. I spent the entire clean-up time thinking of my friend Jill whose gag reflex is, um...quite insane. And then I laughed because Jill is a new mom, and she has yet to engage in such amusing tasks. Jill, your day will come, my friend.

All in all, aside from the soup situation, I'd recommend this as a cheap, multi-textured sensory activity. Just scan the area around the tray before you leave the room...

Like Mother, Like Daughter

After I put Bojey down for her nap today, I read Ninna some stories. Then I fell asleep on the couch for a little while, and while I was having a catnap, Ninna made this--entirely, 100% her own creation, by her own hands:

Her own marble run. I kind of couldn't believe it. She's pretty handy, but still--this is sort of beyond her usual project. She found some old wrapping paper tubes in the cardboard stash that I didn't even know we had, and she cut them to size (all with her dull kid scissors--I don't even know how she managed that.) We haven't even used it yet (bad mom, I know, but we got busy.) Tomorrow we'll try it out and make modifications where necessary (like, in every place that the marble falls out, it seems).

I'm not trying to create a mini-me, I swear. I just told her to have some quiet time so I could close my eyes.