Archive for the 'Family' Category

July 5, 2008 @ 6:34 am | Filed under: Family

Dear Big Sister,

Don’t worry—I’m taking very good care of your monkeys while you’re away.

Love,

Rilla

P.S. I can’t promise you’ll be getting them back.

June 14, 2008 @ 8:40 am | Filed under: Family, Family Adventures, Nature Study

The busier we are, the more I have to write about and the less time I have to write. It’s been an especially busy couple of weeks. Our Shakespeare Club staged a splendid performance of scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I am so proud of those kids. Our plans to perform outdoors were thwarted by San Diego’s first rain in weeks, but our obliging hosts, the Grimms, converted their living room into a perfect stage. We had a great time and celebrated with Alice’s special Midsummer Night’s Tea menu, which the rest of you can get a look at very soon when her long-awaited book hits the shelves.

Have I mentioned how excited I am about this book? It’s a gem. And I’m not just saying that because I’m in it. It’s called Haystack Full of Needles: A Catholic Home Educator’s Guide to Socialization, and it is full of surprises. And it’s not just for Catholics, nor even just for homeschoolers, for that matter. It’s being published by Hillside Education and is already available for preorder. Woohoo!

(By the way, Alice will be giving two talks at the Family-Centered Learning Conference in Lancaster, PA, on July 26th. Conference organizer Michele Quigley has put together a great lineup of speakers. Looks like tons of fun and I wish I were going!)

Other things that have happened in the past few weeks:

• I became the mother of a teenager (speaking of gems). Congratulations, Jane my love!

• Our ballet group had its spring recital. Jane was in three dances and did a beautiful job. They all did.

• The kids and I made a spur-of-the-moment visit to our favorite local nature preserve, Mission Trails. We’d been talking about the Kumeyaay Indians, and the visitor center there has several Kumeyaay artifcacts, including large flat stones with hollows ground into them by acorn- and grain-pounding pestles centuries ago.

This plant was our favorite sight of the day. It’s a member of the yucca family and goes by the colorful common names of Our Lord’s Candle or Spanish Bayonet.

We also saw this guy. He’s much less alarming in his natural habitat than in, say, our laundry room.

• We had an exciting new visitor to our backyard: our very first sighting of the Western Scrub Jay. No photos because Rose and I were too busy gawking. We had bluejays a-plenty at our feeders in Virginia, of course, but here we’ve been in California for a year and a half and we still hadn’t seen their western cousins! Hard to believe, but true. We’re still watching for a Steller’s Jay. Meanwhile, we enjoy the daily antics of our parliament of crows. Ever since I set up my nifty solar-powered birdbath fountain (awesome Mother’s Day present), the crows have been huge fans of Chez Peterson. They arrive with hunks of bread and perch on the edge of the birdbath, dunking their crusts and tearing off little bites of bread. It’s quite comical, and very messy. We have to clean gooey bread crumbs out of the filter every morning, but it’s worth it.

• The vines that took over our compost pile continue to sprawl across the yard. The blossoms look pumpkiny to me, which would make sense because I did dump our rotting jack-o-lantern in the pile last winter. But the fat green melon-thing that is growing on one of the vines looks decidedly watermelonish. Which is very confusing. I did toss some watermelon scraps out there, but the flowers are way too big for watermelon. All the pictures I’ve found of baby pumpkins look very different in color and shape. I suppose it could be a squash of some kind. Did we compost any squash scraps? Looks too fat for zucchini. We are perplexed.

• Some rodent chewed through the big plastic bin I keep my birdseed in. Whoops. There’s nothing left in there but empty sunflower husks. Poor birdies. Replacement bin and seed is on my list of errands for this week.

Oh, I’m sure there was more to tell, but I’m out of time. I’ll end with the obligatory dose of cute.

June 13, 2008 @ 6:48 pm | Filed under: Family, These People Crack Me Up

It’s my evening work time again, and I’m holed up in my bedroom reading Top Chef recaps on Television Without Pity doing seriously hard work. Scott IMs me, as he does about fifty times a night during my work time. If he doesn’t, I have to IM him because, come on, this two hours of separation is agony when you’re in lurve. Which we are, if you hadn’t noticed. Also, it beats working.

Here is the message I just received from him and which I must record for posterity. To fully understand it, you must know that Rilla is two and has just begun using very precise complete sentences. She has made a sudden and irresistible leap into conversation. Certain people around here are helpless in the face of this confident and adorable articulation of opinion.

So Rilla walks into the sunroom.

I say, “Hi, sweetheart.”

“Hi, Dad.”

She’s holding a panda under each arm and starts for the sliding doors to the patio.

I say, “Hey, hold on, honey. I don’t think those can go outside.”

She turns around and just stares at me for three seconds. Then says,

“Why not?”

They’re outside with her now.

Sucker.

May 21, 2008 @ 6:54 pm | Filed under: Breadmaking, Family, Food, Fun Learning Stuff, Home and Hearth

We haven’t baked bread for a really long time (witness my neglected bread blog). Lately the reason is because it’s been too hot. Yesterday our heat wave broke and I had a breadish impulse, and I thought I’d better act on it because it’s bound to get hot again soon and who knows when I’ll feel like baking again. The girls mixed up a batch of dough (Wisteria’s recipe) and I read to them while they kneaded.

Later, after the rising and shaping and second rising, we put the bread in the oven and I had another impulse. Someone blogged recently about making butter—I can’t for the life of me remember who it was. Years ago, summers during college, I had a job as a tour guide at a prairie wildlife refuge where, in addition to 2,000 acres of open prairie full of pronghorn and owls and snakes and prairie dogs, there was a small sod village. Sometimes my job was to give tours to school groups, and in the sod house we always baked johnny cake on the iron stove and churned butter to go with it. We had a jar with a special hand-crank churn blade attached to the lid, and the kids would take turns cranking while I gave my talk and mixed up the johnny cake. When the butter was ready I’d turn it out into a wooden bowl and mash it with a wooden paddle, squeezing out the buttermilk. Even in hot Colorado July weather, the warm johnny cake and sweet, creamy butter was heart-stirringly delicious.

So you’d think with all that buttermaking experience under my belt, not to mention the whole Little House motif threaded through our lives, I’d have made butter with my kids a zillion times. Not so. I think I was spoiled by the fancy churning gadget; I always figured doing it the shake-it-in-a-jar way would take a really really long time and be one of those experiments with a spotty success rate.

But this blog entry I read (my apologies for forgetting where) described it as a simple and sure-fire process that took about 20 minutes. So when I put our bread in the oven to bake, I grabbed a clean spaghetti jar I’d save for rinsing paintbrushes and poured in some heavy cream. Filled it about half full. Called the girls. Commenced a-shaking.

We took turns and everyone was very giggly and excited. Of course we had to pull Little House in the Big Woods off the shelf and read the churning passage there:

At first the splashes of cream showed thick and smooth around the little hole. After a long time, they began to look grainy. Then Ma churned more slowly, and on the dash there began to appear tiny grains of yellow butter. When Ma took off the churn-cover, there was the butter in a golden lump, drowning in the buttermilk.

We couldn’t resist unscrewing the lid every little while to check our progress. At first the cream got very thick, just as Laura described. Our shaking had whipped it, and when we shook the jar we couldn’t hear or feel it sloshing around anymore. Then, about ten minutes later, it began to thin out again, and we felt the sloshing. We peeked inside and it really did look grainy. Another five or six minutes, and it looked lumpy. Right after that it happened to be my turn to shake the jar, and all of a sudden I felt a thunk inside from something solid smacking the lid. We had our butter.

The girls erupted in squeals. We opened the lid and there it was, not golden like Laura had described, but the faintest of pale yellows. I scooped it into a bowl, and Rose and Beanie took tastes of the buttermilk. They liked it. I mashed the soft butter to get out the rest of the liquid. Ma washed hers in cold water, but I didn’t bother doing that. I mixed in a little salt, and the timer beeped on our bread, and we couldn’t bear to wait for the bread to cool. Thick slices, slathered in butter; a blissful hush in the kitchen. Mmmm.

You are not to be impressed with my industrious domesticity on this day because 1) if such a state occurs in this house, it is a passing fluke; and 2) it turns out making butter is incredibly easy. Come to think of it, it was easier than, say, loading all the kids into the minivan and running to the grocery store to buy butter would have been. You know how those grocery-store runs can reduce me to a frazzled wreck.

I have since poked around a little online and it seems baby-food jars make excellent mini-churns. Just remember to only fill the jar half full, leaving plenty of sloshing room. And I wouldn’t give each kid his own jar because your arms do get really tired and it’s good to be able to pass off to the next shaker down the line. It sounds like it only takes ten or eleven minutes to go from cream to butter in a small jar like that. Ours took about 24 minutes, which I only know because the bread timer was set for 25. From (I’m guessing) 6 ounces of cream, we got about half a cup of butter, maybe 2/3 cup.

Oh, a last note about the bread—we did NOT use my fancy mixer with the dough hook because the children object to the way it usurps their favorite thing about breadmaking: kneading. In retrospect I realize that’s one reason we cooled off on breadmaking after our wildly enthusiastic beginning. My co-bakers drifted away because the machine killed the fun. So yesterday, I just set a mixing bowl and the six simple ingredients on the table, and the kids went to town. Yeast, water, flour, honey, salt, melted butter. They can mix this dough all by themselves. I gave each of them her own cutting board (nothing fancy; two of them were plastic, and one of those was quite small, but Beanie asked for it because she wanted to make a small loaf for herself) and divided the dough into three lumps. It’s better if they don’t have to take turns for the fun part. We stuck it all back together for the first rising. The kitchen table works better for kneading than the counters, because they can get above the dough and push down. This is stuff I figured out as we went yesterday, but it’s the kind of fiddly logistical stuff that can make or break an experience for us, and I share it under the assumption I’m not the only mom for whom that’s true.

May 21, 2008 @ 7:42 am | Filed under: Art, Family

After lunch both Monday and yesterday, I cleared the table and brought out a stack of drawing paper and our best crayons, and something magical happened. This was a notion inspired by a passage in Amanda Soule’s book, The Creative Family, about how in her home they have a regular “family drawing time.” That made me realize it had been a long, long time since the girls and I all sat down to draw together. We used to do this regularly, but you know: babies come along and the household rhythm changes.

I remember long, long ago on the CCM list, Leonie wrote about how whenever she would sit down with her watercolor pencils and nature journal, her boys would flock to the table clamoring for their own journals. There was no better, faster way to get her kids interested in an activity than in doing it herself. I had tiny little girls then, and I took Leonie’s wisdom to heart. If I draw it/knit it/bake it/sculpt it, they will come. Far better than saying “Why don’t you…(do this cool activity)” is simply to become engaged in it myself. It’s like strewing your own self.

So I sat down at the table and whoosh, I was a child magnet. For the next hour, all five kids were happily drawing pictures with me. No bickering, not even over the blue block crayon that makes the best sky! Amazing. We put on the Elgar cello concerto and Rose decreed that the perfect music to draw to. I didn’t know what to draw, so I (clumsily) illustrated a scene from a story we’d read before lunch. They really liked my depiction of the wind tangled in a treetop (from Medio Pollito, the Half Chick). Beanie started to draw a fox and decided it looked like a cave painting, so she embellished with a deer and a python and torches on the cave walls. Rose drew a rose-covered garden gate, so lovely, and Jane’s snail among flowers was quite charming. Wonderboy and Rilla filled up pages of scribbles.

Yesterday they all (save Jane, who saw a chance to slip away with the new Penderwicks book, and who can blame her?) wanted a repeat performance. “We should do this every day,” declared Rose. I quite agree.

May 19, 2008 @ 6:38 am | Filed under: Family

Wonderboy to Rilla: “Hi!”

Rilla: “NO!”

May 14, 2008 @ 4:57 pm | Filed under: Family

Well, our scanner isn’t hooked up and all the pictures-of-pictures I took with my digital camera (after ransacking old photo albums) are fuzzy and dark, so there goes my plan to post adorable pictures of the babies we were fourteen years ago on our wedding day. See what I mean? Fuzzy.

Can’t say I didn’t know what I was getting into…sort of.

This has been a very long afternoon, waiting for him to come home from work. Still two hours to go. I shall pass the time visiting the blogs of other people brilliant enough to get married on May 14, 1994. (Cheers, Christine and Amy!)

Other ways I have passed the time this afternoon:

• watching a new Signing Time DVD that Rilla got for her birthday

• sitting on the front step scanning the sky for DOPTERS! and AH-PANES!

• sitting on the front step admiring my beeyootiful new flowers I got for Mother’s Day

• sitting on the front step protecting Rilla from the ants that she is sure are going to eat her

• sitting on the front step listening to my son catalogue the cars and trucks that go by

I’m guessing my long afternoon has been considerably more pleasant than Scott’s at work. But still. One hour and fifty minutes to go. Hurry home, best friend.

May 12, 2008 @ 7:22 pm | Filed under: Family, Uncategorized

I wrote this last night but conked out before sending it. I had half thought to go through old emails and photos to see if I could fill in some of the fuzzy spaces, but here it is the day after Mother’s Day and I’m approaching conk city again. Busy busy days around here. I’ll just post this as is, rather than let it languish with the other (eep) 185 posts WordPress tells me I have sitting in drafts.

Mother’s Day 1995: May 14th. Our first wedding anniversary. Our first baby was due on May 24th. I had quit my job as an assistant editor at HarperCollins Children’s books at the end of April and was plugging away at a freelance project I wanted to finish before the baby came. I was sure the baby was going to come early, sure of it. She was instead a full two weeks late, born June 7th. But on May 14th, my first Mother’s Day, the end of my first year as Scott’s wife, I was thinking today could be the day. I was ready. Where the Wild Things Are prints ornamented the walls of the baby’s room; soft teal and purple bedding was ready in the crib. That would be the crib in which that baby never wound up sleeping—she was in bed with us almost from the first, and the crib was where we stored the clean laundry. When she was three months old, I read The Continuum Concept, and that was the end of cribs for us forever.

Mother’s Day 1996: May 12th. Jane was 11 months old, and she was our everything. Had we converted her bedroom into an office by that point? I was writing the Carmen Sandiego books during her naps, and I remember that I had a deadline that week. Scott and our good friend Keri (the world traveler I’ve written about) took the baby for a long walk so I could crank away at the manuscript. It was a strange way to spend Mother’s Day, I recall. But I finished the book, and then I think we celebrated with Thai food. Either that or the best pizza in the world, from Gino’s down the street.

Mother’s Day 1997: May 11th. Celebrated in the hospital, and I think my best present was getting to go to the Ronald McDonald House for a shower. Jane was about six weeks into chemo by then, having been diagnosed with leukemia on March 22nd. She was past the brutal four-week induction phase and just getting going on the six-month (in theory; it lasted nine) middle phase of treatment, which involved lengthy hospital stays. All the nurses wished me a Happy Mother’s Day. Jane made a picture in the playroom with noodles and glue.

Mother’s Day 1998: May 10th. Jane was about to turn three, and I was expecting Rose in August. We didn’t know whether she’d be a Rose or a little Pete, but Jane insisted she was having a sister. That May things were just beginning to get good again after a long hard slog through hospital months. The early spring had been awful: a bad drug reaction left Jane weak, lethargic, battling the worst nausea of her time in chemo. For a time she had stopped eating, talking, walking. Those were the darkest days when it seemed like our sunny little girl might really slip away from us. But I’d figured out—and on Mother’s Day, I’ll not shirk from taking the credit for this, since I had to fight hard to convince the doctors I was right—that her rapid decline coincided with the switch from one antibiotic to another. The G/I docs thought that was nonsense; they thought her refusal to eat was behavorial, an acting-out of her resentment of her unborn sibling. I knew that was nonsense. Just about the only thing that brought the old spark into Jane’s eye was the mention of the baby in mommy’s tummy. She would kiss my belly and talk about her “sister.” G/I wanted to put in a feeding tube, but I insisted that we try going off the antibiotic first. Three days later, the child was eating and chattering and literally twirling on my bed. Hurrah for maternal instinct!

Mother’s Day 1999: May 9th. Rose would have been about nine months, and Jane was almost four? We were back in the world by then, making frequent trips out to Alice’s house on Long Island, bursting at the seams in our little Queens apartment. And joy of joys, Scott was home full time. He had quit his job as a comic-book editor the day Rose was born, wanting to write freelance and spend as much time as possible with his little girls. I would have been finishing up the second Martha book that spring, I think. I know I’d finished the first Charlotte book the November before. Oh! I remember—that was the spring HarperCollins sent me to Boston for a big hoopla Little House event along with the illustrators of my two series, and Laura’s biographer, William Anderson, and Roger MacBride’s daughter, Abby. There were lots of booksignings and interviews. I don’t remember exactly when it was. But I’m thinking that Mother’s Day that year was dominated by all that fuss.

Mother’s Day 2000: May 14th. It had come around to our wedding anniversary again, our sixth. We had left Queens the previous October, trading our two-bedroom apartment for a three-bedroom apartment on Long Island with a basement and a backyard. And our first washer and dryer, oh the bliss! Jane was about to turn five; Rose was not yet two. I ought to be able to remember this day better. I’m sure there was breakfast in bed (bagels most likely), and Mass at the little white church down the hill, Our Lady of Fatima. A family drive? A trip to the beach at Sands Point? I don’t remember. Chocolate, without doubt. Pizza, probably. That’s how we roll.

Mother’s Day 2001: May 13th. The day before our 7th anniversary. Beanie was 3 1/2 months old. Three little girls. I remember that spring very clearly: that was the year we were on a Beatrix Potter/Secret Garden kick, and we followed the dearest of rabbit trails. One of our funniest and most treasured family stories comes from that time.

Mother’s Day 2002: May 12th. And now we’re no longer in New York. We had moved to Virginia on New Year’s Day that year, into our very first house. Jane was seven, and I remember that Mother’s Day: it was the day after her First Communion. Scott’s parents were visiting, and I made a pork roast for dinner. Our azaleas were in magnificent bloom, and the perennial border I’d planted in April was beginning to look lively. Columbines, pink sea thrift, a few tulips, anemones, a froth of silver-green where the yarrow would be, and all sorts of baby plants not yet come into their own. I’d had to wrestle out enormous clumps of weeds, bush-sized weeds, in order to plant that bed. We had a pair of bluebirds nesting under our deck. Beanie’s curls were beginning to assert themselves.

Mother’s Day 2003: May 11th. Let me think. Jane was almost 8, Rose was going on 5, Beanie had turned 2 in January. Wonderboy was born in December of that year so I must have been pregnant by Mother’s Day, but I don’t remember whether I was sick yet.

Mother’s Day 2004: May 9th. This one should be easy. Wonderboy was exactly 5 months old. He’d had surgery at 3 months, and in mid-April he was evaluated by Early Intervention and determined to qualify for services. He couldn’t lift up his head when lying on his stomach. He would already have started physical therapy by May 9th. We didn’t know yet that he was hard of hearing. Hmm, so I can remember the time frame but not the day. How quickly it all begins to blur!

Mother’s Day 2005: May 8th, and suddenly strolling memory lane becomes so easy: there is a blog. There’s no entry between May 4th (when I wrote about my personal salad bar) and May 17th, which is an entry called “Hands in the Air,” about the roller-coaster ride we’d been on during the past two weeks. Funny, though, the misadventures described in that post seem quite benign compared to the usual run of things around here. I can’t remember Mother’s day at all, but I bet I got beautiful cards from three little girls that year.

Mother’s Day 2006: May 14th, our 12th wedding anniversary. Oh my gosh, I’m in shock. I went to the archives to see what was happening that day and there was baby Rilla. We’re that far along already? Really? Yes, this was just two years ago. Rilla was exactly one month old. I was about to start blogging at Lilting House. The next month, Scott would be offered a job in San Diego, and accept, but we had no notion of that then. I wrote this post. He still gives excellent footrubs.

Mother’s Day 2007: May 13th. One year ago, more or less. I was about to write this. Scott gave me a lime tree, which is now producing excellent, um, lemons. Scott and the girls made me monkey bread and served them on paper plates decorated with love notes. So sweet. I think we went for a drive that day, but I don’t seem to have pictures of it.

And here we are in 2008. Blink. It was such a great day. Mellow, but we did a lot. Around the house, I mean. Getting little house jobs done was part of my present. And there were donuts for breakfast, and Wonderboy made it all the way through Mass without needing to be taken out, and roses, gorgeous roses, and in the afternoon everyone piled in the minivan for a Target run—the nursery, I mean. The parking lot was a nightmare and Scott let me just run in and grab what I wanted (some bedding-out flowers) while he circled instead of parking. Worked out perfectly. Rose helped me plant the flowers (mainly she kept Rilla from unplanting them while I dug the next hole) and after a while all the kids were playing dodge ball with Scott while I puttered around the yard, admiring my new posies. But I think my favorite moment of the day was peeking through the bedroom door in the afternoon and seeing Scott and Rilla curled up together. She’d been down for a long nap, and he went in to wake her up, and got lured to the snuggle. So sweet. Later, we watched Office reruns on TV and he laughed because I smile so big when Jim and Pam are together. I’m a sap. I like romance. I am fond of love.

May 6, 2008 @ 6:54 pm | Filed under: Family

So. The trip is long since over, and life is humming along at home as usual. We’re wrapping up our Journey North project tomorrow with a feast: each kid is bringing a food to represent his or her mystery city. Jane’s mystery class wasn’t a city; it was a research station in Antarctica. She wants to serve ice cream in honor of, you know, the ice. I’m game.

We’ve befriended a crow who visits our backyard several times a day. He was attracted by our compost pile, and now when we see him we throw bread crusts in the grass. He watches us from the fence and sidles over to our offerings as soon as we slide the patio door closed.

Speaking of the compost pile, something has taken it over, something that sprouted from seeds in scraps we threw out. Judging from the leaves, it is probably a pumpkin. I do remember shoveling the soggy remains of our Jack-o-lantern into the heap a month or two ago. I was turning over the compost regularly up till our trip, so all this leafy action has happened since we left.

Beanie and I are doing Rosetta Stone Spanish together most mornings, via the library website. She loves languages and says this is her favorite thing to do with me. Of course, Rosetta Stone is a lot like playing a game. Rose likes to play with the English section of Rosetta Stone: she selects the typing option and sees if she can spell and punctuate everything correctly. And all the kids like fiddling around with the pronunciation feature, recording their words (or nonsense sounds) and playing them back. Very fun.

After ignoring my Twitter account for months, I have finally figured out a way to use it that is really helpful and not so superfluously navel-gazy as Twitter can sometimes be. I have tried a dozen different ways to keep running reading logs for the kids, mainly for my own enjoyment because I love booklists of all kinds, and it’s fun to keep track of what they’re reading. The trouble is, I’ve never hit upon a way of keeping track that I could stick with. Twitter just might be the ticket. It takes two seconds to make a quick tweet about what someone is reading. Of course this probably makes my twitterings less interesting to the mainstream, but that’s all right. It’s working for me. I’ve added the widget to the righthand sidebar, again mostly for my own convenience.

I linked all the Barcelona posts together on one page which can be accessed at the Best of Bonny Glen page. Twitter widget notwithstanding, I’m trying to keep my sidebars streamlined for a while.

I can’t believe we’re already a week into May.

April 14, 2008 @ 7:20 pm | Filed under: Family, Photos

It doesn’t seem possible.

How could two years have passed since

this day?

I know, it really is sobering.

This calls for extreme doses of chocolate.

Carpe cake, my dear. Old time is still a-flying.