out and about

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atwitter: december

December 30, 2008 in atwitter, books, celebrations and traditions, out and about | 6 comments

What a wonderful lull of a week it is, this last week of December. The to-do list is in the recycling bin, and in between loads of laundry and putting away gifts, there’s time to just hang out and play. A few things making me happy right now:

The Christmas tree is still lit. ’Cause it’s not just a day–it’s a season. There’s still some glitter in the air.

christmas morning

Time to play with my camera.  Taking photos of food is almost as fun as eating it. That was our monkey pull-apart bread on Christmas morning. Made by Lily and Henry. Yum!

monkey pull-apart bread on christmas morn

Henry’s on break from school. And was even willing to hike with Mr. T and me yesterday. And while I’m a bit envious of all the white Christmases I’m seeing out there in Blogland–even in Portland!–living in California does have its perks.

hiking with the boys

New music. If you know my sweetie, you know how he prides himself on staying hip to new music. Well, each Christmas my dad does his darndest to surprise us with some music that will impress even Chris with its sheer hipness. (Now, I love my dad, but I wouldn’t exactly call him hip. His little secret is NPR’s All Songs Considered lists.) This year he gave us Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver. Pretty cool music coming from a 70-year old. Good tunes for thinking and puttering.

Making bubbly water. Yes, we are a simple people here on the wonderfarm. Making our own “bubble water” makes for big entertainment. You see, in addition to great music, by parents also gifted us with a soda carbonator. Oh, we’re having fun with this one! And this is another meager attempt to prove our hipness: the latest trend in Bay Area restaurants is doing away with bottled water. Because it’s wasteful. Restaurants are offering their own chilled and filtered water, both still and fizzy. When Chris and I ate lunch at El Dorado Kitchen on our anniversary trip to the wine country and were served some free bubbly water, we admired their snazzy glass water bottles with clamp-on lids. And shopping the next day, we found some of our own: 

love those water bottles!

I’m hesitant to admit how much I love serving chilled water from these bottles. And I just found some red ones online! So we’ll have blue for flat water; red for fizzy. Yes, I know: I’m a geek.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New books. When Chris realized he hadn’t got his book-loving wife a book for Christmas, he promised a trip to Diesel. We went, and I found–oops!–two books. The River Cottage Family Cookbook and this one:

custom knits

That’s Custom Knits, by Wendy Bernard. How is it that I hadn’t even heard of this book? It’s full of knitting-in-one piece projects! Lots of recommendations for adapting patterns to your liking! Great schematics! I won’t put an exclamation mark on the fact that many sweaters are modeled with bathing suits–silliness. But I’m having a good time perusing and dreaming. The Jane (Ravelry link) sweater is calling to me–but without that ribbon bisecting the bustline. Who needs a bisected bust?

So, how are you entertaining yourselves this week? (Chris, that’s your cue to finally leave a comment. Something like: Well, I’m toiling away at the office so my lovely family can stay home and have all the fun.)

lessons learned on a homeschool camping trip

September 29, 2008 in homeschooling, out and about | 3 comments

Even cheese-grating can be fun, when you do it with friends.

  • even cheese-grating can be fun, when you do it with friends.
  • a six-year-old can subsist on little more than quesadillas and marshmallows for three days.
  • when a camping coordinator reads the “camping guidelines” aloud during dinner, including the guideline about adults modeling responsible alcohol use, she is bound to have a bottle of beer in her hand.
  • if you tell a group of five to eight-year-olds that they can “fight” with kindling sticks only if they do so in slow motion, they may surprise you by following your instructions.
  • if you tell your twelve-year-old that she must sleep in your family tent, rather than in a tent full of other twelve and thirteen-year-olds, there will be some wrath to deal with at bedtime.
  • you can knit complicated lace patterns while supervising your six-year-old in the Santa Cruz surf.
  • older teens who have spent previous camping trips hiding out in the farthest reaches of campsites may suddenly spend stretches of time alongside the adults, seeming to enjoy themselves.
  • if you put out an expensive hunk of Humboldt Fog truffle-laced goat cheese for your co-chefs to enjoy, an eight-year-old with a sophisticated palate will snarf half the thing down before you notice what is happening.
  • on the other hand, if you leave out a bag of grated jack while making an aforementioned quesadilla, a far-less-sophisticated adult may approach, stick his dirty camping hands into your cheese and do some snarfing of his own.
  • homeschooling mothers outfitted with headlamps will continue knitting long past dark.
  • homeschooling fathers outfitted with guitars and a trumpet, plus one talented 17-year-old with a mandolin, can lead one heck of a hootenanny.
  • if a park ranger approaches on Thursday night to complain about the noise generated by a group of adults talking quietly around a campfire, he will be nowhere to be found on Saturday night during said hootenanny, even considering said trumpet.
  • despite what naysayers may say, eighteen hearts of romaine does not make too much caesar salad for sixty-one hungry campers.
  • you can make a pretty tasty lasagna with a cast iron dutch oven and a bag of briquettes.
  • despite the all the shopping and packing beforehand, and the unpacking and laundering after, the trip will be worth it. And then some.
we *heart* camping

we *heart* camping

queremos a frida

September 12, 2008 in creativity, learning, out and about | 2 comments

 

When I told Lily to smile, she said, “No, I’m Frida” (who never smiled in her self-portraits.)

The other day, Lily, Theo and I went to see the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the MOMA in San Francisco. If you’re local and you haven’t seen it, it closes on September 28, so vaya!  It’s a big show, with room after room of Kahlo’s work. It’s stunning stuff, and I think all those self-portraits make it compelling for young viewers. (Although there are a handful of disturbing pieces of suicide, murder and miscarriage, with plenty of bloody veins. Mr. T. didn’t seem too bothered by those, although after glancing at one he said, “I don’t want to look at that anymore” and wisely moved on to the next.)

The show was crowded, even on a Tuesday morning. Theo couldn’t see the first painting through the crowd when we entered; when he finally got a glimpse and recognized it as the Luther Burbank portrait we’d seen in this book, he pulled on my hand and called, “Look, Mama, look, there it is!” which drew smiles from several nearby onlookers.

Then he floored me by looking at every single painting in the exhibit. Of course, he bounced and bobbed precariously over the wire that guarded each painting as he talked about what he saw. He recognized Diego Rivera in several paintings, and he talked about what different images might mean and also Kahlo’s use of color. (I can’t believe what he’s learned from that Creativity Express program.) Lily floated around on her own, looking and sketching.

Theo spent a good three minutes studying Moses. This is a mural-like painting, supposedly based on Kahlo’s reading of Sigmund Freud. Theo spotted the guy with the thunderbolts in the upper right corner and said, “Hey, that’s Zeus.” Then he noticed Ra and said, “I think this painting is about gods.” We talked about the painting for another few minutes. Then he said, “I think I’m done here,” and proceeded to act as you would expect a six-year-old in a museum to act, whining about being bored and hungry and wanting to leave right now.

I’ve always been fascinated to watch my kids’ interests unfold. Henry was always captivated by sculpture and three-dimensional models; Lily could sit through a ballet at two. Mr. T seems to have a thing for art, and I’m paying attention. He easily spends an hour each day drawing, a little here, a little there. He doesn’t care much about the product, or having people appreciate what he’s done. For him, it’s all about the process–when he draws he’s in his own world, quietly narrating what he puts to the page.

When he was five, he announced to us over pizza and a big glass of root beer, “Drawing is my life.” Maybe that’s a line to go in the bio at his first gallery show someday. Or maybe it will be something we’ll laugh about, when he turns out to be a car salesman or a stand-up comic.

Another good reason to visit modern art museums: the fantastic photo ops.

A couple of other good Frida books: Frida and Artists in their Time: Frida Kahlo (the second goes into nice depth for older kids.) I never did see the film Frida, but now I’m looking forward to it.