Tea time anyone?

Oak Bay Tea Party time that is!!! Wahooooooooo! Hannah's been counting down the days to this annual Tetley-sponsored old-skool-but-now-there's-a-midway festival for over a month. Oak Bay, the municipality next to us, 'behind the tweed curtain', loves to celebrate it's vague English ties. So the teacup races and baron of beef feasts have symbolised this tenuous link for 42 years now. The midway joined in much later, but it's really all we go for. :) We took our two buddies that we've known since they were born. Hannah and Sadie rocked the bumper cars, and Leif and Taro chilled on the ferris wheel. Ivy was so happy to be there at all, the train ride was over the top!











Leif made dinner the other night, homemade macaroni and cheese.




Oh the waiting . . . will my dish turn out?



It was a delish hit, and now has a spot on our weekly menu.


That inspired Hannah to make breakfast, the giant puffed-up pancake in a pan.




But I can't read this, what do I do next?!!!!!!!!!



Oh yeah, giant pancake rocks!


Two thumbs up!



And then Hannah built a very involved Lego station, complete with a bad guy at the front gate with a gun. Awesome!



How can I possibly top all this next week?

kisses


C

The Butterflies!

I never posted pics of our lovely week of daily butterfly releasing. It was fun, delicate, and almost casualty-free. :)

In the merry merry month of May . . . (A year-end summary)

. . . so, I guess you've noticed the lack of posts huh? Sorry. I've been feeling pretty overwhelmed these past few weeks, and updating our blog was way down on the list of basic survival necessities. I had a bunch of holiday weeks left for our homeschooling reports so I used them up for the last 4 weeks. And we are now done reporting, as you only need to log the number of learning hours a kid in school would log, so we're finished for this school year. Now we'll just blog for the fun of it. Yipee.

The kids? Let's start there.

Hannah is full of advice. Now that she understands so much about the world around her, she wants you to understand it too, in case you don't already. She can also explain a very simple thing in great detail. This is a cool thing to see, and yet it's also extremely tedious. I am reminded of a section in a fantastic book, (Grace) Eventually: Some thoughts on Faith by Anne Lammott, where she says even if she's sitting down with Jesus himself, if he keeps repeating himself, and filling his sentences with Um's and Like's, it will drive her around the bend.

Talking with my beautiful Hannah can be like that. But you just need the space to listen. And then you realise she's got some amazing things to tell you. Sure, the things some people think are important, like math stuff, and how the water cycle works. Yeah, she's got that stuff down cold. She gets why the seasons change, that seeds grow, how to spell her name and read loads of basic words. Cool.

But she also knows how the gears work on her bike, why going uphill in gear 6 makes her cry, what bird sings us awake and to bed (psssst! the Robin), that tent caterpillars are beautiful, how to care for a 2 year old and find ways to get her to understand why you need your slippers back please, how to run the DVD player and skip all the crappy previews, why the stuff in the Playmobile catalogue looks cooler than it really is, the value of waiting for something, whether it's the Oak Bay Tea Party or Ice Cream Saturdays, how much you can find in a tide pool and how cool it is to watch a Heron hunt, how confusing Japanese myths can be, how many strawberries she can eat in a given day (3 pounds), how to design a birdhouse (we're going to build it this month), where the key items are in the produce section, how to lock her bike up, why her cheaper lock is annoying to use, that if she suffers through hills all the way to Government House there's a great ride downhill all the way home, how Hawaii was formed by volcanoes and why mangoes and pineapples grow there but not here and that if she doesn't pester her mother for popsicles before 9am the day will go better. And that even though it looks to her like Mama does nothing all day, being a stay-at-homer is actually a lot of work, because Mama says it is dammit! No school-based education will ever teach her all of that.

This year Leif expanded on his math skills, looking into mapping and graphing through a really cool book we owe much on at the library. He continued to explore all the books on his shelf late at night after we were all in bed, then he re-read all his Chirp and Chickadee magazines. He left his love for Sudoku and crosswords and poured it into his new passion for hockey and soccer, reading large encyclopedias on each while the night time hours ticked by. He has begun to teach Ivy about the flags and the countries, where we live and why Mama's favorite flag is Japan. He has moved from juggling on the ground to juggling one-handed while hanging from a branch in the Willow tree. He reminds me that he can still count to 10 in French, and he still does not feel like learning anymore of it yet. He's discovered that a baseball mitt and a wooden shield work just fine as goalie gear for hockey, and he's felt both the thrill of triumph and the sting of repeated defeat in soccer. That families around the world live differently than we do, and lots of what they do looks pretty cool. That a hero in a story can be unsure if they are doing right or wrong, and can still fix things if they choose the latter. In a list he's maintained the past few months about himself, some things never change (name, best friend) others can (favorite colour (currently pink), favorite country). He's tried sewing both by hand and with a machine, and sees the benefits of each, and how Mama gets anxious to help in either case. He's observed glass blowers work their craft, and commented that it must take a lot of experience to do that. He's developed a thing for ice cold showers, and still needs review on which bottle is conditioner and which is shampoo. Tonight he asked me if I could do less chores and spend more time with him. Sigh.

We've had some big discussions this year. The moral implications in the original Willy Wonka movie, why it's not cool for a science supply company to sell baby American Bullfrogs to classrooms to raise and release, that if someone you think is your friend keeps tricking you to do what they want and screwing you in the process it means that they are not your friend and you need some street smarts. Recently, after Hannah was stung twice by a wasp at a friend's house, we found a nest in construction in our playhouse in the yard. We took it out so we would not be housing harmful bugs, and saw that there were wasp larvae in each little tunnel, each one a writhing tube of white sluggy-ness. And we felt the unfairness, as we watched them squirm, of our needing to kill them for our own comfort; who are we to decide we come first? We sat there, the nest in my hand, and tried to think of another solution. Could we just move it? Could we spray ourselves with toxic crap to keep them away? None of it would work. And as we talked about it, they started to fall out of their nest, as it began to come apart. They squirmed in the soil, and we buried them there. It felt shitty. Then we found 4 more nests in progress in the eaves of our garage. After I knocked them down and the parents flew away, we looked at the way they were built. We knew from Burt Kitchen's book how they digest wood scrapings and turn it into paper (hence the name Paper Wasp), and meticulously shape each spherical egg-spot into a perfect symmetry. When we looked closer, we noticed greenish eggs in the center spots, and then tiny white eggs in the outer ones. Each outer spot also had a clear drop of sticky-looking nectar in it.


We added all the nests to our growing collection of cool things from nature. Over the year we found animal skulls and long bones, snake skins, odd shells and huge dead barnacles. Bird's nests and bright feathers, cool fungi and tiny acorn tops, red leaves and dragonflies stiff with death. It's a great variety of treasures, now taking up an entire book case in the dining room.


Ivy has learned the benefits of saying 'please' and that if she says 'No YOU do it' to my requests to bring me her plate, it gets her nowhere. She's perfected her odd pronunciations of words, and incorporated really big words into her vocabulary. if she spies a boat in the water or a pair of shoes on the power lines, she makes sure each of us sees it also. She prefers to do her cooking naked except for her 'napper' (apron) and selects different nappers for different tasks (pizza-making vs. tea serving).



She knows the special time you can create when you gather your babies around and just sit with them.




And that if you accessorise properly, you can turn the most girly gift into something all your own.


When I pulled her yellow crocs out of the summer box of stuff, she put them on and asked me to 'take a picture of her in her yellow crocs'.





Once again this year we took in the Victoria Highland Games, always on the Victoria Day long weekend and now in it's 73rd year. Between the dancers, pipers, big men hurling heavy rocks, whiskey tasting booth, huge police marching band and skydivers in kilts, it was a day to make ye proud to be a Scot!





A favorite memory of my childhood is watching the pipe band parade in Kincardine (on Lake Huron in Ontario) in the summertime. The police band at the Highland Games can rouse the same feeling for me, of being with family, as I was as a kid, and this year was no exception. The sound quality on this is the pits though. Just imagine it.



Now that we are done raising Painted Lady Caterpillars, Hannah has adopted 4 tent caterpillars (ugh, yet gorgeous on their own in fact). They reside on her bedside shelf, and one has cocooned itself already. It was a great chance to see that each kind of caterpillar makes a different kind of cocoon or chrysalis. Now I need to go learn all about these kinds of caterpillars, so we know when to expect our first moth.



Our little yard is home to weekly sporting events, be it soccer, hockey or basketball. Here is Leif taking a shot on his dear friend Taro.



Now that we've ripped out our garden beds and grass, I've got a yen to grow some things. Argh. So in big containers, under an old plastic sheet, I'm nurturing along some peppers, zucchini and tomatoes. Here are their lovely first buds. Who knew tomato buds were so furry?








We spent the last days of May getting our heads in a summer way. We cycled along the water to Ogden Point and walked out along the breakwater to the light house at the end. It was extremely windy on the water.



We watched a kite surfer cut across the water and thought there was nowhere with a better backdrop for such a great activity.








Then we cycled back along the water to Clover Point, to watch the paragliders and try out our own little kites. As the gliders soared above us like giant handicapped birds, the kids sat, stood and lay down to fly with the wind as best they could.









Ivy insisted on holding Hannah's kite all by herself. And of course she let go. I chased it on my bike, and found it one block over, strung over power lines and then hanging down in the street. I returned a few days later with the pole pruner and snipped the kite free of it's string. Hannah loved me yet again.

And no family update would be truly complete without mention of our solo feline housemate. Bodhi is still Queen of the manor, though her recent diagnosis of hyperthyroidism (which explained all the weight loss) has now returned her the status of pharma-kitty. But it shouldn't hinder her graceful aging, and it gave us all a much needed reminder of how much we love her.




Now you're all caught up with us. Drop us a note to let us know what you're up to this summer. I promise to try not let weeks go by between our posts.

Kisses,

C

A mini-holiday for us (Week 34)

Our little brood (minus Kit) took off for the Mainland this week. First we stayed at Nana's house and then we went to stay at our friends Shona and Ryan's place. Of course we brought our caterpillars with us!

By now they are about 2/3 chrysalises and 1/3 munching caterpillars.


I brought along some Hollyhock for the road and figured they'd eat up and make their way up to the roof to make their final chrysalises.

I was wrong. And it was gross.

The leaves ran out, and I had no Vancouver source of Hollyhock. We tried various other types of leaves, but no dice. We tried Cheerios, nada. As we searched for a substitute, some caterpillars died. They just stopped moving and kind of deflated. In a bind I put a peeled carrot in there, and they ate right through it. Others crawled up to the top and did in fact make a chrysalis. But those turned black over night and then leaked thick black goo. Dead. Finally, with maybe 6 caterpillars left, a walk to the park near Shona's lead us past the always neat to see East Vancouver backyard gardens cultivated by Chinese Canadians. The trelises and neat rows of plants are a marvel of planning to me. And what do I spy on the border of the sidewalk? A Hollyhock! I've become quite the expert at spotting them by now. We nab some leaves and rush our bounty to the remaining caterpillars. They eat them up. We breathe a sigh of relief and head out to Granville Island.

We started our adventure there at Granville Island, a must-stop spot in my childhood and now theirs. We talked about how it's a man-made island, once used for industry, now for tourism and locals. We bought burritos and birdseed, and Leif focused on being still to get a pidgeon to eat out of his hand.





We all remarked on the big variety of pidgeon colourings. Did they get their colourings like cats did, how many eggs did a pidgeon lay at one time, could more than one male fertilise eggs within one 'litter', like cats? Yes, we had cats on the brain.




At one point, the universe intiated a series of tests for Leif and Hannah. Ivy'd fallen asleep on my lap, and Shona'd gone to get a coffee. Hannah really wanted a bagel like Leif had gotten, but I couldn't help her. I told her where to go and how to order it (I could see the counter through the glass wall and it was about 50 feet from me). She gave it a go. But when you're shorter than the counter, and a kid in a culture that tends to ignore kids, or expects an adult to speak for them, you can wait a long time for service. I asked Leif to go help her, and he got huffy about having to speak to strangers, but went. Upon their return, after I thanked Leif and told them how great they both were to try ordering on their own, they told me of a 'wierd' man they'd seen inside. He was standing on a box, all dressed in silver, not moving at all. I explained that he was a busker, a performer. And that if they put money into the box, he'd 'turn on' and do a litle show. So with loonies in hand and Shona as chaperone, the kids went in to see how it worked. They all tossed their money in at the same time, which proved to be trouble. The man started up and did some magic tricks that baffled them (he put golfballs in his pockets and they came out his mouth). Then he reached over to shake Leif's hand, after Hannah declined. Leif, brave and game, shook his hand. And the man turned off, still gripping Leif's hand. Leif panicked a wee bit, asking 'someone put in some money!'. Eventually someone did and he got his hand back. I thought it was a great experienced for this often-shy-but-sometimes-bold little dude.

Then we boarded the little harbour ferry and rode to Science World. We'd heard they had a Lego show, and we always like hanging out in the Eureka Gallery.


We danced in the special effects room, spun on the circular floor, played the drums, shot balls into the air, cranked the windmills and divided ourselves into 10 with the folding mirrors. Science World always rocks, especially when we miss the school groups and have it all to ourselves.

We boated back to Granville Island, and the kids pointed out the various huge art sculptures we passed on the way. Once back we wandered the grassy pathway to the car, and found turtles in the pond!



Ivy has expanded her love affair with owls to include Canada Geese. She had yet to see one for real, but loved to look at them in our bid book at home, and play their honking call. Then we found one 'for real'


It was very cool.

Here is a picture, showing how sweet my 8 year old is, having tea with the little ones. He's happy to play, with whomever is interested.



Leif and Hannah collaborated on a special Keep Out note for Isla's bedrooom door.



Ivy and Bryn shared their end of the bathtub just fine.


And Bryn shared a special moment with me, as she showed me how she coud use her own head for Mr. Potato Head parts. Love her!



On the way home we had a big chat while waiting for the ferry, about the shipyard across from the terminal. How the freighters bring the traincar boxes across the water (or take them away) and then they use those huge cranes to lift them onto the trains, to take them across the land. We talked about what we might have shipped to us from other countries on such freighters, what we might ship out, and how they decorate the cranes for the holidays.

Once home, we entered the age of fine arts. Painting any and everything. All 3 of the kids painted the sidewalk in front of our house, and here is Hannah pinting a rock she found that looks like a fish. She's wearing her swim goggles because she planned the shape the rock by chipping little bits off it on the pathway. Smart girl.




You know what else happened this week?





We found it odd that so many (%99) of our caterpillars had cocooned up, while one or two stayed down and kept eating. We phoned the fellow at the Butterfly Gardens (thank you Curtis!) and he explained the eggs we ordered would have been collected from various sites, and so would be of varying ages, not siblings from one mother. So they'd grow a different rates.

We snagged a crazy shot, if these two have any sense of awe about themselves.

What if you can't find any Hollyhock? (Week 33)

Because dammit, we couldn't! Our dear caterpillars have continued to munch away, and eventually we exhausted our own supply of Hollyhock leaves. We did a little experiment, trying to find leaves that felt similar to Hollyhocks, and put a variety into the terrarium to see if they'd munch on something else. Nothing worked! We read online that caterpillars are very plant specific and will starve rather than eat the wrong plant. I sent out a desperate email and a friend said she had loads in her co-op, so I went on daily trips to fetch the goods.



They were most thankful. Eventually, after eating their fill and growing many times their original size, they started to form their chrysalids.




We were surprised to learn that they do not 'spin' a cocoon as we'd expected. Rather, they hang upside down for about 24 hours, and then in about 2 minutes, they just poof, morph into a chrysalis. their skin actually turns into it, like a marshmellow over the campfire suddenly turns into a burnt marshmellow over the campfire. Heebie-jeebie time indeed. So we watched them over the course of this week, slowly crawl up the terrarium and then go marshmellow-y.

So of course it was time for a trip to the Butterfly Gardens in Saanich! We grabbed our buddy Taro, whom we'd given some caterpillars to, and headed out. As we remembered, it was humid in there. There were gorgeous butterflies and moths everywhere, plus huge carp and Koi fish, flamingos and a very scary puna ibis bird who stalked Ivy. They have chrysalids from Costa Rica suspended behind a huge window, waiting to 'hatch'. It was a very cool outing for all.

Hannah spent parts of this week at the beach peering into tidepools, or on the computer playing a new machine-building game, or being the house DJ with our stereo system. She's reviving an old favorite of hers, Coldplay's X+Y album. One of her favorite songs is Fix You and as we listened to it she announced that Coldplay was a compound word. Leif and her grandma had been teaching her about these.

Speaking of Leif, he had a number of cool moments this week. On his paper route he was given a tip by one of his customers. At a family soccer game date he met up with his match, a boy named Sebastian who gave him a run for his money. And he perfected his recipe for 'slimy green smoothie'. If you're wondering, it's a banana, ice cubes, a bit of water and a scoop of spirulina powder.

But the big deal this week was that soccer began again and anew. Both kids had their shared class with Taro on Thursday, and Hannah rocked the 'big kids' class. Leif had his first practice with his first team, a big deal in our house. He's never played on a team, I didn't see the benefit over simply learning skills and having fun to see if he liked it. And since he likes it, and has been at it 4+ years now, his coach felt he was ready. We signed him up in a private soccer academy as Leif made it clear he wants to improve, to be the best player ever, so we skipped the community soccer route and went right to the big guns. After their first practice they had their first game on Saturday afternoon. Some photos of the blonde pony-tail dude.





It was a great game for all, and Leif especially had a good time. He scored 3 goals, one by accident, one in play and one through a penalty kick. His penalty kick went right up over the other team's heads and then down into the goal. It was a great moment. The game ended 3-1, with their one goal being scored when Leif was goalkeeper, so there was a nice balance of him rocking the fields, and also finding challenges he couldn't meet quite yet.

Perhaps we'll have butterflies to show you next week . . .