Rats!

Yes, we've got them again. The issue is the crazy junk pile in our alley. Our junk pile. Wood, a broken dresser, empty plant pots . . . nothing gross, just a nice spot to make a den, right beside our compost bins. Bodhi took care of this the other time this happened, 2 years ago. I hope she's still up to the task . . I'm thoroughly grossed out. We have a lot of house care stuff literally piling up on us this year.

Hannah has cared for her tent caterpillars and now they have hatched, so to speak. They are a pretty cute brown moth actually. They are literally covered in hair!



We went on a field trip to Swan Lake this week and spotted tons of white moths. Hannah was very keen on the various ways moths can be camouflaged. On this trip we explored the ways life adapts around water. We looked at what we could net in the shallow waters on this marshy lake. Dragonfly larvae, stick bugs, side swimmers, water worms . . cattails, various plants, herons, ducks . . we saw it all.

My little container garden scene has been coming along nicely. While it is too early for the veggies, our strawberries had started to ripen, yet we never actually got any fruit. Then I spied why.




This is the view out our bedroom window. Sibling hockey good times.

The only injuries have been to Hannah, ahem, all inflicted by Leif. Yes, we've had many chats. As the younger sibling I have memories of being 'tackled' in the playroom, and landing hard on the thinnest carpet ever known to man. I definitely give the big brother the gears due to my little sister perspective.

Kit and his Dad took the older two on an outing to Muir Creek to look for fossils. They definitely found some.





They even found evidence of past earthquakes, as you can see by this fault line shift in the rock face.


Kit and I started to watch a fantastic DVD from the library. Earth: A Biography was visually stunning, and really interesting. We had to return it before we could watch it all, but we plan to get it again and watch the rest.


The kids bought new Lego sets this week. It was great to see Hannah reach a stage we remembered from young Leif, of following directions all on her own, from start to finish. She got frustrated in a few spots and had to let me help just for a sec I promise! She's very proud of her hard work, and the fact that she finally has her own Jedi figurine.



Leif opted for an Indiana Jones set. He's never seen any of the films (he's 8!!) but knows the overall concept (and that I think the most recent one is one of the stupidest movies ever).




Even though our berries are scavenged by squirrels, we went out to the farms and bought a flat. I made a crumble and tried my hand at jam. The crumble was a hit, as you can see. The jam I've yet to taste.



Because he's grown up listening to my odd rants about marketing over the years. I knew Leif would like to hear about Q-Tips. That they are a product that is successful, can never be improved upon, and has become the standard for it's market. So those folks can just sit back and keep churning them out, never worrying about being overtaken by a competitor (we've all bought the cheaper ones only to find they really have less cotton at the tips) and rake in the bucks. This lead us to a chat about proprietary eponyms, an eponym being a word that stands for something else, a proprietary one being a brand name that does this. Frisbee, Q-Tip, Bobcat, Xerox, Kleenex are some examples. Can you think of more?


nighty night.

First things first . . . Fleury is THE MAN in our house.

As our one friend who is a long-time hockey fan(atic) asked "When did you guys start watching hockey?". Just now my friend, just now. Here's a typical long-winded Caelen way of getting to the point.

Leif's life-long best bud Taro received a miniature air hockey table for Christmas. Although his mother, like me, worked hard to find knit slippers, Waldorf dolls and other natural toys, this farking plastic sporty-toy overshadowed his other gifts. She stated for months afterwards "But I didn't order a sports-loving son!".

So Leif and Taro played some air hockey throughout the winter. Then they both got their own sticks, and started playing in the yard. Then the Playoffs started, and Taro got a copy of some Hockey News magazine. Now they're reading stats and documenting their favorite players on little lists they make at night. We discover that you can watch the Playoffs online, and we're in. I'm on-board for whatever they're into, be it raising pests as pets or playing Lego all day. So this was an easy shift. We made Leif's special Macaroni and cheese on game night, invited Taro over, set up chairs all around the computers, and let loose. The whole neighbourhood could hear us when the Penguins scored that first goal. To prep for the game, Leif and Taro and Hannah made their own hockey gear, following Taro's lead, out of wood, wool and cardboard (see? using nature still fits in!). During the breaks, they went and played hockey outside until I called them in for the next period. We were riveted right up until the final seconds, when Fleury, sweet little Frenchman, deflected a shot on goal in the final 6 seconds, pushing the Pens to Stanley Cup victory for the first time in 14 years. We'd already googled the Cup itself, how it originated, how it got taller as they added more names, how many times the Montreal Canadians were on it, that the teams get to keep it for the year (really? said the kids), how violence is not a 'natural' part of the game (when another player held Crosby up by only his knee on the boards, sending him off the ice for an injury, and no penalty was given), that it was not aways there, and how no other sport condones anything close to what hockey allows lately. We are all looking forward to the Olympics to show them how hockey can be played with only skill, not skill and gratuitous bullying.

Pics of them getting ready to play:





Can I rave about Radio Flyer for a minute? Well, I was going to. We have a red metal RF wagon that we found free by the side of the road. It's rusty, but like anything well-made, it still works just fine. We use it for Leif's paper route. Recently, when 3 too-big children tried to ride in it all at once, the one plastic component, the wheel spokes, broke. I was bummed. I figured it was irreparable. But I called RF, and in 5 minutes, had a new set of wheels ordered for exactly our wagon model. Woohoo. I told the kids, about how quality manufacturers, good customer service, etc was a gem these days, and linked it to the crap customer service we've had from companies that outsource their manufacturing to countries with crap labour laws and cheaper wages. Our bike trailer comes from Alberta, the kids pj's are made in Washington. Even though by now there's little you can actually get that's still made in N. America, we do try. And so I was miffed to discover that Radio Flyer shut it's US plants in 2005 and now manufactures all their metal items in China.

A decade ago when all this outsourcing was really in the papers, I was firmly against it. I heard often from my elders how I was being Utopian, that really, the jobs were such a benefit to these workers in China, Indonesia, etc . . . did I want to deny them this chance at the American dream we all share? And it was hard not to lay into these well-spoken adults in my community, to point out the total lack of altruism in these corporate moves. They were not moving their factories to 'help' the poor workers, to spread 'the Dream'. They were doing it for money, pure and simple. Across the border in Mexico, slack pollution and labour laws made it an easy choice for hundreds of companies that had previously been working in the US. Ditto for China and the other Asian countries now providing us with all of our toys, clothing, computer and telecommunications needs. Oh but wait! There's a problem now it seems? These money-saving steps and slack pollution and labour laws are resulting in lower-quality goods you say? Lead in toys? Plastic chemicals in Pocky? Weird flu's travelling from animals to people, possibly on the food we ship from far away to nearby? Good heavens, what have we done? Did you know Costa Rica now beats Hawaii for pineapple sales? Tough luck for the Hawaiians I guess, but woohoo for Costa Ricans right? Come on folks. Do the math.

Yes, this still pisses me off, over a decade later. Back then, in the 90's, there might have been a chance of reversing this trend that is entirely based on greed. People tried to effect a change, to get the word out. Trying to buy Canadian/American, protesting against Nike and Kathy Lee Gifford. I remember being in NY on 2003 and seeing a huge banner ad on the side of a building slamming the Gap for it's labour workers in Indonesia. But still, the notion of it being 'better' for us consumers to be able to buy cheaper goods, therefore putting our dollars back into the local economy . . . oh man , I can't even type that without wanting to laugh or throw up. The 'local' economy was the toy store that used to be up the street from us, that shut down when Wal-Mart arrived. The sushi bar that thank god still is up our street. Friends who used to work for Telus and Safeway, who earned good livings and took their money and spent it on local festivals and fundraising and food grown here in BC. But they've since been fired, my Telus service calls now come from Calcutta and the service at Safeway is the worst crap ever. Oh but for the highest prices in town, no less.

I've recently learned about a group finding a different way to 'give the dream' in poorer countries. www.girleffect.org is a group that gives the basic means for a business to poor women and girls in Africa. What's that, they just give it to them? They aren't trying to make money off them at the same time? How can this be? The 'American Dream' is all about greed isn't it? Well, they got my money for sure. And the next time they get my money, it'll be for the soccer-team training for girls that they offer. And this is a perfect time to share another article I read recently, that ties in all the outsourcing with the value of learning to work with your hands. If you have a job online or on a computer, that another country might be able to do for you . . . you just might be fucked in a few years. But no one can outsource a gardener, a hairdresser or a plumber. Food for thought.

Want to talk about Hannah? Let's, because she's just so rockin'. We had a garage sale recently, as part of our clean-house-so-we-have-less-to-clean program. Hannah felt this was a perfect opportunity to have a cookie sale (our neighbours recently had a lemonade stand, which essentially was only frequented by us, but hey, we all got juice). She made her own signs, complete with pictures of her rice krispie squares (seriously, they are the hardest things to make! So sticky and messy, and the waste of the marshmellows and cereal that goes into it, vs. the tiny pan of squares that comes out? Bah!) and told each customer "They are rice krispie squares with marshmellows inside". The marshmellows were key in her view. In this pic you can also take note of her new haircut. She deduced that long, thick hair is too hot, and brushing it is too hard. So we went short and she loves it.




In a bizarre turn, our efforts to clean house netted us just enough money to offer a deal on the drum set being sold at the yard sale across the street from us. Hannah was smitten, though when I offered her a horse instead (trying to illustrate how far-fetched such purchases were) she got upset because it was too hard to choose. Good lord. Now the kid's room is dominated by a shiny red drum kit, and I relax daily to the random beats of the 3 kids who each have their own set of drum sticks.

Her tent caterpillars are now all in their own cocoons. In a week or so they will hatch as moths. She has liked having them as pets, though the amount she can ignore them has proven to be a key thing. If she'd had a pet rabbit or something it'd be dead by now.


Ivy is hilarious. It is hard to convey how she's changing, but I'll try. She is so, articulate? Chatty? Neither of those are right, but I'm at a loss for the word I mean. Some examples:

Leif and Hannah are discussing which movie to watch. Ivy is nearby building with blocks. They agree on a film. Ivy gets up and says "Can I watch it with you guys? Can I watch too?".

She calls me from somewhere in the house, needing help. I say I'll be right there and start to move in her direction. She then yells "Oh, I got it! Never mind Mommy! Nevermind! Thank you Mommy! Thanks!".

She gets ignored a lot, which is lame. She'll be talking to the kids or Kit, asking a question or telling them about her day, and on her third repeat I'll say "Hey guys, she's talking to you!". She'll stand on a chair and hold their shoulder and peer into their faces, telling them her gem about the fish she saw, or the shoes hanging on the power lines. And she'll tell each of them her news individually. She insists, of course, on doing many things herself. Her car seat buckles, her stroller buckles, if you're drawing she wants to draw too. Pretty normal behaviours. But still so sweet and determined, dammit. She is on cloud nine right now because she got her own Ivy-sized hockey stick, and asks "Can I play hockey with you guys?". Last night she lay in bed with Leif, and shared with him this golden nugget:

"Leifer, when I'm taller I'll get a boy-head and I'll put it on."
Then after some discussion with him about being older and taller she says : "Actually, I'll keep my girl-head when I'm taller."

When she goes somewhere she says "Here I go" or "Here I come". Will I be like this when I'm senile? Don't blog about it, my darling children, if I am. It'll be cute and sad for you but awful for me. Though I won't know it or care . . . okay, as long as you buy me Turtles IN THE BOX, I'll agree to most anything by then.


This week I we played restaurant one day for lunch. In truth, I operate a restaurant every day for these guys, but on this day I decided to 'make it fun'. I had them each write out their order and promised to try to mimic it as closely as I could, given what I had on hand.

Leif ordered 'Leif's mak an cheese' (sound it out guys, it's macaroni & cheese)

Then he wrote me a list of his favorite foods:


Hannah ordered: ' oitmeil kukes, etomame (and) stroberes'
(oatmeal cookies, edamame and strawberries)

And here is her list of favorite foods. Can you read them?



And Hannah ordered for Ivy : ' pect yogrt' (peach yogurt)

Okay, watching kids learn to spell is fantastic! I remember the first word Leif ever wrote. He was way young, maybe 4.5? and he wrote in the sand with a stick GRL and said Mama, I wrote girl! And he had. He had all the key hard consonant sounds for that word. I never corrected his spelling over the next 4 years, and now I do not correct Hannah's. Why? They make the effort to solve a problem on their own, and you can either notice the effort and the wicked results, or you can say "sorry, you're wrong". Which one do you think will make them NOT want to write anymore? Yep, criticism when you're just learning sucks. And frankly, our current system of spelling is due to a gov't mandated spelling reform from back in the 30's. Think about it. How come when I read novels written by British authors it's perfectly alright for them to spell tire as 'tyre'. And that my spell-checker prompts me to fix words like 'neighbour' and 'colour'. Up until 100 or so years ago, we had few standards for spelling at all. you got your point across and that was it. Your class was likely indicated in your spelling, as it would be in your diction. But you still got your point across and there was little issue with it. Over the past years of explaining to the kids why something is spelled how it is (when they ask me, not because I'm correcting them) we've collectively deduced that our language is just farked up. Take 2 minutes and read a small bit of why our language is so crazy and follows no guaranteed rules %100 of the time. And if you'd like to read how they've tried to fix the way we spell things in the past 100 years, look here.


Adding extra letters because it looks better? Basing your language and spelling on French, then changing allegiances decades later, but keeping the French spellings? using 'y' because it looks more Greek even though an 'i' would follow current rules better? I always knew it was confusing for new Canadians, but for those born here it's basically a list of rules that make no sense. Yes ours is a culture that uses your grasp of spelling as a sign of your intelligence. No I'm not advocating sending my kids out into life clueless about how to correctly communicate in a society that judges your overall smarts by your book smarts alone. Yet when you look back at the history of spelling, and read old texts that had the now-deemed-wrong spellings in them, it hopefully makes you pause to consider our current stringent rules on spelling, on state-mandated rules for spelling and the exhaustive amount of time spent correcting it in school. And yet, the number of adults I have dealt with, who have any profession from news anchor to nurse to lab tech, who mix up their there-their-they're's, and threw/through's . . . the list goes on. They are the pinnacle of gov't schooling? It's odd to make such a big deal about something that seems to continue regardless of the effort put into fixing it. I hope that because Leif and Hannah (and Ivy) will learn how to spell in this way, not by rules but by sight and overall immersion, they will end up with a far better grasp of the intricate and sometimes ludicrous ways we spell things.


I'm going to stop here. There's just so much to talk about it'll never get up if I don't just cut things off right now. I'll add the rest to next week.

C

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