Monthly Archives: May 2013

drumming fun!

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Yesterday the boys and I went to a drumming workshop at a wonderful fellow homeschooler’s house. It was very gracious of her, I must say, to have a house full of kids which I think totalled around 16 and all of us adults. Oh, and if you are getting that craving for something wonderful and sweet, you must check out her business and sink your taste buds into some of her beautiful sweet wonders! There really is no excuse needed, we all know that. 🙂

The kids, mine included, swarmed around the trampoline and I was wondering if I would be able to pull them off once Andrew came with the drums! I had nothing to worry about for when he arrived many children stopped whatever they were doing and helped bring the drums up onto the deck. There were enough drums for all children and some adults as well. I don’t know how he fit them all into his wee car. Must’ve been some magic involved.

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I was amazed at how keen and attentive all the children were from the little ones to the older pre-teens.L and X chose a drum each and followed along fairly well for never drumming before. We have two small bongos which I brought with us in case more were needed and we used these as well. I’m glad I did this because now I feel a bit more confident at home when the boys bring them out and bang, bang, bang. Now I think it will be more of a rhythmic rumble.

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At times, my boys took a break to do some jumping when their hands became red from the pounding. But, before long they were back again. I think the group and the primitive sounds of the drumming just makes you want to return and be a part of it.

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After all of the drumming, jumping and running around the boys were exhillarated and hot! We said our thank you’s and good bye’s then jumped into the car where the boys threw off their shirts and downed their water. Whew!

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We all enjoyed ourselves immensely and will certainly be back again. Thank you Andrew and Joanne for this wonderful opportunity!

 

Happy Mother’s Day

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Stephen let me sleep in a bit, which was nice and of course his intention as it is a day for mothers. Isn’t every day? 😉

I’ve become more familiar with Ayurveda and learned that I am a vata dosha, meaning many things but for this instance that my energy levels are at a peak in the wee hours of the morning and mid-afternoon. By 6pm I should be going to bed. That’s a challenge, of course as at 6pm I am usually on my way to work many days.

I took advantage of my usual 2:30/3 am wake-up and grabbed this book that has been whispering my name ever since I put it on hold at the library. It came in about a week ago but I was reading another book for book club and kept getting distracted because I wanted to start this one. So I did. In the middle of the night I picked it up. It is wonderful and feeds my soul.

I woke just after 9am and came down to smiling excited boys. L had drawn a map for me of our house. I had to find all of the spots marked with an ‘x’. There I would find a letter marked on paper. I had to collect all the letters.

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I have to say that L made an amazingly accurate map! The boys hid the letters in places that I wouldn’t go to before the morning came. Good thing. They were going to place one letter on or below the toaster but thought I may use it when I got home from shooting a wedding. They were right. Homemade bread toasted is perfect after a shoot. Good thinking!

Once I had all of the letters I had to rearrange them to make a word. At first I was stumped but figure it out:

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I looked in the dehydrator and there on the shelves inside were cards for me. Handmade by my three boys just for me. There is really nothing better than handmade love.

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Today we have the pleasure of picking up my mother from the airport for a two week visit. What perfect timing! We are all so excited and just can’t wait. She is one of the strongest people I know, as was her mother. I treasure our time together.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there, whether this be your first Mother’s Day or fortieth, whether you are a single dad or mom who has the job of being both mother and father (which I can say is amazing as my mother raised us on her own), a grandparent who is blessed to take part in the lives of their grandchildren, or a care-giver who takes the time to take care of others.

Perhaps you have lost your mother/grandmother or both and are missing them today. I feel they are with us now as they always have been, and are comforting us in spirit. Stop, close you eyes and you can feel their love. For me, it sends a coolness flowing through my spine, like fresh ocean air carried along on the breeze. I breathe it in.

Much love and blessings to all.

 

diy compost tumbler

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Last year a co-worker and I were talking gardening and composting. He played a video for me of a store-bought compost tumbler and the effect of the composting tea on your garden. It was amazing and I wanted one!

But, ‘eek!’ I say, to the price of $130 for a tumbler.

I just found this video on how to make your own tumbler and I have to say, it very well may be my next project. Oh, yay, more figuring and cutting! I understand the temptation of the store-bought variety of anything. It’s fast and easy. But, there is something to say for home-made that is for certain.

Think I need to put this on the ‘to-do’ list. Besides, our regular back yard composter is full and just not as interesting. It just sits there. 😉

Thinking about any interesting gardening projects? How about this one?

 

making a medicine wheel garden

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It has been a busy week over here. My mother is visiting come Mother’s Day so I am trying to get as much of the yard work and garden tending to as possible beforehand. It’s been a big job and the boys have been very helpful.

One of the ‘jobs’ I wanted to share with the boys was the making of a medicine wheel garden. We have a plethora of rocks of all types and sizes in our yard. Start digging and you are bound to find one. When I was digging out a spot for our cold frame last fall I came upon many rocks which I added to a pile already on the go. I had wanted to create a medicine wheel garden last year but, with the huge undertaking of our first veggie garden, the time got away from us. I checked out this book from our library a couple of times last year and again this year. It is on my ‘to buy’ list for anyone wondering (wink wink).

This book takes you through the history of the medicine wheel and explains its significance. The circle is an ancient symbol, a strong symbolic shape. Here is one of the many wonderful quotes in the book:

In many ways this circle, the Medicine Wheel, can best be understood if you think of it as a mirror in which everything is reflected. “The Universe is the mirror of the People”, the old teachers tell us (the teachers being Cheyenne ancestors), “and each person is a mirror to every other person.” Any ideal, person, or object, can be a Medicine wheel, a mirror for Man. The tiniest flower can be such a mirror, as can a wolf, a story, a touch, a religion, or a mountaintop.

– Hyemeyohsts Storm, Seven Arrows, 1972

This book has many interesting chapters of which I have not had a chance to read, yet. It has a great section on specific plants and is how I found out more about the amazing ‘old man’s beard’ that I have always seen on many trees in our parks.

It has a full description with many ideas for different types of medicine wheels. You can plant according to colours and their relation to North, South, East and West. There are also diagrams shown for best plants for different regions. I may use as reference the Coastal Medicine Wheel Garden. I noticed one design for the Desert Southwest Medicine Wheel Garden and thought of a friend of mine who has just recently moved to the Southwest States. Dawn, this may be right up your alley.

The rain is coming and it’s a new moon today. That gives me time to let ideas brew in my mind about what to plant in our medicine wheel. The area I chose is a very shaded corner protected from busy, running feet. I have found this book extremely helpful for listing many wonderful shade-loving plants. The timing was perfect when this book arrived just yesterday! It’s worth getting your hands on if you like to plant according to the moon phases and would like to include your children in the gardening fun. It even has a section on best plants for a moonlit garden and which plants are toxic. I had no idea that Moonflower was toxic!

So, as I got our tools ready the boys gathered the rocks from around the yard and from the previously formed pile of last year and created a new pile close to our designated spot. I love the way they think. They didn’t just create a pile but made a cave of rocks instead. One look and I wished we could keep it. They asked for a picture and then were okay with dismantling.

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I cleared away a section of the yard, moved the hosta and violets to another area nearby so they wouldn’t get trampled or quickly overtake the area of the wheel. Then we measured to find out how big we could make the wheel. Six feet was our maximum diameter and was bigger than I thought we would get. From here, we marked the middle with a beautiful white granite rock speckled with black. Then we found our co-ordinates with a compass and string. Now we had our North, South, East and West spots marked with the biggest rocks, and ones shaped like arrows, well kind of.

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Next, we gathered the rest of the rocks to make the final formation. The biggest rocks formed the outside circle. The many smaller rocks were used to create a little path to the centre. At first, I was planning on just making a single line to the centre from each co-ordinate but Xman wanted to be able to make a walking path leading to the middle. It was just big enough for smaller feet. We have a good amount of moss in our shady areas and plan on using this for the path. Now we just need to figure out what plants to add. It was a great collaboration and we all enjoyed taking in our creation once finished.

The sun was warming our backs while we worked and creating fun shadows from the tree branches – and me and my little camera. All this digging, rearranging and carrying made us all a little pooped so inside we went for orange juice snow cones!

Today the rain begins for days to come but when it stops, there will be many seeds to plant in the veggie gardens – with Nanna’s help! – and many herbs and other plants to attend to in our new medicine wheel. I look out the window and I smile. I feel we’ve added a little protection, a little blessing to our humble, small part of the Earth.

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kids and grades

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This came in an email to me from a fellow member of a homeschool Facebook group. It looked interesting so I kept it as unread so I would remember to check out the link when I could sit down and focus on it. Sit down and focus on it. Funny, that is. Right  now the boys are playing on the piano, making their own music as I try to listen to the video. Well, there are no perfect times around here but this will do.

Please check out this video. It says a lot about our system and I don’t mean the school system we have now but even the one that existed when I was in school. I did very well in school, when I liked what I was doing, when I understood the reasoning behind what I was doing, when I found it to be relevant and to my interests. I bet most of you were the same way.

I struggle with my homeschooling some days. I wonder if I am doing it right. If I don’t sit the boys down to do their math but use a game instead am I doing it right? If I take them outside to garden, to learn about the forces of nature and how all things grow, isn’t that biology? Isn’t that learning? If I sit them down in front of a book and tell them to read it and answer the questions, narrate to me what they read or we read, do they enjoy it? Do they remember what we talked about? Will they recall events of history that we learned a week ago? All children learn differently, and I am still working on what works best for my children. I think we all want what’s best.

Whether you homeschool or have kids in school, I believe we all care that our children are learning and how they learn. That they learn what they need to know to get a job, to survive ‘out there’. But, if they don’t do well on a math test that involves sin and co-sin, tangent does it really matter if they will never want to go to university for whatever sin and co-sin would be used for? Yes, I don’t know what they would be used for because I didn’t get that part of math. It didn’t interest me and the teacher had no interest in explaining to me why I needed to know it. But, I can tell you when I go off on a tangent. 😉

We judge so often on appearance. We judge a person by paper. And I do understand this and at times there is good reason. But this video puts it all into perspective.

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a good start to the day

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We’ve read about the Civil War and days with Cobras, done our times tables and additions,  and conquered Assyria and Mesopotamia (Shamshi-Adad was so uncool, Hammurabi not so bad all things considered).

We learned about those naked Celts, painted blue wearing only a metal collar and helmet, waiting on the shores to battle Caesar’s army. Somehow they managed to keep Caesar at bay. I’d be a little freaked myself!

Lessons done for the day and it’s only 10:30.

I should put on my Wonder Woman shirt.

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L’s Celtic Warrior. He’s a happy kind of blue.

diy veggie container

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If you  have ever wanted to make your garden grow without you then it sounds like we have something in common:

  1. We have a smallish yard and it’s mostly shaded
  2. I did my best last year to place the shade friendly veggies in the shade
  3. I also did my best to water when there was no call for rain
  4. I should have known better

I did not have a great harvest last year, let alone much at all to speak of. No, I didn’t water my veggies when it called for rain and most of those times, it did not rain. The veggies I placed in containers on our deck (which gets about 5 hours of sun a day on average) did okay but yet again, I didn’t water them as much as was needed. I also didn’t use fertilizer. I thought the compost in the non-soil mix I made from this wonderful book was enough but when I talked to this amazing woman at a local library whose book I bought last year and inspired my winter planning, I found that I sure needed that fertilizer. Compost is good to start but not to last.

This year I have moved things around and hopefully placed those veggies that need medium depth soil and less sun in the right place. Side note here: I had to build boxes with a bottom so the spawn-of-satan-weeds did not get in through the bottom. Check out the ‘control’ section of that link and you will understand. Those veggies that require deeper soil are either growing in the cold frame (thank you Nikki for this inspiration!) or are going to be planted in containers on the deck.

That being said, I found a great video on diy self-watering containers – to help with my watering deficiencies – and I did purchase some seaweed fertilizer as well. This is a great video and I was inspired! I finished the third container today. Now to add the ‘non-soil’ and plant those seeds! Wahoo! Here are some pics to show you how it all worked out for me. I used 1.5L bottles of water for the bottom inserts. Now I just have to remember to add water on a regular basis! Baby steps!

How is your garden planning going?

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