You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2009.
saskatoon berries
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raspberries
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freezer jam
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Summer is sweet.
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We walk along the street, the dog zig-zagging from one smell possibility to another, and her hand reaches out to find mine.
She is twelve years old. Confident of her selfhood but not always of the world. Beautiful. Logical. Full of deep, careful thoughts. And she holds my hand.
This gesture of connection stretches my heart. A heart that grew so much on the day she was born that it felt like it cracked its outer shell, and yet her smooth, cool fingers expand it again.
In the grocery store. On a walk. While camping. At the mall.
To be trusted by such a being, to be loved by such a girl-woman, to have her seek me out… It is a beautiful connection. It is a beautiful hand. A beautiful world.
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I’m trying to find a word or phrase to use in an artwork to serve as a point to center myself. A single powerful source for steadying and inspiration. I’m looking over Ali Edwards’ list of inspiring words.
Words that are Calling to me:
- Balance
- Breathe
- Build
- Connect
- Cultivate
- Embrace
- Encourage
- Engage
- Enjoy
- Flow
- Growth
- Harmonize
- Invest
- Kindness
- Love
- Moment
- Nourish
- Nurture
- Open
- Satisfied
- Savour
- Slow Down
- Smile
- Together
- Yes
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“If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.”
Susanne K. Langer
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How do you tease yourself out of the regular rhythm to see new questions?
On my mind as I do oodles of prep work for the fall…
How much is too much?
Where does the balance sit between believing in Matthias and what he can be and honouring who he is today?
Is an active, busy family schedule keeping us from a simple, slower life or just the way we relish the days we live?
What one word can I use to remind myself of the importance of the important things as compared to the clamor of the urgent things?
Why do I always think I can accomplish 12x more in a free day than I really can?
If I stop pushing myself all the time, will I collapse back to the lazy, unfocused drifter I fear that I used to be? Am I destined to prod myself for the rest of time because it’s in my nature to move forward?
What if I’m not as good a homeschooling mother as I should be?
Why don’t I go have some tea and yogurt and let things sort themselves out?
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Oh, to be an August baby…
This set makes me all gooey on the inside every time I see it. Almost enough to drive me to have a third baby…almost. Oh, to have been a knitter when mine were wee…
The little bit of red embroidery gives this set such a finished look. I paged through Doodle Stitching to find a simple decoration that would be gender neutral. The star and the colour red shouldn’t make this out of bounds for these parents if they do have a boy. And if they do have issues, I’ll take the set back and put them on a shelf to ‘squee’ over.
The Mary Jane Bootees were super quick and sweet. So crazy cute I want to knit a houseful of these just to have on hand. I embroidered them before seaming rather than wrestling with the curves and constraints.
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The Kilkenny hat from Wee Woolly Toppers is a darling blend of sweet and surfer. I can’t recommend Wee Woolly Toppers enough. The hats in there just pile cuteness on cuteness. And manage to have a bit of funk at the same time. For the newborn sizes it seems that you can get 2 hats from a 50g ball, but all the hat sizes never take more than a 50g ball. Genius design constraint, no?
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The purl i-cord is a nice complement to the garter stitch. The swirl of lace at the top is a good detail, and should make this a nice cap for a summer baby.
Yarn: Simply Cotton Sport undyed organic in Malted Milk, a naturally occurring shade of cotton. This yarn is a dream – soft, silky, drapey, gorgeous. The b ootees took 10g of yarn and the hat 20g. That leaves me about 20g, enough for a second hat. I was thinking of doing something in plain stockingette to have a plain canvas for embroidery.
There’s a family of fairly serious triathletes here in Manitoba that has a license plate which reads: WE TRI. As a woman who chose “Adventure” as her word-of-the-year last year and who likes puns, I really dig that.
This summer, we’re tri-ing, too. That’s nothing new for Rainer and Tias, our intrepid multi-sport men.
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1. On your marks…, 2. Dashing to T1, 3. Woosh!, 4. Fly
Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.
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But we women of the family have been more hesitant to throw ourselves headlong into the water, as it were.
No longer.
Sandra did her first triathlon in Morden at the end of our camping trip.
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1. Beautiful, 2. She cracks me up, 3. T2, 4. One lap down…
Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.
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And the gauntlet is thrown. For there was a deal. A taunt. A motivation. “Sandra,” I foolishly said, “If you race in Morden, I’ll do Riding Mountain.” And she did.
The kids are in MiniU this week and Rainer and I headed out to give it a whirl. A practice try for the Try-A-Tri. Seems a bit crazy since the point of the Try-a-Tri is to…well, you get the picture. What is a Try-A-Tri? It’s a little, wee, baby triathlon to get you over your fear of the wetsuit…or the water…or the bike…or the run. It’s manageable because it’s wee. Just 300m Swim / 15k Bike / 2.5k Run.
Today I donned a wetsuit for the first time. Crazy fun. Today I did an open water swim in a cold lake. And I hate cold water. But…Crazy fun. The wetsuit keeps you warm and you slide through the water all buoyant and slick. Splashing around in a cold lake at the beach isn’t my definition of fun, but this had a purpose. This was quiet and adventurous. After that we did a bike ride and a long run. A fabulous, tiring day. An adventure. A workout. A date.
Yep, a date. Hours alone with Rainer, nothing to do but talk and be near each other. Sweating. Totally sexy.
So I’m committed to this attempt. I’ll Tri. I may even like it enough to contemplate doing a few sprint distances next year. I never thought I’d be sampling this sport so soon. I thought I’d give it a whirl in a few years but secretly thought I’d hate it. (The cold water thing.)
But in the end, after all, how can I resist the opportunity to look this fiercely cool?
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The fence and the garage needed us.
Heck, the house needed us when we bought it. Structurally great, but restrained from happiness by a dull palette of white and grey, both indoors and out. We felt like the house looked like a big iceberg sitting on our lot, particularly in winter. Driving home to an iceberg in January isn’t pleasant, and it was a good thing that flaking paint meant we didn’t need to worry about motivating ourselves to redo it. White with grey trim became yellow with green. As for the indoors, we have painted over every grey wall inside with a mix of yellow, orange, and red. Cheerful colours for a cheerful living environment.
But the fence and the garage were left to languish. We were busy. Money was tight. We preferred have fun than tackle a rather thankless task. It was past time.
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And now, the last of the sterile and unwelcoming white and grey is gone. We’ve had a busy 5 days and have covered half the surrounding lawn and more than half of ourselves with paint spatters. It’s so much better now. Sitting on the deck in the shade of the apple tree, the green fence extends the lush sense of enveloping greenery. The space is more soothing.
From the other 3 sides, the garage is green with yellow trim to match the fence. From the side visible in the yard, though, we’ve matched the house and hope to play up the suggestion that the garage is a little cottage. We’ll be attaching a window box for flowers and hopefully scrounging up some shutters to add to complete the view. And, of course, we’ll trim back the bushes to make it more visible, replace the boards with holes (rotten spots + a boy with a hammer = holes), and we’ll oust the plants growing in the cracks of the walkway.
Isn’t changing things utterly satisfying?
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Alex, Joey, and Jo, you’ve won the little booklets! I’ll be mailing those as soon as I’ve gotten your addresses. Thanks to everyone for the quotes. I do love me some quotes!
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Camping food is problematic, isn’t it? There’s keeping it cool, then the extra steps you have to go through to prepare it; there’s the extraordinary level of hunger camping produces (even without the hours of running, swimming, cycling and hiking we do), and the storage issue when everything you need for days on end has to fit in your vehicle.
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Love the screen tent. Perfect for making shade on hot days, making dry spots on wet days, making the bugs stay away on Canadian days (ahem)
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And then there’s the complicating factor that the tiny stores within a reasonable driving distance of the national and provincial parks around here tend to have stocks that consist of: cans of stew, 9 kinds of BBQ sauce, chips, marshmallows, and milk.
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And then there’s also the complicating factor that we like whole foods, eat almost no treats (by standard definitions at least), don’t eat a lot of bread, and are largely vegetarian.
So.
The problem is that just about every ‘camp food’ that comes easily to mind is either an orgy of processed joy or is a meat festival.
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Rock petroform
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We brainstormed foods that would cook easily and freeze well. We made and froze in Ziploc bags about 5 suppers-worth of dishes. More meat than usual, but not too bad. Meatball and barley stew, sweet potato and lentil stew, ground bison for tacos, etc. We also rinsed and froze a couple of cans of beans and lentils – in bear country all grey water like cooking liquids and dishwater need to be properly disposed of, making the gloopy goo from canned legumes an awkward chore. But rinsed and frozen they were both convenient and worked as freezer packs for the rest of the food. We took hemp seed protein powder ( a relatively new discovery for us) to throw in porridge and other dishes. We also choose a number of vegetables that work well canned: corn, green beans, apple sauce.
We open our cooler as little as possible, and buy ice daily once the pre-frozen foods thaw out. We also have 2 additional Rubbermaid bins of food: a ‘pantry’ of oatmeal, canned goods, high fibre crackers, granola bars, taco shells, bulgar, couscous, etc; and a bin of fruits and veggies. While these would optimally be kept cool, they do pretty well for a few days until you eat them like a ravening horde and make the drive to a reasonable grocery store to stock up again. Choose sturdy veggies like coleslaw mix, celery, carrots, etc. And buy a box of under-ripe mangos before you leave home while you’re at it. They’re super yummy as they ripen and taste like the summer sun is in your hand.
As for snacks – for we are a very snacky family, preferring 6 small meals to 3 big ones – we accepted very quickly that the salty snacks available near campsites do not fit into our eating plan. Rainer and I have each lost 50 pounds and we are not putting them back on even though our definition of happiness includes boardgames and bowls of snacks.
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So we brought along salsa and crackers and flavoured rice crackers. But we ran out of those pretty quickly. (Ravening horde.) We made a happy discovery this trip, though: breakfast cereal. Branflakes, multigrain Cheerios, Cornbran…yum! Snackable, subtly sweet, and available at all the tiny stores.
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We don’t eat bacon…except for at least once while we’re camping. This cool camp griddle/grill is a wonderful addition to a regular camp stove. It makes the tradition of having one lazy morning with pancakes, eggs and bacon that much simpler.
Do you have favourite healthy camping food? Any tips to share?
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A little art book of parenting quotes left in the campground bathroom.
I took several of these with me and had plans to leave them all behind. It was hard. I felt…overly prideful, somehow…stupid. Who was I to think someone would want my quotes, my doodles, my still-new cursive? What had seemed like a bit of spontaneous generosity and prettying-up of the world at home seemed presumptuous out in the world.
I’m glad I left it, though. I hope someone found it and felt the world was a nicer place for a few moments of their day.
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I’d like to give some to you, too. Leave a comment with a quote you like, properly attributed, of course, so that I can add it to my quote journal, and I’ll draw for 3 giveaways. Contest closes Sunday the 19th at midnight.
