Tree detective

About a year ago I started noticing trees. Rather, I started noticing how much I did not know about trees. The kids would ask me, "What's that tree?" and unless it was a pine, my answer was always, "I dunno."

Because I hate appearing like a moron to my kids, I embarked on a project to identify the most common trees and birds of our area. Well, that little project has blossomed into a full-blown Nature Society for our local homeschool group, and my initial curiosity has grown into a bookshelf of field guides.

One of my big questions, after I could cautiously identify most trees, was how to tell what a tree is in winter -- most tree ids are done by leaves. But if there are no leaves, how could I identify a tree? Would I have to spend six months of the year answering, "I dunno"?

Luckily, no. I can look smart year-round in a couple ways. One is by id-ing unusual bark, such as the peeling bark of a River Birch or the shaggy bark of a Shagbark Hickory.

Another way to tell is by spring blossoms. Dogwoods and Eastern Redbuds are easily identifiable.

Peeling bark of a River Birch, Betula nigra

Eastern Redbud, cercis canadensis, with flowers and seed pods still attached

Pink Flowering Dogwood, cornus florida

For the birds

Chickadee nest in the bluebird box.

My grandfather used to claim that written instructions -- like for programming the VCR -- were "for the birds." He might have been right; I think the birds around here need some written instructions. We've got chickadees nesting in the bluebird box, and our cardinals, who have the perfect place to nest in these tall, private bushes on the side of our house, decided to build a nest in the triple jogging stroller.
They are now homeless. 

On our quest to attract a variety of birds to our yard, we visited Wild Birds Unlimited, which is a very dangerous place to visit with kids. Not because there are real wild birds flying around, but because they have lots of breakable bird baths and ceramic thingies in the shape of bluebirds. They also have bluebird houses for $39.99, and if I had paid that instead of $8, then I'd really be mad at the chickadee squatters. 

This is NOT the place for a cardinal nest.

Anyway, the lady at WBU was very helpful (and proved to me how very little I actually know about birds!) and explained how some birds won't be attracted to feeders full of nuts because their bills can't crack them. Others won't eat millet, since it's only for ground-feeding birds like juncos. Goldfinches like thistle, blue jays like peanuts and cracked corn, and bluebirds prefer mealworms, the freeze-dried variety of which can be plumped up by soaking in water. Sounds like the perfect job for a three-year-old.

We now have five feeders around our yard, including one just for hummingbirds. So far we've seen all the usual suspects (that's you, sparrows), but also a mourning dove, and MM swears she saw a red-winged blackbird. I think I will believe her out of hope.

Stay tuned to see what actually shows up at our feeders. For now, I'm going to check the mailbox for chimney swifts.

Westward ho!

The past few months we have been studying the founding of America and the colonial period. Now that we finished that unit with an awesome trip to Colonial Williamsburg, where V-Man attempted to join the militia, we are ready to expand westward in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark!

I confess that until recently I had little idea who Lewis and Clark were. That happens a lot; either I had a really bad education or I daydreamed my way through school. Anyway, L & C were the guys selected in 1803 by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the country. After two years of traveling they found the Pacific... and gazed upon it with a wild surmise... nope, sorry, that was Balboa surveying Cuba, although Keats got it wrong on purpose -- the two-syllable Cortez worked better for that line.

(Don't have any idea what I'm talking about? I'll explain in another post. Or just read On First Looking into Chapman's Homer).

Finishing up our Colonial unit by making "quilts" for our journey west.

So, as introduction we've been reading A Prairie Dog for the President, which is a really cute story, and books about Sacajawea (I have momentarily subverted MM's fascination with Disney princesses and transferred her affection to Indian hero princesses). Sacajawea was the Indian gal who guided Lewis and Clark across the land.

Another area where my education has proved deficient is in our presidential history. The kids know all about George Washington, but then MM asked me who became president after GW returned to Mount Vernon.

Crickets.

Thank God for Google. In case you're wondering the same thing, it was the Federalist John Adams who took office in 1797, and then he was unseated by his political rival Thomas Jefferson in 1801. Want to hear a cool little trivial fact?

Both men died within hours on the same day -- July 4, 1826. Exactly fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. God bless America!

Here are some books we'll be using:  
Lewis and Clark for Kids: Their Journey of Discovery with 21 Activities

A Picture Book of Lewis and Clark

Lewis and Clark (In Their Own Words)

Bluebird, bluebird

A few weeks ago on a beautiful Sunday afternoon the family headed out to a local park to build a bluebird nesting box. Bluebirds are cavity nesters, and with the rapid development of land and the disappearance of their natural habitat, their numbers have been declining. These special boxes give them a safe, dry place to build their nests.

So we built the box, and we took it home and mounted it on a stake just like the directions instructed. We even bought a piece of PVC pipe to put around the bottom to keep snakes and other predators away.


Then we waited. That same week we saw two sets of bluebirds cavorting around the yard. We bought a book of bird calls and learned to identify bluebirds by their song. The kids did a lapbook on bluebirds.We participated in the Great Backyard Bird Count. One afternoon V-Man and I sat in a neighbor's driveway and watched the bluebirds fly in and out of the nesting box, and MM made a trail of grapes from the trees to the nesting house for the bluebirds to find their way. Soon, we thought, we'd have little baby bluebirds.

Fast-forward to this morning. The box is constructed so that one side flips open for you to keep an eye on nest-building. We tiptoed up to the box, knocked softly on the side to warn away any birds inside, and flipped open the side. And guess what? We have -----

CHICKADEES. 

Apparently bluebirds use pine straw for their nests, and chickadees use moss. Oh well. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a bird is a bird is a bird.

Off to study chickadees.

IHC: Yogurt

You will need:

• a yogurt maker

• 1 quart of milk (if using skim, you'll also need 1/2 cup of dry milk powder)

• 1 cup of Greek yogurt

I think that all new parents go through a “quest for perfection” phase, especially when it comes to feeding their infant. Nothing impure will ever touch my baby's lips! So we reach for the organic strained peaches, the whole grain organic cereals, the gluten-free teething biscuits. For a while I made MM organic pureed millet, whatever that was.

It was during this food-saint phase that I happened to glance at the ingredient list for a six-ounce container of organic strawberry yogurt and saw that it contained 32 grams of sugar. Through a complicated system of converting grams to teaspoons of volume based on the actual food, I figured out that these 32 grams equaled 7.674 teaspoons of sugar. That's a heck of a lot of sugar, even if some of it comes from the fruit.

I know what you're thinking – can't we just go metric?

In my quest to abolish sugar from my baby's diet, I researched yogurt makers and lucked out when I stumbled upon the Cuisipro Donvier Electronic Yogurt Maker for $20 at a discount store. It has paid for itself a hundred times over; if you figure that a typical six-ounce yogurt costs 70 cents, and that to make your own eight jars costs one quart of milk plus a starter yogurt –-

I'd calculate it but V-Man took apart my calculator. Trust me, it's way cheaper.

Making yogurt is simple. The hardest part is the planning: This is a twelve-hour process, so don't start it at 3 p.m. unless you like getting up at 3 a.m. Take one quart of milk (that's two pints, or four cups, or 32 ounces, or 946.352952 milliliters). If you're using skim, add a half cup of dry milk powder to help thicken your yogurt. Heat this over LOW heat, stirring constantly. And if anyone manages to do this and NOT scald the bottom of their pan, please let me know. 

With any luck, your yogurt maker came with a dummy-proof thermometer that has lines saying things like “Add starter here” and “Hot enough! Stop!” If not, here are the temps: heat the milk to 185 degrees, then cool it in a separate bowl to 110 degrees. Little old women in Greece say that it's cool enough when they can dip their fingers in for 20 seconds. I am not a little old Greek woman, so I need my thermometer.

The cooling process should take about an hour; less if you use a cooling bath.

Then it's time to add the starter. This just means adding live cultures to your mix; i.e. yogurt. Take your cup of Greek yogurt and put at least half of it in a new bowl. Add to this a cup of your milk and whisk it so that the yogurt dissolves in the milk. Then add the rest of the milk and mix well. Transfer this to your yogurt jars. I find it works well to fill each jar halfway, then to go back around and add more mix. This way, any starter yogurt that has collected on the bottom will make it equally into all the cups.

We're missing one of the cups... it's probably in the sandbox.

Now you just set your timer  for 9-10 hours and wait... and wait. The longer it “cooks,” the thicker your yogurt will be. Still, don't expect your yogurt to be the consistency or the taste of the store-bought stuff, unless you're planning on adding sodium citrate, malic acid, cornstarch, gelatin and pectin. 

What you can add, to counteract the tartness, are a whole host of good things: jam, fresh berries, wheat germ, chopped nuts, vanilla flavoring... or, if you're out of the food-saint phase like I am, chocolate chips.

Sometimes I just like to say "Yes"

Because you get moments like this.
 

The Lord is my shepherd

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:

he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul:

he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

You know that story about the ducklings, the one where Mama Duck shepherds them safely into the water, all the while being kind and patient? Well, I have a confession: Sometimes I don't feel like a good Mama Duck. Sometimes I feel like the Mama Duck who snaps at her ducklings to hurry up, to quit dawdling and whining and would you please just tie your own shoes because we're late?

The Lord is my shepherd; here on earth, I am my children's. It is my calling not just to be patient and kind with them, but to teach them patience and kindness. Yet sometimes – often – I forget.

After one such moment of snappishness, MM snuck up behind me and placed her skinny arms around my waist and said, “Mommy, I love you, even when you're being a bad mommy.” Such simple forgiveness. I had not even asked for it; I was still too busy fuming. She saw the need for forgiveness, she saw what I needed and opened her little heart to me. She taught me, in that moment, the art of pure forgiveness.

The Lord is my shepherd, yes.

And sometimes, my children are my shepherd, too.

IHC: French bread

French bread: So easy a horse can do it.

What you will need: 
1 1/4 cups water at 110-120 degrees
1 1/2 tsps yeast
2 tsps sugar 

3 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp salt 
1 tbsp olive oil
various spices (oregano, rosemary, etc.)
dusting of cornmeal
1 egg
original recipe taken from www.allrecipes.com


Baking French bread is not hard. For years before Kroger started selling its $1 Take 'n Bake loaves little old ladies in France were rising at the crack of dawn to rustle up some dough and slide it into their wood-fired ovens. If they can do, we can do it with our KitchenAid Mixers and Viking ovens. Not that I have a Viking. My stove was a dented Sears discount. Anyway.

For this simple French bread recipe, you just need a few ingredients, as well as good planning skills. If you lack the latter, this recipe is pretty forgiving if you let the dough rise for an extra hour while you shuttle the kids to lacrosse practice. 

First things first: Heat up 1 1/4 cups water. This takes about 25 seconds in the microwave, and it should be between 110-120 degrees. Add 1 1/2 teaspoons yeast (the little packets are 2 1/4 teaspoons). Then, add two teaspoons of sugar and let it all sit for 10 minutes. Why add the sugar? This shows you whether or not the yeast is active (should become frothy and bubbly as it "eats" the sugar) or dead as a doornail.

Easier without paws.

In a separate mixing bowl, meanwhile, measure out two cups of flour, one teaspoon salt and whatever spices you want to use. Oregano and rosemary work well. Once the yeast has finished proofing, add one tablespoon olive oil (forgot about that, too) directly into the flour, then incorporate all the yeast mixture and mix well. You can use a KitchenAid mixer for this, but I find it's more trouble than it's worth. Too much cleaning. Slowly work in another 1 1/4 cups flour. At some point, take your rings off and mix by hand. You'll know you're done adding flour when the dough is no longer sticky.

Now it's time to knead. Why knead? Well, there's actually a scientific explanation. It helps form gluten strands and trap the carbon dioxide inside the dough. Then, when you bake it, the bread rises. If you didn't knead it, all the carbon dioxide would just escape through the top and you'd have a flat loaf. Do this for 8-10 minutes, pushing the bread down and folding it over again and again. 

Now comes the easy part. Put your ball of dough in a bowl lined with olive oil, cover it with a towel, and let it rise in a warm place for an hour or so, until it has doubled in size. If your bread isn't rising, try turning your oven to 200 degrees and putting it in there. Or, I've had success putting it on top of the running dryer. 

After an hour, pound it down and divide it into two halves. Take the first half and place it on a clean surface to roll it out. This is where a non-slip pastry mat comes in handy (or, as my kids call is, the magic carpet). Roll it out fairly thin (like, 1/8 inch) into a long narrow rectangle. Then, starting on a long side, roll it up and seal it at the seam. Do the same for the other.

Now you should have two identical snakes of dough. Take a baking pan and brush olive oil in two lines. Cover these with a dusting of cornmeal. Place your loaves on these, and let 'em rise. Should take another hour or so. 

I thought we were making oats.

All ready? Good. They should be puffed up nicely. Preheat your oven to 375. I've found that putting a pie plate or small bowl of water in the oven helps to keep the crust crispy. Use a knife to make four diagonal slits across their tops. Brush the loaves with egg. Bake for 20-25 minutes, and enjoy with some olive oil. 

Le Salon des Refusés

"Starry Night," by Vincent van Gogh, 1889

I love art. I really do. Most of it. But modern art I just don't get. To me, it's an Emperor's New Clothes type-of-thing; a critic deems it worthy and the rest of the art world jumps on the bandwagon. Oh yeah! Me too! I see that now! So much of it is subjective and relies on you accepting the artist's interpretation of reality - but what's wrong with "real" reality? Like Keats said,

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

My husband and a bundle of  twigs... I mean, modern art.

A few weeks ago my husband and I had dinner at the art museum restaurant. Along the wall behind him was a massive canvas of what appeared to be twigs curled into swirls. Like my husband described it after a few glasses of wine, it looked like crows would fly out if you fired a shotgun into it.



According to our server, this is a famous piece by some famous guy and is an interpretation of Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night." What, you didn't get that? And it's not just bundles of dry twigs -- it's carefully arranged dried maple saplings (that look ready to ignite at the slightest spark).

At which point my husband asked the server if he could smoke.

In honor of this piece, I asked mes artistes en residence to create their own interpretations of "Starry Night." After ascertaining they had no idea what "interpretation" meant, here's what I got:

By Squirette, age 5. Memorable because this is her first work that does not contain a princess and/or a ballerina.

By Vesuvius, age 3. "Starry Rocketship." Most of what he "interprets" involves rocketships. 

The baby was banned from participating in this interpretative experiment because all he did was chew on crayons and spit the wax slivers onto his high chair tray. Which looked, now that I think about it, kind of like modern art.

Educational tidbit for the day: Le Salon des Refusés
Back in 1863, a bunch of revolutionary artists in Paris shrugged off the classically-accepted ideas of art. They were the laughingstock of the art critic bunch, who unanimously said nothing would ever come of these guys. They were right, of course; we know nothing today of Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro or James Whistler. When the Paris Salon, a juried art exhibition, refused to show anything but pieces that adhered to the classic forms, the emperor ruled that rejected artists could show their work next door. That exhibition became known as "le Salon des Refusés" - literally, the Salon of Rejects. 

Favorite art books:
The Private Lives of the Impressionists, by Sue Roe
Lust for Life, by Irving Stone. An eye-opening view of a tormented genius. You'll never look at van Gogh's Sunflowers the same way.
The Annotated Mona Lisa, by Carol Strickland
For fiction, Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland is an interesting account of Auguste Renoir as he creates one of his masterpieces

For the wee ones:
Any of the board book artist series by Julie Merberg and Susanne Bober, like this one
The Laurence Anholt series. He has books on van Gogh, Degas, Matisse, Monet, Picasso, da Vinci, and Cezanne
The "Come Look with Me" series by Gladys Blizzard

Of Redcoats and butterflies

Marching in the militia

We figured we had wreaked enough havoc around our usual stomping grounds, so we departed for an educational field trip to Colonial Williamsburg (CW Homeschool Days = Really Cheap Tickets). We'd been studying the founding of our country, so the kids knew all about George Washington, candle-making and the fact that the colonists used chamber pots. CW, then, was the perfect cap to this unit. Plus, it was cheaper than Disney (where Pocahontas has dual citizenship... very confusing to a five-year-old. "If Pocahontas is dead, how is she in Disney?").

The four-hour drive was easy (thanks to copious amounts of unhealthy snacks and a portable DVD player). Once we arrived, Duke of Gloucester Street was full of moms and dads with approximately 7.2 children each, all in colonial costume. So, wanting our children to fit in with the other nerds, one of our first stops was to buy a colonial bonnet for MM. She wore it to bed that night, too, and wore it so much that we stopped noticing she had it on... until several strange glances at rest stops on the way home ("She's Amish! Stop staring!").

Modern discipline was no longer working

Then, since every good little colonial boy needs a gun, we bought one for V-Man. Not just a wimpy little pistol, either. A rifle (or musket, I still don't know the difference) as big as he is. He promptly picked off a family of Japanese tourists (Welcome to America, folks!), at which point Daddy had a little talk with him about only shooting redcoats. And who should walk by right then but a preschool teacher herding a militia of three-year-olds... and wearing a bright red coat. "Bang! You dead, redcoat lady."

We'll be getting him an NRA membership for his birthday.

We had dinner at the Kings Arms tavern both nights, where none of the kids would try the "game pye" -- venison, rabbit and a few other small furry creatures. In fact, later on at Jamestown, the little boy who had no trouble aimng at anything that moved grew gravely concerned at the Indian campsite where there was an overload of hanging animal skins, asking every Indian he could find, "Do you hurt butterflies?"

At Jamestown where it all began

Indians definitely do not wear butterfly skins, by the way.

Also at Jamestown was the rebuilt ship Susan Constant, which the first colonists arrived on from England. I do feel the need to point out, after a day of indoctrination, that the Jamestown settlers beat the Plymouth Rock Pilgrims by some thirty years. And their life was ROUGH. They arrived during the worst drought in 700 years, and even the Indians were hurting on the food front, so they were hardly interested in trading food with the settlers. Of the 100-some original settlers, only 38 were left by spring, most having died from starvation. They even ate their horses and dogs (but not any butterflies).

Someday this photo will embarrass him.

We also -- this is one of those actions that will quickly inspire us to ask ourselves, "What we were thinking?" -- bought the kids a drum and a tin whistle. One of the trip's highlights was the Friday night drum & fife parade through Colonial Williamsburg, where all the redcoat soldiers marched in formation to the armory and then fired muskets and a cannon. Our little soldier was right there with them, tapping his drumsticks and asking, "Are they redcoats? Should I shoot them?" And MM, terrified though she was of the cannon, stayed right up front and watched. Bravery on all fronts.


Ask MM, though, and she'll tell you her favorite part was the horse-drawn carriage ride through town. That was very cool; we were transformed from part of the plebeian masses into the landed gentry elite. Perhaps that was our fifteen minutes of fame.  

We're home now, and everyone is back in their own beds, and V-Man has his gun and tri-corner hat in a very special place but takes them out every few minutes to hunt for redcoats (Note to son: The dog is NOT a redcoat). I woke up around 5 a.m. to his tinny little voice calling out in his sleep, "Mommy? I have a question. Do I need to shoot the redcoats?"

Yes, son, you do. But not the butterflies.