Meredith has been really interested in dinosaurs lately. We’re going to Calgary at the end of the summer for my sister’s wedding, and so we thought we’d go to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller while we’re there. Looking around the site at all the cool programs and camps they have really got me thinking about the future and unschooling in general. They have high school credit courses, where you learn biology, geology, physics, and chemistry specifically as they apply to palaeontology. There are summer camps for kids and families, guided walks, distance learning courses, and tons more. If either one of my kids were ever potentially interested in palaeontology in the future, that one spot has tons of resources we can turn to for learning and, with a little planning and some travel, some hands-on experience. What a cool way to learn about science by doing something you’re interested in anyway!
It really got me thinking, that likely no matter what my kids are interested in, we can find resources to help them really experience and learn about their interests. It really does make me wonder why some people still think public school is necessary. I’m not trying to start a debate about public vs home school, that’s been done many times, but more to comment on how easy it is for kids to learn anything they need to know just by doing things they love to do.
I remember in grade 11, I adored genetics. To me, it was the coolest part of school. I looked forward to my biology classes when we were doing the genetics unit. We did one unit in Bio 11 and one in Bio 12 (I did both courses in grade 11), and I couldn’t get enough. (And, though I got really good grades, I wasn’t a good student by most people’s definitions. I skipped a lot of school and procrastinated until the last minute on most of my homework. But I never skipped bio.) I read the textbook during lunch periods, and even asked my teacher if there were other things I could do or read to learn more about it. He told me I’d have to wait until university. And that was basically the end of that. By the time I got to university, my interest had waned somewhat. I would have had to take a bunch of prerequisite courses that weren’t even relevant to genetics before I could begin to take the actual genetics courses. I never did get to them. I had no support or help in pursuing my interest outside of school, even though at the time I thought the best job in the world would be to be some sort of geneticist or gene researcher or… But alas, I had school work to do and as far as my parents and teachers were concerned, that was far more important than my interest in genetics. I wonder sometimes how far I would have taken that interest had I had the time and resources to pursue it further.
Kris and I were talking recently about how we think it’s good for the kids to see us pursuing our own interests too. I want to take a class that’s held locally about local herbs and plants and in the end you end up with your own herbal tea made completely from local plants. He’s thinking of taking some drawing courses. I’d love to do photography and guitar lessons in the future. I believe it’s important for our kids to see that learning happens all the time, and at any age, and that any interest is worth pursuing, even if the only real point is that it’s something you enjoy.
I can’t afford photography or guitar lessons right now, so I’m teaching myself both. Photography by taking lots of pictures and practicing on friend’s children, guitar lessons through books and online courses. I want to learn cello in the future, and one day we’ll have a piano again and I’ll likely play almost every day. I hope to play flute and/or piccolo in an orchestra or band again. Kris sometimes goes for walks just to sit somewhere quiet and draw. I think it’s great for Meredith and Fiona to see us doing things just for our own pleasure.
I have to be honest, I’m really looking forward to a few years in the future when my kids really start having these separate interests and hobbies and wanting to learn about new things. I think it will be really interesting for all of us to find resources: courses, people, games, books, movies… Basically whatever we need is likely out there. And I love that my kids won’t be restricted to learning only what someone else feels it’s necessary they should learn, or feeling they don’t have time to do what they want because of school and homework.
I finally got brave enough to watch Fiona’s birth video, and I’m glad I did. It gave me a better idea of some of the timeline (like, for instance, I actually only pushed for about 5 minutes this time around!) and made me realize that I wasn’t as loud as I thought, except right at the very end. I spent a lot of the time chatting with the midwives and Kris and was surprisingly “with it”, considering how I felt at the time.
I spent most of today editing a video. Originally it was supposed to be a pregnancy, birth, and beyond video, set to music with no dialogue. But it got long and I liked a lot of the dialogue, so this is just a birth video. I might change the first dialogue box eventually. The midwives didn’t actually show up until about 10:20, and the first clip of the video is only about 25 minutes before the baby comes, just to give an idea of how quickly it went. I’m going to work on another one that would be more along my original idea too, and will be a little more censored. This particular one has nudity, yelling, etc. Watch at your own risk.
(You need a browser that supports html5 to see this. So basically not Internet Explorer.)
This is adapted from this recipe, and was absolutely perfect with some fresh local strawberries and spinach straight out of the garden. This is how I made it.
1 tablespoon poppy seeds
< 1/4 cup white sugar
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1/4 teaspoon paprika
1/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon minced pearl onion
10 ounces fresh spinach – rinsed, dried and torn into bite-size pieces
1 quart strawberries – cleaned, hulled and sliced
2 kiwi – peeled and sliced
1/4 cup slivered raw almonds
In a medium bowl, whisk together the poppy seeds, sugar, olive oil, vinegar, paprika, Worcestershire sauce and onion. Cover, and chill for one hour.
In a large bowl, combine the spinach, fruit, and almonds. Pour dressing over salad, and toss. Refrigerate 10 to 15 minutes before serving.
I recently came across the Food Renegade blog when a friend sent me the link to the book she wrote thinking I might be interested in it (I was, in fact when she comes out with her one for kids I may get one or both of them). I really love the blog. She seems to feel very similarly to be about diet and nutrition, but she’s a better writer and has been much more successful at actually putting it into action. My goal is to eventually eat that way, but I could make a million excuses why we don’t yet. (My own willpower is one of the biggest ones!)
I do feel very good about the changes we have made already. Compared to when I first moved away from home and was living with my best friend (we had Hamburger Helper several times a week), or when I first moved in with Kris and was so broke one day literally the only food in our cupboards was one bag of (white) spaghetti (we thought buying processed foods was cheaper than eating whole foods at the time), we have improved immensely. The majority of our foods are cooked from scratch including making our own broths, our pasta is organic rice pasta, we’re growing our own veggies and bake most of our own breads, last month we went in with some friends on a side of pasture-raised beef (and plan to continue buying that beef as well as free-range chickens from now on), and so on. Most of the canned food and soup in my cupboard has been there for years, bought with intentions to use it, then easier or healthier homemade versions were discovered and the cans have sat there unused. They need to be donated or thrown out.
There are some things I’d like to still change that would be easy to change. For a while I’d stopped buying white sugar completely and was only using sucanat, but I have started buying white sugar again. I’d like to go back to using sucanat for most things again though. I also want to use more whole grain flour in my baking. I find it very dense though, and don’t like the texture, so still mix it in usually with about half white flour. A friend gave me some tips for using whole grain flours that I’m going to try.
I also don’t know much (if anything) about fermenting foods. We use Tamari instead of soy sauce, but I don’t even like pickles. I want to learn more about it as a method of preserving foods though, especially since we will hopefully have lots of food to preserve at the end of the garden season this year.
I have a huge sweet tooth. I love chocolate, and though (generally) I bake my own brownies and cookies and muffins, they’re still sugary and carby. I love fruit and in the summer I will eat berries when I have a craving for something sweet. I recently made this chocolate pudding and it was so delicious and incredibly easy. We haven’t had pudding in ages because I couldn’t bring myself to buy those packages, but I assumed making it would be difficult (and full of dairy). More and more, I’m starting to find relatively healthy, dairy-free versions of all my favorite snacks and treats.
One of our biggest obstacles to eating well (and especially since Kris and Meredith are both allergic to dairy and I definitely have lactose intolerance) is going out. It’s easy to keep dairy out of the house, but I can’t stop other people from eating it. I don’t mean going to restaurants, that’s actually fairly easy, I mean going to other people’s houses or just being out with friends. Also, many dairy alternatives contain soy instead, which we also try to avoid. Meredith wouldn’t understand why all the other kids at a birthday party (for instance) are eating cupcakes and she can’t have one. I also don’t want to avoid going to friend’s birthday parties. We do talk to Meredith about food, and about how dairy makes her feel. I don’t want to force her to eat (or not eat) certain foods, as I think (from experience!) that that can cause some food issues in the future. More and more often, all she needs are gentle reminders about how certain foods might make her feel later and she will make different choices. But with other kids eating the food she wants, it’s harder. Currently, I feel good enough about most of our food choices most of the time that I’m okay with her occasionally eating that kind of thing though.
With the dairy thing, eventually I want to try raw milk. A friend let us try a bit of the raw milk she gets. Meredith saw it and proceeded to drink two or three cupfuls in one sitting, and then was peeing every 15-20 minutes for the rest of the evening. At least she liked it. We’re going to wait until we’ve been good and been off dairy completely for a few weeks, and then try again but not letting her have so much at once, or perhaps starting by making our own yogurt or butter instead of drinking the straight milk at first.
As you can see, the Food Renegade blog really got me thinking about our diet and the way we eat again. She hosts a blog carnival called Fight Back Fridays, and I think I’m going to try and join in every week. Click the link for more information. I’m hoping by reading the other blogs that join in I’ll learn a thing or two, and that writing my thoughts or sharing recipes every week will help keep me motivated. I’ve only been to one of the blogs that has joined in so far this week, and already learned an awesome tip for making dairy-free whipping cream. I can’t wait to try it! Whipping cream is one thing that I really miss.
Fiona is already over three months old. Unbelievable! She’s growing so fast and definitely not my tiny, squishy newborn any more. Now she’s my tiny, squishy baby. She’s very chatty, much more so than I remember Meredith being, though it’s hard to remember so long ago. She’s starting to be able to roll over fairly consistently on soft, flat surfaces, and occasionally on hard surfaces as well. She can sometimes balance a little bit to sit unassisted for very short periods too. She reaches for things and will play with toys. She already seems to adore Meredith, and smiles and reaches for her. Unfortunately, often she ends up with a hand full of hair. So far Meredith has been really understanding, and will normally just tell her “No grab my hair, Nona!” and pull her hair out. (Meredith calls her Nona or Nenona or sometimes Kiona. She can’t pronounce “f” yet.)
Meredith still seems to be doing well with Fiona, though she is going through a bit of a difficult (for us) phase right now. She seems to be much more sensitive to things like being hungry or tired, and as a result has a lot more tantrums. (I don’t love the word tantrums because it has such bad connotations, but I’m not sure how else to describe them in a way that’s obvious what I mean. I feel very similar to this author about tantrums and what causes them though.) And now when she has tantrums, she will often scream when we’re trying to talk to her or help her, and if we come near sometimes she will hit at us (though she hasn’t actually hit us yet) and scream at us to go away. It makes it especially difficult, because often when she’s really upset, all I want to do is hold her in my arms. Once she’s feeling better, she will usually let me hold her and I try to talk with her about how she’s feeling and why she’s feeling that way. Thankfully, so far she hasn’t taken any anger out on Fiona or the animals, though if Sorcha or Sebastian come over to see what’s wrong sometimes she will tell them to go away too. She hasn’t yelled at the kitten at all yet. These more intense tantrums are a pretty new development just in the last couple of weeks. We try and explain to her that it’s hard to help her when she’s screaming and we don’t know what she wants, and I’m hoping this phase is short-lived.
I’ve discovered too just in the past couple of days, that if we go out earlier and get home before 2 or 3, she seems to do a lot better. If we’re out around 2:30, she will often start getting upset over things that normally wouldn’t upset her, and is often inconsolable. If we’re home, that’s the time that she wants to do something quiet, like reading a book, cuddling and watching a movie, or even just playing alone in her sand box. So I’m going to make an effort to do things earlier in the day so that we can be home and have some quiet time in the afternoon.
Of course, most of the time, she’s still very sweet and I just love watching her imagination starting to take off (she’s making me all sorts of different foods and juices in her play kitchen as I type this ) and continuing to discover the world and learn and grow. We recently repeated the toddler science experiment we did last spring, and it was once again a big hit with the kids.
A lot of people tell me how much Fiona looks like Meredith. I don’t really see it. To me, Meredith looks more like Kris and Fiona looks more like me. But I’m bad at seeing those things anyway. I found a picture of Meredith around the same age Fiona is now. Fiona definitely has more hair. I thought Meredith had a lot too but hers was lighter so not as noticeable, but looking at the pictures there’s a difference in the amount too.
Fiona around 3 months
Meredith around 3 months
Lastly, our kitten is really awesome and I think he was a really good choice for us. He’s fun and friendly and loves to come cuddle on our laps. Meredith can be a little too much for him sometimes, but then five minutes later he will be following her around looking for attention. I hope he stays so friendly and social as he grows.
I have lots more to write about and some things bouncing around my head I’d like to say. We’ll see if I actually get to them or not. I’d like to start posting more regularly again. I see this blog as somewhat of a journal for myself to look back on. I want to be able to come and have a timeline of when we did things, and what’s going on in our lives at any given time. But I don’t want to spend so much time on the computer that I miss my girls’ real lives either.
My mom made me a little cookbook with all my favorite recipes when I moved away from home. The other day Meredith had it out and was looking at it, and she brought it over to me opened to the recipe for Nanaimo Bars. Of course, then I couldn’t get them out of my head, so yesterday we picked up a few ingredients and made them. This is my version of the original recipe, modified to be dairy- and soy-free. They could easily be gluten-free as well if you found gluten-free graham crackers. I think next time I might try them with a little less sugar in the middle, as I find them to be overly sweet there, but otherwise they turned out great! The original recipe has crushed almonds in the bottom layer, which I think I will try next time.
Bottom Layer
1/2 cup coconut oil
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup cocoa
1 egg
2 cups dairy-free graham cracker crumbs
1 cup coconut
Combine oil, sugar, and cocoa in a double boiler. Cook over simmering water until oil melts. Lightly beat the egg, then stir in and cook until thickened, about 3 minutes. Remove from heat and blend in cracker crumbs and coconut. Press into an 8×8 or 9×9 pan.
Filling
1/2 cup coconut oil
3 Tbsp rice milk
2 cups icing sugar
1 package of dairy-free vanilla pudding or pie mix (one day maybe I will experiment with making this part completely from scratch)
Beat until fluffy and spread over the bottom layer.
Top Layer
300g or 1 cup or 6 oz of chocolate chips or baker’s chocolate (dairy-free, of course)
2 Tbsp coconut oil
Melt together over a double boiler. Cool slightly and spread over filling.
Chill in the refrigerator, though I found it easiest to take it out of the fridge for about a half hour before cutting it into squares. Enjoy!
Kris took Meredith to see Shrek 4 in theatres today, so I got a bit of time by myself. Fiona ended up falling asleep in one arm, so I decided to just take advantage and relax and ended up starting her baby book. I’ve decided to do hers completely digitally. There are a few things still that need to be changed or tweaked (for example, I apparently don’t have the non-watermarked versions of the professional pictures on my computer so I’ll need to get my disk and switch out those pictures), but overall I’m pretty happy with them so far. The shadows look very pronounced for some reason in the web versions, they will be much more subtle when printed. Click on the pictures to see them bigger.
I may use this picture instead (though in a sepia tone, not stark black and white, I just have to get it off the disk):
Then here is the next page. I may switch around the order of some of the pictures, but otherwise I’m pretty happy with it.
I haven’t left room for margins. I won’t be printing them as a book, I’ll have individual 12×12 pages printed and then put them in an album that way, I just like how that looks better for some reason. I’ve heard that way a lot less ends up cropped off the edges, so I hope that’s true. I’m trying to find some place that would let me print out one or two as samples to check, but with shipping it often ends up being pretty expensive to just print out one or two pages. I guess it would be cheaper than printing out an entire album and discovering I don’t like something about it though!
The next page will be all the professional pregnancy pictures we had done, and then I’ll work on the labour and delivery page. I still haven’t finished Meredith’s scrapbook either, but hers is all paper scrapbooking and it’s so much harder to just spend 20 minutes at a time working on it because I have to get everything out and then put it away again. I have a big 6 foot craft table upstairs now though that has all my sewing stuff on it. I think I may clear off the sewing stuff and use it to try to finish Meredith’s book (and, uh, my wedding album lol).
I am very fortunate in that I live about 5 or 10 minutes away from a really cool work-at-home mom who makes and sells EC-friendly baby supplies, as well as other items for natural family living. Deirdre runs Continuum Family, and though I live very close, I know she ships all over. We got one of the little potties from her before Fiona was born, and I highly recommend them to anyone who is planning to EC. We didn’t have one with Meredith, but having a little potty that fits on our laps and I can nurse easily with is so handy. Definitely check out her shop. I love to support work-at-home moms and the fact that I’ve met her and she’s so sweet is a huge bonus for me!
She’s having a giveaway for a brand new Beco right now. Check out her blog for how to enter. We have a mei tei and a Beco already, and I don’t know how I could live without them. I have used one or the other daily since Meredith was born. I prefer the mei tei on the front, though I’d love to try the new Beco and see how it is on the front. The Beco is really easy and comfortable on the back though.
Otherwise known as Cricket, at least right now. Yep, we got a new kitten. Sort of on impulse, though it’s actually something we’ve discussed off and on for years.
Meredith loves little animals, and last summer we had thought of getting a kitten. We got a new dog instead, and then I got pregnant, and the kitten idea sort of fell away. Then this year it came up again. We discussed various options: Did we want an adult or a kitten? Where should we get it from? How could we best make sure it would fit into a household with two kids and a dog and cat already?
I looked on a few rescue sites and contacted a few rescues. We went to a local pet store that adopts out animals for the SPCA and there was a sweet, adult black cat there. Kris and I both have a soft spot for black cats, since Sebastian is such a sweetheart but was in foster care for 8 months even though he was a kitten. It’s hard to find homes for black cats. But this particular black cat was super sweet, and then scratched Meredith with very little provocation. I think it made us a bit cautious. It’s so hard to know what a cat is actually like in an environment like that, but we really don’t want a cat that will quickly move to scratching or biting.
For years now, I’ve wanted a Ragdoll cat. But it seemed a bit silly to get a purebred cat when there are so many cats and kittens out there waiting to be adopted. But it suddenly didn’t seem so silly anymore. Ragdolls are known for their wonderful, social personalities. With a busy household and a friendly, social cat already, we really wanted a cat who would be adaptable to noise and not be constantly wanting to hide. We did look in the classified ads at some kittens, but in the end I decided my standards for a cat were the same as they were when we were looking at dogs: either a rescue from foster care (or potentially the SPCA, but you get a much better picture of what an animal is really like from a foster home), or a purebred from a good breeder.
I had actually contacted a Ragdoll breeder who had an adult female Ragdoll available who she had decided not to breed after all. I’d kind of wanted a male (they are supposed to be friendlier, more adaptable, and more social), but we figured we’d at least meet the female. I also contacted another Ragdoll breeder who I’ve talked to before. She has a male on her site who I am absolutely in love with.
When I contacted her, I asked if she had any adult cats available, and as a bit of an aside I also asked if she had any kittens that might grow to look like him. We were still sort of thinking a kitten might be better because we could adjust him or her to our family right from day one.
She emailed me back and told me that she actually had a male kitten who she had been planning to keep as a breeding cat who is half-brother to the cat above and who she thought would look very similar. He ended up developing a black marking on his leg that would disqualify him from showing. She had just decided that very same day that she would have to sell him as a pet kitten instead. So long story short(er), he is now ours.
Meredith wanted to call him Happy Birthday Cake at first, but we all seem to have settled on Cricket. His dad’s name starts with C and his mom’s name is Lady Bug, so it fits. He is a sweetheart. The first evening we brought him home he started coming to us when we went into the room we are keeping him in. He sleeps at night with us and loves to cuddle and purrs all night long. He’s a little cautious around Meredith still, but he will generally run over to her and rub against her legs, purring the whole time, as long as she doesn’t move too quickly.
He loves Fiona. I think he thinks she’s another baby kitten or something. If I put her down in his little room he will go over to her and curl up with her or rub himself against her. At night he likes to curl up right next to her. She is still a bit flaily and will grab at him or kick him and he doesn’t seem to mind at all. In fact, I think he thinks she’s trying to play with him.
We’ve only had him three days, but he seems to be adjusting very quickly. We’ve let him loose a bit the last few evenings and he really wants to explore more. He’s fearless about Sorcha and loves to bat her ears and tail. She is tolerant, and I think really wants to play. She can be quite rough when she’s playing though and I don’t think I will trust them unsupervised together until the kitten is much sturdier and faster. She’s showing zero signs of aggression though and is listening quite well when I ask her to down or leave him.
Sebastian is a very laid-back and friendly kitty, but he seems a bit put off having a kitten in the house. When the kitten has been downstairs he usually goes to another room. He’s hissed a few times, but we’ve been giving him lots of attention and treats and I think he’ll be fine in a few days. We’re taking their introduction really slowly though, as we want it to be as positive as possible for both of them.
I can’t remember if I posted this, but a little while ago Meredith became very interested in the ABC games on the Starfall website. Just through playing those, she started to learn letters and could recognize some letters when we saw them in other situations. For Christmas, she had got some alphabet cards which I had put up on her wall and she loved to go into her room in the morning and look at the cards and name the letters and the different animals and objects that start with each letter. One of her favorite books is a book about cats and she even recognized the word cat (from it being written over and over!) and was able to type it out to Kris on her own from memory.
Then, she seemed to lose all her interest in letters. We follow her lead, so we didn’t push it and didn’t worry. She still would occasionally play the game, but mostly went to other games instead if she was on the computer. She stopped pointing out all the letters we passed and didn’t show any interest in talking about them.
Suddenly today she was playing Starfall again, and at the end of some of the games are matching games, like Memory. She clicked on a card that had a picture of an octopus and said “Where’s the o Mama?”. It’s the first time she has played that game in weeks, and previously she’d had trouble with the matching games. She ended up turning over the z card instead, and then the next card was a zipper. She immediately said “Oh, that’s the z”, and re-turned over the z card. The next card was a carton of eggs and she mused to herself “E for egg”. It was pretty amazing, considering how long it’s been since she’s played these games, and that last time she played them she didn’t (to my knowledge) automatically know what letter each picture started with. It’s so cool how their learning works if they’re left to learn on their own time and in their own way. She was also recently playing a different game that showed pictures and the words to go with it, and she turned to me and said “Mama, c-o-o-k-i-e means cookie”. She was reading the letters as she said it, but I found it really cool that she is starting to recognize that the letters actually can be associated with particular objects!
In other news, she is still sleeping in her own bed every night, by her own request, and staying there until it’s too light in the morning for her to fall back asleep, then coming into our room. (Though she often nurses once in the night too in her room.) We’re going to have to get her a black out blind for that room I think.
) and continuing to discover the world and learn and grow. We recently repeated the 
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