Quotes "You can't give what you don't have," some people say, and if you want your children to give generosity and kindness and patience to others, you should give them so much they're overflowing with it.
-Sandra Dodd
It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
-John Taylor Gatto
The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
-Albert Einstein
We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.
-Stacia Tauscher
You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play, and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again.
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 1762
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We just tried this for the first time last night. It was so quick and easy and the house smelled delicious while it was baking! The original recipe is from Sandi Richard’s Cooking for the Rushed: Healthy Family cookbook. As an added bonus, any leftover potatoes make for delicious hash browns the next morning.
- 1/2 cup unsweetened orange juice
- 2 tablespoons brown sugar (I used the full amounts of sugar and honey but would probably reduce them each by about half next time)
- 2 tablespoons liquid honey
- 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
- 10 to 12 boneless, skinless chicken thighs (800g)
- 2 teaspoons curry powder
- 1 teaspoon pepper
- 1 teaspoon seasoning (the recipe called for a specific brand but I just threw on what I thought would taste good)
- 1 cup corn flake crumbs (we used bread crumbs)
- 20 to 24 baby potatoes (or 4 large potatoes cut)
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
Combine orange juice, brown sugar, honey and mustard in small bowl. Stir. Place thighs (unravelled) in a large shallow oven proof pan. Squish them together. Spoon all the sauce evenly over chicken pieces. Sprinkle with spices and corn flake/bread crumbs in that order. Bake in oven for 50 minutes.
Slice potatoes into bite size chunks and add to a different oven-safe pan. Drizzle with olive oil and toss until well coated. Sprinkle with spice. Place in oven beside chicken. When timer rings for chicken all is ready.
This was delicious and really easy and quick. The salmon came out nice and moist and perfectly cooked.
- 1lb salmon filet
- mushrooms (optional, original recipe didn’t call for these but we thought it would be good)
- 1 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
- 1 Tbsp worcestershire sauce
- 1 Tbsp lemon juice
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp prepared mustard
- 1/8 tsp black pepper
- 1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted (we used olive oil and we didn’t use this much)
- 1/4 tsp paprika (optional)
- 1/2 tsp dried parsley (optional)
Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.
Arrange filets in a shallow baking dish and add mushrooms over top of them. Mix together the remaining ingredients and pour half over the fish.
Bake 20 minutes, basting with the remaining sauce throughout. When done, sprinkle with paprika and chopped parsley, if desired.
Unfortunately, it seems that Meredith has definitely inherited Kris’ milk allergy (he has a true allergy, not an intolerance). She went five or six months almost 100% potty trained, though she would occasionally have a few days in a row with a lot of accidents. Then a couple of months ago I connected the dots: she peed five times in two hours (and didn’t make it to the toilet any of those times), when often she can go six or seven hours without having to pee at all. The night before Kris had bought a litre of milk (which we rarely buy) and she had drank most of it herself in less than 24 hours. We already didn’t eat much dairy anyway (mostly just butter and yogurt and the occasional box of Annie’s pasta, which is what Kris had bought the milk for that weekend), but we decided to cut back all the way. That week, the accidents dropped to pretty much none. Then we went to a birthday party and she wet the bed that night (which is extremely rare for her). Over Christmas was a hard time to be dairy free, especially for a kid who is used to having dairy pretty much whenever. Her favorite candy used to be Smarties, but she is adjusting to alternatives and we offer things like the fruit-juice flavoured gummies and she’s pretty open to those instead. We stopped buying any new dairy to bring into the house, and tried to minimize it while out. I think she must have adjusted to just the small amounts we were having prior to confirming the allergy, because after we stopped buying it altogether, she started having accidents with even small amounts of it. It’s been a bit of an adjustment for all of us, especially since we also try to minimize soy and that’s what most alternatives are made from. I discovered this past week that our local health food store has coconut milk ice cream (and possibly yogurt too), so I’m going to try some! Now that Christmas is over it’s been a lot easier to be dairy free and she seems to have gained back a lot of the control that it felt like she’d lost for a while.
I think a lot of people don’t realize just how much a seemingly-mild allergy can really affect a person. For Meredith, besides far fewer accidents and the bed wetting, other symptoms she had while we were eating dairy that have disappeared or minimized (some of which I didn’t even think might be abnormal for her) are frequent night waking (and I do believe that for some kids it’s likely normal to wake up at night, and she still wakes once or twice most nights, but prior to discovering the allergy she was still waking up every two hours most nights), cradle cap, gagging when she cries (which again can be normal, but also is apparently a symptom of increased congestion and congestion is one of Kris’ main symptoms), etc. Kris’ tell-tale symptom is his eczema, which is pretty much gone now but while we were eating dairy it was quite bad.
One of the side effects of this is that we’ve had to become creative with our meal plans. Almost all of our dinners are completely from scratch, but many of them have dairy in them. Some of our favourites have been easy to find dairy-free and soy-free substitutes for (like Shepherd’s Pie); others have pretty much been taken off the list (like chicken burritos and meatball stroganoff, both of which have sour cream and the burritos have cheese too). So far rice milk hasn’t failed us in baking or cooking, and we’ve used coconut oil in place of butter with no problems (including one of my favourite cookie recipes). I make bread a few times a week and have been able to make the loaves completely dairy free. We’ve been trying out new recipes we haven’t tried before, and this week’s meal plan is actually mostly recipes we haven’t ever tried before. I’m excited to try them all out and add some more variety to our menu. Since we’re changing things up anyway, we also want to start eating one or two fish meals a week again (we have in the past but earlier in this pregnancy I had a huge aversion to most fish and we never really got back into eating it that often again, plus we’re picky about the fish we’ll eat), as well as one or two vegetarian meals a week (because they are often cheaper, and it will add more variety to our protein). I have a few recipes we’ve tried and liked that I want to save, and will post them over the next few days as I get a chance (as this is the place most of my favourite recipes end up getting saved to).
I’ve also had to completely rethink our meal plan for after the baby comes. Sometime in the next couple of weeks we are planning a cooking spree, and will be cooking a whole bunch of meals to freeze. Originally, I had things like lasagne, the aforementioned chicken burritos (they’d make great lunches), alfredo sauce, cream soups, etc. I have a recipe for yam and bean burritos I’m excited to try instead, and I’ve since made cream soups with rice milk. This means the baby will start off completely dairy-free as well. Meredith spat up and threw up a lot (but was pretty happy otherwise, as long as she was being held), but we attributed it to my extremely overactive let down. She gagged a lot while nursing too (again because of the let down). I wonder now though if some of it at least might have been attributable to dairy and I’m curious if this baby will spit up as much as she did.
It looks like while my domain was offline for the few days it was, a domain squatter somehow managed to snatch it up (even though our registrar is supposed to reserve domains for 30 days after they expire). Even though I’ve paid for it again now, it keeps getting redirected again to the squatting site. I’ve e-mailed my registrar and hopefully it will be resolved soon, but if you come visit and don’t see my site, that is why. Lesson learned: renew domains before they expire to avoid this hassle!
My poor ignored blog is back online. It was down for a few days because our domain expired and we had to wait to get paid before I could renew it.
I just noticed my ticker over on the right-hand side there says 55 days to go! Crazy, I can’t believe that’s all that’s left. Of course, it could be give or take 2 or 3 weeks on either side, but still. I went into labour with Meredith on her due date with no intervention, so I’m expecting it to be similar this time. I’m actually kind of hoping to go a bit later actually (though ask me how I feel about that idea in 55 days  ) because my mom’s birthday is early March and I’d rather the baby wasn’t born on or too near her birthday. (On the other hand, would having a baby on her 50th birthday exempt me from having to think of something else to get her? :p )
I was busy over the holidays painting. I didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped, because after I did the dining room/hallway I realized the colours I’d picked for the rest of the downstairs probably wouldn’t work. I was wanting to do green in the living room, mostly because Kris and I both really like green and I liked the pictures I’ve seen of green living rooms. We also want to hang artwork in the living room that was painted by Kris’ grandmother and it’s all very nature-ish: blues, greens, and browns. Anyway, we picked a colour that we thought would be a sort of light brownish red for the dining room and hallway. I painted a little sample on the wall and it ended up being much more orangey-salmony than we thought from the chip. I decided I liked it anyway and went ahead with it without thinking of how the colour would go with the green we’d picked out for the living room. I still really like the clay colour, but I don’t think the green fits. It’s too pastel-y or something, I don’t know. Maybe I’m thinking too much about it.
Here is what the room looks like now, with the Florentine Clay in the background. (Excuse the mess and all the samples painted all over the wall. You can tell the ones Meredith helped with. ) The cover on the futon on the right needs to change, it won’t be staying dark green. We’re thinking cream to match the loveseat, and then I want to make cushion covers for the cushions but the colour of those will depend on the colours we choose for the rooms.
So originally we’d planned on Green Tea for the living room (it’s the little square painted on the wall above the fish tank and below the yellow).
 
I like the two colours together, but I feel like they might be better off in a bedroom rather than a living area, you know? I can’t quite put my finger on why though. I also had a sample of Pollen Grains which we were thinking of maybe doing in the kitchen. I like the idea of a yellow living room but not sure if it would work with the artwork we want to put up and the curtains. Plus it might end up looking too Mexico or tropical or something with the Florentine Clay.
Then we were thinking maybe a darker, more olive-y green would work and not be as pastel-y. This one is Caraway:
We can’t go too dark since that room is so small, but I think the Caraway might work. Problem is, we don’t really have money to keep buying samples. I’m also thinking of just scrapping the idea of green in there altogether or repainting over the Florentine Clay. But with 55 days to go to baby and a few other projects to do (sewing, more decluttering and organizing, etc.), I’d rather not redo something I’ve already done. Anyway, if any one is out there reading my poor neglected blog and has any ideas or suggestions, I’d love to hear them. I think I’m going to paint our study (which comes off the living room) and the kitchen (off the dining room) the same colour, and likely just a lighter colour of whatever I choose for the living room, since both those rooms are very small.
I’m feeling more and more tired now. I guess though I’ve escaped most of the other pregnancy symptoms I haven’t managed to escape that one. I’m hoping to get all the painting and other projects done in the next month or so but I’m not going to beat myself up if I don’t. Then in February we’ll be making a bunch of meals to freeze for after the baby. Meredith is most definitely allergic to dairy so we’re trying to keep everything dairy-free, which messes up my original meal plan as I had things like lasagne and the like in there. But I just have to be more creative now.
Meredith has been sick the last week or so. She actually hasn’t been feeling too bad most days, but wakes up most nights coughing and having trouble going back to sleep. She also stopped eating for four or five days, which made me very grateful she still nurses as much as she does. It’s nice not to have to worry about dehydration or nutrition on top of everything else that comes with being sick. Unfortunately, she tends to wake up sometime between 2 and 4, and pregnancy insomnia means it’s very hard for me to get back to sleep. I’ve been running on 5 or 6 hours of sleep some nights, and I’m someone who can easily get 9 or 10 a night normally. Thankfully, I haven’t been sick at all. I seem to have avoided every bug Kris or Meredith have caught this pregnancy, save a minor one in September. I wonder if it’s the vitamin D I have been taking not so faithfully, or if my body just realizes I can’t afford to be sick right now lol.
Anyway, hope everyone had happy holidays and the New Year has started out great.
I just realized it’s been over a month since I last posted. There are so many ideas and posts floating around in my head and half finished as drafts, it surprises me a bit I haven’t published any of them. We have been busy though. My mom came out for a last minute visit and we painted Meredith’s room. With Christmas coming up, we’ve been busy baking and making our Christmas presents.
Pregnancy is still going so smoothly, I often forget I’m pregnant. I can’t believe I’m in the third trimester already. It’s night and day from last time, when I spent most of the pregnancy nauseous, puking, or with terrible heartburn. I have gotten a little bit of heartburn, but so far nothing major. I also spent a lot more time thinking about being pregnant last time, whereas this time I have a two year old to distract me and life goes on as normal. The baby does move a lot now though, and I definitely love that part. Meredith loves when the baby kicks her while she’s nursing, and will often pop off and talk about how the baby is going to nurse too on whichever breast she’s not on. (I find this really cute, because I’d never mentioned that the baby would need to nurse too. She figured it out on her own.) She’s also started bringing me little bits of food and putting it on my belly and telling me it’s for the baby. I’m really curious how much she’s really internalizing about me being pregnant. Obviously she at least partly gets it, if she’s figuring out things like that the baby will need to nurse. She loves to look at and hold other people’s babies and nurses/potties her own dolls. I guess we’ll see in a few months!
Her room is mostly finished now. She chose blue, and was pretty insistent from the first day I asked her what colour she wanted that it would be blue. Occasionally she would mention purple, but that was rare. I got some blue paint and some purple paint to try out in the room, and was doing the purple paint first and she said “No Mama! No purple. Blue room.” So, blue it was. I’m quite happy with the colours. There’s a little more that needs to be done in there, but it’s coming along. I want to either paint all the trim white, or replace the baseboards with white ones, but the white paint I have is oil-based which isn’t recommended for pregnancy. I have a good friend who’s offered to paint them as a Christmas present, but she’s really busy too so not sure if it will end up happening.
Meredith adores the room. She talks about it all the time and likes to go in and touch the walls. A couple of weeks ago she wanted to nurse in her bed and I wondered if she was going to fall asleep there. She didn’t, but I wonder what I would have done if she had. Likely brought her back into our bed with me. She still rarely sleeps through the night so I prefer her to be with me where it’s easy to just nurse or cuddle her back to sleep. Plus she still wakes up and looks for me, even if it’s just to wake up briefly to put her hand on me. If I’m not there she will wake up the whole way and call for me. I think I may start putting her down in her room for naps though if she seems interested.
Speaking of sleep, I’m pretty comfortable where we are at as far as night nursing. In the beginning of the pregnancy she always had to nurse back to sleep; sometimes it would take her 45 minutes or longer each time. I worried that with a newborn who would likely wake her up each time he/she woke up, both would want to be nursed back to sleep every single time. I really didn’t want to night wean her though. I opted to try for plain old honesty. When she is settling in for a long nursing session in the night and I am really tired or the nursing is uncomfortable or painful (which luckily for me hasn’t happened often), I will ask her to please keep it short this time and then we can cuddle instead. Most of the time, she’s quite happy to just have a quick nurse and then roll over and we’ll cuddle until she’s asleep. The times she nurses longer there’s almost always a reason, such as illness. Prior to pregnancy, she really had never fallen asleep on her own without nursing, now she does quite often. In fact there were a couple of nights where she didn’t ask to nurse at all, and just cuddled into me when she woke up. I think that was the few days my milk dried up and she wasn’t nursing much during the day either. Then my colostrum came in and she’s loving that lol. Back to nursing frequently during the day and usually at least two to three times overnight too.
Anyway, so much for this being a short update post. I do have more to post in the next little while, if I get a chance. I’m still reading lots of blogs. They’re in my RSS feed on my e-mail though and I haven’t commented much lately. But I’m really enjoying reading all the posts and seeing the Christmas baking and crafts being done, and hope to share some of our own holiday activities too.
One of Kris’ favorite meals when we go out to restaurants for lunch is beef dip, sometimes also called French dip. I’ve never attempted to make it before though. Our grocery store had roasts on for a really good price, and in the flyer next to the roasts was a big picture of beef dip. That got me motivated to give it a try. I forgot to take pictures as I went, but here is how I’ve gone about making it. I’ve adapted most of the recipes based on my own preferences or what we had on hand, so there’s no one recipe I used, though I did read through a few recipes/comments on allrecipes.com. This was also my first attempt at beef stock. I make chicken and turkey broth fairly frequently and we almost always have some in the house, but it is apparently a little bit of a different process for beef stock. (Though from the reading I did, beef broth can be made very similarly to the way most people make chicken and turkey broth and is a bit of a simpler process that doesn’t require roasting first.)
Beef Stock
Preheat the oven to 400F. Put about 6 pounds of beef bones on a roasting pan and roast until nice and brown, making sure to turn partway through. Keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t burn as that can make the stock taste bitter. Mine took about 25 minutes.
While they are roasting, coarsely chop the vegetables. I had a large onion, two carrots, two stalks of celery, garlic, and a tomato. You can put them in the oven with the bones, or caramalize them on the stove. I didn’t have room on my roasting pan for them so I chose to caramalize them. (Don’t use sugar for them though.) Basically, heat up a tablespoon of oil or butter on the stove top until it’s nice and hot, then add the vegetables, starting with onions and carrots, then once they are starting to turn brown throw in the tomato, and when everything is getting dark, the celery. Keep the heat fairly high and stir constantly.
I do have a compost, but I also keep a baggie in the freezer and put vegetable trimmings into it that I think would be good in stock: potato peels, the ends of carrots, older mushrooms, etc. So in addition to the veggies above, that baggie also got thrown in the crockpot. (I didn’t caramalize those though, they got tossed in frozen.)
Put everything in the crockpot along with a bay leaf, ten whole peppercorns, thyme, rosemary, and parsley, then cover completely with water. I started the crockpot on high until it was nice and hot, then reduced to low and left to simmer overnight. In the morning, I strained the stock into a bowl and put it in the refrigerator. Once cool, the fat settles at the top and can be spooned out fairly easily. I like to pour the stock into my muffin pan: each muffin cup is exactly half a cup. I freeze it in the muffin tray, then once frozen I take the stock out of the tray and put in a baggie or freezable container, separating the layers with wax paper. Then when recipes call for beef stock, I know each little patty is a half a cup and can use them in recipes accordingly. With chicken stock, it normally ends up strong enough that I will use half water and half the broth when recipes call for it; I have yet to see if my beef stock turned out that strong.
If you don’t have a deep freeze or need more freezer room, you can also take the lid off at the end and let the stock reduce a lot. Then rather than freezing in muffin tins, freeze in ice cube trays and save them like that. You’ll just need to add water as well when recipes call for stock.
Beef Dip
Trim a large roast and place in the crockpot.
In a bowl, add half a cup of soy sauce or tamari sauce, or a combination of soy sauce/tamari and worcestershire, depending on your preferences. Add a bay leaf, three whole peppercorns, garlic, and about a teaspoon each of rosemary and thyme. Pour this mixture over roast and fill with enough beef stock and water to almost cover the roast. Leave the crockpot on low for 8-12 hours.
I’ve read this tastes best if made ahead of time and put in the refrigerator to let the flavours meld a bit, so I left it overnight and put it in the refrigerator during the day. Then I just stuck it back in the crockpot and turned it on to heat it back up in the evening. Take the roast out and shred it with a fork and use the sauce for dipping. Extra sauce could be used as a base for French onion soup or something similar.
Crusty French Rolls
I made these in a breadmaker, so adjust the recipe accordingly if you do it by hand. Add 1 1/4 cups of water, 2 teaspoons sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, 3 1/2 cups bread flour (I actually used 1 cup whole grain flour and 2 1/2 cups bread flour, and would experiment with more whole grain in the future), and 1 1/4 teaspoons yeast to the breadmaker and turn on dough setting. When done, turn dough to a lightly floured surface and shape into nice roll shapes for sandwiches. Cover and let rise until doubled in size, about 30-45 minutes. Mix 1 egg with 1 tablespoon of water and brush over tops of bread. Bake at 375F for 25 minutes, brushing once partway through with glaze again if wanted. I actually under cook these just a tad, because we don’t like them to be too crispy. I do throw some water in the bottom of the oven at the beginning which will crisp up the outside a little bit though. If you like them crispy, you could also cut them open when they’re done cooking and broil the inside for a short time too.
For serving sizes, there are leftovers when it’s just the three of us. With another (hungry) adult around and only a small side, it was the perfect amount. It would probably be great for four adults too, with more sides. Any more than that and I would double the bread, though there is always lots of beef.
While the buns are in the oven, we sautéed some mushroom and onions to put in the sandwiches, and then topped it with a slice of Havarti cheese. These were absolutely perfect. Once you have beef stock, they’re also deceptively easy. The stock was probably the most time-consuming part of making them the first time. This is a recipe we will most definitely make again and again.
I’m switching up my blog a little bit and trying out a new theme. It’s mostly default right now, but I’m going to spend some time working on it in the next little while. Just a heads up that if you come in the next few days and it looks terrible, I’m probably right in the middle of changing or testing something and I’ll likely have it working again soonish.
Meredith and I were lying in bed together this morning and the baby was rolling and kicking quite vigorously. I asked Meredith if she wants to feel the baby and she nodded so I put her hand on my belly. It took a couple of tries, but eventually the baby did kick right where her hand was. She sort of gasped and pulled her hand off a bit, and I told her it was the baby kicking and saying hi. She smiled and waved at my belly and said “hi baby!”. I wonder how much she really understands. She knows what babies are; in fact she adores babies. She’s always pointing out babies everywhere we go, and she loves to touch my friend’s baby. She calls her doll her baby and will tuck her in and take her pee and nurse her. But I don’t think she gets that there is a real baby inside of me (I barely get that, and I’ve done it once before haha), and that in a few months it will be here to stay. But she does talk about (and to) the baby in Mama’s tummy (we try to tell her it’s in my uterus, but she’s decided on her own it’s actually in my tummy), and she loves to come and kiss and pet my belly. Today was the first time she actually talked to the baby though.
Things are still moving right along. I occasionally get mild heart burn, but other than that this has still been an extremely uneventful pregnancy. I’m not complaining at all lol. A few more weeks to the third trimester. We’ve pretty much decided on two girl’s names, though we won’t decide which one for sure until the baby’s born probably. Funnily, neither of them were on our list before I got pregnant this time. Boy’s names are once again harder. We have about ten on the “short” list still. That’s better than with Meredith’s pregnancy though, where we could barely get a short list at all that we were both happy with.
I guess I’m nesting. I’m still doing some major decluttering and reorganizing, especially upstairs though over the weekend we reorganized our living room too. It feels much more spacious the way we have it and Meredith’s toys don’t feel so cramped. Her room is starting to actually look fairly empty. I have the change table set up so I can start putting some baby stuff away on it. I need to sand and paint her bed and finish getting rid of the stuff that’s left, but compared to how it looked when I started it’s looking great. I’m not going to post any pictures until it’s done though, the before pictures will be too embarrassing without seeing that I really did get it done. I’m excited about it. We plan to use it as a space where Meredith can keep things she doesn’t want the baby to get into. She can nap/sleep there if she wants but I don’t plan to push her into that at all, I just want her to have the option because she’s such a light sleeper and I’ve read some kids actually prefer their own room with a cosleeping new baby. I may set our crib up there too and if this baby will actually sleep out of arms I have a feeling he/she may end up being put down more often for naps, so that I can spend some one-on-one time with Meredith and won’t have to be constantly asking her to keep her voice down. I haven’t decided about that though, as it would mean when the baby is sleeping she wouldn’t be able to go up there, and I also really loved having Meredith nap in the mei tei on us and didn’t find it too disruptive. But I didn’t have a two year old at the time either. I’m not really a fan of cribs though (we only have it because my mom bought it for us after I told her we didn’t want one), so more likely if baby goes down for naps it will be in our bed like Meredith does now.
I’ll end with a picture from Halloween. My talented friend Kyre made the shirt and it turned out perfectly. (Check out her site to see the gorgeous cake she recently made for a birthday party.) I got a lot of comments on it when we were trick-or-treating and I’m sad I only get to wear it once. Meredith was Nemo, which was perfect for her as she loves the colour orange and she adores fish (it’s her favorite part of the zoo when we go). She loved Halloween and still talks about the candy and balloon she got that day, even though she really doesn’t eat much candy besides Smarties. Kris and I ended up eating most of hers while she chose to eat healthy things like eggs, bananas, and avocadoes, even though we left the candy bucket out. She would open a bag, sometimes have one or two, and then give the rest of it to one of us. I think just the excitement of everything was really neat to her though.
I had wanted to keep up with the weekly Unplugged projects, but through the summer we spent a lot of time outdoors and it fell to the wayside. This last week Meredith wasn’t feeling well and had no interest in going outside, getting dressed, or really doing much besides cuddling on the couch. In my search for some quiet, easy indoor activities, I went and checked out the Unplugged blog and saw the theme for the next week was “smell”. It reminded me of an activity I’d read about and filed away for a later time. Now seemed perfect.
The idea is to create your own homemade perfume. We don’t actually use perfume, and I had no intention of actually wearing it, but I thought it would be something fun for Meredith to help out with. The only downside to doing this now is that our garden is pretty much dead. At the time that I had first seen it, we had lavender and roses and other yummy smelling things out there. But we were able to make due.
We filled three jars with a cup of water each. In the first jar, we put some orange peels. The second one had cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice. I chose the spices but she dumped them in. The third I let her go to town a little bit on. I gave her some jars of spices and let her smell them all and told her she could put some in the last jar. She put a whole lot of rosemary, and smaller amounts of basil, thyme, and oregano. We put lids on the jars and then she shook them up and we sat them aside to sit over night.
The next day we pulled out the jars and I pointed out to her how the colour of the water had changed in all three jars. She unscrewed the lids, and we used new jars and poured the mixtures through coffee filters into the jars. She loved this part, as she was able to do it mostly on her own. I did do the oranges, but when I realized the filters would stay put on their own she did the rest. She poured a little too fast for the first jar, which was the rosemary one. (Excuse the funny cropping/painting in these, once again she was pants-less.)
But she realized quickly on her own that pouring slowly would result in less mess and more of the liquid getting into the jar and didn’t end up spilling any of the cinnamon one.
Then we waited for them all to strain and I squeezed out the filters a little bit.
Now we had three jars of strained “perfume”. The orange and rosemary one turned out really well, but I don’t think we used enough cinnamon in the third one. I kept the orange peels aside and brought out the jars of cinnamon and rosemary spices and had her smell them and then the “perfume” jars in turn, and asked her if she could tell which ones were used in which perfume. She figured out the orange one quite quickly, though she pointed out that the water was yellow, not orange. She didn’t seem to get the cinnamon and rosemary ones though.
Overall I think this was a fun project to demonstrate some different scents to her. I think it would be fun to repeat it when she’s a bit older and can understand better how the scents transfer to the water, and also when we have some things in our garden we could use for it. One unexpected benefit at her age though was watching her pour the jars out. I could see her noticing how the water went pretty slowly through the filters, and adjusting the speed of her pouring based on that. She experimented with faster and slower pouring and seemed quite intrigued by the whole thing. I think I am going to think up some sort of pouring experiment for her involving different filters, as well as different substances to pour. I have even had some ideas for some simple diffusion and osmosis experiments, though those ones might have to wait a year or two. It’s neat how so many ideas can come out of one simple project though!
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