Agricultural Fair Weekend

We found ourselves at the local agricultural fair yesterday; we've gone all three years that we've been here so far.  In fact, I can remember the first time we went, only a few days, maybe a week, after the move - we were still in that first 'everything is new, everything is nerve-wracking and everyone is deeply uncomfortable' stage of moving.  No one could sleep properly because the night noises were different, no one could find anything because the boxes weren't unpacked, and each person who came to the door was a stranger.  I really dislike that stage of moving.  I especially dislike how I can't navigate the world effectively because each task needs to be re-learned to a certain extent - where do I buy milk?  Someone is sick and we don't have a doctor, what next?  Do I have to bring a quarter to the grocery store to get a cart out?

Anyway, that first time, three years ago, the fair was another uncertainty; was it a country fair as in rides, cotton candy, games for children and ponies?  This is sort of what I think of when you say the word 'fair'.  It turned out to be not quite that, but an agricultural fair, which I wasn't as familiar with.  Lots of chickens and rabbits and such, big tables of handwork (quilts, flower arranging, jars of jam, etc.) and vendors selling things that they had made along the lines of knitted dishcloths and mittens.  This sort of fair is much more popular in the rural area I live in and it's what I anticipate now in 'going to the fair'.  We have been to several of them by this point and they have a common gentle entertainment flowing through them.  The children play on a play structure or swings, or perhaps ride a small train in circles; the food available tends to be hotdogs, coffee, cotton candy, and at our fair there is a milk booth that sells nothing but ice cold milk.  You can watch a tractor pull, or working horses, and you can have a glass of milk and go look at what everyone spent the last year crocheting and see whose child won the photography contest and which chicken looks the weirdest.

It is entertainment from a different era, really.  Every year I tell myself that we will enter some of the categories, not because I think my knitting can compete with anyone else's there, or that my jalapeno jelly is the best, but to support this sort of thing, this gentle kind of event that seems to be disappearing.

Our Grade One Curriculum

It's September, and a brand new school year full of things to worry about.  I'm surprisingly calm, actually, about this year's curiculum choices, and so is the boy.

We bought Rod and Staff Grade 1 mathematics, which is supposed to be a solid grounding in early arithmetic (telling time, measurements, money, addition and subtraction, plus the usual early geometry).  Already I can see that we are beyond the scope of this program - my son knows these things.  But I am making us go through the program from the beginning anyway because I'm mean like that.

For Language Arts we're finishing up Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons, and also starting in on First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind, Volume 1.  I was concerned about the transition from the strange phonetic spelling to stardard printing in 100 Easy Lessons, but when we got to the lesson where they show you the *new* way of reading the transition went smoothly.

We are starting at the beginning of Story of the World Volume 1 for history and geography (we started reading it for pleasure last year but stopped), with the difference being that I also bought the activity book to go along with the text.  It guides you through story narrations, questions to assign (we will probably skip these with my pre-writer) maps and other activity sheets, further reading on the topic and finally a hands-on activity.

For 'science', which I'm not really doing in any formal way in grade one, we found a series called The Quark Chronicles that I was fascinated with and decided to buy the first volume.  The story follows four children who are kidnapped by space pirates and have to find their way back to earth using, in each book, a difference branch of science.  In the Botany volume, which I understand is the first book and is the one we're starting with, they begin to experience nutritional deficiencies and have to plant a garden and discover the secrets of botany.  In all honesty it's probably aimed at grades 3-5, but we're happy to putter through it anyway.  I have thoughts of doing experiments as well, from our many, many science experiment books, but who knows if that will really happen.

The whole 'curriculum', if you will, is scattered with a healthy dose of books.  The boy has received multiple interesting reads over the past few months; Nature Anatomy by Julia Rothman and Terence Dickinson's two excellent books: Exploring The Night Sky and Exploring The Sky by Day (these, along with a beginner's telescope, were his birthday gift) stand out to me at the moment but there are others.  And of course we're still reading chapter books aloud.

Actually, the chapter books have begun to cause a bit of a fuss - we're running through books at a startling pace.  Last year we read Stuart Little by E.B. White, Ginger Pye by Eleanor Estes, Gooseberry Park by Cynthia Rylant, and My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett.  Also some of the Thornton Burgess books - I believe we read Bob White, possibly another.  Anyway, over the course of the year we managed those (approximately) five books.  THIS year, however, we've already read three of the Melendy Quartet novel by Elizabeth Enright, Winnie The Pooh by A.A. Milne, and last night finished Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome.  I was at the library book sale a few weeks ago and picked up a cheap copy of The Wind In The Willows and we'll start that today, but then I suppose we should try to read The House At Pooh Corner and maybe another Burgess?  Or buy the next Ransome, which is Swallowdale...I don't know.  And I don't know why I didn't plan this a bit better.

So that's grade one over here.

Learning Notes for the end of April

Here's what we're doing in school right now...

In phonics we're reading through Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons - we're on lesson 37 now and the boy is reading short, very phonetically based paragraphs.  We've also finally reached the point where we can start on early readers and we're using box 1 of the Bob Books.  TYCTRI100EL (that is not an easy acronym) also has a handwriting practice session at the end of each lesson, so we are doing letter practice.

Further to handwriting the boy has been writing a letter to his 'pen pal' and friend down south.  David took dictation for what the letter should say, and now he is carefully copying David's words in his own hand, crossing them off as he works down the sheet.

For read alouds we're enjoying The Four Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright, Every Living Thing by James Herriott, and Storyland of Stars by Mara Louise Pratt-Chadwick.  We're also reading Story of the World as a history/geography study, looking up countries and such as we go.  I never bothered to buy the activity guide that goes with the book because I know myself and I am not a 'craft person', so it seemed pointless.  Now I hear that it has other non-craft activities like map work in it and perhaps we will try it for the next SOTW volume we read.

For 'science', which is not actually a subject we're actively studying, just more of an examination through living, we are doing a lot of looking through the telescope, naming birds as they return to us in the spring, answering questions about whatever interests us (yesterday's 'I wonder' was whether coniferous trees sleep in the winter the same way as deciduous trees do, since they don't lose their needles) and looking at non-fiction books that interest us.  The latest additions to the children's non-fiction bookshelf are Exploring The Sky By Day and Exploring The Night Sky, both by Terence Dickinson.

This past week we've gone to a cooking class together, which sparked an interest in 'making dinner himself', which turned into jambalaya produced by a six year old, so that's a big interest at the moment.  The 'creating' urge doesn't stop there - we've been gifted a whole bunch of wood scraps and I've been informed we are building a feeding platform for the birds out of them, so that will involve looking up patterns or designing one with the materials we have, measuring, using tools, etc.

For math we're using MEP Year One and we're on lesson 9.  We were fine learning the greater than sign, the less than sign and the equal sign, but when it came to the greater than or equal sign and the less than or equal sign, we hit a little bump.  We've used Khan Academy as reinforcement, but we're still not completely certain about it, so we might move on and cycle back again later.

And that's school right now!  We don't have any plans to change the phonics/math/history spines we're using, but we're always on the look out for new and interesting skill reinforcement and books and activities, so undoubtedly those will continue to evolve in the weeks to come.

What is there left to eat?

Since all I seem to be talking about is food now, here's a more practical post that continues what I said about going back to eating a healthier diet, and why food isn't good or bad.  I guess that leaves the question of what exactly we're eating!  Well, I should preface by saying that I am not dealing with any food allergies or sensitivities, and a very short list of things people absolutely won't eat.  Really, almost nothing is on that list.  I wish I could take credit for that, but I've always been an adventurous eater so maybe it's genetic?  I know lots of parents struggle with picky eaters and I'm fortunate that I don't have to.

Now, I mean, everyone has preferences.  If I served the children a big ole' plate of canned beans they would be less than pleased and it might take a lot of ketchup to get them down.  They also don't love stuff like liver, or raw onions, or anything really spicy.  But to be honest neither do I so it isn't really an issue - I don't make these things because I don't like them!

So here's what we eat!  At breakfast we have eggs, fruit, cereal, sometimes meat, occasionally porridge.  I don't make pancakes and such anymore because I don't have the time or the space.  Every once in a while I'll do a big, fried breakfast with eggs and bacon and sliced tomatoes, or home fries.  Not often these days.

For lunch we almost always have leftovers from the previous night's supper, or else we have a simple soup and bread or salad type meal.  Sometimes I will make a prepared food type meal, like a frozen pizza, or a box of macaroni and cheese, or something like that.

For supper we eat a lot of one-dish meals - either cooked as a casserole type dish or in the slow cooker.  We eat chicken and pork most frequently, sometimes beef if it is ground meat or occasionally beef in another form, like a brisket, and a few times a year I buy a turkey to roast.  I also make an effort to serve fish once a week, although often it is in the form of tuna salad at lunch, or fish sticks for a fast meal before a church event.  We eat pasta and rice very infrequently, usually our starch of choice is potatoes - white and sweet, and sometimes plantains, cornbread, polenta, etc.

The sorts of meals we eat at supper would be things like - chopped root vegetables roasted with chicken pieces, a sausage and potato bake with a fresh salad, something made with spaghetti squash, ground beef, a tomato based sauce (home made or more likely a jarred sauce that has been added to) and cheese, a big salad type meal with lots of vegetables, hard boiled eggs, leftover diced meat, etc., a platter of different meats and cheeses with a loaf of bread and some home made pickled vegetables, a lentil or bean dish with bread, etc.  We don't eat a lot of legumes, but they are there, usually in another dish like chili or cooked slowly with a smoked turkey leg.

It's all pretty simple.

Lines In The Sand

I want to talk about food again.

You know, food is not a moral choice, even though people love to make everything a moral choice and it is exhausting that they do this; food is just food.  It isn't comfort, it isn't moral strength, it isn't 'good' or 'bad' (I detest the idea that there is 'bad' food), it isn't in and of itself a problem.  Food is a tool.  It's a necessity for life.  At its most basic food is a calorie and nutrient delivery system and the only reason it's considered a 'healthy' or 'unhealthy' choice at all is because some food contains more or less vitamins or minerals and calories.  If you need to gain weight then a high calorie food is a healthier food.  If you need to lose weight then a lower calorie food is healthier.  If you have high iron then obviously eating more high iron foods isn't healthy, even if most of society is going along saying you 'need lots of iron because it's healthy'.  Actually, for you, that would not be a healthy choice, choosing an accepted health food.

When you're eating, again at its most basic level, your body is trying to get calories to enable it to keep working.  Most of us in north american society are not having problems with this - we're probably all getting PLENTY of calories.  Indigenous people who were eating nuts and grubs and other fat heavy foods were eating them because they were high calorie foods.  If your diet is mostly low calorie foods, those fatty, higher calorie foods are much prized luxuries.  Living as if you were an indigenous person today would mean that you were eating a large amount of low calorie foods like leafy greens, interspersed with starchy tubers, the occasional fruit, and probably whatever meat you could catch - the most likely being insects and small animals and fish.  There isn't a lot of fat on, say, a rabbit.

On top of these all important calories your body needs certain nutrients - vitamins and mineral - in order to function.  Many of these it needs at a very low level and the occasional item with that nutrient is sufficient.  In addition to this some of those nutrients are water soluble and some are fat soluble - so sometimes you need to in fact be constantly ingesting some of these nutrients for your body to have access to them in the foods you're eating and sometimes you do not - your body can store them for you to use later.  We have all heard the stories of the kid who ate only ramen noodles and died - that's the sort of story that people use in order to scare you about nutrients.  In reality, providing you aren't dealing with a health condition, and you ate a sufficient amount of ramen, I can't personally see any reason why it wouldn't keep you alive for probably a long time.

Some of those nutrients have been labelled 'bad', like sodium, which is a very important mineral that our body does in fact need to function normally, but since it's prevalent in a lot of food in great abundance we've now decided it is  'bad' and we should all avoid it as much as possible.  Calcium, also important, is also really really prevalent in an omnivorous diet these days - in all dairy products, plus an additive in a lot of foods, plus normally occurring in greens and other foods - but since we haven't linked calcium to any bad reactions yet, it's a 'good' nutrient and we're all supposed to consume as much as possible.

Except that sodium isn't bad and calcium isn't good, they're just sodium and calcium, just like a broom isn't bad because it raises dust that might bother an asthmatic.

Anyway, when I talked about cooking whole foods for my family again, and mentioned eating a lot of frozen prepared foods previously, I wasn't saying one of those things was better than the other.  Because they aren't.  There are lots of good reasons to eat a variety of foods - the fibre content is likely higher and that helps your digestion, you have a varied palate and that will make eating more pleasurable for you and make you a much nicer guest, you'll have an easier time staying in budget, you will probably not have to resort to a multi-vitamin just in case you weren't getting enough of something - but a frozen lasagna isn't a good or bad decision.  It's just a lasagna.

Spring Thoughts, Better Eating

Two weeks ago I wrote that spring was here, and then winter thumbed her bitter nose at me and there were two more weeks of cold, including snow and full on storms and awfulness.  Now, a better and more nervous person than I previously was, I'm going to say it again.  Spring is here.

*ducks*

It's chilly, but sunny, and it warms up enough in the afternoon that I can hang laundry and send the children outside and the snow is leaving us very quickly.  Plus all the other non-weather springish signs are appearing.  The red squirrels are chasing each other around and around the pine trees at the end of the street, the sandhill cranes are making an ungodly racket down by the lake...

Now that it's warmer I feel more inclined to work on being frugal and healthy again.  There's something about winter that just makes you (me) want to curl up in a ball with a warm cat on me and eat all of the food, so the warmth is definitely helping me to get away from that and back into the swing of projects.  I'm reintroducing a lot of the whole foods oriented cooking methods I used to use as a matter of course, before my husband became incredibly focused on school and our lives got a lot busier with the church.  If you have been reading my blog since the beginning you will remember that I used to make everything that could be made.  I would make bone broth weekly and soak grains and make yogurt and bake breads...I did it all.  Somehow a lot of that stopped in the past few years and I don't think there's one specific reason why - lots of things contributed.  Adding a third child to our family, working full time in ministry, all the school, a new town without a lot of connections and without a farmer's market in town, lots of elements changed our eating style.  And I'm a big proponent of Doing What You Gotta Do - no judgement here if you eat frozen lasagna every day and use disposable diapers and take antibiotics monthly.  You do what you gotta do.  And certainly this past few years we have done what we had to do to make it work with three little children and the lifestyle we found ourselves living.

But I'd be foolish not to say I missed it, because I did.  I missed the work sessions in the kitchen, making lots of healthy real food and finding ways to trim the budget and learning new recipes.  I missed the research, with friends and family and books.  I missed talking to like minded people about what we were all doing to improve our health and our knowledge.  I loved that area of life; I've always loved food and keeping house, and I wanted to be GOOD at it and I was good at it.  I was really good for a while, and then I wasn't so much anymore and I'm okay with that - seasons of life and all - but I'm excited to get back into it.

Last night I made apple, pear, cranberry sauce with cinnamon in the slow cooker, set two big jars of sliced beets to lacto-ferment on the counter into pickles, roasted another tray of beets, made a jug of iced pomegranate green tea and started an experimental batch of a lentil and barley meat replacement to extend some ground beef.  It was soothing, puttering around in my kitchen, doing the sorts of daily tasks that used to make up such a large portion of my days - it was like lapsing back into your mother tongue.

I don't want to make elaborate plans on what to do because I don't want to be disappointed if things don't move as smoothly as I'd like them to but I feel optimistic.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go make some bread.

All places are the same

I've lived in four different towns or cities in the past eight years.  Some of them were a few hundred souls, some a few thousand and some a few million.  Tiny places, big places.  I've lived in a place with one, small grocery store with expensive food to shop at and I've lived somewhere where the food of the world was at your fingertips.  I've lived in a one bedroom apartment, a two story house, a bungalow.  And I was thinking about the future yesterday - where we might live in the future - would we ever live in a big city again?  I grew up in a city, would my children have that kind of childhood?  Or maybe we'd live on a farm, plants gardens, raise sheep (I like sheep, I'd be up for raising sheep...maybe not forever, but at least for a season of life) and be pastoral and quiet.  Will we have the opportunity to downsize all of our possessions and move into an apartment without a garden again, a high rise, like friends of mine are doing right now with their four children?

It's all just wondering of course - we have a ministry here, and a home (a nice home, one of the nicer we've had) and it's normal for people to wonder about the future.  But what really struck me wasn't the wondering, which is just for fun, what struck me was that all of these places have become the same.

When you live in one place for a long time, or in your childhood home or city, you feel as though it is the entire world.  And when you move from there then the next place you live, it seems like a foreign country.  Where is the grocery store, you wonder?  What, I have to pay to do laundry?  And everything, from the most mundane to the exotic, is exotic.  It's the first time you really come face to face with the daily lives of other people and try to live like them.  But as you continue to move around the fear leaves and the moves take on a different feeling.  There's a sense of confidence in your ability to navigate the world.  When you absorb the information that you'll be moving again, be it a few hours or a few days drive away, you calmly pull out the mental information What To Do When You Move, and you're off.

I can pack our house with my eyes closed.  I know which packing containers work best, what to write on a box label so you aren't crying in the new kitchen that first morning and sending your husband out to find 'any caffeine at all'.  I am confident in my ability to make a meal for five people that doesn't use a fridge or a stove or almost any kitchen tools.  I know who to ask if there is anything for the children to do in town, I have 'rules for choosing a restaurant', in short, I'm a good mover at this stage.

And the places we move don't scare me anymore.  There's still a rush of adrenaline when you walk out of the bedroom looking for the bathroom and it all comes back to you, don't get me wrong, but it passes quickly now.  I don't really concern myself much with 'fitting in', because I know it will happen.  I enjoy that first walk in the new neighbourhood - looking around, seeing what there is to see.  Oh look, there's the grocery store!  Let's take a peek inside to see what we've got to work with.

The places we have lived aren't actually all the same, of course.  There's a lot of local flavour and plenty of differences.  And I have preferences, obviously, because everyone does.  I don't like taking my laundry to the laundromat for example, and I would rather have an outdoor space, but I'm flexible and I can make anywhere a home.  What makes me happy at this season of life is that I can adapt, that the adventure of moving is an adventure and not a burden.  Going to a new place is something to look forward to and enjoy.