Friends of ours had a Pumpkin Massacre

and then they sent us photos!

In proof that our kids have learned the important things in life

Local uncle:  Hannah, do you know what a Happy Meal is?

Hannah:  No, but I know what happy hour is.

Keeping things

I am not a hoarder. I don't hoard. In fact, I am much more likely to throw away mementos and keepsakes than...keep them. I know this about myself, so I force myself to remember that my children might like mementos and keepsakes, so I have a box for each of them, and there I keep things that might be of interest to them later.

Hannah is a hoarder. She does come by it honestly, though, because her dear father, who is a wonderful and amazing man, is also a hoarder. He's actually come a long way about what he'll keep, and he's taken his box of miscellaneous computer stuff to his office (most likely because he's afraid I'll find it and throw it all away one day), and I really don't mean to complain, because keeping things isn't necessarily better than not keeping things...unless the things you keep start taking over your life. Michael's things don't generally start taking over his life, as he usually has a firm hand on them.

Hannah's things, though...I really don't know how to describe it, and I am really unsure of how she gets all this stuff. I am constantly surprised (or appalled?) at the amount of stuff she wants to keep. Really. I have provided for her to keep things, because although I am not a keeper, I recognize that other people are, and it is not always good or necessary to force my not-keeping-ness onto other people. She has a treasure box and a nature box and several shelves she calls her office. She has a file box for storing the papers that she really HAS to keep. (How many 7-year-olds do you know who have an alphabetical file box that they use?) She has a 3-drawer plastic thing. She has a plastic box for her knitting and other craft supplies that are specifically hers. This is besides the usual dresser for her clothes, jewelry box for her jewelry, and shelf space for her books. I don't make her keep her books in her own storage area, that would be odd. Particularly since books are the one area that I really AM a keeper.

All of this is great, except that I turn around for an instant (or two days) and there is a layer of Hannah's stuff ALL OVER THE PLACE. Right now, as I look around the room, I am sincerely astonished at what she's been able to cover with her stuff. She's started using the small parts of the family bookshelves -- you know, the parts in front of the books -- for various knicknacks. When I looked in her office to find out why she didn't put things there, it's because HER OFFICE IS STUFFED FULL.

So I have my work cut out for me: teach Hannah that saving is okay as long as it's stuff that is worth saving and as long as it doesn't take over her life (or mine, for right now, since she doesn't really care if her stuff is lying about in a fine layer over every horizontal surface in the house, but she might like the skills to keep this from happening in her own house or nun's cell when she gets old enough).

I started this process years ago, when I realized that we were coming up to Halloween and Hannah still had candy from last Halloween, Christmas, Easter, and any other time that she might have gotten candy throughout the year. Some might think this is an innocuous thing, but the candy is kept in a drawer with tablecloths and things (yes, this isn't in any of her treasure-keeping areas, either! What does she keep in there?!?), and really, how much year-old candy does one girl need?

We made a rule: saved candy must either be consumed or thrown away by Halloween. Hannah started feeling the pinch of the rule again yesterday.

H: Mom, can I keep some of my candy this year?

Me: No, Hannah, you know the rule.

H: What about just one piece?

Me: No, Hannah.

H: Please? Just my lucky piece of candy?

Me: No. What makes your piece of candy lucky?

H: I found it on the ground outside.

Me: [Gee, I'm glad I didn't say she could keep that.] It has to go, too.

H: Well, maybe I'll have a throwing away ceremony and I'll make a wish on my lucky candy.

Me: Great!

H: [Surveying her candy stock] Maybe I'll have to have more than one throwing away ceremony.

Me: Good idea!

A few minutes later:

H: Mom, I made a wish on my lucky candy. Do you want to know what it was?

Me: Sure!

H: It's that next year my candy gets all used up before Halloween!

And if you aren't yet convinced that Hannah is a hoarder, there was something else that came to light in the throwing away ceremonies.

H: [holding out a ziploc sandwich bag full of colorful-looking things] Look, Mom! I saved the wrappers from my candy!

Assigned reading

isn’t always that bad.

Me:  Hannah, did you read some of Augustine Came to Kent in quiet time?

H:  Yes, I finished it!

Me:  Oh, I didn’t realize you were going to finish it today. 

H:  Well, I wasn’t going to finish it, but every time I was going to stop, it got too exciting, so I finished it. 

Just in case you might wonder

No, it is not easy to administer antibiotics for a possible skin infection twice daily to an unwilling rabbit.

Aesop’s Saddest Fable

Yesterday, Naomi asked if I wanted to hear her tell me a fable.  She knows about Aesop’s Fables because I’ve read a number of them out loud and recorded them, so she can listen to them whenever she likes.  If you ask her to tell you the story of the Tortoise and the Hare, or the Fox and the Stork, she certainly can.  But this time, she had made one up.

[I am going to quote this as accurately as I can – I promise, I am not embellishing.]

“It’s called the Weed and the Bee,” she said, “and it goes like this.  One day a bee was flying near a weed.  The weed said, “Oh, Bee, why is it that you can fly and I cannot?”  But the weed did not hear any answer.  When the weed turned to see why, it saw that the bee had flown away.” 

I think that’s the saddest fable I ever heard.  Aesop often has his animals betraying each other (as in the Frog and the Scorpion or the Fox and the Goat), but here the whole poignancy is that the very lack of ability that makes the weed ask the question is the same lack that prevents it from hearing the answer.  Eat that, Aesop.

A blur of motion

Since our bunnies are still little, we can't give them the run of the house. It's definitely not bunny-proof. So we are very careful not to let them loose.

Last Friday, I woke up weary. I had been up much too late the night before. But the alarm rang and I dragged myself downstairs. As I was brushing my teeth, I saw a blur of motion out of the corner of my eye. I thought, "Wow, I must be tired; I'm seeing things!" And I went on brushing my teeth. Then I looked squarely out the bathroom door.

There was Hildy the bunny, on the loose. She had escaped from her cage by pushing the door open. In fact, both bunnies were loose, with the whole run of the house to themselves. And only one tired man to catch them.

I find, as a father, that I sometimes have to put on the mantle of authority when talking to my children. This is what I had to do now: I put on the mantle of authority for the bunnies. I calmly walked over as though nothing were wrong, said hello, and scooped up Hildy. She seemed fine with it. I'm not sure she knew what to do with herself on the loose. I popped her back in the cage. Now, Gypsy had worked herself behind the cage, so I had to block up one side and then coax her out the other. I popped her back in, and the crisis was averted.

I couldn't tell Hannah at the time - she would have been horrified. But, this week we started letting the bunnies out under controlled circumstances, so the story can be told.

Beware the unexplained blur of motion.

Pictures

Of kids, that is.  There have been a few too many demolished chimney pictures here lately, and too few cute children.  I’m here to fix that.

Hannah got a junior ranger badge at the English Camp on San Juan Island.  She got an actual pin that says she’s a Junior Ranger.  She loves it.

Naomi, on a hike we took while camping.

Two very tired kids on the way home from camping.  I think that all of the passengers took naps on that car trip…but, since I was one of the passengers, and I took a nap, I can’t be completely sure.

Shirt hat!  Not camping related.

I know that there a lot of similarities in these pictures.

But I couldn’t choose just one.

SO CUTE!

I really want to find shirt hat pictures for all of the kids and compare them.  I think they all look more alike with their hair pulled back like that.  I haven’t succeeded yet, but I’m on a quest.

Cute pajamas, cute smile, hardware between the toes.  (Click on the picture and get it bigger, you’ll see!)

Bunnies always bring out the smiles.

Hannah’s Baptism anniversary is also, now, Simeon’s birthday.  It’s a day of many celebrations.  That’s her Baptismal candle she’s holding.

Someone remind me to remind Hannah that growing up is not okay.  She seems to have forgotten.

Here’s how it looks so far

I didn’t get a real “before” picture of our fireplace, because I didn’t know, when they began to dismantle it, that it wouldn’t ever get put back together again.  But, for what it’s worth, here’s what it looked like yesterday morning:

It used to have a screen in front of it, too, and wasn’t internally dismantled.

You can see the ash grate in the middle there.  That was put in so that the ash from the fire would fall down into a pit below (in the basement) and be easier to clean up.  That will go away with the new design.  Aaron doesn’t even want to know how they rigged it.

Here’s the side pocket mentioned before.  That SHOULD have been sealed from the middle, because it wasn’t fire proof.  There’s a matching one on the other side.  However, it wasn’t sealed from the firebox, and it was full of wood…that had gotten charred and creosoted and (blessedly) hadn’t caught fire yet.

Yeah.  This is how it looked before Aaron cleaned up today.  Not too pretty.  The top segment that’s still there is the makeshift attempt at a smoke chamber.

Their attempts to funnel the smoke up the chimney, though, don’t even look that polished to me.  Aaron wants to take it out, since he’s not really sure how they anchored it to the wall, and isn’t, so far, inspired to trust that they did that well enough that it might not decide to come crashing down at some future date.  But he’ll need someone to help him, as it’s concrete and large.

Here’s the ash grate.  That used to be about the width of the firebox.  You can see the smoke staining on the parts of the fireplace that were supposed to be outside the firebox, sealed off from it.  And…what are those little round things on both sides?  They would have been inside the bricked areas.

They appeared to be tubes rigged to get air into the side chambers from the ash grate, although why that would have been in place is anyone’s guess…A good way to pump oxygen into a new fire next to the wall, in a compartment full of wood.

And, yes!, there’s one on each side!

That oxygen, should there have been a fire, would have assisted in setting fire to this lathe – from the wall – that was STICKING OUT in the side chambers.

I’m just thankful for our guardian angels watching out for us!

Experimenting

I recently found these little snacks in our local grocery store.  They are really quite tasty and addictive.  I like these ones, too.  Although both kinds are good, they are also more expensive than I really want to spend on snacks, however good.  So I decided that it couldn’t be THAT hard to make them, or something very like them.  Could it?  I mean, there’s not that much in them, and I’m a fairly experienced baker.

Hannah doesn’t like the chocolate ones. She says that they taste like Play-Dough.  Naomi doesn’t like the non-chocolate ones.  Simeon hasn’t had the chocolate ones, but does like the salt ones.  Of course, I didn’t really take any of that into account when I started, because I like the chocolate ones best, so I thought I’d start with those.

I have spent several weeks – well, I don’t know how long, really – thinking about them, pondering ingredients, texture, baking temperature and time, how to hold them together, what to put in, what to leave out, size of batch.  This has been casually rotating in my mind for a while, and today I decided to give a try to a couple of batches, to see if I could find a good substitute. 

The first batch was out of the oven and on the lunch plates.  Naomi ate two and a half of the three I gave her.  She left the last half, which isn’t a good sign.  I thought they were a bit too…something, and also almost burnt.  Note to self:  lower cooking temperature.  Hannah, though, wins the prize for her input:

“They’re pretty good, Mom.  They don’t taste like Play-Dough!”

Of course, I knew that meant she preferred them to the originals, but let’s not quote that one out of context, all right?

Buh-reathing

Recently the kids had their first cold of the season.  Simeon got a very clogged nose and I needed to use the saline solution on him a couple of times before nursing, because he wasn’t able to breathe through his nose.

This made a very big impression on him.

It was a couple of weeks ago, and for many days afterwards, he would tell me before EVERY time he nursed, “I will buh-reathe through my nose!”

It took some time for me to figure out exactly what he was saying, but then I got it.

He doesn’t say it before every time he nurses any more, but he does reassure me at least once a day that he’s going to buh-reathe through his nose for that nursing session, despite the fact that his cold is gone and he has no trouble breathing now.

Things you might not want the people working on your fireplace to say

“This is one of the scariest fireplaces I’ve ever seen.”

“I’m going to take pictures when we take this apart, and I’m going to send them in for the Darwin awards that the Chimney Sweep Association has every year.”

Well, the joke is on me, apparently

Michael and I were really glad when the home renovations that we started this year came to a close.  So glad that we decided we were done with major projects for a long, long time.  We thought we’d tackle some minor things.  With home ownership, as we’ve discovered, there isn’t ever a time when there aren’t ANY projects.

So we decided to have the liner and cap put on the chimney.  This also would involve some reworking of the interior of the chimney, which our chimney guy (we’ll call him “Aaron,”  since that’s his name) had told us about upon doing the estimate.  If we get the work done now, we reasoned, we’d be able to have fires in the winter.  Aaron had discovered some pretty extensive wearing away of the mortar in the chimney, which is dangerous, since if it wears all the way away, there would be nothing to keep sparks from going inside the wall and setting the house on fire.  Since we didn’t want our house set on fire, that seemed like something we should fix.

Well, things were going just fine until they started doing some of the demolition necessary to fix some of the things that were wrong.  Then some discoveries were made.  They first discovered that the fireplace was probably not an original part of the house, but was tacked on to the chimney that ran the exhaust from the original heating system (burning coal?) at some later date.

It turns out that our whole fireplace was put in wrong when it was tacked on.  There wasn’t a lintel to support the brick and mantel, just the front of the damper.  They had to get the saws-all to get the damper out, because they had to leave in the supporting piece so as not to have the brick and mantel falling down.

(That part led to some funny asides.  First of all, Hannah came in and told me that her instincts said I should take the breakable dancing man and woman off the mantel.  “The workers said that it was all going to come crashing down!”  I assured her that they’d let me know if that was really the case. 

Also, the bunnies are in a room not far from the action that’s going on with the chimney, and there’s not a door.  I thought about the saws-all and how LOUD it is and thought that I should at least get ONE door between them and the action.  So that meant that I needed to ask Aaron to let me know when they were going to use the saws-all so I could move the rabbits.  Blank looks.  Really?  Not every client has rabbits whose hearing and fear have to be taken into account for a job?)

Things weren’t sealed properly, the smoke chamber (to funnel the smoke up the chimney) wasn’t there at all, the sides of the fireplace were open to the firebox – and full of wood that was coated in creosote – the sides of the fireplace (open to the firebox) were not properly sealed by the wall, so there was a distinct chance that sparks getting through would set fire to the creosote-coated wood and then set fire to the house…in the living room. 

Which means…we could either put the front back on the fireplace and pretend this never happened, in addition to not having fires in the fireplace until it gets fixed, OR we could have them tear it all out and rebuild it.  Not the chimney, thank God!, but the fireplace itself.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense to us to close it up and pretend it never happened, since we do like having fires and it will have to be dealt with eventually. 

This is somewhat amusing, since we’d been considering various options for changing the fireplace.  Right now it’s painted brick – not my favorite look – and we’d talked about sandblasting it or perhaps tiling over it, something to make it look nicer.  This was a project that was pretty low on the list, since it was aesthetic.

NOW, though, it’s a safety hazard!  Whoohoo!  New fireplace!

Of course, this means we have to decide what we want and find it.  That wasn’t really on my list of things to do, but I guess it’s just been added.

And after this, maybe we should swear off ALL house projects, even minor ones, for a while.  They all turn out to be major. 

Aging

seems to be the topic here this morning. Sim wants some “aging pear.” That really means he wants some Asian pear, but it truly sounds like he’s asking for old fruit.

******

Naomi was commenting on the ages of the family, “Sim is two, I’m four…”

So I interposed, “I’m four.”

The retaliation was swift: “You’re not four! You're 79!” Ouch. I thought I needed more sleep last night.

Apples!

We went apple picking yesterday.  I have NO pictures, because I forgot the camera.  So I can’t show you Sim, playing on the toy tractors that the farm wisely provides (in a very muddy area) for kids to play with before or after picking.  Nor can I show you Hannah and Naomi swinging on the tire swing (a real tire swing, much to Hannah’s delight, made with a real tire).  And I can’t show you Hannah and Naomi riding on the old-fashioned see-saw, which was perhaps the cutest thing that they did while out there.

But I can tell you that we had a lot of fun, tried a lot of apples, and came home with a lot of apples.  The trees were dwarf stock, so the kids easily picked, much to their delight.  We had to prevent Sim from trying to pick up the windfalls and eat them, but once he got hold of an apple that he especially liked, that wasn’t too hard. 

The orchard we went to has 120 varieties of apples, 80-90 of which are ripe at the moment.  We did not get to all of them, but we did try a bunch of new ones that we really liked:  Dayton, Spartan, Homestead 2, State Fair (I didn’t care for it, but the others did), Aroma, King.  They also had Braeburn, Fuji, and Gala, which we see at the stores a lot.  We tried some that we didn’t like at all, but didn’t try to remember their names.  Michael found a type that is recommended for making hard cider, so he’s planning his trip back next year to get it while it’s in season.

The weather cooperated quite nicely – it was a beautiful day for being out in an orchard. 

My favorite part was the apple picking, but the kids may have enjoyed the play equipment more.  Or the chickens.  There were lots and lots of chickens in a large pen, and both Naomi and Simeon spent a good deal of time while in the orchard asking about whether we could go see the chickens now.  Humbling that they probably would have had just as much fun if we’d gone to look at chickens and brought an apple along to eat…