Making Friends

School ends at 2:00 p.m. here and we walk home to eat lunch. After homework and a job or two, the kids and I like to wander around Dos Hermanas, usually in search of a different park or a sweet of some kind. We've found that making friends with little kids in Spain is pretty easy, as long as we keep our voices down when we're speaking English to each other. When I engage the kids in Spanish conversations, the other kids tend to move in to find out about these fair-skinned kids of ours.

This week we discovered a new park near our apartment. We've seen it from afar on our way to and from school, but had never taken the time to cross the busy street to peer into the vast pathways. Soccer ball in hand, the boys ran straight for the grassy area and soon found themselves engaged in a sweaty match up under the olive trees with another boy. Louise met a six-year-old friend, orange kitten in hand, who wanted to play restaurant with her. Soon they were offering salad, or weeds, to nearly everyone in the park. It was 7:15 p.m. when we left to walk home, nearly dark.

 

The Countdown is On

The other day I went to wake this reluctant morning girl up and she asked about how many days of school we have left.  "Five until Christmas break, and five after break 'til we leave." 

Hurriedly she sat up, smiled, and said, "Fun!"

You see, we're on our way to Spain.  We're heading out in January for a five-month family adventure that I've dreamed about since we first got married.  Having spent two years living over seas in my younger days, I have an amazing desire to share this experience with my family.  We had talked about the hows, the whys, the details and logistics and figured it would happen some day.  Early last spring we decided that given the ages of our kids, the time was right.  Now.  We're headed on our family sabbatical to Dos Hermanas, a medium-sized town near Seville in southwest Spain.

I'm going to start a separate blog to document the trip and also share a few more details here before we depart.  Stay tuned.

A little trip

This little family of ours is about to embark upon a big journey.  The journey began this weekend as we made the cross country trek from Minneapolis to Chicago to take care of a few details before we depart. 

Within the coming weeks and months you'll begin to learn more as the details unfold of our adventure on the horizon.  Will you follow along with us?

In the meantime, I'm reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin for my book club.  The theme is so timely, given the place we are in our lives here.  The book brings up a lot of interesting points about living a purposefully happy lives, not taking happiness for granted, and ensuring that we are doing the most we can to make every day a happy, adventure and song filled day for ourselves, our families and the world around us.  Have you read it?

Return from Angola

The month of August is just about over and I'm finally sitting down for a breath. The warm, slow days of summer blended into a quicker pace as we ran into cabin season, cousins visiting from out of town and then finally my trip to Angola for two weeks. The shock was great upon my return, with just a day of rest before I dutifully returned to my teacher's meetings. Tomorrow, of course, is the first day of school. Good bye wonderful summer, we enjoyed every little jump, splash, berry, tomato, squeeze, giggle, snuggle and leap!

My dear friend Stephanie lives in Angola (in southwest Africa) with her fiance Rolf. Their baby Cecilia Caroline was born in Namibia in May and died 17 days later when she stopped breathing and had to be put on a ventilator. Her cause of death is still inconclusive and the pain has been awful for everyone.

Originally I was going to visit to help take care of sweet Cecilia, but after her death, the trip took on a completely different tone. In the coming days and weeks I will be posting photos of the amazing beauty and sights we saw as we road tripped across southern Africa.

To those of you with kiddos heading off to school these next few days and weeks, good luck!

A Friend with an Orange Hat

On Wednesdays I get to take the boys on an afternoon date while my Mom takes care of Louise. It gives my Mom some alone time with Louise and my nephew Logan and allows me a few hours to myself, plus afterschool time with just the boys to do more grown-up activities.

Since the snow is quickly melting away today with the rain and a forecast that predicts 50s soon, I figured it was time to get outside and enjoy the snow in a big way. I had seen that Kerry had visited this site recently and knew the boys would love it.
.
I asked them, "Are you in, or are you out?" which in our family, means an adventure is on the horizon. Of course they were in, so we donned snow pants and boots and hit the road. I parked a few blocks away-- knowing it would be more fun to meander through the woods by the Minnehaha creek and discover it themselves. All I told them was, "We're going to be meeting a friend with an orange hat."

"We found him, Mom!"

Off to dry off, warm up, and sip our hot cocoa..

A Hike to Spring?!?

The kids and I recently walked to Bachman's to welcome the spring by playing with the farm animals in the petting zoo and by each planting an impatien plug into a tiny pot.Carl, Gus and Louise got to pretend for an hour that they are indeed farm kids and not just city kids, dreaming of their farm someday. On the way home we talked about what animals we would like to have at the farm when we move there. Carl informed me that a pig would be fun because he'd like to slop the pigs. "You can feed them the food scraps that don't go in the compost, Mom." Oh... good thinking, Carl. Previously I had thought that there would never be a chance of owning a pig, but suddenly as a form of recycling, I could be game. Except of course, there reaches a time, well, unless we want to enter a 1,000 pound pig at the Minnesota State Fair someday, that well. You know. I'm thinking that we're going to be slightly wimpy farmers and won't be able to deal with the butchering aspect of rural life. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I just need to spend a little more time in the rural landscape, getting my hands dirty, my boots muddy, and opening my eyes to the reality of country life. For now though, goats and chickens are what we're thinking. A sheep or two, maybe?

Late Night Brussel Sprouts

Even the dog got in on the brussel sprout action!

Have you ever grown brussel sprouts? No, I guess that's a silly question. No one, at least not city dwellers, grows brussel sprouts. Why? They're slow. They don't like the heat of midsummer days. They thrive in the cold. Lots of folks think they're gross.

Not us. We grew them this summer from little plants. Little plants that we probably put into the ground a little too late--because these guys were slow. I'm talkin' slow. We watched them all summer long, wondering, waiting, wishing, hoping... for something to happen. They grew beautiful cabbage-like leaves. "Where are the sprouts?" we'd say every day when we checked them. I remembered seeing how they grew when we received a stalk of them many years back in a CSA. Our brussel sprouts weren't resembling that one, at all.


Then one day, something happened. Something grew in the "armpit" of the leaves. It looked like a pea. What was it? Our first SPROUT! Carl and Gus ran over and told the neighbor, "Megan... our brussel is sprouting!" You would have thought they won the lottery. Such are the joys of gardening with children. Every little growth is a miracle for them and a way to keep us all a little closer to the earth.



The garden has been put to bed for weeks. Well, everything except for the slow growing brussel sprouts. Finally last week, after it had already snowed a few times and the garden had been heaped with raked leaves for winter warmth, we chopped 'em down. It was dark, of course, as it always is in areas so far from the equator this time of the year, but we did it anyway. The boys felt like they had brought home something great from the hunt. The kill. "Let's get it!" They poked and prodded on each stalk, carefully popping each pea-sized sprout off the thick trunk. Oh the excitement! After four giant stalks, we had the bottom of a large bowl filled. Yeah, the bottom. Had those little rascals been full-sized, we could have filled two bowls. But no, they were our pea-sized brussel sprouts and I've never seen the boys so excited to get dinner on the table.



I'm proud to say, my kids eat brussel sprouts. And I thought I was the only freak.

From Start to Finish

I'm done. We're done. With the apple sauce, that is. It has been an almost two-week journey, but I've finally put away the canner tonight and the pile of equipment on the drying rack will be returned to the dark corners of the storage room tomorrow. As a result, we have five gallons of apple sauce put up, canned, put away, stored with a zealous locavore sense of satisfaction.

A few weeks ago we were at a birthday party for my Mom's cousin Chuck and noted that their apple tree in the back yard was heavily laden with fruit. Of course my Dad, ever the resourceful one (read: scrounger extraordinaire) brought me over a sample. The taste was delightful, crisp, sweet, a high pitched flavor. The mug on the apple? No thanks. I'd like to say I've never met an uglier apple, but then I remembered the worm-filled nasties we picked from the farm's trees just a few weeks ago. (Some one needs to send me a tutorial on taking care of apples organically!) But the promise of free fruit was there and I had visions of Nora's pear and peach extravaganza earlier this fall. We cautiously inquired about the apples and soon we had a date to pick the beauties.

Sunday afternoon arrived and my parents picked me, Carl and Gus up, ladder loaded atop the vehicle and boxes stacked tightly in the back end. Off to the urban apple orchard, or tree, that is... we go. The boys had already been apple picking this fall and remembered proper technique for removing the apples without disturbing the tree too much. Does that still matter when you're removing all the apples from a tree? We filled box upon box of apples, reddish and yellow, dented and bumped, beautiful and mangled, every kind of apple imaginable. Our thoughts of future bowls of warm apple sauce kept us going as the swarms of ladybugs almost made my stomach turn. It was a beautiful fall day, the best kind imaginable. Being outside with my parents and the boys, joining Chuck and Cyndi for a cup of coffee and dessert in their back yard... well, it was perfect. The apples were not. It didn't matter.


See what I mean about beauty? They sat on my porch for longer than I care to admit but their smell was lovely every time we passed through on our way to gather the mail or leave through the front door. Finally, a week ago tonight I began the arduous task of cutting, trimming and seeding the apples while I stared at the dinky tv that normally lives in my closet and had been dragged down to the kitchen. For three. and. a. half. hours. Yes, indeed. Two gallons of applesauce later, I had enough liquid gold for 8 quarts of apple sauce to make my pantry shelves happy. If you've ever canned before, you know what a mess it makes of your kitchen. I understand why some farm families had a separate kitchen in the basement or in the "summer kitchen" outside, to keep the mess out of the regular living space. It is messy and space consuming.

The two pots in this photo are my favorites for the process. The robin-egg's blue Martha Stewart pot is sturdy and heavy, the perfect pot to simmer the apple bits down to a deep golden sauce. The pot on the right is my canner, a black speckleware beauty that once belonged to the previous owner of this house. We bought Mrs. Carroll's canner at the estate sale held here before we closed on our house. I knew that I would become a canner someday and that the history of that pot needed to remain here. I'm glad I did. It holds 7 quarts and is reasonably safe in terms of my eternal worry of burning myself. It is big, sturdy and has begged for my trust. So far this year, I'm doing fine.

My Dad came over this week to help go through the other three boxes of apples from the porch. The boys played and munched on apple pieces while Louise napped and we pared apples. After two and a half hours, we had finished the rest--three more gallons. His specialty was "grinding the apples," as the boys called it.
Ben Ten and Vinny the monkey tried to hijack my canning tool.

So today, after almost a full two weeks, I'm done. The first batch is already on the shelves in the basement and here are the rest of the girls, waiting to join them. I love love love the blue glass jar, though Carl and Ron both asked me why some of the applesauce was green. Blue + yellow= green, of course.

Glinty and beautiful, here they are. These jars connect me to my ancestors and fellow farm-women at heart. They connect me and those who share the apple harvest to the earth and to our community. They keep me present in my daily life and grounded in my desire to slow down the pace of our generation. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to finish cleaning the kitchen.

Fall Fun at the Arb

I think the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum is my absolute favorite place on earth to see the fall colors. Yes, some say that driving up north or along the mighty Mississippi is wonderful, and it is, but the arb really knows how to show off its colors.
We went last weekend and enjoyed an unguided romp in the woods with the cousins, the paths unfolding in front of us, allowing our boys (and girl) to discover the woods and all their wonders by themselves. The beauty of bringing children out in the open air like this is that they are exercising so many of their senses as well as their little bodies... and they don't even know it. Later they hit the pillows so hard we didn't hear a peep 'til the morn. They're still talking about the paths and rocks today.

As my wife (well, roommate) and I used to say, "thank you, thank you, thank you" for it all.

Adventures in the City

My dear friends Stephanie and Edward visited for a week from Angola and Atlanta. We had a wonderful week of conversation, amazing food and beverages, early mornings and late nights and many city adventures. The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden was one, across the street from the Walker Art Center and the location of the orginal Guthrie Theatre. Loring Park, the "Central Park" of Minneapolis is just a jaunt away across an art bridge. The kids in tow, we visited both and made a stop at a local coffee shop for treats. I think the church in the rock photo is St. Mark's Episcopal Church. Below is the Basilica.

Minneapolis' most famous sculpture: Spoonbridge and Cherry.
Definitely worth a visit. Louise agreed.

You'd almost think this was their little family.

Louise certainly didn't get her hair color from Edward or her height from Stephanie.

These two are eternally in search of moving critters-- whether bugs, squirrels, ducks or friends. They discovered the Canadian geese in Loring Park. I warned them of my misadventure as a child in this same place when we fed the ducks and I was bitten. Or was it squirrels? Have you noticed that after a while, the memory fades and the exact details aren't quite so important? I know we were feeding something that bit me... what was it?

Firetruck Frenzy

A couple of weeks ago we attended the annual parade in Burnsville called the Fire Muster. It is a parade of firetrucks. Only firetrucks. Well, maybe a few other emergency vehicles, but mostly firetrucks. New and old, from near and far. It is THE best kind of parade my boys could imagine. Late in the season, it isn't hot, it isn't cold. Mid-morning, they aren't tired, they aren't cranky. The route is long but not too populated, so there are no fights for curb seats. It is just perfect.
This year we were wise enough to bring appropriate seating. Ron had his chair while the three kids enjoyed the removeable sides of the wagon/bench. I hovered. Isn't that what we moms do? We learned this time that Louise too, has a 'thang for fire trucks. Don't you? What is YOUR favorite parade?

A Peace Picnic

While the Republican National Convention was in nearby St. Paul, there were many other events around the Twin Cities for the non-delegates to explore. One such activity was the Peace Picnic, not related to the groups who were arrested, but a family picnic to celebrate peace. The kids and I went with my sister in law and her kids. The music was captivating as was the free meal, but being quiet for the speakers... NO THANKS! We settled on some music and dinner, then headed to the park nearby. Great fun. The kids were also very intrigued by the Coast Guard cruising up and down the Mississippi, watching the Peace picnic for any un-peaceful activities.

Someday, Gus will most likely use this saying as his personal motto.A very cool park feature... a water table. Our guys were interested in making a dam, perhaps even a lock to go on the dam, and more than anything, getting themselves wet.


Even Louise got in on the water fun. Imagine the ride home with five soggy kids! Instead they were five kids in their undies and diapers.