How My High School Girl Scout Troop Earned the (*cough, cough* unofficial *cough*) Harvest Badge

Yes, we made up another Girl Scout badge.

I'm telling you, though, that if you've got a troop of older kids, especially Seniors and Ambassadors like I do, and you're not letting them make up badges, then you're sleeping on some of the best girl-led experiential learning that Girl Scouts offers!

Because if you've got a troop of older kids, I know you know that the official GSUSA badge offerings for those age groups suuuuucks. I'd way rather have a bunch of happy and engaged kids flouting the Girl Scout Badge Police than I would a bunch of bored kids reluctantly working through that same dang Robotics badge for the umpteenth time (Seriously, GSUSA? Three Robotics badges per level? At EVERY level?!? And they're all pretty much the same?!? Please hire me to revamp your badges I will do such an awesome job I swear). 

Anyway... during last Spring's budget/planning meeting my Girl Scouts got super revved up about this cute Harvest badge design--

--and decided that they wanted to earn it this autumn. And so we did!

The kids decided on most of the activities, and I fine-tuned them and sneaked in a few more educational bits. Our local council is also offering an Apple Quest fun patch this season (similar to the one I listed here), so I also bought those and we added in some more apple-themed activities to our plans.

Here are our activities!

Research apple varieties; taste-test apples.

For our apple pie meeting, each Girl Scout was asked to bring approximately five pounds of one apple variety, a small serving plate, and an informational label that they'd researched and created for that variety. 

At the start of the meeting, every Girl Scout sliced one of her apples (giving me a good chance to observe and make sure that they all had appropriate knife skills for our upcoming tasks) and displayed it on its serving plate, then we went around the room and each Girl Scout spoke about her apple variety while we all tasted it. Every apple variety was purposefully bred, so it was interesting to hear what characteristics each variety was supposedly bred for--and if we agreed! The kids also quickly noticed that the apple varieties browned differently, so that was interesting, too.

Make apple pie filling; make homemade pie crust; bake an apple pie; learn to decorate a pie.

As you can tell from the heading, this step accomplished a few of the required activities for the Harvest badge and the Apple Quest fun patch. The Girl Scouts were most excited about baking a pie and decorating it, and since apple pie filling is dead simple and my teenager knows exactly how to make homemade pie crust, I figured that baking an apple pie from scratch was juuuust about doable as a Girl Scout meeting.

And it just about was!

Here's what I asked each Girl Scout to bring:

• approximately five pounds of any variety of apple
• sharp knife
• cutting board
• mixing bowl
• oven mitt
• rolling pin
• measuring spoons and cups
• hair tie or bandana

A couple of the cleverest kids (or the kids with the cleverest parents!) also brought a vegetable peeler and/or a cutting/coring thingy and a dish towel. I attempted to teach everyone how to easily peel and core an apple with just a paring knife, but this did NOT go over well--the kids hated the very idea of it, and they traded around the peelers and corers instead. Kids these days!

I used troop funds to buy all the pie crust and the rest of the apple filling ingredients, as well as aluminum foil, plastic wrap, aluminum pie tins, a 12-pack of Mason jars, and several prepared pie crusts.

After everyone had taste-tested the apples, my teenager taught the rest of the Girl Scouts how to make pie crust from scratch, while my co-leader and I assisted. It was a process, but everyone did create a pie crust! 

The kids wrapped their pie crusts in plastic wrap and put them in the refrigerator to chill while I taught everyone the dead simple process of making fresh apple pie filling from scratch. I encouraged the kids to use a variety of apples, relying on their taste-testing to help them choose, and to taste the filling as they went to make sure that it was to their preference. We might have a picky eater or two in the troop, ahem...

When the pie filling was ready, the kids took their pie crusts out of the refrigerator and learned how to roll them out and put them in the disposable pie tins I'd bought. They added the filling, then rolled out their top crust and decided how they wanted to put it on. When planning this meeting, the kids had been interested in learning how to decorate their pies and make cute pie crusts, so I showed them several inspo images from Pie Style, but everyone ultimately decided to make a lattice top, which was a new skill for most.

Then the kids crimped the edges, wrapped their pies VERY well in plastic wrap... and put them back in the refrigerator to take home. We did NOT have enough room to be baking five whole pies at once!

Instead, I brought out the prepared pie crusts and the kids used those, along with any remaining apple pie filling, to make hand pies and/or muffin tin pies. I think they might have liked that activity the best, because they baked quickly and then the kids could eat them!

Learn strategies to use up surplus apples.

Food waste is one of my personal issues (and the troop has those pesky picky eaters!), so it was important to me to show the kids some ways to preserve or prepare apples that you don't feel like eating out of hand or in a pie.

Both applesauce and apple juice are the easiest thing in the world to make, so I had both my giant stock pot and my very old juicer (it was a wedding gift!) out, and at the start of the meeting, since applesauce does take some time, I asked the kids which they'd rather make. They agreed on juice, so at the very end of the meeting, after each kid had cleaned up but before she left, she got to juice herself a pint jar's worth of apple juice to take home with her. This was a new experience for almost everyone, and I think they all really liked it! 

And, of course, the most important strategy to use up apples: while the kids worked, they threw all of their peels, cores, and scraps into a giant bowl in the middle of the table. After we'd cleaned up, I tossed the entire bowl of scraps to the chickens, and they feasted!

Create an apple recipe book.

Since most of those apple pie activities has been to earn the Harvest badge, the kids needed, in my opinion, one more apple-centric activity to completely earn the Apple Quest fun patch, so I made a Shared Google Doc and asked them to each contribute one apple recipe so that we could make a little cookbook.

I'd hoped they'd get super into the project, and at that time we had an upcoming volunteer date at a local food pantry so I also had it in my head that perhaps we could print the recipes into a little booklet for the pantry to hand out during those times when it was swamped with apples, but the kids did not get super into the project, and so we didn't do anything more with it. 

To be honest, I think they were just flat-out sick of apples! But the project did remind me that my favorite cake, Smitten Kitchen's apple cake, exists, and it's just as delicious as I remembered, so as far as I'm concerned the whole thing was a huge success. 

Contribute to a harvest meal for someone in need.

The kids definitely wanted to do a service project as part of this badge, but they dithered a bit over what, exactly, they wanted to do. Also remember that high school kids are VERY busy, and some of these kids were also working on college applications, scholarship applications, Gold Award applications... It is a lot of work to be a high school student these days!

I researched a few opportunities for them to consider, including serving a meal at one of our city's shelters or hosting a food drive for one of the local food pantries. The idea that the kids liked best, though, was volunteering on a specific day to help food pantry patrons choose the components for a Thanksgiving dinner. So the Saturday before Thanksgiving, we went to the food pantry's distribution location and helped fetch and carry and otherwise made ourselves useful. I carried soooo many frozen turkeys!

Make an autumn craft.

The kids wanted to make gnomes, but we kept running out of time to make them. Eventually, when we met to wrap the gifts they had bought for the kid we were sponsoring for Christmas (for the same food pantry as the Thanksgiving project!), I tacked gnome-crafting onto that meeting. 

I actually had almost everything for this gnome project already in my stash, so I just bought a faux fur remnant, rice, and hot glue. The gnomes all turned out sooo cute, with bodies made from one of my partner's old Henleys and hats made from some of my infinite felt stash. 

References and Resources

Here are some other resources I had available during our Harvest badgework:

• The Apple Lover's Cookbook: This book has photos and information about lots of apple varieties, and the recipes are good for Girl Scouts to flip through to see all the yummy possibilities for cooking with apples.
• The Book on Pie: The recipes in this book look DELICIOUS, so it was another book that was fun for Girl Scouts to flip there. There are so many kinds of pie!!!
• Pie Academy: This has good process photos, especially of making the pie crust and making a lattice top. It has several different pie crust recipes, and some unusual recipes for pie fillings (one contains KETCHUP!?!?).
• Pie Camp: This was my main reference book for the pie meeting. I taught the kids McDermott's "20-20-20" method for baking, passed on her tips for preventing a soggy bottom, and demonstrated how to make and use the foil shield that prevents a burned top. We also used her cooking instructions to make the muffin tin pies.
• Pie Squared: These are essentially sheet pan pies, both sweet and savory. This would be a good recipe book if you wanted to serve fresh-baked pie at your Girl Scout troop meeting.
• Pie Style: Even though it was plenty for the troop to learn how to make a lattice pie crust, because decorating pies was something they'd expressed interest in I showed them the photos from this book of faaancy pie decorations. Everyone went "Oooh!," but nobody wanted to give any of the ideas a try just then, ahem...

Overall, I think this turned out to be a very successful badge! The kids wanted to do it and helped plan it, everyone learned a new skill, a couple of kids got a chance to practice their leadership by teaching the others specific techniques, we did some community service, and now each kid has some more practical life knowledge in her toolkit. 

Up next: cookie season, including seeing if I can sneak in a cookie badge or two, and travel planning, including me looking for yet another retired or Council's Own travel-focused badge that these well-traveled kids haven't yet earned. 

Hire me to create more travel badge for older kids, GSUSA! I'll do an awesome job!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Pumpkin Pounding: A Halloween Project for Small Children

 

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World way back in 2009! 

Encouraging my children's independence is VERY important to me. Not only is it easier for me to parent two small children who can pour their own milk and put on their own coats and carry their own balance bikes up and down the front porch stairs, but it's also a priority in my parenting that my girls see themselves as capable individuals who can handle challenges and perform the meaningful work of day-to-day living. 

Because of that, carving pumpkins into Jack-o-lanterns can be a really frustrating experience. 

I do permit my children to cut with sharp knives (with supervision), but not to use them on something as thick and unwieldy as a pumpkin. Although there are around-the-house materials that make pumpkin carving an activity more appropriate for small children (subject for a later post), my girls' favorite Jack-o-lantern craft is something that we call pumpkin pounding.

Pumpkin pounding is a hands-on activity that uses real tools on a real pumpkin, and each of my girls was able to do it with help at age two, and independently by age three. The best part, however, is that in the end, depending on how enthusiastic a pounder your kid has been, you end up with a real, live Jack-o-lantern for sitting on the porch steps and popping a candle inside. 

You will need:

• field pumpkin that's not too round. You want to be able to sit it on its various sides, as well as its butt, and not have it roll all over creation.
• hammer. You can lay out a variety of hammers for your kids to experience, but the best tool for them is one that's as light as possible but has the widest hammer head
• nails. Again, lay out a variety to try out, but the best ones are as wide as possible with the widest head
• knife and scraping tool and whatever else you'll need to cut the top of the Jack-o-lantern and scrape the insides

1. Set the pumpkin up in a space where kids have enough room to swing a hammer, and where they can get in the correct hammering position--a low table or the floor or a bench, etc. 

Be prepared to leave the pumpkin in that space for a few days, to give the kids the chance to come back over and over to this activity independently. 

2. Show your child how to press the tip of the nail into the pumpkin flesh until the nail is held there by itself. That's the safest way to hammer, but older children can also be taught how to gently tap the nail into place with their hammers. 

For kids younger than three, you may need to set up a handful of nails like this for them to hammer. 

3. Let your child hammer nails into the pumpkin. 

Remind them not to hammer the pumpkin just for the heck of it, but pumpkins are extremely sturdy and surprisingly forgiving, and even though your kid will hit the pumpkin a LOT, and HARD, as they're aiming for that nail, it's not going to crack.  

4. At about five years of age, your kid can also learn how to use the claw end of the hammer to lever the nails back out of the pumpkin when she's done hammering. Otherwise, you'll probably need to do this, so give her plenty of nails to work with before she needs your help. 

5. The Jack-o-lantern will show best with as many nail holes as possible, so feel free to take a whack at the pumpkin yourself. It's amazingly cathartic. 

6. When everyone is completely finished with the pounding (and this may take several days), cut off the top of the pumpkin, and scrape out the insides to finish it. Pop in a candle, and enjoy your pretty pumpkin. 

My kids and I are, for some reason, inordinately fond of our autumn-themed craft projects. What are your favorites?

The Post-Girl Scout Cookie Season Cookie Prep Meeting

Every year, the most annoying thing about Girl Scout cookie season is figuring out how to fit in a Girl Scout troop meeting to prep for it. My troop has been selling cookies so long that they don't need a training meeting, just an email with relevant dates and any changes from last year. But every year we always DO need something new prepped, new donation cans or signage or other marketing materials--and who has time for that between Winter Break and a cookie sale start date of early January?

This year, we had a collective revelation: why not have a post-Girl Scout cookie season meeting to prep for the next year's sale? We know exactly what materials we need to replace, we've got brand-new marketing ideas fresh in our minds, and we won't have to rush or be stressed out. As an added bonus, we've got a full stash of empty cookie boxes to use as crafting supplies. 

Y'all, our plan worked BRILLIANTLY! The meeting was relaxed and low-stress, the kids had tons of ideas, and I've got the comfy feeling of knowing that we'll be going into our next cookie season with almost all of our materials already created and ready to go.

During this post-cookie season meeting, Seniors earned the My Cookie Network badge and Ambassadors earned the Cookie Influencer badge.

Pre-Meeting Prep Work

Before the meeting, I ordered the badges, printed photos of the troop doing cool stuff over the years, bought postcard stamps, formed an agreement with our local animal shelter that they would love to have the corrugated cardboard cat scratchers we wanted to make, and met up with various other troop leaders here and anon to take their empty corrugated cardboard cookie cases off their hands. 

As a Little Brownie Bakers troop, the kids really wanted to taste-test the ABC Bakers cookies. We also had a brand-new cookie this year, the Raspberry Rally, that NOBODY had tasted because it hadn't been available for in-person sales! Raspberry Rally was only available as a shipped cookie, during a specific ordering window only, so my night owl teenager got onto the troop's Digital Cookie site at 12:01 am opening day and ordered us some Raspberry Rallies.

Good thing she did, because by 9:00 am other parents and troop leaders were already in the Facebook group griping that it was sold out!

I asked around my Craft Knife Facebook page to find someone whose kid was an ABC Bakers Girl Scout, and I bought the troop a selection of ABC Bakers cookies that we could compare to our Little Brownie Bakers cookies.

My own Girl Scout had to miss most of this meeting, so to earn the part of the Cookie Influencer badge that she'd miss, she baked the Original Girl Scout Cookie, using the original recipe, to share with the rest of the troop during the meeting.

Step 1: Become an authority in your cookie business.

Because kids were earning two levels of badges simultaneously, we ended up doing activities somewhere in the middle. When these Girl Scout Seniors level up and want to earn the Ambassador badge, we'll just do different activities!

To be an expert in the Girl Scout cookie business, you need to know all about your cookies--how they look, how they smell, how they taste. You should also know how to compare/contrast them with other cookies from the same bakery and the other bakery, and other commercial and homemade cookies.

We taste-tested my teenager's homemade original recipe Girl Scout cookies, both so we would know how those original cookies tasted and how they compare to their closest cousin, the Trefoil. 

Here's the original Girl Scout cookie recipe. The dough wants to be sticky, but refrigerate it instead of adding extra flour, or your finished cookies will be bland. It's impossible to make a truly authentic recreation, however, and your Girl Scouts should try to guess why!

Do YOU know? It's because none of these ingredients are the same as they were way back in 1922! Your eggs, milk, and butter were farm-fresh and unpasteurized, organic and grass-fed. Your sugar was made from beets, not sugar cane. Even flour manufacturing has changed numerous times since then. Also, ovens! This cookie recipe calls for a "quick oven," which most modern interpretations set at about 350 degrees, but there weren't thermometers, so cooks just sort of figured out a method and used their own experiences to set the temperature, which would also have fluctuated constantly.

We also taste-tested the Raspberry Rallies, and surprisingly, nobody was a fan! Some kids thought they would taste better frozen (we LOVE frozen Thin Mints in this troop!), and I personally thought they would have been delicious with a raspberry jam layer. But alas, they were just Thin Mints with raspberry flavoring instead of mint. And interestingly, my council has ALREADY sent out an announcement that we won't be selling them next year! Goodbye, Raspberry Rallies--we hardly knew ye!

The main event, however, was the Blindfolded Taste Test. I brought enough bandanas so that each person who wanted to play could have their own, and a couple of kids who didn't want to play helped me. The taste-testers blindfolded themselves, and the helpers and I donned disposable gloves (we use these for all our Girl Scout food prep!) and set dueling cookies before each taste-tester. The only tricky thing to remember is which baker you put on which side! When we'd handed out the two cookies for that round, the taste-testers sampled them both and announced 1) which cookie was more delicious, and 2) which cookie they thought was our Little Brownie Baker version vs. which was the ABC Baker version.

This activity was so fun for everyone! Of course, it only works when the cookies from different bakeries look identical, so it didn't work for, say, Thin Mints, which are smooth when they come from Little Brownie Bakers but crinkly when they come from ABC Bakers--

--but for Trefoils, Do-Si-Dos vs. Peanut Butter Sandwiches, Samoas vs. Caramel deLites, Tagalongs vs. Peanut Butter Patties, and Adventurefuls, they're similar enough that you can't tell them apart without looking very closely... which you can't do when you're blindfolded, mwa-ha-ha!

Our troop of cookie experts had a lot of fun comparing and contrasting and mostly--but not always!--guessing our own cookies correctly, and we had plenty of leftovers so that everyone could take more samples to taste-test home with them.

Step 2: Set cookie business goals and develop a new skill.

After the taste-testing, we spent the rest of the meeting working on these various projects while chatting and munching cookies!

At our Girl Scout cookie booths, the kids sometimes use posters and sometimes don't, but unlike some of our other decorations, we don't really have a good stash of ready-to-go posters. Time to fix that! I set out quarter-sheets of posterboard, along with lots of photos of our troop doing cool stuff over the years, and markers, pencils, glue sticks, etc. The kids could work individually or in groups, with the goal of making posters each tightly focused on one NON-COOKIE theme. 

Because do you know why people buy Girl Scout cookies even if they're not super revved up about the cookies?

They buy cookies to support Girl Scouts! So kids who can talk confidently about what they want to do with their cookie profits, as well as show off all the cool stuff they've already done with their cookie profits, inspire the people who want to support Girl Scouts to support them even more. It's also good for the kids to remember the purpose of all the hard work they put in selling cookies, as well as to celebrate all their awesome adventures.

And on this day, the kids made some great posters! Now we've got posters about camping, about high adventure, about friendship, and about our troop trip to Mexico that we can mix and match at cookie booths. Since they're smaller, we can set up a couple at a time, even, and I think they'll be interesting enough to draw eyes to them... and over to the kids' cookie booth!

Step 3: Create and share your value proposition.

The activities we did for Steps 2-4 could be swapped to meet any of these steps, to be honest, because a good marketing campaign is multi-faceted. So just as those posters do a wonderful job sharing the kids' value propositions, it turned out that making, writing, and sending postcards made from upcycled Girl Scout cookie boxes enabled many of the kids to learn a new skill!

Tell me: do YOUR Girl Scouts know how to write, address, and stamp a postcard? Because many of mine didn't! It took some of them a few tries to get everything laid out properly, so even better that we were using perfectly free, easily recyclable materials!

For this activity, the kids each picked a couple of the troop's shipped cookies customers and wrote them a personal thank-you note. They thanked them, said something they learned during cookie sales or something they'd use their cookie profits for, and finished with something else thankful that wasn't a thank-you. This was also a good time to sign the troop thank-you notes that we give, along with a box of Girl Scout cookies, to businesses that let us have a cookie booth on their property. For those thank-you notes, I mount a cute troop photo to a trefoil that I cut out of green paper, then just have the kids sign the back. It's cute, quick, and easy!

Step 4: Create a marketing campaign.

All of this is part of an integrated marketing campaign, but for this specific step, I got the kids to stock the troop back up with decorated donation cans. At each cookie booth we have one donation can for donating cookies to charity (for the past couple of years, our troop has been donating cookies to the city's emergency youth shelter), and one donation can for donating money straight to our troop. I don't understand why these donation cans get SO beat up over the course of a Girl Scout cookie season, but OMG we are constantly needing to replace donation cans! On top of that, we try to keep at least two full cookie booth set-ups to make busy selling weekends easier, so we're looking at six new donation cans nearly every single year.

Fun fact: the only correct donation cans are either 1) a plastic protein powder canister or 2) a giant plastic peanut butter jar. In my top photo, I don't know what that can on the right is, but it's not going to last, sigh.

Step 5: Leave a legacy.

It's important to pay good works forward, so just as the community supports these kids by buying Girl Scout cookies from them, the kids also give back to the community in other ways. We've got our yearly cookie donation to the youth emergency shelter, but this year, I also thought it would be nice to upcycle some of our massive pile of cardboard waste by creating these corrugated cardboard cat scratchers for our local animal shelter.

Look how many the kids were able to make during the course of just one meeting!

I'd love to find a way to encourage the troop to make more cat scratchers independently during the course of the next cookie season, because we have SO much cardboard waste, but I don't know--they're pretty time-consuming, and teenagers are the busiest people I know!

The kids LOVED this meeting, and it worked really well in so many ways: we got a lot of genuinely productive work done, we did some charity work, we ate delicious snacks, we got to be creative, we looked at cute pictures of our troop over the years and went, "Awww!", we had plenty of time to chat while our hands were busy, and we learned new things like how to address a postcard and how Peanut Butter Patties taste just a little different from Tagalongs. 

I hope our upcoming meeting, in which we're going to plan a Harvest badge to earn, start planning a big 2024 troop trip, and get several kids started on their Gold Award paperwork, goes just as well!

Day 1 in England: In Which Security Theater Flags My Lara Bars, And I Give My Life Over to Cadbury Chocolate

To England!

These teenagers of mine are getting so grown up that who knows how many more times I'll be able to pack them both with me on a big vacation, so I definitely made the most of their free time and their patience with my nonsense to plan out the vacation of my dreams with all my favorite people. 

It turns out that the vacation of my dreams consists of a week in London to see all the sights, go mudlarking, and see a West End show, followed by a week driving around the south of England in a rental car, hugging giant rocks and walking around castle ruins and hunting for fossils.

And all we had to do to get there was travel for 24 hours! 

I do not think that I have ever gone through airport security one time since 2001 without being flagged for extra scrutiny. I didn't get any pat-downs on this trip, hallelujah, but my luggage did get hand-searched Every. Single. Time. And I never had anything forbidden in it! In the Indianapolis airport, it was apparently my stash of four Lara bars that flagged the additional screening... so if you're planning to be short on time to make a flight, pack granola instead, I guess. Although even if I hadn't packed my Lara bars it wouldn't have saved us any time, since one of the teenagers got the pat-down I managed to avoid. After all these years together, Matt just rolls his eyes and collects our shoes and backpacks for us--I don't think he's ever been flagged in his life!

Here's the AirBnb that we stayed in. I was worried it would feel far away from everywhere we wanted to go, but actually it was perfect! Not gonna lie: I couldn't figure out the busses on that first day, AND I turned us in the wrong direction coming out of Battersea Park Station and walked us at least half a mile before Matt was all, "Ooh, look! The London Eye!," and I was all, "Shit! We shouldn't be walking towards the London Eye!", but fortunately everybody felt sorry for me and nobody murdered me and I handed Dr. Google over to Matt and he got us safely to Tim's flat. But the next day we figured out the bus schedule and from then on, we barely had to leave the flat before we had our choice of busses to take us to the train station or the Underground station or even right to the center of the city. We used the busses so much that we probably didn't even break even on our 7-Day Travelcards; they were still convenient to have, but Pay As You Go would have been cheaper overall, I think.

Dr. Google also got us safely to the Sainsbury Local, which is the only other adventure I'd planned for this day. Matt is pretty neutral about travel food, but for me and the kids, visiting a local grocery store and stocking up on new-to-us-snack foods is our collective favorite thing about travel. We still talk about Whippets and All-Dressed Ridgies from our Canada trip... not poutine, though. Poutine was disgusting.

Big wins from the Sainsbury Local on this day included Dark Chocolate Gingers, Walkers Cheese and Onion crisps, and Cadbury Popping Jelly bars.

You know that really gross scene in Breaking Dawn in which Jacob falls in love with a baby, and to act like this isn't the grossest, most fucked up thing that she could possibly write, Stephanie Meyer has him be all, "SHRUG! It used to be gravity holding me to the planet and now it's a newborn! It's totes not romantic! But you know, it also kinda is! But not in a weird way! Anyway, don't worry about it, lol! #specialbond!"

That's me and Cadbury chocolate. 

Not the Creme Eggs. That's the only kind of Cadbury I've had before, and I don't love them. But at the Sainsbury there were all new Cadbury choices, and in the two weeks we spent in England I'm pretty sure I mowed through every option. The Popping Jelly is far superior, followed closely by Oreo, which is followed closely by Orange. 

Matt was equally delighted to find new-to-him flavors of Strongbow, so after our grocery store trip we happily all sat out in Tim's garden, enjoying chocolate, crisps, and cider and watching planes heading to and from Heathrow:

The teenagers liked the Aero bars, but I'm sticking with my Cadbury!

I managed to keep my eyes open long enough to eat the Indian food Matt ordered us for dinner, but I'm pretty sure that I was sound asleep and snoring by all of 7:00 pm, and I don't think I so much as rolled over for the next twelve hours.

Next up: Westminster Abbey, Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery, and Six!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!

Four Little Rascals and Their Mama: Our Foster Kittens are Three Weeks Old!

Dill and Fennel

 Welp, they're definitely messier than they were a week ago! I'm currently spending all my teaching money on puppy pee pads, wet kitten food, and wood pellet litter, but if a hobby doesn't take up all your time and even more of your money, then what kind of hobby even is it?

selfie with Sage

Dill and the teenager

The babies really woke up this week. I miss their wobbly little uncertain steps, but watching them play fight and chase each other is also incredibly cute. They're still nursing regularly, but they've all gotten the hang of their wet kitten food by now, and they and Ginger are easily going through three cans a day on top of Ginger's dry food (that I've also seen a kitten or two snack on). It's so different from every other litter we've ever had, that we've always had to bribe with pureed baked chicken to start putting on weight!

doing our best to make Sage an ipad baby

picture of two mamas!

Even Sage, who I suspect isn't quite the same age as his siblings, FINALLY started chowing down by the end of the week--little dude put on over two ounces in two days!

Sage FINALLY eating his nice wet food!

We're done with quarantine, and although I'm still not giving the kittens any freedom (and Ginger keeps getting herself put back in kitten jail for essentially beelining straight to my dwarf pomegranate, mouth already open for munching, as soon as we let her out), it's nice to be able to bring them out of their room to hang out with us, rather than having to chill out on the floor of the cramped kids' bathroom whenever we want to visit them.

Sage not enjoying his field trip into the outside world

family portrait on my lap

We're probably not technically done with ringworm quarantine, but we're done with changing clothes every time we touch the kittens, so I guess that's us done with ringworm quarantine! If I have to admit in a few weeks that we all have ringworm, feel free to shame me. I'll deserve it.

Clove, Dill, and Fennel

My favorite kitten is still a kitten who's sleeping and purring on my lap, so I like most to snatch one up just as they're all settling down for a nap so it can come and snooze on me instead. I also really like Zooming with my college student from the kitten room; essentially we just spend an hour with me holding kitten after kitten up to the camera, and her squealing at them in such a high pitch that her computer's microphone can't even pick it up. She's coming home for a visit in a few days to watch her sister perform in our town's Trashion/Refashion Show, and I think she'll be hard-pressed to divide her days between the kittens and her dog!

Clove is my snooze buddy

Now that everyone's over the hump of possible illnesses and all the babies are gaining weight, all we really have to do with them is love them, feed them, socialize them, and clean up after them. This is the part where they work their way into my heart and I get so attached to them that I cry for days when we finally have to bring them back to the shelter so their forever families can come adopt them.

Dill is my other best snoozer

I should probably take more pictures of what their bathroom looks like every single morning and just look at that when I miss them...

My Kid's Baking Class, or, a Growth Mindset isn't for the Weak

fresh homemade croissant filled with prosciutto and cheese

Want to know yet another of my fun neuroses?

I don't like to see people praised for qualities like talent, intelligence, or beauty. Like, I'm not a psychopath--I tell my children and my husband that they're talented at whatever and they're smart and they're attractive, etc., but those are meant to be just, you know, the kind of compliments that make sure people know they're loved and awesome and appreciated.

But it's not, like, good or bad to be those things. People are also born the way that they're born, and they can't help how they're born. In my mind, if someone shows you, say, a test that they earned a good grade on and you say something like, "Oh, you're so smart!", you're really just pointing out that they didn't work hard for that grade because all they have is a natural knack for the material. 

This is 100% related to my childhood fucked-upness because hey, guess who got praised all the time for being smart and then about lost her damn mind when shit got difficult in college? I'll give you a hint: it's the same person who also got told all the time that she was fat and was not pretty, so I have first-hand knowledge that being called out on stuff you can't help is not the road to excellent mental health.

So for my kids' whole lives, whenever I've seen a knack emerge or a talent unfold, it's really important to me that when I encourage them, I'm encouraging them for what they've done to improve, not the simple fact of a condition they were born with. And whenever someone praises them for being smart or a good artist or looking pretty or whatever, I am 100% that nag who reminds them that it's what they do with their DNA-given amenities that's important. I have literally looked my children in the eyes and told them, straight-faced and unironically, "With great power comes great responsibility. You must use your powers for good." THAT'S how bad it is around here. 

I was kind of relieved, honestly, the other day when I started to say something about a recent compliment and my kid interrupted me to irritatedly note that, "Yes, Mom, I know it's nothing to my credit and the important thing is how hard I've worked to achieve this result! UGH!" She wouldn't be quoting me with such annoyance if she hadn't internalized the message, right?

I mean... right? Ahem.

ANYWAY, all this to say that my kid has been using her powers for SO MUCH PERSONAL GOOD lately! The kid has always had a knack for cooking, particularly baking. She likes the precision required to achieve perfect results, and she likes the artistry also required. Just between us, I also think it lends itself well to her own personal brand of pickiness, in which she wants to eat only the thing that she wants to eat and it must also be delicious and also look exactly right. 

When a kid seems to have a talent or interest in something, enrichment and challenge are the two ways to turn it into something that IS to their credit, so I've always tried to do that with this kid and cooking. She's had a lot of great experiences, but I, personally, don't have anything to teach her in that regard, being, alas, a miserable cook with zero interest in improvement, and she's never really liked children's cooking camps or classes, because she's never really found the work to be at a high enough level with the "proper" emphasis on perfection.

Junior year of high school has so far always felt like a good time for my homeschooling kids to start taking a real college class or two, and this kid actually started the summer before, when the local community college unexpectedly offered their entire summer course catalog free to current high school students. She'd wanted to take both Intro to Baking and its pre- or co-requisite, a ServSafe Manager Certification course, but alas, the baking class was cancelled so instead she chose to learn about serial killers while also becoming ServSafe certified.

And then in the fall I forced her to take a college art class, also in service of challenging and enriching one's innate gifts. 

So not until this spring semester was my kid finally able to put her ServSafe certification to use by FINALLY enrolling in this much longed for, much anticipated Intro to Baking class.

If I had known what would come home from those school kitchens, I would have moved heaven and earth to make this class happen sooner. Because OMG. It's like living in an expensive French bakery over here.

Check out these loaves!

The sandwich bread and dinner rolls!

The doughnuts, some filled!

And I'm not even going to lie--I teared up when I bit into this croissant, filled with homemade chocolate hazelnut spread, fresh from the oven and still warm:

Each baked item this kid has brought home has been the most delicious baked item I have ever eaten. Her cinnamon rolls were better than Cinnabon's. Her sandwich bread was better than Dave's Good Seed's. Slap my face, but her dinner rolls were better than Aunt Fannie Sue's. 

And she's got all this knowledge, now, of how stuff is supposed to be. She's reading her textbook and listening to the lectures and telling me about the baker's percent of salt in a recipe and hydrating your dough and why you should punch it down, all this stuff that I've never known and never even fathomed was something that could be known. 

I made a batch of apple muffins over the weekend, mostly because apparently only my college kid was doing her duty with the apples so we suddenly had several extremely puny-looking ones in the fruit bowl that nobody in their right mind was going to eat out of hand, but also because I thought that people might like muffins. And people ate them okay, but they for sure weren't delicious. I think I didn't use enough oil, and they were definitely too dry so I probably overbaked them, too? So I mentioned the uneaten muffins last night, as a reminder that they still existed and we needed to force-feed them to ourselves the next morning, and my kid was all, "Oh, right! We're actually making muffins in my class tomorrow!"

My immediate thought was, "Oh, shit! I will never be able to make a muffin again! Everyone will know that my batter wasn't hydrated and my baker's percentage of baking soda was off and I don't know how to cook!"

But you know what? That's the young me talking, the little kid who thought that smart is something that you were, not something that you did. What I'm ACTUALLY going to do when my kid brings home her beautiful batch of muffins in a few hours, the ones that will look and taste a thousand times better than my dry, hard apple muffins, is praise them for how beautiful they are and how delicious they taste, ask my kid a billion questions about how she did such and such to get such and such, compliment her for the work she put into improving her skills and achieving such a perfect result...

... and then ask her to teach me to make delicious and beautiful muffins, too. Tbh I'd kind of rather continue to bake sub-par muffins than take the time and effort to learn the skill properly, but we must let the kids see us practicing a growth mindset if we want them to do it, too, sigh and ugh.

Cooking with Teenagers: Mochi Ice Cream

 

These mochi ice cream balls did not turn out to be delicious, but since the whole point of Cooking with Teenagers--for me, at least!--is spending time with my kids, none of us bickering, it was a successful endeavor, nevertheless.

Not delicious, though!

Mochi is one of the recipes from Cook Anime that I'd been wanting to try, along with the Royal Milk Tea (haven't made it yet) and the Matcha Ice Cream (SOOOOO gross, but Will admitted that she *might* have forgotten the sugar, so we need to try that one again). The recipe for mochi is super simple, although it does call for one perhaps difficult to obtain ingredient:

With that on hand, however, all you have to do is mix and microwave and mix some more!

It took a couple of tries to get the consistency correct, and we made another mistake of sprinkling more flour onto the mochi dough to roll it out, because it was SOOOO sticky. What we were supposed to do was wet our hands and rolling pin, and if we'd done that we might have avoided the raw flour taste of the mochi, which I bet comes from adding in so much... raw flour, d'oh.

Regardless, we refrigerated our sticky dough, then cut it into circles, added scoops of ice cream--

--and pinched the dough around the ice cream:

Let it freeze some more and you're done!

Our mochi ice cream ended up looking not unlike store-bought mochi ice cream--

--but its overall taste is not delicious.

Ah, well... the adventure may not have been successful, but the real treasure was the friendships that we made along the way!