On Horseback

I have a mental list of practical skills that are, while not actually so much practical in the strictest sense of the word, are nonetheless skills that are, rather, useful to have, since they involve activities that we may be called upon to participate in off and on throughout our lives on a casual basis, and that can also be quite dangerous if we participate without knowing what the hell we're doing.

Short and incomplete list:

• lighting a bonfire, fireplace, or grill
• swimming
• ice skating
• shooting a rifle or pistol
• using a chain saw, wood chipper, or other large power tool
• driving a stick shift
• steering a boat
• horseback riding
• using a pocket knife

Sure, ice skating is more merely painful, and absolutely no fun, if the first time you've ever been on the ice is in a group outing with some of your buddies from college, but I know of plenty of idiots who got themselves seriously injured because they didn't know how to light a fire properly (hint: it doesn't involve a Dixie Cup full of gasoline), and I know of one wonderful child who was killed his first time on horseback, on a poorly-run, unsafe trail ride at a state park in Missouri that his parents didn't realize was unsafe because they were unfamiliar with horses, too.

But forget the fear-mongering--call my list, instead, a life skills bucket list, or a list of accomplishments for the well-rounded person. Whatever you call it, and lengthy intro aside, what I am wanting to tell you is that my little girls were basically living the dream last Friday:

First horseback riding lesson? Mark it off the bucket list, and you might as well just go ahead and skip Christmas after that, because it does not even compare.

The girls' horseback riding class at PALS featured a well-fitted helmet that each child wore at all times when around the horse (not just when upon it)--

--and a dedicated side-walker for each child, and a second walker holding a lead rope:

In addition, since PALS is primarily a riding-therapy program for people with special needs, the horses are invariably, calm, kind, patient, and well-trained. The absolute only thing that I had issue with is that they didn't require students to wear a heeled boot (just a closed-toe shoe), but I put my kids in heeled boots anyway, so no problem.

The girlies learned how to mount their horses, how to start them walking (with Willow's lazy horse Splash, this involved a big kick!), how to hold the reins and balance-- 

--how to steer--

--how to stop--


--how to hang on when they work up a little speed--


--how to take off their tack and groom them and make them comfy--

--how to talk about them using all the right words, croup and forelock and barrel and such--

--how to wait patiently, still and quiet--

--and how to put away all their tack and gear in just the right place, even if it's REALLY heavy:

Along with always looking out for things that I want the kiddos to know, I'm always looking out for sports and activities that have value for building them into the types of people that they'll want to be.

Forget the discipline, patience, affinity with another creature, willingness to grub and muck stuff that are of such value--it took a total of one lesson before the girls informed that they want to grow up into the type of person who was good with horses!

Well, okay.

Rainbow Waffles = Nom

Near-ish lunchtime the other day, the girlies seemed hungry for a big lunch and an elaborate project--you know, that sort of wandering, opening and closing the refrigerator, declaring that they want something to eat but all suggestions are deemed unacceptable, wanting me to do "something" with them but they don't know what, kind of behavior.

Inspired by these rainbow pancakes from my Our Favorite Family Foods pinboard, but personally finding standing at the stove and cooking pancake after pancake to be the worst form of torture, I re-translated the recipe into rainbow waffles (because I find standing in front of a waffle iron and cooking waffle after waffle to be a very slightly milder form of torture).

The girls had a gorgeous time dyeing the divided waffle batter:

I know, Sydney looks totally beat up in that above photo. We'd gone to a pumpkin patch the day before (Freeman Family Farms, I'm looking at YOU!), where they'd set up a little barnyard petting zoo, in which there was a miniature Shetland pony, who bit my child ON. THE. FACE.

Yeah, we'll be visiting a different pumpkin patch next year. Anywho...

Since I loathe using the waffle iron, and I happen to have, if I do say so myself, two quite competent children, I set the waffle iron up on the living room table instead of the kitchen counter, demonstrated its use to the little people, and let them have at it. There were a couple of burned fingers, sure, but the kiddos? They  LOVED it:

They did themselves a pretty darn good job, too:

Since my other thing about waffles is that I refuse to believe that they contain enough nutrition or protein or filling power to sustain a meal, I used my break from the waffle iron to cook up the remaining parts of a big ole' breakfast:

We've got yogurt, and bananas, and bacon, and eggs (cooked with a little bacon grease, obviously), and waffles with maple syrup. When I showed the girls how to use up the dregs of each bowl of colored batter to make a few last super-rainbow waffles, you could tell that they totally wished that they'd thought of doing that for every single waffle they'd made.

That's a giant breakfast on my plate there, right?

Well, if you think that's giant, you should see my five-year-old's breakfast:

Well, it was breakfast, and then morning snack, and then lunch, and then afternoon snack, but you get the idea.

And that's the story of how I no longer have to be the one who works the waffle iron!

Saturday Morning, Baking Bread

add honey from the honey farm

to the bowl with yeast and warm water, and set aside.

in a separate bowl, measure bread flour

and salt

mix by hand

Not literally!!!

Oh, okay...literally

pour in the frothy yeast mixture, and mix some more

knead for ten long minutes, to make your muscles strong

Let it rest, let it rise, punch it down, let it rise.

pat it into greased loaf pans

Let it rest, let it rise.

bake it in the oven for a long, LONG time

I make bread often, and when I'm solo, I make my bread solely using the easy five-minute method. 

But that, of course, is because when I bake bread solo, I only care about the product, those rolls or that pizza crust or the next day's sandwiches and toast.

When my little girls ask to bake bread, they're not asking to bake bread because they want to eat bread (at least not solely). They're asking to bake bread because they want to measure, and mix, and taste honey and salt on their tongues, and sift bread flour between their fingers, and knead bread dough with all their strength, and warm their feet on the oven door while they watch their loaf rise, and burn their fingers because they just can't stop themselves from touching that brown crust before it's cooled.

Baking bread...when I tell you that it's the process, not the product, when I seethe so hard that my heart speeds up as I watch a dad take the glue bottle from his daughter's hand and micro-manage her craft project at the library, when I let my girls make big messes and big mistakes, when they draw on themselves with permanent marker, when they do a terrible job of brushing their hair, when we spend an entire day together and don't "do" anything...well, then that's when I want you to think about baking bread. Sure, that bread that my girls baked tasted delicious, tasted even more delicious to me because they'd baked it, but that wasn't really the point of the activity, was it?

The point of the activity was the process.

P.S. We use the bread recipe from here, and we love it:

Pumpkinbear on Pinterest

Do you pin?

Oh, my goodness, do I pin!

I have my own little Pumpkinbear Pinterest land right here:


On it you can see my seemingly millions of boards, all neurotically categorized.

I have board for projects organized by theme:

  

I have holiday boards, with projects and recipes and crafts and homeschool unit studies:

   

I have recipe boards, some for recipes that I want to make--

--and some for recipes that I make all the time:

I have boards for projects that are imminent to-dos:

 

 I have homeschool boards:

    

I have idea boards:

  

 I have boards for projects organized by material:

 

And those aren't even ALL my boards.

Also, because I'm a big nerd with a library science degree, I curate my boards, which means that I go through them, perfect the links, cross-reference them to relevant boards, and edit the commentary to be descriptive, accurate, and informative.

I can't believe how useful Pinterest has been for me. I use it to brainstorm for homeschool activities within the girls' areas of interest, and for holiday projects and kid crafts. I try new recipes from Pinterest (I've got these cranberry sauce meatballs in the crock pot right now!), and if I like them, then I move them to my Favorite Family Foods pinboard so that I can find them again easily.

Didn't people used to use file cabinets for stuff like that? Geez, wasn't that a fire hazard?

Triple War!!!

Of course I HAD to take a photo!

Tutorial: Fat Quarter Cloth Napkins

If I could dress the girls in raincoats at dinnertime, with drop cloths under their chairs, and a Roomba and a medium-sized dog to clean up after them, I would.

If I could get them to stop wiping their fingers on their shirts, or their bare chests, or the underside of the table, I would think fewer evil thoughts quietly inside my head, I have no doubt.

I'm currently, slowly, building up our collection of nicely-sewn cloth napkins to use at mealtimes. I'm not really into white linen, though--my favorite napkins are ample, double-sided, and made from mismatched quilting cotton. I like each napkin to be different, and I like to use fat quarters to make them, so that they sew up quickly and end up identical without me having to measure. I like to have a lot, though, because I like to wash them often, and so every time I make a new set of four and put them into the dinner rotation, it's not long before I think to myself, "We could really use at least one more set of napkins!"

If I happen to be at the store when the fat quarters are on sale, I'll have the girls help me pick out a selection to make a few more napkins, and Willow is happy to help sew them.

First, you have to wash and dry and iron your fat quarters, then match them up. I like to use two different, but complementary, prints for each napkin, but the girls are the most fond of novelty prints and combinations that in no way match or look good together, but hey, if it gets them to use their napkin...

Match up two fat quarters, then lay them out, right sides together, on a cutting mat, as lined up as you can get them. With a clear plastic ruler and a rotary cutter, square up the fabric by trimming all four edges, using the gridded cutting mat to make sure that you've got right angles at all four corners:

Pin the napkin all the way around--

--leaving about six inches that will be open in the middle of one side. I use chalk to mark the ends of that unsewn part:

Starting at one chalk mark, sew all the way around the perimeter, making good turns at corner, and stop when you get all the way around to the other chalk mark:

Clip your corners!

Use the opening to turn the napkin right side out, and use a chopstick or an unsharpened colored pencil to poke out the corners. Iron the napkin flat, turning the raw edges of that unsewn opening to the inside and creasing them so that they're even with the hemmed-and-turned rest of the napkin.

Edge stitch around the entire perimeter of the napkin, catching the folded-under raw edges of that unsewn part and sewing it shut as you go:

These fat quarter napkins are so big that I like to quilt them a little, so that they stay flat and properly shaped in the wash:

We currently have enough napkins to last us about half the week, which is technically plenty since I do laundry at LEAST twice a week, but...it's not enough. I really need at least one more full set!

For breakfast and lunches, I sew my lunchbox cloth napkins, which are about a quarter of the size, and I definitely need more of those, because the girls are ALWAYS eating, and it's always something messy. Since they generally help themselves to their own meals during the day, my dream is to sew a couple of rainbow sets of lunchbox napkins for each of them, so that each girl has a fresh napkin for each meal, color-coordinated by day, that she can put into her own laundry, which she does herself.

While I kick back on the couch, eating chocolate and watching "Days of Our Lives," of course...