Fishing with Pappa, and other Weekend Adventures

A lot of pretty great things happened this weekend:

The most awesome of all awesome kids graduated from high school. Even though I'm pretty sure that it was just a couple of weeks ago that she was the tiny little flower girl at our wedding, twirling around with sparklers while that head full of curly hair flew around her, somehow we all found ourselves on Friday night in the stands of the school's football stadium--

--watching, disbelieving (but very, very proud), as this happened:

Just look at this kid, all grown up in the space of one breath:

These kids are growing up mighty quickly, as well, I must say:

Sitting in the stands for three FREAKING HOURS for this graduation, the kids and I did some discussing of what their high school graduations might look like. We're thinking backyard party, perhaps we'll grill, some of the people who've loved them and guided them through their school years can give speeches, and they can give a speech, too. Although really, as long as their Aunt Pam also makes them Little Debbie Swiss Rolls decorated like diplomas, I don't think the kids care what else goes on.

I *think* we're definitely getting the house! We still had to ask for the second extension, but this bank gave the realtor to pass to the seller some sort of form saying that they're definitely providing our mortgage, so there's no reason why they wouldn't extend. Sometime prior to June 20, I think we'll have our new home!

Pappa taught his great-granddaughters how to fish. It's funny how I've always thought that my Pappa, who helped raise me, was the oldest guy in the world, even though when I was born he was only 57, which doesn't seem old to me now (at least *I* don't plan to be super old in 19 years, but I also don't plan to be raising any grandbabies, either). But no matter how you look at that, today, at 94 (and we'll be driving back to Arkansas to celebrate his 95th birthday in October), Pappa's a pretty old guy, and he hasn't often been up to gallivanting about with the couple of wild little hellions that I always bring with me when I travel, so it's always been a disappointment to me that my kiddos weren't having the same relationship with him that I had, weren't seeing the all-powerful guy who could do anything, could fix anything, could solve anything the way that it seemed he could when I was their age.

But Pappa's actually been seeming to feel really well lately, and my little hellions are old enough now to not absolutely drive an old guy bonkers, and this time when we came down to visit, he had crafted the plan to surprise his great-granddaughters with their very first real fishing trip (stocked pond at the State Fair excluded).

It was absolutely perfect:

Pappa taught each kiddo how to bait her own hook with the worms that he'd brought, how to adjust the bobber, how to cast, and how to wait patiently. The kids took to fishing as if they'd been born to it--as, indeed, they have been, at least on their mother's side. I was Pappa's fishing buddy before them.

But, of course, even with all the newness of hook baiting, all the fun of practicing casting, all the excitement of waiting for the bobber to dip, all the peace of being out next to the water on a lovely morning in good company, the kids' first real fishing trip would not have been quite perfect unless they caught a fish.

Thank goodness:

Pappa held each fish while I unhooked it, and then he handed it back to the kid and instructed her to throw it back in (we neglected the part where you kiss it and tell it to grow bigger. Next time!). Will tossed her fish back in pretty lightly, but when it was Syd's turn, she heard Pappa say, "Throw it back in!", channeled not her complete lack of fishing knowledge but instead Matt's extensive softball coaching, and before we could stop her, she wound back, stepped forward on her non-dominant foot, and THREW that fish across the lake with her very best softball throw! Matt swears that it was her best throw ever. I swear the poor thing bounced before it finally landed, but it didn't come back up, at least.

Kids don't have the ability to stay out fishing all dang day, but neither do seniors, fortunately, so Pappa got tired enough for us to head back at about the perfect time--after each kid had caught a fish, but before they got weary of the fishing. We spent the rest of that day out and about while he rested, met back up only for a bit at the big graduation party that night, and were headed back to Indiana less than 24 hours later, but the memories that we made certainly made it feel to me like one of our biggest, best trips, even if it wasn't the longest. 

I'm very happy for the children, of course, that they got to have this experience with their great-grandfather, to get to know him and see for themselves the kind of smart, generous, and engaging man that he is, that they got to have their first real fishing trip, so long anticipated, with him, and I hope that they've made memories for themselves about this day.

Honestly, though, I'm most happy for myself. Whether or not the kids end up remembering this adventure with their great-grandfather after they're grown, I'll remember it, and feel happy thinking about it. I think that one of my favorite memories now is always going to be this time when two generations, so far apart from each other but both so close to me, spent the morning fishing with each other.

Flat Stanley Heads to London

The other day, Syd recited to me the entire plot of a Flat Stanley book that she'd just read. When she finished, I said, "You know, some kids like to make Flat Stanley dolls and send them to people who live in exciting places. Those people take Flat Stanley around and show him the sights, then send you pictures of his adventures. Should WE do that?"

"We should!", said she.

You can draw your own Flat Stanley, or choose one of several free templates available online--Syd liked this particular Flat Stanley best. I printed him out onto cardstock for her, then she colored him masterfully, using a combination of crayons, colored pencils, and our people-color crayons.

Although we've got loads of friends who live in super cool places, for this inaugural Flat Stanley, who I really want to be a smash hit for Syd's sake, I chose my friend, Trey, and his husband, Philip, who live in London. Philip is the UK Parliament guy that Will's going to Skype interview this summer [hopefully--must get butt in gear on that project], so I thought it would be nice for Syd to do something fun with them, too, so she wouldn't feel left out.

Also, they're amiable fellows who won't be too fussed about holding up a child's drawing next to Big Ben and snapping a photo.

Syd dictated a letter to our friends while I typed it into our Startwrite program, then I printed it out for her in cursive, to her horror. However, she surprised herself at how able she now is to write in cursive!

It took her a long time, with a couple of breaks for playdates and tennis lessons, but her handwriting is excellent.

Mind you, she put a period everywhere there should have been a comma, but her handwriting really is excellent. She colored her Flat Stanley really cute, too.

Flat Stanley is now off and away, and hopefully he'll soon be having adventures that he'll want to show off to Syd. And hopefully that will inspire Syd to want to make and send out some more Flat Stanley guys--maybe to you?

In other news, trying to buy a house sucks. How does anyone ever actually manage to do this? Since I've previously had a newborn in the NICU for three weeks, this is only the second most stressful experience of my life, but it's still really, really, REALLY darn stressful! The thing that I hate most is anticipating decisions that are totally out of our hands and not on our own timetable. Matt has found a bank that says that they'll absolutely offer us a mortgage, but first they have to check with the bank that declined our mortgage to see if that bank will let them use the appraisal that they had done. If so, yay! If not, this new bank will have to schedule its own appraisal, which means that we will not be able to close before the extension that the seller agreed to give us runs out, which means that our realtor will have to ask the seller for a second extension. Will the seller agree to this, especially since they probably don't really know what kinds of hell we've already had to go through to find a bank willing to provide a mortgage for this specific property, or will they tell us to shove off because we're taking too damn long? And if they tell us to shove off because we're taking too damn long, what on earth am I going to do with all of these books that I've organized and packed?!?

Because yeah, the possibility of losing out on our dream house, our future fruit trees and chicken flock and big dog and king-sized bed and woods and creek and spacious family room, and still all I can think about are my books.

Work "Guide" for the Week of May 19, 2014: Entomology and the Mississippian Mound Builders

Instead of divided work plans for each child, this week I gave them both this one-page "guide" to the week:



I organized it into the tasks that I expect them to work at daily, the tasks that I expect them to do once (these can be marked off when completed), a schedule of extracurriculars for the week, and some things to be thinking about.

We're still in the middle of Buying a New House Misery; the bank that was going to fund our mortgage actually changed its mind a couple of days before our closing last week after receiving the updated appraisal (turns out that not everyone thinks that buying a house next door to a drive-in movie theater is the best idea ever. Hello, External Obsolescence!), and although we've got another bank that *says* they'll be happy to fund it, they strangely didn't feel like working day and night over the weekend to figure it out, so we're still waiting and waiting and waiting with no new house yet, sigh. Because of that, I'm not in the mood to make and mentor detailed daily work plans, and yet our past weeks without work plans, although they have still contained regular daily work and fun, spontaneous enrichment--

Cookie Bake-off!

Obsession with Eastern Tent Caterpillars!

--have also contained children "surprised" at finding math still needing to be completed at bedtime, children who just don't understand where their aerial silks uniforms could be five minutes before it's time to leave the house for silks class, and--and this one resulted in lots of yelling and actual angry, frustrated tears on my part--a child who could find neither her sneakers nor her flipping TENNIS RACKET that she had just used TWO DAYS EARLIER, as we were literally on our way out the door to tennis class.

I tore open a packed box to unearth a second pair of sneakers, gave her my tennis racket to use, and drank a frozen margarita with dinner that night.

Clearly, in the midst of this chaos, we do need some sort of schedule that the children can refer to and be held accountable to, hence the guide. Other than math, journal, and cursive, our two major academic emphases this week are entomology (some friends are working on their Brownie Bugs badges, so this is a good week to join them and get Will really started on her long-desired insect collection) and ancient Native Americans (we're SUPER excited to be taking a field trip to see Cahokia Mounds later this week). In the three school days that we've got before our long-weekend road trip to Arkansas to see my baby cousin graduate high school, we're going to watch a documentary on preshistoric Native Americans and listen to a podcast expressly about Cahokia. We read about Cahokia in History of US, so the kids can tell you all about the stinkards and how noble women had to marry them, but I can't wait to see their faces when they actually see that huge mound for the first time!

Most of the kids' work requirements for their Girl Scout and 4-H entomology projects are hands-on and practical in nature, and we'll pretty well have those covered with two insect observation hikes and a trip to the St. Louis Zoo all by this Sunday, but by now they know well that Momma ALWAYS has additional requirements to complete, and mine are mostly academic--reading list, insect anatomy worksheets, insect identification flash cards, documentary, etc. I imagine it will take them a couple more weeks to finish those.

To those plans, add a movie theater field trip that I organized for one of our homeschool groups (last time we did this trip, the manager let the kids cut up the filmstrip of a Spider-man trailer and take the pieces home!), and the children's scripting, costuming, and filming of a "special effects" movie, one that will be heavily informed by the short films of Méliès that the kids and I watched yesterday while Matt mowed the lawn.

And then sometime before tomorrow afternoon I've got to replace the kids' crappy Target tennis rackets that are unstringing themselves. Grrr!

So it's a short week that we've got of out and about, studying math and bugs, making movies and watching them, while poor Matt manages our mortgage mess during his work breaks and finds someone to lend us money. Later this week, will we leave our cats and chickens and chicken sitter behind and drive away happy in the knowledge of a mortgage offered and closing date planned, for real this time?

Good freaking grief, I hope so!

P.S. The sneakers were later found in the washing machine--she'd decided they were dirty, put them in the laundry, then forgot. The tennis racket? That one was found IN THE BOOKSHELF WITH THE LIBRARY BOOKS. Just thinking about that one kind of makes me wonder if Matt will make us another pitcher of margaritas tonight...

Easy Icelandic Laufabraud Experience Using Pie Crust

As soon as the kids finished reading Foods of Iceland, they each immediately asked to make laufabraud (funny, they had no desire to make hardfiskur or hakarl...). Laufabraud (pronounce it "LOIF-uh-broith") is a traditional Christmas food in Iceland, made from bread rolled thin, with snowflake and other pretty designs cut into it, then deep-fried.

Fine, it DOES sound super yummy, but I ain't deep frying nothing for nobody!

Since we read that at Christmas time, bakeries often sell laufabraud bread dough all rolled out and ready to be baked, I decided that pie crust cookies would be a reasonable approximation for us. After all, all the kids really wanted were the experiences of cutting pretty designs and eating yummy baked goods, so no need to struggle for undesired authenticity.

Laufabraud is usually fairly large, but the kids wanted to hand samples out at their International Fair (there's lots of geographically-themed noshing going on at the International Fair, let me tell you), so I cut out small circles from the pie crust using my Pappaw's old biscuit cutter, then gave the kids a clean x-acto knife, clean awl, and plastic straw to make their decorations.

If we hadn't been baking these to pass out, the kids definitely would have preferred to make the larger size--cutting tiny designs into 30 small laufabraud cookies sure gets old!

When the kids were finished with the decorating, I sprinkled the cookies with cinnamon sugar and then baked them as you do any pie crust cookie (burning them a bit around the edges is my own personal specialty):

Even though they weren't deep-fried in sheep fat, they were happily nommed up by all the kids!

I was never in Iceland for Christmas, so I haven't tasted authentic laufabraud, either, but I did once bring home from Iceland a bottle of brennivin wrapped up in sweaters in my duffel bag. I technically brought it home as a souvenir for Matt, but after hearing my stories of how it actually tasted and how it made one feel the next day, both he and I were too chicken to break into it, and instead kept it as a knick-knack on a high kitchen shelf until one night it was spotted in the middle of a rowdy grad school party. This being grad school, there were other friends there who'd also been to Iceland (Old Norse is a grad school thing, y'all), and we were somehow persuaded to open it up so we could all dive in.

I think that the next morning, everyone not already in the know finally understood why I'd been so reluctant to open that now-empty bottle...

Organizing Written and Oral Reports in Elementary School: The Iceland Project

My kids write reports and essays fairly often, but our homeschool group's frequent academic fairs are great opportunities for them to really dig in and up their skills--and show them off!

I tried a new organizational strategy this time, borrowed from Third Grade Thinkers, that worked out so perfectly that we're going to keep it for all time. Heck, I may start using this method!

After the kids had each read a couple of general resources on Iceland (Culture Grams and Britannica School gave the best results for this particular subject), they chose some narrower subjects on which to focus: Will wanted to write about Iceland's volcanoes, geysers, and glaciers, while Syd was most interested in Iceland's language, food, and horses.

I cut off a long section of butcher paper for each kid, then wrote their focus subjects, plus a section for the introduction and conclusion, as column heads across it. As the kids read and re-read all the print and online resources they collected, I asked them to find at least one general fact to help them write their introductions, at least one fact with "meaning" that would help them write their conclusions, and at least three facts relating to each focus subject:

I LOVED Third Grade Thinkers' use of sticky notes to write facts on, and for the exact same reasons: they're easily manipulated to reorganize the flow of logic, and their small size encouraged the kids to summarize instead of copying. Intellectual honesty begins young, folks--NO PLAGIARIZING!

The next challenge, of course, is to not let the kid just string the facts together to make each paragraph, but instead to contextualize, be it with example, personal observation, or a sense of meaningfulness. As you'll see in the reports, Syd had an easier time doing this in her oral presentation, simply because of the subjects that she chose to cover; she was able to do an audience participation activity when reporting on Iceland's language, and we made and brought in laufabraud (more on that another time, but yum!) to enrich her reporting of Icelandic food.

For the International Fair, the kids had the final challenge of translating their written reports into engaging oral presentations. We did this in a couple of different ways. When the kids wanted to insert something unscripted--such as the Icelandic greetings that they memorized, or Syd's Icelandic naming activity--into their report for the oral presentation, I had them write what they wanted to do centered and in caps in the appropriate spot of their report, so that they would see it as they were reading and remember to pause their report and complete the unscripted portion. This worked okay, although I had to help Syd get her Icelandic naming activity both started and stopped; I'll have to think more on how to help her work through that independently next time. I also wanted Will to look at her report less and at the audience more, so I narrowed the margins on her written report way down, printed it, and then had her cut the paragraphs apart and glue them to index cards. In rehearsals, she did an excellent job referring to the cards but speaking to the audience, but during her actual presentation, I don't think she looked up from those index cards once! At least she remembered to speak loudly and clearly.

Don't feel as if you have to watch this video of their presentations; for one, I'm ashamed of how shaky my camera work is (I don't think I was actually looking at it as I filmed, because I was so focused on the kids), and there's also an embarrassing part in which both Matt and I rush to chastise Will as she's interrupting/correcting Syd mid-presentation, because we're both super traumatized by the time the kids fought on TV and I, at least, wouldn't have been surprised if Syd had leaped onto Will pro wrestler-style and began to roll around with her in a cloud of dust.


Fortunately, everyone emerged from their presentations unscathed, and the little hellions were able to later pose in triumph:

After the presentations, as everyone's milling around and looking at displays and eating geographically-themed snacks, these two totally random people literally just wandered into our conference room and began to look at all the displays. And it wasn't just walk around, glance at stuff, and wander out again--these people were INVESTED! They stopped at one particular kid's Ancient Egypt display, and admittedly, this kid had done a seriously tremendous job--she's too young to be a fully literate reader, I *think*, but she stood there and recited, from memory, just a giant amount of information about Ancient Egypt--but this couple stood there for something like forever, reading all the captions and actually translating the title of her presentation and her name from the Egyptian hieroglyphics in which she'd written them. Matt was pretty sure that they were going to kidnap the kid to be their language officer at the Stargate, but I sort of imagined them as very clueless and naive tourists from some random country, coming to the United States to see all the sights, and then seeing on the library calendar that, "Oh, Guthrun, look! An International Fair! I remember reading about World Fairs in our history books as a child! We MUST attend!"

And since this kid is definitely still in town and hasn't been indentured to the Stargate, clearly my theory is the correct one.

Here's a partial list of the resources that the kids used to study Iceland:



Of course, there are many more than these, and we didn't even begin to cover Norse myths or the sagas or do any of the activities collected in my Iceland pinboard (and how I dearly wanted to help the kids make a set of runes!). Ah, well...

Gotta save something for next time!

My Latest: Wool, Chickens, Crayons, and our New House

I've been too busy these past two weeks! Kid activities, packing, etsy orders, mortgage paperwork, schoolwork, impromptu house showings--I am definitely feeling the stress. I've managed to keep the kids fed, learning their math, and on time to extracurriculars with the correct gear on (that last one JUST barely...), but in the rare times when I don't *have* to do something, I've found myself just sort of zoning out for a minute to rest my brain. Otherwise, even when I'm working on something else, my brain is doing stuff like trying to figure out where the record player cabinet will go in the new house, or the mint bed, or when we should go mattress shopping.

I was running in so many directions last week, in particular, that I didn't even think to show you the other writing that I've been doing, so this week you get a two-week update in my paid writing! It's kind of silly, too, because along with sales from my pumpkin+bear etsy shop, my outside writing is THE way that I earn the money that I use to buy birthday presents and pay for tennis lessons and field trips, etc., so failing to promote it is not in my best interests. The sites for which I write earn money from advertisements on the site, and the money that we writers earn is based on how many people have been exposed to those ads--i.e. pageviews. So if you like what I do and want to help me pay for postcards at Cahokia and the limestone carving class that Will wants to take, all you have to do is click through to read the following posts

a write-up of the felted wool egg cozies from So Jane

a round-up of felted wool sweater crafts

an essay about urban chickens

a round-up of upcycled projects for the home

and a tutorial for recycled crayons

We close on our new house at the end of the week, so we get to start moving this weekend! I'm hoping we can camp out on the floor of our new house one night, perhaps to go the drive-in, perhaps start getting some of the DIY projects going and schedule the work that we need to have others do for us. I'd like to get the kitchen stocked a bit so that I can feed the kids if we spend an afternoon there, and we have many, many plants languishing in temporary pots that would like to get settled into their new garden beds.

This time, I am going to be VERY thoughtful about where I put the mint, which we do rely on, but geez louise, not as much as it seems to think we do! How on earth do you keep mint from taking over every single other living non-mint piece of greenery, anyway?

Organizing our Home Library by Author and Dewey Decimal Number, or, I Have Finally and Inevitably Lost the Plot

In our current house we have [had] books in just about every room of the house. Large-format non-fiction reference lived in the basement playroom. Adult fiction and some non-fiction lived in the living room, as did certain ready-reference books and popular magazines. Children's books mostly lived in their bedroom. Homeschooling and crafts books lived in the studio. My esoteric fiction and non-fiction (Welsh-English dictionary, anyone?) lived in my bedroom.

This was inconvenient on many levels. I periodically had to sort through the adult fiction shelves to find books that Will would be interested in, as her reading ability and maturity grew. If we were researching a particular topic--frogs, say--we might have to scan books in the living room, in the children's bedroom, the studio, and in the basement playroom, and we still might miss a couple of relevant resources. If I was looking for a book that I wanted to re-read, I didn't know if I would find it in the living room or in the children's room or in my bedroom.

One of my many organizational goals for our new house is to shelve the entire family's books in one central location, probably the big family room with the very high ceilings. I'd like to make a bookshelf similar to this pipe bookshelf shelving unit, also using some marble slabs that Matt bought from our IU Surplus Store back when we were planning to actually put countertops in our kitchen (we never did; they're still plywood). Will agreed to the plan, as long as none of the bookshelves are out of her reach (I may offer a compromise with a stepladder, but we'll see). The plan will only really work, however, if the books are more or less organized; having to scan every book on four dozen shelves is barely less work than having to scan every book in four different rooms.

So while I'm relatively fresh in the face of packing, my first order of business was to organize every book in our house by fiction and non-fiction, to further organize the fiction using alpha by author, to further organize the non-fiction using broad Dewey Decimal categories, and to pack them up in boxes with labels on so that they stay organized.

In case you DON'T think that sounds crazy, check out what doing it actually looks like:

Um... yeah, those are a billion mile-high stacks of books, each with an index card on top labeling it with its author letter or Dewey Decimal category. I spent an entire Saturday doing it, and as if that's not crazy enough, whenever Matt and the kids weren't in the room to witness this further deterioration of my sanity, I arranged each stack with its spines nicely facing out and then photographed it:

This is the S stack. We've got Bram Stoker, William Shakespeare, Lemony Snicket, Edmund Spenser, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, Robert Louis Stevenson, Richard Scary, and more. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is in there, as well as Black Beauty and Heidi, and The Sagas of Icelanders, indexed by title since it doesn't have an author.

The P stack is a little light, but we've still got Philip Pullman and Thomas Pynchon. Another way in which this system will be useful is that if I like an author or a series, I like to collect all the available titles, but since I mainly shop used, it's a gradual process. If all the books in the house are catalogued together, it will be easier for me to see, for instance, that I only have the first book in the His Dark Materials series--for shame!

Other than Island of the Blue Dolphins and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, the O stack is dominated by Mary Pope Osborne. I'd stopped consciously collecting the Magic Tree House books after Will grew out of them a bit (she still reads the new ones, but doesn't often re-read the old ones), but I'm back at it again now that Syd is a reader.

There's more variety in the M stack. We've got Daisy Meadows, George R.R. Martin, about three copies of The Secret Garden, Stephanie Meyer, Robert McCloskey, Robin McKinley, Herman Melville, Margaret Mitchell, all the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, W. Somerset Maugham, Peyton Place, and L.M. Montgomery.

In the L stack, there's Ira Levin (The Stepford Wives is soooo creepy!), Anne Lamott, C.S. Lewis, Jack London, Lois Lowry, Gail Carson Levine, and Astrid Lindgren. 

After that, I stopped taking photos because Matt came in, and we've already had many discussions about who is acting crazier because of the move (I say him; he incorrectly says me), so I didn't want to give him any more ammunition.

Matt helped me pack up all the books into boxes--one great thing about volunteering weekly at a food pantry is that I'm able to collect so many boxes!--and label them with Sharpies, and he shoved them into the children's room so that I won't have to look at them.

Five minutes after we'd finished, I found a whole entire shelf of books that I'd forgotten to pack, and then Matt found another stack of books up high on a back shelf out of sight, and then I remembered that I'd packed the book we need for this week's Magic Tree House Club meeting. I threw the leftover books in the giant box in which I was packing blankets, so I'll deal with them later, and while the kids are at tennis class, I'll see if there's a library digital copy of Thanksgiving on Thursday to put on Will's Nook.

If only packing clothes and dishes and linens and craft supplies were as interesting as packing books!

Mamma's Strawberry Cake Recipe

In our family, you get to do a lot of what you want on your birthday.

There was no school (although I think on MY birthday, I'll have the kids do a full day of schoolwork without fussing!).

Matt woke up early and made the kids pancakes for breakfast.

I gave Syd a big toy dragon with moveable wings and a dragon rider whose butt has a magnet in it so he won't fall off even when the dragon flies upside-down. She's played with it a lot, but she also plays with two of the twist ties that came with it; she twisted them into dolls, made outfits for them, and keeps them with her constantly.

For lunch, we walked downtown to an over-priced sandwich shop (Matt and I actually split one meal, it was that bad), then the kids did some gardening at the library.

I got the kids to let me do a "photo shoot" with them:

The kids had their first ever tennis lesson--and they LOVED it!

Matt gave Syd a certificate to keep to help her remember that he bought us all tickets to see Marvel Universe Live in January. How cool does that look?!?

We made homemade pizzas and watched Spider-man (the Toby McGuire one, NOT the reboot--ugh!).

Usually on your birthday, you also get the exact cake that you want, but Syd was having trouble deciding, so I suggested that we make my Mamma's strawberry cake. It's got an elaborate ingredients list and was always made for special occasions when I was a kid, and even though it's been made by other family members since Mamma died, I never had the heart to eat it, although in my mind I can taste it perfectly.

I hate it that Mamma died when I was pregnant with Syd, and the two never got to meet. But even Will was just a toddler, so I also hate that she has no memories of her. I guess I hoped that by starting to make some of Mamma's favorite recipes together, it would make her more real to them.

What I had forgotten, though, was the toxic nature of 1950s cuisine. I actually studied this on a tangent in grad school, so I can tell you that in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, recipes became particularly... odd. Advances in technology caused the introduction of tons more convenience food, from cake mixes and boxed Jello to dairy products and a wide variety of canned goods. Raises in wages meant that more people could afford store-bought convenience foods, and they also became a status symbol, as in "Hey, she could afford a Duncan Hines cake instead of a cake that it took her three hours to make from scratch. She must be FANCY!"

But at the same time, the time and effort that goes into making meals remained a status symbol, as well--you still got a lot of street cred for that whole "slaving away in the kitchen" thing. So to satisfy unconscious desires to both use a lot of packaged foods AND slave away in the kitchen, there started to be a lot of really weird, elaborate recipes that used a ton of packaged, name-brand foods in really weird ways. 7-Up cakes. Jello salad.

So here's Mamma's strawberry cake recipe, from the handwritten cookbook that she made me for Christmas one year:

Strawberry Cake

• 1 box white cake mix
• large box strawberry Jello
• 1 cup Wesson oil
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 cup mashed strawberries, drained
• 4 eggs
• 1 cup coconut
• 1 cup chopped pecans

1. Whisk cake mix and Jello powder together. 
2. Add other ingredients in order listed.
3. Blend well.
4. Bake at 350 degrees in three layers. [Mamma doesn't list a time. I baked my cake in one bundt pan, because I don't have any round cake pans. I started at 43 minutes, which was the maximum cooking time listed for a bundt cake on the box of cake mix, but ended up having to add a total of fifteen extra minutes onto the cooking time.]
5. Cool completely.

Icing

• 1 stick Oleo, softened
• 3/4 cup nuts
• 1 box powdered sugar
• 3/4 cup coconut
• 1/2 cup mashed strawberries

1. Cream sugar and Oleo, adding other ingredients.
2. Cover cake well with plenty between layers. If icing is too thin, add more sugar; if too thick, add a few drops of milk.

I pretty much made this as written, although I couldn't bear to use margarine, and I don't know how much powdered sugar came in a box, so I just made regular butter and powdered sugar icing and added the other ingredients. And I have to say, although it's also horrifying, that Jello does dye and flavor white cake REALLY well. The whole thing was neon pink even before I mixed in the mashed strawberries, and it did taste of "strawberry." So if you don't have sensitivities and you really want a neon-colored, artificially flavored cake, dump a box of Jello into it!

Here's the finished cake (actually decorated by the kids and eaten the next day, because they were too full for cake after our day of fancy meals!):

You can sort of tell that the mashed strawberries by themselves actually did an excellent job of coloring and flavoring the icing. 

I'd like to try a version of this cake that uses more whole foods, with applesauce instead of oil, extra mashed strawberries instead of Jello, and perhaps whipped cream or cream cheese frosting instead of butter, so that it hopefully retains most of the flavor and color of the cake that I remember from my childhood, but doesn't make me worried that we're all going to get cancer and die.

The kids, also, have been inspired by this cake, but not exactly in the same direction: their new goal is to try versions of cake made with different flavors of Jello!

It may be a long, hyper summer...

Growing Like a Tall Tree

Eight years old,

two weeks

 She's eight years old.

one

See the happy birthday girl,

two

She's eight years old!

three

She's growing like a tall tree,

four

As good as gold.

five

 See the happy birthday girl,

six

She's eight...

seven

YEARS OLD!!!

eight