~click on the pictures to enlarge them~

I’m starting a new tradition; in addition to birthday sweaters, there will now be birthday books.  Just simple little photo books showing the year that’s past from the child in question’s point of view.  Their baseball games, dance classes, choir performances, horseback riding lessons, school work, hobbies, projects, collections, etc, all bound up together in a little book of snapshots representing that year of their life.  I think they will be well loved.  Above are a couple of pages that I’ve created for Galen, of his 6th birthday celebration, in preparation for his 7th birthday at the end of this month (note: I did leave some of the journaling off these pages as it was of a personal nature).

I’ve used a lot of different scrap booking products over the years.  From the good old-fashioned paper and pen kind to photo book products from many of the major retailers.  When I had an opportunity to review My Memories scrap booking software, I decided to give it a try with this project in mind.  I’m still experimenting and learning all about the program, but I can say there are a lot of options with this software.  So much more then anywhere else I’ve tried.  I know everyone has their own style and preferences, for me I often find the challenge is in being able to create pages that are basic enough to suit my own minimalist, photo-journalistic style.  I don’t like a lot of extras.  I want clear large pictures and not much else.  Not a problem!  As you can see I did play around a bit with a few backgrounds and some other stuff, just to see.  And of course I had to try the ric rac.  I mean, it’s ric rac….  If, however, you happen to like all of the bells and whistles, well, holy cow, feel free to spend a year or two browsing through all of the options, some free and some for a small fee.  Those are all of the add-ons to customize your style.  The basic software comes with many, many options to begin with (enough to last me a lifetime).  And it’s not just about photo books…you can create calendars, cards, all kinds of multimedia stuff that I haven’t even begun to delve into.  I’ve just discovered a whole collection of youtube videos on how to use some of these features and I’m looking forward to creating all kinds of interesting projects.

One of my goals with the birthday books was to capture some of the little details of that particular year.  The things they will look at years from now and say, “Oh yeah!  Do you remember the year I made all kinds of paper dolls?” or “the year I wove like, 40 potholders”.  I want pictures of favorite books and toys, all the small things that change so rapidly as a child grows and are easy to forget, but so much more pleasant to remember.  The pages below are pictures of Galen’s room in our old house, complete with peeks into work and treasure baskets.

These are the kinds of things that I think he will look back fondly on and be happy to remember.

So now, on to the giveaway!  One lucky reader will receive a copy of the full My Memories Suite software package.  To enter please go check out the My Memories site and leave me a comment on this post.  The winner will be announced Monday morning (2/11).

As a special to everyone here, My Memories is offering a $10 discount off the purchase of the My Memories Suite Scrapbook software and a $10 coupon for the My Memories store.  To redeem your coupon just enter the code: STMMMS99407

A portrait of my children, once a week, every week.

Iain: with handwork

Elijah: noticing a theme?

Galen: bathtub innovation

Màiri Rose: wants to know why her legs don’t get all wrinkly like the rest of her.

Steve worked from home all last week, limiting my computer time.  It’s very hard to beat a man who routinely wakes at 4:30 in the morning to the computer.  I can’t think of a single thing that would make it even worth trying.  Nor could I really be bothered to care either way.  I much prefer him home.  I’m somewhat lost in a book at the moment, a completely random acquisition from the library.  At first the writing style irritated me, but now I seem to be all caught up in the story.  It’s kind of the right time of year to get lost in a book I think.  The weather has been cold, cold, cold here, but today seems a little warmer.  I’m, very gratefully, up and around now a bit and doing well.  Thinking it’s high time I go make a pot of decaf Earl Grey steeped with half a vanilla bean.  Yes, I do believe that sounds just right.  Happy weekend to one and all!

1 & 2 There are paper snowflakes everywhere

3 why yes, that is a horseflake

4 & 5 gift making

6 & 7 and wrapping

8 late night knitting with coconut sugar cookies

9 sending off their first order

10 the kids had stamps out while I was addressing Christmas cards so I added some sweet little blue birds to the back of the envelopes

11 & 12 Golden Goose and Fairy trees seen while out and about.

13 nut butter caramel and red raspberry leaf and nettle chai

14 dreidel

15 late night knitting with orange

16 nativity by Iain

17 the enchanting Winter in White by Robert Sabuda

18 making music (why yes, those are more snowflakes on the floor behind him)

19 Crafts Through the Year

20 & 21 we made Swedish straw stars

22 & 23 while she made an empty yarn cone into a Christmas tree

24 We made a whole mobile of ballerina snowflakes.  They twirl and drift about gracefully and it’s like just before intermission at the Nutcracker. template here

~I know I’ve mentioned before that my Middlest Boy has a great love of horses.

~Well, while we are not in a position to get him that pony he has always wanted, we have decided that for his 10th birthday, he is getting riding lessons.  He found out today, when we took them all on a visit to the horse farm.  He can’t wait to start.

~Màiri Rose was gifted a pretty green araucana egg.  I made a snack of it for the two littles, along with odd and ends thinned from my seedling trays.

~The big boys are off at practice again tonight.  The last one before opening day.

~Have I mentioned that my children are the owner/builders of the worlds most elaborate cardboard box house?  Work on the third addition has stalled out due to running out of tape.  There is however, a fireplace (complete with chimney) and some shelves inside.

~I finally got around to unpacking our books.  It was like greeting as many old friends.

~Snow and sleet all morning.

~Elijah built the fire today.  His first.

~Pre-breakfast: banana, pear, orange and collard smoothie

~Actual breakfast: red cabbage, carrots, cucumbers, radishes, olive, guacamole and tulsi-mint tea with honey.

~Too wet to take sketch books out to continue our wildflower study as planned.

~A lot of the morning and early afternoon was much the same as yesterday; quiddler over breakfast, chores, more baseball play (yes, even in the snow), school work, etc.

~Everyone needs things for spring, so I’m trying to get a bit of sewing in each day.

~Library day, which just happens to coincide with a tea party at the library

~I wore the dress I made last week for the first time.

~So funny and a little nice to be introduced to all, as Mrs. —-.  I feel certain that Steve looked over his shoulder for his mother!

~the two small fry came back well fortified with A.A. Milne.  Rosebud calls them “knee-the-pooh books”.

~More horse magazines and “Caroline books” and “Rose books” (the series chronicling Laura Ingalls-Wilder’s mother’s and daughter’s lives) for the bigger ones.  They went through all three of the ones they brought home last week.

~The only thing I managed to grab was a couple of wildflower guides for school this week.

~It’s off to baseball practice for all of the big boys, including the very biggest boy of all.

~Working on Mother’s Day cards for the Grandmothers

~Dinner,Part I: chicken dippers and broccoli

~Littles to bed

~Dinner, Part II: the same thing two and a half hours later.  Only with tea this time too because I knew they would all come home chilled.

~Between the three of them I get an almost literal play by play of the entire practice.  Even though they are starving, it’s hard to get them to even sit down and eat, they are still so excited.  And while they eat they are constantly popping back up again to show me just how a certain play was made.  It was a very good practice!

~The biggest problem with us all sleeping down here is that this little munchkin:

is not sleeping!  Until the upstairs floors are finished we’re all sleeping in rooms just off and open to the kitchen/dinning room area.  Which means that late nights for them more often then not, inadvertently turn into late nights for him.  This photo was taken 3 hours after his bedtime.  sigh.  He would be watching us at the table, then every time I looked over, he would quickly lay his head back down.

~rain, blessed rain!  Rolling off the roof this morning and more importantly, sinking deep into our gardens.

~The house smells good after a night of broth bubbling on the stove and yams cooking in the crock pot.

~an extra little person showed up in my bed this morning, looking to be cuddled.  Then they plotted together and there was a conspiracy to get me to read.  Which I did, one book each; “Little Baa” and “Mother Goose”, the later turning into a sing along.

Little Rosebud’s favorite illustration

~Galen has taken to slipping my wedding ring off while I cuddle him and putting it on his own finger.  Then he asks me to tell him about it.  I show him the circle as well as the continuous Celtic knot pattern.  We look for a beginning and an end and never find one of course.  I tell him that it’s just like my love for Daddy with no beginning and no end.

~The other two get up early and read to themselves for an hour or two every morning.

~Iain built a fire.

~He  lost two teeth on Saturday and has two more loose.  Galen thinks he has a loose tooth (it would be his first).  He often asks if I can see it wiggle.  I can’t really, but I’m certainly not going to tell him that!  “hmm, I think maybe I might see something…”

~Quiddler with the big boys over a breakfast of yams, sausages, sauerkraut and green tea.

~Chores as usual

Màiri Rose with the nasturtium she’s growing.  She was able to taste a leaf for the first time today.  It’s a climbing variety and growing so fast that Galen is convinced he’ll be able to climb it like Jack and the Bean Stalk.

~Baseball fever is alive and well.  We’ve been doing their team’s warm up exercises in the morning before school work.

~outdoor play

~Making sauerkraut this morning as an activity with the little ones.  Really it’s an all morning affair, one that lead right into making lunch, followed by most of the dinner prep, since I know we’ll be working when Steve gets home tonight.  It takes a whole lot of peeling and chopping to fill that big crock.  We usually get around 2 gallons of kraut once it has all fermented down.  We never really make the same one twice.  Today’s is green cabbage, onion, garlic, turnip, radish and ginger.  I got a new little gadget that you crank to julienne things.  The little ones love making (and tasting) little turnip and radish strands with it.

Iain’s Nature Journal Entry:

Date: 4/23/12     Time: 11:42   Location: home   Weather: cloudy, 48 degrees

*Nothing is coming up in the garden yet.

* It is raining today.

*The woods are turning very green.

*My cherry tree is in bloom.

*Galen and Màiri’s peach trees are starting to bloom.

*There are a lot of birds singing today.

~Elijah’s entry by contrast started with, “My fruit tree is the only fruit tree that does not have any flowers on it.”

~Galen the faithful forager went out and gathered a whole bunch of dandelion greens, even though I said I didn’t have time to prepare them today.

~A game of skippo with Galen while the big boys do their math work.  The Wee Girl likes to play with the discard piles, sorting and arranging them.

~Lunch: kale salad with baby basil, pear chunks and maple-blueberry vinaigrette

~Iain and Elijah finished up the map of our property that they started working on together last week.

~the little ones did some coloring of their own.

~One of the big ones told Rosebud that what they were doing was more important because they were working, while she was just playing.  I scolded him and told him that play is the work of little ones and very important.  At which point she announced, with a rather superior tone, “I’m doing baby work!”

~Steve and I put up just under 150′ of fence around the garden.

~ dinner was asparagus soup with Jerusalem artichokes and fresh thyme from the garden.  It was lovely to come in to after working in the cold and damp.

~Steve is reading Peter Pan to Galen at bedtime.

About the photos first- these are some very new little neighbors that we’ve been visiting and helping out with a lot in the last couple of weeks.  The twin nurslings below (3 days old in these photos) are a happily bonded set sticking close to their mama.  We give them lots of space and try not to get in the way of all that is good there.  The little lambs that you see in-arms here (a week and a half old) were rejected by their sheep mother and needed a two legged mama to step in to provide them with care and feeding.  Or, when available, several.

And now for the part where I need your help!  I need suggestions for several things in life right now.  Number one is something new to read.  I just finished Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America, edited by Gloria Bird and Joy Harjo, a thoughtful gift from my sister.  Having thoroughly enjoyed that tome I’m ready to move on to something new.  Any suggestions?  Perhaps something inspiring in the realm of education?  We’re currently re-doing our local history block (along with math review) with both of the older boys, since we were in different towns and a different county when they originally did them.  It fits well and makes sense with our life right now.  But I’m undecided as to where to go from here.  At the same time I’m feeling that end of year push of everything I want to get done before summer starts and we take a bit of a break.  So inspiring in the world of education would be very good, but I’ll take any and all suggestions for a good read!

Number two: I need something to watch.  A late night knitting companion, if you will.  Because I do sometimes like to watch a bit of something and knit at the end of a long day.  So suggestions?  Preferably something available on Netflix instant watch?  TV shows work well because they are nice little watchable chunks and perhaps even more importantly, I don’t have to come up with something new to watch from day to day, I can just click “play next episode” because really deciding on something new is far too over-whelming at that point in my day.

And finally I need boy clothes sewing pattern ideas and inspiration.  Because I have boys that need clothes, but I am bored, bored, bored.  Bored I tell you!  With the same old.  Bleck.  You must help me find something new and exciting that I can get into sewing or else they may just have to go naked because I can’t talk myself into sewing another dull thing.

For three days now everything has been draped in thick grey fog.  It’s insulating and fascinating and kind of gloomy and in some ways very welcome to me.  It makes me want to knit shawls in just that same color.  I actually have two projects on needles right now in shades of fog, but it’s not quite the same as a shawl or a stole to wrap the fog about me.

It’s been a long and thoroughly stressful several months with yesterday ending in heartache and disappointment.  After everyone else was in bed I got down one of the cheap wine glasses with wisteria vines etched on them, that I bought myself when I moved into my first apartment, and poured myself a glass of really bad, cheap cooking wine.  The only kind of wine we ever have in the house because well, Steve doesn’t drink at all and I really don’t either.  Maybe a glass of wine while out somewhere once a year.  Maybe.  Depending on the year.  And never at home.  Seriously, this may well be the first time I’ve ever had a drink in my own home.  And it was from the screw top bottle of red wine that I mix in with my beef stew.

I read somewhere once that your cholesterol level influences how easily you become intoxicated.  The lower your cholesterol the less alcohol it takes.  If there is any truth to that them my cholesterol levels must be fan-freakin’-tastic.

I’ve been out of sorts and not exactly myself the last couple of days.  This morning I made a pot of coffee, perhaps as a counterpoint to the wine the night before?  Even though I’ve not been a coffee drinker for nearly 13 years now.  Not since I got pregnant with Iain.  Those two weeks of withdraw headaches were nearly enough to do me in and since then I’ve contented myself with snagging Steve’s mug on the weekends and taking a couple of deep breaths, and once every so often a tiny sip.  I deemed today’s indulgence medicinal, for the headache I woke up with, probably triggered by the wine (no I wasn’t hung-over, I don’t think you can get a hang-over from a partial glass of wine, but certain foods and substances are triggers for me).  I added maple syrup and coconut milk to it, even though as a coffee drinker I only ever made it black, plain, nothing added.  And usually that’s how it would appeal to me.  But today somehow I wasn’t entirely me.

We made Russian Tea Cakes, as the new me/not me conveniently forgot that we’re not really eating sugar right now.  Or dairy for that matter.  I replaced all of the flour with white buckwheat flour and once cool they tasted very much like the cookies I remember from my childhood, though we called them Mexican Wedding Cookies.  Elijah said they were, “scrumptious and sickening”.

We cut hundreds of paper snowflakes.  We’ve always made the ones with fancy folds of a hexagon, but decided to try circles of all different sizes this year and enjoyed the effect.

The big boys have taken to waking up early to clean random things as a surprise for me.  Which is really lovely, and kind of odd, and makes me feel vaguely guilty, though I’m not really sure why.

The two little ones have been out of sorts as well.  It’s that time of year when you can never quite tell if they are still getting over some little sickness of starting to fight off something new.  Màiri’s cheeks grow bright red when she’s fighting something off and Galen made her cry by telling her she looked like she had scarlet fever.

For dinner I made roasted Brussels sprouts, bacon and apples (for the first time ever) and baked squash (for about the umpteenth time this season alone).

It’s getting cold in the house.  I think that maybe I should make a new throw or two.  I keep borrowing The Girl’s yellow afghan to use as a lap blanket.  She shares very nicely, but it doesn’t seem fair.

It was my father’s birthday today.  I wish I had been there to give him his present.  Not that he would have been around anyway, as he’s working too hard this December, just like every one before it that I can remember.  I worry so about him.  The kids all sang ‘happy birthday’ over the phone.  I hope it brought some cheer to his day.

I just finished reading The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food and Love and it was very good, even while making me a bit squeamish at times.  Now I’m re-reading Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt because I seem to remember it striking a cord with me as an adolescent and I was wondering if Iain is old enough for it yet, but even a couple of pages in somehow I don’t think so.  Not that there is anything particularly alarming going on, but it just doesn’t feel right for the stage he’s at.  It doesn’t seem as though it would be nourishing to him in any way.  I really do look at books for them that way, for myself as well.  I try to find the ones that will feed something inside of them and my gut tells me it’s just not the right time for this one.

I had thought that this evening I’d curl up with my fog colored knitting and watch ‘Little Women’.  Somehow that sounds like such a comfort.  All day this has been in the back of my mind.  And if Màiri is restless again and wakes up looking for me, she can come and lay on my lap while I knit.  But now that it’s nighttime, I’m so tired that I can’t imagine staying up so late, so I suppose I won’t after-all.

Sincerely,

Melody

We started our school year the first of September and it’s been a good year so far.  A sixth grader, a fourth grader, one in kindergarten and preschooler means that I am one busy mama!  Honestly, we’re all busy.  There is so much to fit in to each and every day.

We started our first day by gathering up, cleaning and organizing all of our supplies.  We cleaned out the homeschooling closet for a fresh start.  I didn’t buy any new school supplies this year.  I first wanted to see what we had left and assess.  We cleaned our crayons and sharpened our pencils, tossing away the ones that are too little to be of any use.  There will be more art supplies coming to all of the children at Christmas time, but for now I want to use up what we have left.  Apart for the practical aspects, I wanted them to start the year off by actively doing something to maintain our little school at home.  This isn’t just my thing, we all work together and it’s everyone’s responsibility to help out.  I feel like reinforcing that idea really helped to start us off on the right foot.  At the start of every day, they tidy our homeschooling table again, emptying the pencil sharpener, filing away old work, clearing away scarps of paper and anything that might have been left behind the day before.

At the end of the first day we celebrated by breaking out the chalk; playing games and drawing designs on the driveway.  We’ve lived here for a year now and it wasn’t until that day that it occurred to any of us that for the first time in over a decade, we actually have a paved driveway where this sort of thing is a possibility.  Sometimes we’re not real quick on the uptake.  But it was all the more fun because of the novelty.

Iain is now doing a bit of yoga to start his school day.  Not much, just a few sun salutations, some deep breathing and gentle stretching to settle him into his lesson.  The little ones think this is fabulous and line up beside him to join in.  Pretty adorable that.

unfurl yourself
into the grace of beginning
that is at one
with your life’s desire…

~John O’Donohue (1956-2008)

Excerpt from ‘For a New Beginning‘ from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings.