A seed is sleepy (until it sprouts)

Our daughter loves helping her dad plant and tend the garden - today it was putting in more bush beans after the garlic was harvested.  I had to smile to see her reading one of our favourite garden books for kids "A Seed is Sleepy" by Diana Hutts Aston, right there in the garden as she was working, following along what will happen in the life cycle of a bean from seed to harvest.  We love the whole nature series by Diana Hutts Aston, each with such beautiful artwork and detailed explanations and illustrations (her great titles include: A Seed is Sleepy; An Egg is Quiet; A Butterfly is Patient; A Rock is Lively; A Nest is Noisy)!!

12 Favourite Children's Winter Reads

We love reading, and shorter wintery days give us many more opportunities to cozy up near the fire with a good book.  We have a basket of winter reads nearby, and our daughter can choose books to help us celebrate and enjoy the winter season.  Here are 12 of our favourites.

The Mitten, by Jan Brett (and so many other Jan Brett books!)
Ollie's Ski Trip, by Elsa Beskow
How the Grinch Stole Christmas, by Dr. Seuss
Owl Moon, by Jane Yolen
The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats
The Tomten and the Fox, by Astrid Lindgren
First Snow in the Woods, by Carl Sams and Jean Stoick
The Story of the Snow Children, by Sibylle von Olfers
Findus at Christmas, by Sven Nordqvist
Over and Under the Snow, by Kate Messner
Snowflake Bentley, by Jacqueline Briggs Martin
The Night Before Christmas, by Barbara Reid
The Elves and the Shoemaker, by Jacob Grimm and Jim Lamarche

and all the lovely winter poems found in
Outside Your Window: A Child's First Book of Nature, by Nicola Davies

There are just so many lovely winter stories.  As an alternative to reading out loud together, we have also been enjoying listening to the audio winter stories by Sparkle Stories.   Sparkle Stories offers inspiring simple beautiful audio books about nature, family, community, celebrations, fairies, and more heartwarming themes, through their website (with lots of free sample stories as well).

Playful learning - alphabet book

We're making a homemade alphabet book with our daughter, using the idea from Playful Learning by Mariah Bruehl.  This book (and website) is filled with so many great project ideas!  Here are a few things around the house that our daughter chose to represent letters of the alphabet... we'll print the photos we took, and clip them together into a booklet for her to remember. 

Winter days

We've tried our best to enjoy the snowy winter weather here the past weeks.  Snowshoeing, hiking, daily skating or sledding, snow fort building, and outdoor play in our twig house.  Yesterday our daughter discovered the toboggan can be used for hauling firewood, and much larger loads than can be carried by the armful.  We all love cozy fires in the evening, especially when we settle in for some board games like our latest favourite Bird Bingo (available from our awesome local independent bookstore Wordsworth Books), Wildcraft (how could I resist a board game that teaches players to use medicinal herbs), and lots of the classic Uno.

Local herbal gift basket for Margaret Atwood

The Kitchener Public Library is hosting Margaret Atwood on Sept 26, as part of the Word on the Street festival that weekend. Margaret Atwood is going to be reading from her new book The Year of the Flood. Although I've read many of her novels, I haven't read this one yet, but can't wait to get my hands on a copy - the book is about an apocalyptic time when few humans remain and includes an interesting cast of characters including a fictitious "green" cult religious group called God's Gardener's (with saints such as Terry Fox, saint of locomotion without fossil fuels, saint Farley Mowat of the Wolves, saint Al Gore, saint Desmond Tutu, etc) that is facing a post-pandemic world.

The KPL was putting together a gift basket of locally made items, and asked for an assortment of soaps and herbal products from Homestead Herbals! I feel honoured to have Margaret Atwood receiving my handmade products and hope she'll enjoy them. I included a gardener's hand salve (appropriate given the group in her book), some teas, and a bug spray as she has a cottage on Pelee Island where she often does her writing (and this time of year she could use some natural bug spray if she's spending time outdoors!). The gift basket also included local honey from my beekeeper friend, and a handmade hemp washcloth to go with the soaps.

Preparing for Winter Harvest

New book on our shelf that is very useful these days...Eliot Coleman's The Winter Harvest Handbook (deep organic techniques for the 21st century)...

We're working on the fall-winter garden plan so that we'll be able to have greens for harvest (with luck) until the spring. Yesterday I planted four flats of greens (red and green lettuce varieties, mizuna, kale) and more to come in the next week - I'd still like to plant mache which is a traditional European hardy winter green. I decided to plant in flats rather than directly into the ground as it will be easier to water and monitor the seedlings this way (not to mention keeping away the pesky squirrels in our yard who dig up all new seeds that get sown). Once the seedlings are ready for transplant they are going into our cold frame (a garden raised bed covered with plastic over PVC pipe tubing), as well as the greenhouse where we have growing beds directly in the ground. Eliot Coleman uses both a floating row cover right on his rows of seedlings, as well as moveable plastic hoop houses that he can simply pull over his garden rows when cooler weather arrives. It's a simple, but ingenious method.

New favourite cookbook

I just got a new cookbook - it was mentioned on the Soule Mama blog, and has cover artwork by one of my favourite artists Nikki McClure. Nikki does simple yet complex papercut artwork with exacto knife, along the themes of family, activism, ecology, homesteading, gardens, nature, food sustainability, etc. We've had her calendars on our kitchen walls for years. How could I not get a cookbook that uses her art?

This cookbook is called "Feeding the Whole Family: Cooking with Whole Foods (Recipes for Babies, Young Children and Their Parents)", by Cynthia Lair. It focusses on cooking with whole foods, the importance of gathering for meals, simple wholesome recipes that use fresh, local seasonal foods. Although this book is not necessarily covering new ideas, the recipes look nourishing, interesting and beautiful, yet straight-forward enough that they don't need too much time to prepare (great for families with young children). There are also sections specifically on foods for babies, raising healthy young eaters, food allergies, and how to involve your children in the kitchen. I'm looking forward to using this book more as our daughter grows.

Bill McKibben on Deep Economy, and our Year of Buying Less

I’m currently about half way through Bill McKibben’s new book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. I initially started reading this because the non-profit organization where my partner works is running a book club for staff members with this book as the first pick. I thought the book sounded exactly along the lines of other articles I had been reading lately (more posts on this to come), and I could read along at home and foster discussion with my partner on how to build a stronger local economy.

Books on economics are not usually my first choice (often seeming dry or overly academic for my liking), but although this book assumes a general working knowledge of basic economics, it is highly readable, packed with useful statistics, and looks deeply into economic philosophy. McKibben’s style of writing is incredibly engaging, thoughtful and powerful. His basic premise is this: that the long-held economic ideal of constant “growth” is not viable; for one we are running out of resources to make the products to sustain our rate of growth (especially if developing countries, like China and India would want to consume at the rate of North Americans); secondly we are running out of oil, there will simply not be a way to create, trade and transport the products in mass quantities around the globe as we know it; thirdly we are running out of earth (long discussion on the impacts of climate change); fourthly this kind of growth economy does not trickle down to everyone – it only makes a slim margin wealthy at the top, and continues to increases global inequality; and fifthly even if we did have enough of all the above to go around, it has been proven that consumption does not make us happier. In fact, countries with higher rates of consumption and wealth tend to rate higher levels of depression, anxiety, stress, fear, health issues, etc. Consumption breeds dissatisfaction.

After outlining his thesis clearly, McKibben’s book continues with chapters on topics like food, energy, and transportation, showing how ordinary people are doing incredibly creative things to improve their local economies and quality of local life.

And McKibben is right. Haven’t we all thought “if I would only get this or that, life will be so much better”, and then found that after a short while that item (book, clothing, houseware, toy) is left gathering dust on the shelf while a new interest has filled its place. In a world where we are constantly bombarded with mass media telling us we need things to be more beautiful, gain status, increase our intelligence, find romance, etc. It’s estimated the average TV watching Canadian sees between 300-800 media ads per day. How can we not feel constantly tempted to buy more! The Age of Persuasion on CBC Radio shows us just how much the advertising world insinuates itself into every aspect of our lives. Even environmentalists who “buy green” easily fall into this trap. The book The Rebel Sell shows how strongly marketed eco-purchasing has become, where we can believe we are buying all the "right" things but we are still consuming vast quantities of commodities needlessly. Eco-conscious and organic purchasing is a whole new niche that corporations have happily tapped into, including Nike, Nestle, Monsanto, Cargill and all the rest!

So how much do we really need? I remember being on a short weekend hiking trip a few years ago, thinking I had packed relatively lightly (a tent, minimal cooking gear, a few clothes) and feeling incredibly freed by carrying all the necessities on my back. My friend and I met an older fellow hiking along, and struck up a conversation with him. Turns out he had already been hiking for a month, and all he had with him was a tarp, some raingear, a little food, a knife and matches. He wild-harvested his meals, wore the same clothes, and slept under the stars (with the tarp as back up in case of rain). He didn’t even carry a backpack. He was certainly living freely. When we consider the majority of the world’s population lives – simple homes, simple food, simple clothing – and not to mention the sweatshop or slave-like conditions many workers face to make the cheap products we demand, we have no right to the dissatisfaction we sometimes feel about not having quite enough!

In any case, I proposed a Year of Buying Less to my partner. What I hope with this experiment is to reduce: our spending, our clutter, our plastic & garbage waste; and to increase: our free time, our family time, our creativity, our connection to the local community/economy, and our happiness. What will the Year of Buying Less look like? I proposed we try to live one year without buying a single NEW item of clothing, housewares, or toys. Instead, our options would be:

a) consider doing without

b) borrow or barter for this item

c) buy it used or made of recycled materials

d) make it ourselves

e) buy handmade

f) buy locally made

g) buy fair trade

There would be exceptions of course – toilet paper, groceries which we couldn’t buy locally or grow ourselves, essential building materials needed to complete our strawbale house addition (lumber, straw, plaster), one trip to Winnipeg to visit my family in the fall, and essential items for our Little City Farm business (B&B items, workshop materials, and soap making ingredients). Books and magazine subscriptions (my weakness) were still in question – but we could probably get most of the reading we needed from the local library. Any gifts for family or friends (birthday or other holidays) would also be handmade, recycled, or locally made. Since we don’t own a car, our transportation costs would be for using the local bus or our local car co-op vehicles. Entertainment costs – we could support our local independent movie theatre, get DVDs from the library, support local music shows, and allow ourselves the occasional meal in a locally-owned restaurant.

It would have been fitting to launch our Year of Buying Less on "Buy Nothing Day" in November. (Buy Nothing Day is the first Friday after American Thanksgiving, which generally has been the largest shopping day in the US. Buy Nothing Day is an annual attempt to draw attention to consumer frenzy and reduce needless shopping.) However, since this would mean waiting another 6 months, we decided it would be good to start immediately. There will surely be bumps along the way, things we have forgotten that we can’t get around not buying, and exceptions we realize we really believe we can’t go without. But hopefully this exercise will allow us to re-evaluate the constant pressures to consume more and live more freely because of it.

The Creative Family - Amanda Blake Soule

I'm currently reading Amanda Blake Soule's book "The Creative Family", a beautiful resource book where Soule describes how she brings imagination and creativity into her family life and nurtures strong family connections. Well, I'm not so much reading as absorbing, conscientiously flipping through the artful photos, inspiring stories, and descriptive projects, picking up ideas and dreaming about all the possibilities for nurturing our own creative family life.

Soule goes through various stages in her book - gathering (how to not only gather great materials at low or no cost, but also how to prepare the creative mind); playing (encouraging imagination, supporting young artists in the family through events like regular "family drawing time", or carrying around "art on the go" bags full of art supplies); sharing handmade traditions (passing on traditional skills like sewing, knitting, felting and embroidering to kids); living creatively (exploring nature - for example, finding a special nature spot, building a fairy house, or keeping a garden journal); celebrating and connecting (handmade holidays, everyday rituals, creating with food, holding a hootenanny, organizing community art nights), etc! This book is chock full of super ideas, not only for keeping little ones busy, but encouraging the artist in all of us.

Here's a quote from the "everyday rituals" section of this book, that seemed to sum up in a simple way what much of our life should be about. Taken from the Tao Te Ching:

"In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep it to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don't try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present."

Amanda Blake Soule has her second book, The Handmade Home, coming out in August 2009. She also writes a regular blog, a place I go to often for ideas and inspiration, and to admire her artful photography. Go to: www.soulemama.com