Backlog

Today the kids and I went to a homeschooling conference nearby and I got to see my parenting coach Scott Noelle speak, which was great fun. He has a lot of say about unconditionality and the title of his talk was "How to enjoy parenting, even if you have kids." Samuel found it to be great fun and Eva and I colored pictures of unicorns to pass the time (1 hour, 15 minutes, not too bad but really they are ready to go at 45 minutes...). We celebrated with Thai food and a trip to the park, good swinging times for everyone, including Eva's newest baby, who pees if you put water into her mouth. (I had a baby alive when I was little and can attest to how much fun this is. This baby came with a potty as well.)

Back in time, we celebrated Easter as usual, with colored eggs and an Easter egg hunt on Easter morning and of course lots of Easter candy. Ellen and Evan came over and we had a nice meal with them to celebrate spring and Grandma Spangler's birthday (she has since passed, but she was born on Easter and died on Good Friday and her presence is palpable during this time of year.)

Eva has taken an interest in Jesus and the Christian meaning of Easter and we spent Easter looking at several pictures of Jesus being crucified and the Stations of the Cross, both traditional and avant garde, and I learned a good bit more about this event then I had previously known. Then on Tuesday we took a little trip over to St. Mary's Convent here in Beaverton and the good Sisters there let us in to their chapel and we got to see a Crucifix up close and lots of pictures of Jesus and angels and more Stations of the Cross, which were quite fascinating and we had the whole chapel to ourselves to look around at our leisure. I think we are going to Mass tomorrow morning to see more pictures of Jesus and the Cross. We saw Jesus today as well because the conference was held in a church and we got to see a Protestant cross without Jesus on it, which was also fascinating.

Eva's interest in Jesus and Samuel's interest in the Revolutionary War and all of this Star Wars viewing and talking has given way to some very interesting discussions about good and evil and the lack thereof and duality in general and I almost forgot they have been watching All Dogs Go to Heaven, which also has opened up the discussion on different people's views on Heaven and Hell. Quite fascinating, all of it.

Eva is fully five now. We celebrated her birthday (March 20!) at Chuck E. Cheese's with pizza and cupcakes. She spent a good bit of time on the merry go round and Samuel continued perfecting his skee ball. We finally got the flowers for Spring Equinox and her birthday planted a couple of days later. I like this tradition of planting on the Equinox and Eva likes picking out the flowers and a special one for her birthday, as she was born on the Equinox.

We planted more peas because I got restless about the others- which, by the way, have finally started to come up, so there will be plenty of peas! This year I planted English peas, not just sugar snap peas (which I like so so) and am excited to freeze some as well. There is mesclun mix coming up, radishes, forget me nots, turnips, peas, onions and then we planted more! Broccoli raab, deers tongue lettuce and something else I am forgetting. We had our first radishes from our produce basket this week and Eva ate them all up on the first day, in between playing a game with them and the purple carrots, which is always fun. And more leeks. Good grief, what do I do with all of these leeks! There are certain foods that seem to come in massive abundance that I just can't seem to use up- zucchini, cabbage, celeriac, leeks...I bless them for their abundance and then I just have to move on, I guess.

I got the idea to plant the deers tongue after looking at Slow Food's Ark of Taste which looks at preserving our food heritage. Deers Tongue and Jacob's Cattle Beans are two heirloom vegetables that are from North America and I thought I would give them a try in the garden this year. But for now we have crazy weather as usual, spring time in the Pacific Northwest- hail and sunshine and rainbows and rain all in the same day!