Leave it to Canadians to host a party in -18 degree weather.

Since K was battling the flu and had a rather nasty fever, he stayed home, so it was just B and her friend C and I. Of course, when you party at the park with the whole neighbourhood, you are bound to run into a few other kids you know. Even if it is -18 degrees and all the sensible people are staying home. (We are, apparently, not sensible.)

The first thing we did was pet Winston. Winston is a 14 year old Clydesdale. After we pet him, we sat on him.

He is ever so patient. He is ever so tall, too. Seriously. Clydesdales are huge. See?

If you are observant, you may have noticed that Winston and his partner (whose name escapes me at the moment) are hitched to a wagon. After petting Winston and then sitting on Winston, the obvious thing to do was ride around our neighbourhood being pulled by Winston and his partner.

So we did.

It was fun. But don’t take my word for it.

Do keep in mind it was -18 out. Smiles like those don’t come out in -18 degree weather unless it is really fun. Afterwards, we warmed up by the fire with hot chocolate, and then we watched the hockey game. It’s a great rivalry between our community association and one of our neighbouring communities. The teams are a little odd, made up of kids as young as 5 and as old as 50, but everyone has fun.

Especially the goalie.

It was great fun.

Of course, when you are talking about covering a piece that is about 18″ wide by 24″ long with tiny little embroidery stitches, buttons, beads, and more… well, it takes a while. I’ve been working away at it, but as is usual for me, it is not the only project on the go, and so it gets an hour or two here and there and slowly becomes more detailed, and much heavier, too. That much embroidery thread weighs a piece down.

Why am I telling you about this? Because all over the piece, there are detached chain stitches, which I first learned at my grandmother’s knee as lazy daisies. I love lazy daisy stitches. They are so darn cute! And they can be used in so many different ways. I used them in sets of three along the left-hand edge of the light blue felt, since I felt the border needed a little something extra along that side. I also used them in the letters of the word JOY.

There are large gold daisies formed with lazy daisy stitches, of course, but there are tiny lazy daisies scattered throughout as well, and random single lazy daisy stitches, too. You can also see the trio of stitches with a bead at the base in these photos.

I’ve started embellishing the snowflake, too, and like the letters, it will be getting its fair share of lazy daisy stitches. I’ve started already.

According to the pattern, I was supposed to put white sequins everywhere there is a dot. It looks cute enough in the picture on the package, but I like this way better. But all of these stitches were started before Sharon B’s TAST Week 7 challenge, and to be honest, they are all very traditional uses of the lazy daisy stitch. So, I thought I would experiment a little, and try out a new way of stitching one of my favourite stitches.

Now, I am the first to admit that I am not a very accomplished embroiderer. I like to embroider, especially on felt, but I definitely fall into the category of “beginner”, and maybe (if you are feeling generous) “intermediate.” My stitches aren’t that even, I hardly ever know what it is going to look like before I try it, and I spend a lot of time thinking a very great many bad words as things just don’t turn out the way I had hoped.

My brilliant plan for lazy daisy awesomeness falls into that last category. The idea had potential, but it just didn’t work out.

I wanted to give the feel of feathers, overlapping each other in layers and giving shape to the bird’s wings. I had visions of the wing edge looking like a cluster of individual feathers spread out to catch the wind. You know, something like this amazingly talented stitcher did with her owl. (Go check it out. Seriously. Then you’ll know why I don’t consider myself particularly talented at embroidery.)

It didn’t quite work, but I’m not terribly unhappy with it either. I think I’m going to need to work it in a finer thread than I used here, and with several shades to give the bird dimension, and with feathers at the end.

(Anyone have any white feathers I could have? Mine are mostly browns and dark greys. Hmm, maybe that’s what I should use my Michael’s gift certificate for… can’t you just picture that conversation? “Honey? You remember that gift certificate you got me for Valentine’s Day? I bought feathers! Lots and lots of feathers!”)

At any rate, it needs a little more pondering and a lot more stitching. I think I’ll go ponder some more over a slice of cake.

He forgot the ice cream.

I love him anyway.

It’s a game we play around here, this “I love you more than [fill in the blank].” We’ve played it for many years. I’ve even blogged about it before. I can never win this game. Not anymore. Not since B discovered that she could simply reply: “I love you more than that!”

(And even K’s standard shout of “I love you more than infinity!” still can’t be beat by “I love you more than that!”)

But I think I just might have managed to beat them all this year.

After dinner, we exchanged Valentine’s gifts. The kids got chocolate and books. Is there a better way to say I love you than with the gift of books? I think not. Though I must admit, the dozen roses and gift certificate to Michael’s craft store were pretty darn sweet. And then, to make the evening complete, I brought out dessert.

Don’t ask me for the recipe, because I totally cheated. With a son who spent the week at home due to the flu followed by myself getting sick, and now B catching it, the most I could manage was a box of cake mix and a tub of storebought “homestyle” icing. But did you see what it says? Here, I’ll zoom in:

I love you more than cake.

That’s a lot of love.

(And yes, I did totally steal the idea from a cake I saw on CakeWrecks)

Now, I don’t have the mad crazy talent that Jim has (and since I don’t actually know Jim, I can’t exactly invite him over to make pancakes for us), but I can draw a decent heart. In pancake batter. See?

I even made two sizes – small-ish and large-ish.

Add a little Canadian maple syrup, and you’ve got a lovely Valentine’s breakfast.

What other time of year can you look your kids in the eye and announce in all seriousness “I love you more than pancakes!”

…to this:

Bread starts out so humbly. Some warm water mixed with sugar or honey and a spoonful of yeast soon forms a foamy skin. Flour and salt temper it, forming a tough ball of elastic dough, and time inflates it, making it soft and pillowy without the cook needing to do anything but wait.

What’s more, the same simple ingredients prepared in every so slightly different ways can give you such a wondrous variety of complex tastes and textures. This particular dough started out the same as any white bread, but once shaped and boiled and brushed with egg, then dredged in sesame seeds and baked until crisp and brown, it became a dozen bagels. It could have been bread, this dough of mine, but on a whim I decided it should be bagels instead.

It’s funny how we all would like to have that sort of power over our lives. How we want to take a bare handful of basic ingredients and control the outcome, even though we know that outcomes cannot be controlled. Heck, most of the time, they can’t even be predicted.

I would dearly love to know how my children are going to come out. What they will choose to do with their lives… who they will fall in love with…. if they will be happy. For that matter, I would like to know how my own life is going to turn out.

I used to think that my own life, at least, was within my powers to shape as I willed, if only I gathered up the courage to take charge and forge ahead. The folly of youth, I suppose, thinking of life as a battle to be won, or even as something winnable. Of thinking that not only can we win it, we can control the outcome of each battle along the way. Even the little ones.

Especially the little ones.

Take pasta sauce, for example. I recently heard of a recipe for pasta sauce whereby you roast veggies in a little olive oil and spices and then simply puree them into a lovely, rich, spicy sauce that will make your tastebuds sing. Not only that – the kids will eat it and ask for seconds. With a house full of picky eaters, the idea of a spaghetti sauce that no one turns their nose up at… well, let’s just say it was seductive enough to have me dragging out the roasting pan and the last bag of tomatoes from the garden which were frozen whole back at the end of summer.

I started with one onion, coarsely chopped. Next came 6 cloves of garlic peeled, and some celery, leaves and all. From the freezer, but originally from the garden, some carrots, green beans, squash and the tomatoes went into the pot. I added a glug or three of olive oil, some sea salt and cracked pepper, oregano and basil, and gave the mess a stir.

What a colourful, aromatic mess it was, too!

As it happens, all three of my family members wandered into the kitchen at various points in the preparation. I was hoping to avoid that, since mealtimes tend to go more smoothly when the people eating the meal aren’t exactly sure what went into it, but what can you do. One by one, they wandered over, made a face, asked the same question, and then left again.

The question — asked with a wrinkled nose and a hesitant look, as if they weren’t sure they wanted the answer — was “What’s that???”

To which I replied, “It’s going to be spaghetti sauce.”

Huh. Imagine that. An hour later, my pickiest eater — the one who regularly refuses spaghetti sauce of any description — was back in the kitchen.

“What smells so good?”

The sauce in the oven.

“Can I see it?”

Of course you can.

“Can I taste it?”

After it’s done, sweet child. It has to finish roasting, and then I have to puree it first.

And then she left. Five minutes later, she was back, opening the oven door for a peek and a sniff, with a dreamy look on her face. Five minutes after that, she was back again, following her nose and still looking dreamy. I had to admit, the house was beginning to smell delicious. As well as the sauce in the oven, I had a loaf of farmhouse bread in the bread machine and it was just starting to bake up, filling the air with yeasty deliciousness.

With the vegetables roasting in the oven, I couldn’t get the bagels baked just then, so they sat on the counter, shaped and waiting, rising just a little bit more before they baked. And B hung around my ankles, sniffing and smiling and waiting twice as impatiently as I was.

Finally, it was time, and out of the oven it came. The bagels, meanwhile, were still rising. I hurriedly boiled them for a minute each side, then painted them with egg yolk and dredged them in sesame seeds and popped them into the oven. With the bagels baking away, it was time to look at the sauce. Here’s what it looked like, fresh out of the oven.

Now, I know I’m terrible at photographing red things, but what you see is not a photographic error. The sauce… is orange. Too many carrots, I suppose, or too few tomatoes. Who knows? It tastes delicious, at any rate. Rich and garlicky, though a little too tomato-y (is that a word?) for the men in the house, but that can be fixed easily enough with a slow simmer in the crockpot and a few judicious spices. But orange?

How do I fix orange?

I thought that perhaps the orange might be improved a little once I pureed it, since the tomatoes would be more evenly blended and the carrot and squash a little more disguised. So, armed with a hand blender and a little bit of patience, I turned the chunky stew of vegetables into a smooth puree that served only to lighten the orange colour.

So now, I have a light orange (but still very orange) spaghetti sauce to serve my picky eaters, including the pickiest spaghetti eater of all, little Miss B. What do I do? The timer for the bagels went off just then and I gladly pulled them out of the oven, knowing that the bagels, at least, would have turned out correctly. I can still hear God laughing even now. He must get a real kick out of me.

My first mistake was in letting the bagels rise so long after shaping. Instead of lovely donut-shaped things, I’ve got blobs. Most of them are now entirely lacking a hole in the middle, and they have a rather lighter texture than I like. I like dense bagels. I like bagels that are a challenge to cut, crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside. These… are not.

My second mistake was to only paint the egg on the tops of the bagels and sprinkle seeds on top, rather than taking the time to paint them all around and give them a thorough dredging in a bowl of seeds. As a result, the bottoms seem to be rather pale and definitely less than crisp. Of course, I wouldn’t know how crisp they are, because I am unable to taste them. I forgot to oil the baking pan, you see, and so the bottoms of the bagels are firmly glued to the pan while the tops — with ragged, doughy bottoms — are cooling on the rack.

Yep, God is definitely having a chuckle at my expense today. Orange tomato sauce and bottomless bagels are just so hilarious, after all. The childish part of me was tempted to throw the whole dang mess in the compost bin to feed the worms, but despite a rather less than perfect appearance, the sauce is yummy and the bagels taste delicious. God was talking to me, it seems. Reminding me most firmly that I am not in control, and that things don’t always turn out the way I plan.

B came back into the kitchen as I was packing the sauce into containers so I could put it in the fridge and think on how to fix it for a day or two. When she saw the orange sauce, she let out a howl of laughter.

“It’s orange!” she announced in a very loud voice, as if I hadn’t noticed.

“Yup.”

“Awesome!” she yelled, and she actually twirled around the kitchen. Twirled. Hair flying, hands flung out for balance, an enormous grin stretching her lips from cheek to cheek, and a definitely sparkle in her eyes. “Is it ready? Can we have it for dinner?” she asked then.

“Tonight?” I asked her, wondering if this could be the same child that turns her nose up at her father’s marvelously spicy meat sauce, my own tomato-y-er (definitely not a word) vegetarian sauce, and everything in between. We like spaghetti around here, and we eat it a lot. And every time, B fights us. Every single time we have spaghetti. We’ve tried a lot of variations of sauces in hopes of finding one that will please us all, but nothing ever works, especially for B. This sauce has too much meat. This sauce is too spicy. That sauce is too bland. This one tastes bad. That one doesn’t make her tummy happy. Can’t she just have noodles with butter instead?

“You want this sauce on spaghetti?” (She’ll have to forgive me for being a little incredulous.)

“Yes!” She yelled, nodding her head for good measure. “It smells sooooo gooooood!”

Colour me flabbergasted.

Sometimes, when you’ve lost all the battles you could possibly lose in a day, you turn around and discover that you’ve won a great victory after all.

Apparently I was  a tad premature.

K approached me the other day with a question: “Mom, have you read The Hunger Games?”

Why yes, son, I have. All 4 books, as a matter of fact, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. Why do you ask?

It seems that K, as grown up as he is, was a little concerned about whether or not the book would be… not scary, exactly, but maybe a little intense for a boy of almost-eleven.  We talked about it a bit, and I told him that he could always start it and, if he didn’t enjoy it, put it away for another day.

He decided he was ready to start reading it…

…if I would read it out loud to him.

Part of me was thrilled, but the other part of me now had a dilemma. While our boy of almost-eleven is definitely able to handle the more mature themes in the book, our girl of not-yet-nine most definitely was not. This most definitely could not be a family read-aloud.

At the same time, it didn’t feel right to start what was sure to become a several-months-long read-aloud of the four Hunger Games books with K and exclude B.

What to do?

After a rather short discussion with the kids, I learned that reading aloud is not, after all, something I should no longer do. Oh no! Instead, I should read twice as much, of course, with not one but two read-aloud plans, this time reading one-on-one.

I am officially out of retirement, it seems.

B and I decided to spend the month of February revisiting our old friends the picture books and happily dove into the Jillian Jiggs books by Phoebe Gilman, and Matthew and the Midnight Turkeys by Allen Morgan, and Degas and the Little Dancer by Laurence Anholt, and of course a healthy dose of our beloved Robert Munsch stories, and poetry by Shel Silverstein and Dennis Lee.

With B’s head dancing with stories and poems as she drifted off to sleep, K and I settled in to read a chapter a night. We’re on chapter 7 of the first book now, and he is loving it — in no small part because it means he gets to stay up later than his sister, and he gets Mama all to himself for half an hour.

I must admit, I’m loving it, too.

I’m treasuring the half hour B and I spend going through books that she has almost outgrown, knowing that this is possibly the last time I get to read Munsch to her with a silly voice, or tumble together through poems by the incomparable Dennis Lee.

(Mind you, I’ve been wrong before. This may not be the last of anything.)

I’m treasuring the half hour K and I spend reading and discussing and struggling to make sense of a rather grim vision of a post-war world where life is a daily struggle and government is not benign or munificent, or even well-intentioned. It has led to some rather interesting discussions, to say the least.

Of course, it has put a dent into my crafting and blogging time, so you’ll have to forgive me if I’m not as present here over the next little while.

It just means I’m too busy reading out loud once again.

I don’t mind.

Our specialist falls into that magical category of doctors who are really, really good at their jobs, and who make you feel really, really good about being their patient. So good, in fact, that the long trip (she is on the opposite side of the city) followed by a long wait feel like a small price to pay for such quality care.

But, having spent many years now as a parent of small impatient beings who don’t appreciate waiting at all, it is not a trip or a wait I wish to do unprepared. Snacks were packed, water bottles filled, books readied, the iPod was loaded, and off we went.

B packed her own entertainments, which initially contained two Boxcar Children books, a Nancy Drew novel, a Hardy Boys novel, three picture books, and a Gordon Korman novel just in case she ran out of reading material. Plus her snack, water bottle, iPod, teddy bear, sketch pad, and oil pastels. I vetoed, she complained, and we compromised: one iPod, snack, water, and sketch pad, and a Kindle in place of all those books.

At the very last second as we walked out the door, I grabbed a ball of sock yarn and some double-pointed knitting needles and jammed them in my purse, knowing that I had someone new to knit for.

I’m glad I did, as B promptly settled in to a corner of the waiting room and began to sketch — and she barely moved from that spot for the next 90 minutes.

When our name was finally called, I had this:

An itty bitty bit of sock knitting for an itty bitty baby girl. Those are size 0 needles, which means that the leg of the sock that you see there is pretty much life-sized.

To be completely honest, I had knit a lot more than what you see above, but I didn’t take a photo of it after I turned the heel and started on the foot. At the moment, it remains only to finish knitting the toe and then start on the second sock.

Knitting little things is fun, since they go so quickly. Knitting itty bitty baby things is doubly fun, since they go so quickly and are adorably cute. Plus, if you just happen to be knitting in public, knitting itty bitty baby socks tends to garner a lot of attention from women of all ages, and a few men, too.

There’s something about knitting for a baby that says “You may not know it yet, baby, but I adore you.”

Welcome to the world, baby Anna. I can’t wait to meet you!

(And no, I’m not having another baby. Anna was born a few days ago to a dear friend whom we’ve known since the age of the dinosaurs or so.)

So I won’t.

But I can share with you a little bit of what I have been working on.  I’ve been continuing to work on several different pieces, as is my usual habit.  (Why have one project on the go when you can have half a hundred?)  First, I’ve continued adding seam treatments to a felt kit project that will be a Christmas wall hanging.  Last week, it gained an embellished Cretan stitch seam treatment.

I started with a burgundy Cretan stitch, then added black bugle beads.  I then added straight-stitch flower stems and seed bead flowers in various shades of green, and then finished it up with a row of chocolate brown sequins.

I’ve also put some more work into my landscape crazy quilt block.  The green velvet patch on the lower left corner was crying out for a flower garden, so I gave it one.

I had fully intended to make something out of TAST week 5′s herringbone stitch, but it never materialized.  Instead, there are detached chain stitch flowers in pink with brown french-knot cones (they are meant to be Echinacea).  There are clusters of french knots with fly-stitch stamens in burgundy and dark green. There are blue detached chain flowers that might be crocuses but aren’t quite.  There are button-hole wheels in navy blue, along with random scatterings of french knots in the same.  And then, there are the giant fly stitched turquoise flowers with couched stems and crazy dangling pistils.  There are more flowers to come, but somehow not a one of them wound up using herringbone stitch.  They were fun to stitch all the same.

I did manage to work in some TAST week 6 stitching. The diagonal seam above the garden has a base of Chevron stitch.  I based it on a seam embellishment pattern from Sharon B’s website (follow this link to see the stitch pattern). You’ll see that it takes a base of Chevron, adds a trio of detached chain stitches, a pair of straight stitches with a bead on the end, and then a sequin in the V of each Chevron stitch both top and bottom.

Sharon B’s example has the chain stitches forming a lovely extended diagonal line which I really, really liked. Too bad I didn’t notice I started doing the bottom set of them with the wrong slant half way through!  That’s what you get for stitching while watching TV, I suppose.  I didn’t bother picking out the mistake so you can see it in the photo below if you look carefully. The seam wound up covered by the garden of flowers, so it is somewhat camouflaged.

I’m enjoying the TAST challenge.  Watching B try stitches and abandon them gleefully for a wide variety of reasons is a source of great amusement.  She reminds me of her Auntie N when she does that.  It is a tendency towards impatience and imperfection that comes from a sense of adventurous creativity, strong self-confidence, and oodles and oodles of joyful abandon. I’m also enjoying expanding my repertoire of stitches, and the weekly reminder to do something new and different. But most of all, I’m finding myself fascinated by all the stitching that is posted in the comments of the TAST website each week. There are some truly phenomenally talented and creative people taking part in this challenge, and I am both humbled and awe-struck and inspired.

My knitting has been inspired this week, too…

Tomorrow, I’ll show you pictures of the itty-bitty thing that found its way onto my knitting needles while I was sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office yesterday.

It’s Discovering Great Artists, by MaryAnn Kohl and Kim Solga. Once we had it home, the kids started flipping through the pages, only to discover that the cover was the only bit that was in colour, and that there were far too many words and not enough art on the pages. It got dumped back into the pile and ignored for an entire week, until Mama picked it up.

Inside, there is a veritable treasure trove of knowledge. A generous helping of history, plus new-to-us art techniques, things to try, styles to imitate, experiments to do, and art to make. There is far more in this book than we managed to do in the 3 weeks we had it at home, especially considering we didn’t really look at it until week 2. In fact, there is such a wealth of information and activities, this book has made it onto my “must buy this” list for our next trip to the bookstore. And lest you think it is all about drawing and sketching and art theory, let me show you this:

This is K mixing his own paint from pigments and egg yolks. As part of a mini-biography of one of the medieval artists, Giotto (if I remember correctly), the kids learned that he painted with tempera paints made from pigments mixed with egg yolks, and that he mostly painted on wood panels to decorate churches. Wait… what? Eggs? He painted with eggs?

What did they think paint should be made from? Well, they weren’t sure, but maybe chalk mixed with water. Maybe crushed up rocks.

What else was a Mama to do but break out the mortar and pestle so they could grind up some chalk and test out different formulas. We tried chalk and water and discovered that, while it worked, it didn’t make for a very nice paint. We tried olive oil, but that didn’t work too well either. Finally, with the book in hand, we mixed water and egg yolks and then added our chalk pigment. Wouldn’t you know it, we made the creamiest, smoothest, richest colours of paint.

And then, of course, we painted with our homemade egg tempera. I apologize for the terrible photos – somehow throughout our paint-making adventure, I only took two pictures, and neither does justice to how much fun we had (or how big a mess we made).

The book had many artist profiles inside, with at least one activity for each one. We didn’t get to do all of them, but we did try quite a few, and we had lots of fun. Most of the activities would work equally well with kids as young as 3 (and also with kids as old as me), though the littler ones might find the text to be above their level even as a read-aloud.

All in all, if you like making art with your kids, this is a book you should have on your shelf.

While the kids are confident computer users, their understanding of what computers are made of and how they work was sorely lacking. Oh, they had the general idea, but there were large pieces missing, and all of those pieces fell firmly into the category of “any geek-kid worth their salt would know this stuff.” Things like not really understanding why it is that when you put your thumb drive in the computer at school, it always shows up as F:, but when you bring it home, on your computer it is E:, but on Mama’s computer it is I: instead. And what exactly is a ‘drive’ anyway?

So we took one of our old computers and did this to it:

We exploded it. It was prefaced by a few lessons in the history of computers and robotics, and software vs. hardware, and it was tremendous fun.

We paid careful attention to the idea of information storage, which of course necessitated dragging out an old floppy disk and a hard disk drive too. And yes, before you ask, we exploded those, too.

We aren’t done our explorations yet, nor are the kids done their computer education — not by a long shot! But we are well on our way, and we’re having tons of fun.

Isn’t that what learning is all about?