Parentheticals

I have been having an allergic reaction to something. It really looks a lot like poison ivy, but I can't figure out where I could have come in contact with poison ivy recently. Alison thinks that it might be from the goat's hay, but I can't imagine how poison ivy could get into hay. Either way, it is itchy and annoying. Friday Alison and I got a baby sitter for the girls and went out to get sushi. We had yaki soba (with less barbecue sauce than you would get in osaka), crunch rolls, and dragon rolls. Our choices mainly were selected based on the fact that we couldn't have raw fish with Alison being pregnant. We also had some seaweed jello, bean paste, ice cream a fruit for dessert. It was very traditional. We need to make some bean paste pancakes some time. They are so good! Alison's Birthday was yesterday. We celebrated it by opening presents, having a barbecue, and not going to the zoo. The Zoo was originally in our plans, but we ended up changing them becau...

This week Rea began to read multiple books a day. They are still  pretty short, but she is getting much faster at reading them, and likes to read them for fun. We are excited for this to happen. On Friday we watched Max for Sheila and Scott. They were celebrating Scott's birthday. Max climbed up a tree by himself (I was quite surprised that he was able to.) We went inside and I told him and Rea that I was a pirate, and I showed them my Map and gave them each a gold coin (telling them that we had to pick a good place to hide our gold coins). Rea hid her gold coin under her bed. This week Sara has begun to tell longer stories than she has in the past. She told a story yesterday that she made up. It went something like this: "Sara tinkled in the potty and then Max carried her and they went outside and caught bees and bees and bees and then Sara and Max got stung on the tummy and then Max fell of the monkey bars and got hurt and cried and had to go home." For the firs...

We've been trying to  teach the girls the skill of disagreeing appropriately.  This involves seeing the other person's point of view, stating your own desires, and trying to suggest a solution.  Rea has gotten pretty good at it; if the girls are fighting over a toy, I can yell, "Disagree appropriately!" and she'll say something like, "I understand that you wanted that toy, but I had it first, so give it back!"  Sara usually goes along when Rea disagrees appropriately, maybe because she thinks she has to.  But this week, for the first time, when I yelled "Disagree appropriately!" it was Sara who did!  She said, "Understand... you want... but..." and held out her hand for the toy!  Super cute!  So I made sure she got a great toy.  I was so impressed. Sara also was very excited for nursery this week.  Saturday night, when I put her to bed, I mentioned church, and she said, "And nursery, and bubbles, and snack, and dollies, wrap in...

Since it has been raining for the past few days and it cleared up this evening we (the kids and I) decided to go out on a mushroom hunt (an additional impetus for this decision was the fact that Alison was sick all day and the kids were stir crazy and Alison wanted a little nap). We walked a while and found some oyster mushrooms (which was a pretty good find). Oyster mushrooms are fairly safe, tasty, and grow in big clumps on trees so they are very easy to spot and gather. They are probably the mushrooms that they put in dishes in oriental food, since they taste like most mushrooms in Asian cuisine. Here they are: We walked over to the trees that we found oysters on last year and then I saw something I have never seen before: I excitedly told Andrea and Sara to come over and see what I found,  and sure enough they were morels. I have to explain at this point that I have been looking for morels since I started hunting mushrooms (about three years now) and have never fou...

Saturday we started making our first Caprino Romano (which means 'roman goat' in Italian). It is a cheese traditionally made in Rome out of goat milk. It is a grating cheese (like Parmesan), and has a complex piquant flavor. One of the strange parts of making this cheese is that it requires hand pressing for five minutes. It is sort of like mashing your hands into a hot-tub full of playdough. Hopefully it turns out :). Craig moved the beehive to its final location yesterday as well. The final location of the beehive is 20 feet or so south of the goat shed. He built a fence around a small portion of our back yard to protect the hive from the goats (it is likely that they would jump all over the hive and break it). He expects the bees to arrive on Wednesday, and he is very excited about having bees. I am interested to see how much work bees are so we can get some bees of our own if they are easy enough. Alison has been making more paneer and yogurt most days. She made a lov...

This last week we started making Paneer. We have made three batches of it already. It is a very mild cheese that doesn't melt at all, so you can fry or grill it up and use it like tofu. Our recipe is this: Heat 1 gallon of goat milk to 195 F Let it cool to 190 F Add one tbsp of vinegar at a time and stir Keep adding vinegar until the milk forms curds. The whey will be yellowish Let the curds and whey cool down drain off the whey and collect the curds in a large white napkin using a colander Let drip for about 20 minutes Salt the curd with 1 tsp salt Press with 5 lds of pressure for 10 minutes and then 10 lbs of pressure for an hour Chill the cheese overnight in the fridge Eat it fast Sara told more stories this week, and they now always end with "And Slam Slam Slam all the way home." She and Rea made up the game Slam Slam to play in the car a few weeks ago; as best we can tell from the front, it consists of asking each other, "Ready for Slam Slam?...

I decided this year, when Andrea got so excited for Christmas, that I wanted to make Easter as big a deal as Christmas for my kids.  I'm not especially into holidays, but Easter is celebrating the most important event in the history of the world, so it seemed worth some effort.  I don't know if I made it as big as Christmas, but it was a big deal in our house. I made a list of things that make Christmas so exciting: music, storybooks, Christmas trees, nativity scenes, presents, candy, fancy food, Advent countdowns.  All of those seemed doable as Easter things, except for the nativities, so I tried to do them.  Here's what worked, what went OK, and what failed dismally: Music - I did make one playlist of the Easter songs from the hymnbook and the Children's Songbook and played it a bit this week.  I know most of them, so I did pretty well at singing them for the past two weeks or so.  Rea learned several of them, and even Sara would dance around the hous...