Birthday girl

Come January our family is still celebrating.  It's time for birthday bashes, and this year Sarah wanted a Garden/Musical birthday tea party.  We culled ideas from Emilie Barnes' Let's Have a Tea Party.  This book gives tea party themes and suggestions for invitations, decorations, activities, and recipes.  OBT's mom supplied the birthday cake(s):  a big piece of homemade Red Velvet that was OBT's father's birthday cake from their church (his birthday is in January too) and a cake from the Balboa Dessert Company.  I like the fact that "Sweetness is used sparingly so the natural flavors are what you taste." according to their website.  Yum!

 The placemats were musical and purple, Sarah's favorite color.  Each one had a number on the back and shaped notes on the front.  Everyone present sang their notes in order and then guessed what the song might be.   "The Doxology", one of Sarah's favorite songs, was the right answer.

 

We ate flute cookies - pirouettes with black icing for keyholes,

piano key sandwiches - white bread with cream cheese and pineapple, pumpernickel with apple butter, thinly sliced apples and chopped walnuts,

 

sunny sandwiches - bread cut into circles with apricot preserves inside and raisin faces plus baby carrots for the rays of the sun,

snowballs - peppermint and vanilla ice cream balls rolled in coconut,

and drank raspberry tea.

Happy, Happy Birthday, birthday girl!

And happy birthday in January to me too!

TOG Y2U2 Celebration - Renaissance

Who says that you cannot have a Unit Celebration while on vacation?  Not us!  In fact this was a great time for our celebration as it enabled us to share it with OBT's parents.  For our menu this go-round, I did my research at the Alabama Renaissance Faire's 2002 Feast website.

The Furst Course

Manchet - dinner rolls

Botere - butter

Sallet - a spring mix & raisins, oranges, walnuts, dressed with vinegar, oil, and a little sugar

Apple Muse - We had made this earlier in the unit.  This time I used applesauce.

Potus - Hot Honey Lemonade and Raspberry Tisane (warm lemonade with honey added and raspberries & tea)

The Second Course

Funges - mushrooms and onion cooked in beef broth with a little black pepper and cloves

Carrots - carrots with a little honey added

Makerouns - homemade noodles layered with cheese & spices (medieval "macaroni-n-cheese") - Sarah and I used whole wheat egg noodles layered with grated parmesan and romano cheeses plus basil and parsley.

Poules Rostis - roast hen served with 3 different dipping sauces - We used a rotisserie chicken.

Cold Sage Sauce (savory) - parsley & sage, chicken broth, bread crumbs

Cameline Sauce (hot & spicy mustard) - Dijon mustard, cinnamon, honey, a touch of apple juice

Verjuice (sweet & sour cherry sauce) - canned cherries blended to a sauce consistency

Seed Cake - lemon poppyseed cake - Martha White to the rescue!

We skipped the Thrid Course so that there would be less food to eat and still had plenty.  We also skipped the Firenze Wafers from the Fourth Course.

The Fourth Course of Roial spicerye

Spiced Fruit - Leora made the orange slices in spices (orange slices in cinnamon & sugar)

We celebrated two weeks early as we will not finish Unit Two until next week.  It was great to have plenty of time to cook the food since we were not doing a full school day.  Sometimes we have our Unit Celebrations on Saturdays or Friday nights for this very reason.  The feast still took a while to prepare, but it was well worth it.  

Now on to Crowns and Colonies!

Two poems - one by Leora, one by her brother

Love comes to you,

love come to me

when you do what the Lord says.

Be kind to one another,

and you shall be a child of God.

Do His holy commandment,

and you shall be His child.

We are His creatures,

and He is our Lord.

He is God,

and we cannot see Him.

He is invisible.

We are not.

********

The Lord comes to you

if you do good.

You love the Lord's goodness,

and the Lord will be happy,

and then He will want you

to go to heaven some day.

He loves you so much.

He loves you all the way to heaven

even though you're dead,

even though He's invisible.

He doesn't like hell.

He still likes us.

You say tomato; I say tomato

This morning when I gave OBT the Morning Farm Report, I made sure to ask him if he had taken the trash out.  Now that is a job that I often do and sometimes it even gets forgotten until the week following, but since we live in the country where you can burn things legally and we have a garage, it is not that bad.

OBT assured me that he had taken the trash out.  I had gone out to take care of the animals and spotted the big, blue garbage can in the garage so that got me to wondering.  He took the garbage out.  Okay.  Later my mind said that I had better look out towards the mailbox to see if there was any garbage there.  I couldn't see any.  Uh-oh.

After lunch, I went to the garage and opened the garbage can.  Spying garbage inside and already having issues with my temper, my lack of desire to take out the trash today, and all of the things that are opposite to what I am trying to teach our children (primarily selflessness, i.e. do-it-anyway as you would have others do unto you, GRRRR!, basically fighting my own self), I decide that I simply must get this garbage to the roadside.  Since it is cold and there are about three inches of snow on the ground and our driveway is LONG, I decided to drive it there in the van.

Garbage can is in the van.  Then the van must be warmed up.  We are below freezing.  No coat for me.  This is going to be a quick trip.  While sitting in the van and listening to some new-to-me song on the radio and trying to figure out what it is about, I open the garage door.  As I am sitting there, I spot a car or two going by and then a big, white truck.  The garbage truck.  It goes by and then mysteriously backs up past our driveway.  Now is my chance or is it?  I jump out of the van and look to see one white bag of garbage lying in the snow at the end of our driveway.  He DID take the trash out!  The garbage men must have seen it too as they haul it in the back and continue on their way.  I also spot a FedEx box outside our garage and pick that up on my way back into the garage waving at the garbage man.  He waves back, and our garbage is on its way.  At least some of it.  The rest can wait for next time.  I get back in the van to turn it off and unload the remaining garbage and laugh.

Far From the Madding Crowd

by Nixon Waterman

It seems to me I'd like to go

Where bells don't ring, nor whistles blow,

Nor clocks don't strike, nor gongs sound,

And I'd have stillness all around.

Not real stillness, but just the trees,
Low whispering, or the hum of bees,
Or brooks faint babbling over stones,
In strangely, softly tangled tones.

Or maybe a cricket or katydid,

Or the songs of birds in the hedges hid,
Or just some such sweet sound as these,
To fill a tired heart with ease.

It 'tweren't for sight and sound and smell,
I'd like the city pretty well,
But when it comes to getting rest,
I like the country lots the best.

Sometimes it seems to me I must
Just quit the city's din and dust,
And get out where the sky is blue,
And say, now, how does it seem to you?

What We Read - December 2009

The Gingerbread doll by Susan Tews

Leora picked out several books this time. This was one of her choices, and it was very good. The tale of a family during the Great Depression whose oldest daughter dreamed of a porcelain doll being her gift for Christmas. The family could not afford to give it to her, and the mother comes up with a compromise present to show her love for her child.

Welcome to the river of grass by Jane Yolen

Beautiful pictures and words to match.  An Everglades book worth checking out.

Edna by Robert Burleigh

A book about American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.  When looking at the author's website, I discovered that we will be reading another of his books later this year for school, Napoleon:  The Story of the Little Corporal.

Who was born this special day? by Eve Bunting

A book about the birth of Jesus in question form.

The legend of Saint Nicholas by Demi

In an effort to learn more about this man, I picked up this book that was set out at the library.