crooked house

Sylvie's Temper Tantrum

We went to the exhibtion last night. Sylvie had a major temper tantrum because she wasn't big enough to go on any of the rides. That's her there in the stroller. Almost unrecognizable, she was so angry.

Cool Love

I am standing at the change table, changing Sylvie's diaper. Luke is behind me. Suddenly, he croons sweetly, "I loooooove you."

"Who do you love?" I tease. "Me or Sylvie?" I look over my shoulder and grin at him.

He looks up, startled, from where he is draped languorously over the portable air conditioner. "I meant this," he says, stroking the air conditioner as if it were a cat.

After Her Nap

Sylvie wakes up with an inadvertent mohawk.

Hodge Podge Day

It's official. Today is Annual Hodge Podge Day -- not only did I make Hodge Podge today, according to Grampa's diary I also made Hodge Podge exactly one year ago today. That's because Hodge Podge is one of those seasonal dishes. You have to wait until the local peas, potatoes, beans, and carrots are ready. We spit on foreign potatoes. We pick our teeth with frozen green beans.

 

Most people have their own special way of making it. This is the recipe I've used for the last two years, adapted from the one found here. I did use carrot this  year but I never, ever, ever use turnip because turnip is the vegetable of the devil and also because I don't like it. And I don't bother to thicken the broth with flour -- it doesn't need it. I also add garlic and onions sauteed in olive oil first. All the quantities are very general -- I usually just use all the veggies I've purchased because this stuff gets eaten up fast. And I'm sure I throw in more cream and butter than I probably should.

Anyway, Holly chopped up the veggies for me this afternoon, which is why they are so neat and pretty instead of looking as if a raccoon chewed through them, and then I boiled all of them for half an hour in water before adding the potatoes, butter, and cream. The kids and I went out on the porch while it simmered.

 

Sylvie was too hungry to wait so she ate some sand and then some dirt. Luke  found a pretty feather on the front lawn and also a half-decayed dead squirrel. In the interest of keeping things appetizing, I didn't photograph it and post it here. If I were truly, deeply, madly committed to eating local, I probably would've tried to serve it as a side.

Sylvie had a refreshing beverage. And then we went inside to eat.

 

We followed the Hodge Podge up with locally made cinnamon loaf topped with Nova Scotian blueberry apple butter.

More Close-Ups of the Striped Blankets

From the Department of Stopping to Smell the Flowers: Striped Blankets on a Clothesline

Look what I saw when I took the round-about way home from the grocery store just now:

 

 

 

 

I took my camera with me because I was toying with the idea of driving over to this house on the other side of town that desperately need a paint job. I noticed it earlier today because it is surrounded by the most abundant and gorgeous tangle of flowers I have ever seen. I imagined the owner trying to choose between spending her money on flowers or new paint this year. The flowers obviously won.

After wrestling some women down for the last local green beans -- I won, look a for a post on Nova Scotia Hodge Podge tomorrow! -- I was too tired to go all the way over there. But I did take a slightly circuitous route home and stumbled across this gorgeous display a few streets over from our place. I wish I was a photographer so I could have captured them properly in all their glory.

As I was standing on their lawn snapping away I was half afraid someone would come out of the house to see what I was doing. And the other half of me wanted them to come out, so I could ask about this glorious collection. I wonder if the woman who lives there knitted them all herself.

As always, click on the photos for larger versions.

Giant Dollhouse Furniture and a Marbelous Table

This show of scaled-up dollhouse furniture, by artist Tineke Beunders, happened a couple of years ago now. Creepy that you can't see her reflection in the mirror, no? Check out some of her other projects at ontwerpduo, including the giant combination marble run and table pictured below.

 

Thanks to Sara.

More on Philosophy and the Young Child

As a follow-up to my earlier post: you can read the full text of Gareth B. Matthew's Philosophy and the Young Child at Google books. I especially recommend the chapter called Stories, which excerpts philosophical bits from The Bear That Wasn't, Ozma of Oz, James Thurber's Many Moons, and Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad Together. In an astonishing oversight, Luke and I have read every Frog and Toad book except Frog and Toad Together. Which actually makes me very happy -- because we still have that one to look forward to. If I had to choose a fictional character that I most resemble, it would be Toad. If you know Toad like I know Toad, I don't say this with pride. With rueful affection, yes, but pride? No.

(If you want to get all formal about things, here's a guide for teaching philoshopy with the Frog and Toad story Matthew is talking about, "Cookies.")

Good Questions Or, Philosophy & the Young Child

Image via The Graphics Fairy.

I believe I've mentioned Luke's disconcerting obsession with death once or twice -- thanks very much to commenter Merle Harris (is this you, Merle?) who suggested Jan Thornhill's I Found a Dead Bird: The Kids' Guide to the Cycle of Life and Death. We borrowed it from the library and it promptly became required reading, at bedtime no less, until finally, to David's and my great relief, it was due back.

Questions about death are not the only difficult questions Luke has for us. A couple of months ago we had an increasingly frustrating conversation that started with Luke asking something like "How come I can see everyone else but I can't see myself?" I tried to satisfy him with science-y answers about the location of his eyes in his head and how the eye worked. He became increasingly annoyed, even to the point of tears, until, after a lot of back and forth it emerged that he was asking, essentially, "Why am I a separate person from everyone else?"

Perplexing question. After he'd asked repeatedly about this for a day or two, I emailed my friend Darren Bifford, the only working philosopher of my personal acquaintance (and, incidentally, an award-winning poet), who responded with this:

Wow. Well, a good old Neo-Platonic answer would be that your son, originally and eternally, is really one with the One (or "alone with the Alone") but obtained the distinctness he now questions when, as a necessary condition of Creation, the One became (or emanated) into the Many. Hence the separateness he feels is only a kind of illusion; like all other things, he too will return to the One. Indeed, his question tacitly expresses his deepest desire to make that return. I fear that your son may become a mystic or a monk or a philosopher. He therefore will not be able to support you in your old age. Don't blame him.

What do you tell him?

...dear lord, I can't wait to have kids. I really don't know what I'd say. There's that Buddhist answer: something about drops of rain and the ocean. Or the decent Christian answer: because if he wasn't separate, he wouldn't be able to experience the gift of being alive.

I ran all those past Luke and we talked about them. He wasn't satisfied; he wasn't not satisfied. He was kind of "Hmm." And "Hunh." I suppose you could say he was philosophical about it.

In preparation for similar lines of questioning, I googled philosophy and young children and found a book, unsurprisingly, called Philosophy and the Young Child by Gareth B. Matthews. This lovely book contains a lot of anecdotes about philosophical dialogues with young children, a lot of praise for children's books and their writers who are, in Matthew's opinion, "almost the only important adults to recognize that many children are naturally intrigued by philosophical questions" and the following encouragement for those adults, like me, who have little or no formal training in philosophy. (I didn't take even one philosophy course at university.)

The equipment needed to do philosophy is basically the understanding that anyone with a moderately good command of the language and the concepts it expresses already has -- plus great patience and the willingness to think about the (apparently) simplest and most fundamental questions there are.

To do philosophy successfully with children requires that one rid oneself of all defensiveness. I am embarrassed if I cannot tell my child how to spell "tonsillectomy" or how to convert degrees Fahrenheit to degrees Celsius. But I should not be embarrassed to admit that I don't have ready an analysis of the concept of lying or a good, helpful response to the question, "Where are dreams?" Instead I should simply enlist the child's help so that we can try together to work out a satisfactory answer.

The combination of assets and liabilities that an adult brings to a philosophical encounter with a child makes for a very special relationship. The adult has a better command of the language than the child and, latently at least, a surer command of the concepts expressed in the language. It is the child, however, who has fresh eyes and ears for perplexity and incongruity. Children also have, typically, a degree of candor and spontaneity that is hard for the adult to match. Because each party has something important to contribute, the inquiry can easily become a genuinely joint venture, something otherwise quite rare in encounters between adults and children.

Trying to Beat the Heat

A new air conditioner.

And some raspberry sherbet.

It's not the heat, or the humidity, or even the humanity. It's the insanity. Mine. I don't do well in the heat.