of mysteries and the English countryside

I wanted to be Nancy Drew when I grew up in my pre-teen years.

Carolyn Keene hooked me on reading and taught me to love a good mystery. I'm not into the gruesome or overly "scary" mysteries, but a good plot with a few twists, one that leaves me mulling over the clues while washing the dishes, or changing diapers! They also can't be predictable - my tastes have come a long way since those early days, yet I am forever grateful for the trajectory her novels provided.

Fast-forward a decade and enter Kate Morton's books.

I first read The Forgotten Garden on a trip to Phoenix a few years ago. After a drought of reading (reading for school frequently left me NOT reading for pleasure) I fell in love with Morton's writing - her mysteries laced with romance, set in the English countryside, in houses of long ago. The romantic in me who fantasizes life in castles (without the paparazzi) devours these sorts of stories.

I've since read The Forgotten Garden again, and also her other books - though I felt disappointed by some of them, I did thoroughly enjoy the twists and turns of The Secret Keeper and it became my #2 favourite of hers, until this week when my name was up for her latest, The Lake House, from our local library.

Oh it's good. So very good. I love how brilliantly self-aware the novel is too - as an English teacher, who LOVED giving my students meta-cognitive pieces, telling them to THINK about their THINKING.  I love how the characters themselves delve into the how-tos of a mystery, as the mystery novel unfolds.

Before I even started reading the endpapers pulled me in:

Exquisite.  They make the book feel even more luxurious as it whisks me away to Cornwall in the 1930s.... 

I'm having a tough time putting it down.  And I'm constantly craving a good cup of English tea accompanied by some scones and jam. mmm.

Food Rule #39

...Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself. (Michael Pollan, Food Rules)

And you know what? I think they taste even better than the ones from a certain fast-food restaurant famous for their root beer! mmm.

Loved this recipe!

Booger buster

It's Christmas. So of course people get sick. It's just one of our traditions.

Unfortunately, my two month old picked up something nasty from his admirers. Boo.  And so, I returned to my trusty "baby first aid box" and found my fearless booger buster: 

The idea is rather disgusting, but it works like a charm! A little bit of saline. A little bit of sucking and he can breathe again!

Homemade Birthday: Rocking Horse

I'm super excited for Chritmas gifts this year! (And also my daughter's third birthday!) My husband and I have been working on some very cool gifts...

This little guy we found at a community rummage sale. He went from this:

To this:

And it was (mostly!) so easy!

See that marker? Yeah - it was the glitch. After four coats of chalk paint, it still bled through. So I had to strip those areas & sand off the marker. Boo. But the painting and mane were super easy!

Chalk paint: I picked up a can of white sample paint from the store. It cost me 5.99, but I was able to use it for another project as well. I used a recipe from In My Own Style, and purchased a huge container of calcium carbonate from my local pharmacy, which cost nearly $20, but will be used for multiple projects. I could have painted him any colour, but I like white.

(The paint I had to strip and sand off after it was already painted was HARD work... I believe that's a good thing for kids' toys!!)

Mane: a Pinterest idea that wasn't totally awful! I love it when they work! I used this tutorial. I had to read the directions carefully, as she was missing a few photos. Don't do what I did I and make the mane so thick your sewing machine can't sew through it. I had to remove some layers before I could finish it.

And TADA!

Of course the balloons we blew up to decorate her room were the initial hit, but once she got over those, she loved her rocking horse. And still does :)

Christmas with 3 under 3

This Christmas season is very special to us, and even more so as we get to experience it through the eyes of our three-year-old daughter. But, that also means we have a seventeen month old and a one-and-half month old in tow, which limits our celebrations.

I have to be honest, our house looks quite sparse in terms of decorations.

We have stockings:

And we have a Christmas tree:

But notice something about the tree? Yup. It's missing ornaments. We have a handful of homemade ornaments at Miss K's level, but otherwise it's a naked tree.

As a perfectionist, this year is tough on me.

But, I just didn't want to yell.  Funny enough, as I reflect upon that same article, I wouldn't get out of bed if "not yelling" was my only criteria/reason for not doing things this year. Realistically, I had to pace myself. We have activities planned that I hope will be traditions, and will make memories - and reinforce other ones - without causing too much added stress to a household where all of the littles need help. All of the time.

There's one other things we have this year:

It's our version of Tsh's Easy, no-Frills Advent Calendar.

I looked at the calendar, and attempted to incorporate activities we were already doing, and then added a few more. We even have a few BONUS activities - as Main Street's Christmas tree was lit in November (Miss K - my soon-to-be three-year-old has been asking about it since last January. Not even kidding), and her birthday part is AFTER Christmas this year (again - the whole not yelling thing as important).

Other activities include:
-decorate Christmas tree
-maintaining our Friday family movie night - Elf, Dad's choice!, and A Charlie Brown Christmas
-make perogies (with all of the aunties - and the cousins showed up too!)
-deliver food to the Foodbank
-shop for & deliver Christmas Hamper Toy
-Church Christmas Concert
-make Nuts & Bolts (an easy "dump" activity)
-make cornstarch & baking soda homemade ornaments (so easy & AWESOME!)
-deliver cookies
-candy cane hot chocolate
-"do you wanna build a snowman?!"
-tobogganing
-Christmas train ride

Easy activities. Many of which we were doing already, but now we have anticipation each morning. And? I can switch them around - for instance when there was NO snow on the day we wanted to go tobogganing. And, because I looked ahead, I'm able to "call in the reinforcements" (yay Grandparents!) for the activities that will need a little extra help - like the train ride.

I can't promise I won't yell this year. Mischief abounds around here. But I'm trying not to yell more than normal. :)

Ethical Food Choices

I retweeted Relevant Magazine's article "How Much Should I Care About Ethical Food?" because in a number of ways it resounded with the lessons my head and my heart have been learning this year.

"Ethical" is certainly a buzz word these days. And I wish it wasn't.

Let me explain.

I wish we didn't live in a world that had to distinguish "ethical" from the rest. I wish we lived in a world where things were ethically produced all the time. A world where wages were fair, workers were not exploited and mistreated, where we strived to preserve our beautiful world instead of working for the cheapest.

I come back again and again to a lesson I drew from Tsh's book, Notes from a Blue Bike: everything costs someone something.

But as this piece gently reminds, I don't want my choices to be driven by guilt. And I also can't always afford the most ethical option. I have to live within the means of our family - and right now we are a single income family, with three kids. Money is carefully budgeted and alloted to certain expenses. Some months we just can't afford certain things.

But that doesn't mean I can't try.

As I have written before, in the summer months I visit the local farmer's market to buy produce and eggs. I can buy honey this way too. With the winter months, I called up my egg supplier and asked her if she would be willing to deliver eggs if I set up a few orders each week. She did! We get a dozen farmer-fresh eggs every week. She also has a variety of different types of meat if I'm interested. 

Our meat comes from a few different sources - chickens from a client of ours, beef from our own pasture, sausage and pepperoni stick from my husband's hunting. Fish from his fishing trips - though we don't get enough in the summer and still have to buy some.

Our freezer is full of chopped apples from my husband's grandmother's tree. They were going to waste when he picked us a box ... Next year we'll try picking more! 

Our small-town owned grocery store does provide some organic produce, and whenever possible I buy their locally sourced produce as well. Obviously things like bananas and mangos don't grow in our cold temperature, but we have tried as much as possible with other fruits, while growing a lot of our own veggies.

I'm trying not to feel guilty, and trying to do my part as best as I can. It's not perfect, but my growing awareness is helping us take small steps in the direction of "ethical food".

Poetry

The Modern Mrs. Darcy posted this past week about favourite poetry collections.  It made my mind whirl a little. I used to love poetry, and getting to teach it gave me secret thrills.  But as a sleep-deprived mother of three (under three, I might add!) I find it all too easy to gloss of books and other forms of rich literature, and instead turn to mind-numbing TV and Facebook.  Her post reminded me of what I'm missing, and caused me to go back into the recesses of my mind and extract some memories of favourite poets and their work.  One in particular leaped right out.

Without a doubt Derek Walcott stands out in my mind as a poet I admire, and whose work leaves me awe-struck. I was introduced to him in my first-year English course at university.  It was love at first read. His imagery and vocabulary alone give me shivers.

Taken from the Academy of American Poets:

In the Village

Derek Walcott, 1930

I

I came up out of the subway and there were
people standing on the steps as if they knew
something I didn’t. This was in the Cold War,
and nuclear fallout. I looked and the whole avenue
was empty, I mean utterly, and I thought,
The birds have abandoned our cities and the plague
of silence multiplies through their arteries, they fought
the war and they lost and there’s nothing subtle or vague
in this horrifying vacuum that is New York. I caught
the blare of a loudspeaker repeatedly warning
the last few people, maybe strolling lovers in their walk,
that the world was about to end that morning
on Sixth or Seventh Avenue with no people going to work
in that uncontradicted, horrifying perspective.
It was no way to die, but it’s also no way to live.
Well, if we burnt, it was at least New York.

II

Everybody in New York is in a sitcom.
I’m in a Latin American novel, one
in which an egret-haired viejo shakes with some
invisible sorrow, some obscene affliction,
and chronicles it secretly, till it shows in his face,
the parenthetical wrinkles confirming his fiction
to his deep embarrassment. Look, it’s
just the old story of a heart that won’t call it quits
whatever the odds, quixotic. It’s just one that’ll
break nobody’s heart, even if the grizzled colonel
pitches from his steed in a cavalry charge, in a battle
that won’t make him a statue. It is the hell
of ordinary, unrequited love. Watch these egrets
trudging the lawn in a dishevelled troop, white banners
trailing forlornly; they are the bleached regrets
of an old man’s memoirs, printed stanzas.
showing their hinged wings like wide open secrets.

III

Who has removed the typewriter from my desk,
so that I am a musician without his piano
with emptiness ahead as clear and grotesque
as another spring? My veins bud, and I am so
full of poems, a wastebasket of black wire.
The notes outside are visible; sparrows will
line antennae like staves, the way springs were,
but the roofs are cold and the great grey river
where a liner glides, huge as a winter hill,
moves imperceptibly like the accumulating
years. I have no reason to forgive her
for what I brought on myself. I am past hating,
past the longing for Italy where blowing snow
absolves and whitens a kneeling mountain range
outside Milan. Through glass, I am waiting
for the sound of a bird to unhinge the beginning
of spring, but my hands, my work, feel strange
without the rusty music of my machine. No words
for the Arctic liner moving down the Hudson, for the mange
of old snow moulting from the roofs. No poems. No birds.

IV

The Sweet Life Café

If I fall into a grizzled stillness
sometimes, over the red-chequered tablecloth
outdoors of the Sweet Life Café, when the noise
of Sunday traffic in the Village is soft as a moth
working in storage, it is because of age
which I rarely admit to, or, honestly, even think of.
I have kept the same furies, though my domestic rage
is illogical, diabetic, with no lessening of love
though my hand trembles wildly, but not over this page.
My lust is in great health, but, if it happens
that all my towers shrivel to dribbling sand,
joy will still bend the cane-reeds with my pen’s
elation on the road to Vieuxfort with fever-grass
white in the sun, and, as for the sea breaking
in the gap at Praslin, they add up to the grace
I have known and which death will be taking
from my hand on this chequered tablecloth in this good place.