A Thing About Tea

Behold, our tea cupboard!

We seem to have A Thing About Tea. We are hopelessly addicted to loose leaf tea. We have done five big orders from David's Tea since early last fall, supplemented by Two Hills and Teaopia purchases now and then.

We're don't have sophisticated tastes. We probably couldn't definitively identify an assam vs. a lapsang suchong. We like weird herbals and party teas as much as traditional blends. But we do love the freshness and variety of boutique store loose-leaf tea. The cupboard currently contains fourteen different varieties of loose-leaf tea. You would have thought it was Christmas yesterday from the excitement that erupted when Chuck came home from the post office with the latest mail-order.

In this photo you can also see the three volumes that comprise our kitchen reference library. For curious and creative cooks, these are fabulous resources. First, the bible of kitchen science, Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen." If you want to know what copper bowls do to egg whites and why, or what "double-acting baking powder" really is, or why you need to punch down bread dough part-way through the rise, this book will explain it all. Next, "The Flavour Bible" by Page and Dornenberg, sort of like a thesaurus for flavours. Look up feta cheese, or figs, or garbanzo beans, and you'll find a huge long list of complementary foods and common and unusual combinations of flavours that include that ingredient. If you have a bunch of dried apricots, or a dusty packet of wild rice, or someone gave you an armload of mizuno and you want to experiment and make up new recipes which include your ingredients, this is the place to turn for inspiration. Finally, the book "Ratio," by Michael Ruhlman. This is pretty much devoted to baking, and to the basic ratios that most common baked recipes rely on. How many parts fat to sugar to liquid to flour to leavener in a cookie recipe? How does the ratio change if you want a chewy cookie rather than a crunchie one? What is it about the proportions that changes if you're making a quick bread, or a muffin? If you like to invent or radically modify baking recipes, this book helps you understand which proportions are required and avoid costly mistakes.

Archived!

I write this blog for many reasons. Some are about the process, but several are also related to the product. The accumulated virtual scrapbook is an important memento of family activities, adventures, challenges and milestones. Important not just to me, and not just in a nostalgic way, but also to the kids and also in ways that reassure and re-affirm.

I sometimes worried that I didn't have a backup copy of the blog, that it could theoretically just disappear from the web with a server crash or a reconfiguration or something and all those precious mementos would be gone. I also like the idea of having a tangible record, something I can hold in my hand and flip through, sit on the deck or curl up in bed with, or show to others.

So a month ago I clicked "submit" at Blog2Print and ordered up hardbound volumes of my early blog posts. I put 2003-2006 in one volume, and 2007, the year I really got hard-core as a blogger, into it's own separate volume.

The books arrived today. They're beautiful. The paper and print quality is excellent, the photos are clean and clear, at least as much as my early low-resolution images would allow. The glossy cover is well-applied and attractive. The indexing is accurate. Each volume is about 200 pages. They weren't cheap, though compared to scrapbooking as a hobby they were certainly a reasonable alternative. My kids have already spent lots of time delightedly flipping through and reading aloud to each other from funny entries, enjoying the portrayals of their younger selves and the memories of things past.

If a virus eats Blogger it's okay now. Though I guess first I should get my 2008 and 2009 volumes ordered.

Gentle stories

When Fiona was sick I went looking through our bookshelves for books to read to her. She still enjoys picture books, but often, and especially when she's sick, she prefers longer stories. The other day we rediscovered Catwings, and I was reminded about how difficult it was for me to find lovely books like these when Erin was little. Books that are suitable for very young children (maybe 3 through 6) who happen to enjoy longer stories but prefer gentle uncomplicated books. Books that don't talk down to children, with simple plots but a richness of language. Books that are happy and fun. Here are some of our favourites.

• Catwings books by Ursula LeGuin. There are four slender 'chapter books' in this series about kittens born with wings. Magical and appealing.
  
• The Lighthouse Family books by Cynthia Rylant. There are four or five of these, about a 'family' of animals who are gradually brought together by serendipity and care for each other and for a lighthouse.
• The Children of Noisy Village and Happy Times in Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren. Lovely stories about likeable though sometimes mischievous children growing up in rural Sweden a couple of generations ago.
• The Sophie stories (Sophie's Snail, Sophie's Tom, and others) by Dick King-Smith. Sophie is a bright, feisty girl with a mind of her own who is wonderfully outside-the-box in her interests and perspectives. She grows up in these books, from age 4 on up year by year, pursuing her dream of being a 'lady farmer'. She begins by caring for a snail, then a stray cat...
• All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor. Daily life amongst a family of five Jewish girls growing up in turn-of-the-last-century New York City.
• Three Tales of My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett. My favourite first chapter book for young children. Funny, ever so gently suspenseful and truly lovely. Stories of a young boy who befriends a baby dragon.

Harry Potter Week

It started with a trip to see the fifth movie. We see a movie in a theatre approximately once every 12-16 months, since it entails a big drive. But HP5 was the opening night in our family Harry Potter Fest, a two-week-long gala in our home. We continued the Film Festival component at home with a revisiting of the first four videos in the privacy of our living room. And Sophie and Erin began re-reading the first six books as we awaited the 7th's release.

We've been JKR fans since way back. I bought the first book in January 1999 for Erin, then almost-5. There was no hoopla back then that we were aware of. It was just one intriguing pick off the shelves of the tiny independent bookstore that was in New Denver back then. I asked Jeff, one of the owners, about it. He highly recommended it, and mentioned a couple of other kids who had loved it too. In a very small town, you know whether your kid shares the book tastes of other local kids, and we knew that if I. had liked it, Erin would too. It was an instant hit. Over the next year, she read, or we read together (for the scary parts) the next two as well. And I don't think a year has gone by since that she hasn't read all the HP books available. We've waited impatiently for each release since then. The younger kids have had all the books read aloud to them and independent re-reads have been frequent. Noah isn't much of a novel-reader, but seems to have the best mind for detail of all of us and soaks everything in in the course of a single readaloud.

Erin is now on her second read through the 7th book. The rest of us are savouring our first go through it at a slower pace, as a readaloud. We're close to the end now and will be sorry to be done.

Adolescence? No thanks.

For years I have been saying "we're not doing adolescence in our family." I'm sure many people on the message boards and e-mail lists I frequent have quietly snickered and thought "just you wait..." Some have certainly snickered not so quietly. So far I stand by what I have believed all along -- adolescence is a social construct that comes of shortening childhood through the pressures of media, consumerism and peer-culture and delaying adulthood through impoverished expectations of teens and twenty-somethings. It's a period of little true responsibility, peer orientation and severed ties with family that is, anthropologically speaking, an unnatural anomaly. I've felt this in my gizzard since I was a teen myself.

Psychologist Robert Epstein has written a book called "The Case Against Adolescence," which I haven't yet managed to get my hands on. It's at the top of my wishlist. Here are excerpts from an interview he did recently in Psychology Today:

"We have completely isolated young people from adults and created a peer culture. We stick them in school and keep them from working in any meaningful way, and if they do something wrong we put them in a pen with other "children." In most nonindustrialized societies, young people are integrated into adult society as soon as they are capable, and there is no sign of teen turmoil."

"In this country, teens learn virtually everything they know from other teens, who are in turn highly influenced by certain aggressive industries. This makes no sense. Teens should be learning from the people they are about to become."

"The adversarial relationship between parents and offspring is terrible; it hurts both parents and young people. It tears some people to shreds; they don't understand why it is happening and can't get out of it. They don't realize they are caught in a machine that's driving them apart from their offspring—and it's unnecessary."

Epstein's book has just vaulted to the top of my must-read list.

Biology 101

Normally a post I write entitled Biology 101 would be about chasing frogs, or watching the garden grow, or planting trees or growing a sourdough culture. But this time it really is about a college-level introductory biology course. Actually it's about the texbook designed for such a course.

Sophie first expressed an interest in biology about a year ago. She was no doubt influenced by Noah's interest in chemistry. Sophie got quite excited by his foray into focused, though informal, study of a particular scientific area. After Noah got started on the RealScience4Kids Chemistry I program, she carved out her own area of interest in Biology. Perhaps she mostly liked the shinyness of the hardcover textbook, and the chance to do some semi-structured reading and lab activities with me. In any event, she talked me into buying the Biology I program, and enjoyed it a lot. We found the latter third of the program pretty lackluster, as it was mostly centred around natural science activities we'd done several times in the past (raising tadpoles, observing caterpillar metamorphosis, etc.), but she definitely enjoyed the more academic early part of the program with its emphasis on taxonomy and subcellular structure. And our reading of Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and biographies and historical fiction centred around biology has led her to a deeper understanding and a thirst for resources at a more complex level.

When we had extra SelfDesign Learning Allowance money to use up, Sophie again voiced a desire for a more comprehensive and complex biology reference book. My approach with the SelfDesign money has been to either buy items with immediate practical use for a specific child (eg. bicycle, piano lessons, art materials) or to purchase more academically-focused items with a likelihood of broad future appeal to multiple children, like the Teaching Textbook math programs. With this latter approach in mind I went hunting for a good biology reference book. Eventually I settled on Neil Campbell's "Biology: Concepts and Connections," intended to accompany a high school AP or introductory university biology course.

This publication is far more than a textbook; it's a course too. It comes with a CD-ROM and access code providing on-line MP3 lectures, videos, virtual labs, interactive investigations, self-evaluation quizzes, games, images and tutorials. The entire book can be accessed as an eBook, but the hard copy itself is well-written and beautifully laid out and worth the price in and of itself. If one's aim is to learn the material, I cannot see why it would make sense to spend several hundred dollars on a college course and then also go out and buy a $150 textbook. With textbooks like this, who needs a prof!?

I highly doubt Sophie will choose to work systematically through what is in effect a college Biology 101 course. But so far she's having great fun browsing through the book and taking the computer-based quizzes. She seems to have learned a heck of a lot from our casual reading and discussions over the past year. What kind of 8-year-old sees a question like this

Which of the following are required for natural selection to occur?

1. heritable variability
   
2. differential survival
3. small population size
4. heritable variability and differential survival
5. heritable variability, differential survival and small population size

and clicks on 4 with scarcely a hesitation?

I think this publication will be useful in many ways over the years.

Harry Potter Day

Of course we made the trek to a bookstore for the new Harry Potter on release day. It was a good day for a trip to Nelson for grocery shopping, so we did that. I stalwartly resisted the lure of loss-leader Harry-Potter-racks at the big box stores and headed towards the independent bookstore in Winlaw and spent almost 50% more to support one of my favourite small businesses.

Erin read the entire book between 12:30 pm and 8:30 pm, with breaks for meals and to allow the rest of us an hour or so for a couple of chapters as a readaloud. She's listening to the readaloud too.

About six months ago, Erin began reading aloud to herself. She does this only in private, in a very disciplined way. After years of speed-of-light voracious reading, she's discovered that reading aloud slows her down, allows her to appreciate the writers' turns of phrases, increases her comprehension. So every night before Sophie comes to bed, Erin reads aloud to herself in her bedroom. She's read the Philip Pullman "His Dark Materials" trilogy, the J.R.R. Tolkein "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and the five earlier Harry Potter books this way and is now starting in on Tove Jansson's "Moomintroll" books.

A year or so ago she seemed to lose interest in our family readalouds; shifting her bedtime so much earlier than everyone else's isolated her from that part of our family routine even more. Lately she's been listening in again, during the day at least. And she's listening to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince with the rest of us. How could she miss that?

Reading aloud

Maintaining the kids' interest in being read aloud to as they grow older is something I've been working away at. I'm of a mind to think that the key is to treat reading aloud as something families do, rather than something parents do for children who can't yet read (at least at that level) on their own. In other words, I think that if you create a culture of reading aloud in your family, one where adults read to adults and kids read to adults (for mutual pleasure, NOT for evaluative purposes) and adults read to kids, then children will be less likely to abandon the ritual as they grow in maturity and age. They won't see it as something that "little kids get from their parents when they can't read to themselves yet", but something that "human beings often enjoy doing together".

So I try to include Chuck in our readalouds with from time to time. Often that's tough, as our 'down-time' and bedtime schedules rarely coincide with his. But I'll sometimes save an interesting magazine article to read at supper time. Or we'll share a favourite audiobook with him (perhaps not necessarily at the same time, but we at least share a common exposure that way). And when we're on vacation we always all listen to the readalouds. Chuck and I used to, before kids, read aloud to each other on long car trips, and we share this with the kids.

Two message boards I'm a part of recently had polls asking how often parents read aloud to their kids at bedtime. On one general parenting board 53% said "never". On another over 90% claimed to read aloud to their kids "with some regularity" and this was a poll concerning kids who were already reading independently. The latter was an education-focused board for parents of gifted children. Stark contrast, hmmm? I wonder which direction the causality runs?

I think that reading aloud to independent readers is very important. It allows you to share a common body of knowledge and vicarious experience with your children, to pass along your own love of certain books and favourite authors, to spend time being with your children, to expose them to themes and subject matter that they might not choose to read on their own, and to 'read a little over their heads', expanding their comprehension and vocabulary far more than will happen just through independent reading. Two of my kids were reading independently at 4, and I just never would have entertained the thought of giving up reading aloud at that age... thankfully that early start got us all over the hump of believing that reading aloud is just a helpful thing parents do before their kids can read independently.

I know that families with children in school have a tougher job finding time for reading aloud, and I can't presume to truly understand the challenges of scheduling and time constraints facing families with kids in school. I can't help but wonder though whether, while it's presumably more challenging to find the time, it's perhaps even more important that they do, because relative to families that don't do school they have so little shared experience and so little shared time. Reading independently, though important, does not fill that void.

At the risk of appearing dishwasher-obsessed, I will mention that hand-washing dishes as a family creates a wonderful opportunity for shared reading aloud. One person can be appointed the reader-aloud, while the others wash/rinse/dry/put away the dishes.

Jim Trelease's "Read-Aloud Handbook" contains some very compelling arguments and statistics about the importance of reading aloud as a family. The read-aloud bibliography is also great. Highly recommended.