We live here

Geek that I am, I've been mapping my running routes. And so I've been having lots of fun with on-line mapping applications like Google Earth. Resolution increased dramatically even in our neck of the woods a couple of years ago. We can now see our house, and even make out our fruit trees on the lawn when we zoom in. The higher resolution gives out once you stray just 2 km further up the highway, so it seems the Province of BC, which contributes the hi-res images to GoogleEarth, thinks we live on the very edge of what's worth looking at.

Above is a screen shot of where we live. Not much here except the forest.

1. Carpenter Creek, flowing off the bottom of the image on its way from mountains higher up the pass towards New Denver and Slocan Lake. It's a raging river at this time of year. "Creek" is a bit of an understatement even in October. It passes through a deep canyon at its nearest point to our house. It's no more than 200 metres, horizontally speaking, from our house, and we can hear it, but it takes a good 45 minutes of hiking down steep switchback trails to get to it.
2. Turris Creek, a tributary of Carpenter. We get our water supply from just above this spot. Every spring a snow slide comes down on our water intake and cuts off our water supply. It happened this week. Chuck is an old hand at jerry-rigging solutions until the snow melts enough that he can get in and properly clear the debris.
   
3. The highway. Two lanes, steep and winding, it connects New Denver to Kaslo, 44 km away. During the summers it is one leg of an amazing road tour that is very popular among motorcylists and RV'ers, meaning a couple of vehicles a minute go by during peak hours. Most of the year it's more like half a dozen an hour. The Nature Boy avalanche that closed the highway for more than two weeks this winter was another mile off the top right of the map.
4. The Galena Trail. A linear regional park, basically just a trail, built upon the old K&S Railway bed which was abandoned 80 years ago. The views are amazing, the exposure overlooking the creek is quite something, and the grade is a gentle 2-3%. The trail is my favourite running route, and it is also the location of the geocache we maintain. So far there's too much snow to run more than the lower half of it. The cable car (2005 post & photo) that crosses the creek is farther up and I'm looking forward to getting there as the snow melts.
   

Another fine day

It wasn't as warm as the other day, but the sunshine and 9°C made it a perfect day for the first healthy junk food adventure of the year. Erin, Noah and Sophie got on their bikes and headed down the hill to town with $5 each. After a hair-raising descent they headed directly for Mountainberry, the gas stop / convenience store. They spent almost every penny they had on junk food (chips, crackers, candy and ginger ale). They hung out in town a little bit, and dropped in on their grandma, who snapped this photo of their candy-dyed tongues.

After a bit more hanging out, they headed home. The elevation gain is almost 250 metres (800 feet) over 3.4 kilometres (a steady 7% grade) so this did not go quickly, but they had a very good time. They took frequent breaks as they grunted up the hill and laughed themselves silly, suffering from both short-term and long-term wobbits. I can do the ride home in about 25 minutes if I really push, but Sophie has only 5 gears on her small bike, and with all the rests I think it probably took them almost an hour. The exercise they got constitutes the "healthy" part of "healthy junk food." The food itself wasn't the slightest bit healthy.

I had done my run in the morning (I'm now doing 12-14 miles a week, tada!) and so Fiona and I stayed home during the afternoon's adventure. We got out in the garden for a while and did some rehabilitating of overgrown raised beds and planted some peas. We had a nice time together. Then we made pizza for supper, much appreciated by the hungry people returning home on their bikes.

One fine day

Two girls, two novels, one roof, lots of sunshine, on the first gloriously warm day of the year.

Rooster masculinity update

We'd been questioning our rooster's masculinity. He isn't exactly overtly assertive with the ladies and while we are optimistically incubating eggs that we hope are fertile we haven't actually witnessed mating activity. Andrea told us that when she was raising PP from a hatchling she thought for at least a couple of months that he was a hen; perhaps he's been confused about his sexuality ever since. He's a quiet fellow too. Doesn't crow loudly or much at all. He's not mean. He consents to being picked up. Doesn't aggressively patrol the coop the way most roosters do. He has no history of territorial attacks like the one portrayed in my friend Cindy's awesome CBC Outfront radio spot Life and Death in the Chicken Coop (go listen to it -- her kids are amazing, and so funny).

Today I was in Nelson, Chuck was at work, and Sophie, home alone with Noah, went out to the coop to collect eggs. It was cold (there was snow last night), she was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and so she was in a hurry. She ran into the coop through the little people-door and slammed the door behind her to keep warm. The door just pushes open and closed, but there's a hook-and-eye lock on the outside to help foil wily predators. When she slammed the door, darned if that hook didn't swing wildly and plant itself right in the eye. Locked.

She had told Noah she was going to collect the eggs, but she does that every day and often wanders the property for a while afterwards. I wonder how long it would have taken him to get worried enough about where she had ended up to go outside. A long time, likely. Hours, maybe. And there she was, locked in.

Luckily she's a very skinny kid. She recently grew into to some Size 7 pants. There is a tiny little door designed with chickens in mind that gives them access to the outdoor run. Sophie realized she was going to have to squeeze herself through that and her slight size made this a possibility.

She hunkered down on her hands and knees, and then her belly upon the dirty straw and chicken poop, and proceeded to start squeezing herself through the tiny opening. That's when PP sprang into action. This was no longer a friendly human come to deliver feed and water -- this was a sly slithering predator-like creature! He launched himself at her bare skin, beak and claws going in for the kill.

Poor Sophie! She grabbed him and held him down. Which was helpful at quelling the attack, but made it darned near impossible to wriggle through the little door. Every time she let go for a moment to try to worm her way through, the rooster would renew his attack. There was a rather extensive contest between the two of them, played out on the floor of the locked coop.

Eventually she got through. She was crying and bleeding with chicken manure on her knees and hands. She opened the gate and let herself out of the caged run. By the time she had walked the hundred paces back to the house where Noah spotted her through the window, her jitters and tears had turned to laughter. She's been laughing about it ever since.

It seems PP is a Real Rooster after all. So we'll keep turning those blue eggs and keep hoping.

Running discoveries

Things I've discovered in the three weeks since I began running:

• Duct tape is a good solution for blisters.
• Don't buy nice new pants just before starting to run. After three weeks they'll be too big. Guess that's a good thing, but it's still sad.
  
• Where I live motorcyclists will almost always wave at a runner. Car drivers' rate is about 30%, truck drivers' rate is negligible, unless the truck driver is Blake, whose personal rate is a solid 100%.
• Even if nice spandex running tights from 18 years ago still fit they should be tossed, because something seriously oogy happens to spandex after that length of time, something sort of dusty and sticky at the same time and devoid of all elasticity.
• Once an over-achieving control freak, always an over-achieving control freak. Fifteen years of granola-style laid back parenting will count for nothing when it comes to something quantifiable and personal like running distances and times.
• U2, the Talking Heads and Lloyd Cole make the ultimate running soundtrack. 1980's here we come!
• These guys, who chronicled their journey from couch-potato geekdom to half-marathon geekdom through weekly podcasts, are seriously funny and endearing.
• My dog is in way better shape than I am.

Mysteries that remain:

• How did anyone manage to run before iPods?
• What is that evil by-product of spandex decay?
• How can one run 103% of one's Maximum Heart Rate?
  

We have lawn!

The last few days have been gloriously warm, finally! While running yesterday I actually regretted not wearing shorts. It was 11 C (52 F) and sunny and absolutely wonderful, warm enough in the sun for me to feel overheated in pants.

The snow has been melting like crazy. The southern-sun-exposed parts of our property are now almost completely free of snow. We still have over a foot left in the more shaded areas, and all up the driveway, but as for the property in front of the house -- we have most of our lawn again!

It's grey and matted and soggy, but it's enough of a lawn to encourage the kids to get out with the Speedminton gear and have some spring fun.

Quartet Strides

Go and have a look at this video, and compare it to the one above. Holy Toledo, these kids have come a long way in a year. It's not great coaching or loads of woodshedding ... they've probably only rehearsed together twenty times since February 2008. But they've matured; they listen better, they care more, they pay attention and play with their inner critics engaged. This was their dress rehearsal run-through.

Danny Boy

At the orchestra concert we always like to have a few small ensemble numbers. Noah's quartet played, but we were short on other stuff so I told my family we'd play something. This was the first time we'd performed as a sextet, with Fiona as well. We had one fifteen-minute rehearsal plus a run-through in the hall. It came off pretty well, I think. The tune is "Danny Boy," a.k.a. "Londonderry Air," a.k.a. "London Derrière," a.k.a. "London Butt" (by my kids -- who else?).

Egg incubator

Last fall we acquired a lovely Ameraucana rooster from some friends of ours, a quiet complacent guy named "Peepee" (or "pp" as in musical "pianissimo" since he has a quiet and infrequent crow). We'd had bad luck with roosters -- mysterious coop deaths, predation by bears or raptors. And our collection of Ameraucana hens dwindled from three to two to one little lady named "Toy" last year.

But we had this idea that we'd like to breed more purebred Ameraucanas. They lay lovely blue-green eggs, and are pretty to look at with their varied colouring, but are expensive to buy, since they're a "rare heritage breed" and can only be purchased through the mail in lots of 24 or more, far more than we need. So a month ago we purchased an inexpensive Hovabator incubator in the hope that we could actually hatch some chicks of our own.

Then it remained only for Toy to resume laying. She is not a good layer. She's two years old now, which doesn't help, and she has always been the last hen in the flock to start laying. By March there's plenty of daylight, and we were beginning to lose hope of getting any eggs out of her. But finally yesterday the first blue egg of 2009 showed up ... and today, another. She was just taking her sweet time about things.

Are these fertile eggs? We don't know. Peepee's masculinity is unproven at this point; he's certainly not very assertive with his flock of ladies. But we are hopeful. We've set the eggs in the incubator and are studiously monitoring the temperature (aiming for exactly 100 F, with good stability so far). We penciled a sun on one side of the eggs and a crescent moon on the other, to facilitate twice-daily turning. And we've marked them with the date they went in the incubator, so that in 21 days we'll know which ones to watch. Ideally we'll hatch 10 or 12 chicks between the end of April or the beginning of May. In reality we'll be happy with just one -- especially if it turns out to be female.

Weird facts

For our orchestra concert today I asked all the performers to write down on a cue-card one unusual fact or anecdote about themselves. I then read them aloud in the breaks between numbers and asked people to guess who they belonged to. I like to do something fun like this at all our orchestra concerts because what I love about this group of people is its heterogeneity. For example my mom, a former professional violinist and a teacher of violin teachers sits between an 80-something lady who began fiddling in her 70's and her own 6-year-old grand-daughter. I like to give the audience an invitation to appreciate all the diversity and quirkyness that comes together to have fun making music together.

The "weird facts" were great. Among them:

• When I was young I bet my cousin I would never like pink or boys. Now I owe him 10 bucks.
• I was almost arrested by Thai police in a Bangkok hotel.
• I once sang in a vocal quartet with three males that was called (to my shame and embarrassment) "Three Guys A Broad."
• While touring Universal Studios in LA I was stopped and asked for an autograph by someone who thought I was a famous actress.
• I have a tendency to randomly fall off chairs. (Sophie)
• I once shot my mother between the eyes with a home-made bow and arrow. (Noah)
• I have an irrational fear of CBC broadcaster Rex Murphy. (Fiona)
• I mysteriously attract airborne lizards. (Erin)
• My first-year university transcript contains 5 F's, four of them in music. (Me)
• I was Canadian Junior Formula Racing Champion.
• My first (roundly unsuccessful) experience driving a car came at the age of three.

The music was pretty good too. We put a blurb in the local events newsletter, put up a few posters and had a full house of enthusiastic audience members. And then the lady who is in charge of renting out the community hall called me to say she'd enjoyed the concert so much, and she would like us to have the hall for free. How sweet and small-town-ish is that? I've insisted on paying the rental because our donations collected at the door were generous as usual and the hall is in desperate need of a bunch of renovations and restoration that I want to support. But it was sweet and small-town-ish anyway.

Gear

Running is such a pure sport, isn't it? All you need is a pair of shoes and you're good to go.

Well, except that you also need an iPod loaded with the sort of podcast that gives you music to pace yourself to and reminders to change from run to walk and back to run at appropriate intervals to match the Couch-to-5k training program.

And at least once you need the old Garmin GPS receiver so that you can work out your distances along your route. Because how will you know when you've reached your 5k goal if you don't know where 2.5 km is on your out-and-back route?

And then you'll buy yourself a new toy, because all those miles you're putting on must surely entitle you to something fancy and new. The Polar heart rate monitor that arrived in the mail today will help you pace yourself properly, something that's a little tougher to do when your route is part of a mountain pass than if you were running city blocks.

And then you'll need new shoes, because you're now using duct tape on both your shoes and your right foot in order to avoid blisters in the spot where the uppers on your seven-year-old shoes are all caved in. But keep the duct tape handy -- that purchase will have to wait until the next big-city trip when you can try things on. And keep the credit card handy, because there's no telling what might happen once you get inside a real running store.

Gear-lust aside, I'm having fun. I'm in Week 3 (of 9) in the C25k program now and I know I've gone out hard sooner than I was supposed to but no problem so far. I'm following the program pretty much, but I didn't really give due consideration to the fact that I'm running part of what is essentially a mountain pass. That means, for instance, that what the program intends to be a simple starting 3-minute jog interval on the level ends up being for me a lactic-acid generating grunt up a long steep hill. After about 1.5 km my route flattens out a bit except for one very small hill; I can (and typically do) run the remainder of the distance, the flat stuff and all the downhill, without any walking. No shin splints yet, though.

Sophie came part of the way with me today. Fiona "ran" with me last weekend on an in-between day, and we had fun building rock cairns at 0.5 km points along the way, measuring things out with the GPS. The dog is always my eager companion. She is great on the leash and enjoys the excursions immensely. It drives me crazy though that she trots rather than loping. As if she's determined to point out to me how slow I am. Yeah, well, if I had four legs I'd be twice as fast, I know I would. But I have two, and I'm slow. Big deal, you rude mutt.

Where do the days go?

It's that time of year, spring concert time. The orchestra concert is this weekend, the quartet performs, our family will be playing an ensemble number as well. Everything else is in high gear. The school's March Break provided a brief reprieve, but it's full-on again now. Right now I should be doing math with somebody, but something has to give. I've got a cough and laryngitis and I'm not sleeping very well. It's either give up math or my sanity.

Today I slept until 8, got up and did some leftover kitchen cleanup from last night. Got Erin up, made her a lunch. Drove her to school. It being an even-numbered day (March 32nd) I did not go for a run. Instead I sat with a coffee and did my morning internet work, checking the message boards I administer, posting an update on one of the non-profit websites I manage, checking in with our SelfDesign homeschool program. Then I got Fiona and Sophie up and helped them get breakfast and get themselves organized for violin lessons.

Then it was off to violin lessons for the rest of the morning. Home at lunch time. Made some lunch and London Fogs all 'round. Steam-cleaned the carpet in the basement. Started making supper. Worked on some desktop publishing, making a poster and handbills for the orchestra concert. Helped Noah with his viola practicing. Picked Erin up from school. Printed off the posters and handbills, cut them to size. Went off to the basement to do my afternoon viola teaching. Then finished making supper, served it, got everyone organized for orchestra rehearsal. Drove to rehearsal in time to set up the room (move all the tables, set up the chairs and stands). Ran the rehearsal. Cleaned up. Got home just before 9. Cleaned up a bit from supper until my feet got too tired. Sat down here. Wrote this post.

Normally this would be math time (9:45 pm), but the younger girls like me to read to them for at least an hour before bed, and I have to be up by 6:45 in order to have time for a run before work, so I'm taking this 15 minutes and that's all. I really want to be in bed by 11:30 in the hope that I can actually sleep tonight. But I can't remember the last time I did math with Noah and Sophie. It's been at least a week -- and they really would rather we did it every day. I feel badly.

I really think I've made some good progress ensuring that I don't get over-committed. But there are these months in the spring that produce unfortunate conjunctions between various parts of my life -- work, board meetings, kids' activities, musical performances, web work, taxes, housework ....

With luck I will now be able to rally the kids to help finish the kitchen cleaning.

Video O4L

My mom got a new camcorder and let us borrow it this week. Fiona and I decided that for this week we would do her reporting for the SelfDesign program by way of video. There are some fairly random snippets here, just showing off a few different activities that illustrate the range of things she puts her energy into over the course of a week. We put in some of her detail-slogging on violin, because I wanted to show how much more mature she's getting in her practicing. She was really enthusiastic about demonstrating Hands-On Equations, so we put a fair bit of that in too.

Odd-numbered days

There was a time in my life when I really loved running. It probably started when I was interning in Newfoundland. I'd bike to Logy Bay Road and run out to the cliffs at Middle Cove. The feeling of being out on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, between rock and sky, really hooked me. My running really kicked into high gear when I moved to Halifax and discovered Point Pleasant Park. And when I moved to BC it continued all over Monte Christo peak right up until I was 22 weeks pregnant with Erin.

And then .... I remember running shortly after she was born, but it just wasn't the same. Whatever vessel running helped fill inside me was being drained at least as quickly by the juggling required to leave my very attached little baby behind. Mountainous trail-running was what I was doing, definitely not conducive to a baby-jogger. So that was that. I didn't really miss it. I had a baby. And then another, and another and another.

Eventually I was missing my running. There was a period of time after Sophie was born where I felt a terrible need for something like running. I tried getting out a few times. Various kids wanted to come with me. I tried running slowly with a 6-year-old sidekick who got tired after 300 metres. I tried letting two kids bike along beside me while pushing one in the stroller but our only road was a highway; we were a convoy of fragile wobbly beings sharing the road with logging trucks. It wasn't good. With Chuck on call so much and various nurslings needing me throughout the night it was not so simple to just "get up early and leave the kids with dad." I tried a few times with the desperation borne of feeling my precious running moments were being borrowed from the rest of my life. I got shin splints. I gave up. I turned into a couch potato. Or a mouse potato, actually, as we refer to my species here.

My friend Debbie has inspired me. Having never run before in her life she has gradually over the past two months worked herself along the Couch to 5k program. Two or three weeks ago she began to even really like running, and now she's finding herself enjoying (of all things) running outdoors! As she shared her progress it suddenly dawned on me that most of the barriers to my running had disappeared over the past year or so. My kids can now be safely left home alone in various combinations. They don't even mind. Even Fiona, who loves going everywhere with everyone, can be persuaded to hang out at home with her siblings without too much effort.

So I'm following Debbie on the C25k path. I figure if I start really slowly I'll avoid the shin splints I've encountered the last few times I tried to start running. I started right at the beginning of the program, with the leisurely walk-run-walk intervals. So far the only injury I've encountered was a nasty blister on Day 2, thanks to my old worn-out trail runners -- and I barely even noticed it until I got home and noticed all the blood (the kids thought it all quite hideous). I'm cheating a little. I ramped things up to Week 2 a day early. But so far I'm keeping things pretty sane, going slow, giving myself a recovery day in between, running for now on the odd-numbered days.

I love the excuse to get out all by myself into the wide outdoors for something as energizing as a run. I've promised to run with Fiona on any of the in-between days if she wants, but odd-numbered days are mine.

Results

The five marked written subtests of Noah's Foundation Skills Assessment test came back in the mail today. I was assuming I'd quietly tuck them away and not reveal the results unless he happened to remember to ask about them, something I figured was unlikely. He's a real perfectionist and I figured he would be unhappy with whatever score he got. He's never had his academic skills measured before, and I know he's getting to an age where he's starting to wonder whether he stacks up okay against school's expectations, likely expecting evidence that he doesn't.

But his scores were perfect across the board.

So I told him.

"Does this mean I'm awesome?" he asked gleefully.

Can't find Fiona

Fiona began sounding out words at three, and at age 4 1/2 could read pretty much any word, or collection of words. But surprisingly her pleasure-reading didn't really take off as I'd expected. She was very close to becoming a fluent reader, and certainly wasn't sounding everything out any more, but she didn't seem interested in reading to herself.

We didn't discover her profound far-sightedness until she was 5 1/2. Her uncorrected vision at that point was 20/200, on the threshold of "legally blind." When she got her glasses last summer, she improved to 20/70 immediately, and 20/40 in her best eye by last fall. And that far-sightedness was obviously what was preventing her from truly becoming a reader. Late last fall (once she reached 20/40) things really started taking off. Now that she could decipher the smaller fonts she was happily reading to herself from easy chapter books like Magic Treehouse, Boxcar Children, The Littles and Catwings. She would bring books with her in the van, to rehearsals, to meetings, anywhere she'd need to amuse herself for a little while.

A few days ago I went to pick up a novel Erin was borrowing from a friend to use for her English 10 assignment. As I drove home Fiona, in her car seat in the back, apparently picked it up and read a few pages. When I noticed what she was doing I laughed and told her it was a Grade 10 book. "Really?" Fiona asked. "So I can read a Grade 10 book?" I guess so.

That night she told me she wanted to start reading novels, not "chapter books." She said she was finding her easy chapters books kind of boring and repetitive and asked me to help her look through the bookshelves for some proper children's novels about animals. She enthusiastically packed all the Beginning Reader Chapter books into the Donation Store box. We dug up Avi's Dimwood Forest Chronicles, William Steig's "Abel's Island," some Redwall, the first "Guardians of Ga'hoole" book and a few others. And she dived in, with great delight.

She now disappears for long stretches of the day, during which an eerie quiet descends on the household, and can be discovered cozied up in her bed-nook reading her way through whatever the latest book is. She has been totally thrilled (and surprised!) to discover what a strong reader she now is.

Car wash

This post is for my friend K____ who always takes Fiona under her wing while Noah and I are busy at quartet rehearsals, sometimes sitting down with her to look through this blog and read and talk about the stuff they find here ... and who bugged me about not posting about the bottle drive her family and mine worked a couple of weeks ago. "Well," I said, "I forgot to bring the camera, and I don't write blog posts if I don't have a photo to get me started."

So this morning when we headed out for another community fundraiser I knew I'd need to remember my camera or lose all credibility. I brought it to the car wash and it only got a little wet. The kids worked hard from 11 until 3 pm. I guess we must have washed more than 50 cars. The car wash is an annual spring event run by the community club, with monies donated to groups who help provide manpower. This year a significant part of that manpower was provided by the local members of Corazón Youth Choir and their families.

Fiona enjoyed her special role as Keeper of the Keys, hanging onto the ignition keys during the pre-wash, wash and rinse stations, and then returning the keys to the vehicle's owner over at the BBQ & beverage waiting area.

Everyone got rather wet, despite rubber boots and rain gear. The high pressure spray (hooked up to a fire hydrant without an excess of pressure down-regulation) was enjoyed by all the kids, and wearing soapy mittens was pretty fun, especially if you applauded! The weather was thankfully very mild on this first day of spring, and the sun even poked out a few times -- though the propane-powered mini-handwarming station was much appreciated.

It was another one of those pretty cool community workbees where adults from various walks of life and children of various ages worked cheerfully alongside each other having fun and doing good work. I'm so glad we live in a small town where these sorts of opportunities regularly present themselves.

Corazón leaves on their tour tomorrow. Another week without Erin!

It's not spring

Look how much it's not spring at our house. An early spring here means the snow is gone by April 1st. We are way beyond hope of an early spring, methinks.

Other people's mistakes

Noah's writing has really taken off in the past 18 months or so. He actually enjoys writing and has got quite good at it. He can build a story, turn a phrase, express himself well. All the building blocks of good writing are well in hand -- with the notable exception of punctuation.

His writing is fresh and new; he wrote nothing at all until he was 10. He is so perfectionistic and sensitive to expectations that I don't want to suggest corrections. I want to leave him to write to satisfy his own muse and to enjoy the process. But it's true that ultimately I would like him to understand the function of apostrophes and commas and full stops.

As happens more often than I'd care to admit I was mulling over advice I was about to give to someone when I realized that I'd do well to take my own advice. Another homeschooling mom had posted about a perfectionistic reluctant writer and I was going to suggest practicing editing other people's mistakes. And then I realized that I'd long intended to try that tactic with Noah and I should probably give it a whirl, and maybe, just maybe, someone published a program like that. A quick look led me to the "Editor in Chief" series from Critical Thinking Press.

We've started with the beginner book because it's the one that systematically teaches the rules for proper capitalization / punctuation / etc., and introduces editors mark-ups. Noah, who has never had any interest whatsoever in bookwork other than math, perked right up when I showed it to him. "Other people's mistakes!" he said, "I like finding those!"

The exercises take five to ten minutes each so it's easy to do a few in a session. There's a short bit of text to read which contains some errors. Then you either play detective, finding "5 grammatical mistakes, 3 punctuation errors, 2 spelling mistakes and 2 capitalization errors" or else answering some multiple choice questions about appropriate corrections to particular phrases. Noah doesn't need the work on spelling or grammar, but I'm glad those errors are in there, because he takes great delight in the obvious stupidity of these mistakes. The punctuation is of course the area that he's learning the most from, and having to work the hardest at. But after just one day he's already learned a ton -- in a manner that has been completely non-threatening and non-judgemental to him.

London Fogs

This family has become addicted to London Fogs. The kids and I are prone to drinking two to three a day -- each! They started out as a BC lower mainland invention, quickly spread to Washington state and the interior of BC, and we are doing our best to export the contagion elsewhere. Here is our recipe, refined for ease of production by children:

1 Earl Grey teabag
1/2 a mug of boiling water
1/2 a mug of steamed milk
1 Tbsp. brown sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

Set tea to steep with water. Steam milk and add this along with the other ingredients. Mix. Remove teabag and begin drinking as soon as the fog reaches a nice medium brown tea-like colour.

We sometimes use a Tbsp. or two of vanilla syrup, the kind cafés have on hand to make vanilla lattés with, in lieu of the brown sugar and vanilla extract. That's the official barrista way of making them. And because our dairy consumption has gone way up since we discovered these, we've recently begun making a soy-based London Fog premix. We make 2 litres of soymilk, add a 1/4 tsp. of salt, 3/4 of a cup of sugar and 3 Tbsp. of vanilla extract. Then all we need to do is combine one part Earl Grey tea with one part premix for a quick and easy dairy-free version.

We highly recommend London Fogs for greasing the wheels of family meetings, for improving math concentration, and for cozying up with for a readaloud.