Getting ready

It was less than three weeks ago that we found out Chuck could get enough time off in early February for a family vacation. We began thinking about what we could do. When we discussed it, the kids unanimously agreed that their favourite vacation ever was the one where we rented a cabin for a week somewhere fairly interesting and different from home, but where the pace of life was still slow and rural. That was in the fall of 2006 when we spent a week in September on a gulf island north of Vancouver. We haven't really taken a proper vacation since. We did a 3-day canoe trip on our hometown lake the next year, and then the following year we squeezed a train trip and a couple of days of sight-seeing into a family wedding excursion. But a "get away and relax" vacation? It's been well over 3 years.

We bumped into some local friends at our favourite café the day after we found out about Chuck's time off. They had done a trip they had loved down the west coast of the US via train to the desert and I'd kept that kernel of an idea in my head. We picked their brains about it, listened to their rave reviews and advice. And came home and started working away with Google Earth, Firefox and Google.

Within a couple of days it all fell into place. We'll be taking the train from the US city five hours south of us, heading out to the coast on one overnighter and connecting with another overnighter in Portland. And get this -- we'll have sleepers both nights! On Amtrak the sleeping berths are actually affordable.

We'll arrive in LA, rent a minivan and head out to the high desert, staying at a swanky owner-direct vacation rental near Joshua Tree National Park for a week. We plan to do lots of rock-climbing, hike around, explore the desert and some canyons, hang out, play games, play music, visit some friends who live nearby and somewhere along the way see Avatar in 3D, a luxury not available in our area. Chuck and I spent some time in Joshua Tree before we had kids and loved it. It will be colder this time, but it will be awfully nice not to be in the thick of a Canadian winter, especially the disappointingly warm one we've been having so far which has left us with little snow but a lot of ice and dirt.

I'm planning on running a lot! I'll have the time, and I expect the weather will be perfect with daily highs about 15 C. Desert running ... I can't wait. I'm managing to squeeze in 15 miles a week lately with no recurrence of my hip pain, feeling stronger and running faster week by week.

Two-day train trips tend to be fun and exciting on the outgoing leg, but not so much on the return leg a week later, so we'll being doing the environmentally nasty thing and flying home, saving a lot of time and a fair bit of money.

A formal dinner

More passages. Fiona had a birthday. Her choice for a celebration was a formal dinner where the parents wait on the children. We had done this several years ago for Noah, but she barely remembered it and wanted one of her own.

She invited her grandma. There was a brief discussion about whether grandma was first and foremost a guest and hence would sit at the dining table, or primarily a grown-up thus relegated to the kitchen and waiting staff. It was decided, quite rightly, that grandma was a guest.

A folding table was placed in the midst of the warm ambiance of the living room and laid with a real tablecloth, topped with full place settings of silverware including all those different sizes of forks and spoons for the various courses. There was a candle in the centre, and a choice of red or white "kids' wine" (sparkling grape juice) to start along with some rice crisps.

Then there was soup (cauliflower, the birthday girl's favourite) or salad with ume plum and garlic vinagrette. Followed by a choice of entrées: ham, jacket potatoes and peas for the birthday girl and any other meat-deprived omnivores living in this mostly-vegetarian family, or squash-stuffed agnolotti (fresh but store-bought, I confess!) with mushrooms, sundried tomatoes and roasted garlic.

To finish we all enjoyed a Tiramisu Layer Cake which was also of her request, and decaf lattés.

Got her "L"

This is the magnetic decal that beginning drivers use in BC. The L stands for "learner." It gets placed on the back of the vehicle that, say, a newly-16-year-old girl might drive with her parent to get her first experience driving on public roadways.

Tomorrow I will be tweaking the insurance to cover her and afterwards we will set off on her first driving adventure around town. She's driven on our property and on other private roadways, but this is the real deal.

People ask whether it terrifies me. It doesn't. She'll be a good driver I think. And others ask whether I mourn this rite of passage because it means she's less a child and that much closer to being an adult. I don't. Maybe I'm just so sick of all the driving I've done ferrying this kid around to her lessons and rehearsals. Life will be good next year when she can test for her "N" and start driving herself places without me. But I'm also just darned proud to watch her growing up.

Mystery image

What is this? It's inspiring my whole family right now. We can't wait. We're stretching, working out at the gym, swiping our credit cards, digging out our passports, counting the days... nineteen, eighteen, seventeen....

Fairly blind luck

How lucky was this? I managed to buy something for my 16-year-old's birthday that she didn't even imagine she wanted, that it turned out was très cool and exactly what she wanted. Vintage Swiss army leather motorcycle spats. Who'd have thought?

I am definitely not this cool. Just lucky. She's hardly taken them off since she got them.

Building character

"I believe school really builds kids character. For example, I felt lonely and "on the fringe" in school and grew to be a very compassionate person for the underdog."

I disagree. I think people become strong like plants become strong -- by starting with deep roots. I think that childhood is a time to grow deep roots. Later you can challenge the seedling with wind, drought, and deluge and it will probably do just fine because it will have the firm grounding necessary to weather the hardship.

Much of what gets labeled "character building" is actually emotional trauma that kids, as thankfully resilient as they are, gradually get over. But I don't think that "getting over" happens without a cost -- often the result is a subtle emotional guardedness, a "hardening", a wariness, a fear of being hurt, a reticence to commit, a tendency to look to others for approval, to try to please peers or avoid attracting attention rather than stand up for what one believes. Growing up tough enough that you can shrug off others' hurts sounds like strength of character, but I think it's hardness of character. True strength of character comes of knowing deep down who you are, and knowing that you are supported and loved for who you are, so that hurts don't damage your sense of your true self.

Many of us view the traumas we went through as kids is something ultimately worthwhile because they made us stronger. I confess I used to believe that myself. But now I think we like to believe that because the alternate interpretation is to awful to contemplate -- that the traumas we went through were entirely useless and unnecessary and wrong, that they should never have happened, that we would have been emotionally healthier people if we'd been protected from those things. That's saying "I went through all that for nothing?!!!" It's not a very welcome conclusion, but I think it's closer to the truth.

Two of my kids are now teens. As youngsters they were very much protected from hurtful comments, abusive friendships, exclusionary social tactics, bullying, anxiety-provoking social situations, aggression, power-plays and such. They've grown into very strong people with strong senses of who they are. They shrug off the hurtful language and behaviour of others with little difficulty. They navigate the minefield of social relationships with confidence and matter-of-fact good sense. Strong roots, I think.

Me 'n my baby

I'm never in the photos in my own blog. We stopped for lunch yesterday, though -- we had been hoping to skate on the community rink at the café but it was too warm -- and one of the teens we had along for the ride was a bit of a shutterbug. Unlike my kids.

She took the camera I had brought and started snapping photos. Amongst them was a goofy one of Fiona and me. So here I am, in my own blog! With my "baby," who will soon be seven. Which is surprising in some ways, because it seems like just yesterday I was pregnant with her. And it means I'm getting close to 50. But in many ways she's seemed older than 6 for a long long time.

Genesis of a cardinal

Some readers were interested in more details about how we're making these birds. We're less than a week into this experiment with needle felting and are totally self-taught, but for what it's worth, here's how we're doing it. We start with a hunk of fleece about 12 - 14" (30 - 35 cm) long. We're just using stuff we washed and carded ourselves. If you're using commercially purchased roving, you might need to lay three or four such lengths of roving alongside each other to get a hunk about the right size.

Bend the fleece in half and turn it into a little ghost. Grab it by the neck. Using your felting needle, begin to poke all around the head, especially at the neck. Soon you'll be able to let go of your ghost's little neck and its basic head shape will remain.

You can continue felting the head, but at this stage you can also begin working on the body and tail, which encourages your ghostie to morph into a proto-bird. Here I use a foam rubber block. Thanks to electronics purchases long past, we have some of this stuff hanging around looking for something useful to do. I hold the proto-tail in my fingers on the block, and then felt it flat, atop the foam, where it narrows from the body ... first on one side, then the other.

My birds seem to have a tendency to obesity lately, so at this stage I start madly trying to felt them into more svelte proportions. I refer to my bird guides frequently at this stage, trying to get the shape right. Some birds have heads that are like little ping-pong balls sitting atop hackey-sack bodies. Other birds are more like airships. Some have distinctive shoulders and ample breasts, others are more streamlined. Judicious poking with the needle in the too-prominent areas will help shrink them down to more appropriate sizes and shapes.

When the basic shape is about as good as I can get it, I start adding colour. The tail will be made almost entirely out of the coloured roving -- it gets too thick if it has a base of white -- so in the photo you can see I haven't worried much about it yet. I lay bits of coloured roving on running in various directions until I almost can't see the white beneath and felt it on. Then I add another thinner layer if needed.

We've been making crests and beaks separately from little bits of coloured roving and then affixing them with the felting needle. We've occasionally done wings and heads this way too ... if the bird's head is more of the ping-pong ball type, or if the colouring of these wings is very distinct and contrasting.

Colour blending and detail work is much more an art than something that lends itself to how-to instructions, especially by someone who is as much a beginner as I am. Sophie has figured out a few things and taught me ... like how to felt a tiny bit of flat stuff and roll it up into an appendage like a bill or crest. I've discovered that needle-felting a line along the middle of a puff of embellishing colour and then folding the loose stuff back along the line is a good way to get clean boundaries between colours. I'm sure there are books and classes that teach these things and many more. We're just trial-and-error crafters here.

More avian friends

Today's birdies are a red-breasted nuthatch, more than a little on the obese side, and a tree swallow. We didn't have these colours available to us in wool roving, so we dissected several bits of multicoloured wool yarn to get what we needed, then carded them together with related colours to get what we needed. For instance, the tree swallow is black roving with a bit of the deep teal left over from Chuck's multistriped Christmas sweater (below), while the nuthatch's breast is some medium brown mixed with leftover orange from Erin's hoodie. Sophie is at work on a Western Tanager. Fiona is making noises about an Oregon (Dark-eyed) Junco. The Ontarian in me feels the need to make a cardinal and a blue jay, but those will have to wait until we get to the wool shop for some bright red and steel blue roving.

Hearth bread

Chuck went off to the dump today to salvage an oven rack. Then it was out to the blacksmithy to forge brackets and arms to support it. In short order we had a lovely portable bread-raising rack above the woodstove.

It's too cold in the kitchen for efficient bread-making in the winter, so this will simplify and expedite things considerably.

Notice the nativity characters in view behind the bread dough. Worshiping it, to all appearances. I don't blame them. Fresh garlic bread for dinner -- almost a religious experience!

Felted birds

 

Sophie and I have been needle-felting today. We decided these guys might make nice Christmas tree decorations for next year. We still need to buy some little beads or bead-end push pins for eyes, and some pipe cleaners for feet, but we're pretty pleased so far. They're all winter birds we see around here a-plenty. Top to bottom: Bohemian Waxwing, Stellar's Jay, Black-capped Chickadee. More to come. Erin has threatened to make a turkey vulture for the top of the tree.

Tantrums and meltdowns

"How can you tell the difference between an emotional meltdown due to neurological over-excitabilities and a bratty tantrum the child is using to get what they want?"

I don't believe it's as simple as saying "either the child is subjected to neuro-behavioural storm totally beyond her control, or else she's being calculatingly evil and trying to manipulate me by purposely creating the behaviour." I think it's something in between, with elements of both -- the child is communicating, with inappropriate behaviour, something that she feels deeply. My job is to find out what she's trying to communicate, the root cause of feelings behind the behaviour, and help her de-escalate and find other more acceptable ways to communicate both now and in the future.

I dislike the term brattiness. I think that kids generally do the best they can with the communication tools, maturity and impulse control they've got at their disposal. If they're being "naughty" it's because they've got unmet needs somewhere. That doesn't mean you let them get away with the misbehaviour, but the onus is on you to stretch your empathy and figure out where the misdirected behaviour is coming from.

Mac Love

The uncharacteristic silence from my keyboard is more apparent than real. I'm not blogging much because I'm in love with my iMac. After plugging it in I decided to see how much I could do without buying replacement software for all the things I'd enjoyed working with on my PC.

We bought our first PC in 1990. It wasn't my first computer -- that had been a Commodore 64 back in 1985. But the PC was my first home office tool. The three commercial task-oriented pieces of software I bought for it were Adobe (then Aldus) Pagemaker for desktop publishing, CorelDraw for vector graphics and Finale for music publishing. I upgraded over the years, and eventually switched to PaintShop Pro for graphics, but otherwise stayed fairly loyal to my software and fairly consistent in what I used my computer for. I got into web publishing, video-editing and photo-editing and added bits of software for those things. More and more open source software, as it turned out. But the bulk of what I was doing was graphics and publishing.

In the meantime I had fallen in love with my iPod. And iTunes. 

It dawned on me that the sorts of things I was doing with my computer, and had from the start, were the sorts of things that Macs were renowned for. I wasn't gaming, or crunching numbers. I wasn't buying tons of commercial software.

Then I saw a Mac ad at the moment that I was just beginning to think about the necessity of making the leap to a new PC, of leaving Windows XP behind and take on Windows 7. It was an epiphany moment. The timing was right for me.

My music publishing program, which I love and will never leave, is cross-platform, so that was the first thing I loaded. And it was really the only piece of commercial software I installed.  Everything else has been open source, or included with the Mac, and it all functions so much better than the commercial PC software I'd been studiously upgrading for years. Gimp, iMovie, iPhoto and Scribus are keeping me happily busy learning to do things that I never imagined possible -- for free. This week I'm especially enamoured of Scribus which is so much more robust than Pagemaker ever was.

So yeah, I'm in love with my Mac. Forgive the blog silence.

Like...

We like our new espresso machine, "bought" with grocery store points. It was our family's Christmas Eve treat for ourselves. The kids have a penchant for steamed milk, London Fogs and decaffuccinos. The adults like their lattés and cappuccinos. So far it has seen a whole lot of use. Everyone in the family now knows how to run through espresso shots and steam or froth milk.

Next, below, Sophie is playing with our new sudoku board. Sophie really likes sudoku but finds the physical/tactile version much easier and more fun to use. Especially fun are the little drawers on each side of the board for storing the number tiles.

At the bottom, a bloom of Two Hills art tea, in this case Jasmine Fairy Flower Green Tea. We recently discovered Two Hills, a local importer of quality organic Chinese teas farmed and processed ethically. The regular Jasmine Tea is like something from another world. The art tea version, which "blooms" in your cup, adds visual appeal too.

Our Christmas was as usual a fairly simple affair. Perhaps a little simpler than usual this year. On the gifting front there were a half dozen inextravagant gifts for each of the kids, a couple for the parents, plus a handful of "family gifts" like the ones pictured. Few gifts cost over $30, none over a hundred. Mostly useful things -- clothing, things for the bedroom, books. We had the usual cinnamon buns for breakfast, and a nice supper which included a small turkey for the meat-eaters. No extended family or friends over this year. Chuck was on call, though he only had to go into the hospital once during the day, which was nice.

Sometimes I wonder if we have simplified too much. For many years we focused on special things to do through the holidays, on making things by hand, on contributing good deeds around the community and beyond. Lately we don't even do that much, besides participating in the flurry of Christmas performances and doing a fair bit of charitable giving. So it's just not that big a deal, Christmas. It's a time to be together as a family, to focus on the value of giving, and participate in a few special rituals.

I'm not sure if it should be bigger. My kids' friends' families mostly make a much bigger deal over Christmas. The gifts, especially. Do mine feel embarrassed when their friends ask what their favourite Christmas gifts were and they have only a small humble few to choose amongst (a pair of mittens? a book? a jar of marmalade?), none of which rate next to the laptops, wii's, iPhones, iTouches, X-boxes, Kindles and such that the others got?

We had a nice Christmas. It wasn't the pinnacle day of the year (that would be the first Friday in August every year, the last day of SVI). No one's complaining. I guess we're doing okay.

And this year we had only a tiny handful of paper and plastic, plus two cardboard boxes, to dispose of.

Winter running

When you add two to three hours of structured homeschooling to your family's already pretty full daily life, something's got to give. And in my case, it's been the running. I've only run a handful of times in the past month.

Daylight only lasts about eight hours here now. Running at night is really not a realistic option. We're in the middle of nowhere, no streetlights. When it's dark, it's truly dark. When we were in Calgary I ran at night and it felt like it was practically daytime there was so much light. Streetlights every 20 or 30 metres, plus residential lighting and headlights and that urban glow in the sky. But at home it's scary running at night. It's hard to see your feet properly, even with an LED headlamp.

So daylight is short, and with the schoolwork we're doing added to the other daytime business, there really isn't much time for running. I was making progress at getting back into the habit after my two-month injury-related hiatus, but the additional structured daytime activities with the kids is really making things tough. Somehow I'm going to have to fit it back into my life, though, because running really was making me happy when I was doing it regularly.

Lately when I do run, I love my YakTrax. I use the Pro version, which are secured by Velcro on the top and are so light and flexible that I barely feel them at all. They're fabulous in snow, slush and ice. I have some awesome gloves and just bought myself some wind pants to go over my tights for the really cold days. Along with my hat and neckwarmer and a thermal shirt or two on top, I feel really comfortable even at minus 12.

Choir and Quartet

Noah's quartet doesn't really exist anymore, since the 2nd violinist has moved away. However, the remaining three quarters of the quartet, together with Sophie, were invited to help accompany a piece the local community choir was performing at their Christmas concert. They had only one very short rehearsal with the choir, so I thought it came off very well considering.

Sophie School

Of the three at-home kids, Sophie is the one who has come up with the most unusual approach to structured schooling. She has gravitated to setting her alarm for 6:30 a.m.. This is the girl who often used to still be in bed at noon. Now she's up before it's light outside. She makes a fire in the woodstove and, until that warms things up, she wraps herself in a quilt and turns on Phillip, the (Phillips brand) space heater.

She does almost all her work independently now, though it didn't start out that way six weeks ago. She's relishing the independence and the quiet time before anyone else is up.

Her morning regimen always includes math, which is pictured at the bottom of the further stack. She's using the Art of Problem Solving Introduction to Algebra text and solutions manual. At first this book was a huge challenge which resulted in regular tears. She needed a lot of help, but didn't want to need help, which made her sad and angry. But a couple of weeks later things had changed. She's now working totally independently through Chapter 4 and understanding it. The depth of this book is very impressive. Far beyond the level of the first in the high school series of everything else we've looked at -- Teaching Textbooks, Life of Fred, MathPower, Saxon, Singapore NMC. If I'd known how challenging it was I'd never have bought it for a 10-year-old. But despite my concerns she's doing fine. And gosh, she's getting a very robust math education! We'll be branching out into Statistics and Geometry in the same series in the months to come.

On top of the math is Campbell's "Biology: Concepts and Connections," the other big challenge in Sophie's learning program. This is an AP / intro university level text. She's had it for a while but only skimmed and browsed in the past. Now she's working systematically through it. It's beautifully set up for self-teaching with lovely detailed text and illustrations footnoted by CD-ROM or internet-based activities, explorations, virtual labs, self-evaluation quizzes, links and additional tutorials.

Then there's Theory Time Grade 5. There's some challenge in here for her, to be sure. The bass clef work, and all the circle-of-fifths stuff. It was a good place for her to start working in this series.

Rosetta Stone French. Sophie likes total privacy when doing RS, because of the oral work into the microphone which makes her self-conscious. So she isn't doing Rosetta Stone very often -- maybe once a week, while the rest of us are away in Nelson -- which is a shame because it really needs to be used at least every other day. We're trying to figure out solutions to this.

The bottom of the nearer stack is L'Art de Lire, a systematic grammar-based written approach to French. It's a good companion to Rosetta Stone which is aural and immersion-like.

Next up is the Editor-in-Chief Level A1 book. Sophie blew through the beginner book in 2 weeks, so we've just started the next one. She enjoys these even if they're easy and "below her level" so we'll continue. She doesn't do much writing, so this is a nice way of giving her experience editing other people's writing for clarity and accuracy.

On top are episodes from the two Teaching Company Lecture Series she's enjoying. The first is "The Joy of Science," intended for university non-science-majors. The second is "Introduction to Biology" which just arrived this week. She does like her biology, this girl!

Every day includes math, most days include a bit of Campbell's Biology and typically she'll do one or two other bits of written work. Rosetta Stone and the DVD's come into play maybe once a week each.

In addition there's violin practicing, independent reading (Twilight series most recently), our nightly fiction readalouds, and the evening regimen of history readaloud and/or videos (the latter of which has lately shifted firmly to the back burner). And all the serendipitous stuff that comes up in the course of daily life.

Because she starts her schoolwork at 6:30, Sophie is usually ready for a nap at about the time the rest of us are getting up. We often find her on the couch looking like this. But that's okay, because she's had a productive morning, the evidence of which is strewn all about her, and the house is warm thanks to her fire-building skills.

Fiona's Morning School

This has been a homeschooling blog for years, but now that we're finally doing some structured schooling I thought it would be appropriate to post about what we're doing. Fiona's morning starts at about 8:30 am. She usually grabs some breakfast first and then settles in for some bookwork. These days she is pretty happy with what we're using and is moving up levels almost as fast as I can order them. Left to right, in photo...

Real Science 4 Kids Biology I. This is pretty lightweight stuff, but it's clearly presented, not patronizing in its narrative style and lovely in its layout. The author is apparently a Christian fundamentalist but this book is perfectly fine in a secular context.

Editor-in-Chief Beginner Book. Nominally for Grades 3-4. A little challenging for Fiona, suitable for older kids filling in gaps. I've written about this before. It's a great approach for helping kids, especially perfectionistic ones, learn to write well by having them find and correct other people's mistakes.

Singapore Primary Mathematics. Fiona did a good bit of Miquon Math but preferred the clarity of Singapore Primary Maths and so she transitioned into that after the Blue Book. Singapore PM works beautifully for Fiona because she has a very intuitive understanding of math, easily handles the mental math demands and needs very little practice. It also stays refreshingly friendly and to-the-point right through to the 6B level (approximately equivalent to Grade 7 in North America).

The Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting series. I first bought these years ago because they seemed likely to work well for Erin who is a lefty and who liked the look of the italic font. They seem to work well enough for the other kids, who appreciate the fact that there's almost no transition to cursive once the manuscript font is well-learned. Fiona is my first kid whose handwriting hasn't lagged behind her supposed age-grade. She's just beginning Level C which is I think 2nd grade level and can print reasonably neatly with proper letter formation. What a surprise, after three late-bloomers!

Theory Time Grade 3. She started with this at the Grade 2 level and enjoys it. It's friendly and unintimidating, the best theory program I've seen for kids and pre-teens. She's pretty advanced in her instrumental studies, so she's encountered a lot of the theory in this book already in informal ways. But it's nice to do a little systematic gap-filling.

We don't do all this every day. We do math and one to three of the others.

Most days also involve violin and piano practicing, and some independent reading (currently Harry Potter). And although we've been slacking lately, we were also reading a bit of Story of the World Volume 2 most evenings, and/or watching the corresponding Teaching Company High School History DVD course lectures. And we always have a nightly family readaloud on the go. Currently that's the first Percy Jackson novel, the Lightning Thief.

And then there's all the unstructured stuff, the learning I've mostly been writing about for years, which still seems to fit in around the edges.

Not all fun and games

Someone commented to me (about our recent changes in daily structure):

"Life is not all fun and games and shouldn't be treated as such, sometimes there are things that we have to do even when we don't want to..."

I think this is a little simplistic. I agree that life is not all fun and games. However, my approach has been to try to help my kids look beyond immediate wants to more abstract wants. For instance, Noah wants to be able to play Beethoven, Dvorak and Schubert string quartets, to get the thrill of performing those great works, to experience the joy of working with others on that common goal. Those are abstract, long-term goals. In order to have those 'wants' satisfied, that means practicing scales and studies on the viola today, and tomorrow, and every day. And that may not be intrinsically enjoyable. But does he want to become a better viola player? And does he recognize that this is part of that process? Yes! And so it's no hardship to motivate himself to do the daily scales and studies. He has made the connection and he actually wants to do his practicing even if he doesn't always feel like doing it.

So rather than saying "sometimes we have to do stuff we don't want to" I prefer to say "sometimes we have to do stuff we don't feel like doing because it gets us stuff we really want." I think that's a much healthier long-lasting message to get, because ultimately it facilitates self-regulation and doesn't rely on other people setting rules for us.

Helping kids forge those connections between immediate action and big-picture wants is one of the most difficult parenting tasks, I think. My kids definitely want more balanced lives; they want to be healthy, helpful, good people with strong relationships. They're just not yet always naturals at connecting their immediate actions to those bigger-picture goals. I think that they needed a little remedial teaching in this respect -- someone to forcefully point their gaze at those longer-term goals, and give them a little experience with the habits of behaviour that serve those goals, so that they can re-affirm the connection between them -- and strengthen it within themselves.

At least that's what I'm trying to do. Time will tell.

Rum Balls and their friends

Fun and easy. We do both types at once in two separate bowls.

Rum Balls

The main deal:
4 oz. semisweet chocolate
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1/3 cup dark rum
200 g chocolate cookie crumbs
1 1/4 cups finely chopped walnuts
1 tsp. vanilla

For coating:
1 more cup of finely chopped walnuts

Melt chocolate in a saucepan over very low heat with the sweetened condensed milk. Remove from heat and stir in other ingredients. Chill in fridge for at least an hour. If leaving overnight, cover tightly to prevent the top from drying out.

Shape mixture with hands into teaspoon-sized balls. Toss in remaining finely chopped nuts. Allow to sit out for a few hours to dry out slightly on the outside. Store cool and dry for a couple of weeks. May be frozen for longer, but thaw without opening to prevent condensation from making them soft and sticky.

Hazelnut Balls

Follow the same procedure as for Rum Balls, but substitute hazelnut liqueur for rum, and hazelnuts for walnuts.