Chicken Little has been amazing lately. The first sleep behaviorist we hired when he was about 10 months old told us he would probably mellow out around 5 and she was right. The tantrums are becoming fewer and farther between, which makes them easier to manage, ignore and forgive.

He has made HUGE progress with his letters this year. He knows them all and their sounds and is starting to piece them together into words. That knowledge is pleasing him in the same way that he was pleased with himself immensely when he started to walk and could take things into his own control. It feels like we have entered new territory with him.

Toddler, on the other hand, has converted from mild-mannered Mr. Flexible into a full-on crazy monkey. His recall is worse then the neighbor’s blind, deaf dog’s. He is adamantly stubborn, willfully disobedient and does it all with the sweetest smile on his face. This week has seen a lot of hitting and refusing to apologize on his part. It’s a phase – right? Or so you always hope when it’s negative behavior. That sweet smile though, that is here to stay. I just know it.

There is nothing better than washable markers! And nothing worse then discovering that markers you thought were washable are not…

In primitive cultures masks represented cultural ideals, summoning the magic that only something so pure could conjur. The day after my cupcake class Chicken Little asked if he could use the cardboard circle for an art project. I agreed of course, eager to recycle rather than throw away. He disappeared into the recesses of his closet and emerged with the huge art bin, some paints and yarn about 10 minutes later.

While I went about some mom-ish chores he set to work with a fever unparalleled. About 30 minutes later he proudly showed me his creation – and then proceeded to put on some sort of mystical ceremony wearing his mask.

I’m not sure if he was trying to make it sunny or drive away swarming pests but it surely was entertaining. And my heart was bursting at his ingenuity, creativity and independence. I think he did a bang up job, whatever it is supposed to be.

This year I had the choice to start Chicken Little in kindergarten or let him start when he turned 6. For me it was no choice. He’s very slow to warm up to things, somewhat fearful and a total perfectionist. So this year we are spending lots of time working on letters, improving social skills, and enjoying the last year of our semi-fluid schedule that lets us make short field trips before preschool starts at 12:40.

He’s been hesitant to work on those letters. Until now he’s refused to sit down and work on anything, listening deafly to all my implorement. Awhile back I pushed it. Before I went to bed every night I would get out a little book focusing on one letter of the alphabet and surround it with any household objects and toys I could find that started with that letter. When he woke up I would read him the book and talk about the letters. We had a letter of the day in cling foam in the bathtub every night. Nothing stuck.

I created a superhero game. I made him a little belt with a large pocket on the front. I cut out letters of the alphabet. I would put 3 letters in at a time. We would run through the house pretending catastrophic events were occurring and WE NEEDED A SUPERHERO to save the world. A superhero with superhuman powers and cool tools. I would throw a red scarf on the floor and shout “FIRE!!! Quick throw the letter W on the fire to put it out!” Even though we had just gone through the 3 letters and I showed him which one was a W he would draw a blank. But he loved the excitement of the game.

I decided he just wasn’t ready and would try him a few months later. But he was never ready. So this year I put my foot down. We had a battle of the wills and for the first time in his life I came out victorious. Every day he’s been working on 3 letters, tracing them, drawing them freehand, sounding out the letter noises and coming up with words that start with the letters.

Once he completes a letter he gets to use an old digital camera to take a photo of something that starts with the letter which I then print out for him. But the real fun is that he then gets to put it in a book that I made when he was a baby. You could do this with any scrapbook or even make one by stapling pages together and using paper glue to attach the photos. The cool thing about using an album though is that when he finishes the alphabet we can start over again at A and he can find another A object to change the photo to.

Finally he’s making some good progress on his letters and starting to sound out simple words with a lot of coaching. Yay! Mom: 1 Chicken Little:567

As part of our goal to only buy local food in 2009 I’ve been hitting the farmer’s market every Saturday morning. The kids eat a lot of applesauce and of course nothing I find at the store says where it comes from so I bought 6 – 20 pound boxes of apples.

It took me several weekends to finish saucing them all and when I did my arms and shoulders were sore and my feet hurt. But I now have a freezer full of applesauce that should last us until apples are in season again.

I also made apple juice and left it on the counter to turn to cider. After about 3 days it was starting to get that cider kick but I accidentally knocked the lid closed and the next morning it had mold floating on it. The plan had been to make cider then turn most of that into vinegar. Chicken Little was very disappointed it didn’t work out. He’s a big vinegar fan, often asking to taste the various ones I have in the cupboard and then contrast and rank them.

He had been tasting it every day and noting the changes it was going through. We’ll try again when my shoulders recover.

I signed up for a cupcake decorating class through the community college and had a blast. Chicken Little was very disappointed he wasn’t able to take the class with me but I assured him I would bring home at least one cupcake and share it with him. When I came home I showed the cupcakes to the kids. I pointed to the animal looking ones and explained they were kitty cats, one was a sunflower and the other was me. Toddler looked up at me with big eyes and asked tentatively, “Can I eat you?”

My children, who are NEVER sick, have been very sick lately. I’m still unsure exactly what they both contracted but it’s kept me from posting (in addition to some tax returns, provision making and fun activity distractions.)

In fact, it was a full seven days before we left the house. That is a long time to be cooped up with two small children, in case you have never attempted it.

They are coming out of it now. Neither of them had a fever but the first several days they both had seal barking coughs that kept them both up all night (and me!) for at least three nights. That was followed by congestion, coughing and nose draining. There is still some lingering coughing going on but everyone seems to be ok now.

We’ve been keeping busy by practicing letters, playing in bubbles in the sink and other sensory activities like this wheat berry play:

We’ve done wacky things like add food color drops to bowls of milk to watch them mix together:

And something even wackier that Chicken Little calls “fight dancing”. We’ve done a lot of dressing up in superhero costumes and sliding down the hallway in socks.

And then we’ve been watching entirely too much Sponge Bob. But we’re better now. And Sponge Bob is once again banned.

As part of my goal to buy 85% of our food from local sources this year I ordered a grain mill, then realized I didn’t know where to get local grain. I had one source for spelt but we don’t really use spelt yet so I panicked and ordered some things from www.bobsredmill.com. I had to keep the bread rolling!

My order came today and I nearly threw my back out carrying in the box with the two 25 lb bags of wheat berries (soft & hard).

What a boon to anyone trying to save some money on their grocery bill right now! Granted Bob’s Red Mill is just outside Portland, OR so shipping was fairly cheap to me – I could not believe how inexpensive this stuff was directly from them! Compared to the prices I normally pay at the store for these same items, some of which I have a hard time finding the Organic versions of and the expiration dates sometimes are a little too close for comfort.

I spent $100 including shipping to get all this mostly organic stuff to me. For that I got enough grain to make us 75 loaves of whole wheat bread, 32 whole wheat pizza crusts (http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/001506.html), months of muffins and scones, oatmeal and flaked unsweetened coconut for granola, barley and rye berries, malted barley flour for breadmaking (too lazy to sprout, dry & grind the barley to malt it myself), 1 pound of non-aluminum baking powder, and 24 oz of flax seeds to grind myself rather than buying the oil.

This makes it WAY less expensive to buy the organic foods we want to eat then it would be to buy the cheap refined foods so easy to find at the supermarket. In fact, my grain mill will have more than paid for itself in less than a year.

Of course I still have to mill the flour and do the baking but it’s been really fun. Last week I made 6 loaves of bread, cinnamon rolls, muffins, and several rounds of pancakes. The kids are loving it. Chicken Little & his friend ate a half loaf of whole wheat bread in one sitting! And toddler’s little cheeks are plumping up again. It’s good to see such hearty appetites.

Chicken Little is really enjoying working with his hands to create food and taken an interest in all things kitchen (especially helping me make chocolate pudding from scratch Fri night!). He made a bear and a letter T with the dough I gave him here. Here’s hoping I can keep making enough bread to feed these guys!

On Sunday we went to the Seattle Center as a family…and then we split up. I took Toddler to the Children’s Museum and dad took Chicken Little to the Science Center.

First things first – you can’t drive the firetruck without the hat, even if you do always insist on putting it on backwards.

Pushing buttons, turning wheels, moving levers and watching water move.

How often do you get to paint a window?

In the grocery store, wondering why all the ice cream cartons are empty. And believe me, he tried them all!

I’ve spent a lot of time lately reading, researching and planning for food for my family for 2009. My goal is to eat locally and in season 85% of the time. By local I mean anything that didn’t take a plane ride to come to me, mostly from Washington state or occasionally from Oregon or British Columbia.

I vow to buy organic whenever it is available, not only for the documented health benefits if provides us but because it means fewer chemicals produced and put into the land, fewer dollars in the pockets of companies I choose not to support and more dollars in the pockets of the local sustainable farmers I DO choose to support, both through food dollars and contributions to the farmland trust fund.

My local vow may be seriously hindered by the recent flooding which is certain to have a huge impact on local area farms.

Ideally we will buy only things like cooking oil, beans, coffee, soy sauce, sesame seeds, citrus, peanuts, oats, butter, maple syrup, sugar, salt and some spices, yeast, (although I am cultivating some wild yeast right now but it probably won’t be strong enough to completely leaven our bread), and cheddar from the store. Everything else will hopefully come from our farm box or the farmer’s market or directly from local area farms that I have sourced. We get our meat, eggs and dairy from two farms that practice sustainable, pasturized farming, the honey is raw local honey from another farm, and I’ve sourced yet another farm in Eastern Washington to buy wheat, spelt and kamut berries from.

I’ve been making yogurt and kefir from the milk and want to experiment more making cheese from it as well. I made mozzarella a few times last summer but it was the thirty minute kind and it DID NOT taste that great. Maybe with more practice I can figure out what the heck I did wrong and I’d like to try my hand at other types of cheeses as well since I bought a kit with all the cultures and the cheese mold (as in shaping the cheese, not molding it).

I’m trying not to can so much as to dehydrate, salt, smoke, freeze, cellar or ferment in order to preserve more nutrients and use less energy.

I have already broken my pledge twice this year – I bought a cucumber from California and a squash from Mexico. Both were organic but transported by aircraft.

I’m planning to expand the amount of food we grew last year but have come to the conclusion that it will be more nutritous and cheaper if I simply buy it at the farmer’s market en masse and put up as much as I think we can eat over the next year.

I’ve been making bread all week from the flour I had on hand, in part to use it up but also to nail the perfect whole wheat bread recipe down before my grain mill arrives. I am curious to see how much flour we really do go through since I buy it bulk now and buy many different varieties for pancakes, muffins, pizza dough, crackers and bread. We eat a lot of it cooked in berry form too.

It’s very liberating to shop when you aren’t going down the processed food, canned food or freezer aisle. So far the kids haven’t noticed but we are only 8 days into it. We’ll see what they have to say when the pretzels & cereal run out…

How about you? Could you go a week without eating anything processed?

Chicken Little has been driving me crazy lately with pleas for help doing things that a five year old should certainly be doing by himself. Putting his socks on, taking his shirt off, pulling his blankets up, cracking the door “just so”. It’s probably my fault for babying him but I’ve been making a concerted effort to refuse to do things for him and focus more on helping him when he falls.

Random transition…so today I decided to make him and his friend learn how to fish after school. We all sat at the table with rod pretzels, dipped them in peanut butter and went fishing for raisins and dried cranberries. We didn’t have any goldfish crackers or we would have fished for those.

We’ll see if it helps him get his socks on better tomorrow.

Do you think he’ll buy it? It’s way better than the sooty footprint we found one Christmas morning on the hearth! Oh Photoshop, you make me so evil!

We’ve actually had snow for the better part of a week now which is very unusual for Seattle. This morning the snow turned to rain and made a yucky mess of things but I have a few parting snow pictures to post before turning my attention to Christmas.

I thought for a moment Toddler had fallen in the snow until I realized he was doing a sort of reverse snow angel. He would lie face down eating the snow. Then he would get up, find a new spot and fall face down and eat some more snow.

For Chicken Little this has been one perpetual play date. Just like the dog days of summer, all the kids are outside playing all day long so it’s pretty easy to find someone to go hang out with. Here some of the neighbor kids are decorating a snowman with macaroni hair and carrot nose. Note the sharp end of the carrot in first.

You can see we got a little bit of snow. It’s been fun to watch people cross country ski around town, through the neighborhoods, along sidewalks and onto the Burke Gilman trail which runs at least from Woodinville to Fremont if not farther.

And now, I need to turn my attention to making the magic of Christmas happen for these two…

Burp Rag has been without free time to post, not only because of the holidays but because the weather has not permitted a baby sitter to reach the house. It’s been fun, although Chicken Little was distraught over not being able to gift the stain glass window cookies he had made for his school friends since school was called on account of snow and then the following day the puppet show with his school was also cancelled for the same reason.

Beside that you can see he’s been keeping pretty busy.

Toddler also took well to sledding. He carried his own little sled up to the top of the run, plunked his little bottom down on it by pulling his feet up to his chest as if doing a cannon ball and that would begin his descent.

Of course it’s warmer huddled up…

We’re happy to be snowed in with electricity and wonderful neighbors to share mugs of spiced wine with. This will definitely be one of my favorite Christmas memories!

Chicken Little has a Grandmother that many kids can only dream of. She is warm and fun, tolerant, patient, an amazing cook and filled with fun ideas of things to do with and make for the kids. In all the time he’s known her she’s never stayed with us for more than one night because she’s afraid of becoming a pest.

About a month ago, though, she surprised us by phoning to say she had bought a plane ticket to come stay with us this December. Chicken Little was so excited he couldn’t sleep for weeks and asked several times every day when she was coming. We finally made him a calendar with pictures of her in the airplane so he could count the days for himself.

She would only stay with us for one week so we packed in all the Christmas activities I though the kids could handle. We went Christmas shopping, had the cousins over for a slumber party to decorate gingerbread houses, played A LOT, had a pie-off so I could get some practice making pie crust and watch her secret technique, hubby and I got in a few dates, we went to see Santa with the cousins, rode the monorail downtown, looked at the gingerbread houses at the Sheraton, watched the Christmas train at the Center House, rode the carousel, did some running around (and in) the fountain, made a belated Thanksgiving dinner, and played and played and then played some more.

The kids really miss having her around (as do we all) and we can’t wait for her to come back again…hopefully soon!

When she was 30, Burp Rag used to be a very interesting person.

She jumped out of perfectly good airplanes.

She dressed up like a Swedish Elf. She can’t remember why.

She climbed Mt. Rainier, Mt. Adam, Mt. Constance and Mt. Eleanor, some of them MULTIPLE times. She was not pregnant in the top photo, the wind was blowing so hard that it filled up her coat and her fingers were swollen little sausages without coctail sauce but she was still smiling.

She could blow out LOTS of candles and still have enough air left to get up and boogie.

She had lots of time.

And she really knew how to mix a drink.

But now that Chicken Little is out of her room and Toddler is two she’s coming back. She’s coming back with a ROAR. Life is too short not to. And thanks to facebook BurpRag just realized that she is over 40 so it’s time to get a move on.

How about you – are you being all that you could be? You’re not getting any younger now, ya hear?

Burp Rag has been busy lately, catching up on spider webs and dog hair and cleaning out closets. This blip in the economy has actually been a welcome break from taping boxes all night and given me a chance to get re-acquainted with my cookbooks. I finally got around to finishing the bat cave and switching the boy’s rooms around.

Chicken Little has been sleeping in our room for five years now. FIVE YEARS. For awhile when Toddler was first born I finally convinced him to sleep in the firetruck bed that I lovingly sewed for him, complete with steering wheel and fire hat. I think he was 3 when I made it – the perfect age to want to sleep in a firetruck, don’t you think?

After I slaved over the bed and showed him his new room he opened his mouth and said “I wanted a school bus.”

As soon as the co-sleeper was gone from our room and Toddler had moved into his own crib Chicken Little slowly crept back into our room. Always fearful, he explained exactly how the shadows from the slats on the bed looked like a monster’s legs on the ceiling and how the little light that glows on the light switch after dark looked like a monster eye. He would wake during the night with night terrors, running through the house screaming even though he wasn’t really awake.

So I moved his old crib mattress back into the corner of my room. At least this way when he woke up during the night I could calm him immediately and go back to sleep without even getting out of bed since I was still waking up several times a night with Toddler, then Baby.

Finally last week when Toddler asked if he could sleep in “Ta’s” bed in my room and I explained to him why he needed to sleep in his own room I decided to put my foot down. I finished the Bat Cave and Chicken Little now has his own big boy room finally. Well, it’s not that he hasn’t had his own room but he has always refused to sleep in it. Toddler inherits one firetruck bed.

I’ve left enough of the image for you to get the picture without hopefully getting sued for trademark infringment.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. That and reading all the November posts of my bloggy friends. Can’t wait for November to be over so I can take a break from reading up on you all!

For several days last week the weather cleared and we had some light cloud cover so we headed for the zoo. This is close to the orangutan area. It was near impossible to get Toddler to pose for the camera and my hair was one step away from crazy but here we are!

Some passing stranger offered to take our photo and I jumped at the chance since I have next to no photos that I am in but she didn’t quite get the focus down. I guess I won’t be having HER do my Christmas photos.

Burp Rag has two boys and so she is not allowed to get them a doll house. However, each time Toddler gets close to the one in Chicken Little’s montissori he can’t keep his hands off it so today we made our own. We’ve had these people forever and haven’t really gotten into the blocks with Toddler like we did with Chicken Little but they worked perfectly. We made furniture for the people and Ducky with the blocks. Toddler loved it. The funniest part was when Chicken Little and a friend came home from school and they all fought over playing with it. Who says boys don’t like doll houses?