Wednesday Hodgepodge: Seasons of Change

1. Thursday (September 22) is the first official day of autumn in this part of the world...how will you welcome the season? I know some of you have been celebrating way too early, but it's official now so permission granted. House Beautiful recently listed ten ways to make your home smell like fall (you can read the list here) What's a scent you love this time of year and how will you add it to your home?

I think of the scent of baking with spices: apple cake, gingerbread, cinnamon rolls. But one of the Squirrels has developed a sensitivity to cinnamon (and, to a lesser extent, ginger), so I am trying to accommodate that. Actually, after such a long hot summer when I couldn't do much baking at all, the smell of any kind of baking makes it feel like fall. Banana muffins would do it.

Slow Cooker Applesauce Cake, linked here

2. Apple pie or pumpkin pie? Apple cake or pumpkin bread? Warm apple cider or a pumpkin spice latte?

See #1; I'd take just about any of those things except maybe for the latte. I've posted recipes for almost all of them on the blog over the years.

3. Do you suffer from what is sometimes referred to as an afternoon slump? What helps ward it off before it hits and/or tell us what helps you shake it off once it's here?

I work best in the morning, so I wouldn't exactly call it an afternoon slump, more just being done for the day.

4. Ladies-how have your friendships with women inspired you or made you a better person? For the men here today- how have your friendships with men inspired you or made you a better person?

I'm not sure how to answer that without either getting too personal (about friends who stayed loyal or those who didn't), or...well, yes, getting too personal. 

Let's just say that if you have a mutually encouraging, deep, lasting friendship with someone, or more than one someone, hang on to it.

5. Are you a people pleaser? If you said yes, do you think that's a good or bad thing? If you said no, do you wish you were more of a people pleaser? 

Somewhere in between. I aim to please the people I care about, the rest not so much.

6. The seasons are a-changin'...share a favorite song relating in some way to change (not necessarily seasonal change, it could be change of any kind).

Well, I already used "Mother Earth and Father Time" in a previous Hodgepodge ("He turns the seasons around, and so she changes her gown.."). So I'll have to think of something else. Oh, I've got one! Sesame Street nostalgia is always fun.

7. What do you wish would never change? 

Our city is going through construction turmoil these days, and certain things that just were are never going to be the same. I think families go through the same process: some change that is inevitable, and some that makes you think "why couldn't that have stayed the way it was?" In this post at To Sow a Seed, there's a quote from John Piper: “Occasionally weep deeply over the life you hoped would be. Grieve the losses. Then wash your face. Trust God. And embrace the life you have.” 

8.  Insert your own random thought here. 

If I get too random, I'll never get this posted, so I'll stick to this: if you're in Canada, Ten Thousand Villages has all its fair trade coffee on sale right now (in time for International Coffee Day?). But I can't seem to find any beverages on the U.S. site, so maybe the American stores handle coffee separately. I did find this really fun post (with photos) about an Apple Cider All Nighter.

"I just think it was a great time for friends and family to get together in the fall. We were always a mixed group from little kids to teenagers, twenty-somethings, our parents and grandparents. Sometimes we would go out into the field across the road and stargaze. One year there was a special alignment of three planets in a triangular shape. Then we went out to see it and as we were waiting for it to get dark a meteor flashed above the field and everyone saw it together."

Linked from The Wednesday Hodgepodge at From This Side of the Pond.

Mr. Fixit's Retro Birthday Party

 Front hall--throwback toys.

 Special person, special plate.

Everybody needs a souvenir.

Exam responses: Bilbo's Party

Book studied:  The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien

1. Write about Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday party!

Everyone in the Shire was going to come; it was going to be one of the biggest celebrations in years! Everybody loved Bilbo’s birthday parties; he always had the best games, decorations, food, and PRESENTS! And so, the day of the party came, all of the hundreds of guests were there (they wouldn’t miss it for the world), and they had lined up outside of Bilbo’s cozy little Hobbit hole. Bilbo came outside, and started distributing the presents. Several Hobbits kept coming back for more and more presents! And then the feasting started. And Bilbo stood up to make his speech. He said a few kind words, and then he said “Well, you were nice to know, bye!” and vanished! What he had really done was slipped on his ring with his “Bye!”, but everybody was chattering about it the whole evening!

On birthdays and frugality (links and thoughts)

Getting Freedom From Debt (or Cents to Get Debt-Free) has a guest post about DIY Birthday Cakes.

Nothing New Nothing Wasted has some thoughts on the wastefulness of birthday decorations and disposables.

Here's our own post about Birthdays, Frugal and Otherwise, from a few years ago, with a link to this frugal-birthdays post at The Common Room. And here are the posts from Crayons' Horse Party (last year), Flower Fairy Party Menu (two years ago, with extra comments about the cupcakes), and Butterfly Birthday (five years ago). Other ideas we've used are meeting friends at a park (booking a (free) gazebo in case of drizzle) or having a party that's mostly outside--does save on decorations. Or a tea party for little girls--if you already have the teacups and things, your decorating problems are solved. I read, I think in the Tightwad Gazette, about a parent who took birthday guests to either a flea market or a thrift shop, giving them each a couple of dollars to spend. As far as the issue of the guests bringing presents goes...we've struggled with that one, and solved it at one party by asking them to bring supplies for MCC school kits instead. (That inspired one of the guests, who asked the kids at her own next birthday to bring needed supplies for an animal shelter. We've also been to a wintertime party where it was requested that we bring mittens, hats etc. for a mission for homeless people.) Our kids have been to some very creative parties too where the main activity was sewing or some other craft...one of them brought home a rice-filled hot bag one time. For the Apprentice's ninth birthday, we hot-glued things on painters' caps (cheap from the paint store) and had backyard games like charades.

One idea that was less successful for us was the time we took little Apprentice and her friends to a McDonald's playland--I posted about that a long time ago. That was a year when we opted for "simple" (as in "make it simple for us") instead of "frugal"--but some of our "frugal" parties have gotten better reactions from the guests. This weekend's bowling party was more on the "simple" than "frugal" end, and we did use some disposables (because it's hard to manage china plates at the bowling alley), but there's nothing to say that you should never have parties like that either. We like to support that family-run business, they charge a reasonable price for an hour's bowling plus free chips and drinks, and it was something that Crayons was really looking forward to. We thought about doing a home-based superheroes party, but this time around, she really wanted to do something like bowling...and after a busy rest-of-the-weekend, I was just as glad not to have to figure out party games. So I don't apologize for that. (Besides, we lucked out--the people who had the party room just before us left all their pink balloons up on the wall!)

Shower post update

I added two photos of the fruit bouquet to the post about our friend's baby shower.

Baby shower (and no chocolate on the diapers)

Some baby shower games are just disgusting. See subject line above.

Some have been done to death. How many things on a tray can you remember?

So when it was time for a much-anticipated baby shower this weekend (for a mama who's given many memorable parties of her own, we (her friends) decided we had to do something different. But not gross.

When we asked the New Mama's other offspring (who's the Apprentice's age) what they needed, she said that they were well stocked with clothes and all the big stuff...so we thought having a surprise Toys for Boys party would be fun (and probably appreciated after years of pink). That idea also inspired the games and decorations.

The guests were a mix of moms and teenage daughters--plus our own younger squirrelings, plus the New Arrival who got very well hugged and walked around. Plus Baby's Dad and Mr. Fixit, who spent part of the time hanging out in the workshop. Fourteen bodies altogether. We all know each other--we used to get together every couple of weeks during the older girls' younger years--but don't often get everyone together now. So it was kind of like a family reunion too. (The only (female) bodies missing were our friends who moved to the U.S., and a couple of daughters who were travelling or doing other important things.)

GAMES

We browsed both the baby shower sites and the birthday party sites, and started to get inspiration from some of the ideas there: Nursery Rhyme Jeopardy made Mama Squirrel think of doing something like Toy Jeopardy or a toy trivia quiz; the Lego parties sprouted the idea of having some kind of a model contest or race. Just thinking about all the different kinds of toys through the years made me remember how many little bits and pieces we have around here already (and the old catalogues we've been looking at). Finally we used those ideas to come up with two of our own games. Actually three, but we decided that two were enough. (The third was going to be a competition to see who could build the best "baby stuff" (high chair, bed, toy) out of Lego.)

The first was a variation on the tray game, and it was partly inspired by our problem habit of keeping things for a long, long time. We're squirrels, after all. So we dug around in the bottom of the Treehouse, and found 20 different toys, or parts of toys, ranging from the 1960's through today. We numbered each toy, and everybody had a few minutes to write down the name. The most toys guessed correctly won a prize (two people tied with 15 right). Most people got Mr. Potato Head, Slinky, and Cabbage Patch Kids. Some got Lincoln Logs, Polly Pocket, and Fisher Price Little People. Nobody guessed the Colorforms--well, we did have to make a couple of them challenging! But I thought somebody might remember the Liddle Kiddles.

The second game came out of the WishBookWeb vintage catalogue site, and it's something that Crayons and I did a couple of times this year for school. What you do is pick an old Christmas catalogue on the site--say 1942--give yourself a reasonable budget for the time--and pick out presents within that budget.

I picked out seven catalogues from the site and printed out about ten toy pages from each one. Each pair of players got those pages in an envelope with the year marked on it and some play money, a sheet of coloured cardstock (3-hole punched), a glue stick, scissors, and markers. (Crayons volunteered her set of fancy scissors too.) The 1933 team got only $5; the 1988 team got something like $25. (Yes, I know that in 1933 you would have been extremely lucky to have had $5 to spend on baby presents; but I didn't want to give them 39 cents either.)

The challenge was to pick out presents for the baby and cut and paste them onto a page for a keepsake booklet--with autographs, comments and so on. We had prizes for the most artistic, most fun for the money and so on. Mr. Fixit and the Baby's Dad each made a page too. The last page of the booklet was left blank, and one of the guests used it to write down the "real" presents when Baby's Mama opened them later. At the end, we tied the pages together with ribbon.

There was lots of laughing and reminiscing over the catalogue pages while everybody worked on them--"oh, I remember those!"--"look what a teddy bear cost in 1933!"--"hey, Mom, you found one of those at the thrift shop."

FOOD

Each family brought a plate of finger-food desserts--cookies and squares. I made some mini cheesecakes from the Momma's Corner website [link defunct]. I thought they might fall apart when people unpeeled the paper cups, but they held together really well. I think ours might have been a bit smaller than Momma's--I was just guessing at how much crust and how much cheese mixture to put into each one. We used half her filling recipe--1 package of cream cheese and so on--and ended up with 36 mini cakes.

We followed the very detailed directions here to make an edible fruit bouquet. It's the tail end of strawberry season here, so this idea is a good one for June or July; I don't think I'd try it in January. (I liked the baby sock bouquet too, but the fruit bouquet looked tastier.) (Yes, I know our skewers show a lot more than theirs did--we just did our best.)

High up in a cupboard we found a ceramic container that someone had sent flowers in when one of the Squirrelings was born--not sure which one, and I had probably thought of sending it (the vase, not the Squirreling) to the thrift store more than once, but now I'm glad I kept it, because it did look good with the fruit arrangement. (Photos coming.) I was going to make a batch of plain playdough to stick the skewers into, but I found Play-doh Soft-packs at the dollar store, saving me the trouble. And we saved the Play-doh afterwards.) Ponytails and I put the fruit on the skewers in the afternoon and refrigerated them until after dinner; then she arranged the vase, and we put it in the cold room until the party. (It wouldn't fit in the fridge.)

We made punch (one of the guests brought her punch bowl), from a recipe I saw in Taste of Home while waiting at the dentist's last week. (2 litres club soda, 1 750 mL bottle white grape juice, 1 cup sugar or to taste, 1 cup lemon juice. Mix and serve with ice.) I put on a pot of coffee too.

DECORATIONS

We kept it simple: a dozen balloons, a bright green plastic tablecloth, bright flowered napkins, and Crayons' Toy Story collection (mostly from yard sales) displayed by the front door.

FRUGAL STUFF

We used a lot of things we already had: the old toys for the games and decorations; homemade jam for the cheesecakes, homegrown parsley for greenery in the fruit bouquet, the re-used baby vase, skewers, "real" plates and cups, surplus-store cardstock, and so on. I printed out the catalogue pages mostly on the backs of other printouts (that was partly because we forgot to get more printer paper).

We spent our money where it seemed to count the most: fresh fruit for the bouquet (and a daisy-shaped cutter for the pineapple, although we could possibly have improvised with a knife); cupcake liners and Nilla Wafers for the cheesecakes (graham crackers are cheaper here, but I wanted the "real thing"); a few partyware things. We stopped at a new Dollarama that had a really good craft-supply section, so that's where we found prizes for the games.

MISCELLANEOUS TIPS

If you're planning a shower for a mom whose baby has already been born--and especially if she's nursing--allow time in the evening for her to take care of the baby's needs. New babies can take a long time to nurse, especially if they're heading for a nap. Most guests don't mind entertaining themselves for awhile if the New Mama has to disappear for awhile. For groups that don't know each other well, you might want to have a game or something that doesn't require the Mama's presence. (This happened to Mama Squirrel too when the Apprentice arrived slightly ahead of schedule (and ahead of the baby shower). It wasn't that we were squeamish about feeding the baby in public, it was more that we weren't very experienced at it yet, and our Squirreling wasn't going to go to sleep with all that noise.)

The best idea, I think, is to do what you're comfortable with and what will mean the most to your guests. For this group of friends, that meant--along with no chocolate on the diapers--spending a few minutes at the end thanking God for the blessing of our children and families...and each other.

Horse parties--enough of this galloping around

"I want a horse party"--sounds simple, right?

A lot of the horse-and-pony-party websites assume that you must have unlimited funds and/or local stores brimming with cowboy toys. Some peoples' descriptions of their children's parties sound more like the Calgary Stampede. We wanted to have fun, but maybe not on that scale. Still, how hard could it be to come up with a few horse-themed decorations or toys?

Mama Squirrel can now understand why people end up buying the whole thing online.

We went to a party-ware store that had one mylar horse balloon--and that was it, the rest of the store seemed to be all 40th-birthday parties and adult Halloween costumes.

We went to the bulk store and couldn't find anything neat or original (which turned out to be a good thing since one of the guests has peanut allergies and can't have anything from the bulk store). Jellybeans and pretzels would have been fine, but we were hoping for something sort of cool, like gummy horseshoes.

We went to the "bargain store"--like the dollar store but they charge more. They had no party stuff at all. And very few horses.

We went to the Big Z department store, looked in the toy aisle and found nothing except big toy sets. We did pick up some striped paper plates and napkins, and two packages of dried-fruit snacks.

We went to the Craft Store. All the horse stickers were in the scrapbooking section and priced accordingly. We settled for plastic harmonicas, two packs of balloons, and a Toob of tiny horses (which ended up as game prizes). Mama Squirrel also bought a big ball of brown yarn--which became horses. (Note on the harmonicas: we would probably have been better off with the kazoos they sold, since those are supposed to sound kind of bad anyway.)

(We already had stuffing and scraps of other yarn for manes and saddles. Mama Squirrel would point out that the pattern, while quite good, has a couple of quirks. There's no mention of tails, and there's also no mention of stuffing the legs--but since we didn't want collapsed horses, we thought it must have been just an omission. Also, if you'll notice, all those seven horses were made by the same person using the same pattern--and some of them are quite different, depending on how firm they are stuffed and on the angle that the head is sewn on. No right or wrong, just pointing out how much Results Can Vary.)

We thought we had some clear gift bags, but remembered that we used them up at Christmas. Tin pails would have been fun, but not at Craft Store prices. So Crayons potato-printed paper lunch bags (we made a horseshoe and a star print), and we filled them with the fruit snacks, harmonicas, and crocheted horses. It might have been nice to have a few other candies or smaller things, but as Mama Squirrel has already pointed out, such things were not exactly plentiful (and we didn't think we could handle any more stores).

For decorations, we blew up the balloons, put out as many horse toys and books as we could find, and sidewalk-painted horseshoes coming up to the front door. (Ponytails added a welcome message with chalk.)

And Crayons took charge of the front-door table.

Welcome to 2007

We don't usually go out to parties or church services on New Year's Eve; we usually have a just-us party here. Often it's a theme; last year we had a Narnia party. This year there was no real theme, but we did have a fun menu of things that we usually walk right by at the grocery store. Frozen fried rice and eggrolls, frozen chicken wings, pretzels, fishie crackers, carrot sticks, banana chips, sparkly cranberry juice in wine glasses, and Vachon Jos. Louis cakes. Then we lit our Christmas candle, finished reading Henry Van Dyke's story The Other Wiseman (it took us four nights), and read the last chapter of Revelation and the 150th Psalm. Grandpa Squirrel arrived for ping pong (we are lucky enough to have a table in the garage), and the younger Squirrelings and I watched some of It's a Wonderful Life before they want off to bed. Mr. Fixit, the Apprentice and I stayed up till midnight talking about budgets (Mr. Fixit always does a family accounting at year's end) and watching The Musgrave Ritual, and then a few minutes of Happy New Year's, pouring rain and fireworks from Niagara Falls.

Birthdays, frugal and otherwise

The Deputy Headmistress has posted about her family's frugal birthday traditions. We do some things that are frugal, some that aren't, and some things that are just traditions. Some years the Squirrelings have had kid-parties, and some years they've opted for a family outing. Some years the birthday has extended over a weekend or a couple of days as we've celebrated with other relatives.

This week is Ponytails' birthday, and I should really be baking a cake right now instead of blogging. She's invited a couple of friends and her sisters to go mini-golfing with her tomorrow afternoon, and then they'll come back here for hamburgers and cake. Her birthday is sort of a Groovy theme this year; the girls are going to wear anything Groovy they can find, and we're making this Groovy Jeans cake. I don't do cakes that take a lot of skill with an icing tube; I like cut-up cakes or the kind that we can decorate with candies or plastic people or animals (NOT the kind from the cake decorating aisle--we usually use what we have in the toy box).

The best parties we've had are for Mr. Fixit--and they're almost always just for our own family, which is kind of a shame since they're usually very creative (if I do say so myself). The theme is always a surprise (unless he guesses), and it's usually based on whatever he's watching or doing that year. We've had a Dr. Who party (the Tardis was our hall closet), a time-travel-through-your-life party, a records party, a Junior-Monopoly-come-to-life party (when you landed on the Puppet Show, you got a real Puppet show and so on), and I can't remember what else. The most unusual was a Marvin the Star-Nosed Mole party which would only mean anything if you've seen the 13-episode run of the '80's TV series Four on the Floor with The Frantics. (Want to sign a petition to get it put on DVD?) We thought Marvin was wonderful so we made Mr. Fixit a board game starring Marvin and our own Dewey Squirrel (it was based on a Barbie Prom game I used to have), and a brown-dirt cake with a marshmallow Marvin coming out of a molehill. And brown streamers, of course.

Parties should be fun and have a bit of surprise to them, even if the presents are from the dollar store and we forgot to get balloons. That's pretty much the way we do it.

Of snow and sausages

Every year the Treehouse hosts a very small New Year's Eve party, just for our own family of Squirrels. We usually have a theme of some kind: Star Trek, the Red Green show, fairy tales. This year's theme was almost a given: Narnia.

This is definitely the year to be searching the 'Net for Narnia feast ideas: every other youth group is putting on a Narnia event, every other fancy restaurant has some kind of four-course Narnian menu online. Ideas range from a medieval feast gone wild to a Mr. Tumnus tea with toast and sardines. Most of them feature Turkish Delight. I haven't seen one yet with barbecued bear meat wrapped around apples, but maybe that's a problem of supply. Tim's Mom has a description and photos of their family's annual Narnian dinner--the toddlers in their cloaks are adorable.

But anyway, we had decided to do a small-scale feast for tomorrow night, and I found a website with some food quotes from all the different books. The one that appealed to us most was from The Silver Chair:

"She had a vague impression of Dwarfs crowding round the fire with frying-pans rather bigger than themselves, and the hissing, and delicious smell of sausages, and more, and more sausages. And not the wretched sausages half full of bread and soya bean either, but real meaty, spicy ones, fat and piping hot and burst and just the tiniest bit burnt. And great mugs of frothy chocolate, and roast potatoes and roast chestnuts, and baked apples with raisins stuck in where the cores had been, and then ices just to freshen you up after all the hot things."

Except for the chestnuts, those are just about all of our favourite cold-weather things, and if you add in some Really Good Grapes (from Prince Caspian) and a few cookies (we just happen to have a lion-shaped cutter), it sounds like a perfect New Year's party meal.

Jackdas obviously liked the quote, too, and included it in an absolutely delightful (and mouth-watering) blog post; it's archived here, so you'll have to scroll down to his October 14th post.

As for Turkish Delight...we haven't quite decided. Tim's Mom included a recipe in her post, and we do have a Middle Eastern store nearby that would probably have some, but after all, that was the BAD food in the book! (Not to mention what I've heard that the university students used to put in it in C.S. Lewis's day...Turkish Delight seems to have been the Hash Brownies of its time.) I think baked apples and cookies (and ices just to freshen you up) would be just as good.

So we'll be making some glittery jewellery, having a Narnia scavenger hunt, and eating sausages, maybe just the tiniest bit burnt. What are you doing New Year's Eve?