Dinner with the Squirrels, Part 2

Climb up into our Treehouse and join us for another round of things we make when we don't want to spend all day cooking. Stay for dinner too, maybe Mr. Fixit will make cabbage rolls. They're very good with:

Herbed Beer Bread (no yeast, doesn't have to rise)

The Squirrels’ recipe is identical to this one (link updated 2020). It works fine with de-alcoholized beer; bring the can of beer to room temperature first. Mama Squirrel has baked it in both a loaf pan and in an 8 inch square pan; in the square pan, she can use the toaster oven and it doesn't heat up the house.


Mushroom Steak Bake

To do this, you need either a package of fairly thin steak pieces, or a small roast that you’ve sliced into steak-sized pieces. The Squirrels have tried it both ways, depending on what was on sale that week. Put the pieces of beef into a casserole and cover with a can of condensed mushroom soup and either a can of mushrooms (drained) or some fresh mushrooms (or both). Bake at 350 degrees for about an hour and a half (depending on the thickness and amount of meat). Thicken the sauce at the end if you really need to (with flour or cornstarch).


Beef and Salsa Burritos (National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and Beef Board)

This is a good quick dinner if you've remembered to thaw the beef and the spinach. Somebody can grate cheese while you brown the meat, and you're all set.

1 to 1 1/4 pounds ground beef (the recipe says 1 1/4 pounds, but whoever buys exactly that much? We just use a pound-size package.)
1 ½ tbsp. chili powder (we use only 1 tbsp.)
½ tsp. ground cumin
½ tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. pepper (op.)
1 pkg (10 oz) frozen chopped spinach, thawed and well drained (or you can use fresh chopped)
1 to 1 1/4 cup prepared chunky salsa
1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese
8 medium flour tortillas, warmed (we use whole wheat)

In large nonstick skillet, brown ground beef, and drain if necessary. Add seasonings; stir in spinach and salsa; heat through. Remove from heat, stir in cheese. Wrap in tortillas and serve. (We usually cook a pot of rice to go along with these.)


Ground Chicken Skillet, or Evan’s Mom would Never Recognize This

We adapted this recipe from Jill Bond’s book Dinner’s In the Freezer. She called it Evan’s Mom’s Casserole, but our version’s no longer a casserole and we changed the seasoning from dill to curry (since Mr. Fixit does not like dill much. He wishes Mama Squirrel would also leave the dill out of the Beer Bread, but Mama Squirrel is willing to go only so far.)

1 lb. ground chicken
1 onion, chopped
1 can condensed tomato soup
1 can green beans (or use fresh ones)
1 can mushrooms (op.)
1 tsp. curry powder or to taste
Salt (op.)
Something to serve it over (rice or noodles)

Brown the chicken and onion in a skillet. Add the remaining ingredients and heat through. Serve over rice or noodles, passing hot sauce for anyone who thinks 1 teaspoon of curry powder doesn’t have much pow.


Chicken Cacciatore

Everybody has a recipe for this, but this is Mama Squirrel’s easy way. The Squirrels like the canned pasta sauces that come in different flavours; one variety is tomato-onion, which saves chopping onions when you’re in a hurry; and another one has a strong garlic flavour that’s very good with chicken. Either one will work with this recipe, and regular spaghetti sauce would be fine too.

So: put one pound of boneless, skinless chicken breasts in a small greased casserole; add about half a 680 ml can of pasta sauce (one of those tall ones, for the Americans). (The chicken will give off some liquid as well, so you probably don’t want to use the whole can unless you’re doubling the recipe.) Add anything you like to cook along with the chicken–chopped peppers, mushrooms, canned chickpeas, chopped zucchini (although mushrooms and zucchini could also be added later so they don’t get mushy). Cover and bake for an hour to an hour and a half, depending on how thick the chicken is. When the chicken’s cooked through, you may want to thicken the sauce with either a small can of tomato paste or some cornstarch mixed with cold water. Serve on pasta (preferably whole wheat). You can cook this dinner in the crockpot too.


Frozen Tortoni Dessert (adapted from The Goldbecks’ Short-Order Cookbook, by Nikki & David Goldbeck)

If you can make popsicles, you can make this–it’s just a bit dressier.

You need: 1 2-cup container ricotta cheese (light is fine); 1/4 cup honey; 1 tsp. almond extract; 8 tsp. finely ground almonds (we don’t use this, see below)

Whip ricotta, honey and almond extract with an electric beater or in the food processor, till it’s smooth, light and fluffy. Line a muffin tin with 8 paper liners and fill with mixture. Sprinkle each with 1 tsp. ground almonds, or other toppings. Freeze. When solid, remove from tin and wrap in freezer bags or foil (if you’re going to do them ahead). Let stand for a few minutes at room temperature to soften slightly before serving.

The Squirrels don’t usually have ground almonds around (funny thing), so we have tried this with other toppings: a few chocolate chips, a ring of pineapple, a ring of pineapple with chocolate chips in the middle...at Christmas time, we made these and decorated them with white chocolate chips and red candied cherries. They’re quite small, so you might want to allow two per person unless they’re very small people. (And if you have small people and use chocolate chips, warn them to watch their teeth, unless they're little squirrels: frozen chips can get pretty hard.) Or freeze twice as much in four little dishes instead of eight muffin papers.


Summer Shortcake (from Food that Really Schmecks, by Edna Staebler)

Mr. Fixit does not have a sweet tooth and does not care for those little yellow spongy cakes that are sold to make strawberry shortcake with. But he does like this version, which is more like a pan of biscuits than a cake. Mama Squirrel has cut it in half from Edna’s original version, but you can double it back again and bake it in a 9 x 13 pan.

2 cups flour
1 tbsp. baking powder
½ tsp. baking soda
½ cup sugar, plus a spoonful for sprinkling
½ tsp. salt
½ cup oil or shortening
1 cup buttermilk or sour milk

If you’re making your own sour milk, add 1 tbsp. vinegar to a cup of milk and let it sit for about five minutes while you mix the rest. Mis the dry ingredients and the oil or shortening until the mixture is crumbly. Add the sour milk and mix just enough to make sure the dry part is moistened. Spread the dough in a greased 8 or 9 inch pan. Sprinkle a spoonful of white sugar over the top, unless that idea really turns you off, and bake in a 400-degree oven for about 20 minutes, or a bit longer–prick the centre to be sure it’s done (especially in hot muggy weather). Serve warm and smothered with strawberries, blueberries or slice peaches, plus some vanilla yogurt or tofu topping or whatever other topping you like. I usually cut it in squares and then split a square on each serving plate, dollop some yogurt on, and cover with fruit.


Pineapple-Orange Rings

This one is really simple–even Crayons can help make it. In each dessert bowl, stack two canned pineapple rings. Stuff the hole in the middle with canned mandarin oranges (be generous but not messy). Chill well before serving. The Squirrels think this dessert looks like summer sunshine in the winter.

How you know this is 2005:

Ponytails came home from Vacation Bible School and said that the kids went outside and played blog tag.

Hot German Cauliflower Salad

This is what the Squirrels ate for dinner tonight (with frozen chicken strips and green beans). The two youngest Squirrelings were somewhat reluctant to try it, but they did each manage a piece of cauliflower. The rest of us thought it was quite good. It's the Betty Crocker recipe for Hot German Potato Salad, only Mama Squirrel used a head of cauliflower instead.

Here's the recipe, with our adaptations:

Hot German Cauliflower Salad

Cook (steam, boil) a chopped-up head of cauliflower until it's tender but not mushy. Fry several strips of bacon (we used half a pound) until crispy, adding diced onions (we used one small one) either before or after removing the bacon. (Mama Squirrel has never been able to get the bacon to go really crispy, so she compromised and cut it in pieces after cooking it.)

After you have removed the bacon and onions (we put them in a paper-napkin lined bowl), stir this mixture into a little of the fat that's left in the pan: 1 tbsp. flour, 1 tbsp. sugar, 1 tsp. salt, 1/4 tsp. celery seed, shake of pepper. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until mixture is bubbly; remove from heat; stir in 1/3 cup of water and 1/4 cup of vinegar (we used cider vinegar). Heat to boiling, stirring constantly; boil and stir one minute; remove from the heat. Pour over the cut-up cauliflower and crumbled or cut-up bacon and onion. Serve hot.

(Mama Squirrel got this done half an hour before we wanted to eat, so she put it in the crockpot on high until supper time.)

Green beans might be a nice addition to the salad too, if you weren't having another green vegetable.

Go study Schopenhauer

To the Birds

by Peter McArthur

HOW dare you sing such cheerful notes?
You show a woful lack of taste;
How dare you pour from happy throats
Such merry songs with raptured haste,
While all our poets wail and weep,
And readers sob themselves to sleep?

'Tis clear to me, you've never read
The turgid tomes that Ibsen writes,
Or mourned with Tolstoi virtue dead,
Nor over Howells pored o' nights;
For you are glad with all your power;
For shame! Go study Schopenhauer.

You never sing save when you feel
The ecstasy of thoughtless joy;
All silent through the boughs you steal
When storms or fears or pains annoy;
With bards 'tis quite a different thing,
The more they ache the more they sing.

All happiness they sadly shirk,
And from all pleasure hold aloof,
And are so tearful when they work
They write on paper waterproof,
And on each page express a yearn
To fill a cinerary urn.

Go, little birds, it gives me pain
To hear your happy melodies!
My plaudits you can never gain
With old and worn-out tunes like these;
More up-to-date your songs must be
Ere you can merit praise from me.

Four-year-old humour

Crayons: Let's play Eye-Spy Colours. I know a colour and it starts with D.

Ponytails: There aren't any colours that start with D.

The Apprentice: I don't know any either.

Mama Squirrel: Maybe she means dark-something? Like dark blue?

The Apprentice: Crayons, is the colour dark?

Crayons: No, it's light.

The Apprentice (inspired, looking at Crayons' shirt): Is it light magenta?

Crayons: Yes!

Ponytails: Light magenta doesn't start with D.

Crayons: I was just kidding.

Answers to some misconceptions about homeschooling

The Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room started a post about The Cost of Homeschooling that now has a dozen comments after it. Rather than take up space in the DHM's comments section, I would like to respond to a few of the comments myself.

1. "Very few people have the discipline, knowledge and talents to properly homeschool."

That may be true. But who says you have to go it alone? Our family has had the blessing of wonderful local and online support, including that of people like the DHM who have children older than ours and who have given us the benefit of their experiences. We share knowledge and talents with others, including the hundred and fifty families in our local group and the approximately two thousand families who are or have been connected in some way with the homeschool curriculum we use (a free online project, conceived with the idea of supporting each other and sharing resources).

2. "The net cost of homeschooling is about $15K per child."

Well, that would be more than our total income spent for the educational needs of our two school-aged children. Since we still have the lights on and we ate dinner tonight, that obviously isn't the case. We would be absolutely unable to afford private school tuition; we have, on the other hand, homeschooled happily for nine years on a single income.

3. "Affluent white kids do as well or better in public schools as anywhere else."

Please define "as well as anywhere else." I don't want my children to learn merely as well as they would anywhere else; I want them to learn all they are capable of and all that God wants them to know. Of course my children would probably do fine in public schools, in the sense at least that they would learn to read and probably learn to play the game of taking tests quite well. (We may not consider ourselves affluent in terms of income, but in the sense you're talking about, we would probably be counted as at least middle class.) In practical terms, and based on my experiences as their teacher, my own children probably wouldn't do nearly as well in a classroom setting as they have done with a one-on-one style of teaching.

4. "I recently had a student who came from homeschooling and wasn't prepared at all for high school. Innate intelligence isn't enough."

Please define "prepared." Emotionally? Socially? Academically? One student doesn't make much of a case for your side. I could present some young homeschooled teens such as Tim, Pipsqueak and Jennyanydots, Katelyn, and my own 13-year-old as examples to the contrary in all those areas.

5. "One of the reasons that homeschoolers look better than the average on test scores is that they are a very select group with highly involved families."

Yes, but are you saying that these families are otherwise an elite group? People from any socio-economic group can choose to be highly involved with their children, or not.

6. "Thus, homeschooling is not really different than other forms of school."

My contention, and DHM's original point, is that it's very different. Night-and-day different. For my children, school is not just something to get through; it's learning for its own sake, knowledge for its own enjoyment. We read and write without worrying about graphic organizers, or filling out sheets of comprehension questions and vocabulary words. We can do the next thing in the math book, and also jump forward when somebody wants to know what square roots are. We listen to all different kinds of music, take things apart, read poems, do science experiments, make timelines, and talk about the latest pop psychology theory of teenage brains. Does this require an exorbitant amount of money or a parent with a teaching degree? No. We listen to music on the radio. The books come from our fairly extensive yard-sale-and-thrift-shop library. Anybody can afford a 25 cent used copy of Heidi, and if they can't, there's always the public library. I taught my kids to read without an expensive phonics system--actually we used a game involving an egg carton and Cheerios, but that's another post. Looking at ants in the back yard or ducks in the park is free. Counting house numbers and cars, and going to the corner store to look for packages with M's on them, is free and doesn't take superior intelligence. It just takes time.

Finally, one last point. Some of the disadvantaged (non-homeschooling) parents mentioned by the DHM's critics are immigrants who came from developing countries or other situations where they did not have the chance to have an education, or who are otherwise in bad circumstances because of their struggles since arriving in North America. They may certainly be excused, to some extent, for not being able or willing to teach their own children. As for the rest of these disadvantaged parents--are they not almost all the products of the North American public schools? Did our schools do such a terrible job with them that they are now unable even to teach their own children their colours or how to hold a crayon, or to take their children to the public library and pick out something to read to them? And yes, I AM picking on the public school system, even if the DHM wasn't.

P.S. We live in Canada, not in the U.S., but the problems are the same.

Happy Dominion Day

The Squirrels celebrated Canada Day today by taking the squirrellings to a nearby "heritage crossroads" (what used to be called a pioneer village) and then out for pizza (well, it's red and white anyway). Ponytails made beautiful paper flags for everyone. (Not all the squirrels are as good at drawing maple leaves as she is!)

This particular "village" is supposed to represent life around here in 1914, and on Canada Day--which was Dominion Day in 1914--admission is free and the village storefronts are decorated in red, white and blue. No, not the Stars and Stripes--the Union Jack--which was our flag in 1914.

The Apprentice and Ponytails had been to the village before, although Ponytails didn't remember much. Crayons had never been there before, and it was a lot of fun to see her reacting to things that until now had only been pictures in books. Even a stream, with a covered bridge over it (and maybe a troll underneath?), was something she does not see often. "Oh, a Stream!" She knows the word, but seeing the real thing is different. A locomotive, a pump, washboards, a loom, a chicken coop (which inspired a steady stream of "cluck, cluck, cluck" from Crayons), a really woolly sheep, three black pigs in a pen, big black woodstoves like the one in Paul Galdone's Little Red Hen...she also got to touch a slice taken off the bottom of a horse's hoof by the blacksmith! The late Joan Bodger wrote a book called How the Heather Looks, about her family's trip to England to look for things like Sherwood Forest and Wind in the Willows country; this was no less of a "books coming to life" trip for Crayons.

P.S. If you really want to know what kind of animals we saw, you can click here.

Ponytails' Exam: The Miraculous Pitcher

Ponytails' story is The Miraculous Pitcher, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder Book.

Once there was a lady and a man and then there were visitors. In this country whenever there were travellers, big dogs would come and chase them and bite them. But when royal people came, they weren't allowed to be bitten, but the dogs didn't know that. So when they tried to scare the royal people, the people who owned the dogs would come and bang the dogs.

And the visitors came in [Baucis and Philemon's] house with no trouble. One of them was carrying a long stick. It was a magical stick and it started to walk around when it came to dinner. And the lady and the man were very poor, so they didn't have much to give them except grapes and bread. And then they didn't have very much milk in their pitcher. Then somehow the stick made more milk, so they never ran out of milk again. It was like a fountain.

Then the travellers said thank you for the nice meal. That's all I can remember.

In the mind of Crayons

1. Crayons, age 4, perusing an alphabet place mat: How come the O is HERE but not HERE? The alphabet goes H, I, J, K, L O MEN O P.

Mama Squirrel: I know that's how it sounds, but really it's L, M, N, O, P (pointing to the letters).

Crayons: No, it's L O MEN O P.

Mama Squirrel: I know that's how it sounds, but the O really goes here. That's just where people put it in the alphabet.

Crayons: Well, we could cut it! (referring to the place mat)


2. Crayons (playing kitchen): Would you like some goose jam?

Mama Squirrel: Do you mean gooseberry jam?

Crayons: No, goose jam. It's what gooses put on their bagels.

King Arthur

This is one of the exams that I wrote this week–it’s about King Arthur, The Once and Future King. I didn’t actually interview anybody–it’s fictional.

This morning on CNN news, we go to Stonehenge for an eye-opening experience–we will broadcast on live television a conversation discussing two books in The Once and Future King series, The Sword in the Stone, and The Queen of Air and Darkness. The conversation will be between the author, T. H. White, and King Arthur, the main character of the books. Let’s go over now . . .

King Arthur: As I was saying, T. H., you’ve documented my life remarkably!

White: Why, thank you! But I must say, I have a couple of questions for you.

KA: Go ahead. I, also, must ask you some questions.

W: What was it like when Merlin turned you into things?

KA: It was most enjoyable. The room would start to spin, it would go all black for a minute, and I would be a fish–or a deer.

W: Neat! So . . .did Merlin actually move Stonehenge?

KA: I am sworn to secrecy.

W: Oh–that’s too bad. What did you learn as an animal (or bird)?

KA: I learned life lessons and morals, the value of human life. I also learned about those animals.

W: The value of human life?

KA: When I was an ant, it was so tedious, absurd, and frustrating that I now highly value my life.

W: That’s interesting! You said that you have some questions for me?

KA: Why, yes. For one, King Pellinore was much more absurd than you wrote. Most of the time, the Questing Beast chased him! And he didn’t even know it.

W: That’s not a question.

KA: A comment, I agree. Why did you make Merlin so disgusting at the beginning of the book?

W: With the owl on his shoulder? I do admit that I stretched the truth a little bit.

KA: Not a little bit. That did not happen to him.

W: Very well, I’ll keep that in mind.

KA: What is all this mixed-up history? The events which took place in these books did not happen then. What have you done?

W: Since I wrote The Once and Future King more for pleasure than to make a bestseller, I did things my own way.

KA: A final question. Is my life really as intriguing as you advertise? You truly think that?

W: King Arthur, I love the story of your life deeply. Thank you for spending this time with me. I’m so glad that you like my books.

And now, CNN weather with Bob McChang—over to you, Bob.

From Ponytails: The Wars of the Roses

I finished history for this year, almost. I'm doing history about the Wars of the Roses. It's where one side is red and one side is white. How this happened, one king said, "Which side are you fighting for?" And they were standing in a patch of white and red roses. So one house was called Lancaster and one was called the House of York. And one of the kings said, whoever wants the House of York to be king, stick a white rose in their hat. And whoever wants to vote for the House of Lancaster, stick a red rose in their hat. (Wouldn't that poke them, though?)

Thinking in colours

It's funny that the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room just posted about homemaking and (not) worrying about needing to be June Cleaver, because this weekend Mama Squirrel and Mr. Fixit watched the movie Pleasantville. Mama Squirrel does not recommend this movie for families; it contained enough adult material to make her blush even though she was only watching it with Mr. Fixit. Mama Squirrel also (deliberately) has not read any reviews or criticism of the movie yet, because she wants to comment on it as it came across to her without getting cluttered up with what other people think it was about.

Pleasantville, for those who haven't seen it, is a kind of a Back-to-the-Future story about a teenager and his sister who get zapped, not back into the actual 1950's, but into the black-and-white world of his favourite old sitcom (think Leave it to Beaver), a place where beds only come in twin size, books have no writing inside them, and people exist in a kind of static, unchanging, naive reality (since they are only really characters on the show). As the two of them begin to interact with this world, their ideas and actions start to bring parts of Pleasantville (and some of its characters) into full colour; books start to have real contents, and the artificial stability of the town comes crashing down.

There is a huge amount of symbolism in the movie–-rain as rebirth (it never rains in Pleasantville), roses and D.H. Lawrence, forbidden fruit; besides the main metaphor of things (people, ideas) turning from black and white into colour. There's also a strong and interesting emphasis on the role of books in this renaissance, including a big book burning scene and the city’s decision to close the public library along with “Lover’s Lane.” It's interesting that, at the end of the movie, the sister (who never cared about school) decides to stay in this "time" (which wasn't really any time at all) so that she can go to college.

So reality, unreality; Pleasantville, as it was created, was obviously unreality. Northrop Frye contends that our whole everyday world of small amusements and hassles is unreality, and that our "real" talk about ideas (about literature, for example) is what lasts, what counts. From David Cayley's interview with Frye (from the book Northrop Frye in Conversation):

Cayley: ....You’ve often written about the unreality of the real world, and my sense of what you mean is that when one comes into the presence of Milton, to take your example, one then enters what is truly real. The educational journey is from unreality to reality in your view.

Frye: Yes, the unreality being what’s out there and reported in the papers, and the reality being what remains stable or improves. If I look over the seventy-seven years I’ve lived in this ghastly century....I see only one thing that has remained stable during that time, and that’s the arts. I would include religion with the arts, by the way.

Cayley: And can you say what you mean by stable?

Frye: Something that’s there and won’t go away.

Cayley: What was your advice to students [during the student protests of the 1960's]? What was the way you wanted students to take?

Frye: It was the way of the intellect and the imagination. Those are the powers that you’re given and things you’re responsible for....the demand for relevance, which was, again, an anti-intellectual movement among students, meant of course that they wanted every lecture, every classroom meeting, every gathering of students to be an exciting existential experience. They wanted to shuck off the steady repetitive practice, which is the only thing that does contribute to the real advance of either the intellect or the imagination.....the demand for relevance was, to my mind, the absolute antithesis of what education is about. Education is a matter of developing the intellect and the imagination, which deal with reality, and reality is always irrelevant.

Is the "ivory tower" of the study of the humanities reality or unreality? Are our everyday lives ("the trivial round, the common task") just black and white? (Frye said that an arts degree was useless; and that if it wasn't, then it wasn't worth much.) Is reality just when we write about the books we're reading, or when we post pictures of our cats or our family trips? This is one place where I think Frye forgot something: although our conversations about the "real stuff" (like literature) may bring the colours into our everyday existence, it doesn't necessarily follow that everything else is black and white or unreal. Mama Squirrel prefers to think that because we have these opportunities to think and talk in living colour, the colour finds its way into the rest of our lives rather than being something separate.

And for those who are always trying to define what a living book is, Mama Squirrel has a suggestion: "a book that makes you think in colours."

Frye on education

I found a great quote not by Northrop Frye but about him, on a website by Jean O'Grady of the University of Toronto, who is Associate Editor of Frye's Collected Works (still partly in progress, from what the site says). The complete article is Northrop Frye at Home and Abroad: His Ideas. But the part I thought would be of interest to those who have studied Charlotte Mason's educational philosophy is this:

Frye's rather subdued, egoless presence as a teacher is therefore deliberate: he aimed at being a transparent medium between student and work. The source of authority in the classroom is not the teacher but the writer being studied, and the impersonal authority of the subject itself. He went so far as to say that the relation between teacher and student was rather an embarrassing one, and that the best moments in the classroom were those in which it was obliterated by a joint vision of the subject. In the light of this glimpsed vision provided by culture, the student will be a radical critic of what is: far from becoming a ‘well-rounded’ individual, with its comfortable overtones of contentment and softness, he is likely to be maladjusted and crochety. Like Socrates, the teacher has for his aim that of corrupting youth.

Sometimes Frye wondered if it was too late, when a student reached university, to influence his mind, already pre-programmed by TV and advertisements. He became involved then in schemes for earlier education, helping to found a Curriculum Institute in which university professors joined with elementary and high school teachers to suggest improvements in the curriculum, and later overseeing the production of a series of English readers for grades 7 to 13. His ideal early childhood education began with rhythm and chant and fantastic stories, with the enduring narratives of the Bible and classical myth, and encompassed at ever deeper levels the narratives of comedy and romance, tragedy and irony. His concern was to keep the imagination in play, for only through imagination could the individual think metaphorically and engage in the play of mind through language that constructed reality in human form.

Isn't that true, that "that the best moments in the classroom [are] those in which [the relationship between teacher and student is] obliterated by a joint vision of the subject?" It's one of the advantages of homeschooling, especially as our children get older and we find ourselves often learning alongside them instead of, as some like to accuse us, playing teacher.

For those interested in reading more about Frye's works and an overview of his Anatomy of Criticism, Jean O'Grady's main webpage is here. Mama Squirrel also picked up another interesting book about him this weekend: Frye in Conversation, by David Cayley.

Blog Tag with Books

Kathryn Judson, at Suitable for Mixed Company, has a game of blog tag going over books. Here is her question:

Imagine that a local philanthropist is hosting an event for local high school students and has asked you to pick out five to ten books to hand out as door prizes. At least one book should be funny and at least one book should provide some history of Western Civilization and at least one book should have some regional connection. The philanthropist doesn't like foul language (but will allow some four-letter words in context, such as expressed during battle by soldiers). Otherwise things are pretty wide open. What do you pick?

No restrictions on whether I actually own the book, or whether it's in print?

All right. Since we're giving these books to high school students, I'd give them some books to help them use their brains. Richard Mitchell's Graves of Academe to help them sniff out verbal and educational garbage; Terry Glaspey's Great Books of the Christian Tradition (or the newer version that has a different title) so that they'll know what other books they're missing; Mathsemantics: Making Numbers Talk Sense, by Edward MacNeal (or some other similar book, but I do have Mathsemantics and I'm slowly working my way through it); and Lee Strobel's The Case for a Creator, to help them ask good questions in science classes.

For Western culture, I'd hand out Philip Yancey's Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church. Not so much for the church issue, but for the excellent essays on people like G.K. Chesterton, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and John Donne (written in the context of a funeral for an AIDS victim).

To get their priorities in order, I'd give them Edith Schaeffer's What is a Family? Also I'd give out a copy of Material World, by Peter Menzel; that's the one where families all over the world put their belongings on their front lawns and let Menzel's crew take a picture of them with their stuff. I know it's ten years old but it's still what people would call an eye-opener. He has a new book coming out called What the World Eats. [Update: the title has been changed to Hungry Planet; it still hasn't been released, but you can read about it on Amazon here.]

For humour, something by Chesterton–-maybe The Man Who Was Thursday, since I just finished reading it and I think my own just-turned-teenager should read it too.

For regional interest, I'd choose a book on Canadian culture and literature by Northrop Frye--either The Modern Century or The Bush Garden (a book of essays and reviews on Canadian poetry). Or maybe a biography by John English--he has written several important books about former Prime Ministers of Canada.

And for all-purpose education and entertainment, a volume of Shakespeare’s plays.

Who's next to be tagged? Mama Squirrel picks Coffeemamma at Our Blue Castle.

Dinner with the Squirrels, Part One

Mama Squirrel has friends, online ones and nearby ones, who eat healthier meals than the Squirrel family does. She has friends who use more thrifty tricks and feed more people for probably less money than she spends to fill up five squirrels. She has friends who actually decant their bulk spices out of their baggies before they get used up, who can tell the difference between real and fake vanilla, who can things, who make their own tortillas and who grow their own potatoes. So she is somewhat diffident about posting a view of the Squirrel world of food (aside from barbecue nights).

However, to her credit, Mama Squirrel is good at a couple of things. One is using up bits and pieces of leftovers–squirrel instincts can make use of just about anything. Another one is rooting out recipes that you can get in the pan before the oven’s finished heating, and ones that are easy to learn off by heart. With her cooking roots going back to some wonderful hard-times-trained homemakers, Mama Squirrel also likes recipes that use very basic groceries in different ways. In the last couple of years, she’s also become better at making some of the squirrels’ favourites a little less carb-heavy (or at least making the carbolicious part optional for those who just want a little).

So with those things in mind, here are a few Squirrel kitchen favourites and food quotes. Most of the recipes were not invented by the Squirrels, so credit is given where possible.

Honey-Mustard Chicken (adapted from the Harrowsmith Cookbook Volume 1)

Spread a pound of boneless, skinless chicken breasts with the following mixture: 2 tbsp. butter or margarine, 2 tbsp. prepared mustard, 1/4 cup honey, and a little salt and pepper. Bake in a covered casserole for about an hour or as long as it takes your chicken to cook through.

(The original recipe called for twice as much sauce and 10 chicken drumsticks, and suggested dipping the chicken in the mixture before baking. We like our quicker way better, though.)


Sweet Potatoes or Squash

Either cut sweet potatoes (the orange ones, not the real yams) into chunks to fill a casserole (you don’t have to peel them); or slice a butternut squash horizontally (scooping out the seeds) and fill the casserole with those. Drizzle with oil (olive oil preferred), sprinkle with salt and pepper, and add enough water in the bottom of the casserole so that the pieces don’t scorch. Bake covered at about 350 degrees, for about an hour depending on how big your chunks or slices are. (Even easier: scrub sweet potatoes and bake them whole on a greased pan in the oven while you bake something else.) Good with chicken (above) or some barbecued farmer’s sausage.

“Vegetables can be cooked much more precisely by taste and experience than they can by numbers. You know very quickly how full the salad bowl needs to be to serve everyone, which bowl (or combinations of bowls) needs filling in order to make a vegetable dish. Cook more when it’s a dish you and your family just love and can’t get enough of. Cook less when it’s a dish that people aren’t so fond of, or perhaps one that you’re trying out for the first time.”–Edward Espe Brown, Tassajara Cooking

Sausage and Sauerkraut

Take some uncooked farmer’s sausage (or paprika sausage, or honey-garlic, or whatever the butcher is selling that you like). Put it in a casserole on top of some sauerkraut (we like the kind that comes in a glass jar). Bake at 350 degrees, covered, for at least an hour (we usually allow an hour and a half, especially if the sausage is still a little bit frozen). Serve with potatoes, or frozen perogies, or sweet potatoes. If you put some cut-up broccoli in the pot of boiling water with the perogies, then you have your whole meal done.

Macaroni and Cheese, the Real Kind

Works best with already-cooked (yesterday’s) whole wheat macaroni, because then you don’t have to dirty another pot. But in any case, you need enough cooked macaroni to fill up your greased casserole; enough shredded Cheddar cheese to mix in with the macaroni (or you can cheat if you don’t want to get the grater out, and just cut up a piece of cheese into small chunks), and canned evaporated milk (the Squirrels use the 2 per cent kind). Salt and pepper too, and a little prepared mustard if you want. You might not need the whole can of milk if you’re just making it for a few people; see what looks good (soupy is not good). Canned milk is kind of important here, because it makes the sauce creamier. A little margarine on top might help the sauce out too, but it’s optional. Bake it all together until the cheese is pretty much melted; give it a good stir, and then top with bread crumbs (we use dried ones), dot with margarine, and finish baking until the crumbs are toasted. Serve with Canadian gravy (that means ketchup).

It is possible to make this exact same recipe starting with uncooked macaroni–the Squirrels have tried it and found it acceptable although a little chewy. But in that case you have to use enough milk to cook the pasta, allow extra time, and stir it several times during the baking.

Butterscotch Dumplings (from Food that Really Schmecks, by Edna Staebler)

(Edna calls this recipe 20-Minute Dessert.)

Sauce: 1 cup brown sugar, 2 cups boiling water, 2 tbsp. butter or margarine. Stir this all together in a large pot till the sugar has dissolved; simmer while you mix the dumplings.

Dumplings: 1/3 cup sugar, ½ tsp. salt, 1 tbsp. butter, 1 ½ cups flour, 1 tbsp. baking powder, about ½ cup milk. Cream the sugar, salt and butter; add flour mixed with baking powder alternately with enough milk to make a stiff batter. Drop by tablespoonfuls into the boiling sauce; cover and let boil gently (do NOT take the lid off) for about 15 minutes. Serve with vanilla yogurt, milk, or anything else you like.

“Supper is always mostly made from just what we’ve got that needs eating.”–“Bevvy Martin,” quoted in Food that Really Schmecks


Vegan Gingerbread from The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook (the fastest you’ll ever make)

1 cup molasses; ½ cup oil; 2 tsp. ginger; 2 cups flour; 1 tsp. salt; 1 tsp. baking soda in one cup of hot water.

This is the way I mix it: start the kettle boiling for the hot water, and preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Measure the oil in a one-cup measure, then use the greasy cup to measure the molasses. Beat them together with a whisk. In a small bowl, combine the ginger, flour and salt; and by this time the water is hot so you can put that in the same 1-cup measure and dissolve the soda in that. Add the dry ingredients to the molasses and oil, alternately with the soda water. When it’s all mixed, bake in a greased square pan or small casserole for 35 to 40 minutes or until it tests done.

Now, every time Mama Squirrel has mixed this up, the batter has seemed to need a little something–it seems a little thin. For awhile Mama Squirrel always added some wheat germ to the batter (and sprinkled some on top as well), but lately she has been adding some rolled oats (the 5-minute kind) instead, and using whole-wheat flour, and all the Squirrels seem to prefer it this way. Serve plain or with milk or yogurt. The Squirrels have been known to finish this off for breakfast.


Fruit Crisp from Whole Foods for the Whole Family

Bottom part: canned or cut-up fruit such as chopped apples or pears, or canned peaches, enough to fill a small casserole or square pan (if you have four or five eaters; if you have more, use a bigger pan) Mama Squirrel doesn’t add any sweetener to this part, but sometimes she adds dried fruit or some cranberry sauce (to apples).

Top part: this is the part Mama Squirrel likes because it’s easy to memorize. Half a cup of brown sugar, half a cup of flour, half a cup of wheat germ, half a teaspoon of cinnamon, one cup of rolled oats; mix it all with half a cup of oil. The wheat germ can be omitted or substituted for if you don’t have it; we have just used more rolled oats, or some crushed breakfast cereal (corn flakes are good with peaches). Spread over the fruit and bake it all for about half an hour at 350 degrees or until the topping doesn’t look raw.


“Food is food only if it is eaten, so we make things that the people we are cooking for can relish and enjoy.”–Edward Espe Brown, Tassajara Cooking

Once More Under the Bridge

The Squirrelings have been watching the 1940's version of Henry V, and it is so good that Mama Squirrel would like to recommend it to any home squirrelers doing the early 1400's in history, or learning about Shakespeare or his time period. For those who have never seen it, it was made in Britain during WWII, which meant not only that the patriotic theme was especially appropriate but also that props were in short supply, especially anything made out of metal--so they had to use painted wooden swords and so on. (Mama Squirrel asked the Apprentice what the film company might be most short of during the war, and she said, "Male actors?" After Mama Squirrel stopped laughing, she acknowledged that that likely would have been a problem as well in a movie needing lots of extras, but she doesn't know how they got around that one.) They stepped neatly around the tacky-prop problem by setting most of the film right on the Globe Theatre stage in Shakespeare's time, complete with a booing, cheering audience, people walking around selling fruit, hats that get left backstage, and a rain shower partway through! As the film goes on, the "Chorus" character encourages you to imagine you're right there on the battlefield or whatever, and the settings become more realistic.

Oh, and the title of this post? As King Henry shouted "Once more unto the breach, dear friends!", Crayons (just turned 4) looked puzzled and asked, "Why are they going under the bridge?"

(She was also a little upset that the Falstaff character died during the film, and when we told her it was just pretend, for the movie, she looked relieved and said, "It was just a deadly faint, then." (A favourite phrase from Diana and her Rhinoceros, see post here.))

Egg Corns

While commenting on a sort-of-related post at The Common Room, Mama Squirrel heard for the first time about Egg Corns. Being a Squirrel, she naturally got very excited, thinking this was something to eat, but no. These Egg Corns are a recently-coined term for a particular language mistake that people make, like Spoonerisms and Mondegreens. The official Egg Corn website seems to be here, and you can see a whole catalogue of examples of this kind of error.

So what is an egg corn? It's a mis-hearing or mis-understanding of a word or phrase, often because the person is unaware of its origins. Sometimes a particular egg corn gets to be widespread. Mama Squirrel had already heard the example pre-Madonna instead of prima donna, which is on the Eggcorns website. But it might be just one person who misunderstands (like the egg corn thing, which came from someone thinking that's how you spell acorn). It shouldn't be a mishearing of a song lyric, though, because that's a Mondegreen. Other common ones are people saying that something "peaks their interest" or "touches a cord," or that you "pour over something." One might say that those are just misspellings, but the point of an egg corn is that there's also some misunderstanding of the phrase's meaning. Check out the website and you'll see what the difference is.

Mama Squirrel found a great example of an Egg Corn this past week in a book which shall remain nameless but which could probably have used some copyediting. The book mentioned the different kinds of dancing you could take--ballet, jazz, and flamingo.

More Rhubarb

I guess Mr. Fixit had been asking for rhubarb around the office too, because when he went to work yesterday he was sent off to another friend's to pick up some more! And this second batch of rhubarb has some funny connections for the Squirrel family which are too long to explain, but to make it short, the people with the rhubarb came from the same part of the world as Mr. Fixit's grandparents, and this rhubarb is a whole different type than the first pieces we were given to plant; this is a European kind and it was more of a big root (the other kind came in smaller stalks). So Mama Squirrel hopes The Apprentice means what she says about loving rhubarb.

Pink Crayons

Hi! This is Crayons. Did you know that I turned four? Well, there's a printer at our house. It goes out with paper in it. Well, we can print lots of colouring pictures!

I know what to do when I have a quiet time [She means naptime, not timeouts]. Play on my bed. I play with my baby toy apple. I play with my big polka dot ball. I keep losing some of my toys.

Did you know that I have some family? Did you know that I have my friend Uncle Dewey, and my koala and my bear are friends with me?

Well, I want to barbeque by myself [Crayons is starting to get silly]. (That says b-b-b-barbeque?) Well, I sing. I'm gonna sing for you now [Picks up Duplo microphone and starts to sing]. For down in my heart . . .

Rhubarb and Psammeads

Hi, this is Ponytails! I have a cold.

Today we were planting rhubarb. We planted some in my garden.

I like that in the Five Children and It, everybody wants The Lamb. The Lamb was the baby. All the four other children were named Anthea (her nickname was Panther), Jane, Robert, and Cyril. One of their maids was named Martha. And they found a Psammead in the sand pit, and their mother wasn't there, she was visiting their sick grandmother. One time Jane wrote a letter and she said, "Dear Mother, I hope Grandma is feeling better. We found...(she paused because she was trying to think of Psammead; they looked it up in the dictionary but it wasn't there because they were looking in the S's when it was in the P's)...We found a Thing. Right now is post time, your loving girl, Jane."

What I was talking about everybody wanting the baby, is that Robert wished one time by accident, he wished that everybody wanted the Lamb. There was a rich rich lady; she snatched the baby away from them because she wanted it; and they had to run and run after it, and the lady went into a house. And the two coachmen were saying, No, I want the baby; no, I want the baby! Then Cyril, the oldest, he sneaked into the carriage and picked up the sleeping baby, and he was safe again.

Rhubarb

Some divide the world into two kinds of people. Mama Squirrel thinks there are two kinds of women: those who are still picking, cooking, freezing and eating rhubarb; and those who can't spell it, won't eat it, and don't care anyway.

Somehow, pride in this (neglected) corner of womens' life appeals to Mama Squirrel. Cleaning the nest does not thrill her by any means, but cooking is something she enjoys, and participating in the rites of rhubarb makes her feel a kind of sisterhood with those who have faithfully saved rhubarb recipes and created ways to make use of this weird dessert-thing-that-isn't-sweet.

When Mama Squirrel was very young, she did not like stewed rhubarb at all--it was right up there with turnips and canned peas. It was a weird brown colour, it was mushy, it was too sweet but still tasted bad. It also didn't help that one of Mama Squirrel's daddy's favourite teases was "Do you think the rain's going to hurt the rhubarb?" Now she not only eats rhubarb but bakes it into pies and crisps, and has ventured out with a pair of scissors to cut some off the neighbours' plant (it's okay, they asked her to). Then the neighbours moved and the rhubarb disappeared. This spring Mr. Fixit started saying the Squirrels needed their own rhubarb plant, but they didn't know where to find any.

Yesterday Mr. Fixit visited his massage therapist and mentioned our lack of rhubarb (having a back massage, unlike having your teeth fixed, does allow you a chance to converse with your health practitioner). The massage therapist, an enthusiastic gardener herself, knew someone nearby who had a backyard full of it and who would be happy to give us a piece--so Mr. Fixit came home with a pot full of rhubarb.

The young squirrels, needless to say, are only mildly thrilled with this acquisition (a pizza plant would have been more to their taste), but they are outside as Mama Squirrel types this, helping Mr. Fixit plant the rhubarb.

[Update: for rhubarb recipes on this blog, click on the "rhubarb" label at the bottom of this post.]

A Truth Revealed

Mama Squirrel has discovered this scientific truth:

The fastest way to get young squirrels interested in reading is to start packing or opening boxes intended for a homeschoolers' book sale.

All of a sudden every single book is their favourite again, including The Foot Book and The Norfin Trolls Laugh Out Loud. "Have we ever read this one?" "Crayons hasn't read that one yet!" "You can't sell that!" "No, actually, that's going in the Free box." Wails of anguish...

Someone told Mama Squirrel that they have resorted to doing such packing in the middle of the night, out of sheer self-preservation. Lacking such a sense of stealth (and preferring to sleep in the middle of the night), Mama Squirrel has been using the basement rec room of the Treehouse to box up the extra, outgrown, unwanted, unloved books. And the squirrelings have been unboxing them just as fast. There are now books all over the floor of the nest and Mama Squirrel is ready to start pulling her fur out. She can't decide if The Norfin Trolls are closer to the Albatross or Poe's raven:

This twaddle all over the Treehouse floor
Shall be lifted--nevermore!

Or maybe she will see them, like the Velveteen Rabbit, reborn and hopping back up on the shelf to join the Real Books.

(This idea makes Mama Squirrel very nervous and she wonders if she should tape the boxes shut this time.)

What tweens and grads can do (or not)

Things seen and heard this week, that add up to something:

1. An e-mail Mama Squirrel read, about a disappointing experience attending a high school graduation, mainly because the valedictory speeches were so poor. The writer explained that, besides the usual poor grammar, the speeches contained little of future plans, no thanks to teachers etc., and little besides "we had a good time in high school." The writer (who teaches in a cottage school) compared this to a similar occasion she attended (at the cottage school) where the eighth-grade grads made a better showing (and made much better speeches) than those twelfth-graders.

2. Mr. Fixit's high squirrel reunion this weekend, where he toured his old classrooms and saw displays of current student work. Even to Mr. Fixit's eyes, the English-class projects on display had style--comic book style--but a great lack of content. "They were like what we might have done for grade seven and eight projects," he said with some amazement. "In high school, we were expected to write essays. With lots of words."

3. The Squirrel parents watched a news special this week about "tweens." There was nothing really unexpected in it; it was largely about marketing and about how tweens spend their leisure time (mostly plugged in). The tweens interviewed seemed to have a great deal of the "we know more because we're younger" attitude. As the parents of an offspring of that age, Mama Squirrel and Mr. Fixit know that just being almost 13 does not mean that one has to watch graphic videos and choose one's clothes from tween magazines. Amazingly enough, there are realio trulio persons of that age who know enough not to bother with That Stuff, and the Squirrels are rather proud to be the parents of one such person, who does like to do her nails and fix her hair a different way each day, but who has never yet asked to put anything sharp and shiny through her face, and who actually seems to like being with the rest of her family, most of the time.

Conclusions after all this?

Mama Squirrel thinks we (collectively, that is, Our Culture) show teenagers and tweens a great deal of disrespect. And not in the way they think (making them leave their backpacks at the front of the dollar store, and telling them how they should behave). The disrespect is in giving them less to be responsible for than they deserve; giving them less to think about than they could actually deal with; and keeping them brainwashed and treating them as some kind of moronic consumers. Unfortunately, after being given so little for so long, that seems to be what most of them turn into.

There is a 19-year-old young woman in the Squirrels' city who has recently had to take on the job of caring for her younger siblings after the death of their father (there is no mother either). She has interrupted her own schooling to do this; she is handling this as a fairly recent arrival to this country and managing here in a language that is not her first one. Mama Squirrel thinks that maybe it is a good thing that this big sister was brought up with the values of another culture (from what she can tell from the news stories), because if all she had to go by was the training of typical North American teens, she might not have done nearly so well as she has. Or done it at all. Something to think about, there.

The mind of Crayons

[2008 update: Looks like Diana is being republished! Details here.] Crayons asked me tonight if I'd read her "Anna and her hippo horse." I was drawing a complete blank until I remembered...a few nights ago we had read Edward Ardizzone's Diana and her Rhinoceros. Yes, that was it! Unfortunately I cannot find even one image online of the cover or artwork of this slightly surreal but much-loved story. Other Ardizzone images are around, but Diana is unavailable. (The last edition seems to have been in 1993.) If you can find a copy, though, it's an instant winner with little girl squirrels just turned four, especially those who (like Diana) have a shed in their backyards that just might do to house a rhino. And those who (like the rhino) like hot buttered toast.

Ponytails' Narration of Five Children and It

Hi, this is Ponytails. Have you ever read E. Nesbit before? The Five Children and It one. It's about this Sand Fairy who grants these four children wishes. The first wish was to be as beautiful as the day; but then their housemaid Martha didn't recognize them, so she kicked them out of the house. Then they wished that Martha and all the maids wouldn't notice anything that they did that would get them in trouble. And then they wished for a lot of money, but all the shopkeepers didn't know what the money was. The money was actually spade guineas. And the shopkeepers didn't know the coins. So there was this one man who gave pony rides to people, and they asked him to drop them off at the brook, and he did that. He knew what the money was.

So Cyril, in another store, he bought some ginger beer. He had to use his own allowance, though. And the other kids, because it was so hot, they stuck out their tongues, and everybody said, "why are you doing that?" They tried to buy horses, but the horse guy didn't know if it was real money or not, or he thought probably that they stole the money. Something really gross...the shopkeepers tasted the money to see if it was chocolate! You'd probably get sick from tasting all those things. The horse man called the police, and they were taking them to the police station. And they ran into Martha and the baby (that was the fifth child), but Martha couldn't see the money that they were pulling out of their pockets, because of the wish that they did. She said, "you're on drugs." At dusk all their wishes would disappear, and now it was dusk. So when they got to the police station, the policeman said, "are you on drugs? There is no money on these kids."

The End, bye for now!

Barry Callaghan vs. Frye?

From The Globe and Mail Books section this weekend, a review** of Barry Callaghan's new book Raise You Five (a collection of his essays and reviews), which I have not yet read but would like to if only to get a better handle on this thing called "duende," of which Callaghan (according to the review) has lots but of which Northrop Frye had none.

The review (by Michael Keefer) also contains this paragraph:

Other high points of this collection include Callaghan's deliciously astute deflation of John Updike's pretensions, his affectionate and respectful 1965 interview with Margaret Laurence (published only after her death in 1987), and a finely contextualized analysis of the bilious resentments that underlie Stephen Leacock's sometimes unfunny comic prose. Add to these perceptive reviews of Hugh MacLennan, Robertson Davies and Donald Creighton, who together with Leacock embody exclusionary tendencies for which Callaghan has little patience; and the luminous account of Yehuda Amichai in Jerusalem with which the book concludes.

Is the phrase "exclusionary tendencies" a code meaning that MacLennan, Davies and Creighton represent the traditional, or dead-white-guys, school of history and literature?

This book's definitely going on Mama Squirrel's want-to-read list, if only to satisfy my curiosity about that and about why Northrop Frye didn't dance the flamenco as well as Barry Callaghan.

**2014 updated link.

Trendoids spend lots to scale back

Saturday’s National Post ran an article by Style At Home editor Yuki Hayashi called “Retro Chic is Child’s Play.” Subtitle: “Old-fashioned housewares, toys and clothing are the hot thing for mom and dad’s stylish newbie [baby].” The gist of it (with apologies because I can’t link to it) is that Bob the Builder wallpaper borders are passe in nurseries; chandeliers and refurbished dressers are in; plastic toys are out, “golden age” 1920's-style toys are in. But only if you have the money to buy them. (Mama Squirrel’s main feeling about this nursery-retro thing is that possibly the decorators haven’t actually lived with children very much; crib blankets made of antique chenille don’t sound like they’d survive more than one good upset stomach.)

Mama Squirrel knows she should be delighted to hear that companies like T.J. Whitney’s Traditional Toys are producing things like hardwood ABC blocks, and that stores like Toronto’s Kolkid are selling them (although as the store owner says in the article, “These aren’t Wal-Mart prices.”). As her friend the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room has pointed out, there are many advantages to natural materials, simple toys, things carefully chosen and worthy of being passed down to future generations. Things that biodegrade, things that have educational value, things that are fun.

However, like anything else, the cost of this trendiness puts it out of the realm of most of us single-incomers, at least in its upscale incarnation. The Squirrel family does live near an educational/alternative toy store (although not as funky a place as the stores in Toronto). Some of the toys there are very good and affordable, others fall into the grandparents-only category. Handmade hardwood blocks would be nice if we had a couple of hundred extra dollars for them...ironically though, the squirrelings still play with a tubful of pine blocks that Grandpa Squirrel cut in his workshop about thirty years ago. (They make great beds and tables for the squirrelings’...ugh...collection of plastic troll dolls. Definitely not Retro Chic.) We do have some alphabet blocks, too, but they came from the dollar store and were bought because we needed to spell somebody's name on a birthday cake. How about the squirrelings’ much-used tubs of Duplo and Lego? Mama Squirrel knows quite well that those are not made of natural materials and that they would probably hurt the sensibilities of the trendoids (not to mention their feet if they stepped on a lost piece). But they do have a place in the Treehouse (usually all over the floor).

The main ingredient that seems to be missing in all this trendiness, is the creativity and fun of doing and making these things yourself. (Oh please...like back to The Waltons? No, really. Besides, this is where ANYBODY can do this just as well as the Trendoids, even if the toy budget is miniscule.) Two of the squirrel girls have handmade rag dolls that their Grandma Squirrel made them (with dresses to match some of their own). The Apprentice has made model “cub cars” with Mr. Fixit (one of them won a championship race a few years ago). The squirrelings have made Barbie dresses, things for their dollhouse, and put together battery-powered gizmos like a flashing headband. (Mr. Fixit can always make those books of science experiments work.) Ponytails has knitted herself a hairband and is busy right now learning to boondoggle (see her post below).

Our young squirrels are not short on toys. They have classic books and things to use their imaginations with (even if they're plastic). They have homemade things we've improvised (or they have, which is even better). They also have a Dora the Explorer backpack, a beeping plastic cash register, an assortment of Barbies, and the aforementioned plastic trolls. The squirrel philosophy is that it is better to have things that you like, that get used, and that mean something, than to worry about how they fit the decor.

And in Mama Squirrel’s final opinion, it is more fun to crochet a puppet yourself than to buy it in a funky store on Queen Street West.

Hi! It's Ponytails again. On the 17th of May, a man was making a shed for us. He went home at dinnertime. Next day, the man came back with a girl and built the rest of the shed.

I can boondoggle. Can you? I boondoggled a zipper pull. My sister taught me. She made a zipper pull too. It was going to be a bracelet but it was too small.

This is me.

It IS About School...sort of

A Response to Laura D. Bush

There’s an article online that's been reprinted here and there, called “It’s Not About School,” by Laura D. Bush. Since I first read it, a couple of points from the article have been bothering me and, at the risk of seeming rude or maybe out of date (the article is five years old) I would like to address them.

Overall, I think Mrs. Bush does have something important to say: that the “heart of homeschooling is in the home we build for our children.” As someone who started homeschooling with Susan Schaeffer Macaulay’s For the Children’s Sake fresh in my mind, I agree very much with that point! And I would like very much to think that any family that reads together, that talks about important things (including how those things fit into God’s world) around the dinner table, and that learns to wonder and find out about what that big bug is or how things work, is going to be a learning family no matter what curriculum is chosen; maybe even no matter what school the children attend. I notice, for instance, that theologian Francis Schaeffer’s children (including Susan) and grandchildren were not exclusively homeschooled, although some Christians insist that homeschooling is the only Scriptural choice parents can make.

However, I have to take exception to her criticism that much talk of “books and lesson plans, classical homeschooling and unit studies....obscures the heart of homeschooling” and becomes just an enjoyable hobby of “playing school.” When Mr. Fixit reads the Wheels section of the paper and posts to a station wagon e-group, I don’t call it “playing car”; he enjoys cars, but he’s also taking care of our transportation needs. I enjoy talking about homeschooling and childrens’ books, but I’m also taking care of my family’s school needs. I am the one trying to read between the lines in product reviews, going to workshops, and joining online math groups. I don’t plan everything we do from scratch, but I am responsible for choosing which plan we will follow, which books we will study, and figuring out our longterm academic goals.

If I didn’t do those things and told my children that because the heart of homeschooling is a loving home, I’m not going to spend any extra time working out what we’ll study next school year, they would (rightly) look at me as if I had two heads. Homeschooling is no more just a hobby for them than it is for me; it is how they spend a good part of their days; it means, to some extent, their futures; and it is important that they understand how seriously I do take that responsibility.

To be fair to Mrs. Bush, I don’t think that her purpose in writing was to discourage anyone from comparing curriculum or enjoying “shop talk.” (Even the Proverbs 31 woman considered a field before she bought it.) However, she does tend to wander into the rather romantic ideal that a supportive, literate household will automatically produce educated children. She states that “no child in a home with books and magazines and the welcoming lap of a reading adult will fail to learn to read”; actually, I know at least one child in exactly such a household who has had great difficulty with reading. “No child in a healthy home will fail to learn all the arithmetic he or she needs to succeed as an adult.” Unschoolers may agree with that idea, but for most children (including mine), regular math work is necessary in addition to all the “teachable moments” and real-life learning we’ve made use of. (Cutting pies into fractions goes only so far.) “Homes full of love for one another, love of learning, interest in and concern for the world will almost surely produce well-educated young people, regardless of the methods or materials we choose to use in our homeschool.” Sewing a dress or cooking a meal using wrong methods and poor materials will result in failure, regardless of the good intentions of the sewer or cook; why should the teaching of children be viewed differently?

It’s true that God’s people can have widely varying needs in education, and some families may find they need to supplement their very full “real life” with only small amounts of “school.” Others will need to spend much more time and energy providing learning opportunities for their children. My concern is that, while we can agree with the “heart of homeschooling” philosophy and don’t put prideful over-emphasis on academic achivement, we risk creating a reverse tendency to sneer at method and structure, as if they are somehow less than spiritual. (I think that reflects the same spiritual tension that causes some people to view savings accounts and insurance as prudent, and others to say they show lack of faith in God’s provision.) The “love of learning” Mrs. Bush describes does not happen, for most of us, without at least some deliberate plan and purpose.

More Frye on Poetry

The best quote I've found this week in Frye's The Bush Garden (my favourite book right now) is from his 1943 essay "Canada and its Poetry," a review of A.J.M. Smith's Book of Canadian Poetry.

"Every Canadian has some feeling of sparseness when he compares, for example, Canada's fifth largest city, which I believe is Hamilton, with the fifth largest across the line, which I believe is Los Angeles. And the same is true of poetry. Every issue of the New Yorker or New Republic, to say nothing of the magazines which really go in for poetry, contains at least one poem which is technically on a level with five-sixths of Mr. Smith's book. With so luxuriant a greenhouse next door, why bother to climb mountains to look for the odd bit of edelweiss? The only answer is, I suppose, that in what Canadian poems have tried to do there is an interest for Canadian readers much deeper than what the achievement in itself justifies."

Ponytail's things to say

Hi, this is Ponytails. I know some Charlotte Mason. Beatrix Potter and Charlotte Mason lived in the same place and they were around at the same time. Mama Squirrel and me are reading "The Princess and Curdie" and we only have two chapters left. There's a weird creature in the book called Ballbody. He's shaped like a round ball with eyes, nose, and mouth. And there's a green emerald. It's in Curdie's mom and dad's fireplace. And if it's shiny and sparkly green colour, then Curdie's okay. Because he's on a journey that Curdie's friend Irene the princess' Great-Grandmother sent him there for a mission. He's going . . . South, I think? It's either south or west. Or is it east? I think it's south. And if the emerald's uncoloured, then Curdie's in trouble and danger. And it did happen in the story that he did get in danger and in trouble. And his dad went and looked for Curdie's friend Irene the princess' Great-Grandmother. But she wasn't there. So he started going in the way that Curdie was going. And that's all I know about all that. And Curdie has a special touch and he can feel people's hands with his and see if they're turning into animals. Bye for now.

Intelligent Design and Poetry

Mama Squirrel was very impressed with this post on the Wittingshire blog (also linked from the webring at the bottom of this page). [2012 update: this blog is no longer available.]

The Witts write,

But beautifully wrought things like seagulls and sonnets don't merely bubble up from the cosmic flux; they arise from the effort of an intellect. Does the subconscious play a role for the skilled human poet? Of course. But as the biographies of the great poets attest, there is also discipline behind great art--both the discipline of regular work, of studying and practicing technique, and the discipline of form.

In other words, why should anyone waste time actually learning how poetry works or studying the elements of drawing? Isn't art just EXPRESSING yourself? Even in grade school Mama Squirrel found the command to take the jars of tempera and just PAINT SOMETHING a little oppressive...too much freedom, no form. Equally so the idea that writing one's name down the side of the paper and then adding suitable adjectives for each letter would create some kind of deathless poetry. (S: spry. Q: quick. U: U get the idea.)

"An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetrical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway." [says the anarchist Gregory] "So it is," said Mr. Syme...."Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria [Station], and lo! it is Victoria....You say contemptuously that when has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hair-breadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word 'Victoria', it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed 'Victoria'; it is the victory of Adam." -- G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

Most Families Today

Yesterday Mama Squirrel and Mr. Fixit went to an open house at a nearby nest. The real estate agent pointed out the small breakfast bar in the kitchen/dining area, and said that he thought it could be made even longer, because, you know, in most families these days that’s where the kids eat, and the table is just for “formal meals.”

Today a financial-advice show came on the radio during lunch time, and again Mama Squirrel heard the phrase, “most families today.” As in, most families today need a second income. Most families today have a mini-van or an SUV. Most families today have a mini-van or an SUV with a backseat filled with fast-food wrappers. Most families today don’t eat dinner together. Mama Squirrel was so annoyed that she clicked off the radio without waiting to find out which “most families today” cliche was up for discussion. She paced around the kitchen with her furry tail bristling indignantly (as the squirrelings calmly ate their hot dogs), muttering, “Most families today! I’m so sick of hearing that! And how come whatever most families are doing, isn’t what we want to do?”

So she decided to open this up to friends of the Treehouse. You are invited to post your favourite examples, overused and otherwise, of “most families today.” Virtual Canadian Smarties to the most interesting.

P.S. Mama Squirrel asked Ponytails to finish the sentence "Most families today..." Ponytails answered "homeschool."

Art

Last week I went to an art gallery opening with my Grandpa. Most of the people were dressed up very fancily. They had evening dresses and suits (but not tuxedos) on. I got to meet the mayor!

The gallery was a large room with stairs going up to a platform, and there were a few small rooms at the back-- kitchen, framing, etc. There were three artists that had work displayed, not counting a couple of glass dishes made by someone that I can't remember.

Dina Shubin does art of very skinny ladies in pretty dresses, sometimes with veils, sometimes alone, at a table, with flowers, instruments. I really liked it.

Peter Panov's work is slightly abstract, with figures overlapping, and oddly shaped faces. You have to look at it twice.

Horst Guilhauman does very real-looking paintings. For some reason one expects paintings to be of pretty things--seeing one of a mechanic does something in your head.

One of the paintings was priced at $25,000 cdn.! All of them were very expensive, and most very large. Very large.

At the end we all went outside and the mayor cut the ribbon along with the lady whose gallery it is. I really enjoyed my visit.

Jemima Puddleduck

Over at The Common Room, The Deputy Headmistress has written a series of three excellent articles talking about how children can be influenced through moral and immoral examples in literature. The DHM was talking, specifically, about books for older children and up, such as Andersen's fairy tales and Jane Austen's novels.

However, Mama Squirrel feels that such influence can begin (as she is sure it does in the Common Room household) at a much earlier age. As a specific example, the youngest squirrelling, Crayons, has recently been asking for Beatrix Potter's Jemima Puddleduck. Over and over again. For anyone not familiar with this story, it involves a duck looking for a secret place to lay eggs (where nobody will take them from her). She runs into a friendly fox who offers her a cozy nest in his back shed. Jemima naively goes back to visit him every afternoon, until she is intercepted by a collie dog who blows the whistle on the fox and prevents her becoming that night's dinner.

It occurs to Mama Squirrel that any child raised on that story (and Red Riding Hood would serve a similar purpose) would be in little danger of being lured by a real-world predator later on. A recent sad example of this in the Squirrel family's town involved some runaway teenagers (skinheads) flopping in an abandoned house...it gets complicated, but the story as one of the Squirrels heard it was that one of said teenagers had to be bailed out of jail by her mother, and came home covered with fleas. Is a skinhead boyfriend to be compared to the sandy-whiskered gentleman? Maybe. In any case, Mama Squirrel's point is only that important life lessons can be taught very early on, and as the DHM says, both by good and bad examples. Better to learn from someone else's stupidity (Jemima's eggs get eaten up and she is escorted home in tears) than from your own.

Exploding with Creative Energy

The Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room has been troubled by something on another blog that wonders how those who support conservative politics can also happily mingle with poetry (and, to extend the thought, with intelligence).

At the risk of boring with yet another quote from Northrop Frye, I'd like to offer this, from the very same page of The Bush Garden where I found the quote about weasel words.

"[Poet Irving Layton] speaks of 'the holy trinity Of sex revolution and poetry', and each of these is conceived as an explosion of creative energy against the inhibitions of prudery, exploitation, and philistinism respectively; a trinity more or less incarnate in Freud, Marx, and Whitman." (Letters in Canada, 1953)

(Again on Layton, 1954)
"....the ironic eye does not have free play; it is oppressed by a conscience-driven and resentful mind which sees modern society as a rock pile and the poet as under sentence of hard labour."

It might help to remember what was going on with a lot of poetry during the '50's when Frye wrote these reviews of Layton: there were a lot of Angry Young People doing the coffeehouse thing, Ginsberg and Kerouac and all that. But I think the basic thought hasn't changed so much in 50 years: some people still think that to be into the third part of the "trinity," you have to be into the first two as well. I think that's why some of the people in Mama Squirrel's creative writing classes were so weird, or really wanted everyone to know they were weird, or just pretended they were weird, because it kind of went with the turf. Anger poetry was good, exploding against things was good (even if it wasn't good poetry, it was Saying Something, right?). So do poets, or those who read poetry, have to have a rock pile to pound at? Was Whitman as revolutionary as Freud and Marx? Is that why Mama Squirrel doesn't like Whitman much?

And can Christians still manage to have an intelligent discussion about something like this without being called pseudo-intellectuals? Francis Schaeffer thought so, and so did C.S. Lewis.

On daughters growing up too quickly

Of Irving Layton's 1955 collection The Cold Green Element, Northrop Frye wrote that "in it there are at least a half-dozen poems (including, besides those mentioned, the lilting "for Naomi" at the beginning) which have a rhythmical swing ,an urbane humour and a technical finish guaranteed to make the reader's toes curl up in solid contentment."

Curious about "for Naomi," Mama Squirrel tracked it down online. Here it is, for the enjoyment and toe-curling contentment of those who, like the Squirrel family, see their daughters quickly becoming those "Than whom the grasses though tall / Are not taller."

More on Weasel Words

What are weasel words, anyway? I thought that was just a phrase coined by Northrop Frye, but apparently it has a whole history behind it. Also here, for Australians.

Young Poets and Weasel Words

Two nice quotes from Northrop Frye:

As long as [a young poet] is writing primarily for himself, his thought will be rooted in private associations, images which are linked to ideas through his own hidden and unique memory. This is not his fault: he can write only what takes shape in his mind. It is his job to keep on writing and not get stuck at that point....Then he is likely to pass through a social, allegorical, or metaphysical phase, an awkward and painful phase for all concerned. Finally, a mysterious but unmistakable ring of authority begins to come into his writing, and simultaneously the texture simplifies, meaning and imagery become transparent, and the poetry becomes a pleasure instead of a duty to read.....Every once in awhile, we run across a poet who reminds us that when the lyrical impulse reaches maturity of expression, it is likely to be, as most lyrical poetry has always been, lilting in rhythm, pastoral in imagery, and uncomplicated in thought. –Northrop Frye, "Letters in Canada," 1953 (reviews collected in The Bush Garden)


He realizes that the enemy of poetry is not social evil but slipshod language, the weasel words that betray the free mind: he realizes that to create requires an objective serenity beyond all intruding moral worries about atomic bombs and race prejudice.–Northrop Frye, same, 1952 (speaking of Canadian poet Louis Dudek)

500 Copies of Pilgrim's Progress

My kids were teasing me yesterday after we came home from a book sale with yet another copy of Pilgrim's Progress. I think that makes about 5 different editions we have now, including my favourite with Edward Ardizzone illustrations. The one I found yesterday was published by Sears, probably in the 1920s, and is in amazingly solid condition except for a little chipping at the bottom of the spine.

But the kids have nothing to complain about; here's an essay by somebody who has 500 copies, or did nine years ago anyway. [Updated link]

We also found four volumes of Charlotte Mason (we dug around to see if the other two were in a box but didn't see them); Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales; a book of James Whitcomb Riley's poems (Ponytails wanted that one); a James Herriot picture book; Claire Turlay Newberry's book Smudge; and a nicely-abridged copy of Don Quixote for the Apprentice's school next year. All in all it was a successful trip.

In the Eyes of Crayons

Do you know what a caparison is? It's one of those coverings that looks like a tablecloth, that knights used to put over their horses. The thing that covers up a lot of the horse.

Anyway, Crayons was looking at a picture of a knight on a caparisoned horse. Her comment: "What's that robot doing, riding on the horse dressed up like a pony?"

Three Pooh Stories in One, by Crayons

Crayons' "Eeyore Loses a Tail" Story (with original additions)

Once upon a time Eeyore losded a tail. And then Pooh Bear finded it. It was at Owl's house. He made it into a bell rope. Well, then Pooh Bear gave Owl a new bell rope. Pooh Bear took a string and then attached a bell to it. And then you should ring it and knock at the knocker. The End!

Once upon a time Tigger didn't have anything to bounce with. So he played with his kangaroo jumpers. You jump over rocks with them and you jump like this.

Remember when Pooh Bear wanted to give his honey to Eeyore? And he ate it all? Take it out and put it back in, take it out and put it back in [what Eeyore did at his birthday]. That's the end!

Books That Get Used

One of the Beehive5 clan asked what we thought the three best books in the English language are. I like her choices, but just to be different I'll vote for Pilgrim's Progress, Mrs. Tittlemouse, and I can't decide on a third.

But it did make me think about a similar question. What books get cracked open the most in your house, over and over, whether you homesquirrel or not? Yesterday I was working on some Plutarch homework (an ongoing Mamasquirrel project) and as I grabbed my big hardcover dictionary for about the 20th time, I mentally thanked my own mama and dad squirrel who bought it for me during squirrely-versity days many years ago. For some people maybe a dictionary just sits on the shelf, but mine gets used a lot.

I also wouldn't want to do without our Philips World History Encyclopedia (saves a lot of Internet search time!) and our collection of yard-sale atlases...and an all-in-one-volume of Shakespeare (we never have to worry about which play is coming up next term at Ambleside)...and a hymn book. And, mamasquirrel is a little embarrassed to admit it, but one of those movie/video guides that tells you whether what's on tonight is a winner or a turkey.

They may not be the best-written books in English, but they do get used.

A Manwich is a Meal

Mr. Fixit is delighted to announce that his charcoal barbecue is now clear of snow and the Squirrel family has been eating barbecued food for the last two nights out of three. It would have been three out of three, but the chicken he bought for Sunday smelled like hardboiled eggs when he unwrapped it, so we were happily forced to get some Chinese food instead.

His latest discovery (courtesy of his favourite barbecue cookbook, A Man A Can and a Grill (I'm not making that up, you can order it at http://www.grilllovers.com/shopSearchResults.aspx?type=dept&dept=2&cls=8 )) is Manwich Sauce, something I hadn't thought about for years but still remember the commercials for: A sandwich is a sandwich, but a Manwich is a meal. Anyway, we found some at the squirrel supermarket and figured out that it makes a pretty good sauce for hamburgers as well as in the Sloppy Joes that I think it's meant for. We prefer our burgers non-sloppy, so the Manwich sauce goes on just like ketchup. Mmm. Mr. Fixit says it's his latest favourite food, after Wong Wing's General Tao Chicken.

Apologies to our vegetarian friends! (We do barbecue polenta too.)

We have links!

Mama Squirrel is very proud of herself because she has finally managed to add some links and get them in the right place too.

A comment from Crayons:
The very first thing Crayons said this morning was, "Can you read that story again about play-a-joke on Kanga?" This was before I had even managed to get breakfast on the table.

Winnie the Pooh is just That Sort of Book around here.

Happy April Fool's

Hi, I'm Ponytails. Today's April Fool's. I love to eat serpent eggs! April Fool's!

Mr. Fixit played a trick on me. He put freckles all over my face with black marker while I was sleeping.

("And he gave me a moustache! Look at me!"--Crayons)

And The Apprentice got a beard.

Mama Squirrel is wearing a Christmas shirt. Mama Squirrel put out chips, icing cookies, and dessert for breakfast (for a joke).

Nobody's home

This AP story appeared today in our local paper. The headline used was "Intimacy lost in families’ non-stop busyness."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/03/22/national/main682369.shtml

Please go read it. It’s a story about families that are so on-the-go that they don’t eat dinner until after 10 p.m.; where homework is usually done in the back of the van on the way to hockey practice; and where it’s very unlikely that more than a couple of family members are even in the same room at the same time.

This is something Mama Squirrel feels very strongly about. Some of the squirrel family’s favourite evenings after supper are when everyone’s squished onto the queen-size bed, reading or cuddling or just fooling around together. (Although at those times she wishes it were a king-size bed.) There was something to be said for those old farmhouses with one warm room, though they had their drawbacks too.

Recently we’ve had some firsthand experience of the "on the run" lifestyle. The young squirrels have joined a choir that practices on Wednesday afternoons, and then they and Mama Squirrel take a twenty-minute walk (timed without any snow and no stops at the bookstore) to meet Mr. Fixit at his office for a ride home. By now it’s 5:00, so dinner is either something from the crockpot or (occasionally) pizza ordered before we leave the office. Wednesday night is also either the big squirrels’ night to go to a church group (while The Apprentice babysits), or The Apprentice’s turn to be driven to church for her youth group (20 minutes each way and she has to be there right after supper).

After a couple of weeks of this, Mama Squirrel began to have a great deal of sympathy for people who do this almost every night. Once a week is enough, thank you.

But the part about this newspaper story that really caught her attention is that the parents say "this is good for them [the children]." Now Mama Squirrel is not naive about the way newspaper reporters sometimes twist what people say (it has happened to her). But she wonders how this family came to that conclusion. Do these kids really want to be cramming their homework in the back seat? Do they like having no real dinner until after 10 p.m.? Do the kids ever get a chance to play in their backyard, or play a non-moving board game, or do some of the not-so-structured cultural activities that the Headmistress recently posted about? When do they play with their friends? Do they ever get to blow bubbles on the back porch? Although the parents described here say that their children are having a better childhood than they themselves had, one would have to wonder.

Mama Squirrel recommends the books What is a Family, by Edith Schaeffer, and For the Family’s Sake, by Susan Schaeffer MacAulay, for anyone who, like her, worries about what our togetherness is becoming.

Too many homonyms, Mom

I told Crayons a couple of nights ago, "Now you get in to bed." (Pronounced like that.)

She looked puzzled and said, "But there's only one."

Pounding the Keys

Bad Mama Squirrel...the blog stays blank for days at a time, but she means well, she really does. After watching the movie Finding Forrester, she was tempted for about ten seconds to dig out a typewriter (there's one buried at the bottom of the nest) in hopes that it would inspire her lack of writing productivity, but she quickly reconsidered in favour of high technology and the ability to cut and paste and make many copies of things.

Actually all the squirrels have been busy writing, so much so that we have to take turns on the computer. Mama Squirrel is pulling thoughts together for a Charlotte Mason workshop this weekend. The Apprentice is trying to finish her first ever "realio trulio" (lol Headmistress) research paper on Castles. Ponytails has been making menus (she goes around at meals and asks everyone what they would like). Crayons has been typing words on her favourite software program, which is called, strangely enough, Crayons. In fact, we have so much printer ink to use up that we've called a spring break from school this week.

Resurfacing

After over a week of having everybody sick, the squirrel family is trying to get back to normal and get ready for Easter. Mr. Fixit is back at work. There are Garfield playing cards, toy dishes, hairbands, sunglasses, stencils and pencils all over the floor of the basement room where the squirrelings spend their mornings. (It had been abnormally tidy for the last few days.) Mama Squirrel is actually cooking something besides frozen pizza for supper.

The Apprentice has finished God's Smuggler and The Sword in the Stone (two of her term books) in the last two days and she and Mama Squirrel completed their Plutarch for the term this morning. And the sun is shining, so the heaps of snow around the nest are starting to dwindle a bit. Spring is on its way.

Bleah

Mama Squirrel has been sucked into the vortex of viruses as well. Well, we always said we like to do things together.

We had our own Palm Sunday devotions together anyway. We read from Dangerous Journey about Christian and Faithful going into Vanity Fair, and talked about how that was a little like Jesus entering Jerusalem. And we sang "My Song is Love Unknown." Well, warbled it. That was about all we were up for.

And another one's down

Ponytails is sick now too. Because she's hardly ever sick, she never seems to know what to do with being sick. She reacts in about the same way as she does when she loses at cards. For that reason in particular, all the squirrels hope she will recover very quickly.

Mama Squirrel is still hanging in there. Maybe caffeine provides immunity? However, even healthy squirrels have been known to go down with this in a couple of hours, so if the blog gets no actions for awhile, it will be because she's decided to go curl up with her tail around her. (She might anyway, she was up quite a bit last night with the young squirrels.)

Dress Warm

A funny I forgot to include from Crayons (before everyone got sick): "You have to wear a coat and hat when you go out in the snow, or you'll get amnesia."

Catching Up

It's sometimes easier to add comments to other peoples' blogs than it is to think of new ones for the Treehouse. However, this week even that doesn't seem to be working so well (my comments either get posted three times or not at all), so I'll post something of my own up here on the wall of the nest.

Almost all the squirrels are lying around the nest in various combinations of pajamas and clothes, getting over a virus. So far only Ponytails and Mama Squirrel have escaped it, and Ponytails is a little warm and cross today as well. In the middle of the night Mama Squirrel got up to take care of Crayons, and found Mr. Fixit and The Apprentice watching Dr. Who in the living room, since neither of them could sleep or breathe very well. So it's been that kind of a week.

However, yesterday while Mr. Fixit/Dad Squirrel was feeling somewhat better in the afternoon, he played Kerplunk with the young ones while Mama Squirrel walked downtown to spend a much-appreciated birthday gift certificate at the bookstore. (She also made a stop for some Vitamin C and a box of Breathe Easy Tea, which Mr. Fixit says works very well.) After browsing for awhile, Mama Squirrel decided to use the certificate on three books:

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, by Thomas Cahill. I know Zookeeper/Headmistress likes his book How the Irish Saved Civilization, but I'm not sure quite what I'm getting into with this one. Amazon reviewers seemed to be kind of mixed on whether or not he hit the right important things. But I'm looking forward to reading it anyway.

The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, by Northrop Frye. Head Girl, if this is really good I'll let you know--I know you like Frye.

Shakespeare for All Time, by Stanley Wells. Kind of a combination biography and book about productions of his plays. A big fat hardcover, the kind that's so nice to get when it's a birthday gift!

So the nest is well stocked with reading matter for the next while. And what did Mama Squirrel stay up till midnight reading? None of these. "The Queen of Air and Darkness," book Two of The Once and Future King, which she also picked up at the bookstore for The Apprentice. Some of it reminded her of a Flintstones episode about a lovesick monster, but she doesn't want to spoil the whole thing for The Apprentice by giving away too much.

Uncle Dewey

Here is a picture of our Uncle Dewey (the baby is me, The Apprentice):

Crayons

Crayons (almost 4) got her name because that's what she likes to do most, crayon; she likes to cut and glue too, but picture-making is her favourite thing. If she doesn't have crayons around, she makes pictures on the floor with Cuisenaire rods or pieces of Duplo. Her last Cuisenaire rod creation was a person with hair made of long yellow rods and some short red rods on top. When asked, she said the red rods were "highlights."

Crayons says that when she's big, she'd like to be "married, Santa Claus, and a really big girl."

Happy Jack: Narration by Ponytails

Hi, my name is Ponytails. My little sister is Crayons, my big sister is The Apprentice, my mom is Mama Squirrel and my dad is Mr. Fixit. My favourite thing in school is copywork. The thing that I'm best at is math. I am reading Happy Jack Squirrel. There is this squirrel named Happy Jack Squirrel, he's a gray squirrel. And he walked by a hickory tree, and he saw all these big juicy nuts. And then his cousin Chatterer the Red Squirrel came along, but he was scolding and stuff. Happy Jack hoped he didn't see the big fat juicy nuts. He hoped that he would get all of them, just like a hog. But he took one of the big juicy nuts, Happy Jack did, and he was ticklish, so he started to hug himself. And of course, holding a big fat prickly nut, he dropped it, right on the head of Chatterer. And of course he said, "Did you do that on purpose?" "I didn't," said Happy Jack. "You did!" said Chatterer. "I didn't!" "You did!" Look at those two foolish little squirrels, fighting over nuts.

But Happy Jack's tiniest little cousin, a striped chipmunk, gathered all the nuts that Happy Jack and Chatterer made fall down because they were fighting. The end!

Saddest thing

Mama Squirrel is trying to escape from the cold bleak reality of snow piled deep around the treehouse, by watching movies like "In the Heat of the Night" and reading books about books. In Reading Lists for College Bound Students, by Doug Estell and some other people, Professor Huck Gutman from the University of Vermont says that students should do something before college in addition to reading lots of books. "Go to art museums. My most depressing experience of the past two years has been teaching Robert Lowell's wonderful 'last' poem, 'Epilogue' in which he compares what he does with words to what Vermeer did with paints. In two years, two classes, 60 students, no student knew who Vermeer was!" (p. 338)

Mama Squirrel is sad too, so she's going to make a point of introducing the young squirrels to Vermeer at the earliest possible point.