World Cup Feva

Soccer in the rain...the English blood runs strong in this child.

Hugh is my first child to really care about clothes. Last time I went to St. Joe's, our local thrift shop, he asked me to pick up gold clip-on earrings.  "But not the girly kind"...My boys were never big gender stereotypers so it's anyone's guess what he meant by girly.

Apparently these are piratey, not girly

I don't often shop at Wal-mart, the superstore everyone loves to hate. In my circles shopping at Wal-mart is considered unenlightened. But when I do I always come home with something nifty, and I don't just mean budget toilet paper. This time it was international soccer jersey t-shirts for the boys. (Five bucks. You can't argue with cheap and awesome.) In doing so I accidentally created three new fans: England, Brazil, and Blue. Matthias wears a blue jersey so any team wearing blue gets his support. 

Actually we are pretty middling World Cup fans. We begin enthusiastically, taper out, and then return with a bang for the semi-finals. I keep pointing out the mohawks and cool hair and neon soccer shoes of 2014, but nobody finds it as fascinating as I do.

The boys are playing "real soccer" this summer, and Will plays for Madawaska United! (Barry's Bay has a soccer team!) Kicking the ball around after supper has become a family hobby. So soccer is gradually taking a bigger place in our life, and I'm quite thrilled about that.

(SHAWS STOP READING NOW)

Will and I cheer for Argentina. 

The Colours of Now

A freshly painted scarlet red door. A soccer-playing, novel-reading, goat-wrangling, music-composing, never-sleeping boy who is NINE! (William's sacred animal, painted on his poster, is the night owl.)

All this long, snowy, grey spring I made flamboyant cushions for the house. When I sew I tend to make endless variations of the same thing. We have limited seating here, so I wanted large floor cushions for little people chairs. They are also useful for whacking your brother's head....not too painful, just heavy enough to send him sprawling without actually damaging him. (I don't know this from personal experience mind you. Just the word on the street.)

Will is slowly goat-proofing our property with these beautiful wattle fences. I love baskets, so to me this is perfect: an extended basket all around the house! Thirty foot baskets! They're slow to make, unfortunately. We are still probably one year away from my requested shit-free zone around the house.

Most of our goats have lovely personalities, but we have one crazy goat who tries to barge into the house. She waits off to the side and as soon as the door opens a crack, she rams in, head down. It's seriously intimidating. Especially to guests under four feet tall. But the boys love it, let me tell you! Up goes the cry: GOAT IN THE HOUSE! They dance around in delight while Will or I throw her out with some robust Anglo-Saxon language. (Which the children quote back to us later. Woops! No point in denying...) You can see why I'm anxious to get those fences done. I need peace, man!

Fromage!

The unwrapping of our very first goat cheese was the big thrill of this week. I can't remember if I've rhapsodized on the loveliness of our goat's milk, but it's enough to say that it doesn't taste like goat! (Which is pretty bloody fantastic.) It tastes sweet and fresh, I'd say something between milk and coffee cream. So it's no surprise that the cheese is also sweet.

Cottage cheese (quick, unfermented, ricotta-like) can be made in under two hours but we hung ours overnight yielding a firm little loaf with a rubbery texture like true mozzarella. (The Italian kind that doesn't melt, just bakes.) 

 We used lemon juice for the curdling, so it was a lemony-salty-peppery goat cheese. It got six thumbs up from the Pembertons, plus an extra five from Rafe. It tasted amazing with maple syrup and pears. Or as Hugh would say, "pretty funking amazing"....

When I say "we" made cheese, by the way, I mean our agricultural labourer, Will, who's now the master dairy man. Rafe is weaned, so I guess he's no longer competing for that title.

glimpses

In the Morning Light

Picnics

We're in the golden window of time between cold weather season and blackflies. For those of you who have never heard of blackflies, Beelzebub and all his hellish fiends look like doting grandmothers compared to these swarming insects. They appear suddenly as if by magic in mid-May and molest all warm-blooded creatures, especially gardening enthusiasts and joggers, for approximately 6 weeks. Rumour has it that they've been killed by the extremely cold temperatures this winter, but we all know better.

So this is the season for picnics (Will's lovely students, above),  damming creeks, making wattle fences (no joke!), raking, expanding chicken ownership, and hopefully, finger's crossed, building our grow boxes for the garden. Hurray! We have a shelf full of leggy seedlings ready to go. 

Homeschool is on hold because we have to carpe diem until the blackflies arrive. Then we hit the books in earnest.

Holy (and a little bit cold) Week

It is holy week. We woke up Monday morning to a dump of snow and minus ten...winter is back!

Orthodox Christians call it "Bright Week" because the fasting is not penitential but bright and joyful, polishing up our souls for Easter. It's very fitting this week, with all the sparkling new snow!

As Will and I feel out this delicate dance of family tradition (what do we take? what do we leave? what do we create fresh?) North-American Easter has always felt a bit artificial. It's supposed to coincide with spring, at least in theory. But Canadians shivering in eastern Canada don't see visible signs of spring outside the window. No flowers, baby birds, or pastel colours to be seen. It's a monochromatic mess. Bare sticks and mud, with a light dusting of snow.

And yet the hope of the Resurrection remains. I tell the children, it's like the golden yolk in the Easter egg....the sun is hiding now, but will return to warm the earth and bring new life. (unscrupulously plundered from Waldorf mythology. A beautiful analogy, I think!)

Between rounds of laundry (the mud, people! I tell you...) We've been sitting around batiking and dying easter eggs. There's ample time to discuss Easter analogies....along with biological facts about rabbits. No, they don't lay eggs, that I know of. But they bring eggs, oh yes, indeed...watch out!

This week I've been thinking about how to adapt our customs into a more local, more Canadian, more cold-weather version of Easter. The only signs of life outside are some early pussy-willows and song birds in the morning (hurray!!).

Taking inspiration from fellow cold-climate cultures like Russia and Scandinavia, we've been collecting pussy willows and painting eggs bright, deep colours.

Walls too...

I painted my stairwell. I can't tell you how happy I am to see colour this time of year! (The wall green, not blue, in real life. It looks great with all the orange wood we've got around here.)