Before and After: The Great Library Sort

It's been 7 years since we last culled the herd.  It was time!

It always looks worse before it looks better

 Day1:We started with a toy cull, donating the toys that were too young, and dumping the broken ones. 

We didn't just do the library toys, we worked our way down through all the play areas in the house!

I think we donated 5 trash bags of toys, not counting the special ones we kept for families we knew.

Day 2 and 3: We started going through the books.  We had edged up past 4000, and there were books spilling out of book cases in every room in the house.  Between broken books recycled and heaping boxes of donated books, we dropped around a thousand books.

You can play air hockey again!

Day 4: Sorting and organizing! 

Not only do the books fit on the shelves, we now actually know where specific books are!!

We didn't quite manage the Dewey Decimal system, but we have them organized by subjects, and all the series are together.

I didn't bother with photos of the other 7 "main" book cases, but trust me, it was a massive project.

The blue bins are more books to be donated to the library.

We moved around some book cases, to make a cozy reading spot in the area we've always called "The Reading Nook."  Now you can actually read there!

And the upstairs (our library is upstairs between the main bedrooms) is now cleaner than it's been since we built it, two kids ago!

Seven Quick Takes: Great Book Combos, Cake Fails, and Shark Teeth

 1.  My friend Bill pointed out that you rarely see The Agony and the Ecstasy and Electronics for the Evil Genius on the same shelf.  I suppose he's right. 

I feel like there's something about this book shelf that encapsulates my life.

Big Enough

2 .  I am always on the look out for spots with poor drainage so that when we get a few days of rain we can have a Ducky Day.

This involves putting on rubber boots and hunting down the biggest puddle we can find... After a thorough soaking, we head home for baths, popcorn and hot chocolate!

We started this when Mxyl and Klenda were toddlers, but if you get a big enough puddle, everyone still wants to play!


3. Joy!  Rapturous delight!  This year I used my birthday money to buy a tree peony!  This is a long term investment, but, over the next 50 or so years this graceful plant will get about 6 feet high and 8 feet wide with progressively larger flowers.

This year I get three blossoms this size (8 inches of petals that look like they are cut from iridescent purple silk).

 4. Have you ever made something you were sure was going to be wonderful, and right about the time you are finishing, you suddenly realize...

That it's a terrifyingly creepy dinosaur cake that looks like it's planning to eat your head?

Yeah.  I know. We all go through that.

Fortunately the cake was for Choclo, and he declared it his favorite cake ever.

Trekking to the beach at Purse Park

 5.  It's shark tooth season!  We live in Maryland, in a spot that was covered with a shark infested sea (30 million years ago).  Yes, some people probably would try not to think about that too much.  But we find this wonderful: since each shark has thousands of teeth throughout it's life, our soil is embedded with millions of fossil teeth!

From Bayfront Beach

Fortunately, we don't have to dig for them.  They are continually washed out of the soil and found on the banks of rivers and the Chesapeake Bay.

Which means, on pleasant spring days, we spend the day at the beach,  playing in the sand and enjoying the water collecting fossils.

These are teeth, ray plates, and bone fragments (from whales and dolphins) from our latest day off scientific expedition.

If you're wondering why this is seasonal, I have two words for you: jelly and fish.

6. We finished our model rockets this week! We will meet one more time on Sunday to launch at NASA Goddard (I really do love saying that!) and we are done with our Astronomy and Rocket classes.  Hooray!  So fun!


7. If you are wondering what happened to The Big Trip, we are still traveling in Japan, although we will be leaving soon for Mongolia.  Blog posts coming soon, I promise.  We just got snowed under with birthdays, anniversaries, and end of year craziness.

If you are wondering what the heck that's about, the short answer is that we came across a truly enormous pile of imaginary money, and we have been using it to take a once in a life time trip around the world.  You're free to join us, and/or if you live someplace we will, or should be going, to have us "stay" with you!

Happy weekend!  More fun with Jen!

Favorite Bread Recipes - and Books!

A friend just asked for my favorite bread recipe. I think I mentioned that we've made all of our own bread since I left work when Mxyl was born. That's a lot of bread recipes! How to choose? She relented and let me choose a sweet and a savory recipe.

Savory:

I could eat this every day and not get tired of it. This is from Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads which I got out of the library enough times that I eventually bought it! There aren't any eggs in it, it's from a B & B in Egg Harbor, Michigan. The weird rising pattern gives it a lovely texture.

Egg Harbor Bread

3 T sugar

1 T salt

2 1/2 c warm water

2 T soft (even melted is OK) butter

5-6 c bread flour

2T instant yeast

Dissolve the sugar, salt and yeast in the water. Add the butter. Stir in 3 c of flour and mix until absolutely smooth (100 strokes by hand, 2 minutes by mixer). Add flour 1/2 c at a time. Knead 10 minutes. This can also be done in a food processor if you have a plastic dough blade), add ingredients in the same order and process 60 seconds instead of kneading.

The secret to this dough is that it rises 5 times (but only for a total of 1 1/2 hours). You punch it down after 30 minutes, then again every 15 minutes for an hour. Then you shape it into loaves and let it rise again until doubled (45 or 50 minutes). Then bake at 400 degrees for 30 to 40 minutes. I often let it rise in the pans for 30 minutes, put it in the cold oven and then turn it up to 400.

Sweet:

This is heaven for breakfast. We often have it Christmas or Easter morning. It's from the same book. I actually like a lot of recipes from Beard on Bread (another library find), but these are my absolute favorites!

Orange Cinnamon Swirl Bread

6 c bread flour

2 T instant yeast

1/2 c sugar

1 1/2 t salt

1 1/4 c warm milk

1/4 c soft butter

1 T grated orange peel

3/4 c orange juice (or 3 T frozen concentrate with some warm water added)

1 egg room temperature

Filling: 1 T cinnamon mixed with 1/2 c sugar

Frosting: 1 c powdered sugar

1 t vanilla

4 t orange juice

Mix 2 c of flour with the rest of the dry ingredients. Add the warm milk and mix until smooth. Add the butter, orange peel, OJ, and egg. Mix well, then start adding flour 1/4 c at a time. Knead 8 minutes (or use food processor). Let rise one hour, then preheat oven to 375 degrees. Punch down the dough and gently pat it into a 15'' by 7" rectangle (you may need to let it rest 5 or 10 minutes for the gluten to relax). Sprinkle with the cinnamon sugar and roll up, sealing the end with a little water. Bake, seam side down in a greased loaf pan at 375 for 10 minutes, then turn down the heat to 325 and bake for 20 more minutes. After they cool, mix up the frosting and frost! It doesn't keep well because of the egg in the batter, but I bet you could give a loaf as a gift, freeze it (before you frost it), or make fabulous french toast from the other loaf! I usually make it the night before I want it.

I would also just like to add that the book I learned the most from was Crust and Crumb. It explained so much of the science of bread making that I was able to design my own recipes, even though I don't generally use the recipes from that book. Even if you just like to eat really good bread, it's a deeply satisfying read! Tomorrow, I'll post some of what I learned from it.

Summer Reading

The second best thing about summer (besides having my sweetie home) is getting to read more. In an interesting crossover of these two, the Emperor took the kids to the library and brought me back a book I never would have picked up for myself: Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana by Anne Rice.

Two things made me balk at opening the book: first, I'm not a big fan of "this is what Jesus was really like" fiction, and second, I was not sure where Ms. Rice stood religiously. I mean, I admired her for chucking her truly fabulous career and following Christ, but I wasn't sure how far her conversion had taken her. I had read the Joshua books rather naively some years ago and had (to totally ruin the metaphor) gotten blindsided by the author's axe to grind.

I began reading with cautious foreboding. Hmm. Virgin birth? Check. Jesus' brothers? Step brothers. Fine. Hypostatic union? That's the tricky part, isn't it? Especially if you are going to do a biography from a first person perspective. How does it feel to be fully God and fully human? And, of course, the controversial: When did He know?

Ms Rice's answer is more than on the level, it's actually graceful! She gives Jesus the words,"I know what I need to know. I learn what I need to learn." She also answers the "When?" in a very nice way. (Do I need to give a spoiler alert? I mean, you know His life story, right?) Instead of siding with the "Knew it as a fetus!" camp or the "What a surprising thing to discover in the desert!"camp, she has Him realize (in the desert after His Baptism) that He has chosen not to remember that He is God. The temptation in the desert was also very well done, and she adds a detail which says something very meaningful about the nature of the devil. I don't want to spoil that even if you do know how it turns out!

I most appreciated the segments based on the actual Gospels. Ms. Rice brings her considerable talents as a novelist to bringing these passages to life and she succeeds fabulously. I was a bit less comfortable with the parts dealing with His family life and circumstances. They were marvelously written and plotted to bring the events at Cana to a focus and level of meaning that are nothing less than brilliant.

What they say about Jesus and His life are very true, yet I still couldn't read them without feeling a little put off. It is marvelously well researched guesswork. I think I dislike mixing fiction and non-fiction in the area of religion, probably because so many people view the Gospels themselves as fiction. That's not a criticism of the book, just a personal preference.

That being said, Ms. Rice strikes an excellent balance between showing that Jesus was, in fact, a man like us in all things except sin, and showing that He was, in fact, the God that created the universe. She also does a marvelous job anchoring Jesus securely in history: showing that Jesus came in a particular time to a particular place.

Despite my own minor issues with the book, I would recommend it, particularly to someone who has never quite felt that Jesus is real.

Freight Train

"In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon and a picture of..." If you know that it's a picture of the cow jumping over the moon, you probably have had a toddler in your life (if not, that's the start of Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown).

How many board books do you have memorized?

I think I've got a dozen or so, but, near the top of the list with every child has always been Freight Train by Donald Crewes. It's a great book about a, well, freight train that teaches colors, train terms, and the excitement of travel.

Way back with Mxyl we cut out the cars from construction paper and laminated them: "Red caboose at the back, orange tank car next, yellow hopper car [Choclo calls it a yellow hopping car], green cattle car, blue gondola car, purple box car, a black tender and a black steam engine. Freight train." Crewe's illustrations are simple, elegant, and iconic. Those trains have long departed, so we cut out new ones this week, laminated them, scotch taper the backs and laid an electrical tape track.

Now Choclo spends time each day putting up and taking down the train cars, telling himself the story, shabby book (this is our second copy) firmly tucked under his arm. Then he sits down on my lap and we read it together. It's nice. I don't need to look at the book; instead I get to watch the side of his face curving in angles of delight.

With Mxyl, it seemed as if he would want this story forever, but 10 years later I see: board book time is like Donald Crewe's freight train: "going, going . . . gone."

(If you are wondering how much time Choclo spends with his face covered with chocolate, the answer is: A. Lot.)

Favorite Picture Books

My better half typed the list here, which I am shamelessly copying and pasting!
If you have favorites, leave them in the comments!

Angel in the Waters, Doman & Hatke: the most pro-life children's book of all time.
Click, Clack, Moo: Cows that Type, Cronin & Lewin: pure silliness. Sequels abound, too.
More Bugs in Boxes, Carter: how they did some of these pop-ups, I'll never know. Carter's other buggy pop-up books are also great.
Small Acts of Kindness, Vollbracht & Fay: a book about providence and the effects of free will.
Dinosaur Roar!, Stickland & Stickland: a favorite from ages 2-7, a remarkably wide range.
Night House, Bright House, Wellington: very creative rhymes and highly detailed, if cartoonish, pictures.
Jabberwocky, Carroll & Base: it's hard to beat Lewis Carroll for read-aloud, and Graeme Base is one of our favorite children's illustrators.
Animalia, Base: insanely (and beautifully) detailed, it's the only alphabet book I know of that can take 15-30 minutes to read (depending on attention span).
No Matter What, Gliori: this book about unconditional love helped Klenda through a rough spat of tantrums a few years back, and I'll always be grateful to Debi Gliori for that.
Mouse's Magic Paints: A First Book of Colors, Healey & Chamberlain: as creative as Harold and the Purple Crayon, only with a more solid plot and cast of characters.
Mouse Paint, Walsh: what is it about mice and colors?
When the Rooster Crowed, Lillie & Parker: one of the best farm animal books out there, it often gets read five times per sitting.
Dear Zoo, Rod Campbell: a very silly lift-a-flap book.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Carle: a classic. Personally, I don't get the appeal, but all five kids have loved it, so there must be something there.
Bears in the Night, Berenstain & Berenstain: I don't think much of the Berenstains' books for older kids, but their "Bright and Early" books make for wonderful read-alouds. Another one that can easily be read five times at a sitting.
Bears on Wheels, Berenstain & Berenstain: ditto.
Gorgeous!, Castle & Shields: a baby zebra wanders off from the hers and has an adventure. Favorite quote: "Little Zeb trotted off behind Big Zeb on his brand-new, clippy-cloppy, springy-zingy legs."
Too Much Talk, Medearis & Vitale: a little disturbing, but excellent, this adaptation of an African folk tale has a theme that will resonate with children who are tired of adults not believing them.
The Princess and the Kiss, Bishop & McDaniels: an allegory on purity for girls, but most boys like it too.
The Squire and the Scroll, Bishop & McDaniels: an allegory on purity for boys, but most girls like it too.
Day Dreams: An Imagination Book, Adams: A very clever hide-and-reveal die-cut book.
William and the Magic Ring: A Shadow Casting Bedtime Story, Robinson: unfortunately expensive, but if you can find it used, it's worth a look. (New, it comes with a flashlight.) You provide the blank wall for this shadow-casting story. If you're creative, you can even design your own special effects by moving the flashlight closer or farther away from the book, moving the book (and therefore the shadows) in a circle, etc.
In the Forest, Ets: a classic read-aloud, full of imagination. The most peaceful book Choclo enjoys.
A Day on the Farm, Hulick & Miller: my favorite of the "Little Golden Book" series. Not big on laughs, but the kids love it every time.
The Little Book, Horvath & Wilkin: my second-favorite "Little Golden Book," the clever rhymes and lovely pictures entrance kids ages 2-4.
Caps for Sale, Slobodkina: another classic. Depending on how much animation you read it with, kids can be rolling on the floor.
Pickle Things, Marc Brown: out of print for years, I find this crazy book far superior to his work with "Arthur."
Henry's Awful Mistake, Quackenbush: also out of print, but easier to get used copies of. A lesson in keeping your temper.
Sheep in a Jeep, Shaw & Apple: a quick, rhyming read about some very silly sheep. Sequels abound here, too.
Is It Time?, Janovitz: a book about a very cute wolf cub as he takes his bath, brushes his teeth, etc. Rhyming.
A Pie Went By, Dunn & Santoro: King Bing wants Queen Bee to marry him, so he bakes her a cherry pie and carries it on his head. The animals conspire to get him to fall down so that they can eat it. Very silly.
God Bless the Gargoyles, Pilkey: this book about God's unconditional love for us holds unusual emotional resonance.

Culling the Herd

No, the herd is not the kids! The herd is the crowd of nearly 4000 books in my house. Some mind their manners in the library, some jostle in the assorted book shelves in other rooms, but many perch insolently from any horizontal surface they can find, daring us to find more shelf space.

It was time to thin the herd.

You can't toss any book that any child, adult or near relation ever loved. You can't get rid of a book that might be hard to find again if, say, your 6th child develops a fascination with wombats. You can toss a book that was loved to death, but only after ordering a replacement... Really it's a ticklish job. Home schooling makes it all worse: you can't toss a book of superior educational value. Did I mention that we buy library tape in bulk?

This messy business took most of the day, but I think we may find ourselves some 300 books or so leaner. On the other hand, the library looks like a herd of cattle stampeded through it.

We ought to be embarrassed by our, er, lack of restraint when it comes to books, but really I had no shame... until I realized that we were taking out 1000 items a year from our public library since we didn't really have enough books of our own...