Metalworking

 We've shifted the focus from knights and the ruling classes over to artisans.

What I would have loved to do was do some real smithing, but, lacking a forge, anvil,  and the ability to melt metal, we felt this project, combined with You Tubes of actual smiths, was good enough!

I collected cans, filled them with water, and left them on the porch to freeze.  This touched off three days of fine weather with temps reaching 70, but, last weekend, they finally froze.

One kid at a time, each Zoomlian picked a can and drew a simple design on the outside with a water based marker. Gloves can be helpful here.

 They then hammered a nail through the can (into the ice) to form a pattern of holes along their design.  The key thing here is to rotate the can so that you are always hammering the nail straight down into the can.

Once the design was complete, we removed the ice with a quick soak of the can in warm water.

 Because the water had been in the can for several days, the dissolved air (which mixes in from the pressure in the water system) had dissipated, leaving the ice crystal clear.  You can do this with ice cubes by boiling the water before putting it in the trays, and, indeed, the "solid" ice was slower to melt than our usual "cloudy" ice.

Smaller kids needed more help, including heroic nail holding by a nervous adult.  But they all came out nicely, and no fingers were lost in the making of this project!

We put candles inside our completed lanterns, and ate dinner by candle light.   

It wasn't actually this dark in the dining room!




 By a happy coincidence, we ended up doing this craft on Candlemas (which you may call Groundhog Day), the traditional day for blessing candles!

Gingerbread Castle

On the first real snow, we make a gingerbread house. 

This lovely custom has a very practical purpose: it almost never snows before Christmas, and thus the perennial craziness of making a gingerbread house is separated from the perennial craziness of Christmas prep.

This year, for some reason, we decided to do a castle!



Our castle is a triangular keep with a triangular curtain wall.  This is in keeping with the architectural reality that such a structure will have six walls and the historical reality that I have six children.

As someone who has made (or assisted with) a lot of gingerbread houses, here's the secret: decorate the walls before you construct the house!

That way you can decorate on a flat surface, allow the decorations to dry in their correct positions, and then glue it all together with royal icing (supported in their upright positions by canned goods).


If there is another trick I know, it would be: let it dry overnight before you add a roof or try to move your structure.  I no longer try to fudge that one.

This one wasn't going further than the kids, so I didn't bother with roofs and so forth.  Actually, I found that none of the kids thought to put a door on their wall, which is one way to make your castle impregnable, I guess!

Reasons NOT to Teach Your Five Year Old to Write

It does not  say "Do not come in because of zombies."

No, no. 

It says, "Do not come in because I am busy."

He put it up and promptly wandered off, leaving his (very polite) room mate unwilling to intrude on the (empty) room.

Back to The Walters Round 2

 Besides all the exhibits, The Walters also has a kids' center in the basement, and it's loaded with things to touch and do.

Here they have a castle shaped puppet theater with an astonishing variety of beautiful puppets.

They also have a swoon worthy dress up bin as well as racks and racks of games, books, and toys keyed to the exhibits in their collection.  Here the Zoomlians are building castles.


 Best of all, they have a corner of touchable stuff: fossils, coral, shells, alligator heads, insects (encased in plastic), replicas of Egyptian artifacts, and (our favorite) a suit of chain mail with a helmet.

Everyone had to try it!

Oob felt the helmet was enough to complete his outfit.

Klenda wore it with style.

 Choclo liked it, but it was heavy!



Leena tried the mail with the helmet, which was even heavier.  Here she is looking fierce.








Zorg was pretty serious about the whole thing.






But Mxyl wore his helmet the way he wears his fedora:  at a jaunty angle!

Back to The Walters Round 1

I've mentioned that we could live at The Walters, right?

The Chamber of Wonders alone would make up for all the visiting school groups!

We listened to an audio book of The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler in the early fall, and it was clearly on our minds!  If you haven't read it, it's the story of a brother and sister who run away to The Met, and it was one of my favorite books as a kid (that and My Side of the Mountain, do we detect a theme?).

Anyway, the Chamber of Wonders is what our museum wants to be when it grows up.

In the top picture, the table Leena is sitting at is covered with cases of butterflies, beetles, and magnifying glasses so you can see them better.

Klenda is looking at a dazzling display of jewelry and precious artifacts.

In the other picture, you can see a really large alligator, the mummy of a young girl, skulls of various bears, many amazing paintings and a white peacock. 

What you can't see is the beautifully carved cases that Mxyl is looking at.  They are filled with shells, crystals, snakes, and every imaginable natural wonder or curiosity!

 From there we went to the Knight's Hall, where Zorg and Klenda played checkers, Choclo and Oob played chess, and Leena and I played Medieval themed charades.

Meanwhile, Mxyl went through the Medieval galleries looking at all the art and artifacts.

 Next we went through the Egyptian stuff.  It wasn't part of our theme, but Choclo loves Egyptian stuff!  This time he was most interested in the animal mummies: cats, falcons, crocodiles, and baboons.  They also had a "mummy" that was actually dirt and seeds (wrapped up and painted like a mummy).  It would have been buried with someone to grow their food in the afterlife.

One of the things I love most about the Walters is how beautiful the whole museum is.  Just walking through the rooms is a treat. 

We went off through the main museum into the Hackerman House to see their Japanese collection.

The house itself is carefully restored mansion from the late 1800s.  Just gorgeous!

I am always taken with the graceful sweep of the main stairway.  Not only is the staircase itself breathtakingly elegant, it is topped by a dome appointed in carved plaster and crowned with stained glass.

The Zoomlians wanted to know why we couldn't live in a house like this!

 Hmmm... 

For starters, here are my very elegant children on this elegant stairway!

Interestingly, while most of the house is very "Gilded Age" with the items being shown as an American collector would showcase them, the upstairs rooms show Eastern restraint.  There the swords, armor, and other artifacts are displayed against a back drop of bare walls and tatami mats.

Happy Birthday, Klenda!

In honor of Klenda's 14th birthday, we had a princess party!

Well, we already had the castle, so we figured we'd go for it. Klenda, being Klenda, decided that for this party, she would not be the only princess!

So, the girls all had a great time making tiaras, watching The Princess Bride,  eating red velvet cake, and filming their own musical (!).

It was a slumber party, so, naturally, they spent a great deal of time not sleeping.  What did they do in the wee hours?  Laughed a lot, evidently!

Fourteen Fun Things About Klenda

1. She likes to experiment with creating her own recipes.
2. She has taught herself to play the recorder.
3. She's a leader.
4. She can walk 15 steps on the slack line.
5. She's always willing to help.
6. She is teaching herself watercolor painting.
7. She likes to do calligraphy.
8. She's almost done with Geometry.
9. She's a fast and deadly punster.
9. She's good at all sorts of arts and crafts.
10. She sees the good in others and encourages it.
11. She can do sumi-e painting.
12. She's already a good cook and a great baker.
13. She can compose her own songs.
13. She can knit, sew and embroider.
14. She can count!
14. She's herself, and herself is pretty fantastic!

The Feast!

What would a Medieval unit be without a feast?

Putting together a feast is not that hard - it's much more a matter of subtracting ingredients than adding: no potatoes, corn, or tomatoes!  I guess there is the addition of "baking spices" to meat dishes, and that makes it taste a bit exotic.

This is my favorite site for Medieval recipes, although there are many good others floating around on the web.

Since I only have a few scullions, I kept my feast simple:





Roast chicken with herbs
Meat pies (I prepared the filling the night before and used refrigerated pie crusts)
Bread
Braised leeks
Spinach with bacon
Mulled wine (grape juice and a bit of wine vinegar, simmered with spices)
Almond milk (I skipped the authentic recipe and just bought it!)
Gingerbread
Snowe


That may or may not seem simple to you, but bear in mind that we usually cook 3 meals a day for at least 8 people, we often have dessert, and we make all our bread.  We're used to cooking a lot of food and we really enjoy it.

We were all set when Zorg decided that we couldn't have a feast without a jester!  So Zorg and Leena were matching masked jesters dressed all in black (Zorg) and white (Leena).  That got the ball rolling:  Choclo and Oob did dancing and tumbling, Mxyl read a humorous epic from the period ("Get Up and Bar the Door"), and the Emperor juggled.

Wrap Around

By which I mean my gardening season has wrapped around!

These are my fall blooming camellias.  They usually peak around Thanksgiving, but I might get a few stray blooms through the middle of December.

The entire shrub is covered with flowers!

And here come the snowdrops, just a week or so ahead of schedule: my earliest spring bloomer.

At least this past week it's finally gotten cold.  I'm hoping it will kill off some of the bugs.

And it's been chilling the Bay for today's Polar Plunge, which Mxyl and Zorg are doing!

UPDATE:  It got down to 14 degrees at night, at that zapped the camellias.  I'm glad I took pictures, because those beautiful white flowers turned into brown mush! 

Praying Today

Coats of Arms

We started off looking at heraldry in general and having the kids invent coats of arms.

My favorite is the one on the top right: Leena made a coat of arms that is, well, a coat made up of arms.

Ahem.

Anyway, at some point, I googled our last name with "coat of arms" and discovered that our family actually has one!

 Not only that, it actually told us something we didn't know about our family.  The hammer and chisel signify silver miners.  One thing we did know was the village our ancestors had come from, and it turns out to be next to a silver mine!

So, naturally, we tried shaking the family tree a little more!

We found a number of interesting crests, and this has kicked off a mini genealogy revival!  It's been fun to go through the heraldry and see what each coat of arms signifies.


Some of them even come with mottoes.  The McKnight motto translates to: "nothing is too difficult if you really want it." The Reichwald motto we've had a harder time translating.  Google tells me it means "for short and true."  I'm guessing there is another meaning to "short," maybe "direct?"  "for directness and truth?"

Anyway, we've been printing them off and hanging them as banners in our castle.  For the ones that were very pixelated, I had Klenda go over the edges with Marker to smooth them out a little.