Pumpkin Hunting

Every fall we all load up into the car and make the trip to Shamrock Farm so that the children can run through clusters of pumpkins still out in the field until they find the perfect one. Usually it's bigger than I would like but I can never say no *grin*.

This year the little guy wanted to be fully in charge of the wagon so he huffed and puffed but kept tugging on that wagon full of pumpkins as it weaved and bobbed behind him over the uneven hills of dirt in the pumpkin patch. He was beaming from ear to ear as he made each stop to load in another orange treasure :)

By the time he made the last stop he was more than ready to squeeze in anywhere he could fit and let big brother take a turn pulling the wagon and him back to the barn.

Not only do they have the best pumpkin patch but inside their barn it is always decorated for the kids to. There are pumpkins from floor to ceiling, some real, some decorative, flying witches, hairy spiders and the above nook with creepy creaking noises, chairs that rock on their own, cauldrons that smoke and more *grin*. Talk about fun!

Before we left the children took turns running through a little hay maze they had outside with tunnels and little nooks to crawl through...

and of course we had to check out the chickens to :)

We always have a family party on Halloween since it is Hubby's birthday also so I've been busy planning a ghoulish feast *grin*. This year's menu will include brains and intestines and possibly some pumpkin vomit! Want to come? I promise it will all taste good LOL.

Hugs,
Rosina

Our Fall Garden...

is growing strong :)

It is such a treat to pull open my creaking and quite visibly crooked garden gate with my kitchen bowl in one hand and a the warm fingers of my little one in the other as we tromp together through the weeds and grass that have now taken over the paths between the rows and search for the delicious treats that are waiting beneath their coverings.

We have been enjoying the extra beets I planted this summer immensely! Oh my goodness are they yummy. All of the children love them so I've been boiling them up by the pot full for our dinners and eating the leftovers cold in salads and the turnips are a special treat for me :)

The cold weather has begun here and the temperatures have been dropping to just above freezing or slightly below at night. The perfect temperatures to sweeten them up just right. Who new one could get so giddy over vegetables *grin*.

Along with the vegetables there are a few flowers and herbs still thriving. One of my favorite herbs is my Mullein (verbasacum) with it's giant fuzzy leaves and towering spears of little yellow flowers reaching for the sky. The kids love to pick the leaves and rub them on their cheeks as they are just as soft as a bunnies ear :)

They are a wonderful herb for coughs and asthma to. The leaves and flowers contain mucilage which can be very helpful in soothing coughs and acting as an anti-inflammatory for the lungs. I myself make a tea from the dried leaves and flowers and drink it to help with my own asthma :) Another wonderful thing to make with it is to make an oil with the flowers to treat earaches. So many wonderful uses and it self sews rapidly providing fuzzy leaves the first year and flower spears the second year :)

Do you have a fall garden planted? What sort of vegetables are you growing?

Hugs,
Rosina

Yarn Along ~ Bambino

A post of my current read and what is cast on my needles ~ Inspired by Ginny over at {Small Things}

I am so in love with this little baby sock pattern :)

I had to temporarily put down the baby sweater I was knitting as I'm missing the necessary circular needle for the next step so in the meantime I decided to use up the leftover yarn from the shawl I finished last week and make a pair of these adorable socks.

There's just something about sock knitting that is so darn addictive! For me it's when I get to the heel, working the rows and watching as the cup of the heel emerges. From that point on I just can't put down my needles as I can't wait to see how it all comes together *grin*. This particular sock had something new to me. The heel and toe were both constructed from the same identical 'short row' stitch pattern and then as the toe flipped up it was finished off with the coolest zig zag stitch of slipped knits and purls to create the finished seam across the toes in the above photo. There is absolutely no bulk inside the sock to bother delicate little baby tootsies *grin*.

The only tricky part I found was getting used to the little size 0 DPN's. Those suckers are tiny!! They flexed quite a bit as I knit and I was a little worried that I would snap them but it all worked out great and I've just about finished up the second sock so that I can go back to my little baby sweater for next week :) I'm still reading Deeply Rooted to. I just haven't had enough time to read this week and I'm dying to find out how it ends!

Can't wait to see what you all are knitting up this week :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Fish Hatchery Field Trip

Each year I try to set up or make sure we join in some fun field trips being offered to homeschoolers here on the island and thought it would be fun to organize a trip out to a nearby fish hatchery this year.

There were about 30 of us total and the children got to watch the harvesting of salmon roe (eggs)...

and the milt (sperm) from the male salmon.

Salmon roe are incredibly hardy little rubbery feeling balls and can handle quite a bit of touching so the kids all got to hold some and name them :) The little black spots are their eyes and in the incubation room above were trays and trays of mixed salmon roe and milt waiting to hatch and turn into little Alevin in about 3 months.

When we were finished in the incubation room we had a chance to watch some of the workers taking samples from some of the salmon. They do this randomly and they were taking a piece of the liver from this fish to be sent to Nanaimo for analysis.

Did you know that hatchery fish don't have dorsal fins?

I actually didn't know this but when the young salmon they raise at the hatchery are released into the rivers and streams they have had their dorsal fins removed so that they can easily be identified when they are adults. The above salmon is a wild salmon and you can see that its dorsal fin is still intact :)

As we finished up our tour we all headed down to the river to watch some of the salmon that were spawning right outside the hatchery naturally and came upon a black bear that had come to check out the salmon as well.

He wasn't there purely as a spectator though...

and minutes later he had snatched up one of the salmon and proceeded to take it into the forest for a little afternoon snack *grin*. I guess it was good that we were on the other side of the river when it happened but unfortunately I couldn't get a clear shot of him without all of the fencing in the way. Still very cool for the kids to watch :)

Hope you all had a great week to!

Hugs,
Rosina

Breathing in Beauty

Being by the ocean has to be my most favorite spot to be :)
Yesterday I had one of those rare moments when it was just me, myself and I so instead of catching up on housework that I probably should have been doing I surrendered to the call of the ocean *grin*.

I took my mom with me, a steaming hot cup of coffee, my camera and we just sat and sucked in the beauty around us. Can you truly ever tire of the sound of the waves lapping at the wooden pilings under the wharf, the smell of salt and seaweed or the brisk wind that blows stray wisps of hair around?

When we arrived we were blanketed in a thick bank of fog but as it rolled further away we were greeted by the passing splashes of a pod of dolphins and the cries of the gulls as they soared along the air currents.

The surrounding mountains and islands appeared again...

and the tug boats and fishing vessels became more than just moving gray shadows and echoes of diesel engines.

Definitely a truly wonderful way to spend an afternoon :) How about you, where is your favorite place to relax and breathe in beauty?

Hugs,
Rosina

Shawlette Success ~ Yarn Along

A post of my current read and what is cast on my needles ~ Inspired by Ginny over at {Small Things}

I just loved knitting this little shawlette.
It was amazingly easy and a great little foray into the world of lace knitting and it knit up so quickly :)

I haven't blocked it yet and I'm having second thoughts as to whether or not I actually want to. I sort of like the rippling wave along the bottom where the lace pattern is. What do you think?

I was also going to give it to my daughter right away but now I think I may keep it as a gift for christmas *grin*. So much indecision LOL. We were in the little yarn shop in the city together the other day and she was fawning over pretty little shawl pins and I thought it might be special to buy a nice pin for her and give it all as a gift. Oh and that is my little guy in the photos :) I paid him a quarter to model it for me and to keep it a super secret *grin*.

Now that I'm falling back into my knitting groove I wanted to get another project on my needles right away and I've chose a little baby sweater called the Tummy Warmer and it has the most adorable little honeycomb stitch in it that my grandmother used to knit all the time. I'm going to put it away for when my sister has her baby in the spring. I don't know if it will be a girl but I'm going with pink anyways because I couldn't pass up this soft baby alpaca yarn :)

The owner of the yarn shop in the city that I go to must find me quite amusing to watch as I shop for yarn. I never have a specific yarn in mind when I go in so she can never really help me find anything and I don't shop by color either. I actually go around and around petting all the wool LOL. Yes, I really did say petting and when I finally find one that feels the best I pick a color. Strange I know but it works for me *grin*.

This week my book is Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness by Lisa M. Hamilton and I can't put it down so far. The author writes about 3 farmers that are incredibly small scale in relation to todays super farms but they choose to stay the way they are. Her writing paints a picture in my minds eye so vividly that I swear I could nearly smell the cow manure LOL.

I can't wait to finish reading it and I'm looking forward to seeing what you all are knitting this week!

Hugs,
Rosina

Knitting Lace ~ Yarn Along

A post of my current read and what is cast on my needles ~ Inspired by Ginny over at {Small Things}

Let the fall knitting begin!
I'm so excited to join in with Ginny's yarn along again. With all of the chores that needed attention around here in the spring, sadly I had to put away my knitting needles but I've dusted them off and have cast on a little girl's shawl for my daughter :)

I've been dying to try knitting some lace and the Little House Shawl pattern looks like it's going to be just the right size to see if it is going to be difficult. I have to say though that so far this is EASY!! The hardest part was casting on the 395 stitches without loosing count *grin*.

Our homeschool year is in full swing and I think I've finally found a rhythm that works for me and all three of my children as my youngest has joined us for kindergarten this year and I just love his exuberance each morning as he begs to get started :) I'm using Oak Meadow with him and we have been enjoying reading the Waldorf Alphabet by Famke Zonneveld and starting our own alphabet book together. Oh how I love starting kindergarten all over again :)

Can't wait to catch up with all of you again and see what's on your needles this week!

Hugs,
Rosina

Fall Leaf Sugar Cookies

We are spending a lot of our days embracing the beauty of fall around here lately as we watch the leaves on the trees transition to their vibrant autumn colors and we happily jump on their crunchy counterparts that litter the lanes :) The children keep bringing in handfuls of stray leaves to that they just couldn't resist because they were 'to pretty' and I keep picking up crumbled bits off of the tile floor beneath our nature table as they fall apart from all of the handling *grin*.

So when I saw a photo of some great fall leaf cookies on the Country Living website I just had to bake some with the kids. The only problem was there was no recipe so I made a batch of my favorite sugar cookie dough that I use all the time and thought I'd share it with you to. It makes a nice sized batch of dough for tons of fun :)

4 eggs
2 cup sugar
2 cup unsalted butter

Cream the butter and sugar together. Add one egg at a time and beat really well until the butter mixture is super light and fluffy.

1 tsp. baking powder
5 cups all purpose flour

Add the flour and baking powder to the butter mixture and mix just until combined. Once you've got it all combined divide your dough into four chunks. Don't worry about being completely accurate, just eyeball it up.

Now color each of your dough balls a different fall color :) I really like to use Wilton Gel colors. They create gorgeous vibrant colors and they are cleaner to work with than the old drip style liquid food coloring. You can find them at most grocery stores and walmart.

After you have finished adding your food coloring, wrap each piece in a bit of saran wrap and place in the fridge for about 20 minutes so that dough firms up and makes it easy for rolling later :) Roll out your dough on a floured counter top and bake in a pre-heated oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 - 12 minutes or until just starting to brown and firm up around the edges and the centers are slightly puffed up.

I set the kitchen up with three work stations so that each of the children had their own rolling pin, cookie cutters and assortment of colors and they had fun ripping off chunks of color and creating their own fall color palette :)

It actually turned into a color blending lesson on top of the baking fun as we watched the colors meld together creating new tones of oranges and greens and the surprise arrival of brown each time we balled up our dough scraps and rolled them out again. Things got quite psychedelic LOL.

So much yummy fall fun. I can see we're going to have a lot of tea parties in the coming days *grin*.

Hugs,
Rosina

Celebrating Michaelmas

On thursday we celebrated our very first Michaelmas :)
I had found a great pattern and had been secretly cutting and stitching together a little wool dragon each night after the kids were in bed that would be perfect for our little playmobil Sir George to battle. I finished it up just in time and set it up on our nature table for them to find in the morning when they awoke.

Of course they beat me out of bed and I could hear them gathering excitedly around the Michaelmas scene when they got up and then the quiet that followed as they discovered the little coloring pages of a knight fighting a dragon that I had left on their tables for them to color. It was perfect. I had a few minutes to catch up on what I had to do to get the day started and they had fun picking their favorite colors for their dragons :)

After lunch we took some time to read a little story about Sir George and the Dragon. There seem to be a lot of different versions of Michaelmas stories from St. Michael hurling the dragon (lucifer) from heaven to Sir George slaying the dragon and our gentler version that I decided to go with of a dragon that had the hiccups and the gnomes that called on Sir George to help them solve their problem of a pesky fire breathing dragon. You can find a few different versions here:

The Most Beautiful Dragon
A Little Flower Garden's Michaelmas Festival
Our Little Nature Nests Michaelmas Story
In the end our dragon became the bread maker and I thought it was a perfect fit for my 5 year old :) It came from a copy of Before the Journey that I purchased last year.

With our story fresh in our minds and the anticipation of a fire breathing bread maker we went into the kitchen to make some green bread dough together to shape our dragon out of :)

They added gnarly toenails with pumpkin seeds...

poked in spines made of almonds and we cut in scales with a knife that puffed up and gave him a great lumpy body. Oh boy did he taste good with dinner, although there is something very odd about eating green bread. It just feels weird *grin*.

I can't wait until next year so that we can do it again and maybe add in some more fun ideas that I've seen around the web. One great post with lots of links is over at Rockin' Granola but if you google Michaelmas you will find tons of inspiration!

In case you would like to try my bread recipe I thought I would share it with you. It makes awesome soft white buns if you want a non green or dragonish version for another day LOL.

1/2 cup water
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 egg
a dribble of maple syrup
2 1/2 tsp. yeast
3 1/2 cups unbleached flour
green food coloring optional

Heat your milk and water until it is nice and warm, pour it into your mixing bowl along with your maple syrup, sprinkle your yeast over the water/milk and allow it to proof for about 10 minutes until nice and bubbly. Add your melted butter, egg, and 1 cup of flour and mix. I like to do this to break up my egg nicely before adding the rest of the flour. Now add in your remaining 2 1/2 cups of flour and mix until it forms a ball that you can turn out onto your counter to knead. Knead for about 5-8 minutes until nice and soft and smooth. Cover and allow it to rest until doubled in size. Punch down your dough after it rises and you can now shape it into your dragon, rolls or whatever you would like to use it for :)
Bake at 425 Fahrenheit for 15-20 minutes or until nice and golden and sounds hollow when you tap on it.

If you celebrated Michaelmas and shared photos or stories on your blog I would love to stop by and see how you made your day special :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Recovering

Okay time to break the radio silence that has engulfed my blog! *grin*

My keyboard feels foreign beneath my fingertips after all this time away. It's like riding a bike though, you never forget right? Plus I have SO many photos that I have wanted to share but just haven't been able to get here to post them :)

I guess it was probably a few days after my last blog entry on my homemade rhubarb juice back in June when I suddenly became seriously ill. At first I thought I had just caught a really nasty bug but when my one leg turned flaming red and swelled up three times it size and felt like it was on fire I knew something was terribly wrong. I was in and out of the hospital ER for a week getting IV antibiotics while they tried to figure out what had happened but when all the tests came back normal they ended up telling me that they figured I had been bitten by a spider.

Okay I can go with spider bite but my leg didn't go fully back to normal and I just didn't feel like myself. A lot of the time it was all I could do to get through the day without dropping from exhaustion and sitting at the computer was painful for my leg so the summer was spent unplugged which I must say was really nice :) When Hubby was home from work we did a lot of camping and I lounged beside the lake with my feet up while he took care of everything. He's so good to me *grin*.

It probably was mid August before I started feeling more energy and like my old self again and I thought, yay, it's finally over.... I was mistaken.

We were out camping at one of the forestry lakes about an hour from the city at the beginning of this month when I woke up one night shaking and having uncontrollable spasms. I felt like I was going to have a seizure and I could hardly talk. I woke up Hubby and he said we had to go to the emergency room immediately. The kids were sleeping but thankfully one of our friends and his son had came out that day to join us camping so we woke him up at 2:30 am to come over and sleep in our camper so that we could leave the kids behind.

The ride just to get back to the highway seemed impossibly long. I think Hubby thought I wasn't going to make it and we were so far from help. There is absolutely no cell service anywhere around here so he couldn't even call for help :(

A little over an hour later we arrived at the hospital and they told me I had a fever of 103.5 and the mysterious leg ailment was back. The nurses swarmed around me as I shook uncontrollably on the gurney taking blood, hooking up iv's and trying to get my fever and shaking to stop. I don't know when I finally fell asleep but when I woke up my fever had come down a little and they told me I was septic.

An infection (presumably from the first mysterious bout of illness in June) had run rampant throughout my system and was wreaking havoc.... and the scary swollen foot/leg was back. I spent the next couple of days in the hospital and then back home where I was put on permanent couch rest for 2 weeks and that brings us to now.

Yeah, it's been one heck of a summer and one I'm sure I won't forget anytime soon! I'm stuck with what I'm calling my elephant leg and in a couple of weeks they're going to run some more tests to see why the swelling isn't going down. They're concerned that it has now caused some lymph damage and I'm sporting a very stylish anti emboli stocking. Think Mrs. Doubtfire's hosiery LOL. Seriously not a pretty sight!

I apologize if you emailed me this summer and I didn't get back to you. My email inbox is overflowing with more than 12,000 emails and I'm afraid I'm never going to make it through them all. I think I'm going to have to cut my losses and just hit delete and start fresh so that I don't have a mini anxiety attack just looking at the number climb every day *grin*.

Please email me again if you did send me a message or had asked me a question that you would like me to get back to you on. I know that there have been some new comments the last couple of days on my fall felt leaves and I just wanted to say hi to my new followers and hugs to my long time faithful followers that have been waiting patiently to hear from me again :)

I'm going to try and keep up more regularly here again. It probably won't be everyday like it had been but definitely more than once every 3 months and I've got tons of summer photos that I'm going to try and post some of to. Like the rainbow cake I made for L's 8th birthday, how our chick's are doing (we're getting eggs now!) and our Michaelmas celebration that we did today :)

Hugs,
Rosina