February 2023: Clever as a crow

February is always a short month, and even shorter if you count by school days, because we have a week of vacation. We fit a lot into this “short” month, though: two birthdays (thus two cakes), Valentine’s Day, a quick family visit in Florida, and at least 31 days’ worth of reading even though there were only 28 days.

What we’ve read

The kiddo has been re-reading Patricia C. Wrede’s excellent Dealing With Dragons series, and has discovered the Goddess Girls graphic novels by Joan Holub, thanks to a recommendation from a colleague’s daughter. We also enjoyed The Secret of Platform 13 by Eva Ibbotson, The Golden Compass graphic novel, and The Runaway Princess.

As for early readers and picture books, we love Elise  Gravel’s Arlo & Pips (there are three so far); Love, Violet by Charlotte Sullivan Wild and Charlene Chua (Stonewall Book Award); and Six Dots: A Story of Young Louis Braille by Jen Bryant and Boris Kulikov, which features the Braille code on the endpapers and inspired the creation of some homemade Braille made with cardboard and pencil.

The day the ALA Youth Media Awards were announced in January, I requested several of the medal and honor books across every award, and they’ve all been great, including:

• Freewater by Amina Luqman-Dawson (Newbery Medal, Coretta Scott King)
• Iveliz Explains It All by Andrea Beatriz Arango (Newbery Honor)
• Choosing Brave: How Mamie Till-Mobley and Emmett Till Sparked the Civil Rights Movement, illustrated by Janelle Washington and written by Angela Joy (Caldecott Honor, Coretta Scott King, Sibert Honor)
• Listen: How Evelyn Glennie, a Deaf Girl, Changed Percussion by Shannon Stocker, illustrated by Devon Holzwarth (Schneider Family Book Award, 0-8)
• Wildoak by C.C. Harrington (Schneider Family Book Award, middle grade)
  
• Honestly Elliott by Gillian McDunn (Schneider Family Honor)
• All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir (Printz Medal)
• When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb (Printz Honor, Stonewall, Sydney Taylor)
• Where Wonder Grows by Xelena González, illustrated by Adriana M. Garcia (Pura Belpré Youth Illustration Award winner)
  
• A Seed Grows by Antoinette Portis (Sibert Honor, Geisel Honor)
• The Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town in Stories and Photographs by Chana Stiefel, illustrated by Susan Gal (Sydney Taylor, Sibert Honor)
• Gigi and Ojiji by Melissa Iwai (Geisel Honor)

What we’ve made in the kitchen

I didn’t keep good notes this month, we definitely ate more than this:

Savory

• “Pantry dal” with sweet potatoes
• Grilled cheese sandwiches
• “Angry Grandma” pizza (Keepers by Deb Perelman)
• Green bean and tofu curry (Dinner by Melissa Clark)

Sweet

• Cream scones with currants (America’s Test Kitchen)
• Tiramisu-ish Icebox Cake (Claire Saffitz)
• Cinnamon swirl bread (recipe from the picture book My Hands Tell A Story)
• Three-layer chocolate cake with chocolate cream cheese frosting (family recipe)
• Baked French toast (Keepers by Deb Perelman)

What we’ve grown

The lemon tree flowered, and I tried hand-pollinating it with a paintbrush, and it seemed like we were going to get a few lemons, but…no lemons. The tree is still healthy and beautiful though, and all the other indoor plants are thriving too; the Christmas cactus has been blooming since November, and one of the African violets bloomed too. I’m beginning to think about how best to protect our berries in the spring and summer…

What we’ve made (not edible)

• A pair of green fabric belts. They’re very simple to make: I got a pair of D-rings from the craft store, measured a length of fabric, and folded it in quarters to enclose the seams (like making quilt binding).
• Two cheery blue floral pillowcases: one with a pink cuff and no trim, one with a yellow cuff and pink trim.

December 2022: the icing on the cake

It’s been quite a month, starting with wrapping up the Scholastic Book Fair at my school, attending The Nutcracker at the Academy of Music, celebrating Hanukkah, and cancelling all our vacation plans because COVID finally caught us (well, two out of three of us). Fortunately, we didn’t feel sick (thank you, vaccines!), and some enforced extra time at home to read, do art, build Lego, catch up on cleaning, and watch movies wasn’t the worst thing.

What we’ve read

The kiddo has been zipping through the Phoebe and Her Unicorn series of graphic novels by Dana Simpson, as well as The 13-Story Treehouse books by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton. She also received Eva Evergreen, Semi-Magical Witch by Julie Abe as a Hanukkah present, and we got the sequel from the library.

As for me, I’ve been reading all the Heavy Medal (Mock Newbery) titles that I hadn’t already read, and discovered some excellent titles I might have missed otherwise. I’ve also been keeping up with Betsy Bird’s “31 Days, 31 Lists” all month, and my to-read list is, of course, growing.

What we’ve made in the kitchen

I, too, received a book for Hanukkah…the new Smitten Kitchen book, Keepers. We’ve already made five recipes from it, and they’ve all been…wait for it…keepers!

Savory

• Vegetarian chili
• Baked macaroni and cheese
• Cornbread
• Green pasta casserole (spinach, cheddar-gruyere, pecorino romano)
• Pizza star bread (Junior Baking Show)
• Butternut Squash soup (Smitten Kitchen Keepers)
• Orzo with artichoke hearts (Smitten Kitchen Keepers)
• “Angry Grandma” pizza (but not angry) (Smitten Kitchen Keepers)
• Potato, onion, and cheese pierogies with scallions
• Sweet potato fries (Smitten Kitchen Keepers)

Sweet

• Lemon Poppyseed cake (Sweet)
• Chocolate vanilla marbled cookies (Rage Baking)
• Snickerdoodle cookies (Flour)
• Oatmeal chocolate chip cookie cake (Snacking Cakes)
• Baked French Toast (Smitten Kitchen Keepers)
• Gingerbread cookies (Mary Berry)
• Banana bread muffins (Flour’s banana bread recipe in muffin form)
• Lemon lavender scones (from a mix we received as a gift)
• Bûche de noël (Flour, Too)
• Cranberry orange scones (America’s Test Kitchen)

Gingerbread Catan

Buche de noel

February 2022: Patchwork

What we’ve read

Highlights from a month of reading, including several ALA Youth Media Award winner and honor books. (And some writing about books as well: I wrote a piece on “fantastical creatures” in picture books for School Library Journal.)

Children’s

• Little Witch Hazel: A Year in the Forest by Phoebe Wahl
• The New Neighbors by Sarah McIntyre
• A Walk in the Words by Hudson Talbot
• Before She Was Harriet by Lesa Cline-Ransome and James E. Ransome
• Garlic and the Vampire by Bree Paulsen (graphic novel)
• A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

MG/YA/Adult

• Long Road to the Circus by Betsy Bird, illus. David Small
• A Kind of Spark by Elle McNicoll
• Rez Dogs by Joseph Bruchac
• New From Here by Kelly Yang (ARC)
• The Summer of Lost Letters by Hannah Reynolds
• When the World Was Ours by Liz Kessler
• How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
• Once Upon A Time We Ate Animals: The Future of Food by Roanne Van Voorst
• Beautiful Little Fools by Jillian Cantor

What we’ve made in the kitchen

Savory

• “Anytime bars” (The Cancer-Fighting Kitchen)
• Challah with raisins (Joan Nathan by way of Deb Perelman, with an overnight rest/rise in the fridge)
• Pizza with pesto, roasted butternut squash, and caramelized onion
• Pickled cabbage salad (Smitten Kitchen)
• Veggie sushi
• Chana masala
• Veggie and potato pot pie with caramelized onion crust
• Vegetable and tofu tempura (Moosewood)

Sweet

• Raspberry slab pie
• Chocolate chip cookies (Flour)
• Chocolate chip espresso cake (Snacking Cakes)
• All the Spices cake (Snacking Cakes)
• Donut cake (Snacking Cakes)
• Pretzel wands
• Swedish visiting cake (Dorie Greenspan)

What we’ve made outside of the kitchen

A baby quilt for a close friend’s second baby. I’d never done triangles or pinwheels before, so this was fun for me to put together. The kiddo, as always, helped with fabric choice and design; I only used what I had on hand. In retrospect, a border would have given the eye a bit more room to rest (but as the kiddo said, “Well, it’s too late now”), and the binding I used is cut in the wrong direction, but hopefully it will hold.

Stuffed patchwork turtle toy for a niece/cousin, from a homemade template. Next time the neck and head ought to be bigger; I meant to sew on button eyes, but they would have taken up the whole head, giving it a creepy Coraline appearance. A friend suggested using French knots for eyes (which have the benefit of not being a choking hazard!), but I’d already sewn it up. Next time!

Also, the kiddo was beginning to run through the knees of some new-ish red fleece leggings, so to preserve their usefulness, I sewed heart-shaped denim patches on.

What we’ve grown

Indoor plants remain pretty happy and healthy. I’ve started a few new pothos plants from cuttings off the old plants, moved a few things around, got some cute (but too small to be really useful) hanging planters that look like sloths, and on our one 60-degree day, the lemon tree got to soak up some sun outside.

Thoughts on this year’s garden:

• Tomatoes: Instead of starting 30+ plants from seed, I’m going to wait till May and get just a few plants from a nursery, and plant them in pots or containers I’ll be able to move so they can get as much sun as possible.
• Strawberries and kale: Last year’s plants have spread from one raised bed to 1 1/2 of the beds, so I’m going to let them do their thing, and plant kale in the rest of the space.
• Peas and sweet peas: Will try in pots again this year and hope for better outcome.
• Pumpkins: Thinking of planting some sugar pumpkins to use for decoration and eating. Should we wind up with extra, they’ll be easy to give away to neighbors, but when I’ve grown pumpkins before I’ve only gotten 1-2 full-size pumpkins (and 30 feet of vine).

January 2022: Staying cozy inside

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

-The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was hoping to start 2022 on a more optimistic note, but here we are: “So we beat on…ceaselessly.” Just as in September, our main hope is that we stay healthy, and that our community stays healthy, and that schools stay open. Our 2019 selves would raise an eyebrow at this low bar, but on the plus side…we’re sure doing a lot of reading and cooking and baking, and just started a new quilt. And let’s not forget the great (freezing) outdoors: we’ve gone sledding, and saw a fox catch some small unfortunate creature in the backyard with a tremendous pounce worthy of Over and Under the Snow by Kate Messner. See? Silver linings! (Be the fox, not the shrew.) “You know what the Monty Python boys say…Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

What we’ve read

Children’s

• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
• Nurk by Ursula Vernon
• Fergus & Zeke at the Science Fair and Fergus and Zeke the 100th Day of School by Kate Messner
• The Leaf Thief by Alice Hemming and Nicola Slater
• El Cucuy Is Scared Too! by Donna Barba Higuera and Juliana Perdomo
• It Fell From the Sky by the Fan brothers
• Magic Candies by Heena Baek, translated by Sophie Bowman
• Try It! How Frieda Caplan Changed the Way We Eat by Mara Rockliff and Giselle Potter
• The Book Rescuer by Sue Macy and Stacy Innerst

MG/YA

• The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book by Kate Milford (re-read)
• Beyond the Bright Sea and Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk
• The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix
• Gracefully Grayson by Ami Polonsky
• The Boy, the Bird, & the Coffin Maker by Matilda Woods
• The Last Mapmaker by Christina Soontornvat
• How to Find What You’re Not Looking For by Veera Hiranandani

Adult

• Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
• Pocketful of Crows by Joanne Harris
• Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
• These Precious Days by Ann Patchett

What we’ve made in the kitchen

Savory(ish)

• Ciabatta (Pastry Love): made 2 loaves, incredibly delicious.
• Almond flour pancakes (KAF): Still trying to get the hang of doing these on the electric stove.
• Tomato Soup (Flour): Good with the cheddar-scallion scones but quite acidic; finished with cream. (Tip from a neighbor: add a pinch of baking soda to reduce acidity!)
• Cheddar Scallion Scones (Flour): Sticky to work with but otherwise perfect.
• Chicken(less) Pot Pie (Flour) with potatoes, carrots, corn, peas, and green beans: Better than the ATK recipe I’ve been making for years – and also, somehow, easier and created fewer dishes?? A definite win. (Only did top crust, “bottomless” style.)
• Pickled Cabbage Salad (Smitten Kitchen) (minus the celery seed)
• Potato leek soup
• Veggie sushi with carrot, cucumber, and pickled red onion

Sweet

• Cran-apple pies: Used leftover cranberry-applesauce, and pate brisee left over from the Flour recipe for the pot pie topping
• Pumpkin Olive Oil cake (Snacking Cakes): I think this is better than the pumpkin bread recipe I’ve been using my whole life; a bit lighter and not quite as sweet (but still sweet). Used pepitas on top, no glaze.
• Brioche au chocolat (Flour): Generally I do not like when a recipe includes other recipes in the ingredient list, and this one includes two (pastry cream and brioche). However…exceptions must be made.
• Molasses Spice Cookies (ATK) (added candied crystallized ginger)
• Pear cranberry clafoutis (Wintersweet)
• Snickerdoodle cookies (Flour)

What we’ve grown

Jazzy greens! These little microgreens grow super fast; you can pull them right out, snip the ends into the compost, and throw the tops on a sandwich to feel virtuous when you have spent the whole month baking and eating sweets. For example.

January 2021: Into the woods…and home before dark

It doesn’t entirely feel like a fresh new year – 2020 is still lingering – but here it is, somehow nearly February.

What We’ve Read So Far

The kiddo has fallen head over heels for Harriet Hamsterbone, a.k.a. Ursula Vernon’s Hamster Princess series (Harriet the Invincible, Mice and Magic, Ratpunzel, Giant Trouble, and Whiskerella). We have borrowed both the print and audiobooks of all of them from the library (except the print copy of Harriet the Invincible, which we own), and she listens to them constantly. I love them too – Harriet is a badass with a wry sense of humor, and these twisted fairy tales are some of my favorite versions. The kiddo also loves Bethan Woollvin’s picture book versions of Rapunzel, Little Red, and Hansel & Gretel, as well as Bo the Brave. We might even kick off our brand-new Mother/Daughter Book Club with Woollvin’s Hansel & Gretel.

Here are some other picture books we’ve read and liked lately:

• Just A Minute and Just in Case by Yuyi Morales
• We Are Water Protectors by Carole Lindstrom and Michaela Goade (Caldecott winner!)
• What We’ll Build by Oliver Jeffers
• Wordplay by Adam Lehrhaupt
• Your House, My House by Marianne Dubuc
• Pacho Nacho by Silvia Lopez
• Federico and the Wolf by Rebecca J. Gomez and Elisa Chavarri
• Sootypaws by Maggie Rudy (thank you, Betsy Bird!)
• The Cool Bean and The Couch Potato by Jory John and Bob Shea
• When We Are Kind by Monique Gray Smith

She’s also been really into The Magic School Bus, both the books by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen and the late ’90s TV show (Lily Tomlin is Ms. Frizzle’s voice). She’s learning a lot about various topics (dinosaurs, rocks, beehives) and also picking up on the terrible puns. And we discovered the Zoey & Sassafras series by Asia Citro as well (science + magic = awesome).

As for my own reading, my top recommendations for this month include:

Fiction: Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Racculia, How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang, The Enigma Game by Elizabeth Wein (YA), and The Sea in Winter by Christine Day (MG)

Nonfiction: The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri, You Never Forget Your First by Alexis Coe, Can’t Even by Anne Helen Petersen, and Save the Cat! Writes A Novel by Jessica Brody

What We’ve Made (Edible)

• Thai red curry with tofu and snow peas from Dinner by Melissa Clark: this was fantastic, and I will make it again, but whoa was it spicy! She calls for 3 Tbsp of Thai red curry paste, and I used 1 1/2 Tbsp, and it was still so, so hot. (Granted, none of the adults in the house have much of a spice tolerance, but still…maybe it was supposed to be tsp and not Tbsp?)
• Potato samosas: I tried to use a dough recipe I found online, and it was awful to work with, so I went back to using pie dough. Need to check out an Indian cookbook soon to get some reliable recipes.
• Cheese and tofu lasagna
• Quiche with cheese and shallots
• Enchiladas with homemade corn tortillas: very good, as usual, even though I forgot to put bouillon or bay leaves in the water while I was cooking the chicken.
• Applesauce, twice (we got a bag of disappointingly mushy apples, but they made great sauce!)
• English muffin toasting bread and Vermont whole wheat oatmeal honey bread (King Arthur Flour)
• Cinnamon swirl raisin bread (America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook)
• Rye bread (Pastry Love)
• Rugelach: these came out differently than when I made them before – maybe I did an egg wash before? Maybe I used Deb Perelman’s recipe instead of Joanne Chang’s? Still tasty but not exceptional. I used strawberry jam, pecans, and walnuts for the filling.
• Mocha Chip cookies from Pastry Love were very, very good.
• Apple Vanilla pound cake from Flour was just okay. I’d make Dorie Greenspan’s visiting cake instead next time.
• Morning buns: croissant dough recipe from Flour, morning bun recipe from my friend Catherine. The process takes three days but they are so good.
• “Chocolate Pudding Now” and “Chocolate Cherry Biscotti” from Rage Baking. The pudding was perfect (Ben made it), and the biscotti turned out well, though I had to add an extra egg to make the dough come together (and I added pistachios, and skipped the chocolate drizzle – they’re plenty chocolatey).

What We’ve Made (Not Edible)

• Orange You Glad We Made This Bird Feeder? (Tinkergarten)
• Nature Faces (Playful Invitations)
• Dot Cards for number/quantity recognition (Erikson Institute Early Math Collaborative)
• Lots of drawings, paintings, and writing practice
• Baby quilt for a friend (finished!)

Where We’ve Been

Not much of anywhere (pandemic), except for playgrounds and hikes – but we’ve been on a lot of great hikes! The Emily Dickinson trail, Bear Mountain, Amethyst Brook Conservation Area, Wentworth Conservation Area, Howard Garis trail, Skinner State Park, and probably a couple others I’m forgetting.

December 2020: Goodbye to all that

What we’ve read so far

We’re still enjoying Yasmin by Saadia Faruqi and Dory Fantasmagory by Abby Hanlon, as well as some Magic Treehouse books by Mary Pope Osbourne. On the nonfiction (or nonfiction-ish) side, we’ve liked the Usborne book Look Inside Your Body, which has lots of lift-the-flap components, and There’s A Skeleton Inside You! by Idan Ben-Barak and Julian Frost (who also worked on Do Not Lick This Book).

As is my December tradition, I re-read one of Kate Milton’s Greenglass House books (this year it was Bluecrowne). I also enjoyed (maybe “enjoyed” isn’t the right word) The Illness Lesson by Clare Beams, and am about halfway through The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. I liked Where the Crawdads Sing, but don’t quite understand its off-the-charts popularity. I really enjoyed the middle grade graphic novel Snapdragon by Kat Leyh, and the MG/YA anthology Once Upon an Eid, edited by S.K. Ali and Aisha Saeed. I also got to review a middle grade novel for School Library Journal!

Here’s my 2020 reading wrap-up.

What we’ve made in the kitchen

• Savory: leek quiche, “green pasta,” Spanish rice, tortilla chips (from homemade tortillas), chicken pot pie, veggie daal, za’atar chicken with lemon yogurt (from Dinner by Melissa Clark), battered cod with kale and sweet potatoes, “kale Caesar” salad, and cheese lasagna.
• Sweet: applesauce, oatmeal raisin cookies (from Flour by Joanne Chang), oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, ginger molasses cookies (from Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan), Mary Berry’s gingerbread house, banana bread (Flour), cinnamon swirl bread (America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook), and bûche de noël (Flour, Too).

The gingerbread house recipe made so much gingerbread, and I reduced all the amounts by 1/4. (I did have to substitute corn syrup for the golden syrup, and brown sugar for muscovado.) There was still plenty for four walls and a roof. I elected not to do a chimney, but we had enough dough to make extra cookies: trees, ginger-people, stars, etc. The icing worked remarkably well and hardened quickly; the roof stayed put! After a day we broke the house apart and stored the pieces in tupperware. It took about a week to eat (and we gave some of the extra cookies to neighbor friends).

The bûche de noël is still in progress but will be finished in a few hours. I elected not to do the meringue mushrooms, only (only!) the white chocolate cream filling, the cake, the soaking syrup, and the chocolate ganache.

What we’ve made

• Nearly done with a rainbow rail fence baby quilt for a friend! But my sewing machine is in need of a tuneup, so finishing the binding will have to wait.
• Quilted placemats made from quilt scraps (also waiting on sewing machine tuneup to finish). The kiddo designed all four and helped sew (she works the foot pedal while I guide the fabric through the machine. I also do the ironing).
• Zipper pouch (owl print outside, blue with white polka dots inside).

Where we’ve been

We’ve been exploring all the local playgrounds; we’ve been to four elementary school playgrounds and two public ones, plus the Sunwheel at UMass. We’ve gone on hikes in Amherst (some of the Norwottuck Rail Trail, the Emily Dickinson trail), Shutesbury (near Lake Wyola), and Holyoke (Whiting Reservoir). We visited the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art while it was open (with lots of safety procedures in place). And that’s about it! Hopefully, in 2021 we’ll get to explore some more indoor spaces as well as outdoor ones. Looking forward to getting that vaccine…

January 2020: What do you have to say about today?

My goal for this blog this year is to write (1) a monthly wrap-up post about the dog, garden (indoor/outdoor, depending on season), kitchen, and arts & crafts, and (2) a “what we’ve read so far” post every two or three months to document the kiddo’s reading. So here we go: January!

Dog: The dog is still being her usual self: sleeping, yawning, going back to sleep. We’ve had to tell concerned dog-sitters No, don’t worry, it’s normal that she doesn’t get around to breakfast till 4pm! She has the occasional playful mood; perhaps twice a day she will want to play with a stuffed toy, which means throw and catch approximately three times (if you throw it at her a fourth time, she will just let it hit her and bounce off). Also, in the latest edition of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, she has peed on the rug several times.

Garden: I divided two very overgrown and crowded succulent plants and got eight more! I gave one to a friend and the others are on various windowsills, drinking winter sunlight.

I also read a book called Decorating With Plants by Baylor Chapman; it provided a lot of practical information and good ideas, as well as photographs of wildly unrealistic interiors (who has five whimsical hooks in their entryway with a single item on three of them and NOTHING ELSE? Come on). But really, I read it all the way through and then went to the garden center with a list. I found almost everything I wanted: an air plant, English ivy, a snake plant, and another ZZ. (We also picked up a maidenhair fern, and another kalanchoe because the kiddo liked the color.)

Kitchen: We’ve been doing so much baking, and the kiddo is at a point where she’s really helpful: she knows where all the ingredients are and can get them out and put them away; she can unwrap sticks of butter, cut with supervision, roll balls of dough, and sprinkle flour.

• Bread: I make English Muffin Toasting Bread every week or two, and we’ve started making Simple Tortillas as well instead of getting storebought ones.
• Cookies: So many cookies. Oatmeal raisin and chocolate chunk from Flour, snickerdoodle from America’s Test Kitchen, chocolate ginger from Martha Stewart’s Cookies (we gave those as teacher gifts in December and they were very well-received). Oh, and butter cookies with a tie-dye glaze.
• Pastry: Bought some phyllo dough and made wing-it versions of spanakopita, baklava, and a sweet potato/caramelized onion/goat cheese thing. All pretty good. (Pro tip: anytime you’re applying butter with a paintbrush, the recipe is probably going to be pretty good.)

Arts & crafts: Sometime last year, the kiddo went through a stage of snapping her crayons and peeling them in half. She really, really loved to do this. I let her go to town on half our crayons, and put the rest away, reasoning (I am a genius) that later, she might want whole crayons (I was right). Last week, we organized the peeled crayons by color in muffin tins and melted them in the oven at 200 F for about 15 minutes. We let them cool, and then voila, big new round crayons! (The muffin tin, alas, will never be the same. Should’ve used those paper muffin cup liners.)

In my basement sewing lair workshop, I made an apron for a friend’s kid, and a matching zipper pouch for her. And then another zipper pouch, because it’s just hard to stop once you get going.

And on New Year’s Day, I cut up an old sweater of Ben’s and made it into a skirt. It’s slightly lumpy, but it fits, it’s cozy, and the pockets are sized such that whatever is in them does not fall out when I sit down. (2019 wasn’t the best-ever year for feminism, so it’s DIY pockets, I guess.)

Writing: Last summer, we started keeping a line-a-day journal with the kiddo. Every evening, we ask her, “What do you have to say about your day?” Responses range from “…What did we do today?” to a coherent summary, from a moody “Don’t write anything down” or “It was a bad day” to wild excitement (usually over something ordinary). It’s already really fun to look back at what she’s dictated over the past several months.

And in other writing news, I finished a second draft of my middle grade novel and it’s off with a few trusted beta readers now. I’m looking forward to their feedback.

Previously on Dawson’s Creek this blog: August-November 2019 wrap-up, “From summer to snow“

Wintergreen

If you live in a wintry climate, and there is a garden center or nursery near you, I highly recommend visiting on an cold day and walking around inside, just breathing in all that green. (If you’re lucky enough to live near one of those tropical palm houses, like in Chicago, then by all means go there.)

I spent a couple wonderful hours at a garden center in January and came home with a couple of ficus trees (Ficus benjamina and Ficus lyrata) and a philodendron (“Prince of Orange”) and a jade plant. They all seem to be thriving, though I often hear the benjamina dropping dead leaves in the middle of the night.

We also painted and rearranged our half-size office-y room upstairs, so now it’s more of a greenhouse/yoga room. I divided my aloe and moved a couple other succulents up there, because the window gets great light. We also planted some seeds today from a butternut squash, so we’ll see if those take. (Are grocery store squash treated in some way that makes you unable to use the seeds to grow your own?)

Not related to the garden, but I also knitted a replacement orange scarf (apparently this yarn is NOT washable – the cowl I made last year fused to itself when I washed it), and sewed curtains for two more windows. They’re so much nicer when they’re hemmed to the right length, and it was nice to get reacquainted with my sewing machine. (The kiddo got to help too; I let her do the foot pedal for some of the curtains, and try out a zig-zag stitch on some scrap fabric.) I haven’t done a sewing project since the quilt I finished last December – but I just signed up for a beginning quilting class that starts at the end of April!

Snow day

“It’s snowing EVERYWHERE!”

Blizzard in March? This kid doesn’t mind.