Another sweet and simple holiday–just how I like it.  Our celebration was very similar to last year’s. This year, St. Nicholas brought each child a golden nut, a tangerine, chocolate coins, a candy cane, a geode to break open, and a small wooden mushroom kaleidoscope. For The Girl, he brought a small wooden honey pot for her tea set, and for The Boy, he brought a tiny Lego set.

After celebrating the festivals for over a year now, I can see how the simplicity and the sameness from year to year really shines through.  It’s the resonance of the year’s passage and the comfort of the reliability and predictability that really makes celebrating the seasons so special.

And here’s how our nature table looked before I cleared it off for Advent.

Even though I felt like I was well prepared for the holiday season, it sort of crept up on me!  But vowing to do less every year has really taken the stress out of the holiday.  We are going to wrap up school this week, and get down to some serious crafting and baking in the weeks to come.  I’m really looking forward to it!

Much to my chagrin, The Girl chose to be a princess.  Specifically, “a princess with a fluffy blue dress.” While I don’t especially subscribe to the whole princess thing, I can surely understand my girl’s desire to wear a big beautiful dress. Despite the trickiness of all those layers of tulle, the dress went together pretty easily after just a week’s sewing.  I used Simplicity 2569, even though I had to combine several of the designs to get what she wanted. The crown is the same as these.

The Boy chose to be The Dragon King.  His favorite fantasy character at this time, The Dragon King does not hurt the dragons, but rather he communicates with them.  He is their friend.  We re-used the cape and shirt from this costume, so all I had to make was the vest.  You can’t really tell, but the vest fabric is printed with reptile scales.

This was the first year we took the kids trick-or-treating in our own neighborhood, and we had a great time!  There was much grumbling at first, but once the kids saw how much candy they had, they began to really enjoy themselves!  It was a very sweet and easy Halloween, quietly celebrated by our little family of four.

We’re ready when you are, Fall.

I spent the past weekend processing the 73 pounds of tomatoes I picked on Friday, and it was exhausting work.  But now I have thirteen quarts of canned tomatoes, five pints of frozen oil-packed oven roasted tomatoes, thirteen pints of tomato chutney, and six pints of tomato jam.  Whew!  That’s a lot of chutney?  Do you like chutney?  Come over and get a jar.

Also on my mind lately is worm composting, vegetable gardening, chickens, and beekeeping.  I’m loving this video on “Backwards Beeekeeping.” All of this inspired by the book The Urban Homestead by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen. I first read about Kelly and Erik in the book Radical Homemakers. 

The Urban Homestead has knocked my socks off.  I’ve always come up with excuses for not gardening or keeping chickens, and now I have none.  We are going to be removing a (mostly) dead tree in our backyard, and cutting another way back, to try to create enough sunlight for a narrow veggie patch.  I am so excited about it!  I have big plans for the front yard too, which involve a citrus tree and a rose garden, all watered with graywater from our bath.  I’ve always thought it was such a waste to not re-use all that barely used water, and now I see that there is a real way to use it.

I also started my first wooden spoon, and I just finished the quilt top for the new quilt I am making.  I’ve been a busy bee!  But for now, spring has made a brief return to Florida (It’s usually summer temperatures here by now) so we are on our way outside for some reading.

We celebrated our first May Day today.  Being a cross-quarter day, marking the midpoint between the spring equinox and the summer solstice, it signifies the peak of spring, and the forthcoming summer.  We joined together for flower crafting, singing, dancing, playing and feasting.  Enjoying the sunshine and fresh air, as many many before us have.  Celebrating community and a shared belief that we are all connected to each other as well as the earth.

This was our first outing to meet some local homeschoolers and they were all very friendly and welcoming.  Through a stroke of pleasant irony, The Boy’s previous First Grade teacher just happened to bring her son to the playground while we were there.  It was nice to see her (pregnant!) and fill her in on how it’s going.  It somehow seemed like a nice closure to school.  One thing I was really concerned about when The Boy left school was the loss of community.  Once we were gone, it seemed barely noticeable, and now it seems like a non-issue.

The Girl was very excited about the maypole, having watched several maypole dances online.  As we gathered to watch the experienced maypole dancers show us how it was done, she began to cry because she wanted so badly to join. Her turn came soon enough and she was delighted.

For the feast, I brought gluten free pasta with pesto and a gluten free lemon cake (with mini maypole!). The feast was delicious and I have to say that there once was a time that I disliked the potluck and having now enjoyed so many great ones, now I love it!  Not only is it enjoyable to build community through food, but what a treat to enjoy so many new dishes!

It was a lovely, inspiring day all around.

I love the springtime.  It’s my favorite season here in Florida, and it can be fleeting.  I love the whole spring holiday aesthetic: pastel colors, birdies, eggs.  What’s not to love about that?  I vowed to not let the holiday sneak up on me this year but it did anyway.  It seems that every year we are sick in the weeks leading up to it.  I don’t know why I am surprised that it happened again this year.  But every year I let go of a bit more and every year I am happier with our celebration.  I did not make The Girl’s dress this year, and I did very little crafting for basket stuffers.

And it seems I’m the only mama on the planet who didn’t make her own plant-based egg dyes.  Every year I want to and every year I don’t.  But I’m okay with that.  I have to be honest that I love the bright colors of the food coloring, but next year I swear I will make the natural dyes.

I did manage to make Not Martha’s Surprise Eggs which were a lot of fun.  The kids loved them. They are filled with chocolate, jelly beans, temporary tattoos, stickers, and a pipe cleaner chick.  These were seriously fun and with splitting up the tasks over several days, they were fairly easy to make.

I also managed to make some fresh butter while on the phone with The Bird. How’s that for pioneer woman productivity?

I made the same meal that I always do (except the salmon) and this year I made a gluten free lemon cake because The Bird planted the idea of lemon cake in my head and I couldn’t get it out. With cake flags, of course.

Hopefully next year I will actually get my act together early instead of just thinking about it.  I’ll admit that I’m still trying to find my rhythm as far as having both kids at home and working school into the day.  Watching the holiday come and go so quickly made me contemplate starting winter solstice gifts now.  Seriously.

Well I sort of disappeared from this space for a while there.  I’m sure you can guess why:  I came down with the flu the kids had. Somehow The Daddy Monkey was spared.  But today we are all sick with some sort of sinus cold.  So rather than focus on how much sickness I’ve dealt with over the last three weeks, I decided to pop in here and share a beautiful moment from last week.

It was Friday, and we had finally gotten back into the swing of things.  Laundry was caught up, and we were finally back at school again. We hadn’t yet come down with this bug we have now.  I usually make Friday a half day as far as school is concerned, but I just decided at breakfast that the day was far too beautiful to be inside.  The boy asked me, “why don’t we make Fridays a weekend?”

So for once, I indulged us all.  It was our first beach trip of the year.  We arrived to find the beach pretty empty, and changed from how we left it last year.  The water was still cold, but we managed to get a bit wet.  We had a lovely time, and it was the first time I took my children to the beach, just the three of us, and they weren’t asking, “when do our friends get here?”

I will admit I’ve had a few homeschool moments when I have thought, “what have I gotten myself into?” But to be able to take my children to the beach on a Friday morning (and manage to learn something while we are there!) fills my heart with such gladness that I am able to give them this gift.

“School always appeared to me like a prison, and I never could make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was such a joy to run about in the free air, or to paddle around in the water.”  ~Claude Monet

Here’s our winter nature table once again.  Even though some days it doesn’t feel like winter, it at least looks like winter on our nature table.  I got the idea for the tree from Made by Joel.  I really miss naked trees down here in Florida.

Wheatgrass and quartz crystal.

Handmade tomten.  I absolutely love the book The Tomten by Astrid Lindgren. It’s one of my favorite children’s books of all time.  Rocks, pinecone, sweetgum balls, and acorn caps from our New York trip this winter.

Brigid rejoins our nature table as of Candlemas.  She and her flock were handmade by The Daddy Monkey and I.

Spring is most definitely on its way to us.  The nights are still cool enough for a wool blanket, but this afternoon the temperature climbed up to 73 degrees!  It was absolutely gorgeous.  March is my favorite month in Florida, and I am looking forward to it!