Yeh Shen: A Cinderella Story from China

Finn's first grade class, at the little arts-based charter school that he and Elizabeth attend, performed Yeh Shen: A Cinderella Story from China this month as part of their curriculum. Each of the first grade classes performed a Cinderella story from a different country as part of a larger study of fairy tales and their place in various cultures.

Finn's class began reading the book of Yeh Shen about 6 weeks before the play, then many times over, in different groups with different children playing the various parts, they would go over each facet of the story. Finn would come home almost nightly telling me of the part he practiced that day and who else was in his group and how much fun it was to be a guard one day and a king the next.

During dance class, Finn and his classmates learned out to be cattails, reaching high for the sun, and fireflies, twittering around the cattails, and frogs, jumping among the lily pads.

During art class, they practiced symmetry by drawing shapes, folding their papers, holding them up to the light, and copying the shape to the other side, eventually turning these shapes into Chinese paper dragons.

In music class, they learned about the music from China and a little song to perform briefly in the Yeh Shen play.

During writing time, they eagerly made up their own fairy tale characters, giving them special talents and magical powers. By the end of the performance, these first graders had not just experienced the music, art, and fairy tales of China, they had an intimate knowledge of a story to share with their parents through their play. I didn't see one nervous performer nor one hesitant speaker, and even the children I know to be shy, found their courage and boldly shared this tale which has become part of their life experience now.

Yet another shining example of the educational accomplishment of this little charter school we've come to adore.

more storage for canning

The time finally came. The time where I clearly needed more space if I planned to continue canning as much as I have been. We filled our little jar shelf that used to sit in this space and then another two shelves in the pantry, a half shelf in the garage of empty jars, and still we were squeezing jar into random places. Random places that I would, of course, forget about when I needed a particular item. We've talked about added more jar storage in this space for nearly a year, and the time finally came.

We hired another parent from our kids' school to build this shelf unit, then I immediately set to work on the painting. The paint on the top 3 shelves are drying as I type, but I just couldn't wait any longer to get some of these jars out of the hallway!

The best I can figure, this shelf will hold about 250 jars of varying sizes, which is about how many we have right now. If I decide to can more than that, we'll still have to utilize part of the pantry, but at least the bulk of our jars will be in a single, organized location.

Bring on the summer! I'm ready to start canning!

PS. Have you visited The Book Children recently? There's a giveaway right now so check it out!

a Lego poem by Philip

Philip had an assignment for his AG class to write a poem that was a metaphor. The metaphor was to center around the story of the Mexican migrant workers in Arizona in the 1920s who were making such low wages that they walked out of their jobs and walked some 300 miles in protest. As Lego is the language that Philip speaks best, he used a Lego man as a metaphor.

Lego Sadness

I am the Lego head.

What a sad life I have lead.

I am the Lego hand.

I am worth a pile of sand.

I am the Lego arm.

I do not mean any harm.

I am the Lego leg.

Bad Legos I wish to peg.

And then there's the body.

We don't know about him.

He's come to help.

We now are one!

We now can walk & talk!

Our former lives are dim!

Yay!

Yarn Along

For this week's Yarn Along, I have a new book that I just started reading aloud to the kids, Flora & Ulysses. We're enjoying it, so 3 nights in we're already more than 1/3 of the way through the book. I'm still intrigued that it won the Newbery Medal this year though. Thus far, it seems a little sillier than Newbery's usual fare. More of an older-kid version of Mercy Watson than Kate DiCamillo's other more serious novels. I'll reserve my final judgment until we finish though.

On the knitting front, I've been working on some new dishcloths. I've made several dishcloth patterns in the past, but this one is new to me. I needed a change. The Double Bump Dishcloth pattern is easy to remember, but has enough visual interest and knitting interest to keep the utilitarian knitting from becoming boring. And it moves quickly. A perfect dishcloth pattern, in my opinion!

a mess in the backyard

The saga of the backyard fence began, unbeknownst to us, back when we moved into this house nearly 10 years ago. One of the appeals of this neighborhood property was the fact that our backyard shared a property line with a farm full of cute animals, mostly cows at that point. We enjoyed watching the cows as they grazed and eventually gave birth and raised baby calves. They ate everything in sight and would even happily eat our grass, which we often dumped over the fence to them.

Eventually, the cows were exchanged for horses and they still ate a good bit of the brush from around the property, although we did have some blackberries that came up along the fence line. We were actually thrilled about the blackberries. Who doesn't love free food, especially if it's just growing in your backyard!

Eventually though, the farmer passed away and the animals left. With no one to pay much attention, the forest and field ran wild and started bleeding through the fence and into our yard. Even many of the blackberries were crowded out by the pokeweed and dozens of small trees that sprouted up here.

The brush and vines became so thick that we couldn't even see much of the farm unless we were upstairs. Eventually even poison ivy became part of the mix and to top it off, the smallish trees were becoming larger trees and started shading my garden!

Clearly, we needed to get a handle on things before our garden area was completely shaded and overgrown.

Sunday morning, a couple of nice fellows made short work of this area. I was very impressed. We did decide to keep 2 trees back there, a wild cherry tree and a pine tree. Neither are a shade threat to the garden but will shade the part of the yard where the kids play most.

We still have a great deal of work to do along the fence as there are numerous twigs and debris left over from the removal. There is even still some poison ivy hanging around back there. We're hopeful that the coming rain over the next 2 days will wash some of the residual oils away so we can finish pulling up the roots.

There are also still hundreds of blackberry canes back there but most are at least a foot from the fence. Hopefully we can do a better job, with the help of a brush blade for our weed whacker, of keeping the field in it's place.

Now...let the gardening season begin!

an update for the dining room

For several months now, we've had an update for the dining room on our agenda. This room was originally painted within months of moving in almost 10 years ago! It definitely served us well, but the paint was fading and the curtains were nearly faded through. 

First we had to recover from the Christmas updates to the kids' rooms. Then, we had to wait on the painting until I had the new curtains finished for this room. Our dining room faces the street and gets all of the morning sun. Living without a curtain in these windows is not a possibility! Finally, the stars aligned, the hardware and paint were purchased, and the curtains were sewn. For about $80 in cloth, hardware, and paint, we gained an updated look in the dining room.

Before:

After:

In addition to the new curtains, we relocated the keyboard and the stemware that cluttered the top of the wine cabinet. We also moved the Nikki McClure prints to this room from their old home, which is getting an update soon.

I'm happy that this Pyrex print matches the new curtains so nicely. It needs a larger frame and matting to really fill this space though.

The curtain fabric is from Michael Miller's Put a Lid on It line. I fell in love with it nearly a year ago, and the dining room update was really planned around this fabric.

The orange walls make the photographs look a bit darker, but the room is just as light as it was before and even lighter when the curtains are drawn. The heavy red drapes we had before really blocked out the light in this space. I'm definitely happy with the updates we made here.

{this moment} - National Junior Honor Society

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. See Soulemama to play along.

a happy Easter

Often, the week of Easter is busy for us. It's typically the week that Paulie and Philip have spring break. We often travel. I forget during the busy times just how valuable it is to have a low-key Easter, full of the kind of busyness we enjoy most: making hot cross buns, church services, knitting bunny cubes, dyeing eggs, hunting eggs in our own backyard. With the number of snow days we experienced here in NC this year, the boys' spring break was shortened. We had a bit of a staycation instead, which afforded us the kind of Easter holiday that we all enjoy immensely. (The 5th bunny cube is NOT an announcement, as I've been asked, but a bunny for Paulie's and Philip's baby sister at their mom's house.)

Yarn Along

I haven't participated in Yarn Along for a couple of weeks largely because I haven't done much knitting. Easter is coming soon though, and I found these cute little bunny cubes that are a fairly quick knit (made with scraps, no less!) to add to the kids' Easter baskets. I haven't gotten quite as far as I hoped this week, but I'm sure I can finish the last couple before Easter.

I also just started reading Empty Mansions, which has been on my library list for quite some time. I was fascinated with the story of Huguette Clark when it hit the news a few years ago. Thus far, the book is quite interesting with history of her family and many details of happenings in the world at that time.

The lone finished bunny cube! He needs to start multiplying soon!

a Little Free Library

Back in the fall, I heard about a Kickstarter campaign launched by a local woman hoping to put a couple of Little Free Libraries in our area. The campaign took on a life of its own as the goal was surpassed and totaled more than $10k in only 2 weeks. The woman who launched the campaign decided to build as many as she could, more than 20 at last count, and put them all over our region of NC.

Almost as soon as I heard about the project, I sent a message to the Little Free Libraries NC (a page started to keep folks informed on the progress of the campaign) group on Facebook asking how I could help. I volunteered to help paint, along with my kids, or host a Little Free Library.

Paulie, Elizabeth, and Finn painted our Little Free Library when it arrived this past weekend. They decided on solid backgrounds with dripping-paint stripes for the design. And once the post hole was ready, she was set into place.

The Little Free Libraries NC group received more than just monetary donations, but many book donations as well, and this weekend, when our Little Free Library was installed, it also came stocked with the generosity of our local community.

This project thrilled our kids. In addition to helping get the Library into place, they have been constantly checking to see if any books have been claimed or returned, checking for leakage after our rains yesterday (none was detected), and thinking about which of their own beloved books they'd like to share with the community.

If you are interested in learning more about the Little Free Library project, you can find information at LittleFreeLibary.org. They have instructions for building your own Library, a map for locating a library near you, and other ways to support the Little Free Library program. The map takes time to update, which means it might be a few months before our Little Free Library sees much traffic other than our own little neighborhood (or before local folks can find the 9 that have been added to our area just this month). I can't wait to see how this project unfolds for us over the coming years, and I'm elated that we are able to be a part of this movement of sharing some of our favorite stories with the community around us.