A Glimpse Of Our Weekly Rhythm-On Friday We Grind Our Flour

I thought I might share a little bit about our weekly rhythm here.  Specifically, I want to share what we do on most Fridays.  This is the day that we grind our flour in order to prepare for baking day on Saturday.  It's also the day that we have some sort of pie for dinner.  It can be pizza, or a quiche, or pot pie.  Usually it's something that requires using some of our freshly ground flour.  W doesn't like the noise of the mill particularly, but he does love to help with the grinding.  Honestly, he's more help with this than I have ever wanted!  Still, I wouldn't miss involving him in this process for anything.  Grinding our own flour helps to connect him with the source of his food even at this young age.  He knows what wheat looks like when it's growing, thanks to the wonderful folks at Mount Vernon.

And within a few weeks we'll be able to go see how they separate the kernels of wheat from the chafe in this threshing barn.

We also have been to see them operate the Mount Vernon Grist Mill where they grind wheat and corn.

Picture courtesy of my MIL.  
W was too terrified of the noise for me to get any pictures inside.

Okay, back to our home flour grinding.  This is the mill we grind on.  Someday I'd love to get one of those lovely hand powered mills too, to help W get an even better feel for the process.

Please ignore the kernels of wheat all over the counter and 

kindly remember that I have a two and a half year old helping with all of this!

We mostly grind soft white wheat for pastry flour and hard white wheat for bread flour. 

Soft white wheat on the left and hard white wheat on the right.

W helps me to measure out the grain and sort it to make sure there are not any rocks that go into our mill.   And then we fill up the hopper of our mill, turn it on and go read a book in the other room.

Then W thinks the fun begins as we bag up the flour as soon as it's ground.

Next time I must remember to put an apron on him!

What a mess!

Do you see what I mean about more help than I ever knew I wanted?

And here are my giant bags of flour with the wheat.

The hard white is on the left and the soft white is on the right.

And then of course the best part about our flour grinding day.  Making pizza for dinner.

 He is such a big helper getting that yeast to proof....

...and helping to mix up the dough with Mama's dough hook.

Sorry I didn't manage any pictures past W mixing up the dough for the pizza.  I was too exhausted from cleaning flour off of every surface in my kitchen.  You'll have to take my word for it.  It was delicious!

September Circle Time and Babysitting Rhythm

I'm not sure if I have mentioned it before in my blog, but I now babysit a little girl, A, who is a few months older than W two mornings and one afternoon a week.  She lives in our neighborhood and they were already playmates, when I offered to watch her so that she wouldn't have to go to a large daycare center anymore.  This situation has been a true blessing for everyone in our family.  W now has a very dear little best friend who he loves very much, and who in some ways acts almost as a sibling for him when she is here.  We love having A stay with us.  She is sweet, but a little bossy at times and has no problems with putting W in his place.  I love seeing them work together to figure things out whether it be settling a disagreement and compromising (with a little gentle guidance) or working for a common goal.  She also has helped him vastly expand his vocabulary and is teaching him some Spanish words too (she's bilingual).  A couple of the other benefits to having her stay with us are that 1) my house is clean at least three days a week and 2) when she is with us we fall into a lovely natural rhythm with different activities on different days and a set order to our day.  Ideally we will get to a point where W and I maintain this rhythm on most days when A is not with us as well.

This blackboard is the background for one of our nature tables.  Each month I try to illustrate it with a drawing and verse from our circle time.  the only problem is that my handwriting was horrible this time (trying not to smear the drawing) but I didn't have the heart to erase the whole thing and start over.

One element I try to maintain with W each day is circle time.  It works a little better on days that A is with us as W wants to participate more because he wants to hold A's hand and because he doesn't want to feel left out.  I try to revise our circle time monthly to keep it seasonal, and some items carry over from one month to the next.  It is also one of the ways that I prepare our family for festivals and celebrations during the month.

Here is our circle time for September:

Call to Circle Song:

                Come Follow

                Come follow, follow, follow,

                 follow, follow, follow me

                Whither shall I follow, follow, follow,

                Whither shall I follow, follow thee?

                To the greenwood, to the greenwood,           

greenwood tree (repeat)

From Come Follow Me

Sit Down Song:

                Ring around the rosie

A pocket full of posy

Ashes, ashes we all fall down

Nursery Rhyme:

                To Makret, To Market

                To market to market to buy a fat pig;

                Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

                To market, to market to buy a fat hog;

                Home again, home again, jiggety-jog

Finger Play:

Signs of Autumn

                When the birds fly south (flap arms)

                And the wind blows cool (shiver)

And the green (hold up hands)

on the trees turns red (Flip palms over)

And the days grow shorter

(Bring hands close together from far apart)

And the nights grow long

(separate hands from close together)

And Jack Frost freezes grass dead

 (point fingers straight up, then slowly curl)

Then summer has done (Wave as if goodbye)

And autumn has come

(Turn to opposite direction; hold arms out)

From Finger Frolics

Leaves are Floating Down

Leaves are floating softly down; (flutter fingers)

They make a carpet on the ground

Then, swish!  The wind comes whirling by

(bring hand around rapidly)

And sends them dancing to the sky

(flutter fingers upward)

From Finger Frolics

               

Songs:    Come Little Leaves

Come little leaves said the Wind one day.
Come over the meadow with me and play.
Put on your dresses of red and gold.
For summer is gone and the days grow cold.

Grow cold, Grow cold (repeat)

From Come Follow Me

Michaelmas

                A knight and a lady went ridding one day

                Far into the forest , away, away

                Dear knight said the lady, I pray have a care

                This forest is evil, beware, beware

                A fiery red dragon they spied on the grass

                The lady wept sorely alas, alas

                The night slew the dragon, the lady was gay,

                They rode on together away, away, away

From Come Follow Me

Verses:

…Apples, Apples  everywhere,

please let me have just one,

and just two more please tree,

then September Will be done.

From September-Around the Year

…By all these lovely tokens
September days are here,
With summer's best of weather,
And autumn's best of cheer.

From September by Helen Hunt Jackson

"The goldenrod is yellow
The corn is turning brown
The trees in apple orchards
With fruit are bending down."
-  Children’s song

Religious Verse:

                You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

-Matthew 22:39

Prayer:  

Thank You, dear God, for autumn,

With all the colors bright.

The reds and browns and yellows

Make such a pretty sight.

Amen

(from My First Read and Learn book of Prayers)

Closing Song:       

This Is The Day--Psalm 118:24

                This is the day, this is the day

                That the Lord hath made, that the Lord hath made

                We will rejoice,    we will rejoice

                And be glad in it, and be glad in it.

                This is the day that the Lord hath made

                We will rejoice and be glad in it

                This is the day, this is the day

                That the Lord hath made.

Rhythm Thursday-Our Baking Day is Saturday

After a crazy July that included three nights in a hotel because of fumes in our apartment from renovations being done next door, a week of Vacation Bible School, a trip to visit family in NJ and a longer trip down the Blue Ridge Parkway, through the Great Smokey Mountains , to Norris Damn in Tennessee and side trips to Cumberland Gap and Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge TN, we are back home and slowly settling in and getting back into our family rhythm.  Bed times are getting earlier, I’m babysitting again after a three week break and things are going more smoothly.  While most of our July activities were pretty fun, they did leave our whole family feeling really unbalanced and out of sync and I think we have all welcomed our return to rhythm. 

One big thing that I had been wanting to implement in terms of rhythm, but  had not been completely successful with was establishing a baking day.  I decided that our baking day should be on Saturday so that we can have some fresh baked cinnamon rolls for breakfast on Sunday mornings as we are heading off to church.  This also is an effort to get us to eat a little healthier on Sunday mornings.  Cinnamon rolls made with xylitol and whole wheat bread seem a bit healthier to me than the doughnuts we are otherwise tempted to grab at church.  They also make a quick easy breakfast for the one day of the week that we tend to sleep in a little.  This week W and I made pumpkin pie brioche dough from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day.  I also used their recipe for cream cheese and honey frosting, but used maple syrup instead.  For the cinnamon roll filling I used a mixture of xylitol, cinnamon and coconut oil.  Because the dough needs to set, I ended up making the bread (for French toast) and the cinnamon rolls out and baking them in the evening after W was in bed.  W and I did however also make a queens cake which is a type of pound cake that is flavored with citrus and has currants mixed all though the batter.  The recipe comes from a little cookbook sold at Colonial Williamsburg.  It’s a special cake to me since the favors at my wedding included a little package of mini queen’s cakes.

W loves  “baking day” and I realized it was really the first time I’d done very much baking with him.  He thought the mixing and stirring was so much fun and he is such a little helper in the kitchen.  Ultimately my goal is to make up the bread dough for sandwich bread and brioche the evening before so that W can help shape and bake our bread and treats, and then to make one other item that he can help me to mix up on baking day.  I think this stands to be a really wonderful part of our family’s weekly rhythm!

Oh, and the cinnamon rolls were sooooo good!!!

Meal Planning Rhythm

I think our family has finally found an approach to meal planning that works for us! My previous attempts at meal planning always seemed to fall short for one reason or another and I frequently felt at a loss as to what to prepare on which days.  I hated planning the meals for out week in part because it was just such a tedious task for me.  Earlier this summer I was listening to Sharifa Oppenheimer on the Waldorf Connection and she mentioned a system of having a rhythm for meals with each day's breakfast and dinner assigned a general category.

This has made such a huge difference for me with meal planning.  I created a chart with the days of the week and assigned each day a breakfast food that our family enjoys.  I then put in fairly broad categories for dinner.  In another row under each category, I listed different foods that fall under that category.  Here is what my chart looks like.  As I come up with new meal ideas, I file them under the correct day.  Then before we go shopping, I highlight the items we will be eating that week and make my list from there.

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
Breakfast	French Toast	Waffles	French Toast	Pancakes	Waffles	Pancakes	Sticky buns
Dinner	Pasta	Mexican	Rice	Grill	Pie	Crockpot	Roast
	Ravioli Spaghetti Mac and Cheese Lasagna Park Slope Penne Penne with sausage and broccoli	Tacos Enchiladas Nachos Taco salad	Stir-fry Casserole African Peanut Stew Risotto	Hotdogs Sausages Hamburgers Chicken London Broil	Pot Pie Shepherd’s pie Pizza	Stew Fig Chicken White Chili	Pork Roast Baked Chicken Pot Roast Pork chops

I love that this gives a rhythm and a predictability to our meals without becoming too restrictive!  It meets the need of my very phlegmatic husband to know a general idea of what his meals are going to be each day, and  and gives my sanguine side the ability to try new things and change it up.  Also, because we all have pretty different tastes, it allows me to make sure that everyone is getting at least a few meals a week that they really like.

I have also found that when I have an idea that for instance "Tuesday is Mexican night", I manage to get dinner started earlier in the day and have it ready for dinner time at 6:00 PM which otherwise seems to be a goal that only sometimes happens as we get busy with other things throughout the day.

How I Recover from A Couple of Rough Days...

The past two days have been really rough ones for our family.  We live in a townhouse apartment and one of the major drawbacks is smelling everything from the unit next door.  It's currently vacant and being renovated.  Unfortunately, part of that process involved the heavy use of chemicals with fumes that made us sick.  Of course this had to happen on a 100 + degree day when my husband's car was at the shop being fixed. This meant that my husband was driving my car...and of course both of our car seats were in our respective cars.  So W and I were effectively stranded!

Somewhere in the afternoon I noticed W looked like he was about to fall over and then suddenly felt very dizzy and started smelling bad fumes.  We were getting ready to have friends over to go swimming so I grabbed all our pool stuff, dumped it on the front porch and high tailed up to the management office to report the issue.  Luckily they were really responsive and put out fans next door.  We swam with our friends who were wonderful to bring us cold water to drink as well.  After swimming, I was still feeling sick in our apartment, so we waited outside for  my husband to get home from work, talking to neighbors from the other apartment that was most affected by all of this.  The management company ended up having to send all of us to hotels for the night.  Today the smell is gone and we were able to come home, but talk about messing up our entire rhythm and shattering more than a few of my nerves!

Today started pretty well.  Daddy went to work and W and I took our time getting ready and  getting breakfast at the hotel before coming home, dropping off our kitty, closing the windows and turning the ac back on.  It was well over 90 degrees in our apartment this morning, so we headed back out to run some errands.  Not sure what possessed me to come back home before heading to an event at my husband's work, but we did....and the rest of the day went down hill from there.  I think W and I were really just letting out all of the stress and frustration from the day before, but things got bad quickly and included a very cranky toddler, lots of literally spilt milk, lots of laundry in need of washing (in part due to spilt milk and our laundry rhythm being out of wack) and a possibly broken little toe for me.  Needless to say, we never made it out the door and there were many tears from both W and I throughout the day.

I was so grateful when my husband walked in the door this evening with dinner and everything started to calm down a bit.  W was excited for his time with Daddy, I was able to vent a little and I have some time to myself now  to breathe, finish up a needle felting project and blog.

And so, I relaxed and recovered by adding the finishing details to this little duck that I started at my women's group at church last week.

Ducks have been very popular in our house lately.  Each spring, we have a pair of ducks that come to visit our apartment complex.  The kids in our neighborhood are very find of the ducks and W and the little girl I babysit have been quite into ducks ever since.  Their favorite pages of the books we read are the ones with the ducks and there are days where I feel like all I hear out of either of them all morning is "duck" and "quack".

So, in honor, of the toddlers in my life, I am adding this lovely little wool duck to our nature table.  I am sure every time I look at it, I will remember how nice it was to sit and work with the wool and the needles and just relax after a couple of difficult days.  Needle felting often does that for me.  I really love the creative process of sculpting wool and shaping it into something special with the repetitive poking of my felting needles.  People often tell me that the "stabbing" of the wool, must feel like a release when I'm angry, but I think it is deeper than that.  It hits further down in my soul with the creative process.

All of this has me wondering what other things people do to help re-center themselves and regain their sanity. Tomorrow, we will go to church, worship, and give thanks.  That often helps me to recenter, but I'm thinking this week I may need a bit more.  I'm wanting to develop my own little personal mini retreat for Monday morning/afternoon and thinking on the things that would help me to replenish and rejuvenate myself before my husband goes back to work on Tuesday.  I'm thinking that some time, reading, meditating, praying and drawing/writing in my illustrated journal would help.  I'm also thinking it would be really good to go for a walk and to reconnect with nature if I can manage a time that's not too hot and my toe's not throbbing too much.  I'd also like to take some uninterrupted time to work on some more creative projects.  I need to check the weather and check around a bit to see if there's someplace that I can go outside of the house for all of this.

If you were able to take maybe 4-6 hours for your own personal retreat to help rejuvenate and take care of yourself so you can better care for your family, where would you go and how would you spend your time?

Our Rhythm

I really feel that our rhythm is a constant work in progress and it is something with which I really struggle.  I have  a daily/weekly rhythm down on paper for our family.  I made two charts, one with the basic outline for what happens after W wakes up in the AM for each day of the week.  The other is a list of tasks that I try to accomplish during my "house work time" for each day of the week. I have it posted on the outside door or our computer armoire so that we can refer to it during the day. We don't always stick to what we have posted, but at least having it down on paper helps us a little.  At the very least, if we skip some things one week, the next week we are not left trying to figure out what we are supposed to be doing that day and when.

There are not set times for most things in our rhythm.  We simply flow from one activity into the next as we complete our tasks.   I have set a few anchors in our day however, which are at set times.  These revolve around eating and sleeping.  For example breakfast is at 7:45 AM, lunch is 12:00 noon and dinner is 6:00 PM.  We start the bedtime routine at 8:00 PM and bedtime is 8:30 PM.  This keeps us on track, strengthens our rhythm and generally helps keep peace in our house since I tend to be more sanguine (and therefore loose track of time as I get involved in various activities) and my husband is more phlegmatic (and therefore needs more structure and to know what time certain things are happening).

In creating our rhythm I also tried to take the idea of alternating  "inhale" activities with "exhale" activities which gives our day a wonderful sense of flow.  Inhale activities are things like meals, our circle time, nap time, reading books and more structured activities that we do as a family .  On the other hand "exhale" activities involve more free time and less structure for W and are generally when I do tasks, such as cleaning up after meals, or my housework at this point. Our exhales might also involve going to a park, or playing in the sand box or in the pool together.  For example, most days, W wakes up, we eat breakfast with Daddy before he goes to work (inhale).  After breakfast, W plays independently (as much as he is able to at 18 months) while I clear the table and do the dishes (exhale).  After that, we  have a short circle time where we do some singing, rhymes and finger plays along with a short prayer (inhale).  I then busy  myself with some household tasks while W again plays independently (exhale).  At some point during that time we will come back together for a snack (inhale) and then resume our work/play (exhale) till lunch time (inhale). It took me a long time to fully grasp the idea of alternating inhale/exhale activities and even longer to really implement it.  Now that I have though, our rhythm is much smoother and ebbs and flows nicely.  It also seems to be the way W naturally functions best at this age.  Some independent time or time to release some energy followed by some quiet restorative activities.    Days where we keep to this sort of structured rhythm, are smooth and there are fewer tantrums on his part.  It follows his own energy level and basic needs and he has a general idea of what comes next as we move from one activity to the next.

Other parts of the rhythm, involve rituals that accompany our activities.  I find these rituals to be especially important moving from exhale activities to inhale activities.  For example we like to use, prayer verses, songs and other verses as well as lighting candles at various points during the day to help with transitions.  We have short prayer verses we say upon waking, and before nap and bed time.  When we sit at the table for breakfast or lunch we light a special meal candle and sing  Johnny Appleseed to give thanks before we eat.  At dinner, we again light our meal candle and say a special grace verse at that meal.  We always start and end our circle time with the same two songs as well to signify the transitions.  I change the remainder of the verses and songs monthly however to reflect the the season and any festivals that are occurring that month.

This week I have also paid close attention to my own rhythm and how it affects our family.  Personally, I have a couple of very specific needs that I need to meet each day.  The first is that I need some time on my own in the morning for personal devotions, meditation, prayer, reading and journaling/drawing.  This week I have gotten up between 5:00 and 5:30 AM each morning to have this time alone for these activities.  I found that I am much more centered, patient and an all around better parent when I have this time.  The one morning W decided to get up shortly after I did and my time devotion time was interrupted was a much more difficult day all the way around.

My other significant need is to have time for creative expression.  I love to knit and needle felt and have recently also begun to do some sewing.    I have built time into many of our afternoons and the evenings for this.  Without, some creative outlet every day, I feel stifled.  Like my morning meditations, my  creative time helps me to keep my energy up and  is a soul soothingly productive time.

One final thought on rhythm, is that I strive to see time as cyclical rather than linear as our society and culture would like us to believe.  We do not run out of time, instead, it cycles back around.  Our daily, weekly, monthly rhythm repeats. If I don't finish a project or get some bit of housework done today, it's generally not that big of deal, as the time to work on that task will come again, tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year.  To me this is wonderfully freeing and is key to keeping a rhythm that is both strong and flexible.