Simple Joys-Community

You might ask what a picture of Toadstool with a bandage on his poor little head has to do with community or joy.  Well, the bandage is covering four stitches that he got this week after falling at the park while there with his class at school.  My poor guy.  Not too joyful yet....huh?

Anyway, our school and the community around it is amazing as was evidenced yet again by the whole situation.  We were so supported by the whole community through this...from Toadstool's teachers to the office staff to the other parents they were just so wonderful and helpful.  A staff member from the school even went to the ER with us till Papa could get there and his teacher called several times that afternoon/evening to check on him.  My mama friends from the school were so supportive too.  One of them had alerted me to call the school as we pulled up to where we were meeting.  We had lots of folks checking in with us and got some wonderful suggestions from other parents (this was new uncharted territory for us...amazingly this is the first time I've ever had to deal with stitches with one of my children).

In the end Toadstool's injury wasn't that serious.  We think his forehead was cut by a piece of mulch when he fell running from one part of the playground to another. It's a good cut and did need stitches but there wasn't a knot or a bump or anything with it.  He's healing well.  Lot s of joy over that.

I'm grateful it wasn't worse than it was and I'm also grateful for all the support our family received   It is a true joy to be a part of that community and I value the friendships and relationships we have at our school so much as well as the true sense of community as we all work together to make it a beautiful safe, loving haven for our children and by extension, their families!  Knowing we are a part of this special community brings great joy for our family.

What are your simple joys this week?

Yarn Along and announcing Wool 365

It's been quite a while since I've been on this space and I've missed it.  I think I'm back, but I need to figure out how this is now going to work into our family's rhythm.  It seems like joining in the Yarn Along each week might be a good place to start.  Speaking of rhythm, we need to figure that out again now that the holidays are winding down.

I'm also announcing the start of a new project of mine, Wool 365.  DH and I got a new DSLR camera for Christmas and I figured taking pictures each day would be a good way to learn to use the camera.  I decided to use Wool as my subject.  While working on decluttering this week I realized that I have surrounded our family with wool.  My creativity is largely wool based, with the needle felting, knitting and crocheting that I do.  For me, it seems like a natural subject matter.

This fall was super busy for us. It has also been a really lovely blessed time for our family. We had lots of company over the last few months, which was wonderful.  We've celebrated festivals and holidays and birthdays and maybe if I get around to it I'll share more about that later.  W and I have been attending a weekly Waldorf Play group and we also have our parent-child class at the school once a week.  DH and I are attending bi-weekly parent discussions that are being offered by one of the teachers at the school as well.  The school and the school community have been so wonderful for our family this fall and I am eagerly awaiting the spring term, hoping to get involved in the handwork group etc.

Okay, now to the yarn along.  I'm joining with Ginny of Small Things for this week's yarn along. I've got lots of WIP, but the two I've been working on primarily are the Alice shawl in  Green/Plum Malabrigo sock yarn, and what I am calling the Ranger Cowl for DH to be able to wear to work now that the weather seems to be getting colder finally.  I'm using this Easy Unisex Cowl pattern for it and since DH claims a wool allergy (can you believe I'm married to a man with a wool allergy?) I'm using Lion Brand Wool-Ease that is mostly acrylic.  I don't think that will make him too itchy.  This allergy is probably the reason I don't knit many things for him though.

In terms of reading, I received a Kindle for Christmas and I am loving it.  I just finished reading Philippa Gregory's Lady Rivers on it. Philippa Gregory novels (and others about dead British royals too) are one of my big guilty pleasures! I also have put all the pdf's of patterns I'm knitting onto it which is just wonderful!  DH and I are also working through Simplicity Parenting together for the parent discussions that we have been attending at W's school.

Still around...

It's been too long since I've posted on here yet again.  We've been BUSY!  Apple picking, fall festivals at our previous Waldorf school and our new school, making apple butter, trips to go visit friends, a trip to Williamsburg, trying to establish our autumn rhythm and in my case having one of the worst colds I can remember.  Of course, I've not managed to document most of this because my camera battery is dead and I haven't been able to locate my charger since our vacation out west ( I need to write more about that too, but not tonight).

Today was the fall festival at our new school.  It was a magical day for W and I.  It felt so good to be at the school, surrounded by such a beautiful, caring community, and engaged in lovely activities.  W got to make a bird feeder and a little sachet that he's keeping under his pillow.  He also dug for buried treasure, and played with a beautiful marble run.  We  watched a wonderful puppet play performed by his teacher.  He was also very excited because he was able to sit by her lovely assistant teacher during the performance.  His two favorite things though were a delightful children's musician who let W play the bongos while he sang (my boy LOVES drums) and shucking corn.  Seriously, my thumbs hurt because he wanted me to constantly be shucking the corn too.  We did this for hours at a time!  I wish I had my camera today.  He was just so happy and engaged in his work all day.  I'm thinking I need to be getting some of this corn so he can do this at home too.  His corn bin is getting sparse again and he clearly thinks this is a fantastic activity.

I'm also starting to think about Christmas.  I'd like to do all handmade again this year but I feel like I'm running terribly behind and I'm not totally sure what to do for everyone yet.  Most of my ideas seem to be for W and I'm working to balance them out between for his birthday and Christmas.  I did get one gift completed this week while I tried to rest and recover from this cold.  My mom the other day found a needle-felted nativity on Etsy and loved the idea so much she just could not stop talking about it.  Hint.  Hint.  So I set about starting one for her.  I have made the principal figures of Mary, Joseph and Jesus.  I'm fairly pleased with how these have come out.  I plan on working on additional pieces to add to it in the coming years.  I had initially planned to make the large set all this year, but I would like to have time to make gifts for other people too.

Yarn Along and updates

It's been a couple weeks again since I've managed to participate in the Yarn Along with Ginny of Small Things. Come to think of it, it's been a few weeks since I've managed to even update the blog.  What can I say, things have suddenly gotten very busy around here.

I have finally made some like-minded mama friends around here which is just wonderful!  Together with them I have been very busy starting a local Waldorf Homeschool Coop we are calling Rosebud Circle.  We aren't planning on homeschooling unless we were to move somewhere without a school, but we also don't live particularly close to the nearest Waldorf school here so it's nice to have a local community closer to home.

W and I are also hoping that we will be starting the parent-child class at the nearest Waldorf School next month.  The teacher welcomed us into the class in May and I just realized last week that we hadn't heard anything since then and school starts very soon.  I'm in the process of playing phone/email tag with the school now and hope we get it all resolved soon so we can start week after next.  Our homeschool community is wonderful, but I also really feel a need to be connected to a Waldorf School as well.

I am going to be starting Waldorf Foundation Year Studies through the Sophia Institute late next month as well which is hopefully the start of an exciting new chapter in my life as well.   For some time now I have been wanting to start Waldorf teacher training but I guess it's something I haven't mentioned here previously. My intention had been to start earlier this year, but then our move came up and I had to postpone my intentions for a while.  I'm glad that we are finally settled enough for me to start down this path. I'm really looking forward to this and I think it is going to offer me great opportunities for my own personal growth and really make me stretch  in new ways.  I'm still undecided as to whether I want to pursue early childhood education or elementary education.  I had always thought I would go into elementary education, but there continues to be this little voice in my mind telling me that early childhood might be where I need to be.  I really enjoy both age groups and the curriculum is so beautiful from early childhood up through the grades.  Sometimes I think both are calling to me with equal intensity at this point.  My hope is that as I go through the foundation studies I will be better able to decide in which direction I am being called.  I am sure that by the time I need to make the decision, I will have a clearer picture of what that calling is going to be.

Okay, now to the yarn along!  I finished the first sweater I've ever completed.  It's a blue wool hoodie for W (Rav notes here).  He loves it but I have to apologize for the bad picture.  He didn't feel like being a very cooperative model.  I enjoyed knitting this one so much that when I went back to the store to get a skein of yarn to finish it, I decided I also wanted to make him a striped one which is my knitting project for this week.  I decided to knit this one in the round and work the arms from the top down (Rav notes here).  As I write this, though I'm realizing I'm going to have to go back and take a quite a few rows and start the decreases on the first sleeve.  Still, I don't think it will take me too much longer to complete it.  I'm amazed my how much more quickly it has gone knitting this sweater in the round than it did knitting it flat.

For books this week, I just completed Farmer Boy (not pictured) and The Long Winter from the Little House series.  Oh how I love these books!  I read little bits of Farmer Boy outloud to W and he loved hearing new stories about " 'Manzo" besides the ones in his My First Little House books.  It's certainly not a book I would read to him in its entirety, but I was surprised by how much he enjoyed me reading a chapter book to him.  My other book that I am currently reading in School as a journey by Torin M Finser.  I ordered a used copy of this one from Amazon and imagine my surprise when I opened it up and found that it was a signed copy!  Kind of cool!  In any case, I've read the chapters on first and second grades and I'm working my way through the 3rd grade chapter now.  It's a fantastic book and is really inspiring me right now.  

Okay, hopefully I can be back here a little more regularly in the coming weeks.  I'm also hoping to get a few minutes in the next day or so to see what all of you are working on!

Celebrating Midsummer

Cling, ding ,ding

The summer bells now ring:

There’s laughter on the hills,

The daisies show their frills.

Cling, ding, ding

Be welcome Summer King!

Cling, ding, ding

The summer bells now ring:

The shepherds pipe all day,

The lambkins frisk and play.

Cling, ding, ding

Be Welcome Summer King!

~Wynstones' Summer

W and I have been joyously singing this song all day.  He especially loves the "Cling Ding Ding" lines.   In our family Midsummer/St. John's Day is one of our happiest and most loved celebrations of the year.  W and I have been preparing for this celebration for the past week.  It has been a lot of fun since he was really able to assist with many of the preparations this time.

W helps his mama with the Midsummer decorations.

He is especially proud of these suns, which I cut from some watercolor paintings that W did this week. I oiled the paper to make it translucent with the intent of taping them up to our balcony door.   unfortunately the oil caused them to slip right off of the tape so we decided to scatter them on our table instead.  W likes to point to them and tell me that he made them and that they are beautiful.  They were inspired by this post from Seeds from The Yew Tree.

I also worked on several Window Stars especially for Midsummer in the colors of the sun.  They turned out so beautifully and I love having them hanging on the balcony door, though we may need to edit out the collection a bit as it's getting rather crowded, but they do really brighten up the room when the sun shines through them.  We are very fond of our stars and they have gone a long way towards making this new apartment feel like home.

I love this dragonfly!  Actually I love dragonflies in general and one made from window star folds is just so much fun.  Directions can be found here for the dragonfly, butterflies and flowers.

Other paper decorations included making more suns for the china cabinet and the yellow paper spirals we hung from the dining room chandelier.  Both of these were inspired by All Year Round which remains my go-to book for most of our festivals.  I especially love the explanations and background information this book gives on the festivals and their origins.

My other crafting projects for the day included making floating beeswax candles (which I wrote about last year) and a sand candle.  W supervised me in making these projects but I wouldn't let him too close to the  hot beeswax.  I think both of these are destined to become part of our family midsummer traditions.  W did help make the little dish that holds the sand candle from sand clay that we made together.  We had a lot of fun with it, but he kept trying to eat the clay...silly boy.  He never tries to eat regular play dough, so I'm not sure why he thought the sand clay was edible.

W and I also put together our summer nature table and W has been thoroughly enjoying exploring the various elements of it over and over.  I love how things on our nature table spark his curiosity and  imagination and are the jumping off point for many of the discussions during any given day.

Of course food is always an important part of our family festival, so W and I have been cooking too.  We made homemade honey butter and mixed in some basil from our garden.  It is so incredibly delicious.  We ate it on homemade bread and on corn on the cob and all just loved it!

For our bread, again, inspired by Seeds From The Yew Tree, I attempted to make a  beehive out of bread.  It ended up looking more like a coiled blob, but it is some of the best tasting bread I've made in a while, so I'm not going to complain.  Daddy was as always in charge of the grill which also served as our big fire element since we can't really have a bonfire in our apartment complex.  He grilled delicious burgers and some healthy-ish nitrate-free hotdogs.

While he was grilling W played with some neighborhood kids and I was able to visit with one of the moms who happens to be from one of the places I used to live a while back.

I didn't manage to get the giant bubbles together for this year so W and his new friend played with some bubble wands though most of the bubble solution ended up on the ground...but that's to be expected with toddlers.  W also really enjoyed trying to catch the bubbles I made with mine.

Then we came inside to eat, rounding out our feast with fresh green beans, watermelon and basil lemonade.

For dessert we had the same Summer Berries Bread Pudding I made last year (link to post with recipe).  It was as delicious as I remembered from last year.

W was especially fond of it and really wanted seconds.  Then again, this boy has never met a berry he didn't like and this has fresh raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and strawberries in it.

W also celebrated Midsummer by leaving some dried wild blueberries in these little tea cups for the fairies, who should leave him something in return tomorrow morning.  He is really looking forward to seeing what they bring.

I also wanted to mention one other source of information that I have drawn heavily from this year for our Midsummer/St. John's Day celebration.  This post from Christine Natale has so much wonderful information about the day.  She even convinced me to watch A Midsummer Night's Dream on Netflix yesterday while W napped.  I ended up with this 1968 version instead of the ones she recommends since it was the only one available to stream.  I thoroughly enjoyed it, though it is quite obviously a very late 1960's production....oh the strange juxtaposition of the story, scenery and costumes! All the women except for Judi Dench are wearing these little mini dresses and knee high boots and the men's costumes are almost out of a period piece! Ha Ha!

Anyways, back to  Christine Natale's post.  I also really liked her explanation of the significance of St. John's Day coming six months before Christmas and preparing the way for Christ as well as her discussion of balance.  I definitely find that I am needing a bit more balance in my days right now and it is something I will be working on in the coming days as we look towards fall, winter and Christmas.  This has all greatly enriched my appreciation of Midsummer and made it more meaningful on a very profound and personal level.  It is not an aspect of the festival that I bring directly to W, but I know he benefits from my working on it myself.

Wishing you all the happiest of Midsummers!

Simple Joys: Our Favorite Room

After moving into our new apartment, we quickly found that W's playroom has become our favorite room in our home.  It is intended to be a breakfast nook off of our kitchen, however, we are accustomed to eating as a family in the dining room and felt that the space would be better used by W.  I love that his play centers around the room where I spend much of my time cooking.  He seamlessly floats between playing and helping me throughout the day.

The playroom is also where I now have my gliding chair and it is also the favorite place for most adults in the house as well as a comfy place to take a break, to snuggle and to read books.  Daddy often sits in this chair when he comes home from work while I put the finishing touches on dinner.  It's also a great place to sit, drink a cup of tea or coffee from my favorite mug and knit, read, meditate or pray.

On the high shelf above my chair I have some of my favorite things that help make the room feel homey.  There is the first basket that I made last year, a picture of my grandparents' farm and a little oil diffusing votive holder.  This is also where I put instruments such as my lap harp and penny whistles that I want to keep out, but away from W.


I love that W also has a little table and chairs in this room.  He sits here for snacks and to color.   Above his little table is a little shelf with two drawers that hold his crayons.  We are using the shelf as a mini nature table so that he still has some seasonal items in his main play space, though our primary nature table sits behind the sofa dividing the living room and dinning room.

(Obviously I took these pictures just before Easter.  

It has just taken me a while to get around to writing this post.)

On the other side of the room is W's main toy storage and play space.  Eventually I will be putting arches across the backs of these shelves like this so that we can make a little house with his giant rainbow playsilk.

Above the play area is the mobile I made for W last winter.  It features a shepherd boy W has named Sebastian and his sheep.  

Sebastian is also featured in the window valance which I made by felting wool onto a playsilk.  My mother then cut and sewed the valance and I think it is just perfect.  The sheer curtains behind it are also made from silk veils.  The whole thing has such a beautiful airy effect.  Sometimes W and I like to make up stories about Sebastian and his sheep.

Between this main play area and the kitchen counter I have a fold-out  table that I often use if I am baking or doing projects where I need a large work space.  I imagine it will be a wonderful place to cut out fabric if I ever get my sewing machine set up again.  Above it is the chalk board where I try to do a seasonal chalk board drawing each month.

This hook  where W and I keep our aprons is  between the playroom and the kitchen on the other side of the room.  I love this rooster hook.  W picked out this hook as well as two rooster rugs for this kitchen and I just love them.  We also often keep cheery  rooster place mats on his little table.    Also in this picture you can see our rhythm chart which helps us to keep track of our activities and meals for each day.

Simple Joys: Spiritual, Emotional and Physical Nourishment

One of my greatest needs that has been the hardest to meet since we moved here has been finding a new church for our family to attend.  I'm finding this much harder this time than I did in our previous city.  At that point, W hadn't been born yet and it never occurred to me that I needed to find a church to meet his needs as well as my own.  We were lucky with our church home there.  They have wonderful children's programs, and a nursery staff  who were kind and loving and who knew our family well.  We didn't even use the nursery there all that much.  W stayed with us in services till he was a year old and started becoming disruptive.  Before he turned two we started keeping him with us for the first part of the service and taking him to the nursery if sitting still and quiet started to become an unrealistic expectation for him.  He is a toddler and I think that an hour long service is a long time to expect a little boy to sit quietly and not be disruptive, even if he has plenty to occupy him.

Now, with his new job my husband is working on Sundays so I am also left to take W to church on my own.  In the past he did much of the active parenting during church, respecting my need to be able to participate fully in worship as a way to recharge for the week.  We have tried quite a number of churches since we moved here.  Some were just bad fits all the way around.  Others would have been wonderful places for me, but did not have other children W's age or even nurseries for him.  Another, which I thought was going to work for our family only had a nursery intermittently, and we had very bad results when they did not.  The last time we went to that church, I left in tears as I chased W back through the doors after his third energetic running screaming trip down the aisle during a prayer.  I left feeling more drained and spiritually and emotionally depleted than when we arrived.  It was suddenly very obvious, that this church, while lovely, was not going to meet the needs of W or myself on a regular basis and our search started all over again.

This past week we tried yet another church, and I'm cautiously optimistic.  I took W into the service to start, and he loved all of the singing that started the service.  When he started to become fidgety, I took him to the nursery and he had a wonderful time!  The nursery was staffed by a paid attendant (never realized just how important this is in terms of the nursery being a safe and reliable place before) who had her son who is W's age there too.  She met his needs in a kind and loving way and took the boys outside to play.  I could hear them outside having a wonderful boisterous, energetic time while I was in the service and it was really freeing for me.  The service was very different from what I am accustomed to, but it was deeply nourishing spiritually, and I felt recharged in a way, I have not been since we moved here.  The experience could not have been more different from that of the previous week.  I'm praying that our future experiences there will be as positive.  W had not wanted to even go to church again after the experience we had the previous week.  On Sunday, while I was putting him down for his nap, he turned to me and said "Mama, I love church".

After the service W and I stopped by our local farmer's market for the first time.  It was wonderful!  Almost everything I could ask for in a farmer's market.  It's big!  Lots and lots of vendors who grow crops locally.  Many sell plants as well as produce. The prices were quite reasonable.  Most were comparable or better than what we've been paying at the grocery store.  The herb man is wonderful and knowledgeable and we had a wonderful conversation about the uses of different types of lavender.

This is what we ended up buying at the market...

Two bags of lettuce, asparagus, kohlrabi, sugar snap peas, radishes, baby potatoes, a bag of English lavender, a bag of French lavender,  a chocolate mint plant, an elfin thyme plant (which is the cutest daintiest thing I've ever seen), an English lavender plant and a zinnia.

W couldn't wait to try a radish after we read Peter Rabbit hundreds of times this spring.

He spit it back out pretty quickly so I'm guessing he thought the flavor was a bit strong.  He has been eating them in salads this week though.    We have eaten so well this week and the market ingredients have really energized my cooking. Each dinner has featured some ingredient from the market.  So far we have used our farmers' market ingredients to make several salads,  asparagus pasta (as a treat we added some shrimp and I also added lemon juice and dill to the recipe), steamed sugar snap peas,  a lavender cake (heavenly), and roasted kohlrabi and baby potatoes.  I've also taken to having a cup of lavender tea in the evening before bed.  I think we will make a habit of going to the market each week after church.

All in all, by the time we arrived home last week I felt so nourished: spiritually, emotionally and physically.  Even better, I knew that W had been as well.  It makes our situation after this move feel much less desperate too, which is such a comfort.

In other good news this week, we also found out on Sunday that W and I have been accepted into the Parent-Child class at the local Waldorf School for September.  It feels like such a long way off, but it really gives us something to look forward to as well.  We are really excited!

Nursery Rhymes

When she found out I was pregnant with W, one of the first pieces of advice my mother gave me was to get a large book of nursery rhymes and learn them by heart so that I could recite them while the baby nursed.  She told me that she always credited reciting nursery rhymes while I nursed with helping me to develop a large vocabulary as a very young child.  I wish I could say I took this advice to heart at that point.  I didn't really.  I bought said book of nursery rhymes and looked at it a few times.  I even attempted to learn one or two by heart (not very successfully) and then set it aside.  Memorizing them seemed just too hard and I didn't really see the point then, though  I was shocked by how many of them I thought I knew from my own childhood, but then wasn't actually able to remember much past their first lines.

When W was a few months old, something prompted me to pull out the nursery rhymes again, but this time I used a CD that came with a book and every time W and I sat down to nurse I would play the CD and try to recite along with it.  At first I read along with most of them, and learned many of them very quickly.  W seemed to enjoy listening to them too.  Many of them were set to music and I think it helped that we learned tunes to go along with the words.

A few months down the road, I discovered Waldorf education and fell in love with it.  I remember clearly one of the first articles I read about Waldorf and early childhood stressed the importance of nursery rhymes, singing and having a child hear its' mother's voice.  It really helped to confirm for me that we were on the right path and that all of these nursery rhymes while nursing were further helping to nourish my son's mind, spirit and soul.

 Soon,  I realized that if he was fussy in the car or when we were out at the store, saying or singing one (or ten) of our favorite nursery rhymes would often help to sooth him.

Eventually we found we did not listen to our nursery rhyme cd very much anymore.  It had been very useful for learning the nursery rhymes, but, once we had learned them we did not need it any more.  The nursery rhymes became an almost unconscious part a part of our everyday lives. I still used them when we nursed, and we said them at other times frequently throughout our day.

  W also has several books of nursery rhymes that have been favorites for most of his toddler-hood.  I have always made sure we had at least one good nursery rhyme volume among the books we have out in our current rotation.

 W of course started to talk and once he started it was non-stop.  For a long time much of it was babble that I was not able to understand.  Then, not too long after he turned two, something happened.  One day he was babbling to himself quietly, and I stopped to really listen...he was saying nursery rhymes!  To be specific, he was saying Little Boy Blue and he knew every single word!  I was so surprised and excited that I was almost moved to tears.  I started listening to him more when he was babbling and it soon became apparent that during all that time singing and reciting nursery rhymes since he was an infant he had been soaking in the language and that he knew these nursery rhymes (sometimes even better than I do.)

Part of pre and early literacy education for children in Waldorf schools is immersing  them in rich beautiful language.  The meaning of the words is less important than the sounds and rhythm of the language.   In deed, many nursery rhymes include language that is largely nonsensical, but beautiful, and I might add, pretty fun.  W's favorite nursery rhyme from very early on was:

Higety-pigety pop
The dog has eaten the mop
The pig's in a hurry
The cat's in a flurry
Higety-pigety pop

These silly nonsense words have never failed to get a laugh out of him, and yet, they are also the best kind of language for him to hear and to repeat as he learns to speak.
                                     
Still, I would say that there are other pre-literacy skills being learned even at the tender age of  almost tow and a half.  W is not only building vocabulary, and a sense of the language and rhythm, but he is learning comprehension skills as well.  He can often look at pictures in a nursery rhyme book or elsewhere and tell me a nursery rhyme that would apply to what he sees.  Other times, he would connect rhymes with what we were doing.  When we go visit our favorite sheep (which include several darling black lambs) Will would walk away reciting Baa Baa Black Sheep.  Other times, he pretends to play a horn and recites Little Boy Blue.

I am also observing that the nursery rhymes color his play as well. Recently, a favorite nursery rhyme of his has been

Little Jack Horner sat in a corner
Eating his Christmas pie
He put in his thumb
And pulled out a plumb
And said "what a good boy am I".

The other day while eating the strawberries we had picked, I stuck his thumb through one of them and started reciting this verse.  He then started to pretend that his bowl of berries was a pie, and pretended that it was Christmas by turning over an ottoman for a fireplace and pretending to hang stockings by it.  Periodically he would sit down with his "pie" and stick his thumb through a berry and reenact the rhyme.

As W has started to really play and imagine independently recently, I am noticing that the stories that are read or told to him as well as situations from our lives are being reflected heavily in what and how he plays.  I love that nursery rhymes are among the places he draws from as he develops his imagination.  They are beautiful and rich in language and imagery.  Many involve scenes from rural life and animals or scenes of royalty (but W's obsession with all things royal might be a subject for another post).  They help to balance his interest in trucks and trains and make his play more well rounded.

In all, I would say that nursery rhymes have not only greatly contributed to W's development, but they have made our lives more beautiful.  My mother was right, all those long hours nursing and learning/reciting/singing them was one of the best things I have ever been able to do for the long-term development of my child.

Celebrating May

Having May Day fall on a Sunday during the week between Easter and Mother's Day really through me for a loop this year I have to admit!  I found myself scrambling to get something together to mark the day/season when all we really wanted to do was spend a week recovering from Easter and having company.  Also, having moved recently, I had a difficult time finding public celebrations near our new home. We like to have a family picnic as well at a local park for May Day too though. As a family, we decided not to celebrate on May Day itself but on the following Tuesday instead.  This allowed Daddy to celebrate with us, and allowed me to delay starting our preparations till May Day.  That day I started making the May wine that Daddy and I like to enjoy as a part of our celebration.  I start with a bottle of German mosel wine and pour it in a half gallon jar along with sprigs of sweet woodruff, sliced strawberries and sugar.

 I let this set in the fridge overnight, then strain it out the next morning.  At that point I also add fresh sprigs of sweet woodruff, rose petals, and a bottle of sparkling mineral water and return it to the refrigerator.  It is so, so good and I look forward to it all year!

Daddy toasts May with some May wine

I also made W this Strawberry pomegranate sun tea and added sliced strawberries to it prior to serving.  It was so pretty, I had to take a picture of it with the sun shining through (please note I did not leave it sitting out in the sun once I added the strawberries). 

W thought this was so special.  Our little May King was so careful not to spill a drop of it!

 Before we ate our picnic, W and I made May crowns with leaves and flowers we found at the park.  Last year we made these braided raffia crowns and we simply slip the stems through the braids.  They work really well and we are able to save the crown base from year to year.

Here we are in our May finery!

For our picnic food we had homemade stromboli stuffed with ricotta and mozzarella cheese, pesto, spinach and Italian sausage.  This doesn't have much to do with May Day per say, except that in our family, this is standard picnic food.

We also had goat cheese salad with grapes and walnuts, and fresh cut strawberries mixed with some xylitol.

For dessert, we were supposed to have Rosemary and  Strawberry scones, but I accidentally left them at home.  We ate them for breakfast for a few days instead and they were so delicious!  I think they taste like May with the fresh rosemary W and I picked from our little balcony garden.  

After we ate we flew kites until W decided that the kites were scary.  Then W and Daddy played catch for a while.

To be honest these pictures were taken a few days before  our celebration (I forgot to get the camera back out after we ate).  I wanted to include them though because I love how my two year old plays catch.  There's always a couple of minutes between each throw while he wonders around looking at something else that has caught his interest...lol, but he loves this as special time spent with Daddy who is a very patient ball player!

The following Saturday W and I made the trip down to the Richmond Waldorf School for their May Faire.  We loved watching the May Pole dancing and catching up with dear friends there.

We have continued our celebration of May with W spending lots of time out on our balcony playing in his new sand pot...

...and visiting the sheep at a local farm.  W loves all sheep with a passion that is truly fitting for the son of an avid knitter and felter.  It warms my heart to see him walk right up to the sheep and pet them. I also love that he knows at this early age that the wool Mama works with comes from the sheep.

 He is especially fond of the black lambs here and spent a very long time with this little guy, petting him and talking to him.  I am amazed by the gentleness he shows to his sheep friends.

W and I went to the Maryland Sheep and Wool festival on Mother's Day  It was quite a drive, but was the perfect way to end up our week of celebrating the best of May.  I was able to stock up on some fleece, locks, roving and yarn and W was able to spend lots of time with the sheep.  He spent half the day giggling in delight each time a sheep would baa.  He also loves watching the sheep dogs.  Another year we will have to take Daddy as well so that I can participate in some of the workshops and W can spend more time with his sheep while I shop for wool!

Our favorite sheep at the festival.  He was so friendly and demanded attention.  

W was happy to oblige!

Wishing you all the very best of the happy month of May!