{this moment}

{this moment} - Inspired by Amanda Blake Soule, one of my favourite authors who blogs at http://www.soulemama.typepad.com/  

"A Friday ritual. A single photo... capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember."

Communication is Key

Recently my oldest daughter, who is in grade three, came home from school with an assignment to explain and promote an environmentally friendly practice that she does. I don't usually get involved with her homework unless she asks me to help her or check over her work (I tried once and I now understand why my mother did not like to help me either). This time, however, I decided to step in because she had decided to make her poster about recycling. I explained to her that there are so many things that we do in our family for the environment and that I was pretty sure that everyone in her class would make a poster about recycling.

We talked about this blog and why I started it, which is basically her poster project on the internet. She knows that I write this blog and has read it over my shoulder a few times, but I don't think it has registered with her all that much.

I talked about some of the things that I'm proud of that I accomplished last year and I let her read my "highlight reel" post. I could see the light going on for her when she made the connection between the things we do day to day and how it is good for the environment. But the fact that she was unaware of all the things we do surprised me.

It made me realize that because my daughters are getting older I need to communicate with them more about what we do as a family and why we do it. It isn't enough to just do it. I need to involve my children so that they come to understand what we value, and hopefully value it themselves.

On top of the things we read about in my highlight reel post, I reminded her of the following:

• We turn the heat down and wear hoodies, sweaters and socks when we are cold (ok, that's just me, no one else in my home seems to get cold like I do).

• We had an energy assessment shortly after moving here (almost 3 years ago) to find ways to increase the energy efficiency of our house.

• Even though we are now a two car family, our second car, the one my husband uses for work, is a hybrid vehicle, and we use that one as much as we can when we don't need to take all five of us out.

• We now have a vegetable garden and are trying to grow our own food when we can.

• We are trying to make our own food from scratch as much as possible to not only reduce packaging from the stores but also to reduce preservatives and less healthy ingredients and increase the amount of whole foods in our diet.

• We try to reduce our garbage to less than one full bin each week by recycling as much as we can and by trying to buy items with little or no packaging. I think we can do much better on this one.

• We compost all our organic food waste, either through our backyard compost bin for garden scraps and uncooked food waste or a weekly municipal pick up (table scraps, cooked waste, meat waste).

It is the last item on this list that got her creative juices flowing for her school project. She decided that she would take a picture of all the composting things we have and do and put them on her poster with captions. She was very proud of her project and I was pleased to find out that most of the kids in her class did posters about recycling - she was the only one who did compositing. 

Her poster included our kitchen counter composting containers (we need two because they fill up so quickly around here), the green bins we put out each week and the backyard compost container filled with beautiful new soil for our garden this coming spring.

So I am going to share my thinking aloud more with my girls and be more vocal about our family choices. Once again I am reminded about how important communication is when parenting.

{this moment}

{this moment} - Inspired by Amanda Blake Soule, one of my favourite authors who blogs at http://www.soulemama.typepad.com/  

"A Friday ritual. A single photo... capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember."

Pajamas, kitties and knitting - does it get any better?

A Fabulous Fundraiser

Just in time to start thinking about spring and the coming growing season, my youngest daughter's preschool is doing what I think is the best fundraiser idea ever. Ok, I may be a little biased because I have done a vegetable garden for the past few years. They are selling seed kits from West Coast Seeds! I love this for several reasons.

As I've already said, I love my vegetable garden and I am excited to learn more this year. The kits range from flowers to container gardening for people with limited space to heirloom varieties. Check out the tomato varieties below. Hmm, which ones to pick for my garden this year?

I also love West Coast Seeds. They are an ethical company involved in the community, they sell organic and heritage seeds (no GMO), and their staff is very helpful. I recently bought an indoor growing system and my entire family is watching the sprouts grow before our eyes (seriously, every time we look at the sprouts they are bigger!).

I especially love that  it is a fundraiser that encourages people to grow their own food and educates children about gardening and the environment.

If you are local and would like to purchase a seed kit, contact me or leave a comment here.

The seeds are sold in kits. Kits A - K are $15.00 and the Deluxe Kit is $34.95

A. Annual Favourites Collection: alyssum, jewel nasturiums, Flanders poppies, giant blue point zinnia, sensation cosmos, sparky marigold

B. Cut Flowers Collection: Pacific beauty calendula, red beauty zinnias, baby's breath, rainbow snapdragons, mixed cornflowers, multiflora sweet peas

C. Sunflower Collection: velvet queen, lemon queen, autumn beauty, peredovik, teddy bear, giantess

D. Perennial Flowers Collection: Veronica "blue bouquet", columbine, echinacea coneflowers, Iceland poppies, shasta daisy, verbena

E. Sweet Pea Collection: bijou, mammoth, matucana, high scent, old spice

F. Heirloom Vegetable Collection: dragon tongue bean, scarlet nantes carrot, red Russian kale, little marvel pea, Amish deer tongue lettuce, small sugar pumpkin

G. Gourmet Salad Collection: raddichio, lemon cucumber, super gourmet lettuce blend, scallions, mokum carrot, French breakfast radish

H. Baby Greens Collection: Bull's blood beets, komatsuna, red mustard, chicory, chervil, salad bowl lettuce

I. Herb Garden Collection: cilantro, parsley, basil, chives, dill, sage

J. Patio Vegetable Collection: valentino bean, patio cucumber, lettle gem lettuce, little marvel pea, gypsy pepper, tumbler tomato

K. Heirloom Tomato Collection: brandywine, gold nugget, bonny best, black krim, yellow pear, Italian paste

L. Top 10 Deluxe Collection: parsnip, eggplant, pepper, tomato, broccoli, rainbow swiss chard, carrot, West Coast market mix, zucchini, spinach

Eco Jewelry Cleaning

After my second daughter was born I asked for a charm necklace with my girls' names and birth dates inscribed on them. The internet is chalk full of companies that can create beautiful personalized jewelry for women to commemorate motherhood and I succumbed. I love my necklace that now has three charms on it. I like to tell my girls that when I wear it I am keeping them close to my heart. But because I wear it everyday it can get scruffy looking.

I am very partial to silver jewelry and most of my earrings and necklaces are made of it, but a drawback is that it can tarnish easily when exposed to the humidity in the air because of oxidation.

I tend to forget to clean my jewelry until I am in a hurry getting ready to go out and I realize that my earrings are tarnished, so I put it away to clean at another time. Then I forget again until the next time. Lather rinse repeat.

Silver dips and pastes worked for me because they were quick and easy to do, but I knew that they contained toxic chemicals that smelled horrible. I have been working on detoxifying my home cleaning products and personal care products so I knew that I had to find a better way to make my silver shine again. I don't want to put something on my skin that has been cleaned in harsh chemicals.

It isn't hard to find non-toxic silver cleaner recipes on the internet but this is the one that I like to use.

Supplies for eco jewelry cleaning:

liquid dish soap (some recipes skip the soap)

salt

aluminum foil (I save a piece of recycled foil for this purpose)

water

bowl

Steps:

1. Place aluminum foil in a bowl
2. Pour a tablespoon of salt on top of the aluminum
3. Pour a tablespoon of liquid dish soap on the salt
4. Add 1/2 cup - 1 cup of water 
5. Place silver jewelry on the aluminium and mixture. 
6. Swish the jewelry around then leave for a few minutes.
7. Remove the jewelry from the bowl, rinse in water and dry off.
8. If my silver is particularly dirty I like to give it a quick shine it with a cloth.

That's it! No harsh chemicals, no gloves required.

One Little Word

For the fourth year I am participating in One Little Word. I have been living with my word, gratitude, for almost a month now, and I think it is my favourite One Little Word so far.

On and off in 2012 I kept a daily gratitude on my iPhone, and I do believe that it made a difference for me personally. Finding something that I was grateful for each day, even on those days that just need to end, definitely did turn things around in my mind. I said that I would do something with my list, but after emailing it to myself it languished in my in box and I may have even deleted it by accident. But I suppose it is the thinking that is important, not the documenting.

Including my family in a daily gratitude is part of my 2013 intentions list. It is all too easy to complain about how the day went, the mishaps and unfortunate things that happen. I want my daughters to be resilient in the face of hardship because life does not go smoothly for very long; things always happen. I don't want my girls to have their steps backward overshadow their steps forward. Or even better, I want them to see that the backward steps in life are perhaps just nudging us toward a different path. And if I want them to believe this, I must also believe it. Yikes!

Instead of losing my cool (which I never do, by the way) on a particularly trying day in late December, I had a flash to do a family daily gratitude. I made a gratitude box (because pretty things are motivating) and announced to my family that every night, after dinner together, everyone has to write one thing for which they are grateful, then put it into the gratitude box. I never said anything about sharing, but this is sometimes part of the routine now. Surprisingly everyone (including my husband) agreed. In fact, my daughters were very excited. Pat on the back for me!

We haven't written a daily gratitude every night, because occasionally we are busy and don't all sit down together for a family meal at the end of the day. But because I leave the gratitude box on the kitchen table it is a visual reminder for us all and we do it the majority of nights.

This is a random sampling of some of our daily gratitude writing. I love my husband's:

"I am grateful that the NHL is back", and my daughter Ella's: "I am grateful for my loud screaming voice."

It hasn't been a full month yet, but I can already see some positive spin offs:

• My five year old is sometimes so excited to write her gratitude that she does hers before dinner. A few times she has even said part way through the day that she knows what she wants to write for her gratitude, or if another thing comes along she asks if she can write two for the day! 

• If someone has a stinker of a day we have fun guessing what they are going to be grateful for; sometimes it lightens the mood because we make up funny ones for each other. 

• Once or twice my daughters have said that they have nothing to be grateful for that day, and I appreciate the discussions we have had about their lives and others they know. This has been good for my five year old, who naturally seems to be more of a glass half empty sort. I worry about this and I'm glad that doing a daily gratitude forces her to think of positive things. 

• My almost three year old was in emergency last week with a sore leg and we were all worried it was broken (thank goodness it wasn't!). My older daughters were quite anxious about this so our discussion for the daily gratitude expanded from this into the importance of health. I find that this is hard for young children because unless they have had direct experience with someone who has been seriously ill or died, it doesn't resonate with them. They think in terms of catching a cold or the flu and because they always get better they don't think to be grateful for good health.

• I am grateful that my eight year old is starting to understand that our deepest gratitude should come from non-tangible things in life. Happiness does not come from stuff. 

• I love how doing the daily gratitude makes my girls write more. My eight year old is starting to discover journaling and making personal lists and so independently seeks opportunities to write at home, but my five year old is an emergent writer. When she has to write her gratitude she asks us lots of questions about sounds in words and I love the invented spelling she does on her own. Yay for motivation!

I don't know what I'm going to do with all the slips of paper in the gratitude box at the end of the year. Perhaps they can be glued into a scrapbook? Or put into envelopes by month and into a scrapbook? I'm open to suggestions. 

I am grateful for my One Little Word.

......................................................................

Gratitude Box D.I.Y.

To decorate my gratitude box I used a shoe box, scraps of decorative paper from my scrapbooking stash, chipboard letters (magazine letters or letters cut from paper could be used as well) and modge podge (I don't like the glossy look for this project so I used matte modge podge).

First I carefully measured the paper to fit on the five visible sides of my shoe box.

Then I applied a thick layer of modge podge to one side and carefully placed the piece of paper to top.


After slowly smoothing the paper to remove any air bubbles or wrinkles, I applied a layer of modge podge on top of the paper and smoothed the paper with my fingers one more time. *

I repeated this for each side of the box (excluding the bottom - I don't need it covered).

* Immediately after applying the layer of modge podge to the top of the box I placed the chipboard letters directly on top, then added one more layer of modge podge over the letters.

{this moment}

{this moment} - Inspired by Amanda Blake Soule, one of my favourite authors who blogs at http://www.soulemama.typepad.com/  

"A Friday ritual. A single photo... capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember."