Jalapenos!

Earlier in the Spring, Brian bought a jalapeno at the grocery store. He makes a wicked spicy cheese sauce for dipping nachos in.

We saved the seeds and planted them. Surprisingly (only surprising because I have visions of genetically altered produce being pawned off on unsuspecting Canadians when it is filled with seeds of different, yet related vegetables - so who knows what you would get if you used grocery store produce as seed stock) a good number of strong, healthy stalks grew. Even more surprisingly (to me, Brian has more faith) the stalks flowered and sprouted little jalapenos.

We harvested a large, green jalapeno a couple of weeks ago. Brian whipped up his cheese sauce. No zip. No spice. Not even a tickle.

Since Google is our friend, Brian poked around on the Internet until he found some valuable pepper growing tips. Apparently, if you want hot jalapenos, you need to have stressed plants. Then, you leave the peppers on the vine until they are just about to turn red. Only then should you pick your peppers.

So we stopped caring for the plants. No more watering unless it rained. The leaves drooped and wilted. We kept them crowded in the planter. Just yesterday, Brian harvested all the peppers. We seem to be in the middle of a heat wave here in Ontario, however, frost is just around the corner. Better safe than sorry, so we picked the peppers.

Hopefully we left the jalapenos on the vine long enough to get good and hot. I never was one for spicy things, but 10 years with a guy can change you. I don't mind the odd spicy dish to liven things up.

After...A Week Later

Ho-ly! A week has passed. A WEEK! A week. How'd that happen?!

September is wrapping up and I'm still feeling somewhat organized. How'd that happen?!

The kids have each begun one of their two chosen activities. The organized chaos of hockey has ended as 60 kids have been divvied up onto four teams. Now there is only 30 small people on the ice at any given time. Workable. I worked the kinks out at swimming and Kori is happily swimming in a small group of 4 kids. She is in level 3 and the other children are in levels 4 and 5. This is good as Kori can see the more advanced skills demonstrated, she has more instructor time and she even likes the kids in her class. Extra-curricular Utopia.

October is shaping up as well. Doesn't it look organized? I like stickers. It makes scheduling easier. Really. Both kids will start soccer in October. I've heard from Kori's coach, but not Rai's.

I like October. I like to go to the apple orchard. I like all the pumpkins and squash and gourds. I like coloured leaves. This October, I want to knit and do some final bits of canning. Someone please remind me of these goals before the end of October, will you?

Before...

My September calendar has been looking a little naked. There's a good reason for that, though.

The kids had their choice of 2 activities to sign up for this Fall. Hockey for Raiden and swimming for Kori were givens. I am so happy that Kori has finally found something that she likes to do.

The kids made their choices fairly quickly and easily. They chose to forgo their Cubs/Guides and do indoor soccer instead. This will be Kori's first foray into team sports.

So we were all set with our choices. The only drawback is that scheduling is a bit delayed. We never hear what the hockey schedule will be until the absolutely last minute. It makes scheduling other activities very difficult. I tried not to stress about it this year. Indoor soccer is marginally better. At least we know that Kori will be playing on Thursdays and Raiden on Tuesdays. Start dates are up in the air.

Things have worked out not too badly. The hockey schedule has been posted 6 whole days before we 'need' it! Monday: hockey. Tuesday: swimming, Rai's soccer. Thursday: K's soccer. We try not to schedule anything on Fridays and I particularly like having Wednesdays off as well. Wednesday is a good library/errand/grocery day.

So I am off to fill up my calendar. I feel so grounded when I have a full calendar.

What We've Been Up To...

Being blessed with well meaning relatives, come holiday time, my kids are spoiled with copious amounts of chocolate. Most of this I send to the freezer so that it is not devoured in a gluttonous single sitting. The hoard was getting fairly mountainous so I made fudge one night. Brian, who doesn't have a sweet tooth in his head, actually liked it. So we made more. I now have fudge in my freezer.

Actually, a lot of it has been given away. Brian took a bunch to work where it quickly disappeared. Here he is stirring the third batch we made one evening. He's very efficient in the kitchen. Otherwise, Brian is back to a regular schedule at work - five day weeks. It's a strange time of year. Longer weeks feel somehow shorter due to the shortening days.


Here's Kori doing her math lesson. I've changed the structure of our lessons. She has her independent work and her lesson. I keep the lesson short and to the point. Everything else is independent work. Unless it involves chocolate, as this lesson did. Then she's ok with a longer lesson. I'm sure Saxon die-hards are rolling in their graves, but the format laid out was causing grief. Instead of the tedious counting aloud, she writes out some number patterns on the back of her meeting strips. As we're establishing our Fall routine I think this format is best. During Friday's lesson, she even asked me to explain something to her instead of putting on the brakes and quitting. So it seems that our goal of finishing these math books by March Break is a bit more reasonable after an ok week of regular lessons.


Raiden's hockey has begun. It's the 'pre-season', or so I've been told. As the first practice was barely-controlled chaos, I'm hoping for improvements. At this level (I'm such a bad hockey mom, he's a pee-wee? I think?) they will split the kids into four teams and have rotating round-robins throughout the regular season. Then there is a tournament to wrap up the year with an out of town team. He's playing in the Christian league which means no weekend, late or early games. The focus is on skills and learning the game, not standings and points. This also means that home-town hockey is starting up as well as NHL. Lots to keep track of for Raiden. Quietly, in my mind, I call him my little statistician. Where he gets his love of sports is beyond me. Perhaps it's the competitiveness that draws him in. He's excited for indoor soccer to begin and he dragged me out this morning to see my brother play touch football. Rai was on the sidelines for the whole game, sitting on his soccer ball, taking it all in.

I got a present. The happy thoughts about my present are eclipsing just about everything else that is going on in my life. I've liked these red dishes for a really, really, long time. They're a little pricey so I usually just walk by them in the store, check them out and move on. When in the store this weekend, I moved on from the shelf and Brian snafued a box and that was that. We'll need to get another box in order to have enough dishes in the cupboard. And I'm planning new placements and perhaps something else that matches to spruce the table up a bit. New dishes and planning table settings are just as endorphin inducing as moving furniture around. Other than my new dishes, I have to say I'm feeling pretty excited about our school year. This last two weeks with my pre-planned school schedule in place has gone much more smoothly than I anticipated. It's scheduled enough to keep me on track, yet flexible. We didn't get to a couple of things I had in mind for Friday, and I'm not freaking out. Perhaps we'll do them this week, perhaps not. It's all good.

Nuk is still tearing up cardboard. Of particular enjoyment is a take-out drink tray. She has shown some recent interest in swinging her knotted ropes around like they're weapons and then chewing them to her heart's content. So now, along with all the hair she's blowing, I have string to pick up too. Fun.

Hugo's Here!!

I'm so very excited. Over the summer I stumbled upon a review for The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Our library did not carry it so I requested it through the inter-library loan service.

It arrived today! I had to rush to the library this evening. I arrived 15 minutes before they closed. Noone looked very happy to see me. I picked up a few interesting books pertaining to our school work this week in record time. I also picked up The World Without Us by Alan Weisman for my mom. After reading the jacket, she'll have to wait until I finish it before she can read it. But I digress...






Pardon the glare. Photoshop is not yet part of my repertoire. Doesn't it look nice? The story is set in Paris, 1931. A young lad is living secretly in a train station and he gets caught up in a 'intricate, tender and spellbinding mystery'.

























The thing that drew me in is the author's use of the images to further the story. There are over 500 pages, yet about half are illustrations. For example, chapter one is 61 pages long. Only about 5 pages of text, though. I quite like the artwork. From a quick sneak peek (I'm not supposed to read it until the kids and I start it together) much of it is set up like an artistic storyboard, telling the story one page at a time.

I expect we'll get through this pretty quickly as the kids are anxious to start our read-alouds again. I've been terribly negligent in that area of late. Purposely negligent, though. And only for a week. The week before last, we finished our summer read: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.