Wordsmith Wednesday: Little House in the Big Woods

This week Owen and I have been reading Little House In the Big Woods (Laura Ingalls Wilder). It's one of my favorite books from when I was a little girl, and I am pleased that he is ready to listen to chapter books. (Now that we are in the pooping stage of potty learning, we can spend quite a bit of time reading in one sitting!) We have read about half of it in the last four days, and he has brought it to me to read a couple of times on his own. We are both enjoying Laura's recollection of butchering a hog, smoking vension, storing pumpkins and onions and herbs in the attic, making butter with Ma, watching Pa clean his gun and traps and play the fiddle, making maple syrup, and living in the big woods of Wisconsin. I think it helps Owen to have the occasional illustration (by Garth Williams) since this is his first chapter book. He is surprisingly interested in the black and white pictures and wants to examine them closely and talk about them.
If it's been a while since you've read this one, I'd highly recommend reading it to yourself or a little one in you life.

Minnetonka Moccasins

I recently thought I'd found the solution to my shoe woes. We prefer for Owen to wear soft-soled shoes, but he is getting a bit too big for most of the readily available ones. He also has a rather fat foot, so he needs a wider shoe. When I found that Minnetonka Moccaisins made adaorable, affordable fringed moccasins, I thought we might be set until Owen started picking out his own shoes - and beyond. But, alas, when the first pair arrived, one was wide enough to fit on either of his feet while the other was too narrow to fit on either. When the replacements arrived, we found that the more narrow cut was the correct one. Unfortunately, the shoes were also VERY long. They are the oddest cut I have every seen.
I got a chance to review them this morning (see below). If you're looking for a long narrow shoe for a child, and want soft soles, then this is the shoe for you. I'm still feeling disappointed because they are just too cute. Oh well, off to search again for affordable, soft-soled shoes that come in toddler size 9 and don't cost a fortune.




Product: Minnetonka Childs Fringe Softsole Boot by Minnetonka
Submitted at: Moccasins.com
Review Status: Pending
Long Narrow Shoes by Disappointed Mama from Lancaster, PA on 9/30/2009
Sizing: Feels full size too small
Pros: Well-priced, Cute
Cons: Very narrow, Unusually long, Uncomfortable
Describe Yourself: First Time Parent We were disappointed when the first pair of moccasins came as two very different shoes. One fit my son, but one did not. After getting replacements, the new pair did not fit at all. It was made very narrow and extremely long. They were so narrow, in fact, that we couldn't even get them on my son's feet, and they were a full inch and a half longer than his foot - a tripping issue if he had actually gotten them on. Although they are absolutely adorable shoes, they are the most strangely cut shoes I have ever encountered - how very disappointing.

More Felt Food Tutoials: Carrot and Snow Pea

To make a carrot you will need these pieces - orange wedge, green rectangle with fringe cut on one end, stuffing

Starting at pointy end of carrot, whip stitch on outside of felt with matching thread.Continue sewing toward the top of the carrot, stuffing it as you go.

When you near the top, lay the carrot greens inside and put the last of the stuffing in.After you sew all the way to the top, secure stitches and sew a running stitch through the orange and green layers all the way around the top close to the edge.

Cinch in stitching, and secure thread ends. To make a snow pea you will need a green ellipse and a piece slightly smaller than 1/2 the ellipse.
Fold small piece inside larger one and whip stitch around outside with matching thread.

Done!

Nifty Thrifty

So what have we done to be thrifty in the last week?

• shopped at the central market (Friday)
  
• bargained for stock bones at said market (They used to sell a big ol' box of them for $5. I asked if they had any bulk ones and confirmed that they sold them by the box. The guy said yes but they only had part of a box. I asked again, so it is still buy the bag then. Yes. Then he proceeds to weigh them and charge me $1/lb for them. I say that I thought they were not by the lb., and he shows me the ones in the case and tells me they took out part of the bones (the nicer ones - shank bones) and vacuum packed them and are selling them for $1/lb. So, he wants to sell me a big hunk of frozen-together picked, over bones, and I say no thanks, I used to get twice that much for $5. He goes down from $18 to $12, and I say no thanks again. Finally, he asks how much I will give for these bones, and I tell him $5. He was $5 richer for selling me those picked over bones.)
• used a $3 off a $30 order at the big box grocery store (Monday)
  
• called the insurance company to get another explanation of benefits sent that seemed to have been lost in the mail - Next I can send that off for reimbursement of the amount that was applied to our deductible. (today)
  
• called a company that didn't refund me shipping when they sent me a pair of shoes that were 2 different sizes (Friday)
  
• returned our library books on time (today)
  
• spent part of the morning at the library (today)
  
• checked out more books for Owen - and a video (today)
  
• went to a free petting farm with Owen and Abram (Saturday)
  
• shopped at two front yard farm stands and got red peppers ($0.35 each), honey, apples ($7/half bushel), and some gourds (also $0.35 each) for the table (Saturday)
  
• chopped and froze peppers and dried some of the apples (Saturday)
• found a 100% wool sweater for me at Goodwill for $5 (today)
• turned-off AC/heat and opened/closed windows as needed (all of September)
• made felt food for a birthday present - and some extra sushi for a special surprise (Monday)
• worked on two hand-made baby gifts (ongoing)

Tutorial: Felt Sushi

Here you go, Jessie! I promise these are super-duper easy. Making the tutorial was harder than making the sushi.

I used felted wool sweater scraps. All of these were thrifted for less than $2 each. You will also need matching thread a needle, and sharp scissors.

Here are the pieces you will need for a salmon and avocado roll (adjust filling colors as needed) - nori, rice, salmon, avocado.


I folded my rice and fillings so that they would be a bit thicker.

Place fillings on rice . . .
. . . and roll rice around them once. Overlap white edges about 1/4" and cut off excess rice.


Tack edge of rice in place. (This stitching will not show, so go ahead and use black thread.) Trim filling ends if they stick out of rice too far.Stitch nori to rice roll near seam.
Wrap nori around rice roll. Overlap nori about 1/4" and trim excess. Sew second end of nori to the roll. Trim bottom/top of nori to make it look even and nice.
Sew directly through the roll a few times to make sure all the layers stay together. Tie off ends, and enjoy!
Here are the pieces you will need for tuna nigiri - rice, tuna, nori (change topping as desired).
Fold rice to make it a bit thicker. (I folded it into thirds.)
Tack nori strip to center bottom of rice, and sew through all layers a few times.
Wrap nori strip around rice and tuna. Sew closed, and trim excess nori. Enjoy!

Wordsmith Wednesday: Ruby In Her Own Time

I bought this book long before Owen was even thought of. When I was working on my MA in teaching, I took a completely useless reading pedagogy class. The only good thing I got out of is was reading and reviewing 5 children's books a week. This is one of the gems I found.

Ruby In Her Own Time (written by Jonathan Emmett and illustrated Rebecca Harry) tells the story of a duck family with five ducklings. Ruby is the runt and starts life a bit slow. They name her Ruby because she is small and precious (and because all the other kids have R names). Father duck asks again and again, "Will she ever. . ." hatch, eat, swim, etc. And she does. She does eat - "in her own time." She does swim - "in her own time." When all the brothers and sisters fly, she does too, but she goes farther and wider. Mama duck wonders if she will ever return, and she does in her own time with her own family of ducklings.
The writing is nothing out of the ordinary and the pictures are alright, but I really love the message of this book. I think that it important for children to develop in their own time. This is one I love to read over and over to Owen.

You Have Got To Freakin' Be Kidding Me: A Printer Catridge Rant

We are the owners of a Lexmark Z2320 printer. It's the second printer we've purchased in two years. (We got one just before the compacting year and soon after - by complete chance.) These things break way too easily, and of course they can't be repaired. But that's not the worst of it.
Tonight while trying to print, the black cartridge stopped working. Notice I didn't say the ink ran out? No, I have a perfectly serviceable ink refill kit that cost about $25 and has seen the reigns of THREE printers! Yes, 3. So, I was able to refill the cartridge with fresh black ink, but it wouldn't print.
Do you want to know why?
Apparently this and other Lexmark cartridges are equipped with chips that allow a certain amount of printing (pages?, passes of the cartridge over the paper?, who knows!) and when the clock strikes midnight, the cartridges turn back into a pumpkins.
This is taking programmed senescence a bit too far.
So you want to buy a piece of junk car for half the price of a good one? You might just be able to get 200,000 miles out of it if you treat it just so. Can you imagine the outrage from car owners if suddenly they found themselves with cars that shut off at 99,999 miles never to run again because the darned things had a chips that only allowed them to run that far?
But, if you buy a Lexmark printer cartridge, no matter how gently you use the thing, you are only allowed a certain mileage.
Here is information on a case brought against cartridge remanufacturers.
Fortunately, you can buy refillable cartidges compatible with Lexmark printers, and the next time I need a new one, I'll be ordering it online rather than buying the brand-name one from the office supply store. What a crock!

Renaissance Faire

Sunday we donned out finest Renaissance outfits and made our way to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire in Manheim.
I'm sure we're not the only family who each have a chain mail shirt. Since Abram's shirt is on display in his office, he wore mine.
Owen wore his own shirt that Daddy made him for Christmas, and he got LOTS of compliments on it. I even saw a few pictures being taken of him from afar. He wore it almost all day, but he did take it off so he could get in the carrier and nurse to sleep for a bit of a nap.
While Owen napped, we watched a jousting tournament, and Owen woke up to see the last bit of it. He said, "Those are knights. I'm going to fight them with my sword." By the time we actually got to see the mounted knights, he was more in awe of them and their horses and less ready to fight them with his sword.
We snuck in our own food but tried a bit of mead from the Mount Hope Winery which is home to the faire. It wasn't as good as ours that we made from local honey and wild yeast.
Owen and Abram also took a ride on an elephant (yup, not so PC, but Owen loved it).
He told me later that a real pirate took him off of the elephant.
We also enjoyed the jesters with the "Untrained Dog Show." Owen liked petting Blockhead the border collie after the show.

Wordsmith Wednesday: Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

My friend Kelly and John Coles (of illegal-raw-goat-cheese-at-the-C'ville-farmer's-market fame) introduced me to Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects (Weston A. Price, MS., D.D.S., F.A.G.D., 1939) about five years ago, and since reading it, I have referred to it frequently. It is worth getting for the pictures alone. Whenever I pull it off the shelf, I get lost for a while examining the photos.
Weston Price was a dentist who in the 1920s and 30s went around the world searching for healthy people. His main measure of overall health was dental health including the number of teeth with caries per person and jaw/palate/facial development. He studied isolated populations of Swiss, Gaelic, Inuit and other Native Americans, Melanesians, Polynesians, Africans, Australian Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders, New Zealand Maori, and native Peruvians eating traditional diets and compared them to genetically similar populations who were eating modern diets. Although their diets varied greatly, he found that the isolated peoples eating traditional diets were in good health and had very low incidences of caries. They also had wide palates that appropriately accommodated all of their 32 adult teeth (no need for braces or removal of wisdom teeth or as in my case 4 other teeth that were likely not going to fit in there properly. Incidentally, he noted that even when he had to clear a layer of slime off of the isolated people's teeth, they were generally healthy and white beneath this layer; these people were not brushing their teeth.) The modernized counterparts who ate many processed foods had rampant tooth decay, poorly formed dental arches, narrowed nostrils, difficulty birthing, diseases such as TB, and generally poorer health.
All of the healthy populations he found got much of their nutrition from animal foods. He had samples of the foods tested for various nutrients and found that the varying traditional diets were all very high in vitamins A and D. He also postulated that another vitamin which he called activator X (what we now call vitamin K2) was important for the use of the other fat soluble vitamins. He noted that people eating sea food were particularly healthy: "During these investigations of primitive races, I have been impressed with the superior quality of the human stock developed by Nature wherever a liberal source of sea foods existed."
He was acutely aware of the malnourishment of dental patients in his care in the US and conducted trials with poor populations of children - feeding them one meal a day (in addition to what they ate at home) of stew, whole grain bread (made from freshly ground wheat which is high in phytase to break down phytates which block mineral absorption), butter, milk, cod liver oil, and high vitamin butter oil. He found that their dental carries healed and that often their academics and conduct improved. One good meal a day was enough to make a difference!
Here are some of the fascinating photos:

The Swiss

FIG. 3. Normal design of face and dental arches when adequate nutrition is provided for both the parents and the children.Note the well developed nostrils.

Fig. 4. In the modernized districts of Switzerland tooth decay is rampant. The girl, upper left, is sixteen and the one to the right is younger. They use white bread and sweets liberally. The two children below have very badly formed dental arches with crowding of the teeth. this deformity is not due to heredity.

Wakamba Africans

FIG. 41. The development of the faces and dental arches in many African tribes is superb. The girl at the upper right is wearing several earrings in the lobe of each ear. The Wakamba tribe points the teeth as shown below. This does not cause tooth decay while they live on their native food.

FIG. 44. Wherever the Africans have aidopted the foods of modern commerce, dental caries was active, thus destroying large numbers of the teeth and causing great suffering. The cases shown here are typical of workers on plantations which largely use imported foods.

The entire book can be read here, but in my opinion, this one is worth buying. The Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation continues to keep it in print. I am amazed at the extent of Price's research, and hope that we will realize the wisdom of traditional diets sooner rather than later. I think that change is coming. I think people really are starting to get that it matters what you eat, but I wonder if we can learn quickly enough.

A Few Summer Projects

Here are some projects I have finished since July.

A treasure bag for Anna's unbirthday - thread crochet, lined with fabric:


Felt food - some for Devon and some for Owen - salmon and avocado roll and tuna nigiri:

A reversible apron for Gabriel's birthday:


A felt book of colors for Carter's birthday - based on this book I saw on Etsy:

Wordsmith Wednesday: Pottenger's Cats: A Study In Nutrition

I wish I had read Pottenger's Cat's: A Study In Nutrition (Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., M.D.), but as it is I finally got around to reading it while we were in Italy. I was familiar with his work from his association with Weston A. Price.
This book is a short but thorough summarization of his nutritional studies with cats as well as those with humans and the dietary recommendations for people. It is just 123 pages, so even a busy mama can read it - if you can get your hands on it. It is available from the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation (who keep it as well as Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneration in print) or from amazon.com where you can view part of the book online.
Frances Pottenger was a medical doctor who ran a sanitorium. He used cats to standardize adrenal extracts after removing their adrenal glands. He found that his cats who were on a diet of cooked meat scraps, raw milk, and cod liver oil were poor operative risks, but that a second group of cats who ate a diet of raw meat scraps, raw milk, and cod liver oil were much more robust.
This lead to his nutritional studies where he observed the effects of diets including cooked and raw meat, cooked and raw milk, and cod liver oil over several generations of cats. He looked at their ability to produce uniform healthy offspring over multiple generations, their bone structure, their teeth and gum health, and their bone health and the amounts of phosphorous in their bones. He also used the composted manure from their pens to grow beans.
He obseved the raw meat/raw milk cats were robust generation after generation while cats consuming cooked foods showed poorer health with each successive generation. The cooked food cats also had higher rates of reproductive problems, parasites, respiratory problems, allergies, and had poorer dispostions. He concluded that there were certainl heat labile substances in the raw foods that increased their nutritive potential. His bean experiment results were more ambiguous, and it would certainly be very interesting for a more careful and complete study of this kind were undertaken today.
The book also details some of his nutrition analyses of humans as well as his research on the facial development of people who were breastfed or bottlefed.
His studies are as fascinating as Weston Price's, and their work seems to have drifted into the same place of relative oblivion. While their findings are not complete nor their methods considered rigorous by today's scientific standards, I think that these are very important issues that deserve further study. As we lead increasingly modernized lifestyles complete with ultra-pasteurized milk and other heat processed foods, we are likely causing ourselves many of the ills that are extremely common - infertility, allergies, and poor tooth and jaw structure (you know, the need for braces and fillings - it's not genetic!).
I have been affected with all of these maladies. I'm a third generation cat, if you will, and I have a lot of nutritional healing to do for myself and for the future generations of my family. We drink raw goat milk and try to eat raw meats - sashimi, rare steaks and medium rare burgers. We still have a lot to stive for if I am to be a "regenerating cat," a mama who was on a deficient (cooked) diet but who has been put on a raw diet.
The specific nutritional advice at the end of the book seems inconsistent with itself and with Pottenger's findings. There are some raw recipes but also lots of cooked ones that include items that the book (not sure if this part was from Pottenger or from the editors) recommends against (such as ham).
I hope that you will take the time to read this one. It really is one of those books that changed my life. It relieved some of the guilt I felt over Owen's dental health while energizing me to further improve our diet because my children and grandchildren really are counting on me.

How To Make Beanbags - A Tutorial

Owen and I recently made beanbags for Fin's second birthday. Owen enjoyed helping pick the fabrics from my stash of scraps and filling the bags with beans. He also requested some of his own. Here's what we did:

1. Select woven fabrics.
( We chose all blue ones - three solids, and three plaids. Denim from old jeans is great.)

2. Cut two, 4.75 inch squares for each bean bag.
3. Place each pair of squares with right sides together. Beginning about 1 inch from one corner, sew a 0.25 inch seam around the edges. After turning the fourth corner, sew 1 inch, and stop. This will leave a small hole in one side of the bag. Repeat for each bag.

4. Cut the corners at a 45 deg. angle close to the seam. (This will reduce the bulk at the corners and allow them to turn easily.)
5. Turn the bag right sides out. Use a chopstick to gently push out corners.
6. The edges around the holes should turn under on their own. Make sure they are straight and even, and press the bags with a hot iron. 7. Fill each bag with 1/2 cup of beans.
(We used a piece a paper folded into a funnel to get our navy beans in there more easily.)

Here they are waiting to be sewn up.
8. Sew across the whole length of each open side.
(I used a contrasting thread and a zigzag stitch.)
9. Give them to your little one.
(Here's my cheeky monkey with a basket of beanbags. You can use things from around the house as targets. Baskets, yoghurt cups, and laundry hampers all work great and are free.)