Iveyrock

Ian decided that for our Fourth of July celebration, Daddy and Mommy should have a friendly competition. A pie baking contest, to be judged by Ian, with a prize for the winner. After some discussion about the guidelines (and available ingredients), we got down to business.

Ray went the more traditional route, with a lovely peach pie. I made a mocha silk pie, partially so we didn’t use all the fresh fruit in the house, and partially because – well, frankly, I wanted an excuse to make it again.

It was a close contest. Chava preferred the peach pie, and Ian voted for the mocha. Since Ian was the official judge, I won the prize for the best pie. This is my prize, which I am displaying proudly alongside Ray’s prize from a previous (and more rigorous) cooking contest.

The kids recently finished up their first round of swimming lessons for the summer. Chava has never taken lessons of any kind before, and it was a big deal for her. She and Ian were in the same class, and Ian made sure to take good care of her.

Ian learned to float on his stomach and his back, and the beginnings of the front crawl. He was excited, but kept asking when they were going to teach him to ‘really’ swim. Chava worked on getting comfortable with the water, and with the class setting. She really liked jumping in to the teachers, and when they spun her around the pool.

Watching my baby learn to navigate life.

This morning, Ian explained that he was evaporating water to make hail, which would ’scare away the enemies.’

This afternoon, as we were outside playing, the sky began to get dark. Ian immediately realized that the water he had evaporated had made a storm. He explained to us that he had evaporated a lot of water, and was preparing for a really big storm. With hail. And thunder and lightening. It was going to be so big, it might even break the windows, so we would need to stay back.

All of this scared Chava, who is nervous about thunderstorms anyway. I had a talk with Ian about how it probably wasn’t really going to be a big storm, and told him that we didn’t even know that it was going to rain. Ian did, in fact, know that it was going to rain, because he had evaporated water and made the storm.

Chava was still scared, so I suggested that she draw some pictures of the rain. She wasn’t interested, but Ian thought it was a great idea. He decided to take it a step further, and make himself into a thunderstorm.

He tried to rain down on people, which wasn’t working out very well. So we had a little talk about the other things rain does – falling into ponds, making plants grow, falling into rivers and running to the ocean. That led to some talk about the biggest lakes and rivers in the world.

(here he is raining down)

Sure enough, it started pouring down rain. Ian was thrilled. I am pretty sure that out of all that talk about geography and science, what Ian is going to take from this afternoon is that HE HAS THE POWER TO CREATE STORMS.

Some of our Father’s Day projects.

Should be a good one.

The kids’ project for the day: building a robot that will dig them a tunnel through the backyard, and to the Atlantic beach.

Ian’s preliminary plans

Ian is serious about this project. He has a plan for how the robot should work, and how strong it needs to be. He wants it to be able to dig for at least an hour before needing to stop for repairs. He wanted me to give him electric cords, so I suggested solar energy. He wanted to know where to get solar energy, and I told him he needed something to collect the sunlight. He thought a plant would work well for that.

Chava helped with the digging arm, and provided opinions on what the robot needed to do. They had some intense discussion about details and materials before they ever actually got to work. They spent hours on this project today, and have every faith that it will operate as designed, after a lot of work.

(pictured here is the ‘digging arm’)

Ian has discovered baseball. After weeks of watching him practice with a plastic tube and any ball he could find, it was time to get him some real equipment. Which, in addition to a ‘real’ bat and some balls, means baseball gloves for everybody.

And last night, we surprised the kids with a trip to a minor league baseball game.

Bugs and snakes I can do with the best of ‘em, but I have never been any good at sports. This is completely new territory for me…

The smell of the greasepaint…

The roar of the crowd….

“Mommy – I ‘oosed’ all the black paint.”

Our new Wednesday routine involves picking up vegetables from our local CSA. We get a big box of local, organic veggies… and then I get to figure out how to eat them.

This week’s box had carrots, red onions, broccoli, fennel, beets, cabbage, summer squash, swiss and rainbow chard, garlic, and a big bunch of basil. (The box also had some kohlrabi in it, but I traded it for more swiss chard. Because I know how to cook greens, and I have no idea what to do with kohlrabi. But if anyone knows, I have one in my fridge from last week…. ) We also get eggs, and every other week a pound of coffee.

I really enjoy using vegetables that I wouldn’t usually think about, and it’s always fun to open the box and see what’s inside. The system would be almost perfect, if I just had some chickens to eat the scraps…