Me and the bee and husband Johnny
Fiona has been sick all this week. We managed to have some fun, though. I made some pig pancakes which were a big hit. (At least, the chocolate chips were!) And we have been watching a pair of robins tending to their chicks in the backyard.
And yesterday we ventured out to the store and were surprised to find the Wienermobile!
We went to North Park Village Nature Center recently and walked around the trail with some friends. We spotted quite a few animals. We saw a raccoon and a few deer in the trees. Then we saw some geese by the pond; a mama goose was sitting on her nest. We also saw some ducks. One of the mama ducks had her ducklings with her.
Fiona was not very interested in the nature walk, though. She was most interested in the puppets in the Nature Center playroom. Oh, well. Actually, she did like the bees inside and enjoyed discovering the exit point at the end of the long tube leading out of the building. And she was interested in the bee hives we saw on the trail or, at least, she liked the sign.
Fiona dug out one of her old issues of National Geographic Little Kids and found an experiment she wanted to do. So I helped her find lots of different glasses and got out the carafe for her to use as a pitcher and she made lots of watery music.
I like National Geographic Little Kids magazine. It doesn’t have stories with parenting values that conflict with our own; and it does have games, puzzles, simple experiments and pictures of fuzzy baby animals. We also like Highlights High Five magazine, especially the Hidden Pictures and That’s Silly pages.
The first time we put Fiona on a pony she was 15 months old and we were at an autumn pumpkin patch with rides and food vendors. She was dressed as a bumble bee and she wasn’t quite sure about riding the pony but Papa was by her side. She had on her Face of Great Concentration and kept one hand on Papa but she kept the other hand on the saddle pommel.
Since then, she has been on pony rides every Halloween and maybe once or twice at some other events. In each of these subsequent times she has been wearing a broad smile and has wanted to ride again.
I have searched for a stable in the city but found nothing that offers children’s lessons. Instead, once a month, Fiona and I drive a bit over an hour north of the city for her horsemanship class. She was already confident on a pony tethered to a wheel. When she first rode the pony at the stable, she was nervous but she has grown confident. I figure it is like learning a language when you are little. You might not remember it later in life but you will have a strong foundation for learning languages.
I especially like that these lessons encompass more than just a ride on a pony or a horse. They are showing the girls how to brush and wash a horse, and the different parts of the tack. Fiona’s favorite activity, though, seems to be feeding the animals treats.
We belong to a bulk-food co-op and one of our recent purchases has been a bag of bulk cheese powder. A friend had mentioned that they use it to make mac-and-cheese and I thought we could give it a try. I used to buy Annie’s Homegrown brand mac-and-cheese that came in individual sized packs but we had to change to a family-size pack because of the corn starch in the smaller packs. Because I can’t have the dairy in mac-and-cheese, we would end up wasting so much; the leftovers weren’t always eaten. So now I boil a half cup of dry macaroni, put 2 tablespoons of cheese powder and 3 tablespoons of milk in a bowl and mix it all up after the macaroni is cooked and drained. It’s just the right amount. The cheese sauce in this ratio is really thick and I’m sure you could double or even triple the amount of dry macaroni and still have enough.
Fiona and Moma, her grandmother, walked out of the pet store carrying more than they had walked in with.
These days, Fiona loves playing video games. We play Chibi-Robo, Super Mario Sunshine and Animal Crossing on the GameCube. And we play Kingdom for Keflings and Viva Pinata on the XBox 360. But the game she loves above all others is Pikmin 2.
Pikmin are tiny sprites that inhabit a world like ours. Two tiny spacemen land on the planet and the Pikmin help them find treasure. They find bottle caps, strawberries, lip gloss and other trinkets then bring them back to the spaceship. There are monsters to battle: creatures that look like lumbering ladybugs, bird-headed snakes or hungry grubs. There are five different color Pikmin and each has their own special strength. Red Pikmin are immune to fire, yellow are immune to electricity and are light-weight, blue are immune to water, purple are as strong as 10 other Pikmin and are heavy, and white Pikmin are immune to poison.
Fiona loves to pretend to be different color Pikmin and have adventures. She draws Pikmin every day and she writes stories about them. Every night at bedtime, she asks for a Pikmin story. She has made up several new species of Pikmin that she includes in her activities. Brown Pikmin can dig in the earth, orange can fly, green ones stretch, pink ones can turn into any other color Pikmin, and there are invisible Pikmin. There are also metal Pikmin, ice Pikmin and potato Pikmin.
Some of Fiona’s Pikmin story books.
Pete’s a Pizza by William Steig.
As mentioned on Crafty Crow, se7en featured a post filled with ideas for having fun with kids and photography. One of the suggestions was for a scavenger hunt and Saturday, me and the bee took a chilly walk around the neighborhood with a list of things to find. Our list: a spring flower, a flower bud, a squirrel, a bird, something a dog would like, something that makes you happy, something pink, and something colorful. On a second page, Fiona added: a trash can, a banana peel (she had in mind to rummage through the trash which I had to explain to her as a Bad Idea), a hat, and some cheese.
I have thought of some other ideas–based on se7en’s suggestions–for future scavenger hunts. We can forgo a list and look for as many different kinds of one thing that we can find such as statues, fences, flowers, insects, animals or hubcaps. We could look for one thing of each color of the rainbow. We can walk past some shops and look for each letter of the alphabet. Or, I can come up with a longer list of items that we are more likely to find in our neighborhood and she can pick which items we should look for.
I have been wanting to make plaster casts with the bee for ages, ever since I saw BloesemKids’ plaster relief project. I’ve collected juice boxes and rice milk boxes and I even have plaster of Paris. Then when Art Projects for Kids showed how to make dinosaur plaster casts, I knew we had to try it.
I thought about using Art Project for Kids’ method of making a mold but instead, I went with the juice boxes as BloesemKids suggested. They were small and I haven’t worked with plaster in decades so I wanted to keep things a little air-tight and manageable for now. Next time, we’ll try Art Project for Kids’ method because I see how it would be easier to get impressions on the unbound clay. The image would go off the edge and the objects would be easier for small hands to press into the clay.
As much as I like creating things with Fiona, I like making things with quality and permanence best. We’ve made things out of painted paper towels, egg cartons, or pipe cleaners but they are ephemeral objects. We can hang these little casts up on the wall and they will look amazing. Plus, plaster casting is a skill she can use throughout her life. I know I am looking forward to making more of them.