It is spring in Portland. With all its colors, and sights, and the sunshine and rain dance. I do love this time of the year.
Potatoes in our new bed, already growing.
Foxglove ready to bloom.
Fern.
And you can see there’s more coming! What a beautiful place this is.
A beautiful and fun Friday ritual. Inspired by SouleMama.
{this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. – Amanda Soule
If you’d like to leave a comment and a link to your moment, we would love to see it. Have a beautiful day.
We’ve started cleaning our garden, to get it ready to plant and transplant all the seeds that Siena has started.
As every year, our calendula plants are spread all over our vegetable garden, and they look beautiful! I love seeing them in the winter, with their greens so strong, ready to flower as soon as they can.
We’ve never done anything with them but admire them and place them in vases for some fresh cut flowers to enjoy throughout our house. But I checked out this book from the library a while ago and found a recipe for calendula salve I thought we’d try. The Essential Herbal for Natural Health by Holly Bellebuono is a great book. So good! Lucas and Siena gave it to me for Mother’s Day, I’m so excited to have it on hand now whenever we need it.
With Siena’s love for making all things at home, especially with wild plants, didn’t take us long to get started.
Mix equal parts of fresh calendula flowers and olive oil. Warm on stove in very low heat for about 20 minutes.
Pass through the colander to keep the liquid without the flowers.
Put it back on the stove on low heat to melt some beeswax with it.
Let it cool a little. Pour it onto a jar and enjoy! My hands have felt better since we made it, they’ve been very dry. I love how it feels. Siena does too. We are enjoying our salve, and Siena has a little travel size for her days out. Mmm, so good. Look at the color! If I could only smell…
Seeing that our calendula is flowering like crazy, with our rain and sunshine, and also some requests from Siena, I’m looking for more salves or good things to make with calendula.
I’ve also read that is better to use dried flowers instead of fresh, because they tend to get moldy quicker. So we are drying some flowers and some petals as well, separate, to give it a try on different recipes.
I’ve found these recipes too that we’d like to try:
Oh… we are having so much fun.
These past few weeks we’ve been remodeling Siena and Lucas’s playhouse. No longer called such, now it’s a ClubHouse.
With sadness I saw their play kitchen go (which was OK to hand over to someone else to enjoy), but seeing them grow up from that very special piece of furniture that stayed in our kitchen for many years, and then moved to the playhouse for more cooking, was hard to let go.
We saw many soups and pancakes, teas, and coffee, and more foods being prepared in this tiny kitchen. Siena especially, would cook right next to us for so many hours. It seems that she was always playing with it. Then moved to the playhouse for more cooking, mud soups and bark chips snacks and flower coffee or tea. Lots more playing.
As they were cleaning up the playhouse, they said they don’t use it anymore. Siena much too tall for it. Lucas a little bit too.
I realized it was me who didn’t want to let it go. Siena and Lucas were ready for a new place. They want this new space to be something they can use, right now. Most of the larger cooking utensils and equipment have moved out, and now the floor is filled with pillows, cards, quilts, and some crafting supplies.
Not bad at all, just different. And I wonder if I am ready for this change. It’s a very visual sign that two of my most precious people are growing. Growing up right in front of me. I don’t really see this in our day-to-day things (except in the shortening of their pants.)
I do try to really pay attention, and notice how they are changing, learning new things, and just how big they’ve gotten. But this change, from playhouse to clubhouse is a visual, clear sign that they are growing up into what they are right now. Sigh. A very beautiful sigh!
It reminds me to hug them just one more time, a little tighter, a little longer. Give them one more kiss. Say I love you one more time.
So from a kitchen centered playhouse, it’s changed to a playing and hanging out clubhouse.
It makes me happy to see them hanging out there. Magazines on hand. Craft supplies or playing cards. It makes me happy that the decorations are mostly hand made by them and their friends. That they’ve asked to put a mason bee hive on the outside of their clubhouse. And that their Clubhouse House Warming Party was focused on being ecological and Earth-caring.
Here are some pictures of Siena’s first planned and organized, all by herself, party. With Lucas’s help when needed, of course.
There was the getting ready for the party.
Siena invented a new game called Pick the Trash.
Very similar to Pin the Tail, but with a different theme.
There were decorations hung.
There was waiting.
Until friends were coming around the corner.
They were welcomed with a shower of flower petals confetti.
Visited the new Clubhouse (sorry, but I can’t disclose the location.)
Had snacks.
Played games.
‘Picked Up Trash’.
Blind folded.
By placing a piece of grass as close as you could to any of the trash drawn on the paper. (I know she’s my daughter (and well, it’s also my blog, so I’ll go ahead and say it) I love the creativity and the fun game she came up with!
And then the club members drew on pieces of (recycled) cotton fabrics (old sheet cut and sewn with a loop) to hang for prayer flags for the new Clubhouse.
It was a super fun party and we all had fun.
To a life full of changes. I think I am ready for this one! Have a fun day.
I have Poppies in my garden. I’ve always admired these beautiful plants. The flowers seem so delicate, paper-like. I’ve taken lots of pictures of them but never before I’ve had them in my own garden to admire.
I’ve bought lots of cards with paintings and drawings of poppies. Look at this page, full of beautiful poppy-art. And Claude Monet’s Poppy Field. Van Gogh Poppies. And of course, I think my favorite painting, Georgia O’Keeffe‘s Oriental Poppies, and the other ones. Included the stamp that came out a long time ago with her painting.
Siena and Mark came home one day two springs ago with a plant of poppies. So we put it in the front yard, right next to the window to admire.
And this spring… look at what we witnessed:
I shared other photos on Friday too, I love them. We’ve been enjoying the blooms, the colors, the smell, the bees coming to visit them, watching these plants daily, even few times a day to admire their beauty. Such a beautiful plant. I hope we’ll be able to enjoy them more springs to come.
What a couple of weeks we’ve had. It’s been so much fun. I am:
:: loving the change in the days, from rain to sun, clouds moving so fast on top of us. I don’t mind as much the rain still, and I’m loving when the sun comes out. It is Portland after all!
:: watching the moon, and its cycle. I want to get one of these calendars.
:: trying to figure out how to put this calendar on the side bar of my page. Does anybody know how I can do this on wordpress?
:: trying very hard to stay in the present.
:: loving seeing Lucas so immersed in baseball, and his new experiences in a team, learning so many things in so many levels.
:: enjoying seeing Lucas with our good friend, share their love for baseball. Lucas looks up to him and enjoys his company and baseball playing every time.
:: loving seeing Siena loving swimming so much as well. So much she loves it that she enjoys the “pool smell”…
:: loving seeing Siena so excited coming back from her daily check of her greenhouse, and update on how big her plants are, which seeds are sprouting and which ones are not.
:: trying to remember Siena’s face when coming from her said visit to her greenhouse. What a face. These moments, are certainly beautiful. I want to stay in the moment.
:: seeing all the playing and talking about bees with friends and neighbors as well.
:: trying to figure out what our days ‘should’ look like, to make everyone comfortable and meeting everyone’s needs. If I stay in the moment, it’s enjoyable.
:: enjoying every non-rainny moment to play outside, garden, eat lunch and dinner out of doors.
:: excited to see that our local Farmer’s Market has started. A sign of spring for sure!
:: loving seeing Lucas be so ready for his games, so excited and passionate.
:: enjoying new friendships.
:: happy to see that our new bees are staying in their new home.
:: reminiscing our great time at Cirque du Soleil, Ovo.
:: enjoying seeing Siena and Lucas remodel our playhouse into what they want right now. Perfect!
:: hearing all their plans for their new, remodeled space, with dreams of staying and keeping it forever even as Mamá and Papá get old. So fun!
:: loving our new (almost can’t hear it) dishwasher.
:: even loving more the man I live with who hooked it up. Thank you so much!!!
:: glad we could help our friends to get ready for their move. (Hopefully closer to us!)
:: enjoying hanging out outside and having fires for no other reason than having one to warm up and hang out.
:: looking forward to drying and making fun things with the wild plants we picked yesterday (more on this later.)
:: I am so happy of having had a complete ‘wild salad’ last night, from the plants we harvested on our hike yesterday.
Have a great start of your week.
Yesterday we went to volunteer at the Oregon Food Bank. I’ve wanted us to go for a long time, but you have to be at least 6 years old to volunteer. Which we have finally reached, everyone in our family. Now we can help more often!
We went with a few other homeschool families, and two other groups were there too, and we all worked together.
We re-packaged rice, from 100 lbs. bags to 2 lbs. bags. Siena loved doing this part. I think she would volunteer in the bulk section of the store to fill up the bags for people. So today was ‘her day’! Packaging smaller bags, from a huge bulk cart of rice. I don’t know how many bags she made, but I’d say around 300.
Then, we tied these bags, and put them into boxes that were stored to give away. Lucas was also enjoying doing his job, packing the boxes. He was also very happy. It was perfect for him. We each found something we liked and enjoyed our work in the afternoon there.
This is the room we were in, all cleaned after we’ve done our work.
We visited the warehouse and saw the food they had and different rooms. Their large and very cold (-10 F) freezer, smaller refrigerator (set at 35 F), perishable room, non-perishable re-packing room, shelves and shelves filled with food. Good to see, but also hard to know that all this food is needed to help people who don’t have anything to eat. And that if donations stopped right now, all this food would only last 2 weeks for the people in need.
With everyone’s work yesterday, we packaged 8,550 lbs of rice, which means over 4,200 2-lb-bags. And the volunteer coordinator at the Food Bank told us that all these bags represents about 6,576 meals.
These numbers meant a lot for Siena and Lucas, especially. Something concrete. Knowing we had done a little bit of work to help people who don’t have food to eat. A nice way to end our week.
This reminded me of this game online at freerice.com where you can play to earn free rice. For every correct answer they donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. If you have a minute you should go check it out and try your vocabulary!
Have a beautiful weekend.
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