Pumpkin Carving

The kids carved their pumpkins this morning and Princess was very interested in what they were doing.

We love Halloween and the kids always have a great time planning their costumes. This year Jay went as Harry Potter, and Bee was Hermione (they're both obsessed with the HP books). They looked fantastic and we all had a lot of fun trick-or-treating with their friends, but the poor dog won't even go outside to pee because of all the firecrackers!

To see the final result of their carving, click here.

Halloween Cookies

The kids spent the morning decorating cookies for Halloween, and now we've got a plateful of scary ghosts, spiders, pumpkins and witches hats to share with the kids in Bee's art class.

I'm surprised the kids are sleeping, they're so excited about the big day tomorrow!

Favorite Things - Brambly Hedge

One our very favorite things to read is the Brambly Hedge series of books by Jill Barklem. Her illustrations are amazing; a person could spend hours looking at them (and I think we have).

The stories center around a community of mice living in the English countryside. In the books we hear about their weddings, birthdays, voyages, snowstorms and other fun adventures. In the above photo you see one of their kitchens, where all of the big feasts are prepared. I hope to have a kitchen just like it one day!

This is the store stump where they keep all the goodies they've collected over the summer. They also have a dairy and a flour mill. The books are filled with wonderful illustrations, including landscapes and cut-away drawings of each of their houses.

The stories are sweet, but with a sense of adventure. They're a bit like Beatrix Potter, but don't have the dark element that some of hers have. I think the illustrations are even better.

The kids and I dream of living in Brambly Hedge one day, but in the meantime the books transport us there whenever we feel like a visit!

Panda Cub Web Cam

I thought some of you might enjoy this:

http://www.zooatlanta.org/animals_panda_cam.htm

So cute!

Homemade Baby Carrier

Bee spent some time this morning making a baby carrier for her Calico Critters.


I swear, the girl can make anything out of a few scrap materials and some hot glue!

Chocolate Cupcakes

The kids and I had an entire day at home today, so we decided to do some baking. In our search for something to make, we turned to one of our favorite cookbooks, Honest Pretzels.

Mollie Katzen's book has one of the very best chocolate cake recipes I've ever tasted. It's incredibly easy to make (it can be mixed right in the pan), and is totally vegan (no eggs or milk). Even if it wasn't either of those things, it would still be one of my favorites. We decided to use this recipe to make cupcakes, as the kids firmly believe that anything tastes better in miniature form!

Made-in-the-Pan Chocolate Cake:

• 1 1/4 cups unbleached white flour (I've used half whole wheat with good results)
• 1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 3/4 tsp. baking soda
• 1 cup water
• 1/3 cup canola oil
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 1 tsp. vinegar (cider or white)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Stir together until batter is smooth (or mix directly in an 8 inch square pan for a cake). Spoon evenly into a 12 cup muffin pan. Bake for 20 minutes (30 minutes for cake). Allow to cool before frosting (this cake is even good without anything, or with fruit).

Chocolate Frosting (from Allrecipes.com)

• 2 tbsp. butter or non-hydrogentated margarine, melted
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
• 2 1/2 tbsp. milk
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla
• 1 3/4 cups icing sugar

Mix butter and cocoa with mixer until combined. Stir in milk and vanilla. Add icing sugar until frosting has reached the desired consistency. Adjust with more milk or sugar if necessary.

Cakes made with this recipe are even more moist and delicious the next day,not that they ever last that long!

Okay, I've waited long enough - time to go eat one!

Thanksgiving Clay

The kids decided to host a Thanksgiving dinner for their Littlest Pet Shop animals a few days ago (in Canada we celebrate Thanksgiving on the first Monday in October). They made a delicious looking feast out of modeling clay, including salad, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, roast turkey, gravy and stuffing, with pumpkin pie for dessert.

Bee is quite an amazing sculptor. She's been able to make things with incredible detail from an early age. Here's a photo of some elves she made out of Fimo a couple of years ago.

She's a big fan of Barbara Reid's work, and would like to get into claymation (she loves Wallace and Grommit).

Field Trip - Native Plants

We took part in a program about native plants at a nearby park today. We learned a lot about the plants native to our area, and even got to taste some of them.

It was a gorgeous day for a walk, and the red leaves of the blueberry bushes were stunningly beautiful.

We saw some really cool mushrooms in the underbrush, and the kids had fun imagining the fairies and gnomes that might live in them.

I've only ever seen toadstools like this in storybooks!

We learned about cattails and their edible roots (which apparently taste like celery). Muskrats must like celery, because a pair of them moved into the park and ate every last one! Here are some of the kids blowing cattail fluff back into the pond.

The ground in the park is covered with cranberries. Here our guide is telling us all about them - did you know that cranberries float, so the farmers harvest them by flooding the fields and scooping them off the surface? . We'd love to visit a farm during harvest time (which is right now)! At the end we got to taste the berries - they were sour, but yummy!

Racing back to the nature house!

Back at the nature house we got to make cattail bracelets while snacking on blueberry fruit leather and labrador tea.

Pay a visit to our other blog to see some more pictures and learn more about our native plants.

Some Colleges Courting Homeschoolers in Quest for Best Students

COLUMBIA, Missouri (AP) -- Bombarded by choices at a college job fair, Sara Kianmehr quickly found her match: Columbia College, a small, private school that didn't mind that her transcripts came from her parents.

The college "was the only institution that didn't have a puzzled look and say, 'Home school,' and ask me a million questions," the 19-year-old junior said. "There was a big appeal."

With colleges and universities aggressively competing for the best students, a growing number of institutions are actively courting homebound high achievers like Kianmehr, who took community college courses her senior year of high school and hopes to eventually study filmmaking at New York University or another top graduate school.

The courtship can be as subtle as admissions office Web sites geared to home-schooled applicants or, in the case of Columbia College, as direct as purchasing mailing lists and holding special recruiting sessions.

After years of skepticism, even mistrust, many college officials now realize it's in their best interest to seek out home-schoolers, said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

"There was a tendency to kind of dismiss home schooling as inherently less rigorous," he said. "The attitude of the admissions profession could have at best been described as skeptical."

Home-schooled students -- whose numbers in this country range from an estimated 1.1 million to as high as 2 million -- often come to college equipped with the skills necessary to succeed in higher education, said Regina Morin, admissions director of Columbia College.

Such assets include intellectual curiosity, independent study habits and critical thinking skills, she said.

"It's one of the fastest-growing college pools in the nation," she said. "And they tend to be some of the best prepared."

Read the rest of the article here.