Chilly Halloween Fun

The day after planting a slew of new seeds, I invited a bunch of preschoolers over for a Halloween playdate, and of course we ended up in the backyard (NO WALLS CAN CONTAIN US!) and of course some of my seeds got trampled, or - let us say - worked deeper into the earth. We'll see what comes of them.

But it was worth it, because we were doing an awesome Halloween spooky ice activity - frozen hands with surprises inside. Tipped off by Anne from Left Brain Craft Brain to the post at Happy Hooligans, I prepped the latex gloves at noon, dumping a large portion of liquid red food coloring in each. I got them out of the freezer at 4 PM. They were mostly frozen and in fact if they had all been entirely solid it would have taken the kids a lot longer to harvest their toys. The project's mess was all contained in the yard, where the grass was in its death throes anyway. (The red does get all over fingers and clothes - could have used a couple of those gloves for myself!)

The three-year-old kids all loved digging in their icy hands for some period time, varying by attention span, but my big first grader may have enjoyed it the most. He didn't have any parental help (because I was scurrying around distributing supplies to everyone else), and he took the longest, extracting his toys and applying salt with almost surgical precision. He told me later that it was so much fun it made everything else about the day "boring". Um, sorry?

I was too rushed to follow the Happy Hooligans suggestion about removing the gloves carefully, so we did break some fingers and the moms amused ourselves by staging them in some unused dirt a la fresh corpses. Classy. Thanks to Anne for the photos!

I'm both glad and sad nobody got a photo of the "bloody" pile of surgical gloves left at the end. Revolting!

"HEY! Do you want to get some fruit???"

That was the cry echoing up and down our block the other evening. While I love the idea of crop swaps, and there are many nice people who attend, most of them are at an awkward time for my family, right around dinnertime/bedtime. I am also ever so slightly tired of getting a small amount of a lot of produce - too little to cook with, too much to snack on.

But being the frugal person I am, I cannot stand the idea of wasting food from my yard, even - or especially (guilt) - the produce my family doesn't eat. This fruit stand idea has been percolating for a while as a way to offload some produce while working on math skills, and last week we finally were available at the right time to catch the evening commuters who walk past our house (located a block from the BART station).

The first two sales were to two discrete fellows who each bought 5 gooseberries. Huh. Then things started moving along and they sold almost everything we had available - basil, gooseberries, blackberries, and nectarines. The kids and I (lurking in the background) were outside for over an hour, and they were pretty attentive to the project for a good 45 minutes. They also made a good team, with the more outgoing little one flagging down pedestrians using her big Outside Voice, and the older one counting out the produce. They made about $4, and have been incessantly begging me to do it again ever since.

Note on the signage: My older child wrote "Fruit Stand", then absolutely refused to do the price list (summer learning loss, argh!). The younger child taped on the sequins. What a helper!

Happy Fourth of July!

Every year I organize a neighborhood sidewalk parade for kids & pets. It gets cuter and cuter every year!

Getting Kids Excited About Gardening (or at least the Garden)

For my older child in particular, garden projects work best if they tie into an existing interest. For example, he remembers eating cherry tomatoes right off the plant last summer, so he was totally jazzed to plant a cherry tomato in "his area". Another example is art activities - he can't get enough of them, so when we were invited over to Left Brain Craft Brain to make seed bombs and decorate containers, we accepted with alacrity!

Just Get Outside!

That's really Step #1 to connect kids with gardening. Just get outside.
... And water shooters can be the lure.